The Rack is seeing some action now. Antiquities versions are jumping more than time shifted versions. This has been in the works somewhat slowly. This is likely the 8-rack effect. In a similar vein, I also note that Blackmail is increasing in price. I have presumed that this is somehow related to Waste Not being printed. Blackmail allows you some flexibility in what to get with Waste not effect which balances the fact that your opponent will be hiding their best card.
Antiquities Tron also creeping up. I suspect it will only do so until the prices double. The new border tron lands are cool because they satisfy the kid in me that likes all my cards to be foil and have the same border. The adult in me likes the diversity of art and the nostalgic old borders in the antiquities version. The appropriate recipe here would be a set of judge foil promos depicting all the original 12 arts in the new border!!
@illinest: I'm definately liking your use of Varolz in your example but I don't think it will end up getting a lot more for the investment (only one additional counter for each scavenge). Here's the first deck I'm going to build with Hardeng Scales.
I think this deck would be hysterical to play. Scavenging Ooze might not go too well with Varolz but you would try to eat your opponents yard first with the ooze. You would have to avoid using the Oran-Rief, The Vastwood when you first play Strangleroot Geist but after that it would be all good. Gyre Sage should be able to get pretty big in this deck and could also help power out Garruk or mass scavenge your yard for an alpha strike.
Lightning bolt hitting for 3 damage is a little more powerful as a potential win condition in modern than in legacy given that many decks are starting with 16-17 life by the time they get some mana down.
Come and play magic's greatest format!! No we can't print new cards to support it. So we thought we would just put a lot of time and energy into letting 2 flavors of delver and a few iterations of SFM hack it out until there isn't a dual land left to be bought and let the floor fall out from under this project. Deck building is so streamlined and easy that you really only need to build a 45-50 card deck - as a bonus the rest of the deck just builds itself (we aren't reprinting those cards either).
*void where prohibited. Some restrictions apply.
Really?! Modern May have 99 problems but a reserved list land base ain't one.
@endgame1331: I don't hate legacy with a passion. I have collected all the cards I want and more, but what use are these riches without people to play with. I can build any legacy deck without candelabras or Tabarnacle at pendrel vale but it's almost pointless to innovate new decks beyond the kitchen table with the legacy card pool. The top 8's are basically the same decks over and over again unless you are a real leagacy affectionado and can appreciate nuances that make dropping a FoW for a singleton misdirection a great game changing deck manipulation. When most of the top 8's have the same core of some combination of delvers, FoW, Daze, Brainstorm, and Stoneforge mystic, it's easy to seehow legacy has grinded down to a few good decks and a few lucky players getting into the top 8. These are not my sentiments alone:
Dakra Mystic - I love this card. This card is deceptively good, imho, and I'm surprised I haven't seen more discussion of it.
One drop, check. Relevant tribe, check. Ways to break the synergy practically built in, check.
A deck equipped to use the graveyard as a resource could abuse this card (it's in colour with SCM). There are a few related abilities coming up that may also have some synery; Jace, Living Guildpact and Dimir charm also work at setting the top of your deck while simulataneously sculpting your yard. All of these cards can work to set up miracles (Dakra mystic allowing for readily casting miracles conveniently set on top of the library on your opponents turn). I think the pieces are coming together for a sturdy BU reanimator deck.
Can be used with courser of kruphix to fix draws to some extent. Courser is already a pretty good card by itself.
Dakra Mystic and Spirit of the labyrinth can give you a limited fate steal ability if used on opponents upkeep while still allowing you to draw an extra card. Spirit of the labyrinth is also a good card by itself.
Dakra Mystic could be good with Notion Thief in a controlling type deck for activations on opponents turns.
@endgame1331: Nothing to date is more stagnant than watching legacy. This being said, magic is a little like watching professional sports. Everyone has their favorite team(s) and you get get to watch your favorite team do well. If your favortie team is *insert *****ty football team here*, you can still be a fan of the game but your favorite team never goes to the superbowl. The top teams in professional sports most often rise to the top with a few surprising upsets. Outside of magic we often find ourselves rooting for the underdog after our favorite team has been knocked out - I think the same kinds of things happen in magic. I don't know that watching the best sports teams always (often) winning counts as stagnation. It's not that "team X has won again, big shocker in this stale format called NFL/NBA", it's a little more like how they won, the plays that make the game great.
Watching 4 year olds playing soccer never gets stale. I love it when they score in their own net (assuming they don't get beat up later)! Cute as this may be, it's not what I'm looking for when I watch World cup with more enthusiasm. Sure we have a pretty good idea who is going to be in the finals already, but it's as much the upsets and heroic plays that make the game worth watching as much as the sleek moves of the finely tuned upper tiered (favored) teams.
Modern being removed from the pro-tour felt like a financial decision. My observations from these boards over the last year started with the most people viewing the standard threads followed by legacy, then modern, then vintage. Over time it seemed to be standard, then modern, then legacy, then vintage. I was concerned about the trend occuring when I most often saw the most viewers in the modern thread with standard following not that closely behind. This trend seemed concerning (im my mind) because it heralds the requisite loss/decrease of revenue from the standard arm of this game, along with the attendant increase in belly aching regarding the price of modern. Pushing/supporting modern too robustly would be an expensive mistake that would be too easy to make. Watching standards 2 - 4 decks duke it out week-in and week-out in addition to the PT 4 times/year is not the picture of witality/innovation.
