A masterpiece in each booster? Well that's cool! Loving the bright vibe of this set so far
Dude, it's obvious that the OP just messed that part up. It's probably going to be like the Zendikar masterpieces, where you get one per box (or multiple for a collector box).
*Opens up actual mothership article*
...Sweet mother of god.
Seriously, though, can we take a moment to recognize exactly how brilliant this strategy is? Creating a "spells matter" set for standard is incredibly difficult when any new instants or sorceries that would rival the power of old staples like lightning bolt or counterspell are simply too powerful to put in standard-legal sets. This approach allows a "spells matter" set to actually be about powerful spells (at least in limited environments) without impacting standard/historic/pioneer/modern. It's kind of brilliant and may be a blast to draft.
So... if that Jin is real, people are going to be having a bad time. This thing would make draw-go decks as cancerous as Vorinclex makes Superfriends decks.
They do potentially do nothing, and they would provoke players to tech snow covered basic lands in other formats (which isn't bad).
I kind of disagree with the notion that they do nothing, honestly.
1. If I have Be in my opening hand and I play a snow land, my opponent is either screwed (if they don't have a snow land) or they are being taxed for 1 mana at the start of each of my upkeeps until the opponent attempts to "go off" and win. I paid no mana and no cards to tax my opponent in this way but they are still inclined to pay the tax due to these cards existing in the metagame. It's true that having a second Be in my hand doesn't add to that advantage (similar to legendary creatures) but having a passive 1-mana tax that comes online turn 1 is NOT nothing.
2. Giving all of these cards a CMC of 1 seems to ignore the possibility of just casting Be on turn 1. A 5/5 on turn one that your opponent couldn't possibly negate seems a tad overpowered... unless your opponent is running a Be of their own to block or a Bo to bounce the token into oblivion... which gets back to the problem of these cards becoming ubiquitous and killing deck diversity. Anyone who doesn't tune their mana to snow and use BeBuBo would simply lose, meaning that everyone would run enough snow to ensure a turn 1 snow land and will be running enough BeBuBo to force each other to paying a tax of 1 each turn, making an archetype that renders all other archetypes unplayable while simultaneously having absolutely miserable mirror matches. This is not a desirable game-state.
I recommend increasing the CMC for those tax spells up to 3 (at least) so that non-snow decks have 1-2 turns of unimpeded play before snow starts becoming an issue, allowing for a wider variety of decks to flourish.
So... if Bo/Bu/Be are intended to be Instants, they simply do not work.
Quote from The Comprehensive Rules »
500.3 A step in which no players receive priority ends when all specified actions that take place during that step are completed. The only such steps are the untap step (see rule 502) and certain cleanup steps (see rule 514).
500.4 When a step or phase ends, any unused mana left in a player’s mana pool empties. This turn-based action doesn’t use the stack.
If I wait for the end of someone's upkeep (the first step in which mana could even be added to the mana pool), the opponent's mana will not have had a chance to drain by any means that turn (it only drains after everyone has had priority) and you will automatically get the effect.
If they are meant to be sorceries, they would only warp the game to the umpteenth degree by forcing players to tap a mana at the beginning of your upkeep for the entire game SIMPLY BY EXISTING. Compared with previous "rhystic" payoffs like Rhystic Tutor or Rhystic Lightning (Rhystic Study doens't really count as it can't "ambush" a player that tapped out), the benefits being gained for a single mana are immense... to the point where you would pay the tax to any opponent (whether or not they actually use the card) who play snow lands... meaning that you are forced to use snow lands if anyone else is using snow lands... and in that case, why not run these cards as well.
While common consensus might claim that favoring a basic mana base would disincentivize 3-5 color "good stuff" decks and promote deck diversity, I honestly feel that these cards would end up homogenizing formats instead as everyone would need to be using these cards and a snow mana base.
...All of which you might know, if you knew how the game was actually played.
I don't understand why a certain volume of creatures are needed. Perhaps he just means in the modern style of game design they have chosen to pursue. Because, and someone please correct me if I am wrong, it feels as though creatures are just so much more plentiful in each new set than they ever used to be. If I am wrong about that, maybe it just feels that way because of the way they have moved so many effects, keywords, and abilities onto the creatures. Effects which spells used to be the primary source.
