The Meta rotates and Tier-1 decks are in chaos trying to replace key cards, but RDW is has always been based on Pup and Bolt varients so it forms faster than other Meta decks....
I have my butt handed to me many times by RDW (both skilled and unskilled), but RDW just feels like an empty strategy....
There have always been people that play RDW without much thinking about it -scratch that, they play netdecks without much of a thought; RDW, midrange, control, milling, whatever- but some of the most important concepts of today's magic were actually discovered by the original RDW brewers, just like the guys that started using Necropotence even though everyone though they were idiotic, and happened to discover that drawing cards was much more important than your life total.
I don't think there are really empty strategies when it comes to magic, but you'll quite often find empty players.
I do like the Pup.... but it just seems like it would be more productive to bypass the RDW stage of a new meta and design something of substance....
Fates are pretty cool... would like to have one just because....
While I can see your point, it must be noted that RDW strategies have proven quite resilient in MTGO, because they are budget if for nothing else. And RDW does not lack "substance". If anything, it takes real skill to actually play RDW consistently at a professional level.
And also, in the right circunstances they can be dominating, as it has happened quite a few times already.
With that said, I must agree to the consensus that RDW probably won't be tier 1 in the Theros universe. The truth is that creatures are now a lot better than in Dave Price's heyday.
Proof that these forums are filled with new players attempting to debate time-tested strategies. Cant even be bothered to do a google search before posting?
Don't be so rough with the poor guy! What you don't get is that these experts are actually playing magic, while all we oldtimers were into some form of collective psychosis, imagining things such as jackal pups, necropotences and rare Serra Angels.
It's not like some of those old timers basically invented the concept of mana curve or defined how magic is played in the present.
On second thought, I don't see why I should defend the satyr anymore.
While the cool kids in the 'hood go around thinking that the card is rubbish, I'll gladly unburden them of such lowly cards, trading them for beads and cheetos.
And then, when the initial metagame for standard develops, the card jumps up to $8 (like it happened with Stromkirk Noble) when the first tier one deck just so happens to be monored.
Then I trade them away after a couple weeks of brutal domination, while they're at their cost peak, get me a cute midrange deck once the meta has evolved and watch them block with the Satyr and lose horribly.
At that point I would say "yep, that satyr is lousy".
Why on the earth is people focusing on Firedrinker Satyr's loss of card advantage and/or life?? Do you even know how monored aggro works? Do you think a sligh deck dedicated to take your life from 20 to 0 gives a tin whistle about either card advantage or life?
People imagine scenarios where they BLOCK with the Satyr, where they LOSE LIFE....as if any of those terms even made sense to the core concepts behind red aggression.
Of course this is better than Jackal Pup! And comparing to the cackler makes no sense at all, since, as someone has already suggested, they're not meant to be compared, but to be played together. Aggro is all about more efficiency for your mana, and the Satyr not only does that but even provides some residual late-game value.
If the Satyr were to fail in Standard, it wouldn't be because it's a bad aggro card by itself, it would be because it's a much more reasonable plan to play midrange. Every card must be balanced in context, so with this in mind, I must agree that perhaps the Satyr will be one big dissapointment.
The only time when the argument "it blocks horribly" makes any kind of sense is if all of a sudden, the meta would be dominated by monored aggro and it becomes an issue in the mirror. By that point, it would be quite obvious that the card is a hit. If it blocks horribly because you're trying to grind with monored in a midrange environment, it's not the card's fault.
Sadly, I think midrange will be king. Nonetheless, I would keep 4 satyrs in retainer, in case control starts pushing around midrange and needs to be kept in check.
So here we are again, celebrating the Nth destruction of magic as a game and the fact that the legions of emo quitters won't make a dent in hasbro's profits by the time the release events hit.
Personally I've always thought Rath's slivers were some sort of custom adaptation for the plane, and the originals were somewhere else, quite possibly different. This would seem to be the direction flavor is taking. Making the effects one sided is quite interesting, and I think it will make gameplay better (inb4 "wah wah WOTC is dumbing down the game").
It seems like an interesting development for M14, although in my personal case, my burning question is still "will Thragtusk return or not?"
