We have a handful of commons & uncommons to work with now (which are the cards us Limited junkies mostly care about, right? ;)), so it's time to talk about them!
Some that caught my eye, to kick things off:
This thing seems like a pretty formidable finisher, and a 5/5 blocker for 5 is nothing to sneeze at to begin with. Of course, if you are playing a blue mirror, you have a blue Hollowhenge Beast with significant upside. Also, my dream is that I at some point get to use Sealock Monster as a manafixer Anyway, I really like this thing.
I already like 1/3s, and scry 2 is dangerously close to adding "draw a card" on top of it. It's no Sea Gate Oracle, but it is cheaper, and it's still really good. Can't have too many of these things.
Not sure what to think of this card yet. It seems pretty loose, but it's also undeniably powerful. Slapping it on an evasive creature or a thing with high toughness doesn't seem terrible. It's a really high variance card, that's for sure. Also, interestingly enough, if there are cards like Altar's Reap for permanents, you could sacrifice this and get the three damage without bashing at all. Something to look out for.
I guess this is better than normal because of bestow and such. Slamming a 2-power bestow card on it seems pretty powerful, and perhaps worth building around. Depends on how cheap they go with common bestow cards, I suppose.
This guy being common is going to be pretty significant, I think, and it would greatly surprise me if it isn't one of the top few green commons. Already a fantastic deal at 4/5 with reach for five mana, and it grows out of control for seven. Also, worth pointing out is that monstrous can happen at instant speed, so when you hit 7 mana, you can start hitting with this into anything at all even if you have no intention of pumping it. It's a pretty impressive creature.
This thing seems like a pretty formidable finisher, and a 5/5 blocker for 5 is nothing to sneeze at to begin with. Of course, if you are playing a blue mirror, you have a blue Hollowhenge Beast with significant upside. Also, my dream is that I at some point get to use Sealock Monster as a manafixer Anyway, I really like this thing.
I think you may be overrating him in this format. Is an 8/8 really that great as a finisher in a format with common 8/9s?
I already like 1/3s, and scry 2 is dangerously close to adding "draw a card" on top of it. It's no Sea Gate Oracle, but it is cheaper, and it's still really good. Can't have too many of these things.
In a normal format, perhaps. But if this is anything like RoE, 1/3s may be irrelevant as bodies. And as I said in the other thread, I expect scry to be less powerful than it is in a normal format.
Not sure what to think of this card yet. It seems pretty loose, but it's also undeniably powerful. Slapping it on an evasive creature or a thing with high toughness doesn't seem terrible. It's a really high variance card, that's for sure. Also, interestingly enough, if there are cards like Altar's Reap for permanents, you could sacrifice this and get the three damage without bashing at all. Something to look out for.
You can also slap it on a monstrous creature for immediate counter+bolt.
I'm keeping a close eye on combat tricks. The Heroic mechanic seems to appear on a lot of cards (Heroes vs. Monsters being the main theme) so the question is how often will you be able to trigger them? Obviously they push Auras because you get an immediate benefit just from casting the Aura, but Instants will be more powerful for the surprise factor. Also it's an ability that can't be stopped by counterspells or removal -- the Heroic effect goes on the stack when you cast the targeting spell, not when it resolves.
Phalanx Leader for example has huge blowout potential at uncommon.
I'm guessing this set will play like Rise of the Eldrazi with the two main strategies being ramp into huge Monsters vs. Heroic aggro to try to end the game before the Monsters get going. I really doubt the Heroes will be able to stay in the game in the long term.
Random aside: Presumably "Destroy target enchantment" will be a powerful maindeck ability in this block, just like how Shatter is almost as good as Doom Blade in Mirrodin blocks.
MaRo has stated that this format is nowhere as slow as RoE, and I expect it's nothing like RoE simply because, according to WotC, RoE wasn't popular among players that aren't draft junkies. I don't think a regular expert expansion is going to have a format where only the synergy decks are good.
So I'm assuming Nessian Asp is an outlier. It's probably just straight-up the biggest common in the set and, when monstrous, it's actually going to be the biggest common ever (Just about big enough to eat Ulamog's Crusher which is an 8/8). It IS going to be good, I think, unless the format has a lot of ways for more aggressive decks to get through a giant guy with reach. Reach, as usual, is the difference between a pointlessly large Green creature and a monster that dominates the board.