It isn't about needing a certain volume of creatures. In fact, I'd say that's kind of backwards.
MDFC lands didn't make players put more land slots into their deck. What it did was allow some of your nonland slots to double as lands when mana screwed or allow some of your land slots to function as gas if flooded (depending on your perspective). Likewise, MDFC creature//spells would let players have extra creatures if they don't need an expensive broken wings or annul at the moment (as examples) or use their creature as an answer if they are on the backfoot. MDFC creature//spells would increase the frequency of spells while allowing players to still have access to game-progressing threats. The only problem is that MDFC land/spells naturally funnel players into using the land side early on and the spell slide later on (with a few exceptions like the weak counterspell) while a card that's a spell on both sides does not make that distinction (which would likely make the cards trickier for newer or less skilled players to navigate, which wizards doesn't want).
I guess that's what I am saying. I don't mind having the same literal number of creatures, but I want them to be more watered down. Give them a keyword here or there; just let the spells be the power houses for this set. There are already plenty of strong creatures to carry Standard from the other sets.
Yeah... I have a hard time imagining a future in which you are anything other than disappointed.
Either you are expecting a standard set to churn out vintage-level all-star answers or you are hoping for the power level of the entire set to be punched in the face so that normal spells doing spell things of the appropriate power level for standard don't overshadow the creatures. Like, we'll probably get a cycle of "splashy" commander spells (like the CMD 8-9 cycle in commander legends) and a couple of good rare spells/enchantments but... yeah.
Oops all Spells decks, it sounds like. They weren't having a huge win percentage or share of the metagame but they were hard to interact with and essentially contributed to unfun non-games, which wizards wanted to reduce.
Remember, all of the changes that Wizards made today were made with the intention of increasing FUN!
The only reasonable answer you put here is thoughtseize which goes a long way to proving rowan's point. You don't know how this game is played. You've admitted you don't play why try and make the claim that you do. Your notions of how the game is played is a strange blend of outdated and misinformed which makes sense given your own admittance to not playing in a decade and never really being into the game. If you can't even accept such obvious critiques about not knowing things you've admitted you shouldn't know then you have no hope of growing as a designer or an individual.
Was Meddling Mage not a staple in its time? How it that not relevant?
Did you even explain how the other examples aren't reasonable?
Did you even explain anything at all of 'how the game is played' that makes this broken?
1. The key words you are looking for are "In it's time", as in "not anymore".
2. Meddling mage (and a bit of Ixalan's Binding/Gideon's Intervention in Standard and nowhere else) were the only card of its sort that ever saw considerable play. Declaration of Naught, nevermore, voidstone gargoyle, and even the recent Ashiok's Erasure have seen little to no play.
3. When it comes to "how the game is played", everything ultimately comes down to what is played competitively. Look at the decks that actually make up the meta before throwing down a random card as a counter or else you're just spitting out cards that nobody actually uses. declaration of naught appears in virtually no decks so suggesting it as a counter makes no sense. Thoughtseize does appear in played decks so it would be fair to point out.
4. Yes, we expect you to do the research (or at least to absorb what is actually played via exposure to the game). You are putting out cards and all of us are going to critique it in the context of the current meta-game, not in an isolated bubble. If you want to make a card that others call good, that means being aware of these things.
Why wasn't Vesuva legendary? That definitely should be fixed. It's a proper noun. Seems more legendary than generic to me. Should also enter untapped to that respect. No one at the time obviously realizes the significant of providing a 'tech extension' to increase the 'probability factor' and secure a successful 'mathematical proportion' for a content. This is the same in Pokemon TCG. And yet, I'm the one who doesn't understand how to play the game?
Again, this shows that you are out of touch.
It has been addressed on multiple occasions why Emeria, the Sky Ruin, Vesuva, and The World Tree are not legendary cards.
1. On a mechanical level, making them non-legendary makes lands virtually unplayable. When you draw a second copy of a legendary creature, it is reasonable to expect to cast it after the first copy has been removed (and you can play the second copy to remove the first via legend rule even if it is locked down by arrest or something similar). As land destruction is so much less common, however, it is far more likely that a second copy of a land will simply be trapped in your hand for the entire game. While legendary land can still technically be created, keep in mind that the two most recent legendary lands (Inventors' Fair and The Mirror Pool could both sacrifice themselves, meaning that excess copies could eventually be played.
