I've got my code saved verbatim in a Google docs file. I'd advise others do the same as its just a matter of a mere c/p job.
This. Most of the primers on here have thousands of words and a few of them are pushing a decade of existence. If the only place you're keeping that is a single online forum post, you're asking for trouble.
There are some decent situational things in the final dump.
Recruit the Worthy has some appeal as a difficult to disrupt (i.e. counter or bust) instant speed token maker, even though the rate per token is pretty poor.
Smoke Shroud will help keep ninjas connecting after the first combat step and there are bound to be a few more ninja decks around after this set.
Mob is neat, though the jury's still out on how good it is.
Winding Way is potentially drawing multiple cards for 2 mana in green and has utility at all stages in the game in addition to fueling GY strats.
Cave of Temptation is the first time we've seen +1/+1 counters on a land for creatures already on board outside of Gavony Township, which has tougher color restrictions.
Solid set overall. There's plenty that I'll pick up for as yet undetermined future decks like the enemy talismans, horizon lands, and Prismatic Vista. For my longer term decks, Jaya is definitely getting Tectonic Reformation, then I'll probably test out Goblin Engineer and Shenanigans beyond that. Estrid gets Hall of Heliod's Generosity for obvious reasons and will probably pick up a Waterlogged Grove to go along with Horizon Canopy. I'm also looking forward to Echo of Eons and Yawgmoth, Thran Physician despite not having decks in mind for them at this point and will probably pick up a variety of other things that look potentially good.
A couple months later, all of the color work on my new tattoo is done. The artist is super good with color and I'm super white, so it's a good combo. One image in the spoiler, a couple others and a video (because it wraps around my leg) on the artist's instagram. All of the grey in the background is fresh, so it will fade a little over time/once my leg isn't red.
I'm starting this now because of a slow meeting, but it's also so I have less to go through when the full set drops tomorrow: intial thoughts on MH1. Red has gotten plenty of goodies here, including a few cards that look like solid Jaya options.
Red
Aria of Flame - Fun card. The lifegain and targeted damage hopefully helps it fly under the radar a little (i.e. only one person wants to remove it, and they have a few spells before it undoes the life you gave them to begin with) and it comes down early enough to trigger on filtering effects. I'm guessing I don't have enough instants and sorceries to really take advantage.
Force of Rage - Small effect and the alternate cost is rough. Without some kind of synergy to take advantage of the tokens, I can't see this finding a place here. I'd be surprised to see it in the format as a whole very often.
Geomancer's Gambit - I normally would skip over targeted land destruction as a sorcery - Stone Rain has never been a serious consideration - but I like that it replaces itself. Cards are more often the bottleneck than mana unless you're wheeling, so taking out a strong nonbasic without spending a card is worth a look. While I'm not planning on making any cuts for this, it's a decent EDH spell.
Goblin Engineer - Now we're into the good stuff. I run 14 artifacts this could recur and most of them are high impact. I'm usually happy to trade out one of my more situational artifacts for something more relevant, like getting rid of a late game Wayfarer's Bauble for a destroyed Rings, or swapping Scroll Rack out when I have no cards in hand. The tutor is the real appeal here. It can kick off one of the various card advantage/selection engines, or grab a higher cost artifact for one of the other recursion cards to bring back. I'm definitely interested in testing this out.
Magmatic Sinkhole - Probably worse than Skred or Lightning Bolt most of the time (and snow mountains are getting easier to find with this set). Not the worst choice if you're looking for a third copy of those two, as much as I doubt most Jaya lists are.
Pashalik Mons - Mentioned here because I love how deep this set is going on references. Decent if you're running a goblin package, hard pass otherwise. No surprise for a tribal card.
Planebound Accomplice - Prevailing format wisdom is that you should only be running a walker if you're ok with getting a single activation out of them. I've generally found that they live longer than that, but you could do worse than this if you're running walker heavy and want to sneak Karn or Ugin in to remove something. This has better homes in more combo oriented lists in other colors. That said, it's actually fine with just its "fair" use here.
