MTG Salvation

I can't wait to Befuddle this in limited.

Playing Melek, Izzet Paragon 1v1 against Yidris, Maelstrom Wielder

Earlier, in the game, I used Desertion to take Yidris and was using a Mystical Tutor imprinted onto Isochron Scepter to keep control and stop any answers to Yidris. I needed to because I was at six life. I had Yidris and Melek out at this time and could attack for lethal commander damage with Yidris next turn.

Opponent plays Treacherous Terrain and we look at my six lands. I go searching with Mystical Tutor and don't see any counters. He's out of range of a Fork effect too (19 life left, 9 lands in play). I keep looking for something and remember that terrain is for exactly my life total. I then go and find Capsize and bounce two of my own lands, allowing me to live with two life.

It should work.

Gatherer ruling on Necrotic Ooze

If an activated ability of a card in a graveyard references the card it’s printed on by name, treat Necrotic Ooze’s version of that ability as though it referenced Necrotic Ooze by name instead. For example, if Cudgel Troll (which says “{G}: Regenerate Cudgel Troll”) is in a graveyard, Necrotic Ooze has the ability “{G}: Regenerate Necrotic Ooze.”

I eagerly await the day I can Willbender an opposing Aetherflux Reservoir activation.

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So I said this when meld was officially spoiled.

Quote from Cakeifier »

Meld is interesting and will undoubtedly be fun, but there's one thing that could make me hate it. If one card is foil while the other isn't, that will annoy me to no end.

Yeah, that happened.

Quote from Exodite »

Quote from Cakeifier »

...I've been hyping SoI since the teaser. It's a return to my favorite setting in magic after all.

Mine too!

That's to say it was, right now I'm definitely over it. Quite possibly over Standard for some time too, and I only play Standard. I can only hope Kaladesh pushes out anything from BFZ and SOI because I don't know if I can take any more of this.

That's your prerogative. I'll reserve my judgment on the set itself until I actually have a chance to play and draft it. With SOI, I hyped the setting, but did the same.

Quote from Cakeifier »

I don't find Innistrad's pushing of horror tropes nuanced. It was always top-down based on horror tropes, but that was pretty much all it was.

I'm going to go ahead and not-so-respectfully disagree.

The conflicts on Innistrad were never just Humans vs. Monsters. There were many factions, vampire lineages had different styles as did the different werewolf pack. Heck even the zombies had factions (or well, skaabs I guess) thanks to Gisa/Geralf.

And the angelic hosts in the different flights.

Now it's been reduced to "everyone vs. the Eldrazi" and pretty much all the existing flavor of the plane has been lost.

Perhaps I chose my words there poorly. I meant that the conflict itself was rather simple. Any nuance was a way to push more tropes into the set.

Quote from Cakeifier »

Using eldrazi to get some pseudo cosmic horror into the lore of the plane is something that expands on Innistrad, and gives them more to work with should they return again or print cards in supplemental products.

They keyword being "some".

Like I said, Shadows over Innistrad did this reasonably well - though I were always wary of that personally. What we got now is quite different though. It's not just that the "cosmic horror" trope came in and murdered everything else, it also murdered the whole "horror" aspect. Part of the allure of Innistrad, for me personally anyway, was that the place were reasonably dark. Not oppressively dark, just enough that you got a feel for hidden plots and sinister motivations.

That's all gone with the Emrakul reveal, now it's just a grand melee for all the marbles.

This is simply a big event in the plane's history though. If it only stayed 'reasonably dark', why go back? Something needed to happen (At least WotC seem to think so). It just so happened that it took a darker turn this time around.

Quote from Cakeifier »

I suppose my problem with BFZ was that Zendikar didn't have much of an identity. Innistrad does.

Fair.

I suppose my problem with EMN is that Innistrad used to have an identity. Now it doesn't.

Innistrad still has an identity. It's a horror plane. BFZ brought us to a very vanilla setting in comparison and OGW did very little to change it up. That set could have been "Battle for 'insert plane name here'" and it wouldn't have been any better or worse. SOI did a much better job of showing what Innistrad is all about. Eldritch Moon doesn't seem like it should or could have happened on any plane except Innistrad (although maybe that's just the Bloodborne fan in me talking).

Quote from Jack Power »

So Investigate is gone.

Another interesting, useful, flavor-packed mechanic introduced at the start of a block completely gone by the end of it. (Hello, Converge)

What's left to investigate? Everyone knows what's causing the madness.

