MTG Salvation

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First time I opened a box, I think the last one was back in 8th edition or something. Not disappointed.

'Goif, Veil, Blood Moon, and 1 of each fetch. Pretty stoked!

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Vampiric tutor and Necropotence are the black Mythics.
Sadly, I Don't think we'll see demonic tutor in there.

Meren was my first precon, and I just love it.

You just have to send her to the command zone 2 or 3 times, I find it hard to believe 3 other players couldn't just find 4 combined damage if she was being annoying. Also you can just laugh at her.

Ever considered Crumble to dust + Oblivion sower Into Ulamog/Kozi?

I've had 3 out of 5 players scoop to a resolved crumble to dust taking out 4x tango/painlands, manabases seem to be way too fragile.

This is what I've proxied/gathered from preleases atm.



Manabase def needs some work, I started with Eldrazi displacer + Thought-Knot Seer in mind, but it felt waaaaay to slow.
Cards I'm considering are, mostly trying to deal with the heavy costs for the Fatties:
hedron archive Turn 4 ramp-to-sower.
Conduit of ruin Tutors wincons and makes them cheaper, on a decent body aswell.
Endbringer might be worth considering.

I own a 1-of each illustration basic land from invasion block to ravnica and up to BFZ. Including a couple of Unhinged basics and a foil set from there, and the artifact lands from Mirrodin block (Back in 2003 those were your basics, pretty much). I'm working on the rest of the sets, the newer ones (From Time spiral to Khans) have been coming along steadily, but man, is it hard to find M/NM basics that are old enough to drive.

My "land bunch" is probably half as tall as yours, mostly from mirrodin era when I bought fat packs instead of regular boosters.

Last Gameday I noticed a trash-talking dude, he seemed to criticize his opponets every move and smack-talk every one's deck in between rounds, I even heard him say he hoped his last game ended quick cause he needed to go grab a bite and he'd be back for more a-kicking. At this point, everyone in the tourney knew He got a warning on the first match, a game loss on the 2nd (repetitive bad behavior), a match loss on the 3rd round and still made it to table 1 with me.

Figured I'd give him a run for his money, he was pointing out how much money he spent on his 4x ojutai's and jaces before our match, I was already qualified for top 8 with a 3-0, this guy and 3 more were at 2-1-0 so even if I played his game and got a match loss I'd make it to the knockout stage. It was worth the risk, if you ask me.

We start shuffling and roll a dice to see who starts, I win the first die roll, he complains and says my dice is tricked and we should roll with his instead, I agree and we roll again, I win, this time for real.

At this point in time I start shuffling kinda slowly just to get on his nerves, we draw 7 and I see him reach for his box and pull out a jace, he was running the proxy card. So I just mull hard for despise down to 5, I keep, scry into a 2nd despise.
I play despise and knock out a jace, noticing the 2nd one on his hand. I draw my 2nd despise and knock it out too, At this point in time I say to him: "Hey, Isn't jace worth like 75 bucks?" He fell right for it, he starts ranting, bashing and even said "Yeah, that's roughly what your mother charges for a night".

Judge sends him packing and TO bans him from the store.

Later I found he was a yugioh player, the yugioh environment is super toxic down here, I've seen more than 1 match end in a fist fight and he was known as one of the more toxic players in that community, and that he was banned from most stores in the city so he decided to start playing MtG since he literally couldn't play yugioh anywhere.

Some kid, that was.

Your island stays an island swamp, blood moon has no effect on basic lands regardless of what else they are.

Your steam vents and tomb are now only mountains. Blood moon overwrights all other types. timestamps matter here. If played the other way your lands would be mountain swamps.

Back to basics functions as normal, only basics untap. There is no interaction between blood moon and back to basics, nor does realmwright. Adding basic land types doesn't add the BASIC supertype.

While the Gravetide may very well be the best UBG Stax Commander, Stax is not the best Gravetide build. Also consider that there are far superior choices for Stax in other color combinations.

Something to keep in mind for Stax is that, while you probably should be utilizing cards like Smokestack, most of the Stax strategy revolves around Resistance & Orb effects to strain resources. The Gravetide has no particular synergy with those, or their complementary support.

Maro has a lot of input into marketings questionnaires which people take off the WotC website.
Apparently there was lots of whining and data pointed them towards 'don't kill my fatty'.
WotC is also under pressure to make more money. This change in design philosophy for standard comes from bad questions, the wrong pool of people, and a bad decision.

Did they ask people at FNMs to give them data? No.
Did they direct people at FNM's to go to the website and give them data? No.
I bet they didn't even urge pros to give them data.
Who designed the questions? I took those surveys (randomly stumbling on them using gatherer) and I have to tell you they were flavor, art, and non standard centric questions which Maro then took and applied to Standard sets to 'make cards people want to buy'. That's a quote from his twitter.

