MTG Salvation

Personally, I think this card will be incredible in Standard. Remember Cryptbreaker? People mostly ran it for the card-drawing ability, as far as I can recall. The token-making part was pretty nice, I'll admit, but so is a tribal +1/+1 counter pump. Seems... incredibly playable to me.

I like the cards. Wanted to say that first.

BUT THE FLAVOR TEXT ON HALF OF THESE CARDS ARE AWFUL.

"Liliana always knew that Jace's illusions would come in handy." I honest to god threw up in my mouth.

"Bolas remade this plane in his image. He has the advantage here. We must approach carefully." Thanks captain obvious.

"I was promised an afterlife, not this. Samut was right. The God-Pharaoh lied." Did you need the second half? Honestly, the first sentence would have had a nice ambiance to it. It would have been short and sweet. But no... this set has some real trash flavor text. Why Wizards? Why?! This has been trending since at LEAST Dragons of Tarkir.

I actually prefer this. It would have bothered me if we saw one reprint of a card from that cycle, but not the rest. This, at least, does something new.

I'm just glad that they did give us a variety of additional answers in this set for both vehicles and copycat.

For Copycat, we got:
White: Some enchantments that can lock it for a time.
Gideon's Intervention
Protection of the Hekma (Awful, yes.)
Blue: A greater selection of counter spells than we've had in a long while.
Essence Scatter for the kitty,
Commit can interrupt the combo while simultaneously delaying a future activation,
Reduce is no mana-leak, but if mana-leak were in standard we'd be having a very different problem.
Black: Some spot removal and a neat enchantment!
Never is an interesting variant of Ruinous Path, though we would rather have had an Instant. Still, it's something.
Lay Bare the Heart is an incredibly good discard spell, which incidentally hits all the Copy-cat pieces,
Trespasser's Curse is a common that not only turns off the combo, but kills them for the attempt! For those wondering why they can't see the card, whoever it is that set up the card's page in the card index misspelled Trespasser as Tresspasser.
Red is a bit sad at not getting much for its Copy cat match-up, but it got more tools for Vehicles than most any other color, so there's that.
Green got one good answer for it, Manglehorn, which is a pretty cheap card, with an admittedly fragile body, that stops the combo.

All in all, everyone but red got something for it, and the pieces aren't so narrow that they are awful against anyone else.

Then, there's vehicles.
White: Decent spot removal and a combat trick with a body.
Cast Out is pretty good against Gideon or Heart of Kiran, and has cycling to boot.
Forsake the Worldly yet more proof that white gets better [card]Naturalize]s these days than green, XD. Good against most of the threats, while being especially good against Scrounger.
Vizier of Deferment is an incredible combat trick that could let you focus your defenses on a few of the smaller threats while not having to worry about the biggest one.
Blue got another counter in addition to the counter spells listed above, for copy cat. Failure is pretty good in this match-up too, to throw off the other deck's tempo. Other than that, still basically the other counter spells.
Black: Hand/Deck disruption, mostly. Aggro decks are generally good against that, but black already had the best answer for Vehicles before, anyways.
Dispossess is pretty incredible, though it does unfortunately come after Heart of Kiran in the curve.
Lay Bear the Heart is still pretty amazing, though it can't hit Heart. Heart seems to be the largest problem here. I wonder why, it's as though it's even better than that card they banned, you know, for being too aggressive and fitting into too many decks... just my opinion, of course.
Never is still pretty good here, for Gideon, while still hitting something else. The Return half even gets rid of Scrounger!
Red: Hoo boy, finally!
By Force is a very cheap multi-target removal spell here.
Harsh Mentor Every vehicle activation is pain, and... I think this counts Scrounger reanimations? It's still an artifact even in the graveyard, so I would assume so.
Magma Spray can take out a lot of the smaller creatures, including Scrounger, permanently!
I'm still trying to evaluate whether or not Soul-Scar Mage will be good against this deck or not, seeing as -1/-1 counters won't fall off of Heart.
Cut is still up in the air, honestly. Probably not...
Green:
Manglehorn again, obviously and... uh...
...Dissenter's Deliverance?
Okay, so green didn't get too many answers in this set, but have you seen all the toys it got here? Yeah.