Seasoned Pyromancer - Young Pyromancer grew up. Filtering or draw on the way in, instant speed token production from the yard. This feels like too small an effect for this list, but there's a chance that it plays well enough with the equipment and GY themes to be better than I'm expecting. I like having value spread around the curve so this is a weak candidate for testing. Outside of mono-R, I'll almost certainly jam it in a reanimator list somewhere.
Shenanigans - Ohhhhh! This is a decent card and another one that should be tested out. Repeated artifact destruction is a nice effect and there isn't much of a hoop to jump through here. I've outright won games thanks to Caustic Caterpillar recursion and this has the same possibilities. I'd make sure to keep some mass hate like Vandalblast or Shattering Spree around in addition to this.
Tectonic Reformation - It's late in the alphabet, but this is my favorite card of the set so far for Jaya. It plays very nicely with Crucible of Worlds, Experimental Frenzy, and all of the to hand land searching. When it doesn't do any of that, you can just cycle it. I do like making more land drops than is necessary in this deck because of wheels and other late game, mana intensive plays, but there's still a point where you're just looking for ways to kill the table or find one of your limited answers. This is the card I most want to run out of the set so far.
Throes of Chaos - Basically all the same stuff that was just said about Tectonic Reformation, but with a higher startup cost. I do like that this can be freely discarded and still serve it's primary function. This feels a lot like Reality Scramble with a higher floor and a lower ceiling, and that's a card that's tempted me in the past.
Artifact/Land
Arcum's Astrolabe - If you're running a snow manabase, this is the cheapest cantrip I'm aware of in red. It's a decent grease piece if you have that and heavy artifact themes. Outside of that, I'd skip this one.
Mox Tantalite - Very slow, small upside. If you're very focused on the late game and have heavy artifact themes, it's a little better.
Scrapyard Recombiner - There are some very good constructs available. I'm currently running exactly 0 of them. This is a better fit for decks like Daretti, Scrap Savant that are likely to have a higher density or artifact creatures.
Sword of Sinew and Steel - Another pro-red sword. Finding targets for the artifact is not a difficult thing in an EDH game, even if the planeswalker part of the ability is more likely to go unused. I don't think that 3 swords is necessary, especially with Goblin Engineer as an option, so this would replace one of the other two. Sword of Fire and Ice is one of the best cards in the deck, so it's not really a consideration. Sword of War and Peace has some room for discussion. The lifegain is frequently helpful and I've liked having a fast clock sometimes. I'll have to try the new one and see if I like the repeatable artifact destruction even more than that.
Sword of Truth and Justice - Eh. The protections are generically good and the counter/proliferate is fine. I value pro-red much higher than the other colors here for obvious reasons, and the creature density is too low to go super equipment heavy. I'm not planning on trying this here at all.
Frostwalk Bastion - Respectable manland if you're running snow. I think there are better utility land options.
Tectonic Reformation is pretty clearly the strongest card for this deck spoiled so far and the one I'm most interested in including. After that, I think that Goblin Engineer, Shenanigans, and Sword of Sinew and Steel have the broadest applications. There are a few more that could fit depending on how your deck is constructed. On the whole, great set for EDH and for Jaya. On a sadder note, this forum is shutting down in a little over a month, which obviously means this thread is going to end. The current staff has plans to create a new forum so I'm at least going to give that a shot, including migrating this thread over. The text of the primer has lived on a local file forever and could probably use an update or three anyways. As long as that is up and running before this one goes read only, I'll also throw links in this thread to push anyone who finds it later in that direction. I'll post about that again closer to the day it's actually going dark, so hopefully the discussion keeps going elsewhere.
I would advise anyone with primers/top lists to save/back up those pages, a lot of hard work and ingenuity went into many of them.
