MTG Salvation

at that many cards... this product is a total gamble. just call it magic the gathering lotto edition because those are your odds of opening anything valuable.

Quote from Melkor »

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Quote from Xcric »

the packs themselves are kind of boring without the test cards but meh

Mana Crypt $190
Kolaghan’s Command $23
Elesh Norn $18
Sliver Hivelord $20
Demonic Tutor $24
Rhystic Study $16
Teferi’s Protection $37
Aura Shards $13
Bloom Tender $47
Kiki-Jiki $13
Teferi, TA $15
Alhamarrett’s Archive $12
Animar $13
Tireless Tracker $13
Defense of the Heart $16
Grave Titan $13
Soren Markov $11
Recruiter of the Guard $18
Rhys the Redeemed $30
Mishra’s Bauble $10
Phyrexian Arena $10

$4-$10 cards like Manamorphose, Sol Ring, Caged Sun, Kruphix, Lightning Greaves, Birds, Chromatic Star, Toxin Sliver, Solemn Simulacrum, PHyrexian Metamorph, Lotus Petal, Asceticism, Chromatic Lantern, Hedron Crab, Dictate of Erebos, Basilisk Collar, Baleful Strix, Temporal Mastery...

Sub-$4 format All Stars like Thran Dynamo, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Helix, Rune-scarred Demon, Skullclamp...

That’s “meh”? Seriously, get better at evaluating, you’re terrible at it.

Other then fetches, what more kind of things are people looking for in a reprint set? And the list I compiled was with about 400 cards spoiled, with anywhere from 600 to 1600 more cards to come.

He said boring, not bad. There looks to be some good stuff (although at 2000 cards, every rare is basically a mythic, and a mythic is basically a Masterpiece in terms of how many packs need to be cracked for a specific one). I don't care about the test cards either way, but it was neat that they had a gimmick. It's not great for the first card we saw on stream to be something we can't get at the LGS. It still looks decent.

As far as prices, you know those won't age well. There are certainly some excellent picks, and a lot of things I will be glad to see reprinted, but of the cards you listed, there are quite a few that are expensive because of scarcity, not play. They are welcome sights for EDH players, but like Defense of the Heart and Bloom Tender would not break $5 if as many copies as a rare in just one core set existed in the world

you get it.

meh definitely does not mean bad.

it means... its not doing anything all that exciting. once you remove the test card aspect of it all its just a huge set with the chance to open value, a diminished chance, but a chance. that's nothing we haven't seen before, and when we have seen it its been done in less bloated sets so you can open them with more consistency with less of a lotto feeling. note that i said less.

pricing will also dictate a lot of the appeal. price them too high and no thanks, price them just right and sure. lets open them every time. the minute mana crypt became an option, i anticipate a lot of gouging.

how fun of a draft environment will these create is another important question. if you're cracking them just to crack them, again, kinda meh whats so great here other than the thrill of a diluted lotto? it has a bunch of neat reprints, great. do they appear at a consistency that makes a difference? is this product available enough to make a difference to pricing? if the answers are no, then yeah, total meh. that can all be mitigated with a better limited environment... but with so many cards jammed into it is that environment going to be any good? who knows! the people testing it so far probably, but i'm seeing more hype over trying to figure out exactly whats in it than the strategies created. so... meh

test cards is a neat idea. they're worthless and all, but i think the possibility of the players giving feedback on them and influencing future design has a lot of potential.

the packs themselves are kind of boring without the test cards but meh

anyway, there's a part of me that would very much like to see future retail packs have the possibility of replacing the token/ad insert with a test card. it wouldn't be legal in any official capacity, but would allow players to see the design process, and be able to give more feedback on potential cards. the future future league is clearly broken somewhere. either the league isn't great at magic, or r&d doesn't listen to them. it might be worth it to push this idea of real world feedback on experimental or troublesome designs so that we can get stronger, fairer, more interesting cards in the long run, instead of turning every card into an elk.

if you guys are just playing each other, pick up the precons. they're not super broken, super expensive, or super terrible, so they're a good place to start as long as everyone is on the same page.

i'd love to see a gix and an ashnod. maybe a revisited orim since most of the weatherlight saga has been getting redos and she is just terrible.
i'd like to see more love for fallen empires, so a few throwback cards to that, maybe a reod dai, ailis connaut or a taurach. nods to homelands would be great too, there's a lot of speculation on a new baron sengir so that'd be neat.

titania would be great, since her price has slowly crept up and we could finally get a foil option

i'd like to see: sylvan library, oracle of mul daya, rhystic study, cyclonic rift, exploration, scroll rack, any of the tutors, and sensei's divining top all get reprints. we'll be lucky to get just 1 of those cards, but they all need it.

prismatic vista could easily get a reprint here, or a complete battlebond cycle of lands.

things i don't want to see: sol ring. seedborn muse. high market. lightning greaves.
give them a rest.

while i don't think the card was made specifically for zada... feather is much more likely, i do agree that designing for commander hurts the format.

