Eh, if the limited format gets super grindy, I would play this card. Find the best 3 remaining cards in your deck will probably win you the game. Also, this is an EDH all star...shame I dislike using tutors in edh. Format is singleton for a reason.
So...Jace and Dark Dwellers got a new friend.
Also, Aggro deck probably get a boon from people playing and flashing back this card.
It will probably be 3-4 of in decks that run it and will be the first card cut in the aggro match up.
Maybe time to find some good sources of lifegain if Kalitas does not cut the mustard.
Also, is the Promo version from the Buy-a-box or is it for Gamesday Top 8?
Nevermind, it is the top 8 promo.
First off the ability is not bad looting, it is Rummaging.
Secondly rummaging is worse than looting, as surprisingly red's filters should be worse than blue's.
Thirdly, I am sorta glad that they are not creating game ending walker ultimates anymore, but considering that the best standard creatures
to cheat into play do their effects on cast instead of ETB, Shadows will have to show something very powerful cost efficient to make me want to even bother ulting...(and yes I know, walkers should not be evaluated by this metric, Nahiri just feels more flavor text-y than usual).
As for Nahiri, I honestly do not know what to think. So I will break her down by format.
Limited.
She is a walker, she filters to find your more powerful cards, enables madness, she has a good starting loyalty and at worse she is a conditional exile effect for creatures and artifacts, as well as some passive enchantment hate. Seems good and no limited deck that can support her will ever cut her.
Standard.
This is where things get dicey.
+ 4 loyalty for 4 CMC.
+ Filters you into better cards and enable madness.
+ +2 loyalty on the up is pretty cool
+ Conditional exile for creatures and artifacts, plus unconditional exiles for enchantments.
- She will be sharing a bed with mini Jace for the next year, which is probably a better enabler for Madness and a scarier walker on the flip.
- The quality of the madness deck is still an unknown factor.
- She is conditional removal, which means her ability to defend herself is in question.
- Minor point, her ult probably will not win a game on its own currently, so will probably never get used. It also hurts that the creature does not get to stick around.
For the older formats, she is probably too underpowered to see play.
I know that I have repeated myself a few times, but that is more to do with the fact that what is playable in one format, might now be so in another.
Honestly, if you verbalized that the card resolved by saying "draw?" and the opponent is not being forth coming with communication, the best thing you can do is wait a few moments for a response, ask again. If he persist with that pattern, just call a judge, so that it can be noted for his remaining matches.
Without being there it is hard to tell, but if your interpretation of events is fair, but at face value it does look like he was angle shooting, which is pretty scumy
i think that the ban will arrive for sure. eldrazi temple will say hello to us.
i also think that the deck is very powerful. to much? i don't know.
it's simply the first time that we see a so big slice of the meta controlled by an archetype.
but... what will happen if 60% of people should decide to play living end at the next GP?
without any reason.
i think that we could see the same result.
have the 60% od eldrazi deck in top 32 is ABSOLUTELY NORMAL if 60% of the starting peolple decide to play this deck.
and we should considered that lot of proplayer are playing eldrazi. (this increase the possibilities to see the deck in top)
without the possibilitis to compare initial e final % nobody can judge.
If 60% of people play living end ANYWHERE then a counter meta will rise up and CRUSH that deck because the deck itself isn't broken. If you saw a meta with 60% living end players you'd see 8 white based decks running Rest In Peace in it's sideboard and you'd never see a 60% LE meta again.
That's what you're not getting, people are TRYING to take advantage of the Eldrazi meta with Anti decks like Living End and they simply aren't good enough to overpower the deck.
i understand your point, and i totally respect it.
there isn't a single card that can radically change the match against eldrazi.
this is also a good reason to ban it.
i simply dislike people that say "we have to ban eldrazi because is winning to much"
an this is the reason why i posted here.
i ve read very good opinion and comment here. i really appreciate this.
Ok, think of it this way.
When Eldrazi won the Pro Tour, it placed a large target on its back, as it had a crazy conversion rates from Day 1 to Day 2, Day 2 to Top 32, etc.
