MTG Salvation

I dont know man. I hear these arguments a lot.

I have a prime speaker zegana combo deck that runs very little interaction and just combos out. It runs a lot of the so called staples.

At certain tables people cant keep up with it. Its a combo monster. Even without counterspells they just seem to leave it unchecked and it dominates.

But you know what stops it? The tiniest bit of disruption.

Last week it went 2-1, the first two games were full of people not running anything to slow it down at all. Nothing. Not one card got removed from the table, not one spell cast stopped. Zero interaction from my opponents and i exploited that. The last game though? The last game had a guy playing queen marchesa akido-style. He had an answer for everything. I had to actually think. It was the best game ive had in months. It used a bunch of cards you wouldnt see in your typical staples build.

The point of my anecdote is no one forces you to play staples, and creativity coupled with smart plays can beat a honed deck.

People try so hard to jam all these things into their decks because theyre good or the internet tells them to. They forget that something as simple as deflecting palm, or red elemental blast, can ruin an entire deck's gameplan, and steal victory.

The only one forcing you to play things you feel are staples, or upfront powerful cards, is you.

so i guess this is our new cancel. would be nice to not see it for once, but its not a terrible reprint by any means and is of course appropriate here.

This feels sloppy, stupid, and exactly what everyone doesnt want for rw legends.

i'll never scoff at cards that can vomit tokens.

Quote from Flamebuster »

Really? They put a Soldevi Machinist/Vedalken Engineer onto a legendary permanent? Really?



'buster

Did you miss the flying and haste to equipped creatures part? Also that hes bigger than those guys. Legendary doesnt need to mean overly complex. I mean, isamaru is a grizzly bears for w that sees tons of play sooo

its 1 and 2 are great, its 3 IS ABSOLUTELY ******* AWFUL AND I'M SO SICK OF THIS ***** ON WHITE CARDS

Quote from SilvosRogueElemental »

I really don’t understand why it only gives 1 creature a counter instead of all of your creatures. This is not a mythic Mythic. Do they actually want White to be the worst color in Magic? They could do so many little things to make White more viable but they consistently choose not to.

Okay sure. But lets imagine this guy that way in soul sisters. Hes 3 mana. Youve got even just 1 lifegainer in play... is it really fair to put that many counters on your team starting that early in the game?

I mean just stop and think about that.

Hes also indestructible.

Think about that.

You go t1 crypt, plains, this guy. T2 cast soul warden. The entire game is now ****ed. Every single creature hitting play would make both him and your warden bigger. Its manageable on 1 dude, but your entire team that early?

Even outside of edh this guy comes down t2/3 and youll surely be able to net life that turn if youre building to exploit that aspect of him. In what world is that not stupid busted?

really bad mythic, fits into feldon edh pretty well, but really bad mythic wtf. it should've had haste, or some other effect, or trample, or been bigger, or done something more for 5 mana.

and thus has been revealed the mythic that i will open more than any other mythic in the entire set.

they've been ass terrible lately. why even bother.

they really haven't been a good read in almost 2 decades.

better to scrap it and do it right than keep pushing out turds. it would be nice if we could get brothers war quality books again, but it isn't likely to happen. i'm glad they're not forcing us to eat ***** this time.

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.

Quote from Shiroe The Enchanter »

Quote from H3RAC71TU5 »

This has been discussed in another thread, but I think it is somewhat myopic for them to consider the investment in the story only through its direct impact on the bottom line. Although only Vorthoses place the lore at the center stage of their fandom, it's also in the background for most other players. Otherwise they would probably just play poker or something like that.

I would agree with you if Magic was a new card game with little or no tournament support. However, Magic is established now and has tournament support, with money and prizes on the line. I think the number of competitive or semi-competitive players dwarf the Vorthoses, so as long as Wizards creates cards that players believe will help them win games, the story (excluding basic world building and synopsis) can take a backseat. Modern Horizons and Core Sets had no story support, but they sold well if they had cards people wanted. (Modern Horizons appears to have sold to expectations, at least.)

Quote from H3RAC71TU5 »

I think the brand has a very serious crisis about how it's going to do its storytelling.

Either Wizards goes back to the pre-Weatherlight days of storytelling for their sets, or they will spend money on story for a reduced number of sets. Likely, Wizards will spend money for story on sets taking place on new planes like the upcoming Ikoria, and less or no money on story for most returning planes. For example, Zendikar's story about its people vs Eldrazi is concluded, so in the next Zendikar set, the cards tell the general narrative of "D&D adventuring in dangerous places with a token amount of Eldrazi remnants," and we get a story synopsis.

Yet if the quality of the overall franchise declines, its popularity probably will eventually follow. Now that the game is bigger than any previous point, it is the time to expand on what makes it unique rather than to regress to an earlier stage when the game was small and new.

I just want to throw down Chisei, Heart of Oceans and throw down another kraken each turn.

