The differences are pretty arbitrary when you think about it. Now that we have colored artifacts, the only thing separating the two in a functional sense is aura vs equipment.
Unlike creatures vs. enchantments, or artifacts vs. sorceries. Often times, you can change "enchantment" to "artifact", and there is no fundamental difference; especially if you keep the color requirements. If you strip the enchantment of color, just add some colorless mana to it, and everything is even. Besides for Smelt hitting one, and Demystify hitting another, it's no different.
What separates enchantments from artifacts is mostly flavorful. An enchantment is a persistent magical force, an artifact is a physical object. So a weapon, wielded by gods, that is made of pure magic fits the bill as an enchantment artifact. Or, at the least, it's as close as you can get to an enchantment artifact.
We just have to accept that cards like Aegis of Honor and Forcefield fit in that weird middle ground between enchantment and artifact, and Wizards finally decided to take a risk and say...
It does seem like the difference is mostly flavor based now. Ever since mirrodin and the introduction of equipment, the differences between equipment and enchantments have slowly been disappearing.
In the past its always seemed like wotc will favor mechanics over flavor, to keep the game running smoothly, but making an enchantment artifact seems like the opposite of that.
Flavorwise, i have no issue with equipment or colored artifacts or tapping enchantments, or even enchantment artifacts, but mechanically i can no longer see a noticable difference between the two. How are you even supposed to describe the differences between artifacts and enchantments to a new player now, without giving a 100% flavor description.
I guess it doesnt matter, as long as wotc decides that it doesnt matter if theres not a clear difference between artifacts and enchantments like there is between creatures and lands.
-You can never end up with a card in your hand or library that you don't own. This I think will remain unbroken... the spectre of someone accidentally stealing cards looms too large to risk meddling with this. And there are ways to template playing cards from exile that end up giving the same result, at least as far as cards in hand are concerned.
I think the bigger issue would be if players are using sleeves or not. I cant think of any way to be able to put another players card in your hand unless there was a rule that each player had to have extra sleeves to put the other cards in first.
The risk of accidentally stealing cards is larger, but it already happens to me sometimes, when i enchant an opponents creature and then forget about it at the end of the game.
-Cards in the library can't do anything while they're in the library. Miracles and that worm that you can cast while you search both play with this design space a little bit, I think it can be explored a fair bit more. Cards that are revealed when you shuffle? Cards that do something if they're on the bottom of your library?
Its hard to think of any ways to effect this without creating a huge mess of a situation. You could design cards that affect play from your library(if XXXX is in your library, creatures you control get +1/+1 and cost 1 more to play?), but they would be hard to play with. There are tons of cards that can affect the battlefield from the graveyard.
The difficult part would be verifying that a player actually has a copy of that card in their library without having to pick up the deck and look through it. Each player could just submit a decklist before the start of the game, but then things start getting real confusing when you use cards that exile library cards face down. This would kill way too much time in tournament settings.
These types of cards would also be removing a large part of the randomness from the game by essentially giving you options right away.
-Shuffling must always be random. There are a few things that modify how you search a library, nothing that really modifies how you shuffle it. But "the next time you shuffle your library this turn, instead arrange it however you like" isn't impossible, although it would have to be rare enough not to be super time-consuming
Shuffling is kind of a on/off thing. You either shuffle the deck, and its assumed to be random, or you get to choose an amount of cards to order however you want. There are plenty of cards that do the second option. I cant think of any that let you organize your entire library, but that would be a huge waste of time and shouldnt be necessary if you know how to win with your deck.
-Only the active player can attack. Could there be an instant relentless assault that gives you an attack phase during an opponent's turn? Vaguely possible, although I'm not sure how well the rules could handle it
There are definitely ways you could do this, but if it was implemented im sure that it would be in a way that avoids messing around with the order of the phases of the turn.
First deck I built myself was a RG Onslaught Beast deck with a splash of blue so that i could play my Slipstream Eel copies. It must have been at least 80 or 90 cards.
Luckily my friends deck was just as bad, so we were able to have fairly evenly-matched games.
I dont remember my second deck very well, but i know it included a lot of copies of healing salve and reviving dose and a very light soldier theme.
