While there are similarities, Freyalise wouldn't give a ______ about Zendikar. All she cares about are the elves on Dominaria. Plus after performing the World Spell she does not want to do anythign that massive again(I believe she says this in the time Spiral novels when she is offered the mirror). If the Eldrazi were truly horrible and needed three walkers of old to contain them it had to be a World Spell level enchantment to imprison them.
Time For Big Bad Conspiracy Theory! (an expanded Marit Lage=Eldrazi conspiracy theory!)
We know that Marit Lage was a super powerful, ancient, evil, planeswalking damigod who spent a long time trapped in a Dominarian Glacier (the heart of Ronom Glacier wasn't it?). Freyalise's world spell ended the Ice Age and, well...melted a lot of ice. Where in the 9 spheres was Marit Lage during Shattered Alliances? Perhaps she 'walked home as soon as her prison melted sufficiently to go conspire with her old friends on how to invade the shard. In this case, sealing the Eldrazi on Zendikar becomes a necessity for the survival of Freyalise's Dominarian elves as well as making the Eldrazi threat something that Freyalise is at least partially responsible for (Marit Lage let the other Eldrazi in on the fact that there be good eatin' in Dominaria).
So I was thinking about this in calculus class, and I came up with a really interesting theory that ties up some interesting loose ends as well as explaining away something that we thought was just laziness on the part of creative...
3 Walkers=Sorin, Freyalise, and Jaya Balard
Sorin Freyalise Jaya
Black Green Red
Vampire Lover of elves Pyromancer
3 walkers who are self interested and neither purely good or evil, but more of anti-heroes, or very focused (Freyalise) on saving one group of individuals.
Sorin is totally unaccounted for for thousands of years of his life.
Freyalise's career has HUGE gaps in it for long periods of time.
Jaya Ballard; ditto, we really don't know much of anything about what she did after becoming a walker at the end of the Ice Age
I still think that the other 2 walkers are dead oldwalkers and the sealing was pre-mending...probably way premending.
All we know about Sorin is that he is pre-mending somewhere over lets say 300 years old at least and not as old as Nicol Bolas (which doesn't tell us much since Bolas is as old as dirt).
I am trying to think of all of the potential walkers who could have helped Sorin...I'l post a list sometime later today.
Playing mainly Touhou Project, but I suck at it. I try my best.
If you are a touhou fan I would recommend you get Castle of Shikigami 3 if you own a nintendo wii. Great bullet hell game with very similar mechanics to touhou (flying anime characters for player and bosses, "grazing" for points).
On normal mode the difficulty isn't that bad although on the really high difficulty settings it becomes absurd since the speed of enemy bullets is increased so high that you need to memorize every attack pattern of all of the bosses and all of the trash perfectly since dodging is impossible if you are not already in the right places.
yeah I know that it still works with dreadnaught, however the truth remains, the card is doing something other than what it is intended to do. This seems hypocritical to me in light of the change in functionality of Time Vault around a year ago now that made it work with key which was a change back to the card's original intended functioning from a wording based on trying to make the card unbroken rather than make it work like it was supposed to.
As anyone paying attention to random oracle wording changes knows, Illusionary Mask no longer does what it had done for so long in its previous oracle wording, for all intents and purposes it is dead for competitive play. This at first seems like an odd oracle change as the card's new wording doesn't at all resemble the text of the card.
However, its previous oracle wording didn't either. The problem is that Illusionary Mask is more fundamentally nonsensical than Chaos Orb as if you play it according to what it is actually meant to do, you need a judge present at all times to verify that you are not lying about the information that the mask is hiding. Chaos Orb only would require a judge to step over and confirm that you dropped the card onto the play surface in a legal way and yet it is banned because of this. Shaharazad is banned for the delay caused by and extra space needed for the subgame that it creates.
My argument, why not restore Illusionary Mask to its original function and then universally ban it like ante cards, the 2 drop onto the table cards, and Shaherazad? I would personally prefer this to pointlessly changing its oracle text in ways that don't really matter since the card is usually worse than others for what it does according to its various oracle wordings.
I don't do it with sleeved decks because I've had too many instances where one sleeve gets stuck inside another one and when they're pushed together it rips the sleeve in half
yeah this is a sucky phenomenon as the thicker (and therefore more costly and tough) sleeves are more prone to this. I usually shuffle by pushing cards together and pile shuffling with sleeves anyway though as you usually get either 50 or 75 sleeves in a pack and so either way you will have extras if some get destroyed.
Since we get no indication of when Sorin and co. did their big magic shoopdawoop on Zendikar, what if it was Leshrac and Tevesh Szat who helped him? 3 self interested, individualistic, black planeswalkers temporarily uniting to do something that would benefit them all. That would explain why the other 2 walkers are awol since both Szat and Leshrac are dead.
