Been toying with a rogue deck that's been surprising me during testing, but it feels like it's missing a piece. If they give me this...
Ember-Soul Spawn
Creature - Elemental RR
When Ember-Soul Spawn or another creature dies, Ember-Soul Spawn deals 2 damage to that creature's controller.
Rare
Print that, and I'm really in business.
This looks pretty good. Melira would hate it, of course.
Unless you just target it with the first Redcap trigger...
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I think Esper control is interested in some number (quite possibly just one) of Utter End. Instant is pretty huge. I don't think decks without Islands are going to want it at that price.
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According to Maro, Khans is a tri-colour set, but it's not actually a tri-colour block. Given that Maro claimed in an article ages ago that they'd always keep five years between multicoloured sets and RTR is much less than that long ago, I think the multicolour stuff won't be super-emphasized. We'll get a bunch of gold cards, but not as much "everyone must play lots of colours!" encouragement as past gold blocks.
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nykthos are you running counterflux? usually you just hold on to that for deer life and it stops scapeshift. are you running enough of them would be the next question if you already have some?
I have two in the board. I think in at least one of the losses to the mirror I made what was likely the wrong play and used one to protect my Scapeshift (which he had another counter for). It's definitely a lot more valuable against the opposing Shift. I could think about running more copies, though I'd likely have to cut something cheaper to do so which worries me.
Thrun and Gigadrowse are good ideas too. The latter is something I've seen in some lists and have been thinking about finding room for already. The mirror is definitely a match where it'd be good.
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Cliques are a good idea. I'm already bringing in extra countermagic. I'm bringing in Boseiju too, but it's hard to rely on finding it.
Right now I'm running the all-Peer Through Depths build, and while I really do like Peer I guess the fact that it doesn't find Boseiju hurts here. I've been considering surrendering to the Serum Visions empire anyway, so that probably will help.
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Does anyone have advice for playing the mirror? How do you tell when to go for it? It seems like every time I cast Shift my opponent wins the counter war, and every time my opponent casts Shift...they still win the counter war.
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It's five or more other Mountains. Thus six total.
The bottom part is correct. With two Valakuts (either in play or in the library), you only can easily kill with three or four (sometimes even two) new Mountains, provided that you have enough already in play to make Kut trigger at all.
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I still believe that the whole thing was an over-reaction, a "panic button" pressed by some Hasbro/Wizards sales/marketing executive because Born of the Gods and Journey into Nyx (probably) didn't sell exceptionally well.
I do agree that this was part of the motivation. As I said earlier, the Pro Tour is considered by Wizards to be a marketing tool. Historically it's been more or less marketing for the game of Magic as a whole, but the poor(er) sales of some recent sets may have upped the pressure to use it as a marketing tool for recent sets, specifically. In some sense, all-Standard PTs could be seen as the modern equivalent of "you must run at least five Homelands cards".
I think that if anything, Wizards underestimated the symbolic importance of a format having a PT. It's clear that they never meant to drop support for Modern in GPs and MTGO events, and I guess they figured that dropping one single event (that most of the community can't play in) didn't really matter. When people misread it as cutting back on support for the format in general, they realized they'd screwed up. This is why they didn't restore the Block PT: there's no community for Block. This is also why they announced an extra Modern GP at the same time as they brought back the PT. They wanted to make it abundantly clear that the Modern format's future was never in question.
For what it's worth, the biggest reason that I personally wanted a Modern PT to exist is because I want to qualify for the Pro Tour some day, and if I get to play one PT I would much prefer it to be Modern than (most iterations of) Standard. I think that perspective is one that they also didn't really consider in making the initial decision.
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making.magic@hotmail.com is an email for Maro, which according to his Tumblr he checks frequently. That said I'm fairly sure he has approximately zero influence regarding OP things. Helene and Aaron would be better people to contact, but I'm fairly confident that this was a decision made primarily by the marketing department (who, again, are the ones paying for the PT).
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Ahem. Now that I've gotten that out of the way: I dislike this too. In fact, as far as I'm concerned it's ******* terrible. But some of the conspiracy theorizing in this thread is ridiculous. Tom LaPille's absurd rationalizations on Twitter don't help things, but other Wizards members (notably Aaron Forsythe) have been quite upfront about the actual reasoning for this change, and in this case I 100% believe them. A lot of people don't seem to really get that the Pro Tour is paid for by the marketing department. As far as Wizards is concerned, the primary purpose of PT [Set] is to get people interested in [Set]. Modern, in general, is a bad PT format from that perspective, because most new sets don't include many cards for Modern. Even RTR, which introduced lasting format staple Abrupt Decay and so-good-it-got-banned Deathrite Shaman, had only three distinct cards appear in T8 decks at its namesake PT (the aforementioned two and Slaughter Games in some sideboards). That's not a good use of marketing money.
It comes down to this: Block promotes the set but nobody wants to watch it. People watch Modern but it doesn't promote the set. Standard is the intersection in the Venn diagram. This is a terrible move for the health of Modern and, arguably, the game in general, but it's a good move for business. Sadly, these decisions are made by businesspeople, and unless someone starts a nonprofit dedicated to holding giant Magic events, they always will be.