There was a possibility that these conversion rates could have occurred, simply due to the fact the field was not prepared to deal with this style of threat and opponents were not well versed enough in the match up to know how to play it.
So we move on.
As a result of the Pro Tour, some people wanted to play the deck, as it is a new and shiny toy.
Others wanted to figure out how to combat it, so we see Painter Servant, Humility, Ensnaring Bridge becoming the hot tech to beat the deck.
People start battling and after having some initial success, the anti-Eldrazi decks start having problems, the Eldrazi adapted to beat the mirror and beat the hate.
Fast forward to the modern gp weekend.
The deck has an even greater target on its back, since everyone knows that it is popular and will be out in huge numbers, around 40-50% of the field. Even with all the prior knowledge of the list, the hate cards and the new deck that arose to Police the Eldrazi, the Eldrazi decks still won the most.
Instead of the 50% field share the Eldrazi decks held on day 1 field reducing to 20-30% on day 2 due to the hate, the Eldrazi decks day 2 % share stayed at 50% of the field or increased.
As a result, we have a deck that is objectively better than the rest of the field, one specifically designed to combat the Eldrazi decks. A true tier 0; a super predator. And when that happens, people who want to play modern competitively are left with 2 choices, either play the super predator or wait for the format to get regulated by Wizard.
I have to confess that people arguing in defense of the Eye ban, seem to be forgetting the fact that Twin is banned.
One of the reason Twin was banned was for limiting design space and the variation in blue decks in modern, specifically control variants. Now that the have removed Twin from the format, there is no natural predator for Tron anymore. Furthermore, while Eye is legal in Tron, it cements Tron as the deck with the best inevitability in modern, which is a huge barrier for classical control decks to exist, since they are unable to win on the inevitability axis, one of the defining characteristics of control decks.
As a result, there is additional merit that is not initially obvious to the Eye ban. Personally, I believe that the Temple enables Eldrazi more than Eye, but post rotation Eye might prove to be too much of an issue in Tron. I will confess that I am willing to let the meta adapt after the Eldrazi bans, but I also would not fault Wizard for banning Eye and Temple straight up.
Modern is in a weird spot right now, so I would ignore it for the immediate future until it is shaken out either by the meta or a ban...probably the latter.
Legacy is an interesting format and often segregates the player base as it probably has the largest variety of potential decks...well after vintage, but has the disadvantages of being blue-centric (this restricting potential diversity, which is an offshot of the requirements to police combo decks), expensive for the buy in, especially now with the reserve list cards spiking from Eternal Masters, is basically not supported at the competitive level outside of 3 (?) Gps a year and also seems to have been in decline as a format recently at the local level.
Commander is fun, but will only work out if your group of friends enjoys the format.
Draft and Sealed are often much maligned by the constructed formats for being 'luck' -centric, but in reality have a different set of skills (such as limited resource deck building, draft skill, signal reading, etc...).
Honestly, the safest long term option is too let modern sort its stuff out and probably buy into one of the decks when the meta has re-stabilized.
I honestly think that the bigger take from the ranking discussion not the ranking itself, but the fact that the power level disparity between the colors has been reduced. As a result, the convention that the most powerful color is the color that is open during draft is true again.
I think the problem with green in Battle was 3 fold.
1. The format was highly synergy driven and all green synergies were either weak or non-existant.
2. Due to the Grixis colors getting large numbers of eldrazi scions, Green no longer had the ramp advantage.
3. Most of the best common and uncommon finishers in the format were colorless, Green no longer held a monopoly on high cmc finishers, which was further complicated by the high powerlevel of non-Green rares.
Thanks to the release of Oath, a large chunk of these issues have been removed or rectified.
1. Oath is less synergy driven and more of a normal good-stuff meta, so the synergy advantage has been marginalized.
2. Non-Green colors get less scions now, so Green's ramp strategy has been revitalized. Also the present of colorless matters, means that Greens ability to fix for Waste, means Green's ability to splash the high end colorless finishers is more effective.
3. Colorless Finishers are no longer as present and Greens commons (Scion Summoner, etc) and uncommons (Birthing Hulk ,etc) are better cards and present better finishers than most other colors can reliably produce anymore.
