MTG Salvation

Quote from Kryptnyt »

I wouldn't be surprised to see variants of Rhystic Study in Commander supplements or Conspiracy or the like in the future. Maybe also cards that reward you for chump-blocking with card draw- "For the greater good" flavor. Sacrificing Plains for card draw could work well in concert with all of the Land Tax flavored stuff they keep printing; the problem with a critical mass of those abilities is that they do stop working.

I think taxing/punishing effects fit white very well in commander, as it falls within white flavorfully and mechanically. On the other hand, sacrificing lands for card draw fits white neither flavorfully nor mechanically. The land searchers you alluded to are certainly no justification for something in the line of Aggressive Mining no more than white's token strategies justify a white Goblin Bombardment. Sacrificing lands for resources is so indelibly red that it would take a fairly tortuous twist to cram such a mechanic into white. As far as lands themselves that draw cards, white-based EDH decks have access to a number of decent colorless options.

Quote from Awear »

I'm sorry, but is this claim backed up by any actual rule? Cause I've just quoted a rule that actually says the opposite. Perhaps there is another rule I'm missing, perhaps I'm misunderstanding what I'm reading, and I'm fine discussing that! But I'm not inclined to blindly follow claims that aren't back-up by any rule.

This might be difficult to hear, but Comprehensive Rules, despite its grandiose name, vast amounts of text, and regular upkeep, simply isn't built to handle every single specific card interaction in the game. Specific card interactions can be a blind spot for certain card interactions, and that's why there's another rule: what the judge says, goes. Judges may be wrong, as they are human, but the comp rules simply can't intercede in every quibble over card interactions. Those judge rulings may be written down, in which they become [O] rulings, such as this one:

2/1/2014
While you control an Archetype, continuous effects generated by the resolution of spells and abilities that would give the specified ability to creatures your opponents control aren’t created. For example, if you control Archetype of Courage, a spell cast by an opponent that gives creatures they control first strike wouldn’t cause the creatures to have first strike, even if later in the turn Archetype of Courage left the battlefield. (If the spell has additional effects, such as raising the power of the creatures, those effects will apply as normal.)

Now, this particular [O] ruling does not, as you have said, answer your precise question regarding static abilities, so I encourage you to seek out a judge ruling on this subject from a judge community. However, the text I have bolded here indicates that the response I expect from the judge will be that the lord will still give +1/+1, extrapolating from the spell interaction.

I apologize that it might be frustrating for you to ask for hard rulings on the subject and get a direction to find a judge who may very well give you the same response as us, but that's the space most of the game's card-to-card rules interactions live in.

Quote from migrena »

Quote from Patch8700 »

Most judges are pretty good. I've been to a lot of events and I trust that the few times people will try something they have a good chance of being caught.

But just to note, of course you CAN cheat. I've never said you can't. But there are always ways to cheat, and new ways with almost every set. I would say the most sketchy standard environment for shady plays was Khans of Tarkir with both manifest and morph at the same time. There was a lot of room for abuse, yet it all worked out. I'm just an optimist.

You could not abuse/cheat with morph/manifests with very little effort. In fact the rules required you to clearly mark which one is which.
With all companions except Lutri you can verify if opponent is not cheating as soon as offending card is put on the stack (or earlier if you have ways to reveal hidden information eg Duress). But with the otter you cannot do this in all situations. Opponent can still cast rule-breaking spell and you have no way of verifying if it breaks companion restriction.
Consider the following scenario: opponent casts Impact Tremors, casts Release to the Wind, casts Lutri. Wins the game. At no point you had a chance to verify that opponent did not cheat by having multiple copies of those cards while opponent could increase the probability of assembling them.

