Magic: The Gathering C/D

also someone leaked a photo of part of the Ixalan rare sheet on reddit. no keyword mechanics in sight but there's a pirate guy that makes Treasure tokens that are basically lotus petals, and Sunpetal Grove is on there so we're getting that land cycle back finally.

https://i.redd.it/r7yoylx9ht3z.jpg

also has the pithing needle people have been asking for, though you have to pay an extra mana for the privilege of looking at your opponent's hand

It seems like there are always too many people trying to force red white aggro, and the other colours are subsequently very open. Lay claim seems to go crazily late.

I like that way better than Pithing Needle. One extra mana isn't that big a difference is it?

not really since generally when you want needle you're using it to turn off your opponent's deck, not just 'trade' it for any old card. but in that case the hand peek doesn't matter much either.

right, i think 1 mana vs 2 prob will prob come up more often than there being a selection of things you want to needle

those effects are always overrated anyway, both needle effects and cranial extraction effects. people try to use them on everything when they're only particularly effective vs one-dimensional combo decks.

It seems like there are always too many people trying to force red white aggro, and the other colours are subsequently very open

i admit i'm curious what kind of correction has been going on if any in response to this kind of thing. didn't learn anything from my draft, was just a mess.

wow, look at those rares. 3 drop haste that...makes mana, a 7 mana draw 7, 5 mana anthem+. looks like might be a touch slower than akh.

xp i suspect GB or UG will be wide open most drafts, but uh they're not very strong pairs so you have to be sure that's actually the case.

not really since generally when you want needle you're using it to turn off your opponent's deck, not just 'trade' it for any old card. but in that case the hand peek doesn't matter much either.

right but Needle as sideboard to shut off combo always felt like kinda dumb gameplay to me, which is why I sorta like the one-for-one nature of this one

3-mana Conspiracy is nice

new Jace as well, with an interesting ultimate (looks like he makes copies of himself). this is quite the announcement week

a wider but blurrier photo of the rare sheet is going around now - kinda thinking maybe i wont look at all of these right now

brings back memories of when an Invasion card sheet leaked but was so lo-res that you could barely make out anything besides the gold and split cards (which no one seemed to figure out, everyone thought it was a misprint)

So many of the comments on mtgsalvation are that this leak is intentional. Because yeah, it makes sense to spoil mechanics, reprints, and chase rares for your fall set days before we even get spoilers for the set coming out in a few weeks. Meanwhile, I am expecting yet another article about why leaks are bad for the game

I think the "future card in booster" thing is intentional but this, no way

Yep exactly. They are very controlled with leaks, and this totally steps on the toes of Hour of Devastation

i looked at a few of the cards but when it became clear that the entire rare sheet was out there and not just a subset i stopped - would prefer to just talk/think about HOU rn

relevant information for anyone doing leagues:

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/6hjf20/do_not_draft_on_magic_online_you_are_being/

yeah i call bullshit. would be insanely easy to spot this kind of collusion.

yeah i wouldnt be surprised if people pull that off occasionally but i think it would fail a considerable % of the time

I know the more astute online poker sites would sniff this sort of thing out immediately. I don't exactly have that sort of faith in the MTGO staff though the popularity of that Reddit post tells me they're at least gonna look at it

It would seem unlikely that you could get 8 people into the same draft, even if it was when the queues were quiet at night - plus it's an international game, so night isn't night everywhere.

And then it seems a logistical nightmare for everyone to share their card pools, agree on the best 8 decks (or 7 if you're sacrificing one player) and then allocate them out given the time constraints.

All this effort for what? An increased but not guaranteed chance of some 3-0s. It just seems like fake news.

Yeah it seems difficult to pull off and the EV of this has got to be quite low for all that effort. But c'mon, you know *some* people have tried this.

It would definitely be a risk if the potential winnings increase. But I can just imagine people trying it and it being a car crash. Dude, I was supposed to be taking the slitherblades

if you need to collude to draft a slither blade deck i'm not too worried about playing against you

if that was at all true then i wouldnt have to wait so goddam long for drafts to fire at 3AM

Haha yeah I wish this was true. This is way too much effort for little payoff, and sounds a lot less fun than actually, you know, doing a normal draft

http://mythicspoiler.com/hou/cards/solemnity.jpg

is it just me or does this card singlehandedly kill a lot of decks

nice

i hate counter's

Supreme Will and The Locust God are the only cards i particularly like in this set so far

Solemnity also auto-cracks Dark Depths

I like the new Angel that blinks and exiles.

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/card-image-gallery/hour-devastation

set up

overrun at +2/+2 probably still p gross

gameplay-wise this set looks more similar to its parent set than any of the previous few small sets - afflict isn't really a game-changer so the only real change is the A/B mechanic goes from trial/cartouche to deserts

i appreciate the cartoonishly bloody basic land art though

http://media.wizards.com/2017/hou/en_WbwNfgNAA1.png
http://media.wizards.com/2017/hou/en_pSvsT6JaDX.png
http://media.wizards.com/2017/hou/en_1txsYZzFBT.png
http://media.wizards.com/2017/hou/en_0vRtbib6Ud.png

yeah i was thinking the same. aggressive again. on board complexity maybe a little higher.

It's weird having a set with nothing that feels pushed/dangerous - I'm kinda foggy on how the power budget for this kind of thing is meted out, like it makes sense to have 'pendulums' but it feels a bit like a set which just arbitrarily got the short straw from a constructed POV.

yeah this set is really hiding its constructed power if it's there - even the biggest flop of recent times, Born of the Gods, still had one blatant format staple in Courser of Kruphix

i do think most of the rare Eternalize guys are good and Earthshaker Khenra should be an auto-include in red aggro if that deck exists, but i don't know that any of them are as high impact as you'd expect from the best cards in a set

yeah this set has the feel of a major blunder, worse than born of the gods possibly. weakest turnout i've seen at a boston prerelease in 6 years, including core sets. the 5 HOU rares in my pool were not particularly playable, i went 1-1 with common green creatures and an overrun and then dropped because i was tired and bored.

:(

The high volume of multicolor rares make deckbuilding in sealed kind of a pain, especially when you are trying to balance that against Desert synergies.

Of course, it could just be that I got a weird pool of cards. I had Nicol Bolas, which is utterly ridiculous and pretty much unbeatable, but my other rares were Reason to Believe, Temmet, Abandoned Sarcophgus, Dread Wanderer, Hostile Desert, and Scavenger Grounds. So 3 multicolor cards that only had blue in common, and then 2 colorless lands. Luckily Bolas balanced out the utter worthlessness of the other rares. After trying out an ill-conceived 5-color build, I landed on G/R beatdown splashing for Nicol Bolas, which was pretty solid.

yeah there were a lot of spots open in nyc prereleases too. I had a fun 3 unsummon tempo deck and lost to glorybringer in the finals, as one does.

it was fun (mostly because I played interesting games against good players and not 10 y/os) but does feel like a super forgettable set already. eternalize is the new megamorph.

iatee i'm one trophy ahead of you in the vintage cube competition you didn't know we were having and times running out...

i realized recently that you can filter the trophy lists by your buddy list which provides a good source of motivation

my buddy list is just trade bots lol

ha! well roberto it's good to know I was grinding those leagues for *some* reason. I got one more last night and ended with 13 so we might have tied unless you also got another one. I would def have more if I just kept to a 'never draft storm ever' philosophy.