Cavern of Souls seems unnecessarily impactful to me. It pretty much shuts down all counterspells with the rotating-out of Mana Leak , which was reasonably costed and versatile enough to be played. But the current playable counterspells (Syncopate , Dissipate , Izzet Charm ) can't be shoved in a U/X/X (Delver) deck to the extent that Mana Leak could; instead being more or less limited to UR decks if not unplayable.
So, to reiterate my query, why does Standard need the flavorless Cavern? It completely hoses at least one archetype (being draw-go, no comment on its current playability), and prevents counterspells from being played prolifically in any archetype in this creature-based format.
I believe, with the limited power of standard counterspells and in light of Return to Ravnica and the rest of the upcoming block, Cavern of Souls should be banned or restricted from Standard. I honestly don't see how another year of it will be conducive to a diverse standard format, as should be desired. But that is my opinion. I would like to hear other, more experienced ones (with or without subjectivity related to the party's investment in playset(s) of CoS).
CoS was, from the beggining, completely unnecessary. It was a mistake to have printed it, and I always said it.
With that said, a banning is largely unwarranted. You don't ban a card from destroying an archetype. After all, Timely Reinforcements was never on the hit list.
Yeah... Until next game, where it'll be right back.
Seriously, there's no way to deal with Rancor in any format. It should be banned, except Gleemax is a lobbyist for the Rancor party, so that'll never happen.
You can't ban rancor, it just returns to your deck.
You might want to actually talk to the Flavor & Storyline Board people... since, you know, our whole reason for playing Magic is the flavor. I'm willing to bet you'll get a lot more interest there than in General.
Indeed, both posters down there would be thrilled.
When talks about banning Jace first started, I was thinking that I would see him banned come June 20th. But as I think more about it, I don't really think that Jace is the problem anymore. Sure his power level leaves very little to the imagination (opening Jace is like opening a refrigerator box with a naked girl on the inside), and sure his price does have a strong impact on what players choose to play (playing Jace is like being intimate with a woman and she doesn't charge you in the morning), but it is not the source of all the problems in Standard.
How do people think saving room to print more abilities on cards is dumbing down the game?
Do you really think, say, Akroma would ever be printed if she said, "Akroma can block by creatures with this ability and cannot be blocked by creatures without this ability. If a creature without this ability would deal combat damage by Akroma would be destroyed, prevent all combat damage that creature would deal to Akroma this combat. Attacking does not cause Akroma to tap. If Akroma is blocked and deals lethal damage, it deals the remainder of its damage to the defending player. Akroma may attack and use abilities that require tapping in the casting cost the turn it enters the battlefield. Akroma cannot be damaged, enchanted, equipped, blocked or targeted by black or red sources" rather than her "dumbed down" wording she has? No freaking way. Keywording and shorthand allows them to make complicated cards easy to play with, allowing them to be printed in the first place.
1. cast frankie peanuts 2. ask opponent "will you concede the game this turn"? if they say yes, you win; if they say no, play a staying power 3. subsequently ask "will you attack this turn"? and "will you cast a spell this turn"? (using a Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir for the second question if necessary) to ensure they can't disrupt the combo 4. donate them a platinum angel 5. play a mox lotus and braingeyser them for every card in their library. play an opalescence and donate them a glorious anthem and a blacker lotus , then play enchanted evening . play and activate a mindslaver and then donate them a fastbond and the mox lotus (returning one of the donates to your hand with eternal witness or whatever) 6. during their turn, play every permanent in their hand (playing lands with fastbond) then (as yourself) cast mirrorweave on the blacker lotus, so every permanent becomes a copy of it. proceed to tear up every card they control, and hopefully do it before they notice that they aren't bound by staying power's ability anymore and can concede
Dark Ritual being overpowered is determined more by what is done with it than the card itself.
True, but the fact that it enables so many ridiculous things is pretty telling. It's like, sure I can use a shotgun as a bludgeoning instrument, but that doesn't make it not a shotgun.
