- BlazingRagnarok
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Member for 8 years
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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I doubt that they would put a dragon that the rules don't actually acknowledge as a dragon in this precon. If any planewalkers make it in, it'll be a Sarkhan.
I mean, Path to Exile, Serum Visions, Gitaxian Probe, and a few others did get their own FNM promo versions, but Wizards tries to aim for more competitive cards in their FNM and judge foils. They're certainly more widely popular than specific, casual-oriented examples like yours. Everyone has a favorite card they would like to see in foil, but alt-art promos aren't so cheap to produce that Wizards can afford to cater to personal requests.
The -2 is a little disjointed. Roast is extremely powerful on a 3 mana planeswalker, perhaps even situationally better than Liliana of the Veil's edict. The artifact hosing doesn't make much sense. The +1 indicates a planeswalker that works well with artifacts, so rewarding you for going after opposing ones seems a little tacked on.
The -7 is extremely underwhelming for an ultimate so expensive. Using opposing graveyards is a pointless option because it depends on other strategies, and the Entomb effect looks like a color pie breach.
You're right. That comment was uncalled for. I apologize for attacking you and your friends. It won't happen again.
Forager Faerie needs some contextual explanation. Why doesn't it just return the card to hand? It's not like the flashback version of it is more color-pie friendly or anything.
The best option among those you named is Slaughter Games. Most AN decks run copies of Slaughter Pact against Spellskite and hatebears and Laboratory Maniac to bypass Leyline of Sanctity and its ilk.
Well, it's an 8 mana spell with 8 colored mana symbols (more difficult than an ultimatum!), so it has to be really splashy unless you just drop the cost. If you consider "weighted" costs that count colored symbols twice as much as generic ones, then it's even harder to cast than Primal Surge, which dumps your whole deck into play, so just raising the numbers won't work, either. If it were just creatures, I'd consider a pump and haste. You could have it take cards from all players, or be attached to a Warp World-style effect.
You fixate too much on total mana cost, which is probably my fault because I mentioned how fast the decks go off. The type of combo deck you describe is generally referred to as an "all in" combo deck in which you rely entirely on the combo, but all in combo decks tend to be rather vulnerable to disruption. Most successful combo decks fall into one of two categories: hybrid or non-linear.
Hybrid combo decks sacrifice speed by combining with another archetype, usually control or toolbox midrange. This makes the deck highly resilient to disruption, and it gives you valuable alternatives for when your opponent stops your combo. Hybridization is extra important when you consider that every combo has a weakness. The mana combo I mentioned gets stopped by a simple Lightning Bolt. Both of the other infinite mana combos you mentioned get stopped by Stony Silence. It's a question of ceilings and floors. All you talk about is situations in which you have your combo pieces, but what about other times?
Nonlinear decks are a little harder to describe, but the gist is that the deck is the combo, as opposed to being a deck with a combo. Storm is the archetypical example of a nonlinear combo deck. Incidentally, the closest thing Modern has to a successful infinite combo deck is KCI Eggs, which uses Krark-Clan Ironworks in conjunction with artifacts that draw you a card when they die and artifact reanimation to produce tons of mana and cast Emrakul, the Aeons Torn or some other win condition. Of course, the deck isn't really an infinite mana combo, but it rarely needs to be.