These slowroll spoilers are awful.

Quote from Xcric »

ridiculously overcosted even for putting the ability in black at common. clearly made just to keep escape in check in limited.

Which is basically the same as they did when they called this Final Reward in the Embalm-Eternalize-And-Gods-that-didn't-like-to-die Amonkhet block.

This card is fake and I do not understand how this thread isn't locked up yet.

We officially know more about Ikoria than we do Theros. That’s some garbage right there. Wow Wizards. Way to seriously fail. I can’t even get an answer about whether or not Theros will have a story. Remarkable

Quote from Blair Phoenix »

Quote from Simto »

Those basic lands are ******* amazing looking... can't believe you only get one of each for ******* $30

They're snow lands. It's on par with how much you'd be spending on the open market, if not a bit less.

That is a problem though.

Wizards has a number of ways to go about rectifying the high prices of cards. They can do what they have said they have been doing and print cards they think people want or cards that fit with whatever set they are making but realize people who already have the cards don't want to lose value. This doesn't seem to work because it doesn't do anything. In order to really make things accessible, they need to print more copies or put the packs of cards at a reasonable price point. Something they are not willing to do. Plus, there are too many cards people want and not enough avenues to print them.

Or, they can ignore the secondary market, and the value of people's collections entirely, and just print these supplemental sets to demand. No more limited print runs. No more high cost packs. They seem reluctant to do this to because they don't want people to lose focus of the "cheaper" format of Standard so getting reprint sets always command a premium. But this would arguably be a pretty decent route for accessibility.

Or, they do what they have done here with these "Secret Lair" boxes: they print cards and price them based on the secondary market. That is, they have given us sets that are priced based on the individual cards' values on the secondary market. This is Wizards saying "we don't pay attention to the secondary market (wink, wink)". This is especially egregious with Bitterblossom as they are selling us a Single for lower than, but still close to, current market value. There is a reason this card is the only one included in that box.

This is why I think arguing that these boxes are a "good deal" misses the point of people's complaints entirely. This product, if successful, creates a conflict of interest within Wizards. There will now be a reason not to reprint cards to make them accessible. They are better off *not* making things accessible so the prices jump. With this product, they could cease major reprints going forward. Instead, and the fetchlands are a good example for this right now, they could simply allow prices to skyrocket out of control and then come in with their own product for cheaper.

If they neglect to reprint a Pioneer staple and it gets to $100 over the course of the next 3 years. And then they come out with a product that gives us a single, "special edition" copy of that card for $50. That is certainly a "good deal" but why is that card $100 to begin with? At what point do we no longer accept their excuse not to reprint as simply "we couldn't find room for it in a set" and start seeing it as "we wanted it to get high enough where we could make money selling that same card direct to players".

Now, as this is the beginning of this product line, it is difficult to go too far down the rabbit hole on what they will do. This is only speculation but this opens the doors to some pretty scummy stuff Wizards could do.

So, no, I don't think getting 5 foil basic lands is a deal since there should have been more than 2 reprints of snow basics in the last 20 years (and definitely should not have been in a limited, overpriced product). I don't believe getting a Single, Alt-Art Bitterblossom for $30 is a good thing just because the current version in $40.

There is a way to do these products right. Releasing the basic land pack with 2 of each would have been more acceptable. 3 of each I think would have been the sweet spot. Perhaps more than that is giving a bit too much, but they are still basics that are only expensive because of scarcity. This product doesn't change that and only exacerbates it by setting an artificial floor on these lands right out of the gate.

The kaleidoscope box is a good way to do this too. Overlord was $30+ before this box and they gave us a couple other good cards with it. It won't drastically reduce the buy in, but it does a lot to lower existing prices. Overloard is already down about 50% from where it started. That is a good thing for accessibility.

We can enjoy these products for what they are and buy the ones we want to buy. Overall, while I don't feel any but two of them are worth it (and I am being very generous with the Cats one since the cards themselves are worth less than half what they are charging) others may like certain ones for different reasons. But the Basic Land box is the most damning of them all. There is nothing special about them and there is nothing that dictates that price beyond what the current market says because of lack of supply. These could have arguably been in a Holiday Gift Box and would make perfect sense (in NA anyway) as Winter = Snow. But Wizards chose to put them in this product, where people need to spend hundreds to get enough for a deck when they could have done so much more with them. If only they would truly ignore the secondary market like they want us to think they do.

I can't get behind the new format. Bannings or whatever.It really just feels like a lazy modern. Massive cop out to a easy fix of the modern format with $4 masters products and a few more bannings. meh.......... Feels like the junior league. They really should have just brought back extended. Their long term plan is to kill off modern. So we might not have much of a choice with the slow phase out. RIP Vintage, RIP Legacy, and now RIP Modern. Unless Pioneer is just terribly boring to play.

This better be when we get gix as a card