This means that they will likely be male (else they'd have said Empress) and it is unlikely to be anyone from the past Kamigawa. How a Planeswalker got to be Emperor though ... now that would be a tale. I'm hoping there will be Sagas in the set that will refer back to the past and that the city is the high tech neon part of Kamigawa but that the countryside outside will be more of all style rural Kamigawa and temples, creating a kind of conflict between the old and the new.
I like the Gangs of New York/Sin City feel of Streets of New Capenna (Al Capone reference? Street Wraith reprint?, but if it's a shard theme then I think I'd have liked to see us go back to Alara in that case.
BUT I'm curious to see how this goes down.
'buster
Calling it now, but New Capenna is a city on Alara. Please note that they said that the city has special significance to Elspeth. With Alara merging the demons of Grixis will have infiltrated the other shards that were once separate. Demon led gangs and a city that was built by Angels (the city on Bant no doubt). With there being 3 colour factions I'm guessing this is what Alara has become and after Elspeth escaped Theros she decided to head back to her adopted home only to find how much it had changed.
You are aware that regenerate was retired and they replaced it with indestructible (and for a number of game play reasons). Also white has more lifelinkers, flyers and indestructible cards than black.
Yes I'm aware of replacing regenrate with Indestructable until the end of the turn. Outside of cycles though white really doesn't get many cards with indestructable, mostly because it ups the power level. More often that not they are part of a cycle (such as the Gods) and more often the other colours get better ones than white. White gets very few indestructable cards outside a cycle very rarely and usually at Mythic. Black uses indestructable until the end of the turn more often and at much lower rarity. As to lifelinkers I've been counting the last few expansions and black has been generally getting the same if not slighty more than white. If you count up the numbers overall then sure white has more because they got a lot more earlier.
Thats a creative issues, not play design (which has only been around since 2018). And they have been looking for a characteristic fantasy race (so no Kor or Leonin) with apparently the players not latching on to anything they have tried and humans ending up the default. But honesty I think this point is meaning less, this will flux and change depending on the planes. Goblins are default in mono-red race but we seen Innistrad use devils and vampires instead, Kaladesh having gremlins, Amonkhet minotaurs and jacklefolk, Ikoria only having humans the monsters and Kaldheim has trolls and dwarves.
True the other colours characteristic races aren't used all the time, but they DO get used regularly whereas white's are all over the place. Goblins and zombies and elves are consistently printed in their respective colours. You can't say that for white. Whereas goblin cards all buff each other up, we are often left with white having a theme one set (knights) and the soldiers the next meaning that the deck as a whole is not got the depth for standard.
By that logic, black can't claim to be good at reanimation since all the other colors can get it. Most thing in magic can be found in other colors (unless its counter-spells in blue), more so when that thing is a major theme of a set.
True, but you'd expect that the colour that gets the thing primarily would be the best at it. Black is the king of reanimation despite the fact that other colours dip into it. Can we really say at this point that white is the best at enchantments?
Protection has been brought back and white has been using it.
Yes I'm aware that it has been brought back, but I thought there were less than there are. I just did a gatherer search for it in standard and I was surprised at the number there were to be honest. They have been using it pretty conservatively though - either protection from colour until the end of the turn or protection from 'random unimportant thing' (Gods? Demons?).
Everyone is welcome to be wrong. But when you are so wrong and push an agenda your agenda gets lost in how wrong you are. What hasn’t always been weak.
But white doesn’t need Aggro, that’s not what it does.
Wrong. White weenie has been a thing since 1994. Mark Rosewater's definition is white is the colour of the army and the group. Its the colour that should have the best small creatures (which is a direct quote). Unfortunatley this has been taken recently to be the most small creatures and not the best. The quality of reds small creatures has been going up and up recently as the quality of whites has been going down. As white has no reach it can't finish of a game as aggro whereas red with impulse draw and burn can.
So white's problems are pretty deep. Here's an article I wrote on it (unpublished till now).
