Not throwing a bone to established players is absolutely the stupidest possible thing to do with a Magic product. You're pushing 99% of your customers away in order to gain quite literally nothing at all. The argument they keep running with that new players can't get their hands on it because enfranchised players snap it all up is brain-meltingly stupid.
Just. Print. More.
It's like they hate money or something, but we know that's not true so I don't get why they keep trotting out this empirically incorrect theory that flies in the face of all of the data and elementary logic as to why new players aren't buying their intro products.
Intro Decks are a perfect example: They used to be good, so existing players bought them for their contents. WotC saw that... I guess... too many people were buying them? Oh noooooo! So they made them dramatically worse on purpose. Then nobody bought them anymore. There was never any magical uptick in new player purchases as a result. Then WotC saw they weren't selling and scrapped them... instead of just making them good again.
Y'all are ******* funny. This set is a gift to two groups: 1) EDH players in the market for duals who can't quite afford them yet, and 2) investors with deep pockets.
Neither of which really care that these aren't tournament legal.
They stated pretty clearly that duals and duals alone will drop at an accelerated rate (making it VERY obvious the intended purpose of opening these exorbitantly expensive packs). This means that, for a while at least, there will be a cheaper option available for anyone who wants it by buying singles on the secondary market.
Meanwhile this is a limited release product with BANANAS EV, so anyone who can afford to snatch some up and wait a year will see INSANE return on investment. There's potential for this to surpass CE and ICE in terms of RoI.
And of course WotC makes an absolute killing selling cardboard for outrageous prices and giving the whiny brats who defend the reserved list the middle finger (which I think we can all agree is the biggest win here).
It is unfortunate that Legacy/Vintage players get the shaft with this product being non-tournament-legal, but WotC have made it pretty clear they hate those formats already so its nothing to get mad about. Everyone else? This is either something you were never going to be interested in so the crazy price doesn't matter, or its a god-tier windfall.
Waitwaitwait. You rate no max hand size higher than drawing 1-20 cards? What? No max hand size isn't even worth a SINGLE card, let alone an average 10.5 of them. Please tell me I'm missing the sarcasm here.
Drawing more than 7 cards is pretty bad if you have to discard to handsize immediately after. That's why the effect granting unlimited handsize is important.
I'm so confused by this logic. Why is drawing more than 7 bad in any way shape or form? If you draw 20, you sculpt a perfect 7 card hand and stock your graveyard with juicy reanimation/snapcaster/etc. targets or simply dump the cards you don't need. Unlimited handsize has to be one of the least useful abilities you could put on a card, which is why they tacked it onto the best dragon's effect for free. There's a reason Reliquary Tower sees little to no play anymore, the benefit (unlim hand) is just absolutely not worth the drawback (colorless land). Spellbook costs 0 and nobody plays that since its overcosted.
the impossible happened probably the rarest moment in modern times of magic
green got the worst one in the cycle
red makes treasures
blue gives you atleast 1 or more card draw but more importantly forever infinite hand sized
black Gives recursion (if you don’t roll bad)
white makes a bunch of flying 1/1's
and green……pumps two creatures
And the boardwipe is beautiful if your ridiculously behind and only have 1-3 creatures
Waitwaitwait. You rate no max hand size higher than drawing 1-20 cards? What? No max hand size isn't even worth a SINGLE card, let alone an average 10.5 of them. Please tell me I'm missing the sarcasm here.
Instant staple. Very pushed for the cost. The chances of someone tutoring in a game of EDH approaches 100% asymptotically, so you'll always at least get a 2 mana 2/2 and draw a card, then trade it for removal, which is obviously fantastic. If you draw a second card (which you absolutely will unless someone kills it) then this thing is bananas. Best card in the set so far not close.
i loathe the toxicity that is group hug and kingmaker strategies in edh more than any other strategy or aspect of the format.
i love the art and flavor of this card, i just hate the kingmaking group hug aspect of it so much that any game against this thing (or anything like it) you will immediately become the target just to keep you from dictating who is allowed to win on YOUR merit over their own.
Can't agree more. Nobody who runs group hug does it to make the game more fun, they do it to ruin the game and feel like a powerful puppet-master while 'abstaining' and often get incredibly salty when you see through their facade and kill them before they can kingmake. Absolutely miserable strategy, kill on sight.
