Yeah, so far it looks to be as well designed as Amonkhet. Maybe even more fun, too.
Personally, the Escape mechanic makes me worried for limited.
While many formats have been slow (eldraine had life-gaining tokens as a prominent mechanic), the existence of escape may make combat too daunting and dangerous as most escape creatures double as "rattlesnakes".. even with the prevalence of exile effects we've seen (with more sure to come).
I can imagine nightmare scenarios similar to Saviors of Kamigawa limited, wherein board states grind to a halt so players can fill their hand and start discarding cards each turn to fuel more escapes.
This card... is actually pretty sweet. With this guy out, I can kill a creature with Mire's Grasp to revive Aphemia, the Cacophany... who exiles the grasp at end of turn for even more value. Kind of fun to think about.
Decent include for Gallia as mentioned above. Also good for Korvold in brawl. In limited, however, this guy is the bomb. I can imagine having multiple times where you need one of your creatures to die so it can escape (or you need one more card in your grave to stage an escape) and having a halfway decent sack engine is important.
Actually though this card might be rare before I looked too carefully.
It’s the only equipment (other than overpriced hammer) that really gives a big boost to little creatures out there... and allows for a nice Temur mana base with paradise Druid (mana fixing and potential haste, vigilance, menace, flying, hexproof beatstick in the air) and the 1-drop halberd.
I don't really get people who expect an indestructible Archangel of Thune for 3 mana.
Lifegain has been a surprisingly okay (if unexciting) strategy for a while with pridemate, aerialist, hawk, and that annoying 1-drop vampire.
Heliod makes those decks notably better as it allows ANY creature (even 1/1 lifelink tokens) to build up into a threat rather than relying on a specific few cards from the library that grow... plus this guy is hard to remove.
While this is a terrible EDH card, it's a decent Mythic for standard (and maybe historic).
Honestly, while everyone else here is drooling over the broken applications, can I just take a quick moment to appreciate what this card is at face value.
I mean, this is among THE best reanimation that mono-red has ever received (outside of artifact shenanigans). Even without the obvious combos, this is an obvious staple.
1. Play it with 6 cards in graveyard.
2. Play lion's eye diamond and trigger, discarding wheel of fortune.
3. Use mana and cards from graveyard to cast wheel.
4. Cast diamond again and trigger, creating 3 mana and binning 7 cards from hand to repeat cycle, ending with one additional card in your graveyard.
5. Eventually exile Eternal Scourge and bin food chain and a big burn spell.
6. Use mana to cast food chain and go off.
So it’s an affordable and splashable free sac outlet that gives you a free body yo sack and has the possibility of returning from the dead (using your other sacked creatures as a resource) in the mid-game as a respectable thread...
If your strategy doesn't include ramping up in mana, drawing a bunch of cards and using the broken tutors to fetch up the mistakes in magic's history, chances are you are going to lose to the decks that do.
They do to a certain extend and always be what I want to know is where you would draw the line to what that extent should be and what that would accomplish.
And Rosy also raised a point I'd like to add to and that is if you remove the "Autoincludes" other cards will just take their spot leaving you exactly where you started.
There are cards that are way, way to good at what they do that overcentralize the game.
Every blue deck I make has the same ramp package, the same draw package, the same tutor package.
If these cards weren't so standalone broken, I would have to start looking for different versions of the effects and other synergies instead of just mindlessly throwing in the busted cards. Like if my choice is diabolic tutor or another threat, suddenly I have options. Deck building becomes interesting again.
So... from what I'm gathering... you want every piece of interaction, card filtering, card advantage, and mana advantage to be so grossly inefficient and/or niche that which one you use (or whether you even use them) doesn't make a meaningful impact on your win/loss record. Am I finally getting this right?
Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Sol Ring, Chrome Mox, Mox Diamond, arcane signet, The ten signets, the ten talismans, darksteel ingot, chromatic lantern, Trinket Mage, Seething Song, Caged Sun, Gauntlet of Might, Gauntlet of Power, Kodama’s Reach, Cultivate, Harrow, Circuitous Route, Explosive Vegetation, Sakura-Tribe Elder, Nature’s Lore, Farseek, Three Visita, Boreal Druid, Llanowar Elves, Elvish Mystic, Fyndhorn Elves, Birds of Paradise, Noble Hierarch, Land Tax, Tithe, High Tide, Bubbling Muck, Cabal Coffers, Nykthos, Ancient Tomb, City of Traitors, Expedition Map, Thaumatic Compass, Exploration, Mul Daya Oracle, Azusa, Coiling Oracle, Gitaxian Probe, Preordain, Ponder, Serum Visions, Brainstorm, Time Spiral, Timetwister, Wheel of Fate, Rhystic Study, Consecrated Sphinx, Sylvan Library, Smothering Tithe, Windfall, Necropotence, Phyrexian Arena, Yawgmoth’s Will, Toxic Deluge, Cyclonic Rift, Wrath of God, Damnation, Chaos Warp, Generous Gift, Beast Within, Harmonize, Blasphemous Act, Skullclamp, Grasp of Fate, Swan Song, Force of Will, Force of Negation, Cryptic Command, Pongify, Rapid Hybridization, dreamstone hedron, Hedron Archive, Brainstone, carpet of Flowers, Perilous Vault, Nevinyrral’s Disk, Sylvan Scrying, Crop Rotation, Enlightened Tutor, Idyllic Tutor, Sterling Grove, Open the Armory, Steelshaper’s Gift, Mystical Tutor, Merchant’s Scroll, Worldly Tutor, Tooth and Nail, Chord of Calling, Eldritch Evolution, bloom tender, Natural Order, Vampiric Tutor, Demonic Tutor, Beseech the Queen, Mastermind’s Acquisition, Diabolic Tutor, Increasing Ambition, Gamble, Imperial Recruiter, Curse of Swine, diabolic intern, Recruiter of the Guard...
That is over a hundred cards I just listed and that is likely the tip of the iceberg. While some of them aren’t competitive right now, you need to nuke almost everything to get rid of the auto-picks. Even if all of the top rate tutors in black were banned, for example, it would still be better to run Diabolic Tutor rather than running yet another token creator in your Endrik deck.
This is why I don’t get the complaint. You want to get those deck slots “back” but the simple fact is that you likely never had them to begin with. What most likely happened is that you (and/or your gaming group) gained more knowledge of the card game and got better cards. The game didn’t magically change overnight.
Beyond that, the request doesn’t make sense when you get down to it. When I’m crafting Toshiro Umezawa, he wants me to use kill spells. If any of those kill spells are decent, however, I will feel pressured to use them in my Endrek deck to interact and follow the template. If there are enough awesome token makers for Endrek that it’s worth not using that kill spell, however, then Toshiro is pressured to use those token spells. I don’t know what sort of artificial silos you want between commanders but that is fundamentally not how this game works.
I guess that I should ask what type of cards you actually want. It seems that you oppose generic good cards and cards that are so great for the archetype that they are obvious. When building an Orzhov Enchantment Deck, you would be against Land Tax and necropotence (which are generically powerful) along with cards like Enlightened Tutor (which is an auto-include for enchantment decks). That just seems to leave us with middle-ground cards like Extinguish Hope or Three Dreams. If you banned tutor/necro/tax, however, we would be having this exact same conversation about how cards like Extinguish Hopes, by being the best available tier of enchantment support, forces you to include it and robs you of your deck slots.
I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. Could you give me an example of the sort of synergy cards you wish could be played that would not risk becoming autoincludes if all of the better cards were banned? That just seems like a problem of infinite regression from where I’m standing.
Personally, the Escape mechanic makes me worried for limited.
While many formats have been slow (eldraine had life-gaining tokens as a prominent mechanic), the existence of escape may make combat too daunting and dangerous as most escape creatures double as "rattlesnakes".. even with the prevalence of exile effects we've seen (with more sure to come).
I can imagine nightmare scenarios similar to Saviors of Kamigawa limited, wherein board states grind to a halt so players can fill their hand and start discarding cards each turn to fuel more escapes.
angelic exaltation
castle embereth
Cavalier of Flame
embereth skyblazer
glass of the guildpact
heraldic banner
icon of ancestry
inspiring Unicorn
the circle of loyalty
venerated loxodon
that new 5-drop from the collectors packs that pumps everything each turn.
while a few instants and sorceries add one-time buffs (or counters], that’s the main list as far as I’m concerned.
