Which part of alibou's card make her white? The card could be monored imo
Maro has talked a bit about wanting to move Scry more into White, especially large amounts of Scry. That aspect of it certainly isn't a monored ability, so it's quite possible it's an early peek at something they're moving into or at least adding to white.
And so Wizards's answer with Strixhaven is "You can have all the answers you want, but they're gold cards."
This card's not as great as some of the others, but it's clearly part of a pattern.
A lot of it is that efficient removal in gold cards is more difficult to make work in the same deck. For example, if you want to run this and Extinguishing Verse, there's exactly 1 color combo you can do it in, assuming they don't mess up and make 4 color soup decks the best option again. And if you're looking for the greater reliability of a 2 color mana base... well, you'll have to hope there's enough removal spells specific to your school. So gold removal spells tend to A) allow them to print a greater variety of good ones without saturating the environment, and B) require them to print a greater variety to ensure that every color combo has access to some. And then you add in the fact that it's an instant and sorcery focused environment...
Ok, I guess that mistakes happen, but this one is the second one for this spoiler season, and both were on big, splashy mythics ... at that point, you should really ask yourself if your QA is working properly
My personal theory is that this set would have been going into editing/locked down on stuff like creature type changes about a year ago. Which was a time period, notably, that would have involved a lot of confusion and extra work, as Wizards switched to working from home.
Shame that Explore and Growth Spiral rapidly become mere cantrips by Turn 4 or later, or Journey to the Oracle actually might have been good in Modern.
Actually, with around 28 or so out of 60 cards being lands, how often can Journey to the Oracle dump 2 or more lands out of your hand?
So we're basically just looking at a hypergeometric calculation, where your sample size is 11 (cards drawn by turn 4 on the draw), and you're looking to have 6 lands out of those 11, so you'll end up with about a 40% chance to dump 2 or more if you drop it on curve.
For just 12 mana (14 in Commander) a 1/1 becomes a one shot. Hoo boy.
What if that 1/1 is your commander?
It takes it back down to 12 mana. 12 mana doubles the power 5 times, which starting at 1/1 gets you to 32/32, which is more than 21 commander damage. Realistically, it's plausible you'd only need 10 mana or 4 doubles if the opponent took some other damage, as that'll get you to 16 power.
Why did they leave out the green mascots? I'm so confused lol
Likely space issues. Adding a Fractal would have required adding a whole extra line or two defining how many counters to put on it, and adding a Pest would have required an extra line or more for the death trigger ability. Considering it took them 4 lines for just the 3 simplest tokens, adding the other two would likely have doubled the number of lines or more, for relatively little gain.
Dream Strix is rare because it's a 3/2 flyer for 3 mana that (effectively) draws a non-land card when it dies. It even gets to be a non-land of your choice. That's a fairly powerful card, and a reasonable rare. The "drawback" isn't a huge one in constructed, since most spells that can target it are kill spells anyways, and this lets it avoid most exile spells keeping it from dying.
when countless other cards exist for the 99 that kill creatures in black and white.
beside creatures are the easiest to remove in edh that aren't indestructable/hexproof
...Sure? But that's like saying Demystify replaces Mortify, then. The two have very different benefits. One of the big benefits of Mortify is that it's enchantment removal that's *also* creature removal, meaning it's never completely dead. This is an upgrade to something like Disenchant, not Mortify.
People have been memeing Strixhaven as the "HP ripoff set" from the point the name and tagline got spoiled, before we saw anything. You always see what you want to see. I mean, of course the influence is going to be there because of HPs huge cultural status, but so far I don't really see 1:1 plants unless you count really broad tropes like "genius student" and "university sports teams."
Also, the whole "there absolutely was a HP tie in at some point that they had to scrap" argument feels like something on the level of Mew being under the truck near SS Anne. It's based on nothing more than the perception of Wizards as a "SJW company" by some and Rowling's recent fall from grace.
I find the theory that Strixhaven was supposed to be a Harry Potter Tie-in to be so strange. If the theory is that the set was designed with HP in mind but then they didn't secure the license and had to change the flavor, there seems to be problems with it. This is just my opinion, but the flavor seems pretty extensive to be something slapped together to salvage an already designed set. And the big issue for me is that the set does not seem like it would mechanically fit with HP. 5 enemy colored factions doesn't fit into a world with the four Hogwarts houses, lots of the mechanics on the cards really would be hard to concept in the HP world, and if it were designed as a top-down HP set then I feel like there'd be a lot more direct examples that people could point to.
I'd really like to know what support these people have for the theory beyond "This character fits the same trope as Hermione" and "This magic school ALSO has team sports" because I really feel like I must be missing something..
As far as I can tell, the support is "I want it to be true" and confirmation bias. There's way more evidence that this is a cohesive, independent product that takes inspiration from some of the same sources as Hogwarts than that there was some sort of deal that fell through.
I am pretty sure that it does not work at all with this card with the post-Kaldheim errata on converted mana costs. This would have a CMS (or mana value) of 4. That is, if I remember how it works correctly.
You're not correct, but you're still right about it not working. This card still has a mana value of 2 in all other zones, because things that check characteristics only care about the front face while not in play or on the stack. Because of that, when Isochron Scepter asks you to exile a card, this isn't eligible, because it's a 2 mana value creature, not a 2 mana value instant.
The stadium is a very interesting design. I like how it can create a back and forth without ever fully backfiring on you. At worst, if your opponent is "winning" you end up with a crappy mana rock. At best, it gives you an alternate win con. It also presents an amusing conundrum against a control deck. They can kinda sorta ignore it, but since they won't typically be stripping counters off, it can use its mana ability to build up points and eventually get to the point where any attack becomes lethal.
Looks like they're aiming for 12 EST, or about an hour and 20 minutes from now