Sadly, I'm already bored with M15. But at least we got some confirmed Khans of Tarkir info!
It's now confirmed after months of rumors that the set will focus on "wedges" a.k.a. 3-color combinations of 1 color and its 2 enemies on the color wheel. Mechanically, this should play out similarly to Shards of Alara. Switching from arcs to wedges around the color pie doesn't really matter, it's just flavor.
Some lessons learned from Shards of Alara, that will probably apply to Khans:
- Each clan will have a mechanical link that you'll want to build around to some extent. There will be incentives to stay in one clan, not unlike Ravnica guilds. Some clans will be more linear than others.
- Mana fixing will be very important. In Shards, the triple lands like Arcane Sanctum were first picks out of a lot of packs. I think it's safe to assume Khans will have the wedge versions or something similar. They will be powerful since they'll allow you to consistently play the most powerful spells. You really don't want to shuffle up a mana base of 6/6/5 basics of different colors.
- It will be a 3-color format by default. Two interesting implications here. 1) There will probably be a 5-color control deck with insane power levels but also steep mana demands. 2) There might also be opportunity to play an aggro 2-color deck that is less powerful but doesn't care about mana. Let everyone else worry about hitting a 3-color mana base while you burn them out with aggro cards.
- Don't ignore the benefits of the "smoothing" mechanic. In Shards, it was Cycling. In Khans, it looks like it will be Morph. What I'm talking about here are mechanics that help bail you out when your mana doesn't cooperate. Morph turns a bunch of creatures into 2/2s for 3. That way you at least have a fighting chance while you try to draw into your colors.
- Speaking of Morph, if Onslaught block is any indication, 18 lands might be the norm. When Morph is plentiful, that means everyone is going to be able to play a 2/2 on Turn 3 at the worst. Missing your 3rd land drop means you can fall way behind when 3-drops are more plentiful than usual, that's why 18 can be best.
- And of course...there will be much raging about the variance caused by 3-color blocks in Limited, and opponents who make the Khans equivalent play of Mountain, Forest, Plains, Woolly Thoctar on the play. The outcomes of the games will be more shuffler dependent than usual since the specific order in which you draw your lands will matter more than any other block. (Just one more reason why you need to focus on fixing!)
Let's build the discussion as we learn more, and let's try to avoid baseless speculation since that tends to create useless tangents.
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The only thing I can add here is that the wedges are not centered on the color that is the enemy of the other two. Rather, they are centered on one of the colors that has one ally and one enemy.
The five 'wedgelike collections' in Tarkir:
Wgb
Uwr
Bug
Rbw
Gru
There is discussion in the Mill whether or not MaRo has stated that a given 2-color combination can be watermarked in more than one Clan.
E.g., it may be that every WB card is going to be an Abzan (WGB) card rather than it perhaps being a Mardu (RBW) card.
If this is true, we won't have true wedges per se so much as guild alliances a la Ravnica.
We already know that the block it will be drafted AAA -> BAA -> CCB, which excites me. I never like the CBA drafts as each set gets too diluted. I think this block's composition strikes a nice balance. We get to see and draft more of the last set than usual and it will nicely reset the format without changing it entirely.
I liked the Alara block, so I look forward to KTK. I guess it will be different since the clans are one-color centered. (IIUC, the white clans will have W, WG, WB and WGB cards.) This would leads to lesser color pressures on decks, with mana bases more like 8/5/5, hopefully.
We know of one card so far, the RWB Khan. He looks powerful, yet balanced. Being a hasty indestructible 7/2 means he's an almost guaranteed 2-for-1, but easy to remove as he has only 2 toughness, so a shock on the other player's turn is enough to deal with it. (And he's a mythic, so low-impact.) For five mana of three colors and the arguable bomb of its clan, it looks fine. If all other clans are the same, splashy, interesting but no completely over-powered, it could be an interesting set.
One thing worries me is the new 40-promos shtick. We still get the unbalance of having a seeded booster, but now you're no longer guaranteed that every one has the same baseline promo, which add yet more variance. (I pity the collector who will want all promos!) At least we get a pin instead of a dice, which is more set-specific than simply a choice of plastic hue. There will be whining from the players who get the 'bad' promos.
