Individually - each of these spells would not or barely make commander decks. Thus his ability is approximately a strixhaven learn. The exception being black lotus - let me rewrite this card as a much more powerful card. I wouldn't play this - I'd take the eldraine King over this in a heartbeat.
WURGB
T: Scry 2, draw a card
T: create 3 treasure tokens. Use this ability if Gavin is not "spent". Put a "spent" counter on Gavin.
5/5
(If he could constantly tap to bank 3 mana he could actually be good/combo engine)
Just an FYI- I would have just given him the ability T: learn, but for whatever reason the rules committee still feels a Sideboard is too powerful for commander. The number of cards that are suffering from that ruling is growing year to year and I doubt that any number of magic bullets in your Sideboard is going to make burning wish as powerful as demonic tutor.
You know, in my play group, we wouldn't bother playing wrath, doomskar or other basic wrath effects.
--- I'll stop you right here. As you admit, that is your meta, but your meta is not equal to what is a card potential in a vacuum and how can be used in other EDH playgroups worldwide. My personal experience contradicts yours for example. And that confirm what I'm saying : that whoever says that black mass removals are always useless, it's only because have a limited game experience playing with the same cards and against the same people and judging a card in base of that bias.
I would be willing to concede it is just my meta (consisting of 9 players who 3 of which play in different groups - so actually about a baker's dozen of unique minds) - but look at decks on the command zone (where they literally play commander for a living) - and I think you will see this is a natural progression experienced in commander as a whole. The introduction of non-creature cards in the command zone, heck - we will literally have sorceries in the command zone in a week, the proliferation of etb value, indestructible and other just value engines - along with cards that allow you to ignore a board wipe (teferi's protection), has reduced the potency of those cards. Furthermore, board wipes - when they do work - tend to just make people bored as they spend 2 or 3 turns to rebuild. It is the same line of thinking as why armageddon has been generally frowned upon in commander - it tends to set people back equally and just adds 30 minutes of low interaction to the game, which makes people pull out their phones, go for a cigarette - or otherwise lose an investment in the game. So, yes, I don't think that white's ownership of boardwipes does much to establish it as a color people want to play in commander.
Nope. Only for control and combo decks "all removals are asymmetrical". Many removals are definitely more asymmetrical than others, and black is king on this. You clearly confirm that your knowledge about commander games and strategies is quite limited and you are basing all your argument on that bias.
All mass removal is asymmetrical because you choose when you play it. Not a difficult concept really.
You clearly never played games where one-sided mass removals not only break any stall but directly win the game within an aggro strategy (big beasts or tokens army). Just because you never experienced this, don't assume every player play your same strategies. So a wrath of god will never win you any game the same turn you casted. An asymmetrical mass removal, can.
All mass removal is asymmetrical
Nope. Only for control and combo decks "all removals are asymmetrical". Many removals are definitely more asymmetrical than others, and black is king on this. You clearly confirm that your knowledge about commander games and strategies is quite limited and you are basing all your argument on that bias.
All mass removal is asymmetrical because you choose when you play it. Not a difficult concept really.
And still is true my statement, some mass removals are more asymmetrical than others. a Decree of Pain or in Garruk Wake's can do much more advantage and even straight win you the game in the good situation, a simple wrath will simply reset the board most of the time. As I said, you are wrong when you say that black mass removals are both "inefficent and worse" because only one of the 2 is actually true.
You know, in my play group, we wouldn't bother playing wrath, doomskar or other basic wrath effects. First of all - if it doesn't exile, or put on the bottom of the library, between indestructible and graveyard shenanigans, those removals accomplish very little except perhaps adding a turn or two to the game. Inevitably, someone is set to recover better than the other people based on equipment/enchantments/etc, so you are only changing who is going to win the game amongst your 3 opponents, and not actually improving your own lot at all. We pretty much only play modal (merciless eviction/crux of fate/austere command) or purely lopsided wrath effects (ruinous ultimatum, in garruk's wake, slaughter the strong, tragic arrogance or single combat in certain one critter combo decks), occasionally we may see an odd fumigate or the aforementioned terminus. We tend to run a lot more enchant removal/artifact removal (fracturing gust, bane of progress, shatterstorm, even some form or another of tranquility) and tend to leave the creature removal to single target - problem solving removal. Too many commanders are almost single card combos and by the time you can cast a sorcery to deal with them, it is too late.
Deekah: oh simple it’s shark typhoon on a legendary basically but can grant unblock ability rather than flying
Ruxa: hey Congradulations this is the brith of a French vanilla themed commander deck and for 99 that’s Ayula, Queen Among Bears all the way the vast majorly of the bears will get the buff and quite a few of the bears can be brought back from the grave with this
Curiosity crafter *smells* aah the fresh smell of yet another reliquary tower effect these always benefit and this one can even draw you cards for tokens getting damage through via combat.
