Doesn't work well with Jace, but with his illusions...
But this plot twist would have been too good, I guess.
It doesn't work with his illusion clones either, those are CMC 3, just like Jace. Token copies of cards have all the same copiable values the original card has, unless the copy effect specifies otherwise (Embalm/Eternalize are worded to make copies with no mana cost, for instance).
I'm mad that they do not have a planeswalker token for Jace. That's insane. I'd love to have a blue illusion token for Jace.
It would have been really surprising if WotC did make such a token, there's never been one for any of the other cards that create token copies of themselves. Having tokens for all the Embalm and Eternalize creatures might seem like what I just typed isn't true, but the way those abilities are worded specifies that the token has no mana cost, so what you actually get is a modified copy of the creature, but not a copy of the "card"; with this new Jace and other previous examples, there is no such stipulation.
As much as we might want them to, WotC is probably never going to print a token with a mana-cost on it.
Interestingly, I was just thinking late last week that Glorious End could work in Ramunap Red in Standard. Attack, put the opponent's life total down low, then in response to the beginning of their untap step you end then turn--they don't get to untap, upkeep, or draw, which sends it back to being your turn and thus allowing you to attack for the win before the beginning of your end step.
That doesn't work the way you want it to, because nobody has priority to do anything during the untap step - the first time you have the opportunity to do anything during an opponents turn (or for that matter, your own) is during Upkeep. You cannot stop opponents from untapping by trying to do shenanigans after their turn begins, just like you can't stop opponents from declaring creatures as attackers if you let the turn progress until the Declare Attackers step; if you're doing anything before your opponent untaps, unless it's a multiplayer game, it's still your turn.
I just hope that once the last unset is released and Oracle is updated for the rest of the silver-bordered cards, some of the more useful cards are not banned for commander - especially the cards that work with teamwork like Checks and Balances, Get a Life, Organ Harvest, and Team Spirit.
Those are all going to be banned in Commander, regardless of Oracle updates. Or rather, they aren't, because they don't even have to be banned in the first place - silver-border cards aren't legal in any constructed format. Silver border cards are, and always have been, effectively outside of Magic's card pool, in the same way that a 3rd party parody of MTG would be outside of the actual card pool; the only difference is that Un-Sets and other silver-border cards are 1st party parodies.
You are free to house-rule them in, but they are never going to be part of the Vintage card pool anymore than a custom fan-created set of cards would be, so they are never going to be legal in Commander, regardless of how well they function within the rules.
With respect to Commander, is she Naya or Boros? Based on the MTGCommander color identity description, only mana symbols count towards color identity. However the comprehensive rules also mention characteristic-defining abilities, and I just wasn't sure if the mere mention of a color in the text applies to the color identity.
I would say from a flavor perspective she is Naya.
Just not sure how she's defined by the rules.
Thanks.
Color identity in EDH is only tied to mana symbols/color indicators on cards, mentioning a color in rules text or even creating off-color tokens doesn't change the color identity of a card; any EDH deck could use Dark Depths, for instance, even though the Marit Lage token is black. Huatli does not require you to play green.
I wouldn't be surprised if this planeswalker rules change is just WOTC taking the first step toward a future rules change in commander that broadens the definition of what a commander can be. I'm sure that they're going to roll out the idea slowly if they do plan to make this change and they probably have several employees theory building commander decks with planeswalkers as the commanders to try to find the truly broken planeswalker commanders so that if/when they roll out this rules change, they can roll it out with a banned list*.
*(If all planeswalkers were allowed to be commanders then I think they might end up banning Doubling Season. After that I think they'd ban a select few planswalkers from being a commander. I think Jace, the Mind Sculpter would never be allowed as a commander just because of its reputation. Sorin Markov might get nixed since Sorin's -3 and his mindslaver ultimate might just be too powerful to allow players to recast him over and over since black has amazing ramp in commander with Cabal Coffers and a ton of cheap, unconditional tutors. Then there are cards with "unfun" utltimates like Jace, Unraveler of Secrets and Narset Transcendent which also could get the ax. The only other planeswalker that looks like it could be broken to have in the command zone is Tezzeret the Seeker, but he is borderline and it really depends on how many potential combos his -x ability enables.)