2. Things have also changed on a creative level (much as players are no longer thought of as planeswalkers waging war with each other since the mending occurred). Rather than a land representing exclusive access to a specific space as our domain, it represents an open mana link to that location. A single space can have more than one mana link at a time, allowing us to have multiple copies of a single land even if it feels that it should be legendary.
3. If you don't like this... so what? We are talking about the actual rules of the actual game. If you keep adding caveats and rules changes that would need to be in place to talk about your card, you are no longer talking about the game in the state where it stands... and your card remains utterly pointless (or broken, in this case) in the actual game that people play.
4. Even if Vesuva WAS legendary, the rules for copying effects mean that it would lose the legendary supertype if it copies a nonlegendary permanent (as a copy copies all of the types and supertypes of a card), which makes your argument utterly pointless to begin with.
5. I find it kind of funny how you ask for specific and detailed reasons why the cards you recommend don't work while spitting out terms like "tech extension" or "probability factor" as if those are standardized terms that we could find in the glossary of any game design handbook and not personally created buzzwords that you think everyone should automatically intuit the meaning of.
Again, you are the one who doesn't know how to play the game.
Personally, I'd expect Time Spiral to do decently well (the original cycle had a number of good cards other than Goyf like Damnation, simian spirit guide, Dryad Arbor, Tolaria West, the cycle of cost-less suspend cards, a couple of the 0-cost pacts, Gemstone Caverns, vesuva, urborg, tomb of yawgmoth, angel's grace... They have enough there for the start of a good reprint set and those time-regressed cards may also be worth something (especially if they put in a couple of $20-50 reprints in that slot).
Modern Horizons 2 should also do pretty well. I mean, if nothing else, there's fetches.
Did you guys read Maro's response? Strixhaven is "not just a reskinning of any one version," which leaves it fairly open to borrow from any number of sources. Just like every other set.
Yeah, not sure where people are getting "there will be zero Harry Potter references" from.
My guess: it's an instants and sorceries matter set. This has been described by MaRo as a difficult concept due to needing a certain volume of creatures for a set to work, but was possibly solved by MDFCs with instants and sorceries on the back of creatures.
My other, way more farfetched guess: the plane it's on is Vryn, which has a specific need for a lot of mages.
You are on to something.
ZNR was land/X and KLD was god/permenent. Spell/creature is one missing combination. Perhaps the theme is : either you summon your teacher or you learned the spell form him/her. And that inspired the school theme, maybe?
It may be a Magic version of school tropes, and not necessarily from Magic School tropes. So not necessarily Horcruxes or Dark Lords but definitely MTG versions of Potions or Herbology. A Xmen Danger Room, perhaps? Quidditch?
I'm pretty sure that Maro also mentioned that DFC will be closer to Kaldheim than Zendikar regarding how many there will be (Read: 1 mythic and 2-3 rares per color), meaning that this won't be the mechanic that pushes up the As-fan of sorcery/instant cards to a level where we can get a dedicated "spell-slinger set"... and I would actually be pretty worried if MDFCs were being used in that way, honestly.
In Zendikar, players generally aren't punished too badly for playing their MDFCs as lands instead of tools or creatures. If you need to do so, you are probably low on lands and making that choice may actually remove what would have otherwise been a non-game. Most players will stop playing MDFC lands that they top-deck in the late-game when they have enough mana and the "correct choice" for which side to play is rarely too obscure for new players. With Creatures/Spells, however... that's just not the case. If I have 3 creature//counterspells, playing the first two as counterspells doesn't make me more likely to want to use the last one as a creature. I could imagine games where players keep using the spell sides and end up with with long limited games where one or both players legitimately run out of threats (imagine running 12-14 creatures as normal and being forced to use 6 of those creatures as spells, for example, and you only have around 6-8 creatures to survive all of your opponent's answers and win the game). While it can be done with careful planning, using MDFC as the primary "spells matter" mechanic would be really risky.
