The joke is that you play the rats on turn 2 and trade it for your opponent's 2-drop, then later the Scavengers disentomb the rats to upgrade themselves.
And the power level seems well-tuned, so you can actually pick them up. Neither is an extremely high pick, but Scavengers is a good Limited card if you have some 2-3 drops with late game utility (fliers, deathtouchers, Duskwatch Recruiter). Then once you have a Scavenger, the rat (which is normally marginally playable) becomes more attractive, so the drafter with the Scavengers can get rats late in the pack.
I accept the reasonable rewards for drafting synergy like this. If you draft this and reap the rewards for it, more power to you. It's sealed that I find this to be an absurd hit-or-miss mechanic. You don't have any control in sealed whether you get the matching set or not. Sure, the cards may be playable sealed cards on their own so you didn't pull dead cards if you only got one half or the other. But the players that pulled both halves will likely have a substantial gameplay advantage relative to those who pulled nonmatches.
I don't disagree, but... well, that's Sealed for you, right? Synergy mechanics always do that in Sealed, and they're such a positive for draft that I don't want R&D to stop making them.
The joke is that you play the rats on turn 2 and trade it for your opponent's 2-drop, then later the Scavengers disentomb the rats to upgrade themselves.
And the power level seems well-tuned, so you can actually pick them up. Neither is an extremely high pick, but Scavengers is a good Limited card if you have some 2-3 drops with late game utility (fliers, deathtouchers, Duskwatch Recruiter). Then once you have a Scavenger, the rat (which is normally marginally playable) becomes more attractive, so the drafter with the Scavengers can get rats late in the pack.
Man, Innistrad has to be the worst place in the Multiverse to be right now. It was already almost as bad as New Phyrexia and Grixis… but with Emrakul there now? Pushes it over the edge as absolute worst.
I think you're 100% right about how bad Innistrad is right now; Emrakul Rises made the state of the plane seem downright apocalyptic. But I think people tend to greatly overestimate how bad a place Innistrad probably is to live under normal circumstances.
I assume that the stories of terror and death are relatively exceptional events, like the farmer down the road never came back from a trip through Kessig last year, your cousin says he knows a guy who fell prey to a mad scientist's demented experiment, and you saw a ghost one time when you were a kid, but the leading cause of death is still old age. I think that has to be the case for a few reasons:
- People seem to live relatively normal lives. Maybe they're fastidious about superstitions and careful not to go into the woods at night and committed to decking their homes out with Avacynian wards, but the denizens of Innistrad clearly aren't living like the characters on The Walking Dead. They keep tidy homes and wear fancy hats and are sometimes taken unawares by things that go bump in the night, which implies that most people don't live in a constant state of mortal fear.
- The civilization has a complex social structure, with noble titles and an aristocracy, and at least some well-established trade networks and urban centers. That kind of social complexity suggests a level of stability and security that indicates day-to-day life isn't a nightmarish struggle for survival for most people, at least in long-settled cities, townships, and farmsteads. Even the lower social classes can't be too badly off, except maybe in the hinterlands, or they couldn't be productive enough to support the wealth of the upper classes.
- The level of technological development suggests that struggling for survival is not a typical lifestyle. To have sailing ships, precision clockwork, sophisticated architecture, and fine glasswork for quality lenses, you need whole castes of artisans and scholars to create those things, as well as consumers for those creations, none of which can really be subsistence farmers fending off constant werewolf attacks.
- Finally, it just wouldn't be genre-appropriate for Innistrad to be all horror all the time. Places like New Phyrexia or Grixis aren't really horror settings, they're post-apocalyptic settings. To be an appropriate setting for a variety of horror stories, Innistrad needs to be able to provide most people with a baseline of "normal life" to be interrupted by horrific happenings.
Whether Nahiri is motivated solely by revenge or has some "greater good" in mind as well, isn't the morality of summoning Emrakul to Innistrad something of a trolley problem? If Emrakul is going to consume planes, is it inherently immoral for Nahiri to choose which plane?
Its pretty immoral to summon Emrakul to a plane full of innocent people when there are other options.
Now maybe the Emrakul would have no interest in an uninhabited plane but what about New Pyrexia? Or the plane of people who are all like total jerks?
Nahiri is unquestionably the villain here, understandable as her rage may be.
To what extent does the morality of her actions depend on her intentions vs. the results?
We had a long debate about this a few months ago and people disagree very strongly. Personally I don't feel that a consequentialist view of ethics makes much sense. Accidentally doing something beneficial is not inherently a morally righteous act. Because it is useful to distinguish between "beneficial" and "moral" we should do so.
