MTG Salvation

consider me on board the hype train.

man you guys are thinking way too hard over-analyzing what, at face value, was a rather straightforward decision.

like attributing choosing bridge over another card because they are greedy and only care about selling new product. is it not possible that bridge was chosen because it was actually the appropriate choice given its role in the most degenerate play patterns and its awkward and frankly poor design?

similarly their citing of certain data points but not including all the data they looked at isnt some deliberate attempt at deceive or hide anything. there isnt some set of immutable guidelines for ban decisions where some burden of proof exists. they are just people designing a game, and they adapt the 'rules' as they see fit in order to craft what they believe is a more enjoyable environment. so you either agree or you dont, and in turn you trust them or you dont. i get that players, especially ones that might use this forum/thread, would delight in more transparency; however it behooves wizards not to share everything they look at and the specifics because its needlessly constrains future decisions by setting precedent/expectations that most will likely misinterpret.

i mean did anything about the announcement seem unreasonable if taken at face value? regardless if anyone believed bridgevine didnt ultimately cross some line, i dont believe it can be argued the deck w/ bridge wasnt at least a borderline case.

solid announcement. i think many of us, including myself, were and are still hoping for some unbans; especially moreso along the lines of the precedent they set last year with the jace/bbe unbans. however for a non-rotating format like modern, and with the higher frequency of b&r announcements there isnt any rush.

if anything the format has been too chaotic as of late. better to give things time to settle

Quote from Melkor »

Sad Commander player asks- I don't suppose there is any home at all for a pile of now almost worthless Paradox Engine in Modern ?

its shown up as a 1-of in urza lists. other than that the card is just way too slow to be relevant in a format like modern.

if you are really sitting on a stack of them id bite the bullet quick and dump them as quickly as possible.

these assertions about what may or may not end up happening to bridgevine are well and good. ive been around long enough to know that pretty much everyone, including myself, are severely limited in our capacity to know what the hell we are talking about nor separate ourselves from our biases.

what im genuinely curious about though is who actually WANTS bridgevine to stick around as yet another 'top deck'?

i just dont see how anyone could be content with it being a thing influencing what modern is about on top of the direction the format has noticeably been moving in

yeah the ban list could use cleaning. for the most part a good portion of the cards are being evaluated under assumptions born from context that is no longer relevant or applicable. this has been evidenced multiple times as cards were unbanned and it was clearly evident that pretty much no one knew what the hell they were talking about. its easy to chalk it up to anyone wrong being ignorant or incompetent, including wizards; but really the complexity of the system involved with format ecology and how it develops is crazy high.

like look at punishing fire. who the hell would play that card? at first blush id think it wouldnt show up anywhere, but i cant be sure cause there are way too many unknowns.

so basically wizards will (probably) never even attempt cleaning up the ban list and challenging assumptions of the past because its a huge pain in the ass; to the point where you'd probably be better served just remaking the format from the ground up. whereas the alternative is to just keep doing what they are doing, design new cards, they trickle into the format and it develops organically. ban stuff when it looks like its harmful and just move on.

Quote from cfusionpm »

Here's hoping they make it right on 7/8. But my hopes are not high.

well if Albegas is correct with the subsequent b&r announcement only being a month afterwards its all the more reason not to expect any changes. as i mentioned in a previous post, for non-rotating formats 2 months is barely anything. i dislike the deck as much as anyone else since it sort of encompasses the worst aspects of modern by hitting basically every point of criticism over the years; also to be blunt id rather the deck go away even if it isn't 'too good' in whatever sense. however i can acknowledge that its just my opinion, and wizards might give it the appropriate benefit of the doubt until results provide confirmation.

being that close together if we DO see action taken on 7/8 id attribute it to one thing and one thing only: the mythic championship.

Quote from AnImAr_ »

I would've loved these to have all had Bolas making them into God-Eternals with Bolas himself being embued with the sparks of the planeswalkers on his own card.

