There is a reason WOTC spends millions of dollars on their marketing department and it is the same reason all big companies do which is that it is because marketing is an absolutely crucial part of whether a product will succeed or not. I would not be surprised if the marketing and public relations department over at WotC is considerably larger than that of the entire creative department.
The way WotC trickles out spoilers, times the release of their stories, crafts their teasers and trailers etc. are all part of a multi-million dollar marketing campaign that countless man hours of research and implementation have gone into. The reason WotC is willing to sink millions of dollars into this marketing strategy is because it is a key part of promoting, hyping and selling their product. To suggest that having almost every hype generating and future meta defining card in a set spoiled two sets ahead of time won't have an impact on their bottom line is very silly. I am not a marketing expert nor do I work of WotC so calculating the exact details of the coming financial impact is beyond me but one thing is certain which is it has completely derailed their entire multi-million dollar marketing strategy for the next half a year.
With a company like MTG the intellectual property is the product. We will see most of the rare and mythic cards from Ixilan available to play on various third party MTG software proxies probably within a week or two. Half of that sets meta will be solved before a single card even hits the market. It's similiar to a movie in this respect. If a blurry incomplete copy of a movie is leaked months before it is released in theaters it's ticket sales are decimated. Sure watching that crappy blurry version is nothing like getting to see it glorious Imax 3d, but it will completely gut the hype regardless. Ixilan will literally be old news before it even hits the shelves. MTG is a huge game world wide. It's sales are upwards of 300 million dollars a year, so if the leak costs them even just a few percentage points of their sales for the set then the hit will be in the millions of dollars. Talking to a buddy of mine who is a marketing major he thinks the losses will likely be considerably higher than that.
It's a shame. MTG has been limping along for a while now. The last thing it needed was a huge kick in the teeth while it was trying to get back on its feet again.
If your old friend came by and got angry at you for breaking a promise, then slapped you and stated quite clearly that she was going to make you go do your job even if she had to use force would you then turn around and stab her in the face fearing for your life?
Bad comparison. Nahiri initiated the physical combat. Nahiri impaled Sorin by hurling pointed darts of stone at him while he is in a weakened state at one point. What if, given his drained state, that had been enough to kill him?
That's exactly what I just said. Sorin breaks his word and refuses to do his job in about as condescending and insulting manner as he can muster. Nahiri gets pissed and and does the planeswalker equivalent of losing her temper and slapping him across the face by running him through a couple of times while telling him that he is going to do his job even if she has to force him to. In old walker terms, that's basically a ***** slap followed by twisting somebody's arm to get them to say uncle, nothing even approaching a real injury let alone a life threatening one. Like I pointed out earlier Sorin has strait up shattered Nahiri's arm in the past during a simple training exercise just to show her how her body worked now that she was a planeswalker. Planes walkers play rough and their little sparing match after Nahirir tells him that she's going to make him do his job even if she has to force him to is nothing even remotely approaching mortal combat. Old walkers were essentially Gods.
The only point in the fight were things go from Nahari roughing Sorin up a bit for being a lying prick and twisting his arm to make him acquiesce to keeping his broken promise to actual real combat is when Sorin's newly created monster jumps in and actually tries to kill Nahiri. Even then Nahiri isn't really in mortal peril simply because she is an old walker and Avacyn is not. Nahiri gets the upper hand while fighting his rabid attack dog and this is the point where Sorin calmly steps in and banishes Nahiri to a fate worse than death and then leaves her there to rot in his own little personal sensory deprivation torture chamber for the rest of eternity. Go back and read that part of the story again. Literally everything Sorin says and does completely flies in the face of him in any way fearing for his life. He isn't even being attacked when he does it.
Now, that doesn't mean Sorin is squeaky clean, either. All he had to do when Nahiri came is be like "Nahiri, I'm sorry that my new protections messed up the call. I'll do what I can to help." Now, how he actually was out of line but Nahiri then escalated it further by threatening his life. And things went downhill from there...
