MTG Salvation

Sorry for the late reply. I don't check these message boards very often as I don't play Magic anymore.

Quote from DrAutissimo »

Now, this might be an immense necro, and I am really sorry, but wouldn't Rule 101.1 break any kind of loop?


Like, if someone just stands up and leaves, it is essentially the same, but 101.1 provides an in-rule way out of every loop, therefore an infinite loop is inherently impossible to achieve?

I don't follow. Unless rule 101.1 was different at the time of your post, rule 101.1 has nothing to do with breaking loops. Rule 101.1 states:


Did you instead mean to ask, "Doesn't rule 104.4b break any kind of loop?" If so, the answer is: it depends. Loops like Sporemound and Life and Limb where playing a land causes Sporemound to create a saproling, but that saproling is a land due to Life and Limb so it causes Sporemound to create a saproling, but that saproling is also a land so it causes Sporemound to create a saproling, and that saproling is a land as well, and so on and so forth... Rule 104.4b ends games in a draw whenever those types of loops occur because they can never be terminated. The Wild Ride is similar in that it can't be terminated once it's begun, but it's a bit different as well seeing as it doesn't really use the stack. Yes, the game state may not be changing, but nothing is stopping players from moving through the steps and phases of the game either.

But to answer your second question, I'm not certain that 104.4b is impossible to circumvent. I just don't know enough about what constitutes a "loop of mandatory actions" in the eyes of the game. It may be possible to create infinite "novel" gamestates under the effects of the Ride. That would make it so that 104.4b never draws the game, and the Wild Ride stays in effect throughout the entire duration. I just lack the rules knowledge necessary to even begin working that angle. Hell, it might not be possible to even construct such a thing given the parameters of the Ride anyway.

Quote from Tiro of Meletis »

I don't understand people, my friends included, who feel they need to quit MTG to better themselves. It's a hobby. It's a fun, recreational de-stress hobby that you can turn to and gives social interaction and a winding down between career, responsibilities, etc. Only if you make it your life does it conflict. But there's never a need to quit any game. If played right, it can actually be an important motivating factor in keeping you happy enough to be successful as it helps buffer responsibility with pleasure/recreation.

In short, I was making Magic my life. I don't begrudge anyone for playing Magic. I just personally needed to move away from it.

Quote from Kireek1 »

Also, arrogantAxolotl has already mentioned some 3 card piles to go withEmergent Ulitmatum are there any others ?

There are others. The piles I posted earlier were just the most compact ones I managed to cook up. If you wanted, you could certainly build a pile like:

• Omniscience
• Enter the Infinite
• Dark Petition

Pile 1: Omniscience + Enter the Infinite
This is just a death sentence. Barring something like Narset, the opponent can't give you this pile.

Pile 2: Omniscience + Dark Petition
If the opponent gives you this pile, you can use the Dark Petition to find Enter the Infinite since Emergent Ultimatum shuffles the third card back into your library. From there, you can cast Enter the Infinite for free with your Omniscience, and that leads you back to pile 1.

Pile 3: Enter the Infinite + Dark Petition
Provided you have spell mastery (you'll only need one other instant or sorcery to get there since you get to cast Enter the Infinite before Dark Petition if you want), you draw your deck and add BBB to your mana pool. What can you do with BBB? Well, if you convert it to blue, you can win the game off Thassa's Oracle, but to do that you'll need to play something like Ashiok followed by two Mox Amber.

Pile 3 illustrates the problem that many Emergent Ultimatum piles have. Are you going to play Omniscience, Enter the Infinite, Dark Petition, Emergent Ultimatum, Thassa's Oracle, Ashiok, Dream Render, and Mox Amber all in the same deck? Probably not. And if you're not playing all those cards, Emergent Ultimatum effectively just becomes a less expensive Enter the Infinite that sometimes fizzles because the opponent controls an Ashiok or something.

