MTG Salvation

Quote from GW2GuruUser7586 »

Hrm. Didn't Time Spiral happen hundreds of years ago? Shouldn't Teferi have died of old age if he's not a planeswalker? He should look at least as old as Jaya if that were the case.

I think it would be incredibly disappointing if Teferi is not a 'walker (he's the only 'walker I was looking forward to), but it does open the door for Liliana or a villain planeswalker, which would basically negate everything I said above (which pretty much assumed Teferi would get one of the decks)

i think it was closer to 60 years ago, and despite having lost his spark they can easily explain away his age by saying he drank some of that handy dandy slow time water like jhoira

calling it now, it'll come out that duel decks were phased out because of poor sales. actually, i've been calling that for awhile, ever since quality declined and there was zero incentive to either buy them, or buy more than one of them. in true wotc fashion its better to ditch a product that once sold well rather than actually look at why those sales may have declined and take steps to improve the product.

i'm sure these things will be a disjointed barely playable mess out of the box too.

given the track record lately....

Almost complete abandonment of theme.

Little to no exploration of introduced mechanics, and a completely knew one thats also barely explored.

Probably something like the golden city or whatever opens ixalan to the multiverse and the residents go mad from the influx of power so theres vampire on dinosaur carnage resulting in vampire dinosaurs or whatver predictable generic crap they churn out

Hooray! Another product that wont see support after release!

I hope i can crank other cards that arent from this set

I want to crank my bone flute

We were talking about this the other night.

A big part of it is probably meta. Once people start acceopting the power of combo and that a game has to end, decks start including at least one as a way to finish things out. Spot removal also goes up proportionally to deal with combos. It becomes a much more interactive game, that just happens to end quickly. People will argue this point, but theyre probably playing in a more casual circle where not every player wants to win so much as they want to play.

More casual groups aim for a more battlecruiser style game, and thats fine, the games just last forever and the person who realizes combo wins will be hated on so hard. Removal also tends to be light because you dont need to stop someone from going off.

The two ideaologies dont mix well, so when you mix a player with one mentality with the other it clashes. Battlecruiser style players tend to gripe and hate on a combo player regardless of board State and deck type. This in turn forces a person who understands combo to play more aggressively if they want to play, it also ensures the person who knows how to combo can never play a battlecruiser deck with those people because they will always expect a combo and hate on them.

A good example of this appears in the ettiquette thread where one person tailored their deck to hate blue and will always target blue regardless of what the deck does, meaning if youre playing blue in that guys pod you have to win aggressively fast or hes not going to let you play the game at all regardless of other players. He in essence escalates the thing he hates and creates a bigger problem where none should exist. This is also something ive experienced locally recently, along with some of my friends, and we know now that if a certain person is in our pod we have to play the most cutthroat deck just to cram it up his ass and hate him out of the pod, because even if we play derpyelephant tribal he still hates because we have another deck that can combo. Its a gross misunderstanding of threat assesment, clashing ideaologies, and most times an inability to adapt with a group.

I think a lot of people also confuse synergy with combo. Theres a huge difference. The noninfinite combo posted above is a synergy, not a combo. Combo ends a game on the spot. Synergies tend to just put you in a position where its difficult to lose.

Quote from 3drinks »

Quote from Xcric »

this is also something to avoid doing.

evaluate current board state, don't just choose targets because someone runs counterspells, or because you don't like that a deck might have ld in it, or a stax effect, or a combo. i get really tired of hearing losing players whine and cry about blue and how broken it is, when really they just weren't prepared. what it does is creates an environment where that blue player CAN take advantage of the game because you don't like aspects of it.

Maybe if they did something other than counter my cards, bounce my interactions to make me feel useless, I wouldn't feel so agitated by them. You wanna counter me? Here, I'll give you something to counter. Play with this t2 Scald, make sure you never ever tap out without a Force backup because I'm going to Boil/Omen of Fire you. I get about six different counters of my own, and they are reserved only for counter-warring the U player, or protecting my U hoser. "Keep countering all of my plays...I will run you cards out too, and then you won't win. Now you see how I feel." And then I will Seedtime to refresh myself.

As long as people play these 35+ counter decks, I will keep playing dedicated hate and hard hosers. As long as I'm the only guy at the table to not be on U, I will keep playing Cryoclasm. You keep doing a good job ensuring my Mogg Salvage is always free to cast. I will continue forcing Boseiju, and Samut-via-Cavern-backup, with Sable Stags, Scragnoths, Kavu Chameleons, and River Boas. And I will continue sending these uncounterables and protection-from-you guys at you, as long as you continue trying to make my limited time playing this game miserable.