White - sucking since 1994
Everyone is welcome to be wrong. But when you are so wrong and push an agenda your agenda gets lost in how wrong you are. What hasn't always been weak. It has never been particularly strong in EDH which has been acknowledged repeatedly and no one will contest this. However, other than the last year and a half, white has always been a major player in standard as well as other formats. It feels great to thump your chest and say "White has always been bad look at the stuff other colors get" but it really sends the message "The players don't understand why this color is weak so ignore their advice." This isn't the message you want to send. Heck half of the stuff you say is fine but the other half covers it up with being so overwhelmingly wrong that it's hard to say I agree with anything you say.
Name one mono white deck that has won any pro level tournament in the last 3 years? I've been playing since 1994 and watching magic for a as long. Very few mono white decks have ever won anything major. There have been the occaisional success, but that has often been around one or two format defining cards such as Gideon Ally of Zendikar.
Yes white has been a player in blue-white control, but that's because WoTC pushes wraths in white. They tend to be blue based decks with a splash for white for removal and wraths.
So white's problems are pretty deep. Here's an article I wrote on it (unpublished till now).
White - sucking since 1994
The Problems
So, in the past year or two we've seen Maro saying on his blog that white is in need of a little TLC because recently it’s been underpowered. Boy do I have news for you Maro, it has been underpowered since the game began. We only have to look at the boon cycle in unlimited to see just where this started. Even at one time WoTC considered removing Serra Angel from the card pool because it was overpowered. If this doesn't this explain to you that WoTC doesn't understand white I don't know what does!
Ben Bleweiss complained about the state of white in 2004 and Randy Buehler said that they were taking steps to address the issue. You know what, either they didn't take any steps, or they just got it monstrously wrong. Apart from two very brief periods in the sun (Astral Slide and Rally the Ancestors) white has been a bit player in standard at best. The sometimes occaisional ugly stepchild who showed up to win something because everyone had forgotten about it.
Let me get this straight. Wizards understands the colour pie and philosophically there is nothing wrong with the colour pie. The problem has been in its execution since time began. Every other colour has had a strategy or two built into it such that gameplay is specifically crafted. Blue has draw-go and countermagic, green has ramp, black has discard and reanimation and red has the weenie rush with burn as a finisher. White however is a schizophrenic.
White's signature strategy is supposed to be in its small creatures and its synergy is supposed to be in a team. It is supposed to have the best creatures with 3 casting cost and the best at combat. In the last 5 years though I'm seeing all the other colours get the best small creatures. Yes, white gets volume of creatures in standard, but its creatures have not made the grade. In part this is because WoTC has been making other colours creatures better. Red used not to get a 2/2 for 2 without a significant drawback. Now it gets that with considerable upside. The less I say about some of the things green has gotten at the lower casting cost the better. Black has been encroaching onto white space by getting increasingly more lifelinkers, flyers and indestructible cards such that with its removal and reanimation there's no longer a point in playing white.
On top of all that white is not getting its share of the combat orientated mechanics. You don’t believe me? Let’s look at the current set which is a fighting set which should mean white gets lot of great fighting mechanics right? Well, years after Maro said that they were doing something to help white they have 2 cards in Kaldheim with first strike, no cards in Kaldheim with double strike (one though if you include the equipment that gives double strike) and two cards with lifelink. What do they have instead? Five creatures with the relatively low power ability vigilance.
Another issue white has here is that play design keeps failing for white's small creatures to stick to one theme. One minute its dwarves, then its kithkin, next its cats, zombies, humans (which are actually all colours), birds, soldiers, knights, spirits, warriors ... I could go on. None of the themes between sets synergize with each other and often the themes in one set are not strong enough alone to make a strong standard deck.
