MTG Salvation

No and no.

In the first case, it doesn't work because Isochron Scepter creates a copy of the imprinted card. The copy is still red, and so it can't even target the Silver Knight, because one of the things protection means is that it can't be targeted by things that are that color.

In the second case, still no. Protection stops exactly five things - Targeting, Being Equipped, Being Enchanted, Damage, and Blocking. In this case, damage is the relevant factor; something with protection from red can never be dealt damage by a red source, even if no targeting is involved.

Unfortunately, the Chrome Mox trick doesn't work. It taps for one mana of any color that the imprinted card is, not one mana of each color the card is. So if you imprint the angel, your mox taps for W, U, B, R, or G each time, but doesn't tap for WUBRG all at once.

Your art is great!

If nothing else, I think everyone can agree that The Reader really was hells of bad.

Technically, the reason that you have more time to rebuild is because you have 40 starting life, not 99 starting cards.

It's a casual format, and what's important is that people are having fun. If a lot of the group finds Armageddon effects unfun (but feel that they need to play them to compete), sit down and chat with your group about scaling back on such effects.

I'm not sure where you're looking, but if you're looking at actual decklists, like I am, then you're not seeing that many Baneslayers. The top 8 from the last five PTQs (the last five visible on Wizards' site) have 41 maindeck Baneslayers and 3 sideboard Baneslayers spread across the 40 decks represented. That's an average of one angel per deck. In only one case did a deck with any Baneslayers in it at all finish better than 4th. Only a minority of decks are playing Baneslayer at all.

I don't love the mythic rarity myself, but nowhere in the history of official statements made about mythic has anything remotely like "just ment for casual play" been uttered. There's never been anything like a promise to never print a card as strong as Tarmogoyf again either. (Tarmogoyf was stronger than intended, and there's no way they can promise to never print a card that turns out to be better than they anticipated. It's not possible.)

I'm not happy about mythic, but the idea that the rarity was ever intended for only cards that wouldn't be popular tournement cards is pure delusion and doesn't have any basis in anything an official source has ever said.

Equally incorrect is the notion that Baneslayer Angel is played in "90% of the tier one decks". A simple glance at PTQ decklists show that that's completely untrue.

I love it too when cycles and mechanics are connected by art cues; I suspect that the only reason it isn't done more is that it requires the set of cards that bear the mechanic to be fairly locked down by the time the art is commissioned, otherwise you get some cards that should have the cue and don't, and vice versa. (It's also possible to overkill it, I think; Suspend art started to look kind of samey after a while.)

I agree that Ravnica's "Who's side are you on?" flavor (and hip urban fantasy look) really helped catapult it into stardom, but the mechanical identities of the guilds certainly helped. (In many ways, the guild division was Rav's largest and most important mechanic.)

I suspect that, based on statements made on the WotC site, you'd find a lot of sympathizers within the company with regards to nostalgia for the Weatherlight saga, but relatively few outside. The problem, at least as they've put it, is that cards are not a good medium for telling a story. You can't guarentee that people will see all of the cards or any of the cards in a specific order, and out of context, many of the cards have very weak or confusing flavor. (I personally like to pick on Jilt, which not only has dorky flavor text, but has very little logical connect between the art, name, flavor text and especially the mechanics.)

In the You Decide! legend contest, the Weatherlight crew and their nemeses, as well as the legends of Legends, got largely beaten to a pulp in the voting. Part of that is probably due to recency; the poll ran while Ravnica was the new thing, and even though few Ravnica-ers made the bracket, people who hadn't been playing long were more likely to remember cards from Kamigawa or Onslaught than from Tempest. Part of it was probably also that a lot of the important story characters are on distinctly unexciting cards. Whatever other factors played a role, nostalgia for the Weatherlight wasn't enough to keep the crew from getting mostly eliminated in the very first round. Supposedly-beloved Squee got bumped off by no-thing Cromat, Hero Gerrard fell to B-List villian Ambassador Laquatus, and Karn got knocked off by Mageta the Lion, who I'm not sure is even a real character. (Being an angelic or demonic woman on a kick-ass card is apperantly the road to popularity; the final four were Akroma, Ink-Eyes, Visara and Reya Dawnbringer. Niv-Mizzet and Mageta the Lion were the only dudes to even top eight, and they had soft matchups.)