That said, this card is deceptively powerful when played in a straightforward fashion. You can often pick someone without creatures for the first part, draw the card yourself, and give the player with an empty hand the treasure, or some similar permutation. Politics obviously complicate the math further. At the end of the day you've got more-or-less a phyrexian arena in the command zone.
Geez, the amount of frothing churlish hate people have for the mere prospect of other people enjoying things differently than they do is staggering. I'm glad that WotC is smart enough to ignore the screeching minority here and continue doing crossovers people enjoy, UB obviously makes a lot of people happy (and I'm one of those people).
As a side benefit, gatekeeping brats seem inclined to drum themselves out of playgroups entirely by refusing to play with a litany of specific players instead of just enjoying the game. Its always delicious when a turd vindictively declares that they won't play with X, expecting others to agree with them, the entire room goes "K" and then said turd is unable to find a game until they grow up or leave.
Super hyped for the Tyranid deck, and am in fact in the process of gluing together 18 warriors right now. It'll probably be a jank garbage deck but I'm still building it
Here's hoping for The Swarmlord and Old One-Eye as commander options! Legitimately curious what the mechanic is going to be, ngl gonna be bummed if its just slivers lol.
Eh, he's super medium. Body isn't efficient, effect is nice but isn't going to do as much as people seem to think by the time you cast him. If he were 2-3 mana at any size he'd be excellent, but 5 mana for a mediocre draw engine strapped to a mediocre stax piece is not a good rate.
He likely won't see any play outside of a deck he helms where you can build around his positive text, and occasionally hosing someone's draw from time to time will just be icing.
Is there a particular reason you want to bring down the power level on an already fairly janky commander? He caps out pretty low already, but I get it if you're playing against precons on the regular.
That said, I guess you can run spellslinger and ignore his mechanics entirely for the juke?
Collect these if you want.
However, these are NOT Magic: The Gathering Cards!
Also, did anyone else recently get their Phyrexian praetors (and other) drops delivered?
The packaging changed and shrank.
I was surprised to see drops no longer come in those nice black boxes.
I mean, the boxes were always cheap-yet-overproduced garbage that took up too much space, at least now they take up less space?
We had a weekly "Gauntlet" event on Sundays in Ottawa for close to 10 years until the organizers moved on.
Round 1: 4-player pod, no infinite combos. 1 point per player killed, 1 point for last-person-standing.
Round 2: 2 v 2, but players on same team were diagonal from each other like so:
XY
YX
You could table talk but if you wanted to ask about casting a card in your hand, for example, you had to show the whole table.
Round 3: 1 v 1
You had to use the same deck throughout, so you got some pretty neat showings. Ad Naus won a lot, but then meta adjusted and Thalia, Guardian of Thraben shows up, or Thrun, or Azusa. Entrance was $5 store credit and it was split among top...8? I think. It's been a while.
Wizard's Tower did pre-con leagues pre-pandemic, everyone got a pre-con and you all battled in a pod of 4. Then next week you could add $X in upgrades to your deck, based on non-foil pricing at the store. Then $50 upgrade, then $100+. Sometimes you got ganged on and it sucked waiting for the next round, but overall it was pretty fun.
It really is a matter of time until Wizards does this on its own, they don't really need the RC or CAG either way, and they could even incentivize players by allowing the big event winner to make a custom legendary. The salty streamers would have no choice but to get on board because, believe me, they would love to see their face on a Magic card.
60 card formats just aren't worth it these days because they severely lack the kind of variance that a format like EDH / Commander provides. In a 60 card format you're guaranteed to make the exact same plays as If going on auto-pilot because you have 3-4 of playsets of the same card to dramatically increase your odds of winning. In 99 card Singleton no play is the exact same unless you tutor. It seems as though the lines are starting to become more blurred on this the more functionally identical cards are printed with different names in order to make these decks more consistent than they should be.
To continue this tangent: A lot of people REALLY value consistency. Myself included. The first cards that go in any blue deck for me are Ponder, Preordain, and Brainstorm. Variance is an extremely dirty word lol. If I build a deck to do a thing, I damn well want it to do that thing. Not everyone specifically seeks out a lack of variance, but I think everyone CAN get on board with with the fact that its incredibly frustrating when your deck doesn't 'do what it's supposed to do.'
