These are really underwhelming. They are likely good in midrange, but aren't we getting a bit sick of how midrange Standard has been for a couple years?
There's no point in the game at which an aggro player would want to draw this. Early you don't want ETB tapped, late you'd rather draw gas you don't have to spend 2 mana on first. It doesn't solve the flooding problem at all, because the decks that don't want to flood don't want ETB tapped.
Control wants to hit their land drops and probably won't cycle these away too often, except in late game situations that aren't control mirrors.
It's midrange that benefits, where they're constantly drawing the wrong half of their deck, and where they can do cutesy synergies with these. It's probably good there isn't a G/B one yet.
If the decks they benefit are midrange and maybe Saheeli, then just... bleh.
They work with the show lands from Innistrad but only in a way that makes land sequencing awkward and bad.
Goyf yet again? This is pretty silly. The card had lost a lot of luster since 2010 when it was in every legacy deck (including merfolk and countertop sometimes even!) and been on a steady decline in both usage and price for the past few years. This is so completely unnecessary.
The original trifecta of high price cards in Modern that were perpetually whined about - Goyf, Bob and V Clique - have all seen their importance to the format fade drastically, and it feels like a throwback to another age to keep printing this card over and over again like it was an Argentinian peso.
What? It's one of the 5 most played cards in the format and a week ago copies cost more than an entire regular booster box. When it is not the most expensive card in the format and a playset doesn't cost more than most decks because you can't reasonably play midrange without it, then the luster and prices will drop. Until then I hope they print it in just everything and anyone can reasonably have it. This is not me just talking because this set only impacts other people, I have my Goblin Guides and Snapcasters and Craterhoofs and I am quite happy to see them here, I don't plan to sell out anytime soon, I might get more copies, and I will have more people to play with. If your collection losing value upsets you and you see your cards as an investment in money instead of fun, may I suggest Legacy Reserved List cards and not the format built on 'we can and will reprint anything'
It's in Zoo and the two midrange green decks, which is at best 15% of the metagame. For the other 85% of people, there are numerous options for those wanting to get into Modern without buying Goyfs. The card isn't even remotely scarce having been printed this often, prestige and price memory was about the only thing keeping it afloat. If you take a long view of the format, Goyf is in decline, and this simply isn't necessary.
Anybody who wasn't playing Modern before was being silly or disingenuous if they claimed the price of a card they don't need for 85% of the competitive metagame is what kept them out. Those people, and I know many, will keep complaining at $50/ea and would keep complaining at $20/ea, and will never play Eternal formats unless the best deck is handed to them in a precon for $29.99 fully built.
Amd it isn't about "speculating" or "investing", though the very tiny class of speculators is a perpetual boogeyman in Magic going back to my early days in 94. It actually increases the cost of maintaining a playable CCG collection if for example some $200 playset I had to buy is going to be reprinted into oblivion Yu-Gi-Oh style so it's a sunk cost, rather than something I could get most of my money out of if I wanted to swap decks. This is why many players prefer the stability of eternal formats to the volatility of Standard where your collection is 90% sunk costs if you intend to play a full season. In an LCG model like Fantasy Flight Games it doesn't matter, you buy a chapter pack a month and everyone has everything, but that's not Magic. In Magic the most economically stable format is Legacy where 90% of your deck value is reserved list lands, that format costs me basically nothing to maintain a collection for indefinitely, whereas the philosophy shown by this needless Goyf reprint is a flashing warning sign that Modern is getting more dangerous to buy into. If you're prudent with your money that makes the format worse, not better.
Goyf yet again? This is pretty silly. The card had lost a lot of luster since 2010 when it was in every legacy deck (including merfolk and countertop sometimes even!) and been on a steady decline in both usage and price for the past few years. This is so completely unnecessary.
The original trifecta of high price cards in Modern that were perpetually whined about - Goyf, Bob and V Clique - have all seen their importance to the format fade drastically, and it feels like a throwback to another age to keep printing this card over and over again like it was an Argentinian peso.
Obviously the inventions are going to eat up much of the value. someone on another board estimated based on their frequency and the starting SCG prices and quantity SCG must be busting to fulfill the preorders offered, that SCG is expecting to retail about $55 worth of non-invention singles per box, and clearly some of that is ordinary pack foils as usual.
