Magic: The Gathering C/D

fall set is called Ixalan, sounds as if that'll be the mesoamerica-themed thing we saw fake booster art for previously

also GP Providence in september will be a release weekend event for it (team sealed)

makes sense, nice idea for a theme tho kind of funny right on the heels of amonkhet. also, i wonder how they are pronouncing that.

oh cool I'm def gonna go to that gp

looks like the mtgo folks read the email i sent them about the uncommons, they're pretty thoroughly shuffled in this set

ha!

apparently exert doesn't work with "attack with all" on mtgo. if you want to choose to exert you have to click attackers individually or else the option is not presented

yeah it's not a trigger, it's just an additional choice you make when you declare attackers

big shakeups in the eternal scene

What changed that made top/miracles a ban target?

miracles had been the best deck for a while, at least in the hands of experienced players

4-5 in my first Amonkhet sealed league. Thought it was supposed to be a friendly league ;_;

Exert made combat much trickier than I thought it would. Rather than figuring out what creatures should attack and what creatures should block, you have three states now. And exerting forces you to think a turn ahead. And then you have to do the same thing for your opponents creatures. I thought it would be straightforward, but there were several times I wasn't sure I was making the right play

I don't play Legacy but I really hate Top, so good riddance

miracles was the best deck for like 4 years straight, which is pretty unprecedented

I think it was mostly just them listening to people complaining though, I liked the legacy meta under pax miraclecana. it's probably going to be like souped up modern now.

top is the 2nd most miserable card ever printed and i approve of its removal from every format possible

ok, what's the 1st

mental misstep

the actual answer is probably shahrazad but that card is so miserable that it's banned in vintage which means it transcends any list placement

idk I think if you include MTGO then Top is way more obnoxious, it pretty much singlehandedly adds 5+ extra minutes to the match, can't think of another card like that offhand

personally I find Jace TMS the most miserable card to play against, I was so happy when that got banned

top in cube is particularly obnoxious. overall if my opponent is playing top i figure i am getting like +5% win equity at the cost of sitting through 10 minutes additional pointless fucking around time.

top can be strong in cube in decks that look more or less like legacy miracles (lotta fetches, maybe some actual miracles)

the card is obviously very poorly designed, for sure. it's funny can any number of small tweaks (add a mana here or there, make the draw effect sorcery speed, etc.) would have made it a totally fine card, but in the end it's just a little bit too efficient.

if you had to tap to do the Sylvan Library ability that would help too. a lot of my frustrations with the card had to do with the fact that I could never kill it. plus I remember a lot of "upkeep Top, crack fetch, Top again" where people would spend 2 full minutes before getting to their main phase.

my one amonkhet discovery so far is that, because all of the cycling synergy stuff triggers off discard, the 1U sometime looter guy can potentially be strong in that archetype. effectively makes any non-creature spells you cast potentially count as a cycle, which could be very important for critical mass. just at common, that guy into the 2/3 sentinels that pump on discard is a p nice start

I did one draft last night and opened the stupid dragon + lili so I 'did okay' but the one deck that scared me was a mono-cycling deck that really went off one game. I guess you try and dive into that deck if you open a powerful enabler early? I wonder how fringe it's gonna be.

drake haven is actually unbeatable unless you have one of the two enchantment removals in the set, both of which have cycling so the drake haven drafter is gonna cut them from other people if they're smart (they're also both white so if you're not playing that color then you're just screwed from the start)

it's not quite pack rat but it feels similarly futile if they have it on t3

That card is bonkers, yes. It basically reads "1U: drake" in the right deck. I Lay Claimed it because my opponent was going off, and still lost just to the two drakes he/she had already made

i just had an opponent play it vs me and my immediate reaction was 'oh fuck i'm dead' and then they made a single drake with it over 3 turns and i was like 'oh phew they drew the wrong part of their deck to use it' and then they played sandwurm convergence and i died. quite the emotional rollercoaster

i just got hit for 24 on turn 4 in draft

did it involve that 4/1 mythic?

Buh bye, Felidar Guardian.

it's the right thing to do but the optics are really really bad for them to not have done it on Monday.

they should just get rid of the set release B&R announcement and only have the mid-season one imo, makes everyone's job much easier

Do you buy their explanation? I think people are generally happy enough that they'll look past or forget about the clumsy way it was handled.