Personally, while I'm merely ambivalent towards the characters, I'm so glad they've shifted away from trying to tell a story on the cards. It just didn't work. The flavor works much better when the cards are a window into a world than when they're a window into a story. (I believe that there's a strong correlation between how closely tied a card's flavor is to the Weatherlight saga and how much of a flavor dud it is on its own. If the cards were really beautiful in how they told a story when you put them together, it'd be worth it, but they really aren't. (Okay, so the little guy with no pants is stabbing the big guy...I guess that's his verdict?...Wait, stabbing is discard and lifegain? What?))

Sweep is technically an ability word, which is basically a keyword that doesn't have any rules meaning because the full text of the rules would have to be on there anyway. For all nonmechanical purposes, keywords and ability words do the same thing, which is label mechanics. Sweep has been admitted to be a mistake in retrospect; the Kamigawa mechanic that should have gotten an ability word was spiritcraft. (Whenever you play a spirit or arcane spell, do X.) The reason for ability words is a simple one - it gives mechanics that serve all the same functions that keyword mechanics do, but don't really need keywords to work equal billing.

Ability words get frowned at, I think, partially because they didn't get off on the right foot. The first ones were Sweep and Channel, which were not very popular mechanics at the tail end of a set not popular for its mechanics, and they were then followed up by radience, seen as the weakest and least interesting of the 4 guild mechanics in its set. It wasn't until hellbent that an ability word was tied to a popular mechanic. Nevertheless, ability words do everything actual keywords do in terms of grouping cards together, making a mechanic easier to promote, add some flavor, and so on. People like mechanics with names. Masques has lots of mechanics, but none with names, so it seemed like a set without any innovation. Some largish mechanics - rebels, slivers - are sort of incidentally self-naming, but things like the Invasion gating creatures don't stand out as a unified mechanic. (Gating would be ability worded today.)

Agreed on "Here I Rule". That's too dorky even for me. Shudder.

I think Tribal cards were sort of a neccesary evil; I think what everyone would have really wanted was just "Instant - Faerie" in the typeline. I guess there's some fiddly stuff in the Magic rules that breaks things if subtypes are allowed to mingle, though.

I don't see any correlation between number of keywords in a block and how well it's received; in particular, Ravnica had eight keywords, two ability words, a novel mechanical aspect (hybrid) a returning mechanical aspect (split cards), and is both my favorite block and one of the most popular blocks of all time.

I believe that either Aaron or Maro addressed this somewhere, possibly in a "The Magic Show", but the gist was that they didn't expect players to view Shadowmoor as a multicolor set to the extend that they did, and so instead of it looking like multicolor is a popular theme that they return to once in a while, it looks like we can't go two years without having a multicolor set. Despite the fact that heavy hybrid and heavy multicolor play very differently and the sets use them in different ways, it really does seem like every single set, practically, is a multicolor one.

That said, in the same interview, Aaron or Maro (wish I could rememember; I think it was Aaron) said that Fall 2009 is a theme that they've genuinely never done before.

The Orzhov precon has advantages against other precons because it has a fair amount of removal as well as cards like Souls of the Faultless that effectively keep many creatures from attacking. Most precons are on some level trying to win by attacking with creatures and have a few key card, and the Orzhov deck is very well qualified to handle things like that. No precon deck is especially fast or consistant, and the Orzhov deck can prey on that. (I wouldn't normally leave such a rambly comment, but I once played the Orzhov deck in a precon league.)

Now that it's the night before Halloween, the costumes are all for sale at huge discounts. This is the best time of the year to go shopping for little girl costumes.

I don't know if its something that appeals to you, but there are lots of niches in art where it's advantageous to have some background in computers and vice versa. As someone who started in computer science and stayed there, there's a lot of times I wish I had more of an art background.

There was a fruit fly on our window and the guy I share an apartment with swatted it hard enough to make a hole in the window. (Both roommate and fly where unharmed.)

Really? You complain that you only get colorless mana on turn one with the fetchland. If you played the mountain on turn one, you would have had a colored mana, and your turn two would have been the same. If you didn't have a turn one play, then the fact that the land only produces colorless mana doesn't matter, and you should have played the CIPT land on that turn anyway, which would have negated its drawback entirely. There's no reason at all to play the Panorama as your first land -ever-, unless you have a one-mana artifact you can play with it or unless it's the only land you have in your hand, in which case you should not have kept a one-land hand. It's not especially complicated; not only is the order described not the best way to play the fixers out, it's hard to think of an order that's worse. (It's also unclear why, upon getting the ability to cast a CDE spell, you'd use that mana to cast an Obelisk.)

Is this the best non-rare mana fixing in a set ever? No. Ravnica's was probably better. (Signets and Bouncelands are both very nice.) But you can make about any combination of cards look bad with senseless play.