MTG Salvation

Quote from Wildfire393 »

Quote from Pokken »

She's pretty much as warping as primeval titan. Not as powerful as Ad Nauseam but people actually play her extensively.

It's kind of a lame argument honestly, I get it, but for some reason stupid combo tricks don't get the same kind of play as stupid creatures. Otherwise Rings of Brighthearth would be banned.

Primeval Titan is an entirely different type of warping from Prophet. Like, several orders of magnitude more warping.

If you cast Prophet, have entire go around the table, and then someone wraths, odds are you're back in the same position you started in. Maybe even worse because you overextended into that wrath.
If you cast Prime Time, even if it is IMMEDIATELY removed, you've already gotten a huge bonus to your board position - the standard grab of Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth + Cabal Coffers means that you more than doubled your available mana. If it survives an entire go around the table, you can grab Vesuva and Deserted Temple and have more than four times as much mana as you started with. Even without a land drop in there, you went from 6 to 10 lands and two of your lands give +8 mana with a third giving +6, meaning you've got 29 mana available on your next turn - which is actually almost five times the initial amount. And answering this is difficult, generally requiring multiple people to find their Strip Mine effects.
Even without grabbing things like Coffers or Cradle, the ability to ramp your mana significantly every single turn means that everyone is cloning, stealing, and reanimating Prime Time as soon as it hits the board. While some of these things may be true about Prophet as well, many are not. Nobody is ever going to cast Act of Treason on a Prophet. A mono-black player without good mana dumps like Geth will likely not waste his Reanimate on Prophet. Etc.

Quote from Wildfire393 »

Quote from Pokken »

I have played extensively with the primordial and while he often won games with blinking, he never created a board state like Prophet creates where one player plays what is functionally another turn during each other player's turn.

When I say he craps on games worse than those guys, that's what I mean - he creates a really unpleasant board state that is different than one guy being able to make a bunch of mana. Primetime guy makes cabal coffers and urborg and casts another spell then passes the turn, that's nothing like:

I cast prophet. untap. Ok, did you play a creature? Ok, I flash in roil elemental, then flash in wood elves and gain control of it. Did you want to wrath? Ok, I flash in primespeaker to dig for a counterspell, I counterspell it.

I do agree that Sylvan and Primetime are far more format warping, but I don't think they ruin individual games to the same extent.

But the thing is, 90% of the bad stuff that Prophet does, Seedborn Muse does just as well. Spell Burst lock the table? Check. Opposition lock the table? Check. Capsize lock the table? Check? Stroke of Genius effects into counterspelling everything? Check. Long before Prophet was even a glimmer in whoever-designed-it's eye, Seedborn Muse was giving control players a turn during everyone else's turn. Heck, there were even plenty of things played alongside it like Alchemist's Refuge, Leyline of Anticipation, and Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir that would let the guy flash dudes in if that's the way you wanted to do things.
In fact, there are definite situations in which Prophet is WEAKER at doing Prophet-y things than Muse is. Crystal Shard + Mystic Snake springs to mind. Mana Vault, Grim Monolith, and Basalt Monolith are definitely others.

Banning Prophet would slightly reduce the amount of games that end in the control player Lighthouse Chronologist ulting easily, but it would by no means eliminate it.

Quote from JWK »

The horror scenarios people keep reciting about Prophet... they've been possible for ages if a person has out Seedborn Muse with either Leyline of Anticipation or Vedalken Orrery. I pulled off that combo lots of times, and did all that broken stuff, long before Prophet was released. And yes, that's a powerful combination.

Prophet is better than that, because you get it all that power one card, and it's easier to recur one card (and especially a creature) than two (one being an enchantment or artifact), but if "untap mana and flash things in" hasn't already destroyed the world, I still don't see Prophet being the final straw.

Quote from artvi »

Hi there.

I am totally new to the format and I have no idea whatsoever what to expect. Is there any archetype list available somewhere ?

I would like to build an abzan deck around spells such as pernicious deed, drown in sorrow, inquisition of kozilek, ... I guess this has been tested already. Is this performing well ? Any list you would recommend me to start with ?

Quote from paragonweapon »

Id like to see a Mogis primer. I run him and would like to see how it compares.

Quote from cryogen »

I see a mix of player levels in my league, from people who have played precons out of the box to players with decks that look like singletoIn vintage decks.

Quote from Sheldon »

Quote from atlas_hugged »

Quote from Sheldon »

Quote from ProfessorWhen »

I feel like a large portion of the list is there to make sure people have fun the way the RC says they should. At some point they either need to acknowledge that they are sculpting the format to their own personal definition or they need to understand that "tailor your game with house rules" is not an acceptable fix for a large portion of the EDH population.

Pretty sure we've repeatedly acknowledged we're sculpting the format to our own vision.

Hypothetical: if you ever felt that your vision was no longer desired by the majority of the players in the format, would you change the direction you're taking with the format?

Majority? No. Overwhelming majority? Still pretty much no. I'll draw an analogy to a TV show, like maybe Arrested Development. From the beginning the show had a particular vision of the kind of comedy it was going to do. When the masses didn't like it, the producers continued with their vision, even if in the end, the ratings got so low they were cancelled. For them, the important part was the vision, not the popularity. It's kind of the same with us. We want to make the format accessible to a broad audience, but since there's no way that audience ever includes everyone, raw populism is just a path to destruction. We never want to a be a least common denominator thing (and unlike a TV show, don't need to worry about money). Our message the whole time is "this is the direction we're going, we hope you follow along," understanding that YMMV. If our vision leads to the death of the format as we know it (which we have pretty good evidence won't happen), then so be it. I'd rather die as myself than live as someone else.