To make a good pile for Emergent Ultimatum, you need to find a combination of cards that kills the opponent no matter what they choose. It needs to use as few cards as possible to prevent clogging your deck with dead cards, and it needs to kill the opponent immediately; you don't want to give them a chance to fight back. Furthermore, you want each card in the pile to be useful on its own since there's no sense in playing dead cards if you don't have to. To top it all off, it would really help if all of these cards were in colors you already wanted to play, so you don't have to stretch yourself thin playing OmniDoor ThragFire. All of these stipulations really narrow down the number of viable possibilities. After all, if you're going through the trouble of casting Emergent Ultimatum, you don't want to create a pile that will always result in something akin to a slightly cheaper Omniscience when you could instead be winning the game outright. Take this pile for instance:

• Revival // Revenge
• Sorin's Vengeance
• Wound Reflection

This one's not too bad. The cards are significantly less expensive than something like Enter the Infinite, and they're (mostly) in the same color. The problem with this pile is that it's vulnerable to several different axes of attack. For one, Wound Reflection gives the opponent an opportunity to figure something out as it won't kill them until the end of the turn. Sure, they don't get to untap, but if they already have mana available, that could spell trouble. An opponent could, for instance, destroy your enchantment with an Assassin's Trophy. They could also gain additional life with something like a food token provided they don't lose any additional life that turn. Hell, if they have more than 20 life, this combo can't even kill them; the opponent just straight up lives. Leyline of Sanctity gets through this as well.

Having said all of this, I do want to mention that I'm far from exhausting every viable combo. In fact, I'm sure someone somewhere will probably think of something better than I have. I haven't even mentioned how Emergent Ultimatum gets a lot worse if you're relying on one combo piece to be in your deck and then you mill it or draw it or whatever. Still, the payoff is tantalizing enough to warrant exploring, and I'm going to mess around with the card to see what I can learn whenever I next get the chance.

EDIT: I spaced out and forgot Emergent Ultimatum only let's you find monocolored cards. Replace Revival // Revenge in the above combo with Fraying Omnipotence, and it checks out.

Haven't posted on MTGS in a long time. Hell, I haven't really contributed to any online community lately. Since I'm stuck inside and can't get any kind of Magic fix though, I figured I'd chime in and present my thoughts on the new set for whatever that happens to be worth.

First and foremost, I'm fairly convinced that Tooth and Nail is a dead card now. Ikoria just released a smattering of new cards that all threaten to do the same thing as Tooth and Nail, only better, so there seems to be little reason to pursue ramping into Tooth and Nail at this point. I'm not sure which card has the most merit yet since I haven't gotten the chance to actually sit down and test any of them, but their applicability on paper is plain as day. One or more of these cards will just straight up be better.

Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast — This is a Polymorph that you can ramp into. Polymorph has always been a powerful card, but the setup required to get Polymorph to work has always made the card seemingly unviable. You have to be able to build a reasonable deck without any creatures, save one or two for Polymorph itself. Then, you have to be able to produce a creature somehow, be it either a creature token or a card that can somehow turn itself into a creature, like man-lands for example. Finally, you have to cast and resolve Polymorph. If the opponent kills the creature in response, the spell fizzles, and you get nothing.

While Lukka doesn't address that last issue, he does make enormous ground on the other two. Because Lukka always cascades upwards, if your deck only contains creatures with the same converted mana cost save for one of them, Lukka will always find that one target 100% of the time. This allows you to build a Polymorph deck with actual creature cards, and mana dorks are seemingly perfect for this; they increase the speed by which you can cast Lukka while simultaneously being the targets that Lukka needs. Not to mention, without Lukka, mana dorks are still independently going to be useful on their own. They'll ramp you into whatever other valuable cards make up the rest of your curve.

Now, that isn't to say that Lukka isn't without his faults. Generally speaking, Lukka's other two abilities suck. If you're only playing 1-drops, you don't particularly care if you exile any for you to cast later, but you would care a great deal if you happened to remove the only remaining card that's eligible for Lukka's -2 ability. As such, Lukka's first ability can be a significant liability. His ultimate, in turn, is also sucks. If all you intend to do is cheat a spaghetti monster into play, not only will you not activate his first ability to generate loyalty in the first place, but you also won't have much of any power on the battlefield with which to capitalize off of Lukka's third ability even if you could activate it. Lukka also costs more than his Polymorph counterparts at five instead of four.

On another note, I do think it's worth mentioning that Lukka can activate his minus ability back to back. Say the Emrakul you pull out with Lukka gets bounced by T3feri. Next turn, you can activate Lukka's minus ability again and pull out another Emrakul, provided you have another copy anyway.