Nahiri never at any point in their initial confrontation threatened his life. She did the planes walker equivalent of slapping him across the face and twisting his arm behind his back to try and force him into honor the promise he had broken. Nahiri even strait up tells him her intent is to drag him back to Zendikar by force if necessary and make him do his damn job. She makes it quite clear she intends to drag him there alive so they can finish the work together. She doesn't leave it ambiguous. She at no point tells him or implies that she harbors murderous intent or even a desire to do him real harm. Planes walkers play rough. I mean Sorin strait up shattered her arm at one point while sparing just to teach her a lesson about how her body worked when she was younger.
Sorin's actions right up until he casts her into the Helvault and then leaves her to rot are very understandable if a bit selfish and arrogant. I was seriously on his side up until this point. Nahiri has the right to be pissed, but she shouldn't have slapped him around like that. She should have been a bit more patient. This however in no way excuses what Sorin does next. He basically does the equivalent of reacting to his angry step daughter slapping him by chaining her up in a sensory deprivation torture chamber with a horde of Hell's most vile demons for the rest of eternity. This is a fate considerably worse than being tortured to death for days with blow torches and pliers. Seriously, that is some next level evil right there. He didn't just do this to some enemy or even a stranger, this is what he did to his old friend for no other reason than she got a bit rough with him after he broke his promise to her. Never was his life in danger. She had made it quite clear what her intentions were and they were not to kill him, but simply to force him to make good on his word whether he liked it or not.
Unexplained nothing. Many of this block's stories have featured her descent and the motivations behind it, and her sympathisers are desperate enough to ignore them.
I was pretty clear with what I meant, if you're going to respond to me, respond to me and not a strawman. Her turn to pure villainy isn't adequately explained from the character she used to be. Getting revenge on Sorin is one thing. Dooming his whole plane because of one guy's actions is a whole other level.
Your presumption is that her actions are villainous. They are at worst neutral in the grand scheme of things. She spared one innocent plane and directed Emrukul to Innistrad and doomed it instead. In the grand scheme of things her actions didn't kill any more innocent people than would have died anyway. Her reasons were a selfish sense of vengeance and poetic justice but her actual actions aren't really detrimental in the grand scheme of things. The universe pretty much breaks even for what she did. As she said herself, Emrakul had to go somewhere. This is in stark contrast with what Sorin pulled where his selfish actions directly led to countless millions of more innocents dying than would otherwise have, ultimately including his own kin on Innistrad.
Had he not broken his oath and cast the Eldrazi's jailer into that eternal torture chamber he designed to hold his enemies then the Eldrazi's warden would have still been on the job preventing their escape. He wasn't just negligent in his duties to help keep them locked up, he directly interfered with and dispatched the one being capable of properly tending to their prison. Nahiri just switched some of the victims that resulted from Sorin's selfish actions. Nahiri didn't really do anything to increase the grand death toll caused by that chain of events he set into motion by casting his old friend into the Hell vault for a thousand years of torture. She just made sure that some of the people who were destined to die because of him were the ones he cared about rather than other innocents.
She's certainly no hero, but calling her a full blown villain is maybe pushing it a bit. Even if you consider her a bad guy, she certainly isn't the same caliber of villain that Sorin is, for instance. She reminds me of Beatrix from Kill Bill. Not really a villain, but not really a good guy either.
He's not dead. He got carbonited for when Creative wants another revenge story.
Although I guess, sooner or later, one of them will die for good. Don't see a way out of that little spiral of hate.
Surely now that they are even, or at least they will be after Sorin spends a thousand more years with his insides being put through a stone blender, they will hug it out and have a good laugh about their little spat.
"This guy sucks. He should cost 1cc and exile all your opponents creatures when he flips to his human side and he should grant +8/+8 and trample to all werewolves and wolves when he flips to his werewolf side." It's hilarious how much people are pissing and moaning over this card when it's actually quite good.
She seems pretty good. Not an auto-include in WR decks, but if at the very worst she's exiling a decent slew of permanents, she'll se some degree of play in Standard IMO.
Her +2 is alright-ish, and to me it seems like it was something else in development that kinda broke something out and they decided to swap it for something "safer". Its playability will rely on Madness, but honestly I'm not too hot about it. Looting effects, however, are the perfect complement to Nahiri's main use: pressure. The real gem here is that the ability is a +2, and that's awesome.
