Magic: The Gathering C/D

its neat when MTGO offers an old set (like the Time Spiral Remastered thing they're doing now) and you can see just how much the gameplay has evolved over the years. it's just a mess of small creatures with weird abilities and between Slivers and cards like Sporoloth Ancient you wind up with tons of text on all your cards. so much going on yet so few ways to actually win, half the games are just "fuck this I concede"

that said it is kind of nice to play games that don't just suddenly turn on a dime due to mythics/rares/uncommons that do 3 things at once

3x time spiral is the best draft format of that era imo but yeah the games play really differently from current stuff. lots of utility creatures with tap abilities which they don't do as much of anymore

also mixing the best cards from the 3 sets together probably changes the texture of the set substantially, i haven't played it but it looked like there's a lot more removal than vanilla time spiral so its probably harder to close games

like e.g. in the original block amrou scout was still good but you couldn't pick them up knowing you already had copies of bound in silence for it to fetch because that was in a later pack, it was only getting other low impact creatures

strixhaven looks corny af and is another set with novel-length double-faced rare legends to parse, but i appreciate that it doesn't do the full on 5 keyword mechanics for the 5 factions thing like a ravnica set, it looks fairly lightweight so far outside of individual rares.

learn mechanic seems the sort of thing that will give the set unique texture in draft much like a mutate or snow. while piling on a zillionth 'this card is actually n different cards' mechanic onto the current standard, what an exhausting format that is to play right now

I like that mechanic a lot, feels almost like a Conspiracy thing. wonder if they're gonna nerf it so it doesn't break formats like Companion or if they're just gonna have to go "whoops I guess allowing people to tutor a bunch is broken"

there's already a card in standard that lets you pull any instant/sorcery from your sideboard and not just a small curated subset, don't see how this will break anything that that didn't

oh, idk what card that is, just thinking about how a pushed version of this mechanic might make control decks really obnoxious

i would rather a wish mechanic be good than the 'ramp into 7 mana win the game' that control decks are doing currently

only played a few matches of Sealed with this new set but it's pretty fun! lots of dynamic cards, nothing (thus far) seems overly broken, and the Learn/Lesson mechanic gives the deck a bit of reach. also someone just cast a Swords to Plowshares on me???

very cute and charming flavor too, the school thing

yeah one of my cards was like "Professor Bear" or something, incredibly cute

also dig Tome Shredder, literally "dog ate my homework"

hah i didn't catch thats what that card was representing

professor bear is good, top 3 common in the set imo along with frost trickster and the 4 damage red spell

thus far the format seems to be pretty slow so Rise of Extus is probably up there as well

its good but its 6 mana so you cant really play too many copies so you cant value it that much higher than the crowd

wait scratch that I misread it, I thought it returned an instant or sorcery to your hand

huge disconnect between MTGO/Tabletop prices on Magma Opus & Prismari Command, wonder why that is. neither of those cards seem very good to me but rn the Command is worth 27 tix which is insane for a normal rare

might be some modern application, thats the main constructed format on mtgo these days

no standard play means the entire set value gets shifted into the modern/eternal cards

sure but why is that card any good in Modern? seems worse than Kolaghan's Command and probably worse than Electrolyze...either way I've got one so I'm gonna try to finish this league ASAP so I can unload it for 42 tix (!!!)

utility card for UR decks that aren't playing black for k command. depends how important killing artifacts is re: electrolyze comparison. it doesn't have to be great in a vacuum, just has to be the highest interest rare in the set

magma opus plays cleverly with torrential gearhulk which is already used in pioneer so maybe that's whats going on there

ah yeah I was wondering what the 'reanimate spell' card was that would make Magma Opus work. I think of Gearhulk as a Cube card, sometimes need to remind myself those are real cards too

anyway I 9-0'd my first Sealed which is funny because I don't think I ever did better than 7-2 in Kaldheim. as someone who naturally gravitates towards U/R spell archetypes I think this set may be good for me (obviously I got tremendously lucky, but still). btw is it just me or do there not really seem to be streamlined aggro decks in the recent Limited formats? since taking up MTGO again with Ikoria I've noticed every format has been pretty grindy and time intensive, much less of the solitaire style matches where two good cheap creatures + two removal spells could win you the game by itself.

