Speaking as a guy who mains 4 blood moons, I'm not a fan of more prison cards in the format.
and i gotta agree with Arkmer, T3feri is a prison card first.
Compared to blood moon though, t3feri isn't so bad, i'm more concerned that this was a card they were willing to print in standard, and i'm worried we might see something truly problematic just around the bend.
4+1 loyalty is a bit much though tbh.
regulator seems too slow, maybe if we hit a critical mass of chandras, but even then im kinda doubtful.
6cmc chandra is exclusively a SB card for permission decks. i don't want to play a 6 mana anger that doesn't exile/6 mana skred to kill goyfs. i want an uncounterable way to start burying my opponent in burning emblems.
my problem with chandra, acolyte of flame is, while she's certainly far better of a card for main-boards than chandra, awakened inferno, she just doesn't excel at anything.
difficult to remove? as much as any other PW.
generates value? yes but very slowly (her loyalty accelerator). or at a steep loyalty cost (-2 to flashback)
threatens the opponent? sure, with 2 damage per turn. while doing so she doesn't generate any loyalty though. even if she did, she lacks an ultimate.
protects herself? kiiiinda, by flashback'ing removal. but that not only requires you to tick her down, it also requires free mana.
she might be flexible enough to end up being worth a slot or 2 depending on your exact build, but i don't see her doing much beyond that. and if you don't run pillage she's probably just a complete miss as it lends a lot of versatility to her -2.
im calling it now, seasoned pyromancerwill be the next must-have-4-of like koth used to be back when this deck first took shape.
and yeah, frostwalk bastion is just good so long as your manabase can survive its inability to make R, much like mouth of ronom. i think the real question is what the ratios ultimately look like.
personally, I'm planning on 2x bastion, 2x ronom, 3x scrying sheets. (22 total lands)
in the past, i've run 3x ronom, 3x sheets without any issues (4x magma jet might be part of why), so i feel pretty confident in 7/15xR.
ronom tends to be more useful vs control decks, and bastion looks better vs aggro decks, so that particular split will likely just depend on a meta call.
its pretty good in skred for a sideboard card... Cant be countered, and immediately makes an emblem to do 1 damage every turn, then can make another next turn
yeah, i don't know what UW is supposed to do against that, celestial purge? even if they have it, we'll still get to activate her +2 once, after that they're on the clock. so even under ideal circumstances, she seems like a flat-out trump card vs the premier permission deck of the format.
i'm not sure i see how the london mull will particularly favor unfair decks. sure it makes it easier to find their combo pieces if they mull aggressively, but it also makes it easier to find their silver-bullets in games 2 & 3.
and honestly, even if this IS a bump to unfair decks, i think i can live with that so long as it's addressed in the long term. it's a fair price to pay for such a powerful tool that will help seriously mitigate the number of games lost to bad opening hands.
The traditional modern snow deck has been SkRED.
and it only runs 2 cards that really benefit from snow: Scrying Sheets & Skred
waaaaay back when the deck first got put together, you might see the occasional coldsteel heart or phyrexian ironfoot, but as time's gone on it's become pretty clear that stuff was just clutter.
looking at the new snow-cards, the only ones that stand out as worthwhile payoffs are Dead of Winter* & Ice-Fang Coatl On Thin Ice & Arcum's Astrolabe get honorable mentions for interacting positively with scrying sheets while doing a good enough job at fulfilling their respective roles should we need spot removal or color filter.
*as far as Dead of Winter is concerned though, It's only worthwhile as a payoff so long as we have a reasonable amount of snow-creatures. frankly, that seems like a pipe-dream. If it turns out that snow decks are just better-off including black, then obviously we'd play Dead of Winter, but as it stands, I don't think Dead of Winter is worth going black for. We could just as easily go white, play a bunch of PW's & wrath effects, and get the same one-sided board clears.
this has basically been SkRED's approach, play stuff like koth of the hammer & chandra, torch of defiance so that your Anger of the Gods type cards are one-sided.
all this in-mind, i feel like temur or bant snow is the way to go (or just sticking to SkRED, idk).
temur would use skred + bolt for spot removal, bant would use on thin ice + path for spot removal.
the deciding factor would be whichever color combo has the best threats/how badly we'd want wrath of god over anger of the gods (or vice/versa)
the final issue is whether or not coatl is worth it. unfortunately he means splashing 2 colors rather than 1. Abominable Treefolk seems like it might not be half-bad in a temur list, as it'd survive all our board-wipes & lock-down whatever survives. I'm pretty hesitant to play glacial revelation though, i'm not confident in it's ability to draw us gas consistently enough.
honestly, the more i think about what the best snow-deck would look like, the more i think it's probably just skred + seasoned pyromancer & pillage
oh, and as long as it's still mono/mono+splash frostwalk bastion probably makes the list
I can't say I know how your games have been playing out. However, I can say that it's been my experience that Skred has acted as a sort of red Path to Exile (minus the exiling of course).