Shortly before Serra died, she transferred her spark into an angel whose full name was Asha Avacyn Bolas. Her dragon father groomed her for her positions in Alara and Innistrad, and she's also been getting help from her uncle Ugin in the form of Urza, who was resurrected as Marit Lage to be the avatar as which she projects herself into material realms. Grieslbrand is a split personality who sometimes wanders the planes disguised as a human woman named Liliana Vess.
Everyone's life would be easier if players would, instead of coming to the 'net for help with a deck, just netdeck and be done with it. And I'm not talking about some Top 8 lists, for the Casualists, too, can benefit from netdecking. I've netdecked plenty of decks from the Casual Play forums from users such as Mown, Raedien, Floopfoot, and a few others. I snatched straight the heck out of my web browser. Yes, people, your original idea fell victim to a savage netdecker. You have been assimiliated.
Suppose I wanted a Zombie deck. Why on earth would I spend time searching Gatherer for a decent list of Zombie cards when Raedien already did it for me? Taking time to be creative or waiting on people on the forums to tell you why your deck sucks or 'go to Casual forums' is a disasterous waste of time (to me).
That being said, Magic was ruined back in Alpha when they added all that rules and cards [Debutantes avert your eyes]. My friends and I still like playing it the "pure" way (Basically we go into the woods and hit eachother with wiffle bats while shouting made up obscenities. You know, the way Garfield wanted it to be played).
Don't worry about it. I've come up with a list of changes to fix EDH.
-First off, there's no commander. -The minimum deck size is 60 cards, and each deck can have up to four of each card, save basic lands and relentless rats. Also decks have no color identity. -Starting life total is 20.
Here's a clever play you can try yourself: -Convince friend to run relentless rats.dec in legacy tournament -Get a deck with lots of mill, yixlid jailer, and humility -Drop humility and jailer, wait for him to dump his hand, mill him out -All his rats now have no abilities. Call a judge because he's playing an illegal deck with more than 4 of a single card. -Get him/her banned from competitive magic play
L, is for the leather gloves you weaaaar. O, is for the organs that guy could spaaaare. V, is very very, extraordinay. E, is for every vagrant i butchered in a wine cellar befooooore.
The outer layer of the Magic: the Gathering box, the carton, or crust, is fairly thin and light, and contains largely aluminosilcates.
Within that lies the middle layer, consisting of the familiar booster pack. Although solid, the booster packs' high temperatures allow them to acutally move around within the booster box. This flow, sometimes called convection, is cited by frustrated box mappers as one of WOTC's most genious uses of thermodynamics since the Ravnica block.
No one knows what lies at the core of the booster box, but scientists theorize that it must be especially dense in order to make up for the large amount of fluff distributed amongst the booster packs.
I imagine [Ajani 3's] second ability involves him hurling the creature at your opponent Brion Stoutarm style, then the guy is just like "Okay, that may have worked, but don't- GOD DAMN IT!" as he does it again because cats don't give a **** :33.
Its like that one time Elves broke out in a field of Jund. Elves became a resurgent hit, then died off again once Jund adapted to the rest of the field of G/W that it required mass removal that inherently pooped on Elves too.
Submit to the menace. Delver can, and will blot out the sun.
"I remember my days as a youth at Tolarian Academy ." "Wow, small multiverse, I actually went there too." "WAIT, DON'T- Well ****, there's $200,000 in student loans well spent."
And flavor goes out the window when you cast a second copy of a planeswalker right after the first one dies, so...
"Hey Nissa, I need a favor." "You just asked me for a 'favor' like thirty seconds ago, and it turned out to be having Sarkhan Transmogrify my only follower into a dragon like 5 times -which dickery aside also violates some laws of causality - and then you let me get beaten over the head by that hedron crab." "...I'll give you " "...Well all right then."
GM, I don't think Dill is better than you. I KNOW it. Even if he wakes up every morning, clubs a baby seal, steals all the TV remotes from within a block's radius of his house and then robs hungry orphans of their food he'd be better than you, for the simple reason that he learns from his mistakes.
