Well, I guess one last gasp of interaction is worth another. The relative death of this community was always sad to me; I was pretty committed to it for a long time. This site remains my preferred place to check for spoilers, so seeing that go is also unfortunate, but the thing I miss most of all is bateleur schooling me on basic (and not-so-basic) logic throughout my college career.
Goodbye, Flying Spaghetti Monster. Have a great life.
Pretty sure Thoughtseize doesn't work with this. Life loss doesn't mean life payment. Fetchlands definitely don't.
The effect of killing a creature is not one you'd happily trade life for very many times, unless your deck has a significant amount of lifegain. Also, these don't stack well, so putting multiples in a deck risks you losing the card advantage you sought to gain. It may see play in a black control deck as a 1-of alongside Arguel's Blood Fast but other than that there's little reason to think this is going anywhere competitive. In EDH, though, there are a handful of commanders that will turn this on as a matter of course, and the extra life will make this pretty decent at killing things. Probably better than most single-target removal at that point.
Considering that Doom Whisperer costs 5 with no off-color mana, and has a worthwhile ability already, the trigger you're getting with Rakdos comes with a significant cost. I guess there are games where your opponent has a big board and this will reliably generate value, but I can't imagine it being better than the Whisperer in general, nor wanting to run this card for the corner case where I'm specifically about to lose to a big board *and* my opponent lets me cast a giant fatty *and* I have good luck with the coin flips.
Doom Whisperer already sees limited play, and Rakdos is much worse.
Birthing Pod is already a stick! This isn't Birthing Pod on a stick. If it were, using it would have the effect of casting Birthing Pod, which it definitely doesn't do.
This might be the cheap UW legendary that UW Historic has needed to find its niche. It slots perfectly into the curve, increases the count of legends for Urza's Ruinous Blast, and requires you to jump through far fewer hoops than Sai, Master Thopterist.
10 hours later, I'm the only voter. I think that pretty much sums up exactly how popular the format is.
But seriously, it sucks. The format is a coin flip format with a dearth of removal and a bunch of idiotic nonsense cards like Jade Guardian and Captivating Crew that punish people for playing a normal game of Magic. The polite way to describe the format is it's a "racing format", but all that means is that trying to be interactive is going to get you punished, so don't try.
When the cleverest thing you can do to win games is stack your deck with lifelink creatures and equipment, of course the format's going to suck.
Leagues have closing dates, but you can join them anytime before that, and play your games whenever. There's a matchmaking system for players kind of like in Hearthstone Arena, so that you're paired against players with your same record. If you want to play all your games in a row, you can. If you want to join, play one game, log off and come back 3 days later, you can. There is still some scheduling to be aware of of, but it's in the form of weeks, not hours or days.
There are prizes, they vary between events. You can check them by clicking the event details link, in-game.
Playing around spells you know your opponent has and which will completely wreck you is generally a good plan. Doing it when it doesn't cost you much except tempo and when you have the chance to actually gain value is kind of the whole point of the game.
Combo with Adanto Vanguard. Considering that Vanguard is a virtually guaranteed 4-of in some white aggro deck or other, I could imagine this as sideboard tech against decks with lifegain, if there are any. Definitely going to get pulled off in Limited at some point too, which will be hilarious.
Okay, Captivating Crew is upsetting to me. It's a ludicrous, unbeatable bomb in limited, and unplayable in constructed. I *hate* cards like this. "Hey, you know what we really need for this set? A card that makes every limited game in which it shows up suck, but also in constructed is only good for the sorts of people who think it's hilarious to grief their kitchen table opponents." Cards like that should never be printed, ever.
Don't get me wrong, one of my very favorite things to do in Magic is steal stuff. What I hate is that this card isn't about stealing stuff. It's about suppressing the opponent's board. It isn't that much different from a card that says "3R: Destroy target creature."
It should have been "3R: Threaten a creature. Sacrifice ~ at end of turn." That would have been a cool, fun, swingy, powerful aggro card. For limited, this nonsense is not cool, not fun, outright oppressive, and obscenely overpowered in all the wrong ways.
Seems good. The question is how much tempo a deck can afford to sacrifice to actually get this down. I kinda suspect the answer is "not much", but we'll have to see.
The picture on the card shows wrecks on a shore, as opposed to underwater.
