It will also allow some new janky interactions with stuff like Douse or Pentarch Paladin
In combination with Painter's Servant, one of the cards allows you counter any spell that you want to counter (assuming it can be countered) and the other allows you to destroy any permanent you want. Those are not what I would call "janky" applications.
Maybe I am naive, but I do not fully understand the explanation for taking down the site.
This site was owned by a larger company, that company decided to shut down a number of community fan sites for several games, not just Magic: the Gathering.
I am only speculating here, but there are several possibilities about why they no longer wanted to support these sites. One possibility is that the company decided that it was no longer interested in being in the business of owning / supporting those sites and because of technical / engineering reasons it would be difficult to simply sell those properties onto another company (ie. a lot of proprietary under-the-hood resources that they did not want other companies to get access to).
Another possibility is that this section of the company was losing money, not from every individual owned / supported site, but as a whole. So the company decided to cut their losses and stop supporting all of them since resources dedicated to supporting 3 profit-turning sites, for example, would not make sense compared to supporting, say, 10 profit-turning sites.
Another possibility is that, while the section of company was profitable, it cost X amount of dollars to support while generating a certain amount of profit and the company decided that they could make more money from that same X amount of dollars by doing something else. This is similar to what happens when decently viewed TV shows are cancelled. The idea is that while this show is doing OK, it will never be a huge hit and another show could be a huge hit.
I'm not 100% on whether it should be unbanned or not, but for me there are two things to consider:
1) Every 5-colour Commander deck (nor nearly) is going to play this card and every time you sit down against a 5-colour Commander, you are going to have to keep track of how close they are to getting that card into play.
2) One of the best ways to combat the card is land destruction. There are ways to protect a creature from removal, but if you always destroy one of two of their land types all the time (not access to those colours, but just to Mountains and Plains, for example), then who cares what they do with their creature.
Once you get into the late game with a 5-colour deck, you simply won't be able to let them keep their commander on the table, ever, because Coalition Victory could just resolve and end the game right there. While you have a similar risk with Tooth and Nail and similar cards, there is little pro-active you can do about it until they try to go for the combo. By comparison, with Coalition Victory, there is plenty you can do throughout the game: you keep going after their commander and specific lands.
While you can try to say the same thing about a green deck featuring a Tooth and Nail combo, they are trying to get to nine mana, and there are plenty of ways to get there, so losing one land or another or an artifact along the way doesn't matter to them as much. Coalition Victory requires more specific combo pieces so it is easier to disrupt and because of the consequences of not disrupting them (you lose), it might encourage people to disrupt them.
One reason cards are banned is because they can have a centralizing effect. The game becomes all about that card. This was demonstrated with Sylvan Primordial and Primeval Titan. I could see something similar with Coalition Victory.
I think the inclusion of Planeswalkers as potential commanders for Brawl is strictly to try and engender some sort of added diversity in the format. Gatherer tells me there are currently 45 Legendary Creatures in Standard right now (which seems really high from a historical standpoint other then when Kamigawa Block was legal), so adding in the current 28 Standard-legal Planeswalkers gives you 73 potential decks; that's a 62% jump in the number of options.
That actually seems pretty average for the last several years. I had to go back to when it was just Theros block, Magic 2015, and Khans of Tarkir to get a number of legendary creatures less than 40, and even then it was 37 creatures. The next smallest was Khans block, Magic Origins, and Battle for Zendikar, which had 40.
Edit: Return to Ravnica block + Magic 2014 + Theros set has just 33 legendary creatures. So you can go back about five years to start getting numbers in the low thirties or less.
I do think that the main limitation for this idea is just how to present it to people in a packaged product. Cards like these could not be printed in a regular set, so they would have to be in the dedicated command sets, but then they would have to be the flagship cards of that set. For example, if you are going to have a Commander that can use off-colour Curses, you are going to want to include some of them in the deck, but then you have these cards that cannot be used with any other legendary creatures in the deck.
