Quote from Daeyel »No it will not be reprinted any time soon. Wizards generally announce new releases a couple times a year, and as of right now, a card like Scapeshift is only reprintable in a Masters set. There are no Master sets on the currently announced timeline, which extends out roughly 6 months.
So, no one has any idea WHEN the next possible reprint set will be, and even if we did, we have no idea if Scapeshift will be included
To further compound the issue with scapeshift is its effect is unique and it's a deck defining card, which makes it mythic eligible. Furthermore, what kind of draft archetype would even be supported by scapeshift? Valakut is a fine draftable card by itself, and can easily show up at rare. Scapeshift does nothing to support most draft archetypes and would call for concessions elsewhere in the set environment.
Since every booster set has a draft theme now, apparently that's one of the main sellers of every booster set now (I disagree the community is that head over heels about drafting these specialty sets, I do think there is a draft subsection that enjoys it thoroughly. Making each set a draft format is in wizards best interest for sales, however). Let the masters set mainly cater to the crowd the product was designed for imho. Modern players who need staples.
I'm not sure what the right route for scapeshift is. It adds little depth to a draft environment without warping it if it's rare. If it's mythic the price sees little movement after the initial release and spring back (look at other modern staples like karn or emrakul for trajectory patterns I think). In a supplemental set you probably won't get the full 4 because they want you trading, chasing cards, or buying more product. Also, if the secondary mkt prices of singles exceeds the product, then the product is broken down for parts by stores and the distribution channel before the end consumer.
There isn't an elegant solution for scapeshift I'm afraid. At least not an argument where other cards in need of reprinting don't just win out over it.
1
I'd like to turn the discussion over to the proposed London Mulligan rule, and how this helps and hurts us in UB mill.
First, I see that it makes it easier for us to find our core pieces, be they Hedron Crab, Archive Trap, Mesmeric Orb and Ensnaring Bridge.
But it hurts us be allowing us to be greedy, and wide open to Thoughtseize/Inquisition of Kozilek. Others can mulligan aggressively to find Leyline of Sanctity, or an artifact destruction spell.
Transformational sideboards will become more common, leaving us guessing the core pieces of their deck.
As a side note, I am anxiously awaiting spoiler season of Modern Horizons, to see the rumored new land cycle. If it is the mono-color fetch many are expecting, Land based Mill could become a Thing, using Mind Grind, Mind Funeral and even Mirko Vosk, Mind Drinker, not to mention Dimir Charm. (And I am so getting my Mirko's altered to depict Mirko Cro-Cop! 'Land card hospital, non-land cemetery!')
1
I've moved beyond UBg mill, and am currently running rUG mill. It is an aggro speed race, with a T3 win. Waiting on the last few pieces, and then I'll be trying it out locally. I'm excited to see how it goes.
The deck is as follows:
Creatures:
4 Sakura-Tribe Scout
4 Hedron Crab
2 Young Pyromancer
2 Walking Atlas
Instant
4 Cerulean Wisps
4 Growth Spiral
4 Opt
4 Spell Pierce
Artifact
4 Amulet of Vigor
Enchantment
4 Retreat to Coralhelm
Lands
4 Botanical Sanctum
4 Breeding Pool
2 Forest
2 Island
2 Izzet Boilerworks
4 Misty Rainforest
4 Simic Growth Chamber
2 Steam Vents
The strategy, is to get a Sakura-Tribe Scout (STS) down T1. He will be vulnerable, so you have to hope he can survive their turn. Alternately, you can play Amulet of Vigor as a 2nd line.
Turn 2, you tap him to add a 3rd land. There really is nothing else to do this turn, except drop Amulet if you have it. Leave U mana open to counter anything that attempts to remove the STS. She is the key to the deck. At the end of their turn, use the mana to draw a card with one of the 12 cantrips and find the other pieces. 8 of them will give you a fourth land. On line 2, you drop a bounce land for the mana. Now that you have protection, go ahead and play STS, and Hedron Crab. Just make sure you hold up U for Spell Snare to protect them.
T3, Go ahead and drop another land with your land drop for the turn. You now have 4 mana. If you played Amulet, you can drop a bounceland, but only if you have another in hand. Otherwise, drop a regular land. You can now play Retreat to Coralhelm, being sure to keep U mana open. Tap STS to drop a bounceland. Tap it for mana, and return it to hand. Untap STS. Now that you have the mana to protect your creatures with Spell Pierce, go ahead and drop Hedron Crab. Repeat dropping the bounceland and untapping STS until the opponent is milled out. Pass Turn. If you are missing anything, use the continual mana to cast the cantrips to find the missing pieces. Don't forget to use Young Pyromancer to create a line of chump blockers.
