Why is it green? I mean, we all know red was bad at drawing and good at damaging even back then. Why is it green? And Stormbringer should be black or red; tt was inspired by Muramasa, after all.
If I had to guess, it's because green got other cards somehow related to storms (like Hurricane).
Also, even then drawing a lot of cards was a very blue thing, and they were big into the opposing color thing back then, so something that punished you for drawing a lot of cards, it made sense it would be green.
I really didn't want to see this thread degenerate into a slam of people playing old, pricey cards.
Oof. This is not what I intended. People ought to play what they want, but, I find that there is some truth to being able to dunk players by having expensive cards, and that may not be to the player's taste. That is all.
If people use their expensive cards to build competitive, killer decks, sure. That's lame, unless they are playing against other cEDH players. Are there some people who do that? Sure. We should rightly call them a-holes.
On the other hand, there are people who simply have deeper card pools, either because they've been playing for a long time and picked up a lot of stuff along the way, or because they've paid for them (or both, I guess). The question is, what do they do with those cards? Are they playing 100-card singleton Legacy, or are they playing decks built around a bunch of cards that can't complete in Vintage or Legacy or even Modern (were they in the Modern card pool)? Not everybody has original duals or good fetches, which is frankly unfortunate, but not everyone who does have them uses them to build T4 combo-wombo instawin decks, either. For example, one of my decks includes Badlands, Underground Sea, Volcanic Island, the corresponding Ravnica duals, Bloodstained Mire, Polluted Delta and Cavern of Souls. Does that give me an advantage over some player who has a bunch of CIPT duals from recent standard sets and Commander precons? Sure. But fact is, the deck in question is still a vampire tribal deck commanded by Garza Zol, Plague Queen. Yep, I might use my fetches to get an Unlimited or Revised dual land, but my T1 play (if I have one) is still gonna be something like Blade of the Bloodchief or Guul Draz Assassin. If a strongly-thematic, combat-based tribal deck headed by 7-mana beater counts as picking on the scrubs just because it has a strong mana base and a few other pricey cards (Vampiric Tutor being the most pricey outside the manabase, and chosen because it was obviously the most thematic), I dunno what to say. My other vampire deck - Edgar Markov - has no orignial duals and only one fetch, but it has a much higher win rate - and a tendency to win a lot quicker - than my decks including more pricey stuff, simply because Edgar is a vastly more powerful commander, even when (as the case with my build) the deck isn't based around all the 1-2 drop vampires and swarming the field with vamp tokens.
Fierce Empath is a fine card, especially in decks based around copying ETB effects or flickering/bouncing creatures. He can also be good in reanimator/recursion decks, letting you get something big to hand and then discarding it to cheat it out and repeating this effect by reanimating/recurring the Empath. Not bad in some Birthing Pod set-ups, either, and fine in decks that give you ways of cheating big creatures from hand to battlefield for cheap. Solid green creature, really. Old-school staple is still good tech after all these years.
Do we know if they will revisit the change to 4 decks?
That's a really good question. I haven't heard any mention of that one way or another. I would hope that they would be open to that depending on what they decided to do with a given year's releases. If they decided to go with a wedge theme or an allied color theme or whatever, it would not make sense to leave out one combination.
I am holding out hope for someday seeing allied-color commanders with the experience mechanic.
“Partner with [name]” is a variant of the partner ability. “Partner with [name]” represents two abilities. One is a static ability that modifies the rules for deck construction. Rather than a single legendary creature card, you may designate two legendary creature cards as your commander if each has a “partner with [name]” ability with the other’s name. You can’t designate two legendary cards as your commander if one has a “partner with [name]” ability and the other isn’t the named card. The other ability represented by “partner with [name]” is a triggered ability that means “When this permanent enters the battlefield, target player may search their library for a card named [name], reveal it, put it into their hand, then shuffle their library.”
How does Sram work? Does he run too much cheap equipment (in place of auras) to get a boost from this?
It depends on the build. My Sram deck includes a mix of auras and equipment. I don't run Helm in that deck, mostly because utilizing both equipment and auras lets me pick from the cream of the crop for both and the Helm just doesn't make the cut there. I haven't ever seen a full-out enchantress Sram deck, but if anyone has one, this would probably be fine in there.
