Magic: The Gathering C/D

i'm getting mildly excited by standard again now that some actual new decks have shown up. i like gerry t's new build of nykthos green and there's also a big naya list with the new ajani that i want to try.

meanwhile, modern feels super stagnant. after all the hype around the january changes, wild nacatl and bitterblossom have failed to crack 2% of the metagame while the same few decks continue to sit on top. i don't really know what the solution is here, but other than possibly splinter twin and birthing pod, i favor addition over subtraction at this point and i think part of the problem is that theros block by nature isn't likely to add staples/archetypes to the format. some new sets centered on something other than creature augmentation could help.

i'd like them to leave the banned list along right now tbh. modern isnt exciting right now but there are a decent collections of strong, interactive decks at the top of the metagame and range of less competitive but possibly more interesting decks that are viable. i think im happier than you are to just pilot boring but effective lists other people come up w/ tho, i can see being frustrated as a deck-builder.

also, w/o a fetchlands reprint i have a hard time taking modern seriously as an alternate to legacy - i think my legacy deck cost me less than modern jund did to build, and over half my fetches came from tournament wins. its boring to gripe about it so much, but i feel like the cost of modern staples is the biggest problem by far facing the format

yeah i mostly agree with you - what i was trying to say was that i'd rather see the format grow & develop via new sets rather than banlist curation. and there's absolutely still room for that to happen power-level-wise; RTR block put a lot of cards into the format.

aaron forsythe straight up admitted in an interview recently that R&D was blindsided by how fast modern prices inflated, and that because they work so far ahead we shouldn't necessarily expect much for a while but that they're getting stuff into the pipeline now.

maybe we discussed this before but wasnt the issue that Modern Masters wound up doing the opposite of what was intended? instead of reducing prices by putting more copies of these cards into print, it got way way more people interested in Modern which made the scarcity of Bobs/Goyfs even more pronounced

iirc it did do what was intended for every card in the set other than those few headliners though. a lot of the regular rares are still half the price they were before MMA while comparable ones that weren't reprinted in MMA have ballooned.

I love Modern right now, basically for the reasons Lamp mentioned. 6 very distinct archetypes made up the top 16 at Minneapolis, and there's a handful of other decks that can do well with good metagame positioning, but of course it's quite stagnant compared to Standard. I would like it to be a slowly-changing format where I can (hopefully) learn one deck and keep it for years, maybe updating a card or two now and then.

Was a little surprised to learn that the most expensive Zendikar fetches now sell for as much as the cheapest original dual land, but that really illustrates how much people like Modern.

I think modern is pretty sweet atm, but I think they need to cultivate more control (unban ancestral visions) non-affinity aggro decks in the long-term

idk what the solution for the pod problem is, banning pod seems wrong, but it's a hard card for them to print the right hate for

the solution is to have access to enough strong midrange threats that don't work in pod decks, such as, say, bloodbraid elf

to elaborate, you need creatures that are worth playing for abilities that aren't ETB or death triggers, or creatures that need to remain in play for multiple turns to generate advantage.
some good midrange creatures that aren't at their best in pod decks: knight of the reliquary, geist of saint traft, vengevine, falkenrath aristocrat, hero of bladehold

there's a bunch more than that, and all of these show up a little bit right now but they don't have a strong enough supporting cast to match up to pod at the moment

also, not creatures, but elspeth knight errant, garruk relentless, sorin lord of innistrad are all good midrange threats that can't be podded into but want to be in creature decks

the problem with most of these cards is that they're 4-drops. what you really need are more 2-drops that encourage building non-pod midrange decks. lotleth troll is a good example of this actually, though i don't know if it's quite strong enough for the format. but that type of card is key.

there's too much midrange already!

also they should reprint wasteland

obv will never happen but would allow for the cooler tempo and prison decks

i've seen people cash mtgo daily events with a monowhite enchantment-based prison deck but it's pretty niche

tempo is pretty much just U/x delver until they make new cards to enable some other tempo deck. U/R delver is reasonably good right now.

i don't think wasteland is necessary or desirable card to have in a format without broken lands but ymmv

yeah wasteland just seems hateful. if you wanted to punish greedy manabases i feel like price of progress would be better? also i like that urzatron is fringe strategy in modern

price of progress / blood moon seem 'worse' than wasteland to me

I like the ur tempo deck I might play that for a while

full Conspiracy spoiler out now. looks like there a lot of things to keep track of but the power level seems high and I like the multiplayer mechanics that keep things moving. kind of amused by all the one-shot returning mechanics. really excited to be able to play Spiritmonger and Pernicious Deed again. Spiritmonger was the first creature I can remember that felt really unfair. I guess that power level is the standard now!

