Sure heres how it goes down.
For when you have champion and forger in play:
if you can make WWR heres what you get with forger
first you get desperate ritual and get WRRR
then you get manamorphose to filter and get WWRR
then you get repeated reverberations and have RW
then you get manamorphose and get 2 copies to draw 3 and get RRRWWW
then you get 3 activations to get another reverbations if you have it and another manamorphose to increase your mana even more, then you can get boros charm to give him double strike and then use fist of flames on it to give it trample and alot of attack. Usually ends up being a 13/1 with double strike and trample.
if you only have RW available but can get up to WWR you can first get chance for glory and attempt the combo above on the following turn.
if its really late into the game you can get reverberations into another reverberations then cast a boros charm to get 7 copies doing 4 damage each.
Am I missing something here? You have to let the stack clear to re-equip the Sunforger, since equip is sorcery speed. So what exactly is on the stack when you use Sunforger to cast Reverberate? After the first Manamorphose, the stack should be empty with RRWW in your mana pool.
Then, you re-equip Sunforger, activate the ability and unattach Sunforger to get Reverberate… but there's nothing on the stack for Reverberate to target. Manamorphose should have already resolved.
They HAD to roll out Historic soon. With a new rotation coming up, players are about lose a ton of cards on Arena. This gives the cards rotating some sort of use once they are no longer playable in standard. If they didn't do this, plenty of people would have peaced out of Arena because all of those cards that they spent money, gold, and/or wild cards acquiring would be absolutely worthless.
They needed to create Historic in order to show that they have a plan on Arena for cards rotating out of Standard. My guess is that they support it more if it becomes widely popular in the Arena community, or when the card pool is larger and more robust to produce a metagame that's different enough from Standard.
WotC is a business. It wants to keep as many people engaged with their product as possible. If a format is popular, it makes more sense to support it and produce product aimed at that playerbase than it does try to cripple in hopes they playerbase will switch to Standard to support that product. Why do you think they kept making Masters sets and Modern Horizons? It would be like Coca-Cola purposely tanking Sprite, in hopes of former Sprite drinkers to start buying Coca-Cola.
I'm curious to see the reasoning on why we should have such opposition to having to run gravehate.
Because multiple previous decks have been banned for what Hogaak is doing. And the abuse of the graveyard was specifically cited (albeit ham fistedly, and in-line with my above criticism of their logic) as a justification for banning a deck. Nothing matters any more. Consistency is irrelevant.
I don't disagree with you on that one. But is having to run grave-hate inherently wrong, or just a natural progression of the format? Why or why not?
I've just seen some people use the prevalence of grave-hate in decks as a sign that the format is unhealthy. But I often wonder if that's only because the format went for a long time with the graveyard as primarily as food for Tarmogoyf or potential targets for Snapcaster, as you mentioned a few pages back. Should we cling to the past, or just move forward and accept that interacting with the graveyard is just something you need to pack (akin to the Force of Will/Brainstorm package in Legacy fair decks)?
This thought is meant outside of the Hogaak deck. I suspect something will be removed from that deck at some point, but it still doesn't stop me from pondering the above idea.
Why should the graveyard be the exception? In certain metagames, it's completely reasonable to play 4 Fatal Push, but that's a sign of a healthy metagame, but 4 Surgical Extractions main is for some reason a symptom of unhealthy decks. If you get run over by a creature deck… but you don't have a single piece of creature removal, the response is really "Sorry, Charlie. You should've packed some creature removal in your mainboard. Them's the breaks!" If you get run over because someone goes buckwild with their graveyard it's, "The format is a hot dumpster fire." That's the part I have difficulty with.
Hogaak takes it too far, that's for sure. That's a deck abusing a zone beyond the limits of what the format can handle. I doubt we see that deck for too much longer in the format. But is it immediately wrong to have to pack grave hate, perhaps even mainboard? Most decks utilize their graveyard as a resource, so maybe we should be more open to interacting with it in general. Graveyard usage and creature prevalence both seem to be high. What truly separates them? Because we're just more comfortable with creatures being a core mechanic?
I'm curious to see the reasoning on why we should have such opposition to having to run gravehate. On a personal level, I don't enjoy having to run so much gravehate in the main or side. I'd be fine if most of the heavy grave-abusing formats left the format, but I just wonder if our mindset is what needs adjusting, instead of trying to force the format into a box that it used to fit inside of.
The Force cycle doesn't do enough. Force of Despair is much better than people are giving it credit for, but most of the decks you need the speed of a free wipe against can just reestablish their board.