What would they have to fight about? Like, all I can think of now is Gideon going "Hey, long-ears! I'm gathering a group of 'Walkers together to fight some tentacle monsters.....you want in?" and Tamiyo going "Ew! Hentai no bakka Gideon-desu desu!" and flying away.
I open 4 packs just to be on the safe side. Not only do I get more cards than everyone else, but I also get to spend the rest of the night off. Win Win.
MaRo has a thing for people opening boosters with bad cards. But since he can only get so many bad cards printed in each set, he has found a devious way of getting more bad cards into circulation: He makes entire print sheets with just bad rares, then puts them onto the assembly line. He proceeds to wring his hands and twirl his evil mustache that he grew for twirling purposes as a lightning bolt strikes in the background. Afterwards, he goes to make sure that the good cards are only opened by everyone's friends, and that we all only get to open bad cards. He does this by memorising each booster, than switching them around accordingly. Whenever someone complains about a card, he immediately jumps out from behind a chair to yell "WELL, IT'S NOT FOR YOU!" before merging back into the shadows in order to devise new ways in which he can screw over players, then claim that he has valid reasons for doing so.
Mark Rosewater is sitting in a seemingly innocuous cable TV van, outside of Bankaimastery's house. Sitting nearby are two hardened criminal hackers, fresh out of prison, and filled with resentment at their lack of physical fitness. "Have you managed to hack his brainwaves yet? The set deadline's coming up fast." "We're almost through. It should be coming up on the screen any second." The hacker presses a button, and Kevin's thoughts flash onto the screen. Mark and the hackers stare in amazement at the sheer beauty, the elegance, and the raw truth of what they see. It's like the ending to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Brilliant light shines across the screen, the truth of existence is made clear to them, and they despair at their own foolishness, their own ignorance, their own inadequacy. And then they steal his ideas. As they return back to R&D, Mark sneers at a haggard old man chained to a cast-iron sphere. The man looks up from his laborious task of breaking rocks in the dungeon of Wizards of the Coast headquarters, and asks a question: "Kevin, my greatest student. He - he's all right, isn't he? You didn't hurt him?" Mark deals him a weighty blow with his boot. "Know your place, Richard. Get back to work."
I'm only opposed to it because it bears so little relation to how people actually play the game. The example of Miracles is actually a much better one then the Clone example I was trying to use.
From the game's perspective, the card can move instantly from face down in the library to revealed in the hand and that's fine for the rules. But in real life, we can't actually do that, so the card spends a good bit of time in locations that are neither where that player's library is nor where that player's hand is. And that's fine for real life. What I don't want is the disconnect to be explicitly codified. Along the lines of
183664.697 A game of Magic as laid out by these rules exists only as a pure Platonic ideal, utterly unrealizable by fallible mortals limited by the confines of physicality and the ravages of evil and sin.
183664.698 The cake is a lie, too.
I know it's true, but I don't want the rules to actually straight-up tell me that.
Pfft this cant be serious can it? If it is please delete your account OP. Its not even close to ban worthy, considering what JTMS and stoneforge had to accomplish to get banned i see the WotC selling magic to aquire Pokemon before that ever happens.
I'm trying to imagine sorin markov as a gym leader in one of those pokemon games which you have to beat him to get his badge... somehow I imagine that he would stab you in the chest with his sword before giving you the badge, even if you beat his pokemon....
Personally, I'd be fine with tea time but then I'm not gonna waste the mana summoning Emrakul, the Aeons Torn . He always takes all the sugar, drinks the whole pot of Earl Grey and doesn't even say thank you. SO. RUDE.
Break the Card is a regular thread in the Cards and Combo Forum. Quite simply, the participants are given a Johnnystatic card (e.g. Xenograft ) and are asked to build a deck around it. The winner and honorable mentions are sigged below. Get brewing!
This week's Break the Card was based around Xenograft . Thread : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/27681049/Break_the_card_:_Xenograft?pg=1
Winner : Axterix with his Vampdrazi deck. Finalist : Vektor480 with his Ally/Golem/Plant deck. Honorable mentions : Zammm for the Turntimber Ranger combo and TinGorilla for suggesting Sarkhan the Mad .
