MTG Salvation

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/announcing-core-set-2020-and-commander-2019-edition-2019-02-21

Just thought I would bring it up

And I don’t know the source and name but the guy who makes the commmander decks heard all of are criticisms about C18 and will take them to heart for C19 so that’s a good sign they realized their terrible mistakes with last years decks

Saw Core Set 2020 first, thought you was trollin

Quote from Ryperior74 »

And I don’t know the source and name but the guy who makes the commmander decks heard all of are criticisms about C18 and will take them to heart for C19

Gavin Verhey

Quote from Ryperior74 »

And I don’t know the source and name but the guy who makes the commmander decks heard all of are criticisms about C18 and will take them to heart for C19 so that’s a good sign they realized their terrible mistakes with last years decks

I'll believe it when I see it.

Quote from 3drinks »

Quote from Ryperior74 »

And I don’t know the source and name but the guy who makes the commmander decks heard all of are criticisms about C18 and will take them to heart for C19 so that’s a good sign they realized their terrible mistakes with last years decks

I'll believe it when I see it.

Gavin mentioned that by stopping production of the all-reprint Masters sets, it will allow more reprints to be granted to things like Conspiracy and Commander.

Way to say nothing, was really that hard to put an image or say at least the themes?

I have a great deal of respect for and faith in Gavin Verhey as a game designer and as a person. C19 will be cool.

Quote from Sheldon »

I have a great deal of respect for and faith in Gavin Verhey as a game designer and as a person. C19 will be cool.

do you have any juicy rumor?

i have faith that they will improve from c18, but knowing nothing is really frustrating. Especially since we really know nothing about the next sets

Release is still several months out. 6? It's a bit early for spoilers yet or even necessarily a theme. They don't want to draw too much attention from more imminent releases.

Quote from RivenEsq »

Release is still several months out. 6? It's a bit early for spoilers yet or even necessarily a theme. They don't want to draw too much attention from more imminent releases.

yeah we don't have a theme or an image even for the more imminent releases so...
we still don't even what will be released after war of the sparks

Quote from Dunharrow »

Quote from 3drinks »

Quote from Ryperior74 »

And I don’t know the source and name but the guy who makes the commmander decks heard all of are criticisms about C18 and will take them to heart for C19 so that’s a good sign they realized their terrible mistakes with last years decks

I'll believe it when I see it.

Gavin mentioned that by stopping production of the all-reprint Masters sets, it will allow more reprints to be granted to things like Conspiracy and Commander.

This is going to go swimmingly with the removal of msrp.

What I'm going to be most interested in is how WotC balances putting cool reprints that might have a higher secondary market value in a Commander product, but still try to maintain some sort of price point for the product given that they just announced that they are no longer providing an MSRP for their products.

For a product like this, I can see different places valuing the product differently and there being some big discrepancies between retailers as people try to find the right price point to sell these at. Perhaps (and I hope) most shops will just list them at the old MSRP of $40 in the US and prices will fluctuate up and down based on demand, but if you stick in something like Three Visits (currently $100 on TCG Player; $80 on SCG and CFB) will it drive up the price of the deck that it is in? And if so, by how much?

I'm hoping that what happened with Imperial Recruiter is the norm, where the P3K version is still $150 but the Masters 25 version is only $28 and Masters 25 didn't jump up way in price because it was in the set (although there is a big difference between it being included as a Mythic Rare in a set versus one being included in every deck...)

I guess we'll see in about 6 months....

What a great bode of confidence from that announcement which basically says "Yep, we gots 2019 Commander in August" and nothing more. /sarcasm

If its not preview cards this early, at least they could have given a single sentence on the themes. 2017's had so much talk because we knew it was a bunch of tribal decks. Yet with this, we know they always ship this product out during August and that its likely to see the next iteration of these decks every year because they do tend to have decks that sell well and make up for other weaker ones. So there is basically no new information being provided.

Also yes, I hope their reprint game is better and they reprint actually worthwhile cards.

Quote from Sheldon »

I have a great deal of respect for and faith in Gavin Verhey as a game designer and as a person. C19 will be cool.

