MTG Salvation

that's cute
feel like the name demands some sort of "creatures damaged by this don't untap next turn" effect
on second thoughts I think the name demands beatings for everyone involved in naming it
a lot of the card names in this set so far smack of being unchanged playtesting cards

Been searching for MTG writing, be it by pros or players of casual formats or anyone else who likes the game and I'm having trouble finding the good stuff!

SCG free content is fairly perfunctory and repetitive these days, split between surface-level competitive articles and untested Commander decklists. (their gradual cross-over to video and podcast formats is faintly irritating to me as a musician because it takes over teh senses I'm trying to use for my own ends!) Emma Handy seems like the best writer of the bunch but can get edgy in a way that makes me not wanna finish reading the page. It seems like SCG articles are written by relative celebs of Magic who have good reps as players or format administrators but don't necessarily write interesting prose. Sometimes it's fun to dig deep into their archives to find the more entertaining tourney reports and casual articles (there's a lot of personality in their articles from around the Invasion, Odyssey, Onslaught, Mirrodin, Kamigawa and Ravica times, even if it's negative personality, and I loved Abe Sargent's ideas but think he's faded away on gatheringmagic.com - his writing seems rushed now.) but I would not call it the main hub of good Magic writing. the daily mtg articles on the mother site are no less repetitive and I feel disincentivised to even visit that page apart from on mondays.

Personally I've enjoyed digging through gatheringmagic trying to find people whose writing viewpoints resonate with my ideas about the game. my number one wish right now is to find people writing about casual that don't just bang on about Commander the whole time; it's a good format but far from the only one!

Who are your favourite writers and the sites they write for? and are Channel Fireball's articles any better than SCGs? thanks!

those are powerful cards buuuut Gurmag Angler feels like it escaped teh ban

so far the names are really tacky and Time Spiral-ish but about half of these cards are exciting to me as a weird deckbuilder.
this is the kind of set that I'll buy individual cards from and will never touch the foil of a booster pack

I've had a lot of fun with the Nemesis Volrath in weird casual power-matters decks but he looks overcosted in today's pushed legends environment. would be nice to see a UB version of him that had a reference to Buyback or something. Tahngarth is fairly quaint, too, could use a more threatening card - he could start with defender to reference his period of inaction during Planeshift and then become a double-striking, provoking killing machine upon meeting the conditions for losing defender!

but more urgently than that I think it's time for them to print a Mishra that has a less specific effect :))) now there's a card that's incredibly hard to set up in Commander

Dawnglow Infusion

so glad they blew this art on a stream of life variant lol

must admit I'd rather uncounterability appeared on more innocuous cards cos stuff like Aether Vial and Cavern of Souls are OP beyond belief

maybe if the new generation of Splice became an ability with the old "add this effect to the instant spell you splice it on to and keep this in yer hand" text but omitting the word Arcane, which instead of being on the type-line, could be another keyworded ability written Arcane X which meant "Spells and effects you play targetting this spell cost X less mana to play; spells and effects your opponents play targetting this spell cost X more mana to play." so the two words were still complementary but no longer inseparable? guess that's just pipe dream stuff though

looking through original Commander set cards from past years there's so many all-upside designs - endless variations of "when you do the thing you wanna do anyway, draw a card!" and "vigilance, lifelink!" and big mana, big stats, no drawback cards in every colour that this time I'd like to see some riskier cards. at least one commander deck based around pushed-cost cards with disadvantages, like a 1RB commander that's a 6/5 First Striker but when you play it, target opponent gets to steal one of your lands, or some mean sorceries with the additional cost of "Put your commander in your library, two cards from the top."... black and red is the ideal reckless colour combination so maybe the theme could be Lorwyne Boggarts?

i'm an Ice Age and Mirage person too, that was an era where I loved the art and the naive, fairly arcane approach people had to card design. all the cards about having a headache in Ice Age/Alliances really resonate with me too! the art for each card felt distinct to my naive mind and it was before the idea of art consistency really kicked in so you weren't seeing, eg., Gerrard and Crovax, or Chandra and Jace all over the cards. i'm a bit of a Rebecca Guay, Margaret Organ-Kean, Quinton Hoover, Melissa Benson person and loved the soft side of card art. I didn't hear about the game until Revised and didn't own any of the cards 'til 4th Ed so by around Mirage I had finally arrived at a dim understanding of the relative power of cards; I noticed that Visions and Weatherlight were sets full of fairly powerful, fairly diverse cards, way more fluent and useful than Ice Age was, and I finally had coherent deck ideas. From then on I kept up with the game, not always buying but always checking spoilers and tournament reports, playing weekly against a few friends until all that went away..

more recently I adore Lorwyn, Innistrad and Amonkhet and enjoy the art of Omar Rayyan and Anthony Palumbo and Nils Hamm and many more. (just that in an era of complete information, sites that automatically suggest what should go in yr commander deck, a card with Notch's name on it, clearly pushed mythics and removal, and SCG or Channel Fireball branding all over everything, it feels really hard to relate to the modern game or discover anything about it for myself.)

huh apparently this set ships in like five weeks? trying to imagine having enough money for this AND War of the Spark

casually it'd be fun to see the geothermal crevice cycle of lands reprinted plus I remember it being the basis for a weirdo balance deck, and people have been looking at restore balance again recently...

i think they'll give us a brand new plane which is ginormous and under-populated to contrast with Ravnica, and keep the first set totally peaceful with no major war and if there's an antagonist they'd be a faction of high-tech meddlers or a single political underminer, rather than blatant invaders and pillagers. the story will probably establish some newer planeswalkers like the Kenriths or Kasmina and whoever she choses to ally herself with and they'd be searching this new plane for something.

that's just brainstorming though, I don't follow the story closely.

it occurs to me that Battle Screech might be in this set - it has never been reprinted before and is relevantly strong!

ten commons I wanna put in casual decks:

01. Vivien's Grizzly - solid creature that turns itself into a digging engine if you're stalling
02. Arboreal Grazer - ramp and defense for one mana
03. Burning Prophet - gives you an amazing spellslinging advantage
04. Kasmina's Transmutation - two-mana kill spell which can hit shroud creatures with certain tricks
05. Kaya's Ghostform - avoiding Exile is a very uncommon ability and there must be some tricks to be found with this card
06. Spark Reaper - really solid & zombie decks love sacrifice outlets
07. Return to Nature - versatile enough that you'll always have a reasonable target
08. Spellkeeper Weird - always love walls that intelligently replace themselves
09. Callous Dismissal - way above the normal Disperse rate
10. Topple the Statue - neat cantrip time-walk

i've got a box of commander decks that use a lot of common cards or unusual cards that aren't directly off the Bennie Smith and His Hundred Basilisk Collars auto-include list (but they're for playing against each other, not for challenging big expensive edh decks) and my fave card here is the 1/5 lifelinker because attaching equipment to that sort of creature is usually really entertaining.