I have a hard time evaluating the creatures with bestow. They feel really underpowered to me, which is most likely wrong. This is probably because the bestow costs are so high.
I agree, I don't get the costs on Bestow creatures. They seem backwards. Considering Auras are considerably riskier to play than creatures (risk of 2-for-1 and all that), the Aura half should be affordable and the creature half should be more expensive than usual. It seems they did it the other way -- a competitive price for the creature, and a huge premium for the option to use as an Aura. I imagine the way to evaluate them is whatever the value of it is as a creature without Bestow + a slight bump that you can occasionally cast it late game when your opponent is tapped out or out of cards and build your own finisher.
One thing's for sure, this set has an unusually high number of productive things to do with 7+ mana so ramp is going to be good. The only question is whether ramp will be the default strategy, or if it will be balanced by Aggro.
I don't really care what MaRo says about the speed of the format because if there's one thing R&D has proven over and over again, it's their inability to predict the speed of the format. They don't test it with the same ruthless efficiency of competitive drafters.
I agree, I don't get the costs on Bestow creatures. They seem backwards. Considering Auras are considerably riskier to play than creatures (risk of 2-for-1 and all that), the Aura half should be affordable and the creature half should be more expensive than usual. It seems they did it the other way -- a competitive price for the creature, and a huge premium for the option to use as an Aura. I imagine the way to evaluate them is whatever the value of it is as a creature without Bestow + a slight bump that you can occasionally cast it late game when your opponent is tapped out or out of cards and build your own finisher.
One thing's for sure, this set has an unusually high number of productive things to do with 7+ mana so ramp is going to be good. The only question is whether ramp will be the default strategy, or if it will be balanced by Aggro.
I don't really care what MaRo says about the speed of the format because if there's one thing R&D has proven over and over again, it's their inability to predict the speed of the format. They don't test it with the same ruthless efficiency of competitive drafters.
You're really only going to get 2-for-1'ed by Pacifism effects with Bestow, though; it's been confirmed that if the creature you're trying to enchant gets removed in response, your Bestow card will enter the battlefield as a creature rather than being countered on resolution.
Agreed on not paying too much attention to what R&D says about format speed. The one helpful thing is that they almost always seem to miss by making the format faster than they'd expected, so when they say "We wanted to speed the format up a bit" we're looking at Zendikar/Gatecrash, and when they say "We wanted the format to be slow enough to make expensive Flashback/Monstrous/etc costs viable", it's probably only going to be Innistrad/Return-to-Ravnica-fast.
Think of Bestow as being kind of the opposite of Evoke. When you Evoke, you get less than if you hard-cast the creature. When you Bestow, you get more. The fact that it's an optional cost makes it a lot more palatable to put something with a Bestow cost of 6 or 7 in your deck, since you can still just cast it as a creature. I think Bestow cards are going to split between the ones that you want to cast as a creature, and the ones that you want to cast as an aura, but I don't think that it's going to be one of those mechanics where the card is only good if both 'halves' are reasonable. Cavern Lampad, for example, seems like a good finisher for a black deck but hard-casting it is underwhelming. A a 2/2 intimidate for 4 probably doesn't have enough impact early enough in the game to be good, but giving +2/+2 and intimidate to your best creature, then getting a 2/2 to finish the job afterwards, is entirely different.
People focus a lot on how Bestow helps with the 2-for-1 problem Auras normally have, but it also deals with another problem: Normally, every Aura you put in your deck is one less creature that can carry Auras. Bestow neatly sidesteps this... and the more Bestow cards you have in your deck, the more value you get from random 2/2 and 3/3 guys that are left lying around in the late game after your enchanted creatures die.
I think evasion is going to be even more important on Bestow cards and in decks with lots of Bestow cards in them, both because evasive creatures are a better target for an Aura, and because it makes them more likely to remain relevant in the late game after they fall off a creature.