Meld is interesting and will undoubtedly be fun, but there's one thing that could make me hate it. If one card is foil while the other isn't, that will annoy me to no end.

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As someone who works a pretty successful store, these have done nothing to our bottom line so far. They haven't impacted our event attendance, singles sales, or anything else. It has been business as usual.

Im fine with Chandra being bi in the future, but I always hated Chandra/Nissa shipping. They had no chemistry,and the only thing their relationship offered was being a lesbian relationship. A lot of that comes from Nissa being boring as hell though, so there's no reason that Chandra can't be shipped with another woman down the road and have it actually work (and they really should keep her bi).

Quote from Tiro of Meletis »

Blue will always rule my friend, deal with it. Frankly, I’m not ashamed to share my opinion, and I’m hardly in the minority here. The backlash is on every internet medium out there, and the Amazon reviews speak for themselves. Outsourcing the writing was polarizing, but I can’t call that a failure because Kate Elliott delivers every time. We’ve seen some good material come of it, but overall, I do prefer creative handling the material. I do hold Weisman accountable for his own writing, though.

I’m anticipating Theros and hope it will be handled by Helland, Elliott, Kelly Digges or a name we can trust. Seriously, I waited years for this resolution and I do not want to see a flop with Theros. I am still stunned they took such a risk with resolving the Bolas arc, considering the time and effort invested in cultivating it all these years, only to send it Media Mail and have it arrive shattered.

I know you are not ashamed to share your opinion. You just happen to present them (mostly) in such a way that irritates me to no end - a thing I also make no secret of. In this particular case, the unnecessary avalanche of derisive words. And yeah, the outrage is there, and it is strong. I just tried to provide another pieces of puzzle to what happened and that scapegoating Weisman in such a way might not be justified.

Quote from ArixOrdragc »

Well, I mean, I'm kind of on Pip's side with this. Wintermute's novels are bad for sure, but they're like Asylum movie bad - if you can get yourself in the right mood, you can have a lot of fun with them. WotS, more than anything else, is just boring. They're not good, but they're also not bad enough to be "so bad that it's good". Wintermute's novels can still provide some degree of entertainment value, even if it's for all the wrong reasons, which is more than can be said for WotS.

Although in all fairness, it's been a long time since I read QfK - I just remember smiling and giggling to myself all the way through it, in an "Oh my god what am I even looking at" manner, but it's entirely possible my memory sucks and/or things were just different back then, and it was just bad.

That said, I don't pin the blame entirely on Weisman - a significant chunk of it rests with the creative team who actually came up with this dross of a storyline to begin with. Weisman's novels are bad for sure, but in all fairness, he just wasn't given a whole lot to work with. Sure, he might have done a better job with it - a good enough writer can make eating a bowl of cereal compelling - but it's not like he butchered a good story, he simply failed to make the best out of a bad one.

Hah, I see your point, but to be honest, I have never found anything even remotely funny in that novels. I cannot even consider them a guilty pleasure (even Legions and Scourge qualified for this a bit), they are just BAD. The only worse book than Wintermute's would be probably Prophecy.

Considering the last paragraph - yes, Wizards as a whole bit a larger piece than they were realistically able to chew, unless they approached it in wholly different way - more time, more writers, better and more detailed story supervision...

Quote from Ryperior74 »

painter's servant is unbanned dear lord why..

cards like Grindstone are still legal in commander

Because who cares, there are plenty of other two-card combos in EDH, Painterstone isn't degenerate

People panicking about Painter's Servant combos like there aren't far worse combos in the format already.

Quote from MRHblue »

Quote from Forgotten One »

2) Games of Commander are unsanctioned, so I don't know why the RC has to have any rulings on what a sideboard is. The concept of a sideboard is unnecessary for Commander play. The idea of people revealing their commanders and people siding in cards before a game starts seems awfully unnecessary and kinda lame, so I understand why people wouldn't want sideboards. But you don't need a sideboard for a wish to work; you just need to define the parameters that a player must follow to get a cards from "outside the game". I will repeat this again; if calling it a Wishboard is somehow problematic because of a Wishboard's association with a sideboard for sanctioned, competitive play, then call it something different.

I seriously doubt it has anything to do with the name. And without a set number of cards, you slide right back into 'how do wishes work outside known groups?'

Except when people are purposefully misleading others into thinking that a Wishboard is anything other than something to make a Wish work as intended without holding up the game. It has been suggested that allowing sideboards for a Wish somehow implies that people will then be allowed to sideboard before and/or between games, and even though that was the intent of the old "House Rule" or "optional" sideboard rule (that has since been eliminated), that is just not the case here. Either people act confused to intentionally derail the conversation or they really are confused that the two are different. I'm just trying to reiterate that they are two different things.