I've had mine in a word doc for basically its whole life and anyone maintaining a primer should do the same regardless of forum closure. Much less risk of losing a bunch of time/effort if you run into network problems or something. It's also sometimes helpful to fork it and test changes if you want to restructure or rewrite part of it, without having to redo the original work if you change your mind.
I'll definitely give a replacement forum a shot. I've been on this one long enough that I should at least try it out.
Which is funny because players can check each other's graveyard at all time, how am I suppose to "randomly" pick a card from graveyard if me or my opponent happened to memorized the order already. :3 Am I suppose to write the order down, shuffle it, pick a card at random, then rearrange it back to the way it was? Yes, that's pretty nightmarish.
Die or random number generator on a phone is the easiest way to do it. I maintain GY order out of habit (despite it not actually mattering in many/most EDH games) and it's usually not too bad. I don't run into a lot of random recursion effects, though.
Overall The Wanderer is rather akward as removal outside of limited or decks that have use for the static ability. Off the cards that could be compared to it i'd rather run Valorous Stance or Radiant's Judgment over it. They have some restrictions, but come in handy a lot more often than one might think.
Exile is definitely worth something and it's not impossible that you'll get two creatures with this. It's never going to be my first choice for removal, especially given all of the great white spot removal options, but I could see it making the cut in some decks.
I've seen it across the table a couple times and it's been a minor annoyance, mostly for the static ability. My opinion there is probably heavily influenced by the fact that I was playing Jaya Ballard, Task Mage, where I run a fair amount of burn.
Future Sight could be useful..with top deck manipulation Throes of Chaos looks like a perfect for chaos decks or something
Future Sight has been legal for almost the entire history of the format and is definitely a solid card if you can swing the U-heavy casting cost on an enchantment that doesn't impact the board on its own. Meta dependent but strong.
I have no idea how to feel about Throes of Chaos. I like the design a lot. I'm not sure I like the card.
Dead of Winter is probably the best reason for a snow manabase in mono-B unless you were in the market for a second Pestilence. Snow still feels like it's going to be a mostly mono-color thing, possibly two colors. There's not a ton of fixing (an allied tapland cycle and Coldsteel Heart before this set) and three colors are probably not going to want to be basic heavy, which is where most of the snow permanent count comes from. I do like that it effectively gives some more incentive for mono-colored decks in the format.
Pashalik Mons getting a card is going super deep and I like it. That's a solid goblin on its own merits too.
By the way, how does this interact with horde of notions? it doesn't allow us to cast any elementals from the grave for free, right, 'cuz it's an ability that plays stuff for free, not the cost of actually playing stuff?
Right. Horde isn't giving you an alternative cost, it's an ability that lets you cast for free. No interaction with Morophon's reduction.
Read the card again. It doesn't make creatures cost WUBRG, it makes them cost WUBRGless than they already do, e.g. Goblin Marshal now costs 4R. (Colored cost reduction doesn't reduce colorless costs.)
Morophon combos with Fist to play any creature of the chosen type for free because cost reductions are applied after alternative costs.
I was definitely not expecting a modern legal mom out of this set. Starting with the good, an extra point of toughness is always relevant for a one drop and adding colorless protection is important with all of the artifacts/eldrazi around. On the bad side, not protecting itself hurts a lot. Loss of human typing is relevant for modern and much less important in other formats.
I'll run as many of these lands as I can fit into a color combo. Coming in untapped, tapping for multiple colors, and cycling late when you have an abundance of resources is a great place to be. The benefits of these vastly outweigh the life payment when you're starting at 40 life.
A complete enemy colored cycle of Horizon Canopy analogues was not what I was expecting from this set, but I'm not complaining. Canopy is a great land and these just open the effect up to more color combos.
