I mean, sure, the angel's drawback hurts, but it's not just a drawback. It's a drawback+evasion. Your opponent's gonna want to keep it around because it makes you easier to kill, so they'll let you swing in with it instead of killing it with a block. As long as you can deal with flying chumps, you're fine. 4 Damage on turn 4 plus whatever you've managed to achieve on turns 1-3 means you're probably looking at much better than just a 5 turn clock. I'm not saying it's a game breaker but it's not as bad as some people are claiming.
Plus, come on people lets be real here. This is Red we're talking about. You know, WOTC's least favorite color? It was either this or a huge dumb over-costed dragon, I don't know why anyone would expect anything different. At least this is some interesting and new design space.
So, like, I would love if we got Marit Lage instead of Emrakul, just because I feel like that would be a fun twist since so many people were expecting Emrakul, and because after Battle Block I'm rather eldrazi'd out, frankly. But it didn't seem likely because the meat-moss in the art of stuff like Thraben Inspector looks an awful lot like Emrakul's handy work, plus mutating things is supposedly how Emrakul affects planes. And, if we're honest, from a narrative stand-point, Marit Lage was pretty obviously the Eldrazi before the Eldrazi were around, so they fill the same sort of space and play the same sort of role, making it not very likely that they'd be together in the same story. It wouldn't really make a sense for Wizards to have a set focusing on an entirely NEW be-tentacled inter-planar threat when we just spent an entire block focusing on the established ones. So I'd basically given up on the titular shadow hanging over Innistrad being Marit Lage.
...
And then I see this art.
And yeah, it could definitely be just some random totally normal sea monster in the art of this card and absolutely nothing special at all. And in fact it probably is exactly that because of all the reasons I list above. But deep in my heart of hearts, I can't help but want it to be Marit Lage.
Weee, ANOTHER (R/G) planeswalker who makes your creatures better. We definitely needed one of those. Huraaaaaaaaaaaay.
Honestly though, how boring YET ANOTHER (R/G) creature boosting planeswalker is not-withstanding, this card is incredibly frustrating to me. When I first saw Nahiri was (R/W), I was ecstatic that we might get something along the lines of Ajani Vengeant (I wasn't playing when Vengeant came out so I never got a chance to grab a copy) because as a (R/W) player I like direct damage, and I REALLY like Lightning Helixes. But instead we got...whatever the heck Nahiri, The Harbinger is. Then they reveal this, and somehow a (R/G) planeswalker, with it's ability to turn itself into a lightning bolt and turn all my creatures into more beefy Prodigal Pyromancers, gives me a better (R/W) planeswalker than the card that actually has R and W in it's casting cost!
Thing in the Ice is a great card, but... why is it blue, again? Blue seems to be the color for "Super undercosted fatties that have easy-to-satisfy conditions," including Delver of Secrets, Ensoul Artifact, and now, Thing in the Ice. I mean, for pete's sake, at least make it cost UG! C'mon, I love Blue as much as the next guy, but this is really getting stupid.
Blue gets the least amount of creatures in general, but is actually the second most likely color to get a fatty at common, never mind higher rarities. Flavorfully it'd be weird to have a whale or kraken or sea serpent be a small creature, and mechanically blue needs big threats to be finishers for control decks.
As for being undercosted, it really isn't. Yeah the front face is cheap, but you aren't transforming it until you've cast a bunch of instants and sorceries. Even if you only cast 1 mana cantrips, that's still a total of 6 mana you paid to get your Awoken Horror. Which is admittedly very efficient for a 7/8 with an evacuation effect, but how likely are you to actually make that happen? More likely is that a couple of those instants and sorceries will cost 2 or maybe 3 mana, possibly even more, upping the total cost.
I'm not saying the card isn't powerful, mind you. Just that, as a potential fatty that requires you to fill your deck with instants and sorceries and requires a certain amount of deck-building skill to really go off, it's not unusual for a blue rare. It's actually rather par for the course.