I actually like the 40-promos thing. No longer will you select your color/guild/clan/whatever on the strength of the rare alone. (Like M15 where Black clearly had the best choice, and Blue clearly the worst.) You can pick the clan you prefer knowing you'll get an aligned rare at least, but not necessarily a specific one. It seems like a better system, more in the spirit of Sealed while still giving players some choice.
Players will always complain about getting worse rares than someone else in Sealed. The promo 1-of-8 chance is no different. I like that better than "Everyone gets a Dragon" or "Everyone picks Black because the rare is unbalanced."
I am also on board with the promo thing. I really like the idea of being able to pick a color/shard - it gives players who don't play many organized events a better chance to play the sort of deck that they like, but you don't just know what their bomb is going to be. Also it means that players who are prone to do such things might actually get to sell/trade their promo for a little value, since there will be collectors trying to track them all down.
I'm less excited about the pin. I like and use the dice. The pin will probably sit around until it gets in my way and I throw it out.
So by this theory every Azban card would be white, green, black, white-black, or white-green-black?
Or White/Green, yes. (For Wedges, it's always true that there is only one ally pair per Wedge.) Most specifically, GB cards would not be Azban, but Sultai.
Thank you for this post and recap of what Shards was like. I didn't draft much of any three color set, but I may go back and play some knowing Khans will be similar.
It'll be interesting to see just how wedge focused the set is. It's distinctly possible that you'll have wedge colored mythic legends and a mechanic shared between three colors, but there might not be a plethora of multi-colored cards. Either way, they may be some advantages in playing three colors. In sets like that, I love to look for the most aggressive 2 color deck possible and try and punish greedy opponents.
Shards was really fun to draft and so I'm looking forward to Khans. It was very frustrating to sit across the table from the nut draw Thoctar or turn 4 Tower Gargoyle. If memory serves, it was really important not to go full out crazy on the gold cards to minimize your mana variance, but the panoramas helped significantly there.
There's been some speculation that the Temur mechanic may end up somewhat similar to the Naya mechanic. How did the "power 5 or greater" thing play out in Shards limited? Was it worth building around? Was it "win-more"?
Well we now know the mardu mechanic is 'raid' which feels somewhere between battalion and bloodthirst where as long as you attacked with anything this turn your raid guy triggers a bonus effect.
It's no flametongue kavu but it's probably a decent uncommon.
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It's not an awful mechanic, that's for sure. Trading FTK's build in Flame Slash for Shock is interesting. Hopefully there is a decent evasive creature for Mardu, maybe some Intimidate.
it's 4 cost and being a 2/3 doesn't make up for the fact that it can shock. this guy isn't what Mardu is about, but the mechanic is promising for limited at least.
It depends on the format, we don't know how common 2 toughness or how valuable a little reach might be. Heck, people are getting a decent number of wins using meteorite right now and it sure isn't because of the ramp.
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"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?"
Raid seems like a high variance mechanic. It might as well say "Your deck loses as soon as you have to hold back blockers" because all the Raid creatures will be undercosted when you're attacking and overcosted when you're not.
I don't think Raid is any more high variance than Battalion.
Depends on how it's designed. Mechanics like this have two key components:
1) How hard is it to trigger?
2) How big is the reward for triggering?
Raid is clearly easier to trigger than Battalion. But the rewards might be quite different. This Mardu Heart-Piercer for example goes from a vanilla 2/3 for 3R without Raid -- plainly unplayable -- to 2/3 + Shock for 3R which is going to be reliable card advantage in a set with Morphs. Most of the Battalion creatures had a much smaller reward. Let's look at some uncommon examples:
+2/+2 on a 1/1
Target creature can't block
Double Strike on a 3/1
Note that none of the Battalion abilities were "worth a card" on their own. Maybe Mardu Heart-Piercer is an outlier and the cards don't all give you card advantage for attacking. Time will tell but I think it's too early to say Raid is lower variance than Battalion. The problem with Battalion was that once you assembled your attackers, the avalanche of abilities made it hard for your opponent to ever recover. Raid is the opposite, once your opponent gets something going, Raid can make it impossible for you to recover.
It's also worth considering that with morph you'll often be able to bluff (or not in fact be bluffing) when you swing in with a 2/2. If they block you (possibly) morph into something that kills their creature. If they don't you get your Raid creature. There will definitely be some times when you are swinging with a morph creature that actually can't survive if blocked but when you know your opponent is quite unlikely to block anyway (of course if they know you know that, etc. etc.).