I think the main problem is that the orcs printed in magic so far look to much like goblins. Little green men in the art, little red men gameplay-wise, lot's of silly art... but the orc's from the Lord of the Rings movies are a lot different. More vicious than bumbling, sickly black or white skin instead of green, humansized or even bigger, muscular. And in the other ip that Orcs are associated with these days, World of Warcraft, orcs may be green and pointy-eared, but still big, muscular and serious rather than silly. You won't mistake a WoW orc for a WoW goblin.
So WotC could give the orcs a new look, and/or make them bigger than goblins, and/or focus more on their martial nature than on sillyness, and/or make them black (the LotR orcs seem more black minions than red to me, though the WoW orcs are very red), while still retaining the flavor of orcs. In fact, that would bring them closer to what the general public expects of orcs than the ones that have been printed so far.
But I don't think we'll see the return of orcs soon. Not until WotC wants to make a "stardard fantasy world", and since Magic is already a fantasy property, they like to base their worlds on less standard fantasy settings.
I like this version of orcs and hope that they eventually go down this route. I agree that it'll have to wait until the right block though. Theros doesnt seem like an orcish plane, and if they return planes like alara or lorwyn, they wont be able to stick them in.
Wotc could easily bring orcs back in the core set if they wanted to. It would be much easier than bringing back slivers like they did.
What is the background on Shandalar that people keep mentioning? I've been playing since Onslaught, but i can't remember ever hearing of Shandalar before the past few sets.
It definitely seems like Shandalar will be the new core set block for awhile. I doubt we'll be seeing any non-core sets taking place there. If you look at most of the planes since Dominaria (Ravnica, Innistrad, Alara, Lorwyn, Kamigawa, Mirrodin/New Phyrexia), all of them have a lot of unique flavor and are not very high-fantasy themed like Shandalar seems to be. There would have to be a very unique storyline for wotc to return to a generic plane like Shandalar for a full block.
I dont really see why people mind having a plane like Shandalar as a core set plane. People dont go to core sets for flavor, but it is nice to see a core set that feels a little more cohesive.
I'm not sure if this counts, as its not strictly a character, but I'd love to see something like Umezawa's Jitte for Agrus Kos' Magic Stun Rod (name escapes me), maybe see some other legendary items? Or Legendary Land cards for important places
Im pretty sure his staff was standard issue Boros equipment and I don't think it would really work well as a legendary artifact, but it would have been cool to see as a generic artifact or equipment.
I've heard before that Wotc has avoided certain creature types like Orcs because they wanted to distance themselves from other games like D&D. If that is the actual reason though, i don't think it is really necessary anymore, after 20 years of MTG.
Wow, yes, that is an incredibly bad card. Unplayable even in limited, imo.
A 7/7 trampler for 7 that can go in any deck is pretty good in limited. It cant be chump blocked, so your opponent either needs removal or enough creatures to trade with it, both of which can be hard to find in limited decks sometime.
There are very few decks that can win without attacking, especially in limited, so i dont think the drawback is really that big of a deal.
Actually, what would be interesting would be a "Job" subtheme, rather than Tribe. So, Warriors, Wizards, scholars, ect. Tribes always come down to Race rather than Class.
This was the theme of Morningtide set. There was support for a lot of creature classes like archer, shaman, rogue and others.
Tribal is one of my favorite types of decks, but i thought that Class Tribal was just ok. Tribal lords make a lot of sense flavorwise, but its more of a stretch to have a lord that pumps all of your zombie/treefolk/human shamans all at once.
I doubt there will be a legendary matters theme. How could they fit it in with all of the gold and guilded cards in a smaller set?
If any legends show up in Sinker, they'll be part of a cycle. The nephalim weren't legendary, but they should have been, and thats the way i would expect to see any non champion legends in sinker. It wouldnt make sense to have some random monoblue legend that isnt part of a cycle in a block heavily based on cycles.
Also remember that there's bound to be a couple planeswalkers in the set too, which are similar in flavor to legends.
No way it will be all hybrid. That would be very hard to successfully design.
I do expect a good amount of hybrid cards though. Having too many regular gold cards of 10 different combinations would be very hard to draft into a working deck.
It does seem like the difference is mostly flavor based now. Ever since mirrodin and the introduction of equipment, the differences between equipment and enchantments have slowly been disappearing.