I'd anticipate some sort of spell-morph (like that one test card) or Awaken Variant tacked onto lands so that spells make threats. Also, I believe that there was that one flavor blurb regarding Kasmina trying to recruit potential planeswalkers to respond to a threat. We might see that Spark mechanic from that other test card (loyalty counters on creatures) to reflect that to give a taste of "Planeswalkers matter" while tying everything to a traditional creature body.
Yeah... can we collectively agree as a community that if a creature not only needs removal... not only needs to be exiled... not only needs this to happen at instant speed... not only needs to have all of its abilities negated... but needs to be actively punished by a card that would make the "good answers" of yesteryear blush to stop that card from suffusing every format in which it is legal... that the card was probably a mistake?
There is a point at which the tried truism of asking wizards to "add good answers" to add safety valves for good threats is no longer a practical response. I feel that Uro has passed that point by a good margin.
In the end, they can totally produce OP cards, as long as they put in some proper answers to these cards, so a metagame can evolve around them.
If every deck plays Uro as green can splash any color without a problem and not playing Uro becomes a "mistake" , the only decks not running the stupid card are decks that intentionally try to work under it (like red aggro decks).
If a card can warp a format so hard around itself, it simply means the answers are crap and the format is not equipped to work with its pushed cards.
----
Every time you make something powerful, produce a properly powerful answer to it (and put some form of answer in every color).
If each color has something powerful decks will naturally evolve around these cards, so a format can become stale quickly, if anything else lacks behind in power level.
Putting a card in your deck should have a reason and a cost, being ALL upside and good in every situation is producing cancerous cards and it becomes almost impossible to print any proper answer to such cards.
While some of these cards are unexciting, a few of them are main-deckable. We have a mainstream deck that packs crypt in the main deck for the purpose of targeting it with trickery... a deck which runs valki (which comes down before they can cast uro and steals it) and Ugin (which just kills Uro)... and Uro is STILL taking a ban.
Compared with everything listed above, what sort of “Good Answer” would need to be printed for something like Uro to be balanced? I honestly don’t think that even Path/StP would do much to stop it. I don’t think that mana leak or counterspell would do enough to stop it, either. Uro is simply a mistake, plain and simple.
With the "spoiler" of Cranial Plating , it seems to be pretty clear that we get some form of equipment/artifact theme.
Highly doubtful.
This set will have absolutely no new cards and there will only be 24 cards per draft pod that did not originally appear in the time spiral block... which was not an artifact set.
I don't understand the valentine's one. What's "Valentine's Day" about it? Couldn't they have found six cards that would make sense to give "romantic couples/dates" artworks? At least that would have been cute.
I imagine that they went with "candy + cupid + hearts" to sidestep possible orientation politics (with cries of exclusion if they only show straight couples and cries of "PC pandering" if they include any other couples). I'm a bit surprised that wizards would sidestep the issue instead of punching through so soon after Wizards vowed to write the stories they want to write in spite of politics, however.
The Giants (Titans) ones are a giant middle finger from Wizards to us. First, include Primeval, which is banned in EDH. Second, exclude Sun Titan, which sees more EDH play than any of the other OG Titans. Third, breaking it up into TWO sets, when the Black is Magic lair shows they’re willing to do a 7 card set, and combining these would only be 6, and again that’s with unforgivably leaving one out. Fourth, they have two different price tags, despite both having the same theme and the same number of cards? Wizards just s******g all over us.
Are you low on Sun Titans or something?
It literally just got reprinted, and has had many more printings than Primeval (MANY commander decks including both recent Zendikar and Kaldheim commander decks, the alt art Heroes vs Monsters Duel deck, alt art Prerelease promo...) Where was Primeval reprinted with alternate art beyond the Grand Prix Promo? And then there was the Alternate Grave Titan DoTP promo which wasn't even available where I live and somehow got credited to the wrong artist. That's the Titan screw up you should be upset about, but I digress.
Why do you assume Secret Lair products are only geared towards commander players?
They can't throw modern a bone on occasion?
Geez, this is one of those Lairs I saw and instantly thought everyone would be happy with until I started reading and noticed the pending banning, which in all honesty is unsurprising, even if I'd prefer they unban something else in said formats instead to balance the playing fields. It it really so impossible to sideboard vs Uro, or are people just too lazy and not including the right cards in sideboards?
Regardless of the banning and absence of sun titan which I could care less about, I'll be buying some of these for sure without hesitation.