Her -2 is pretty good. "But it only exiles tapped creatures!", you might say, and yeah, that's kind of a bummer. But she's still the 4-mana Planeswalker that answers the most permanents. Her minus effect is like half of Karn Liberated's effect, with the drawbacks being not hitting lands, untapped creatures and Planeswalkers, but that's still pretty good, because Karn is pretty good! But her minus ability is awesome by the sheer pressure it puts into your opponent. Think about it for a sec: Once you drop her, she's a 6 loyalty Planeswalker threatening into a 8 mana Ultimate next turn that will kill anything that swings at her and doesn't drops her at below 1 Loyalty. Once she hits the table, she'll pressure your opponent into action, and then she will punish him for it. That's why I think Nahiri is pretty good. She's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of girl.
Her -8 is a massive threat. Honestly, one of the most threatening Ultimates I've ever seen. Not because it's extremely powerful - it's actually pretty tame as far as Ultimates goes, but as mentioned before because she is both very fast to get into Ultimate range and punishes your opponent when he tries to retaliate. Shame it's kind of a massive nonbo with her +2 ability. Would love to see her fetch from Grave as well. Now that would make her a powerhouse.
Doubt she'll make a splash in Modern or, heck, maybe she ends up without a deck and fails even in Standard. But I personally think she's great, and if we ever get a Madness or Delirium deck that has some massive beefy creature/artifact finisher for her Ultimate I'm confident she'll see play.
The biggest problem I think she will have is that she will have trouble protecting herself. More often than not the only way she can target and remove a creature is after the thing has gotten to take a swing at her and if they manage to damage her badly she won't have the counters left to get rid of them. Remember you just spent your 4 drop slot on bringing her to the field so your opponent is more likely than not going to have a pretty serious creature advantage over you at this point. You are quite likely going to be forced into blocking unfavorably for at least one round to keep her healthy.
I think the best play with her will be waiting to play her until you see a tapped creature you want to kill and then using her removal ability immediately. The problem with this is it leaves her with just 2 counters which puts her into shock range or just within the killing range of even a small unblocked creature. It also means you will likely have to play her reactively rather than proactively a lot of the time. I think she is a neat planeswalker, but I do see some potential issues with playing her in more aggressive builds. I think she belongs in a more defensive deck that utilizes a lot of tapping lock down.
All you people out there who are hyped about this card, I suggest you proxy it for a bit before deciding to buy or not. I immediately fell in love with this card when I saw it, but after mulling it over for a bit, I realized it's recursion ability is both extremely expensive, tricky to execute and narrow in scope. After testing it a bit in an aggro zombie build I realized this card wasn't even close to being as good as classic zombie cards like gravecrawler and bloodghast for aggro applications. Bloodghast and Gravecrawler both can return directly from the graveyard rather than just when they get killed. Bloodghast does it for zero mana and gravecrawler does it for one black compared to the BBB it costs to do it with Relentless Dead. It also forces you to leave one black mana open at the end of your turn if you want to be able to make sure you can keep it from dying permanently from removal.
Since it's recursion only works upon death you are pretty much forced to run this in an aristocrats style deck with consistent and very cheap sacrifice outlets otherwise it will be your opponent that always gets to decide when you can use it's abilities. On top of this you need to run it along side a lot of other value zombies that can't bring themselves back from the dead for it's main ability to be useful. This card also needs lots of mana to shine so you have to run it in a mid-range grindy sort of deck to really get value out of it.
My suggestion is that before pulling the trigger and buying this card you try running it in a few different builds. This is a good card but it's not nearly as amazing or versatile as I first thought. Proxying with it a bit was a real eye opener. This card only really shines in a very specific kind of deck rather than just any old zombie build. In standard it will definitely see play along side cards like Nantuko Husk, Fleshbag Marauder, shambling goblin and Kalitas, but I'm not sure those decks will be top tier. The current aristocrats decks don't have that many zombies in them and this guy needs to have other zombies to interact with in order to shine. We will have to wait and see if we get enough great zombies to make a top tier zombie tribal. If those cards don't materialize then Relentless Dead isn't going to have enough partners to tango with.
Edit: Looks like I'm an imbecile. Bloodghast is a vampire. My bad.