I mostly agree, I just found the appearance of an interplanar trolley problem funny and felt like stirring the pot a bit.
I would question the conclusion that Nahiri is unquestionably a villain. She probably is, and certainly seems that way given the information we have, but there are possible sets of facts consistent with the fiction thus far that could make her... well, not heroic, but less than villainous. We know for a fact that she's motivated by revenge against Sorin so her motives are impure, but if (and it's a very questionable "if", but not precluded by anything we've read) her foremost goal is actually re-sealing the Eldrazi, then luring them to Innistrad may actually be the best of bad options. It may not be possible to draw the Eldrazi to an uninhabited plane, so Emrakul would be killing people no matter what; using Innistrad's moon may be the only plausible plan Nahiri has for a backup prison; guaranteeing Sorin's investment in solving the problem may be essential. I'm not convinced that that's what's going on, but it's certainly possible that creative could be deliberately setting up Nahiri as a villain only to undercut that perception later by revealing additional facts and motives.
Whether Nahiri is motivated solely by revenge or has some "greater good" in mind as well, isn't the morality of summoning Emrakul to Innistrad something of a trolley problem? If Emrakul is going to consume planes, is it inherently immoral for Nahiri to choose which plane? To what extent does the morality of her actions depend on her intentions vs. the results (e.g., if compared to Emrakul's first-choice plane, Innistrad has a larger or smaller population, or affords a greater/lesser chance for stopping Emrakul)?
Bruna and Gisela weren't killed, they were.... improved!
All the extra hands and wings and faces are just part of creative's new direction on angels, to bring them more in line with audience expectations from reading the book of Revelation.
They've made a point to address that they know a set flooded wwith eldrazi wasn't interesting. So I doubt they'd repeat that.
Something I have missed: why was Emrakul inside Innistrad/the sea and how long has she been there and how did Nahiri know she was there?
I think (and this is just me) that Emrakul was in the blind eternities, and she's crossing into physical reality by emerging from the sea because she knows how to make an entrance.
---
Oh, and I forgot to add to my list of things I liked/didn't like:
Things That Make Me Worried:
- Tamiyo acting all serene and purposeful and insisting on staying behind, exactly as described on page 34 of the Handbook for Doomed Characters. Dammit, do not kill off Tamiyo, or I am going to go pick up Jenrik and Glamdring, make some torches, and drive to Wizards of the Coast to demand justice for our favorite characters.
My advice to anyone looking to invest in an angel without getting your heart broken is to start learning to love Sigarda; I think she really has been set up to be the plane's post-Avacyn protector. As far back as Avacyn Restored, they were already setting up that she and the Herons were a little different from the other angels, a little less devoted to Avacyn, and were starting to look into ancient druidic/shamanic magic as an alternative to Avacyn's magic as a source of power.
---
Things I liked about this story:
- Great Emrakul entrance. Her appearance already feels apocalyptic, like the entire plane is already turning into some sort of Carpenter/Cronenberg nightmarescape, and everything seems screwed beyond belief. It feels like the end of the world, and that's just how it should feel when you're telling a Lovecraft-esque horror story and the cosmic horror actually shows up.
- They're managing to make Innistrad feel like yet another different horror world while still feeling appropriate to the story and setting. First Gothic-via-Universal-monster-movie horror world, then paranoid Lovecraft horror world, and now apocalyptic body horror world. They just keep making it work. Next time we come back they're going to do Hitchcock World and it's still going to work, somehow.
- Jace is going to get the Gatewatch. Okay, some people are calling this as a negative, but a traditional problem with teamups in serial stories is that you have the ensemble stories and the individual stories, and you try not to think too hard about why Captain America doesn't come help when terrorists try to kill Tony Stark and kidnap the president just because it's Iron Man's movie. Good, acknowledge that it's time for Jace to go get the team, and make him hesitant, to drive home the seriousness of the situation, that we shouldn't expect them to really have a good solution to this.
What I didn't like:
- I found the I'mrakul thing goofy. I like the idea, that she's immediately in everyone's heads em shaping their thoughts. And I like the idea that Emrakul's name comes from em showing up inexplicably in peoples' minds. I just think that em there may have been better ways to emrakul, because the weird compounding, to me, made it seem like they were making goofy dad puns rather than emrakul. Like the emrakul could just insert itself emrakul their speech emrakul they're just babbling her emrakul over emrakul emrakul.