I think this would work for some cool lesser known theme cards, like the Curses, or some smaller, spread-out tribes, but a single cycle or two of these commanders would be all that you need. It is not a lot of design space, but you could make some interesting commanders out of it.
Eater of the Dead is a great card to win the game very quickly against a single opponent, especially if you have milled them or cleared the board a few times first so they have a few creatures already in there to work with. A milling strategy generally only works on one player at a time, but if you know who to target first, you can hit them pretty hard and remove them in an interesting fashion.
One reason I like Mill decks is that they allow you to attack the format in a way that is not expected and that keeps things fresh for me.
Crovax, Ascendant Hero is very similar to Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite. It costs 1 less, has synergy with the life gain parts of the deck, but only gives a -1/-1 penalty and then only to non-white creatures, including my own. I just don't see the value unless there is another card to take out for it.
Treasonous Ogre is a good card that can generate quite a lot of mana for the deck. We are not going for any kind of combo with that extra mana, but since we often have a lot of life to work with, it could be useful in the deck.
Axis of Mortality is interesting to me because of the repeatable effect which can give me lots of life gain, as you describe, but it doesn't have to switch between me and another player. On turns when there is no life for me to gain from a switch, I can simply switch other players' life totals around as I see fit. I like that.
Oketra's Last Mercy is cheap, with lots of life gain potential, but if I have lots of life already, it is just a dead card that does nothing. The card above continues to be useful even when I have lots of life, where this one does not.
It is hard to figure out what to take out since I made the deck and I certainly tried to make the best deck possible. Cards like Blind Obedience and Aura of Silence are quite good, but something has to go. If other people have suggestions of what to take out instead, I am open to ideas.
I definitely recommend those life lands in exchange for the expensive lands in the original list, along with the Kabira Crossroads.
I played this deck at our recent Commander night and it was quite a lot of fun. There was a lot of life gain in the deck and it worked out well. I never drew Chandra's Ignition, but playing the deck showed how powerful it would be had I drawn it.
One game, there were a few turns when no other players had removal that they wanted to spend against me and I had both Licia, Sanguine Tribune in play along with Brion Stoutarm. I swung with Licia against a particular player, and she had six extra +1/+1 counters on her (three from last turn and three more from this turn), gaining me 10 life, and then I could throw her at that same player with Brion, gaining me 10 more life, and then I could replay her for just RWB. It was quite fun.
I did draw Karlov and the deck does lack the frequent life gain triggers that make him shine and I am wondering if he and the Archangel of Thune are even worth their slots in the deck. One game with Karlov he sat on my board for three turns without me gaining any life until I finally gained five life in a single chunk and he gained just two +1/+1 counters. Given the way the deck work, I think I might be better off with a card like Tithe Drinker or something like that that can give me more life in a single turn to work with Licia or a Cradle of Vitality. The Archangel is a harder sell since it does give a benefit to my entire board, but again, there might be cards that are just better given the more infrequent nature of the life gain triggers.
Still Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter gives you a reason to keep recasting Licia, Sanguine Tribune, as you can just make him large on his own, and at least has flying so some evasion. The threat of being able to kill a creature at will, often changes decisions of people playing out there own combo creatures for fear of getting killed.
Well reasoned and it is another creature with lifelink, which goes along with what the deck is doing. I think I'll find some room for it in the deck.
Wow, that could be a lot of life gain with the right creature. I think I just missed the synergy between it and a lifelink creature. I will definitely have to find room for it in the deck.
I like Brion Stoutarm. It has lifelink and can give me something to do with a high power Licia. That's nice.
I've always been unsure about cards like Ad Nauseam. I've seen it used in dedicated combo decks where the intention is that you draw most of the cards in your deck with it or all of the cards if you are going for something like Angel's Grace, but in a deck like this what should the goal be? Is it treated as a way to full the hand back up since we will likely have the life to pay for that?
I wish Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter could be more pinpoint with his removal power. You lose all of the +1/+1 counters to get rid of one thing.
