- arrogantAxolotl
- Registered User
-
Member for 9 years, 2 months, and 22 days
Last active Tue, Nov, 9 2021 20:36:47
- 0 Followers
- 1,106 Total Posts
- 373 Thanks
-
Oct 31, 2017arrogantAxolotl posted a message on The 13 Scariest Pieces of Magic ArtNo old school Mutilate?Posted in: Articles
-
Sep 12, 2017arrogantAxolotl posted a message on Changes to MTGSalvation User AccountsPosted in: Articles
I don't think this is an entitlement thing for most folks. I think folks are just being skeptical about the change and aren't sure if they can trust Curse because they don't understand the imperative for the change.Quote from Ertai Planeswalker »As much as I dislike this change as the next guy, I do want to remind everyone that if you did not pay for anything, you are not entitled to anything.
Everybody who paid for your MTGS account, raise your hands -
Sep 11, 2017arrogantAxolotl posted a message on Changes to MTGSalvation User AccountsPosted in: Articles
Thanks for taking the time to reply to my inquiry. I guess I'll just bite the bullet and make myself a Twitch account then.Quote from Feyd_Ruin »snip -
Sep 11, 2017arrogantAxolotl posted a message on Changes to MTGSalvation User AccountsPosted in: Articles
Would you be willing to elaborate on why this is true? I know that I'm being skeptical here and that the question I'm asking is pretty technical in nature, but I'm failing to see why this is the case. What makes the account merging more secure for users here? Aren't you still just dealing with the same number / types of accounts anyway?Quote from molster »
This lets us just run a single user pool, which is a LOT more secure for users!Quote from Eruyaean »So Basically, i have to create an account in some unrelated service i may not use to continue to use this Forum? -
Sep 11, 2017arrogantAxolotl posted a message on Changes to MTGSalvation User AccountsThis is... huh? What? I don't understand what's going on here at all.Posted in: Articles
I don't use Twitch. I don't even like Twitch. Why do I have to merge my Salvation account with a Twitch account all of a sudden? Molster says it's because it provides more streamlined account security, faster user support, and an easier log-in process, but this is still baffling to me. Easier log-in process? How much easier could logging in be? My home computer already logs me in automatically. Everywhere else... it's just a simple username/password system. How could that process possibly be made any easier?
Maybe this is a security thing, and admittedly I know absolutely nothing about security, but how does merging Salvation accounts to Twitch accounts make things more secure? And why Twitch of all things? Why now? What's the prerogative for this change? Maybe I'm just being some cranky, old man whose resistant to change regardless if it's for the better or not, but I honestly just don't understand why this even needs to happen. I don't want a Twitch account. - To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Did you instead mean to ask, "Doesn't rule 104.4b break any kind of loop?" If so, the answer is: it depends. Loops like Sporemound and Life and Limb where playing a land causes Sporemound to create a saproling, but that saproling is a land due to Life and Limb so it causes Sporemound to create a saproling, but that saproling is also a land so it causes Sporemound to create a saproling, and that saproling is a land as well, and so on and so forth... Rule 104.4b ends games in a draw whenever those types of loops occur because they can never be terminated. The Wild Ride is similar in that it can't be terminated once it's begun, but it's a bit different as well seeing as it doesn't really use the stack. Yes, the game state may not be changing, but nothing is stopping players from moving through the steps and phases of the game either.
But to answer your second question, I'm not certain that 104.4b is impossible to circumvent. I just don't know enough about what constitutes a "loop of mandatory actions" in the eyes of the game. It may be possible to create infinite "novel" gamestates under the effects of the Ride. That would make it so that 104.4b never draws the game, and the Wild Ride stays in effect throughout the entire duration. I just lack the rules knowledge necessary to even begin working that angle. Hell, it might not be possible to even construct such a thing given the parameters of the Ride anyway. In short, I was making Magic my life. I don't begrudge anyone for playing Magic. I just personally needed to move away from it.
This is just a death sentence. Barring something like Narset, the opponent can't give you this pile.
Pile 2: Omniscience + Dark Petition
If the opponent gives you this pile, you can use the Dark Petition to find Enter the Infinite since Emergent Ultimatum shuffles the third card back into your library. From there, you can cast Enter the Infinite for free with your Omniscience, and that leads you back to pile 1.
