I won 4 coinflips.
https://img.scryfall.com/cards/large/front/5/0/50a27943-f08c-4cbd-affb-8e59411b3d4f.jpg?1547234878
Yeah I used to play mainly in the RTR days and a little into the Theros block. I haven't been able to find much time to play it these days, but I play Arena when I have decently long breaks lol.
But yeah I haven't played the new set yet, but the limited side of it looks really fun since none of the colors look particularly terrible
I started playing at my LGS around that time and have been playing since, with a hiatus after Kaladesh block till GRN. God, that block essentially destroyed standard until Guilds of Ravnica basically.
Yeah that was the main time I really wasn't paying attention at all to magic lol, what was wrong with standard?
Energy was a free mechanic that had lots of potential uses and outlets but no ability to punish players for hoarding energy, no way to interact with enemy players energy counters, etc. So there was lots of decks that abused that.
Turn 4 cast a 13/13 creature that took your opponents next turn or a 10/10 indestructible that exiled two of your opponents lands. I played that deck . It then got banned (which is why I quit until recently - nearly $200 of my cards that I played with got banned).
After they released a turn 4 combo that instantly killed your opponent in standard too. It then got banned.
After that the previous turn 4 13/13 deck morphed into a midrange energy deck that had the best threats, card draw, and a ton of other resources to just out-aggro and grind out pretty much any other deck to a ridiculous degree. It then got banned.
After that a red/black aggro deck formed from the ashes of THAT deck dominated standard as the tier 0 deck until it rotated out with Guilds of Ravnica.
They fucked up the game harder than I have ever seen in my entire time playing.
I've heard some people say that Nexus of Fate is overpowered. What do you guys think?
Its not overpowered, its just miserable to play against in Arena because of how the platform functions and the format of Bo1. In real life you can establish loops and even just pick up your deck and show them your wincon. Plus, sideboarding allows you to directly pick apart and destroy the strategy.
The big worry is if Wilderness Reclamation can make the strategy busted, since it has the potential to kick off infinite turns on turn 4. I don't think there is enough tools in standard to make the deck resilient enough to withstand countermagic and a disruptive gameplan while also being consistently that fast, but its definitely a giant hurdle for set design moving forward.
But for Arena Bo1 play, they should just ban the card. It just makes the game a worse experience overall by a significant margin.
Marked due to how the foils bend?
There is a Pauper event going on right now.
Persistent Petitioners is a good deck. I had a deck with just them and land, and I was able to win 2 of the 3 pauper events I played.
I finally got the gang back together to draft my Cube, after a massive overhaul. It played pretty damn well.
Final game came down to the wire. It was a three-player free-for-all, I managed to kill one player but even though I was sitting fairly high at 17 life, I had eight poison counters. I thought I was safe, I'd killed the guy playing infect, but I didn't notice the other guy had Animation Module. He did that proliferate-ish thing once, bringing me to 9 (and attacked for massive damage, too, fucking Scytheclaw)... he was at 5 life, I had four damage I could do but all he had to do was untap to win. I risked everything with a Khorvath's Fury, hitting him for 2 and drawing me five cards (throwing away a Murder and a Spiteful Returned that could have been another two damage, but I couldn't spare the mana)... the fifth card was a Naturalize, probably the one card in my deck that could have saved me.
I died next turn anyways, he had a Run Amok to trample through for just enough damage. That's just how the game is sometimes.
Things that worked well:
The pack structure was great. I was doing 6 commons, 4 uncommons, 2 rares, a multicolor card, a silver-border/conspiracy card, and a land. Two rares is the big part - pack 1 pick 1 can't just be auto-draft the rare, you actually have to decide which one to get since there's at least two. The average is three rares per pack, like a 1% chance to get five.
The specific silver-bordered cards I picked were good. I didn't do any Gotcha, contraptions or host cards, and very few physical skill cards. Nothing needlessly wacky, mostly just dice rolls or effects just a bit too weird for tournament Magic. (I'm still not sure how I managed to lose a game with a Modular Monstrosity with Protection from Everything and Annihilator 6)
The increased removal massively helped. My first iteration was like 0.5 removal cards per pack... for reference, Avacyn Restored draft was about 1.5 and it was widely criticized for lacking removal, most sets are 2-3. I haven't crunched the numbers yet on what my exact as-fan is but it's much better now, you weren't an idiot if you took a bomb rare over Murder or Lightning Strike.