If you are on line 2, Turn 3 unfolds in the same way.
You will come out of the gate T1 and T2 acting very much like an Amulet Titan deck that isn't going well, which should make them take different, non-optimal lines. They will likely try to attack your Amulet, which is ok. It slows you down a turn, but much better they spend their removal on that. What you do not want them to do is take away your STS, since it A: ramps you into a faster win, and B: is part of the engine that wins you the game. Do not drop your Hedron Crab until you are ready to win the game. On turn 3, if they are on the draw, they will not have the mana to cast a counterspell and satisfy Spell Pierce, which means they lose. Alternately, they cannot cast 1 mana removal (Push, Path, Bolt) and pay Spell Pierce costs. If they are on the play, to have the mana, they did nothing on their turn 3, which is highly unlikely. To put it simply, if they have only 2 mana untapped, they cannot stop you. Go for broke. If they have 3 or more open, proceed with caution.
Note: Lands may need to be adjusted. Advice is very helpful.
1
Taking Crop Rotation out for Spoils of the vault means Tree of Tales is no longer needed. I like the Nevermore plan.
Clearly, the biggest obstacle to winning T1 or 2 is Force of Will and Daze. Stopping those 2 cards is key, what with the predominance of Blue. Nevermore can work - but that is a turn gone, and we have to decide between Daze and FoW. Guess wrong, and you likely lose.
Need something that can withstand both of those. Urim's Chant/Silence is great. You may draw out their counter. But if you do this, you had best win before giving them another draw and turn. Still not optimal.
But looking at Trinisphere, this is also a solid T1 play if you do not have 4 Leylines, or need to Spoils for the missing piece. You are rather assured of getting 3 Leylines in opening 7. Trinisphere is a solid T1 play. Trinisphere does affect us as well, though - something to keep in mind. Your tutors are going to cost 3, regardless.
And that brings me to the last option, the one that only affects your opponent, is cheaper than Trinisphere, and actually matches it in increasing cost, or beats it. Welcome Defense Grid. We do not play cards on the opponents turn, but he is likely to attempt to cast on ours. Defense Grid adds 3 to the cost, Trinisphere only increases it to 3. Trinisphere costs 3, Defense Grid costs 2. It will fish out a counter for sure, leaving them vulnerable if they do not have another in hand or on the draw. Most importantsly, either Trinisphere of Defense Grid will completely shut down disruption for at least 2 turns, providing for that vital window to find your pieces and go off.
Now go find room for 4 Defense Grid! It can replace Suppression Field, if you fear blue counters more than fetchlands and the like.
One could even argue that with our current set up, it replaces Serum Powder, but I doubt it.
6
I'd say what WotC needs is a LOT more communication. And a standardized plan for reprints that is clearly communicated. A Modern Masters set every 2 years is a great idea. I find it hard to imagine they will ever run out of things to reprint, for 2 reasons:
1: Right now, the game is very wide open. The number of cards seeing demand is high. This is not 2015, where there were 5 or 6 'Tier 1' decks. We have dozens of decks that can spike a tournament into top 16 or 32 contention. Any of those could top 8 at any time.
Much as I hated it at the time, and still hate it, Splinter Twin ban was a smashing success for Modern.
2: Carried off successfully, a new program of openness is going to only increase players in the fold, which will keep demand steady and consistent, always resulting in upward pressure for reprints.
Wizards needs to get off their DRAFT nut, and realize, Draft is great to sell Standard products. Draft does not need to sell Masters products. I bought 4 cases of MM15, 4 cases of MM17 and 1 case of EMA, and it sure as hell was not to draft it. (And that is not even getting into the Standard cases I bought.)
Communication and consistency. Bring back Modern Masters. Tell us Modern Masters is NOT a drafting set. The sole reason is to introduce more copies of needed cards into the arena. If a land reaches $50, you can expect a reprint. That's not a promise of one, but expect one. If a planeswalker reaches $60, again, no promises, but start expecting. And so on. Clear communication about what their standards are for reprints will prevent the wild swingy buyouts that frustrate so many players. Reassure us that when the time comes to sell, we generally should get 40 to 50 cents on the dollar. You probably won't make a profit, but you also won't walk away with nothing.
Eliminating the draft aspect of the set completely removes a year of design time. All you have to do is calculate how much EV to add, and then go about picking cards that need a reprint, right down to the common and uncommon level. It allows you to ignore the need to upshift into Mythic 'because this at rare or uncommon will ruin the draft experience.'