I urge you to consider this variant, the original was played by eilesstyles in an MTGO daily, and he went 4-0, it features a Trinket Mage package, which seemed really appealing to me, and I wondered why the guy wouldn't try to use a singleton Grafdigger's cage in the SB (I was thinking you could remove the Snapcasters in g2 against a deck like frites or pod, while screwing them with the cage).
I took this to my Game Day and went undefeated through 5 rounds, plus the top 8 where I split the final. It was certainly skill intensive -and luck requiring- at some points, but I seemed to have game against pretty much everything. The mono red dude had to see how I popped 7 (!) elixirs of immortality in his game, and both Zombies and Control are sad puppies when they see a Nihil Spellbomb. Also, if the control mirror comes down to Nephalia Drownyard's activations and you find an opening to play elixir, they're screwed.
I'm currently considering to switch the doom blade and the GFT with 2 dismembers, thus enhancing the early game while not being situationally dead against monoblack and metalcraft.
In case you're wondering: yes, in my metagame there's not such a heavy presence of Delver or Wolf Ramp. Most decks are humans, control, pod, zombies, fringe aggro archetypes (monored, RB, monogreen) and rogues.
WHAT? NATURALIZE? OMFG WoTC Is killing magic!!! What a blatant disrespect for the color pie, what was wrong with disenchant anyway?? I'm so QUITTING Magic now.
...what Marty? Don't you see I'm busy??
....
...what year do you say it is?
Sorry folks, time travel can have that effect. Fire up the flux capacitor Marty! We have to go back, it seems like all these guys ignore what a wrath of god is.
I concur, there's always this people posting here claiming to be tournament players and calling sh*t on any and all cards. It really gets tiring and then they just call out and mock "kitchen table players". Sorry for not copying last week champ's deck...
It goes like this:
1. New spoiler season starts.
2. Say magic is being killed
3. Threaten to quit, again
4. ???
5. PROFIT!!
I've seen the same story, over and over, for 6 years. Eventually you ignore completely the apocalypse mongers.
So, now that we have the black bear, how long until we see the bear jew printed ?
Trample has always been allowed to bleed into other colors when flavor warrants it. This is nothing new and nothing to threaten to quit over, seriously.
Dear Luminum: This is mtgsalvation. If ABBA announces that they're getting back together for a concert in Abu-Dhabi, I'm sure someone will threaten to quit magic in these forums.
I like the card for flavor reasons. Chances are it will never make it to constructed unless WoTC shows us a very profitable way to sac a lot of our dudes. And time will tell if it's too much work in limited.
Still, it seems interesting as a tension point: "if I block that thing, I'll have to deal with a 5/4 trampler, if I don't, I keep being drained by the 2/2 and his cronies....awkward"
I'll try to put my 2 cents here in the form of evidence, for what it might be worth:
My magic community could be considered young (about 5 years of steady tournament attendance). And some guys did very well at the beginning, jumping into the net and watching sites while a lot of the other beginners were barely grasping the basics of the game. Some of them climbed to very respectable positions with the old system (myself included, winning the first nats).
About 5 guys from this original pack eventually stopped attending tournaments, some got to study -or had their cards stolen- but some others stopped attending altogether just to sit on rating. It's not like they were planning to attend a GP or something, they pretty much just enjoyed watching themselves in the top 10 or 20 by virtue of not doing anything. Eventually another guy joined this group and was the case study for the abuse of the old system: He is a good player (no arguing this point) that went through a hot streak, attended a couple gp's in the states, crossed the 1800 barrier and then played a sort of magic guerrilla tactic: only showing up at big tournaments with the deck-to-beat, hoping to do good or dropping at the first sign of trouble.
Since his return, I think I've seen him play two tournaments, and one of them was nationals.
In the other hand, I have a friend who decided at some point that winning nats to get qualified to worlds was too luck and stamina dependant (our nats are open), and decided to do all in his power to raise his rating high enough to be qualified by being in the top players in the region. He qualified twice to worlds using this method, and to be honest, couldn't keep going because he could finally focus on his studies and personal life and didn't have the time and the money to keep the streak going.