The decreased focus on archetypes made it way more interesting. In the first version, the cards fairly screamed at you what you were "supposed" to be doing. If you started drafting something, you pretty much always had multiple cards in every pack that you, and only you, wanted. Now about half the cards in the cube aren't aimed at any one strategy, they're just general good cards or only loosely play into a draft archetype.
The Commander 2011 cycle of Vows play really well in multiplayer. I won a lot of games by enchanting an opponent's big threat with Vow of Malice or Vow of Wildness, making it unable to attack me but even more dangerous to my other opponent.
Cubeamajigs worked pretty well. They're a bit hard to open and close, and I'm a bit worried about long-term durability, plastic doesn't usually like being folded and unfolded repeatedly, but they were way better than just stacks of cards.
Areas of ongoing concern:
Might still be low on color-fixing? Other than the one idiot who kept trying to draft five colors, there wasn't much color screw going on, but there was some. I'm keeping an eye on it, might add some lockets or keyrunes or maybe cluestones. Something like that. (Maybe a mix? Give the more aggro colors signets, the more control ones keyrunes, the midrange ones lockets or cluestones)
The multicolor-but-not-gold cards (eg. Bump in the Night, Onward // Victory, Agent of Horizons) didn't see much play. Maybe there's a problem, maybe there isn't.
Three player draft is kinda boring, although it's a good playgroup size. If I get it drafted with more players, I might split into two groups to play - draft as 6-8, fight as two groups of 3-4.
Still not sure the archetypes are on equal power levels. I have five, using wedge colors - WUR Equipment/Affinity, UBG Poison, BRW Attack Triggers, RGU Energy and GWB Graveyard. Poison and Attack won a lot of games, Equipment has given good showings, but nobody's won yet with a heavy grave or energy strategy. Granted, that's out of six decks so far, and one of those was wasted on "Sovereign's Realm and literally every card I drafted".
I'm going to take it to my LGS again next week... did it last Saturday but couldn't find anyone to play with, there were only a few Magic players and they all just wanted to play EDH. Apparently Mondays are the bigger Magic nights, maybe I'll have better luck.
Cube is sick as hell and its cool that you have one. Do you have a full list of it somewhere?
http://www.cubetutor.com/visualspoiler/113229
That list should be mostly accurate. I haven't added the planeswalkers yet because I'm still deciding which ones I really want, there's a couple cards I haven't gotten my hands on yet, I didn't obsessively match the printings (so long as the rarity symbol was right), and the site can't handle different cards with the same name, since that's explicitly not a thing in normal Magic. So for reference, my Knights of the Kitchen Sink are "First Strike; Protection from Two-Word Names" and "First Strike; Protection from Watermarks"; my Very Cryptic Command is the one starting with "untap two target permanents"; my Sly Spies are "saboteur - that player loses 1d6 life" and "saboteur - draw a card from that player's deck"; my Garbage Elementals are "Battle Cry; ETB tokens" and "last strike; battalion - target creature can't block"; and my Ineffable Blessing is "choose a rarity".
The draft sims on that site are a bit off. Instead of having card slots, it just shuffles everything together, giving you way more rares than a proper draft. They actually have a feature for it but it's locked to a premium membership, and I'm not paying $5/mo for that. But it's good enough to get a basic feel for the cube.
So despite all the shit I've been talking about EDH players, I did get into an EDH group. Spent two weeks playing borrowed decks (fact: literally EVERY commander player has a spare deck that they would love for you to play), then decided to cobble together a deck of my own from a tier-four-trash Multiplayer Modern deck and various cards in my collection (mostly a Conspiracy 2 box and a few prereleases). I didn't even buy new sleeves.
My colors? RBW - in no small part because they're the "worst" three colors in EDH and I have a thing for defying the hivemind. My commander? Queen Marchesa. My strategy? Never be the player anyone wants dead, hurt everyone else equally, and abuse the Monarch mechanic. I used a lot of repeating "each player loses 1 life, you gain that much life" effects like Agent of Masks, some Oblivion Ring/Fiend Hunter style spot removal (so that if anyone killed me, a big threat would be coming back), a number of board wipes, and every RBW monarch card I owned, which is all of them except Skyline Despot. It's not quite "group hug" - I'm almost never helping other players, just not hurting them enough to be a big threat, not worth attacking and leaving yourself open to everyone else, and with no single card scary enough to remove.
