Magic: The Gathering C/D

I'm looking forward to jamming Eldrazi Displacer into every deck I play.

Not looking forward to being wrecked by Kozilek's Return

yeah the u/r 1/3 dude is a card I am gonna buy 4 foil copies of immediately

I keep reading "Devoid" as "Devour" and thinking "holy shit is that good"

I think I just built my most degenerate Vintage Cube deck yet, amassing three turn-4 wins with Craterhoof Behemoth, that's the sort of thing that'll keep me addicted to this format until they take it away

ends today sadly. i am borrowing someone else's insight here but one underrated aspect of a powered cube in particular is the entertainment/drama of the draft itself. i have discovered 2 of the worst feelings in magic for me are the creeping realizations that 1) what was going to be a sweet broken deck is actually just a pile of garbage and 2) i have somehow ended up drafting a sad fair deck

spending a minute trying to figure out which creature to Bribery and taking a Sheoldred only to have it immediately bounced back with Karakas was pretty bad

i kinda like the chronological flashback draft thing theyre doing this year, there's a lot of dud formats like the core sets but it's also the only chance we'll get to draft the best 'partial' formats, like champions/champions/betrayers of kamigawa and 3x time spiral are among the best draft formats imo but their full block versions are a lot worse

it also means they have to run coldsnap drafts and coldsnap owns

for a long time the drafts at the store here were just "any three packs you want" and I liked how full block Time Spiral captured that feeling to some extent

problem with full block time spiral was sprout swarm which was a common that ruined games. planar chaos was fine but not particularly more interesting than just getting a 3rd time spiral pack imo

i guess i do still like full block though, thinking about it more

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CYEDUJoWsAEOy-o.png

love this card

I wouldn't say TS-TS-TS was inherently a better format than TS-PC-FS, but I do find that the newness of a totally new format, new world, new mechanics tends to cement way more nostalgia for me. So that when they run TS-PC-FS or especially TS-TS-PC, it feels like a weird version of TS-TS-TS and just makes me want to do TS-TS-TS. I even have more nostalgia for original RAV-RAV-RAV than full block RAV, and I'd guess that's an unpopular opinion

i just like triple large set formats best in general, the main exception being invasion block

agreed - they've gotten pretty good at designing triple large draft formats and a lot of times adding another set feels like they're screwing with the formula.

full block RAV always confused the hell out of me, I could never remember which 3-color combos could draft well and which were traps. I don't really like finishing one pack with an idea of what 3rd color you'll need to splash, that was the thing I didn't like about Fate/Khans/Khans (and triple Khans was pretty much perfect)

I don't like any of the multicolor formats that have fewer than 10 supported color combinations, they get stale way faster in my experience

super excited about warping wail, I think it's a sure thing modern/legacy card

yeah i like eldrazi charm

full spoiler now up. set looks great at first pass, lots of cool stuff at all rarities esp w/ colourless activations. and very little vanilla.

http://media.wizards.com/2015/ogw_239nCi30ks3/en_RdYPALUIin.png
http://media.wizards.com/2015/ogw_239nCi30ks3/en_2coXKQFgkw.png
http://media.wizards.com/2015/ogw_239nCi30ks3/en_ZXi4eRRR4S.png

these are p cool cards for commons

http://media.wizards.com/2015/ogw_239nCi30ks3/en_CwUVtu4ZGe.png

http://media.wizards.com/2015/ogw_239nCi30ks3/en_EpO0ChpKsf.png

dealing damage instead of fighting seems red? idk, even at 5cmc this is so much better than the miserable bfz flight card. green still not very exciting overall tho.

fighting with multiple creatures is kinda weird though. also lol @ that card in general

so Wastes are basic lands for draft purposes right? idk what they're doing just seems strange, really believe BFZ should have had this mechanic as well

you have to draft wastes

set definitely looks like a pretty big step up from BFZ, lots of cards I'm liking

there are a lot of really strange things about this set

xp Wastes are common, they'll show up in common slots, but there's 2 of them so you'll see them twice as often as other commons

https://twitter.com/KaolinTiger/status/686755431042183168

"big fatty?"

it's what we smoke before our games, grandma

did people catch the pithing needle controversy?

pithy needle rather

uh oh, WOTC cracking down on proxy-friendly tournaments, get out the pitchforks

the pithing needle thing is dumb, nothing worse than losing on a dumb technicality

I've really been enjoying playing the U/B ingest/devoid deck in BFZ, it's right up my alley and there seems to be enough good commons to make it work