There's probably some potential for a super janky cheerios style combo deck here. Unless I screwed up my search, there are 962 EDH legal cards that can be cast for free with Morophon down (for anyone else curious, it's motly 1 drops. Only 225 of those are CMC 2+). Of those, 316 are humans. I haven't gone through in depth, but I'm guessing there are 40-50 that you wouldn't be laughed out of the room for playing. That means you could run a critical mass of humans with no colorless component to their mana costs along with cards like Guardian Project and Glimpse of Nature to storm off, while still having a decent creature gameplan when you weren't comboing. You can also run Cream of the Crop, which combined with the anthem effect on Morophon will help lower the number of misses.
I checked a couple other common creature types like elf and cleric and most of those only have 60-70 creatures that fit the criteria. This probably works with those too but you're going to end up a lot more restricted in what you can run. The big selling point for cleric would be the ability to run Edgewalker for some redundancy, which is probably not enough of a reason. I suspect this would be a pretty bad deck no matter how you build it, but it's something different than just building with the usual tribal suspects.
Here's my search if anyone else wants to tweak it. The formatting is breaking the link tags and fixing it sounds like a pain:
Prismatic Vista is a great EDH card. That's joining Command Tower and Reflecting Pool in my auto-include pile for multicolored manabases and has the potential to crack a few monocolored lists. Finding Wastes means it even has upside over fetches in some lists.
I'm cautiously optimistic about the snow cards in this set. Ice-Fang Coatl is playable without any other snow support and ridiculously good if you can reliably turn on the deathtouch. It seems unlikely that the set would include that and snow-covered lands with no other support, so we're probably going to see some more goodies. Some of the existing snow related cards are already fairly strong - I've played Into the North, Skred, Scrying Sheets, Dark Depths, Mouth of Ronom, Coldsteel Heart, Rimewind Cryomancer, and Heidar, Rimewind Master without any support beyond snow basics. If there are a few more snow cards at the level of Coatl in the set or some good nonbasic snow lands (untapped duals of some kind?), snow packages have a lot more potential.
Most importantly, Morophon gives us the long awaited homarid tribal commander.
- Recruit the Worthy has some appeal as a difficult to disrupt (i.e. counter or bust) instant speed token maker, even though the rate per token is pretty poor.
- Face of Divinity is kind of neat for aura voltron strategies and will almost certainly be cheaper than Daybreak Coronet.
- Smoke Shroud will help keep ninjas connecting after the first combat step and there are bound to be a few more ninja decks around after this set.
- Mob is neat, though the jury's still out on how good it is.
- Winding Way is potentially drawing multiple cards for 2 mana in green and has utility at all stages in the game in addition to fueling GY strats.
- Cave of Temptation is the first time we've seen +1/+1 counters on a land for creatures already on board outside of Gavony Township, which has tougher color restrictions.
Solid set overall. There's plenty that I'll pick up for as yet undetermined future decks like the enemy talismans, horizon lands, and Prismatic Vista. For my longer term decks, Jaya is definitely getting Tectonic Reformation, then I'll probably test out Goblin Engineer and Shenanigans beyond that. Estrid gets Hall of Heliod's Generosity for obvious reasons and will probably pick up a Waterlogged Grove to go along with Horizon Canopy. I'm also looking forward to Echo of Eons and Yawgmoth, Thran Physician despite not having decks in mind for them at this point and will probably pick up a variety of other things that look potentially good.Red
- Aria of Flame - Fun card. The lifegain and targeted damage hopefully helps it fly under the radar a little (i.e. only one person wants to remove it, and they have a few spells before it undoes the life you gave them to begin with) and it comes down early enough to trigger on filtering effects. I'm guessing I don't have enough instants and sorceries to really take advantage.
- Force of Rage - Small effect and the alternate cost is rough. Without some kind of synergy to take advantage of the tokens, I can't see this finding a place here. I'd be surprised to see it in the format as a whole very often.
- Geomancer's Gambit - I normally would skip over targeted land destruction as a sorcery - Stone Rain has never been a serious consideration - but I like that it replaces itself. Cards are more often the bottleneck than mana unless you're wheeling, so taking out a strong nonbasic without spending a card is worth a look. While I'm not planning on making any cuts for this, it's a decent EDH spell.