Having a very low value set at the level of card quality here seems unprecedented. The power level seems high relative to recent sets, and many of these are build-around cards that will appear as 3x 4x in decks.
Fallen Empires was overprinted and then nothing new was released for 8 months after that while all older product was long gone, so we were saturated with those cards and they were relatively weak except at common, so not a close comparison.
I'm just not seeing an application for Lily in THIS deck. The +1 doesn't do enough against the field, and tapping out on Turn 3 for this is inviting disaster. Playing it later when you've bought some breathing room seems pointless, as Tasigur would probably seal the deal just as well and can be played sooner with countermagic backup. With only 10-11 creatures in the optimal versions (4 SSS, 3 V Clique, 3 Mistbind, maybe one flex slot for Kalitas or Tasigur or whatever) that minus ability often won't be worth a card, unless you're in that hypothetical mode of chumping SSS's and recurring them. Just seems like a LOT of other things have to come together for it to be right. Why are you working that hard to create incremental value, when Fae is already a synergy based deck with a ton of powerful pieces? You don't have slots to just throw around trying to create scenarios for something to work, you need those slots to not die.
I understand the natural desire to be optimistic, but it would take a very peculiar metagame and probably a very different build of Fae (more Snapcaster heavy than typical now, perhaps) to make it right, and even then it's dangerous to tap out for something that many opponents can safely ignore and go over the top with a game-ending threat. Playing this Turn 3 on the draw is just god awful.
In something with BoP or Hierarch powering it out early, I could potentially see it, slam it Turn 2 and eat the opponent's mana dork and you are way the hell ahead, but even an Abzan mirror doesn't want this in the current environment since it can't handle most of the other creatures. Maybe for Abzan vs Grixis Delver, enough juicy targets there.
Decks with X/1s as integral parts of their engine just got so much better for us
Affinity x/1s
Infect x/1s
Elves x/1s
Opportunities to help against jund (not spectacularly, but they help) killing dark confidant and returning creatures that are discarded, as well as shrinking early goyfs into dismember range. And it pressures them to use abrupt decay on something other than bitterblossom
If you want to repeatedly kill X/1's and also put two cards in your graveyard, perhaps you want Darkblast? I don't think Fae will be seriously considering new Liliana, playing out a 3 drop sorcery speed threat that provides only incremental value seems like a very quick way to lose a game of Modern. You might play a few more turns, but you lost when you cast that.
Evoke mechanic is a pretty spicy combo for emerge creatures that have flash. Evoking an Ingot Chewer and then flashing this in saves you most of the cost and gets you a ton of value.
It That Rides As One is simultaneously an amazing aggro play while also being a card that actually makes life gain relevant and worth it.
Is it really an aggro card? A 1/1 for 2 certainly doesn't fit that mold. If you manage to flip it on T2, then kudos to you and it fits the bill perfectly because now you're swinging with a T3 4/4 first striking lifelinker. If you don't flip it T2, you have to wait for it to flip at the end of T3, so you're not swinging with a 4/4 first strike until T4 - and you dedicated resources to playing it and meeting its flip condition on the previous 2 turns. Feels like it's a bit too conditional or slow for an aggro build.
I will fully admit that I am not a constructed whiz and I only play casually, so my thoughts here are genuinely inquisitive and not at all a condescension or rebuke of your post.
edit: 1,000th post. not particularly dramatic, is it?
Aggro are always looking for cards that scale well for the mid game. If there were Rancor in the format maybe it gets there. At the moment we have only like Gob war paint to get it to 3 power on its own cheaply. But it has a good payoff if a good way emerges.
Divination was NOT considered playable from 2009-2013. When M14 was released in fall of 2013, it began to see occasional play in Esper and UW control. It is only considered playable in the radically low power environment of some recent Standard formats.
Unless there's some secret formula for perfect on-curve three-color mana in this format that nobody has found yet -- I've looked, and I doubt it -- Traverse is the ONLY way I would even consider playing it.
I like Traverse the Ulvenwald, but I worry that it dilutes your threat density.
Yes it tutors later on, but to make room for it, you need to cut several other needed tools.
I would like to find room for it as a 2x of maybe, but I don't know where I would cut for it.
