In 8 pages only one person has discussed the impact of this card on Vintage. This card will be the most impactful card on the Vintage meta since Griselbrand, and it will render competing blue creature decks (BUG, RUG, Fish, Stoneblade) completely obsolete. Dedicated combo decks trying to Vault/Key, Oath, Storm, or Bomberman the opponent will still be viable, but any Vintage deck that is trying to win through a combination of combat and stack interaction is going to either play this card or lose to it.
I know, "nobody plays Vintage" ... but for the minority who pay attention, this card is a huge, huge deal.
And if you're doubting its raw power level, here's some math. If you can reasonably expect to cast a spell the same turn you cast it, and then cast a spell precombat each turn for the next 3 turns, it will have done 20 damage by its 3rd attack. That means that with the entirely reasonable expectation of one spell per turn, you're effectively getting an average 7 power for 3 mana. In vintage it's possible to put this guy in play on turn 1 and be attacking for lethal on turn 2.
In Modern, you can cast a turn 3 Mentor, then Mutagenic Growth in response to their Bolt. You untap and cast a cantrip, Bolt a blocker, attack for 7, and kill them the next turn with a single spell. This isn't Magical Christmasland, guys. This card is a trump against the entire midrange strategy if the cheap spells to support it exist in a given format. A mentor and 4-5 cheap spells beats almost any army that can be put on the battlefield for a comparable mana cost even if those spells are blank cards. Oh, and Treasure Cruise is still a thing.
In the same way that Seige Rhino is a better Bloodbraid Elf, Treasure Cruise is a better Ancestral Vision, and Jeskai Ascendency is a better Second Sunrise, this is a better Stoneforge Mystic. The Modern banlist is starting to look like an absolute joke.
It's definitely playable, but I think Cataclysm is marginally better in any list that wants it. Getting to hose swarm/tribal decks, Enchentress, and planeswalkers when Armageddon doesn't makes it more useful and they cost almost the same. The only situation when you want Armageddon instead is when you have multiple fliers and your opponent has a True-Name Nemesis with no equipment already attached. I wouldn't fault anyone for playing it because it's still game-breaking against Miracles and Lands (the decks that you need mass LD against the most) but I would basically always play Cataclysm instead. Sometimes you'll lose to Lands after a Cataclysm because you let them keep a Maze for your one creature, but usually this isn't the case.
So many people went to Eternal Weekend (where there were 18 Cruises in the top 8) that I think the most recent SCG was actually pretty soft. We will be right back into Cruise domination next week. There's a real argument over whether it's better than Brainstorm in an optimally built deck.
As long as you're willing to judge this set and this block by its merits as a Limited-oriented set, it's awesome. The Limited format looks powerful and balanced, with every color offering multiple strategies and multiple good pairings with other colors. It will be a VERY rare draft that people will lack playables, and the strategic decisions involved in gameplay will be deep and skill-testing.
As far as Constructed goes, this set is steaming hot dog garbage. There's a few more conditional removal spells, a couple splashy mythics that are probably playable, a bunch of terrible narrow combo enablers, and that's about it. I don't think this is really such a bad thing since I'm going to be drafting this set rather than trying to play it in Standard, but it should be considered. Given that Wizards obviously designed and tested this set with Limited in mind I think it's still a success, but any argument for the Constructed playability of the set is going to be pretty thin.
Actually, if they have a red mana open and you can cast the Ring when you untap, it's better to Show in Revoker because if you Show in Ring they can Show in Sneak Attack and respond to the trigger by activating it, and they'll get you. Showing in Oblivion Ring can be limited in its effect at times.
It's very difficult to play optimally, soft to a fair amount of very common cards, and its defense against unfair strategies is pretty much exclusively based in hand disruption (read: susceptible to variance via opponent top decking the win), all of which combine to make it an inconsistent choice for large tournaments. But a skilled player can spike small weekly tournaments (4-5 rounds) if the meta doesn't have too much hate.
It's ultimately a deck that you only play if you want to make your tournament a challenge from square 1, because it's just not doing things that are as powerful as most of the rest of the format and you have to play extremely tight to win basically any matchup. It almost never wins except by inches. But as an exercise in technical play, it's an excellent skill tester and that alone is a good reason to play it if that's what you're looking for.
What is at risk here is the vast majority of tournament play infrastructure. Secondary retailers, by far the majority of tournament organizers, can't all afford to lose the value of their sale stock to counterfeiting. Wizards will lose TONS of money if secondary retailers, mostly LGSs, start going out of business. Wizards has to care about the health of the secondary market or else it risks losing its organized play infrastructure.
If the fakes are good enough that trained judges can't recognize them, they WILL be played in tournaments. What matters to Wizards is that the tournaments still get run at all.
A lot of game stores have an enormous proportion of their assets in older singles. If Legacy staples as a whole tank, even if future cards are printed to be harder to fake, the real money in MtG collecting (the reserved list) will cease to exist, and while it is pretty cool to imagine all those awesome old cards suddenly being available to the masses, the issue is that there suddenly won't be any incentive to run big tournaments for Moxen or duals and the infrastructure for actually using these sweet old cards in Constructed play goes down the tubes. There are a potential solution (I'm sure there are several, but here's one):
-organize and implement a MASSIVE redemption program by which Wizards reprints the high-value cards that are being faked, and invites people to trade in their high-value staples for new versions, after their copies are certified by Wizards as real. This assumes that Wizards has technology unavailable to the average consumer for spotting the fakes (which I think is likely). It also assumes that Wizards is willing to go to the expense of this unbelievably far-reaching reprinting program. However, there are numerous upsides to this idea, as difficult as it would be logistically. Anyone who owned high-value staples before the surge of fakes would be assured of being served by this program. This would basically lock in the value of the new replacements even more than the reserved list itself now does. However, since the average tournament organizer would not be able to spot the fakes, there would be a second class of maybe-fake-maybe-not cards that would have to be legal for tournament play. Basically it would separate Magic into collector-class items and lower-grade potential fakes that were only good for play and which would have declining value over time as the pool of genuine old cards was diminished by the trade-in program and the likelihood of any given old card to be real dropped.