- Goblin Engineer - Now we're into the good stuff. I run 14 artifacts this could recur and most of them are high impact. I'm usually happy to trade out one of my more situational artifacts for something more relevant, like getting rid of a late game Wayfarer's Bauble for a destroyed Rings, or swapping Scroll Rack out when I have no cards in hand. The tutor is the real appeal here. It can kick off one of the various card advantage/selection engines, or grab a higher cost artifact for one of the other recursion cards to bring back. I'm definitely interested in testing this out.
- Magmatic Sinkhole - Probably worse than Skred or Lightning Bolt most of the time (and snow mountains are getting easier to find with this set). Not the worst choice if you're looking for a third copy of those two, as much as I doubt most Jaya lists are.
- Pashalik Mons - Mentioned here because I love how deep this set is going on references. Decent if you're running a goblin package, hard pass otherwise. No surprise for a tribal card.
- Planebound Accomplice - Prevailing format wisdom is that you should only be running a walker if you're ok with getting a single activation out of them. I've generally found that they live longer than that, but you could do worse than this if you're running walker heavy and want to sneak Karn or Ugin in to remove something. This has better homes in more combo oriented lists in other colors. That said, it's actually fine with just its "fair" use here.
- Pyrophobia - Cowards can't block Warriors.
- Seasoned Pyromancer - Young Pyromancer grew up. Filtering or draw on the way in, instant speed token production from the yard. This feels like too small an effect for this list, but there's a chance that it plays well enough with the equipment and GY themes to be better than I'm expecting. I like having value spread around the curve so this is a weak candidate for testing. Outside of mono-R, I'll almost certainly jam it in a reanimator list somewhere.
- Shenanigans - Ohhhhh! This is a decent card and another one that should be tested out. Repeated artifact destruction is a nice effect and there isn't much of a hoop to jump through here. I've outright won games thanks to Caustic Caterpillar recursion and this has the same possibilities. I'd make sure to keep some mass hate like Vandalblast or Shattering Spree around in addition to this.
- Tectonic Reformation - It's late in the alphabet, but this is my favorite card of the set so far for Jaya. It plays very nicely with Crucible of Worlds, Experimental Frenzy, and all of the to hand land searching. When it doesn't do any of that, you can just cycle it. I do like making more land drops than is necessary in this deck because of wheels and other late game, mana intensive plays, but there's still a point where you're just looking for ways to kill the table or find one of your limited answers. This is the card I most want to run out of the set so far.
- Throes of Chaos - Basically all the same stuff that was just said about Tectonic Reformation, but with a higher startup cost. I do like that this can be freely discarded and still serve it's primary function. This feels a lot like Reality Scramble with a higher floor and a lower ceiling, and that's a card that's tempted me in the past.
Artifact/Land- Arcum's Astrolabe - If you're running a snow manabase, this is the cheapest cantrip I'm aware of in red. It's a decent grease piece if you have that and heavy artifact themes. Outside of that, I'd skip this one.
- Mox Tantalite - Very slow, small upside. If you're very focused on the late game and have heavy artifact themes, it's a little better.
- Scrapyard Recombiner - There are some very good constructs available. I'm currently running exactly 0 of them. This is a better fit for decks like Daretti, Scrap Savant that are likely to have a higher density or artifact creatures.
- Sword of Sinew and Steel - Another pro-red sword. Finding targets for the artifact is not a difficult thing in an EDH game, even if the planeswalker part of the ability is more likely to go unused. I don't think that 3 swords is necessary, especially with Goblin Engineer as an option, so this would replace one of the other two. Sword of Fire and Ice is one of the best cards in the deck, so it's not really a consideration. Sword of War and Peace has some room for discussion. The lifegain is frequently helpful and I've liked having a fast clock sometimes. I'll have to try the new one and see if I like the repeatable artifact destruction even more than that.