Allies seems like it's the best deck, if you curve out you're basically unbeatable, with no cheap Shock-like removal (Outnumber doesn't count) this deck is dangerous

Still confused by the presence of Converge in this set. The mana elf obviously helps you but barring that there doesn't seem to be any way to generate a 3rd (or 4th or 5th) color. Now that the 2nd set wants you to play colorless mana it gets even more difficult, just seems like a mechanic that doesn't belong

Converge seems more pitched toward standard where you can play 4 or 5 color decks with barely any drawbacks. Painful Truths is the big one, but Radiant Flames, Exert Influence, Woodland Wanderer, and Skyrider Elf all see some play.

Hadn't heard about the Pithing Needle thing, that's pretty dumb. Seems like everything was played by the rules, but the rules shouldn't allow for that situation. If there are two cards in a format where one card name is wholly in another card name, it should be treated like partially overlapping card names (like how saying "Jace" requires you to specify further, even if there's only one type of Jace in your opponent's deck)

Bye bye Summer Bloom and Splinter Twin. Pretty surprised about twin, but I guess it makes sense. Not real clear on what makes these two so bad but tron, affinity, and storm ok.

yeah I am fine w/ them mixing things up, but I really feel like twin was not 'problematic' for the format the same way that tron is, even if the deck is ultimately better. most fair decks can't deal w/ t3 karn, t4 ugin and there's not great land destruction in modern.

I was actually hoping they would ban ancient stirrings. nobody likes playing against a deck that has ancient stirrings in it, and it's secretly the best cantrip in modern.

twin really, really surprised me. i had actually moved over to amulet bloom about five months ago with the expectation that this would happen but ive had all the pieces both on-line and in paper since 2013 (i remember talking to iatee abt building it as a budget option after the drs ban hurt my jund deck haha). weirdly (or not i guess) all three modern decks ive done well with have been hit with bans. although its hard to count u/r delver with treasure cruise really.

i feel like theres been this weird acknowledgment that ancient stirrings is the 'green ponder' over the last month or so, i've heard a few different people advocate for it being banned. its certainly the glue for a bunch of the least liked decks in modern (not just tron but lantern and the late lamented amulet bloom). i think the other enabler common that could get the axe is simian spirit guide which also only shows up in decks people hate.

yeah didn't you have a bunch of foil amulet pieces?

I agree on simian spirit guide, I've thought about that one. I like this 'does this card appear in decks people don't hate' test.

twin has been all over the place recently and it's clear that control decks are getting crowded out by it and forced to include a splinter twin package instead.

I thought that maybe if they nerfed amutlet bloom, they'd also consider banning blood moon, which just seems like an obnoxious no fun card. I also thought they'd consider bringing back some cards.

so pod and twin were the nightmare matchups for affinity despite being a large portion of the field and now they're both gone, i'm curious to see if affinity just goes nuts now

someone got their hands on a Shadows Over Innistrad booster pack and the cards are up on mythicspoiler

looks way less of a boring retread than BFZ from these few cards, discard mechanics instead of self-mill with Madness as the returning keyword rather than one of the innistrad ones

cool to see a new deck in modern

also rip modern

I like that the top modern deck is basically a bunch of BFZ draft cards. How long until they ban Eye of Ugin?

I don't think they emergency ban it but I don't think it gets past the next ban announcement. it feels so inevitable that I think a lot of people aren't even gonna buy into the deck.

the nice thing about banning eye is that it also makes rg tron (which is a long-term disease for the format imo) less inevitable, maybe some grindy control deck could actually beat it.

anyone doing Oath draft? they're pretty fun though with the caveat that the BFZ mechanics feel a bit clunky. I'm surprised how well the colorless mana mechanic works, especially in a format where 3+ color decks are playable.

I think of colorless as a 6th color that can only be a splash color, not a base

they were pretty clever with how they implemented the colourless sources, in particular having several colorless lands that can also provide other colours to lessen the disruption of the splash. i've hardly ever played wastes themselves, except the couple times i've had walker of the wastes specifically.

i think this format is more fun and will prove to have more depth than bfzx3 but i do notice it feels more like an assortment of cards whereas bfz was very coherent/flavourful. you were more incentivized to have just an ally or just an eldrazi deck before.

also, i don't know how far this was engineered on purpose, maybe giving too much credit, but it is cool that the eldrazi decks were much better in the block where they were in the ascendancy story-wise, and now it has gone the other way and the ally decks are generally better.