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  • posted a message on A better way to play all formats.
    There are people that play like that , especially in EDH / Commander games that are casual anyway.

    In such games you want just to have fun, its not competitive.

    It certainly works, if nobody abuses it for some combos.

    That said, the game drastically changes around it, if you can reliable get to 4+ mana , or put just Urza Tron lands in your land pile, its much more of a problem.
    Some might even choose to only play Wasteland, Strip Mine and the like in their land deck, all of that is a problem as the game is not designed to work that way.
    If tuned, you really just want to have the absolute minimum required lands in your land deck, so even if its randomized, you basically are guaranteed to get the lands and color your need at will.
    Doing so makes land destruction even more painful, to combat that you have to add more lands, which then automatically makes your land deck worse in any scenario that does not involve land destruction.


    Managing two decks gets somewhat annoying, especially if the lands are mixed in with your hand, graveyard etc.

    The rules have to accommodate the fact that 2 decks exist and should never mix, thats reasonable fine in a casual game, but to have clean rules for competitive this becomes quite messy.


    That said, the vast majority of games are fine with mana screw and flood, its part of the game, and the "average" will never have a perfect land draw, and the fact that you cant control what you draw is part of the game, so you want to use cards to combat that (draw + discard effects, lands with cycling, simply having less lands in your deck to begin with, fetching them out of the deck, or man-lands that become creatures, which makes them not dead draws later on).
    A lot can be done so mana screw is less of an issue, and simply part of the game.

    ----

    Variations of the extra land deck could be:

    Instead of a "deck" of lands, simply allow players to play lands from their sideboard, and make it a cost, like exile 2 cards from your hand, which is painful enough that you dont want to do it all the time, but you could still abuse this in some fringe decks. (this variant still becomes a problem if players can more easily play decks with no lands at all, for some kind of combo).
    As each land costs 2 cards in hand, you can basically assume they mulligan to 5 cards just to get a guaranteed land. Some decks can operate with that, and opt to play much less lands.

    Playing any card in hand as a land tapped and with pay 1 life to activate.
    This is kinda what WotC designed much much later as the cards with double side and a land on the back. So you can play something as a land in that way.
    As a normal card does not take this ability into account, it has to be painful and slow, so players only do it if they "have" to.

    If you dont play a land for a turn, at the end of turn, you get a mana token (not an artifact, more like an emblem that nothing interacts with in the game).
    Also a variant that fixes the problem of mana screw or color screw, at least temporarily, so the player gets to cast something to buy more time till they actually draw lands (and if they never do, well, too bad, they will be horrible slow, but at least able to cast stuff).
    In this variation some players opt to play no lands at all, free-spells, like a mono-blue deck with Force of Will and spells that win with little mana, like a storm deck that uses its "free" Lotus Petals to explode with the mana from the first 3 turns.

    ----

    Over time a lot of these variations saw some play , and all of them work for casual games.

    But the moment someone builds and changes their deck with these mechanics in mind, it simply changes the entire game fundamentally, which is the main issue of having it in the first place.

    Posted in: Magic General
  • posted a message on [CLB] "Popular Artist" — MtG Brazil Twitter preview
    Zoltan Boros as "Popular Artist" is kinda meme.


    So you can claim to play a "Boros" deck.
    Posted in: The Rumor Mill
  • posted a message on [CLB] Bane, Lord of Darkness and Jaheira, Friend of the Forest — Herumkommandiert previews
    Well all "tokens" is a hell lot better than creature tokens.

    Just make a billion treasures, clue tokens, food tokens , all work.

    The only bad thing is, Urza does it better, in blue.
    Posted in: The Rumor Mill
  • posted a message on [CLB] "Majestic Creation" — Kalle Koschinsky preview
    Would prefer if these could be played outside of commander, with something else, like an actual X cost and an alternate cost for the commander X value.

    As it is, you pay enough mana that will win the game in decks that packs enough big spells, make X like 10+ mana (for the 5-color big guys) (especially haste creatures, planeswalker and other big permanents).
    Posted in: The Rumor Mill
  • posted a message on [CLB] Mothership 5/17 — Tasha, the Witch Queen, Elminster's Simulacrum and Bundle Basics
    The "borderless" black haired (Natasha / Iggwilv) Tasha looks more like the one in the old books, as she had black hair in them for basically forever.


    The blond hair version is not what i think of Tasha, but people that only know the latest D&D wont know better.

    So having both art versions at least pays tribute to that, so thats good.
    I also prefer the borderless, as it looks more fantasy to me, the other one is more like what i expect a cosplayer to look like.
    Posted in: The Rumor Mill
  • posted a message on [40K] [2X2] Warhammer 40k and Double Masters 2022 Prebeat — Weekly MTG previews
    Like always, buy singles.

    The reprints make the cards cheaper, which directly makes this product "cheaper" in terms of value, but at the same time, its more expensive then ever due to price increases and WotC milking players.

    Its so much product in such a short time, its just too much for people for quite a lot of people.

    That does not mean some cards are enjoyable, they sure are, the entire issue is simply the massive product fatigue and enjoying it all, already starts to cost you so much, it becomes problematic for cost reasons alone (its like WotC is hell bent to find the breaking point of the community, when the moment kicks in that people simply rage quit from a addiction, surely has to be at some point).

    I resort to singles, i wont touch any of these products, except the very few cards that i can clearly budget.

