Magic: The Gathering C/D

it's not *bad* but if you're behind on board it might be more of a stabilize than win

you generally don't get to ultimate a planeswalker when you're behind on board

pretty sure ral fits best in an aggressive/tempo deck anyway, with a slight nod to control decks who will just use the +1 to add a card to their sphinx's revelations

you generally dont cast Revelation on your turn though do you?

you do if it's going to give you an extra card!

alternately, you can do like...t4 play this, bolt their guy, then t5 you can wrath and still leave 2 mana up for a counter/removal for their follow-up play

the more i think about it, i think he's going to be one of the best walkers in standard

that sequence of plays makes no sense though, forget i posited it

i hope Beck is good enough to make elf combo a deck in modern, though if it is it might just get banned

I've heard some people complaining about fuse as being basically entwine, but if both halves have different casting costs and power levels (like Beck and Call does) it's really kind of different isn't it? I'm a fan just for the goofy frame, I love when they modify the look of the cards like that.

yeah it's just another variant on modal spells, like 50 other mechanics are

So excited about all these cards - Beck/Call joining the Whispering Madness club of 'print a banned card for 1 extra different-coloured mana' too. Is there anything for elves in blue? Coiling Oracle?

Y'know Beck is actually different than Glimpse of Nature in that it triggers any time a creature enters play, which means that A) it works for token producers like Saproling Cluster and B) it triggers if your opponent gets creatures too (so it's good with the Hunted creature cycle). It's the first point though (and the fact that Glimpse was crazy good to begin with) that tells me this should be a combo piece in something; will the one extra mana/blue splash nerf it?

i feel confident saying that Beck will see play in both standard and modern in combo decks. what the standard ones look like i'm not sure yet

it'll be fun in older formats with Empty the Warrens! (or is that banned?)

empty's only banned in pauper

beck + mana creatures + village bell-ringer is the first thing that comes to mind for standard uses - basically bant elf-ball. a few people were playing this last year with primeval titan and soul of the harvest already.

i had forgotten about that village bell-ringer combo - it won an scg open or something iirc maybe last summer? decks that can abuse beck dont appeal to me at all but i was surprised that they printed this considering glimpse is banned in modern (i think?). the idea that adding a blue mana to the cost of glimpse but making it work for tokens/your opponents creatures/blink effects is one the whole still less powerful is interesting to me.

I've heard some people complaining about fuse as being basically entwine, but if both halves have different casting costs and power levels (like Beck and Call does) it's really kind of different isn't it?

One of the judges in my MTG-London facebook group was having an absolute meltdown over Fuse. He said that Entwine was just a standard trigger, as opposed to fuse literally "casting both" as some sort of complete new confusing thing - like, it's confusing enough just whether you can counterspell*, let alone when snapcaster gets involved.

*: I just realised that this is what Counterflux's overload is for! Well, that and grapeshot, anyway.

I imagine it's just gonna be you cast one then the other

fuse cards are 1 spell no matter which of the 3 modes you cast. the spell's colors change depending on which mode though. also note that you can't snapcaster-fuse, you can only cast one half from a zone other than your hand

Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine it's worse than miracle, so I kinda surprised at his virulence - any judges here?

weird

http://magicjudge.tumblr.com/post/47438305293/fuse-faq

That's helpful - thanks iatee and cider!

yeah this seems like a weird thing for a judge to get super crabby over the mechanics article was pretty clear about how it worked, and even corner case stuff that i thought up like targeting with reverberate or appetite for brains isn't that complicated.

judges should be happy about magic getting complicated

I'm a fan just for the goofy frame, I love when they modify the look of the cards like that.

I don't mind the two color split frames, but Beck / Call visually looks awful. I would have called that out as a shop instantly if it didn't come straight from Wizards.

master of cruelties is lol

http://media.wizards.com/images/magic/tcg/products/dgm/tiwoirwiixix/7isqwv12oz_EN.jpg

probably not very good though

advent of the wurm on the other hand looks bonk

http://media.wizards.com/images/magic/tcg/products/dgm/tiwoirwiixix/0g0viseo9e_EN.jpg

not gonna comment on simic guy

i really like that card, i'm just disappointed that the "life total becomes 1" ability isn't a "you may" thing. technically you can't kill your opponent with this guy alone. very cool though!

and hooooly shit @ that wurm instant. kinda confirms my suspicion that DGM is where all the really ridiculous cards that were maybe too good to print in RTR or GTC will go.

god I didn't even notice it was an instant. ridiculous.

at least we've had a year of practice not attacking into 4 open mana by now

again the card im most interested in for today's spoilers is the limited card...

also link

I'm imagining a Back to the Future moment where you show cards like Call of the Conclave, Loxodon Smiter, and this new stupid Wurm token generator to someone in 1998 and blow their fucking minds

sin collector is definitely a constructed card too, in some fashion

Oh yeah, can definitely see Sin Collector getting constructed play, in fact I think it's better there than in limited. Against control, it puts a threat on the board and snags a Wrath or Revelation. That's great for 3 mana, and with Resto, it can get nutty. It needs a home, but I think this card will get played.

I'm imagining a Back to the Future moment where you show cards like Call of the Conclave, Loxodon Smiter, and this new stupid Wurm token generator to someone in 1998 and blow their fucking minds

Master of Cruelties is lol. I thought it seemed weak on first glance, but it's an excellent Defender, and with any evasion, that's the game. It's also risky to block with a bunch of creatures to try and kill it because if they have Bloodrush, you lose your whole team.

yeah i dont think sin collector is great in limited although i think it might be surprisingly powerful in sealed where i like that kind of effect but i like sin collector as a reusable answer to sphinx's revelation in midrange decks. at least that's the first idea i had

Regardless of whether or not it's playable it's still a really neat design.

i'm not convinced that these cards are that much more powerful than like...weatherseed treefolk. it's just that there are lots of them now instead of 1 per set/block

It's not so much that - but IIRC that was an era when stuff like Shivan Dragon, Mahamoti, Serra Angel, and Sengir were all pulled from 6th edition because it was thought that they were too powerful! It was normal for really good creatures to slip through that had downsides that weren't properly balanced - Blastoderm and Negator come to mind - but the idea that they'd just great up print 4/4's with upside for 3 mana, or a 4 mana instant 5/5 trample in a set that can abuse tokens (I was obsessed with King Cheetah back then!) is really something old R&D just never would have done. That's become the mantra of crotchety old Magic players - "remember when big creatures used to have downsides?"

king cheetah was the first flash creature, right

i think having creatures be better than spells is probably a more interesting game tbh even though i can understand both the nostalgia and general preference for when it was the opposite

xp - haha i looked king cheetah up in gatherer and it at least predates flash as keyword so

I still have a collector's box with the King Cheetah artwork! At the time the idea of a creature you could play as an instant was treated the way things like flip cards or Miracles are today. Damn, did I really start this hobby when I was 10 years old? I could have done so much with my life...

have you played nonstop since?

I started at like 8-9