Pile 3: Enter the Infinite + Dark Petition
Provided you have spell mastery (you'll only need one other instant or sorcery to get there since you get to cast Enter the Infinite before Dark Petition if you want), you draw your deck and add BBB to your mana pool. What can you do with BBB? Well, if you convert it to blue, you can win the game off Thassa's Oracle, but to do that you'll need to play something like Ashiok followed by two Mox Amber.
Pile 3 illustrates the problem that many Emergent Ultimatum piles have. Are you going to play Omniscience, Enter the Infinite, Dark Petition, Emergent Ultimatum, Thassa's Oracle, Ashiok, Dream Render, and Mox Amber all in the same deck? Probably not. And if you're not playing all those cards, Emergent Ultimatum effectively just becomes a less expensive Enter the Infinite that sometimes fizzles because the opponent controls an Ashiok or something.
To make a good pile for Emergent Ultimatum, you need to find a combination of cards that kills the opponent no matter what they choose. It needs to use as few cards as possible to prevent clogging your deck with dead cards, and it needs to kill the opponent immediately; you don't want to give them a chance to fight back. Furthermore, you want each card in the pile to be useful on its own since there's no sense in playing dead cards if you don't have to. To top it all off, it would really help if all of these cards were in colors you already wanted to play, so you don't have to stretch yourself thin playing OmniDoor ThragFire. All of these stipulations really narrow down the number of viable possibilities. After all, if you're going through the trouble of casting Emergent Ultimatum, you don't want to create a pile that will always result in something akin to a slightly cheaper Omniscience when you could instead be winning the game outright. Take this pile for instance:
Having said all of this, I do want to mention that I'm far from exhausting every viable combo. In fact, I'm sure someone somewhere will probably think of something better than I have. I haven't even mentioned how Emergent Ultimatum gets a lot worse if you're relying on one combo piece to be in your deck and then you mill it or draw it or whatever. Still, the payoff is tantalizing enough to warrant exploring, and I'm going to mess around with the card to see what I can learn whenever I next get the chance.
EDIT: I spaced out and forgot Emergent Ultimatum only let's you find monocolored cards. Replace Revival // Revenge in the above combo with Fraying Omnipotence, and it checks out.
First and foremost, I'm fairly convinced that Tooth and Nail is a dead card now. Ikoria just released a smattering of new cards that all threaten to do the same thing as Tooth and Nail, only better, so there seems to be little reason to pursue ramping into Tooth and Nail at this point. I'm not sure which card has the most merit yet since I haven't gotten the chance to actually sit down and test any of them, but their applicability on paper is plain as day. One or more of these cards will just straight up be better.
Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast — This is a Polymorph that you can ramp into. Polymorph has always been a powerful card, but the setup required to get Polymorph to work has always made the card seemingly unviable. You have to be able to build a reasonable deck without any creatures, save one or two for Polymorph itself. Then, you have to be able to produce a creature somehow, be it either a creature token or a card that can somehow turn itself into a creature, like man-lands for example. Finally, you have to cast and resolve Polymorph. If the opponent kills the creature in response, the spell fizzles, and you get nothing.
While Lukka doesn't address that last issue, he does make enormous ground on the other two. Because Lukka always cascades upwards, if your deck only contains creatures with the same converted mana cost save for one of them, Lukka will always find that one target 100% of the time. This allows you to build a Polymorph deck with actual creature cards, and mana dorks are seemingly perfect for this; they increase the speed by which you can cast Lukka while simultaneously being the targets that Lukka needs. Not to mention, without Lukka, mana dorks are still independently going to be useful on their own. They'll ramp you into whatever other valuable cards make up the rest of your curve.
Now, that isn't to say that Lukka isn't without his faults. Generally speaking, Lukka's other two abilities suck. If you're only playing 1-drops, you don't particularly care if you exile any for you to cast later, but you would care a great deal if you happened to remove the only remaining card that's eligible for Lukka's -2 ability. As such, Lukka's first ability can be a significant liability. His ultimate, in turn, is also sucks. If all you intend to do is cheat a spaghetti monster into play, not only will you not activate his first ability to generate loyalty in the first place, but you also won't have much of any power on the battlefield with which to capitalize off of Lukka's third ability even if you could activate it. Lukka also costs more than his Polymorph counterparts at five instead of four.
On another note, I do think it's worth mentioning that Lukka can activate his minus ability back to back. Say the Emrakul you pull out with Lukka gets bounced by T3feri. Next turn, you can activate Lukka's minus ability again and pull out another Emrakul, provided you have another copy anyway.
