Magic: The Gathering C/D

I might be misremembering these sets, it's been years for me too. Come to think of it, the bulk of play in Onslaught block wasn't that linear, I was only remembering the cards that were (like Amplify, a terrible mechanic). I remember it being more easy to draft though, as in, the best card in the pack was usually very obvious. There were more choices in Lorwyn draft.

Oh yeah, that uncommon lord cycle was stupid. I do recall there there being a lot of removal in Lorwyn, spread across the colors too, but cards like Imperious Perfect shouldn't be uncommon.

There's a certain type of Magic card that kind of just makes you nervous sitting across the other end; like, "I have to deal with this real quick or it's going to overwhelm me, and I know exactly how it's going to play out". Usually these things are rares like Ogre Slumlord or Mercurial Chemister; occassionally uncommons like say Vitu-Ghazi Guildmage. Lorwyn was just full of cards like that at both Uncommon and Rare.

i can understand armadillo cloak and even sparksmith but that they decided to put pestilence at common still floors me

the one of those that annoys me the most though is sprout swarm, since it's a blight on a limited format that's otherwise really fun and well balanced and also my personal favorite

xp lorwyn also had way more efficient removal at common than recent sets though so in theory it balances out

though it also had 5 planeswalkers at regular rare which seems kind of nuts in retrospect

well at least they were generally at a lower power level than the "modern" planeswalker. Garruk was the only real bomby one IIRC. Jace, Chandra, and Ajani all seemed good (Ajani was really good with Kithkin IIRC), while Liliana was only borderline playable.

it is true that Lorwyn had a lot of ways to deal with creatures, which I think was a great decision. Crib Swap is one of my favorite designs ever (at least from a flavor perspective)

and yes Sprout Swarm definitely belongs on the list. I imagine for MTGO players it must be that much more obnoxious since it takes so long to resolve at EOT. awesome design but just an overall stupid card in a slow format that made the opponent feel helpless.

it's not really that annoying on mtgo compared to GRAFT

i have seen RGD matches won and lost on time entirely due to one player having a couple aquastrand spiders in play in a long game

my suspicions about woodlot crawler were confirmed. got to play with it for the first time in my match today. it is extremely good. color-hating abilities are just so much better in a format where people play 3 colors. as in, there's a 60% chance that little bug shuts down the board. which it certainly did for me.

the format remains slow. in my draft today i played against two decks which tried to go fast. they failed.

i still haven't tried the 5-color ramp deck. i think you guys are right about needing to p1p1 an expensive bomb to get into it.

still haven't drafted this yet, will for the first time at FNM tomorrow, but i have some vague ideas on how to make fast decks work. i think izzet/azorius tempo decks are going to be the most fun proactive decks to play though so that's what i'm going to be looking for early on.

had a pretty good draft last night w/ a RUG deck

weapons surge is a scary card to play against

my first DGR draft went kind of mediocre since i raredrafted a sacred foundry over a warleader's helix pack 1 then got cut from my colors pack 2 becasue of it, plus i raredrafted a gyre sage in pack 2 over a card for my deck since i needed 1 more for my standard deck.

i did a 4-man draft afterwards though where i ended up with a really fun grixis tempo deck that had so many spells that i actually ran Uncovered Clues and it kept hitting 2 every time (even though it should have only hit 1 on average)

i had a fun time yesterday at a DGR sealed GPT. i had a couple really borderline violations (accidentally drawing 8 cards at the start of r1g1, registering a 39 card deck after a last-second splash) that led to judge-ordered game losses in rounds 1 and 2. thankfully, i played them out and lost proper matches each time, giving me some peace of mind. 0-2 and disgruntled, i decided i'd play round 3 as a bit of a fuck you round, and also just to get some practice. i ended up running the table and finished 12th, good enough to get me 3 packs. started from the bottom!

also i just played against eggs for the first time in modern and wow that is an unpleasant deck. i hope the second sunrise ban nerfs it enough that i won't see any at GP

Drawing eight cards at the start of a game shouldn't be a game loss anymore, iirc, I think you just shuffle a card back at random and get a warning. Maybe you don't even get a warning. They've taken good steps in recent years to not punish players for making mistakes that are easily undoable. And yes, I think the Eggs deck is well and fully nerfed (or so I hope).

yeah if your deck is randomized then drawing 8 cards should be considered 'something that happens before the game begins'

but I guess this could be taken advantage of - like not if the cards were draw face down, but if someone drew 7 face up and didn't like the average quality of card or w/e they could 'accidentally' draw an 8th and have a chance at a slightly better hand.

I guess if you ensured that they had to return that 8th card rather than a random card that wouldn't work.

yeah the Eggs deck seems to appeal to a very specific type of Magic player and it's often the kind of dude you hate even playing casual against

I didn't think about the possibility of cheating by drawing the 8th card after the first 7, but that seems like a pretty small gain. There must be a warning attached I guess, since over the course of a tournament doing that every game would give you some advantage.

i think the problem is that if they don't get caught people will just keep that 8th card

looks like Slivers are back in M14! except, they only affect Slivers YOU control. guess they felt the other way 'round was too confusing?