In my case, after winning the first nats, I decided to show the middle finger to the rating system and just play as often as I could, not only to hone my skills, but because I really friggin' love to play magic.
So what happened after planeswalker points?
I'm a level 39 sorcerer, currently putting me at the top of the country. The super-grinding, mad skilled friend that went twice to worlds on rating alone is a 38-level sorcerer.
And our buddy who has played twice in sanctioned tournaments in as many years is in the second page of our country's rankings.
In conclusion: I don't know how the system will shape things to come, perhaps it will bring more money to WoTC, perhaps it will raise attendance, perhaps some skilled players will quit forever, aggravated at what they feel is an abusive change. But in our local community at least, it feels a lot like justice has been served.
If I had a suggestion to make, it would be to include a measure of the speed at which a player increases his or her rating, kind of like an acceleration gauge. It could be a tiebreaker if needed (two players hold, say, 3000 planeswalker points, but the one that has earned 100 points per month gets promoted over the one that has earned 50 points per month).
Granted I'm not seeing much happiness about the mythics...but what of the normal rares? What's the judgement been on them as a whole, exactly? (Why do the flagship cards have to be among the mythics, anyway? Why can't any of the uncommons and rares share in that status?)
I think the whole "flagship" plan either comes straight from Hasbro or was hatched at wizards and thoroughly loved by Hasbro. I think the long train of bad decisions that finally lead to the last bannings started with the renewed obsession to tote around Planeswalkers as iconic brand representation.
I will own that relates to what is STILL my main grievance against mythic rarity--Because of the way printing is done, it lessens how many cards a set can have. What was so confusing, again, about large sets of approximately 280 cards each, as compared to 230?
Supposedly the math for the sets never changed (which I find doubtful, to say the least) but then again, the whole mythic concept also feels like a marketing ploy. I don't think it has enhanced any aspect of the game except for maybe the occasional sales pitch, even though I understand that profitability is a large concern these days.
My personal pet peeve is the frequency by which new sets and core sets are released -not to mention special products, premium decks, etc. Would it be so disastrous to print sets every 4 months instead of every 3? I find this issue to be particularly annoying with the core set. I don't think there have been real advantages of changing the core cards every year and fail to see what would be so wrong about keeping them for two years, as it used to be. I don't think a core set card has ever been banned (of course, not counting alfa, beta and unlimited).
There have always been people that play RDW without much thinking about it -scratch that, they play netdecks without much of a thought; RDW, midrange, control, milling, whatever- but some of the most important concepts of today's magic were actually discovered by the original RDW brewers, just like the guys that started using Necropotence even though everyone though they were idiotic, and happened to discover that drawing cards was much more important than your life total.
I don't think there are really empty strategies when it comes to magic, but you'll quite often find empty players.
While I can see your point, it must be noted that RDW strategies have proven quite resilient in MTGO, because they are budget if for nothing else. And RDW does not lack "substance". If anything, it takes real skill to actually play RDW consistently at a professional level.
And also, in the right circunstances they can be dominating, as it has happened quite a few times already.
With that said, I must agree to the consensus that RDW probably won't be tier 1 in the Theros universe. The truth is that creatures are now a lot better than in Dave Price's heyday.
Don't be so rough with the poor guy! What you don't get is that these experts are actually playing magic, while all we oldtimers were into some form of collective psychosis, imagining things such as jackal pups, necropotences and rare Serra Angels.
It's not like some of those old timers basically invented the concept of mana curve or defined how magic is played in the present.
....what do you mean "they did" ?
Would you kindly provide a link?
http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/fundamentals/3692_Whos_The_Beatdown.html
Ah, I see. My bad.
really?
Times were different, I'll grant you that much.
While the cool kids in the 'hood go around thinking that the card is rubbish, I'll gladly unburden them of such lowly cards, trading them for beads and cheetos.
And then, when the initial metagame for standard develops, the card jumps up to $8 (like it happened with Stromkirk Noble) when the first tier one deck just so happens to be monored.