That is to say that it's functioned just fine in the roll of, "kill anything it can target" (with the occasional exception for big, early-game Death's Shadows)
Aria of Flame seems like a hilarious way to deal with the occasional turn-3-6/6. certainly not a good idea, though. If only it could target creatures... still probably not a great plan, but i find it funny enough.
With that in mind, and considering that "X is the number of snow permanents you control" will only scale better with the release of so many new, playable, snow cards; I feel like Dead of Winter should function just fine in the role of a pseudo-Damnation. But with the additional upside that it's potentially one-sided and can kill indestructible creatures and what-not.
Prismatic Vista isn't exactly a breakthrough, to be sure. Yet it is a subtly powerful upgrade for us nonetheless.
It let's us choose any basic land, not just one of two choices. This allows us to more easily run a potential 3-color snow deck.
Maybe it isn't enough on its own, but with the help of Arcum's Astrolabe it actually seems kind-of feasible. Though I am loathe to play non-snow lands in a deck like skRED, if only because of Scrying Sheets.
I also dislike paying life for my lands in skRED, having a particularly 'non-violent' land-base has made the difference in countless matches vs burn. though, 4 fetches in the lot isn't like to change that too much.
UPDATE :
Okay so Alpine Guide is *not* insane
I was pretty pumped till i read that last line of text.
On Thin Ice is just like Chained to the Rocks, except replace "Mountain" with "snow land". Might it be playable as Path to Exile 5+? Snow basics are easily fetched at the singleton level, and probably this card's only obstacles to playability are its sorcery speed, its vulnerability to removal, and its slight inconsistency.
Throes of Chaos looks pretty fun as a 4-cmc Cascade Retrace dumb red sorcery. Unfortunately, everyone knows that the true weak link of Cascade decks are the Cascade spells like Living End. I'll be trying it in Jund anyway; none of Hexdrinker, Wrenn and Six, Vraska, Golgari Queen, and Living Twister have convinced me that they earn that slot after I tested with them.
Thinking about Yawgmoth, Thran Physician again, we've never had a spammable sac outlet that draws cards without ever incurring card disadvantage, doesn't require mana to sac, and is 4 cmc or less. At the very least, Yawgmoth mitigates board wipes and makes blocking more awkward, even if he has an inefficient body.
If this set gives the format a 1-drop version of Open the Armory then On Thin Icemight get some play in Bogles, but as-is it's just too clunky. Even for a deck that benefits from the fact its sorcery speed.
It's been a while since I've played, but Frostwalk Bastion looks pretty awesome, not quite a Mishra's Factory but it can block an unequipped etched champion and live to talk about it. super helpful for versions of the deck that don't run too many outs to the card mainboard.
the other snow-cards look pretty solid too, nothing in red so far though. which is kinda disappointing tbh. pillage is a nice upgrade over molten rain, i've always been a proponent of molten rain in the deck so that's a nice development. seasoned pyromancer seems like a powerful tool to play with, if we can get more use out of our graveyard. I'm not expecting much will come of it though.
maybe the pyromancer can function well with something like goblin engineer and an artifact package of some kind? but I can't think of too many artifacts <=3CMC that would be worth running beyond what we already have.
as much as i'm excited to play with new stuff like pyromancer/engineer...
building around the GY seems like a mistake anyway. part of our strength is that we can just nuke graveyards with relic of progenitus and the effect is entirely one-sided. if we build a version of skred where neutering the enemy's goyfs also shuts-down part of our deck, i don't know if i could call that terribly "innovative"
pyromancer might still be 'good enough' on its own merits though. basically a slower, redder, lingering souls that lets us discard blood moon typer cards in matches where they aren't relevant.