So right now in formats that could be interested in playing that card instead of UR having the best companion it has none. Good job. :/

I think the point being made in this thread is that cheating Lutri's deckbuilding has little difference from cheating EDH deckbuilding rules or running five copies of your best card in regular 60 card constructed. Either way, the cheater can, theoretically, make in-game choices that hide the cheat, but the ease in which that can be revealed makes deckbuilding cheats unappetizing to all but the dumbest of cheaters. Even without a full deck check, anything that the opponent does that gives them information will the reveal the illegal deckbuilding and get the cheater DQ'd in a competitive setting and ostracized in a casual one. Any type of peek, discard, or mill will do this, and then there are cards that let a player search their opponent's deck like Surgical Extraction.

To reiterate, cheating in deckbuilding has existed as long as there have been deckbuilding rules, has always been able to benefit cheaters, and has always been incredibly transparent because of how many ways opponents have to expose the cheaters. The companions do not change this.

Quote from sainthyacinth »

One option that could work as CA for white is Pull from Eternity but back into hand? It won't work for sideboard cards like a wish but can interact well with many other cards and could be sometype of CA or quality for white.

I think easy exile interaction is a problem of its own right, not only because of the "second graveyard" issue parodied by AWOL, but also because exile acts like a safety valve for a lot of powerful mechanics. Imagine a deck that gets to recur something like Temporal Mastery multiple times over the course of a game. Easy exile interaction is like building a city on top of a nuclear waste dump; everything that results will be poisoned.

Quote from migrena »

while i do not agree with splinter twin example but you are correct about everything else.
i might add that while there is a lot of answers to problematic cards/combos the problem is that most of them are not maindeck cards. no one sane would maindeck lost legacy or return to nature. cards like thoughtseize can be maindecked but they do nothing against topdecks and library manipulation. also filling your deck with answers after sideboarding dilutes your deck and lets your opponents do other stuff their deck is trying to accomplish unimpeded.

The fact that people were unironically calling Twin a "police" deck while largely acting like the strategies that it pushed out of modern did not deserve to exist by virtue of losing to Twin is, to me, evidence enough that the deck warped Modern. Threats do not police formats, answers do, and that players treated its banning as the removal of a Force of Will-caliber format cornerstone is proof of the myopic effect that personal preference has on perceptions of format health.

Quote from Tormented »

Quote from Pants_On_Head »

This reminds me of History of Benalia. Three mana for two 2/2s over two turns with the final mode being a reward for having more creatures of the created tokens tribe in play. Not a bad card to be reminded of, I like this design.

QFT. Despite the final payoff being less splashy than giving all of the tribe +2/+1, we are also looking at a rare vs. a mythic - which was played significantly. Furthermore, we still don't know how many "escape" cards will be floating around, as well as other graveyard shenanigans (Desecrated Tomb? and we most likely will see a new crop of saga support Keldon Warcaller.

Judging a card like this when there are still 200+ cards of mystery - when this is released - and 1000 cards following it before it rotates is terribly rash. Unique and strange cards often have the most potential for impacting this game much more than obviously powerful cards. I would wager that for the first 5 years of magic, more tournament decks had shivan dragon than bazaar of bagdad, but 20 years down the line, shivan is a nostalgic piece of bulk trash and bazaar is the cornerstone to several legacy decks. (feel free to insert your own favorite sleeper card).

It's such a shame that Desecrated Tomb rotated out. I loved playing it with Muldrotha, the Gravetide. While this probably won't quite hit the heights of History, this card does have a couple of advantages. For one, the mana cost is easier and more friendly to multicolored decks, and the other is that zombies generally have an easy time swarming, letting the third verse have a powerful effect.

I like the tap-for-indestructible idea. It makes these cards more interactive than previous iterations on the mechanic. I'm a little concerned with how wildly the 'animation' requirements and activated abilities vary amongst these cards, though.

The green one looks like the most complete of the bunch, as it has an easy activation requirement that synergizes well with both the activated ability and means of protection. It's also huge and unstoppable.