This set of cards is called Bolas's Engame. Why not give these more meaning than "let's put these cards with the landscape of the guild in which you should play them with in standard?"

eh you can tell they didnt dig too deep for this product, and in all likelihood they are just toying around/experimenting with the gloss coating.

besides god bolas already has 3 versions without this one added on. his endgame is over. dude needs to move on

i made out alright with Aria of Flame. once i saw it showing up in main/sideboards in storm and a few phoenix decks i picked up 20 copies at around $0.50 each, kept 3 for myself, and buylisted the rest for $5/per cash.

as for mh1 cards if anyone might see themselves wanting any of the cards such as ranger captain of eos, seasoned pyromancer, hexdrinker, giver of runes, goblin engineer, unsettled mariner, force of negation + other forces, etc. you are probably better served just biting the bullet and picking them up now.

the market for mh1 is looking to be quite volatile since the set, its timing and nature, are unprecedented. even print to demand sets have their limits for how much will hit the market (as implied by the 'to-demand'). as mentioned above m20 looks to be quite a sweet looking core set, and with standard popping-off as it has been stores wont be as inclined to go as deep on mh1 boxes; even WAR box/packs are in still in heavy demand and stores only have so big of a budget. the sense im getting from the set (mh1) is that people want the cards but no one wants to purchase/open the product at its price point.

if you are into buying boxes id also keep an eye out for mh1 boxes to dip in the coming weeks. its not implausible that stores that went in too deep on the set will want to offload product at little to no profit (or even a small loss) just to recoup that capital to spend elsewhere.

Quote from idSurge »

OK, I think these cards are going to get stupid, hopefully I'm wrong but since there was no way to catch these at 'low' prices, whens the optimal time for Force of Negation and Fiery Islet?

i think you should definitely wait on fiery islet. its holding the highest price tag among the horizon lands, but URx decks will be playing 1-2 copies at most (or none at all cause the lifeloss is too big a downside).

force of negation is more of a wildcard. before i would have said that it was on track to go down to at least 15ish in the first few weeks after release. unfortunately hype/fomo caught on from a minimal showing in the mtgo challenge, and with the 8% kickback on tcgplayer the rush to buy made it look like there was a supply shortage when really only qualified sellers can post preorders; so it spiked $10 overnight. so now the card has an even higher starting point.

id think its fairly low risk to at least wait until after release when real competition/undercutting kicks in

just gotta say wizards missed an opportunity with force of despair. could have easily tagged on an exile clause to give it applications against GY creature decks.

Quote from tronix »

man you guys are thinking way too hard over-analyzing what, at face value, was a rather straightforward decision.

like attributing choosing bridge over another card because they are greedy and only care about selling new product. is it not possible that bridge was chosen because it was actually the appropriate choice given its role in the most degenerate play patterns and its awkward and frankly poor design?

similarly their citing of certain data points but not including all the data they looked at isnt some deliberate attempt at deceive or hide anything. there isnt some set of immutable guidelines for ban decisions where some burden of proof exists. they are just people designing a game, and they adapt the 'rules' as they see fit in order to craft what they believe is a more enjoyable environment. so you either agree or you dont, and in turn you trust them or you dont. i get that players, especially ones that might use this forum/thread, would delight in more transparency; however it behooves wizards not to share everything they look at and the specifics because its needlessly constrains future decisions by setting precedent/expectations that most will likely misinterpret.

i mean did anything about the announcement seem unreasonable if taken at face value? regardless if anyone believed bridgevine didnt ultimately cross some line, i dont believe it can be argued the deck w/ bridge wasnt at least a borderline case.

All of this. People need to look at this and internalize it.

I dont know if you are on twitter tronix, but I consistently think 'this is someone people should listen to more.'

