MTG Salvation

I quite like the Priest, but I think I'll vote Mardu Charm, because the set's pretty dense in playables so I think a speculative pick is fine.

I'd probably allow the takeback there, unless the blocks had somehow given away information.

Amusing Cube game today. I have Ratchet Bomb for the opponent's morph, but decide not to pop it immediately because I want to Tinker with it (for Battlesphere). Turns out it's Nantuko Vigilante and blows up my Bomb, so I draw into Channel, channel out a Sundering Titan, copy my own Titan, then Force Spike his reanimation attempt.

Quote from jackspeed »

and I cast necropotence to turn devotion back on and win.

Aha! So Necropotence is good for something after all!

The allied colour pairs don't really have themes in Khans. Or rather, since they each appear in only one clan their themes are just the clan themes.

The enemy colour pairs, as mostly covered above, work out something like:

W/B: Warrior tribal
W/R: Aggro/racing
U/R: Spells/tempo
U/G: Morph
B/G: Big creatures

Quote from fnord »

The evaluations of that card (from people who are good) range from bad to one of the best commons.

Definitely not one of the best Commons, which I'm quite confident in without having played any of the set at all.

This card is functionally like bad, sorcery speed bounce most of the time. As such, Force Away is better in almost every situation and the cases where it isn't can't possibly come up often enough to make Singing Bell the stronger card. Crippling Chill is probably also better in most decks which would want Singing Bell. And both of those are in the same colour, so far from being the best Common I suspect Bell will often stay in the sideboard.

Cube is back on MtGO. Celebrated with a Grim Monolith powered Sneak Attack -> activate (Bogardan Hellkite) -> Karmic Guide. My opponent was on 13.

Regarding Incremental Growth: in Lorwyn I quite frequently played it on two of my creatures and one of the opponent's. That's still really good. If you actually have three creatures in play then it's effectively 6/6 worth of haste creature for 5 mana, which is better stats than any creature ever printed!

Quote from chenjesummrnmrhm »

How do you all feel about Herald of Anafenza? I think he's going to be bad without a wrath effect or outlast friends. Which is likely in Abzan, I suppose.

It's just too slow. The best Outlast cards will be the ones with the cheapest activation costs so that you can just grow them every turn until you're ready to win. This card will win games, but they'll mostly be games you were going to win anyway.

I'd like to play, please.

Quote from Promatim »

What do you guys think of the set so far? Too early to ask for drafting advice?

I'm cautiously optimistic so far. The big question for me is whether the set manages to dodge the "only five archetypes" problem which is the theme's natural risk. But at least it doesn't look way too fast this time.

The only drafting tip I have so far is the obvious suggestion that the common and uncommon land cycles should both be picked highly since there's a lot of card power reward for having decent multicolour support.

(Did I say five archetypes? Obviously Tahn's going to draft 5-colour again, so we'll have to count that as a sixth! ;))

Quote from smellyrebel »

Polymorphist's Jest doesn't change the name of the creatures.

It doesn't?! Oh, that's so sad! Spoils all the fun!

Quote from Puddle Jumper »

I don't exactly remember the Odyssey block standard metagame with much detail, but I mostly think of morphs consisting of Blistering Firecat and Exalted Angel.

It was Onslaught that had morphs and that was my first ever draft format, so I remember it pretty well. The thing about morph gameplay was it meant nobody ever missed their 3-drop and if they didn't have a 4-drop they could always play another 3. By the standards of modern Limited Magic that sounds pretty mediocre, but back then a 2/2 for 3 was a lot faster and a lot closer to playable. There were a couple of 2/2s for 2 in that format and if you got one down on turn two and followed with a morph on the play your opponent was under serious pressure.

The classic morph play was attacking into an X/2 enemy blocker with Mountains up. If the opponent blocked they were risking Battering Craghorn, but if they didn't it could be Skirk Commando. Gary Wise hated this situation, but actually despite the fact it feels random the decision to block or not depended on your hand, so it was moderately skill testing. The other interesting morphs were the Blue ones, with Echo Tracer being interesting and hard to play right and Raven Guild Initiate (later in the block) turning out to be surprisingly playable. Plus, of course, Willbender - forget about it and lose!

Quote from smellyrebel »

Here's the deck I ran for those curious.

Ooh, nice! Particularly pleased to see Polymorphist's Jest in there with Staticaster!

Regarding playing on camera: Every time I have ever played a game of anything on camera or watched a friend's matches I've always been struck by how many errors get made. My theory is that I make these errors all the time and just don't usually notice. With stuff like waiting to play removal it's even worse, because unless the opponent has the trick it's much harder to spot that it even was a misplay.

Quote from Sene »

Surely you just slam him on turn 2 95% of the time?

Maybe, but that's certainly not obvious to me. Cast as a morph on turn three you have access to six mana on turn four if it survives. I can easily imagine a hand - at least in Limited - where that seems like an appealing option. Depends a little on how good morphs are, though. If killing your opponent's unidentified morph is always good play then that's going to spoil a lot of otherwise appealing options.

Quote from Tahn »

These seem like the only correct statistics to me.

OMG, those are my exact stats!

Quote from Tahn »

As for Block Constructed, good riddance. The format is virtually always miserable. I think the last one that wasn't, was Time Spiral block. Which probably had almost as many cards as Standard usually has.

Players who like Block tend to do so for the "unsolved" feel it has at the start of a season. There's a (false?) sense that nobody knows what's good and you could brew some crazy deck and win a GP with it.

What do you people think of the new block structure? Seems like a really good thing for Limited, at least. :-D

Quote from Amadi »

I certainly wouldn't pick it over Yeti, Senjin, Silver Hand Knight, Harvest Golem or even Boulderfist Ogre, unless I felt I really needed the earlygame.

It's not close to Yeti or Silver Hand, but it's about equal to Ogre and better than Golem. The main reason is that there is no card in the whole game which is redundant with it, whereas whilst Golem is a good 3-drop there are lots of good 3-drops and likewise late drops (although Ogre is admittedly one of the best late drops).