It's safe to say Gruesome Menagerie is Golgari's eighth promo. The leak of it showed it as a Prerelease Promo.
If they want a different color for each guild's monocolor that means Dimir gets Blue, Izzet gets Red, Boros gets White and Selesnya gets Green. We can't assume they're doing this when we only know one of the promos, but I still wanted to say which guild would get what color if they did a different color for each.
That makes sense. Theoretically, it could also be a Dimir kit, but that seems pretty unlikely.
I can't imagine a cube composition that would only run one of these two. Frankly if you only run 2 aggro green creatures it should probably be these two. I support collected company decks, recurssion deck and aggro decks all would e great here. Plus if you are into kalonian hydra/doubling season counter nonsense it has value there.
Rules question. If I play a deranged hermit how many counters to I get?
1, unless you have a way of further pumping your squirrels or shrinking your pelt collector. It has an intervening if clause, so it will check both when it initially triggers, and when the ability goes to resolve. So you can remove counters or shrink him between triggers, but otherwise they'll fizzle because the squirrels have equal power.
Hmmmm. This card would be really cool of it didn't exile itself. As it stands it seems far too narrow and random to be useful once. I would love for this to be recurrable.
Also, why does Dimir get 4 Mythics? I HATE when Wizards does this lopsided crap when they don't make guilds / tribes / whatever have the same, equal amount of stuff to play with.
Because two of those mythics are mono-color cards that easily slot into (and potentially work really well in, given how much Surveil synergizes with the Undergrowth and Jump Start) decks in the other two guilds. The mono color cards have never been perfectly balanced in which watermarks are given out, because different guild mechanics have differing amounts of space, and they've got fairly strict rules about what deserves a watermark. Divine Visitation, for example, isn't watermarked as a selesnya card, but that doesn't mean it's not going to be good in selesnya decks.
What happen if the opponent doesn't have creatures?
The defending player takes 3 damage and, sadly, Etrata's owner shuffles her back into their library.
Since it's a targeted triggered ability and since it's all one block of text, if there's no legal targets doesn't the whole combat ability get countered (by the rules)? So she doesn't shuffle herself into the deck?
Specifically, the ability won't even get put onto the stack at all. Similarly, she won't shuffle in if your opponent makes the target illegal in response (such as with a sacrifice or protection spell).
If I had to guess, I'd say that they ended up getting constrained by Dominaria's Saproling support. Dominaria had some decent saproling support cards, so if they had any tournament quality token producers, they would have to assume that they could be played with Saproling lords and such. So rather than risk having to tone down cards like March of the Multitudes, they changed the token to not synergize with Dominaria, and that allowed them to give it the small bonus of lifelink.
I get these "when you surveil" cards are to make Surveil into a distinct limited playstyle or whatever, but "when a card enters your graveyard from your library" would just be so much less parasitic for older formats - plus none yet would be breakable with that clause.
They probably didn't want to force people to dump good cards just to trigger their triggers. It would suck to try and, say, pump your thoughtbound phantasm to trade with a surveil 1 card, only to find yourself staring at your bomb and either losing your phantasm.
Its not as aggressive as rabblemaster. If you're swinging in every turn, this is capped out at creating 1/5/7/9 power on the board on T3/4/5/6 respectively, maybe a bit more if there's a pushed 1/1 double strike applicable but this would be hard pressed to scale past ever adding a +1/+1 to anything but a 1/1 base- even if you give it a lord effect, your 1/1s will get that too and become 2/2s, so it can't mentor them past 3/3. So count this as 1/5/7/9 power. Rabblemaster makes 1/6+x/8+x/10+x power where X is the number of other gobbos you drop. Which is usually going to be 2+, maybe 4+. So rabblemaster piledrives it in whereas this just poops mogg-sized gobbos. And that's also an advantage against spot removal, because after swinging once this can leave you with larger 2/2 tokens leftover
Now that's in terms of pure goldfish aggressiveness. This is better equipped for attacking into some 2/2 or larger blockers and less all-in aggressive since it can sit back and generate tokens without attacking, and won't force the rest of your field to suicide. But its also a pretty sad token generator if you don't swing in- it won't mentor- and its a contrived board state you'd have to be in where you want 1/1 tokens that charge in but your horde doesn't.
/e wow I got that off in the original, brainfarted those numbers hard, fixed
I mean, your opponent having a X/1 and not much else doesn't seem that contrived of a board state, especially on early turns. You probably wouldn't want to trade your Warboss for their dude, but you're happy if they trade your token for their dude.
