Back playing again after a small hiatus, mainly due to the, to me, very boring Avacyn Restored limited format. I am a huge sucker for multicolor blocks and decks, so I've dived right into the RtR prerelease. Went 3-1 with a Selesnya deck, splashing black for removal and blue for the sweeper. Format seems somewhat slow-paced, which is nice. The unleash decks I faced weren't really that scary as detain and populate really slowed them down. Went 2-1 in draft with an Izzet burn/control deck that was kind of bad, but fun to play.
Yes, if a lot of token or weenies decks become common in the meta, this won't be a mainboard card. But if ramp, combo, control or midrange decks become common this will be a good card.
Also, the sacrifice is at the beginning of combat. If the controlling player has an untap effect it can be used at the beginning of declare attackers, and there is nothing the opponent can do about it. Now it is not worth adding an untap effect for this card alone, but if there is something strong enough on it's own that can untap, then it becomes really brutal. We wil have to wait and see the complete set.
I see a place for this guy in Jund, in MBC, in UB control and lots of other archetypes.
There is also a likelihood of spells synergizing with stuff having +1/+1 counters on them, due to the presence of Unleash. This might potentially allow more shenanigans with this card.
I dont see anyone claiming this is the top card of the set. But it is a solid card with a potential future in standard and block. Dismissing it as useless is just silly. It might even be a counter to Populate decks as it can land very early on the play, and severely hamper Populate, as it requires constant sacrifices, and Populate decks presumably want their early creatures/tokens pretty bad.
I think a lot of you are underrating this creature. I see the anti-evasion interpretation, but it is pretty much a one-sided The Abyss, that if they run out of creatures give you a huge flying beater. And it's 4 cc. Against creature-light decks this guy just wrecks the board.
This is not Abyssal Persecutor. It is not a finisher. It is a tempo/control tool.
Of course, it's very possible White is being overdrafted right now, but that's a different matter entirely. (For example, I'm probably overdrafting it because I keep losing to it.)
That's something I'm constantly having to fight. If I lose against a deck type, I actively have to resist almost forcing it during my next draft. Really annoying, but glad to hear I am not the only one with this tendency.
Sigh - Magic can be such a cruel game. I finally managed to find the time to plan playing a 64-man release draft, and after the hour of drafting and deckbuilding a nice and synergistic RG beatdown/soulbound deck, I play a guy who curves out beautifully into Sigarda in G1, and then I get manascrewed in game 2 after keeping a 2-lander, while he drops one creature after the other and an angels' tomb.
Strangely I haven't had much success with green and white. Red and black have been my most succesful colors. I really want to like blue, but I find I usually lack oomph somehow if I draft a blue deck.
Yeah the statistical odds of going 26-0 even at an ELO difference of hundreds are... quite low, especially with MTG being a randomized game, so that a mighty feat indeed.
Interesting that I seem to be undervaluing Homocidal Seclusion. I guess I am colored by playing against someone who used it to put all his eggs in one basket. It just felt rather easy to play around. I'll keep an open mind about it, and try building around it myself I guess, if it lands in my lap.
I don't know about Cavern of Souls - it's colorless mana unless it's the correct creature type - I didn't really feel my deck had mana issues, even with the couple of triple colored cards. My gut feeling was just that I didn't need it, so I resisted the temptation to play it. I don't think I would play it in the future in a deck with this distribution of mana costs and creatures/spells. It just feels like an unnecessary risk.
As for combat tricks - it was mostly the Terrifying Presence, which like I wrote, were pretty much blowouts in every game. It's not the most difficult thing in the world to play around a fog - but keeping 2 mana open, and having a potential blowout was just really nice. And when it did hit the table it really had an impact. Especially as there is so little removal to void it by removing the target.
I didn't actually get to play Defy Death - even though I had it in hand several times. Either I had something more relevant to play or I didn't want to use it on what was in the graveyard.
Haunted Guardian was actually decently relevant as early durdle - I was quite unsure on the speed of the format, so I was a bit wary of making my curve too top-heavy, and he seemed like a decent roadblock until I could land some fat and start racing. Side-boarding Eaten By Spiders was probably a mistake as you indicate.
Bladed Bracers was also a bit so-so. It was a nice curve-filler, but it didn't really have a big impact on the game.
A funny game I had was against a guy with double Homicidal Seclusion. It seemed like a great idea on paper, but it was really not very hard to create blow-outs against. I can't really see that card being maindeckable, with all the combat tricks and what not floating around.