Emergent Ultimatum — This is Tooth and Nail, but for seven mana instead of nine. Granted, the color requirements are certainly more difficult, but seven mana is also substantially easier to get to than nine. Not to mention, even if you didn't have the right combination of colors to cast this at seven mana, you almost assuredly would by the time you hit nine. Anywho, here are some piles I cooked up:

• Worldfire
• Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
• Restoration Angel

Any two card combo will work here in place of Kiki-Jiki and Resto Angel; they just need the capacity to deal damage on their own. If the opponent chooses Worldfire and either one of the other cards, you cast Worldfire first, exiling everything, then put your creature onto the battlefield. At that point, there's nothing the opponent can draw on their next turn that can possibly kill you, and you attack them for lethal next turn. The only vulnerability here is if the opponent controls something very unusual like Thragtusk since that ability triggers when the card leaves the battlefield rather than when it dies. Of course, if the opponent opts for the two-card combo, you can just proceed to go infinite and kill them with that. There will be times when the opponent has an out to that though and can stop your combo with whatever interaction they happen to have in their hand.

• Omniscience
• Enter the Infinite
• Tooth and Nail

How ironic that Tooth and Nail itself is a combo piece here. The opponent can't give you both Omniscience and Enter the Infinite together since that would be suicide, so they have to give you one of those two plus Tooth and Nail instead. Tooth and Nail, of course, lets you win with either setup, no entwine required. If the opponent gives you Omniscience, you choose to find two creatures with Tooth and Nail and then cast them for free afterwards. If the opponent gives you Enter the Infinite, you draw your library and then have Tooth and Nail put two creatures from your hand onto the battlefield. What sucks about this three-card pile is that Tooth and Nail also requires you to play an additional two-card combo somewhere else in your deck, so there are a lot of slots occupied by otherwise dead cards; you won't realistically ever hardcast an Omniscience across the course of a game.

• Exquisite Blood
• Sanguine Bond
• Enduring Ideal

Baby's first combo actually works pretty well here. If the opponent chooses to put both Exquisite Blood and Sanguine Bond onto the battlefield, they die from the two-card combo. If they go for Enduring Ideal plus one of the other two cards instead, Emergent Ultimatum will shuffle the third card back into your library, and Enduring Ideal will pull it right back out, so there's no way for the opponent to stop you from getting your combo. The downside here is that you still need a way to either gain life or to make the opponent lose life, so if you don't have any way to do that already then the opponent will have ample opportunity to turn the game around.

Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy — On the surface, this might not look like a replacement for Tooth and Nail, but it most assuredly is.

The reason why Leyline of Abundance sucks (and the reason why I have never bothered giving it the time of day) is because it lacks redundancy, and it doesn't play well with other ramp cards. If you play Leyline, that means you're not playing the best ramp spells in Arbor Elf and Utopia Sprawl, and you are playing objectively worse mana dorks instead. That wouldn't be so bad if you had other cards that could support said dorks, but with Leyline as your only supporting card you instead run into the issue where every game you don't draw a Leyline is one where you're operating as a worse ramp deck than you could otherwise be. Worse yet, drawing Leyline outside of your opening hand is also terrible since there's no opportunity to play the card before turn 3 at which point you should be slamming haymakers. Hell, if all of that wasn't bad enough, Leyline is still problematic even when you do begin the game with it since, if the opponent is able to kill whatever dork you happen to play turn one, they effectively two-for-one you because now your Leyline isn't doing anything until you play and untap a second dork.

With the printing of Kinnan, Leyline of Abundance gets a lot better, as you now have additional redundancy which ensures you won't be that "same ramp deck but worse" in the instances where you don't draw a Leyline. And because Kinnan only costs two, he's easy to weave into turns, enabling lines like:

1. Land —> Cast Birds of Paradise
2. Land —> Cast Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy, tap Birds to cast any other 2-drop

Or

1. Land —> Cast Noble Hierarch
2. Land —> Cast Llanowar Tribe
3. Land —> Cast Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy, tap Hierarch, Llanowar Tribe, and your third land to activate Kinnan

What makes Kinnan so crazy is that he's a powerful ramp spell with an insane win condition stapled onto him. Paying seven mana to effectively cast Summoning Trap is absurd. It can be done at instant speed, and it skirts around countermagic because the creature is put straight into play. You don't even need to play with otherwise uncastable creatures like Emrakul, the Aeons Torn to make this guy good. It may just be that finding six mana or seven mana threats that you would otherwise be able to cast is better than trying to high-roll some unplayable Eldrazi. And as long as Kinnan is in play, this can be done turn after turn. It's repeatable! That's way better than Leyline's weaksauce "spend my entire turn to put a +1/+1 counter on each of my three creatures." A repeatable, instant-speed, uncounterable, cost-efficient way to win the game that comes attached to an otherwise playable ramp spell is about the best thing a ramp deck could hope to ask for.