The power level is really, really weird. I had some stupidly powerful cards - two different Lilianas (Dark Realms and Last Hope), lots of generally-powerful stuff (I did steal a Black Sun's Zenith from my Modern BW Control deck)... but basically no EDH staples. No Sol Ring, no Command Tower, basically none of the "every Commander deck should run these" cards.
I played two games, one with five players, one with six (completely different groups, too). First game, I came in third... everyone was just out-drawing me, two different players had 40+ cards in hand and I actually outlasted one of them. Second game, I nearly won - I was ready to deal lethal to the remaining two players, after dominating most of the game, but one of them topdecked an instant win and I couldn't respond. That's just how it goes sometimes - sometimes you get one-shot from 23 and can't respond because you exiled your hand for Bottled Cloister.
Considering I was googling "how many lands do I need in an EDH deck?" literally a day before this, and these were my fourth and fifth games of Commander ever.... I'm obviously very happy with how it went. Some quick, cheap improvements (Tower, Sol Ring, some more O-Ring effects and especially Vows to replace the straight spot removal) should get it in even better shape. I'm not gonna go crazy with super-expensive tiny optimizations to manabase... I'm fine running checklands and fastlands instead of ABU duals and fetches; no urge to splurge on a Mana Crypt or Mana Vault.
Glad you had a good time! Commander/EDH is probably my favorite format and I have 5 decks at differing power levels depending on the table to keep it fair. You don't really need to worry about power levels in EDH since each playgroup is different and people often have multiple decks, as well as the fact that the format is casual and more about self expression and having a good time more than anything (though keep in mind people have different ideas for what a "good time" entails).
Also, while blue and green are the most obviously powerful colors in EDH, pretty much every color besides white can pull together an extremely powerful strategy so don't let that hold your deck ideas down (and even then, white is a fantastic support color).
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/announcing-modern-horizons-2019-02-28
New product announced: Modern Horizons, draft set legal in Modern (and Legacy/Vintage/Commander obvs) but not Standard, containing a mix of not-yet-Modern-legal reprints as well as entirely new cards. Previews start May, prerelease June 9, release June 14.
Only currently known cards:
https://media.wizards.com/2019/images/daily/wWvkVvZ04S.png
https://media.wizards.com/2019/images/daily/kyMKKpW9UH.png
I don't really play Modern anymore but this is bound to shake it up. I guess they ran out of things they could safely unban? My only real concern is that if the power level of this set is high enough, Modern will be dominated by it, or at least heavily warped.
These two cards aren't good enough to do much in modern. A 4 mana card that can't be cheated into play and, while Cabal Therapy is a powerful effect, Cabal Therapist can only effectively be used by sacrificing itself on turn 2 or waiting until turn 3 with other creatures to use
Some details on the next Standard set, War of the Spark:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/closer-look-stained-glass-planeswalkers-2019-03-08
36 planeswalker cards in the set (!), every pack will have one (!!!).
I can make most of them out. I see Samut, Nicol Bolas, Ashiok, Elspeth (!), Domri Rade, someone I don't recognize, Ral Zarek, Tamiyo, Karn, Jaya, Tibalt, another mystery walker, Kiora, Sorin Markov, Teferi, Angrath, Dovin Baan, Ajani, Arlinn Kord, Ob Nixilis (I think?), Jiang Yanggu (from the China intro decks), Huatli, Sarkhan, Saheeli, Narset, Nahiri, Ugin, some sort of Azra?, Vraska, Kaya, Jace, Gideon, Liliana, Nissa, Chandra, and Vivien Reid.
The three I can't figure out:
https://media.wizards.com/2019/images/daily/06_PvgfmRfwpM.jpg
https://media.wizards.com/2019/images/daily/12_jnGhEekbnD.jpg
https://media.wizards.com/2019/images/daily/28_kB6vy4HNmJ.jpg
Anybody have any clue about them? They're probably just brand-new walkers but maybe I missed someone. Third guy could be an Azra (from Battlebond) or maybe an Aetherborn (from Kaladesh). The other two I can't even guess.
I was expecting some elevated Planeswalker appearance in this set, just off the premise, but 36? Or maybe more - they phrased it specifically as "36 planeswalkers getting cards", leaving a hole for multiple cards of each. I'm definitely going to the prerelease for this one.