Force of Despair is barely a speedbump for Hogaak, Bloodghast, Vengevine, and Gravecrawler, along with Phoenix. It's hardly a decent safety valve for Hogaak. Force of Vigor might help you stop the combo kill using Altar, but you're 2 for 1ing yourself against a deck that can recur the entire grave against you.
Against fair-ish creature decks, Force of Despair is a decent safety valve card. As long as at least 2 creatures hit the battlefield, it's an even trade on card resources. It's the dredge problem. It's fine if a deck is resilient to removal, or fast, or has a combo kill… but when it has all three that require different hate pieces, the deck is much harder to keep in check.
Brainstorm is so synonymous with the format (legacy), they can't really touch the card. It would nuke at least half, probably more, decks in the format. I don't think they want to throw that stick of dynamite into the format.
We're not quite there with Faithless Looting, but I can see Modern becoming the "Looting" format.
just gotta say wizards missed an opportunity with force of despair. could have easily tagged on an exile clause to give it applications against GY creature decks.
they probably want to keep W the main source of battlefield creature exile effects.
About Modern Horizons. I'm pleased with it. Plenty new cards to test, and the horizon lands. Glad to have more ninjas, as the tribe badly needs it after 14 years of no new modern playable ninja. Null rod ouphe, so even mono green budget decks have ways to fight tron and harden scales. Liking the new changelings and fairy as well.
Exile is in black's wheelhouse. Here are just a few off the top of my head.
just gotta say wizards missed an opportunity with force of despair. could have easily tagged on an exile clause to give it applications against GY creature decks.
Totally agree on this one. I was really expecting some better safety valve cards from Modern Horizons, but all we got are highly situational cards that don't truly address some of the issues in the format. I like the design of Force of Despair, and I even think it's a decent card as it is... but an exile clause would have went a long way on that one.
My overall feeling about Modern Horizons, as a mostly fair deck player, is that it feels like Christmas... except all of your friends got really cool toys when they opened up their presents and I got a pair of long underwear. Force of Despair? Sort of cool I guess, but most of those creatures I just killed for zero mana are just coming back the next turn. Force of Negation? It's okay, but totally overhyped. Archmage's Charm? Um, neato... a really hard to cast Cancel that sometimes turns into CA when I need it. Seasoned Pyromancer? Again, cool, but nothing that really makes me feel any more equipped to take on linear decks. The Horizon lands are awesome, but they slot right into the linear, unfair decks too, so it doesn't really fee like a win.
Don't get me wrong, I'm going to continue playing Modern and I think the format is still fine, but I just can't help feel a tinge of disappointment at the whole set.
I don't find the idea of restricting cards in Modern elegant at all. It just adds to the variance and lopsided nature by allowing some decks to have more busted than average hands. What purpose does that serve in the format? For example, if we restricted Allosaurus Rider, does it help the format to have a deck that sometimes can have a turn 1 kill "oops I win" mode, but has to grind out its wins some other way when it doesn't have the broken opener? I just want to know HOW it's better for the format?
I think it's fine in Vintage, but the goals of Vintage are different than those of Modern.
I was discussing this event with a couple of friends and for some reason I ended up defending the deck. I surely believe it's way too early for a ban but it's a deck that is doing really obnoxious things. It attacks through multiple angles and it's required a considerate amount of hate/interaction to win.
Regardless, the discussion was that the deck that was in number one on the Challenge was a UW Control with 4 snapcasters and 2 surgicals mainboard. One of my friends reply to that was that if we are mainboarding hate it means that the format is busted. That made me wonder...
Is the format broken? If we look at legacy... Force of Will is the safety valve of the format, a free spell that interacts with the degenerate stuff that happen in the format. In legacy the stack is where the degenerate decks win from... In modern our stack is the graveyard. Can't we accept that maybe we should just be playing Surgicals main?
If we really think about it Surgical is 100% analogue to Force of Will in legacy. It's card disadvantage, free, instant speed, costs life, deals with the degenerate stuff that happen in the format while being somewhat mediocre to bad in the fair match ups. It's also a card that we sideboard out in a lot of matches.
Probably I'll get some bash over this but it's a different point of view. To be honest it eases my mind looking at things this way. My only grief is that surgicals are super expensive (same as force of will) and playing 4 is a big hit in the budget.
This is where my mind has been going lately.
People often tout that "Surgicals main is a symptom of an unhealthy format" but I've really been wondering if that's even a reasonable statement. We accept creature "hate" as fine and normal, because most decks feature a heavy creature element. Occasionally, your Path to Exile and Fatal Push cards will be dead, but no one laments about that. We've sort of come to accept that creature removal is just a part of the format. Perhaps we should be just as open to grave hate being "just a part of the format." Maybe that's just where the format needs to go.