I really didn't want to see this thread degenerate into a slam of people playing old, pricey cards. This is exactly the format in which those cards can be played; in fact, it was designed in part to give people a format in which those cards could be played, because things like Invoke Prejudice and All Hallows Eve and Moat are not viable Legacy/Vintage cards. They only work in a less competitive, more social setting. Heck, it was originally based around the Elder Dragons from Legends, which are some of the least cost-effective cards ever printed.
Are some of the old cards pretty over-powered? Sure. You can say the same thing about much later cards, including many Storm and Dredge cards. And let's be real here, what's really scarier, Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale or a tuned Storm deck? And are some of the old cards hard for most players to access? Sure. Heck, I only have a lot of the old stuff I have because I started playing Magic within a few months of the original printings, and even though I have more disposable income than the average player, there's no way I'm going to buy cards that cost more than my monthly mortgage payment.
Having a deeper card pool gives you more options, and sometimes more power, than is available to a player who doesn't have the same resources, but that really isn't an issue in this format unless you are playing it competitively, which is not what it was designed to be. You can play old and pricey stuff, but you don't need that stuff to play and to do fine. Many of my decks have ABU duals and old cards, and they don't have significantly better win percentages than my decks which just have more recent cards and Ravnica duals. I think my Brudiclad and Edgar Markov decks - neither of which has anything from the Reserved list - have higher win percentages than my most pricey decks (Tazri 5-color allies and Kurkesh, both of which are pricey mostly because of the mana bases, with Kurkesh including Mishra's Workshop). The beauty of this format is that through the nature of multiplayer dynamics, politics and just luck of the draw, a player who has a well-built deck consisting mostly of junk rares and staples can pull out games against players with much pricier decks.
Edited to add an example:
Recently I played in a game with a guy who is fairly new to Commander, and to Magic in general. I am pretty sure he's been playing less than a year. He had two decks. One of them was a very fast Gishath dino tribal deck. It consisted mostly of dinos, green ramp, haste enablers and cards that made him resistant to boardwipes (things like Boros Charm, Rootborn Defenses and Heroic Intervention), plus a few staple removal cards and some recent green card draw (Beast Whisperer, Lifecrafter's Bestiary, Rishkar's Expertise). His manabase was mostly basic lands and a few CIPT duals and stuff like Evolving Wilds. I was playing my Lord Windgrace deck which, while not particularly pricey, still probably cost at least about 10x what his deck cost(I don't think he ran a single card approaching $10) and someone else was playing a superfriends build, and the Gishath player was more than holding his own.
IMO, this is not as bad as it's made out to be, here.
Obviously the aggressive cast and equip cost are countered by the need for a board investment. That doesn't make it worthless, and it's fairly possible for it to have some serious bonuses even without comboing with Enchanted Evening.
I would strongly consider playing this in Estrid, Heliod, and realistically any other Enchantress deck.
Yeah, I seriously do not get the hate this card is getting. Would it work better with an enchantress/aura build if it was itself an aura or enchantment? Sure. On the other hand, this gives you something else you can tutor for to good effect in some of those builds. Bant enchantress is a thing, and blue brings some good artifact tutors to the game.
I have seen this do well in some Sram builds. It has helped push Krond and Geist of St. Traft into one-shot kill territory many times in my own decks. It's a narrow card, and not optimal, but narrow and not optimal =/= bad.
I think the Ibex is fine, personally. Similar effect but not as over the top as Hoof. Winning with Ibex, or being beat by Ibex, doesn't feel nearly as anticlimactic as winning with ot losing to Hoof, probably because Ibex requires a lot more set-up and can't literally win out of nowhere. If you are playing an opponent who is playing green and you aren't keeping haste enablers off the table, you really have nothing to complain about when you get overrun by Ibex or Thunderfoot Baloth or something like that.
The Battlebond partners ala Krav, the Unredeemed shuffle library trigger is not limited to you the player, so if you already have the other partner in hand or play or are only running one of them you can and I have seen this use them to disrupt anything people are setting up with Top of the Deck stuff, just be sure they don't have the card they are being told to find in their deck or it is a free card for them.
