Zombies are starting to look really really good.
If not competitive, extremely powerful casual
Love it.
Too bad I dumped my relentless deads a bit ago for practically nothing. D'OH
Who knows tho, with MaRo's reply in Tumblr about the Gatewatch maybe Amonkhet is the last hoorah of them appearing way hugely in a block hence why they are again appearing largely.
A good card for Simic? I never would have imagined!
Cool Nissa. Can't protect herself at all, but that's fine. I wish they made more planeswalkers like these so that we would stop getting crap like gideon. These types of cards require some level of deck building.
I'll make her protect herself. Pay 1GU with decks full of cmc 1 creatures. Rawr.
I kinda wished they would've made a new character for this concept, not that I mind, but it seems that Gideos and Nissas are just being hemorrhaged at this point. Maybe I'm alone in this but the new Nissa seems very Kiora-y IMO.
Her ultimate is nice but not necessarily game winning, but it's fairly easily attainable, especially when you consider the fact that you can scale her starting loyalty with her CMC.
Like I said already, she's made for a control deck. Once she lands, if you can protect her with removal/sweepers and counterspells, being able to Scry 2 one turn into a free land or creature the next turn with no additional mana investment (and then rinse and repeat) is just incredible value. If you can clear a path, the ultimate is a nice free 10 points of damage.
Before you even say it, there are a million creatures that control could use in this Standard that don't rhyme with "potential sphere bulk." Twosphinxes, the new angel, the blue god, heck, even a Rogue Refiner if you want a chump blocker that gives you an ETB free card and energy.
I kinda wished they would've made a new character for this concept, not that I mind, but it seems that Gideos and Nissas are just being hemorrhaged at this point. Maybe I'm alone in this but the new Nissa seems very Kiora-y IMO.
I totally agree, especially if she made tokens of leviathans, krakens, serpents, or octopuses instead of animating lands as her ultimate. Kiora's always been about summoning creatures. Nissa's about animating lands. And who knows? Maybe this used to be Kiora and they stuck Nissa in her place to better fit the story at the last minute? Or it was a rejected Kiora design that they just crammed Nissa onto?
FLYING and HASTE?! She can be busted in the right build.
Yeah, but the fact that it's land animation makes haste less important than you might think.
And yes, she's blue. I'm actually more surprised by the fact that a "main five" walker went into two colors than that they were enemy colors (especially GU, which always seemed less intense than the other enemy pairs' reasons for hating each other, possibly because these two colors are the most open-minded, unlike their common ally) or that it was Nissa.
Seems like Blood Artist variants are going to be deciduous but common enough to make Aristocrats at least a possibility in every Standard season.
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Card advantage is not the same thing as card draw. Something for 2B cannot be strictly worse than something for BBB or 3BB. If you're taking out Swords to Plowshares for Plummet, you're a fool. Stop doing these things!
UG Nissa doesn't feel right to me. I think they should have used this card design on a new character instead of the Gatewatch's mono-green poster child.
The problem with defining this format by what is "fun" is that everyone seems to define fun as what they don't lose to. If you keep losing to easily answered cards, that means you should improve your deck. If you don't want to improve your deck, then you should come to peace with the idea that you are going to lose because you chose to not interact with better strategies.
I'm guessing that the green tendency to accept the world and the natural order for what it is will be too difficult on this plane for Nissa. This death-obsessed world was probably twisted and tainted by Bolas, so she's Simic in Amonkhet because the world needs to change.
I'm guessing that the green tendency to accept the world and the natural order for what it is will be too difficult on this plane for Nissa. This death-obsessed world was probably twisted and tainted by Bolas, so she's Simic in Amonkhet because the world needs to change.
I'm sure WotC loves that you think they put this much thought into things,
but I'm fairly certain this Nissa is GU
because they already had THREE other mono-G Nissae in Standard.
Momir Vig, Simic Visionary
Melek, Izzet Paragon
Oona, Queen of the Fae
Bruna, Light of Alabaster
Gisela, Blade of Goldnight
Rhys the Redeemed
Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord
Sen Triplets
The Mimeoplasm WUBRGSliver OverlordGRBUW WUBRGSliver Hivelord(Superfriends)GRBUW
If only it wasn't ******* Nissa out of all characters. Hopefully Bolas kills off the Gatewatch next set so we see less of them. He can leave Jace, Chandra, Lilly and I guess Ajani alive I suppose.
Seriously, one of the worst characters in the series lore-wise. She was better as elf Hitler, at least she was kinda interesting then.
But I digress.