Personally, I think that we have returned to a much more bread and butter draft environment with the innovation of having a restrictive 6th color, which happens to re-normalize the relative power level of the colors.
I think that it is now A-OK to draft green if the signals put you into it.
Sure the set is pretty poor from a standard point of view.
Draft is actually still pretty deep and enjoyable as long as you treat it as its own beast and stop trying to compare it too Original Zendikar Block (and that is with the green screw up).
I actually believe that with the release of Oath the opposite will happen and that the limited format will suffer (I have serious issues that the colorless mana symbol might spread the playables too thin in a set with such poor fixing) but will probably be just fine for constructed, since they have introduced a bunch of mythics, rares and uncommons that look to be making an impact.
If Thoughtseize and Meddling Mage are acceptable answers to Tron, why do both Jund and UW Value Control have abysmal matchups, statistically, versus the archetype? If the best Thoughtseize and Meddling Mage decks don't have a chance, are these cards really answers? Jund players have been stuffing Fulminator to Dust in our sideboards for months and the matchup is still hugely lopsided in their favor.
Yes, you can Slaughter Games the dude, but they still have all of their other giant dumb cards to deal with, none of which these decks are prepared to answer.
Because the answers required for Tron, Aggro, Twin, Bogles, and Affinity are all completely different. With Twin out, maybe now many decks can prepare a little bit better for Tron - Twin NEEDED to be metagamed for in maindecks because it presents the most immediate threat in G1 AND represented the highest meta share in the format.
I've known players that devoted 0 sb cards to the Twin matchup and still had a positive win% against it. Even with those extra slots, those same players had nearly unwinnable Tron matchups.
Precisely, if they were going to try and manage Twin, the should have banned out Exarch, thus opening the deck up to being controlled by Bolt.
There have been quite a few cards that could have done a good Exarch impersonation, while not being as resilient. That would have moderated the meta % without destroying the deck. I also think that control as an archetype is simply not a thing in modern, since decks like Affinity and Tron exists. Infact you could have even printed better control cards in colors that were not blue and red to improve control as an archetype, thus not improving Twin.
Finally, Twin helped keep decks like Tron in check, now without this policeman around, these linear strategies have no safety and will probably run rampant over the Pro Tour and reduce diversity, not improve it! I swear, it is hard to call the meta stale when there are 22 different decks to choose from at or more than 2% of the field.
A combination of Wastes being new, limited being designed with colorless matters in mind and the fact that there simply are not enough Wastes in circulation.
I have had a look at the set and I think it is safe to say that between the mana rocks, creatures in both sets that can produce colorless, some of the lands (see Spawning Bed) and the Eldrazi Scions, I do not actually think that it will be too hard to create colorless mana.
I hope nothing gets banned from the bloom deck. It's not dominant, isn't warping the metagame (if it was, everyone would snap-run blood moon in everything) and only seems to irritate people more than actually cause problems.
If they had to ban anything though it should weaken the deck, not destroy it completely. Banning Sunhome would stop any crazy fast wins while still allowing the deck to continue to be played. Solves the "too quick" problem and doesn't crush some people's favourite deck.
Jund is in such a shockingly bad place right now though. Hasn't won an event in... More than a year? Tron and eldrazi running wild. Numbers falling away like mad. It's a good time to see if bloodbraid can work a little magic and at least get the deck back into a respectful position. Unfortunately I don't think wizards' decision to unban a card will incorporate the current metagame, probably being a larger snapshot of the last three to six months.
I can dream. My jund deck has sat, unloved, since bloodbraid was banned. Maybe I could dust of my goyfs and lillies once again this January :). That's my hope, anyway.
Ok, from now on I need you to say that before every Modern Pro Tour, I wanna see Jund win that thing!
In all seriousness, the current meta is pretty hostile to Jund, but I would like to wait and see what the effect the Eldrazi Deck has on the meta and what happens after the Bans. As much as I like Jund, there is too much recent metagame shifting to determine if anything needs to be done.
It's a bit funny that after all this discussion in coverage of how overpowered the deck supposedly was and the possible necessity of the bannings, Amulet Bloom got... one deck in the Top 32.
