Heartbreaking.
This is simply the only place I come for any sort of Magic information, so I'm not quite sure I'll even be paying attention to Magic as much anymore after close.
Truly sorry to see this go. It is, indeed, the end of an era.
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- Crazy Pierre
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Member for 19 years, 3 months, and 17 days
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I've seen Oath of Druids in a friend's Child of Alara build, it leads to hugely undesirable gamestates as you avoid playing creatures until he gets Forbidden Orchard and then gets an Eternal Witness into Terminus or other tuck spell, Gaea's Blessing trigger to get all the stuff back. Or a Spike Weaver to just fog down the board. Oath of Druids is one of the most unfun and uniteractive cards you could reprint, it discourages aggressive strategies that are the heart of Commander.
I also don't ever see Mana Crypt being reprinted with Sol Ring in ever Commander product. Sol Ring + Mana Crypt would create too much early fast mana in a format that prides itself on being a battlecruiser format, that's not very useful. Plus it would hike the prices of the decks beyond MSRP and necessitate another TNM solution where they'd need to print and print to keep up with demand and lower the prices.
I play in a pretty competitive cutthroat/competitive meta and the only ones that have seen consistent play on that list are Azami and Wanderer. And both lose to either mono-red quick stupidity like Krenko or consistent targeted Land-D. Narset is pretty linear but you can whiff without Top or Soothsaying or so on. Kokusho is meh. Derevi is pretty annoying but loses to Phyrexian Revoker or Pithing Needle.
I can't ever imagine the RC banning so many cards at once, esp. in a format that prides itself on being a big splashy multiplayer fun format.
In a slower group of people it might see some consistent play though.
My Ad Nauseam has 45-50 lands + rocks.
My (ex) Thrun 26-28 and that felt fine.
It really depends on how aggressive you are and how fast you can rever from Strip-lock (if that's a thing in your meta) and so on.
Eh, I have a ton of store credit (in the form of coupons) accumulated at one store that doesn't have a lot of great single selection, so I'll basically buy a bunch of Khans boosters since I need a boatload of its contents. As Khans becomes more available in a month or so, I'll turn to singles purchases from other stores, or trading.
What Mike said. I'm going to start playing Standard myself after not doing so since Valakut was around, I know I'll get faceripped but I'll get to tune my deck, meet new people, trade, hang on...it's still a social adventure and you can always learn while you are there.
Trade Secrets was pretty problematic over here. You either had two players drawing their entire libraries or you had 2+ if another had Consecrated Sphinx out. It's a dumb, uninteractive card that does not benefit the format in any way and leads to two players making the game about themselves.
Global haste outlets are super easy to get (Urabrask and Nass Hysteria see a lot of play, as well as Anger in some decks) and T&N is basically a derpy "I win" card that requires you to instantly react or lose the game. It's in the same boat as Omni but is a ton easier to cast since it needs only two coloured mana and is the ramp colour on top.
The thing is...these aren't "9 mana/10 mana spells", they are turn X win conditions. That's how they need to be evaluated. Spells aren't locked in turns by their mana costs, you generally need to shave 2-3 off the colorless cost of any spell with all the mana rocks floating around; T&N is more than likely a turn 5-6 play, Omni a little later than that but can get cheated out through Dream Halls or Academy Rector.
This is a pretty good idea and intention, but I could see players just derping around until turn X is reached then comboing out. Ideally you'd either remove the early fast mana or the "Boom I win" cards and make the game about battlecruiser, but that's unlikely to happen due to self-policing and so on.
Well, probably not happening in EDH or Modern/Vintage/Legacy but I did some back of the napkin math:
Assuming you are playing with 4-6 fetchlands, a variety of cards (6-8) like Thoughtseize, Sultai Charm, Hero's Downfall and that some of your creatures die, you should be looking at having at least 4-6 cards in your graveyard at any time. If you push Delve with cards like Sultai Ascendancy you can probably go to 8-10. It may not be a reasonable expectation to have 10+ cards in grave, but 4-6 sounds doable. That makes this basically a lower-costed Concentrate, which is fine. Still prefer the two-Impulse variant though.
Commander changes:
New Bans:
Braids, Cabal Minion is BANNED.
Rofellows, Llanowar Emissary is BANNED.
Erayo, Soratami Ascendant is BANNED.
New Unbans
Kokusho, the Evening Star is UNBANNED.
Metalworker is UNBANNED.
Explanation from the RC:
There are, in essence, two changes here. The first one is that we've decided to eliminate "Banned as Commander". Having multiple lists was unnecessary information overhead, and we felt it was clearer to have a single, streamlined banlist and add "Problematic as a Commander" to the banlist criteria.
Doing that meant that we needed to evaluate the four cards on that list. Fully banning Braids and Rofellos were easy calls, especially given Rofellos' last stint. Though we have a few reservations about how annoying Kokusho may be, general consensus was that unbanning her was more correct. Erayo was the most contentious; it's a bigger problem in competitive play, which we don't really consider, but is a miserable card to play against at all levels. We're leaving it banned for now, but may revisit that in the future.
We've been discussing the possibility of unbanning Metalworker for a while now. It's capable of making some truly ridiculous amounts of mana, and having 12+ mana available on turn 4 or 5 is not something that casual games should have to deal with. We like to encourage battlecruiser-style decks, but over the later stages of a game, where players have had a chance to build up to combat it. However, the all-in nature of Metalworker leaves it vulnerable to mass artifact removal, and when it isn't performing optimally it's a pretty weak card (though still part of several combo engines). Aside from Sharuum - a deck that can already be built to a competitive extreme - the decks that most look to use Metalworker already have a lot of disadvantages to overcome, so allowing them the occasional early explosion should be acceptable risk.
On the whole, we're pretty happy with the health of the format. Conspiracy introduced a bunch of new and interesting commanders, a few unusual planeswalker-commanders have been previewed, and Khans is going to provide some much-needed wedge-color love. And Hardened Scales. Oh yes, Hardened Scales...
I'd dearly love DEN to go away, it adds nothing fun to the format at all. Rift is fine, Prophet is a little centralizing but mostly fine and Sphinx meh.
I don't think there are going to be any changes though, nor will there be for the foreseeable future unless another Griselbrand comes out. Which is a shame, really, since occasional bannings/unbannings can kick some new life into the format.
As for Bribery...it's seen less and less play around here. It does nothing against my Thrun deck (no creatures at all maindeck) or Oloro (get Skirge Familiar? Ok I'll Suddden Death then Yawg Will/Elixir it back) and generally games end too quickly for the bribed creature to do much. I will agree on Palinchron though, it's just a recycling combo engine, meh.
Pretty sure Sheldon said here prior that you wouldn't have to worry about Crypt/Ring getting banned.
I'm going to go out on a thin lim and say there won't be any changes for the foreseeable future to the banned list, except maybe to remove something.
The forums are pretty quiet outside of complaints about the usual suspects and there's nothing in Khans (so far) that looks degenerate.
Nah. We had a player that got a Collector's Chaos Orb and wanted to try it out, so I asked if he could just use it as a self-exiling Vindicate and he wanted to flip it...so he measured exactly one foot up, cupped the card then slowly released it so it turned a full cycle and it blew up the permanents he did not like, then he recurred it with Academy Ruins or whatever, and it came down to a big grief-fest. I had to pull up the rules section and various threads on the mtgcommander forums to get him to stop. It was that or I spread my cards all over the store so he could not hit more than card per use.
Also no thanks on Painter's coming off the list, adds nothing to EDH and creates a bunch of annoying corner cases you need to deal with.
Least to lose: Probably anything that durdles creatures without actually killing you, borin.