MTG Salvation

Quote from Undone

Sol ring, Crypt and Vault are broken. The tutors are not anywhere close to broken (especially the topdeck tutors as they are -1 card). Crypt is probably the biggest offender as its essentially a double timewalk on turn 1.

Uh, no, it's not. I'll take the two lands, two cards, and two opportunities to play things with my lands over Crypt.

Here's a couple highlights from my deck that does similar things.

• Teferi's Realm
  
• Storm Cauldron
  
• Shimmer
  
• Equipoise
  
• Destructive Flow
  
• Sands of Time
  
• Psychic Battle
  
• Crawlspace
  
• Collective Restraint
  

80% of the deck is going to be enchantments and artifacts so Cast Through Time is going to be a total brick.

They should make a modular banned list that rotates every quarter. Take out 20 cards every three months, then they come back in.

Obv great with mana doublers, Gaea's Cradle, Serra's Sanctum, etc.

Casting Cabal Conditioning after is nice too!

I played it in a 5-color aggro deck once and it sucked. I play it in my degenate mono-U combo deck and it's awesome. It's a situational card for sure.

People have one deck?! That is crazy.

I have 10. Try having two. That will literally double the variation you get out of this format.

(I get 900% more variety than you just from my own decks. Or whatever. Math is not my game.)

Quote from Reyemile

You're aware that the Sculpting Steel can't copy anything in this scenario and was a whiff, right?

...no.

Whoops. Thanks for the heads up.

3 player game; I'm playing Mono-Red Marton Stromgald tokens, buddy is playing Sharrum, last guy is playing Kresh sac/tokens.

With me at 12 permanents, Sharuum at 6 (!!), and Kresh at 10, I Warp World. Sharuum hits Magister Sphinx, Sculpting Steel, Platinum Emperion, in a row, and in that order. We lost.

I wish you the best of luck in convincing people that what you think is the truth by talking down to them and calling them terrible. Flies, honey, etc.

Besides that, you're ignoring the most pertinent critique here. "Staples" lists are, as a rule, too general to be useful beyond maybe a top 10 or so because the variability of the format is too great to distill it down in such a way. There's simply too much variation in what you can do within 99 cards in a singleton eternal format to say that Tangle Wire should go in almost every deck. This fact defeats your premise in that cards should be categorized by their function and not their type, as your objection to the classification by card type paradigm as too general to be useful can equally be applied to your proposal. With only a few exceptions, one card can serve very different functions in different decks. In fact, the number of categories you'd need to classify cards by "function" would make your system unintelligible.

And if you think Tangle Wire should be included in every deck, instead of just stating it and calling everyone who doesn't see the obvious truth in your statements poor players who play terrible cards, why don't you convince us that that is actually the case? I'm all ears.

I wrote an article on my blog trying to dissect the situation and trying to propose a solution. Don't mind the shameless self plug, but check it out.

http://nerdalert.thwomp.net/?p=505

Like it or not, this format attracts about the widest variety of Magic players you can find, both in terms of style and of play skill, to an arena where their relative styles and play skills have no bearing on who plays who.  To make matters worse, the card pool is exceptionally large and some very expensive and hard to find cards can make their way into decks; those players who have the benefit of having played for a long time and have a large collection have a massive advantage in card quality over players newer to the game.  On top of all this, there’s little way to tell ahead of time which player is which and which deck is which — people don’t come with glowing neon signs saying “15-year Magic vet with $2500 Commander deck”.  It’s a situation ripe for conflict, and will remain so unless the format is dramatically altered by changing the banned list.

I’m convinced that everyone reading this, whether you consider yourselves casual or competitive or a mix of both, has decks of varying power levels.  I’m willing to bet most people have a favorite deck, a crown jewel, that they tinker with and treasure like I do my Arcum deck.  I’m also willing to bet most people have a few stinkers.  While most of Player X’s decks are better than most of Player Y’s, Player X still has decks that lose to player Y’s decks given average draws and generally equal play skill.