I am continually baffled by all the people online mistakenly concluding that this rule change would even have any bearing on the rules of EDH, what is it you all (think) you see that leads you to that erroneous conclusion? Planeswalkers not being legendary wasn't why they couldn't be your commander before, it's because they weren't legendary creatures. They still aren't, and if such a rules change was in the works, it wouldn't (and this is the key here) require them to be legendary - this could only be a "first step" towards making them valid commanders if you are seriously suggesting WotC is later going to make all planeswalkers creatures as well. Which is utterly ridiculous.
I realized as I was typing this that there is an even stupider way this could be a "first step", because you could be suggesting there will be a future rules change to allow any legendary permanent to be your commander, which makes more sense (in that it could be at all related to this rules change, instead of utterly unrelated, it doesn't actually make any sense at all because that would be stupid), but I seriously doubt that was your reasoning.
I really just want to know why people keep thinking this.
Other than Jhoira giving stuff suspend. Are there any other cards before Mairsil that put counters on other cards in exile?
There are only two cards that put a non-time counter on a card in exile, and only one of those does it to a different card: Ertai's Meddling exiles spells and puts delay counter on them (All Hallow's Eve puts scream counters on itself). In both cases, the effect is essentially the same as it would be if they were time counters instead, so this is indeed a new effect.
Minor off-topic nitpicking here, but it annoys me that they've several times finally made cards for popular/well-known/important characters, only to slap said cards into Commander decks which means they can NEVER be printed in normal set (like Core Set). Before Edgar here, we have Ludevic (and Ludevic is also pure suck)
While cards that have commander specific mechanics on them like Eminence or Partner are definitely not going to ever see print in standard, core set or otherwise, cards/characters showing up in Commander precons doesn't in itself preclude ever appearing in a Standard legal set: take Scavenging Ooze or Hornet Queen - those were both printed in the first set of Commander decks and later made their way into standard via core sets. On the character side of things, Ghoulcaller Gisa and Stitcher Geralf being printed in C14 certainly didn't stop Gisa and Geralf from showing up later in Eldritch Moon; the Commander specific versions certainly won't get reprinted into standard but we can have multiple versions of characters, so a Ludevic that doesn't suck can still happen (and probably will next time they visit Innistrad).
Is there a point where after the 6/5 taps that you can untap it and still attack? If so, can you choose to attack anyone with it?
Yes, the ability triggers at the beginning of combat, after it resolves you have priority to do something else before moving to the declare attackers phase. The requirement to attack the selected player will only apply if you were able to choose one, when the Dragon is tapped because a player could not be chosen, no such attack requirement is created. So if you have a way to untap it, you would be free to attack whoever you want.
There's also Comeuppance, though that only redirects damage to players if they were sending non-creature damage your way (creatures that were going to damage you or your planeswalkers just hit themselves instead).
I also read that the cards should be sleeved because people have found that if they keep their cards in the binders for any length of time, without moving them (6-8 months) the back of the cards stick to the black plastic of the binder and ruin the card. I guess this is a pretty common problem. So should I find clear sleeves for them, and if so, what brand is best? Or should I use my Dragon Shields?
If you are looking for clear sleeves specifically DragonShield makes those (in regular or matte styles), but really any sleeves should be fine. I double sleeve all the cards I keep in my "not for trade" binders in DragonShield Matte black sleeves myself (except for the double-faced cards, those get clear DragonShields), but I will freely admit it is probably overkill.
Junk is called that because it was similar to both Jund and Rock decks. Jund + Rock = Junk.
I find the whole "refer to G/B midrange decks as "Rock" thing rather funny already because of its origins (Rock "the Dwayne" Johnson), so now I'm going to chuckle a bit every time I hear Junk. Thanks!
Not necessarily. I am looking for a list of terms. I have heard people name their type/style of Commander decks too, so it seems to be in all formats.
Well two of those terms you listed refer to creatures - the titans were a cycle of 6 CMC mythic giants with ETB abilities that also trigger when they attack (for example, Inferno Titan), which are generally considered in retrospect to be too strong, which is why comparable cycles printed nowadays are compared against them (just like how red burn spells are inevitably compared to Lightning Bolt).
Eldrazi is a creature type, which has the distinction of being an almost entirely colorless tribe despite being in all 5 colors (they would be entirely colorless but some of the drones from Rise of the Eldrazi were colored). The original versions (apart from the drones) all had the Annihilator ability, which is famously unfun to play against, and were all very expensive to cast; Eldrazi as a deck type didn't really take off until Oath of the Gatewatch brought a slew of smaller and more aggressively costed versions, which could be further discounted by lands legal (at the time) in Modern from the first sets with the eldrazi. That led to "eldrazi winter", where the eldrazi deck was unquestionably the best deck in modern, which is why Eye of Ugin is banned in the format now.