I like life gain decks and I've built a few of them over the years using Oloro, Ageless Ascetic and Karlov of the Ghost Council and others, but Licia, Sanguine Tribune offers something unique among them. Most life gain decks either want to have a high life total or want to have frequent life gains, but a Licia deck wants to gain large chunks of life during your turn in order to cast and recast the Commander as cheaply as possible. This presented an interesting deck building challenge as some typical life gain cards, like Soul Warden, are not as useful in this deck as in other life gain decks.
Mana Base: With a Mardu-land base, I decided to go with what I had, which is fetch lands, dual lands, and Ravnica's shock lands. However, there are a number of other lands that could go in those places along with more basic lands.
Spells: Beyond a mix of card draw and removal spells, the deck features some cards to enhance the life gain theme with Alhammarret's Archive and Venser's Journal, along with one game winning combo with Exquisite Blood + Sanguine Bond. Again, the deck is trying to balance a mix of big life gain with small, multiple triggers by including Blind Obedience, Bloodchief Ascension, and Sun Droplet. Cradle of Vitality is good in the deck as it allows you to translate large life gains into a large number of +1/+1 counters for a small cost.
Conclusion:
This has been an interesting deck to build and try out, but I feel I don't have the balance quite right on the big life gains vs. small triggers, and I am still trying to work that out.
I, for one, certainly hope that the people with the proper credentials to conduct one have much, much better things to do with their time.
I disagree with this. People with the proper "tools" to conduct a market survey like this are simply hired by companies like WotC. And even if the Rules Committee has not shown much interest in this idea at the moment, WotC has the money and the reach to conduct a survey of this nature to determine whether this is a good idea or not. They already know how popular or not popular their current roster of planeswalkers are among the public and knowing whether this idea is popular or not could be valuable for them.
The last time they released planeswalkers as commanders was with relatively unknown people, but imagine if they wanted to do a new set that did the same thing but with the Gatewatch at the helm, knowing whether this would be popular or not would be important to them. Once you are thinking along these lines, it is not a huge leap between a second set of planeswalkers that can be Commanders and a rule change that would allow all planeswalkers to be commanders.
While I think it is easy to explain that some legendary non-creatures are more obvious as commanders than others (like Genju of the Realms vs. Day of Destiny), I don't like just adding such things to the rules on a case by case basis.
There is no unifying thing that would explain why some non-legendary creatures should be allowed as commanders (Chromanticore) and why some non-creatures should be allowed. Just like there is no way to easily allow players to use Suspend from the Command Zone for Ith, High Arcanist or to allow players to discard Haakon, Stromgald Scourge from the command zone.
While I think you can combine all of the planeswalkers and let them be allowed as a group, that doesn't really apply to individual cards on a case by case basis and I don't think the rules should be modified to allow it. I definitely think House Rules are the way to go with these individual cards.
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In combination with Painter's Servant, one of the cards allows you counter any spell that you want to counter (assuming it can be countered) and the other allows you to destroy any permanent you want. Those are not what I would call "janky" applications.
This site was owned by a larger company, that company decided to shut down a number of community fan sites for several games, not just Magic: the Gathering.
I am only speculating here, but there are several possibilities about why they no longer wanted to support these sites. One possibility is that the company decided that it was no longer interested in being in the business of owning / supporting those sites and because of technical / engineering reasons it would be difficult to simply sell those properties onto another company (ie. a lot of proprietary under-the-hood resources that they did not want other companies to get access to).
Another possibility is that this section of the company was losing money, not from every individual owned / supported site, but as a whole. So the company decided to cut their losses and stop supporting all of them since resources dedicated to supporting 3 profit-turning sites, for example, would not make sense compared to supporting, say, 10 profit-turning sites.
Another possibility is that, while the section of company was profitable, it cost X amount of dollars to support while generating a certain amount of profit and the company decided that they could make more money from that same X amount of dollars by doing something else. This is similar to what happens when decently viewed TV shows are cancelled. The idea is that while this show is doing OK, it will never be a huge hit and another show could be a huge hit.