That's my analysis, anyways.

Quote from Mata_Hxri »

For a second I was thinking 'de-ferment', like, turning wine back into grapes.

You'll have to wait for the next Un-set. From what I hear, that card lets you take an opened pack of magic cards, seal it up, and sell it back to the store you're playing in.

...This is pretty versatile. It's technically two combat tricks in one, because if an opponent attacks you with two creatures, you can blink one and block the other. You can also use it to save one of your own blocking creatures before damage is dealt, while also re-triggering enter the battlefield effects. You can turn around an attack that goes awry by blinking the creature you swung with, again before damage is dealt.

This thing is pretty sweet!

Well, what are people going to do? Not play optimal mana-bases? They're just going to have to shake up their strategies a little to deal with this guy before fetching, which will, indeed, be interesting to watch.

That doesn't matter quite as much if all they have to do is reduce you to zero life before taking out whichever Gideon is currently in play. It's not gonna ruin the format, is all I'm saying.

It would go to the graveyard, but I'm not sure what part of that you're confused about. There are several things that might contribute to that, so I'll hope that I can cover all of them.

Whenever a permanent changes zones, (In this case, your Bloodmad Vampire entering the battlefield from being cast) It is treated as an entirely new instance of that permanent. The card would 'forget' that it had been cast from exile as soon as it resolved. By that same token, once your Bloodmad Vampire was killed by a Doom Blade, it would follow all the normal rules of a card dying. In this case, going to the graveyard.

Hope that helped.

Lots of people are saying this is going to prevent people from "Buying into Modern".

That phrase really bothers me, because it implies that in order to play in this format, you need to pay up for some very specific things.

I'm hoping that this shakes up the format enough that people have to come up with new decks, and that net-decking might die down for a bit, at least until the next big Modern tournament where people will, doubtless, start copying the pros.

Brewing season is the best season.

Quote from Ryperior74 »

What so special about a additional promo card of a legendary

I mean, if you don't want yours, I'll take it.

Teferi has a child. Makes sense though. Can't be going around the multiverse looking like Idris Elba and not having someone that'll let you phase them out.

*planeswalks away*

Quote from Viledrone »

This would be stupid broken with almost any extra keyword

Defender

😄

Quote from Nylon »

Squirrellink! That ability is broken!

I prefer to think of it as nuts.

"Now you can't block all of my already unblockable merfolk, haHA!"

Is there an open job for "flavor text writer"?

Because I'm pretty sure I can do a better job than whomever is writing these terrible things. It is almost as if they're generating random words from a software and having a human put them together.

At first I read it as "Ixalan's Banding" and I shivered.

A spell/ability can only "fizzle" (be countered by the game rules) if all its targets are illegal when it would start to resolve. Since UtM doesn't have any targets, it cannot "fizzle". A resolving spell/ability will always try to do as much as possible. You can fail to find (intentionally or not) the stated number of cards when searching a hidden zone, if those cards have to fulfil a certain criteria. Basically, you announce your search over when you want it to be over, wether you found everything you were looking for or not. Only if no criteria is given is it nessessary to find the stated number of cards if they are present in the searched (hidden) zone. If you didn't find X cards with UtM, you only reveal the cards you did find and put them into your hand. They still have to fulfil the criteria, though (Each must have a differrent name than the others, and they all must have a CMC of X).

Quote from Courier7 »

People actually care about the flavor text? Isn't the the most irrelevant part of any card? I am not going to tell people to ignore it, of course, because if they choose to care about it they choose to care about it--everybody has to be somewhere and wherever you go, there you are.

Flavor text and art are the difference between Magic being a fantasy trading card game and it just being a bunch of numbers on cards.

STOP RUINING FLAVOR TEXT WITH UNINSPIRED "STORY" JUNK!! C'mon, Wizards!