Edit: There is also this bastard deck out that that is running every color but blue in an argo/burn/death deck. It has way to many solutions or problems. Our only hope of beating it thus far is mana screw and great draws.
multicolor non-blue control and aggro/control gets eaten for breakfast by mill decks though so as long as they continue to be played there is a definite rock/paper/scissors effect going on between the 3 decks.
contrary to what you may think, pillarfield oxe is a 2/4 instead of a 1/4 not because of his horns but because of the 'stache. It is sharp as blades and is feared by lotus cobras all across Zendikar for its ability to shred their mana-gaining hides to ribbons.
I honestly think that Lovecraft is one of the most critically underapreciated authors of the 20th century. His writing style is as idiosyncratic and original as Tolkien's and while he occasionally churned out some downright bad sentences in some of his works, he was an author whose work can entertain even when the logical part of your brain recognizes it as a second rate part of his oeuvre. Somewhat like early Shakespear imho; Titus Andronicus is a ****** play...yet it isn't meant to be "good", it is a late 16th century example of the gore/exploitation genre and if you stack it up next to Hostel or Saw, it still works centuries later.
BTW-Sealed horrors aren't Lovecraftian, Cthulhu is one of the only examples of this in his stories (well there is the ancient race in "The Nameless Race" and a couple of potential examples in " The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath")
Lovecraftian super mega bads (big big big bads) are scary in a philosophical sense precisiley because they are absolutely unbound. Lovecraft re-imagined the idea of the all-powerful god in a post-Nietzschean post-WW1 context in a pseudo-sci fi framework. In Lovecraft land, God cannot hear you scream (and no I do not think that Alien is a work of Lovecraft imitation) because he never existed. Instead you have Azathoth which is a blind, mindless embodiment of pure entropy and his homies Yog-Sothoth the scheming trickster god who doesn't destroy humanity more because we are too small to care about than anything else and their messenger Nyarlathotep who is the Christ of the unholy trinity who basically wanders around spreading plague, madness, and evil everywhere.
Probably the most Lovecraftian non-mythos thing of which I know are the Chaos Gods from Warhammer 40k (their Warhammer equivalents aren't as cosmically scary to me at least)
I'm going to be playing vampires or archive mill probably although I might go rogue instead.
I think 5cc control and soldiers will perform disappointingly since 5cc control's mana base is pretty hurt and soldiers just aren't kithkin.
I think top spots will be dominated by bloodbraid decks, warp world, and vampires. I except mill decks to make a showing in quite a few top 8s if the deck can tune its answers to vampire, goblin, and naya zoo decks to perfection before states. I think lots of people playing mill will end up running decks not optimized for the metas that they will face (this hurts the deck much more than it hurts many others). I think jund and bant aggro will do fine; grixis/chandra control might as well. Baneslayer control decks in several flavors will place well.
I think lots of rogue stuff will probably make a good showing with the metagame so unfixed and (seemingly) wide open.
Y'know what is funny and ironic about the whole noobs hate draw go theory is that playing draw-go decks against noobs with decent (but flawed) decks is actually pretty hard because the noob isn't likely to always make the best or even the most logical plays and so trying to predict what you can afford to use counters on what to let resolve is harder due to this unpredictability. I have been in games where people have made some very strange play decisions causing me to use counters that I shouldn't have, or more commonly tempt me into countering too little.
Time For Big Bad Conspiracy Theory! (an expanded Marit Lage=Eldrazi conspiracy theory!)
We know that Marit Lage was a super powerful, ancient, evil, planeswalking damigod who spent a long time trapped in a Dominarian Glacier (the heart of Ronom Glacier wasn't it?). Freyalise's world spell ended the Ice Age and, well...melted a lot of ice. Where in the 9 spheres was Marit Lage during Shattered Alliances? Perhaps she 'walked home as soon as her prison melted sufficiently to go conspire with her old friends on how to invade the shard. In this case, sealing the Eldrazi on Zendikar becomes a necessity for the survival of Freyalise's Dominarian elves as well as making the Eldrazi threat something that Freyalise is at least partially responsible for (Marit Lage let the other Eldrazi in on the fact that there be good eatin' in Dominaria).
3 Walkers=Sorin, Freyalise, and Jaya Balard
Sorin Freyalise Jaya
Black Green Red
Vampire Lover of elves Pyromancer
3 walkers who are self interested and neither purely good or evil, but more of anti-heroes, or very focused (Freyalise) on saving one group of individuals.
Sorin is totally unaccounted for for thousands of years of his life.
