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.
what the hell was WotC thinking? t1 win- I don't care to go over it right now, but rite of flame, Eldrazi conscription, faithless looting, Storm herald... not too hard or expensive.
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.
One option that could work as CA for white is Pull from Eternity but back into hand? It won't work for sideboard cards like a wish but can interact well with many other cards and could be sometype of CA or quality for white.
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.
I disagree. It's easy to categorize card effect into specific colors, such as all land fetch must be green or all discard must be black, but it's possible to have similar effect in nontraditional colors by having a twist. For example, black traditionally don't have artifact/enchantment removal but it could be done with effect such as Gate to Phyrexia, Phyrexian Tribute, Mire in Misery, and Pharika's Libation. Similarly, red could draw cards via effect like Risk Factor and Browbeat.
Not to mention, this card is a multicolor card that could incorporate different facets into one.
It may seem odd at first, but in reality Issac isn't doing anything outside of Naya pie, he merely combining what's already there. In fact, he could be complete Boros and it'd still make sense, with enough cards from the past to back it up.
The only ability that I'm not completely satisfied with is his activation ability. It is a little off to have a mana dump via discard. I will remove that one.
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!"
Something tells me that the things that prevented No-RL Legacy from being popular went beyond being unable to play singletons of Legacy's normal banlist.
For 3 drops i decided to go for Underworld Dreams. My deck had a tad too many creatures already, and 3 devotion that is not easily removed, plus pining my enemy for 1 more each draw sounds pretty nice to me.Blight-Breath Catoblepas i replaced with Bolas's citadel for card draw like you recommended, plus 3 devotion. i replaced the witches cottages with normal swamps, as Castles are a little too far off my budget. and i removed one of the ovens. a 1/1 for 1 that dranins when it ETB's is decent, so I'm fine keeping that in.
sorry about the complaining, I'm just a bit annoyed that most of my posts are getting ignored.
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.
I don't think that comment about being ignored is going to win you any points, but whatever.
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.
Nice try, but this is a color pie break, through and through. Red just doesn't get that kind of discard, plain and simple. It's too discriminating, compared to the random looting and wheeling that are the extent of red disruptive discard. I don't see at all how those color pie philosophies you laid out tie into the mechanics you chose for this card.
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.
while i do not agree with splinter twin example but you are correct about everything else.
i might add that while there is a lot of answers to problematic cards/combos the problem is that most of them are not maindeck cards. no one sane would maindeck lost legacy or return to nature. cards like thoughtseize can be maindecked but they do nothing against topdecks and library manipulation. also filling your deck with answers after sideboarding dilutes your deck and lets your opponents do other stuff their deck is trying to accomplish unimpeded.
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.
That's just warping the meta though. If every viable deck has to include the same set of counters to one or two decktypes, you end up with matches that might as well just be two players flipping a coin since they play out the same way over and over.
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.
Just to say: On Standard and Pioneer we have Bonecrusher Giant as the counter for 2 and 3. Also stomp makes this guy die to any block soo if you are playing vs a red deck better never block with this guy.
If the kinds of decks that want to run this guy are blocking with him, something has gone wrong.
I hope the blue one isn’t just a strictly worse Blue Sun’s Zenith but does something impactful and unique like this one
Probably gonna be Draw X and Tap twice X nonland permanents.
It's be interesting if it was something like counter Target spell unless they pay twice X mana. At X = 1 it's be Quench. At 2 it'd be Convolute. At >= 3 it'd basically be Cancel.
I doubt it'll have a draw effect. XU is more efficient that most X draw spells even without the extra mode thrown in.
This reminds me of History of Benalia. Three mana for two 2/2s over two turns with the final mode being a reward for having more creatures of the created tokens tribe in play. Not a bad card to be reminded of, I like this design.
QFT. Despite the final payoff being less splashy than giving all of the tribe +2/+1, we are also looking at a rare vs. a mythic - which was played significantly. Furthermore, we still don't know how many "escape" cards will be floating around, as well as other graveyard shenanigans (Desecrated Tomb? and we most likely will see a new crop of saga support Keldon Warcaller.
Judging a card like this when there are still 200+ cards of mystery - when this is released - and 1000 cards following it before it rotates is terribly rash. Unique and strange cards often have the most potential for impacting this game much more than obviously powerful cards. I would wager that for the first 5 years of magic, more tournament decks had shivan dragon than bazaar of bagdad, but 20 years down the line, shivan is a nostalgic piece of bulk trash and bazaar is the cornerstone to several legacy decks. (feel free to insert your own favorite sleeper card).
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.
Mairsil'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.
While 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.
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.