Quote from sicsmoo »This was my first experience against it. He had turn 1 Steel Overseer, turn 2 Karn make a 7/7. I just had to laugh. I think it also has legs in Eldrazi Tron but it's really hard for that deck to get any traction when Humans and Affinity are widely played.Quote from tronix »speaking of being good against removal. i played against karn affinity for the first time. baby karn is ridiculous in that deck. i got handily dumpstered by early karns pumping out pseudo cranial platings.
Affinity plus Karn is real. MTGO trophies don't lie and I've been seeing this trend for a few weeks; see the Affinity thread for one of the better grinders and their match history. I expect Karn is good elsewhere too and we'll see more of it in a few more decks.
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Not quite unprecedented. Jace, the Mind Sculptor was a little either side of $100 for his reign in Standard, and Jace, Vryn's Prodigy maxed around $80.
I guess it's unprecedented for a card that doesn't have the word "Jace" in it though.
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Absolutely. The Turn-4 Rule artificially constraining the speed of decks is a big part of it. Not the whole story though IMO.
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I've been jamming 2 in every red sideboard for years; don't see any reason to stop now.
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Generally agreed, although I'll reiterate that I think the term "disruptive aggro" is both pretty well accepted and has less baggage than "aggro-control" (which people have picked fights over here before).
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This is only true from an essentialist perspective, i.e. everything must fit cleanly into exactly one category.
From a more organic/hollistic perspective, the model holds up just fine. There's nothing threatening in Twin being tempo-combo, Breach Moon being control-combo, Vizier being midrange-combo, and the Grixis lists of yore being midrange-control.
That those hybrids or blurry lines exist doesn't invalidate the decks that do fit into the categories pretty neatly, or the information we can get from examining how they interact. Like Jeskai (Control), Storm (Combo), Mardu Pyromancer (Midrange), Infect (Creature Combo), Ironworks (Combo), etc.
I envy you that. Playing Spreading Seas and Blood Moon feels like the absolute opposite of what I want to be doing when I play Control. Jeskai is a bit more like it (as is Grixis), but so tenuously meta-dependent that it's better for my peace of mind not to rely on it.
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No, I think you're spot-on, simplifications and all. Working with shortcuts is necessary to keep the conversation from taking an extra 10 pages of text.
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Obviously everyone's wrong time to time, but I'm inclined to agree. This is possibly the most in-demand set in Magic history, with a triple-DOM draft format. Teferi is great in Standard and will probably be a staple for his stay in the format, but compare him to Gideon, Ally of Zendikar. Gideon was a 1-color 4-drop who was a staple in many decks, often run as a 3-4-of. He peaked at $40, immediately after his release. Within 3 months, he'd lost half of his value. He made it back up to $30 again for a bit before rotating.
I don't think that paints a favorable portrait of Teferi.
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You're making the same mistake that people make every time people evaluate unbans. You're looking at it as if Mardu Pyro is still has the same cards, draws, and plays it has now, and then on top of that it's also jamming on-curve Stoneforge Mystic.
Pyro would have to entirely change to accommodate Stoneforge. First by retooling its mana base in which white is an afterthought. Then by trying to make that new mana base work around Blood Moon. In a format bristling with unfair like Modern, you really need to evaluate how many points you're going to gain by shocking yourself down to 14 and playing Squire into Batterskull when you could just ended the game turn 3 because your opponent scoops to Blood Moon.
And then there's Death & Taxes, in which Stoneforge has anti-synergy with literally the entire architecture of the deck of the deck. I'm not a D&T player so I don't have much insight into that, but last time a Stoneforge unban came up, the D&T players were pretty lukewarm on it.
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Throw the mana tag around the letter T.
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I like the direction of this, but the tuning and wording is pretty off.
The first ability is kind of absurdly pushed. The only 3-drop planeswalker that can kill a creature with a + ability is the already-very-pushed Liliana, the Last Hope. But Lili can't go face, can't kill opposing 'Walkers, can't kill 2-toughness guys, and she certainly can't kill 2 creatures per turn. That ability could possibly be appropriately costed at 2RR though, or as a minus ability at 1RR.
For the second ability: two modes on one Planeswalker ability is a no-no AFAIK, but you can do it just without saying "choose one" like Torch of Defiance's first ability. It should work if restyled as: "Exile the top card of your library. You may cast that card. If you don't, ~ deals 3 damage to target creature player." Note that that's an upgrade since you can decide which mode to choose after you know what's on top, but it gets around the mechanical inconsistency. Alternately, take another page from Chandra, ToD and split it into two abilities with the same loyalty cost.
As for the second ability's balance, it's probably fine although often weaker than her +1 (but that's not this ability's fault). I do like the mechanical flavor of being part Searing Spear, part Jace Beleren -2 but Red.
Minor point on the first ability: it should probably read "...among one or two targets" since that's consistent with WotC's wording.
"generic Chandra ult"
I would love to have a playable 3-drop Chandra. Really like the direction of this one even if the tuning is a bit off yet!