I am aware that if you are in the know you are not allowed to share any of it. I guess I am just curious if you are still in the loop for anything related to the commander decks.

I also do have faith in Gavin. There were a lot of community voices about last year's commander decks and the feedback all felt very consistent so I suspect that Gavin is very aware of the shortcomings of last year's product. My LGS still has something like 10+ decks from last year's first order of product that absolutely are not moving from the shelves unfortunately for him.

Speaking of consistent feedback, hopefully they fixed the consistently poor QC from last year. Every single rare in my Estrid deck had an off-center hologram sticker. Compared to booster rares from other recent sets, the quality was notably poor. I also heard horror stories of players having cards stuck together upon opening their decks. There needs to be a strong emphasis on resolving that.

I'm sure the design quality of the sets will be good, and hopefully not in a way that bends the rules of the format too much (looking at you, Derevi cycle + Eminence).

Quote from ilovesaprolings »

i have faith that they will improve from c18

Pretty hard to go worse than last year, short of intro pack bad.

Quote from Dunharrow »

Gavin mentioned that by stopping production of the all-reprint Masters sets, it will allow more reprints to be granted to things like Conspiracy and Commander.

Oh good, so "some guy on the internet said" these can have good reprints. The ability to put good cards into these things doesn't mean they actually can or will. As usual, best bet is to take a wait & see approach with the deck list reveals. With the new overseeing committee, this year will be an important one for their success.

Or.............this is all a perfect time for R&D to produce the same awful, non-cohesive lists and use the new committee folks as the scapegoat to take the blame.

Gavin is a Senior Magic Designer at Wizards, so while it could be posturing, it isn't baseless speculation from a person on the outside. Without Masters sets, there is a need for reprints of powerful cards in eternal formats. Many of these cards are too good to ever be printed in Standard again. This leaves far fewer options than previously for these cards to be reprinted. While some of them will get thrown into supplemental sets, a la Conspiracy, there almost have to be some good reprints that come in Commander, though I am somewhat convinced that Wizards does look at the secondary market when deciding what to print in these sort of sets, even if they say they don't. After all, the fundamental need for reprints to begin with comes from inflating prices due to card popularity.

Quote from 3drinks »

Quote from ilovesaprolings »

i have faith that they will improve from c18

Pretty hard to go worse than last year, short of intro pack bad.

Quote from Dunharrow »

Gavin mentioned that by stopping production of the all-reprint Masters sets, it will allow more reprints to be granted to things like Conspiracy and Commander.

Oh good, so "some guy on the internet said" these can have good reprints. The ability to put good cards into these things doesn't mean they actually can or will. As usual, best bet is to take a wait & see approach with the deck list reveals. With the new overseeing committee, this year will be an important one for their success.

Or.............this is all a perfect time for R&D to produce the same awful, non-cohesive lists and use the new committee folks as the scapegoat to take the blame.

I'm guessing you haven't been aorund munch...Gavin as pointed out actually works at WotC and so knows what he's talking about and if you're referring to the CAG as new committee folks you clearly haven't really looked into what their role is...

Quote from Hermes_ »

I'm guessing you haven't been aorund munch...Gavin as pointed out actually works at WotC and so knows what he's talking about and if you're referring to the CAG as new committee folks you clearly haven't really looked into what their role is...

Or...I don't spend exorbitant amounts of time obsessing over who the design team is or who does or doesn't work @ R&D in a given fiscal year. Got better things to do, watch, read, play, and write about.

Yeah, Gavin Verhey is not just "some guy on the internet." He's very involved in this process, and in multiple venues he has written and stated that the feedback re: the poor quality of reprints in last year's Commander sets has been heard loud and clear and recognized as legitimate. He has also stated that Commander (as well as things like future Conspiracy and Battlebond sets) is one of the places where in-demand reprints - those desired for Commander and also some which are popular in other eternal formats and in Modern - will be showing up. These are statements made by a guy in the know.

I don't blame someone for taking a "I'll believe it when I see it" approach to this, and I am not expecting fetches or Wasteland reprints in this year's Commander decks, but I am pretty confident we will be getting a better variety of strong reprints this year than has been the case for the past couple years.