I'm just curious...How much more value do you want them to print, box up, and ship you at a discount (compared to the current secondary market value of the cards included) for such a product to be worth your time and interest? Personally, I'm happy to pay shipping, exchange to CAD, and duty above the tag and tax.
Perhaps if there was a "build-your own" Secret Lair where you can choose any five commons, four uncommons, three rares, and two mythics (from any previous secret lair product) it would be "worth it"?
If you think the secondary market price of Sun Titan was my point, you’re beyond clueless.
Dude, your initial point boils down to "Wizards is releasing an obviously bad product". That is an opinion that you are welcome to have. As it is an opinion, however, I don't have the ability to say "Nuh uh" and forcefully change your mind. All that we can do by means of conversation is share agreeing or contrasting opinions and share our ideas on why things are the way that they are (which is still unknowable to some degree but that we can probably reach a greater level of consensus on). Explaining why something is the way it is does not automatically excuse bad decisions or argue "this is the only way things could have been" but it can help to reveal external factors, build evidence that decisions were made with purpose rather than being slapdash works, and (in some cases) excuse some levels of asymmetry.
Why two of these products?
The format for these products isn't all that arbitrary. Wizards is obviously and transparently copying the format of their Theros God Secret Lairs from the previous year (1 multicolor mythic and 2 single color mythics of the component colors and same types).
Why is Sun Titan not here?
Because sun titan does not neatly fit into the format of the aforementioned Secret Lairs (as there was no white multicolor titan in Theros). As has been pointed out, the large number of reprints that Sun Titan has received relative to other titans may also explain why it is not here... and the corresponding lower price tag may actually increase the odds of Sun Titan appearing as a bonus promo in one or both of those packages. If all but one of the original titan cycle gets cool alternate art, that admittedly upsets my desire for symmetry and cool-looking cards. At the same time, it can be argued that not all secret lair drops are designed explicitly for Commander (thinking back to that drop with four serum vision, for example).
Why not include all 7 Elder Giants in one big drop?
(again, not saying that these are GOOD or SUFFICIENT reasons but that these are likely ACTUAL reasons)
1. Packaging 7 mythics in a single drop may risk drawing attention away from other drops being put out simultaneously. As long as Wizards keeps insisting on putting out a half-dozen drops at once (and insist they do, apparently), it is bad business sense for them to to print "The Good One" and make a bunch of others that fewer people have any interest in.
2. Secret Lairs don't typically include full cycles other than lands (Not sure whether the Zendikar one would count as one of those cards was originally an uncommon). I hope that this changes in the future (and that we get better packaging that allows secret lairs to be displayed as collector art pieces, closer to the Comic-con planeswalker kits).
3. While the new secret lair has 7 cards, Wizards may be going above and beyond what they are willing to release in normal drops when they do charity drops (releasing 7 cards in this one, more valuable cards than normal with the previous one such as consecrated sphinx, and releasing those brand new MLP cards in the charity drop before that). What wizards plans to do in an upcoming charity drop may not be a statement of what they are planning to do in regular drops, in other words.
Why do they not cost the same?
one of them has the weakest titan and two titans with notable bans and the other has three titans that don't have bans in longer-running formats. Nobody would buy the Simic one if it cost the same.
Dude, it's obvious that the OP just messed that part up. It's probably going to be like the Zendikar masterpieces, where you get one per box (or multiple for a collector box).
*Opens up actual mothership article*
...Sweet mother of god.
Seriously, though, can we take a moment to recognize exactly how brilliant this strategy is? Creating a "spells matter" set for standard is incredibly difficult when any new instants or sorceries that would rival the power of old staples like lightning bolt or counterspell are simply too powerful to put in standard-legal sets. This approach allows a "spells matter" set to actually be about powerful spells (at least in limited environments) without impacting standard/historic/pioneer/modern. It's kind of brilliant and may be a blast to draft.
I kind of disagree with the notion that they do nothing, honestly.
1. If I have Be in my opening hand and I play a snow land, my opponent is either screwed (if they don't have a snow land) or they are being taxed for 1 mana at the start of each of my upkeeps until the opponent attempts to "go off" and win. I paid no mana and no cards to tax my opponent in this way but they are still inclined to pay the tax due to these cards existing in the metagame. It's true that having a second Be in my hand doesn't add to that advantage (similar to legendary creatures) but having a passive 1-mana tax that comes online turn 1 is NOT nothing.