You can't take a random pool of input and get data that tells you anything. Flawed method + flawed data = flawed result. Maybe they had more Commander players take the surveys than anyone else. Maybe more 15 year olds with less than 2 years experience. Who knows?

They could use someone who knows science and math to help them with data collection if that's the model they want to use. And hire someone who knows marketing with data driven customer modeling.

Result is evident in the sets.
Counters are much weaker.
Removal is much weaker and specific.
Creatures have body + resource + effect.
They are spoon feeding us decks and over powering mechanics.

If every creature is 2 or 3 + for each resolve how can counters or answers that only do one thing keep up? Vraska's Contempt is a step in the right direction but CMC is too high and it's only 2 things where you have cards like Rogue Refiner that aren't even primary threats that completely outpace you. Maro has admitted that he made mistakes and they are 'fixing it' but from the look of these sets where fixes are supposed to be in Maro doesn't believe that he's completely wrong. He just thinks they went too far. That's the only explanation I can get from the weak sauce removal and counters we see.

Hell RIX gave aggro a counter bump Admiral's Order and nothing significant for actual control. Dispel anyone?

Maro needs to believe that the new philosophy will not work. They don't have to reinvent the wheel. The game was popular and successful not that long ago. Go back to sound principals and stop refusing to reprint cards just to milk Modern Masters!

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Hey,

You need to play 4 Fumigates and 4 Blessed Alliances in your deck if you hope to withstand the power of the mono-red deck. Thraben inspector and Dovin Baan are useless against that deck so you should take those out. Also you have no card draw, you need some glimmer of genius or pull from tomorrow in your deck, without those you will die after turn 4 or 5 for sure when you run out of answers.

So my advice is to put in:

2 Fumigate
2 Blessed Alliance
4 Glimmer of genius
1 Pull from tomorrow

Take out:

4 Thraben Inspector
3 Dovin Baan
1 Oketra's Last Mercy
1 Supreme Will

That should work out much better for you to make sure that you can survive past turn 5 and get your gearhulks out!

my thoughts are simply : Put up or shut up.

Truth be told, I have no faith in anything they do anymore and I suspect we'll get more of the same

Quote from The Decepticon »

This is exactly why core sets were vital to competitive standard play. Also, with as out of control as the creatures have become, i wouldnt call counterspell, lightning bolt, etc too powerful for today's game.

With the power level of creatures and planeswalkers being so high I can't think of any reasons why they would be to strong for standard.

This is exactly why core sets were vital to competitive standard play. Also, with as out of control as the creatures have become, i wouldnt call counterspell, lightning bolt, etc too powerful for today's game.

Quote from Sepulcra »

So, I resolve any of the Expertises, let's use This one, for example. And chose a legal card (Equal or less CMC to whatever the expertise restricts me to) to cast with the 2nd part of it. My questions are:
-When do I announce the 2nd card I want to cast? I would assume once the Expertise has resolved.

During the Expertise's resolution.

It one of the Expertise spell effects; you perform its first instruction (returning artifacts/creatures with Baral's), then you perform the second instruction (casting the spell), and then you're done resolving Expertise and put it on the graveyard.

-Let's say I cast a card that somehow interacts with Instat/sorcery as my free spell: Thing in the ice, just an example. According to gatherer, while casting my free spell, Expertise is still on the stack, does this mean Thing in the Ice "sees" the expertise? For the purpose of removing counters?

Expertise is still on the stack, but so is the Thing on the Ice. Thing's ability works only when Thing is on the battlefield.

The free spell is cast while the Expertise spell is still on the stack, but that spell will only resolve after all players pass priority, like any other spell.

-If for some reason I could speed up an expertise to instant speed, Brains in a jar for example, do I have to chose an Instant/Flash to cast, or can I just cast anything with 4 CMC or less?

You are allowed to cast a card of any type (except land).

-Let's assume my oponent has a Counterspell in hand, but let the expertise resolve, again according to gatherer I assume he could counter the free spell, right?

Of course. The free spell is a spell.

You are correct, you cast your second spell as the Expertise spell resolves so for Baral's Expertise, after you have returned the cards to hand. So if you returned a card you own with appropriate CMC you could cast it.

If you cast something that interacts with a spell on the stack, such as Reverberate the Expertise is technically a legal target but it won't do anything because shortly after the spell you cast goes on the stack the Expertise goes to the graveyard. For permanents that look at spells being cast like Thing, they will be spells that won't resolve until later so there is no way for their permanent to see the Expertise.

Casting an Expertise during your opponent's turn, or any other time you wouldn't be able to normally cast it doesn't impact what cards can be played with its second effect. Because normally you wouldn't be able to cast any spell during the resolution of a spell but the Expertise gives you special permission so you ignore timing restrictions of the card type but not of specific restriction like on Cauldron Dance.

Yes, once you have cast your free spell priority works like normal so your opponent will get the chance to cast spells and activate abilities before it resolves.