The mana base for shards is good enough for 3 color without it- just look at what Jim Davis did this past weekend- Traverse-less Bant Company... 1st Place...
I did look at that one of course, I was scouring results for anything with 3 colors to see if a better solution had been reached. I do not believe Jund can work with the color-shifted analogue of that Bant manabase. He's riding two advantages: 1) CoCo instantly repairs his board state in turn 4 even if he stumbled with his mama curve prior to that, and to a lesser extent 2) Jace helps him find the right lands. If Jund had actual Huntmaster for a 4 drop to repair the board and Thragtusk to follow, a couple early tap lands isn't fatal. But none of the 4 drops now have that kind of board presence, so early interaction on 2 and 3 is necessary and there's no wiggle room with the current crop of clunky removal spells available.
If Traverse isn't good enough, then Jund is probably unplayable IMO. If I weren't playing Traverse I think I'd have to hope that Dead Weight, Fiery Impulse and Ultimate Price are all amazing because good luck ever casting any other kill spell on the turn you would need it.
I've played out about 200 sample hands to see if a Jund deck was even possible with the current lands available. I immediately found that the mana worked smoothly every time I could cast Traverse on Turn 1. Nearly any hand -- no matter how ugly the mana looked in the opening 7 -- played out perfectly if it started with an untapped green and a Traverse on Turn 1. Grab the correct basic and you can either hold the land in hand to allow your shadow-lands to enter untapped, or put it on the table to let battle-lands enter untapped, as needed.
Unless there's some secret formula for perfect on-curve three-color mana in this format that nobody has found yet -- I've looked, and I doubt it -- Traverse is the ONLY way I would even consider playing it. Maybe a control deck can suffer more tapped lands, but a midrange deck needs to interact on curve and early, the removal spells are not so cheap in this format that you can afford to putz around.
I started with a set of Traverse almost on accident because I wanted proactive sorceries I could play on Turn 1 to enable Corrupted Grafstone. I've since cut back on Grafstones after running the sample hands, that card might be a bust, but the set of Traverse is the glue for this deck, I'm sure of it.
Assume my opponent has an active Thopter/Sword combo which I cannot disrupt. He has three Thopters in play and some amount of untapped mana. It is my turn, I would like to attack, and I have a Bile Blight in hand. Is there any time during the combat phases at which I can cast the Bile Blight which will ensure my opponent has zero Thopters in play that can legally block this turn?
I should point out for non-Vintage players who've seized on the "format for people to play their Moxen" comment, that the comment is rather silly and has nothing to do with the banning. Nobody was ever going to replace their Moxen with Simian Spirit Guides just to play around Chalice, there are too many other incentives to play the Moxen. Also, all the Chalice decks play 5 Moxen themselves, and Shops is using a $2000 set of 21 year old lands, so this wasn't like some budget upstart deck was being killed to benefit rich kid decks. Whoever wrote the reasoning section seemed to have no idea what the real basis for the decision actually was.
There's no point in the game at which an aggro player would want to draw this. Early you don't want ETB tapped, late you'd rather draw gas you don't have to spend 2 mana on first. It doesn't solve the flooding problem at all, because the decks that don't want to flood don't want ETB tapped.
Control wants to hit their land drops and probably won't cycle these away too often, except in late game situations that aren't control mirrors.
It's midrange that benefits, where they're constantly drawing the wrong half of their deck, and where they can do cutesy synergies with these. It's probably good there isn't a G/B one yet.
If the decks they benefit are midrange and maybe Saheeli, then just... bleh.
They work with the show lands from Innistrad but only in a way that makes land sequencing awkward and bad.
It's in Zoo and the two midrange green decks, which is at best 15% of the metagame. For the other 85% of people, there are numerous options for those wanting to get into Modern without buying Goyfs. The card isn't even remotely scarce having been printed this often, prestige and price memory was about the only thing keeping it afloat. If you take a long view of the format, Goyf is in decline, and this simply isn't necessary.
Anybody who wasn't playing Modern before was being silly or disingenuous if they claimed the price of a card they don't need for 85% of the competitive metagame is what kept them out. Those people, and I know many, will keep complaining at $50/ea and would keep complaining at $20/ea, and will never play Eternal formats unless the best deck is handed to them in a precon for $29.99 fully built.