Decent include for Gallia as mentioned above. Also good for Korvold in brawl. In limited, however, this guy is the bomb. I can imagine having multiple times where you need one of your creatures to die so it can escape (or you need one more card in your grave to stage an escape) and having a halfway decent sack engine is important.
Actually though this card might be rare before I looked too carefully.
I know that many people will see this card and think of Fervent Champion but my first thought is actually Glaive of the Guildpact
It’s the only equipment (other than overpriced hammer) that really gives a big boost to little creatures out there... and allows for a nice Temur mana base with paradise Druid (mana fixing and potential haste, vigilance, menace, flying, hexproof beatstick in the air) and the 1-drop halberd.
that’s unique in and of itself.
On the whole, it kind of reminds me of Wall of Omens.
Lifegain has been a surprisingly okay (if unexciting) strategy for a while with pridemate, aerialist, hawk, and that annoying 1-drop vampire.
Heliod makes those decks notably better as it allows ANY creature (even 1/1 lifelink tokens) to build up into a threat rather than relying on a specific few cards from the library that grow... plus this guy is hard to remove.
While this is a terrible EDH card, it's a decent Mythic for standard (and maybe historic).
Seriously, though, this card gives me some serious Academy Researchers flashbacks.
I mean, this is among THE best reanimation that mono-red has ever received (outside of artifact shenanigans). Even without the obvious combos, this is an obvious staple.
...okay, Theros is doing pretty well.
Can you use this card to loop wheel of fortune and Lion's Eye Diamond (getting a net gain of 1 card in your graveyard each time)?
Edit: how to properly use this card:
1. Play it with 6 cards in graveyard.
2. Play lion's eye diamond and trigger, discarding wheel of fortune.
3. Use mana and cards from graveyard to cast wheel.
4. Cast diamond again and trigger, creating 3 mana and binning 7 cards from hand to repeat cycle, ending with one additional card in your graveyard.
5. Eventually exile Eternal Scourge and bin food chain and a big burn spell.
6. Use mana to cast food chain and go off.
Good card. Will obtain!
So... from what I'm gathering... you want every piece of interaction, card filtering, card advantage, and mana advantage to be so grossly inefficient and/or niche that which one you use (or whether you even use them) doesn't make a meaningful impact on your win/loss record. Am I finally getting this right?
That is over a hundred cards I just listed and that is likely the tip of the iceberg. While some of them aren’t competitive right now, you need to nuke almost everything to get rid of the auto-picks. Even if all of the top rate tutors in black were banned, for example, it would still be better to run Diabolic Tutor rather than running yet another token creator in your Endrik deck.
This is why I don’t get the complaint. You want to get those deck slots “back” but the simple fact is that you likely never had them to begin with. What most likely happened is that you (and/or your gaming group) gained more knowledge of the card game and got better cards. The game didn’t magically change overnight.
Beyond that, the request doesn’t make sense when you get down to it. When I’m crafting Toshiro Umezawa, he wants me to use kill spells. If any of those kill spells are decent, however, I will feel pressured to use them in my Endrek deck to interact and follow the template. If there are enough awesome token makers for Endrek that it’s worth not using that kill spell, however, then Toshiro is pressured to use those token spells. I don’t know what sort of artificial silos you want between commanders but that is fundamentally not how this game works.
I guess that I should ask what type of cards you actually want. It seems that you oppose generic good cards and cards that are so great for the archetype that they are obvious. When building an Orzhov Enchantment Deck, you would be against Land Tax and necropotence (which are generically powerful) along with cards like Enlightened Tutor (which is an auto-include for enchantment decks). That just seems to leave us with middle-ground cards like Extinguish Hope or Three Dreams. If you banned tutor/necro/tax, however, we would be having this exact same conversation about how cards like Extinguish Hopes, by being the best available tier of enchantment support, forces you to include it and robs you of your deck slots.
I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. Could you give me an example of the sort of synergy cards you wish could be played that would not risk becoming autoincludes if all of the better cards were banned? That just seems like a problem of infinite regression from where I’m standing.