Magic: The Gathering C/D

it's not a broken card really, just an unpleasant effect to have at the center of the format. think of it as being like the reflector mage ban i guess

yeah idk what kind of mana accel there is but I can see a card like that effectively making a bunch of 4-6 CMC cards unplayable. the fact that killing the creature doesn't give you your permanent back seems like an important pretty safety valve to get rid of

it's being cheated out on turn 4 or 5 (and then blinked for another steal via your yorion which is always available to follow it up every game)

yes I am proud of myself

https://i.imgur.com/DFc4NEN.png

A frog and 4 otters

I thought Lukka would get a ban. The Lukka/Omen of the Sun combo seems like it will work with something else, if it's not Agent of Treachery. Agent was a good ban though, it's become really unfun to play against. Companion change is really strange, like the kind of nerfing that Hearthstone does to individual cards

This seems like overkill to me but what do I know:

https://www.polygon.com/2020/6/10/21287154/racist-magic-the-gathering-cards-banned-removed-from-database-wizards-apology

yeah that's just a kneejerk marketing dept response that no one was asking for

I mean if you really want to go down that route MTG itself can easily be construed as racist.

playing an irl game of magic tonight (you're allowed to hang with up to 6 people where I live)

supposedly the 1488 thing was just a weird coincidence, as they were indexed in alphabetical order

fwiw WoTC has kind of a checkered history with race issues, particularly when it comes to their hiring practices. its been sort of an open secret for a while.

GWoTC

I was pretty shocked to see some of these, and I think there's nothing wrong with throwing them out, even if it is a bit of an empty gesture.

Weird to see these cards dredged up again after 25 years. I was definitely not old enough to understand what was going on on Invoke Prejudice (which I think I own a copy of somewhere)

banning a bunch of cards that nobody has played with in a decade is pretty fucking weird, it is practically by definition performative activism since nobody would ever think of these cards otherwise and now they're gonna sit on a ban list forever.

anyway I have not played a game of paper Magic in about a year but I had a dream last night that I was a Pro Tour player and every time I won a game I'd scoop up my cards, look my opponent in the eye and say "abracadabra"

that's a strong bit

this Jumpstart idea seems extremely cool and kind of brilliant from a marketing perspective

can't believe it's taken this long for them to come up with it

i dont care about jumpset but i love how aggressive the reprints/pseudo-reprints in this core set are, lots of cards from ~10 years ago when i was really into standard, which is making me want to play again

lol they really did bring back phasing for one mythic rare, how weird

the reminder text is way cleaner than you'd expect!

that almost makes it stranger, they do exile/return effects all the time and the differences with phasing (which, if I remember correctly, are that counters & auras stay on, and it's in a different place than the 'exile' zone) don't really seem significant enough to bring back a 23 year old keyword which was kind of famous for confusing everyone. but I'm really amused that they did.

Wizards is about to drop another big artist I think. Been a long time coming for this guy.

Yep he's out. Unfortunately gonna be seeing his art for many months to come due to how early in advance they produce things

gotta love the final days of a sealed league

https://i.imgur.com/2YdJxc9.png

im worried thats what mtgo standard is gonna be like if i try to play again this fall. don't really want to get into arena though

update

https://i.imgur.com/Hxuwgk1.png

Nice of you to give Patroclus a bit of hope

I felt bad for him, we had basically the same deck but he was losing in every fashion possible; he had the stuck at 2 land game, the mull to 5 game, the topdecked 4 lands in a row game, the oops forgot that had reach game, the can’t believe you fucking drew more removal game, the wow that mythic is stupidly good game, etc.

anyway I’ve played 2 matches of M21 and wow what a stark difference, I forgot what the “grind out card advantage” style of Magic was like

I really love Core Sets

I like how core sets have just become a dumping ground for cool designs that just don't fit into other sets. though Brash Taunter has got to be one of the most unfun cards I've ever played against.