Okay, that is a hilarious interaction. I missed that when the Battlebond rules were released.
Agree with this. As nice as it would be, fetches are not getting such an easy course reprint. Here's why:
- They pretty much chew up the entire value of a precon in a single card, so you could more or less guarantee the rest of the box would be dross - there's no way WOTC go above monetary parity unless they can help it in precons. Sure there are outliers like Teferi's Protection, but they KNOW the value of fetches prior to printing, and that value isn't going to drop anytime soon.
- They're chase cards not only for commander but other formats as well - the last thing they want is modern players scooping up precons in lieu of EDH players getting access to them. Sure they want the sales, but they also don't want to deal with the fallout of EDH players complaining they're not getting access to precons for a format that modern players aren't interested in.
I'd suggest that what Ertai has mentioned is likely to be the case; we'll see them return, but not until we're seeing a more financially risky set come up; a new plane, new story arc, mechanics WOTC is uncertain of; something they need an insurance policy for.
Rosewater and Verhey have both said it is unlikely that fetches will be showing up in any Standard set in the foreseeable future. Fetches = lots of in-game shuffling, which lengthens match times. This is also why we are getting crappy "look at the top five cards of your library, reveal up to one of X card type and put it in your hand, put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order" cards in place of things more along the lines of Farhaven Elf. Verhey did specifically say today that fetches will be reprinted somewhere in the fairly near future, but he did not specify where other than that they would not be in either Commander precons (for the reasons you mention) or standard-eligible sets. It's hard to imagine them fitting into future Battlebond/Conspiracy sets, but he did hint there are some new things coming down the pike, and he also noted that with the success of the Challenger decks last year, a similar Modern product is not outside the realm of possibility, especially if this year's Challenger decks also do well.
If you are playing that many enchantments, I think you go for Ancestral Mask or Ethereal Armor. It is hard to play a lot of enchantments and have cards that care about enchantments and then play a random equipment.
I hate this card.
I play it along with those other two cards in Krond and along with the Armor in Geist. Redundancy is good sometimes.
And Desert Twister. And Tornado and Ice Storm. A lot of it was about flavor more than color pie.
Also, even then drawing a lot of cards was a very blue thing, and they were big into the opposing color thing back then, so something that punished you for drawing a lot of cards, it made sense it would be green.
If people use their expensive cards to build competitive, killer decks, sure. That's lame, unless they are playing against other cEDH players. Are there some people who do that? Sure. We should rightly call them a-holes.
On the other hand, there are people who simply have deeper card pools, either because they've been playing for a long time and picked up a lot of stuff along the way, or because they've paid for them (or both, I guess). The question is, what do they do with those cards? Are they playing 100-card singleton Legacy, or are they playing decks built around a bunch of cards that can't complete in Vintage or Legacy or even Modern (were they in the Modern card pool)? Not everybody has original duals or good fetches, which is frankly unfortunate, but not everyone who does have them uses them to build T4 combo-wombo instawin decks, either. For example, one of my decks includes Badlands, Underground Sea, Volcanic Island, the corresponding Ravnica duals, Bloodstained Mire, Polluted Delta and Cavern of Souls. Does that give me an advantage over some player who has a bunch of CIPT duals from recent standard sets and Commander precons? Sure. But fact is, the deck in question is still a vampire tribal deck commanded by Garza Zol, Plague Queen. Yep, I might use my fetches to get an Unlimited or Revised dual land, but my T1 play (if I have one) is still gonna be something like Blade of the Bloodchief or Guul Draz Assassin. If a strongly-thematic, combat-based tribal deck headed by 7-mana beater counts as picking on the scrubs just because it has a strong mana base and a few other pricey cards (Vampiric Tutor being the most pricey outside the manabase, and chosen because it was obviously the most thematic), I dunno what to say. My other vampire deck - Edgar Markov - has no orignial duals and only one fetch, but it has a much higher win rate - and a tendency to win a lot quicker - than my decks including more pricey stuff, simply because Edgar is a vastly more powerful commander, even when (as the case with my build) the deck isn't based around all the 1-2 drop vampires and swarming the field with vamp tokens.