If there's a common Pacifism/Claustrophobia effect in Theros, it's probably much clunkier than either of those cards, since it doesn't really make sense to print a mechanic that helps with the 2-for-1 risk of auras and then print a common removal spell that still 2-for-1s them. Also: Draft formats usually end up being faster in the real world than they are in R&D's testing. I don't think R&D can perfectly gauge the speed of a format, but it's a stretch to think they grossly misjudged it and made a format that's as slow as a Limited format that was specifically designed to be unprecedentedly slow. So far Theros looks more like Innistrad than any other format.
One thing I have noticed so far is that evasion is relatively scarce. Outside of common/uncommon, most of the big monstrosity creatures don't have it in any form, and those that do only have it temporarily or in a way can be worked around. I think Bestow creatures that grant this (Lampad, for example) are going to be a bigger game than people think.
With the very limited info we have about commons and uncommons, so far I feel that:
- 4/5 is the new 2/2. So many creatures seem to be 4/5 so far. That would mean 5 is the magic number.
- 4-5 CMC seems the be the turning point so far.
- The few common / uncommon removal we've seen so far are kinda weak and expensive. We've yet to see a black one though, but I seem to recall someone from R&D saying that Theros was like a fixed Avacyn Restored, so I expect clunkier removal than usual.
So far I think limited will hinge on who misses his land drop first. You don't want to be stuck on 3 mana in this format. As such, it probably is a 18-lands format and I'll probably choose green in the pre-release to increase my chances of playing mana accelerant and land-drop insurance.
It will be interesting to see if devotion is a mechanic you can build around in limited or just ignore. So far, I plan to mostly ignore it in sealed and take it as a bonus if it happens. Trying to force a color too hard would require playing too many fillers most of the time.
I think Devotion-Monocolor might be more of a sideways thing than something that is being specifically pushed. There's a cycle of two-colour uncommons, for example. I think like in Innistrad, this format pushes towards somewhat synergistic two-colour archetypes without making the more usual Limited creature decks untenable. I think the real strategy to maximise devotion is to play cheap permanents that stick around (=enchantments) than to build a monocolor deck. Cards like Journey to Nowhere might have a secondary job as a Devotion enabler.
it's been confirmed that if the creature you're trying to enchant gets removed in response, your Bestow card will enter the battlefield as a creature rather than being countered on resolution.
I totally missed that. But it does make the Bestow costs sensible to me now. I stand corrected, it is a very powerful mechanic.
Bestow seems like a rules headache. Another in the line of mechanics that are trying to be "fixed Licids." Newer players are going to be confused at the prerelease.
I totally missed that. But it does make the Bestow costs sensible to me now. I stand corrected, it is a very powerful mechanic.
Bestow seems like a rules headache. Another in the line of mechanics that are trying to be "fixed Licids." Newer players are going to be confused at the prerelease.
Yeah, I have the same concern; I hope that Mark Rosewater's right about how it plays out in practice.
(When asked about it, he said [paraphrase] "We've found that newer players assume that mechanics will work in the way that is most beneficial to them. New players will expect Bestowed auras to become creatures when their targets are removed, because that's what they want to happen. Experienced players might not expect that, but they're much more likely to have read the rules or the mechanics article beforehand.")
I hope they have some playtesting to back that up, because otherwise "Voyage's End in reponse to your Bestow aura" is going to cause a lot of arguments at the prerelease. Even in the best case, I expect at least some temporary confusion from experienced players who've only read the reminder text before going to the prerelease.
I'd really like to see some more removal and heroic/low drop creatures spoiled. My assumption is that the flow of the game will go something like heroic weenies will come out strong early, then get outclassed by monsters, then outgrow or push past the monsters with auras and pumps, then get outclassed by monstrous activations.
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My biggest issue with Heroic is the fact that most Limited decks will probably only be packing eight or nine non-creature spells. Most of the time (at least in my opinion), I would want the majority of those to be removal spells of some kind or other, or else a finisher effect like Overrun. How many times can you run something like Giant Growth before it becomes too many? Consequently, how many chances are you honestly going to see Heroic activate?
I had similar concerns about Battalion and was proven wrong about how recurring the effect could be, but simply turning men sideways seems different from having to find and cast something that targets your own guys. Note that Heroic doesn't trigger when your opponent targets your guy with a spell, only when you do.