Perplexing test (teaser name by the way): very nice slightly worse Evacuation but with options based on creature board states is it more tokens or more non-tokens in play.
Replication test: this is a risky demonstrate you get to copy 2 stuff you own but a opponent can get something too. I say the safest thing by far is doing it with atleast 1 token of and Biovisionary in self because you just win instantly that way.
Spawning Kraken Yo tiro of meletis this is the card your waiting for, anyway not so hot for this pre-con but sea monster tribal will absolutely take this easily (too bad it’s not legendary that would be a perfect legend)
Fractal harness: sweet a doubler for attack and germ ETB but somewhat pointless if you already have Kalonian Hydra in the deck since it does that attack effect for all the creatures
Guardian augmenter: oh this would have been so much better if itself has hexproof as well. Oh here’s a tip it’s saids “you control” not “you own” so that means if you happen to control magic someone’s commander (or whatever way) it gains hexproof since you control it
Paradox zone: pretty simple token maker that gets double sized every end step would rather use sandwurm convergence since it throw in no flying attackers allowed even though no size doubler
sequence engine if this wasn’t sorcery speed, nor a huge mana amount needed for giants creatures to be targeted , and not a tap ability so untappers needed. This would have defeated scavenging ooze.
Geometric nexus: before you say it sticks you might want to read that it’s everybody's instants/sorceries spells not just yours it see's so you gonna make Godzilla size tokens easily with this so any token themed deck can take it since it’s colorless.
oversimplify very very risky since they end up with monster plus size fractals knowing the total power average on a board. But nice it exiles the creatures though I saw best case is to have 9 mana for this and a wrath effect when you have next to none creatures
The answer to essix/mystic reflection is always master of waves imho. with just those 2 - he enters with 3 devotion, makes 3 of himself with 6 devotion and you end up with 18 5/4 elemental tokens. go.
new goal in life. cast doubling season and untap with it. hmmm....oversimplifytwincast 2 tokens with twice your boardstate's previous power that then get exiled to make 2 tokens with 8 times your old boardstate's power.
perplexing test is very similar to the white destroy all non-token critter wraths. This is instant speed - so in this deck it should function like a poor man's cyclonic rift to let you swing for the kill.
As someone who knows a bit about math, all these Fractals just having +1/+1 counters on them makes me cringe a bit.
It would have been better if fractals were only allowed in a geometric progression 1/1, 2/2, 4/4, 8/8, 16/16. But they all possess the same basic characteristics (green and blue vanilla critter). Considering the amount of leniency we give our other forms of entertainment, (ask anyone who has worked in a lab about how well the CSI new york team does PCR, how well the doctors diagnose on Grey's anatomy) I think the term is just fine.
Meh on both, maybe the rare will see play in commander as card draw idk
What? The floor on silencer is a 3/2 for 2. That alone is pretty solid. The moment your opponent plays a land in standard - you have a 25% chance of being able to guess what they are playing. By the second turn, I can reliably guess at least one card to name from them. Furthermore, you can expect that we will be given some free info from the learn spells that will at the very least disrupt their game. I think your expectations for 2 mana is a bit high.
Turn 4 efreet, turn 5 sea gate stormcallerx2, frost bite - aim the triggers at one stormcaller - do 2 damage to 2 opponent dorks and 2 to that stormcaller kill 2 things and get 3 4/4s...I broke standard ;). Seriously though why isn't stormcaller going up in price? Should be at least a 5 dollar card now right?
Back in the day...I used to play this with foreshadow for a ghetto 2 part dismiss.] Anyways, while playing with that in a format with ophidian, it was far more important to draw lands instead of spells to win the counter wars. It actually was better to do a mini stunted growth by denying your opponent a chance to draw a land - instead having to draw the spell they just tried to cast - this was a time walk. Truly one of my favorite counterspells ever.
Embrosse is just the 15th card in a long line of cards that make thornbite staff an engine - although it needs a few more tricks than other ones. The white side is actually the side that intrigues me more - both cards seem to be wanting to pair with green (hehe generous patron with the black one) and of course I would absolutely love to ratchet up a stuffy doll until it is a stuffy Macy's Thanksgiving day parade float.
How the frack is young pyromancer going into the 15th reprint without a change of the terrible art? Seriously - an all reprint set like this should have a lot more new art to make cracking packs anything other than lottery tickets for chase rares.
Pretty sure firsttwo cards are mono-white now. The lasttwo are staple black effects, though.