Here's the link to the Mindlock Orb contest : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/27697565/Break_the_Card_:_Mindlock_Orb?sdb=1&pg=last#497536269
Here's the link to Break the Card : Bludgeon Brawl : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/27715169/Break_the_Card_:_Bludgeon_Brawl?sdb=1&pg=last#498208797
Winner : Vektor and his Grab the World deck. Finalist : Crandor with his Awesome Aliteration deck. Honorable mentions : RP Jesus with his Wat deck and Zix200 with his Signet Renewal deck.
This week was Followed Footsteps : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/27748677/Break_the_Card_:_Followed_Footsteps?pg=1
Winner : Tevish_Szat with his Exponential Growth deck. Honorable mentions : Zix with his Carbon Copies deck and Escef with his Fungus of Speed and Time deck.
This week's card was Jace's Archivist : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/28063377/Break_the_Card_:_Jaces_Archivist.
Finalists : Jentaru with his "Consecration of the Draw" deck and HereticSmitty with his "ADHD: The deck" deck. Winner : JaxsonBateman with his "The Archives Are Endless!" deck.
Wizards hates counter-magic and burn decks. People shouldnt have to make choices other than... should i play a deck based around terminus, thragtusk, or geralf. Should I play 26 or 30 creatures? Should I even feel good when I win, because it had nothing to do with the way I played my cards, just based on what I drew.
I dont care if people enjoy aggro and I only slightly care if wizards feels the need to make it more powerful. but, I can't beleive they would be so arrogant and self-important to basically tell me I can't play the way I want to. What is up with uncounterable and hexproof anyways? It seems like Wizards just wants magic to be less and less about interacting with your opponent and more and more freindly to the table top player.
Really though... my buddy who never even plays magic competitively can pick up a thragtusk or zombie deck and pilot it to victory just as well as any of us can. Why? because you just draw cards.
Do we really need to play a game of war with $200 decks? I can just spend $3 on a deck of playing cards and have the exact same experience.
Thanks for nothing wizards. Once again, standard is unplayable and all these new sets are starting to filth up modern and legacy as well. sad.
Hell, look at this weekend SCG top 12. Thragtusk or Geralf? The best part is people think they are being smart when they have different cards bookending those buildarounds... but the joke is on them. You can Frites out your Thragtusk... you can play him with Restoration Angels, you can play him in a house, with a mouse... it doesnt matter. Its just wizards taking advantage of stupid people pretending that these nearly identical decks with different titles are part of a diverse metagame. They aren't... its a completely 1-dimensional metagame. Thragtusk, Terminus or Geralf? lame as ****.
The sad thing is... cards like Geralf (and its completely wizards-build zombie creature curve and perfect spell suite), thragtusk and terminus will be here for a whole year. Which means I wont be able to play this attrocious, repetitive standard format until next october.
This is sad. I have no idea why my fellow magic colleagues are so blind to this atrocity... hey ignorance is bliss. Hopefully, magic players snap to reality and start demanding that card designers start removing themselves from the card design process, stop building tournament decks and just make some balanced cards.
CoS was, from the beggining, completely unnecessary. It was a mistake to have printed it, and I always said it.
With that said, a banning is largely unwarranted. You don't ban a card from destroying an archetype. After all, Timely Reinforcements was never on the hit list.
I don't think Reinforcements can be compared to Cavern in the current context. Reinforcements was from a Core Set, meaning it had a year lifetime. It is colored, and has a notable mana cost. It can be countered, and doesn't always work out ideally. Cavern always works, and can be put down turn one to full effect. Land destruction is, of course, highly-inconvenient in a competetive format.
Cavern is practically an auto-include in any creature-heavy deck, and there is little reason not to play it.
I agree there is a fine line between "annoying" and "bannable", but I also think Cavern just has far too large an impact at no cost to stay around for another year.