That's the synergy with Bestow - Bestow spells are creatures but they're also auras that can trigger Heroic, so you can pack more auras than normal in your deck.
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My biggest issue with Heroic is the fact that most Limited decks will probably only be packing eight or nine non-creature spells.
This is why I'm struggling to evaluate this mechanic as well. It reminds me quite a bit of Populate in RTR not because of how it works but because you need jusssst the right mix of two different kinds of cards.
The Populate deck needed the right mix of token producers and Populate activations. Most of the token producers were under-powered on their own, and similarly Populate is useless with no tokens on the board. The risk even in a good Populate deck is that you can draw all your generators or all your Populators at once and the plan falls apart.
Heroic has the same issue. If you have too many Heroic creatures, then you're overpaying for an ability that's unlikely to trigger. If you have too many spells that you're playing for Heroic upside and not enough creatures -- well then obviously you're just playing bad spells.
I think you have to evaluate Heroic creatures as if they didn't have the ability, and treat any activations like a happy bonus. That seems to be how they are costed, by the way:
2/2 for 2 (twice)
2/2 Flying for 3
1/4 for 3
1/1 for 1
4/5 for 5
3/2 First Strike, Vigilance for 3 (actually well above curve)
The only outlier is the one that Clones on activation, and you can see why that has to be 1/1 for 2 because the ability is potentially very powerful.
My key takeaways are: Don't play bad spells just because "it gives me something to trigger Heroic" and don't overvalue Heroic creatures for being worth much more than their base stats.
Hundred-Handed One is hilarious, as is the Mythic that makes 1/0 tokens. Curse of Swine reminds me of Willow.
This is what I want to talk about. Along with the Drain Life/Devotion guy, this could be a big game; saccing one to get another is a 16 point lifeswing without anything else.
I like devotion a lot... you don't need to be mono-colored, it's always a nice little bonus.
My biggest issue with Heroic is the fact that most Limited decks will probably only be packing eight or nine non-creature spells.
As was noted before, Bestow creatures will help boost the number of activations you get out of it. I think they will be activated just enough to be worthwhile, and I like that you don't always get to trigger them at instant speed.
The asp seems like overkill... a common 4/5 for 5? C'mon, Wizards. You didn't need to reply directly to the "Is Green the Worst Color" thread.
So far, the deck I'm most excited to draft is the Flamespeaker Adept*/Scry deck.
*Couldn't find a linkable image. 2/3, gets +2/+0 and first strike when you scry.
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My Decks: EDH: Sygg, River Cutthroat , Road to Scion
Grimgrin, Corpseborn Modern: Polytokes IRL: Progenitus Polymorph , Goblins
With heroic in the set, I would really like to see things like Seeds of Strength and Common Bond running around. Wow. Now, that would get a lot of mileage out of your heroic guys. Because they are pushing using Bestow on the heroes, (kind of as a way to cope with what's otherwise a poor late game in all likelihood) I suspect that we may unfortunately see many multi-target combat tricks. And, if we do see some, that might move them up the pick order a bit.
Another thing that I've paid attention to is the number of gold cards. Already, we have many more than I expected after Return to Ravnica block; Anax and Cymede is number 186 in the set. It's very likely the first gold card, which would mean that we have 37 mono-colored cards per color. Underworld Cerberus is currently the last gold card we have at number 208. The next card we have is Pryxis of Pandemonium at 220.
So, we are already talking a minimum of 22 gold cards, and likely a bit higher than that. Now, obviously this isn't RTR, but 25-ish gold cards is a pretty significant number. Granted, there are no commons in gold yet, but this could have a significant impact on draft. The presence of a fairly high number of gold cards (especially if/when we start getting good gold commons) does detract a bit from possible mono-colored strategies. Therefore, the number of gold cards may detract a bit from devotion strategies if we see some decent commons in gold.
I'm thinking this set will have a lot of room for interesting limited plays, based on the mechanics we have seen.
Monstrosity: Instant speed. Everything is super-Rootwalla. Pump after blocks, in response to removal, and so on.
Bestow: Sacrifice outlets = surprise blockers.