Now everything else in your post made sense, but this point doesn't. WotC does massively unpopular things all the time in order to make money. If they thought that taking control of Commander would help them make money, they wouldn't start by somehow infiltrating, bribing, or coercing the RC into banning the most popular commander in the format. They'd just take it over and be done with it. At least, that's what seems most likely to me.
I know this is the prevailing thought, but its tragically untrue. The folks at WotC really do care, much more than the RC does at least, they just don't always hit the mark. Discussions with multiple members of R&D and playtesting have yielded the same impression (thinly veiled by NDA-safe equivocating): They dearly want to take over the format, but they're petrified that there will be an enormous backlash from a small but vocal section of the playerbase. At the end of the day they can tell Sheldon to do whatever they want (and have, look at the Unstable amnesty) but they refuse to take that last big step until its obvious that they'll not get torched on social media for it.
And they're not wrong in this thinking, remember how childish and stupid Mitch got after UB, and how he and other influencers tried to rip the format in half in their froth?
The fact that anyone thinks Golos is banworthy really makes me feel like we're playing completely different games.
Is he strong? Eh. He's just a ramp/value engine for a durdly deck. Which is what average players always profess to want out of a game of EDH. I played him for a while and he was fun but not broken.
If he were broken I could see some validity to the argument that he smothers diversity (ie: if he were the best option for 5c commander) but since he's just a solid catch-all commander that doesn't do any one thing particularly well there's TONS of more effective options for almost every conceivable strategy.
If you want to be competitive you play Kenrith or Najeela.
If you want to play tribal you play Morophon.
If you want to be aggressive you play Scion or maybe Slivers.
If you want to play dragons you play Ur Dragon or Tiamat.
If you want to ramp and durdle, yeah I guess you play Golos.
Golos is never about doing the most broken thing, that's not what he does. So I don't see him being the most popular commander as a result of his power level, I see it as a result of casual EDH players just loving ramp and durdle strategies. And there's nothing wrong with that, so why take away casual players' toys? The ban just seems gratuitous, and as much as I hate 'spirit of the format' arguments, removing Golos looks an awful lot like a dagger aimed directly at the 'spirit of the format' and any other explanation feels disingenuous.
To indulge in some conspiracy theory:
Coupled with a Worldfire unban, which is definitely against the 'spirit of the format' as the RC lays it out (regardless of the fact that the card is bad), I'm curious as to whether this announcement is setting the stage for something greater. The ban/unban both coming out of left field with no valid explanation for either, and the way both seem almost specifically designed to piss off the playerbase makes me think maybe this is the first salvo in the RC sabotaging its own reputation so that WotC can finally swoop in and fix the format without enraging the more petulant and vocal members of their consumer base.
Just. Print. More.
It's like they hate money or something, but we know that's not true so I don't get why they keep trotting out this empirically incorrect theory that flies in the face of all of the data and elementary logic as to why new players aren't buying their intro products.
Intro Decks are a perfect example: They used to be good, so existing players bought them for their contents. WotC saw that... I guess... too many people were buying them? Oh noooooo! So they made them dramatically worse on purpose. Then nobody bought them anymore. There was never any magical uptick in new player purchases as a result. Then WotC saw they weren't selling and scrapped them... instead of just making them good again.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
Neither of which really care that these aren't tournament legal.
They stated pretty clearly that duals and duals alone will drop at an accelerated rate (making it VERY obvious the intended purpose of opening these exorbitantly expensive packs). This means that, for a while at least, there will be a cheaper option available for anyone who wants it by buying singles on the secondary market.
Meanwhile this is a limited release product with BANANAS EV, so anyone who can afford to snatch some up and wait a year will see INSANE return on investment. There's potential for this to surpass CE and ICE in terms of RoI.
And of course WotC makes an absolute killing selling cardboard for outrageous prices and giving the whiny brats who defend the reserved list the middle finger (which I think we can all agree is the biggest win here).
