It makes your 2/* trade with their */4. Or their */3 AND their */1. This is both very powerful and very flexible. If it finds a home, it will be amazing.
The best synergies are Gruul-Simic and Rakdos-Orzhov. It was like this in GRN too, where some neighbouring mechanics cooperated and others didn't. Expext draft to be lots of Simic splash R and lots of Mardu.
More of a wish than a spec, bit I really want them to design a successful aggro/zoo planeswalker in Domri. They are all either bad or meant for midrange and control. And I understand that they easily turn out that way because of their inherent mechanics, but still, it must be possible to pull off in a decent way.
Standard is certainly down. Popular LGS's in my city have far fewer on FNM. The threads are a lot less active. And are not very well maintained.
I think it's kind of a shame, since the current Standard is great, the format is more accessible than ever thanks to Arena, and Modern... Well, peoplevhave different opinions on Modern, but personally I feel like it's a lot worse than it was just a few years ago, it's way too broken now. I would welcome a resurgence of Standard and/or a wide adoption of the upcoming new non-rotating format.
As long as they continue the recent trend of making planeswalkers that don't auto-win if not immediately answered and don't require to be built around in the slightest, I don't care if they give them banding.
Without naming names, a buddy of mine got the invite but had to turn it down.
This list makes sense if:
a) You live in the Continental USA
b) If you don't, you're loaded
WotC isn't paying any hotels or flights for these. So for example, APAC players would have to fork out for all the details (and the traveling). Buddy told me that financially, it didn't really make sense and it would wreck havoc on his personal life.
I heard that they are changing the way it's done, so instead of paying for flights (which can get messy and expensive for WotC, as you'd imagine) they've started paying out the prizes down to the last player for their premium tournaments?
I'm guessing paying out a sort of flat rate to everyone attending isn't exactly the same thing, but I've heard people comparing it favourably to offering flights, albeit in a slightly different way.
I guess the crux of this will be down to how much each player gets
And more importantly, how much the flight is. Flying from Europe or Asia is a very different thing than flying within the US, yet the prize payouts are the same for everyone all over the world. So you would have to place higher as an EU player to break even, making the arrangement worse EV for non-US players.
If they covered the flight, no matter the cost, it would be an even playing field. Now, it's pretty unfair.
Pretty sure this card will see zero Modern play. Does anyone even play this in EDH? Undermine is a better card and it sees little to no play either far as I know.
Am I crazy and this is actually good enough for Modern?
No, I agree. Modern has access to a slew of Cancels with upside and none of them sees play. I don't think this is so incredibly much better than the others that it's going to change anything.
But if anything, it's better in Modern than EDH. Who cares about 3 life points in EDH?
Good way to get Goyf online, it might see play in monkey grow.
I haven't run the numbers or seen the latest deck lists, but when I ran Monkey Grow before the Probe ban, it ran 13 creatures in the main, which sounds like a "hell no" to me. And the back half sucks too, way too expensive in general for the deck, and in particular for a card that doesn't even remove the blocker. And how does work with Shoal, X=4, right? Hard pass.
It's a transformative sideboard for matchups where the aggressive strategy is bad or unviable.
Aggressive decks often have less strain on their sideboard slots than midrange or control decks, since your strategy is to get them dead instead of answering whatever your opponent does. This means that these decks can use a high number of sideboard slots to transform into a midrange deck for G2 and G3, so that they can go toe to toe with the midrange decks that crush their G1 setup or even go over the top of other aggro decks.
The mono red aggro deck of the current standard will, when matched up against, say, Golgari, take out their lowest impact cards, like maybe some Shocks, Ghitu Lavarunner and the 2/1 that deals two to their opponent, and then also Wizards' Lightning because too many wizard creatures go out. Then we brings in Lava Coil and Fight With Fire to remove the big creatures that stonewall our aggro creatures, and Map as both a value engine that also makes Fight With Fire into a win button, so that we kan keep up into the mid/late game instead of folding to some life gain and removal.