Quote from 3drinks »

Quote from ilovesaprolings »

i have faith that they will improve from c18

Pretty hard to go worse than last year, short of intro pack bad.

A huge concern is "So you want to do THEME, but what do you want to do with THEME?" Take lands. Do you want ramp decks and x-cost? Sacrificing/discarding lands and bringing them back? Land-counting cards? Scapeshift combo? Infinite landfall (which probably requires green and blue at a bare minimum)? loam loop? Land animation?

Artifacts have the same issue. I can focus on equipment, artifact creatures, Eggs, affinity, what do you want? As do enchantments, which can be enchantress, auras, control...

A card type is only a beginning question with a deck. Like, if I play enchantress, I can focus on auras, control, or even tokens, since a lot of cards that help tokens are enchantments.

And yet, they didn't even manage that. The land deck took the cheap, x-cost route, which, interestingly isn't seen as "lands matter", despite lands being our primary source of mana.

Yeah, the themed decks could use some more... focus. If you're doing a broad theme, at least have most of the cards in the deck related to that theme(aside from new cards, which I give more leeway in this regard tbh, as those tend to be otherwise interesting). If the decks are supposed to be a starting point(which is good), I'd rather they'd be a starting point that costs a bit more but is actually more directed, than a haphazard pile of cards that resemble a deck if you squint a bit.

Then again, they kind of did a few of the major "permanent type" themes 'out of the way'. Maybe the decks this year will be more focused. One can always hope?

Aaand I'm kind of musing pointlessly anyway, as my interest in Commander products has always been pretty much new cards only. With 'modern frame reprints of old stuff' a distant second... I don't actually care much at all for the playability of the decks myself.

Quote from hyalopterouslemur »

And yet, they didn't even manage that. The land deck took the cheap, x-cost route, which, interestingly isn't seen as "lands matter", despite lands being our primary source of mana.

They could have at least added a Drownyard Temple + Claws of Gix to get people started on some of the stuff lands can do. Maybe with added Memorials and Blighted lands. For the one chase card they could have added Loam, but I get why it wouldn't be included due to it's own ubiquity and I'd have been ecstatic just to see the Drownyard Temple (Titania would have made excellent sense here!)

Yeah, last year's decks were a mess. Windgrace didn't have lands to support what was supposed to be a big part of the theme. The "top of the deck matters" didn't have topdeck manipulation cards that would have made it function, even though they would have been cheap to reprint. The enchantress deck included terrible, overpriced bestow creatures in place of good things to enchant and some obvious choices of enchantments.

That said, I saw out of the box or minimally upgraded versions of all of these decks - but most often Windgrace and Saheeli - sometimes pull off wins at fairly casual tables, mostly by virtue of the overall strength (value aside) of the cards in Windgrace and Saheeli being insanely strong as a commander. Which doesn't make them actual good decks, and which certainly doesn't negate the fact that the reprints offered very poor value. It just gives me some confidence that with the feedback from last year in mind, the team at WotC can design commander decks which are worth buying in terms of card value and which are also interesting to play or to use as a starting point to build without having to replace 75% of what the decks start with.

But please, please, upgrade the freaking mana bases. They are largely embarrassingly terrible. Does anyone anywhere at this point need another Vivid Grove?? Are they trying to test how many crappy CIPT duals it takes before you would be better off just running more basic lands? I would much rather have another version of the new art cycle basics we got from Guay and others a couple years back than more CIPT draft chaff.

Quote from hyalopterouslemur »

And yet, they didn't even manage that. The land deck took the cheap, x-cost route, which, interestingly isn't seen as "lands matter", despite lands being our primary source of mana.

Because that is called a ramp deck not a land deck
It's like if i put together a burn decklist with lightning bolt and all its variant with also 3 goblin guide and i called it a "goblin deck". It's not a goblin deck, it's a burn deck.

I don't see why a token deck should be called "enchantments" and not token or things like that, beside misleading. Every deck has its own name and wizard should now how to use them.