haha the only context I have experienced spiritmonger in has been in cubes where it was unplayable

spiritmonger was really exciting when it came out, it was sort of the first time that they pushed a creature way above the established mana curve without a drawback

would it even see play in current standard?

i think it might actually, since it can attack into desecration demon and doesn't die to hero's downfall. in most recent standards it wouldn't though

Spiritmonger did seem really pushed in terms of power at the time, but it goes to show that you need more than big p/t numbers at 5 mana. It wasn't even played much in Standard when it was legal, IIRC. If you opened it today in sealed, it would be a good but not great rare. I don't think it would get played in Standard today unless the metagame was set up right for it.

I would be pretty happy w/ this in a sealed pool

http://media.wizards.com/images/magic/tcg/products/cns/asdfsc3wfas234/QybjB0lKv5_EN.jpg

this is confusingly worded

the tl;dr is you get everyone's last pick from the current pack and any future packs

okay my initial read was 'last card' in the sense that every hands over the card at the bottom of the pack that they are holding right now

which is clearly wrong, but they could have worded that more clearly

The fact that they need to account for multiples of these draft-action cards really makes the wordings get obtuse. I think a lot of these cards are pretty simple once you get what they do.

re: Spiritmonger - no idea if it would see play now (about as much as Reaper of the Wilds, maybe?) and yeah it didn't destroy Standard the way a lot of people had predicted but I recall a lot of people playing it, IIRC Standard was was slow then. I just remember that being one of the three times where a card looked so obviously overpowered that my first impression was that it must be a misprint. The other two were Baneslayer Angel and Jace, the Mind Scupltor.

vintage masters limited actually looks pretty fun, i'm excited to play it. hopefully they'll add phantoms eventually like with modern masters since the price point is a bit high

kinda just looks like cube

looks more like 'modern masters but with older cards from my most fondly remembered era of magic' to me

vintage masters seems pretty amazing so far

but the real test will be when i start drafting i guess

I am way too insulted at the idea of $40 online drafts where you can open a lotus w/ dumb art

they're only 25, still a lot but maybe decent if you can win prize packs and open decent cards. anyone know the EV of a pack here or is it way too early to tell?

no idea

i am guessing they'll run phantoms eventually like they did for modern masters, once the release hype/sales die down.

Had friends over for a Conspiracy draft this weekend - lots of fun. I ended up in black because it was underdrafted and I ended up getting 4 Liliana's Specters before the last pack. I opened and took Secrets of Paradise in pack 3, and realized two picks later that all of a sudden with that Secrets pick I could splash any cards I wanted to, thanks to having so many Specters. I didn't make that much use of it though, only taking a Dack's Duplicate and a Selvala's Charge. The Conspiracy cards are really fun but also pretty interesting for gameplay. I wouldn't be opposed to them showing up in regular Magic.

I <3 Grudge Keeper. My friend to my right played a Custodi Squire, voted to get back some bomb and I voted for him to get it too. My other three friends were priced into voting for some other card to prevent the bomb from getting returned, and taking 2 damage for it. Needless to say, I was killed quickly that game, but it was worth it

Another highlight was killing a 13/13 Custodi Soulbinders with a Morbid Tragic Slip

has anyone else been drafting vintage masters? i've drafted a bunch over the last few days and while its fun both to play the crack a lotus lottery and to continually draft battle screech and/or goblins its starting to feel a lot more narrow than modern masters draft.

i've done a couple drafts so far and i like it a lot. i didn't draft MMA enough to get a good sense of how deep it was so i can't really compare them in that regard, but this set pulls from my favorite era of magic so i'm probably naturally inclined to like it more.

M15 looking kinda exciting and weird for a core set. i'm excited to get a new non-theros draft format irl, at the least.

yeah it def seems more promising than m14

pretty much every single one of the guest designed cards look awesome. gonna have to see the commons and uncommons to figure out how it's going to play in Limited but what we've seen is very interesting. I'm guessing the rest is reprints??

The guest designed cards are all really out-of-the-box. Maybe they should do those more often.

yeah a lot of them are actually pretty cool, only a few cringeworthy ones

the 'designed by' tag makes them all a little bit cringeworthy

Eh I don't mind that. OTOH I'm really not digging the "movie trailer for 300" look of the new dailymtg.com

yeah they were so dedicated to making a site that looks good on an ipad that they sacrificed a site that people actually go to