Cavalier of Thorns was spoiled today, and while community reaction to it has mostly been negative, I think the card is actually quite good. In fact, having previously reviewed green's 5-drops, I think Cavalier of Thorns might even be one of the best.

Reach — I'm glad this has reach instead of trample. Ramp decks backpedal a lot, and the 5/6 body combined with reach makes it so that the Cavalier can mitigate pressure that other cards wouldn't be able to. It also isn't important that the Cavalier lacks trample. As a 5-drop, Cavalier of Thorns is a stepping stone. I'm not trying to win the game with it, so I don't care if it can push through damage. What I do care about is whether or not it puts me in a better position the next turn. Trample doesn't do that, but the entire package surrounding Cavalier of Thorns (reach included) does.

ETB, Elvish Rejuvenator — Not a perfect analogy. The land the Cavalier finds comes into play untapped. The remaining cards are also binned instead of being bottomed. Still, the two effects are similar. Having played Elvish Rejuvenator before, I can attest that digging five cards deep is enough to rarely brick with the ability but nothing more. It effectively amounts to getting a random land. With that said, this is still a nice ability to have. Although ramping isn't usually what I want on a 5-drop, it isn't so bad when it's bundled together with the rest of Cavalier's abilities. In the instances where I make it to 5 on turn 3 but not to 6 or 7, I may have a hand full of bombs and not enough mana to cast them. Or maybe an opponent interacted with me, and I would have had enough mana to cast whatever top end is left in my hand, but now I only have 5. That will happen sometimes, and in either case Cavalier of Thorns will help.

Dies, Reclaim — Putting a card back on top of my deck is a lot less salient than putting it into my hand, but this effect is still a lot better than what people give it credit for. A smattering of fetchlands ensures that Cavalier of Thorns will always have lands at its disposal if I want to make my land drop next turn. The fact that the Cavalier's second ability mulches also means it sets itself up. When the Cavalier is answered (as it often will be), it can find a replacement threat for me to deploy the next turn. That is an extremely important quality to have, and one that shouldn't be understated. If I'm playing a ramp deck, I don't want to invest all of my mana and all of my turns into casting some sort of payoff card only to then see that payoff card answered to no lasting effect. That could mean losing the game. Cavalier of Thorns makes it so that I can follow it up after it dies, something other 5-drops seldom do.

Quote from Creedmoor »

Are you looking at the one from Gatecrash? Or Return to Ravnica? Can't remember which set it was in. The new one featuring Teferi is gorgeous.

Ah. I was looking at the Dominaria one. My mistake.

Quote from Creedmoor »

Sorry for opening your eyes to this lol


I remember fighting on the forums back then about that art...

Not to cause a fight, but what don't you like about this Syncopate art exactly? Compositionaly, I think it looks spectacular.

Quote from pinkmex »

that art on the aura is a right-away contender for the worst of the last... 26 years.

Hyperbole aside, I have to agree. I didn't really notice it at first, but the more I look at Wolfkin Bond the less I like it. That pose just seems... awkward? Stilted? I don't know. It just looks really off to me. I think the background, the trees, the buildings, the wind... I think all the negative space looks great. It's just something about the subject that feels... hokey? Magic has some really phenomenal artwork, and this definitely feels like one of its weaker pieces.

Quote from Semoreh »

The green leyline is kinda exciting to be honest. This in your opening hand + any dork (apart from arbor elf) gives you 4 manas on turn 2.

Yeah, that's Leyline of Abundance's biggest selling point: that it can make 4 mana turn 2, and it doesn't require having exactly Arbor Elf and exactly Utopia Sprawl to do so. Leyline of Abundance comes with a lot of baggage though.