Wow - that's a nice streak. I've only done 1 prerelease and I managed to 4-0 it with this slightly unfair pool Notice the bonus Cavern of Souls for value. Haven't played in a while due to League of Legends, Diablo 3 and my indie game project distracting, so it was great to play around with a new set. The format was better than I had expected with combat tricks/complicated races/soulbound playing a key role in pretty much all matches (except for the Sigarda->concede games). Terrifying Presence was incredibly strong and decided a lot of the games. It was just brutal in a lot of the games. Defang got sided out pretty much every game.
Agree on Cathedral Sanctifiers being a horrible maindeck. I can see it being useful against blistering fast aggro with low T dudes - but I don't know if I'd want to play it against most of them. Speaking of aggro: I faced an interesting BG aggro deck with Blood Artist+Bloodflow Connoisseur+ -2/-2 zombie + trident + 2/1 pseduo-unblockable wolves. I won that match while on 1 life, playing Sheltering Word in response to his final swing. It was scarily fast considering the colors. I didn't see any of the red aggro decks.
Do you know the card game Family Business? It's a low skill game and one of the most savagely political games ever due to the absurd potential for ganging up on people. Nonetheless I managed an absurdly high win rate at the game back in the mid 90s simply by keeping my visible assets way down to discourage targetting and never playing my good cards so that my hand was way stronger than the number of cards in it would suggest, ready to dominate a 2-3 player endgame.
I used to play that a lot back then as well, and later I introduced my wife to it at some point, who then decided to bring to a family dinner. So now it's usually a staple of family dinners in her family. It's pretty well suited for people who don't do a lot of gaming, I think.
Managed to finally draft a Cube deck that didn't do awful. Made it to the finals of an 8-4, but lost 1-2 in the finals, when I got wrecked in the last game by a monored deck with landdestruction and fast dudes. Won one of the games in round 2, due to my opponent casting Wispmare while he had a Treachery on my Master of the Wild Hunt. Even though I think he would've won still, he immediately conceded the game went it dawned on him that Wispmare doesn't have an optional effect.
It was sort of a aggro/midrange-ish rock deck, and I hadn't really expected it to do as well as it did.
Midrange hasn't really been a viable deck since Jund, the way I see it. It's been ramp, control or aggro. First SFM and Jace made midrange obsolete. Then the Titans.
I like Cavern of Souls and I like Mana Leak leaving standard. But these are minor things compared to the Titans, which were really just bad design. And the Swords, which are also bad design, as I see it, and the low casting/equip cost is simply to create some symmetry with the old swords. They're pretty much deliberately overpowered.
A healthy format should contain a mix of aggro, midrange, combo and control decks. Of course each format, especially in something like Standard with a rotating pool, will have it's signature decks. But to me, control is more fun when bouncing, sweeping, controlling and disrupting is the primary control mechanism, and not unconditional counterspells. Especially in the early game. Draw-go decks are just the worst kind of Magic for me.
However, people have different preferences, and there should be room for blue players too. But midrange is the underdog right now, as I see it, and anything which increases the likelihood of midrange, is a good thing in my book. When CC4 is a critical part of the deck, I am a happy camper.
I must say Primal Surge came as a surprise. 10 mana for that effect? That's very strange. Yeah, RoE looks to remain king of single-set draft formats. AVR has some cool cards, but looking at the pool in it's entirety, I don't see that many interesting archetypes. And I dislike formats without fixing, and there's not a lot of it in AVR spoilered so far. The more colors in the deck the more merrier!
I hope the set ends up surprising me because I really like Soulbound and all the blink effects. But I hope it doesn't end up being a format where everyone fights over the awesome white flyers, and the ground is full of durdles. Also, Miracles - I am not sure they'll do good things for the format.
Yeah, that's true - ISD had a good amount of decent auras. But I still think it's quite telling that equipment is often cheaper *and* more powerful than auras. And there's so many wasted cards - something like Talons of Falkenrath. This is actually close to being playable, but then they go ahead and overcost it. I don't understand this extreme caution - when was the last time an aura turned out overpowered and format warping?
I guess the subtheme makes sense if RTR has a lot of aura stuff going on. If it doesn't then it's hugely baffling.
Good luck at the tourney Team Norway!
Also, the sacrifice is at the beginning of combat. If the controlling player has an untap effect it can be used at the beginning of declare attackers, and there is nothing the opponent can do about it. Now it is not worth adding an untap effect for this card alone, but if there is something strong enough on it's own that can untap, then it becomes really brutal. We wil have to wait and see the complete set.
I see a place for this guy in Jund, in MBC, in UB control and lots of other archetypes.
There is also a likelihood of spells synergizing with stuff having +1/+1 counters on them, due to the presence of Unleash. This might potentially allow more shenanigans with this card.