Card itself is pretty solid. Ultimate is honestly pretty meh, you're not going to be wanting to use it very often, she is very clearly built around her 0, which is damn fine.
But uh..why is she blue? I really doubt she is smart enough to be Simic colors. This is almost as dumb as when Sarkhan became blue because...time travel?
Finally, the X cost planeswalker I've been waiting for, and it's got excellent abilities, excellent balance, and is in my favorite colors. I love everything about this card. It's strange that someone seems to have stapled Nissa's picture on top of this blue/green planeswalker who obviously isn't Nissa.
She doesn't feel like a PW to be honest due to the X cost in her starting loyalty, but I don't really have anything else to say on her. Due to the scalability she will eventually be broken due to the lack of any hard cap on her free cast outside of loyalty counters, unfortunately. Maybe not in standard right now, but in the future. The exert creature is a bit too slow to be a problem.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
GU Nissa... really? You know how great the last set with a mono-white walker, a mono-black walker, and a GU walker was. But in all seriousness, either bringing back Kiora or introducing a new walker (as Kiora wouldn’t really fit the plane) would clearly be a much better option. Now, I know that they have said that the Gatewatch oversaturation is going to stop after this set, but it still freaking appalls me that not one person in the entire company said “Do you know what? What if people don’t want three already overused Gatewatch planeswalkers to appear in the same set? Maybe people might get sick of these characters if we shove them down people’s throats by giving each one a role in every block’s story and a card in every other block. Maybe we shouldn’t arbitrarily force three Gatewatch planeswalkers into every block we make. Maybe we should actually introduce interesting new planeswalkers or bring back existing characters that people actually like.”
But seriously. How could no one realize that it might be a mistake? How blind are they to the blandness of their own cringe-inducing characters? How could they so horribly misunderstand what their audience wanted? It seems that they realized that having three mono-green Nissa cards in the same standard (and now it would be four, with the rotation change) might be a mistake so what do they do? Instead of making the right choice and just giving us a non-Gatewatch planeswalker instead, they force Nissa into the set anyway but change her color identity so that maybe, just maybe, their players will forgive them for reusing the same character yet again. But if they were so concerned with not doing the same thing again, why not just give us an entirely new planeswalker that actually makes sense in that color combo? But I still don’t understand how they realized that three mono-green Nissas in standard would be a bad idea, but they didn’t realize that three Nissas total, along with two Gideons, two Lilianas, three Chandras, and a Jace across just six sets might be a little bit too repetitive for our tastes. How oblivious can they possibly be?
Now of course, it’s most certainly a good thing that realized how much the players hated this, and they are changing it as soon as possible. Most other companies don’t take and implement customer feedback nearly as well as WotC does for Magic. Many other companies might continue right along doing something that players are thoroughly sick of. I’m grateful that they heard our complaints and are going to change this as soon possible. I’m also grateful that Maro informed us in advance that they had heard our complaints and were going to fix things as soon as possible (granted, he might have told us early mainly to save his own skin from the inevitable flood of backlash he would get once this set’s planeswalkers were revealed, but still). They really did try their best to do what we wanted as soon as they were able to implement our feedback (the delay was an unfortunate consequence of them so working in advance). But I still can’t wrap my mind around how they thought we might like this in the first place. Even before Origins, people were complaining about getting too much of Jace (and to a lesser extent, some of the other core set staples). So making these already overused characters the centerpiece of the story and printing them at an even higher frequency was clearly a step in the wrong direction. They clearly should have anticipated this backlash before they even started to print way too many of these planeswalkers, and yet here we are. And although we know that they’re going to fix it soon, if they were able to so fundamentally misunderstand what players wanted once, then they could do it again, and that’s what scares me.
All that being said, I do love this card from a mechanical standpoint. The first two abilities interact beautifully, and they’re definitely things that a Johnny can build around but they’re still being pretty good on their own. The ultimate is weak for ultimate standards but only because it’s so much easier to achieve than most. In theory can basically use this card as 10 damage to target opponent for 6GU. It feels more like a red ability (since the damage is done by temporary creatures, which are kind of a red thing, with flying and haste, a combination usually seen on dragons) but it’s a welcome extra function for the card, especially in Commander (where you will reliably be able to get to 8 mana). She is slightly less efficient than most 3-drop planeswalkers at X=1, 4-drop planeswalkers at X=2, 5-drop planeswalkers at X=3, and so on. (Although she is arguably a better 2-drop planeswalker than Tibalt.) Fortunately, she has the ability to potentially be a 3-drop, or a 4-drop, or a 5-drop, or whatever else you need, which makes her extremely good. As with most X-cost and modal spells, her power lies in versatility rather than efficiency.