Well, I mean, he started out as one of the best generals alive on a plane full of warring armies. Then he became a demon which means at a base physical level he's stronger and tougher than probably any given mortal being. Then he also had centuries to master the best dark magic he could find from all across the multiverse. His opponents on the other hand were four totally normal mortal mages, three of whom were, as you pointed out, not exactly at the top of their game. Admittedly, four mortal mages who are very strong and talented when compared to other mortal mages, but still. None of them have demonic strength or speed, and only Gideon could match Ob's durability. And none of them have had multiple lifetimes to hone their craft. Plus he was probably still riding high on the surge of power from reigniting his spark. And keep in mind that Ob has murdered entire planes before by himself even when not super charged by a crazy ritual powered by a bunch of hedrons and leylines.
Taking all that into account, Ob being anything less than overpowered against a single opponent who didn't have a similar list of credentials would feel cheap to me
I don't find any fault in any of your logic here. My point was, maybe not made clear enough, that any future encounter by any single member of the Gatewatch and Ob should end in that Gatewatcher's prompt demise based on the precedent set by this story. Short of a retcon or some other deus ex machina there shouldn't be any other outcome.
Ah well yes in that case I totally agree. But I'm hoping that they're setting Ob Nixilis up as an alternative "evil planeswalker" type antagonist, so that Nicol Bolas won't be the Big Bad Evil Guy behind literally every bad thing in the multiverse anymore. If that's the case, I'd hope that they'd specifically avoid have Ob go one-on-one with one of the Gatewatch.
So, it takes 4 Neo-walkers (granted 3 of them were in grim shape)to drive away one descended old walker? That, my friends, is nothing but trouble and messy retcons in upcoming stories when one on one confrontations occur.
Ob is a satisfactory non-multiverse level threat villain but do they have to present him as so overpowering against a single planeswalker?
Well, I mean, he started out as one of the best generals alive on a plane full of warring armies. Then he became a demon which means at a base physical level he's stronger and tougher than probably any given mortal being. Then he also had centuries to master the best dark magic he could find from all across the multiverse. His opponents on the other hand were four totally normal mortal mages, three of whom were, as you pointed out, not exactly at the top of their game. Admittedly, four mortal mages who are very strong and talented when compared to other mortal mages, but still. None of them have demonic strength or speed, and only Gideon could match Ob's durability. And none of them have had multiple lifetimes to hone their craft. Plus he was probably still riding high on the surge of power from reigniting his spark. And keep in mind that Ob has murdered entire planes before by himself even when not super charged by a crazy ritual powered by a bunch of hedrons and leylines.
Taking all that into account, Ob being anything less than overpowered against a single opponent who didn't have a similar list of credentials would feel cheap to me.
My only question is, What is the color identity of waste because right now it is all over the place.
"being all over the place" is actually their identity. Between how weird it would be for something that's not a color to get it's own section of color pie, and the fact that colorless symbols in the cost is a one-off thing for Battle block, R&D didn't feel like carving out a specific mechanical identity for Kozilek's brood and instead just came up with a bunch of stuff that felt weird and oddball-ish enough to fit the Eldrazi, then stuck it at the appropriate rarities.
Eh, I wouldn't call Wrexial or Lazav, mill related. They synergize with milling, but don't rely on it, or even cause it themselves.
I agree. And now that I'm thinking about it, assuming my Gatherer-Fu hasn't failed me, there are a total of 14 UB legends that were printed in the last 10 years. Honestly, 1 out of 3 Dimir colored legends having an effect that directly mills or grants mill abilities to other creatures doesn't actually seem like that bad a ratio considering how relatively narrow the mechanical overlap between Blue and Black is.
If you had told me two weeks ago that BFZI's major Constructed archetype was going to be 5-color, and have nothing to do with land mechanics or Eldrazi, I would have thought you were nuts. Like, you know this is a Zendikar vs. Eldrazi set, right? Not Alara 2.0?
I mean, seriously, what is the deal with this set?