I haven't seen any confirmation. Only text on a post that anyone could have written. Show me the proof and I will acknowledge it is confirmed. That thread is a bunch of people circle-jerking with no actual evidence.
To each their own. That leak has been endorsed by a very well respected member. In any case, we will know in three days.
Yeah, I'm ready for them to show us Emrakul on Monday and put this whole thing to bed. (We all get that the card Mark Rosewater showed to Jimmy Wong was Emrakul, right? I mean, yes, technically not confirmed-confirmed, but seriously, the Monday morning preview video is going to be unveiling Emrakul)
I'm confused by the Emrakul is "in" the moon theory, at least if it's predicated on the 5 legged shrew tidbit. The heron-shrew moon outdates Emrakul's very recent escape. If anything, today's story's demonstration of the moon's binding abilities leads me to believe it could be keeping Innistrad's Cthulhu/Stromkirk sea god dormant since before Sorin, Runo, Olivia et al ever even drank the angel's blood to become fangers. Whether or not Emrakul is coming, there's something else down there that's preparing to resurface imo. C'Thulhu-esque creature + R'lyeh temple artifact being harbringer-ed?
I think the clear implication being made in The Drownyard Temple, where the idea of the new "Eldritch Moon" was introduced, is that Emrakul is the Eldritch Moon. That is, the "new astral body" that Tamiyo deduced was distorting the tides and mana of Innistrad, the mysterious "Object" that Jace sensed over the drownyard, is Emrakul herself, just not yet visible because she hasn't yet entered the plane.
The Heron Moon is, I think, just the moon, doing what moons do (in addition to apparently being made of silver with magical properties). It may end up being the prison for something before the block is over, like a new, giant Helvault, but I don't think we've seen a compelling reason to think there's anything trapped in there already.
So Innistrad has 2 moons. One real and tangible(and made of Moon Silver) and one magical/ethereal? I need to catch up on my reading could you link this for me?
The term "eldritch moon" was coined by Tamiyo in her journal, in a passage that Jace reads while investigating the drownyard temple that all the cryptoliths lead to:
Taken in total, the findings presented in this work support the presence of an object of significant mass. Most likely a new astral body, an eldritch moon of sufficient size as to provide a gravitational pull able to disrupt the normal patterns of both the tides and magical energy.
You can read the story for the more detailed version (IMO Tamiyo's journal entries are great and make that story well worth reading), but in short the "Eldritch Moon" is a newly-appeared, huge, invisible object, perhaps not really "there" in a physical sense, hovering over the drownyard temple off the coast of Nephalia and exerting an influence on the plane.
This is distinct from the "Heron Moon," Innistrad's regular silver moon (so-called because it has markings that suggest a heron, kind of like the "man in the moon" for earth's moon).
The joke is that you play the rats on turn 2 and trade it for your opponent's 2-drop, then later the Scavengers disentomb the rats to upgrade themselves.
And the power level seems well-tuned, so you can actually pick them up. Neither is an extremely high pick, but Scavengers is a good Limited card if you have some 2-3 drops with late game utility (fliers, deathtouchers, Duskwatch Recruiter). Then once you have a Scavenger, the rat (which is normally marginally playable) becomes more attractive, so the drafter with the Scavengers can get rats late in the pack.
I assume that the stories of terror and death are relatively exceptional events, like the farmer down the road never came back from a trip through Kessig last year, your cousin says he knows a guy who fell prey to a mad scientist's demented experiment, and you saw a ghost one time when you were a kid, but the leading cause of death is still old age. I think that has to be the case for a few reasons:
- People seem to live relatively normal lives. Maybe they're fastidious about superstitions and careful not to go into the woods at night and committed to decking their homes out with Avacynian wards, but the denizens of Innistrad clearly aren't living like the characters on The Walking Dead. They keep tidy homes and wear fancy hats and are sometimes taken unawares by things that go bump in the night, which implies that most people don't live in a constant state of mortal fear.
- The civilization has a complex social structure, with noble titles and an aristocracy, and at least some well-established trade networks and urban centers. That kind of social complexity suggests a level of stability and security that indicates day-to-day life isn't a nightmarish struggle for survival for most people, at least in long-settled cities, townships, and farmsteads. Even the lower social classes can't be too badly off, except maybe in the hinterlands, or they couldn't be productive enough to support the wealth of the upper classes.
