MTG Salvation

Quote from ktkenshinx »

Holy Life from the Loam moly.



http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/latest-developments/cycling-duels-2017-03-31

Cycling duals. Painless, fetchable, cycling duals. Don't even care that they come into play tapped.

Dual land types and cycling are tempting, but when you unconditionally ETB tapped that just kills it for me in a lot of applications. I like them in Standard with how they line up alongside the SOI show-lands in that they enable those lands while also being able to convert themselves into an unknown, but in Modern I don't expect much from them beyond enabling very fringe strategies.

Which, on one hand, is nice, because it's always cool seeing new things in this format.

Yet, on the other hand, that means having to account for an even larger spread of ridiculous nonsense in a format that's already more diverse than the average fighting game.

But, on the third tentacle, I've always wanted to play a format where Life from the Loam could be a grindy card advantage engine in more than just recurring lands. I've seen old Extended Loam-Knight piles before, and while these duals aren't going to be as efficient as the Onslaught cyclers, it's still something. Besides, a lot of duals are fetched in tapped in this format anyway, maybe it's the case that cycling makes these a better card in hand than shocks or BFZ-duals, since you can do something with them besides play them for whatever tempo advantage or disadvantage you'd get. A question worth asking might be how many shocks or BFZs does it take before the first bicycle is better than the N+1'th of the other options?

Eh, it's Shock.

What's there to say, other than wishing it wasn't just Shock but instead a variant that pushed it closer to the sweet spot between Shock's floor and Lightning Bolt's ceiling?

That said, an unconditional 1cmc means of doming people is nice to have again in a Standard context, and dealing 2 damage isn't all that bad, there's stuff out there that the first Galvanic Bombardment of the game could take care of.

It's not quite a shock to the system, but it'll do.

@Izzet: Obviously you Fatal Push the small stuff while the big stuff gets the Murderous Cut treatment. Or you Remand them, because Delve and Remand are the best nonbo.

I'm kinda just jumping to the end of the thread here to say this, so sorry if I'm repeating an earlier point, but Fatal Push still shares some flaws with Smother, a card I love but have benched not too long ago because of the liability that is targeting creatures of cmc 3 and below (IT'S ALL FUN AND GAMES UNTIL SOMEONE WHIPS KALITAS OUT ON YOU, JUST SAYING).

Now, with Revolt active, you get, ignoring the fringe cases where regeneration matters, a card that outperforms Smother where it counts: a single Black mana clowns anything on curve for the first four turns of the game. Without Revolt, you're limited to 2cmc and below, worse than Smother but acceptable for the reduced cost, and still totally a card worth playing when you need to kill stuff on the cheap and aren't in colors that have a better baseline. Try naming a card you'd cast Disfigure on that would survive an unrevolted Fatal Push, it's not exactly a large list.

To draw from a somewhat unrelated concept, Fatal Push is the low half of a high-low mix for Black-inclusive removal. It's cheap, and it hits a relevant range of targets. It doesn't cover everything on its own, but if you pair it with something that excels a few turns into the game like Murderous Cut then you get a really good removal suite going on.

Positive attitude aside for a minute, the fact is that being in the Smother school of cmc-matters spell design has relevant liabilities, and sometimes bad draws combined with poor sequencing leave you staring down the wrong half of a deck like Eldrazi with cards that aren't going to touch them.

But really, Fatal Push helps to bring Black's removal options up to par with the hand disruption combo of Inquisition of Kozilek plus Thoughtseize, which improves the color's ability to address threats in a resource-equitable fashion without necessarily requiring the addition of other colors (or playing Dismember and shooting yourself in the face for a lot of life just to stop the big fatty from out of nowhere).

TL/DR: GOOD CARD, WOULD SABOTAGE DRAFT TO PICK UP.

Collected Company.
Huge amount of support between the two Innistrad blocks.
Collected Company.
Collected Company.
Confirmation Bias.
Collected Company.