Maybe they should just announce bans whenever they need to rather than worrying about a schedule.

the schedule is important so that players can prepare for events appropriately

i don't really buy the stated explanation, i think 2 days of mtgo data is not enough to base a decision on. i think they were planning to hit it in the next one in 6 weeks to be consistent with the previous B&R message about waiting until after PT Amonkhet, but the community pressure plus fear of a stagnant PT forced their hand.

Would be cool if we get a real wild assortment of decks at scgatl, will probably just be 50/50 Mardu and GB thiugh.

you'll see marvel too. ppl dont usually find radically new stuff before the PT unless its super obvious like drake haven or w/e

this is my favorite deck i've drafted so far though sadly i hit the ass end of variance in the games http://i.imgur.com/MklfkLd.png

This is my favourite sealed format I think I've ever played - you can do so many different things across all five colours and they all seem to work really well. The number of unbeatable cards is really small - like Rhonas, Glorybringer, Samut, Liliana, maybe the R/W gods or the Sphinx, but that's about it - nothing at rare.

i haven't tried sealed yet, i got annoyed at that format because there was a long string of sets where BUG were way better than R and W in sealed and it got boring always playing the same colors

also 5 matches feels like a marathon compared to the only 4-round events for some reason

*old

I've had little success in Sealed so far but lots of close, fun matches. The number one thing that bugs me is the lack of enchantment removal, cause there are some game winning enchantments, but I did manage to outrace the black curse one match, which was thrilling. Glorybringer also should've been mythic, I have yet to beat that card

yeah idk why that one is the rare and the double combat step one is the mythic

complexity maybe? idk. i've had glorybringer one time and the only time i drew it it got cloned and then killed. terrible card.

i'm winding up super grindy almost every draft, probably i ought to correct for some biases. as far as enchantment removal goes, i was in a very control-y game with drake haven vs an opp whose way to win the game was convergence, also happening to nerf my win con, and i was able to win by using the griptide/timetwister card to get rid of it for long enough. felt almost like cube.

earlier today i had someone plague wind me by casting blazing volley 4 times in one turn.

4 times? how did that happen?

rares and mythics have the same level of complexity I think - it's more the uh epicness that distinguishes them. or something. I don't know anymore. on paper, the double combat step guys seems very powerful, maybe even mythic level powerful, but no cards with that effect have been playable in constructed... ever? I'm predisposed to be disappointed by double combat step cards

t I did manage to outrace the black curse one match

Yeah I can't evaluate that card at all - I've faced it a lot on t2, where it's like "drain 7" - which is a good card in a format that can be race-y at times, but I also don't see the games where it's stuck in their hands being embarrassing, so... I don't think it's a for-sure maindeckable card but I could be totally wrong.

i think he meant the 7 mana curse.

i experimented with the 2 mana curse after 1st picking the cycle drain 2 enchantment. i had enough early good blockers and interaction to make board stalls likely, and if you can get to mid game alive and have a couple of those on the battlefield it's a real thing. my win cons were drain and a couple big fliers, i don't know if i would consider it outside of exactly that kind of shell. in the game i was referencing, i was in a long stall vs a guy playing a bunch of RW dorks and we both had a pretty full hand - i had a bunch of cyclers and had decided to wait to draw the enchantment as it didn't seem like there was much urgency, and i assumed he had little creatures he wasn't playing because of the couple of curses i had down. but no, he was collecting his blazing volleys until he had all 4... i still won tho!

Yeah I meant Cruel Reality, the sac a creature or planeswalker every turn. yeah I don't think the drain curse is very good

xp lol I am not surprised that you beat a person with 4 Blazing Volley in their deck

yeah but of course i happened to play that guy when it was actually reasonable tech against me! who knows what he thought he was doing otherwise. and it was g1 too.

the other time i built around the drain 2 enchantment i neglected to included the additional win support. i had a few big ground creatures - the 4 drop that gets indestructible, a couple of the 5 drop black dude that gets a boost, the blue 6 serpent - but if you don't get those down pretty early, later on it's hard to break a stall with them. every single game i decked with me at 30 life at opp at 4.