However, then you say white is the best at mass destruction. Well yes mostly it is, but that just slots into blue's play pattern and the card may as well just be blue as white is merely acting as blue's sidekick in this. White's mass destruction doesn't go in a white deck as it would just be completely anti-synergistic with the strategy above. So often the power is given to mass destruction cards in white or large goofy angels that don't fit white's strategies but sit perfectly with blue.
Enchantments! White's best at them surely? Well, it certainly has some stronger enchantments but it doesn't have a monopoly on them. Green is as good as white at destroying them and gets the best enchantment synergy (enchantress effect). All colours get good enchantments however so this really isn't especially white.
Wizards has been pushing white's rule setting agenda more recently, but there is never enough of this to make a deck and often its only normally good enough for sideboard play in modern (that is when an artifact can't do white things as well as white). More disturbingly despite saying that they are trying to boost white, we are starting to see these rule setting cards in blue and black as well now.
Okay I hear you say. White is the best at defense. I would hasten to say that hexproof is a better defensive ability that anything white has. It used to have protection but WotC decided it was too complex and to do away with it. Circles of Protection - done away with due to poor gameplay. Indestructable? As often as not given to other colours and made better than the white ones these days. Any white indestructable cards tend to be weak and pushed set card such as Gods go into all five colours.
Meanwhile WoTC has consistently played down on white's disadvantages. It gets poor card draw (causing issues in Commander), it doesn't have ramp (though to be fair WoTC has been easing up on that recently) and its answers now have to have answers. This means that when it used to be a slight second to black in removal it is now third and sometimes even fourth in removal. Blue gets to steal creatures (which is argueably stronger) and transmute things into 1/1 flyers! (please compare the no.2 removal colour's uncommon Divine Gambit to blue's common Ravenform for recent evidence of this). Sometimes I think that WoTC fills its development teams with blue and green players who propogate the play styles they like.
The Solutions
White needs to have a defined strategy or two strategies that it can call its own. What it doesn't need is card draw, but it does need its own way to get card advantage in a unique white way. My suggestions for this are below.
a) Defensive Recruitment Aggro
White needs aggro creatures that are defensively minded and can recruit and / or regenerate. It's way too easy for the other colours to ramp into blockers or just destroy whites army before it can get its game going. It needs to have creatures that can out survive the other colours and are agressively costed. If protection and indestructable are too pushed for this strategy, then it needs to have a mechanic (such as the Ward mechanic from Keyforge) that will allow for temporary protection. Also it needs to recruit out of its deck more to give card advantage without draw.
b) Rule setting aggro control
White needs aggro control creatures that can set rules to its own advantage and stifle the other colours. WotC need to make more use of the rule setting so that white can set its agenda and have its own strategies that will define its play pattern. As part of this its small token making probably needs to be made stronger than it currently is.
c) Make white answers better
White's answers to answers tend to be enchantments or creatures with exile and thus it has to play removal in the slow lane. The second best colour at removal has to normal rely on doing it on its own turn and it doesn't get to be the cleaver colour. That seems to be reserved for everyone else and white's tricks need to be better. Wizards please don't just make white's ability in the cycle to be life gain. Give it some damage redirection tricks that are actually cost effective. Play to white's strengths in card designs and not the weakest part of its colour pie. Make white clever!
d) Weenie characteristic creature
Please, please, please give white a small characteristic creature type and stick to it. Humans are not it as WoTC have given that race to all five colours and made good cards in all the colours. It needs something that it gets with the same freguency as elves, goblins, zombies and merfolk. Something that is identified as white and gets to be repeated all the time.
For your 3 mana you are getting 4 mana back over two turns and you are also then getting to tutor for your equipment or the legendary God. I think it looks okay personally.
Okay here's my predictions for 2021. I believe next year we'll get two new worlds and one return again.
Agree that Kaldheim seems likely. I've been predicting it for a while and I think that its finally time.
For the return in the spring I believe it will be Alara. It was popular enough and its over time that this came back
Core 2022 is a shoe in
The second new plane I think may be Jace's home plane Vryn. We haven't seen Jace for a while and I suspect we'll see him go home to Vryn. They've had time to think about how they are going to flesh it out and start tying it into the new storyline.