Freyalise's career has HUGE gaps in it for long periods of time.
Jaya Ballard; ditto, we really don't know much of anything about what she did after becoming a walker at the end of the Ice Age
So Sorin returns to Zendikar and we know that Freyalise and Jaya are dead...but wait whats this? A planeswalker who is a self interested (sometime black mana user) elf lover? And a cocky young female goggle wearing pyromancer
The coincidence is pretty darn striking imho.
All we know about Sorin is that he is pre-mending somewhere over lets say 300 years old at least and not as old as Nicol Bolas (which doesn't tell us much since Bolas is as old as dirt).
I am trying to think of all of the potential walkers who could have helped Sorin...I'l post a list sometime later today.
If you are a touhou fan I would recommend you get Castle of Shikigami 3 if you own a nintendo wii. Great bullet hell game with very similar mechanics to touhou (flying anime characters for player and bosses, "grazing" for points).
On normal mode the difficulty isn't that bad although on the really high difficulty settings it becomes absurd since the speed of enemy bullets is increased so high that you need to memorize every attack pattern of all of the bosses and all of the trash perfectly since dodging is impossible if you are not already in the right places.
However, its previous oracle wording didn't either. The problem is that Illusionary Mask is more fundamentally nonsensical than Chaos Orb as if you play it according to what it is actually meant to do, you need a judge present at all times to verify that you are not lying about the information that the mask is hiding. Chaos Orb only would require a judge to step over and confirm that you dropped the card onto the play surface in a legal way and yet it is banned because of this. Shaharazad is banned for the delay caused by and extra space needed for the subgame that it creates.
My argument, why not restore Illusionary Mask to its original function and then universally ban it like ante cards, the 2 drop onto the table cards, and Shaherazad? I would personally prefer this to pointlessly changing its oracle text in ways that don't really matter since the card is usually worse than others for what it does according to its various oracle wordings.
yeah this is a sucky phenomenon as the thicker (and therefore more costly and tough) sleeves are more prone to this. I usually shuffle by pushing cards together and pile shuffling with sleeves anyway though as you usually get either 50 or 75 sleeves in a pack and so either way you will have extras if some get destroyed.
contrary to what you may think, pillarfield oxe is a 2/4 instead of a 1/4 not because of his horns but because of the 'stache. It is sharp as blades and is feared by lotus cobras all across Zendikar for its ability to shred their mana-gaining hides to ribbons.
I honestly think that Lovecraft is one of the most critically underapreciated authors of the 20th century. His writing style is as idiosyncratic and original as Tolkien's and while he occasionally churned out some downright bad sentences in some of his works, he was an author whose work can entertain even when the logical part of your brain recognizes it as a second rate part of his oeuvre. Somewhat like early Shakespear imho; Titus Andronicus is a ****** play...yet it isn't meant to be "good", it is a late 16th century example of the gore/exploitation genre and if you stack it up next to Hostel or Saw, it still works centuries later.
BTW-Sealed horrors aren't Lovecraftian, Cthulhu is one of the only examples of this in his stories (well there is the ancient race in "The Nameless Race" and a couple of potential examples in " The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath")
Lovecraftian super mega bads (big big big bads) are scary in a philosophical sense precisiley because they are absolutely unbound. Lovecraft re-imagined the idea of the all-powerful god in a post-Nietzschean post-WW1 context in a pseudo-sci fi framework. In Lovecraft land, God cannot hear you scream (and no I do not think that Alien is a work of Lovecraft imitation) because he never existed. Instead you have Azathoth which is a blind, mindless embodiment of pure entropy and his homies Yog-Sothoth the scheming trickster god who doesn't destroy humanity more because we are too small to care about than anything else and their messenger Nyarlathotep who is the Christ of the unholy trinity who basically wanders around spreading plague, madness, and evil everywhere.
Probably the most Lovecraftian non-mythos thing of which I know are the Chaos Gods from Warhammer 40k (their Warhammer equivalents aren't as cosmically scary to me at least)
I think 5cc control and soldiers will perform disappointingly since 5cc control's mana base is pretty hurt and soldiers just aren't kithkin.
I think top spots will be dominated by bloodbraid decks, warp world, and vampires. I except mill decks to make a showing in quite a few top 8s if the deck can tune its answers to vampire, goblin, and naya zoo decks to perfection before states. I think lots of people playing mill will end up running decks not optimized for the metas that they will face (this hurts the deck much more than it hurts many others). I think jund and bant aggro will do fine; grixis/chandra control might as well. Baneslayer control decks in several flavors will place well.
I think lots of rogue stuff will probably make a good showing with the metagame so unfixed and (seemingly) wide open.