...and people are complaining that it dies to Lightning Strike? Even though every other planeswalker in the current format already dies to the much more ubiquitous Hero's Downfall? O_O
I may be wrong, but I feel Kiora has a lot in common with what makes Jace good in Standard at the moment, and they complement each other really, really well. Add some extra support for Bant and RUG mana bases, and there's a lot of potential here...
I see a lot of talk about Keyrunes and other turn 3 acceleration. It's important to note that the difference between ramping on turn 2 and turn 3 is very significant tempo-wise, especially given the quality of turn 2-3 plays in the current format and expected prevalence of artifact and enchantment removal.
There are few five-mana plays that are significantly better on turn four (or three for that matter), and most of them involve a heavy color commitment. Frankly, the only reason I could see people maindecking 3-mana Keyrunes in an artifact-hostile, aggro-heavy environment is to ABSOLUTELY ensure you hit 1WWU on turn four, which Scry cards and Azorius Charm are already better at.
There is a valid point on Mana Bloom which I hadn't considered, though. The fact you can pass the turn with U open to Annul or Swan Song a key spell, while keeping turn three Advent of the Wurm, Supreme Verdict et. al. a possibility is very significant indeed. Too bad there's not a lot of things you can do with green devotion at the moment...
First of all, I am taking no stake on any strategy yet, at least not before heavily playtesting to confirm/deny my suspicions about the metagame. My original post is not a complaint; it merely tries to be an analysis based on card availability and evidence provided by the RTR meta.
Secondly, I am well aware of the best-case possibilities of Ordeal/multiple mana dorks, just as I am aware of the best-case possibilities of aggro. What I care about is the average scenario, and the cards being what they are, you are much more likely to have 8+ power on the board by turn three than you are of having either the right answers or the right card sequence to ramp and get ahead of their game. This is especially true if you consider follow-up, given that aggro/midrange will have committed less cards to obtain said advantage, and is more likely to have the time and resources to recover and finish you off.
Like I mentioned, the one unknown factor right now is Scry, and the amount of consistency it provides to slower and faster strategies both.
Watching the spoiler, one thing that stuck out is the absence of a 1G mana ramp sorcery.
Once Theros becomes legal and M13 rotates out of Standard, the only means players will have of ramping to four mana on turn three will be creatures such as Sylvan Caryatid and Voyaging Satyr. While there is nothing wrong with these creatures by themselves, you can't play them in a control deck without significant anti-synergy with mass removal. This means that, at least for the next three months, creature-light control strategies are effectively one turn slower.
This lack of options to regulate tempo is important if you consider that multiple two-color combinations, including Boros, Rakdos, Gruul and Selesnya, can field eight or more points of damage worth of board presence by turn three, distributed among creatures that cannot be consistently answered by all removal spells at their costs, and after dealing five to seven damage on the previous turns. Creature quality tends to plateau at about four mana, with creatures costing five or more not being significantly stronger or more advantageous. Conversely, most defensive early-game creatures, including the aforementioned mana enablers, are consistently in range of burn, wide-range removal spells, and can't survive combat against aggressive creatures at their same cost. The increase in maindeck artifact/enchantment hate must also be factored in, making Keyrunes and Cluestones not only slower, but also inconsistent.
This means that any sort of tempo hiccup in the early game - a missed land drop, drawing or failing to draw an answer at the wrong time, etc. - is bound to cost the slower player a whole lot more than to your aggro opponent. A slow control against an aggro deck will likely mean you have to stabilize with as little as 5 life, well in range of burn spells. Control decks have to do too much in the first five turns of the game: draw lands, answer threats, stabilize the board, with tools that are significantly lesser quality than those their opponents can field.