- The level of technological development suggests that struggling for survival is not a typical lifestyle. To have sailing ships, precision clockwork, sophisticated architecture, and fine glasswork for quality lenses, you need whole castes of artisans and scholars to create those things, as well as consumers for those creations, none of which can really be subsistence farmers fending off constant werewolf attacks.
- Finally, it just wouldn't be genre-appropriate for Innistrad to be all horror all the time. Places like New Phyrexia or Grixis aren't really horror settings, they're post-apocalyptic settings. To be an appropriate setting for a variety of horror stories, Innistrad needs to be able to provide most people with a baseline of "normal life" to be interrupted by horrific happenings.
I would question the conclusion that Nahiri is unquestionably a villain. She probably is, and certainly seems that way given the information we have, but there are possible sets of facts consistent with the fiction thus far that could make her... well, not heroic, but less than villainous. We know for a fact that she's motivated by revenge against Sorin so her motives are impure, but if (and it's a very questionable "if", but not precluded by anything we've read) her foremost goal is actually re-sealing the Eldrazi, then luring them to Innistrad may actually be the best of bad options. It may not be possible to draw the Eldrazi to an uninhabited plane, so Emrakul would be killing people no matter what; using Innistrad's moon may be the only plausible plan Nahiri has for a backup prison; guaranteeing Sorin's investment in solving the problem may be essential. I'm not convinced that that's what's going on, but it's certainly possible that creative could be deliberately setting up Nahiri as a villain only to undercut that perception later by revealing additional facts and motives.
---
Oh, and I forgot to add to my list of things I liked/didn't like:
Things That Make Me Worried:
- Tamiyo acting all serene and purposeful and insisting on staying behind, exactly as described on page 34 of the Handbook for Doomed Characters. Dammit, do not kill off Tamiyo, or I am going to go pick up Jenrik and Glamdring, make some torches, and drive to Wizards of the Coast to demand justice for our favorite characters.
My advice to anyone looking to invest in an angel without getting your heart broken is to start learning to love Sigarda; I think she really has been set up to be the plane's post-Avacyn protector. As far back as Avacyn Restored, they were already setting up that she and the Herons were a little different from the other angels, a little less devoted to Avacyn, and were starting to look into ancient druidic/shamanic magic as an alternative to Avacyn's magic as a source of power.
---
Things I liked about this story:
- Great Emrakul entrance. Her appearance already feels apocalyptic, like the entire plane is already turning into some sort of Carpenter/Cronenberg nightmarescape, and everything seems screwed beyond belief. It feels like the end of the world, and that's just how it should feel when you're telling a Lovecraft-esque horror story and the cosmic horror actually shows up.
- They're managing to make Innistrad feel like yet another different horror world while still feeling appropriate to the story and setting. First Gothic-via-Universal-monster-movie horror world, then paranoid Lovecraft horror world, and now apocalyptic body horror world. They just keep making it work. Next time we come back they're going to do Hitchcock World and it's still going to work, somehow.
- Jace is going to get the Gatewatch. Okay, some people are calling this as a negative, but a traditional problem with teamups in serial stories is that you have the ensemble stories and the individual stories, and you try not to think too hard about why Captain America doesn't come help when terrorists try to kill Tony Stark and kidnap the president just because it's Iron Man's movie. Good, acknowledge that it's time for Jace to go get the team, and make him hesitant, to drive home the seriousness of the situation, that we shouldn't expect them to really have a good solution to this.
What I didn't like:
- I found the I'mrakul thing goofy. I like the idea, that she's immediately in everyone's heads em shaping their thoughts. And I like the idea that Emrakul's name comes from em showing up inexplicably in peoples' minds. I just think that em there may have been better ways to emrakul, because the weird compounding, to me, made it seem like they were making goofy dad puns rather than emrakul. Like the emrakul could just insert itself emrakul their speech emrakul they're just babbling her emrakul over emrakul emrakul.
The Heron Moon is, I think, just the moon, doing what moons do (in addition to apparently being made of silver with magical properties). It may end up being the prison for something before the block is over, like a new, giant Helvault, but I don't think we've seen a compelling reason to think there's anything trapped in there already.
You can read the story for the more detailed version (IMO Tamiyo's journal entries are great and make that story well worth reading), but in short the "Eldritch Moon" is a newly-appeared, huge, invisible object, perhaps not really "there" in a physical sense, hovering over the drownyard temple off the coast of Nephalia and exerting an influence on the plane.
This is distinct from the "Heron Moon," Innistrad's regular silver moon (so-called because it has markings that suggest a heron, kind of like the "man in the moon" for earth's moon).