MTG Salvation

Most of the "new art equity" is going toward the really old stuff with non-viable art contracts. We're not going to see much new art for post-1998 cards in this set.

Here's an easy question that should rule out any confusion over the old rarities:

Did you open Sol Grail, Urza's Engine, or Whirling Catapult? If so, did you count it as a rare or an uncommon?

Someone's claiming it won an Old School (93/94) tournament over the weekend.

It's worth noting that Wizards has their own definition of the word "iconic", as spelled out in this Rosewater article: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/building-better-monster-2013-11-11

Specifically, it means Dragon, Angel, Demon, Sphinx, and Hydra. Nothing more, nothing less.

Quote from Alix444 »

If you are playing competitive magic, you should know what a vast majority of cards in a given format do. I really like how japanese cards look and I have a UB faeries deck in all japanese. Why should I care that you don't know what spellstutter sprite does?

Do you know exactly how many cards are legal in Modern*, as of the time I'm writing this?

11,084.

The "vast majority" of that is still an obscenely large number to keep track of.

*I know you didn't say Modern, but there's not really a competitive format that includes U/B Faeries that has a smaller card pool than Modern.

Quote from Dontrike »

They say they needed another avenue for reprints, well then how about just making reprint products better? They say they have restrictions, but also need a place to put these.

They're on record as saying they can't make supplementary products too good, or else people will buy them.

Yes, that's right. Their concern is that if the products are too good, stores and speculators will hoard them and the reprints won't get into the hands of people that need them.

9 Gearhulks and 11 Ballistae in the top four decks of last weekend's Star City Open.

I can name exactly one person who likes the Duel Decks and prefers to play Magic with them, and that's Tom Vasel (link to relevant Dice Tower podcast here). For someone that plays 853 different games every week, he can just pick them up and play with a friend without wasting time trying to build his own decks.

Cards don't get the chance to be super-lustworthy nowadays because they're so disposable. Every two months, a new batch of cards comes out and the hype machine no longer cares about what was hot two months ago.

There is no 'baseline' anymore like we had with Alpha or the core sets back in the 90s. Even Hearthstone gives everyone a baseline by keeping the Classic set in print at all times, immune to the rotation of everything else.

City of Brass is the card that came to mind first.

Quote from izzetmage »

Goblin Test Pilot needs to be a Pilot now.

For the same reason, Tree Monkey and Zodiac Monkey need to be Monkeys now.

And Monkey Cage needs to make Monkey tokens.

If we live in a world where Lightning Blast is Constructed playable, I'm not sure I want to be playing Constructed.

Quote from Rezzahan »

Quote from Hotspur000 »

Quote from Bread Connoisseur »

I started around 7th ed. and absolutely needed to have shivan dragon and serra angel, but couldn't afford them for crap.

They were expensive cards even by the time of 7th edition?

Serra Angel was a rare up till 10th edition. 7th edition was still way before Wizards decided to power up creatures, so it was still a big deal at that time.

Serra Angel was actually uncommon from Alpha through 4th. It was way before Wizards knew what they were doing.

In order for a card to be good in Limited, it only has to be one of the ~23 best cards out of a pool of 84 randomly selected cards, most of which are common.

In order for a card to be good in Constructed, it has to be one of the ~23 best cards out of every single card in the format, including every single rare and every single mythic.

Slight simplifications involved, but I hope it gets my point across.

Quote from MyomightyDjinn »

Try this. Assume the mythics have a perfect 1/8 distribution. We all know they don't, but for simplicity, go with it. Now take 800 packs put them in 100 groups of 8 where the 1/8 ratio holds. Now, have one person pick 1 random pack of from 80 different sets and a second person select 10 groups of eight. Now, calculate the odds based on probabilities of who gets the most mythics based on the fact they opened the same amount of packs.

While I get what you're trying to say, what you're saying isn't quite true. Both players will have the same average number of mythics pulled, but the one who opens the random packs will have a higher standard deviation - they're less likely to end up with exactly ten mythics than the person who pulled 10 groups of eight, but the times they pull more than ten will cancel out the times they pull less than ten.