2. Giving all of these cards a CMC of 1 seems to ignore the possibility of just casting Be on turn 1. A 5/5 on turn one that your opponent couldn't possibly negate seems a tad overpowered... unless your opponent is running a Be of their own to block or a Bo to bounce the token into oblivion... which gets back to the problem of these cards becoming ubiquitous and killing deck diversity. Anyone who doesn't tune their mana to snow and use BeBuBo would simply lose, meaning that everyone would run enough snow to ensure a turn 1 snow land and will be running enough BeBuBo to force each other to paying a tax of 1 each turn, making an archetype that renders all other archetypes unplayable while simultaneously having absolutely miserable mirror matches. This is not a desirable game-state.
I recommend increasing the CMC for those tax spells up to 3 (at least) so that non-snow decks have 1-2 turns of unimpeded play before snow starts becoming an issue, allowing for a wider variety of decks to flourish.
If I wait for the end of someone's upkeep (the first step in which mana could even be added to the mana pool), the opponent's mana will not have had a chance to drain by any means that turn (it only drains after everyone has had priority) and you will automatically get the effect.
If they are meant to be sorceries, they would only warp the game to the umpteenth degree by forcing players to tap a mana at the beginning of your upkeep for the entire game SIMPLY BY EXISTING. Compared with previous "rhystic" payoffs like Rhystic Tutor or Rhystic Lightning (Rhystic Study doens't really count as it can't "ambush" a player that tapped out), the benefits being gained for a single mana are immense... to the point where you would pay the tax to any opponent (whether or not they actually use the card) who play snow lands... meaning that you are forced to use snow lands if anyone else is using snow lands... and in that case, why not run these cards as well.
While common consensus might claim that favoring a basic mana base would disincentivize 3-5 color "good stuff" decks and promote deck diversity, I honestly feel that these cards would end up homogenizing formats instead as everyone would need to be using these cards and a snow mana base.
...All of which you might know, if you knew how the game was actually played.
It isn't about needing a certain volume of creatures. In fact, I'd say that's kind of backwards.
MDFC lands didn't make players put more land slots into their deck. What it did was allow some of your nonland slots to double as lands when mana screwed or allow some of your land slots to function as gas if flooded (depending on your perspective). Likewise, MDFC creature//spells would let players have extra creatures if they don't need an expensive broken wings or annul at the moment (as examples) or use their creature as an answer if they are on the backfoot. MDFC creature//spells would increase the frequency of spells while allowing players to still have access to game-progressing threats. The only problem is that MDFC land/spells naturally funnel players into using the land side early on and the spell slide later on (with a few exceptions like the weak counterspell) while a card that's a spell on both sides does not make that distinction (which would likely make the cards trickier for newer or less skilled players to navigate, which wizards doesn't want).
Yeah... I have a hard time imagining a future in which you are anything other than disappointed.
Either you are expecting a standard set to churn out vintage-level all-star answers or you are hoping for the power level of the entire set to be punched in the face so that normal spells doing spell things of the appropriate power level for standard don't overshadow the creatures. Like, we'll probably get a cycle of "splashy" commander spells (like the CMD 8-9 cycle in commander legends) and a couple of good rare spells/enchantments but... yeah.
Oops all Spells decks, it sounds like. They weren't having a huge win percentage or share of the metagame but they were hard to interact with and essentially contributed to unfun non-games, which wizards wanted to reduce.
Remember, all of the changes that Wizards made today were made with the intention of increasing FUN!
1. The key words you are looking for are "In it's time", as in "not anymore".
2. Meddling mage (and a bit of Ixalan's Binding/Gideon's Intervention in Standard and nowhere else) were the only card of its sort that ever saw considerable play. Declaration of Naught, nevermore, voidstone gargoyle, and even the recent Ashiok's Erasure have seen little to no play.
3. When it comes to "how the game is played", everything ultimately comes down to what is played competitively. Look at the decks that actually make up the meta before throwing down a random card as a counter or else you're just spitting out cards that nobody actually uses. declaration of naught appears in virtually no decks so suggesting it as a counter makes no sense. Thoughtseize does appear in played decks so it would be fair to point out.
