That may be true but the OP's issue with the set is not really reflected by the title they chose. Their issue was more that not enough of the rares and mythics will shake up standard, so their format is not being made more interesting by this set. They don't actually care whether that's because those cards are instead being made for EDH, regular chaos multiplayer (which most people see as basically the same thing even if they're slighty different), Vintage or even Iron Man. Of course one issue with their claim is that it's not only rares and mythics which affect the format. But the other issue is it's wrong anyway. I reckon I can easily find more than 20% of the currently spoiled rares and mythics (the usual proportion of cards that see Standard play) - maybe even more than half - that will at least need to be playtested by Standard players as the new set rolls in to see if they're good enough, without even considering the shocklands.
Blind Obedience Frontline Medic Gideon Realmwright Stolen Identity Crypt Ghast Legion Loyalist Gyre Sage Assemble the Legion Aurelia Aurelia's Fury Biovisionary Clan Defiance Deathpact Angel Domri Rade Firemane Avenger High Priest of Penance Master Biomancer Mystic Genesis Obzedat Zegana Signal the Clans Soul Ransom Spark Trooper Glaring Spotlight
Have fun trying 'em out and stop complaining about the stuff that's not designed for you.
Every card could be made for EDH, some less suited than others. And to say that charms and legendaries were clearly designed for EDH is misleading. Every set has a large amount of EDH playables. Why now, in everyone's mind, is "designed for EDH" such a stigma.
But, yeah, sure:
Enter the Infinite Merciless Eviction Thespian Stage
I think a couple of people find your vernacular irritating, Q. You're too often condescending...
Out of all the cards in the set that I could predict will be played in Modern/Legacy, it will be Thespian's Stage. Sure it works in EDH very well, but it's also going to make some waves elsewhere. If there were something worth targetting in Standard, it would be making a hit there as well. As it stands that is probably the single worst example you could probably show. The thing seems quite possibly the best cross-format card of the set, akin to Deathrite Shaman .
Enter the Infinite feels like it was printed for Omnidoor decks.
With that said, I don't really like the feel of the guilds. It seems they push a mechanic, make it slow and then print a chase card that enables that mechanic to no end. For me, the biggest positive is the alternate art Fathom Seer. I really like it.
I think I'd like to see a spell that says, "~~~ deals damage to target player equal the total power of creatures that player controls."
Competitive players happen to buy their cards from the secondary market, which nets a lot less benefits for Wizards. Casuals crack packs more often, and most players start there before getting competitive. Furthermore, the bulk of Magic players are Casual.
The cards a competitive player buys in the secondary market come from booster packs or other sealed products sold by Wizards. WotC's income is from the products they sell, not from cards on the secondary market.
I think that's what was meant by "a lot less benefits". Chase competitive cards do sell pack, just not as many as chase casual (which can be the same card).
When playing Commander, before you add a card to your deck, you have to ask yourself: "Is this card better than Rings ?" If you play commander and don't have your deck[s] in the Decklist Compendium, maybe you should. Or if you're new or looking into the format, the compendium has some good advice for beginners as well as decklists.
I was careful to write "a lot less", thinking it would be clear that it still does I know they still indirectly make money out of it, but the average competitive player buying from the secondary market will net a lot less money for Wizards then the Casual player who buys boosters and in doing so buys a lot of useless cards. Not no money at all, but a lot less.
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.
I was careful to write "a lot less", thinking it would be clear that it still does I know they still indirectly make money out of it, but the average competitive player buying from the secondary market will net a lot less money for Wizards then the Casual player who buys boosters and in doing so buys a lot of useless cards. Not no money at all, but a lot less.
Competitive play includes a great deal of draft wherein multiple boxes of product are gone through in a few rounds. And some sealed, which involves quite a bit of product opening. This is why WotC is very big on crafting limited format- they keep product moving and they put cards into the hands of players regardless of "casual" or "competitive" status. The other weird part of that dichotomy is that many "competitive players" do play casually fairly often and occasionally the reverse is true.
I play Standard more frequently than EDH or casual games, but I enjoy all of those formats equally. When I see a preview card, I try to come up with some way or some combo to put it in. For me, Gatecrash has been a fun set to follow, and will be a fun set to play with.
Also, I feel like we're still kinda still recovering from how fast the Scars/Innistrad format was. Innistrad/RtR has slowed down a bit and, quite frankly, I like having a game last more than a few turns. A good amount of these cards that are deemed "good but cost too much" may be viable options. It all comes down to how well they play when we actually get our hands on them next week. Then we may be able to properly address the power level of the cards, instead of speculating.
Additionally, just to throw this out there, as unfortunate as it is to see GTC guilds not get a cool uncounterable cycle like RtR guilds did, at least they have decent mechanics. Bloodrush and Cipher seem like really awesome abilities to play with, and Evolve and Extort may actually be extremely relevant come playtesting. Batallion looks like it'll make at least Boros decks faster than any other deck in the format, as they'll want to swing earlier and with more guys, and use cards like Lightning Mauler to speed that process up.
Personally, as an EDH player, I don't see this set as an "EDH set". If you think about it, the shocklands are just as useful in EDH as in Standard, or any other format. The set doesn't revolve around EDH or any other particular format, it just has something for everyone. It's not like every card needs to win the game in record time to be Standard worthy. There could be a good amount of hidden gems in the set that we don't notice yet. I guess we'll just have to wait till next week to see how the set actually plays out.
I should probably put something here someday. Here's a set I'm working on: http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/29422241/Corthenhol_--_A_Work_in_Progress
It's actually the bad competitive players who are mad that a lot of the cards in this set, especially rares, are catered towards casual play.
Also a lot of bad competitive players crave cards that are no-brainers to use. All this "exploring deck types" and "waiting for the metagame to determine the best deck" malarkey is horrible for them, because they can't just hand a shopping list to the FLGS owner and buy victory. They have to *GASP* playtest and learn which new cards are good.
"People want balance but can't accept this homogenization that occurs as a result of that balance being implemented. then they complain that the fighter is weaker than the wizard ad nauseam.: - Teitan
I know they still indirectly make money out of it, but the average competitive player buying from the secondary market will net a lot less money for Wizards then the Casual player who buys boosters and in doing so buys a lot of useless cards. Not no money at all, but a lot less.
: Regenerate.