I got lucky to open Teferi, can anyone explain why this card is so expensive? It actually seems kinda underpowered for a big blue planeswalker

its the face card of the set, people are gonna assume its good until proven otherwise

remember that you can activate him on all your opponents turns too bc of his instant speed clause

lol yeah I literally *just* figured that out

I am guessing this means it's gonna be huge in Commander which yep means $$$$$$

I think the best color in the set is Red. Shock & Scorching Dragonfire take out a huge % of creatures and the Spellgorger Weird is quite good, costing 3 instead of 4 is huge and the format has a lot of cheap cantrips to power it up. Second is probably Green. Drowsing Tyrannodon is ridiculously easy to turn on and the mana dork is super good value. Plus you've got Hunter's Edge which is obviously great. Weakest has got to be Black. Grasp is good but it doesn't really hit much that Dragonfire doesn't, plus BB can be difficult when you really don't want Black as your main color. As far as the archetypes go:

B/W lifegain can do ridiculous things but it's a bit awkward that the triggers are just at the end of *your* turn, so you can't hold lifelinkers back on defense. I've done well with this deck but the games are challenging.

G/R monsters w/ 4-power triggers is probably the most solid archetype, especially with Garruk's Whatever & Furious Rise, both of which take care of the main problem this deck has, a lack of card advantage.

U/R spells has worked really well for me. Fun to play too. Then again I always seem to get 2-3 Kinetic Augur.

G/W +1/+1 counters....looks better than it is. You can make some insane plays with the uncommon Hydra & Invigorating Surge but you need to draw solid opening hands and have things play out in a certain way. You lose to the decks with a lot of good removal.

Least favorite card has to be Brash Taunter, every time I play it it dies immediately but when my opponent has it I have one of those decks with exactly zero answers for it

Second least favorite is Teferi's Ageless Insight, between the special border & the mana cost I think I got the planeswalker whenever I open it in Sealed, which would make the event a freeroll (and then some). The card is weirdly playable though.

I've only done one draft so far but I drafted a UB control with 4 Finishing Blow and card draw and got run over 3 out of 5 games. I obv don't know how fast the format is with so little data but combined with what I've heard it seems I can't durdle like in the last few formats

Brash Taunter seems like a really annoying card

from what i've seen this is one of those sets where slow decks just can't keep pace with good aggro/tempo decks unless you manage to get a shitload of the 1-2 mana removal spells. think original zendikar. finishing blow seems bad

last night i played against someone named "tombrady", when it started I wrote "hey good luck on the Bucs next season" and he spent the whole match chatting as though he actually WAS Tom Brady which was pretty funny and honestly I can't prove that it wasn't

They finally pulled the trigger on Teferi and Reclamation bans, along with various others. I'm wondering if it's now time to start dipping my toes back into this stupid game.

just wait for fall rotation at this point imo

still think its extremely not coincidence that standard gets more unstable the more 'blocks' they have per year

last night i played against someone named "tombrady"

I just played against TomHanks, cool to see more celebs getting into the game

It's kind of hilarious that they are doing this so close to rotation. Wilderness Reclamation has been a miserable card pretty much since it was printed.

the new "Supreme Draft" format on MTGO is pretty neat.

they just did a big reveal stream

zendikar rising mechanics are:
kicker
landfall
"party" mechanic (stuff that cares about you having a wizard, a warrior, a rogue, and a cleric)
double faced split cards that are land/spell, or land/land for the duals

winter 2021 set is kaldheim, viking theme
spring 2021 set is strixhaven, magic school theme
summer 2021 set is a d&d crossover set instead of a core set
fall 2021 is some sort of innistrad vampires vs werewolves double set, no details on how that will work

tried a sealed league with Zendikar Rising

some very very early takeaways:

average power level is pretty strong, very rare to see weak/vanilla cards in anyone's deck
dunno what to make of the Party mechanic, it's cool but seems like something you'd want in a set without a lot else going on? there's tons of stuff happening here
U/B Rogues are pretty powerful, lots of synergy and high-value cards. doesn't seem too hard to mill someone to death
much like Ikoria there appears to be a lot of game-ruining rares

kinda got the itch to draft this one, for the first time since...amonkhet?

i'll wait a week or 2 for the format's pace and priorities to get figured out though.

I haven't played any magic since the beginning of the year, but would like to get back into paper drafts if that ever happens again.

was going to be playing a paper draft tomorrow but we nixed it as there's been a real uptick in VID cases here recently. Sad!