Emergent Ultimatum — This is Tooth and Nail, but for seven mana instead of nine. Granted, the color requirements are certainly more difficult, but seven mana is also substantially easier to get to than nine. Not to mention, even if you didn't have the right combination of colors to cast this at seven mana, you almost assuredly would by the time you hit nine. Anywho, here are some piles I cooked up:
Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy — On the surface, this might not look like a replacement for Tooth and Nail, but it most assuredly is.
The reason why Leyline of Abundance sucks (and the reason why I have never bothered giving it the time of day) is because it lacks redundancy, and it doesn't play well with other ramp cards. If you play Leyline, that means you're not playing the best ramp spells in Arbor Elf and Utopia Sprawl, and you are playing objectively worse mana dorks instead. That wouldn't be so bad if you had other cards that could support said dorks, but with Leyline as your only supporting card you instead run into the issue where every game you don't draw a Leyline is one where you're operating as a worse ramp deck than you could otherwise be. Worse yet, drawing Leyline outside of your opening hand is also terrible since there's no opportunity to play the card before turn 3 at which point you should be slamming haymakers. Hell, if all of that wasn't bad enough, Leyline is still problematic even when you do begin the game with it since, if the opponent is able to kill whatever dork you happen to play turn one, they effectively two-for-one you because now your Leyline isn't doing anything until you play and untap a second dork.
With the printing of Kinnan, Leyline of Abundance gets a lot better, as you now have additional redundancy which ensures you won't be that "same ramp deck but worse" in the instances where you don't draw a Leyline. And because Kinnan only costs two, he's easy to weave into turns, enabling lines like:
Reach — I'm glad this has reach instead of trample. Ramp decks backpedal a lot, and the 5/6 body combined with reach makes it so that the Cavalier can mitigate pressure that other cards wouldn't be able to. It also isn't important that the Cavalier lacks trample. As a 5-drop, Cavalier of Thorns is a stepping stone. I'm not trying to win the game with it, so I don't care if it can push through damage. What I do care about is whether or not it puts me in a better position the next turn. Trample doesn't do that, but the entire package surrounding Cavalier of Thorns (reach included) does.
ETB, Elvish Rejuvenator — Not a perfect analogy. The land the Cavalier finds comes into play untapped. The remaining cards are also binned instead of being bottomed. Still, the two effects are similar. Having played Elvish Rejuvenator before, I can attest that digging five cards deep is enough to rarely brick with the ability but nothing more. It effectively amounts to getting a random land. With that said, this is still a nice ability to have. Although ramping isn't usually what I want on a 5-drop, it isn't so bad when it's bundled together with the rest of Cavalier's abilities. In the instances where I make it to 5 on turn 3 but not to 6 or 7, I may have a hand full of bombs and not enough mana to cast them. Or maybe an opponent interacted with me, and I would have had enough mana to cast whatever top end is left in my hand, but now I only have 5. That will happen sometimes, and in either case Cavalier of Thorns will help.
Dies, Reclaim — Putting a card back on top of my deck is a lot less salient than putting it into my hand, but this effect is still a lot better than what people give it credit for. A smattering of fetchlands ensures that Cavalier of Thorns will always have lands at its disposal if I want to make my land drop next turn. The fact that the Cavalier's second ability mulches also means it sets itself up. When the Cavalier is answered (as it often will be), it can find a replacement threat for me to deploy the next turn. That is an extremely important quality to have, and one that shouldn't be understated. If I'm playing a ramp deck, I don't want to invest all of my mana and all of my turns into casting some sort of payoff card only to then see that payoff card answered to no lasting effect. That could mean losing the game. Cavalier of Thorns makes it so that I can follow it up after it dies, something other 5-drops seldom do.
1.) Leyline of Abundance doesn't work with Arbor Elf, Utopia Sprawl, or Overgrowth, and those three cards are some of the best, if not the best, at making mana in Modern. As such, if I want to support Leyline of Abundance, I'll need to play with objectively worse cards. Granted, that may be okay. If the synergy is powerful enough, then there's nothing wrong with playing worse cards; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts after all. I just suspect that this may not be the case with Leyline of Abundance.
2.) There's no way to make Leyline of Abundance redundant. Sure, the games I have it, a 1-drop, and two lands make getting to 4 relatively easy, but I'm not always going to have Leyline of Abundance, and in the games where I don't I'm effectively playing a much worse ramp deck. If there were other cards that could supplement Leyline of Abundance, this wouldn't be so bad, but the next most effective way to reach 4 turn 2 is by playing something like Simian Spirit Guide or Gemstone Caverns, neither of which are very appealing.
