MTG Salvation

This is a lesson for WotC hopefully. You can't both print pushed land value like this and not print real land destruction to remove it. Personally, I'm not a big fan of land destruction, so I know what to choose. It should just have been an enchantment.

Quote from Shadow345 »

Silly. Did people forget board wipes exist?

Highly ineffective against Golos. They recuperate next turn as long as they have a single spell or land ready, which is the vast majority of time. In order to get board wipe working, you need mana for both the zombies and building enough board presence to kill during the same turn - and in a matchup where you're very much behind in mana due to playing against a ramp deck.

Quote from Xcric »

oh thank god. now i get to see knight of the ebon blade every single matchup on arena, instead of every other matchup being field of the dead.

Aggro was artificially pushed because the only real way to beat Golos is to kill it before it lays eggs. Control and midrange will show up more now to combat aggro.

I'm not into Unsets myself, but am happy to see that the product is succesful.

Standard is weird right now. I can't really wrap my head around it and have only made it to Silver 1 (I'm not a good player either, so take everything as a grain of salt).

I decided to go and build a slower deck, so I'm running Bant (ie mono green with Oko and selesnya legend splash) food wolves, and maaaaaaaaaan the format is either ridiculously fast or centered around Field of the Dead. I'm not really that fond of it. At least you know what you face when they play stuff. That's what I hated about blue back when Nexus was legal in BO1. You had to play the game completely differently whether they used counterspells or fogs, and they only played lands until you knew what you were going against. When someone drops a Gutterbones or a guildgate at least I know what I need to do.

Level up won't return. It mostly failed as a mechanic, as most players have mixed feelings about it or don't like it, many loathe the frame, has a lot of board complexity and doesn't mesh well with +1/+1 counters. Personally I love the mechanic, but I'm not the majority of players.

Landfall is simply not going to be left out. There's no chance. It's the core of Zendikar lands matters design and beloved by most people. And for good reason. It mitigates one of the most frustrating parts of the game, drawing lands in top deck mode, as well as making lands, the card type with the least fans, exciting to everyone.

This is why landfall is so great; assuming you have the necessary lands in play to be able to play your cards in general, this marks the the difference between landfall and no landfall:

Having no landfall permanent in play: Drawing nonlands is exciting, drawing lands is boring.

Having a landfall permanent in play: Drawing anything is exciting.

Now, a good player appreciates lands in a different way than above, but think of Kitchen Table Toby. Landfall increases the amount of exciting draws without undercutting the game's foundation of randomized card draw. It's just great.

But when have they missed the chance to print these things? I don't understand how this is devious behavior in any way. Taplands are the simplest forms of duals, so that's why they did them in Alara, and in Khans they just finished the "cycle" because it felt natural, and there has been no other tricolor sets. Maybe Modern Horizons? But does Modern really need a stronger manabase? I'm at a loss as to how this serves them and not the players or whatever the problem is.

Also what italofoca says.

Uh. No? I think? They had two sets centered around tricolor, and both have a triland cycle. They have literally not missed a single chance to print trilands. Well, unless you count Invasion block, which pushed for As Many Colors As Possible while having very poor land support. However, Invasion is also notorious for having the very same manabase demonized by all of R&D for not being open enough.

Where in the world should they have expressed lack of will to print trilands? Ravnica is a color duo set, Ixalan has three color factions but is centered around color pairs... And in the time since Alara, they have printed plenty of 3+ colored lands, although admittedly much fewer cycles of them. Sorry, but I have no idea what you're on about. When should they have printed 3+ colored lands, and how damning is this?

From what I understand, Eldrazi will show up, but in very, very small quantities, and the focus will be on the Zendikar environment of old. It hasn't been confirmed, but Rosewater expressed that that was the ideal vision for the plane in a blogatog post.

Wait his best deck had 78 cards?

I'd suggest he reads up on deckbuilding if he hasn't at this point.

Quote from buffntuff »

Quote from DirkGently »

That seems like a guaranteed recipe for failing to get an SO interested. FNMs are usually male-dominated and at least fairly competitive. I think the vast majority of women, put into that situation unprepared, are not going to have a good time. Let alone something more competitive like a GP or PTQ.

You want to make a woman go to FNM? To a room full of dudes with varying level of social skills who will invariably spend the entire night treating this woman as a weird object? You're right that she's not going to have a good time. I straight up stopped going to releases because I am exhausted by men and all their weird *****, let alone the extra competitive dudes who get extremely uptight about winning 5 packs or whatever.

Look, it's a systemic issue that's not going to be solved by you and it's not going to be solved by pushing your S.O. into uncomfortable situations. It's not because there's anything inherent about women or men and this card game or any game, it's a bunch of historical prejudice that arbitrarily assigned certain attributes like "competitiveness" to arbitrary measurements of genitals and hormone levels. Women will self-select out of these kinds of things for the same reasons dudes will buy large trucks or watch sports even if they're not really invested in either.

That said, this isn't the 90s and more women are playing magic now than ever. They're just playing it with their non-judgmental friends or anonymously online now that there's a decent internet version of magic.