Eh, variance. One good result does not overturn all the data that Wizard has.
Edit: I guess it should be one bad result, if we are talking about the Amulet Bloom Day 2 conversion.
Also, Aggro deck probably get a boon from people playing and flashing back this card.
It will probably be 3-4 of in decks that run it and will be the first card cut in the aggro match up.
Maybe time to find some good sources of lifegain if Kalitas does not cut the mustard.
Also, is the Promo version from the Buy-a-box or is it for Gamesday Top 8?
Nevermind, it is the top 8 promo.
Secondly rummaging is worse than looting, as surprisingly red's filters should be worse than blue's.
Thirdly, I am sorta glad that they are not creating game ending walker ultimates anymore, but considering that the best standard creatures
to cheat into play do their effects on cast instead of ETB, Shadows will have to show something very powerful cost efficient to make me want to even bother ulting...(and yes I know, walkers should not be evaluated by this metric, Nahiri just feels more flavor text-y than usual).
As for Nahiri, I honestly do not know what to think. So I will break her down by format.
Limited.
She is a walker, she filters to find your more powerful cards, enables madness, she has a good starting loyalty and at worse she is a conditional exile effect for creatures and artifacts, as well as some passive enchantment hate. Seems good and no limited deck that can support her will ever cut her.
Standard.
This is where things get dicey.
+ 4 loyalty for 4 CMC.
+ Filters you into better cards and enable madness.
+ +2 loyalty on the up is pretty cool
+ Conditional exile for creatures and artifacts, plus unconditional exiles for enchantments.
- She will be sharing a bed with mini Jace for the next year, which is probably a better enabler for Madness and a scarier walker on the flip.
- The quality of the madness deck is still an unknown factor.
- She is conditional removal, which means her ability to defend herself is in question.
- Minor point, her ult probably will not win a game on its own currently, so will probably never get used. It also hurts that the creature does not get to stick around.
For the older formats, she is probably too underpowered to see play.
I know that I have repeated myself a few times, but that is more to do with the fact that what is playable in one format, might now be so in another.
Without being there it is hard to tell, but if your interpretation of events is fair, but at face value it does look like he was angle shooting, which is pretty scumy
Ok, think of it this way.
When Eldrazi won the Pro Tour, it placed a large target on its back, as it had a crazy conversion rates from Day 1 to Day 2, Day 2 to Top 32, etc.
There was a possibility that these conversion rates could have occurred, simply due to the fact the field was not prepared to deal with this style of threat and opponents were not well versed enough in the match up to know how to play it.
So we move on.
As a result of the Pro Tour, some people wanted to play the deck, as it is a new and shiny toy.
Others wanted to figure out how to combat it, so we see Painter Servant, Humility, Ensnaring Bridge becoming the hot tech to beat the deck.
People start battling and after having some initial success, the anti-Eldrazi decks start having problems, the Eldrazi adapted to beat the mirror and beat the hate.
Fast forward to the modern gp weekend.
The deck has an even greater target on its back, since everyone knows that it is popular and will be out in huge numbers, around 40-50% of the field. Even with all the prior knowledge of the list, the hate cards and the new deck that arose to Police the Eldrazi, the Eldrazi decks still won the most.
Instead of the 50% field share the Eldrazi decks held on day 1 field reducing to 20-30% on day 2 due to the hate, the Eldrazi decks day 2 % share stayed at 50% of the field or increased.
As a result, we have a deck that is objectively better than the rest of the field, one specifically designed to combat the Eldrazi decks. A true tier 0; a super predator. And when that happens, people who want to play modern competitively are left with 2 choices, either play the super predator or wait for the format to get regulated by Wizard.
One of the reason Twin was banned was for limiting design space and the variation in blue decks in modern, specifically control variants. Now that the have removed Twin from the format, there is no natural predator for Tron anymore. Furthermore, while Eye is legal in Tron, it cements Tron as the deck with the best inevitability in modern, which is a huge barrier for classical control decks to exist, since they are unable to win on the inevitability axis, one of the defining characteristics of control decks.