In case you're that new, I'll add for context that on the aggro-midrange-control spectrum, you want to be the slightly bigger deck. Control decks beat midrange decks beat big aggro decks beat small aggro decks. This means that having the possibility to use the sideboard to move your position along this spectrum is a very powerful tool. And as I wrote, control and midrange decks can't do this as well, since they need the slots for answers: Wipes for Carnage Tyrant, Dead Weight for aggro, exile effects for Phoenixes, Negate/artifact/enchantment removal for artifacts/enchantments and so on. Aggro decks want to ignore your Carnage Tyrant or Frenzy or PW and win before it has a meaningful impact on the game, instead of answering them.
LSV joked about being "a pro, well, kind of" (or something like that) in yesterday's LR episode. Ben Stark pushed back on it, and he avoided to elaborate. Now we know what he referred to. I guess he hasn't played enough lately, I'm sure activity level enters into it somehow. Maybe yearly pro points.
Ben Stark made it though, YEAH! Go Ben!
Second Place in the last Pro Tour isn't "playing enough"?
You're confusing quality with quantity. Nobody doubts that LSV is still a beast and a top pro, but afaik he has been playing less for the last year or two because he has a lot of other things going on. If this list is based on something that is tied to activity level, such as yearly pro points, that could explain why he's not on it.
It is still an idiotic oversight.
I'm willing to bet that it's not an oversight, but rather a function of how their qualifying system works. They obviously didn't sit around at the WotC office chewing their pencils trying to come up with a list of their personal favorite players. They need to use some kind of hard criterion (yet unveiled for some reason) to set the bar if this League is going to be taken seriously. Now you may disagree with how that system works, that's fine. That doesn't make it an oversight on their part.
Edit: According to their Twitter, it's by ranking from the previous year. I'm not sure what the metric for "rank" is, but I'm still guessing yearly pro points. Of note, two players declined the offer, letting in number 33 and 34.
Also, both this and the UW at 3CMC makes me worried that Domri will have a high mana cost.
The picture looks deteriorated on purpose, as if someone took a decent picture and then blurred and distorted it in Photoshop.
If they covered the flight, no matter the cost, it would be an even playing field. Now, it's pretty unfair.
But if anything, it's better in Modern than EDH. Who cares about 3 life points in EDH?
Aggressive decks often have less strain on their sideboard slots than midrange or control decks, since your strategy is to get them dead instead of answering whatever your opponent does. This means that these decks can use a high number of sideboard slots to transform into a midrange deck for G2 and G3, so that they can go toe to toe with the midrange decks that crush their G1 setup or even go over the top of other aggro decks.
The mono red aggro deck of the current standard will, when matched up against, say, Golgari, take out their lowest impact cards, like maybe some Shocks, Ghitu Lavarunner and the 2/1 that deals two to their opponent, and then also Wizards' Lightning because too many wizard creatures go out. Then we brings in Lava Coil and Fight With Fire to remove the big creatures that stonewall our aggro creatures, and Map as both a value engine that also makes Fight With Fire into a win button, so that we kan keep up into the mid/late game instead of folding to some life gain and removal.
In case you're that new, I'll add for context that on the aggro-midrange-control spectrum, you want to be the slightly bigger deck. Control decks beat midrange decks beat big aggro decks beat small aggro decks. This means that having the possibility to use the sideboard to move your position along this spectrum is a very powerful tool. And as I wrote, control and midrange decks can't do this as well, since they need the slots for answers: Wipes for Carnage Tyrant, Dead Weight for aggro, exile effects for Phoenixes, Negate/artifact/enchantment removal for artifacts/enchantments and so on. Aggro decks want to ignore your Carnage Tyrant or Frenzy or PW and win before it has a meaningful impact on the game, instead of answering them.
Edit: According to their Twitter, it's by ranking from the previous year. I'm not sure what the metric for "rank" is, but I'm still guessing yearly pro points. Of note, two players declined the offer, letting in number 33 and 34.
Edit 2:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/content/top-25-rankings-top-players-coverage-events