MTG Salvation

Quote from Bismuth Von Pherson

So, is Archetype of Courage Field Marshal #2? Seems saucy, at least in soldier tribal.

I play Darien, and I'm leaning towards "no" on Archetype of Courage. Field Marshal is primarily for the +1/+1, not the first strike, and while first strike is relevant sometimes, I don't know if I'd play a card just for that, and putting it on a body (compared to things like Knighthood, a card I don't think I'd ever seriously consider) is a mixed blessing, since it makes it die to wrath effects, which are already trouble for weenie swarm decks. Removing first strike from other people's stuff is niche at best. Soldier or not, I think that there are too many other cards that just improve your guys more for the cost of the card. The fact that he's an enchantment isn't a big deal, but it is a slight negative in that it makes him random collateral damage against Tranquility effects.

If anything, I think that Archetype of Courage makes more sense in decks with LARGE creatures; in lower-power metas where blocking is actually a relevant thing, giving large creatures first strike makes them hard to efficiently trade with.

Enchantment effects are often a bit wordy. If you look at Ephara, she has room for only three (maybe four) lines of effects text after the Indestructible and the Devotion clause, even without Devotion's reminder text. They probably wanted the minor gods to be reasonably symmetrical, which means that putting two abilities on each means that they'd need to be very brief abilities. If you look at the five major gods, four of them (Purphoros drops the reminder text to fit more) try to fit two abilities onto three lines, and the abilities are all very simple as a result. There's only so many interesting enchantment effects that are only one or two lines long, and rather than trying to come up with ten such abilities, and ten accompanying two-line abilities (without feeling repetitious or lame), they probably just decided to give each of the ten minor gods one ability that could be up to three lines long, which opens up way more possibilities.

It's certainly not impossible to come up with ten one-line enchantment effects, but there's a point where awesomeness, avoiding collision with other cards in the set, and other demands have to play a role as well.

These gods are also gods of more specific things, and having more complex abilities helps communicate that.

Quote from DerangedHermit

I did like how that thought outside the box as far as planeswalkers are concerned. There haven't been too many oddball ones lately.

Double-Faced Garruk was just two years ago, and was both double-sided and had a non-loyalty ability. I think they're intentionally using planeswalker design space very, very slowly so that they don't run out.

At some point a little while back, they sat down and hashed out exactly what sorts of things were in each planeswalker's sub-pie and what their most signature mechanics should be, to keep them from blurring together and just becoming generic avatars of their color or colors. That doesn't mean that Kiora, if she's in the set, definitely has some kind of Ula's Temple ability, but it would be surprising if she had no abilities that connected to largish creatures at all, since that's basically the core of her schtick.

The decks I'm most interested in keeping updated are Red and White (Darien and Homura) so the list is a little more limited than most people's, but primarily I'm looking at:

Purphoros, God of the Forge
Burnished Hart
Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx

There are other cards I would conceivably play (especially in other colors), but those are the must-gets. There are some probably-staple cards in blue that I'll pick up, even if I don't have an active deck for them.

Quote from Impossible

I thought they frowned upon printing strictly better cards now-a-days.

They're sensitive to the optics issues, but they still do it if the environment needs it, especially if the baseline effect is something that isn't overwhelmingly powerful to begin with. (Murder is a good card compared to a lot of cards, but it's not a premier removal spell in constructed.) There are some people who REALLY dislike the aesthetics of strictly-betters, but they can't let that be an ironfast rule that keeps them from printing the cards the environment needs.

It feels weird to me to call a cycle that will almost certainly have a higher value than the value of the median-value rare in the set "junk rares".

Really, though, it's kind of inevitable that in an era where in most years they print fairly high-quality two-color lands in most blocks, you're eventually going to reach a saturation point where it becomes harder and harder for a card to be one of the N best lands of all time, where that's the threshold you need to hit to be included in a deck that can include almost any land that's ever been printed.

I do think that anybody who thinks the lands are "barely better than a guildgate" is underestimating the value of card selection pretty severely, but even aside from that, it's a foregone conclusion that rare land cycles are sometimes going to be not auto-includes nowadays (unless they powercreep them pretty aggressively.)

Theros is NOT an "enchantments matter" block in the way that Mirrodin is an "artifacts matter" block. While there'll probably be some cards that care about and interact with enchantments, the design is not "way more enchantments than normal, and then a bunch of cards that interact with enchantments in random ways". They've said that the block has an enchantment theme (obviously true), but they've also said that they're using enchantments in a specific way in the block, and that way is not (apparently) "piles of random enchantments, and then piles of cards that care if you have a bunch of enchantments in random ways". "X-theme Block" doesn't have to look like that.

Quote from Aegraen

Why are people surprised? Wizards have made it known that instants and sorceries will be fewer and less powerful, while creatures are becoming 'it' and more and more powerful. It's a terrible direction for the game, but hey, make it known with our wallets.

They've never said there'd be fewer instants and sorceries. If they did, they're not doing a very good job of that at all, since RTR block has proportionally more instants and sorceries than any block for a long time before it.