The dominance of Thragtusk and other ultra-efficient creatures emphasizes this issue. Once they hit the field, they have a huge impact and can't be traded effectively, card for card. Counterspells are the only efficient, long-term removal for these creatures, not to mention they prevent the ETB effects. But by playing a land and saying "I declare Beast" or "Zombie", your opponent can rule this out with zero strategic input. There's no reason to not play an uncounterable Thragtusk or Messenger as soon as possible. The format is thus degraded into a race of whoever can draw better--this includes the luck-not-skill involved with Miracle draws. It's a shame, really. Standard could be so much more without Caverns.
I'm sorry that all you blue players don't know how to use discard effects.
Elaborate?
Forcing your opponent to discard is black, and is exceptionally unreliable in "countering" (discarding) a 3, 4, or 5 drop before they are cast. Milling is just bad. Looting doesn't immediately help with creature threats, and puts me down on cards even if I draw an "answer".
CoS was, from the beggining, completely unnecessary. It was a mistake to have printed it, and I always said it.
With that said, a banning is largely unwarranted. You don't ban a card from destroying an archetype. After all, Timely Reinforcements was never on the hit list.
I don't think Reinforcements can be compared to Cavern in the current context. Reinforcements was from a Core Set, meaning it had a year lifetime. It is colored, and has a notable mana cost. It can be countered, and doesn't always work out ideally. Cavern always works, and can be put down turn one to full effect. Land destruction is, of course, highly-inconvenient in a competetive format.
Cavern is practically an auto-include in any creature-heavy deck, and there is little reason not to play it.
I agree there is a fine line between "annoying" and "bannable", but I also think Cavern just has far too large an impact at no cost to stay around for another year.
The dominance of Thragtusk and other ultra-efficient creatures emphasizes this issue. Once they hit the field, they have a huge impact and can't be traded effectively, card for card. Counterspells are the only efficient, long-term removal for these creatures, not to mention they prevent the ETB effects. But by playing a land and saying "I declare Beast" or "Zombie", your opponent can rule this out with zero strategic input. There's no reason to not play an uncounterable Thragtusk or Messenger as soon as possible. The format is thus degraded into a race of whoever can draw better--this includes the luck-not-skill involved with Miracle draws. It's a shame, really. Standard could be so much more without Caverns.
If you aren't playing tribal, Cavern can actually hurt you, since it will produce colorless mana for the other creatures.
Have you played during Cawblade Standard? The top 36 were a bunch of Cawblade on Cawblade. Even before Cawblade, people would splash blue just to play JTMS. We even had a Valakut version with blue! Before that, it was Raffinity, where you either played it or played a deck that was exactly made to counter it. Two decks. As for Kamigawa, Umezawa's Jitte was an auto-include in every deck as a four-of. If it had been colored, people would've splashed for it. And the only other Standard bannings were Necropotence and Tolarian Academy times.
So no, Cavern isn't even on the radar. Sure, it's annoying for people who like to play counterspells. However, your counters are still good against noncreature spells like Bonfire or Rites. Adapt to the metagame, as much as you dislike it.
Yeah... Until next game, where it'll be right back.
Seriously, there's no way to deal with Rancor in any format. It should be banned, except Gleemax is a lobbyist for the Rancor party, so that'll never happen.
You can't ban rancor, it just returns to your deck.
You might want to actually talk to the Flavor & Storyline Board people... since, you know, our whole reason for playing Magic is the flavor. I'm willing to bet you'll get a lot more interest there than in General.
Indeed, both posters down there would be thrilled.
When talks about banning Jace first started, I was thinking that I would see him banned come June 20th. But as I think more about it, I don't really think that Jace is the problem anymore. Sure his power level leaves very little to the imagination (opening Jace is like opening a refrigerator box with a naked girl on the inside), and sure his price does have a strong impact on what players choose to play (playing Jace is like being intimate with a woman and she doesn't charge you in the morning), but it is not the source of all the problems in Standard.
How do people think saving room to print more abilities on cards is dumbing down the game?