The white one has a much less sensible design. The requirement to attack and block is incredibly winmore, so much so that you will rarely attack or block at all. The activated ability, by contrast, is incredibly oppressive. Who need to block when all opposing creatures are dead? It doesn't so much synergize with the animation as cause the game to grind to a halt.

The blue one is just weak. Attacking and blocking requires specific support, and it has a non-synergistic activated ability that pales in comparison with the rest of the abilities you gave.

The black one is probably where you want this cycle to be. The animation is difficult, but it enables itself with an appropriately powerful activated ability. Five mana is probably high enough to dodge the usual sorcery requirement for this type of ability.

The red one is in the same category as white, as it has a difficult animation and a grotesque activated ability. Precombat life loss/damage is an even narrower category than what the blue one has, and the red one will more frequently cost you a card to use. The activated ability probably shouldn't exist on any card of this cost in any form. You drop this on turn 3 and curve into destroying a land every turn for the rest of the game. Awful.

I made Top 8 in the 72-player MCQ, going 5-1 over the first six rounds into an ID in round 7. Unfortunately, I scrubbed out in the first round of the single elimination due to some incredible mana flood.

I faced a lot of Oko in the tournament, including the middle four rounds that I played, and I went 3-1 against them. Those Oko matches were bookended by an Azorius deck that never really interacted with me in a meaningful way and a Golgari adventure deck that sputtered in games 2 and 3 after beating me in game 1.

I ended up playing a playset of Noxious Grasp for the tournament alone, though I'd never get away with that in my LGS meta. I was highly relevant and useful every time I drew it, except when my opponent had Summer Veil.

Overall, Corpse Knight was an absolute all-star. It forced through life loss in situations where I could not attack, tore through opposing life totals in conjunction with Worthy Knight, and acted as a valuable source of reach to enable Knight of the Ebon Legion. Sorin and Archon were decidedly less than impressive in the Oko matchup, unfortunately.

You would probably better off swapping Witch's Oven and Cauldron Familiar out for something like Pitiless Pontiff, Plaguecrafter, or Priest of Forgotten Gods. The combo, with two pieces, is decent, but it needs other combo pieces present to really get rolling. The cat, by itself, is a pretty underwhelming 1-drop, and the oven is, quite frankly, a lousy sac outlet when you're not doing something busted with the food tokens. With only four cards that make food and two cards that use food in a profitable manner, that just doesn't seem enough.

Quote from Gutterstorm »

Interesting that Typhons are a kind of creature rather than a specific creature.

Pegasus and Medusa (well, not in MTG, but in many other media) welcome Typhon to the club.

That's just warping the meta though. If every viable deck has to include the same set of counters to one or two decktypes, you end up with matches that might as well just be two players flipping a coin since they play out the same way over and over.

Turn one Gilded Goose
Turn two Rotting Regisaur
Turn three The Great Henge +?

That is a pretty ridiculous board relatively easily.

Quote from Joban8 »

You'd think that the same people who allegedly monitor format health would have an expert understanding of the modern infrastructure and which existing cards would be most efficacious when it comes to filling in gaps, balancing the color pie, bolstering lower tier archetypes, etc were they ever reprinted into modern. Instead of utilizing those existing cards, which have concrete data, and opting to make MH a majority compilation of brand new unknown variables is a sign of either ignorance or ineptitude, in my eyes. I won't damn the set until everything is laid out on the table, but I'm going to have some serious trust issues come June 14 if all we have is a set with sweet EDH toys and one solid land cycle.

Quote from cfusionpm »

I have literally been saying this for years, and constantly mocked for it. But time and time again, they show that their understanding of the format is embarrassingly thin and almost entirely dictated by spreadsheets and data sets of names. There is no deep and fundamental understanding of the actual format meta or how the decks interact with each other, outside of the absolute most basic, surface level observations. Is this set what it finally takes for others to see that?