Just won a 81 person tournament in the Philippines with Hogaak. Here's how my matches went - my opponent draws hate and it slows them down. I eek out a win. They don't draw hate and they get smushed to the ground. I did lose a round to UW Control (LMAO) when I mulled to 4, then he turn 4 Vendilion Clique into Timely Reinforcements into Cryptic Command AND Surgical Extraction. I lost on turn 7 to a swinging Colonnade and that Vendilion Clique. Then I lost game 2 to Celestial Purge into Rest in Peace into Supreme Verdict into Cryptic Command into 4 turns of Colonnade swinging. That was my worst round. This deck is certainly unacceptable.

BTW, 3 Hogaak in the top 9. This is what I remembered.

1. Hogaak
2. Amulet with Karn
3. Dredge
4. UR Phoenix
5. Humans
6. RG Loam
7. Hogaak
8. UW Control
9. Hogaak at 5-1-1 on breakers (I played him in Round 3)

People consistently discount what it would take to keep these 'monoliths' of the format relevant in today's meta.

Assuming you dont ban Hogaak or nerf it in some way, you have 2 options.

Go under.
Run 6+ Hate, some of it main deck or you just auto lose Game 1. I'm not even making it up, thats just reality right now.

Forget about 'battle of the sideboards' you literally need to be able to execute your own strategy while holding onto a 'Hogaak' package of hate in reserve.

Now fit that into Stoneblade, forgetting for a moment that its namesake is Push/Bolt/Insert Removal Here and that the 'payoff' is an Artifact. Like we as Modern players have not dealt with an Artifact before?

Now fit that into Twin, which I see Todd (who is not ignorant to what the deck is doing) is shaving off even more of the Combo (3/2 Creature split, 3 Twin) because maybe, just maybe, its not that good in Modern, in 2019.

Now fit that into Eldrazi...oh wait, THEY DONT CARE they are Eldrazi, and it is still the best Modern deck of all time on the back of Eye of Ugin and the most hideous creatures they ever printed.

Honestly, unban Jitte, what deck even cares about Jitte that is actually competitive? None that I can see.

Either way, its an irrelevant topic. Wizard's is not going to review with any kind of integrity, the ban list.

I just hope for some seriously busted lines of play out of Hogaak, and an overwhelming amount of GY hate that is insufficient to contain the deck, and some clips that I can retweet to Forsythe.

The second and third abilities of Plague Engineer are linked (C.R. 607.2d). The choice made for Plague Engineer applies only to those two abilities, not to any other ability, even one that another object (such as a Servo token) acquires from Plague Engineer (C.R. 607.2d, 706.7). When an artifact becomes a copy of Plague Engineer due to Saheeli's loyalty ability, Plague Engineer's third ability that the artifact acquires this way will refer to an undefined choice and so do nothing (C.R. 706.7a).

So you're saying that those of with the deck should play as much as possible online before the B&R date. Well if I must, I can take one for the team. For the sake of the format.

Yes I will be posting the Link here once we go live for the public

Oh man, I thought this was a thread on how its been added!

Personally, I would love it.

It's definitely heartbreaking to a lot of us, but being here has been one hell of a ride. I've grown a lot since coming here, mostly because I joined up and was subsequently brought into the mod team while in high school. Maybe in that regard saying I've grown a lot is, well, inevitable and actually doesn't say much about the how MTGS has influenced me. All the same, despite working on something new, I'm really going to miss this place. I've dumped so much time into this site it hurts to see it leave. I feel like a different woman than I was when I first started (although I wasn't a woman to begin with, so I guess my mileage may vary), but I've seen so much come and go in this community. It wouldn't trade this community away for the world. We've had our ups and downs, along with State of the Meta being... well, State of the Meta (long may it reign!), but I've loved interacting with every single one of you.

Mark my words, I will make our new home better than what we have here. We're gonna make something awesome, just you wait.

I feel like I need to reiterate the article: We are building something new. It's gonna be awesome, you'll see.

Also, unban Twin.

