Standard is always two blocks at a time, plus a Core set (and for a short time each year there are two Core sets at once). The oldest block and Core set leave Standard when a new block is released. So yes, Innistrad through M13 will be out once the first set of the new block is in, which will be in the fall, I think October.
As long as a card is in a Standard legal set, you can use any version of that card. Right now you could use copies of Think Twice from Time Spiral.
As for whether you should build a deck with Innistrad cards, that's entirely up to you. If 5 months or so isn't enough time to be worth it to you, then don't do it. Personally I'll still be using the older cards, but I'm not going to go out of my way to pick up any of the $25+ ones.
If 5 months or so isn't enough time to be worth it to you, then don't do it. Personally I'll still be using the older cards, but I'm not going to go out of my way to pick up any of the $25+ ones.
So it's actually seven months, but this is the key point. You have to decide for yourself how much it is worth to buy cards that will be standard-legal for ~7 months. This, in turn depends on how much enjoyment you will get out of them and how important it is for you to win.
Also, to answer the question more philosophically, Standard changes all the time. Not only is there a new expansion set every three months and a major rotation every 12 months, but it takes time for the meta game to react to these changes. As an example, just look at how Bant aura came into the scene right before Gatecrash, only to quickly disappear afterwards.
I consider standard the wild, wild, west of Magic. It's fast-paced, and constantly changing. It can be tough to make good calls, but if you happen upon a deck that works for you, I'd keep it throughout Standard.
Standard I feel, is also the most expensive format in Magic, over a long term. For your 1st year or 2, you may spend $100 on a deck or two, or more than that. But then the cards start rotating, and you gotta buy again. And again, and again.
Modern/other eternal formats may have a higher buy-in, but cards stay consistent. SO even though you may spend $500 on a Modern legal deck, that is $500 you never have to spend again.
I currently run a deck for Standard, Modern, Commander and Legacy. For standard, I have a typical, horribly budget Rakdos Deck Wins. For Modern, I have a B/G/U/W Draw-go Reanimator featuring my favorite creature, Wurmcoil Engine . For Legacy, I'm trying too hard to break Pyromancer Ascension . I also run a Naya Zoo with all the oldies . For Commander/EDH, I'm running The Mimeoplasm . A little morals thing about me, I like winning through combos, but not infinitely.
However quiet, I am a Christian, so feel free to tell me you are too, it's always a relief.
Modern/other eternal formats may have a higher buy-in, but cards stay consistent. SO even though you may spend $500 on a Modern legal deck, that is $500 you never have to spend again.
That's an awfully long time to wait to break even, if you ask me. Plus it's much harder to find tournaments/players for Modern. And it doesn't necessarily stop you from having to buy the most powerful new cards each year.
I play more casual games with friends and haven't ever been to FNM or one of the game nights at my local shop. That being said, I've been trying to make my decks Modern legal because I would like to play with more than the four or five people I usually do. Honestly, I couldn't see my way to playing standard. Too much money for too short a time playing the deck. Modern sounds fun although i have a lot of cards from pre-8th edition that I wish I could play. I'd like to be able to build a deck that could sit on the shelf for a few months if I take a break from playing and then pick up again. I'd hate to see all that hard work and $$ be worthless in a few months. just my two cents.
Newbs! Ask me your questions but always question my answers The Six Commandments of Beginning Deck Building Spoiler:Show
Thou shalt play 60 cards. No more. No less (unless thou so choseth to play EDH... in which case I cannot help thee)
Thou shalt playtest with at least 22 lands (perhaps more for Control, perhaps less for Aggro).
Thou shalt pick no more than three colors of thine own choosing which ye find to be the most fun to play.
Thou shalt use Mana Fixing, lest ye be Mana screwed for all thine days of Planeswalking.
Thou shalt abide by the Rule of Nine.
Thou shalt play a playset (four copies) of the aforementioned Nine.
I play more casual games with friends and haven't ever been to FNM or one of the game nights at my local shop. That being said, I've been trying to make my decks Modern legal because I would like to play with more than the four or five people I usually do. Honestly, I couldn't see my way to playing standard. Too much money for too short a time playing the deck. Modern sounds fun although i have a lot of cards from pre-8th edition that I wish I could play. I'd like to be able to build a deck that could sit on the shelf for a few months if I take a break from playing and then pick up again. I'd hate to see all that hard work and $$ be worthless in a few months. just my two cents.
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.
Definitely. I just meant I'd hate to spend all the time and money (particularly the money), only to have to do it all over again. I like that Standard is constantly changing but I enjoy the synergy between old and new cards too much to really get into that format.
Newbs! Ask me your questions but always question my answers The Six Commandments of Beginning Deck Building Spoiler:Show
Thou shalt play 60 cards. No more. No less (unless thou so choseth to play EDH... in which case I cannot help thee)
Thou shalt playtest with at least 22 lands (perhaps more for Control, perhaps less for Aggro).
Thou shalt pick no more than three colors of thine own choosing which ye find to be the most fun to play.
Thou shalt use Mana Fixing, lest ye be Mana screwed for all thine days of Planeswalking.
Thou shalt abide by the Rule of Nine.
Thou shalt play a playset (four copies) of the aforementioned Nine.
While in theory you could in practice create a standard-legal deck in October that only contains the expansion set that came out then, so that it could be played for two years, it would not be competitive. For good or for bad, standard changes significantly every three months when a new expansion or core set is publsihed. In practice, it changes continuously, since it takes time for the metagame to react to the last set.
One nice thing about Magic is that it can be enjoyed in a number of different ways, some cheaper than others. But to suggest that standard only changes every two years or to imply that it is not expensive, I think would be misleading.
To answer the OP's question, it's mostly about the scale of change you're looking for. If you're looking for new cardpools then it's about 4 times a year. If you're looking for innovative design, it's quite often, except in formats with severely crippled counterplay where the format is easily broken. Generally though, standard is in a constant state of change and if it stops changing it's mostly because people have given up due to an expanding or diminished cardpool on the horizon.
: Regenerate.