Hymn is like playing the lottery with your opponent's hand. I really don't want to add more of that into the format, even if it mostly just powers up fair decks. That's just a personal opinion. I'm not really sure if the power level would be too much for the format.
I actually like having a wide range of land hate available. I'll admit that none of them are a complete slam dunk, which is what I think what most people are hoping for, but it does force players to make some interesting deckbuilding decisions when trying to interact with lands. I do understand the desire for Sinkhole though.
I do think Wizards has been trying when it comes to land-hate. We got fairly recent additions like Alpine Moon, Field of Ruin, and Damping Sphere, which were all aimed at decks that leverage lands to win. I like where their head is when it comes to cards aimed at taking out lands and I'd rather see them continue going that route instead of letting Sinkhole loose into the format.
Oh man. Niblis of Frost... you're bringing back some fond memories of limited. With a mitt full of spells, that thing puts the board on lockdown.
He's probably not good enough though. I want to love him, but I think Tubbybatman is right. You have more resilient options at 4 mana. If you decide to try it out, I'd be interested to see your results though.
Adding consistency to an opener DOES make any deck more aggressive.
It doesn't. It might change the number of keepable 7 handers you have. It doesn't increase your clock or velocity.
It's primarly an undercosted beater. Most and foremost. That turns into a big threat if we draw it from the midgame on. It could be good, could be bad, but that's it.
Is it undercosted? We've had access to 1 mana threats before. Narnam Renegade was tried and is basically always a 2/3 that always trades up AND has psuedo unblockable due to deathtouch. Gnarled Dryad, while it does take a bit of extra work to activate, can also be swinging in as a 3/3 by turn 2. Goblin Guide is also a 2/2 for 1, but we really have no interest in that threat. I think you're overvaluing the 2/1 body.
I was refuting the fact that Hexdrinker somehow makes the deck more aggressive. The reason I was comparing it to the other threats was more about evaluating how it matches up with currently used threats and partially due to this statement:
Ehr, I wholehearthedly disagree with this statement. It's the opposite, if any.
We did the math: Hexdrinker attacks for two on turn two. Only flipped Delver can do better than this. Nimble Mongoose is certainly not better in this aspect (it's way worse, expecially considered the fact we can't play it alongside Hooting Mandrills). Same reasoning for Pteramander.
What are we talking about?
It doesn't actually make the deck more aggressive. It may, perhaps, add consistency to an opener, if it is indeed a hearty threat on its own. If anything, it actually plays more into a midrange plan, since the hope with a Hexdrinker is that using its ability creates virtual card advantage by changing your opponent's live cards into dead cards at the cost of lost tempo.
Am I missing something here? You have to let the stack clear to re-equip the Sunforger, since equip is sorcery speed. So what exactly is on the stack when you use Sunforger to cast Reverberate? After the first Manamorphose, the stack should be empty with RRWW in your mana pool.
Then, you re-equip Sunforger, activate the ability and unattach Sunforger to get Reverberate… but there's nothing on the stack for Reverberate to target. Manamorphose should have already resolved.
They needed to create Historic in order to show that they have a plan on Arena for cards rotating out of Standard. My guess is that they support it more if it becomes widely popular in the Arena community, or when the card pool is larger and more robust to produce a metagame that's different enough from Standard.
WotC is a business. It wants to keep as many people engaged with their product as possible. If a format is popular, it makes more sense to support it and produce product aimed at that playerbase than it does try to cripple in hopes they playerbase will switch to Standard to support that product. Why do you think they kept making Masters sets and Modern Horizons? It would be like Coca-Cola purposely tanking Sprite, in hopes of former Sprite drinkers to start buying Coca-Cola.
I don't disagree with you on that one. But is having to run grave-hate inherently wrong, or just a natural progression of the format? Why or why not?
I've just seen some people use the prevalence of grave-hate in decks as a sign that the format is unhealthy. But I often wonder if that's only because the format went for a long time with the graveyard as primarily as food for Tarmogoyf or potential targets for Snapcaster, as you mentioned a few pages back. Should we cling to the past, or just move forward and accept that interacting with the graveyard is just something you need to pack (akin to the Force of Will/Brainstorm package in Legacy fair decks)?
This thought is meant outside of the Hogaak deck. I suspect something will be removed from that deck at some point, but it still doesn't stop me from pondering the above idea.