- Sword of Truth and Justice - Eh. The protections are generically good and the counter/proliferate is fine. I value pro-red much higher than the other colors here for obvious reasons, and the creature density is too low to go super equipment heavy. I'm not planning on trying this here at all.
- Frostwalk Bastion - Respectable manland if you're running snow. I think there are better utility land options.
- Prismatic Vista - I effectively run 4 copies of this already and I think I'm happy to go to 5. Fetches play well with Scroll Rack, Sensei's Divining Top, Experimental Frenzy, Crucible of Worlds, Rings of Brighthearth, and Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle with very little downside. If you're running enough effects that can take advantage of this, it's great. If you're not, it's worse than a basic. This is not worth running for deck thinning. The effect on your draws is smaller than the impact of the life loss, even in EDH.
Tectonic Reformation is pretty clearly the strongest card for this deck spoiled so far and the one I'm most interested in including. After that, I think that Goblin Engineer, Shenanigans, and Sword of Sinew and Steel have the broadest applications. There are a few more that could fit depending on how your deck is constructed. On the whole, great set for EDH and for Jaya.On a sadder note, this forum is shutting down in a little over a month, which obviously means this thread is going to end. The current staff has plans to create a new forum so I'm at least going to give that a shot, including migrating this thread over. The text of the primer has lived on a local file forever and could probably use an update or three anyways. As long as that is up and running before this one goes read only, I'll also throw links in this thread to push anyone who finds it later in that direction. I'll post about that again closer to the day it's actually going dark, so hopefully the discussion keeps going elsewhere.
I'll definitely give a replacement forum a shot. I've been on this one long enough that I should at least try it out.
I've seen it across the table a couple times and it's been a minor annoyance, mostly for the static ability. My opinion there is probably heavily influenced by the fact that I was playing Jaya Ballard, Task Mage, where I run a fair amount of burn.
I have no idea how to feel about Throes of Chaos. I like the design a lot. I'm not sure I like the card.
Dead of Winter is probably the best reason for a snow manabase in mono-B unless you were in the market for a second Pestilence. Snow still feels like it's going to be a mostly mono-color thing, possibly two colors. There's not a ton of fixing (an allied tapland cycle and Coldsteel Heart before this set) and three colors are probably not going to want to be basic heavy, which is where most of the snow permanent count comes from. I do like that it effectively gives some more incentive for mono-colored decks in the format.
Pashalik Mons getting a card is going super deep and I like it. That's a solid goblin on its own merits too.
Morophon combos with Fist to play any creature of the chosen type for free because cost reductions are applied after alternative costs.
Looking forward to playing with this one.
I checked a couple other common creature types like elf and cleric and most of those only have 60-70 creatures that fit the criteria. This probably works with those too but you're going to end up a lot more restricted in what you can run. The big selling point for cleric would be the ability to run Edgewalker for some redundancy, which is probably not enough of a reason. I suspect this would be a pretty bad deck no matter how you build it, but it's something different than just building with the usual tribal suspects.
Here's my search if anyone else wants to tweak it. The formatting is breaking the link tags and fixing it sounds like a pain:
I'm cautiously optimistic about the snow cards in this set. Ice-Fang Coatl is playable without any other snow support and ridiculously good if you can reliably turn on the deathtouch. It seems unlikely that the set would include that and snow-covered lands with no other support, so we're probably going to see some more goodies. Some of the existing snow related cards are already fairly strong - I've played Into the North, Skred, Scrying Sheets, Dark Depths, Mouth of Ronom, Coldsteel Heart, Rimewind Cryomancer, and Heidar, Rimewind Master without any support beyond snow basics. If there are a few more snow cards at the level of Coatl in the set or some good nonbasic snow lands (untapped duals of some kind?), snow packages have a lot more potential.
Most importantly, Morophon gives us the long awaited homarid tribal commander.