As a result, there is additional merit that is not initially obvious to the Eye ban. Personally, I believe that the Temple enables Eldrazi more than Eye, but post rotation Eye might prove to be too much of an issue in Tron. I will confess that I am willing to let the meta adapt after the Eldrazi bans, but I also would not fault Wizard for banning Eye and Temple straight up.
Legacy is an interesting format and often segregates the player base as it probably has the largest variety of potential decks...well after vintage, but has the disadvantages of being blue-centric (this restricting potential diversity, which is an offshot of the requirements to police combo decks), expensive for the buy in, especially now with the reserve list cards spiking from Eternal Masters, is basically not supported at the competitive level outside of 3 (?) Gps a year and also seems to have been in decline as a format recently at the local level.
Commander is fun, but will only work out if your group of friends enjoys the format.
Draft and Sealed are often much maligned by the constructed formats for being 'luck' -centric, but in reality have a different set of skills (such as limited resource deck building, draft skill, signal reading, etc...).
Honestly, the safest long term option is too let modern sort its stuff out and probably buy into one of the decks when the meta has re-stabilized.
1. The format was highly synergy driven and all green synergies were either weak or non-existant.
2. Due to the Grixis colors getting large numbers of eldrazi scions, Green no longer had the ramp advantage.
3. Most of the best common and uncommon finishers in the format were colorless, Green no longer held a monopoly on high cmc finishers, which was further complicated by the high powerlevel of non-Green rares.
Thanks to the release of Oath, a large chunk of these issues have been removed or rectified.
1. Oath is less synergy driven and more of a normal good-stuff meta, so the synergy advantage has been marginalized.
2. Non-Green colors get less scions now, so Green's ramp strategy has been revitalized. Also the present of colorless matters, means that Greens ability to fix for Waste, means Green's ability to splash the high end colorless finishers is more effective.
3. Colorless Finishers are no longer as present and Greens commons (Scion Summoner, etc) and uncommons (Birthing Hulk ,etc) are better cards and present better finishers than most other colors can reliably produce anymore.
Personally, I think that we have returned to a much more bread and butter draft environment with the innovation of having a restrictive 6th color, which happens to re-normalize the relative power level of the colors.
I think that it is now A-OK to draft green if the signals put you into it.
Draft is actually still pretty deep and enjoyable as long as you treat it as its own beast and stop trying to compare it too Original Zendikar Block (and that is with the green screw up).
I actually believe that with the release of Oath the opposite will happen and that the limited format will suffer (I have serious issues that the colorless mana symbol might spread the playables too thin in a set with such poor fixing) but will probably be just fine for constructed, since they have introduced a bunch of mythics, rares and uncommons that look to be making an impact.
At least that is my 2 cent.
Precisely, if they were going to try and manage Twin, the should have banned out Exarch, thus opening the deck up to being controlled by Bolt.
There have been quite a few cards that could have done a good Exarch impersonation, while not being as resilient. That would have moderated the meta % without destroying the deck. I also think that control as an archetype is simply not a thing in modern, since decks like Affinity and Tron exists. Infact you could have even printed better control cards in colors that were not blue and red to improve control as an archetype, thus not improving Twin.
Finally, Twin helped keep decks like Tron in check, now without this policeman around, these linear strategies have no safety and will probably run rampant over the Pro Tour and reduce diversity, not improve it! I swear, it is hard to call the meta stale when there are 22 different decks to choose from at or more than 2% of the field.
I have had a look at the set and I think it is safe to say that between the mana rocks, creatures in both sets that can produce colorless, some of the lands (see Spawning Bed) and the Eldrazi Scions, I do not actually think that it will be too hard to create colorless mana.
Ok, from now on I need you to say that before every Modern Pro Tour, I wanna see Jund win that thing!
In all seriousness, the current meta is pretty hostile to Jund, but I would like to wait and see what the effect the Eldrazi Deck has on the meta and what happens after the Bans. As much as I like Jund, there is too much recent metagame shifting to determine if anything needs to be done.
Eh, variance. One good result does not overturn all the data that Wizard has.
Edit: I guess it should be one bad result, if we are talking about the Amulet Bloom Day 2 conversion.