MTG Salvation

I personally like the mechanic

Quote from BubbaKanoosh

Is there a scenario currently in Standard that one can survive a terminus or supreme verdict unscathed outside countering them?

I'm no competitive player by any stretch but using a wrath effect as example of why the card is bad seems silly. Then again, I'm a casual player so maybe I'm missing something in your example.

You're missing the fact that one of the ways to minimize the impact of sweepers is to not overextend.

Battalion, barring some amazing token makers, demands that you overcommit. And no, Lingering Souls is not enough, because there are now like 5 different cards that hose Lingering Souls to the point where it doesn't really see that much play.

On top of getting hosed by sweepers, battalion also gets hosed by simple point removal. They can remove the battalion guy, or if they can't, they can just remove one of your other guys. It gets hosed by anything, really. This mechanic is destined for a lot of frustrating moments where getting the trigger is perpetually just out of reach. Oh and when you do get it, on Firemane Avenger, you get rewarded with a massive... lightning helix. That's a lot of hoops to jump through for a pretty mediocre reward. Lightning helix is decent, but it's not exactly game-changing.

Compared to Cipher, Cipher is also a combat mechanic but one that is inherently enormously stronger. You get an effect right away; then you can get the effect again by connecting with one creature, which can be any creature you want it to be. Even if you don't connect, who cares? You still got the spell off. They have to deal with that particular creature, and you can choose a really hard to kill dude if you want (Invisible Stalker, eh?). They can't go kill another random bystanding creature to turn off your mechanic.

or compare it to Evolve, for that matter. The new 1 drop creature with Battalion was spoiled today (Boros Elite) gets +2/+2 for attacking with 2 other creatures. The Simic one-drop, Experiment One, gets +1/+1 everytime a bigger creature enters the battlefield- bigger in power OR toughness. It's incredibly easy to pump Experiment One to a 3/3 by turn 3 or 4 if you play a creature heavy deck. It's much harder to pump Boros Elite to a 3/3 (on the attack only) if you play a creature heavy deck, because you also have to attack with those creatures- all of them- at the same time. Experiment One has an activated ability to boot, which lets it regen and re-evolve if necessary. Boros Elite has nothing, which is kinda ridiculous given that it already has a much weaker keyword. Both are uncommons.

Battalion is inherently a really weak mechanic, and the previews so far show nothing that overcomes that, which makes sense, because historically RW has been the weakest color combo by a country mile, and Wizards' devs and designers have never particularly cared for the color combo. (It's still by far the worst two-color pair in EDH, for example). Compare to, say, UW or GB, which are two of their pet color combinations that almost always get pushed for constructed, and UW is my favorite color combination so it suits me just fine- I'm just pointing it out.

Best of the guild ability rares that we've seen. This guy is crazy good.

I know a lot of people will say it's win-more or depends too much on your board position, but I think it's great

Quote from empathogen

You're right, but sometimes, you can't remove everything.
They may have undiers, reanimation, Thragtusk, and other removal-resistant critters.

TBH, I'm more worried about Bloodrush-
it shouldn't be too hard to keep their army below 3 or whatever,
but Bloodrush works if they have even a single attacker.

There's also limited, where removal is sparse.
A Stifle or Trickbind effect would be perfect for foiling a key Bloodrush.

Yes, but none of those things stop you "countering" Bloodrush when you kill the dude in response.