I'm starting to believe a conspiracy that this was actually a totally different set in design, but got a last-minute Zendikar facelift. Like, if you're sitting around the conference room, and boss man says "Let's make Zendikar 2", most of the major ideas here are NOT ones you would pick. Like, they aren't even a reasonable point of departure. So confused.
Zendikar's two biggest schticks other than the Eldrazi were Allies, a tribe of creatures that appeared in all five colors, and lands. A five color theme not only encourages you to play lots of different lands but also supports people who want to throw a bunch of different colored allies into the same deck. Of all the ways of returning without just doing more of the same old thing, introducing a five color theme was probably one of the best ways they could have done it.
Are people really complaining that Jace isn't a recluse anymore? He's had a job where he has to talk to people now. He's going to get out of depressed teenage mode. It's logic. I was a recluse until I got a job. Now I have around 50 more friends and I talk to around 100 people per day.
Also, Jace and Lili aren't acting like boyfriend and girlfriend; they're acting like exes who still hang out because their friends hang out. I've seen it four times in one school year. It happens more often than you think.
Having a job where you have to talk to people is by no means a guarantee of character development however. Especially if you hate your job (which is the sense I get from this UR given how Jace describes the average day in the life of the living guildpact) you can come out just as reclusive as you go in, I know I did. It's true that forced socialization can teach people social skills they might otherwise lack, but Jace isn't socializing during his day job, he's settling disputes between angry members of various guilds and telling people whether or not they're allowed to do the thing they'd like to do. I wouldn't expect that to develop him in anyway other than patience, and perhaps an even more deeply entrenched dislike of other people than he already has. He's basically customer service for the guildpact, and nothing teaches loathing for humanity like working in customer service.
Also your point about how Jace and Liliana are interacting doesn't really hold out either, because they don't have any shared friends. They don't have anything forcing them to interact on a regular basis, and in fact haven't interacted at all since the novels they shared the spotlight in, where Liliana apparently did some pretty bad stuff to Jace. So them acting like exes who hang out because their friends hang out doesn't make any sense.
Maybe it's because I never read the stuff where Jace and Liliana first met up and established their relationship, but I'm not really super fond of their interactions in this UR. Jace is supposedly, according to wizards, this uber powerful master mind mage, not to mention the living guildpact. But two minutes spent in the company of an old ex and suddenly he's a blushing nervous child? This is especially egregious in my opinion, given that Jace has also been teased romantically with Chandra, and was still carrying a pretty massive torch for Emmara at the end of Return Block. I'm not generally one of those guys who hates on Jace for being a Mary Sue but given the fact that he's supposedly anti-social and not skilled in the arts of interpersonal relationships, the amount of ladies who are into him is starting to get a bit ridiculous. Especially since half the reason Jace is the "mickey mouse" of MTG has to do with the fact that he's a nerd and so nerdy players identify with him. As a nerd myself, I speak from experience when I say that we don't usually have people of the opposite sex falling all over themselves to hang out with us unless said people are also nerds. So the fact that Jace is apparently so popular just seems like pandering to me.
By a similar token, Liliana is, according to wizards, this insanely powerful necromancer who's killed demons and lived for thousands of years, and yet Jace is able to see "fear in the eyes" of this mighty figure just because the chain veil got hauled out of hammerspace for a metric two seconds? I understand that the chain veil is powerful and scary, but as stated in this UR, it hasn't actually done anything too noticeably detrimental to Lil yet. Nothing in concrete terms anyway. I mean, she's yet to start growing spikes out of her back or have black veins spiderweb across her skin or anything like what happened to Garruk, so it seems reasonable to assume she's still pretty far away from the veil actually fully taking over or whatever, and yet I got the sense that the veil had her running scared.
Now, obviously, it's good for her to be running scared because the chain veil is supposed to be scary and if she wasn't scared she'd be a cardboard cut-out who was dull and uninteresting. My problem is with the fact that Jace was aware of her fear without diving into her mind. Liliana is the sort of person who cares what other people think of her and always has to project this image of poise and confidence and utter control, it seems OOC for her to allow herself to show even a hint of fear to anyone about anything, even to Jace about the veil.