1.) Leyline of Abundance doesn't work with Arbor Elf, Utopia Sprawl, or Overgrowth, and those three cards are some of the best, if not the best, at making mana in Modern. As such, if I want to support Leyline of Abundance, I'll need to play with objectively worse cards. Granted, that may be okay. If the synergy is powerful enough, then there's nothing wrong with playing worse cards; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts after all. I just suspect that this may not be the case with Leyline of Abundance.

2.) There's no way to make Leyline of Abundance redundant. Sure, the games I have it, a 1-drop, and two lands make getting to 4 relatively easy, but I'm not always going to have Leyline of Abundance, and in the games where I don't I'm effectively playing a much worse ramp deck. If there were other cards that could supplement Leyline of Abundance, this wouldn't be so bad, but the next most effective way to reach 4 turn 2 is by playing something like Simian Spirit Guide or Gemstone Caverns, neither of which are very appealing.

3.) Leyline of Abundance is risky. Not only do I need it in my opening hand to be effective, but it also makes me more vulnerable to disruption. In a regular ramp deck, if an opponent Bolts my Bird, that sucks, but at the end of the day it's still a 1-for-1. In a deck with Leyline, when an opponent Bolts my Bird, not only is my Bird dead, but they've also invalidated my Leyline until I manage to stick something. That can turn Bolt into a 2-for-1 or better depending on the circumstances, so not only will I need to play worse cards to support Leyline of Abundance, but the consequences of having these worse cards destroyed are even more disastrous than they would normally be.

You know, I kind of want to go back and elaborate on Veil of Summer because, when I said it was a 2-for-1, that was true, but that doesn't really paint the whole picture. See, there are different kinds of 2-for-1s, and some are more valuable than others. For instance, compare Mind Rot to a card like Wicked Pact. Both will give me card advantage, but Wicked Pact is typically better than Mind Rot since the creatures Wicked Pact destroys are cards that my opponent probably had to spend mana (and therefore turns) developing. With Mind Rot, I get just as many cards, but I don't get the tempo advantage that a card like Wicked Pact creates.

What's great about Veil of Summer beyond it being a 2-for-1 is that it often protects cards I've already invested mana in. This makes it a whole lot better than, say, the following card:

We've come a long way since Watchwolf.

Oh man, Golos, Tireless Pilgrim is the pentacolor commander Mr. Bones has always wanted.

For the longest time, the only five color legends were these dumb tribal lords like Reaper King and Atogatog. There were a handful of other cards like Cromat and Progenitus that didn't care about tribes, but these were ineffectual if not outright counterproductive as is the case with Child of Alara. Eventually, Wizards printed Ramos, Dragon Engine and Jodah, Archmage Eternal, and these were a step up, but they too left a lot to be desired. Ramos got too big if I cast too many spells, and that incentivized me to just attack players. Jodah encouraged me to fill my deck with expensive cards, and while I could sometimes make use of his mana discounting ability, he was really designed for something else entirely.

But now I have Golos! Oh boy, do I love this card. I was already salivating over Urza's ability to Mind's Desire for one, but for 2 mana more I get to Mind's Desire for three? On my Commander? I'm in heaven! It's like a mini Aminatou's Augury. And the fact that it finds one of my many crucial nonbasics is nothing to slouch at either. Between Academy Ruins, Hall of Heliod's Generosity, and Volrath's Stronghold, that's three alone. Then there's ancillary stuff like Reliquary Tower, Maze of Ith, or even just colorfixing with Command Tower et all. There's so much stuff I can find.

Also, I think it's only fitting that Golos throws back to Solemn Simulacrum which is a card I'm notorious for *****ting on. Because of course the guy who has always sweared against Sad Robot would find his perfect commander in one.

Quote from CurdBros »

Ravenous Hydra seems like a kinda cool way to get some creature removal in a purely Mono-green deck. It is interesting to compare this to Ballista (a little cheaper when dealing with a single creature while still living...obviously can scale like crazy...but far less versatile ). Love that it starts with 1 toughness. What are everyone’s thought?

