Magic: The Gathering C/D

haha its been a rollercoast mtg ride today for me - i forgot that the mtgo ptq was today and that i was qualified and spent the afternoon playing paper sealed deck which is kinda w/e but i also have been pretty aggressively buying foil onslaught fetches under the assumption that they would get reprinted and thus be modern legal so i am happy to hear that this is in fact the case.

khans has me fairly excited for a new draft and standard format and its interesting to think about what decks the allied fetches open up in modern.

khans looks pretty promising to me so far, theres a ton of variety just in the handful of commons/uncommons we've seen

sultai charm seems modern playable? like how is that card ever bad

http://cdn.magicspoiler.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Ankle-Shanker-spoilers.jpg

this guy seems fun

Yeah, he seems like he'd be a good pal for Goblin Rabblemaster

first week of previews is in the books and this set's looking pretty low-key other than the fetchalnds, which is fine i guess. looks fun for drafting but there's no real constructed firestarters yet

yeah the fetch craze might have made them think they didn't have to include any other chase cards

though if nothing else explosive comes out it will be kinda funny how large the power gap is between ths/khans standard and some of the previous standards

Some of the 3-mana tricolor cards look great, though it depends on how the mana's gonna work. fetchlands are kind of an odd fit for a set based off wedges, aren't they? if anything the enemy color ones would've fit here.

I mean there's nothing that looks super broken the way Brimaz or Voice of Resurgence did, but a lot of these cards look very playable.

i think original ravnica block is still the lowest power level block they've made, people just liked it so much that they didn't notice that dryad sophisticate and ravenous rats were being played in top standard decks

i just saw Empty the Pits - surely someone is going to figure out something messed up with that.

I feel like the formats where it's easy to get delve-bait are not the formats that want to be paying BBBB (okay maybe edh)

oh wait lol fetches are coming back to standard

pretty happy about these common dual-lands, those are exactly what i like to see for limited

Siege Rhino looks pretty damn legit

the 4B delve removal seems potentially modern/legacy playable

yeah those were the 2 cards that jumped out at me today. given how removal has been shifting, a kindasorta doom blade at uncommon is not too shabby.

i think that card's too unreliable to see modern/legacy play in a world where go for the throat and doom blade no longer show up

it's a good card nonetheless

I feel like an esper control deck in modern could def play it

common lands, uncommon lands, rare land *and* cluestones
jeez

probably best to overcompensate, full-block RTR had lots of mana fixing but sometimes you'd get a 5-color drafter next to you and wouldn't pick up much, and the result would be miserable

shards of alara had the uncommon lands, obelisks, and a 5-cycle of common lands that kind of sucked, and the fixing in that format wasn't quite good enough, so switching the common lands to a 10-cycle of good ones should hopefully get it there

also this set isn't going to be as heavily multicolor, though you wouldnt know it from the cards they've previewed since the multicolor stuff is mostly at rare

Less than half as many multicolor cards as RTR, I saw somewhere.

it was half as many per pack, not necessarily by overall count. meaning there wont be many at common

that makes sense

I am having cluestone-related war flashbacks to dgm, I guess in a large set you probably won't open 5 in a pack

these do seem worse (pretty hard to crack) than the cluestones, which already weren't very good (in a slow format that could accommodate them)

you'll probably get some packs with 4 common mana fixers but most of them will be the lands which are significantly better

for what its worth i think this format is likely to be slower than RTR block, morph means that your turn 3 play is often going to be a plain 2/2, which doesn't really push the tempo of games much compared to the likes of splatter thug or beetleform mage or whatever

yeah that's a good point, a morph creature will often eat up two turns also

card idea: 1WB banishing light style card, deals 2(?) damage to you each turn, when cast you can search library for another copy

http://mythicspoiler.com/ktk/cards/digthroughtime.html

this seems like it'll find a home somewhere..?

yeah that card's fine in dedicated control decks

here's the set http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/ktk-cig-en

limited looks fun, constructed looks pretty low-key to the point where i have no idea what's even good

the Blue Elk is doing my head in

i love Blue Elk

doesn't seem like a ton of ways at common to get cards into the yard for for delve

early observation: there is a lot more toughness than power on low rarity creatures. this is usually the sign of a slow format. theros broke this trend but only because its mechanics let you go over the top of 4-5 toughness creatures in the midgame; i'm not seeing as many tools to do that in this set. it seems like it shouldn't be difficult to stall the game out while you delve or outlast your way into a winning position. i can't figure out what a winning mardu or temur deck looks like, but the existence of two 6-power green commons and 3 cards that spew out 1/1 tokens is probably related to this.

with RTR block and M14 rotating out, this is the first time that I have a bunch of of cards that are staples in non-Standard formats including shocklands, Abrupt Decay, Deathrite Shaman, and Mutavault. Is it worthwhile holding on to these or should I be trading them as soon as possible?

I think Abrupts will only go up, and Mutavault feels like a good bet to stay at $25+, people were playing them in Modern a lot before IIRC. Dunno about Deathrite, being banned kinda caps its value doesn't it?

still gets lots of Legacy play

those 3 cards are playable in every format they're legal in, hold them all if you have any interest in modern/eternal magic

got coerced into doing the midnight prerelease again. i'm playing sultai because cost-reduction mechanics have always been broken in the past and i don't see why that should change now. people already talking about playing treasure cruise in legacy.

ars arcanum is up and the guy hits the same conclusions as i got from eyeballing the spoiler more or less - slower format than recent blocks, 18 lands probably optimal due to a logjam of 5cmc costs because so many of the morphs unmorph for 5, choose to play first despite slow format because morph initiative is super important, highly value 2cmc cards that trade with morphs and 3cmc 2/3s, banners suck because you want to play a morph on 3.

tl;dr basically morph is a really format-warping mechanic for limited and most of your macro-level decisions should be informed by its existence.

i think whoever gets to 5 mana first in this format is heavily advantaged, and it's going to be difficult to win at all if you don't get there within a turn cycle of your opponent

it definitely occured to me that a banner may not be an ideal Turn 3 play

i think banners will be like cluestones in DGR, a bit of over-the-top fixing that most people won't need/want but they'll be available late if you somehow get starved for fixing or if your deck explicitly wants to jump 3 to 5 (i.e. if you have few morphs and several strong 5cmc hardcasts like Bear's Companion or whatever)

Yeah that's a spot on analysis. The Banners are kind of a consolation prize for those who don't pick up good morph creatures. I like that they exist.

I just moved to Vietnam, which doesn't have a Magic scene afaict, so this will be the first block since Invasion that I'll only be watching instead of playing with (I'm rarely in the mood for MTGO).