Heroic: Once again, instant speed. I'm looking forward to finding all sorts of tricky plays with this mechanic. Not only do you have the regular combat tricks that now do overtime, but this mechanic makes any targeting instant a potential trick as well.
Going along with others' thoughts, my favorite creature commons so far are Scry Augur and Nessian Asp. Nessian Asp just looks down at Giant Spider, an already good card, and lols.
As it seems like this might be a slightly slower format, card advantage could be extremely important. Along those lines, Read the Bones looks fantastic. Divination with an added bonus of hopefully drawing no lands with only a minor drawback of 2 life looks very, very good.
I don't think it's worthwhile to comment on removal as a whole yet, but if Vanquish the Foul is any indication of the level it might be at in this set...
Now that I think about how Heroic will play out, won't Heroic creatures have a large target painted on them: keep removal mana up to respond to Heroism to get a 2-for-1? I think Heroic will make people play tricks more pro-actively and lose to removal more often, at least for inexperienced players, as they try to go for the bonus.
If someone wants to durdle and keep mana open while not advancing their board against my already reasonably-costed heroes, I'm perfectly fine with that. I like making my opponent playing reactively and keeping mana open so long as I'm ahead on board, which you should be with heroes. At any rate, bestow is the best way around that 2-for-1 problem. It is pretty expensive though.
Besides, heroic triggers off of casting the spell. The heroes that have global rather than heroic effects that only benefit that creature aren't going to care about getting hit by Doom Blade any more than a non-heroic creature anyway.
But yes, there is a bit more of a target on their backs. Being tapped out while facing down a board of heroes is quite a precarious position to be in.
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Some that caught my eye, to kick things off:
This thing seems like a pretty formidable finisher, and a 5/5 blocker for 5 is nothing to sneeze at to begin with. Of course, if you are playing a blue mirror, you have a blue Hollowhenge Beast with significant upside. Also, my dream is that I at some point get to use Sealock Monster as a manafixer Anyway, I really like this thing.
I already like 1/3s, and scry 2 is dangerously close to adding "draw a card" on top of it. It's no Sea Gate Oracle, but it is cheaper, and it's still really good. Can't have too many of these things.
Not sure what to think of this card yet. It seems pretty loose, but it's also undeniably powerful. Slapping it on an evasive creature or a thing with high toughness doesn't seem terrible. It's a really high variance card, that's for sure. Also, interestingly enough, if there are cards like Altar's Reap for permanents, you could sacrifice this and get the three damage without bashing at all. Something to look out for.
I guess this is better than normal because of bestow and such. Slamming a 2-power bestow card on it seems pretty powerful, and perhaps worth building around. Depends on how cheap they go with common bestow cards, I suppose.
This guy being common is going to be pretty significant, I think, and it would greatly surprise me if it isn't one of the top few green commons. Already a fantastic deal at 4/5 with reach for five mana, and it grows out of control for seven. Also, worth pointing out is that monstrous can happen at instant speed, so when you hit 7 mana, you can start hitting with this into anything at all even if you have no intention of pumping it. It's a pretty impressive creature.
I think you may be overrating him in this format. Is an 8/8 really that great as a finisher in a format with common 8/9s?
In a normal format, perhaps. But if this is anything like RoE, 1/3s may be irrelevant as bodies. And as I said in the other thread, I expect scry to be less powerful than it is in a normal format.
You can also slap it on a monstrous creature for immediate counter+bolt.
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
Draft: (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5)
Phalanx Leader for example has huge blowout potential at uncommon.
I'm guessing this set will play like Rise of the Eldrazi with the two main strategies being ramp into huge Monsters vs. Heroic aggro to try to end the game before the Monsters get going. I really doubt the Heroes will be able to stay in the game in the long term.
Random aside: Presumably "Destroy target enchantment" will be a powerful maindeck ability in this block, just like how Shatter is almost as good as Doom Blade in Mirrodin blocks.
So I'm assuming Nessian Asp is an outlier. It's probably just straight-up the biggest common in the set and, when monstrous, it's actually going to be the biggest common ever (Just about big enough to eat Ulamog's Crusher which is an 8/8). It IS going to be good, I think, unless the format has a lot of ways for more aggressive decks to get through a giant guy with reach. Reach, as usual, is the difference between a pointlessly large Green creature and a monster that dominates the board.