They like it because it means more decks will want fetchlands+BFZ lands, and more expensive rare lands means more Khans and BFZ will be opened. IMO it's idiotic that something like Blood Moon or even Spreading Seas is in standard right now to punish these ridiculous mana bases. Hopefully that comes next set.
3
The way WotC trickles out spoilers, times the release of their stories, crafts their teasers and trailers etc. are all part of a multi-million dollar marketing campaign that countless man hours of research and implementation have gone into. The reason WotC is willing to sink millions of dollars into this marketing strategy is because it is a key part of promoting, hyping and selling their product. To suggest that having almost every hype generating and future meta defining card in a set spoiled two sets ahead of time won't have an impact on their bottom line is very silly. I am not a marketing expert nor do I work of WotC so calculating the exact details of the coming financial impact is beyond me but one thing is certain which is it has completely derailed their entire multi-million dollar marketing strategy for the next half a year.
With a company like MTG the intellectual property is the product. We will see most of the rare and mythic cards from Ixilan available to play on various third party MTG software proxies probably within a week or two. Half of that sets meta will be solved before a single card even hits the market. It's similiar to a movie in this respect. If a blurry incomplete copy of a movie is leaked months before it is released in theaters it's ticket sales are decimated. Sure watching that crappy blurry version is nothing like getting to see it glorious Imax 3d, but it will completely gut the hype regardless. Ixilan will literally be old news before it even hits the shelves. MTG is a huge game world wide. It's sales are upwards of 300 million dollars a year, so if the leak costs them even just a few percentage points of their sales for the set then the hit will be in the millions of dollars. Talking to a buddy of mine who is a marketing major he thinks the losses will likely be considerably higher than that.
It's a shame. MTG has been limping along for a while now. The last thing it needed was a huge kick in the teeth while it was trying to get back on its feet again.
1
That's exactly what I just said. Sorin breaks his word and refuses to do his job in about as condescending and insulting manner as he can muster. Nahiri gets pissed and and does the planeswalker equivalent of losing her temper and slapping him across the face by running him through a couple of times while telling him that he is going to do his job even if she has to force him to. In old walker terms, that's basically a ***** slap followed by twisting somebody's arm to get them to say uncle, nothing even approaching a real injury let alone a life threatening one. Like I pointed out earlier Sorin has strait up shattered Nahiri's arm in the past during a simple training exercise just to show her how her body worked now that she was a planeswalker. Planes walkers play rough and their little sparing match after Nahirir tells him that she's going to make him do his job even if she has to force him to is nothing even remotely approaching mortal combat. Old walkers were essentially Gods.
The only point in the fight were things go from Nahari roughing Sorin up a bit for being a lying prick and twisting his arm to make him acquiesce to keeping his broken promise to actual real combat is when Sorin's newly created monster jumps in and actually tries to kill Nahiri. Even then Nahiri isn't really in mortal peril simply because she is an old walker and Avacyn is not. Nahiri gets the upper hand while fighting his rabid attack dog and this is the point where Sorin calmly steps in and banishes Nahiri to a fate worse than death and then leaves her there to rot in his own little personal sensory deprivation torture chamber for the rest of eternity. Go back and read that part of the story again. Literally everything Sorin says and does completely flies in the face of him in any way fearing for his life. He isn't even being attacked when he does it.
1
Nahiri never at any point in their initial confrontation threatened his life. She did the planes walker equivalent of slapping him across the face and twisting his arm behind his back to try and force him into honor the promise he had broken. Nahiri even strait up tells him her intent is to drag him back to Zendikar by force if necessary and make him do his damn job. She makes it quite clear she intends to drag him there alive so they can finish the work together. She doesn't leave it ambiguous. She at no point tells him or implies that she harbors murderous intent or even a desire to do him real harm. Planes walkers play rough. I mean Sorin strait up shattered her arm at one point while sparing just to teach her a lesson about how her body worked when she was younger.