Again we'll see another colour Commander product (we had Green this year), A commander 2021 set of decks tied to Vryn and a Signature spellbook for Liliana.
They'll keep churning out Secret Lairs until we are sick of them too.
Innovation product will be some kind of whacky draft set.
Also the creature types are all over the place. There's a white 'ape'. All apes to date have been in red or green, so making a white ape seems highly suspect to me. Also insects are pretty entirely in green and yet there's white insects here.
I'm calling this a fake as there are too many strikes against it for my liking.
There's also the Chinese walker Jinag Yanggu in Mono green.
The colours that are currently most missing on Walkers are:-
1) Green-White. There's only really Ajani in this colour combination. I know that Hualti was last green-white, but she's also been white-red like Ajani.
2) Green-Black. Now that Garruk is back to being mono-green we only have Vraska.
3) Red-white. Other than Ajani (who is now officially white-green) we only have Hualti (who seems like she is Naya) and Nahiri in this combination.
My guess is that it will be a Nordic / viking based plane, possibly Angrath's home. Then I suspect that the Winter set will be Return to Theros followed by Rescue from the Underworld. They may do that all in one set, but I suspect they might give Theros two sets so that they don't need to expend too many art resources generating another new world in the year.
a) We know them
b) That it was an Emperor
This means that they will likely be male (else they'd have said Empress) and it is unlikely to be anyone from the past Kamigawa. How a Planeswalker got to be Emperor though ... now that would be a tale. I'm hoping there will be Sagas in the set that will refer back to the past and that the city is the high tech neon part of Kamigawa but that the countryside outside will be more of all style rural Kamigawa and temples, creating a kind of conflict between the old and the new.
Are they cutting down then next year
Calling it now, but New Capenna is a city on Alara. Please note that they said that the city has special significance to Elspeth. With Alara merging the demons of Grixis will have infiltrated the other shards that were once separate. Demon led gangs and a city that was built by Angels (the city on Bant no doubt). With there being 3 colour factions I'm guessing this is what Alara has become and after Elspeth escaped Theros she decided to head back to her adopted home only to find how much it had changed.
Yes I'm aware of replacing regenrate with Indestructable until the end of the turn. Outside of cycles though white really doesn't get many cards with indestructable, mostly because it ups the power level. More often that not they are part of a cycle (such as the Gods) and more often the other colours get better ones than white. White gets very few indestructable cards outside a cycle very rarely and usually at Mythic. Black uses indestructable until the end of the turn more often and at much lower rarity. As to lifelinkers I've been counting the last few expansions and black has been generally getting the same if not slighty more than white. If you count up the numbers overall then sure white has more because they got a lot more earlier.
True the other colours characteristic races aren't used all the time, but they DO get used regularly whereas white's are all over the place. Goblins and zombies and elves are consistently printed in their respective colours. You can't say that for white. Whereas goblin cards all buff each other up, we are often left with white having a theme one set (knights) and the soldiers the next meaning that the deck as a whole is not got the depth for standard.
True, but you'd expect that the colour that gets the thing primarily would be the best at it. Black is the king of reanimation despite the fact that other colours dip into it. Can we really say at this point that white is the best at enchantments?
Yes I'm aware that it has been brought back, but I thought there were less than there are. I just did a gatherer search for it in standard and I was surprised at the number there were to be honest. They have been using it pretty conservatively though - either protection from colour until the end of the turn or protection from 'random unimportant thing' (Gods? Demons?).
Wrong. White weenie has been a thing since 1994. Mark Rosewater's definition is white is the colour of the army and the group. Its the colour that should have the best small creatures (which is a direct quote). Unfortunatley this has been taken recently to be the most small creatures and not the best. The quality of reds small creatures has been going up and up recently as the quality of whites has been going down. As white has no reach it can't finish of a game as aggro whereas red with impulse draw and burn can.