1 lightning storm
3 treasure hunt
56 lands
damnit it wizards make paper pauper a thing i'm poor as shit and goblinstorm is too fun
What do you mean? Pauper is a thing in paper. Does nobody at your LGS play it?
A couple of people do, but not nearly enough to have a vibrant meta. If Wizards did anything to create in store excitement for it, it would be wonderful.
The only events WotC pushes on LGS's for are standard and limited ones, and Modern is already really vibrant despite that. Stores can run whatever they please, and without a large Pauper product I don't see how WotC personally organizing any events would change much. They're already starting official support for events at Mythic Champs and Magic Fests, there isn't much else to do without something like a Pauper Masters.
If you want to see a local Pauper event you should ask your LGS about it. We got Legacy and Modern to fire at my LGS after a bunch of us asked for it, you don't really need WotC for that.
War of the Spark spoilers have begun and I am hype.
http://mythicspoiler.com/war/cards/lilianadreadhordegeneral.jpg
http://mythicspoiler.com/war/cards/tezzeretmasterofthebridge.jpg
Ridiculously overpowered planeswalkers? Check.
http://mythicspoiler.com/war/cards/vraskaswarmseminence.jpg
https://img.scryfall.com/cards/normal/front/7/f/7f9a24dc-8bc3-4528-8780-57fb108fdfbf.jpg?1554037457
https://img.scryfall.com/cards/normal/front/1/4/14916e2d-73af-4747-a927-d2d4cb3e32db.jpg?1554038463
Planeswalkers all the way down to uncommon? Check.
http://mythicspoiler.com/war/cards/fluxchanneler.jpg
Much-beloved returning mechanic? Check.
http://mythicspoiler.com/war/cards/invadethecity.jpg
http://mythicspoiler.com/war/cards/dreadhordeinvasion.jpg
Brand-new mechanic? Check.
http://mythicspoiler.com/war/cards/emergencezone.jpg
http://mythicspoiler.com/war/cards/bolasscitadel.jpg
Generally cool cards? Check.
I'm really hype for a couple reasons. First, it's just a really cool story wrapping up, all the sinister machinations coming to a peak. Second, my Cube is basically built around proliferate interactions, there's surely some cool stuff I'll be adding. And finally, a year or two ago I did some experimental design of custom cards, poking at the idea "how can we make planeswalkers work at lower rarities?". I'm kind of proud that my solution seems to be the exact one Wizards is using - have the uncommons not naturally grow and have a static effect instead of a plus ability, have the rares have a static ability instead of an ult, and have lots of ways to destroy planeswalkers. Only thing I've not seen yet is planeswalkers with a triggered ability to gain loyalty instead of a plus ability, but there's still more coming.
Some of these cards look busted beyond belief, I haven't seen a set so egregious since, well, Kaladesh. While I still believe Play Design has made sure Standard is fine, I wonder just how these cards are going to warp other formats
Also, keep in mind that Proliferate has been mechanically changed. It no longer works exactly like it used to @gman003-main
So far the casting cost on these cards is high enough most won't see much play in eternal formats, though everything is possible through commander. I definitely want to try out Flux Channeler in a Proliferate Engine deck though.
Seeing Tezzeret's +2 makes me sad they've changed loss of life to dealing damage moving forward. It's a small change but has an impact on gameplay and just feels less flavorful.
And apparently the reasoning behind the Proliferate change is to have less clicks in MTG:Arena games? You're already going to have to click on each permanent you want to proliferate, why is one extra click in very marginal cases going to require this much errata? This was the same reasoning behind Pridemate's errata to no longer be a "may" ability on resolution- I don't like that the newest moneychild for Wizards is dictating so many game-changing decisions.
The cost on most of them seems too high for a four-turn format like Modern, let alone Legacy/Vintage. Although the new Lab Maniac Jace might see play there.
Yeah, I saw the change from "a counter type" to "each counter type". I'm a fan. It kind of makes my cube more interesting - energy vs infect will have some tough choices to make. Plus if I ever add some experience counters cards, you'll be able to buff both your XP and energy count at once.
They're switching black back to loss of life instead of damage. It was an experiment, they didn't like the results either. Wizards works way far in advance, though, so this set and maybe the next might still have black dealing damage.
As a fan of zombies this set is looking good for me.
the black and green deck that mtg:a is op if you know how to play it
inb4 this block's story ends with Nicol Bolas going "AW SHUCKS I'LL GET YOU NEXT TIME JACE AND FRIENDS"
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