1) Every 5-colour Commander deck (nor nearly) is going to play this card and every time you sit down against a 5-colour Commander, you are going to have to keep track of how close they are to getting that card into play.
2) One of the best ways to combat the card is land destruction. There are ways to protect a creature from removal, but if you always destroy one of two of their land types all the time (not access to those colours, but just to Mountains and Plains, for example), then who cares what they do with their creature.
Once you get into the late game with a 5-colour deck, you simply won't be able to let them keep their commander on the table, ever, because Coalition Victory could just resolve and end the game right there. While you have a similar risk with Tooth and Nail and similar cards, there is little pro-active you can do about it until they try to go for the combo. By comparison, with Coalition Victory, there is plenty you can do throughout the game: you keep going after their commander and specific lands.
While you can try to say the same thing about a green deck featuring a Tooth and Nail combo, they are trying to get to nine mana, and there are plenty of ways to get there, so losing one land or another or an artifact along the way doesn't matter to them as much. Coalition Victory requires more specific combo pieces so it is easier to disrupt and because of the consequences of not disrupting them (you lose), it might encourage people to disrupt them.
One reason cards are banned is because they can have a centralizing effect. The game becomes all about that card. This was demonstrated with Sylvan Primordial and Primeval Titan. I could see something similar with Coalition Victory.
That actually seems pretty average for the last several years. I had to go back to when it was just Theros block, Magic 2015, and Khans of Tarkir to get a number of legendary creatures less than 40, and even then it was 37 creatures. The next smallest was Khans block, Magic Origins, and Battle for Zendikar, which had 40.
Edit: Return to Ravnica block + Magic 2014 + Theros set has just 33 legendary creatures. So you can go back about five years to start getting numbers in the low thirties or less.
Otherwise, it is a cool list.
I do think that the main limitation for this idea is just how to present it to people in a packaged product. Cards like these could not be printed in a regular set, so they would have to be in the dedicated command sets, but then they would have to be the flagship cards of that set. For example, if you are going to have a Commander that can use off-colour Curses, you are going to want to include some of them in the deck, but then you have these cards that cannot be used with any other legendary creatures in the deck.
I think this would work for some cool lesser known theme cards, like the Curses, or some smaller, spread-out tribes, but a single cycle or two of these commanders would be all that you need. It is not a lot of design space, but you could make some interesting commanders out of it.
Eater of the Dead is a great card to win the game very quickly against a single opponent, especially if you have milled them or cleared the board a few times first so they have a few creatures already in there to work with. A milling strategy generally only works on one player at a time, but if you know who to target first, you can hit them pretty hard and remove them in an interesting fashion.
One reason I like Mill decks is that they allow you to attack the format in a way that is not expected and that keeps things fresh for me.
Treasonous Ogre is a good card that can generate quite a lot of mana for the deck. We are not going for any kind of combo with that extra mana, but since we often have a lot of life to work with, it could be useful in the deck.
Axis of Mortality is interesting to me because of the repeatable effect which can give me lots of life gain, as you describe, but it doesn't have to switch between me and another player. On turns when there is no life for me to gain from a switch, I can simply switch other players' life totals around as I see fit. I like that.
Oketra's Last Mercy is cheap, with lots of life gain potential, but if I have lots of life already, it is just a dead card that does nothing. The card above continues to be useful even when I have lots of life, where this one does not.
Here are the cards I am going to be changing from the deck list posted above.
1 Crested Sunmare
1 Karlov of the Ghost Council
1 Tithe Drinker
1 Martyr of Sands
1 Rhox Faithmender
1 Slaughter Pact
1 Blind Obedience
1 Bloodchief Ascension
1 Debt to the Deathless
It is hard to figure out what to take out since I made the deck and I certainly tried to make the best deck possible. Cards like Blind Obedience and Aura of Silence are quite good, but something has to go. If other people have suggestions of what to take out instead, I am open to ideas.