Do you really think, say, Akroma would ever be printed if she said, "Akroma can block by creatures with this ability and cannot be blocked by creatures without this ability. If a creature without this ability would deal combat damage by Akroma would be destroyed, prevent all combat damage that creature would deal to Akroma this combat. Attacking does not cause Akroma to tap. If Akroma is blocked and deals lethal damage, it deals the remainder of its damage to the defending player. Akroma may attack and use abilities that require tapping in the casting cost the turn it enters the battlefield. Akroma cannot be damaged, enchanted, equipped, blocked or targeted by black or red sources" rather than her "dumbed down" wording she has? No freaking way. Keywording and shorthand allows them to make complicated cards easy to play with, allowing them to be printed in the first place.
1. cast frankie peanuts 2. ask opponent "will you concede the game this turn"? if they say yes, you win; if they say no, play a staying power 3. subsequently ask "will you attack this turn"? and "will you cast a spell this turn"? (using a Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir for the second question if necessary) to ensure they can't disrupt the combo 4. donate them a platinum angel 5. play a mox lotus and braingeyser them for every card in their library. play an opalescence and donate them a glorious anthem and a blacker lotus , then play enchanted evening . play and activate a mindslaver and then donate them a fastbond and the mox lotus (returning one of the donates to your hand with eternal witness or whatever) 6. during their turn, play every permanent in their hand (playing lands with fastbond) then (as yourself) cast mirrorweave on the blacker lotus, so every permanent becomes a copy of it. proceed to tear up every card they control, and hopefully do it before they notice that they aren't bound by staying power's ability anymore and can concede
Dark Ritual being overpowered is determined more by what is done with it than the card itself.
True, but the fact that it enables so many ridiculous things is pretty telling. It's like, sure I can use a shotgun as a bludgeoning instrument, but that doesn't make it not a shotgun.
Shortly before Serra died, she transferred her spark into an angel whose full name was Asha Avacyn Bolas. Her dragon father groomed her for her positions in Alara and Innistrad, and she's also been getting help from her uncle Ugin in the form of Urza, who was resurrected as Marit Lage to be the avatar as which she projects herself into material realms. Grieslbrand is a split personality who sometimes wanders the planes disguised as a human woman named Liliana Vess.
Everyone's life would be easier if players would, instead of coming to the 'net for help with a deck, just netdeck and be done with it. And I'm not talking about some Top 8 lists, for the Casualists, too, can benefit from netdecking. I've netdecked plenty of decks from the Casual Play forums from users such as Mown, Raedien, Floopfoot, and a few others. I snatched straight the heck out of my web browser. Yes, people, your original idea fell victim to a savage netdecker. You have been assimiliated.
Suppose I wanted a Zombie deck. Why on earth would I spend time searching Gatherer for a decent list of Zombie cards when Raedien already did it for me? Taking time to be creative or waiting on people on the forums to tell you why your deck sucks or 'go to Casual forums' is a disasterous waste of time (to me).
That being said, Magic was ruined back in Alpha when they added all that rules and cards [Debutantes avert your eyes]. My friends and I still like playing it the "pure" way (Basically we go into the woods and hit eachother with wiffle bats while shouting made up obscenities. You know, the way Garfield wanted it to be played).
Don't worry about it. I've come up with a list of changes to fix EDH.
-First off, there's no commander. -The minimum deck size is 60 cards, and each deck can have up to four of each card, save basic lands and relentless rats. Also decks have no color identity. -Starting life total is 20.
Here's a clever play you can try yourself: -Convince friend to run relentless rats.dec in legacy tournament -Get a deck with lots of mill, yixlid jailer, and humility -Drop humility and jailer, wait for him to dump his hand, mill him out -All his rats now have no abilities. Call a judge because he's playing an illegal deck with more than 4 of a single card. -Get him/her banned from competitive magic play
L, is for the leather gloves you weaaaar. O, is for the organs that guy could spaaaare. V, is very very, extraordinay. E, is for every vagrant i butchered in a wine cellar befooooore.