Instants and Sorceries in large sets:

Gatecrash: 71
Return to Ravnica: 71
AVR: 63
Innistrad: 62
Scars of Mirrodin: 38
Zendikar: 55
Shards of Alara: 46
(Sets after here have the number scaled to the proportions of a modern large set.)
Shadowmoor: 61
Lorwyn: 47
Time Spiral: 63
Ravnica: 64

In other words, nope. The number of instants and sorceries hasn't fallen at all in the past eight years.

Really, though, there's always way more creatures and planeswalkers revealed early. Or do you think that Theros is going to have seven planeswalkers in it? (Much like Scars of Mirrodin, it's likely that Theros will have somewhat fewer instants and sorceries because it's focused on another card type. Even though it's not just generically an enchantment-matters block, it's likely to have somewhat more enchantments.)

Quote from Impossible

That's what originally made me think they were going to be equipment. I was reading the Planeswalker's Guide to Theros thing on the mothership and I was like wouldn't it make sense for the gods and their weapons to go together and have a special effect? Especially after WotC just made cards-that-reference-other-cards-by-name in Bogbrew Witch, Festering Newt, and Bubbling Cauldron M14?

But alas, it seems my hopes were dashed. I do like the idea of fetching a god-creature with Enduring Ideal, though.

Just because the cards don't explicitly refer to the god cards in the rules text doesn't mean that they aren't designed to work together. If you look at the core set's Planeswalker signature spells, the uncommon and rare ones usually have direct and fairly tight synergy with the planeswalkers themselves, and the common ones synergize with the uncommon and rare ones. While it's possible that the Bident is just a random colored artifact with no mechanical connection to Thassa, it seems not unlikely that Thassa rewards you for drawing cards, rewards you for getting attacked and/or at least grants evasion.

It doesn't seem unlikely that there'll be a cycle of cards referencing the gods specifically by name in their rules text, but it'll probably be a common or uncommon cycle to drastically up the chance that it'll ever matter in limited.

Not that it means much at this point, but they might look better after we see the rest of the set. Heroic being a set mechanic means that the set also almost certainly contains some enablers for it. It would take some absurd, almost inconceivable world-changing turn of events for the card to ever really be powerful (or even okay-ish), but it might at least hit vaguely interesting.

Flanking and Bushido work pretty differently against creatures with one toughness. Bushido also works on defense. Those two things make the effects at least somewhat different in play. I wouldn't put them in the same block or anything, but they're much less similar than they appear to be superficially if you've never played with them.

I'm hoping that maybe they'll eventually creep up on printing text that only really makes sense in commander to the point that a card can just outright say something like "If ~ is your commander, you may include creatures with morph in the deck regardless of their color identity", but barring that I'd settle for a five-color morph lord. (And a similar ally lord.) Even a three-color morph lord would be pretty cool.

The Humilty-Ixidor feels like the kind of thing I'd be wary about. "Can I play with this alternate version of Ixidor, changed so that it's less of a morph lord and more of a partially asymmetrical Humility effect?" is a pretty big reach. As someone who'd tried to do Ixidor twice, I feel as though what's a bummer about him is that there's not the right volume of reasonable blue and colorless morph creatures to go full morph theme, not that he doesn't incidentally shut off everyone's deck.

If I were allowed to write whatever I wanted on cards without having to worry about whether it's something they'd ever in a million bjillion years write on an actual card, I'd write something like "If Ixidor is your commander, your deck may produce mana of any color* and may contain non-blue spells if those spells have morph." To me, that feels like what the Ixidor deck wishes it could be. It's not just a case of "Well, obviously every commander would be better if could play more colors". It's the very specific pain point for the specific general. If someone wanted to play with me and said, "Look, I know this Ixidor deck isn't technically commander-legal, but all of the illegal cards have Morph", I'd be much quicker to want to accommodate than than "This is a commander deck built around an alternate Humility version of Ixidor."

*This may not be totally necessary, but omitting it makes the deck dramatically more dependent on Ixidor.

Re: Baron Sengir: I think that the easiest way to write that would just be "Protection from other Vampires". Also, the way you have his regen ability written, it doesn't target him anyway.

Quote from Woohah

Yeah, I wasn't trying to argue with you, sorry about that. Does anyone remember someone on the dev team (probably MaRo) saying that the RtR block mechanics were going to tie back to the old mechanics? While, for the most part, they succeeded (Bloodrush, Evolve, Scavenge, Populate, and Overload are all extremely flavorful and tie or play well with their Ravnica block counterparts,) it feels like they dropped the ball with others, particularly Battalion and Dimir's mill-sub-theme.

On that note, Battalion feels like something that's in the wrong place. Don't get me wrong, Battalion does feel like a pretty Boros thing (and it's way better than Radiance,) but I think there was a better place to implement it.

They said not that the keyword mechanics were going to tie back to the old keyword mechanics, but that the guilds were going to tie back to their identities in Rav block and contain synergies such that if you mix a bunch of Rav-block Izzet cards with a bunch of RtR-block Izzet cards, it makes sense as a deck. In a few cases, the mechanics have direct synergy, but in most cases it's that the guild cares about the same general things and has the same general set of strategies. The idea did rapidly mutate in the public consciousness to "the actual keywords will have some synergy", which is why Maro's gotten stuck clarifying it on his blog (what feels like) about twice a week since RtR previews began.