Magic: The Gathering C/D

http://mythicspoiler.com/iko/cards/colossification.html

damnit this card makes me want to start playing again

it's no eldrazi conscription

so much for all the companion cards being too weak for constructed

Rielle seems really good

alternate art stuff looks amazing

This companion mechanic seems like a pain in the ass.

I feel bad for all the people who are gonna p1p1 those

the bw one is really good just as a card in your deck though

Would be interesting to see someone use one successfully in limited though. Allowing sideboard cards to break the companion rule just seems bad to me.

the "each card must be unique" one almost invites you to cheat in limited

in limited all the cards not in your deck are in your sideboard though so it has to work that way to be doable. not that its worth going for rather than just putting the rare creature in your normal deck

other than the highlander one yeah that seems very doable

there's some interesting deckbuilding challenges you could get around in Modern but idk if any of these cards are good enough to jump all the hoops for

of course I'm always wrong about stuff like this so I fully expect one of these to be banned by July

yeah the lifelinker is gonna be a stupid free roll in a lot of decks. I hope it’s banned quickly. stupid, stupid mechanic.

full spoiler is out. I think Zirda is the companion card that really needs to be watched. I can see some U/R artifact based deck doing some stupid things with this. idk how many Standard decks are gonna try these out but Modern with its huge cardpool seems like it'll have the pieces to do something broken with these

UW one is better than it looks in modern, i think playing a cantrip-heavy 80 card deck is worth it if you always start with a 4/5 mulldrifter in hand

as an 8th card in hand even

I feel like the popularity of edh has made them overrate how popular this will be among the very-not-edh. I have no desire to play any competitive format where one guy gets a commander.

I'm willing to give this a try, but highly skeptical that it will create an enjoyable experience.

Although the commanders themselves are not the primary reason I steer clear of edh.

Companion is one of those mechanics that on the surface seems fun and encourages interesting deckbuilding, but too many of them limit the card pool to the point where I think the ideal decklists will look very similar. The U/W one might be an exception if it's good enough, that one encourages more variety of cards played. For limited, I guess a couple of them are doable but it might be better to just put the card in your deck

I guess a couple of the ones that restrict permanents are freerolls in older formats, and could be played in any number of decks if they are good enough

yea the freeroll thing occurred to me too but I wonder if those decks will want to give up the sideboard spot

14 card sideboard is an easy trade for an 8 card hand

the U/W will not create variety of cards played, it will cause every deck to have 4 arcums astrolabe, 4 ice-fang coatl, 4 abundant growth, etc

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new set's been pretty fun. idk if the Cycling decks are the strongest but it's definitely the architype I've seen (and played) the most. I've had several games where I've nearly decked myself which seems not ideal. Mutate seems to result in a lot of reverse 2-for-1s but when you start chaining creatures with Mutate abilities some crazy things happen

btw I've noticed that some of the companion cards are fetching high prices which is probably not good for the game

one of my friends suggested that lurrus was the strongest card ever printed (at least in the perspective of older formats) and I think that's certainly true for vintage and legacy. haven't been paying attention to what's being broken in modern and pioneer. I really, really hope they just ban the mechanic outside of standard, but I have to imagine at least one of these guys is gonna break standard too.

UG and GW ones basically already have standard decks and GB is easy to build around. and i don't think anything other than a combo deck is going to compete at 7 starting cards vs 8 in standard. lurrus won't be a problem though at least!

all the pushed cards they've made since WAR are so unsatisfying to look at & read too, its nightmare wall of text after wall of text. give me back smuggler's copter, i'll live with that now

whoever's designing the cards now has no nuance, every rare is a sledgehammer

I don't know where they lost the script, but each new set is making me feel less likely to jump back in

Planeswalkers

I came to the game well after planeswalkers and enjoyed it for years. However WAR does seem like a more recent tipping point.

All I play is limited and from that perspective it's been really fun. Drafting against human players on Arena is a big improvement, too. Signals in the draft are readable now. Just went 7-1 with a BW go wide deck, feels good.

Also I have no idea what to do with the 80 mythic and 200 rare wildcards I've accumulated on Arena. Maybe I'll try historic or smthg

other than JTMS planeswalkers were fine for their first 10 years. they intentionally started pushing them after Origins

maybe elspeth knight errant and liliana of the veil were a little too good too but whatever, i'll accept that as the high end of planeswalker power

and the former doesn't even cut it anymore in any format i don't think?

yeah even veil and jtms see less and less play in older formats

was looking at some of my decks from delver standard and i want to go back to that format where you could play birthing pod and it wasn't the boogeyman somehow

it did seem pretty clear at a glance when the set was first released that oko was gonnna break a few formats prolly

oko felt like an honest mistake - they saw it as something that made 3/3s every other turn and occasionally swapped them for something

there's no excuse with companion though - it was obvious that this mechanic was going to change the game significantly. edh is popular - probably even the most popular way to play magic, so it's easy to understand their urge to push the game in that direction. but edh only works because it's a casual format.

I think this set will sell terribly, will go down as a saga-level disaster and I hope they don't blame it all on coronavirus.

i don't know if this set will sell terribly but i think people will start to check out and the next few sets will take a hit

they really need the fall set to be confidence-restoring, it's going to be a make or break moment for the entire competitive portion of the playerbase

the ??? part of oko is its loyalty numbers are way better than other 3 mana planeswalkers so they clearly thought his abilities were low impact or something

Saga was busted in more ways than just one, idk if you can compare it to anything. there are so many "what the fuck were they thinking" cards in that block. iirc it sold quite well, it was Mercadian Masques that people weren't really thrilled with

whoever's designing the cards now has no nuance, every rare is a sledgehammer

as a strictly limited player for the last decade I agree with this, kinda sick of every bomb rare being a 5-mana 6/6 that 3-for-1s when it enters play

saga was a mistake you can justify because they had a very basic understanding of what they were doing at the time - most of the sets before that were underpowered, some so underpowered that it might have been a real threat to the game's future. they pressed the gas pedal too hard, but that had basically never happened before.

but everyone knows better now - any competitive player could have told you that giving a player an extra card that goes in their hand every game was going to be a disaster.

some of the stories that came out of Saga block were insane. Tinker was originally supposed to have the Transmute Artifact "make up the difference in mana" clause but they axed it because the card got too wordy. Time Spiral was supposed to be a 6 mana Timetwister but they wanted big splashy cards to put the "untap x lands" mechanic on. Tolarian Academy was originally just colorless but was changed to blue to fit the mini cycle. Memory Jar....first card to ever be banned before it was even released. even my 13 year old self knew this stuff was obviously insane BUT as you mention it had been a long time since a truly broken card had ever come out

underworld breach is the most saga ass card they've printed in a while and they managed to top it immediately

you just know there were meetings where the sole topic was "how do we print another Yawgmoth's Will"

whats funny is that post-Saga I remember that Maro had written a bunch of articles about what went wrong, and what design rules should never be broken, stuff like "don't circumvent mana costs" and "avoid lands that tap for more than 1" and "don't just let players draw as many cards as they want", then after 3-4 years of sets that made basically zero impact on older formats they decided to start breaking things again