Magic: The Gathering C/D

Zombie Cutthroat is a great example of what I'm looking for - if it were [(3),1 life] for a 3/4 zombie that's definitely meaningfully different to [(3),5 life] for the same thing.

well sometimes they add up. I've seen a game of Modern where a guy cracked a fetch to get a shockland untapped three turns in a row, essentially starting him at 11 life. But that's a good point and a good reminder of how little life really matters anymore, unless you're playing against mono-red, I guess. Don't forget Force of Will!!

i remember when Modern first came out online, i watched a game where someone went turn 1 fetch shockland, thoughtseize, turn 2 fetch shockland, dark confidant. they're at 14 life on turn 2 with a bob in play, were playing against an aggro deck, and they ended up winning anyway. i guess that was more the power of Dark Confidant than irrelevancy of life loss, but all those incremental life payments do add up sometimes.

i play splinter twin in Modern, and i have won games at 1 or 2 life before because i played my Steam Vents tapped on turn 1 rather than firing off a Serum Visions right away. managing your life total is still important!

err that was actually 12 life on turn 2, not 14

Ok, I got one, Moonlight Bargain:

Moonlight Bargain 3BB
Instant

Look at the top five cards of your library. For each card, put that card into your graveyard unless you pay 2 life. Then put the rest into your hand.

I always wondered why Sligh wasn't more popular in Modern; decks running Thoughtseize and Bob must be dealing themselves 6-7+ damage a game

moonlight bargain seems playable to me, i assume it didn't get played much because it was in the same format as Dark Confidant and Compulsive Research which are both more mana-efficient ways to draw cards

if you're talking about straight-up burn, that's pretty popular on MTGO (mainly because it's cheap). Jund is the only popular Dark Confidant deck though and it runs Kitchen Finks too. Thoughtseize isn't actually bad against burn, since it just prevents 1 damage which is better than not being able to interact at all

and sometimes you hit their goblin guide and prevent more than 1 damage

i'm surprised it's an instant. still if it was 3BB: Draw 5, it would have gotten a lot of play, but the life requirement may be a bit much there.

don't get me wrong I don't know anything about Modern, it's crazy that Jund finds a way to play Finks, that's got to be a crazy manabase

1GG is not that crazy to get in a deck with fetches/duals! i'm confused what you mean

i often forget that finks is also a white card, since i haven't seen it played as such in about a year

also the problem with burn decks in modern is they can't interact in a format where most decks have either a combo kill or Geist of Saint Traft

I can see that. but I'd think a card like Blightning would be really good. to be honest I don't know what post-Onslaught Goblins even looks like. anyway, what I mean about Jund is that 1GG is kind of a crazy mana cost for a 3-color deck that isn't even heavy green, isn't it?

jund plays treetop village, tarmogoyf, and bloodbraid elf, it's pretty heavy on green. and even if it wasn't, fetches/duals and twilight mire would get you there anyway. casting double color spells is just not an issue in eternal formats.

i was playing a dredge deck for a bit that had birds of paradise, hedron crab, faithless looting, and gravecrawler as its turn 1 plays, and boarded into 4 thalias against spell-based decks. the manabase worked out fine.

hmmph. something just seems wrong about that. on the other hand I guess I see why the fetches and shocklands are so high now.

call me old school but I just don't think playing a 3-color deck should be so easy

goblins doesn't exist in modern, the good ones are all in onslaught. blightning is not a very good card because there are few of the slower attrition decks it's good against (pretty much just jund and U/W midrange), while there are decks like affinity that can have no cards left in hand by turn 3

i guess you missed out on lorwyn/shadowmoor/alara standard, when people were playing cloudthresher and path to exile in their cruel ultimatum decks.

i missed out on that too but it seems absurd in retrospect now that we have more typical mana in standard again

Yeah I kind of skipped the Cruel control era. Either way I think the mana-fixing in Standard has been really good for a long time and I kind of miss the days when people were at least somewhat encouraged to build mono-color decks. Nowadays I guess there's Stompy every once in a while and there's always a tier-4 Sligh deck but I miss the days when 3-color decks were not easy to pull off without some trickery.

mana fixing is tight enough that you are definitely paying a cost to run 3-colours in standard rn tho

Well the two dual types in Standard right now don't really play nice with each other but in general I don't find 3-color decks tough so long as you don't play a bunch of double-costed cards. Or at least, not as hard as I remember it being.

mana fixing is a double edged sword kinda. if the power level of cards in standard is low and/or balanced across the spectrum, then the best decks are more heavily defined by which ones have good mana (we see this in block constructed a lot, it's why Borderland Ranger is a 4-of in almost every ISD block deck). if you improve the mana in this sort of environment, you can produce a pretty radically diverse metagame. this is what happened with the first Ravnica block, and led to the era that people have dubbed the 'tier 2 metagame' because there were dozens of viable Standard decks and none of them were really powerful enough to beat up on random homebrew decks.

the flipside is that if there are a few overpowered cards in Standard and the mana is good, the format warps around those cards, because there's nothing keeping you from dropping them into your off-color deck and then tweaking the manabase to fit.

