Oblivion Ring effects are the only cards we have, and not all of us are playing very many of them. If you have to remove six or seven loyalty counters with burn, you're spending massive amounts of resources. Black doesn't have any of the "or target planeswalker" removal spells, because they're rare or otherwise unplayable for us. Blue doesn't have anything besides a massively expensive Control Magic for permanents. Green doesn't have anything. So... yay, we're safe?
Right, the fact that you think it's a Spells Matter card and not worth it just as a pump effect is exactly my point.
DOM did some weird ramp and 5C things but still had a lot of creature-centric decks (esp in red), and Fury was just... filler, because giving your team first strike on your turn isn't actually reliably good.
Warlord's Fury is only ever a one turn thing and your opponent won't have to do anything to make it go away. You could usually take a hit and wait for next turn to block/trade in DOM. That's the reason it's not a great card. That doesn't work with Nahiri though, it's not a great analogy imo. Nahiri makes blocking much more difficult for most decks for the rest of the game, not just for a turn. Plus you have to spend resources (cards, attacks and damage that could go face or block something without Nahiri) to get rid of her. Just ignoring her and going face means you open yourself up to her ability, which makes racing more difficult at the very least. None of that is true for Fury.
The relevant question to my mind is how often you can just ignore her. How much and what kinds of evasion a cube has plays a huge role in how useful she will be. I don't think most decks can just ignore permanent blocking diffulties, but a race against Nahiri is very hard to theorize about, because so much depends on the exact game state. I typically find killing planeswalkers with creatures to be a pain also, and we don't have any of the spells that can deal with them, so I suspect in most games they'll actually be harder to remove than we are used to now (although again, much depends on evasion).
Unfortunately, nahiri only kills stuff that your opponent lets you kill, outside of her first turn. So without tap effects she really cant be a value engine.
Six loyalty sounds like a lot until she takes even 2 damage. Then she has the real possibility of only killing one relevant thing.
Point taken, but there are plenty of situations where not giving Nahiri the opportunity to kill something means you fall behind. Not that many decks can just sit back and wait. So I don't think she necessarily has to kill something right away to have a significant effect.
Slower decks are going to have a very hard time getting rid of her and her six loyalty without opening themselves up to a massive attack. And if they don't, first strike for the whole team is a pretty big advantage in most situations.
She can also remove some creatures that Red usually doesn't get to kill, so she might even work in a controlish build that can protect her loyalty until you really need it. She can "top off" stuff like Bolt too, so she might be contributing to three or four kills, although that might be optimistic. Still, she's worth testing for sure imho.
I'm not convinced we'll get planeswalkers. They might just do a planeswalker spot in the pack. But I am curious about what uncommon planeswalkers would look like.
My concern with planeswalkers is interaction. I dislike the mini-game of "kill the planeswalker" that often ensues once they're played and the interactive cards we'll get in the set are likely to be too niche or too bad for us.
Signets just end up instant picks, because it's pretty much always correct to take a signet, no matter what your colors are. I don't want that kind of pick in my packs, so I don't run any.
I'm not too excited for now. It's so unclear what that set is going to look like, and apparently it's draftable as well. We'll have to hope it's going to be more like one of the good masters sets.
They've said they've created it especially for Limited and Standard, so I'm not too worried about access being too easy. One, if that were the case, they presumably wouldn't let the thing loose at a PT draft. Two, if it works for combo decks in constructed, it should work for limited decks just fine. Three, people were worried about the same thing when they introduced the scry mulligan and nothing happened.
Two cards that have really surprised me in draft are Resolute Watchdog and Ill-Gotten Inheritance. Watchdog is sort of a Mother of Runes light, so may be interesting for larger cubes (or if you don't want to play Mother). Inheritance is a suprisingly effective clock. Maybe it's still too slow for cube, but I'm considering trying it now. Of course cube won't allow you to draft three Inheritances...
If you teach chess to kids it's the same story. At that age the most important thing, by far, is that they're having fun. They'll pick up strategy whenever they're ready.
Warlord's Fury is only ever a one turn thing and your opponent won't have to do anything to make it go away. You could usually take a hit and wait for next turn to block/trade in DOM. That's the reason it's not a great card. That doesn't work with Nahiri though, it's not a great analogy imo. Nahiri makes blocking much more difficult for most decks for the rest of the game, not just for a turn. Plus you have to spend resources (cards, attacks and damage that could go face or block something without Nahiri) to get rid of her. Just ignoring her and going face means you open yourself up to her ability, which makes racing more difficult at the very least. None of that is true for Fury.
The relevant question to my mind is how often you can just ignore her. How much and what kinds of evasion a cube has plays a huge role in how useful she will be. I don't think most decks can just ignore permanent blocking diffulties, but a race against Nahiri is very hard to theorize about, because so much depends on the exact game state. I typically find killing planeswalkers with creatures to be a pain also, and we don't have any of the spells that can deal with them, so I suspect in most games they'll actually be harder to remove than we are used to now (although again, much depends on evasion).
Point taken, but there are plenty of situations where not giving Nahiri the opportunity to kill something means you fall behind. Not that many decks can just sit back and wait. So I don't think she necessarily has to kill something right away to have a significant effect.
She can also remove some creatures that Red usually doesn't get to kill, so she might even work in a controlish build that can protect her loyalty until you really need it. She can "top off" stuff like Bolt too, so she might be contributing to three or four kills, although that might be optimistic. Still, she's worth testing for sure imho.
Kiora looks really good imo. Tibalt is interesting.
I don't think Jiang will be worth it without some signigicant support in the cube. Even then you can probably find better.
My concern with planeswalkers is interaction. I dislike the mini-game of "kill the planeswalker" that often ensues once they're played and the interactive cards we'll get in the set are likely to be too niche or too bad for us.
and maybe Rhythm of the Wild
Wilderness Reclamation is a powerful effect, but I'm not sure we have the card pool to really take advantage of it.