Best of all, losing a year of design time gives you much greater flexibility in making late changes. Having uncommons worth $25 or $40 is one of those problems. Constantly being 2 or even 3 years out from being able to satisfy demand is NOT an option. When Goblin Lore or Mishra's Bauble start demanding stupid prices, you need to be able to say - Scratch Lightning Bolt and replace Goblin Guide with something else, we're shifting value and throwing in Bauble or Lore. Even if the set is supposed to go to the printers next Monday.
Keep Modern stable, and you will always be able to sell a master set that, because you eliminated the hours that go into crafting a draft format, is even easier and cheaper to make. You will better be able to control the prices of cards, and grow Modern as an 'After Standard' format. Standard is a format that depends on 'Daddy's money, or, sad as it is to say, student loan money. When the era of fiscal responsibility hits, and allowance money and student loans no longer pay for your entertainment, and a single constant expense is desirable, Modern should be cheap enough for former standard players to ease into. This is not just coming out of my rear end. I live in a college town, with 2 high schools of 2000+ students each. College students constantly comment about student loans money paying for their gaming and magic. I see players fade away as student loan money runs low in February and March. I see high schoolers quit as allowances get reduced or eliminated as parents cut off the flow and tell them to pay their own way. Suddenly these high schoolers decide in a big hurry that draft is expensive!
But it all comes back to communication and consistency.
Those 9 cases I bought of MM15, MM17 and EMA?
Gone.
I sold out of the game because I cannot handle the inconsistent nature of WotC. They can't decide how to handle rotation. They can't decide how many sets should be in a block. After 25 years, they can't figure out that formats work best when it is Rock, Paper, Scissors. They can't decide of Modern should be a Pro Tour or not. They made 'graveyard matters' blocks with no way to deal with graveyards. They made 'Energy matters' with no way to deal with energy. They can't decide how to handle something as simple as rewards for showing up to their events. They keep screwing up the simplest things. They can't figure out how to #paythepros. Constantly, from the moment I started playing on the eve of MM25, it has been a consistency of poor decisions, half tracks and backtracks from WotC. And now they can't even be smart enough to not kill the cash cow that was the Masters series. I'm burned out. Too much whiplash. I'm done. I have 2 modern decks, 1 legacy deck, and I play Commander 90% of the time. And I have every expectation they are going to continue to grab control of that format just so they can screw it all up like they do everything else.
My hell, they do ONE thing right, in introducing an investment level of cards like the Masterpiece series, and sure enough, doing what they do best, they screw it up. They make the ugliest cards in the history of collectible, customizable or trading card games.
They are so bad you literally cannot read them. They look nothing like a Magic card. A kid walking down the street would never pick it up and say, 'Hey! Magic!' Hell, the Reddit boards STILL get players asking 'What is this card I got in my Amonkhet pack? It's in some foreign language?'
Masterpieces were a fantastic idea. It sucked the value of a box all the way up to the collectors of the game. That, in turn, made Standard a lot cheaper to play, and Drafts a LOT more entertaining. There was the small drawback that your box EV was a lot lower if you didn't have a Masterpiece, but Standard players play draft, they don't much buy boxes. Allowances don't quite stretch that far.
And then, to compound the stupidity, they did away Masterpieces with the vague, 'We aren't doing them anymore, but we can always bring it back if we like!' More of the same inconsistent excrement I've come to expect, and leads everyone to say, 'They'll be back next time they have a bad set that needs something to sell it.'
Communication. It's really easy. Set a standard on reprints, and tell us. Do not mess with what works, aka Modern Masters. Quit changing all your formats. Do not jerk us around with rash decisions that you have to reverse 6 months later.
But what do I know? I do know this: I don't buy cases any more. WotC managed to slay this golden goose/whale.
2
You aim for headlines in 20 years like 'How A Physical Game Survived In A Digital Age'.
You do it with MM17, not IMA and A25.
3
Alpha rares have 1100 copies. Beta added another 3200 copies.
When you watch Legacy tournaments, and see players using black border copies of dual lands - it's insane. You could run a very small GP with the amount of people who can have a full playset of black border duals.
Then they opened the floodgates with Unlimited. I mean, they went to town! 18,500 copies! We're talking half of a Vegas GP can have duals now!
They kept those floodgates open with Arabian Nights. 20,500 of each Arabian Nights rare. Ran the printer till the presses broke with Antiquities, 31,000 of each rare. Guess they realized they printed too much, and Legends had 19,500 copies of each rare.
At that time, there was so much demand for the earliest stuff (Game is only 18 months old by this time, they decided they were going to really go for broke, and Revised had a mindblowing 289,000 of each rare, and that includes Duals. They probably thought they'd never sell all of those packs, and might as well grab all the cash they could while the game was hot.