Junk is just an old slang term for the color wedge now known as Abzan (White/Black/Green), though I couldn't tell you why it was referred to that way (RUG and BUG for Temur and Sultai on the other hand are fairly obvious if you're familiar with the WUBRG color designations).
Not that they couldn't in the future, but they didn't work for what we were trying to accomplish. I mentioned last year that we were moving more toward printing full cycles of lands in a block to make the mana work for Constructed and for Block Constructed. That isn't changing.
Part of keeping Standard interesting over the long haul is constantly rotating what the dual lands in the environment do.
No where in that article is ten lands as a cycle ever mentioned. Full cycle can be interpreted as 5, which is par for most things. You still have not proven that ten is the full cycle.
If it's all nonsense, why do you even care that they don't make it? You have nearly no way of getting what you want them to make. Play with what you have.
...Are you for real? For the final time, let's examine why I keep telling you that your assertions are utter nonsense (not the idea of completing land cycles, that's something a great many players want and a constant source of frustration whenever WotC does not): For cards to be considered a cycle, the design must be such that each shares certain mechanical similarities, such that having seen one example the text for other cards in the cycle can be partially/completely guessed at. For a cycle to be complete it must have a representative card for each color combination in the scope of the cycle. If that is a set of 5 mono-color spells, or lands that only produce 1 color of mana, then 5 would be a "complete cycle", because there are 5 colors in Magic. When you add in a second color, you now require 10 cards to comprise a full cycle, because there are 5 colors in Magic.
You are arguing that what Sam Stoddard meant when he said "we are moving more towards printing full cycles of lands in a block" was that WotC intended to release 5 lands in either the ally or enemy color pairs in any given bock, and that whenever they do just that, they are living up to their word. Here is why that is ludicrous - the part of that sentence where the words "we are moving toward" is, cannot possibly be interpreted (by a reasonable person) to mean "continue doing exactly what we always have since Revised", because that makes no sense whatsoever; if the end result is the status quo, there is nothing to move towards. This is the clearest possible repudiation of your argument and the fact you refuse to acknowledge it is maddening. Particularly because every single "incomplete (ie, ally colors only) cycle of lands that produce 2 different colors of mana are not only from the same block, they were printed in the same set. Full stop.
You seem to think that stuff like the Future Sight ally-color duals were not a weird exception (a partial cycle itself comprised of 5 other incomplete cycles), but across the entire history of Magic and its various types of "dual lands", there are only two other sets of those lands that break the standard 5 ally/enemy breakdown: the tainted lands from Torment (a cycle of 4 cards, 1 for every color pair with black in it), and the tribal lands from Lorwyn (a mixture of ally and enemy color dual lands that corresponded to the colors each tribe was in). That's it, a set containing all 5 ally color producing lands and then maybe years and years later the corresponding 5 enemy color producing lands is the long established pattern, so when a Magic developer tells us multiple times that their design philosophy is shifting towards printing full cycles of lands in blocks, there's just no grounds to interpret that statement to conclude "5 lands in just the ally colors is a full cycle" like you have.
That a full cycle of dual lands by definition must contain 10 lands (at least) or be considered incomplete, that's not something I need to prove, it's how numbers work, but I went the extra mile and provided statements from the developers to back up all my points, and the cards themselves support my position - if you continue arguing that WotC has in fact not said one thing and then done the opposite, Sam Stoddard's statements must be pointless and nonsensical for your interpretation to be correct (one does not "move towards" continuing to do the same thing you've already been doing for 20 years). Unless you are seriously going to suggest that his statements are in fact nonsense, the only possible number of lands he could be referring to when he says a "full cycle", in the context of dual lands, is 10.
Telling me to "play with what I have" is both patronizing and completely besides the point.
As much as we might want them to, WotC is probably never going to print a token with a mana-cost on it.
You are free to house-rule them in, but they are never going to be part of the Vintage card pool anymore than a custom fan-created set of cards would be, so they are never going to be legal in Commander, regardless of how well they function within the rules.
