the bear seemed pretty unremarkable until I looked at the rarity. I would have thought complexity alone made this uncommon. I suppose this set is going to be a real outlier in terms of mechanical complexity, learning curve and uniqueness. I mean, they just threw affinity on tezzeret in a set with no affinity or reminder text of what affinity does. Straight up meaningless to someone who doesn't already know it- but I guess, everyone has a phone to google it.
still though. 2/3 for 3 that has a card draw engine glued to it?? at common? People are so used to playing mediocre dumb filler beaters at common and wizards is basically giving us a pseudo-azure mage or Dimir Guildmage. Yeah its not nearly as good, its not efficient, it can whiff- but when you're getting that kind of lategame reach and hand refill to keep you steaming along in limited from a common, in green, you know you've got a winner
a lot of people going on about lore, but eh, that's a whole lot of lore could easily be disregarded as non-canon, I mean, 'Voluptara wears a fitted grey jacket over a simple knee-length skirt, and her black hair in a bun. She has an ashen grey skin and dark red eyes, with small horns peeking up through her hair.' Naw
But as an uncommon, oh my that's a sick amount of card advantage possible from a 3-drop. You're going to be able to rack people in a draft with a single card. He doesn't have to jump through many hoops to be as good as a blightning, and being able to punish someone whether they are emptyhanded or just nuke a card they decide to keep, seems nice even if he's often going to get overrun. But with all the token generators at low rarities, I'm suspecting there will be a lot of stalled boards.
swinging into someone with a 1/4 lightshield on its own is going to feel really odd from a flavor standpoint
I can understand why balancewise it doesn't need defender, but eh
He honestly might see play in Vintage just as a one-sided Null Rod for 4, at least in sideboards. Actually, scratch that, the dude's a one-sided Null Rod that can also reach into your SB to grab your: Pithing Needle, Grafdigger's Cage, Tormod's Crypt, Engineered Explosives... the list goes on and on. If the decks that can reliably cast this on turn 2 start playing it main, Dredge may lose a LOT of percentage points in G1s. The more I think about it, the more confident I am that he's going to make a huge splash in Vintage.
he also searches for mycosynth lattice, a 1-of in your sideboard that turns this karn into a one-card lock combo and finisher in both modern & vintage
I really love the flavor of “amassing an army”. But the execution is just lazy AF imo. It would’ve been nice if it was like “choose a creature type” instead of locking you into the stupidest “creature type” in the history of Magic. Even just good old Zombie would’ve worked. Not only would the flavor be better, but then there’s be backwards compatibility.
Yeah I don't see what would have been so wrong with just replacing every instance of 'army' with 'zombie'.
Its not like zombies would suddenly take over standard or modern because of it, its not even necessarily a benefit in a deck that has zombies since it means less bodies. It would just mean a far more generalized interaction given the huge number of zombies.
Is it actually a nice uncommon for limited, though?
it seems worse than just picking a common like colossal dreadmaw. Would you rather have a 6/6 trample body up front, or 3x 3/3 bodies over 3 turns that might only be a single 3/3 when your opponent swings into the walker.
Worth noting that in one sense, all of Bolas's abilities actually have bad synergy with his static ability. An opponent can choose to exile their planeswalkers to deny their abilities to his +1, or destroying with his +3 also loses their abilities, and he can only -8 to win the game once he's reached a point where his static ability does nothing on the other hand
if you're using your opponents loyalty abilities, they might not have any anti-synergy
~~Gideon seems quite pushed. If your opponent can't swing back at you to destroy his loyalty, then he's effectively a 4/4 indestructible lifelink for 1WW who will be able to exile an enemy permanent at some point, which in turn will held stabilize his board to stop opponents from being able to swing into him. He can't protect himself, but this is a considerably more efficient body than Gideon of the Trials when he's starting at 5 loyalty instead of 4 and gaining +1 per turn when swinging in, with lifelink. I could see aggro decks having troubles when a deck with gideon gets in just one swing and the opponent swings back to kill him- that's already 10+ life 'gained' from them having to take down 6 loyalty and you lifelinking 4.~~ naw it says "other" creature
This is extremely wierd in blue. As it is either 3U Create a 3/3 black zombie army token or 3U put three +1/+1 counters on your black zombie army token...neither of which strikes me as blue.
in limited its maybe better than hill giant. If the format is light on removal, the ability to make a +3/+3 bonus on one of your creatures is better than another 3/3 body. But all these planeswalkers and tokens in the format make me think otherwise
Its interesting that wizards felt like overengineering citadel enough to be a combo deck's card advantage engine, mana engine and win condition all in a single card. It will make combos with it rather linear, but whiffing when it hits lands and costing 6 mana cost make it run into more roadblocks than experimental frenzy. I wouldn't hold my breath on it to be a thing, but if you can make that 6 cmc hurdle thats a lot of moving parts on a single card
Have you noticed the rules change on proliferate? In Scars of Mirrodin block, you could add one counter to each permanent or player, of any one type that it already had. Here, proliferate automatically gives one counter of EACH kind. I guess they realized that permanents with multiple kinds of counters appear so rarely that it's not worth it. But it also means that if you have, say, a poison counter and an energy counter, proliferate will automatically give you both or neither -- so both you and opponent would have to decide whether you really want to do that.