Long live Modern, good riddance to Legacy, peace and prosperity to Standard.
fulminator Mage could be reprinted anywhere (but more likely a MM product). If it is reprinted in a standard legal set, this card will drop in price a lot because it's a sideboard card in RB (depending on standard support - would be great in black devotion...).
Grove might not be reprinted for sometime given it's appearance in FTV. Because it has seen a reprint already, It might get overlooked for a card in need of a first reprinting (horizon canopy).
Anybody know why Squelch is rising in price so steeply?
Technically 'modern' is dead as soon as M15 frames came out. (Ie the 8th to current frame run is over).
Prices should drift down and unless we see MM2, maybe Modern is a dead format. But who knows, I love the format and I won't stop playing. (This reminds me of the death of Type 1/Vintage, then Legacy, then death of Extended... same basic Wizards pattern).
They basically turn their back on it and don't look back.
What?
Is any of this real besides the fact that you love the format?
I have all the pieces to build a legacy Lands.dec except for the [tabernacle. I'm not even considering putting it together because I feel like tabernacle is just that crucial. There will never be a deck like Lands in modern competitive (in my humble opinion). It only works through elements (several) that are very unlikely to see modern play (manabond anyone?). There are too many missing pieces that are not expected to ever become available.
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Antiquities Tron also creeping up. I suspect it will only do so until the prices double. The new border tron lands are cool because they satisfy the kid in me that likes all my cards to be foil and have the same border. The adult in me likes the diversity of art and the nostalgic old borders in the antiquities version. The appropriate recipe here would be a set of judge foil promos depicting all the original 12 arts in the new border!!
4 Dryad Militant
3 Scavenging Ooze
2 Gyre Sage
4 Strangleroot Geist
2 Varolz, The Scar-Striped
4 Leatherback Baloth
3 Kalonian Tusker
2 Abrupt Decay
4 Rancor
4 Hardened Scales
1 Garruk, Primal Hunter
4 Oran-Reif, The Vastwood
4 Verdant Catacombs
4 Overgrown Tomb
1 Swamp
9 Forest
I think this deck would be hysterical to play. Scavenging Ooze might not go too well with Varolz but you would try to eat your opponents yard first with the ooze. You would have to avoid using the Oran-Rief, The Vastwood when you first play Strangleroot Geist but after that it would be all good. Gyre Sage should be able to get pretty big in this deck and could also help power out Garruk or mass scavenge your yard for an alpha strike.
I might try Garruk Wildspeaker instead of Primal Hunter because I think it would be awesome to untap Oran-Rief the Vastwood for extra laughs!
Any thoughts as to undying triggering the Hardened Scales effect? (I'm still building this deck anyways!).
Lightning bolt hitting for 3 damage is a little more powerful as a potential win condition in modern than in legacy given that many decks are starting with 16-17 life by the time they get some mana down.
*void where prohibited. Some restrictions apply.
Really?! Modern May have 99 problems but a reserved list land base ain't one.
Yet another unfounded legacy is dieing article...
Leaving legacy after years of innovating...
Legacy is fun for a little bit but modern has a world of possibilities yet to be discovered.
One drop, check. Relevant tribe, check. Ways to break the synergy practically built in, check.
A deck equipped to use the graveyard as a resource could abuse this card (it's in colour with SCM). There are a few related abilities coming up that may also have some synery; Jace, Living Guildpact and Dimir charm also work at setting the top of your deck while simulataneously sculpting your yard. All of these cards can work to set up miracles (Dakra mystic allowing for readily casting miracles conveniently set on top of the library on your opponents turn). I think the pieces are coming together for a sturdy BU reanimator deck.
Can be used with courser of kruphix to fix draws to some extent. Courser is already a pretty good card by itself.
Dakra Mystic and Spirit of the labyrinth can give you a limited fate steal ability if used on opponents upkeep while still allowing you to draw an extra card. Spirit of the labyrinth is also a good card by itself.
Dakra Mystic could be good with Notion Thief in a controlling type deck for activations on opponents turns.
Watching 4 year olds playing soccer never gets stale. I love it when they score in their own net (assuming they don't get beat up later)! Cute as this may be, it's not what I'm looking for when I watch World cup with more enthusiasm. Sure we have a pretty good idea who is going to be in the finals already, but it's as much the upsets and heroic plays that make the game worth watching as much as the sleek moves of the finely tuned upper tiered (favored) teams.
Modern being removed from the pro-tour felt like a financial decision. My observations from these boards over the last year started with the most people viewing the standard threads followed by legacy, then modern, then vintage. Over time it seemed to be standard, then modern, then legacy, then vintage. I was concerned about the trend occuring when I most often saw the most viewers in the modern thread with standard following not that closely behind. This trend seemed concerning (im my mind) because it heralds the requisite loss/decrease of revenue from the standard arm of this game, along with the attendant increase in belly aching regarding the price of modern. Pushing/supporting modern too robustly would be an expensive mistake that would be too easy to make. Watching standards 2 - 4 decks duke it out week-in and week-out in addition to the PT 4 times/year is not the picture of witality/innovation.
Long live Modern, good riddance to Legacy, peace and prosperity to Standard.
Grove might not be reprinted for sometime given it's appearance in FTV. Because it has seen a reprint already, It might get overlooked for a card in need of a first reprinting (horizon canopy).
Anybody know why Squelch is rising in price so steeply?
What?
Is any of this real besides the fact that you love the format?