Personally I get awkward around women in Magic events even though I don't anywhere else exactly because of the weird climate around them at the events I go to. I want to be welcoming and just treat them as another person, but I feel I get weirdly dismissive because I'm too afraid to make them uncomfortable. Male players, I joke with them and talk cards, female players I rarely speak to in case I start mansplaining why a card is good. I don't have this problem in any other areas of my life, school, work, bars, readings, even other competetive types of events, whatever. I don't actually know whether it shows or not, since I've never gotten on good enough terms with any of the female players I meet through FNMs and such to ask. I play boardgames with some women however and have played Magic with them too there, and there everything is natural as normal. I'm not sure what you can use that information for, but I just wanted to let you know of my personal experience with this problem. And it's honestly all on me, of course.

Maybe just a female cat? You can browse for them reasonably easy here:

https://scryfall.com/search?q=t:cat&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name

Quote from buffntuff »

Wow this thread fell out of the nineties. Magic isn't remotely obscure any more, and honestly it wasn't all that obscure twenty years ago either.

I have been pretty open about my Magic hobby for a while, and basically every time I mention I play it, people go "what's that?", I say, it's that card game with elves and dragons, they're still a big questionmark, and then I google it and they go "oh I've seen that before."

They want a default, "real" look that's a good point of reference between worlds. More stylized art usually goes to the wayside for this reason; it's very clear that the alt arts in question are not part of the same universe as Ravnica. Remember, they have direct experience with bad art direction, such as early Magic goblins that were a cesspool of styles with no consistency; then the onlooker will feel very detached from understanding it as a cohesive world. OTOH differences can be deliberate but still definitely part of the same world such as in Lorwyn. However, coherence is also the argument they used to use for consistent frames I believe (although a larger problem then was the cost of alternate frames), and the increased use of more abstract framing in works such as Seb McKinnon means that they may be going to experiment more with more abstract or stylized framings. After all, early Magic frames were designed to look like spellbook pages. Later frames became stylized for information and more of a border to serve an in-world image and inform the player of the card's properties. As such, the alt art frame is definitely connected to a possible change in style. Their recent experiments in Ixalan, Amonkhet and now Eldraine should make more experiments possible.

Personally I'm not sure what I want. I prefer a spellbook style (which the Eldraine alts fall under) but I also want to be able to read my cards.

Wrenn and Six - No, wait, don't hate me yet! Mechanically, I love tiny, incremental gains and noncreature RG archetypes. And I have self control, so I wouldn't use cards like Strip Mine with this. Problem is basically that it's the one card in the game - by far - that I identify the most with. It's my personal colors and the chaotic fire nature magic is very "me" in my personal color philosophy. In addition, it's not just a chaotic fire nature person, but a chaotic fire druid, even a druid personally connected to a tree/nature - world-interconnected druid is pretty much an always-online nerd in fantasy settings.

Commander is a 40 life game with basically unlimited access to a free, usually powerful card beyond your starting hand. As such, players have a roster of resources that can be hard to circumvent. It's an engine/battlecruiser format at its core. This fundamentally pushes it towards massive combo advantages or wins. Luckily, decks are 100 card singleton, which should circumvent this.

But it doesn't. Tutors and deep or selective draw completely screws over the format's deckbuilding restrictions. It doesn't just counteract it or add diversity (like group slug does), but is a fundamental detriment to the format's core spirit: "I don't want to play a 100-card singleton deck, so I'll just add a load of tutors so I can win fast."

Of course, this isn't always the case when players add the tutors. But groups self-check both in the direction of relaxation and power. People passively empower their decks as time passes, depowering takes self control. The game shop I play at has a very interchangable and large roster of players, so combo and nasty kinds of control is rampant there.

Yes, battlecruiser is still legitimate, but I have been playing Magic since 10th edition, and boy has Commander seen an unhealthy crapload of battlecruiser power creep since then. Stuff like Omnath 2 has become necessary to countact infinite combos. Which is just sad.

EDIT Oh, and for the record, I hate to play battlecruiser myself - well, I do kind of like it, but I'm more enjoying it at the power of stuff like Pelakka Wurm; later, more ridiculously potent cards are not my thing. I tend to make engine builds of fair cards and durdle a lot for incremental gain instead, and my more powerful stuff has real weaknesses I refuse to fix in order, usually intentionally subpar win paths, to let other players beat me.

I'm actually surprised how often I have to explain girls what Magic even is. Then again, I'm the de facto IT guy on my work by virtue of being able to fix people's Macs, not ever having owned one myself.

When dating someone, Magic is something I reveal/properly introduce after a while, and they don't give a ***** by that point. I have actual bad things to scare them away with way before that point, so by then, it usually sticks.

If you just talk about it casually, like "Oh I can't, have to play Magic that day", like, verbally demonstrating that it's maybe weird but completely unthreatening and fine, you should be fine.

OK, answer time. How to actually get them playing. Well, it's basically board game. What I'd suggest is to treat it as such, removing the collectible aspect, and making some simple decks you can vary between. Perhaps give her her favorite and a few other cards to improve it with, and then you can start bringing her to casual events. If anything, you can play with her yourself, which is always cozy.