This looks very cool, I'll be looking to try it out some time.
I notice the sample you provided doesn't have any cantrips in them (from what I could see anyway) they seem like they could be pretty sweet, and not too powerful. Basically just letting players bid on the next card down, and with scry and stuff you can play some sweet mindgames. whispers of the muse seems particularly cool, letting players either run it off as a cantrip, or spend 5 gold for a free card. Seems like it could be balanced enough, though I could see it being a bit much.
I do almost feel like it would be best to build an auction block with no mana sources and no mana requirements, meaning you could essentially abolish rule 8. How important of a dynamic have you found it to be?
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- rowcla
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Oct 5, 2014rowcla posted a message on Off Topic: Issues with VarianceI've played a lot of chess in the past, however, I've found that while it does share a lot of qualities with Magic, the biggest fundamental issue with it is the lack of variance. Games of chess often develop with only a few variations of openings, and the fundamental state of the game is often repetitive and lacking in originality from game to game. On this end, I've always found Magic to be greatly superior, at least in terms of how much I enjoy it, simply because of variance.Posted in: Articles
On a somewhat separate note, I've always been of the opinion that variance is one of the core enablers of hidden information in Magic, one of the most important contributors to it's strategy and depth. While it is possible to introduce hidden information to a game with no variance, those methods are limited, and can't take it to the same depth as Magic. On that note, similar to how you stated that brainstorm can is arguably detrimental to the game in how it reduces variance and streamlines the game (though, agreeably that's a rather farfetched argument) cards like thoughtseize, courser of kruphix, or probably better yet, something like wandering eye, also are, in my opinion, limiters of variance. While these cards obviously don't actually alter whether or not a game is different to others, it does however, make games more streamlined and ultimately predictable. One of the reasons I believe magic to be fun, is because nearly anything can happen, and players are benefited by the speculation of what the most likely outcomes are (ie: applications of hidden information) granting players additional information which let them simply crunch numbers to achieve the desirable outcomes, warps the game in an arguably detrimental way, and certainly eliminates a degree of much of the traditional applications of variance.
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Tracker is interesting, I'm not in black, but it does strike me has having potential, probably worth testing in some capacity. Being non-white does hurt a LOT though.
As a side note, while it is obviously it's own animal, if I were to splash green, I'd do it for a glittering wish package, and not really Rallier.
Blood Moon is actually a very maindeckable card (I currently run a split). It can sometimes just win games against the majority of decks in the format, but is particularly useful against decks like Tron, Eldrazi variations, Amulet, Lantern, and pretty much everything else that runs at least 3 colours/is low on basics.
For what it's worth, in a great deal of cases, you end up fetching up shocks tapped anyway, as our deck gets a lot of good opportunities to do so. In fact, had one been printed, I had been considering running a one of WR cycling dual land.
It occasionally comes up for me that Blood Moon or Emrakul prevent me from gaining life we want, but we still have a lot of hits, and I'm only running 2 Ascendants anyway.
I still strongly believe that mono white isn't really worth it. Splashing a second colour is just so free, and gives you access to powerful enough tools to more than compensate for any minor shortcomings that come with having to play a couple of shocklands.
I'm personally still on the RW Nahiri version, but I haven't tested other versions enough to really say definitively what the best one is. For monetary reasons, I would definitely run the RW version though, if I wanted to compete somewhere.
Kami lock is one of the best reasons to run Kami. Some decks literally cannot beat it, and many others only have a few answers, which means we can buy a lot of time, and if we can gain enough life to survive an attack from them, then they still lose (as spot removal only buys them a single turn to attack). What's more, if they want to be able to kill us in a single attack, they probably need to play into Wrath, which is obviously great for us.
Some matchups have the removal to deal with Kami, but most of the ones that are actively pressuring our life total are fairly removal light. Removal is also usually fairly weak against us, so forcing them to keep removal in against us can also be fairly powerful.
At the very least, I can say with some confidence that it is extremely suboptimal to not run at least 1 Kami, whether or not you should play for Kamilock will vary depending on the matchup, but you should always have the option for game 1 at least, imo
As for the Outcast, he basically just serves as a powerful target for Ranger that you can get in situations where Ascendant is inactive or isn't good enough on the field. He dies to more removal, however, he still requires an answer or else he gets out of control, which is particularly useful given that we have Proc to keeping recurring it. Being able to fetch Kami and Outcast is also pretty useful in a lot of situations, where other tools wouldn't really do the trick.
I was using the term "extremely useful" somewhat loosely, though I do find it odd that you don't list our lord and savior Kami of False Hope there. That card is low-key one of the top few cards in the deck imo.