- BlazingRagnarok
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Member for 8 years and 25 days
Last active Sun, Nov, 1 2020 11:38:09
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Nov 20, 2017BlazingRagnarok posted a message on Jaya Ballard ReturnsMairsil's reappearance in card form absolutely can be a coincidence because Commander products are a dumping ground for neglected legendary figures, the vast majority of whom are irrelevant to contemporary sets.Posted in: Articles
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Apr 4, 2016BlazingRagnarok posted a message on The Magic Market Index: Set Review of Shadows Over InnistradWhile its value probably won't spike, I disagree with your assessment of Bygone Bishop. It has applications outside of clue-based decks; for example, it makes every creature that Collected Company decks hardcast replace themselves. If any sort of white weenie crops up (human or spirit tribal?), Bishop would give the deck crucial staying power in the mid and late games.Posted in: Articles
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Your second guess was correct; you will not be able to get the exile permanent(s) back if you bounce sanctum. Sanctum creates what is known as a linked ability, in which the permanents it exiles are recognized as being "exiled with" that permanent, and that permanent alone. Once a permanent leaves the battlefield, it becomes and entirely different game object, so the re-played sanctum is not the same one that was bounced.
Contrast with Karn, Scion of Urza, which uses counters and only cares about exiled permanents with said counters, allowing him to retrieve cards exiled by other copies of him.
It's not the first T1 win in Legacy, nor will it be the last. Such combos tend not to be as impactful in the house of Force of Will.
I think easy exile interaction is a problem of its own right, not only because of the "second graveyard" issue parodied by AWOL, but also because exile acts like a safety valve for a lot of powerful mechanics. Imagine a deck that gets to recur something like Temporal Mastery multiple times over the course of a game. Easy exile interaction is like building a city on top of a nuclear waste dump; everything that results will be poisoned.
For record, throwing out a lot of cards that predate the modern color pie is a horrible way to respond to accusations of a pie break. Sirocco is not, never was, and never will be a justification to give red a Duress variant.
You're still making a lot of generalized statements without directly factoring in this design. I'm not asking you to justify every pie break and outdated design space (and, I assure you, Balance is not something white gets any more), I want to know how you invoking a bunch of early attempts to represent equality translates to "Hmm, I see you have three lands in hand, I guess you have to discard or sacrifice one!"
I've actually played against a mono-black brew that used Underworld Dreams. I can say three good things about it, and one bad thing. The good bits are the BBB mana cost, being great against slower decks, and that it's a nice card to curve Tyramet into, since it'll be harder for your opponent to suddenly yoink away your devotion than with Ayara. The negative is that there's no tempo to it. It's an awful card against anything remotely aggressive (like the Orzhov Knights list I was using), so you'll lose a lot of ground against decks that want you to play removal or a blocker on turn 3.
Bolas's Citadel is certainly a powerful card advantage generator. Just watch out for Erebos's Intervention, for which you can only pay 1 life and do nothing because X has to be 0 when paying that alternate cost.
Looking at your curve, you seem to have a need for better 3 drops. Ayara is, of course, fantastic, but you won't always have her in hand. My first recommendation is Murderous Rider. Gains life, kills planeswalkers and creatures, in an all-around house. If that doesn't appeal to you, you have other options at 3. Rotting Regisaur is huge, though the discard may be inconvenient at times. Bloodthirsty Aerialist gives you a bit of flying in your deck, and it grows whenever you use a drain effect. All are good, solid creatures at 3.
I also notice a few cards here that might not work as well. Blight-Breath Catoblepas might care about devotion, but 6 mana is a lot. He's no Ravenous Chupacabra. Witch's Cottage is cute, but you need lands that come in untapped before turn 4. Get 4 Castle Locthwain ASAP. Omen of the Dead is...ok. Getting one of your important creatures back is not bad, and it does add one to devotion. Still you, have some better things to do there. You could run some form of card draw to not gas out, or a crowd control option like Cry of the Carnarium or Massacre Girl.
Finally, I, personally, am not a fan of the cat oven combo. I'm not advising you to take it out, since it would require you to retool your deck. Still, I'm not crazy about the idea of running four artifacts that do little on their own except gain you life inefficiently alongside four creatures that don't do much without said artifact. The ceiling is high, sure, but the floor has gotten me some free wins against decks that run this combo.
What's particularly galling for me is your invocation of "suppression" as if this card were some kind of hatebear. I mean, that's the only thing that comes to mind when you throw such a vague term around. I mean, what other kind of "suppression" does GW get? Certainly not this. It's not even a hatebear, which tend to target at least one specific category of cards or actions.
The fact that people were unironically calling Twin a "police" deck while largely acting like the strategies that it pushed out of modern did not deserve to exist by virtue of losing to Twin is, to me, evidence enough that the deck warped Modern. Threats do not police formats, answers do, and that players treated its banning as the removal of a Force of Will-caliber format cornerstone is proof of the myopic effect that personal preference has on perceptions of format health.
This is what got Golgari Grave-Troll (re)banned in Modern.
One of my biggest pet peeves in ban discussions is when people talk about counterplay as if it were, by its very existence, a valid rebuttal to a ban argument. The fact that a card or strategy is beatable is irrelevant because every strategy in the game is beatable if things go good enough for one player or bad enough for the other. If a bannable card or deck actually does reach the point of being unbeatable, then the metagame has problems deeper than what can be solved with a few bans.
This is because ban (and nerf, in other games) decisions are based in the metagame, which should take a much wider view of the game than what players get in a game-to-game basis. It's perfectly possible for a strategy that feels 'fair' game-to-game to be a metagame black hole (as was the case of Splinter Twin), or a deck that feels totally broken in individual games to not make a splash in the broader meta (like Neoform combo decks). As such, questions of whether and how a deck can be beaten are not near as important as the question of what effect a deck has on the metagame.
If the kinds of decks that want to run this guy are blocking with him, something has gone wrong.
I doubt it'll have a draw effect. XU is more efficient that most X draw spells even without the extra mode thrown in.
It's such a shame that Desecrated Tomb rotated out. I loved playing it with Muldrotha, the Gravetide. While this probably won't quite hit the heights of History, this card does have a couple of advantages. For one, the mana cost is easier and more friendly to multicolored decks, and the other is that zombies generally have an easy time swarming, letting the third verse have a powerful effect.