This one's not too bad. The fact it can double its size if it ever lacks a fight target means there's always something productive it can do. Still, I think I prefer Ravager Wurm to this. Ravager Wurm is always at least as big as Ravenous Hydra when X equals 4, and Ravager Wurm's ability to destroy lands (and sometimes even planeswalkers) feels a lot safer than making a big trampler when there's nothing to fight. The fact the Hydra scales as well as it having trample kind of makes this an apples to oranges comparison though.

EDIT: Has anyone seen Veil of Summer? I'm not sure what to make of it yet, but that card looks crazy to me. In the right matchup, it's a 2-for-1 for 1 mana. And it's super versatile too. It protects me, and all of my permanents, and makes my spells uncounterable. It does so much for 1 mana.

One of my concerns with Veil of Summer is that, because my deck is so proactive and reliably uses all of its mana the first two turns of the game, Veil of Summer might lose a lot of its effectiveness since, if I'm always tapping out, I won't have any mana up to stop any errant Thoughtseize or Fatal Push. Anywho, I think it's worth seriously considering as a sideboard card. It still has so much going for it.

Yeah, that's one thing I do kind of wish for on the new site: better deck tags.

Quote from DR1V1R »

It seems like you would only need 9 mana and 8 devotion to go infinite. Pay 4GG to cast Wakeroot and then an additional 2 to activate Nykthos. If you have 8 devotion at that point (and since Wakeroot counts as 2, only six other sources), use 5 to activate Wakeroot, 2 to activate the untapped Nykthos, and 1 floats. Rinse repeat. It does seem like a tough ask, but maybe easier than you initially laid out? Or I could be getting it wrong as well.

No, you've got it right. For whatever reason, I neglected to think of that sequence Thank you for pointing that out.

Regardless, my point still stands. Wakeroot Elemental is a terrible card without Nykthos, and even when I do have Nykthos I still need six more devotion and eight more mana. That's asking way too much from a card that isn't very useful outside of being a combo piece.

Quote from CurdBros »

I’m not great with that stuff; but I don’t think that includes the lines taking Kiora, Nykthos, or Garruk into account.

Correct. My last post only mapped out the lines involving Arbor Elf, Birds of Paradise, Utopia Sprawl, Overgrowth, and Llanowar Tribe that get to exactly 7 mana using 6 or fewer cards. I chose to map out lines with those cards specifically because those are the cards that seem the most crucial to play four copies of if I want to make as much mana as possible as quickly as possible. I may humor you and map out the other cards you mentioned later.

Quote from CurdBros »

So...Wakeroot Elemental is in an infinite combo wih any Nykthos tapping for X=8 or more...If the translation is correct, it untaps ANY land and turns it into a creature with haste...that means you can keep untapping and tapping a Nykthos over and over again.


Granted, it takes him, a Nykthos, and six other green symbols...but creatures and lands are relative easy to tutor/dig for...and it can be done at instant speed, even if Wakeroot just entered the battlefield. Could make for some very interesting brews. Could also just be a random 1-of to have an “oops I win” ability (and sink for late games when you have a ton of mana”.

I’m going to add one to my current deck just in place of one Primeeval Titan (since it is built to take advantage of infinite mana in some respects) and I’ll let you know how often it comes up.

You're more generous than I am. To me, Wakeroot Elemental looks completely unplayable. And I'm not talking just about Modern. Wakeroot Elemental looks unplayable in every constructed format as well as probably Limited. It's just that terrible.

The crux of the issue is that Wakeroot Elemental is a Craw Wurm. It does nothing the turn it comes into play. It has no combat abilities. It isn't resilient. It is merely a 6 mana 5/5. That's it. In that respect, Wakeroot Elemental is significantly worse than Colossal Dreadmaw. Its only saving grace is its activated ability which isn't even especially useful. If what I want is a pair of big guys, then I ought to play Kalonian Twingrove instead. At least with the Twingrove I don't have to invest another 5 before getting anything valuable. Not to mention I don't lose absolutely everything in the event it's destroyed.

And if I want to make infinite mana with Wakeroot Elemental and Nykthos, that's a tall order too. Not only do I need to have both those cards in tandem, but I also need eight devotion, which is no easy feet, and my vanilla 5/5 needs to make it all the way till my next turn since casting Wakeroot Elemental, activating its ability, and using Nykthos requires 13 mana total, and there's no way I'm ever going to have that much all in one turn.

EDIT: See posts below.