In the past its always seemed like wotc will favor mechanics over flavor, to keep the game running smoothly, but making an enchantment artifact seems like the opposite of that.
Flavorwise, i have no issue with equipment or colored artifacts or tapping enchantments, or even enchantment artifacts, but mechanically i can no longer see a noticable difference between the two. How are you even supposed to describe the differences between artifacts and enchantments to a new player now, without giving a 100% flavor description.
I guess it doesnt matter, as long as wotc decides that it doesnt matter if theres not a clear difference between artifacts and enchantments like there is between creatures and lands.
I think the bigger issue would be if players are using sleeves or not. I cant think of any way to be able to put another players card in your hand unless there was a rule that each player had to have extra sleeves to put the other cards in first.
The risk of accidentally stealing cards is larger, but it already happens to me sometimes, when i enchant an opponents creature and then forget about it at the end of the game.
Planechase kind of does this already with the planar deck in the middle.
Its hard to think of any ways to effect this without creating a huge mess of a situation. You could design cards that affect play from your library(if XXXX is in your library, creatures you control get +1/+1 and cost 1 more to play?), but they would be hard to play with. There are tons of cards that can affect the battlefield from the graveyard.
The difficult part would be verifying that a player actually has a copy of that card in their library without having to pick up the deck and look through it. Each player could just submit a decklist before the start of the game, but then things start getting real confusing when you use cards that exile library cards face down. This would kill way too much time in tournament settings.
These types of cards would also be removing a large part of the randomness from the game by essentially giving you options right away.
Shuffling is kind of a on/off thing. You either shuffle the deck, and its assumed to be random, or you get to choose an amount of cards to order however you want. There are plenty of cards that do the second option. I cant think of any that let you organize your entire library, but that would be a huge waste of time and shouldnt be necessary if you know how to win with your deck.
There are definitely ways you could do this, but if it was implemented im sure that it would be in a way that avoids messing around with the order of the phases of the turn.
Luckily my friends deck was just as bad, so we were able to have fairly evenly-matched games.
I dont remember my second deck very well, but i know it included a lot of copies of healing salve and reviving dose and a very light soldier theme.
I like this version of orcs and hope that they eventually go down this route. I agree that it'll have to wait until the right block though. Theros doesnt seem like an orcish plane, and if they return planes like alara or lorwyn, they wont be able to stick them in.
Wotc could easily bring orcs back in the core set if they wanted to. It would be much easier than bringing back slivers like they did.
It definitely seems like Shandalar will be the new core set block for awhile. I doubt we'll be seeing any non-core sets taking place there. If you look at most of the planes since Dominaria (Ravnica, Innistrad, Alara, Lorwyn, Kamigawa, Mirrodin/New Phyrexia), all of them have a lot of unique flavor and are not very high-fantasy themed like Shandalar seems to be. There would have to be a very unique storyline for wotc to return to a generic plane like Shandalar for a full block.
I dont really see why people mind having a plane like Shandalar as a core set plane. People dont go to core sets for flavor, but it is nice to see a core set that feels a little more cohesive.
Im pretty sure his staff was standard issue Boros equipment and I don't think it would really work well as a legendary artifact, but it would have been cool to see as a generic artifact or equipment.
A 7/7 trampler for 7 that can go in any deck is pretty good in limited. It cant be chump blocked, so your opponent either needs removal or enough creatures to trade with it, both of which can be hard to find in limited decks sometime.
There are very few decks that can win without attacking, especially in limited, so i dont think the drawback is really that big of a deal.
This was the theme of Morningtide set. There was support for a lot of creature classes like archer, shaman, rogue and others.
Tribal is one of my favorite types of decks, but i thought that Class Tribal was just ok. Tribal lords make a lot of sense flavorwise, but its more of a stretch to have a lord that pumps all of your zombie/treefolk/human shamans all at once.
If any legends show up in Sinker, they'll be part of a cycle. The nephalim weren't legendary, but they should have been, and thats the way i would expect to see any non champion legends in sinker. It wouldnt make sense to have some random monoblue legend that isnt part of a cycle in a block heavily based on cycles.
Also remember that there's bound to be a couple planeswalkers in the set too, which are similar in flavor to legends.
I do expect a good amount of hybrid cards though. Having too many regular gold cards of 10 different combinations would be very hard to draft into a working deck.