4. Yes, we expect you to do the research (or at least to absorb what is actually played via exposure to the game). You are putting out cards and all of us are going to critique it in the context of the current meta-game, not in an isolated bubble. If you want to make a card that others call good, that means being aware of these things.
Again, this shows that you are out of touch.
It has been addressed on multiple occasions why Emeria, the Sky Ruin, Vesuva, and The World Tree are not legendary cards.
1. On a mechanical level, making them non-legendary makes lands virtually unplayable. When you draw a second copy of a legendary creature, it is reasonable to expect to cast it after the first copy has been removed (and you can play the second copy to remove the first via legend rule even if it is locked down by arrest or something similar). As land destruction is so much less common, however, it is far more likely that a second copy of a land will simply be trapped in your hand for the entire game. While legendary land can still technically be created, keep in mind that the two most recent legendary lands (Inventors' Fair and The Mirror Pool could both sacrifice themselves, meaning that excess copies could eventually be played.
2. Things have also changed on a creative level (much as players are no longer thought of as planeswalkers waging war with each other since the mending occurred). Rather than a land representing exclusive access to a specific space as our domain, it represents an open mana link to that location. A single space can have more than one mana link at a time, allowing us to have multiple copies of a single land even if it feels that it should be legendary.
3. If you don't like this... so what? We are talking about the actual rules of the actual game. If you keep adding caveats and rules changes that would need to be in place to talk about your card, you are no longer talking about the game in the state where it stands... and your card remains utterly pointless (or broken, in this case) in the actual game that people play.
4. Even if Vesuva WAS legendary, the rules for copying effects mean that it would lose the legendary supertype if it copies a nonlegendary permanent (as a copy copies all of the types and supertypes of a card), which makes your argument utterly pointless to begin with.
5. I find it kind of funny how you ask for specific and detailed reasons why the cards you recommend don't work while spitting out terms like "tech extension" or "probability factor" as if those are standardized terms that we could find in the glossary of any game design handbook and not personally created buzzwords that you think everyone should automatically intuit the meaning of.
Again, you are the one who doesn't know how to play the game.
Only if you make the changes recommended.
Otherwise, it is broken.
Modern Horizons 2 should also do pretty well. I mean, if nothing else, there's fetches.
I'm pretty sure that Maro also mentioned that DFC will be closer to Kaldheim than Zendikar regarding how many there will be (Read: 1 mythic and 2-3 rares per color), meaning that this won't be the mechanic that pushes up the As-fan of sorcery/instant cards to a level where we can get a dedicated "spell-slinger set"... and I would actually be pretty worried if MDFCs were being used in that way, honestly.
In Zendikar, players generally aren't punished too badly for playing their MDFCs as lands instead of tools or creatures. If you need to do so, you are probably low on lands and making that choice may actually remove what would have otherwise been a non-game. Most players will stop playing MDFC lands that they top-deck in the late-game when they have enough mana and the "correct choice" for which side to play is rarely too obscure for new players. With Creatures/Spells, however... that's just not the case. If I have 3 creature//counterspells, playing the first two as counterspells doesn't make me more likely to want to use the last one as a creature. I could imagine games where players keep using the spell sides and end up with with long limited games where one or both players legitimately run out of threats (imagine running 12-14 creatures as normal and being forced to use 6 of those creatures as spells, for example, and you only have around 6-8 creatures to survive all of your opponent's answers and win the game). While it can be done with careful planning, using MDFC as the primary "spells matter" mechanic would be really risky.
I'd anticipate some sort of spell-morph (like that one test card) or Awaken Variant tacked onto lands so that spells make threats. Also, I believe that there was that one flavor blurb regarding Kasmina trying to recruit potential planeswalkers to respond to a threat. We might see that Spark mechanic from that other test card (loyalty counters on creatures) to reflect that to give a taste of "Planeswalkers matter" while tying everything to a traditional creature body.
There is a point at which the tried truism of asking wizards to "add good answers" to add safety valves for good threats is no longer a practical response. I feel that Uro has passed that point by a good margin.