So, no, don't tell me to stop focusing on the U player sitting from atop his throne of eleven mana and thirty counterspells like he's not the kingmaking threat that chooses who wins and who loses. Years of experience, bad beats, and getting combo locked have shaped my deck building & play strategy to what it is today.

thats cool, but i'm sure the zombies player over in the corner is the one really disrupting you, even more so if you've geared your entire deck to hate on the perceived threat of blue. you're just upset that the blue player did one clutch counter to keep you in check so you're throwing everything you have at them regardless of everything else.

honestly, while i hate games like this because it allows someone to sit back and wait and REALLY wreck the game, i also love games like this because player A thinks player B is the threat because idk islands, so they throw everything they have at them, while player B has either built their deck well enough to put up a fight and use up A's resources, or they crumple and get to a point where player C can just laugh and kill both because A and B are spent and player C hasn't been disrupted at all, but A still blames B, generally using excuses like 'but i had to keep the blue player in check'

i tend to be player C in this scenario.

its bad threat assessment and holding grudges like that make the game miserable for anyone directly involved, for zero reason.

I dont like it.

I mean, i dont want or expect anything over the top but this looks like a kid rushing to finish a project in his graphic design class. Its cheap, forgettable, boring.

Its also an unnecessary change

don't hold grudges between games

i've seen so many games ruined by one jerkoff who is pissy because they lost one pod, so they pick on the person who won regardless of board states and someone else wrecks the entire game because they're unhindered while another person doesn't get to play at all and the grudgeholding player is just salty the entire time, making someone else salty in the process

Quote from Ertai Planeswalker »

This will be in every EDH deck ever. I need 15.

I disagree
While the first thing i want to do is nuke that gaea's crade, the last thing i want to do is ramp everyone else to do it.
Ill stick with strip mine, wasteland, dust bowl, tectonic edge, and even ghost quarter before this

I think it's more important to figure out what sort of mechanics you want, how you want the deck to play, then work out the best commander for it.

Here's how they brong them back to Kamigawa.

The Kami won the war, but after a few thouaand gwnerations, the moonfolk and humans look to the dwindling Akki populations to help them win a new war, one taken to the heavens with Akki riggers building contraptions called Gundams....

The problem is you can't push threat-assessment on to players. This is something that honestly needs to be forced down their throat by multiple game-losses to the threat.

"Talking to your friends" is going to be the default answer in this thread, but how you go about it is going to really change how well (or how much effort) this player actually puts in to adapting.

My normal reaction to this sort of player is, after a few games and I'm aware that it is how they play, is to waste a game-saving spell just targeting him, displaying how bad the threat assessment caused a game loss. Not by just randomly destroying one of his things, but specifically when another player is about to combo-win, spend your removal that could save the table on one of this dice-players permanents instead, and then ask him if he would have done the same thing / would he have spent earlier removal knowing about the potential combo / etc.

Now that he (hopefully) has your attention, suggest to him that if he has random removal spells in the future, and he isn't sure what the best target is, that he just asks the table for advice and what they would recommend destroying. Even if one of my own permanents was the most threatening must-destroy thing I would confirm this and tell him that it should be destroyed.

Good versions of Titania are actually midrange control and play a variety of cards that other green decks do not. I've run ton of green decks and it's very different than all the others.

She exercises her right to bear fangs

Quote from Tolarian PC Principal »

Can I "thumbs down" this whole set somewhere?

Yep. At the cash register. Don't buy it.

Best card in Limited!

This is such anti flavor for the block

As I said to my playgroup in our group texts earlier: look at every card in this set so far and there's another recently printed/affordable that does it better. Outside of truly niche applications like Food Chain and Triskadekaphobia, the rest just strikes me as meh. Tamiyo is dumb, powerful. All of her abilities are mono-u, but I'll play her in Bant. I don't need prophet/deadeye 2.0, but man the rest is bad. I was building a werewolf tribal deck in anticipation and just took it apart. Gisa and Gerald combined are worse than either alone. Overall: supremely disappointed. Here's hoping for Kaladesh I guess.

Quote from Sallucianious »

Quote from Raptorchan »

What's going on?

A set that was supposed to be what happens when an Eldrazi shows up turned into a set about Eldrazi...

It's like this card is emblematic of what WotC thought of this set. "Hey you guys: why play those old Innistrad tropes and tribes? Ditch them and let's you get some new stuff that shows how cool Emrakul is!" "Can we still get some of the old stuff AND this cool new stuff?""You silly beans, that stuff doesn't synergize with Eldrazi!"

I mean, I like the effects in this set, but does everything have to be Eldrazi or Horror if it isn't in white or blue?