A mechanic that has been used once before, and already has a good 20-40% of the previous cards with it seeing actual play, and when reintroduced now has the very first instant-speed version of a powerful, iconic effect, is not, I would think, a failure of a mechanic by the metric of how many cards of a given mechanic actually see real play.
I'm sure you made some good points but I stopped reading your novella after I got to the above sentence. No sentence should ever contain over 60 words.
Maybe spend less time on twitter and more time reading books?
Maybe take a junior high level English class and spend less time on the forums? 4,500 posts equate to a whole lotta time in mom's basement.
someone should have told Faulkner to get out of his mom's basement I guess. Back on topic, originally I was crapping all over adapt too but framed in the sense of Monstrosity but triggering off all +1/+1 counters I think it may have a lot more legs than I anticipated.
my partner in crime managed to snag a box for the booster collection and i'm glad.
bit peeved about the inclusion of a couple of trashy bulk rares (really, in this set there didn't need to be any at all), but compared to most sets we've seen, this is good value in terms of secondary market EV.
Agreed on the filler my blister pack from walmart was Squee, Spoils of the Vault, and Reya Dawnbringer. Only thing that made the purchase not a crapshoot was I got lucky and pulled a foil Demonic Tutor.
I would love a color shifted Land Equilibrium. Its a pretty fair card and not a devastating Balance level card unless you pair it with mass land destruction to lock people out.
Doesn't destroy the lands they have just keeps green decks from pulling too far ahead. Combine that with a similar effect on hand size and or some draw that works the same way and I think White would be in a good spot.
I'm going to put a good word in for my boy Sean Connery better known as Hakim, Loreweaver. Dumping auras into your graveyard to utilize with your general is fun and the low amount of good pumping auras in Blue can cause you to get creative with some of your card choices. Stuff like Flight of Fancy and Ordeal of Thassa get a lot better when you can recur and have them be destroyed by Hakim. If you want a faster clock you got Corrupted Conscience that functions both as theft before you put it on Hakim and also puts Grafted Exoskeleton style pressure on them coming out of the yard. Eldrazi Conscription and Auramancer's Guise can let you beef up and all of this is before fun stuff like Arcanum Wings and Illusory Gains shenanigans. You want evasion you can grab Vanishing if you need to untap some lands for something you can pay UU get Treachery and go up 3 lands there's just so many options and fun choices you can make in his aura suite.
Activating his own ability during your upkeep in response to itself lets you load him up with the best auras in your grave but at the same time if you're using looting or things of that type you can use the auras to make respectable attackers/blockers.
Ya know, I really want baseball cards from the 60s but I cant afford them.
People, not everyone can have every card and play every format.
I'm not saying that people should have access to every card, though I don't think asking to be able to play every format in a game should be considered absurd, but what I am saying that it is clear that huge chunks of the Reserved List are an archaic leftover from a time they had no idea how big the game was going to get and a good decade or so before EDH was a thing. People have been whining about the reserved list forever, and yes they no doubt would after the restructuring, so what does bringing that up point out other than the number of people saying 'hey this is probably a problem' is getting more chorused and louder over time? Touching the reserved list once and slimming it to a group of 20-40 cards that are the most expensive and iconic and obviously would never get reprinted anyhow even without the reserved list would free up a lot of breathing room for WoTC, silence a lot of the people 'whining' as you put it about paying 130 bucks for a Gaea's Cradle for their EDH deck, and simultaneously keep the reserved list for all intents and purposes intact.
I myself am lucky enough to have some duals, a Cradle, and some other expensive stuff FWIW. It's not an issue of 'working to go buy them' when they cost as much as one month's rent. The key difference between a baseball card collection from the sixties and a MTG deck that requires Lion's Eye Diamonds or Tabernacle to function is that one still functions as a baseball card collection no matter if there are cards missing or not, while the other is not so lucky. You might not be able to sell the collection, but it was designed to be 'collected' and that's it. Magic also has the game aspect of 'CCG' involved, and if you're looking at the game (for that is what it is, unlike baseball cards) as a purely collector-based market then that is a purely one-sided view that does a great disservice to the people actually playing.
The reserved list, the way I look at it, is going to become an issue sooner or later given the chinese counterfeit market. Once the counterfeiters are able to crank out identical counterfeit versions of old and expensive cards like power and Mishra's Workshops and what not (they are getting close) and sell them at a fraction of the price I think collectors are going to be in a world of trouble one way or another. Reprinting some of these old cards with the new anti-counterfeit measures I believe would be healthier for the finance side of the game in the long-term anyhow.
To that end I think Wizards should just restructure the Reserved list, not remove it completely. There's a lot of cards on there that really don't need to be, and there are some cards on there begging for a reprint as we all know. Really what they should do is start slimming down the Reserved list, starting with the cards like Elephant Graveyard and other stuff that doesn't belong on there but also cheaper but still absurdly expensive cards to help out EDH and other eternal formats a little bit. Stuff like Gaea's Cradle, Lion's Eye Diamond, and Mox Diamond all of which (maybe not Cradle, but the other two) are pretty much sold out everywhere as a result of this announcement and are going to crank up in price again now for no reason other than scarcity. Cards like these have a spot in EDH too, so lopping some of the value off of them would help but also keep their prices fairly high as they are still used and people would be looking for them.