And of course, the concept of an X-cost planeswalker in itself is quite interesting. I had always assumed that rules didn’t support an X-cost planeswalker that just had X for its starting loyalty (since X-cost creatures always enter the battlefield with X +1/+1 counters rather than just being X/X, I figured that an X-cost planeswalker would need an extra line of text saying “[cardname] enters the battlefield with X loyalty counters on it”) but I’m glad to see that I was wrong. I had also thought that if we were ever going to get an X-cost planeswalker, it would have to be in either an un-set or a set like Time Spiral (both of which were known for weird and unique card designs). So needless to say I was pretty surprised to see an X-cost planeswalker just show up in a standard set without warning. But this seems like a really cool way to design planeswalkers and it seems like it opens up a lot of design space. I really do hope that they continue to make walkers like these in the future. If they made a Commander-walker that had X in the cost it would absolutely amazing. And I would laugh if they ever printed a planeswalker with something like X+2 or 2X starting loyalty in an un-set. Maybe Fraction Jackson could become a planeswalker with X/2 starting loyalty. But I really would definitely like to see more planeswalkers get X-cost versions eventually. I hope X-cost planeswalkers show up more often than colorless ones, maybe at about the same rate as tricolored planeswalkers.
Edit: I just realized another cool thing about this card: if you can get infinite combo than you can cast this spell with an arbitrarily large number of loyalty counters, meaning that you can ultimate every turn. That's pretty damn powerful. Granted, there are many other X spells that can end the game immediately with infinite mana but unlike most of those you will still be quite happy to cast Nissa without a huge mana investment or an infinite mana combo.
Just wanna note that this Nissa seems absolutely perfect for Lantern Control. The +2 is exactly what the deck already does and the ~0 takes advantage of all the mill rocks they already play. Plus, some Lantern lists already play Tezzeret as a win-con for decks they otherwise can't beat or for time's sake, and this planeswalker has the win-con built in on its own.
All in all, neat card. Wish they made Gideons or Jaces like this.
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"It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes... Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
--Buck v Bell, 1927. This case, regarding the compulsory sterilization of inmates at mental institutions, has -- somehow -- never been overturned. Just a wee PSA for ya.
I think this card is just too hard to evaluate as there's nothing like it to base a judgement off of. The trouble is that on x = 1 the second ability is likely going to wiff and the first ability makes it a turn 3 do nothing play that just fixes your next draw. She's the strongest when she comes down on turn 4 or 5 and you already have something out to protect her. I've seen some people suggest she would be good with heart of Kiran, but that has it's own problems due to the fact her second ability will fail if the card isn't a creature or land.
Basically, we need a deck that does a lot of scry and draw effects. You really need to know what that top card is without using the second or first ability on the walker. As for her ultimate, yes it can win you the game, but anything at X=8 should better damn well win you the game.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
I think this card is just too hard to evaluate as there's nothing like it to base a judgement off of. The trouble is that on x = 1 the second ability is likely going to wiff and the first ability makes it a turn 3 do nothing play that just fixes your next draw. She's the strongest when she comes down on turn 4 or 5 and you already have something out to protect her. I've seen some people suggest she would be good with heart of Kiran, but that has it's own problems due to the fact her second ability will fail if the card isn't a creature or land.
Basically, we need a deck that does a lot of scry and draw effects. You really need to know what that top card is without using the second or first ability on the walker. As for her ultimate, yes it can win you the game, but anything at X=8 should better damn well win you the game.
She's s finisher planeswalker. You never want to cast her for x=1, she can't defend herself unless x=avg creature cmc. Build around walker that's easily splashable in green based decks. My bet is she will shine after the next set is released. Right now... likely too slow.
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If not competitive, extremely powerful casual
Love it.
Too bad I dumped my relentless deads a bit ago for practically nothing. D'OH
Nissa - 10/10 artwork, 1/10 design, and only 1 because I love Scry. Otherwise, what kind of crap are these abilities.
|| UW Jace, Vyn's Prodigy UW || UG Kenessos, Priest of Thassa (feat. Arixmethes) UG ||
Cards I still want to see created:
|| Olantin, Lost City || Pavios and Thanasis || Choryu ||
We can only hope.
I'll make her protect herself. Pay 1GU with decks full of cmc 1 creatures. Rawr.