1 Anger
1 Brion Stoutarm
1 Urabrask the Hidden
1 Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter
1 Slaughter
1 Boon Reflection
1 Hatred
1 Spirit Loop
1 Unspeakable Symbol
If these changes work out, I will change the original post to reflect the new deck list.
I played this deck at our recent Commander night and it was quite a lot of fun. There was a lot of life gain in the deck and it worked out well. I never drew Chandra's Ignition, but playing the deck showed how powerful it would be had I drawn it.
One game, there were a few turns when no other players had removal that they wanted to spend against me and I had both Licia, Sanguine Tribune in play along with Brion Stoutarm. I swung with Licia against a particular player, and she had six extra +1/+1 counters on her (three from last turn and three more from this turn), gaining me 10 life, and then I could throw her at that same player with Brion, gaining me 10 more life, and then I could replay her for just RWB. It was quite fun.
I did draw Karlov and the deck does lack the frequent life gain triggers that make him shine and I am wondering if he and the Archangel of Thune are even worth their slots in the deck. One game with Karlov he sat on my board for three turns without me gaining any life until I finally gained five life in a single chunk and he gained just two +1/+1 counters. Given the way the deck work, I think I might be better off with a card like Tithe Drinker or something like that that can give me more life in a single turn to work with Licia or a Cradle of Vitality. The Archangel is a harder sell since it does give a benefit to my entire board, but again, there might be cards that are just better given the more infrequent nature of the life gain triggers.
Well reasoned and it is another creature with lifelink, which goes along with what the deck is doing. I think I'll find some room for it in the deck.
Wow, that could be a lot of life gain with the right creature. I think I just missed the synergy between it and a lifelink creature. I will definitely have to find room for it in the deck.
I've always been unsure about cards like Ad Nauseam. I've seen it used in dedicated combo decks where the intention is that you draw most of the cards in your deck with it or all of the cards if you are going for something like Angel's Grace, but in a deck like this what should the goal be? Is it treated as a way to full the hand back up since we will likely have the life to pay for that?
I wish Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter could be more pinpoint with his removal power. You lose all of the +1/+1 counters to get rid of one thing.
Introduction:
I like life gain decks and I've built a few of them over the years using Oloro, Ageless Ascetic and Karlov of the Ghost Council and others, but Licia, Sanguine Tribune offers something unique among them. Most life gain decks either want to have a high life total or want to have frequent life gains, but a Licia deck wants to gain large chunks of life during your turn in order to cast and recast the Commander as cheaply as possible. This presented an interesting deck building challenge as some typical life gain cards, like Soul Warden, are not as useful in this deck as in other life gain decks.
The Deck:
1 Licia, Sanguine Tribune
Lands - 35 total
1 Plains
1 Mountain
1 Swamp
1 Ancient Tomb
1 Arid Mesa
1 Badlands
1 Blood Crypt
1 Bloodstained Mire
1 Bojuka Bog
1 City of Brass
1 Clifftop Retreat
1 Command Tower
1 Dragonskull Summit
1 Flagstones of Trokair
1 Flooded Strand
1 Godless Shrine
1 Isolated Chapel
1 Mana Confluence
1 Marsh Flats
1 Miren, the Moaning Well
1 Plateau
1 Polluted Delta
1 Radiant Fountain
1 Sacred Foundry
1 Scalding Tarn
1 Scrubland
1 Smoldering Marsh
1 Strip Mine
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
1 Vault of the Archangel
1 Verdant Catacombs
1 Volrath's Stronghold
1 Wasteland
1 Windswept Heath
1 Wooded Foothills
1 Academy Rector
1 Archangel of Thune
1 Baneslayer Angel
1 Blood Baron of Vizkopa
1 Bruse Tarl, Boorish Herder
1 Cliffhaven Vampire
1 Crested Sunmare
1 Disciple of Bolas
1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
1 Gray Merchant of Asphodel
1 Karlov of the Ghost Council
1 Kokusho, the Evening Star
1 Martyr of Sands
1 Rhox Faithmender
