Magic: The Gathering C/D

No Renegade Freighter makes Kaladesh Remastered a so much better experience

the balance patch

so in arena sometimes people are dicks and they use the "good game!" emote to taunt you when they think they're about to easily win a one-sided game against you—as some nerd did to me just now.

this time i decided i'd teach him a lesson, so i commenced to play as slowly as possible, letting the timer fuse nearly run out during every phase of every turn. maybe it would teach him some manners. i could at least get the moral victory.

i was the BW life gain draft deck, and i managed to scrape by for quite a while... more than half an hour passed where my average game takes five, maybe ten minutes.

then he got that artifact that makes a dude fly, and he thought he could start closing, so he made a little swing to knock my life total back down. but i had the little nerd that pumps the whole team, and a pretty wide board, so in my following i ended up swinging back for lethal.

it felt nice. ppl should learn not to abuse the emotes.

Nice

lol i did the GG emote back before the last damage step because i'm petty

finally decided to bite the bullet and pick up arena since mtgo is kind of dead other than modern (though modern is pretty nice). gonna just accumulate gold for 2 months off the daily bonuses and hope that kaldheim is a good draft set

I once pulled a pretty egregious angleshot on some dude I was getting frustrated by because he was taking so damn long. Game 3 he had less than 2:30 on his clock and I had like 17 minutes. As usual when I'm in this situation he curves out perfectly while I have to mull and find myself unable to really play anything. Anyway with about 30 seconds left on his clock he swings for lethal with a big pump dragon (Hellkite Punisher), my only card in hand is a Grasp of Darkness. not enough to buy me another turn cuz he can pump it 4 times. but I figure maybe if I just keep clocking and make him believe I ragequit (the MTGO way) I can play it and catch him off guard. indeed the plan worked. but I felt pretty guilty about it. still, fuck him for taking so long.

Time for Kaldheim!

yup, time to get into this the way I do every new format: base my entire deck around some mediocre rare and marvel at the variety of insane shit I get owned by

i've caught the bug again so i'll be drafting this one a bunch

I'm gonna have to memorize all the Forecast cards aren't I

there's like 40 cards with foretold, just memorize the instant/flash ones like you would in any set

definitely enjoying this so far, there's a bunch of stuff going on at once and a lot of powerful things to do. Between Foretell and Boast you're kind of forced to think differently about your mana.

Foretold is such a nice way of dealing with leftover mana, and the boast mechanic is (at least in this early stage) genuinely surprising for opponents.

I'm still new to Arena (as of last month) and it's a bit difficult to tell where I should be focussing my attention. I like dimir decks the best, but that doesn't seem to be where all the action is with the new expansion and so far I'm drafting much better in every other colour. Any tips on how to get a jump on this season? I like the cat very much.

this set has so many 2-color cards at uncommon that i feel like you'll get rewarded unusually strongly in draft for being the only person in your color pair (assuming we're talking about player drafts here and not bot drafts). good incentive to work on reading the table.

in Sealed I see a lot of people trying 3 and 4 color decks. it seems kinda doable and the gold cards are generally worth it. all the Sagas are pretty good & there's a lot of stuff you'd think would be rare, like the U/W legendary flyer that lets you draw every time you play a Foretold card. I've had a lot of games feel like Cube despite not a single rare being played

i honestly don't like it when the uncommons are closer to rares than to commons but that seems to be their current experiment

the RG uncommon saga does a disgusting amount of stuff for a 2 mana uncommon

yeah that thing's kicked my ass a number of times already. it's all three modes of the 3GG rare inscription from the last set in one.

the way Skull Raid handles discard is neat (where you draw the difference if they don't have enough in their hand) - I hope they do this much more from now on

it's like that because regular mind rot would be unplayable in the foretell set. dunno if it'll stick around after its served that purpose

in general making discard more playable sounds like a bad idea to me unless you enjoy the topdeck war part of magic games

discard is the great equalizer in Limited, I think it's good to have one playable spell per set at least

in other news I had to name "Tribal" for Alrund because I only had 2 cards left in my library and had no idea what they were, thank you WoTC for making that a card type for some reason

does anyone else find themself surprisingly delighted by the flavor/artwork of the new set?

nostalgia is a factor for me: this one is a throwback to Ice Age if i'm not mistaken, which was released during the peak of my middle-school MTG obsession, so i'm glad to find that this set honors the earlier look of magic really well. it feels like they intentionally brought back the much more human, painterly style of artwork from the old days. but they improve on it! some of the old art looked pretty lazy and hastily/carelessly done and this set doesn't have that problem.