I like Gideon's depiction though. He ain't got time for dress codes or appointments, and he certainly doesn't believe in rest for the weary. Not while there are people suffering and dying in any case. He's earnest, simple, and to the point. He's like a well intentioned mallet.
It feels like Wizards probably should have held off on posting Sorin's Restoration. That UR honestly DID kinda seem like the story of DTK coming to a close. Maybe if they'd waited to post that, and done more filler flavor stuff like The Guardian before hand, people would still be at least a little more invested.
I guess it's a good thing for Oret that Black is no longer a part of his clan's color identity, cause if it was I'm sure somebody would have informed on him by now in order to gain favor with the dragons.
Oh. Joy. Exactly what I was hoping wouldn't happen, happened. The internet really does become completely useless on the first of April.
Like, okay fine, some people like the jokes. Fair enough, I can respect catering to the people who think this was funny, but is there any particular reason why the people who wanted to read actual articles today have to wait? Couldn't they have put a link to the real articles at the bottom of the joke articles or something like that?
Ah shucks Kaburi, does that mean that I won't get to talk about being a neo-pagan when wizards does the inevitable top-down block based on Norse legend?
Plus, come on people lets be real here. This is Red we're talking about. You know, WOTC's least favorite color? It was either this or a huge dumb over-costed dragon, I don't know why anyone would expect anything different. At least this is some interesting and new design space.
...
And then I see this art.
And yeah, it could definitely be just some random totally normal sea monster in the art of this card and absolutely nothing special at all. And in fact it probably is exactly that because of all the reasons I list above. But deep in my heart of hearts, I can't help but want it to be Marit Lage.
Honestly though, how boring YET ANOTHER (R/G) creature boosting planeswalker is not-withstanding, this card is incredibly frustrating to me. When I first saw Nahiri was (R/W), I was ecstatic that we might get something along the lines of Ajani Vengeant (I wasn't playing when Vengeant came out so I never got a chance to grab a copy) because as a (R/W) player I like direct damage, and I REALLY like Lightning Helixes. But instead we got...whatever the heck Nahiri, The Harbinger is. Then they reveal this, and somehow a (R/G) planeswalker, with it's ability to turn itself into a lightning bolt and turn all my creatures into more beefy Prodigal Pyromancers, gives me a better (R/W) planeswalker than the card that actually has R and W in it's casting cost!
Blue gets the least amount of creatures in general, but is actually the second most likely color to get a fatty at common, never mind higher rarities. Flavorfully it'd be weird to have a whale or kraken or sea serpent be a small creature, and mechanically blue needs big threats to be finishers for control decks.
As for being undercosted, it really isn't. Yeah the front face is cheap, but you aren't transforming it until you've cast a bunch of instants and sorceries. Even if you only cast 1 mana cantrips, that's still a total of 6 mana you paid to get your Awoken Horror. Which is admittedly very efficient for a 7/8 with an evacuation effect, but how likely are you to actually make that happen? More likely is that a couple of those instants and sorceries will cost 2 or maybe 3 mana, possibly even more, upping the total cost.
I'm not saying the card isn't powerful, mind you. Just that, as a potential fatty that requires you to fill your deck with instants and sorceries and requires a certain amount of deck-building skill to really go off, it's not unusual for a blue rare. It's actually rather par for the course.
Well, I mean, he started out as one of the best generals alive on a plane full of warring armies. Then he became a demon which means at a base physical level he's stronger and tougher than probably any given mortal being. Then he also had centuries to master the best dark magic he could find from all across the multiverse. His opponents on the other hand were four totally normal mortal mages, three of whom were, as you pointed out, not exactly at the top of their game. Admittedly, four mortal mages who are very strong and talented when compared to other mortal mages, but still. None of them have demonic strength or speed, and only Gideon could match Ob's durability. And none of them have had multiple lifetimes to hone their craft. Plus he was probably still riding high on the surge of power from reigniting his spark. And keep in mind that Ob has murdered entire planes before by himself even when not super charged by a crazy ritual powered by a bunch of hedrons and leylines.