Feels like it was done to speed up Arena play. It removes a step that would slow a game down.
Does arena make you choose counter types on proliferate? I know you have to choose targets, but if it was already ignoring the 'choose counter type' on permanents with only 1 type of counter on them, then this change wouldn't matter for anything but permanents with 2+ types of counters on them. And if WotC is going to make that regular enough to matter, something is screwy designwise
Widespread Brutality looks scary for the same reasons as Gates Ablaze
But maybe we'll have to reevaluate sweepers that don't hit planeswalkers? I guess it wouldn't actually save you from walkers spamming tokens. But brutality could turn the board from you have a lone 2/2 and facing 3x creatures in the 2/2-4/4 range, to being a 4/4 and wiping your opponents board.
I asked Maro about this concept once,. He said R&D had played around with the idea when tackling the issue of too-much-shuffling, and discovered that it wasn't feasible because players would constantly forget to take the 'wished' lands out of their deck after the game, same problem with token lands. Even if hypothetically it saves shuffle time, in practice it caused a lot of headaches.
What I came up with and asked him about- and never got a response- was why they couldn't do 'half-size' token lands, using perforated punchcards on tokens so that you can put two lands on a single card print and then tear them apart and use them as two tokens. That way it would never get shuffled back into a deck. Well I brought that up years ago, and then later we got the perforated cut-outs for amonkhet. Maybe there's a chance?
still though. 2/3 for 3 that has a card draw engine glued to it?? at common? People are so used to playing mediocre dumb filler beaters at common and wizards is basically giving us a pseudo-azure mage or Dimir Guildmage. Yeah its not nearly as good, its not efficient, it can whiff- but when you're getting that kind of lategame reach and hand refill to keep you steaming along in limited from a common, in green, you know you've got a winner
But as an uncommon, oh my that's a sick amount of card advantage possible from a 3-drop. You're going to be able to rack people in a draft with a single card. He doesn't have to jump through many hoops to be as good as a blightning, and being able to punish someone whether they are emptyhanded or just nuke a card they decide to keep, seems nice even if he's often going to get overrun. But with all the token generators at low rarities, I'm suspecting there will be a lot of stalled boards.
I can understand why balancewise it doesn't need defender, but eh
he also searches for mycosynth lattice, a 1-of in your sideboard that turns this karn into a one-card lock combo and finisher in both modern & vintage
Yeah I don't see what would have been so wrong with just replacing every instance of 'army' with 'zombie'.
Its not like zombies would suddenly take over standard or modern because of it, its not even necessarily a benefit in a deck that has zombies since it means less bodies. It would just mean a far more generalized interaction given the huge number of zombies.
Is it actually a nice uncommon for limited, though?
it seems worse than just picking a common like colossal dreadmaw. Would you rather have a 6/6 trample body up front, or 3x 3/3 bodies over 3 turns that might only be a single 3/3 when your opponent swings into the walker.
on the other hand
if you're using your opponents loyalty abilities, they might not have any anti-synergy
ah that's a little more reasonable. I wasn't squinting hard enough
And here I was thinking 2UU to bounce and draw a card was a good value
Gideon seems quite pushed. If your opponent can't swing back at you to destroy his loyalty, then he's effectively a 4/4 indestructible lifelink for 1WW who will be able to exile an enemy permanent at some point, which in turn will held stabilize his board to stop opponents from being able to swing into him. He can't protect himself, but this is a considerably more efficient body than Gideon of the Trials when he's starting at 5 loyalty instead of 4 and gaining +1 per turn when swinging in, with lifelink. I could see aggro decks having troubles when a deck with gideon gets in just one swing and the opponent swings back to kill him- that's already 10+ life 'gained' from them having to take down 6 loyalty and you lifelinking 4.~~ naw it says "other" creaturein limited its maybe better than hill giant. If the format is light on removal, the ability to make a +3/+3 bonus on one of your creatures is better than another 3/3 body. But all these planeswalkers and tokens in the format make me think otherwise
Does arena make you choose counter types on proliferate? I know you have to choose targets, but if it was already ignoring the 'choose counter type' on permanents with only 1 type of counter on them, then this change wouldn't matter for anything but permanents with 2+ types of counters on them. And if WotC is going to make that regular enough to matter, something is screwy designwise
But maybe we'll have to reevaluate sweepers that don't hit planeswalkers? I guess it wouldn't actually save you from walkers spamming tokens. But brutality could turn the board from you have a lone 2/2 and facing 3x creatures in the 2/2-4/4 range, to being a 4/4 and wiping your opponents board.
What I came up with and asked him about- and never got a response- was why they couldn't do 'half-size' token lands, using perforated punchcards on tokens so that you can put two lands on a single card print and then tear them apart and use them as two tokens. That way it would never get shuffled back into a deck. Well I brought that up years ago, and then later we got the perforated cut-outs for amonkhet. Maybe there's a chance?