Then I trade them away after a couple weeks of brutal domination, while they're at their cost peak, get me a cute midrange deck once the meta has evolved and watch them block with the Satyr and lose horribly.
At that point I would say "yep, that satyr is lousy".
People imagine scenarios where they BLOCK with the Satyr, where they LOSE LIFE....as if any of those terms even made sense to the core concepts behind red aggression.
Of course this is better than Jackal Pup! And comparing to the cackler makes no sense at all, since, as someone has already suggested, they're not meant to be compared, but to be played together. Aggro is all about more efficiency for your mana, and the Satyr not only does that but even provides some residual late-game value.
If the Satyr were to fail in Standard, it wouldn't be because it's a bad aggro card by itself, it would be because it's a much more reasonable plan to play midrange. Every card must be balanced in context, so with this in mind, I must agree that perhaps the Satyr will be one big dissapointment.
The only time when the argument "it blocks horribly" makes any kind of sense is if all of a sudden, the meta would be dominated by monored aggro and it becomes an issue in the mirror. By that point, it would be quite obvious that the card is a hit. If it blocks horribly because you're trying to grind with monored in a midrange environment, it's not the card's fault.
Sadly, I think midrange will be king. Nonetheless, I would keep 4 satyrs in retainer, in case control starts pushing around midrange and needs to be kept in check.
Personally I've always thought Rath's slivers were some sort of custom adaptation for the plane, and the originals were somewhere else, quite possibly different. This would seem to be the direction flavor is taking. Making the effects one sided is quite interesting, and I think it will make gameplay better (inb4 "wah wah WOTC is dumbing down the game").
It seems like an interesting development for M14, although in my personal case, my burning question is still "will Thragtusk return or not?"
2 Drowned Catacomb
4 Evolving Wilds
2 Ghost Quarter
4 Glacial Fortress
3 Island
1 Isolated Chapel
3 Nephalia Drownyard
3 Plains
4 Seachrome Coast
1 Swamp
Creatures:
1 Consecrated Sphinx
2 Phantasmal Image
2 Snapcaster Mage
1 Sun Titan
1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
1 Trinket Mage
3 Day of Judgment
2 Dissipate
1 Elixir of Immortality
3 Forbidden Alchemy
1 Go for the Throat
1 Doom Blade
4 Mana Leak
1 Nihil Spellbomb
2 Oblivion Ring
2 Ratchet Bomb
3 Think Twice
2 Timely Reinforcements
2 Celestial Purge
1 Black Sun's Zenith
1 Flashfreeze
1 Divine Offering
1 Sun Titan
1 Grafdigger's Cage
3 Negate
1 Nihil Spellbomb
1 Revoke Existence
2 Surgical Extraction
1 Trinket Mage
I took this to my Game Day and went undefeated through 5 rounds, plus the top 8 where I split the final. It was certainly skill intensive -and luck requiring- at some points, but I seemed to have game against pretty much everything. The mono red dude had to see how I popped 7 (!) elixirs of immortality in his game, and both Zombies and Control are sad puppies when they see a Nihil Spellbomb. Also, if the control mirror comes down to Nephalia Drownyard's activations and you find an opening to play elixir, they're screwed.
I'm currently considering to switch the doom blade and the GFT with 2 dismembers, thus enhancing the early game while not being situationally dead against monoblack and metalcraft.
In case you're wondering: yes, in my metagame there's not such a heavy presence of Delver or Wolf Ramp. Most decks are humans, control, pod, zombies, fringe aggro archetypes (monored, RB, monogreen) and rogues.
...what Marty? Don't you see I'm busy??
....
...what year do you say it is?
Sorry folks, time travel can have that effect. Fire up the flux capacitor Marty! We have to go back, it seems like all these guys ignore what a wrath of god is.
*whoosh*
I guess "The Fly" doesn't count as a horror classic, which is a shame...
I could imagine that insect thing being played in the sideboard of the actual pyromancer ascension, too bad it rotates, etc.
It goes like this:
1. New spoiler season starts.
2. Say magic is being killed
3. Threaten to quit, again
4. ???
5. PROFIT!!
I've seen the same story, over and over, for 6 years. Eventually you ignore completely the apocalypse mongers.