a lot of the more busted cards that have become staples in every single deck of whatever color(s) were designed with edh in mind. it turned the format into a nuclear arms race and i think thats actually where the problem lies as a whole. why its shifted so heavily away from battlecruiser style magic. at the same time there are members of the rules committee that publish articles at odds with this. they push the tools that exist to combat the problem as being 'unfun' and 'not in the spirit of edh' or 'you just shouldn't play these'. it means that if someone sits down at the table with a honed deck, running a lot of these cards, its going to feel oppressive to the guy who bought into that agenda and didn't pack any of the tools to deal with the abundance of 'great in edh' style cards being vomit out of every set.

personally, i do really miss the days where nothing was designed with commander in mind. where we had to scour databases and collections to find neat synergies and old cards rather than just shove whatever new hotness from whatever new set into every deck.

but then again, i also run spot removal so... its much less of a problem dealing with these things.

Quote from Gutterstorm »

Quote from Xcric »

not just that, but do commander players even care what plane we visit? format doesn't really impact the popularity of a set, or the desire to return to it... the cards do.

yeah those legacy players sure are hyped to return to zendikar! dominaria sold well because it once had lightning bolt printed in that setting! ...see how silly that sounds?

So? Commander players also tend to be Vorthos as well. And yes. Sometimes when our favorite cards are associated with a particular plane we get excited at the prospect of going back. I'll always get excited for Ravnica because I'm always looking forward to a new Niv card. So what does it matter that they've been doing 50% return planes (as long as you count GRN, RNA and WAR as a single entity it's actually slightly less than 50%)? They're going to use popular settings. It'd be like telling Marvel to stop publishing Iron Man.

do they? data on that?

half the dudes i play with couldn't even tell you what goes on in the story, and don't much care what plane we go to unless its one they already liked because it gave them powerful cards

i think if anything we take what we personally enjoy and ascribe it as a broad generalization to the playerbase

personally, as someone who primarily plays commander over the past 10 years, i don't care what plane we go to at all. there are a few characters i'd like to see get cards some day but beyond that? going back to zendikar is about as neat as going to eldraine, i don't care so long as the cards are good.

Quote from 5colors »

Y'all know they been doing ~50% return planes, new planes since Scars of Mirrodin right?

not just that, but do commander players even care what plane we visit? format doesn't really impact the popularity of a set, or the desire to return to it... the cards do.

yeah those legacy players sure are hyped to return to zendikar! dominaria sold well because it once had lightning bolt printed in that setting! ...see how silly that sounds?

Quote from Ryperior74 »

This better be when we get gix as a card

This is one of the major things I want to see here.

The set wont be able to include enough high value/necessary reprints to be helpful without also instantly selling out everywhere.

It is however a massive step in the right direction, and allows them to explore commanderiness more than they have in precons

So we've finally gone full pokemon with the lands.

Ill stick to my ones with words on them

Quote from SpeedGrapher »

People have already started buying up cards for the format. Siege Rhino went from $1 to $4 two days after the announcement. A lot of high volume buyout gambling is happening right now. Makes me not want to even bother with the format. At this point they can print Pioneer Masters in Summer 2020 or just forget about the format. I also don't feel like playing against Siege Rhino anymore. Everyone was trilled when it was gone.

prices will stabilize, but i absolutely agree. people in this very thread have complained about the cost to get into modern, and this will be no different in very short order. they can't just go and reprint tons of stuff without adversely effecting standard so they forced themselves yet again into a corner where they won't do anything about the secondary market but it consistently causes a problem because of their approach to reprints

Quote from Mishotem »

Quote from Xcric »

yawn.

as long as modern exists, this is a dead format.

they can't have both, they need to sacrifice one of them. it's just going to be another tiny leaders, or brawl, or whatever that other one was where a walker could be your commander with a signature spell, its great in theory but without support it'll go nowhere fast and to get support you have to pull away from modern. that's a difficult balance. there is actually a point where there are TOO many ways to play.

i mean, it happens often enough already where a legacy event doesn't fire because people want to play modern that night, but that doesn't fire because some want standard, but no maybe half of them want to draft, oh whatever **** it lets all play commander. it was brawl night anyway.

Except Pioneer is necessary because Modern is gradually pricing itself out of playability for new/newer players. Or even some older ones. It's a necessary step. I imagine in another ten years or so, they'll do it again.

Thats a reprint policy issue not a format issue

yawn.

as long as modern exists, this is a dead format.

they can't have both, they need to sacrifice one of them. it's just going to be another tiny leaders, or brawl, or whatever that other one was where a walker could be your commander with a signature spell, its great in theory but without support it'll go nowhere fast and to get support you have to pull away from modern. that's a difficult balance. there is actually a point where there are TOO many ways to play.

i mean, it happens often enough already where a legacy event doesn't fire because people want to play modern that night, but that doesn't fire because some want standard, but no maybe half of them want to draft, oh whatever **** it lets all play commander. it was brawl night anyway.

oh thank god. now i get to see knight of the ebon blade every single matchup on arena, instead of every other matchup being field of the dead.