The outer layer of the Magic: the Gathering box, the carton, or crust, is fairly thin and light, and contains largely aluminosilcates.
Within that lies the middle layer, consisting of the familiar booster pack. Although solid, the booster packs' high temperatures allow them to acutally move around within the booster box. This flow, sometimes called convection, is cited by frustrated box mappers as one of WOTC's most genious uses of thermodynamics since the Ravnica block.
No one knows what lies at the core of the booster box, but scientists theorize that it must be especially dense in order to make up for the large amount of fluff distributed amongst the booster packs.
I imagine [Ajani 3's] second ability involves him hurling the creature at your opponent Brion Stoutarm style, then the guy is just like "Okay, that may have worked, but don't- GOD DAMN IT!" as he does it again because cats don't give a **** :33.
Its like that one time Elves broke out in a field of Jund. Elves became a resurgent hit, then died off again once Jund adapted to the rest of the field of G/W that it required mass removal that inherently pooped on Elves too.
Submit to the menace. Delver can, and will blot out the sun.
"I remember my days as a youth at Tolarian Academy ." "Wow, small multiverse, I actually went there too." "WAIT, DON'T- Well ****, there's $200,000 in student loans well spent."
And flavor goes out the window when you cast a second copy of a planeswalker right after the first one dies, so...
"Hey Nissa, I need a favor." "You just asked me for a 'favor' like thirty seconds ago, and it turned out to be having Sarkhan Transmogrify my only follower into a dragon like 5 times -which dickery aside also violates some laws of causality - and then you let me get beaten over the head by that hedron crab." "...I'll give you " "...Well all right then."
GM, I don't think Dill is better than you. I KNOW it. Even if he wakes up every morning, clubs a baby seal, steals all the TV remotes from within a block's radius of his house and then robs hungry orphans of their food he'd be better than you, for the simple reason that he learns from his mistakes.
What would they have to fight about? Like, all I can think of now is Gideon going "Hey, long-ears! I'm gathering a group of 'Walkers together to fight some tentacle monsters.....you want in?" and Tamiyo going "Ew! Hentai no bakka Gideon-desu desu!" and flying away.
I open 4 packs just to be on the safe side. Not only do I get more cards than everyone else, but I also get to spend the rest of the night off. Win Win.
MaRo has a thing for people opening boosters with bad cards. But since he can only get so many bad cards printed in each set, he has found a devious way of getting more bad cards into circulation: He makes entire print sheets with just bad rares, then puts them onto the assembly line. He proceeds to wring his hands and twirl his evil mustache that he grew for twirling purposes as a lightning bolt strikes in the background. Afterwards, he goes to make sure that the good cards are only opened by everyone's friends, and that we all only get to open bad cards. He does this by memorising each booster, than switching them around accordingly. Whenever someone complains about a card, he immediately jumps out from behind a chair to yell "WELL, IT'S NOT FOR YOU!" before merging back into the shadows in order to devise new ways in which he can screw over players, then claim that he has valid reasons for doing so.
Mark Rosewater is sitting in a seemingly innocuous cable TV van, outside of Bankaimastery's house. Sitting nearby are two hardened criminal hackers, fresh out of prison, and filled with resentment at their lack of physical fitness. "Have you managed to hack his brainwaves yet? The set deadline's coming up fast." "We're almost through. It should be coming up on the screen any second." The hacker presses a button, and Kevin's thoughts flash onto the screen. Mark and the hackers stare in amazement at the sheer beauty, the elegance, and the raw truth of what they see. It's like the ending to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Brilliant light shines across the screen, the truth of existence is made clear to them, and they despair at their own foolishness, their own ignorance, their own inadequacy. And then they steal his ideas. As they return back to R&D, Mark sneers at a haggard old man chained to a cast-iron sphere. The man looks up from his laborious task of breaking rocks in the dungeon of Wizards of the Coast headquarters, and asks a question: "Kevin, my greatest student. He - he's all right, isn't he? You didn't hurt him?" Mark deals him a weighty blow with his boot. "Know your place, Richard. Get back to work."