I suspect we'll see something like a tormented soul reprint that is a right color for a mardu deck and enables raid as painlessly as possible just like it did bloodthirst and exalted.
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"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?"
I'm hoping for Gustcloaks. That would be awesome White Mardu cardspace.
For the Heart-Piercer, though, I would like to discuss how it slots into the different Clans. (Even though it's a Mardu card.)
Mardu is fairly self-explanatory.
Jeskai is more likely to use this tactically. Given that Jeskai seems to be the Clan with the best Evasion, they have an easier time getting around Phyrre's objections than Mardu.
Temur..? They may want this as Green and Blue don't get a whole lot of removal.
While this card is no FTK, you can do things like swing with a bunch of bears/morphs into bigger creatures, in an attack that is normally unfavorable. But who knows what you might unmorph, and you can cast this postcombat to blow up an X/4 (making your bear have traded with an X/4) or deal opponent 2 extra.
Looks like the jeskai mechanic is Prowess, which gives a blistercoil weird style pump every time you cast a noncreature spell.
kind of an obvious synergy mechanic with tempo plays, bounce a blocker and pump your beaters, attack into a 5/5 with your 2/2 and shock doesn't just bump the damage up to 4 but to 5, if you're targeted by burn you can do something entirely unrelated to saving your creature like inspiration to pump it out of burn range, etc.
Odd that it works specifically 'noncreature spell' instead of the slightly more WRU 'instants and sorceries' because this way they get pumped by noncreature artifacts and enchantments. Maybe the RU artifacts matter subtheme in M15 was one of the seeded preview of things to come cards they like to do in core sets, like ajani's chosen for theros' enchantment stuff.
"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?"
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It's now confirmed after months of rumors that the set will focus on "wedges" a.k.a. 3-color combinations of 1 color and its 2 enemies on the color wheel. Mechanically, this should play out similarly to Shards of Alara. Switching from arcs to wedges around the color pie doesn't really matter, it's just flavor.
Some lessons learned from Shards of Alara, that will probably apply to Khans:
- Each clan will have a mechanical link that you'll want to build around to some extent. There will be incentives to stay in one clan, not unlike Ravnica guilds. Some clans will be more linear than others.
- Mana fixing will be very important. In Shards, the triple lands like Arcane Sanctum were first picks out of a lot of packs. I think it's safe to assume Khans will have the wedge versions or something similar. They will be powerful since they'll allow you to consistently play the most powerful spells. You really don't want to shuffle up a mana base of 6/6/5 basics of different colors.
- It will be a 3-color format by default. Two interesting implications here. 1) There will probably be a 5-color control deck with insane power levels but also steep mana demands. 2) There might also be opportunity to play an aggro 2-color deck that is less powerful but doesn't care about mana. Let everyone else worry about hitting a 3-color mana base while you burn them out with aggro cards.
- Don't ignore the benefits of the "smoothing" mechanic. In Shards, it was Cycling. In Khans, it looks like it will be Morph. What I'm talking about here are mechanics that help bail you out when your mana doesn't cooperate. Morph turns a bunch of creatures into 2/2s for 3. That way you at least have a fighting chance while you try to draw into your colors.
- Speaking of Morph, if Onslaught block is any indication, 18 lands might be the norm. When Morph is plentiful, that means everyone is going to be able to play a 2/2 on Turn 3 at the worst. Missing your 3rd land drop means you can fall way behind when 3-drops are more plentiful than usual, that's why 18 can be best.
- And of course...there will be much raging about the variance caused by 3-color blocks in Limited, and opponents who make the Khans equivalent play of Mountain, Forest, Plains, Woolly Thoctar on the play. The outcomes of the games will be more shuffler dependent than usual since the specific order in which you draw your lands will matter more than any other block. (Just one more reason why you need to focus on fixing!)
Let's build the discussion as we learn more, and let's try to avoid baseless speculation since that tends to create useless tangents.
At literally every prerelease, someone will yell "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAANS!" and think that they were the first to be so gosh dern clever.
As an aside, I will be this person at my prerelease.
:dance:Fact or Fiction of the [Limited] Clan:dance:
The five 'wedgelike collections' in Tarkir:
Wgb
Uwr
Bug
Rbw
Gru
There is discussion in the Mill whether or not MaRo has stated that a given 2-color combination can be watermarked in more than one Clan.