Quote from tronix »

what did you think, if anything, about the mana base? like did you do any iterating on it, or just choose what 'seemed good' and just ran with it for a while? also, did the 2 blast zone / 3 field split play well? (especially interested on blast zones performance)

been muckin around with GDS and elves the last few weeks, jeskai is in a somewhat dubious spot, so i figured id start making the adjustments to UW super-friendly control, while also preparing for additions from horizons. the 3 mana UUU charm might require some adjustments to the mana base, and its also plausible that moving to snow basics for 1-2 copies of on thin ice will be beneficial. im thinking cutting one or both of the glacial fortresses for the new prismatic fetch (blue fetch works too, but more lands that can get oncolor basics is worth looking into). i also dont think a full set of colonnades is required in UWx anymore, so maybe dropping 1 or 2 for an island.

as for the knowledge pool lock. i can get on board with the reasoning of having a powerful game-closing lock to draw to at the expense of a single slot. kinda the same thing with the singleton terminus, an idea which i also toyed with a few weeks back; for such cards the inclusion of the first copy is by far the most impactful since it gives an entirely new axis that otherwise didnt exist. my only question is: did you ever just cast the card without baby teferi? the card reads like butt, so id be interested in first hand knowledge on what it does to games by itself.

The mana base feels actually quite solid. It's true that I've taken a couple of extra mulligans due to basic + double colorless land. I'm somewhat used to it because I used to run 4FoR+GQ. I started 4 FoR + 1 Blast Zone and I felt that I needed the BZ way more often that I thought I would. There were so many matches that I won due to it that made me want more of it. FoR on the other hand is kinda mediocre but it's something we really need for Tron, mainly. Aside from that, most people run enough basics for Path+FoR. Regarding the Snow basics, it's a neat idea because the removal is very cool. My issue with it is that you can easily get 2 for 1 with some effects but most of the decks we'd want the extra removal for don't have those types of cards. I could easily see cutting one Colonnade, one colorless land, one Glacial Fortress and jam some Vistas. They are quite good.

Regarding the Charm, I'm super hyped for it but we'd need 23 U sources to play it on curve. With my build I have exactly 18+4 cantrips which amount to the 20 needed for CC on curve. To play the charm I'd have to cut one of the colourless lands for another basic or dual, play 26 lands and probably two extra cantrips. We can always assume that the Charm will be played like a CC is and then our manabase is just fine. I'm super in love with the effects. They are relevant the entire game and in all matchups. I'm not that hyped over the fact that the 3cmc is super cluttered...

Quote from tronix »

Quote from 13055 »

Yeah, my main issue with Pool is it literally reads as useless without T3feri. At least Mycosynth Lattice only eats up a sideboard slot. I can't imagine it being anything but a dead card without the other half of the combo.

it does make me wonder why UW couldnt just run like 1 copy of the new karn. its not like you need to dedicate the whole sideboard to it, just have like an EE, cage/crypt, and a lattice. both the blue and white gearhulks aint bad either.

seems like UW is already supporting like 500 planeswalkers, whats 1 more right? lol

The 1of Pool in the main I'm super positive about. The second copy on the sideboard is way more difficult to justify. I certainly had to cast it without the T3feri... and it felt incredibly bad. I would have to play Opts to mitigate the fact that it's super awkward because typically the opponent has the advantage. I'm super focused on the Tron matchup and that could be a mistake but I really feel that it's a winnable matchup if we dedicate enough resources to it. Dredge is probably the worst one but with 2/3 Rips and 1/2 Surgicals and some agressive mulliganing you can almost even it out.

I've seen it discussed people trading the second Teferi, HoD for a singleton Karn to get the Lattice lock and win on the spot. It does a similar job to the Pool combo and it's more consistent. On the other hand... Lattice is extremely bad as a magic card and it takes one sideboard slot necessarily. The Pool combo could be on the maindeck and sided in and out with lower opportunity cost, imho.