The rarest cards in the game are Legends RL cards. There are more Black Lotuses in print than there are Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale. I don't know how many people were playing when Legends came out, but I cannot imagine packs lasted very long.
In the end, there are 311,800 of each dual land available. That means 77,950 people can have a playset of any given dual land. There are NFL games that have more than that in attendance.
When you see and comprehend these numbers, you can see why AB, Arabian Nights, Antiquities and Legends collectors lost so much value when Chronicles came along. It is estimated that there are less than half of those early rares left due to damage, loss, parents throwing them away, etc. Less than 10,000 Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale... Even in the 90's, 20,000 was rare. In sportscards, people lost their minds when 1992 Donruss Diamond Kings were randomly inserted 3 or 4 to a box, and Elites being about the same ratio as masterpieces are now. Cal Ripken autos numbered to 10,000. I remember prices being over $100 for Elites. Crazy times, and Magic was still 18 months away. In todays world of print them till the cows come home, those early Legends numbers seem like a fantasy.
1
Yet I have a hard time seeing core sets as the avenue for reprinting Chalice of the Void, Arcbound Ravager, Ensnaring Bridge, Karn and Noble Hierarch, etc.
1
Snapcaster is an investment foil at this time. I would purchase one, but only in gradeable condition.
You could trade them for other pieces you need, as well.
I expect the Zenfetches to be reprinted again here. They have not come down as far as they want. Spoiler season begins Monday, I believe.
1
You can still try it, but remember, we still have Masters 25 in the spring and Eternal Masters in the fall. You don't think Ensnaring Bridge, Crucible of Worlds and Engineered Explosives won't be reprinted?
No one knows where the chips will fall, but I will say that Zen fetches will be reprinted at least once more, likely in Masters 25.
The only safe place to put your money is in the three Masterpiece sets, Judge foils and the Reserve List.
Some enterprising souls have begun to notice the foundation id increasingly being laid for a new format that will likely begin with Origins. Good money being dumped into that in anticipation of that announcement in 2 or 3 years. Cards like Tireless Tracker, Cryptolith Rite, and even Attune With Aether will be in demand.
But Modern is dead as for investing or flipping. The expansion into Walmart tells me Wizards seriously wants to make Modern cheap for entry - or, they are liquidating all their equity in Modern before announcing a new format - and the 25th anniversary may be as good an opportunity as any. Modern will suffer with a new format being announced, but it will not endure Legacy type dwindling.
I'm moving my money out of Modern into Masterpieces, RL and new format staples. I'd advise others to do likewise.
1
The deck, as it was explained to me, did very well at GP's, converting to day 2 at an amazing rate. There, it died horribly, because people had better removal, and could counter Grapeshot.
I'm wondering if we can't shift Cheeri0s off the Grapeshot route. It is harder, but I think it is doable, because Retract works so well.
Replace Grapeshot with Altar of the Brood. With 4 Retract, we have the option to run the table. There's so many ways it can go, Lab Maniac, straight mill with Sphinx's Tutelage, to using Mox Opal and Paradise Mantle to extend to a Paradox Engine to endure we can cast anything, it seems it opens up a lot more options. I'm not worried about a counter, because anything that stops Altar, stops all the other artifacts. Altar is not going to eat a counter T1 or 2, it's viewed as a gimmick card. Yet paired with Paladin and Mentor, it begins doing twice the work. Altar also gets around Leyline of Sanctity
The key then becomes protecting the Sram/Paladin and Mentor. While cards like Alley Evasion and Clutch of Currents and others work admirably to prevent removal, I'm thinking Turn To Mist works best, since we avoid having to burn 2 mana in recasting the card. And we never lose an attack to summoning sickness. My build is a bit of a mess, and I've just sold all my Opals, so my manabase is not adequate (I do expect Opal to be reprinted in the 25th Masters set) but so long as Mantle has a target, we can Retract even just once for a win. I'd also love to give those prowess monks haste, just for flexibility in using them as a wincon. And Soul Warden for all those tokens, and....
I'm thinking this may push past the day 2 doldrums.
Thoughts?
Milling Cheeri0s:
Lands: (15)
4 Flooded Strand
4 Hallowed Fountain
2 Island
2 Plains
3 Windswept Heath
Artifacts: (28)
4 Accorder's Shield
4 Altar of the Brood
4 Bone Saw
4 Cathar's Shield
4 Kite Shield
4 Paradise Mantle
4 Spidersilk Net
Creatures: (11)
4 Puresteel Paladin
3 Monastery Mentor
4 Sram, Senior Edificer
Instants: (6)
3 Retract
3 Turn to Mist