Given all that, I don't believe that GPs and Dailies are in danger at all. There's a huge difference between GPs and PTs from a business pespective, which is that GPs actually make Wizards money. They're not a marketing tool, they're a product in their own right. Wizards continues to hold GPs for Legacy (which has never been a PT format, and has a healthy community anyway) because doing so is still profitable. As long as attendance is good for Modern GPs, Wizards will continue to hold them too. I don't think the removal of Block Dailies really heralds anything for Modern either. Block's only major event each year is the PT and sometimes one GP. Neither of those are going to happen next year, and they want the Daily formats to reflect what's played at high levels. Block has never been an especially popular format anyway; Modern is far far more widely played.
Again, this doesn't mean that anyone has to like the change. Personally, I'm not going to watch any PT coverage next year. I already never watch non-Modern GPs. If you feel like hopelessly pretending that you can have an effect on things, I suggest doing the same. The day that a Modern GP gets more views than a Standard PT will be the day they reevaluate this decision.
The problem with Esper is that you can't respond properly to a turn one dork- Path to Exile sucks there- and this translates into the game slipping away of your grasp because you're behind the whole time. You can't even Path properly a Dark Confidant on turn two if he slipped past Spell Snare. Once you reach the four mana to cast your Wraths the damage has already been done, be it against Jund, Affinity or Pod.
Lightning Bolt is a necessity for a control deck aiming to tier one status.
Disfigure is a perfectly legitimate card if you really feel like you need one-mana removal for small creatures. It's not much worse than Bolt since most of the major targets have 1 or 2 toughness anyway.
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Thrun and Gigadrowse are good ideas too. The latter is something I've seen in some lists and have been thinking about finding room for already. The mirror is definitely a match where it'd be good.
Right now I'm running the all-Peer Through Depths build, and while I really do like Peer I guess the fact that it doesn't find Boseiju hurts here. I've been considering surrendering to the Serum Visions empire anyway, so that probably will help.
The bottom part is correct. With two Valakuts (either in play or in the library), you only can easily kill with three or four (sometimes even two) new Mountains, provided that you have enough already in play to make Kut trigger at all.
I think that if anything, Wizards underestimated the symbolic importance of a format having a PT. It's clear that they never meant to drop support for Modern in GPs and MTGO events, and I guess they figured that dropping one single event (that most of the community can't play in) didn't really matter. When people misread it as cutting back on support for the format in general, they realized they'd screwed up. This is why they didn't restore the Block PT: there's no community for Block. This is also why they announced an extra Modern GP at the same time as they brought back the PT. They wanted to make it abundantly clear that the Modern format's future was never in question.
For what it's worth, the biggest reason that I personally wanted a Modern PT to exist is because I want to qualify for the Pro Tour some day, and if I get to play one PT I would much prefer it to be Modern than (most iterations of) Standard. I think that perspective is one that they also didn't really consider in making the initial decision.
(Confirmed by Helene Bergeot on the GP stream. I'm sure there'll be a proper announcement soon.)
Ahem. Now that I've gotten that out of the way: I dislike this too. In fact, as far as I'm concerned it's ******* terrible. But some of the conspiracy theorizing in this thread is ridiculous. Tom LaPille's absurd rationalizations on Twitter don't help things, but other Wizards members (notably Aaron Forsythe) have been quite upfront about the actual reasoning for this change, and in this case I 100% believe them. A lot of people don't seem to really get that the Pro Tour is paid for by the marketing department. As far as Wizards is concerned, the primary purpose of PT [Set] is to get people interested in [Set]. Modern, in general, is a bad PT format from that perspective, because most new sets don't include many cards for Modern. Even RTR, which introduced lasting format staple Abrupt Decay and so-good-it-got-banned Deathrite Shaman, had only three distinct cards appear in T8 decks at its namesake PT (the aforementioned two and Slaughter Games in some sideboards). That's not a good use of marketing money.
It comes down to this: Block promotes the set but nobody wants to watch it. People watch Modern but it doesn't promote the set. Standard is the intersection in the Venn diagram. This is a terrible move for the health of Modern and, arguably, the game in general, but it's a good move for business. Sadly, these decisions are made by businesspeople, and unless someone starts a nonprofit dedicated to holding giant Magic events, they always will be.
Given all that, I don't believe that GPs and Dailies are in danger at all. There's a huge difference between GPs and PTs from a business pespective, which is that GPs actually make Wizards money. They're not a marketing tool, they're a product in their own right. Wizards continues to hold GPs for Legacy (which has never been a PT format, and has a healthy community anyway) because doing so is still profitable. As long as attendance is good for Modern GPs, Wizards will continue to hold them too. I don't think the removal of Block Dailies really heralds anything for Modern either. Block's only major event each year is the PT and sometimes one GP. Neither of those are going to happen next year, and they want the Daily formats to reflect what's played at high levels. Block has never been an especially popular format anyway; Modern is far far more widely played.
Again, this doesn't mean that anyone has to like the change. Personally, I'm not going to watch any PT coverage next year. I already never watch non-Modern GPs. If you feel like hopelessly pretending that you can have an effect on things, I suggest doing the same. The day that a Modern GP gets more views than a Standard PT will be the day they reevaluate this decision.