This program would have to be done at great expense to Wizards and it would probably cost money to participate in as a player, collector, or secondary retailer. The new certified versions would probably be worth much more than current printings. But it would potentially solve both the counterfeiting issue and the availability issues presented by the reserved list in one fell swoop. It's a pie in the sky idea, but this counterfeiting problem might have a significant silver lining.
I started grabbing shocks at 6 on eBay and stopped when I realized that there were just too many for it to possibly be a worthwhile use of money. It'll be a while before they start rising again, I think ... Unless devotion strategies get ousted from tier 1 by heavy multicolor support in the remainder of Theros block (very unlikely, I think, but possible), shocks will not see the uptick in pricing due to Standard play that everyone was predicting before Theros came out, and any speculator in shocks will have to hold out for the long haul before cashing out feels profitable.
Guys Pauper is a real format. If you love Magic, and you want to try a ton of new ideas out very quickly and easily, just convince your friends that Pauper and Pauper EDH are so simple and easy to try that there's no reason not to, and if they love Magic too, you will have fun with it.
A few of my friends decided to build Pauper EDH decks to see if the format was fun. They convinced me to try it and I cobbled a Spellheart Chimera list together just by going through my collection and pulling commons I thought would be playable. It took zero financial investment and I have already gotten some really good evenings of playing interesting, challenging, skill-intensive Magic out of it. I'm definitely going to build another one.
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I know, "nobody plays Vintage" ... but for the minority who pay attention, this card is a huge, huge deal.
And if you're doubting its raw power level, here's some math. If you can reasonably expect to cast a spell the same turn you cast it, and then cast a spell precombat each turn for the next 3 turns, it will have done 20 damage by its 3rd attack. That means that with the entirely reasonable expectation of one spell per turn, you're effectively getting an average 7 power for 3 mana. In vintage it's possible to put this guy in play on turn 1 and be attacking for lethal on turn 2.
In Modern, you can cast a turn 3 Mentor, then Mutagenic Growth in response to their Bolt. You untap and cast a cantrip, Bolt a blocker, attack for 7, and kill them the next turn with a single spell. This isn't Magical Christmasland, guys. This card is a trump against the entire midrange strategy if the cheap spells to support it exist in a given format. A mentor and 4-5 cheap spells beats almost any army that can be put on the battlefield for a comparable mana cost even if those spells are blank cards. Oh, and Treasure Cruise is still a thing.
In the same way that Seige Rhino is a better Bloodbraid Elf, Treasure Cruise is a better Ancestral Vision, and Jeskai Ascendency is a better Second Sunrise, this is a better Stoneforge Mystic. The Modern banlist is starting to look like an absolute joke.
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As far as Constructed goes, this set is steaming hot dog garbage. There's a few more conditional removal spells, a couple splashy mythics that are probably playable, a bunch of terrible narrow combo enablers, and that's about it. I don't think this is really such a bad thing since I'm going to be drafting this set rather than trying to play it in Standard, but it should be considered. Given that Wizards obviously designed and tested this set with Limited in mind I think it's still a success, but any argument for the Constructed playability of the set is going to be pretty thin.
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It's ultimately a deck that you only play if you want to make your tournament a challenge from square 1, because it's just not doing things that are as powerful as most of the rest of the format and you have to play extremely tight to win basically any matchup. It almost never wins except by inches. But as an exercise in technical play, it's an excellent skill tester and that alone is a good reason to play it if that's what you're looking for.
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If the fakes are good enough that trained judges can't recognize them, they WILL be played in tournaments. What matters to Wizards is that the tournaments still get run at all.
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-organize and implement a MASSIVE redemption program by which Wizards reprints the high-value cards that are being faked, and invites people to trade in their high-value staples for new versions, after their copies are certified by Wizards as real. This assumes that Wizards has technology unavailable to the average consumer for spotting the fakes (which I think is likely). It also assumes that Wizards is willing to go to the expense of this unbelievably far-reaching reprinting program. However, there are numerous upsides to this idea, as difficult as it would be logistically. Anyone who owned high-value staples before the surge of fakes would be assured of being served by this program. This would basically lock in the value of the new replacements even more than the reserved list itself now does. However, since the average tournament organizer would not be able to spot the fakes, there would be a second class of maybe-fake-maybe-not cards that would have to be legal for tournament play. Basically it would separate Magic into collector-class items and lower-grade potential fakes that were only good for play and which would have declining value over time as the pool of genuine old cards was diminished by the trade-in program and the likelihood of any given old card to be real dropped.
This program would have to be done at great expense to Wizards and it would probably cost money to participate in as a player, collector, or secondary retailer. The new certified versions would probably be worth much more than current printings. But it would potentially solve both the counterfeiting issue and the availability issues presented by the reserved list in one fell swoop. It's a pie in the sky idea, but this counterfeiting problem might have a significant silver lining.
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A few of my friends decided to build Pauper EDH decks to see if the format was fun. They convinced me to try it and I cobbled a Spellheart Chimera list together just by going through my collection and pulling commons I thought would be playable. It took zero financial investment and I have already gotten some really good evenings of playing interesting, challenging, skill-intensive Magic out of it. I'm definitely going to build another one.