You know what? I don’t fully understand this.
agonizing demise
banishing light
cling to dust
eat to extinction
elspeth conquers death
Epic Downfall
Erebos’s Intervention
Extinction Event
Immersturm Predator
Kitesail Freebooter
Klothys, God of Destiny
Memory Leak
Ravenform
Return to Nature
Scavenging Ooze
Shadows’ Verdict
Skyclave Apparition
Soul-Guide Lantern
Tormod’s Crypt
Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
Valki, God of Lies
Weathered Runestone
While some of these cards are unexciting, a few of them are main-deckable. We have a mainstream deck that packs crypt in the main deck for the purpose of targeting it with trickery... a deck which runs valki (which comes down before they can cast uro and steals it) and Ugin (which just kills Uro)... and Uro is STILL taking a ban.
Compared with everything listed above, what sort of “Good Answer” would need to be printed for something like Uro to be balanced? I honestly don’t think that even Path/StP would do much to stop it. I don’t think that mana leak or counterspell would do enough to stop it, either. Uro is simply a mistake, plain and simple.
Highly doubtful.
This set will have absolutely no new cards and there will only be 24 cards per draft pod that did not originally appear in the time spiral block... which was not an artifact set.
I imagine that they went with "candy + cupid + hearts" to sidestep possible orientation politics (with cries of exclusion if they only show straight couples and cries of "PC pandering" if they include any other couples). I'm a bit surprised that wizards would sidestep the issue instead of punching through so soon after Wizards vowed to write the stories they want to write in spite of politics, however.
Dude, your initial point boils down to "Wizards is releasing an obviously bad product". That is an opinion that you are welcome to have. As it is an opinion, however, I don't have the ability to say "Nuh uh" and forcefully change your mind. All that we can do by means of conversation is share agreeing or contrasting opinions and share our ideas on why things are the way that they are (which is still unknowable to some degree but that we can probably reach a greater level of consensus on). Explaining why something is the way it is does not automatically excuse bad decisions or argue "this is the only way things could have been" but it can help to reveal external factors, build evidence that decisions were made with purpose rather than being slapdash works, and (in some cases) excuse some levels of asymmetry.
Why two of these products?
The format for these products isn't all that arbitrary. Wizards is obviously and transparently copying the format of their Theros God Secret Lairs from the previous year (1 multicolor mythic and 2 single color mythics of the component colors and same types).
Why is Sun Titan not here?
Because sun titan does not neatly fit into the format of the aforementioned Secret Lairs (as there was no white multicolor titan in Theros). As has been pointed out, the large number of reprints that Sun Titan has received relative to other titans may also explain why it is not here... and the corresponding lower price tag may actually increase the odds of Sun Titan appearing as a bonus promo in one or both of those packages. If all but one of the original titan cycle gets cool alternate art, that admittedly upsets my desire for symmetry and cool-looking cards. At the same time, it can be argued that not all secret lair drops are designed explicitly for Commander (thinking back to that drop with four serum vision, for example).
Why not include all 7 Elder Giants in one big drop?
(again, not saying that these are GOOD or SUFFICIENT reasons but that these are likely ACTUAL reasons)
1. Packaging 7 mythics in a single drop may risk drawing attention away from other drops being put out simultaneously. As long as Wizards keeps insisting on putting out a half-dozen drops at once (and insist they do, apparently), it is bad business sense for them to to print "The Good One" and make a bunch of others that fewer people have any interest in.
2. Secret Lairs don't typically include full cycles other than lands (Not sure whether the Zendikar one would count as one of those cards was originally an uncommon). I hope that this changes in the future (and that we get better packaging that allows secret lairs to be displayed as collector art pieces, closer to the Comic-con planeswalker kits).
3. While the new secret lair has 7 cards, Wizards may be going above and beyond what they are willing to release in normal drops when they do charity drops (releasing 7 cards in this one, more valuable cards than normal with the previous one such as consecrated sphinx, and releasing those brand new MLP cards in the charity drop before that). What wizards plans to do in an upcoming charity drop may not be a statement of what they are planning to do in regular drops, in other words.
Why do they not cost the same?
one of them has the weakest titan and two titans with notable bans and the other has three titans that don't have bans in longer-running formats. Nobody would buy the Simic one if it cost the same.