1 Sangromancer
1 Serra Ascendant
1 Sun Titan
1 Tithe Drinker
1 Vizkopa Guildmage
1 Vona, Butcher of Magan
1 Weathered Wayfarer
1 Wurmcoil Engine
Planeswalkers - 1 total
1 Sorin, Grim Nemesis
Acceleration - 5 total
1 Boros Signet
1 Mana Crypt
1 Orzhov Signet
1 Sol Ring
1 Talisman of Indulgence
Card Draw - 6 total
1 Necropotence
1 Phyrexian Arena
1 Read the Bones
1 Well of Lost Dreams
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Wretched Confluence
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Enlightened Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
Removal - 14 total
1 Aetherflux Reservoir
1 Anguished Unmaking
1 Aura of Silence
1 Blasphemous Act
1 Chaos Warp
1 Consuming Vapors
1 Crackling Doom
1 Fumigate
1 Hide // Seek
1 Path to Exile
1 Shattering Spree
1 Slaughter Pact
1 Swords to Plowshares
1 Toxic Deluge
Spells - 13 total
1 Alhammarret's Archive
1 Blind Obedience
1 Bloodchief Ascension
1 Cradle of Vitality
1 Debt to the Deathless
1 Exquisite Blood
1 Exsanguinate
1 Rest in Peace
1 Sanguine Bond
1 Sensei's Divining Top
1 Sun Droplet
1 Venser's Journal
1 Whip of Erebos
Deck Description:
Mana Base: With a Mardu-land base, I decided to go with what I had, which is fetch lands, dual lands, and Ravnica's shock lands. However, there are a number of other lands that could go in those places along with more basic lands.
Creatures: There are plenty of lifelink creatures to help you gain big chunks of life, like Baneslayer Angel, Blood Baron of Vizkopa, and Serra Ascendant. There are also a few general utility cards like Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite and Weathered Wayfarer to help the deck out. There are a few good creatures that still trigger off of multiple life gain triggers with Karlov of the Ghost Council and Archangel of Thune, but I felt they were too good not to include in the deck.
Spells: Beyond a mix of card draw and removal spells, the deck features some cards to enhance the life gain theme with Alhammarret's Archive and Venser's Journal, along with one game winning combo with Exquisite Blood + Sanguine Bond. Again, the deck is trying to balance a mix of big life gain with small, multiple triggers by including Blind Obedience, Bloodchief Ascension, and Sun Droplet. Cradle of Vitality is good in the deck as it allows you to translate large life gains into a large number of +1/+1 counters for a small cost.
Conclusion:
This has been an interesting deck to build and try out, but I feel I don't have the balance quite right on the big life gains vs. small triggers, and I am still trying to work that out.
Comments and thoughts are welcome.
I disagree with this. People with the proper "tools" to conduct a market survey like this are simply hired by companies like WotC. And even if the Rules Committee has not shown much interest in this idea at the moment, WotC has the money and the reach to conduct a survey of this nature to determine whether this is a good idea or not. They already know how popular or not popular their current roster of planeswalkers are among the public and knowing whether this idea is popular or not could be valuable for them.
The last time they released planeswalkers as commanders was with relatively unknown people, but imagine if they wanted to do a new set that did the same thing but with the Gatewatch at the helm, knowing whether this would be popular or not would be important to them. Once you are thinking along these lines, it is not a huge leap between a second set of planeswalkers that can be Commanders and a rule change that would allow all planeswalkers to be commanders.
There is no unifying thing that would explain why some non-legendary creatures should be allowed as commanders (Chromanticore) and why some non-creatures should be allowed. Just like there is no way to easily allow players to use Suspend from the Command Zone for Ith, High Arcanist or to allow players to discard Haakon, Stromgald Scourge from the command zone.
While I think you can combine all of the planeswalkers and let them be allowed as a group, that doesn't really apply to individual cards on a case by case basis and I don't think the rules should be modified to allow it. I definitely think House Rules are the way to go with these individual cards.