Has anyone even looked at Gate to the Afterlife?
I know we have Haruspex and a few other draw engines, but this one does something that as far as I recall others can't: Ditch things into the graveyard for easier access. There have been a few times where I had infinite draw, but couldn't do anything with it cuz everything was in my hand.
It's obviously not a replacement for Haruspex since it's not a creature, but it definitely deserves a fair run, don't you guys agree?
You usually solve that by passing, discarding down to 7 and going off again on their upkeep.
Personally, I'm going to keep Boonweaver in my list instead of replacing it with hulk, with the rationale that Hulk grabbing Grand Abolisher + Academy Rector lets you beat grave hate that comes in the form of Relic, Scooze, Tormod's Crypt etc. I'm also in agreement that a card that only facilitates a win is useless, but I'm keeping in Zulaport Cutthroat due to the fact that having access to a win condition out of incidental combos such as Saffi + Loyal Retainers, Fiend Hunter/Saffi + Sun Titan, etc. is fairly valuable.
That said, I think I'm going to be moving away from Karador to a UG/BW Partner list for Hulk combo, as blue has a bunch of useful tools if you're focused entirely on the combo. Karador probably still grinds better though, so I'd say it comes down to what you're playing against on a regular basis.
Yeah the Partner commanders seem like a decent idea. Some have nicely grindy abilities and better casting costs, too, and I find myself missing Phyrexian Metamorph from playing Pattern-Rector in German Highlander. That card is a house.
If a card is in your Reveillark-Hulk combo deck because it wins you the game when you combo out, it's a bad card. You get Guide=>Lark=>Saffi+stuff and you can just shred their hands with Tidehollow Sculler, have arbitrary amounts of: Hulk triggers, life, reanimates, Regrowths. You likely also have access to disenchants/acidicslimes, edicts, draw, and either infinite green mana or infinite mana of any color and thus repeat application of any spell in your deck. Maybe arbitrary amounts of targeted damage and definitely power on a creature attacking at an empty board the next turn as well. If you cannot win the game from that kind of position I question wtf you're doing or what kind of eldritch sorcery the opponent is employing that he can't be made helpless.
Just pick cards that have a use outside of the combo. You can cobble together all manner of insane Goldberg machines with these kinds of decks, and those solve just about anything just in an unnecessarily complicated way.
Council's Judgment is cancer. It's funny how it looks like an answer to a certain equally cancerous fun-killing fish, yet will largely hurt nonblue decks that can't really do anything about it - it circumvents every form of protection nonblue creatures tend to have, you can't use multiple bodies as a buffer like vs. edicts, you can't get the target out of the way, stupid card will just choose a new one on resolution. It exiles, so making it poor value by using creatures with dies triggers is out, too.
Meanwhile, blue as usual can just counter the damn thing and proceed to cast True-Name Nemeses and laugh all the way to the bank.
Stupid card is stupid, it's one more piece of cancer upon the game, and it will hit nonblue decks in a thoroughly blue format the worst. Feels really nice and encouraging.
There's going to be the usual vocal internet minority whom will have a knee-jerk reaction an lash out about the slight card frame change, but in all honesty it makes perfect sense. Counterfeits have become an issue in the past couple years as print technology becomes available to the wider masses. When I played the Dragonball Z card game for a while, that company did something similar for it's rares and ultra rares and it didn't really detract from the rest of the card.
Or, alternatively, that transition to black is horrible and should never have been done.
Or they could've just added appendages if the current form felt too constraining. Not like you can't make a reptilian or insectoid critter with a sliver head and a couple scythe-claws.
Anything in a fantasy work can be technically excused by waving hands and coming up with some excuse. Technically speaking, "a wizard did it" is enough. The thing is, the end result will still be a lazy, piss-poor hackjob, like the new "slivers".
That you can technically justify the new "slivers" being Slivers by stretching the stuff they've been described doing doesn't change the fact that the new "slivers' " art, separated from the card frame that's yelling "look they're Slivers!" at us, doesn't make anyone go "Oh, that's a Sliver". It's a failure of the product's visual design that tramples on people's expectations and established visual identity so badly it isn't funny.
Trying to say they evolved is precisely that lazy, justificatory hack writing. Moreover, we can pretty well observe that the "evolution" is at odds with both how Slivers have been depicted to date, and with how actual evolution works. In this way, the explanation starts breaking the secondary belief Tolkien wrote about.
In short, it is an argument about quality, not technical correctness. The charge is this is lazy, uninspired and lame product design, not you haven't written the requisite handwavy paragraphs of hack writing to make this work.
Yet the new "slivers" still bear more visual resemblance to Eldrazi than they do to actual existing slivers, which is pretty bad.
The rules and the art issues wrt the new sliver cards are pretty separate. They are mechanically slivers, creature type and all, with a bit of slivery feel sacrificed for good gameplay, which is a deal-breaker for some. But I would never have even thought of any of the "slivers" (except perhaps Blur) as slivers if I hadn't seen them in frame. Visually they have almost nothing in common with other slivers.
It's funny how people say "You want to keep Slivers exactly the same", when I and many others have simply expressed distaste for these specific "slivers". Having more limbs or other departures from the strict one claw beak head snake body two tails anatomy is fine, especially if used to draw a line between the two kinds of slivers - the visual difference is a great way to spot it at a glance.
It's fine if Slivers look different across the planes, too. Happens to all the other critters, elves, goblins, dragons, Vedalken alike. The thing, though? Despite differences, all those still look like elves or vedalken or whatnot. They are, some exceptions aside, identifiable as such at a glance (at least as long as you know it's MTG art). The new Slivers don't have that. People can go "but but change-y things so it's absolutely fine" does not cut it. That's inane, it's semantics. Change and sharing is what defines Slivers mechanically, and the new ones still do that within NWO constraints. It even leads to better Limited.