so much of the recent MTG art direction has been (for my tastes) overly digital, boring comic book art, and it's been a real pleasure to find lots and lots of cards in this set that i actually enjoy looking at :)

yeah this set's pretty good. it's not a throwback to ice age though (they did that already years ago with Coldsnap) so much as it's a new wintry setting

the showcase versions of the legendary creatures are pretty cool in this one: https://scryfall.com/search?order=set&q=set%3Akhm+frame%3Ashowcase&unique=prints
and some of the arts for the saga cards are actual physical wood reliefs rather than paintings: https://scryfall.com/search?q=set%3Akhm+type%3Asaga&unique=prints&as=grid&order=set

ah yea it figures. a proper Ice Age throwback would have to include Icy Manipulator, wouldn't it.

thank u for the links. i hadn't seen these showcase frames. to my eye they look silly on a computer screen, but i bet they look gr8 on paper. and it's neat that WoTC commissioned some woodworking craftspeople for the sagas. those translated really well to the digital format. it would be so sick to hang one of the originals in yr game room. i wonder where they'll end up, probably Hasbro HQ f0rever huh.

this set is fun in the limited formats so far. after a several humiliating attempts i finally got to 7 wins on arena in sealed, so i've moved on to sucking at drafting.

yeah this is definitely a fun Limited format, I think it beats the last two. though I second cider's complaint that there are a ton of uncommons that feel like rares. and the snow mechanic feels kind of weird, it feels like a quarter of Coldsnap made it into the set somehow. though I suspect it plays much better in draft than Sealed

yeah it doesn't seem like a great sealed set because of how snow works - you either want lots or none and sealed gives you something in the middle

some of the snow stuff still works in Sealed, don't forget about all the common snow taplands. that said I kinda view it as a positive since the snow decks look incredibly frustrating to play against

well in draft the non-snow decks have higher power level too, it works out

fwiw I do suspect that in a couple weeks half the decks in Sealed will be 4-color snow

Yeah I usually like how snow plays out in draft (including in this set) but don't like it in sealed or constructed formats. Still undecided how much I like Kaldheim but I do miss the Zendikar Modal DFC

Obv I mean the ones that are lands on one side

I miss them too, with this set comes the realization that sometimes a one-land hand is just a one-land hand

this set feels very Cube-ish, not just in that it's swingy but also because there are a ton of powerful, high-impact cards at uncommon - very good legendary creatures, the Sagas which can be tremendous value, even the lands which can sacrifice for a pretty big effect. also it kind of welcomes playing 3 or 4 colors so you see a lot of decks that can do a ton of crazy shit.

not wild about the fact that there are 2 board sweepers, was kind of nice that the last set didn't have any

also I strongly suspect in a week or two the format's gonna be all 4-color snow & W/R aggro boast decks

by which I mean Equipment decks, as the RW uncommon legend & the Runesearching equipment are pretty nutso

As a weaker player I love and rely on the board-sweepers.

also I just found out that Valki is going for 92 tix (!!!!!!) so I am really trying to scrub out of this league fast so I can sell it

everyone switched to arena for draft so mtgo has supply issues for new cards playable in modern/legacy

also why is Tibalt's Trickery valuable? what are people planning do to with it?

people are playing gimmick decks where they use it to cast a turn 2 ugin in standard, or cascade into a turn 3 emrakul in modern. these decks fizzle half the time and auto-lose to any counterspell but some folks just want to flip coins for wins

hah best of luck to 'em

gotta say I dig the "randomly mill 1-3 cards" thing, makes it feel like blackjack

to clarify, the modern deck is: 4 violent outburst, 1 tibalt's trickery, 4 emrakuls, and then 51 lands of various utility (cycling, etc). you mulligan to violent outburst and then cast it on turn 3 and it hits trickery which counters it and turns it into an emrakul. if you can't find a violent outburst you lose, if your trickery gets countered you lose.

obviously if you get thoughtseized you probably lose too, have to draw another one of your 3 outbursts

yeah I cannot see that deck having any tournament success once it's out in the wild

and yet if I worked for the DCI I'd ban it for being too stupid

this might be the most skill intensive non-Cube limited format I've ever played. there are so many weird little things you have to keep track of. even how you tap your lands matters a lot.

yes. there's a great many subtleties and i haven't quite got it wired. i've made a couple entries into this weekend's arena open and gotten wrecked.

the snow decks are really strong but its a headache to play through the board stall-y mirror matches they create so i've mostly been drafting aggro

I've only played the format a small amount so far, but I've been disappointed by how many long board stall games I've had. I used to enjoy that type of game more but Arena has really changed my preferences

Also I was shocked to start seeing Strixhaven previews. I know we're not in preview season yet but I don't think I even know all the Kaldhiem cards yet!