It's very easy for players to criticize Wizards' understanding of the format if we focus on misses without context. I prefer to look at the big picture since 2016. The most telling example of this is banlist management. Every few months since Eldrazi Winter, vocal subsets of the player community have clamored for bans. Pros have joined in (LSV and GDS is an infamous example). SCG casters regularly talk about bans and format health at every single event. I stopped counting the number of times authors tangentially mention bans in articles or Tweets, and I have seen literally dozens of ban suggestions made by players, authors, commentators, pros, observers, and other community members. These have included Tron lands, Mox Opal, GDS, Cavern, E-Temple, Company, SSG, Teferi, Baral, Manamorphose, Moon, Bridge, Hierarch, Stirrings, Looting, Inquiry, and many more. It's a widely established meme at this point. But throughout all of this, Wizards has ignored most outcry and only banned three cards: Probe (a card so broken it is banned in every non-Standard format), GGT (a surgical nerf to a still viable, top-tier deck), and KCI (a demonstrably broken deck by objective, predictable measures).

I argue this conservatism is because Wizards has a much deeper and broader understanding of format dynamics than most players who get caught up in the day to day grinding and comment mill. Wizards understands that barring extreme situations, the format arcs towards diversity and two dozen viable decks of all archetypes and colors. Bans aren't necessary. Targeted shakeups aren't necessary. Basically every new Standard set has trickled format-defining cards into Modern and Wizards knows this will continue to happen. Wizards also understands that this broad viability is central to Modern's widespread appeal, even if individual players from enfranchised, knowledgeable, and experienced cohorts disagree or dislike the format. Not all players will like this. Notably, players who prefer the powerful cantrips and countermagic of Legacy will probably not like this and will describe this format as high variance and low skill, even though I have disproven this claim more times than I can count with analyses of player/pro MWPs across formats.

Unfortunately, because Wizards does not support Legacy to the same extent as Modern, all players who prefer non-rotating formats generally are funneled into Modern specifically. This means that players who would probably prefer a Legacy environment can't really enjoy it. Standard and EDH players don't have this issue; they can just stick with the formats they want to play, especially with Arena offering such a great Standard experience. But because Modern is a top-down response to the problems of the Reserve List, it is the de facto nonrotating format of Magic and that will never appeal to all the players who could theoretically enjoy nonrotating Magic. This means there will always be critics, especially vocal, enfranchised, and experienced players who want a defined metagame, a 50/50+ deck, a specific type of strong interaction/selection, etc. Wizards just understands they can't please everyone and instead chooses to promote a format where two dozen decks can T8 a GP, and they understand this is possible with hands-off management.

Quote from AUTUMNTWILIGHT »

Honestly what makes it disgraceful is that it aint hard for WOTC if they care about this stuff to sign up to some Forums like this, Cruise multiple Reddit for Magic and sit in Discords. This isn't the 90s or early 00s. If they actually cared it wouldnt be that hard to do a decent job. If they wanted to do some research and find out what people think about various decks it be easy. But I honestly don't think they care and wanna fix things.

Again, these kinds of criticisms are likely not grounded in reality. Wizards has visible representatives on Reddit and Twitter. They repost articles on the mothership from dozens of websites. A prominent R&D member is a mod alum of this website. It is implausible that they do not know about the feedback. They simply did not process the feedback how you and others might have preferred. It's frustratingly common to see people, both online and in person, criticizing large organizations for decisions with thousands of moving parts. They are obviously listening and engaging the community. It takes just a cursory look at even the last B&R announcement, where they explicitly mentioned Modern concerns, to realize this.

I’m pretty sure if the BAB was some awesome highly relevant card to modern we would all bemoan the idea of having to figure out how to afford it. And if this was the only printing it would only be available in foil.

Flusterstorm not being highly relevant to Modern makes it a great BAB, in my opinion. I hope this was chosen exactly for this reason and I hope that it shows how the community groaned over Nexus of Fate being a BAB.

... Still just hope though.

