Thanks for posting this. I've had this, uh, 'discussion' with a number of shops that had proposed to launch Pauper nights and I try to ask them "MTGO rules or actual-paper printed rarity", they go "Whatever, if it was ever a common it's good unless it's on the banlist, if it was bad it'd be on the banned list", I explain "Hymn and Sinkhole aren't on the MTGO banned list because they're not MTGO commons..." "Whatever, man. We'll see how it plays out." Yeah, I already know how this plays out.
I don't want to bring a deck with Hymns and get in arguments with the faction that thinks they're illegal in paper pauper (not on the MTGO pauper valids list). I don't want to bring a deck with Chainer's Edicts and get in arguments with the faction that thinks they're illegal in paper pauper (never printed as paper commons). I don't want to bring a deck that resists using either flavor of corner case and then face decks all evening that didn't hold themselves to the same deckbuilding restrictions. I want a show-runner who gives a damn enough to make it clear to all players what the cardpool is; ideally, I want the organization that handles all the other formats (including the online version of Pauper) to actually give a damn enough to codify a ruleset for paper pauper. But for some reason they never do.
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- thatmarkguy
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It's not a good card, mind. But it is a card that fits an archetype that had been looking pretty underrepresented in DTK draft so far.
We also finally have some artifacts with which we can do better number deductions in the numbercrunch thread.
Their thinking (justified or not) is that because these are bad, they will go deep in drafts. And because they'll go deep rather than be early takes like any competent flying creature would be, people who want to draft dragon-tribal will actually be able to do so (at cost of running some truly awful cards to be able to get the dragons-matter fringe benefits).
If all the dragons were Air Elemental grade, you wouldn't be able to draft a dragon deck. All the dragons (which are all uncommon+ reportedly) would be gone from packs so early that no player could hoard the tribal. There need to be bad cards with the dragon type to make them not be early claims and allow late picks to fill out the dragon-tribal drafter's deck.
Evolving Wilds was spoiled early because it's the minimum prize in the prerelease promo game and so was spoiled at the same time as all the other promos (buy-a-box, gameday, launch, etc). We still haven't even seen the 'proper' Evolving Wilds, just the promo.
I could definitely see there being a cycle of lands with a common prefix before E ("Altar", "Dragon", "Dragonlord" being possible prefixes - I think they've established the cycle "Palace/Monastery/Citadel/Outpost/Frontier" as lands in KTK and sieges in FRF for a reason, and I would expect those to be revisited in this timeline - perhaps "Dragonlord's Palace" "Dragonlord's Citadel" or such).
I do strongly believe 15 basics is most likely though - this set is effectively parallel to Khans, which had 20 basics and 269 total cards. This has 264 and we know it can't have 20 basics - the -5 in basic lands and the -5 in total set size just makes too much sense to not mess with the numbers of the C/U/R printing sheets and keep them in line with Khans numbers.
If you're paying 1 to animate your Mutavault to be able to cast a Counterspell for UU, wouldn't Cancel just do the same with less dependency?
She doesn't have Flying when she enters the battlefield, so she doesn't trigger Dragon Tempest. Even if you can give her flying after she enters the battlefield, she never gets the haste.
A snippet of my Anafenza Tiny Leaders deck, as saved from Decked Builder on iPhone, then opened and copypasted in a text editor on my PC:
///mvid:383425 qty:1 name:Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth loc:Deck
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
///mvid:386725 qty:1 name:Windswept Heath loc:Deck
1 Windswept Heath
///mvid:386729 qty:1 name:Wooded Foothills loc:Deck
1 Wooded Foothills
///mvid:386476 qty:2 name:Anafenza, the Foremost loc:SB
SB: 2 Anafenza, the Foremost
///mvid:265385 qty:1 name:Golgari Charm loc:SB
SB: 1 Golgari Charm
(I have Anafenza as a quantity-2 sideboard card to distinguish it from 'normal' sideboard cards but to keep it out of maindeck so when I use the 'test deck' feature it doesn't get shuffled with the other 49)
The corresponding deck in the app:
So you never actually cast anything and we draw 2-2.
(edit) Oh, crap, no, the damned round rule strikes again. I counted only 3 permanents in that deck but there are in fact 4 - a manifested Foil is also a permanent. So 7 can just build up enough mana on bottomless vault to cast dread and two manifests (or Dread, one manifested Foil, and play Undeground Sea as a land), and when Pathrazer comes along, sac the 3 permanents that aren't Dread to the Annihilator and then Pathrazer dies to Dread's trigger. Drat. 6-0 is right.
Are you sure about that? Kiora, the Crashing Wave was just printed last year, and she has the same sort of targeting template that disallows her from firing her +loy ability if the opponent controls no targetable permanents.
Nice.
Even without it being a replacement for Path, the way you worded things you implied that it was the Path type card a blue deck has been pining for and that now that blue has a Path-level removal spell it would be dominant. But there were a lot of people who played blue-and-not-white this past weekend, and none of them - none of the successful ones anyway - even included this card, even when they weren't playing white and thus didn't have access to Path. If it was on-par with Path, some blue players would have run it. The fact that they didn't should be a pretty good indicator that your view that it's playable efficient hard removal for blue, is not widely held.
Or is calling someone who disagrees with you vulgar names your way of conceding an argument? Because it sure isn't a way of winning one.
So, do you think you're smarter than the combined top players of Modern on Pro Tour?
Because results from last weekend are in. While you seem to think Reality Shift is competitive efficient removal that rivals Path to Exile, they... voted with their decklists, and their decklists favored Path to Exile... by a count of 141 to 0. Path appeared in deck+side of the 6-4-or-better decks 141 times, and Reality Shift appeared 0 times. Now would you like to reframe your argument about Reality Shift being a rival for Path, or are you going to stick to your guns that those poor saps simply haven't seen the light yet, and you're ahead of the curve on predicting how this card will dominate?
But your opponent doesn't know which ones are morphs that can eventually be turned up and which ones aren't. It's the same drama as we have with Manifest today - the opponent is 'in the dark' about whether your facedown creature he's thinking of blocking or not blocking is about to turn into a big whammy, or if it's just another facedown instant.
It's not just the 'option play', it downright keeps your opponents guessing and second-guessing everything, even if YOU know it'll never be more than a Stonework Puma, your opponent doesn't.