I agree, I don't get the costs on Bestow creatures. They seem backwards. Considering Auras are considerably riskier to play than creatures (risk of 2-for-1 and all that), the Aura half should be affordable and the creature half should be more expensive than usual. It seems they did it the other way -- a competitive price for the creature, and a huge premium for the option to use as an Aura. I imagine the way to evaluate them is whatever the value of it is as a creature without Bestow + a slight bump that you can occasionally cast it late game when your opponent is tapped out or out of cards and build your own finisher.
One thing's for sure, this set has an unusually high number of productive things to do with 7+ mana so ramp is going to be good. The only question is whether ramp will be the default strategy, or if it will be balanced by Aggro.
I don't really care what MaRo says about the speed of the format because if there's one thing R&D has proven over and over again, it's their inability to predict the speed of the format. They don't test it with the same ruthless efficiency of competitive drafters.
Agreed on not paying too much attention to what R&D says about format speed. The one helpful thing is that they almost always seem to miss by making the format faster than they'd expected, so when they say "We wanted to speed the format up a bit" we're looking at Zendikar/Gatecrash, and when they say "We wanted the format to be slow enough to make expensive Flashback/Monstrous/etc costs viable", it's probably only going to be Innistrad/Return-to-Ravnica-fast.
People focus a lot on how Bestow helps with the 2-for-1 problem Auras normally have, but it also deals with another problem: Normally, every Aura you put in your deck is one less creature that can carry Auras. Bestow neatly sidesteps this... and the more Bestow cards you have in your deck, the more value you get from random 2/2 and 3/3 guys that are left lying around in the late game after your enchanted creatures die.
I think evasion is going to be even more important on Bestow cards and in decks with lots of Bestow cards in them, both because evasive creatures are a better target for an Aura, and because it makes them more likely to remain relevant in the late game after they fall off a creature.
If there's a common Pacifism/Claustrophobia effect in Theros, it's probably much clunkier than either of those cards, since it doesn't really make sense to print a mechanic that helps with the 2-for-1 risk of auras and then print a common removal spell that still 2-for-1s them. Also: Draft formats usually end up being faster in the real world than they are in R&D's testing. I don't think R&D can perfectly gauge the speed of a format, but it's a stretch to think they grossly misjudged it and made a format that's as slow as a Limited format that was specifically designed to be unprecedentedly slow. So far Theros looks more like Innistrad than any other format.
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- 4/5 is the new 2/2. So many creatures seem to be 4/5 so far. That would mean 5 is the magic number.
- 4-5 CMC seems the be the turning point so far.
- The few common / uncommon removal we've seen so far are kinda weak and expensive. We've yet to see a black one though, but I seem to recall someone from R&D saying that Theros was like a fixed Avacyn Restored, so I expect clunkier removal than usual.
So far I think limited will hinge on who misses his land drop first. You don't want to be stuck on 3 mana in this format. As such, it probably is a 18-lands format and I'll probably choose green in the pre-release to increase my chances of playing mana accelerant and land-drop insurance.
How do you feel about devotion?
I totally missed that. But it does make the Bestow costs sensible to me now. I stand corrected, it is a very powerful mechanic.
Bestow seems like a rules headache. Another in the line of mechanics that are trying to be "fixed Licids." Newer players are going to be confused at the prerelease.
(When asked about it, he said [paraphrase] "We've found that newer players assume that mechanics will work in the way that is most beneficial to them. New players will expect Bestowed auras to become creatures when their targets are removed, because that's what they want to happen. Experienced players might not expect that, but they're much more likely to have read the rules or the mechanics article beforehand.")
I hope they have some playtesting to back that up, because otherwise "Voyage's End in reponse to your Bestow aura" is going to cause a lot of arguments at the prerelease. Even in the best case, I expect at least some temporary confusion from experienced players who've only read the reminder text before going to the prerelease.
I had similar concerns about Battalion and was proven wrong about how recurring the effect could be, but simply turning men sideways seems different from having to find and cast something that targets your own guys. Note that Heroic doesn't trigger when your opponent targets your guy with a spell, only when you do.