Interested to see if any of the red wizard tribal cards are worth-while. bear in mind that we have a fair number of wizards depending on the list. even boros reckoner is a wizard.
nothing so far looks that great apart from copies 5-8 of lightning bolt.
I'd imagine a post-modern format wouldn't include coldsnap. so we lose our draw-engine and our best removal spell. thus any future 'big red' would more likely than not either take the form of AiR or would involve some HEAVY splashes into white or black (probably black)
not to mention shocklands/dual lands in general. sun isn't a card i'd bother playing even if moon didn't exist.
moon can auto-win vs nearly any multi-color deck that isn't careful about how it fetches, sun is a mild annoyance at best.
frankly these recent few sets have been disappointing me in the big red department. a couple wacky big cards like etali or form of the dinosaur, but nothing that would actually make sense to run in a real modern list.
we got nothing to add from this set or amonkhet save that new flavoring of 3-mana-3-point-sweep. and more importantly they're not really exploring any terribly interesting design spaces for red atm.
back when commune with lava ( a card i still recommend as a one-of ) was printed, i was excited/hopeful. it looked like WotC had found their footing with the 'impulse' mechanic and were finally going to be able to give red some ways of directly generating card advantage, but new chandra's been the last we've seen of it.
maybe i'm just dumb, but i'm not seeing useful utility spells being printed in red
and i gotta agree with Arkmer, T3feri is a prison card first.
Compared to blood moon though, t3feri isn't so bad, i'm more concerned that this was a card they were willing to print in standard, and i'm worried we might see something truly problematic just around the bend.
4+1 loyalty is a bit much though tbh.
6cmc chandra is exclusively a SB card for permission decks. i don't want to play a 6 mana anger that doesn't exile/6 mana skred to kill goyfs. i want an uncounterable way to start burying my opponent in burning emblems.
difficult to remove? as much as any other PW.
generates value? yes but very slowly (her loyalty accelerator). or at a steep loyalty cost (-2 to flashback)
threatens the opponent? sure, with 2 damage per turn. while doing so she doesn't generate any loyalty though. even if she did, she lacks an ultimate.
protects herself? kiiiinda, by flashback'ing removal. but that not only requires you to tick her down, it also requires free mana.
she might be flexible enough to end up being worth a slot or 2 depending on your exact build, but i don't see her doing much beyond that. and if you don't run pillage she's probably just a complete miss as it lends a lot of versatility to her -2.
im calling it now, seasoned pyromancer will be the next must-have-4-of like koth used to be back when this deck first took shape.
and yeah, frostwalk bastion is just good so long as your manabase can survive its inability to make R, much like mouth of ronom. i think the real question is what the ratios ultimately look like.
personally, I'm planning on 2x bastion, 2x ronom, 3x scrying sheets. (22 total lands)
in the past, i've run 3x ronom, 3x sheets without any issues (4x magma jet might be part of why), so i feel pretty confident in 7/15xR.
ronom tends to be more useful vs control decks, and bastion looks better vs aggro decks, so that particular split will likely just depend on a meta call.
yeah, i don't know what UW is supposed to do against that, celestial purge? even if they have it, we'll still get to activate her +2 once, after that they're on the clock. so even under ideal circumstances, she seems like a flat-out trump card vs the premier permission deck of the format.
and honestly, even if this IS a bump to unfair decks, i think i can live with that so long as it's addressed in the long term. it's a fair price to pay for such a powerful tool that will help seriously mitigate the number of games lost to bad opening hands.
and it only runs 2 cards that really benefit from snow: Scrying Sheets & Skred
waaaaay back when the deck first got put together, you might see the occasional coldsteel heart or phyrexian ironfoot, but as time's gone on it's become pretty clear that stuff was just clutter.
looking at the new snow-cards, the only ones that stand out as worthwhile payoffs are Dead of Winter* & Ice-Fang Coatl
On Thin Ice & Arcum's Astrolabe get honorable mentions for interacting positively with scrying sheets while doing a good enough job at fulfilling their respective roles should we need spot removal or color filter.