Did I mention Collected Company?


Past that, knowing the difference between the two is like knowing the difference between Murder and Stasis Snare. On the surface they functionally come off as the same class of card, and sometimes one may be seen as better than the other due to the context of the metagame, but as you dig deeper into their nuances you start to realize how they're worlds apart. Spirits has Collected Company which has powerful synergy with their nature as a tribe that disrupts in the form of static on-field permanents, Faeries has the Cryptic/Mistbind crossup which thoroughly dismantles entire chunks of the opponent's turn in an archetype that gets a lot of value out of devaluing the opponent's turns as much as possible.

Honestly, it's Beleren's lack of doing anything but drawing cards that serves as both his greatest strength and greatest flaw.

He's real good about being a Blue Phyrexian Arena, and unlike PA which whittles your life down Beleren just complicates decisionmaking for the opponent by offering a card that can be interacted with through damage sources (the hidden mode of all planeswalkers, being able to take a hit and save you some life in the process), but that's all he does. Relying on a Planeswalker to be some kind of damage shield is poor Magic, because it relies on the opponent doing something they're under no obligation to do (unless it's Gideon), they're going to tank a hit based on how much of a threat they are and the opponent's threat evaluation process isn't guaranteed to line up with yours. This is arguably the root of why Planeswalker abilities that impact the board are so important, they shift the agency back to the controller's hand.

So if you're in the market for drawing cards repeatedly, Beleren is really up there, but between his low cost and being the original Blue Planeswalker, you don't get anything else out of him. JVP sorta almost gets the ideal mix of low cost and crossup of card draw (albeit in the form of looting) with boardstate influencing abilities but it splits it across two mutually exclusive sides, one of which is a very fragile creature. Those caveats kinda add up if you're not abusing him to hell and back in a Thoughtscour deck.

Quote from TotumusMaximus »

Sorcery speed is bad though

At 1cmc, sorcery speed is quite trivial.

Quote from Dynamite_Private »

Plant for cursed artifacts stolen out of tombs in Amonkhet!

RETURN THE SLAAAAAAAB.

OR SUFFER MY CUUUUUUUURSE.

I'M ANGRY.

ANGRY ABOUT NEW CHANDRA.

FOUR ABILITIES, THIS WORKED OUT WONDERFULLY LAST TIME.

Quote from Redlimit »

Quote from Sephon19 »

This cycle bothers me a bit - not because of the gameplay. But are the original fastlands reprintable outside Mirrodin? Aren't they way too setting specific to get reprinted here in Kaladesh, for example? Does anyone see an unawkward solution to this?

Welcome to the reason why we haven't seen the allied painlands in a while.

Battlefield Forge is like the only plane-agnostic painland of the Apocalypse cycle I can think of. The other four namedrop locations in Dominaria.
In fact, the allied painland cycle has even more plane-agnostic names with stuff like Brushland, Sulfurous Springs and Underground River.

Anyway if you do the auditory and semantic equivalent of squinting your eyes the names of the SOM fastlands aren't exactly impossible to apply elsewhere, they don't really describe explicit locations but rather natural formations with a metallic flair. If Kaladesh weren't so upbeat I could totally believe in the existence of Darkslick Shores on the plane, depicting the Magic equivalent of an oil spill.

Quote from TaheenMage »

Quote from ktkenshinx »

Enemy fastlands!!?? Abzan, Grixis, D&T, UR, and many more rejoice!!

If nothing else, Abzan just lost one (but not all) of its key edges over Jund.

You boyos are still getting cucked by Lightning Bolts up your rhino's sandy wazoo.

Begun, the GBx wars have.

The time has come A fact's a fact It belongs to them Let's give it back

Chandra went a courtin' she did ride, Kambal.

Guys. How can you be so blind? How do you not see the obvious? Here, let me illustrate it for you:

Quote from znancekivell »

Quote from DudeFromDenmark »

Im confused, isn´t Chandras parents dead?