(W/U)(B/R)GForm of Progenitus, Shape of a Scrubland
BRGJund Tokens with Prossh, the Magic Dragon Foil
URGAnimar, the RUG CleanerFoil
RRRFeldon of the Third Path 2.0 Foil
BG(B/G)Not Another Meren DeckFoil
UR(U/R)Mizzix, Y Control and X Burn Spells
(W/U)(B/R)GHarold Ramos - The 35 Foot Long Twinkie (In +1/+1 counters)
UB(U/B)Dragonlord Silumgar
They aren't crap. If Courser of Kruphix had a baby with Call of the Wild, it'd be this Nissa (or her first two abilities, anyhow).
Her ultimate is nice but not necessarily game winning, but it's fairly easily attainable, especially when you consider the fact that you can scale her starting loyalty with her CMC.
Like I said already, she's made for a control deck. Once she lands, if you can protect her with removal/sweepers and counterspells, being able to Scry 2 one turn into a free land or creature the next turn with no additional mana investment (and then rinse and repeat) is just incredible value. If you can clear a path, the ultimate is a nice free 10 points of damage.
Before you even say it, there are a million creatures that control could use in this Standard that don't rhyme with "potential sphere bulk." Two sphinxes, the new angel, the blue god, heck, even a Rogue Refiner if you want a chump blocker that gives you an ETB free card and energy.
EDIT:
I totally agree, especially if she made tokens of leviathans, krakens, serpents, or octopuses instead of animating lands as her ultimate. Kiora's always been about summoning creatures. Nissa's about animating lands. And who knows? Maybe this used to be Kiora and they stuck Nissa in her place to better fit the story at the last minute? Or it was a rejected Kiora design that they just crammed Nissa onto?
With the top of the curve being cmc 5 for Liliana of the Sella and Liliana's Mastery then yes, as long as people stop trying to be cute with Prized Amalgam and just go mono-black.
Yeah, but the fact that it's land animation makes haste less important than you might think.
And yes, she's blue. I'm actually more surprised by the fact that a "main five" walker went into two colors than that they were enemy colors (especially GU, which always seemed less intense than the other enemy pairs' reasons for hating each other, possibly because these two colors are the most open-minded, unlike their common ally) or that it was Nissa.
Seems like Blood Artist variants are going to be deciduous but common enough to make Aristocrats at least a possibility in every Standard season.
On phasing:
UG Nissa doesn't feel right to me. I think they should have used this card design on a new character instead of the Gatewatch's mono-green poster child.
I'm sure WotC loves that you think they put this much thought into things,
but I'm fairly certain this Nissa is GU
because they already had THREE other mono-G Nissae in Standard.
Reprint Stasis!
Control needs more love.
EDH:
Momir Vig, Simic Visionary
Melek, Izzet Paragon
Oona, Queen of the Fae
Bruna, Light of Alabaster
Gisela, Blade of Goldnight
Rhys the Redeemed
Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord
Sen Triplets
The Mimeoplasm
WUBRGSliver OverlordGRBUW
WUBRGSliver Hivelord(Superfriends)GRBUW
Selling some cards I don't want.
Generally less than tcg mid.
Seriously, one of the worst characters in the series lore-wise. She was better as elf Hitler, at least she was kinda interesting then.
But I digress.
Card itself is pretty solid. Ultimate is honestly pretty meh, you're not going to be wanting to use it very often, she is very clearly built around her 0, which is damn fine.
But uh..why is she blue? I really doubt she is smart enough to be Simic colors. This is almost as dumb as when Sarkhan became blue because...time travel?
UBBreya's Toybox (Competitive, Combo)WR
RGodzilla, King of the MonstersG
-Retired Decks-
UBLazav, Dimir Mastermind (Competitive, UB Voltron/Control)UB
"Knowledge is such a burden. Release it. Release all your fears to me."
—Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver
My 720 Peasant Cube
Low-power cube enthusiast!
My 1570 card cube (no longer updated)
My 415 Peasant+ Artifact and Enchantment Cube
Ever-Expanding "Just throw it in" cube.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
But seriously. How could no one realize that it might be a mistake? How blind are they to the blandness of their own cringe-inducing characters? How could they so horribly misunderstand what their audience wanted? It seems that they realized that having three mono-green Nissa cards in the same standard (and now it would be four, with the rotation change) might be a mistake so what do they do? Instead of making the right choice and just giving us a non-Gatewatch planeswalker instead, they force Nissa into the set anyway but change her color identity so that maybe, just maybe, their players will forgive them for reusing the same character yet again. But if they were so concerned with not doing the same thing again, why not just give us an entirely new planeswalker that actually makes sense in that color combo? But I still don’t understand how they realized that three mono-green Nissas in standard would be a bad idea, but they didn’t realize that three Nissas total, along with two Gideons, two Lilianas, three Chandras, and a Jace across just six sets might be a little bit too repetitive for our tastes. How oblivious can they possibly be?