3.) Leyline of Abundance is risky. Not only do I need it in my opening hand to be effective, but it also makes me more vulnerable to disruption. In a regular ramp deck, if an opponent Bolts my Bird, that sucks, but at the end of the day it's still a 1-for-1. In a deck with Leyline, when an opponent Bolts my Bird, not only is my Bird dead, but they've also invalidated my Leyline until I manage to stick something. That can turn Bolt into a 2-for-1 or better depending on the circumstances, so not only will I need to play worse cards to support Leyline of Abundance, but the consequences of having these worse cards destroyed are even more disastrous than they would normally be.
What's great about Veil of Summer beyond it being a 2-for-1 is that it often protects cards I've already invested mana in. This makes it a whole lot better than, say, the following card:
Instant
Until end of turn, for the first time this turn, if a blue or black spell an opponent controls targets you, targets a permanent you control, or counters a spell you control, draw two cards.
For the longest time, the only five color legends were these dumb tribal lords like Reaper King and Atogatog. There were a handful of other cards like Cromat and Progenitus that didn't care about tribes, but these were ineffectual if not outright counterproductive as is the case with Child of Alara. Eventually, Wizards printed Ramos, Dragon Engine and Jodah, Archmage Eternal, and these were a step up, but they too left a lot to be desired. Ramos got too big if I cast too many spells, and that incentivized me to just attack players. Jodah encouraged me to fill my deck with expensive cards, and while I could sometimes make use of his mana discounting ability, he was really designed for something else entirely.
But now I have Golos! Oh boy, do I love this card. I was already salivating over Urza's ability to Mind's Desire for one, but for 2 mana more I get to Mind's Desire for three? On my Commander? I'm in heaven! It's like a mini Aminatou's Augury. And the fact that it finds one of my many crucial nonbasics is nothing to slouch at either. Between Academy Ruins, Hall of Heliod's Generosity, and Volrath's Stronghold, that's three alone. Then there's ancillary stuff like Reliquary Tower, Maze of Ith, or even just colorfixing with Command Tower et all. There's so much stuff I can find.
Also, I think it's only fitting that Golos throws back to Solemn Simulacrum which is a card I'm notorious for *****ting on. Because of course the guy who has always sweared against Sad Robot would find his perfect commander in one.
EDIT: Has anyone seen Veil of Summer? I'm not sure what to make of it yet, but that card looks crazy to me. In the right matchup, it's a 2-for-1 for 1 mana. And it's super versatile too. It protects me, and all of my permanents, and makes my spells uncounterable. It does so much for 1 mana.
One of my concerns with Veil of Summer is that, because my deck is so proactive and reliably uses all of its mana the first two turns of the game, Veil of Summer might lose a lot of its effectiveness since, if I'm always tapping out, I won't have any mana up to stop any errant Thoughtseize or Fatal Push. Anywho, I think it's worth seriously considering as a sideboard card. It still has so much going for it.
Regardless, my point still stands. Wakeroot Elemental is a terrible card without Nykthos, and even when I do have Nykthos I still need six more devotion and eight more mana. That's asking way too much from a card that isn't very useful outside of being a combo piece.
You're more generous than I am. To me, Wakeroot Elemental looks completely unplayable. And I'm not talking just about Modern. Wakeroot Elemental looks unplayable in every constructed format as well as probably Limited. It's just that terrible.
The crux of the issue is that Wakeroot Elemental is a Craw Wurm. It does nothing the turn it comes into play. It has no combat abilities. It isn't resilient. It is merely a 6 mana 5/5. That's it. In that respect, Wakeroot Elemental is significantly worse than Colossal Dreadmaw. Its only saving grace is its activated ability which isn't even especially useful. If what I want is a pair of big guys, then I ought to play Kalonian Twingrove instead. At least with the Twingrove I don't have to invest another 5 before getting anything valuable. Not to mention I don't lose absolutely everything in the event it's destroyed.
And if I want to make infinite mana with Wakeroot Elemental and Nykthos, that's a tall order too. Not only do I need to have both those cards in tandem, but I also need eight devotion, which is no easy feet, and my vanilla 5/5 needs to make it all the way till my next turn since casting Wakeroot Elemental, activating its ability, and using Nykthos
requires 13 mana total, and there's no way I'm ever going to have that much all in one turn.EDIT: See posts below.