I dont see anyone claiming this is the top card of the set. But it is a solid card with a potential future in standard and block. Dismissing it as useless is just silly. It might even be a counter to Populate decks as it can land very early on the play, and severely hamper Populate, as it requires constant sacrifices, and Populate decks presumably want their early creatures/tokens pretty bad.
This is not Abyssal Persecutor. It is not a finisher. It is a tempo/control tool.
That's something I'm constantly having to fight. If I lose against a deck type, I actively have to resist almost forcing it during my next draft. Really annoying, but glad to hear I am not the only one with this tendency.
Strangely I haven't had much success with green and white. Red and black have been my most succesful colors. I really want to like blue, but I find I usually lack oomph somehow if I draft a blue deck.
I don't know about Cavern of Souls - it's colorless mana unless it's the correct creature type - I didn't really feel my deck had mana issues, even with the couple of triple colored cards. My gut feeling was just that I didn't need it, so I resisted the temptation to play it. I don't think I would play it in the future in a deck with this distribution of mana costs and creatures/spells. It just feels like an unnecessary risk.
As for combat tricks - it was mostly the Terrifying Presence, which like I wrote, were pretty much blowouts in every game. It's not the most difficult thing in the world to play around a fog - but keeping 2 mana open, and having a potential blowout was just really nice. And when it did hit the table it really had an impact. Especially as there is so little removal to void it by removing the target.
I didn't actually get to play Defy Death - even though I had it in hand several times. Either I had something more relevant to play or I didn't want to use it on what was in the graveyard.
Haunted Guardian was actually decently relevant as early durdle - I was quite unsure on the speed of the format, so I was a bit wary of making my curve too top-heavy, and he seemed like a decent roadblock until I could land some fat and start racing. Side-boarding Eaten By Spiders was probably a mistake as you indicate.
Bladed Bracers was also a bit so-so. It was a nice curve-filler, but it didn't really have a big impact on the game.
A funny game I had was against a guy with double Homicidal Seclusion. It seemed like a great idea on paper, but it was really not very hard to create blow-outs against. I can't really see that card being maindeckable, with all the combat tricks and what not floating around.
Agree on Cathedral Sanctifiers being a horrible maindeck. I can see it being useful against blistering fast aggro with low T dudes - but I don't know if I'd want to play it against most of them. Speaking of aggro: I faced an interesting BG aggro deck with Blood Artist+Bloodflow Connoisseur+ -2/-2 zombie + trident + 2/1 pseduo-unblockable wolves. I won that match while on 1 life, playing Sheltering Word in response to his final swing. It was scarily fast considering the colors. I didn't see any of the red aggro decks.
I used to play that a lot back then as well, and later I introduced my wife to it at some point, who then decided to bring to a family dinner. So now it's usually a staple of family dinners in her family. It's pretty well suited for people who don't do a lot of gaming, I think.
Managed to finally draft a Cube deck that didn't do awful. Made it to the finals of an 8-4, but lost 1-2 in the finals, when I got wrecked in the last game by a monored deck with landdestruction and fast dudes. Won one of the games in round 2, due to my opponent casting Wispmare while he had a Treachery on my Master of the Wild Hunt. Even though I think he would've won still, he immediately conceded the game went it dawned on him that Wispmare doesn't have an optional effect.
It was sort of a aggro/midrange-ish rock deck, and I hadn't really expected it to do as well as it did.
I like Cavern of Souls and I like Mana Leak leaving standard. But these are minor things compared to the Titans, which were really just bad design. And the Swords, which are also bad design, as I see it, and the low casting/equip cost is simply to create some symmetry with the old swords. They're pretty much deliberately overpowered.
A healthy format should contain a mix of aggro, midrange, combo and control decks. Of course each format, especially in something like Standard with a rotating pool, will have it's signature decks. But to me, control is more fun when bouncing, sweeping, controlling and disrupting is the primary control mechanism, and not unconditional counterspells. Especially in the early game. Draw-go decks are just the worst kind of Magic for me.
However, people have different preferences, and there should be room for blue players too. But midrange is the underdog right now, as I see it, and anything which increases the likelihood of midrange, is a good thing in my book. When CC4 is a critical part of the deck, I am a happy camper.
I hope the set ends up surprising me because I really like Soulbound and all the blink effects. But I hope it doesn't end up being a format where everyone fights over the awesome white flyers, and the ground is full of durdles. Also, Miracles - I am not sure they'll do good things for the format.
I guess the subtheme makes sense if RTR has a lot of aura stuff going on. If it doesn't then it's hugely baffling.