E.g., it may be that every WB card is going to be an Abzan (WGB) card rather than it perhaps being a Mardu (RBW) card.
If this is true, we won't have true wedges per se so much as guild alliances a la Ravnica.
I liked the Alara block, so I look forward to KTK. I guess it will be different since the clans are one-color centered. (IIUC, the white clans will have W, WG, WB and WGB cards.) This would leads to lesser color pressures on decks, with mana bases more like 8/5/5, hopefully.
We know of one card so far, the RWB Khan. He looks powerful, yet balanced. Being a hasty indestructible 7/2 means he's an almost guaranteed 2-for-1, but easy to remove as he has only 2 toughness, so a shock on the other player's turn is enough to deal with it. (And he's a mythic, so low-impact.) For five mana of three colors and the arguable bomb of its clan, it looks fine. If all other clans are the same, splashy, interesting but no completely over-powered, it could be an interesting set.
One thing worries me is the new 40-promos shtick. We still get the unbalance of having a seeded booster, but now you're no longer guaranteed that every one has the same baseline promo, which add yet more variance. (I pity the collector who will want all promos!) At least we get a pin instead of a dice, which is more set-specific than simply a choice of plastic hue. There will be whining from the players who get the 'bad' promos.
Players will always complain about getting worse rares than someone else in Sealed. The promo 1-of-8 chance is no different. I like that better than "Everyone gets a Dragon" or "Everyone picks Black because the rare is unbalanced."
I'm less excited about the pin. I like and use the dice. The pin will probably sit around until it gets in my way and I throw it out.
Or White/Green, yes. (For Wedges, it's always true that there is only one ally pair per Wedge.) Most specifically, GB cards would not be Azban, but Sultai.
R Norin the Wary: I've Got a Bad Feeling About This
UG Thrasios & Kydele: Knowledge is Power
RG Borborygmos Enraged: The Breaking of the World
BG The Gitrog Monster: All Glory to the Hypnotoad
WUR Zedruu the Greathearted: Endless Possibilities, One Outcome
WBG Karador, Ghost Chieftain: What's Dead May Never Die
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It's no flametongue kavu but it's probably a decent uncommon.
Mogis, God of Slaughter
Daxos of Meletis
Depends on how it's designed. Mechanics like this have two key components:
1) How hard is it to trigger?
2) How big is the reward for triggering?
Raid is clearly easier to trigger than Battalion. But the rewards might be quite different. This Mardu Heart-Piercer for example goes from a vanilla 2/3 for 3R without Raid -- plainly unplayable -- to 2/3 + Shock for 3R which is going to be reliable card advantage in a set with Morphs. Most of the Battalion creatures had a much smaller reward. Let's look at some uncommon examples:
+2/+2 on a 1/1
Target creature can't block
Double Strike on a 3/1
Note that none of the Battalion abilities were "worth a card" on their own. Maybe Mardu Heart-Piercer is an outlier and the cards don't all give you card advantage for attacking. Time will tell but I think it's too early to say Raid is lower variance than Battalion. The problem with Battalion was that once you assembled your attackers, the avalanche of abilities made it hard for your opponent to ever recover. Raid is the opposite, once your opponent gets something going, Raid can make it impossible for you to recover.
I'm hoping for Gustcloaks. That would be awesome White Mardu cardspace.
For the Heart-Piercer, though, I would like to discuss how it slots into the different Clans. (Even though it's a Mardu card.)
Mardu is fairly self-explanatory.
Jeskai is more likely to use this tactically. Given that Jeskai seems to be the Clan with the best Evasion, they have an easier time getting around Phyrre's objections than Mardu.
Temur..? They may want this as Green and Blue don't get a whole lot of removal.
kind of an obvious synergy mechanic with tempo plays, bounce a blocker and pump your beaters, attack into a 5/5 with your 2/2 and shock doesn't just bump the damage up to 4 but to 5, if you're targeted by burn you can do something entirely unrelated to saving your creature like inspiration to pump it out of burn range, etc.
Odd that it works specifically 'noncreature spell' instead of the slightly more WRU 'instants and sorceries' because this way they get pumped by noncreature artifacts and enchantments. Maybe the RU artifacts matter subtheme in M15 was one of the seeded preview of things to come cards they like to do in core sets, like ajani's chosen for theros' enchantment stuff.