I... really don't think that Jump-Start is worse than Retrace. You cannot play the card infinitely like Retrace, but you do get the following upsides:
1) The cost is WAY cheaper.
2) It can self-fuel, while Retrace cannot. (I.e., I can discard Jump-Start cards to Jump-Start cards.)
3) You are not required to discard a land. While lands are likely going to be the preferred discard, unless your deck is made with 2) in effect, it's not required... and that's a good thing.
Finally, I would expect a card, similar to what they print in Flashback blocks, to get an Instant or Sorcery back from exile.
1) cost is way cheaper than Retrace? how?
2) discarding Jump start cards to activate jump start isn`t fueling anything, just losing the opportunity of casting that same card from your hand for the same cost.
3) ok, now an upside.... but I`d take the ability of casting it again and again over it any day of the week
Spitting Image says this card would likely cost at least 3UU if it had Retrace (Restricting it to your own creatures has traditionally made these things cost 1 less, as evidenced by Mirror Image.)
Is there some reason we've never seen the most basic version of this card?
We keep getting stuff like this and Fated Infatuation.
Speaking of Mirror Image, it seems likely that's the most basic version of this card. They're not going to turn it into a token unless they have a reason to, such as Fated Infatuation being part of a cycle or wanting to give it flashback.
One of the articles on the DailyMTG site said they had designed the non-leading legends specifically to inspire decks/builds of their own. Which is cool for its own sake, but at the same time it makes these decks seem pretty disjointed and awkward.
How can they said that and have the two enchantress legendaries being so similar?
Are they really that similar? Tuvasa the Sunlit encourages playing at least one enchantment a turn, and getting a lot of them onto the battlefield and voltroning Tuvasa themselves. Kestia, the Cultivator, on the other hand, encourages putting enchantments on multiple creatures, or running enchantment creatures, and attacking with them.
Windgrace SHOULD be Jund. Mountains, forests and swamps are the most pronounced biomes on Urborg, Windgrace's homeland and the place he swore to protect from artifice after Yawgmoth's defeat. I mean the guy literally became one with Urborg in his dying moments (which probably means that he's the maro-sorcerer of the island now which I really hope we get a card of).
If Windgrace isn't the face of the Jund lands deck I'll literally eat cat fur.
You’re going to be awfully put out when you discover he’s the face of the Esper deck. Has everyone really forgotten about Aryel already?
While possible, there's far more Windgrace red cards than there are white or blue. He's the face of the red card of the Planeswalker cycle, after all.
It's still blue and green, it's just secondary in black. They're trying the shift to enable them to have a blue/black overlap keyword, as that's been something they've been looking for for a long time.
What happened to Skulk? thought it was the right direction for UB
It turned out to be a lot harder to design than they wanted for an evergreen keyword. It's basically useless/feels wrong past a certain power (even 3 power skulk creatures were pushing it), discourages pumping, and generally didn't play as well with other mechanics as they would have liked. If it had been super popular, they might have been able to shoehorn it in anyways, but it wasn't. It mostly got an "eh, okay" reaction, which is not where they want keywords to be.
Flash is now a black keyword, not blue or green... very interesting.
It's still blue and green, it's just secondary in black. They're trying the shift to enable them to have a blue/black overlap keyword, as that's been something they've been looking for for a long time.
Each color has a 3 or so non-affiliated options left for the final slot (Green has 4, but that's counting Bounty of Might as non-affiliated, when it seems pretty likely to be Selesnya). White gets Bounty Agent, Citywide Bust, and Dawn of Hope, Blue gets Drowned Secrets, Narcomobea, and Omnispell Adept, Black gets Gruesome Menagerie, Midnight Reaper, and Ritual of Soot, Red gets Erratic Cyclops, Experimental Frenzy, and Runaway Steam-kin, and Green gets Beast Whisperer, Pelt Collector, and Vivid Revival. There's some I can definitely see not being used as prerelease promos, like Runaway Steam-kin, but it definitely feels like there's a lot of combinations that would work. My guess would probably be Narcomobea for Dimir, Citywide Bust or Bounty Agent for Boros, Erratic Cyclops or Experimental Frenzy for Izzet, and Pelt Collector or Beast Whisperer for Selesnya.
Speaking of Mirror Image, it seems likely that's the most basic version of this card. They're not going to turn it into a token unless they have a reason to, such as Fated Infatuation being part of a cycle or wanting to give it flashback.