i haven't played any of the recent formats besides kaldheim and this but i'm told M21 was quite fast

if you only play sealed though then it's possible the answer is that there's been none

WR and WG aggro were the best decks in kaldheim draft once the snow lands became contested and stopped wheeling

yeah those archetypes were nearly nonexistent in Sealed now. whereas back around RTR there always seemed to be a good R/W archetype based around 3 power 2 drops. M21 was definitely faster than other recent formats but it was also prone to those 20+ turn topdecking wars

whipping ass at sealed and dying at draft so far in this one. my constructed half kaldheim/half strixhaven deck that leans hard on Koma & Ascended Spirit w/all snow lands just rolls over everybody.

Aggro is still common in recent draft formats but the nature of sealed formats has always made aggro difficult. you need a very specific set of cards. I can count on one hand the sealed formats I remember where aggro was often viable - Zendikar, Gatecrash, Ixalan

I'm liking Strixhaven so far (three drafts in). UG has been the most fun, tons of synergy cards and huge tokens. In UR, I had some bonkers turns with Storm-Kiln Artist. LSV on stream pulled off a Grapeshot for five, wiped the opponent's board, and attacked for 11 with it!

yea I really dig how the nuts things you can do in this set are fundamentally different than what you get in most other Limited formats

Yeah it has a different feel. The Mystical Archive cards also contribute to that - unexpected moments because I haven't learned all the cards they brought back yet. Very Time Spiral in feel

love the artwork on those

I'm currently playing a U/R deck in Sealed with 4 creature cards in it, it's pretty wild. No clue if it's good or not but I can definitely say I've never played a deck like this in Limited before. Also my deck contains both a Shock and a Lightning Bolt. I love this set

two of those creatures don't really attack much either. the other 2 are Storm-Kiln Artists. I mostly win by using Learn spells to generate tokens

Yeah creature-light decks are viable this time around. I thought Codie, Vociferous Codex would be straight up unplayable in draft but if turns out to be amazing if you're in that spell-heavy type of deck

idk about draft pick orders but I feel like Environmental Sciences is a card every deck wants to have. it's saved my ass so many times

you will be pleased to learn that it is the highest pick common then in draft (or should be, dunno if everyones on board yet)

it may be boring but adding mana fixing to 20 cards in the set lets you draft a much more powerful deck and the earlier you have it the earlier you can act on that

I've also found it's hard too have ~~too much~~ land in this set

idk if I'm just connecting with this format but my results have been insane so far: 9-0, 8-1, 7-2, 4-5, 8-1, and 7-2. I'm 3 place in trophies through only 6 leagues.

how many people are in those friendly leagues? i started a competitive league yesterday and theres only ~500ish people and the wait times for matches were like 5 minutes

it says 750 at the moment. wait times are not bad now, usually after 4-6 weeks they get pretty brutal

biggest downside of those leagues is having to play 9 matches but there's so much you can do in this set that I don't mind at all. that U/R deck I mentioned earlier I'd gladly play another few leagues with.

ok sounds about the same then. i've been in a sealed mood but arena is not really an option for the format

btw Quandrix Apprentice is pretty busted, even though it only gets you lands the sheer card advantage this thing can very quickly generate is insane

yeah terrific card. blue green generally really strong in draft imo

can't say I've ever wound up at this particular life total before

https://i.imgur.com/CzUEXCJ.png

Starting to get sick of this format. I kinda forgot how these five deck draft formats have shorter lifespans, and this time around, I'm ready to call Lorehold a trap. I've never had a successful Lorehold deck, and rarely find I lose to them either. I like Learn as a mechanic but it also leads to a lot of similarity in games, e.g. I've lost count of the number of games someone goes turn 3 Field Trip, turn 4 Elemental Summoning

yeah i think putting learn in a 5-faction format was a big mistake, its 2 things that severely narrow the ways in which games can play out in the same set