Name one mono white deck that has won any pro level tournament in the last 3 years? I've been playing since 1994 and watching magic for a as long. Very few mono white decks have ever won anything major. There have been the occaisional success, but that has often been around one or two format defining cards such as Gideon Ally of Zendikar.
Yes white has been a player in blue-white control, but that's because WoTC pushes wraths in white. They tend to be blue based decks with a splash for white for removal and wraths.
White - sucking since 1994
The Problems
So, in the past year or two we've seen Maro saying on his blog that white is in need of a little TLC because recently it’s been underpowered. Boy do I have news for you Maro, it has been underpowered since the game began. We only have to look at the boon cycle in unlimited to see just where this started. Even at one time WoTC considered removing Serra Angel from the card pool because it was overpowered. If this doesn't this explain to you that WoTC doesn't understand white I don't know what does!
Ben Bleweiss complained about the state of white in 2004 and Randy Buehler said that they were taking steps to address the issue. You know what, either they didn't take any steps, or they just got it monstrously wrong. Apart from two very brief periods in the sun (Astral Slide and Rally the Ancestors) white has been a bit player in standard at best. The sometimes occaisional ugly stepchild who showed up to win something because everyone had forgotten about it.
Let me get this straight. Wizards understands the colour pie and philosophically there is nothing wrong with the colour pie. The problem has been in its execution since time began. Every other colour has had a strategy or two built into it such that gameplay is specifically crafted. Blue has draw-go and countermagic, green has ramp, black has discard and reanimation and red has the weenie rush with burn as a finisher. White however is a schizophrenic.
White's signature strategy is supposed to be in its small creatures and its synergy is supposed to be in a team. It is supposed to have the best creatures with 3 casting cost and the best at combat. In the last 5 years though I'm seeing all the other colours get the best small creatures. Yes, white gets volume of creatures in standard, but its creatures have not made the grade. In part this is because WoTC has been making other colours creatures better. Red used not to get a 2/2 for 2 without a significant drawback. Now it gets that with considerable upside. The less I say about some of the things green has gotten at the lower casting cost the better. Black has been encroaching onto white space by getting increasingly more lifelinkers, flyers and indestructible cards such that with its removal and reanimation there's no longer a point in playing white.
On top of all that white is not getting its share of the combat orientated mechanics. You don’t believe me? Let’s look at the current set which is a fighting set which should mean white gets lot of great fighting mechanics right? Well, years after Maro said that they were doing something to help white they have 2 cards in Kaldheim with first strike, no cards in Kaldheim with double strike (one though if you include the equipment that gives double strike) and two cards with lifelink. What do they have instead? Five creatures with the relatively low power ability vigilance.
Another issue white has here is that play design keeps failing for white's small creatures to stick to one theme. One minute its dwarves, then its kithkin, next its cats, zombies, humans (which are actually all colours), birds, soldiers, knights, spirits, warriors ... I could go on. None of the themes between sets synergize with each other and often the themes in one set are not strong enough alone to make a strong standard deck.
However, then you say white is the best at mass destruction. Well yes mostly it is, but that just slots into blue's play pattern and the card may as well just be blue as white is merely acting as blue's sidekick in this. White's mass destruction doesn't go in a white deck as it would just be completely anti-synergistic with the strategy above. So often the power is given to mass destruction cards in white or large goofy angels that don't fit white's strategies but sit perfectly with blue.
Enchantments! White's best at them surely? Well, it certainly has some stronger enchantments but it doesn't have a monopoly on them. Green is as good as white at destroying them and gets the best enchantment synergy (enchantress effect). All colours get good enchantments however so this really isn't especially white.
Wizards has been pushing white's rule setting agenda more recently, but there is never enough of this to make a deck and often its only normally good enough for sideboard play in modern (that is when an artifact can't do white things as well as white). More disturbingly despite saying that they are trying to boost white, we are starting to see these rule setting cards in blue and black as well now.