So, now that we have the black bear, how long until we see the bear jew printed ?
Dear Luminum: This is mtgsalvation. If ABBA announces that they're getting back together for a concert in Abu-Dhabi, I'm sure someone will threaten to quit magic in these forums.
I like the card for flavor reasons. Chances are it will never make it to constructed unless WoTC shows us a very profitable way to sac a lot of our dudes. And time will tell if it's too much work in limited.
Still, it seems interesting as a tension point: "if I block that thing, I'll have to deal with a 5/4 trampler, if I don't, I keep being drained by the 2/2 and his cronies....awkward"
My magic community could be considered young (about 5 years of steady tournament attendance). And some guys did very well at the beginning, jumping into the net and watching sites while a lot of the other beginners were barely grasping the basics of the game. Some of them climbed to very respectable positions with the old system (myself included, winning the first nats).
About 5 guys from this original pack eventually stopped attending tournaments, some got to study -or had their cards stolen- but some others stopped attending altogether just to sit on rating. It's not like they were planning to attend a GP or something, they pretty much just enjoyed watching themselves in the top 10 or 20 by virtue of not doing anything. Eventually another guy joined this group and was the case study for the abuse of the old system: He is a good player (no arguing this point) that went through a hot streak, attended a couple gp's in the states, crossed the 1800 barrier and then played a sort of magic guerrilla tactic: only showing up at big tournaments with the deck-to-beat, hoping to do good or dropping at the first sign of trouble.
Since his return, I think I've seen him play two tournaments, and one of them was nationals.
In the other hand, I have a friend who decided at some point that winning nats to get qualified to worlds was too luck and stamina dependant (our nats are open), and decided to do all in his power to raise his rating high enough to be qualified by being in the top players in the region. He qualified twice to worlds using this method, and to be honest, couldn't keep going because he could finally focus on his studies and personal life and didn't have the time and the money to keep the streak going.
In my case, after winning the first nats, I decided to show the middle finger to the rating system and just play as often as I could, not only to hone my skills, but because I really friggin' love to play magic.
So what happened after planeswalker points?
I'm a level 39 sorcerer, currently putting me at the top of the country. The super-grinding, mad skilled friend that went twice to worlds on rating alone is a 38-level sorcerer.
And our buddy who has played twice in sanctioned tournaments in as many years is in the second page of our country's rankings.
In conclusion: I don't know how the system will shape things to come, perhaps it will bring more money to WoTC, perhaps it will raise attendance, perhaps some skilled players will quit forever, aggravated at what they feel is an abusive change. But in our local community at least, it feels a lot like justice has been served.
If I had a suggestion to make, it would be to include a measure of the speed at which a player increases his or her rating, kind of like an acceleration gauge. It could be a tiebreaker if needed (two players hold, say, 3000 planeswalker points, but the one that has earned 100 points per month gets promoted over the one that has earned 50 points per month).
*wall of text hits your for 10 poison*
Congrats sir, you just won the forum.
I play time reversal in an edh, because I don't have time spiral
But yeah, wouldn't be thrilled of opening it, really.
Let's hope the event day decks for m12 have all the chase rares, that would save us old players a lot of grief
I think the whole "flagship" plan either comes straight from Hasbro or was hatched at wizards and thoroughly loved by Hasbro. I think the long train of bad decisions that finally lead to the last bannings started with the renewed obsession to tote around Planeswalkers as iconic brand representation.
Supposedly the math for the sets never changed (which I find doubtful, to say the least) but then again, the whole mythic concept also feels like a marketing ploy. I don't think it has enhanced any aspect of the game except for maybe the occasional sales pitch, even though I understand that profitability is a large concern these days.
My personal pet peeve is the frequency by which new sets and core sets are released -not to mention special products, premium decks, etc. Would it be so disastrous to print sets every 4 months instead of every 3? I find this issue to be particularly annoying with the core set. I don't think there have been real advantages of changing the core cards every year and fail to see what would be so wrong about keeping them for two years, as it used to be. I don't think a core set card has ever been banned (of course, not counting alfa, beta and unlimited).