I have no idea why it's supposed to exile creatures. The context makes no sense to me. Maybe it's a bunch of Pirates getting shipwrecked and settling inside the wreckage for shelter? The art doesn't have any people in it though.
Going back to Dominaria is a hard thing to do. The plane is so soaked in old stories that have been fully resolved.
I think slivers are definitely coming back. They're popular, Wizards likely wants a chance to correct their last implementation that screwed them up, and they were never really dealt with in any old plots.
So much of the rest of the plane is just giant holes of unreality or incursions from another plane that I have a super hard time imagining any kind of cohesive culture forming there, beyond "post-apocalyptic non-recovery", and we already had that, in Time Spiral. Now it's even worse.
Maybe the story will be that there's some McGuffin that planeswalkers need from there, a la the Golgothian Sylex or something. I just can't see much actual world-building happening on top of the ruins a plane that's been destroyed as many times as Dominaria has.
This is just me, but I have a baseline of 24 lands, at least 4 cards that I feel can absolutely win the game on their own, and at least 8 cards that can stop my opponent from winning. That gives me 24 more cards to try to support the goals established by the first 36. And then, once I've put things together and tested it a bit I can mess with the numbers and tweak things if I need to, but until I've tested, the first 36 are locked in.
This has the advantage of giving me a lot more focus than I might otherwise have.
Also, your mana curve is important. You can usually only justify about 6 cards at most that cost more than 4 mana in a typical deck. Try it out. You'll be pleasantly surprised at how much smoother your draws are when your hand isn't filling up with uncastable bombs.
Goodbye, Flying Spaghetti Monster. Have a great life.
The effect of killing a creature is not one you'd happily trade life for very many times, unless your deck has a significant amount of lifegain. Also, these don't stack well, so putting multiples in a deck risks you losing the card advantage you sought to gain. It may see play in a black control deck as a 1-of alongside Arguel's Blood Fast but other than that there's little reason to think this is going anywhere competitive. In EDH, though, there are a handful of commanders that will turn this on as a matter of course, and the extra life will make this pretty decent at killing things. Probably better than most single-target removal at that point.
Doom Whisperer already sees limited play, and Rakdos is much worse.
Birthing Pod is already a stick! This isn't Birthing Pod on a stick. If it were, using it would have the effect of casting Birthing Pod, which it definitely doesn't do.
But seriously, it sucks. The format is a coin flip format with a dearth of removal and a bunch of idiotic nonsense cards like Jade Guardian and Captivating Crew that punish people for playing a normal game of Magic. The polite way to describe the format is it's a "racing format", but all that means is that trying to be interactive is going to get you punished, so don't try.
When the cleverest thing you can do to win games is stack your deck with lifelink creatures and equipment, of course the format's going to suck.
There are prizes, they vary between events. You can check them by clicking the event details link, in-game.
Don't get me wrong, one of my very favorite things to do in Magic is steal stuff. What I hate is that this card isn't about stealing stuff. It's about suppressing the opponent's board. It isn't that much different from a card that says "3R: Destroy target creature."
It should have been "3R: Threaten a creature. Sacrifice ~ at end of turn." That would have been a cool, fun, swingy, powerful aggro card. For limited, this nonsense is not cool, not fun, outright oppressive, and obscenely overpowered in all the wrong ways.
I have no idea why it's supposed to exile creatures. The context makes no sense to me. Maybe it's a bunch of Pirates getting shipwrecked and settling inside the wreckage for shelter? The art doesn't have any people in it though.
I think slivers are definitely coming back. They're popular, Wizards likely wants a chance to correct their last implementation that screwed them up, and they were never really dealt with in any old plots.
So much of the rest of the plane is just giant holes of unreality or incursions from another plane that I have a super hard time imagining any kind of cohesive culture forming there, beyond "post-apocalyptic non-recovery", and we already had that, in Time Spiral. Now it's even worse.
Maybe the story will be that there's some McGuffin that planeswalkers need from there, a la the Golgothian Sylex or something. I just can't see much actual world-building happening on top of the ruins a plane that's been destroyed as many times as Dominaria has.
This has the advantage of giving me a lot more focus than I might otherwise have.
Also, your mana curve is important. You can usually only justify about 6 cards at most that cost more than 4 mana in a typical deck. Try it out. You'll be pleasantly surprised at how much smoother your draws are when your hand isn't filling up with uncastable bombs.