Now of course, it’s most certainly a good thing that realized how much the players hated this, and they are changing it as soon as possible. Most other companies don’t take and implement customer feedback nearly as well as WotC does for Magic. Many other companies might continue right along doing something that players are thoroughly sick of. I’m grateful that they heard our complaints and are going to change this as soon possible. I’m also grateful that Maro informed us in advance that they had heard our complaints and were going to fix things as soon as possible (granted, he might have told us early mainly to save his own skin from the inevitable flood of backlash he would get once this set’s planeswalkers were revealed, but still). They really did try their best to do what we wanted as soon as they were able to implement our feedback (the delay was an unfortunate consequence of them so working in advance). But I still can’t wrap my mind around how they thought we might like this in the first place. Even before Origins, people were complaining about getting too much of Jace (and to a lesser extent, some of the other core set staples). So making these already overused characters the centerpiece of the story and printing them at an even higher frequency was clearly a step in the wrong direction. They clearly should have anticipated this backlash before they even started to print way too many of these planeswalkers, and yet here we are. And although we know that they’re going to fix it soon, if they were able to so fundamentally misunderstand what players wanted once, then they could do it again, and that’s what scares me.
All that being said, I do love this card from a mechanical standpoint. The first two abilities interact beautifully, and they’re definitely things that a Johnny can build around but they’re still being pretty good on their own. The ultimate is weak for ultimate standards but only because it’s so much easier to achieve than most. In theory can basically use this card as 10 damage to target opponent for 6GU. It feels more like a red ability (since the damage is done by temporary creatures, which are kind of a red thing, with flying and haste, a combination usually seen on dragons) but it’s a welcome extra function for the card, especially in Commander (where you will reliably be able to get to 8 mana). She is slightly less efficient than most 3-drop planeswalkers at X=1, 4-drop planeswalkers at X=2, 5-drop planeswalkers at X=3, and so on. (Although she is arguably a better 2-drop planeswalker than Tibalt.) Fortunately, she has the ability to potentially be a 3-drop, or a 4-drop, or a 5-drop, or whatever else you need, which makes her extremely good. As with most X-cost and modal spells, her power lies in versatility rather than efficiency.
And of course, the concept of an X-cost planeswalker in itself is quite interesting. I had always assumed that rules didn’t support an X-cost planeswalker that just had X for its starting loyalty (since X-cost creatures always enter the battlefield with X +1/+1 counters rather than just being X/X, I figured that an X-cost planeswalker would need an extra line of text saying “[cardname] enters the battlefield with X loyalty counters on it”) but I’m glad to see that I was wrong. I had also thought that if we were ever going to get an X-cost planeswalker, it would have to be in either an un-set or a set like Time Spiral (both of which were known for weird and unique card designs). So needless to say I was pretty surprised to see an X-cost planeswalker just show up in a standard set without warning. But this seems like a really cool way to design planeswalkers and it seems like it opens up a lot of design space. I really do hope that they continue to make walkers like these in the future. If they made a Commander-walker that had X in the cost it would absolutely amazing. And I would laugh if they ever printed a planeswalker with something like X+2 or 2X starting loyalty in an un-set. Maybe Fraction Jackson could become a planeswalker with X/2 starting loyalty. But I really would definitely like to see more planeswalkers get X-cost versions eventually. I hope X-cost planeswalkers show up more often than colorless ones, maybe at about the same rate as tricolored planeswalkers.
Edit: I just realized another cool thing about this card: if you can get infinite combo than you can cast this spell with an arbitrarily large number of loyalty counters, meaning that you can ultimate every turn. That's pretty damn powerful. Granted, there are many other X spells that can end the game immediately with infinite mana but unlike most of those you will still be quite happy to cast Nissa without a huge mana investment or an infinite mana combo.
All in all, neat card. Wish they made Gideons or Jaces like this.
--Buck v Bell, 1927. This case, regarding the compulsory sterilization of inmates at mental institutions, has -- somehow -- never been overturned. Just a wee PSA for ya.
Basically, we need a deck that does a lot of scry and draw effects. You really need to know what that top card is without using the second or first ability on the walker. As for her ultimate, yes it can win you the game, but anything at X=8 should better damn well win you the game.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
She's s finisher planeswalker. You never want to cast her for x=1, she can't defend herself unless x=avg creature cmc. Build around walker that's easily splashable in green based decks. My bet is she will shine after the next set is released. Right now... likely too slow.