TMS has been the first PW I tested last summer and it's been so good at doing the stuff I needed him to do that I consider it an auto include in every UW or Esper version. Loved Chandra Torch in Jeskai btw, but Jace is still superior.
I think the posts where I had explained the card have gone lost with that mess this site has been through like two months ago, but in short: there are slow enough matchups where you are at the mercy of the top deck and you not just want something to draw, but to draw selectively, so unless you are on bant for Company, you want a tool to pick up cards and decide what to keep. Jace does that, and being a PW it will be harder for the opponent to deal with it, especially when they don't see that coming. I want him against control and prisons. Whatever ensnaring bridge deck plays with no cards in hand so you just have to tick up for 5 turns before the opponent gets doomed. Control is forced to find D Sphere or move with colonnade to attacking, it puts them in a very awkward spot. Resolving Jace is the best play you can have and your plan should be focusse on that once you have it in your hand. Some told me you can't resolve TMS against a counterspell deck, I say by experience there's plenty of spots to do that if you re smart enough to sequence your cards. Drawing the best two cards off the top 4 on your deck pulls you so much ahead. It also deals with the 5/5 angels which is very important when you have a few PtE post side.

It feels great to have such a great card for the control MU but also for a variety of decks like mono red prison, enchantments, mill, 8 rack,Rock (you get full grind mode after sideboard), martyrs, controls, teachings, whirl... you get the brainstorm for longer games(liked it against vizier combo too where I'm the controller and I need to draw answers to fight his topdecks later in the game, plus it beats worship) and an alternative wincon that bypasses the attack step.

Test it yourself, have fun

Maybe they need some sort of digital line to wait in while the person(s) in front complete the purchase. I have done stuff like that for pre-season MLB tickets for a very big Northeast franchise. I would literally refresh every second until I could enter the line. Once there I'm in line and then allowed in once it was my turn to make my purchase.

They just made a Black Friday sale (big sales day for US companies to cash in on the beginning of Christmas sales right after US Thanksgiving) that more than 12k wanted and they trampled over eBay. They need to funnel the people into the store orderly to avoid overloading the server.

Quote from user-11102155 »

i am international and i thought they will be available worldwide. will they be and just the rest is not visible for me ?

yeah the mythic edition will be available with international shipping. its one of the primary reasons wizards/hasbro turned to ebay since most everything else hasbro sells direct only has US domestic shipping.

if you arent seeing anything being sold by hasbro-toy-shop at all, then could be the reason. before assuming that though i would try the website on a different device and browser to help rule out it being some page bug. you could also try going to the link below and see if anything shows up. instead of the ebaystore portal its just listing everything the hasbro ebay account has for sale.

https://www.ebay.com/sch/hasbro-toy-shop/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_ipg=&_from=&_sop=10&rt=nc&LH_BIN=1

Kanister's results are interesting, but we (I at least) don't have an N of total games to see frequency. Someone who is knowledgable and able could run some goldfish tests to see how often it would go off T0-2 without disruption and we would know. Because in the end, this is what this deck does, if it doesn't go T0-2 then it loses to itself.

It definitely is the hype of the moment, so we will be seeing this all over the place in MODO and it makes sense. There is no assertion to be made from this as for now it's just the hot potato and everyone wants to have a bite. Resilience and consistency in performance will tell us if this deck it to be considered as trash, mid-tier, top tier, or tier 0/bannable material.

IMHO, the deck is just another glass cannon and has the hype the Cheerios had. People in this thread talked about banning pieces from Cheerios even before the deck had a showing in a GP, or said that it would dominate the field. In the end Cheerios is still a fringe deck with nothing to show for itself. I believe this will be the case with the new combo-kid on the block.

*Karn drives up in Parhelion II* get in peasants we’re going to go fight Bolas

It actually reminds me of the opening scene of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, when the buildings were fighting each other like naval combat, file cabinet cannons and all.