The one factor that control strategies have going on for themselves is Scry. There are several useful early-game spells with Scry 1 or 2 tacked on. Nearly all of them incur in short-term card disadvantage, meaning that though draw quality is improved, players on both sides will have less cards to work on average during the midgame, ironically making games more susceptible to topdecked blowouts such as unanswered Sphinx's Revelation or Stormbreath Dragon. Also at the center of this are the Scrylands, which currently favor specific color combinations (none of which have access to or real need for quick board sweepers), and may themselves produce tempo inconsistencies during the early game, especially if drawn in multiples or in combination with shocklands.
After considering all these facts, I have to say I am concerned about early-game variability in Type 2. I fully expect competitive control and midrange decklists hitting 26 lands and more just to ensure they absolutely hit those fourth and fifth lands, not to mention dropping out color splashes. Consistency is the name of the game for Theros Standard, and Magic has never been particularly good at consistency in the absence of cheap cantrip effects.
I won't comment on the quality of the cards because it's still way too soon to see if any of them will impact the metagame in any meaningful way (most likely some will).
What really worries me is all the critical tools we'll be losing once M13 and Innistrad rotate. Two-mana acceleration is gone, two-mana quality burn is gone, most cheap answers to Voice of Resurgence, Boros Reckoner and Loxodon Smiter are gone, and most of the creatures above four mana provide only marginal benefits compared to those below this line.
What this means is that a LOT of tools to control early-game variance will be rotating out of Standard, leaving a considerable number of quality early-game threats and few reliable ways to answer them, nearly all of them requiring heavy commitment to a specific color pair. Given that most U/x and B/x guilds have significant holes on their strategies that are not being addressed on M14, any sort of slower archetype is bound to have trouble stabilizing.
Also keep in mind that, even though Theros could, in theory, be a very control-friendly expansion (unlikely given the theme and trend), there are only so many playable cards it can bring to Standard without destabilizing the format and warping the market. The odds of it bringing quality burn, acceleration, early-game countermagic and card draw, defensive creatures, mass removal and at the same time pleasing creature-centric players, are low.
I won't spell doom and the death of Magic as we know it because I've been around long enough to know we're nowhere near it, but I can't deny that I'm once again concerned about the health of the T2 metagame.
The armor is cool. Dodges some removal and is big enough to survive combat against some stuff in the format. It's probably too slow to see play in control decks, but we'll see...
I fail to see how a 2/2 body that makes (on average) another 2/2 is relevant in a format where every relevant creature is 3/3 or greater. Heck, they can have two additional creatures on the board and you can still block the token with a Restoration Angel! By itself, this either invites you to overextend to try and make the token bigger, or to adopt a play style where your opponent has a great deal of control over when and how Voice of Resurgence dies.
Personally, I think one of the best ways to make Ultimates viable is to replace their prohibitively high loyalty cost by a scalable -X one. Not only does this allow for more interesting gameplay as more options become available to you, but it makes redundant copies a bit more valuable. Depending on the value of the ability, you can go for the entire gamut of starting loyalty values, plus and minus abilities. Some examples
White XWalker 2WW
+1 Creatures you control gain Lifelink until end of turn.
-2 Creatures you control get +2/+2 until end of turn.
-X Put X 1/1 white Soldier creature tokens into the battlefield.
Loyalty: 4
Black XWalker 2BB
+3 Target player draws a card and loses 1 life.
-2 Until end of turn, you may cast target creature card in your graveyard as if it were in your hand.
-XX All creatures get -X/-X until end of turn.
Loyalty: 3
Green XWalker 3GG
+2 You may play two additional lands this turn.
-3 Search your library for up to two land cards, reveal them, and put them in your hand. Then shuffle your library.
-X Target creature gets +X/+X and Trample until end of turn.
Loyalty: 6
Blue XWalker 4UU
+2 Return target permanent to its owner's hand.
-4 Draw 3 cards.
-X Gain control of target creature with power X or less.
Loyalty: 5
Red XWalker 1RR
+1 Up to one target creature gains Haste and Trample until end of turn.
-2 Target creature gains Double Strike until end of turn.
-XX Gain control of up to X target creatures until end of turn. Untap them. They gain haste until end of turn.