That's fine, great even. But, as in Doug's old column, Slivers are visually defined by things like the eyeless, beaked head, their scythe-like claws, a serpentine body and they tend to have split tails. You can easily make a new, more expressive body shape and not violate many of these, maybe even none of these. Especially, you can pretty easily design something that draws more from insects and reptiles with which slivers already share visual and flavourful connections rather than weird Claymore-esque wtfs or humanoids. A lot of the new art looks like Sliths. They also share a lot more visual similarity with Phyrexians and Eldrazi than with the actual goddamn slivers, which is pretty damn sad. It's the same as if you printed fluffy rabbits with flippers that breathe fire and said they're Vampires. Oh, they probably are now because you said so, and there's surely people who will defend it. That still doesn't mean it isn't godawful and dissonant as hell.
That's a game I think is well designed. Emergent gameplay is usually kept intact and it fosters more strategies and more tactics.
Dota and well designed in the same sentence? Seriously? I mean, the game works, and is interesting, but I don't think I would ever call it well designed. (Let's take this into PM, please).
Humans have been a "thing" for long enough I think, time to give them a break.
And many posters here would seem to want them to stop evolving, to betray their actual flavour in the name of nostalgia.
Ally != Human
Few here have hated the idea of different Slivers. We just hate and despise these "Slivers" because they throw out everything Slivers used to be visually.
It's like having a fluffy bunny with flippers who breathes fire and putting "Vampire" on the type line. No, really, it's a Vampire, it has lifelink and flying, please buy this crock.
You usually solve that by passing, discarding down to 7 and going off again on their upkeep.
Yeah the Partner commanders seem like a decent idea. Some have nicely grindy abilities and better casting costs, too, and I find myself missing Phyrexian Metamorph from playing Pattern-Rector in German Highlander. That card is a house.
Just pick cards that have a use outside of the combo. You can cobble together all manner of insane Goldberg machines with these kinds of decks, and those solve just about anything just in an unnecessarily complicated way.
Meanwhile, blue as usual can just counter the damn thing and proceed to cast True-Name Nemeses and laugh all the way to the bank.
Stupid card is stupid, it's one more piece of cancer upon the game, and it will hit nonblue decks in a thoroughly blue format the worst. Feels really nice and encouraging.
Subtle as a hammer to the head. The transition at the bottom is ugly as hell. The black as such, fine.
I mean, it's not hard. Paint gave me this:
Probably because it's ugly. I mean, look above, I can do better with Paint.
Or, alternatively, that transition to black is horrible and should never have been done.
Slivers in name only becomes truer and truer with each reveal
That you can technically justify the new "slivers" being Slivers by stretching the stuff they've been described doing doesn't change the fact that the new "slivers' " art, separated from the card frame that's yelling "look they're Slivers!" at us, doesn't make anyone go "Oh, that's a Sliver". It's a failure of the product's visual design that tramples on people's expectations and established visual identity so badly it isn't funny.
Trying to say they evolved is precisely that lazy, justificatory hack writing. Moreover, we can pretty well observe that the "evolution" is at odds with both how Slivers have been depicted to date, and with how actual evolution works. In this way, the explanation starts breaking the secondary belief Tolkien wrote about.
In short, it is an argument about quality, not technical correctness. The charge is this is lazy, uninspired and lame product design, not you haven't written the requisite handwavy paragraphs of hack writing to make this work.
The rules and the art issues wrt the new sliver cards are pretty separate. They are mechanically slivers, creature type and all, with a bit of slivery feel sacrificed for good gameplay, which is a deal-breaker for some. But I would never have even thought of any of the "slivers" (except perhaps Blur) as slivers if I hadn't seen them in frame. Visually they have almost nothing in common with other slivers.
It's fine if Slivers look different across the planes, too. Happens to all the other critters, elves, goblins, dragons, Vedalken alike. The thing, though? Despite differences, all those still look like elves or vedalken or whatnot. They are, some exceptions aside, identifiable as such at a glance (at least as long as you know it's MTG art). The new Slivers don't have that. People can go "but but change-y things so it's absolutely fine" does not cut it. That's inane, it's semantics. Change and sharing is what defines Slivers mechanically, and the new ones still do that within NWO constraints. It even leads to better Limited.
That's fine, great even. But, as in Doug's old column, Slivers are visually defined by things like the eyeless, beaked head, their scythe-like claws, a serpentine body and they tend to have split tails. You can easily make a new, more expressive body shape and not violate many of these, maybe even none of these. Especially, you can pretty easily design something that draws more from insects and reptiles with which slivers already share visual and flavourful connections rather than weird Claymore-esque wtfs or humanoids. A lot of the new art looks like Sliths. They also share a lot more visual similarity with Phyrexians and Eldrazi than with the actual goddamn slivers, which is pretty damn sad. It's the same as if you printed fluffy rabbits with flippers that breathe fire and said they're Vampires. Oh, they probably are now because you said so, and there's surely people who will defend it. That still doesn't mean it isn't godawful and dissonant as hell.
Dota and well designed in the same sentence? Seriously? I mean, the game works, and is interesting, but I don't think I would ever call it well designed. (Let's take this into PM, please).
Ally != Human
Few here have hated the idea of different Slivers. We just hate and despise these "Slivers" because they throw out everything Slivers used to be visually.
It's like having a fluffy bunny with flippers who breathes fire and putting "Vampire" on the type line. No, really, it's a Vampire, it has lifelink and flying, please buy this crock.