Dirge was a planar chaos take on kor chant showing that the card was almost in Black's color pie. Sudden spoiling resembles a blue effect mass diminish more than humble but that one seems to bleed either way (sorceress queen, humility, etc)
Nothing about any of these cards strikes me as strong or empowered. Family man Teferi is the biggest win of the bunch - but I would much rather see more "Nick Cage/Black Panther" than "Fat Albert" for the artistic style. This would have also been a great opportunity to (as much as I disagree with the removal of Terese Nielsen) to kill two birds with one stone so to speak. Make Angel of Jubilation, Descendant's path, essence warden, eternal witness, intimidation - just kidding lol, force of will!!! -that would have been a game changer, and show a real dedication to the charity/theme, mother of runes, or pattern of rebirth.
It truly is too bad that we used our scales of judgment for...well.. judgment. The owl of wisdom is so terrible - it really has ruined quite a few judge promos that I would have otherwise sought out.
WURGB
T: Scry 2, draw a card
T: create 3 treasure tokens. Use this ability if Gavin is not "spent". Put a "spent" counter on Gavin.
5/5
(If he could constantly tap to bank 3 mana he could actually be good/combo engine)
Just an FYI- I would have just given him the ability T: learn, but for whatever reason the rules committee still feels a Sideboard is too powerful for commander. The number of cards that are suffering from that ruling is growing year to year and I doubt that any number of magic bullets in your Sideboard is going to make burning wish as powerful as demonic tutor.
I would be willing to concede it is just my meta (consisting of 9 players who 3 of which play in different groups - so actually about a baker's dozen of unique minds) - but look at decks on the command zone (where they literally play commander for a living) - and I think you will see this is a natural progression experienced in commander as a whole. The introduction of non-creature cards in the command zone, heck - we will literally have sorceries in the command zone in a week, the proliferation of etb value, indestructible and other just value engines - along with cards that allow you to ignore a board wipe (teferi's protection), has reduced the potency of those cards. Furthermore, board wipes - when they do work - tend to just make people bored as they spend 2 or 3 turns to rebuild. It is the same line of thinking as why armageddon has been generally frowned upon in commander - it tends to set people back equally and just adds 30 minutes of low interaction to the game, which makes people pull out their phones, go for a cigarette - or otherwise lose an investment in the game. So, yes, I don't think that white's ownership of boardwipes does much to establish it as a color people want to play in commander.
All mass removal is asymmetrical
Nope. Only for control and combo decks "all removals are asymmetrical". Many removals are definitely more asymmetrical than others, and black is king on this. You clearly confirm that your knowledge about commander games and strategies is quite limited and you are basing all your argument on that bias.
All mass removal is asymmetrical because you choose when you play it. Not a difficult concept really.
You know, in my play group, we wouldn't bother playing wrath, doomskar or other basic wrath effects. First of all - if it doesn't exile, or put on the bottom of the library, between indestructible and graveyard shenanigans, those removals accomplish very little except perhaps adding a turn or two to the game. Inevitably, someone is set to recover better than the other people based on equipment/enchantments/etc, so you are only changing who is going to win the game amongst your 3 opponents, and not actually improving your own lot at all. We pretty much only play modal (merciless eviction/crux of fate/austere command) or purely lopsided wrath effects (ruinous ultimatum, in garruk's wake, slaughter the strong, tragic arrogance or single combat in certain one critter combo decks), occasionally we may see an odd fumigate or the aforementioned terminus. We tend to run a lot more enchant removal/artifact removal (fracturing gust, bane of progress, shatterstorm, even some form or another of tranquility) and tend to leave the creature removal to single target - problem solving removal. Too many commanders are almost single card combos and by the time you can cast a sorcery to deal with them, it is too late.
The answer to essix/mystic reflection is always master of waves imho. with just those 2 - he enters with 3 devotion, makes 3 of himself with 6 devotion and you end up with 18 5/4 elemental tokens. go.
new goal in life. cast doubling season and untap with it. hmmm....oversimplify twincast 2 tokens with twice your boardstate's previous power that then get exiled to make 2 tokens with 8 times your old boardstate's power.
perplexing test is very similar to the white destroy all non-token critter wraths. This is instant speed - so in this deck it should function like a poor man's cyclonic rift to let you swing for the kill.
It would have been better if fractals were only allowed in a geometric progression 1/1, 2/2, 4/4, 8/8, 16/16. But they all possess the same basic characteristics (green and blue vanilla critter). Considering the amount of leniency we give our other forms of entertainment, (ask anyone who has worked in a lab about how well the CSI new york team does PCR, how well the doctors diagnose on Grey's anatomy) I think the term is just fine.
What? The floor on silencer is a 3/2 for 2. That alone is pretty solid. The moment your opponent plays a land in standard - you have a 25% chance of being able to guess what they are playing. By the second turn, I can reliably guess at least one card to name from them. Furthermore, you can expect that we will be given some free info from the learn spells that will at the very least disrupt their game. I think your expectations for 2 mana is a bit high.
countryside crusher would like a word with you. Aimless milling is not a novel thing for red. White let's you profit from it.
Add vendillion clique for all the shenanigans! (This guy actually compares very well to plunderer and clique)