Loyalty: 2
Terminus already does that. The artifact/Enchantment parts of this card may as well not even be there. The only plus on it is that it can hit opposing Planeswalkers, but I'm not sure that is good enough.
The other three modes are precisely what make this card interesting. With aggro pushing everyone to play maindeck removal, and two of the best removal spells being Oblivion Ring and Detention Sphere, this card can greatly solidify a board position against control, unlike most other sweepers, which are basically blanked. Add splashability on top of that and I'm definitely willing to consider it on UWb and even Bant+b.
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...and people are complaining that it dies to Lightning Strike? Even though every other planeswalker in the current format already dies to the much more ubiquitous Hero's Downfall? O_O
I may be wrong, but I feel Kiora has a lot in common with what makes Jace good in Standard at the moment, and they complement each other really, really well. Add some extra support for Bant and RUG mana bases, and there's a lot of potential here...
Oh
God
Why
There are few five-mana plays that are significantly better on turn four (or three for that matter), and most of them involve a heavy color commitment. Frankly, the only reason I could see people maindecking 3-mana Keyrunes in an artifact-hostile, aggro-heavy environment is to ABSOLUTELY ensure you hit 1WWU on turn four, which Scry cards and Azorius Charm are already better at.
There is a valid point on Mana Bloom which I hadn't considered, though. The fact you can pass the turn with U open to Annul or Swan Song a key spell, while keeping turn three Advent of the Wurm, Supreme Verdict et. al. a possibility is very significant indeed. Too bad there's not a lot of things you can do with green devotion at the moment...
First of all, I am taking no stake on any strategy yet, at least not before heavily playtesting to confirm/deny my suspicions about the metagame. My original post is not a complaint; it merely tries to be an analysis based on card availability and evidence provided by the RTR meta.
Secondly, I am well aware of the best-case possibilities of Ordeal/multiple mana dorks, just as I am aware of the best-case possibilities of aggro. What I care about is the average scenario, and the cards being what they are, you are much more likely to have 8+ power on the board by turn three than you are of having either the right answers or the right card sequence to ramp and get ahead of their game. This is especially true if you consider follow-up, given that aggro/midrange will have committed less cards to obtain said advantage, and is more likely to have the time and resources to recover and finish you off.
Like I mentioned, the one unknown factor right now is Scry, and the amount of consistency it provides to slower and faster strategies both.
Once Theros becomes legal and M13 rotates out of Standard, the only means players will have of ramping to four mana on turn three will be creatures such as Sylvan Caryatid and Voyaging Satyr. While there is nothing wrong with these creatures by themselves, you can't play them in a control deck without significant anti-synergy with mass removal. This means that, at least for the next three months, creature-light control strategies are effectively one turn slower.
This lack of options to regulate tempo is important if you consider that multiple two-color combinations, including Boros, Rakdos, Gruul and Selesnya, can field eight or more points of damage worth of board presence by turn three, distributed among creatures that cannot be consistently answered by all removal spells at their costs, and after dealing five to seven damage on the previous turns. Creature quality tends to plateau at about four mana, with creatures costing five or more not being significantly stronger or more advantageous. Conversely, most defensive early-game creatures, including the aforementioned mana enablers, are consistently in range of burn, wide-range removal spells, and can't survive combat against aggressive creatures at their same cost. The increase in maindeck artifact/enchantment hate must also be factored in, making Keyrunes and Cluestones not only slower, but also inconsistent.
This means that any sort of tempo hiccup in the early game - a missed land drop, drawing or failing to draw an answer at the wrong time, etc. - is bound to cost the slower player a whole lot more than to your aggro opponent. A slow control against an aggro deck will likely mean you have to stabilize with as little as 5 life, well in range of burn spells. Control decks have to do too much in the first five turns of the game: draw lands, answer threats, stabilize the board, with tools that are significantly lesser quality than those their opponents can field.