Sorin's actions right up until he casts her into the Helvault and then leaves her to rot are very understandable if a bit selfish and arrogant. I was seriously on his side up until this point. Nahiri has the right to be pissed, but she shouldn't have slapped him around like that. She should have been a bit more patient. This however in no way excuses what Sorin does next. He basically does the equivalent of reacting to his angry step daughter slapping him by chaining her up in a sensory deprivation torture chamber with a horde of Hell's most vile demons for the rest of eternity. This is a fate considerably worse than being tortured to death for days with blow torches and pliers. Seriously, that is some next level evil right there. He didn't just do this to some enemy or even a stranger, this is what he did to his old friend for no other reason than she got a bit rough with him after he broke his promise to her. Never was his life in danger. She had made it quite clear what her intentions were and they were not to kill him, but simply to force him to make good on his word whether he liked it or not.
1
Your presumption is that her actions are villainous. They are at worst neutral in the grand scheme of things. She spared one innocent plane and directed Emrukul to Innistrad and doomed it instead. In the grand scheme of things her actions didn't kill any more innocent people than would have died anyway. Her reasons were a selfish sense of vengeance and poetic justice but her actual actions aren't really detrimental in the grand scheme of things. The universe pretty much breaks even for what she did. As she said herself, Emrakul had to go somewhere. This is in stark contrast with what Sorin pulled where his selfish actions directly led to countless millions of more innocents dying than would otherwise have, ultimately including his own kin on Innistrad.
Had he not broken his oath and cast the Eldrazi's jailer into that eternal torture chamber he designed to hold his enemies then the Eldrazi's warden would have still been on the job preventing their escape. He wasn't just negligent in his duties to help keep them locked up, he directly interfered with and dispatched the one being capable of properly tending to their prison. Nahiri just switched some of the victims that resulted from Sorin's selfish actions. Nahiri didn't really do anything to increase the grand death toll caused by that chain of events he set into motion by casting his old friend into the Hell vault for a thousand years of torture. She just made sure that some of the people who were destined to die because of him were the ones he cared about rather than other innocents.
She's certainly no hero, but calling her a full blown villain is maybe pushing it a bit. Even if you consider her a bad guy, she certainly isn't the same caliber of villain that Sorin is, for instance. She reminds me of Beatrix from Kill Bill. Not really a villain, but not really a good guy either.
1
Surely now that they are even, or at least they will be after Sorin spends a thousand more years with his insides being put through a stone blender, they will hug it out and have a good laugh about their little spat.
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The biggest problem I think she will have is that she will have trouble protecting herself. More often than not the only way she can target and remove a creature is after the thing has gotten to take a swing at her and if they manage to damage her badly she won't have the counters left to get rid of them. Remember you just spent your 4 drop slot on bringing her to the field so your opponent is more likely than not going to have a pretty serious creature advantage over you at this point. You are quite likely going to be forced into blocking unfavorably for at least one round to keep her healthy.
I think the best play with her will be waiting to play her until you see a tapped creature you want to kill and then using her removal ability immediately. The problem with this is it leaves her with just 2 counters which puts her into shock range or just within the killing range of even a small unblocked creature. It also means you will likely have to play her reactively rather than proactively a lot of the time. I think she is a neat planeswalker, but I do see some potential issues with playing her in more aggressive builds. I think she belongs in a more defensive deck that utilizes a lot of tapping lock down.
2
Since it's recursion only works upon death you are pretty much forced to run this in an aristocrats style deck with consistent and very cheap sacrifice outlets otherwise it will be your opponent that always gets to decide when you can use it's abilities. On top of this you need to run it along side a lot of other value zombies that can't bring themselves back from the dead for it's main ability to be useful. This card also needs lots of mana to shine so you have to run it in a mid-range grindy sort of deck to really get value out of it.
My suggestion is that before pulling the trigger and buying this card you try running it in a few different builds. This is a good card but it's not nearly as amazing or versatile as I first thought. Proxying with it a bit was a real eye opener. This card only really shines in a very specific kind of deck rather than just any old zombie build. In standard it will definitely see play along side cards like Nantuko Husk, Fleshbag Marauder, shambling goblin and Kalitas, but I'm not sure those decks will be top tier. The current aristocrats decks don't have that many zombies in them and this guy needs to have other zombies to interact with in order to shine. We will have to wait and see if we get enough great zombies to make a top tier zombie tribal. If those cards don't materialize then Relentless Dead isn't going to have enough partners to tango with.
Edit: Looks like I'm an imbecile. Bloodghast is a vampire. My bad.