in general i think having 2 sets of duals per color pair is the sweet spot - we're a bit shy of that now but looks like we'll be heading there or beyond with a new Ravnica set

Well Ravnica was before the era of Mythics. I remember Baneslayer Angel being the start of something newer and shittier, where the metagame wasn't so much tier 1 decks as it was tier 1 cards, and who could fit the most into their manabase. I haven't played Standard in a while but from what I remember there were a ton of archetypes, but in reality it was just a dozen ways different ways to lose to Wurmcoil. Nowadays I'd guess there are a bunch of decks with tortured mana bases that just want to get their Huntsmasters and Bonfires in as both cards are way over the curve. I remember feeling like Baneslayer was so stupidly overpowered that EVERY white deck should be packing them, no matter what (at least, before Dismember was printed). Jace 2.0 was the same way. And soon that kind of spilled over into, "if I've got a two color deck, can I make it three so I can play Jace?"

baneslayer, huntmaster, and wurmcoil are all strong cards, but i wouldn't call any of them format-warping - i would call jace and bonfire that though...

Well the Baneslayer/Titan/Wurmcoil era really brought about an era where they were SO far ahead of any other 5-7 drop that you could hardly play anything else in those slots, even if they had abilities that fit your deck perfectly. I had a deck set up to abuse Flayer of the Hatebound in several ways, then found out that just straight up swapping them for Inferno Titans made my deck better, even though the synergy wasn't there anymore.

Anyway to make this fit my argument a little better I don't think Titans/Wurmcoil are the problem when it comes to excess mana fixing as any deck can play those. They are problematic, but for different reasons. But low-cost mythics like Lotus Cobra, Geist, Bonfire (sort of), and Jace do encourage a lot of dumb off-color splashing. I remember the Zendikar era being the same thing, "just play fetches and Lotus Cobra and your deck will rule"

i dont think bonfire is warping standard its not like every (any?)one is playing u/r delver

assuming steam vents is in RTR, i actually think that's the direction delver is headed after rotation - with most of the cheap blue spells gone i think there'll be an aggro version that goes UR for burn, and a more midrange one that's more about abusing snapcaster and restoration angel than flipping delvers

of course this is all wild conjecture until we know whats in the new set

the main thing bonfire has done so far is add a hilarious amount of variance to green midrange mirror matches

yeah I dunno if we really can speculate on what's going to happen post-RTR. losing Ponder, Vapor Snag, GutShot, and Mana Leak seems like it would totally nerf Delver anyway.

Is it naive of me to feel annoyed that all the top decks in standard are variations on the same 2 or 3 themes ad infinitum?

Is it a lack of imagination or are those just the only decks that can possibly win?

again a lot of this is because they've made a conscious decision that the mythics should be the most powerful cards in the game

ime almost every rpg system when min/maxed comes down to 4-5 at most archetypes (i'm thinking particularly stuff like MMORPGs with tank/dps/heal archetypes, or magic/range/melee in diablolikes). when i played in 4th grade tho there were a million archetypes bc we weren't exactly scholars of the game and we played w/ whatever cards we had available.

yeah keep in mind we are at the tail end of the standard season, by this point everything's pretty much been figured out. though to be fair there are probably 15-20 reasonable deck choices, it's just that a lot of them fit under a few umbrella archetypes (green midrange, blue tempo/midrange, green ramp, black zombies)

I made some tweaks to my exalted soldiers deck and was able to win about half the time in casual. So long as I'm not getting crushed over and over by delver decks, I'm ok with that.

yeah unfortunately a delver deck would be an exalted deck's nightmare matchup - delver handles single threats very well but has no way to deal with swarm tactics

right, I've added in more cheap removal in order to neutralize some of the earlier threats so that I can ramp up to the big token cards like Captain of the Watch, Captain's Call, and the Odrics. Also swapped out Servant of Nefarox for Diregraf Ghoul which works really nicely with Duty-Bound Dead. Basically gives me an attacking 3/3 on turn 2 and allows me to flood the board with more little guys earlier on.

The other new addition that's really paying off me is Riders of Gavony, which immediately neutralizes a whole class of creatures.

Well Ravnica was before the era of Mythics. I remember Baneslayer Angel being the start of something newer and shittier, where the metagame wasn't so much tier 1 decks as it was tier 1 cards, and who could fit the most into their manabase.