That's a really good question. I haven't heard any mention of that one way or another. I would hope that they would be open to that depending on what they decided to do with a given year's releases. If they decided to go with a wedge theme or an allied color theme or whatever, it would not make sense to leave out one combination.
I am holding out hope for someday seeing allied-color commanders with the experience mechanic.
Aw, bummer. Though this does make more sense.
It depends on the build. My Sram deck includes a mix of auras and equipment. I don't run Helm in that deck, mostly because utilizing both equipment and auras lets me pick from the cream of the crop for both and the Helm just doesn't make the cut there. I haven't ever seen a full-out enchantress Sram deck, but if anyone has one, this would probably be fine in there.
Are some of the old cards pretty over-powered? Sure. You can say the same thing about much later cards, including many Storm and Dredge cards. And let's be real here, what's really scarier, Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale or a tuned Storm deck? And are some of the old cards hard for most players to access? Sure. Heck, I only have a lot of the old stuff I have because I started playing Magic within a few months of the original printings, and even though I have more disposable income than the average player, there's no way I'm going to buy cards that cost more than my monthly mortgage payment.
Having a deeper card pool gives you more options, and sometimes more power, than is available to a player who doesn't have the same resources, but that really isn't an issue in this format unless you are playing it competitively, which is not what it was designed to be. You can play old and pricey stuff, but you don't need that stuff to play and to do fine. Many of my decks have ABU duals and old cards, and they don't have significantly better win percentages than my decks which just have more recent cards and Ravnica duals. I think my Brudiclad and Edgar Markov decks - neither of which has anything from the Reserved list - have higher win percentages than my most pricey decks (Tazri 5-color allies and Kurkesh, both of which are pricey mostly because of the mana bases, with Kurkesh including Mishra's Workshop). The beauty of this format is that through the nature of multiplayer dynamics, politics and just luck of the draw, a player who has a well-built deck consisting mostly of junk rares and staples can pull out games against players with much pricier decks.
Edited to add an example:
Recently I played in a game with a guy who is fairly new to Commander, and to Magic in general. I am pretty sure he's been playing less than a year. He had two decks. One of them was a very fast Gishath dino tribal deck. It consisted mostly of dinos, green ramp, haste enablers and cards that made him resistant to boardwipes (things like Boros Charm, Rootborn Defenses and Heroic Intervention), plus a few staple removal cards and some recent green card draw (Beast Whisperer, Lifecrafter's Bestiary, Rishkar's Expertise). His manabase was mostly basic lands and a few CIPT duals and stuff like Evolving Wilds. I was playing my Lord Windgrace deck which, while not particularly pricey, still probably cost at least about 10x what his deck cost(I don't think he ran a single card approaching $10) and someone else was playing a superfriends build, and the Gishath player was more than holding his own.
Yeah, I seriously do not get the hate this card is getting. Would it work better with an enchantress/aura build if it was itself an aura or enchantment? Sure. On the other hand, this gives you something else you can tutor for to good effect in some of those builds. Bant enchantress is a thing, and blue brings some good artifact tutors to the game.
I have seen this do well in some Sram builds. It has helped push Krond and Geist of St. Traft into one-shot kill territory many times in my own decks. It's a narrow card, and not optimal, but narrow and not optimal =/= bad.
Okay, that is a hilarious interaction. I missed that when the Battlebond rules were released.
Rosewater and Verhey have both said it is unlikely that fetches will be showing up in any Standard set in the foreseeable future. Fetches = lots of in-game shuffling, which lengthens match times. This is also why we are getting crappy "look at the top five cards of your library, reveal up to one of X card type and put it in your hand, put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order" cards in place of things more along the lines of Farhaven Elf. Verhey did specifically say today that fetches will be reprinted somewhere in the fairly near future, but he did not specify where other than that they would not be in either Commander precons (for the reasons you mention) or standard-eligible sets. It's hard to imagine them fitting into future Battlebond/Conspiracy sets, but he did hint there are some new things coming down the pike, and he also noted that with the success of the Challenger decks last year, a similar Modern product is not outside the realm of possibility, especially if this year's Challenger decks also do well.
I play it along with those other two cards in Krond and along with the Armor in Geist. Redundancy is good sometimes.
Very narrow card, but acceptable in its niche.