I realized as I was typing this that there is an even stupider way this could be a "first step", because you could be suggesting there will be a future rules change to allow any legendary permanent to be your commander, which makes more sense (in that it could be at all related to this rules change, instead of utterly unrelated, it doesn't actually make any sense at all because that would be stupid), but I seriously doubt that was your reasoning.
I really just want to know why people keep thinking this.
On the topic of binders specifically, Monster is a brand I don't have personal experience with, but from what I've seen their binders are roughly equivalent to the standard Ultra Pro binder (perhaps a bit nicer), and those are fine but nothing spectacular. Personally I would recommend the Ultimate Guard Xenoskin Zipfolio, the Pirate Lab Summoner Deluxe Trade Binder, or the Legion Dragon Hide Binder.
Eldrazi is a creature type, which has the distinction of being an almost entirely colorless tribe despite being in all 5 colors (they would be entirely colorless but some of the drones from Rise of the Eldrazi were colored). The original versions (apart from the drones) all had the Annihilator ability, which is famously unfun to play against, and were all very expensive to cast; Eldrazi as a deck type didn't really take off until Oath of the Gatewatch brought a slew of smaller and more aggressively costed versions, which could be further discounted by lands legal (at the time) in Modern from the first sets with the eldrazi. That led to "eldrazi winter", where the eldrazi deck was unquestionably the best deck in modern, which is why Eye of Ugin is banned in the format now.
Junk is just an old slang term for the color wedge now known as Abzan (White/Black/Green), though I couldn't tell you why it was referred to that way (RUG and BUG for Temur and Sultai on the other hand are fairly obvious if you're familiar with the WUBRG color designations).
...Are you for real? For the final time, let's examine why I keep telling you that your assertions are utter nonsense (not the idea of completing land cycles, that's something a great many players want and a constant source of frustration whenever WotC does not): For cards to be considered a cycle, the design must be such that each shares certain mechanical similarities, such that having seen one example the text for other cards in the cycle can be partially/completely guessed at. For a cycle to be complete it must have a representative card for each color combination in the scope of the cycle. If that is a set of 5 mono-color spells, or lands that only produce 1 color of mana, then 5 would be a "complete cycle", because there are 5 colors in Magic. When you add in a second color, you now require 10 cards to comprise a full cycle, because there are 5 colors in Magic.
You are arguing that what Sam Stoddard meant when he said "we are moving more towards printing full cycles of lands in a block" was that WotC intended to release 5 lands in either the ally or enemy color pairs in any given bock, and that whenever they do just that, they are living up to their word. Here is why that is ludicrous - the part of that sentence where the words "we are moving toward" is, cannot possibly be interpreted (by a reasonable person) to mean "continue doing exactly what we always have since Revised", because that makes no sense whatsoever; if the end result is the status quo, there is nothing to move towards. This is the clearest possible repudiation of your argument and the fact you refuse to acknowledge it is maddening. Particularly because every single "incomplete (ie, ally colors only) cycle of lands that produce 2 different colors of mana are not only from the same block, they were printed in the same set. Full stop.
You seem to think that stuff like the Future Sight ally-color duals were not a weird exception (a partial cycle itself comprised of 5 other incomplete cycles), but across the entire history of Magic and its various types of "dual lands", there are only two other sets of those lands that break the standard 5 ally/enemy breakdown: the tainted lands from Torment (a cycle of 4 cards, 1 for every color pair with black in it), and the tribal lands from Lorwyn (a mixture of ally and enemy color dual lands that corresponded to the colors each tribe was in). That's it, a set containing all 5 ally color producing lands and then maybe years and years later the corresponding 5 enemy color producing lands is the long established pattern, so when a Magic developer tells us multiple times that their design philosophy is shifting towards printing full cycles of lands in blocks, there's just no grounds to interpret that statement to conclude "5 lands in just the ally colors is a full cycle" like you have.
That a full cycle of dual lands by definition must contain 10 lands (at least) or be considered incomplete, that's not something I need to prove, it's how numbers work, but I went the extra mile and provided statements from the developers to back up all my points, and the cards themselves support my position - if you continue arguing that WotC has in fact not said one thing and then done the opposite, Sam Stoddard's statements must be pointless and nonsensical for your interpretation to be correct (one does not "move towards" continuing to do the same thing you've already been doing for 20 years). Unless you are seriously going to suggest that his statements are in fact nonsense, the only possible number of lands he could be referring to when he says a "full cycle", in the context of dual lands, is 10.
Telling me to "play with what I have" is both patronizing and completely besides the point.