The worst current example of this in the current Standard is the UW Delver deck that runs Geist of Saint Traft and Hero of Bladehold - those cards have zero synergy with anything else in your deck (beyond, like, "kinda aggro"), but they're so curve-exploding that it doesn't matter.

what, that's not true at all. geist has very good synergy with snapcaster + vapor snag. its weakness is that it gets blocked easily, and being able to tempo their guys off the board is the solution to that.

i honestly don't get the fist-shaking at mythic rares. standard costs about the same now as it always did, adjusted for inflation etc. before mythics, you'd just pay more for stuff like dual lands and utility rares that are now dirt cheap. stratifying card availability like this is a net positive for new players because it gives them access to more cards even if the top few cards in each set are less accessible

the idea of mythics (in the beginning) was that they were all gonna be splashy, powerful rares but not "4 of" type cards. so Baneslayer or the new Thundermaw are fine; it's when they started printing stuff like Lotus Cobra at Mythic that I started to feel like we were being exploited (to their credit Lotus Cobra seems like a one-time thing)

actually I don't mind the mythic rarity w/r/t what it does to the price of Standard, because as you point out it does keep regular rares like say, Restoration Angel in higher supply and does knock the price of stuff like duals down. my problem with it is when they take the mythic rarity as an opportunity to print stuff WAY over the curve that pretty much any deck in those colors has to consider playing. like I remember my jaw dropping when I saw Jace TMS, thinking "how could they do this?", and that was when I misread it at 5 mana!!

i played a sealed draft M13 this weekend w/ some friends visiting - i got one of the white mythics (serra something) and a ton of white exalted creatures, ran those w/ green for some bigger beatdown creatures and very little removal and dominated which was really exciting. then we played some edh. every time they come in and we play, i want to start seriously playing MTG again but then i'm left in philly at the end of the weekend w/ no one to play with. :(

^play Magic Online!

Here's what Mark Rosewater said when he introduced mythic rares:

This now leads us to the next question: How are cards split between rare and mythic rare? Or more to the point, what kind of cards are going to become mythic rares? We want the flavor of mythic rare to be something that feels very special and unique. Generally speaking we expect that to mean cards like Planeswalkers, most legends, and epic-feeling creatures and spells. They will not just be a list of each set's most powerful tournament-level cards.

We've also decided that there are certain things we specifically do not want to be mythic rares. The largest category is utility cards, what I'll define as cards that fill a universal function. Some examples of this category would be cycles of dual lands and cards like Mutavault or Char. That also addresses a long-standing issue that some players have had with certain rares like dual lands. Because we're making fewer cards per set, in the new world individual rares will be easier to acquire because each rare in a large set now appears 25% more often.

Personally I think "no cards that fill a universal function" is a little different from "no 4 of" cards. Geist of S-T and Hero of Bladehold are definitely 4-of cards, but I wouldn't say they fill a universal function; they're not in the same league as Mutavault or dual lands. Lotus Cobra is a bit more marginal, but as you say I think they recognise that as a mistake as they seem to have moved away from it in more recent sets.

Right, but I think there's a certain threshold where a card becomes so powerful where virtually any deck that can support it in its manabase will become more powerful for doing so, and they've definitely been toeing that line lately (if not outright crossing it with cards like Jace or Tarmogoyf)

tarmogoyf is not 'lately'

jace was a mistake, we know that. stoneforge mystic and snapcaster mage were too, though those weren't mythic rares. geist of saint traft and hero of bladehold are just strong cards; unlike all the overpowered creatures/planeswalkers, they don't play the defensive role and offensive role equally well, which limits their use and makes them fair

is this all about the online game? i keep seeing this thread high up but can't understand the discourse.

magic ruled my world as a young teen. i quit after a bit and sold my "fork" for 100 pounds, plus "made" (recouped) a decent amount on the rest (10 per cent of what i spent, probably.)

had a brief relapse around the time of mirages, hammer of bogarden and all that shit, then quit again for good.

hmm. forgot future sight was 5 years ago! whoa

still, I don't really think the format is necessarily unbalanced (as it was in say, the Affinity days), I just dislike the way cards that are way over the curve retroactively make a bunch of interesting or "build-around-me" stuff virtually unplayable in a serious deck, and the mythic era has kind of compounded this, as Wizards seems hellbent on printing a few such cards every set. Lately a lot of the most powerful cards have been either A) "deal with this immediately or you will lose" (such as the Titans, Wurmcoil, Hero, maybe Geist too), or B) "there is no good answer to this since it's too much card advantage/too cheap" - for example Snapcaster/Stoneforge/Delver really don't have good answers; they can be dealt with, but not in a way that's more efficient than the actual card. Wurmcoil sort of fits in this category too. Like, you may get burned by tapping out for Baneslayer and having it Dismembered right away, but most of the more powerful cards today don't even give your opponent the ability to respond to them in a manner that's actually efficient, meaning that the cards are so good that you have to search for reasons not to play them. Again I don't want to say this really unbalances things because T2 is relatively diverse now (or at least, it was a few months ago), it just sucks that Wizards has been printing so many neat/fun cards that really just can't see constructed play because they're so outclassed. anyway, rant over

I do give 'em credit for Birthing Pod though, most engine-type cards like that get nerfed horribly in development

just went on a little edh shopping spree on ebay. for less than $16 (including shipping) i got for my teneb the harvester deck: skullclamp, dauntless escort, aura shards, deadwood tree folk, loxodon hierarch, balance, qasali pridemage, saffi eriksdotter, elvish herder and magus of the disk.

i love birthing pod so much. i play it in my teneb deck. one of the most fun cards i've ever played w/ tbh

i'm particularly excited about a little loxodon hierarch/saffi eriksdotter/magus (and other removal) combo action

mordy come to ny some weekend and we can go to a draft together

i would like to!