Okay I hear you say. White is the best at defense. I would hasten to say that hexproof is a better defensive ability that anything white has. It used to have protection but WotC decided it was too complex and to do away with it. Circles of Protection - done away with due to poor gameplay. Indestructable? As often as not given to other colours and made better than the white ones these days. Any white indestructable cards tend to be weak and pushed set card such as Gods go into all five colours.
Meanwhile WoTC has consistently played down on white's disadvantages. It gets poor card draw (causing issues in Commander), it doesn't have ramp (though to be fair WoTC has been easing up on that recently) and its answers now have to have answers. This means that when it used to be a slight second to black in removal it is now third and sometimes even fourth in removal. Blue gets to steal creatures (which is argueably stronger) and transmute things into 1/1 flyers! (please compare the no.2 removal colour's uncommon Divine Gambit to blue's common Ravenform for recent evidence of this). Sometimes I think that WoTC fills its development teams with blue and green players who propogate the play styles they like.
The Solutions
White needs to have a defined strategy or two strategies that it can call its own. What it doesn't need is card draw, but it does need its own way to get card advantage in a unique white way. My suggestions for this are below.
a) Defensive Recruitment Aggro
White needs aggro creatures that are defensively minded and can recruit and / or regenerate. It's way too easy for the other colours to ramp into blockers or just destroy whites army before it can get its game going. It needs to have creatures that can out survive the other colours and are agressively costed. If protection and indestructable are too pushed for this strategy, then it needs to have a mechanic (such as the Ward mechanic from Keyforge) that will allow for temporary protection. Also it needs to recruit out of its deck more to give card advantage without draw.
b) Rule setting aggro control
White needs aggro control creatures that can set rules to its own advantage and stifle the other colours. WotC need to make more use of the rule setting so that white can set its agenda and have its own strategies that will define its play pattern. As part of this its small token making probably needs to be made stronger than it currently is.
c) Make white answers better
White's answers to answers tend to be enchantments or creatures with exile and thus it has to play removal in the slow lane. The second best colour at removal has to normal rely on doing it on its own turn and it doesn't get to be the cleaver colour. That seems to be reserved for everyone else and white's tricks need to be better. Wizards please don't just make white's ability in the cycle to be life gain. Give it some damage redirection tricks that are actually cost effective. Play to white's strengths in card designs and not the weakest part of its colour pie. Make white clever!
d) Weenie characteristic creature
Please, please, please give white a small characteristic creature type and stick to it. Humans are not it as WoTC have given that race to all five colours and made good cards in all the colours. It needs something that it gets with the same freguency as elves, goblins, zombies and merfolk. Something that is identified as white and gets to be repeated all the time.
Agree that Kaldheim seems likely. I've been predicting it for a while and I think that its finally time.
For the return in the spring I believe it will be Alara. It was popular enough and its over time that this came back
Core 2022 is a shoe in
The second new plane I think may be Jace's home plane Vryn. We haven't seen Jace for a while and I suspect we'll see him go home to Vryn. They've had time to think about how they are going to flesh it out and start tying it into the new storyline.
Again we'll see another colour Commander product (we had Green this year), A commander 2021 set of decks tied to Vryn and a Signature spellbook for Liliana.
They'll keep churning out Secret Lairs until we are sick of them too.
Innovation product will be some kind of whacky draft set.
Anyway that's my 2 cents worth.
I'm calling this a fake as there are too many strikes against it for my liking.
The colours that are currently most missing on Walkers are:-
1) Green-White. There's only really Ajani in this colour combination. I know that Hualti was last green-white, but she's also been white-red like Ajani.
2) Green-Black. Now that Garruk is back to being mono-green we only have Vraska.
3) Red-white. Other than Ajani (who is now officially white-green) we only have Hualti (who seems like she is Naya) and Nahiri in this combination.