I'm only opposed to it because it bears so little relation to how people actually play the game. The example of Miracles is actually a much better one then the Clone example I was trying to use.
From the game's perspective, the card can move instantly from face down in the library to revealed in the hand and that's fine for the rules. But in real life, we can't actually do that, so the card spends a good bit of time in locations that are neither where that player's library is nor where that player's hand is. And that's fine for real life. What I don't want is the disconnect to be explicitly codified. Along the lines of
183664.697 A game of Magic as laid out by these rules exists only as a pure Platonic ideal, utterly unrealizable by fallible mortals limited by the confines of physicality and the ravages of evil and sin.
183664.698 The cake is a lie, too.
I know it's true, but I don't want the rules to actually straight-up tell me that.
Pfft this cant be serious can it? If it is please delete your account OP. Its not even close to ban worthy, considering what JTMS and stoneforge had to accomplish to get banned i see the WotC selling magic to aquire Pokemon before that ever happens.
I'm trying to imagine sorin markov as a gym leader in one of those pokemon games which you have to beat him to get his badge... somehow I imagine that he would stab you in the chest with his sword before giving you the badge, even if you beat his pokemon....
Personally, I'd be fine with tea time but then I'm not gonna waste the mana summoning Emrakul, the Aeons Torn . He always takes all the sugar, drinks the whole pot of Earl Grey and doesn't even say thank you. SO. RUDE.
Break the Card is a regular thread in the Cards and Combo Forum. Quite simply, the participants are given a Johnnystatic card (e.g. Xenograft ) and are asked to build a deck around it. The winner and honorable mentions are sigged below. Get brewing!
This week's Break the Card was based around Xenograft . Thread : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/27681049/Break_the_card_:_Xenograft?pg=1
Winner : Axterix with his Vampdrazi deck. Finalist : Vektor480 with his Ally/Golem/Plant deck. Honorable mentions : Zammm for the Turntimber Ranger combo and TinGorilla for suggesting Sarkhan the Mad .
Here's the link to the Mindlock Orb contest : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/27697565/Break_the_Card_:_Mindlock_Orb?sdb=1&pg=last#497536269
Here's the link to Break the Card : Bludgeon Brawl : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/27715169/Break_the_Card_:_Bludgeon_Brawl?sdb=1&pg=last#498208797
Winner : Vektor and his Grab the World deck. Finalist : Crandor with his Awesome Aliteration deck. Honorable mentions : RP Jesus with his Wat deck and Zix200 with his Signet Renewal deck.
This week was Followed Footsteps : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/27748677/Break_the_Card_:_Followed_Footsteps?pg=1
Winner : Tevish_Szat with his Exponential Growth deck. Honorable mentions : Zix with his Carbon Copies deck and Escef with his Fungus of Speed and Time deck.
This week's card was Jace's Archivist : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/28063377/Break_the_Card_:_Jaces_Archivist.
Finalists : Jentaru with his "Consecration of the Draw" deck and HereticSmitty with his "ADHD: The deck" deck. Winner : JaxsonBateman with his "The Archives Are Endless!" deck.
The irony of the whole situation is that cavern isn't even seeing much play right now
This. There was more tribal synergy in the recently-rotated Standard than there is now, and they've gotten rid of Mana Leak , which arguably wasn't even that good the last few months.
Right now the only decks that will really be playing Cavern are misc. humans builds and zombies, and if you're running a lot of counterspells against aggro decks like that you're doing it wrong anyway.
I won't comment on the impact of Cavern on older formats though since I really don't play them as heavily.
Also to the person complaining about zombies: Humans have a metric buttload of creatures that are maindeckable and absolutely drop a giant dump on zombies. Red has Pillar of Flame and Annihilating Fire , and if you've played any white in your decks over the last 6 months Celestial Purge was a huge beating.
Well, Mana Leak wasn't good because of Cavern of Souls...
Caverns are still necessary for color fixing for some of these aggro decks with really greedy mana bases. Do you need to play them? Probably not until there are real counterspells available.