Taking all that into account, Ob being anything less than overpowered against a single opponent who didn't have a similar list of credentials would feel cheap to me.
"being all over the place" is actually their identity. Between how weird it would be for something that's not a color to get it's own section of color pie, and the fact that colorless symbols in the cost is a one-off thing for Battle block, R&D didn't feel like carving out a specific mechanical identity for Kozilek's brood and instead just came up with a bunch of stuff that felt weird and oddball-ish enough to fit the Eldrazi, then stuck it at the appropriate rarities.
I agree. And now that I'm thinking about it, assuming my Gatherer-Fu hasn't failed me, there are a total of 14 UB legends that were printed in the last 10 years. Honestly, 1 out of 3 Dimir colored legends having an effect that directly mills or grants mill abilities to other creatures doesn't actually seem like that bad a ratio considering how relatively narrow the mechanical overlap between Blue and Black is.
Zendikar's two biggest schticks other than the Eldrazi were Allies, a tribe of creatures that appeared in all five colors, and lands. A five color theme not only encourages you to play lots of different lands but also supports people who want to throw a bunch of different colored allies into the same deck. Of all the ways of returning without just doing more of the same old thing, introducing a five color theme was probably one of the best ways they could have done it.
Having a job where you have to talk to people is by no means a guarantee of character development however. Especially if you hate your job (which is the sense I get from this UR given how Jace describes the average day in the life of the living guildpact) you can come out just as reclusive as you go in, I know I did. It's true that forced socialization can teach people social skills they might otherwise lack, but Jace isn't socializing during his day job, he's settling disputes between angry members of various guilds and telling people whether or not they're allowed to do the thing they'd like to do. I wouldn't expect that to develop him in anyway other than patience, and perhaps an even more deeply entrenched dislike of other people than he already has. He's basically customer service for the guildpact, and nothing teaches loathing for humanity like working in customer service.
Also your point about how Jace and Liliana are interacting doesn't really hold out either, because they don't have any shared friends. They don't have anything forcing them to interact on a regular basis, and in fact haven't interacted at all since the novels they shared the spotlight in, where Liliana apparently did some pretty bad stuff to Jace. So them acting like exes who hang out because their friends hang out doesn't make any sense.
By a similar token, Liliana is, according to wizards, this insanely powerful necromancer who's killed demons and lived for thousands of years, and yet Jace is able to see "fear in the eyes" of this mighty figure just because the chain veil got hauled out of hammerspace for a metric two seconds? I understand that the chain veil is powerful and scary, but as stated in this UR, it hasn't actually done anything too noticeably detrimental to Lil yet. Nothing in concrete terms anyway. I mean, she's yet to start growing spikes out of her back or have black veins spiderweb across her skin or anything like what happened to Garruk, so it seems reasonable to assume she's still pretty far away from the veil actually fully taking over or whatever, and yet I got the sense that the veil had her running scared.
Now, obviously, it's good for her to be running scared because the chain veil is supposed to be scary and if she wasn't scared she'd be a cardboard cut-out who was dull and uninteresting. My problem is with the fact that Jace was aware of her fear without diving into her mind. Liliana is the sort of person who cares what other people think of her and always has to project this image of poise and confidence and utter control, it seems OOC for her to allow herself to show even a hint of fear to anyone about anything, even to Jace about the veil.
I like Gideon's depiction though. He ain't got time for dress codes or appointments, and he certainly doesn't believe in rest for the weary. Not while there are people suffering and dying in any case. He's earnest, simple, and to the point. He's like a well intentioned mallet.
Like, okay fine, some people like the jokes. Fair enough, I can respect catering to the people who think this was funny, but is there any particular reason why the people who wanted to read actual articles today have to wait? Couldn't they have put a link to the real articles at the bottom of the joke articles or something like that?