So, here is my suggestion.  Designate your decks as Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3.  Do a self-analysis by comparing your deck’s success rate against your metagame and by considering how aggressively it was built.  Once your playgroup has done that, the next time you start a game, you can either designate the game as a tier 1, tier 2, or tier 3 game, where players can only use decks from that tier, or merely use the tiers as a guideline to evaluate the metagame of that specific game.  The first requires a little more planning a little more organization, and a little more formality, and a lot of people are allergic to that.  Therefore, the second solution is simply to give people an idea of what they’re up against.

The article contains more on how to evaluate your decks and what the metagame might look like on such a system.

What do you think? Do-able? Does it work?

It's been said on this forum that if Norin the Wary is your general, you can choose to move him to the command zone when being exiled and his trigger will still "find" him even though he's changed zones. This came up because I cast a Time Stop, thinking that would stick him in the exile zone permanently. This, of course, is not nearly as effective if he can simply be replayed from the command zone.

If this does indeed work, supposedly it's because the effect refers to "this card" and not "the exiled card", which requires it to be in the same zone. Thus, his effect will track him as long as he only changes zones once. Why only once? Does this work no matter which zone he's moved to?

I've tried to corroborate this in the comprehensive rules but I'm having trouble. The rule that was cited to back this up was:

406.2. To exile an object is to put it into the exile zone from whatever zone it’s currently in. An exiled card is a card that’s been put into the exile zone.

I don't see how that rule gets this interaction from point A to point B, so if it does work, surely there's something else going on.

Lastly, if this is what he's doing, does his "general tax" increase by two every time he goes to the command zone? Or does that increase only every time he's cast?

Thank you.

My Dralnu, Lich Lord deck is playing 1v1 against Marton Stromgald. Marton taps out for Eldrazi Monument with some beats on the board, turns sideways, and puts me to 1 life. He flashes Red Sun's Zenith and passes the turn.

I have 3 islands, Academy Ruins, and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth, and a Lightning Greaves. My hand is Cabal Coffers, Acquire, Frantic Search, and two lands. Things look real bad, man.

I untap and draw Palinchron. Play Cabal Coffers. I study the math for a little bit and realize that I'm short one land to recur Palinchron infinitely. My only possibility is to Acquire a mana doubler, play Frantic Search, and hope.

I tap everything but one isalnd (2[mana[/u], 6B), and Acquire, floating BBB. Manage to find a Gautlet of Power, naming blue. I tap my remaining Island and play Frantic Search, untapping two islands and Coffers. I draw Creeping Tar Pit and Swamp. I think I'm screwed. I have infinite mana now but nothing to do with it. I play Palinchron and get my infinite mana.

Playing Dralnu, equipping Greaves and casting Acquire again doesn't get me anything useful. So I play him and flashback Frantic Search, drawing Stroke of Genius for the win.

I'd like to chime in and agree with everything Slivortal said.

Quote from Dm225

Minor nitpick but Flayer of the Hatebound doesn't work with Living Death because Living Death puts them into play from exile, not the graveyard. Also @Reyn: Mind's Desire is banned unfortunately.

No it ain't.

Quote from bfellow

Horn of Greed doesn't trigger with this enchantment. You would need to play Exploration with Horn.

It's not for me. Opponent plays a land, they draw a card, trigger Mind's Eye, choose land, draw a land, play a land off the Burgeoning trigger. Then you've got a land up for the next Mind's Eye activation. Bam.

The budget constraints are certainly interesting. Wasteland, a card that probably should be in almost every deck, is quite a ways down the pile yet Strip Mine is one of the most-played lands. I find this interesting as in most cases the extra functionality of Strip Mine is not what the cards are being used for (problematic non-basics). Of course, Strip Mine can be had for $3 and Wasteland is $30+.

Also, no ABUR duals made the list, but most of the shocklands and fetches made it.

This would seem to indicate that the decklists on this site are skewed to the slightly-more budget conscious.

And yet, Mana Crypt, which is hard to be had at less than $70, makes an appearance.