    ----

    At least so far we havent seen a non-reprint card that will be important for constructed, so these cards as "casual" only cards and reprints are indeed skip-able.

    Gets more ugly if we see something along the lines of Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer and Urza's Saga.
    Posted in: The Rumor Mill
  • posted a message on [CLB] Maro’s Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate Teaser
    A weird thought.

    10/10 flying, trample G

    Sacrifice all of your lands. You may not play lands from any zone for the rest of this game.


    That would even be insane in vintage Wink

    ----

    Probably something with a drawback thats more unplayable, like play this only if you have ten lands in play or something along that line.
    Posted in: The Rumor Mill
  • posted a message on Truly unique interactions
    Well your pet is not as unique as you might think, as there are a bunch of morph creatures that can counter stuff:
    https://scryfall.com/search?as=grid&order=name&q=(oracle:morph oracle:turned oracle:counter oracle:spell)

    Lots of old cards to stuff that is extremely unique, as its so wonky.
    Illusionary Mask
    Raging River
    Ice Cauldron
    Shahrazad
    Divine Intervention

    Some more wonky cards where they tried something:
    Panglacial Wurm
    Goblin Game (Still insane that this is not a silver-bordered card and potentially a tournament playable card, which has incredible obscure judge questions, if a bag of M&Ms counts as 1 object or multiple for each piece)

    Then the "draft-only" cards like:
    Aether Searcher
    Posted in: Magic General
  • posted a message on [CLB] Maro’s Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate Teaser
    Quote from Dontrike »

    Honestly, the less IP specific races they do the better. I would have much preferred Halflings to be Kithkin, and many others have Magic equivalents, as I'd rather have more creature types for those that exist in Magic to use when they eventually do get more tribal support rather than incredibly niche types that will likely never do much of anything.


    Exactly. Its better to have more broad race types and simply make the difference in art and name.

    If the tribe matters, the art should show it.

    Which is the problem of creature types like "Ally" that have no visual distinction at all, and only serve a gameplay purpose (so thats super bad abuse of the creature type).

    Aasimar is a Human Angel , thats exactly what it is, no reason to make it its own type, supporting 2 tribes would make it way more useful anyway.
    Posted in: The Rumor Mill
  • posted a message on I am a novice in Magic the gathering, I would like guidance on my deck and an opinion on the strategy I was able to develop...
    Your listed cards with the card tag:


    If you are interested in Commander (99 cards + 1 Legendary creature as your commander), you can check out :
    https://edhrec.com/commanders/gw

    At the commanders tab you can select color combinations and it lists you decks and interesting cards for that color combination, some combos and basically all kinds of informations that are useful if you just want to explore a little bit into what the colors offer you.

    If you want a specific theme for a commander, like lifegain , tokens or enchantments in GW, you can pick one and get a bunch of cards that work well with that.

    Posted in: Deckbuilding/Playtest Groups
  • posted a message on [CLB] Maro’s Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate Teaser

    Its actually an important character in descent into Avernus, Lulu the Hollyphant. Hollyphant are basically Elphant celestials, so Angel Elephants makes sense.
    https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Hollyphant


    Celestial like an Elemental would make more sense than Angel, but at least it looks less silly then it did in my mind.
    Posted in: The Rumor Mill
  • posted a message on [CLB] Maro’s Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate Teaser
    I am convinced for creature types, they have a list and just want to have any combination to appear somewhere.

    Elephant Angel ...
    Posted in: The Rumor Mill
  • posted a message on Magic to become more expensive (again)
    Quote from Simto »
    Funny I got back into Magic because it seemed like a cheap hobby to have a few decks to play with my friends...


    It certainly is, if you never buy any new product (or just few singles).

    Can also proxy a lot of expensive cards with a color printer for casual play and its basically "free".

    I use to play Draft whenever i can, so thats each FNM, did cost 10 euros some years ago, now they charge 20 euros (provide and extra guaranteed pack at least, to move more product).

    Thats like 40 weeks a year x20 bucks, 800 euros a year for drafting, then like 4 PreRelease sealed events (30 euros a pop now) , 120 bucks.

    Buying (and selling) some singles over a year, thats a combined like 1000 bucks a year.

    Thats certainly more money then i spend in video games or any other hobby, just a few years back, it combined to like 500 euros a year, so that basically all doubled.
    Posted in: Magic General
  • posted a message on Magic to become more expensive (again)
    As we see here:
    https://investor.hasbro.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hasbro-reports-first-quarter-2022-financial-results

    Hasbro operates on like a 10% profit margin overall with all product lines.

    WotC has a 40% profit margin, and that is like 22% of Hasbro revenue.


    With a 40% profit margin, increasing the cost of boosters is pretty wild, so nobody can possible deny that WotC is indeed milking the player base dry.
    They have plenty of room to not increase prices.
    Posted in: Magic General
  • posted a message on Opened some New Capenna Draft Boosters with 4 rares!!! (No Uncommons)
    Tolarian Prof opened some Commander decks and had weird packaging errors as well, live on camera:

    https://youtu.be/C9Jn4vSxdMY?t=403

    So that thing is not random, they have something that did go wrong in a much larger scale , i heard of 10+ people already in chats they had similar issues in the Commander packs, of card duplication, or cards outright missing, replaced by basic lands and all of that.
    Posted in: Magic General
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