It is unfortunate that Legacy/Vintage players get the shaft with this product being non-tournament-legal, but WotC have made it pretty clear they hate those formats already so its nothing to get mad about. Everyone else? This is either something you were never going to be interested in so the crazy price doesn't matter, or its a god-tier windfall.
That said, this card is deceptively powerful when played in a straightforward fashion. You can often pick someone without creatures for the first part, draw the card yourself, and give the player with an empty hand the treasure, or some similar permutation. Politics obviously complicate the math further. At the end of the day you've got more-or-less a phyrexian arena in the command zone.
As a side benefit, gatekeeping brats seem inclined to drum themselves out of playgroups entirely by refusing to play with a litany of specific players instead of just enjoying the game. Its always delicious when a turd vindictively declares that they won't play with X, expecting others to agree with them, the entire room goes "K" and then said turd is unable to find a game until they grow up or leave.
Super hyped for the Tyranid deck, and am in fact in the process of gluing together 18 warriors right now. It'll probably be a jank garbage deck but I'm still building it
Here's hoping for The Swarmlord and Old One-Eye as commander options! Legitimately curious what the mechanic is going to be, ngl gonna be bummed if its just slivers lol.
He likely won't see any play outside of a deck he helms where you can build around his positive text, and occasionally hosing someone's draw from time to time will just be icing.
Will probably see standard play?
That said, I guess you can run spellslinger and ignore his mechanics entirely for the juke?
I mean, the boxes were always cheap-yet-overproduced garbage that took up too much space, at least now they take up less space?
To continue this tangent: A lot of people REALLY value consistency. Myself included. The first cards that go in any blue deck for me are Ponder, Preordain, and Brainstorm. Variance is an extremely dirty word lol. If I build a deck to do a thing, I damn well want it to do that thing. Not everyone specifically seeks out a lack of variance, but I think everyone CAN get on board with with the fact that its incredibly frustrating when your deck doesn't 'do what it's supposed to do.'
I know this is the prevailing thought, but its tragically untrue. The folks at WotC really do care, much more than the RC does at least, they just don't always hit the mark. Discussions with multiple members of R&D and playtesting have yielded the same impression (thinly veiled by NDA-safe equivocating): They dearly want to take over the format, but they're petrified that there will be an enormous backlash from a small but vocal section of the playerbase. At the end of the day they can tell Sheldon to do whatever they want (and have, look at the Unstable amnesty) but they refuse to take that last big step until its obvious that they'll not get torched on social media for it.
And they're not wrong in this thinking, remember how childish and stupid Mitch got after UB, and how he and other influencers tried to rip the format in half in their froth?
Is he strong? Eh. He's just a ramp/value engine for a durdly deck. Which is what average players always profess to want out of a game of EDH. I played him for a while and he was fun but not broken.
If he were broken I could see some validity to the argument that he smothers diversity (ie: if he were the best option for 5c commander) but since he's just a solid catch-all commander that doesn't do any one thing particularly well there's TONS of more effective options for almost every conceivable strategy.
If you want to be competitive you play Kenrith or Najeela.
If you want to play tribal you play Morophon.
If you want to be aggressive you play Scion or maybe Slivers.
If you want to play dragons you play Ur Dragon or Tiamat.
If you want to ramp and durdle, yeah I guess you play Golos.
Golos is never about doing the most broken thing, that's not what he does. So I don't see him being the most popular commander as a result of his power level, I see it as a result of casual EDH players just loving ramp and durdle strategies. And there's nothing wrong with that, so why take away casual players' toys? The ban just seems gratuitous, and as much as I hate 'spirit of the format' arguments, removing Golos looks an awful lot like a dagger aimed directly at the 'spirit of the format' and any other explanation feels disingenuous.
To indulge in some conspiracy theory:
Coupled with a Worldfire unban, which is definitely against the 'spirit of the format' as the RC lays it out (regardless of the fact that the card is bad), I'm curious as to whether this announcement is setting the stage for something greater. The ban/unban both coming out of left field with no valid explanation for either, and the way both seem almost specifically designed to piss off the playerbase makes me think maybe this is the first salvo in the RC sabotaging its own reputation so that WotC can finally swoop in and fix the format without enraging the more petulant and vocal members of their consumer base.