Keep Power on the list, possibly Mishra's Workshop and Bazaar and such, maybe even keep dualies on the list, but then do away with Vintage and Legacy as we know it and make a new eternal format with everything minus banned cards and stuff on the reserved list. The collectors get to keep their stuff at pretty crazy high prices still but without a tournament format for them to be legal in they will retain their value for what they should be: collectors items, rather than cards people are hunting for. If collectors are interested in them for the sake of collecting the cards and not monetary value for the sake of monetary value, then that's what Wizards should make them: collectors pieces. Without the demand for these cards prices will go down, but the natural scarcity of these cards will keep their values high after a momentary drop in price before heading back to appreciation over time. Will they? I doubt it, but I don't think that keeping the Reserved List in its current state is anything but bad for the game as well. If the bubble doesn't burst as someone said earlier once Legacy becomes a 'one player in one player out format' it will when well-made forty dollar Chinese forgery Mishra's Workshops start rolling off the presses, and Wizards can just skip all that headache and the stain counterfeiting brings to their business right now.
I found that no matter how much people get told that it was not a combo build people still hated me out. So I made it as degenerate as possible and it is my go-to spike deck.
I'm not a real big fan of stuff like Omen Machine or Knowledge Pool But that's because they usually either facilitate a lock with Teferi or something, or just muck up the game state. I don't mind random chaos cards like Grip of Chaos or Confusion in the Ranks even in stuff other than Norin, but they at least let you still do what you want, even though the outcome might not be. Timesifter is another big offender, especially in multiples. Mean to me mostly means really really really annoying.
Doesn't destroy the lands they have just keeps green decks from pulling too far ahead. Combine that with a similar effect on hand size and or some draw that works the same way and I think White would be in a good spot.
I think the biggest thing an esper zombie deck gets in addition to all of that in a non combo list is Anointed Procession .
Activating his own ability during your upkeep in response to itself lets you load him up with the best auras in your grave but at the same time if you're using looting or things of that type you can use the auras to make respectable attackers/blockers.
I'm not saying that people should have access to every card, though I don't think asking to be able to play every format in a game should be considered absurd, but what I am saying that it is clear that huge chunks of the Reserved List are an archaic leftover from a time they had no idea how big the game was going to get and a good decade or so before EDH was a thing. People have been whining about the reserved list forever, and yes they no doubt would after the restructuring, so what does bringing that up point out other than the number of people saying 'hey this is probably a problem' is getting more chorused and louder over time? Touching the reserved list once and slimming it to a group of 20-40 cards that are the most expensive and iconic and obviously would never get reprinted anyhow even without the reserved list would free up a lot of breathing room for WoTC, silence a lot of the people 'whining' as you put it about paying 130 bucks for a Gaea's Cradle for their EDH deck, and simultaneously keep the reserved list for all intents and purposes intact.
I myself am lucky enough to have some duals, a Cradle, and some other expensive stuff FWIW. It's not an issue of 'working to go buy them' when they cost as much as one month's rent. The key difference between a baseball card collection from the sixties and a MTG deck that requires Lion's Eye Diamonds or Tabernacle to function is that one still functions as a baseball card collection no matter if there are cards missing or not, while the other is not so lucky. You might not be able to sell the collection, but it was designed to be 'collected' and that's it. Magic also has the game aspect of 'CCG' involved, and if you're looking at the game (for that is what it is, unlike baseball cards) as a purely collector-based market then that is a purely one-sided view that does a great disservice to the people actually playing.
To that end I think Wizards should just restructure the Reserved list, not remove it completely. There's a lot of cards on there that really don't need to be, and there are some cards on there begging for a reprint as we all know. Really what they should do is start slimming down the Reserved list, starting with the cards like Elephant Graveyard and other stuff that doesn't belong on there but also cheaper but still absurdly expensive cards to help out EDH and other eternal formats a little bit. Stuff like Gaea's Cradle, Lion's Eye Diamond, and Mox Diamond all of which (maybe not Cradle, but the other two) are pretty much sold out everywhere as a result of this announcement and are going to crank up in price again now for no reason other than scarcity. Cards like these have a spot in EDH too, so lopping some of the value off of them would help but also keep their prices fairly high as they are still used and people would be looking for them.
Keep Power on the list, possibly Mishra's Workshop and Bazaar and such, maybe even keep dualies on the list, but then do away with Vintage and Legacy as we know it and make a new eternal format with everything minus banned cards and stuff on the reserved list. The collectors get to keep their stuff at pretty crazy high prices still but without a tournament format for them to be legal in they will retain their value for what they should be: collectors items, rather than cards people are hunting for. If collectors are interested in them for the sake of collecting the cards and not monetary value for the sake of monetary value, then that's what Wizards should make them: collectors pieces. Without the demand for these cards prices will go down, but the natural scarcity of these cards will keep their values high after a momentary drop in price before heading back to appreciation over time. Will they? I doubt it, but I don't think that keeping the Reserved List in its current state is anything but bad for the game as well. If the bubble doesn't burst as someone said earlier once Legacy becomes a 'one player in one player out format' it will when well-made forty dollar Chinese forgery Mishra's Workshops start rolling off the presses, and Wizards can just skip all that headache and the stain counterfeiting brings to their business right now.
You'll note that he says he killed the person who cast it.
Edit: Nathed.