Amd it isn't about "speculating" or "investing", though the very tiny class of speculators is a perpetual boogeyman in Magic going back to my early days in 94. It actually increases the cost of maintaining a playable CCG collection if for example some $200 playset I had to buy is going to be reprinted into oblivion Yu-Gi-Oh style so it's a sunk cost, rather than something I could get most of my money out of if I wanted to swap decks. This is why many players prefer the stability of eternal formats to the volatility of Standard where your collection is 90% sunk costs if you intend to play a full season. In an LCG model like Fantasy Flight Games it doesn't matter, you buy a chapter pack a month and everyone has everything, but that's not Magic. In Magic the most economically stable format is Legacy where 90% of your deck value is reserved list lands, that format costs me basically nothing to maintain a collection for indefinitely, whereas the philosophy shown by this needless Goyf reprint is a flashing warning sign that Modern is getting more dangerous to buy into. If you're prudent with your money that makes the format worse, not better.
The original trifecta of high price cards in Modern that were perpetually whined about - Goyf, Bob and V Clique - have all seen their importance to the format fade drastically, and it feels like a throwback to another age to keep printing this card over and over again like it was an Argentinian peso.
Having a very low value set at the level of card quality here seems unprecedented. The power level seems high relative to recent sets, and many of these are build-around cards that will appear as 3x 4x in decks.
Fallen Empires was overprinted and then nothing new was released for 8 months after that while all older product was long gone, so we were saturated with those cards and they were relatively weak except at common, so not a close comparison.
I understand the natural desire to be optimistic, but it would take a very peculiar metagame and probably a very different build of Fae (more Snapcaster heavy than typical now, perhaps) to make it right, and even then it's dangerous to tap out for something that many opponents can safely ignore and go over the top with a game-ending threat. Playing this Turn 3 on the draw is just god awful.
In something with BoP or Hierarch powering it out early, I could potentially see it, slam it Turn 2 and eat the opponent's mana dork and you are way the hell ahead, but even an Abzan mirror doesn't want this in the current environment since it can't handle most of the other creatures. Maybe for Abzan vs Grixis Delver, enough juicy targets there.
If you want to repeatedly kill X/1's and also put two cards in your graveyard, perhaps you want Darkblast? I don't think Fae will be seriously considering new Liliana, playing out a 3 drop sorcery speed threat that provides only incremental value seems like a very quick way to lose a game of Modern. You might play a few more turns, but you lost when you cast that.
Aggro are always looking for cards that scale well for the mid game. If there were Rancor in the format maybe it gets there. At the moment we have only like Gob war paint to get it to 3 power on its own cheaply. But it has a good payoff if a good way emerges.
I did look at that one of course, I was scouring results for anything with 3 colors to see if a better solution had been reached. I do not believe Jund can work with the color-shifted analogue of that Bant manabase. He's riding two advantages: 1) CoCo instantly repairs his board state in turn 4 even if he stumbled with his mama curve prior to that, and to a lesser extent 2) Jace helps him find the right lands. If Jund had actual Huntmaster for a 4 drop to repair the board and Thragtusk to follow, a couple early tap lands isn't fatal. But none of the 4 drops now have that kind of board presence, so early interaction on 2 and 3 is necessary and there's no wiggle room with the current crop of clunky removal spells available.
If Traverse isn't good enough, then Jund is probably unplayable IMO. If I weren't playing Traverse I think I'd have to hope that Dead Weight, Fiery Impulse and Ultimate Price are all amazing because good luck ever casting any other kill spell on the turn you would need it.
Unless there's some secret formula for perfect on-curve three-color mana in this format that nobody has found yet -- I've looked, and I doubt it -- Traverse is the ONLY way I would even consider playing it. Maybe a control deck can suffer more tapped lands, but a midrange deck needs to interact on curve and early, the removal spells are not so cheap in this format that you can afford to putz around.
I started with a set of Traverse almost on accident because I wanted proactive sorceries I could play on Turn 1 to enable Corrupted Grafstone. I've since cut back on Grafstones after running the sample hands, that card might be a bust, but the set of Traverse is the glue for this deck, I'm sure of it.
I guess I can at least try to bait him into tapping out to make more thopters when I pass priority.
http://magic.wizards.com/en/events/coverage/faeries-fly-high-shizuoka