The one factor that control strategies have going on for themselves is Scry. There are several useful early-game spells with Scry 1 or 2 tacked on. Nearly all of them incur in short-term card disadvantage, meaning that though draw quality is improved, players on both sides will have less cards to work on average during the midgame, ironically making games more susceptible to topdecked blowouts such as unanswered Sphinx's Revelation or Stormbreath Dragon. Also at the center of this are the Scrylands, which currently favor specific color combinations (none of which have access to or real need for quick board sweepers), and may themselves produce tempo inconsistencies during the early game, especially if drawn in multiples or in combination with shocklands.
After considering all these facts, I have to say I am concerned about early-game variability in Type 2. I fully expect competitive control and midrange decklists hitting 26 lands and more just to ensure they absolutely hit those fourth and fifth lands, not to mention dropping out color splashes. Consistency is the name of the game for Theros Standard, and Magic has never been particularly good at consistency in the absence of cheap cantrip effects.
How do we cheat this into play?
Not really. Some people just want to play the game with expensive/rare/hard-to-get cards. Which is, indeed, annoying.
And you know what the coolest thing is about games? You can choose not to play them for a while.
What really worries me is all the critical tools we'll be losing once M13 and Innistrad rotate. Two-mana acceleration is gone, two-mana quality burn is gone, most cheap answers to Voice of Resurgence, Boros Reckoner and Loxodon Smiter are gone, and most of the creatures above four mana provide only marginal benefits compared to those below this line.
What this means is that a LOT of tools to control early-game variance will be rotating out of Standard, leaving a considerable number of quality early-game threats and few reliable ways to answer them, nearly all of them requiring heavy commitment to a specific color pair. Given that most U/x and B/x guilds have significant holes on their strategies that are not being addressed on M14, any sort of slower archetype is bound to have trouble stabilizing.
Also keep in mind that, even though Theros could, in theory, be a very control-friendly expansion (unlikely given the theme and trend), there are only so many playable cards it can bring to Standard without destabilizing the format and warping the market. The odds of it bringing quality burn, acceleration, early-game countermagic and card draw, defensive creatures, mass removal and at the same time pleasing creature-centric players, are low.
I won't spell doom and the death of Magic as we know it because I've been around long enough to know we're nowhere near it, but I can't deny that I'm once again concerned about the health of the T2 metagame.
The armor is cool. Dodges some removal and is big enough to survive combat against some stuff in the format. It's probably too slow to see play in control decks, but we'll see...
White XWalker 2WW
+1 Creatures you control gain Lifelink until end of turn.
-2 Creatures you control get +2/+2 until end of turn.
-X Put X 1/1 white Soldier creature tokens into the battlefield.
Loyalty: 4
Black XWalker 2BB
+3 Target player draws a card and loses 1 life.
-2 Until end of turn, you may cast target creature card in your graveyard as if it were in your hand.
-XX All creatures get -X/-X until end of turn.
Loyalty: 3
Green XWalker 3GG
+2 You may play two additional lands this turn.
-3 Search your library for up to two land cards, reveal them, and put them in your hand. Then shuffle your library.
-X Target creature gets +X/+X and Trample until end of turn.
Loyalty: 6
Blue XWalker 4UU
+2 Return target permanent to its owner's hand.
-4 Draw 3 cards.
-X Gain control of target creature with power X or less.
Loyalty: 5
Red XWalker 1RR
+1 Up to one target creature gains Haste and Trample until end of turn.
-2 Target creature gains Double Strike until end of turn.
-XX Gain control of up to X target creatures until end of turn. Untap them. They gain haste until end of turn.
Loyalty: 2
*sigh*
The other three modes are precisely what make this card interesting. With aggro pushing everyone to play maindeck removal, and two of the best removal spells being Oblivion Ring and Detention Sphere, this card can greatly solidify a board position against control, unlike most other sweepers, which are basically blanked. Add splashability on top of that and I'm definitely willing to consider it on UWb and even Bant+b.