@Tanion: Grafted Skullcap saw play with burn because Ensnaring Bridge and (at times) Null Brooch Incentivized the living heck out of keeping your hand empty. And as they were all artifacts, way over-taxed the available good artifact removal. It was a strongly synergistic control deck that happened to kill your opponent by throwing a bunch of removal spells at their dome over several turns in place of the standard control finisher of "play a fatty and protect it."
Jamming a more fragile Grafted Skullcap, with none of those powerful synergies known to be present as yet (and I highly doubt we'll ever see a Standard reprint of Ensnaring Bridge, it's very "don't play the kind of magic R&D wants people to play"), just to toss mediocre-rate burn spells at people's domes will definitely not have the same effectiveness as those Grafted Skullcap decks.
The synergy with dash is actually really good. When you hit the end step, you get to choose the order of your triggers. You can choose to discard your hand and then have the dash cards come back to your hand. This means that in theory, you could just run this with a bunch of dash creatures and not have an empty hand.
1) Beginning of End Step.
2) Avaricious Dragon trigger to discard hand.
3) Dash creatures come back to your hand.
That's not good synergy. That's just not-completely-self-defeating interaction. Next turn you draw 2 cards you have to play while *also* recasting those Dash creatures.
Glad to have a smaller impact from the seeded packs. Prior seeded packs making it "reasonable" to have on-color cards in 3x-4x quantities commonly was pretty bad for enabling casual pre-release substitution cheating. I miss Starter Packs, since you *knew* there was a hard limit on the number of each card a player could have due to their structure, so no "oops I totally opened the 4 Abzan Charm pool teehee."
Would be interesting if, since we're back up to 6 packs, the 7-card pool is a fixed set of 7 alternate-art cards for the walker in question (Not the walker itself, of course), since they've been doing the alternate-art prerelease promo stuff a couple of way recently.
It's a nice card. Not amazing, since any EDH table you play at should have enough Spot Removal/Graveyard Hate to counteract it if you slap it on something too dangerous. Seen a lot of people get away with putting it on a more "harmless" target like a land-fetcher, though.
Ally Tribal has the same issue Slivers does: Everyone should be killing your creatures constantly, because if they aren't, they deserve the super obvious bad thing that's going to happen with exponential scaling. I'd pretty much rather have any Changeling or clone-effect over this guy.
Zirilan of the Claw wore out his welcome quickly. Built the deck as durdly dragon tribal silliness, but every game just turned into: "Accel into Zirilan. Fetch Hoarding Dragon to fetch whichever Artifact I need to dominate the current boardstate, recycle Hoarding Dragon to use him again next turn."
Ended up playing like an awkward mono-brown combo deck that just happened to deck you for 4 a few times with its Dragon-Tutors.
Not to mention that tutoring an EDH deck every turn gets pretty annoying fast.
A block is two sets going forward, instead of 3. If they did full sets of "duals" in each block, there'd be 25-30 rare-level dual lands in Standard at any given time, which is a bit much.
I'd expect standard to continue to have 10-20 rare-level dual lands in it, which is supported by not printing a full set of duals in each "block."
Possible ex:
Set 1: Allied Duals
Set 3: Enemy Duals
Set 5: Allied Duals
Set 7: "Multicolor Block" Enemy Duals. Set 1 Rotates out.
All Foil Comet Storms should be immediately torn to pieces upon opening.
Don't even know if I'll draft this set. You can do 3-4 normal drafts for what one of this set costs, and have better expected value/easier time finding 8 people to fire off the pod in the process.
They took away/reduced the # of/gated behind higher judge level requirements the Grand Prix Judge Promos last year, didn't they? Which likely contributes to an attendant rise in needed judge compensation to attract sufficient numbers of judges.
Jamming a more fragile Grafted Skullcap, with none of those powerful synergies known to be present as yet (and I highly doubt we'll ever see a Standard reprint of Ensnaring Bridge, it's very "don't play the kind of magic R&D wants people to play"), just to toss mediocre-rate burn spells at people's domes will definitely not have the same effectiveness as those Grafted Skullcap decks.
That's not good synergy. That's just not-completely-self-defeating interaction. Next turn you draw 2 cards you have to play while *also* recasting those Dash creatures.
Would be interesting if, since we're back up to 6 packs, the 7-card pool is a fixed set of 7 alternate-art cards for the walker in question (Not the walker itself, of course), since they've been doing the alternate-art prerelease promo stuff a couple of way recently.
Nobody wants to blow removal spells on a Fertilid
Ended up playing like an awkward mono-brown combo deck that just happened to deck you for 4 a few times with its Dragon-Tutors.
Not to mention that tutoring an EDH deck every turn gets pretty annoying fast.
I'd expect standard to continue to have 10-20 rare-level dual lands in it, which is supported by not printing a full set of duals in each "block."
Possible ex:
Set 1: Allied Duals
Set 3: Enemy Duals
Set 5: Allied Duals
Set 7: "Multicolor Block" Enemy Duals. Set 1 Rotates out.
Set 8: "Multicolor Block set 2" Allied Duals.
Don't even know if I'll draft this set. You can do 3-4 normal drafts for what one of this set costs, and have better expected value/easier time finding 8 people to fire off the pod in the process.