*as far as Dead of Winter is concerned though, It's only worthwhile as a payoff so long as we have a reasonable amount of snow-creatures. frankly, that seems like a pipe-dream. If it turns out that snow decks are just better-off including black, then obviously we'd play Dead of Winter, but as it stands, I don't think Dead of Winter is worth going black for. We could just as easily go white, play a bunch of PW's & wrath effects, and get the same one-sided board clears.
this has basically been SkRED's approach, play stuff like koth of the hammer & chandra, torch of defiance so that your Anger of the Gods type cards are one-sided.
all this in-mind, i feel like temur or bant snow is the way to go (or just sticking to SkRED, idk).
temur would use skred + bolt for spot removal, bant would use on thin ice + path for spot removal.
the deciding factor would be whichever color combo has the best threats/how badly we'd want wrath of god over anger of the gods (or vice/versa)
the final issue is whether or not coatl is worth it. unfortunately he means splashing 2 colors rather than 1. Abominable Treefolk seems like it might not be half-bad in a temur list, as it'd survive all our board-wipes & lock-down whatever survives. I'm pretty hesitant to play glacial revelation though, i'm not confident in it's ability to draw us gas consistently enough.
honestly, the more i think about what the best snow-deck would look like, the more i think it's probably just skred + seasoned pyromancer & pillage
oh, and as long as it's still mono/mono+splash frostwalk bastion probably makes the list
Nah, Alpine Guide makes you sac a land when he leaves the battlefield, not when he dies. If he gets exiled it still triggers.
That is to say that it's functioned just fine in the roll of, "kill anything it can target" (with the occasional exception for big, early-game Death's Shadows)
With that in mind, and considering that "X is the number of snow permanents you control" will only scale better with the release of so many new, playable, snow cards; I feel like Dead of Winter should function just fine in the role of a pseudo-Damnation. But with the additional upside that it's potentially one-sided and can kill indestructible creatures and what-not.
Prismatic Vista isn't exactly a breakthrough, to be sure. Yet it is a subtly powerful upgrade for us nonetheless.
It let's us choose any basic land, not just one of two choices. This allows us to more easily run a potential 3-color snow deck.
Maybe it isn't enough on its own, but with the help of Arcum's Astrolabe it actually seems kind-of feasible. Though I am loathe to play non-snow lands in a deck like skRED, if only because of Scrying Sheets.
I also dislike paying life for my lands in skRED, having a particularly 'non-violent' land-base has made the difference in countless matches vs burn. though, 4 fetches in the lot isn't like to change that too much.
UPDATE :
Okay so Alpine Guide is *not* insane
I was pretty pumped till i read that last line of text.
On thin ice's biggest strength IMO is that it's a removal spell that scrying sheets can draw
the other snow-cards look pretty solid too, nothing in red so far though. which is kinda disappointing tbh.
pillage is a nice upgrade over molten rain, i've always been a proponent of molten rain in the deck so that's a nice development.
seasoned pyromancer seems like a powerful tool to play with, if we can get more use out of our graveyard. I'm not expecting much will come of it though.
maybe the pyromancer can function well with something like goblin engineer and an artifact package of some kind? but I can't think of too many artifacts <=3CMC that would be worth running beyond what we already have.
as much as i'm excited to play with new stuff like pyromancer/engineer...
building around the GY seems like a mistake anyway. part of our strength is that we can just nuke graveyards with relic of progenitus and the effect is entirely one-sided. if we build a version of skred where neutering the enemy's goyfs also shuts-down part of our deck, i don't know if i could call that terribly "innovative"
pyromancer might still be 'good enough' on its own merits though. basically a slower, redder, lingering souls that lets us discard blood moon typer cards in matches where they aren't relevant.
UPDATE :
okay so Dead of Winter is actually insane
nothing so far looks that great apart from copies 5-8 of lightning bolt.
moon can auto-win vs nearly any multi-color deck that isn't careful about how it fetches, sun is a mild annoyance at best.
frankly these recent few sets have been disappointing me in the big red department. a couple wacky big cards like etali or form of the dinosaur, but nothing that would actually make sense to run in a real modern list.
we got nothing to add from this set or amonkhet save that new flavoring of 3-mana-3-point-sweep. and more importantly they're not really exploring any terribly interesting design spaces for red atm.
back when commune with lava ( a card i still recommend as a one-of ) was printed, i was excited/hopeful. it looked like WotC had found their footing with the 'impulse' mechanic and were finally going to be able to give red some ways of directly generating card advantage, but new chandra's been the last we've seen of it.
maybe i'm just dumb, but i'm not seeing useful utility spells being printed in red