I wonder what pushed Mythic I’m going to ignore this set. So excited.
Feel the wrath of Nicol Kahn!!!
I swear the inner child of everyone in Wizards R&D woke up when making Ixalan.
They are like “you know what was a cool show, Dino-Riders lets to that but MTG flavored”.
“You know what else we need, pirates, a metric-fuck-ton of them, lets make a planeswalker into a pirate, lets to Vraska, she would be hot in pirate garb”.
Hmm…
It sounds like a refreshing bit of fun honestly.
These leaks for Ixialin that surfaced remind me of the good ol days where in DBZ I was in the major know and got access to files with all the cards in text form way before they came out and in VS system this also happened a few times as well.
http://media-dominaria.cursecdn.com/attachments/163/804/636331161205608603.jpg
So I guess I KIND of called dinosaurs?
Ah thanks for the insight. Very sneaky of WotC, but they left some very obvious clues…
Like not banning Gideon.
I’m glad we get more pirates. Weird to have red pirates, though.
I wonder if they’ll unban much. Obviously Reflector Mage and Emrakul are rotating but some of the more recent bans might not be as threatening with Itlaxan coming out.
I estimate 0% chance of unbanning. What’s the upside for WotC? In the best case scenario the cards will end up taking slots in decks that could have been used for new Ixalan cards. In the worst case scenario they will turn out to be just as busted as before and need to be re-banned.
They probably won’t unban anything. I’m just hoping they don’t start banning new cards too
The white black zombie deck in Standard looks pretty fun. Took down our PPTQ today. Decklist was something like this:
Called it. Good old Dominaria!
Will we get Lord of the Pit, Lim Dul, Juzam (a new Juzam card), Stasis, some kind of the following variations of the following names:
Serra
Shivan
Sengir
Teferi
Ernham
Serendib
Mana Flare
Ankh
Gaia
Sisay
And whoever else
Bet this is for the 25th anniversary or something
They have talked about introducing more traditional fantasy elements to appeal to new players who might play traditional fantasy video games.
On bans vs unbans:
- Bans are great because they introduce a period of creativity. People aren’t sure what they can fit into the hole where the banned card used to be. Can a new card go in there? Maybe a new deck is viable now. Maybe an old deck that was bad is now good. Who knows? Even a bad ban, which gets rid of a card that the meta could have adapted to, still introduces this beneficial effect. Plus when a bad turns out to be wrong (i.e. Wild Nacatl) WotC can always unban the card and the players are happy.
- Unbans are less beneficial because they are much more easily “solved”. If WotC bans Death’s Shadow from Modern there are a million other cards, decks and strategies that can take its place in the meta. If WotC unbans Splinter Twin we just test Twin and see if it’s still good. There is also the scenario I previously described where WotC unbans a card, it turns out to be busted, and they have to re-ban it (i.e. Golgari Grave-Troll).
This weekend we played some legacy with proxies. I went with lands - one of my favourite decks.
First round was grixis delver. G1 I had a solid hand, but my opponent had an early deathrite that i couldn’t kill fast and the shaman destroyed me. G2&3 Lands did what lands do best - keep your opponent landless =) . Easy win
R2 it was food griffin. Another easy one, my opponent tried it’s best, but it’s pretty hard to win when you require at least 3 lands in play. He had shamans, tasigurs, but still couldn’t win.
R3 was show and tell - that’s a tough one. G1 I was on the play and had a broken start - t1 I played land, mox, 2nd mox, exploration, 2nd land, cast a loam. I was able to win the game based on the broken start. G2 was hilarious. My opponent surgically extracted my dark depths, and since I took out punishing fires and molten vortex, my only win cons were 2 tireless trackers. On my part I played 3 spheres of resistance, so my opponent couldn play a single spell. The game dragged forever untill I found a tracker.
I took the tournament 3-0. Lands is a super fun deck, very different. I wish we could play legacy more often…
Food Griffin is a pretty cool deck. I really like how it plays now with Walking Ballista turning it into essentially a Combo deck. It can loop off of Eternal Scourge now as well though obviously it’s better with Griffin due to FoW. If more people played Legacy locally I’d definitely be tempted to build that deck though I can see why lands would suck for it.
I actually enjoyed watching the GP’s. Kinda made me want to play Modern again. Kinda like not going to happen but was at least bearable to watch.
Just dumped all my MTGO crap this morning! I spend like 370 on all of it when I got it and got almost 700 back which was nice. #gottalovetherightsideofspikes!
Now to finish going though all the paper crap to dump uuugggghh.
(So far, outside of the Planeswalker cards revealed so far, Hour of Devastation looks nice.)
Speaking of which, the “Defeat” cycle is pretty hilarious as well well-deserved and needed. It’s rather amusing how Liliana’s Defeat might be the best of the bunch overall despite her not getting bad-touched by Bolas in some way like everyone else in the cycle’s art and being the most recent, most reluctant member of the Gatewatch. Being able to essentially Searing Blaze both Liliana of the Veil and Liliana, The Last Hope for one Black mana seems really nice as a sideboard option even before it killing any and all black creatures, even if it is at sorcery speed.
Unlikely that cards won’t get banned from soon-to-be sets given how apparently barren WotC’s playtesting department has become. It’s not Urza’s block levels of stupid and things eventually slip through even when it isn’t understaffed, but we’ve heard for a while that people have been getting removed for Gatewatch-related bullshit and it shows.
For example, provided these Ixalan spoilers are actually real, then Hostage Taker needs to either be banned or errata’d before it even drops like how Felidar Sovereign should have been. See if you can spot why its current text is FUBAR:
Hostage Taker
2UB
Creature - Human Pirate
When Hostage Taker enters the battlefield, exile target artifact or creature until Hostage Taker leaves the battlefield. You may cast that card for as long as it remains exiled, and you may spend mana as though it were mana of any color to cast that spell.
2/1
[details=Spoiler]It goes infinite with itself mandatorily if no artifact or other creature is on the board and can go infinite with itself even if there is.
Clearly the epitome of balance.[/details]
Beyond that, Revel in Riches might end up being too good for Standard depending on how many things create Treasure tokens, especially since only two colors out of five can even really interact with resolved enchantments.