Pia was never "confirmed" the way Kiran explicitly was. It was heavily implied that Pia was dead, but it all happened off screen.

First rule of drama: If you didn't see a body, they aren't dead.

Quote from MikePemulis »

My biggest takeaway from this isn't about bannings or unbannings, but that Wizards needs to devote some serious resources to testing for Modern, if they're going to continue calling it a format. It's either that or be forced to do pseudo-emergency bans all the time, ala Treasure Cruise, somehow slowing this deck down a bit, and being prepared to do that every time there is an oversight like this.

They knew about the lands and the deck in modern, but Eldrazi offer a lot of options to splash colors and cards that fix specific matchups.

The key here was to have Chalice of the Void which fixes otherwise bad matchups and they also removed 2 otherwise quick decks from the format in bloom and twin.
Ofcourse twin wouldnt be good against the Eldrazi, but you could have played Ratchet Bomb in Twin to beat Chalice and Endless One, while killing the bigger eldrazi with counterspells and bounce, together with flyers to deal damage to them. Certainly more interactive, as Twin also would have options to make the matchup better than it would be in the "basic" form twin was before.

Bloom could just roll over them and Primeval Titan would also be quite a hit, while it would be a more interesting matchup with the Ghost Quarters around.



Overall the format ended up with "slower" decks, and decks that need the graveyard to function (which are storm due to flashback spells and griselshoal) , which also get hated by chalice 1.


Problems add up and make the Eldrazi deck favourable, while the 2 mana lands provide the crucial speed to make it as unfair as it is.
Without the 2 mana lands, the Eldrazi cards are still "good" but not undercosted, so its fair magic and more often than not, Eldarzi lose if they dont have the lands around.

Quote from bfrie »

Idk man, exarchs price is clearly gunna skyrocket to like $2 when they unban twin, this is obviously a preemptive measure to prevent that

Right on. Good thing they reprinted Stoneforge Mystic as the GP promo before they unbanned it. Oh wait...

#banlistlogic

The secret true purpose of this reprint is to add another layer of draft matters: the money draft. Inquisition of Kozilek is totally unplayable, so seeing IoK in your pack gives you that classic choice "Should I draft a blank card because it's worth the draft entry fee?".

Quote from djphan25 »

and really... how hard is it to hire someone to be the modern czar? someone who's going to spend more than 1hr every 3 months thinking about modern? is that totally out of the wizards budget? the guy doesn't even have to be full time...

i mean if it were someone like karsten or lsv or kibler... i mean these guys are more than qualified to take that position and it would definitely ease my concerns of the format going forward...

It takes more than 1 person, at minimum you need 2 people to play games. If you assume the meta changes every 6 months (new cards that change decks, require redoing matchups, etc), and that you have 6 hours/day to play, 5 days a week that's 30 hours. At 15 minutes per game that's 120 games. If you play 20 game sets (10 preboard, 10 post), that's 6 decks per week. In 6 months you get 87 matches, which is just over 9 decks that can be tested assuming everything is tested against everything else.

The format is much too broad for that.

I think this is the first time this decade a Company has done well in Detroit. #mtghottakes

Quote from Colt47 »

Personally, I dont' really play in tournaments all that often as I like to brew decks and find the competitive scene to be chokingly bad, even when the variety is good. Modern itself plays like two boats passing each other in the ocean when it gets to really strong strategies because they execute their gameplan so fast, interaction is not really encouraged. It also doesn't help that WoTC refuses to print Counterspell or Daze in the format even though it desperately needs them. The most blue card in the format isn't even blue: It's an 0/4 artifact creature that redirects stuff to itself.

There is plenty of interactive decks in the format.. just because they aren't blue, that doesn't mean they don't exist. There are also a lot of linear strategies as well sure, but that doesn't stop you from playing something interactive (and besides the rise in Eldrazi decks which will be stemmed in time), I have seen more draw-go control decks at my local meta than ever before.