MTG Salvation

Phenax wears a gold mask very similar to the ones the Returned wear. Is there anything else in lore tying him to them?

Quote from Vestar

god bless him for having the courage to speak the truth. he got fed to the lions, as do most christians who have the audacity to speak their beliefs in today's society.

I'm sorry to hear of Mr. Robertson's death. When I saw him interviewed on television earlier today he seemed quite healthy.

To be fair, his suggestion to "Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there" does seem to me like pretty good advice.

It's so weird to me that everyone is flipping out about his speech on the Evils of Manlove, which is the completely normal, standard party line for an evangelical conservative - something we've all heard a million times.

Everybody knew that this guy was the evangelical-conservative reality star -- that's his entire schtick. Even I knew it, and I've never seen the show.

So, an evangelical conservative is a homophobe. Shock and amazement!

Meanwhile, his truly bizarre and aberrant remarks about how sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South were all happy and content and zippy-de-doo-dah until that pesky Civil Rights Movement came along and gave them ideas above their station is being totally ignored.

Because that was not just a weird thing to say, but a weird thing that has been publically repudiated by even the most traditionally racist of southern religious groups.

His homophobia is nothing surprising - we all hear that stuff weekly from one pundit or another. If he were on a different network, he could get paid specifically to go on TV and talk about how gay sex is the root of all that ails America, and no one would blink an eye.

But his racism is some serious out-of-left-field ****. I don't get how no one is talking about it.

[edit: ok, no one except the guy quoted extensively in the second post above mine.]

Quote from whitemage82

I'm not asking for sugar and rainbows, just a deviation from all this seriousness. Lorwyn had this feeling for me.

Funny, to me Theros comes across as pretty noble and white-knight-y. Not just the flavor but even the new mechanics - Devotion, Heroic - seem to give an impression of brave souls striving for virtue, as compared to the squabbling factions of Ravnica where no one is really in the right.

I love the Ravnica setting, but the conflicts there are so political and shades-of-grey, while Theros seems much more epic and morally uncomplicated in feel.

YMMV. I actually found the Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block storyline a bit grim, what with everybody turning evil and losing their memories and so on.

I had a similar question about Keiga, the Tide Star.

His ability reads "gain control of target creature" -- ever so slightly different from simply "you control target creature". The card has to be a creature for you to gain control of it, but once you control it, does it matter how the type changes?

Quote from Neuroticneurok

Therosian Demons are some of the most amoral beings on the plane

What's the lore on this? Looks like Abhorrent Overlord is the only actual demon card we have so far.

Quote from JWK

Geist of St. Traft - it's really more of a theme deck - "Holy Spirits" - than a true tribal deck, but runs lots each of Spirits, Angels and Clerics.

That's kind of what I'm shooting for too - does it work well for you? What's the deck list?

I'm trying to make UW Spirits work under Geist of Saint Traft, and I'm trying to make WG Elementals work under Trostani, Selesnya's Voice. Neither is working very well!

Quote from hyugafan

This might just be me overstating things, but I feel like commanders that interact directly from the command zone were a mistake.

I agree, but not because it's over-powered. Varying power levels are fine in EDH - it was never supposed to be a strictly balanced format.

I don't like it because the card was all too obviously designed to be a commander and only that. The fun of a commander deck is choosing a legendary, putting them in a new context than the standard game they were originally designed for, and seeing what happens.

A card that has been optimized precisely for the format wrecks the whole point of what the format is about, seems to me.

The same goes for Derevi with her command-zone-only ability.

aw, dang... I wish I hadn't asked so I could carry on using my awesome banned card.

Thanks, guys.

I'm putting together a Talrand, Sky Summoner EDH deck. I was thinking of including both Last Thoughts and Panoptic Mirror, but I'm not completely certain how they'll interact with his ability.

Last Thoughts says "cast a copy of the encoded card" which I'm pretty sure will trigger one of Talrand's drakes. But Panoptic Mirror says "copy a spell and play the copy". Is that just a slightly different way of saying the same thing, or does it make an important difference to Talrand?

Is the word "cast" important here in the same way that the technicality of including a colon with the activation cost is definitional of activated abilities?

And what about the many cards that just say "copy a spell and choose new targets"? Is that close enough to casting a spell to make a drake or not?

Thanks!

Quote from 5colors

Quote from RedSocialKnight »

The Agent of Horizons is an "acolyte" of Kruphix tho, right?

I don't think he is.

???

You don't think that the flavor text about priests of the god of horizons refers to the Agent of Horizons on which that text appears, given that the text refers to those priests having the power to "walk unseen" and the agent's ability is to become unblockable?

[sorry if I was mistaken in seeing your sentence as a reply to mine.]

Quote from hairlessThoctar

Auntie is a genderless term for boggarts.

As is mother?