This is why I'm struggling to evaluate this mechanic as well. It reminds me quite a bit of Populate in RTR not because of how it works but because you need jusssst the right mix of two different kinds of cards.
The Populate deck needed the right mix of token producers and Populate activations. Most of the token producers were under-powered on their own, and similarly Populate is useless with no tokens on the board. The risk even in a good Populate deck is that you can draw all your generators or all your Populators at once and the plan falls apart.
Heroic has the same issue. If you have too many Heroic creatures, then you're overpaying for an ability that's unlikely to trigger. If you have too many spells that you're playing for Heroic upside and not enough creatures -- well then obviously you're just playing bad spells.
I think you have to evaluate Heroic creatures as if they didn't have the ability, and treat any activations like a happy bonus. That seems to be how they are costed, by the way:
2/2 for 2 (twice)
2/2 Flying for 3
1/4 for 3
1/1 for 1
4/5 for 5
3/2 First Strike, Vigilance for 3 (actually well above curve)
The only outlier is the one that Clones on activation, and you can see why that has to be 1/1 for 2 because the ability is potentially very powerful.
My key takeaways are: Don't play bad spells just because "it gives me something to trigger Heroic" and don't overvalue Heroic creatures for being worth much more than their base stats.
This is what I want to talk about. Along with the Drain Life/Devotion guy, this could be a big game; saccing one to get another is a 16 point lifeswing without anything else.
I like devotion a lot... you don't need to be mono-colored, it's always a nice little bonus.
As was noted before, Bestow creatures will help boost the number of activations you get out of it. I think they will be activated just enough to be worthwhile, and I like that you don't always get to trigger them at instant speed.
The asp seems like overkill... a common 4/5 for 5? C'mon, Wizards. You didn't need to reply directly to the "Is Green the Worst Color" thread.
So far, the deck I'm most excited to draft is the Flamespeaker Adept*/Scry deck.
*Couldn't find a linkable image. 2/3, gets +2/+0 and first strike when you scry.
My Decks:
EDH: Sygg, River Cutthroat , Road to Scion
Grimgrin, Corpseborn
Modern: Polytokes
IRL: Progenitus Polymorph , Goblins
Just a friendly reminder that I will drive this car off a bridge
Another thing that I've paid attention to is the number of gold cards. Already, we have many more than I expected after Return to Ravnica block; Anax and Cymede is number 186 in the set. It's very likely the first gold card, which would mean that we have 37 mono-colored cards per color. Underworld Cerberus is currently the last gold card we have at number 208. The next card we have is Pryxis of Pandemonium at 220.
So, we are already talking a minimum of 22 gold cards, and likely a bit higher than that. Now, obviously this isn't RTR, but 25-ish gold cards is a pretty significant number. Granted, there are no commons in gold yet, but this could have a significant impact on draft. The presence of a fairly high number of gold cards (especially if/when we start getting good gold commons) does detract a bit from possible mono-colored strategies. Therefore, the number of gold cards may detract a bit from devotion strategies if we see some decent commons in gold.
Monstrosity: Instant speed. Everything is super-Rootwalla. Pump after blocks, in response to removal, and so on.
Bestow: Sacrifice outlets = surprise blockers.
Heroic: Once again, instant speed. I'm looking forward to finding all sorts of tricky plays with this mechanic. Not only do you have the regular combat tricks that now do overtime, but this mechanic makes any targeting instant a potential trick as well.
As it seems like this might be a slightly slower format, card advantage could be extremely important. Along those lines, Read the Bones looks fantastic. Divination with an added bonus of hopefully drawing no lands with only a minor drawback of 2 life looks very, very good.
I don't think it's worthwhile to comment on removal as a whole yet, but if Vanquish the Foul is any indication of the level it might be at in this set...
Besides, heroic triggers off of casting the spell. The heroes that have global rather than heroic effects that only benefit that creature aren't going to care about getting hit by Doom Blade any more than a non-heroic creature anyway.
But yes, there is a bit more of a target on their backs. Being tapped out while facing down a board of heroes is quite a precarious position to be in.