Hogaak takes it too far, that's for sure. That's a deck abusing a zone beyond the limits of what the format can handle. I doubt we see that deck for too much longer in the format. But is it immediately wrong to have to pack grave hate, perhaps even mainboard? Most decks utilize their graveyard as a resource, so maybe we should be more open to interacting with it in general. Graveyard usage and creature prevalence both seem to be high. What truly separates them? Because we're just more comfortable with creatures being a core mechanic?
I'm curious to see the reasoning on why we should have such opposition to having to run gravehate. On a personal level, I don't enjoy having to run so much gravehate in the main or side. I'd be fine if most of the heavy grave-abusing formats left the format, but I just wonder if our mindset is what needs adjusting, instead of trying to force the format into a box that it used to fit inside of.
Force of Despair is barely a speedbump for Hogaak, Bloodghast, Vengevine, and Gravecrawler, along with Phoenix. It's hardly a decent safety valve for Hogaak. Force of Vigor might help you stop the combo kill using Altar, but you're 2 for 1ing yourself against a deck that can recur the entire grave against you.
Against fair-ish creature decks, Force of Despair is a decent safety valve card. As long as at least 2 creatures hit the battlefield, it's an even trade on card resources. It's the dredge problem. It's fine if a deck is resilient to removal, or fast, or has a combo kill… but when it has all three that require different hate pieces, the deck is much harder to keep in check.
We're not quite there with Faithless Looting, but I can see Modern becoming the "Looting" format.
Exile is in black's wheelhouse. Here are just a few off the top of my head.
Totally agree on this one. I was really expecting some better safety valve cards from Modern Horizons, but all we got are highly situational cards that don't truly address some of the issues in the format. I like the design of Force of Despair, and I even think it's a decent card as it is... but an exile clause would have went a long way on that one.
My overall feeling about Modern Horizons, as a mostly fair deck player, is that it feels like Christmas... except all of your friends got really cool toys when they opened up their presents and I got a pair of long underwear. Force of Despair? Sort of cool I guess, but most of those creatures I just killed for zero mana are just coming back the next turn. Force of Negation? It's okay, but totally overhyped. Archmage's Charm? Um, neato... a really hard to cast Cancel that sometimes turns into CA when I need it. Seasoned Pyromancer? Again, cool, but nothing that really makes me feel any more equipped to take on linear decks. The Horizon lands are awesome, but they slot right into the linear, unfair decks too, so it doesn't really fee like a win.
Don't get me wrong, I'm going to continue playing Modern and I think the format is still fine, but I just can't help feel a tinge of disappointment at the whole set.
I think it's fine in Vintage, but the goals of Vintage are different than those of Modern.
This is where my mind has been going lately.
People often tout that "Surgicals main is a symptom of an unhealthy format" but I've really been wondering if that's even a reasonable statement. We accept creature "hate" as fine and normal, because most decks feature a heavy creature element. Occasionally, your Path to Exile and Fatal Push cards will be dead, but no one laments about that. We've sort of come to accept that creature removal is just a part of the format. Perhaps we should be just as open to grave hate being "just a part of the format." Maybe that's just where the format needs to go.
Hymn is like playing the lottery with your opponent's hand. I really don't want to add more of that into the format, even if it mostly just powers up fair decks. That's just a personal opinion. I'm not really sure if the power level would be too much for the format.
I actually like having a wide range of land hate available. I'll admit that none of them are a complete slam dunk, which is what I think what most people are hoping for, but it does force players to make some interesting deckbuilding decisions when trying to interact with lands. I do understand the desire for Sinkhole though.
And Hymn? You're a true madman
He's probably not good enough though. I want to love him, but I think Tubbybatman is right. You have more resilient options at 4 mana. If you decide to try it out, I'd be interested to see your results though.
It doesn't. It might change the number of keepable 7 handers you have. It doesn't increase your clock or velocity.
Is it undercosted? We've had access to 1 mana threats before. Narnam Renegade was tried and is basically always a 2/3 that always trades up AND has psuedo unblockable due to deathtouch. Gnarled Dryad, while it does take a bit of extra work to activate, can also be swinging in as a 3/3 by turn 2. Goblin Guide is also a 2/2 for 1, but we really have no interest in that threat. I think you're overvaluing the 2/1 body.
It doesn't actually make the deck more aggressive. It may, perhaps, add consistency to an opener, if it is indeed a hearty threat on its own. If anything, it actually plays more into a midrange plan, since the hope with a Hexdrinker is that using its ability creates virtual card advantage by changing your opponent's live cards into dead cards at the cost of lost tempo.