Quote from Teia Rabishu »There's a lot about the pro scene that really trickles some bad values down through the playerbase when you get right down to it. Problem is I can only antagonize so many people in one article, you know?
True that.
There's only so many times I can handle people questioning why I mainboard Duress instead of Thoughtseize or inquisition of Kozilek, when those cards are outrageously priced and someone would have to have either gotten lucky with their drafts or have a lot of disposable income devoted to magic just to have them. But yeah, it goes back to the whole deal of Wizards needing to print something like Vingolf Engage Knights each rotation that contains all the dominant main deck cards found in top pro-tour decks that are rotating out. Just slap two of each in there and sell them at msrp 35 usd to all major retailers.
That being said, this game will shoulder on while the giant slug of a corporation keeps trying to find the door of the closet it shoved itself in.
On the contrary, three color decks are very poorly balanced and under tested historically. Magic was never really intended to go to three colors in it's original form because all elements of strategy start to get muddied and soon you just end up with the best of the best (hello jund). When you have three color land fixing and virtually no down side, you get modern. However, MtG has migrated to a game that players expect tri-color decks to exist in, so at this point what needs to happen in frontier is to print the fetches, but also make sure there's enough down side that two or even mono-color decks can compete against a three color one. And as I stated in my previous post from my phone, wizards needs to facilitate deck creativity by making it easier for players to get competitive mana bases, which means ultimately going away from rare land cycles and rarity shifting the lands they intend to have people play with going forward to uncommon (and possibly common if they want a wedge type deal like in Kahns). we'd see a lot more happy players if everyone could afford the fast lands or fetches in budget builds, that's for sure.
They are going to be reprinting the zendikar ones in amonket. If not, I'm unsure how they will support the shards wedges suggested by the bolas card reveal and at this point they are already committed to a print run. The one thing we won't see (hopefully) are shock lands.
The only problem with the card is that it's not good on it's own, which makes it not so obvious on how good he actually is. Most people these days seem to want to just see a card and say "yeah, he's good period" without looking for synergies that can make the card good.
Only reason I'm saying he is is that I've been playing a more control oriented deck in modern online using a modest amount of artifact ramp, and he single handedly wins the game on turn 6 in testing. When you judge this walker keep in mind he comes with a tutor that can get him from the graveyard or the main deck and find another artifact along with it. It's going to depend on your meta and your playstyle, but since I like games that run a little longer so people actually "play" and not just "win/lose" this walker is a win. Standard might have a hard time because the search targets get a little tighter and he's fighting with other good 6 drops like the gearhulks.
Also, this guy is definitely modern playable. That's going to make this interesting since WoTC said they weren't going to print anything that would make people want to commit arbitrage on the decks. Yeah, that worked out really well for them.
Well, in the long long run modern is probably going to get canned as a competitive format because WoTC can't actually support it and go in a direction that supports new players. What's happening right now (besides the holiday season draining the living crap out of people along with the impending tax season following it) is that standard is running into similar problems to Kahns block, though not on the same vector, in that only a very select few decks are competitive and players are getting the impression that if they don't play one of these decks they are wasting their time at FNM. Combine this with horrible FNM promos and you get a really bad FNM environment which is why so many people are jumping to EDH at the moment to wait it out. This also means a weak market for standard, which then translates into WoTC going into panic mode and doing what we are seeing right now. Print the heck out of everything except what people actually want because they want to save those as hooks for future sets. I swear these guys at WoTC are like bungee corded hamsters trying to escape a play pen they built themselves.
What do people want right now to get printed across various formats? Engineered Explosives, Noble Hierarch, Arcum Dagson, Contagion Engine, all the freaking praetors, Craterhoof Behemoth, Mikaeus, the Unhallowed, Death baron, Doubling Season, Basilisk Collar, etc. What do they print instead? Planechase in a box set at way too high an MSRP because they think the high prices of the cards are from demand when it's from scarcity and print a bunch of commander decks that purposefully don't have high demand reprints because they don't want to deal with the EV issue that they also made themselves. Well okay, they didn't completely miss the target with those decks, but because they only half did the reprints it resulted in higher prices on the stuff they missed.
On the upside it looks like they are starting to listen to the community over the last year or so. Maybe it's all an illusion or something, though.
Also, I'm really thinking energy is possibly more broken than infect. Dynavolt tower, Panharmonicon, Aetherworks Marvel, electrostatic pummeller, and some creatures with ETB effects that add huge amounts of energy can really lock down the field. I don't think that energy will survive as a mechanic in modern, but then again it just might be one of the rare edge cases if it gets enough support in aether revolt.
Well, it was actually a newcomer. But I will admit it felt like a three player game with a fourth gal playing the Joker from The Dark Knight with the kinds of cards she was playing. Her commander was Sen Triplets so I was assuming a control deck from the start, but I wasn't expecting that scenario. She also had Redirect on an Isochron Scepter.