3) The biggest reason that I am opposed to the concept of "If you don't like Rule 13, then see Rule 0 and ask your playgroup" is that for every other class of cards that might come up under Rule 0, the default is that they are legal and allowed. We don't have a rule that says "Cards that destroy more than two lands do nothing in a game of Commander.", we ask before we start whether people are playing Mass-LD or not and go from there. We could do the same thing with Stax cards, infinite combos, extra turn cards, or whatever players might find objectionable, but the default is that these cards are legal and do exactly what they say they do. For some reason, Wishes are treated differently.

There is also no confusion about how those cards work. Wishes work differently depending on what kind of game it is. Banned cards also do not fall under a separate class.

So once the confusion is cleared up, then we should be all good, right? So let's clear up the confusion. It's not that hard.

4) The biggest reasons why Wishes are treated differently has nothing to do with most of the reasons people bring up in this thread. The biggest reason is that the Oracle Card Rulings for Wishes are totally wishy-washy on what "outside the game" should mean for non-sanctioned play. The more I think about it, the more it makes a certain degree of sense for the RC to be equally vague on the subject. I just think that we have enough smart people in the room to figure this out so that we can fix this issue. And if it comes down to all the smart people coming together and saying that this issue is either not worth solving, unsolvable, or the issue are insurmountable, then so be it. I just haven't heard anything that is a true deal-breaker yet.

That discussion has clearly been had by the RC, and a decision was made. A certain faction will never like that idea. Much like Hybrid, or Extort.

There at least are very good reasons for why Hybrid and Extort behave the way they do in Commander; it is based firmly on the rules of the game. The rules state that a Hybrid card is both colors, not one color or the other. The rules state that reminder text has no function. For a format that was created by and is currently run by former judges, I would expect nothing less. People who don't like Hybrid or Extort rulings in Commander are basically asking for format-level errata to allow the cards to work differently than they do (not functionally, but within the rules of Commander which I concede is slightly different). What we are asking for with Wishes is that if they need format-level errata, then let's do it such that they act like their current printed intent.

With all that said, maybe the RC isn't the people we need to be talking to. Perhaps a better way to solve this is to petition WotC to provide a "real" Oracle card ruling for non-sanctioned play. I doubt that the powers-that-be at WotC would directly override to RC, but perhaps there is a way for the Oracle card rulings to be written to solve the problem in a way that doesn't require Rule 13.

The "cleanest" solution is to make wishes conform to the comp rules and get rid of the inconsistency they currently have with their "we don't do functional errata except when we do" approach. To do this, the RC should let wishes function how the rules say they work. Of course, to do this they need to a) create a defined sideboard for sanctioned play, and b) work with wizards to add a rule that gives wishes a limited scope so that the card you pull has to be within your CI, not already be in your 100, and not be banned.

What I propose isn't actually a very difficult thing to do, but it comes with it's own set of problems. I don't subscribe to the notion of "we want to differentiate ourselves from competitive Magoc" because much like PBtE, it's an antiquated idea. And as I mentioned earlier, I play in a casual league which is technically sanctioned. The bigger problems insee are:

Confusion - with two different rules you will inevitably have arguments over which sideboard you can use.
Slow play - digging through a collection to find one particular card
Poor game play - what are people going to actually do with wishes? Grabbing a doom blade? Cool, but a regular tutor works just as well. Grabbing a specific hoser that isn't good enough to run on it's own merit? Lame.

So although I think the "best" solution is the one which gives wishes a very definitive answer, the most practical one which creates the best gameplay experience is the current solution we have in place.

The number one reason white doesn't win games is a lack of dumb, splashy wincons. No expropriate nonsense. No craterhoof shenanigans. No necropotence malarkey. No cards it can play that just instantly win the game without strategy or forethought.

It plays fair, and fair doesn't win games in this format.

Waiting for someone to sort through their entire collection to find the one perfect card seems like a great way to bring any game to a grinding halt. Double that if they don't know what they're tutoring for.

I'm perfectly happy not seeing wishes in EDH. If I did play with someone who was dead set on running them, I'd insist on a wishboard to keep the time it takes to resolve to a more reasonable level.

Quote from CatParty »

Also, flavorfail? This is a cleric from Ixalan... What counters even exist in Ixalan? It should at least be some sort of being from Kaladesh...

This cleric does his job just right