not too confusing but it made slivers randomly awful in limited which is not something they want to do in a core set. lots of nerd rage over this sliver reboot though from what i've seen (they look a lot different in the arts too)

i used to feel that the random downsides like that were part of what made the game fun and interesting but i've relented a bit on that position. i do remember siding in random bad Slivers during Onslaught and Time Spiral and it's kind of a weird experience. the change is a little surprising because Slivers were always the one thing that hit your opponents guys too and even though you know they'd change it if they had a do over I didn't know if they'd be willing to create a world with essentially two different types of Slivers. but I guess it's best to bite the bullet now?

cant say I like the art much direction though. can't really tell what is a Sliver and what is an odd humanoid thingy anymore

I've been in favor of a lot of changes that haven't been that popular, even the shift to reducing cards with downsides, but this one seems strange. Slivers are so well-defined already, and this makes playing with both types of Slivers potentially very confusing. It's not really a big deal to me, but if their goal is to bring back one mechanic each core set, it's odd to change one of the fundamental parts of the mechanic. It might have been cool to instead make a new creature type that was a clear homage to Slivers, but then people would probably complain that it wasn't Slivers.

playing casual Slivers vs. Slivers will definitely be very confusing but they must figure that matchup won't happen very often (and they're probably right). I don't think there are any one-off Slivers that see much play. what they're trying to solve is the situation where say, you have the 4/4 Sliver that gives +2/+0 in your hand but don't want to play it because it helps your opponent more than it does yourself. they've really tried to shy away from that type of gameplay. probably not a bad thing in the long run but I loved the flavor and art direction of Slivers and this kinda nerfs them both.

I've been doing pretty well w/ izzet splash decks in block draft so far. ran a deck w/ 3 maze gliders tonight. blue is good.

can't wait for block draft to be up on mtgo, i can't get out of work early enough to get to weeknight drafts anymore. awkwardly the mtgo prerelease drafts are 3x DGM which seems like a bad format but i'll probably play it anyway since i need 5 QPs before the release queues go up

haha that's a terrrrrible format

i guess i can just play standard for them since my standard deck i'm pretty sure gets 0 new cards from DGM

on that note, do you still think dgm is gonna be a big money set? it seems like there isn't much there beyond ral and voice.

like advent is gonna hit standard but overall it seems like the set didn't rock many worlds

yes and no - i think it has good long term potential for casual play but is pretty average for standard impact, at least for the rares.

I feel like it's one of those sets that is going to show up more than many people think in Standard. Seems like a lot of solid rares in general, not a bunch of garbage, and some things that'll be one-of or two-ofs in various decks. I want to keep my eye on Notion Thief, a $6 card now that I could see skyrocketing over the next few years if the Modern environment plays out a certain way. I also see Varolz being big in some kind of deck as its ability seems so easy to abuse.

It seems like it's gonna be a low money set, possibly one of the lowest in a while. Also it's going to get opened a lot as far as third sets go, so that will make it tank too. Here's LSVs top Constructed rare/mythic for each guild:

Voice of Resurgence
Plasm Capture
Legion's Initiative
Ruric Thar
Sire of Insanity
Varolz, the Scar-Striped
Notion Thief
Catch // Release
Beck // Call
Blood Baron of Vizkopa

IMO nothing on here stands out like Obzedat, Sphinx's Revelation, or even Dreadbore or Detention Sphere. Voice is probably the closest, but many of these are cards that are metagame choices. I guess at least it has the shocklands.

i disagree re: 'low-money set'. take a look at DKA to see what an average small set looks like value-wise, it's got 3 big mythics and a handful of popular rares. i can't see dragon's maze doing much worse than that.

I'd be shocked if Voice didn't get a lot of play. I also feel like Advent's power level is too high to just be ignored (though Resto Angel may 'block it out', so to speak)

also i've probably said this multiple times already but i am pretty high on progenitor mimic long-term and if you can pick some up at like $3 or $4 i would do that

is a populate deck going to be marginally competitive soon? maybe after rotation?

I don't pretend to understand standard but 4 advents/4 voices/4 calls/4 selesnya charms/4 thrags+buncha populate stuff seems like it would work?

progenitor mimic + biovisionary = lol

you could play the 3/3 GW centaur as well, maybe Centaur Healer, Rootborn Defenses, maybe the W: Populate card, maybe a Trostani or two. i dunno if a deck like that would dominate but I have a hard time believing you wouldn't do fairly well with it

growing ranks too

i've seen some neat delver-populate lists actually but i'm not convinced they're good.

scion of vitu-ghazi seems absolutely standard playable though, it's similar enough to geist-honored monk which saw some play, and its a nice follow-up to your turn 4 end of turn advent of the wurm

i'm pretty down on all-in populate as a strategy in standard though, since it wasn't good enough in RTR-only block constructed, where you had almost all of the good populate cards in the smallest cardpool possible

advent and voice both seem better than anything in rtr

hadn't seen the Scion, that thing looks real good - but you do suffer from the same problem that G/W always seems to have, you can dominate the board with big, over the curve dudes, then lose 'em all to wrath effects. hence why I like Garruk so much in these decks - you can start the recovery right away.

rootborn saves you from wraths and any populate instant as a response to a wrath keeps your board alive

I watched some of Standard in the Somerset SCG Open this past weekend and saw one guy who was running a populate deck with Advent. It looked interesting, but he didn't do too well.

you can practically build an aggro delver deck now, like

4 delver
4 snapcaster
4 voice of resurgence
4 call of the conclave
4 advent of the wurm

4 wake the reflections
4 selesnya charm
2 rootborn defenses

or so, that's a lot of creatures without sacrificing delver flip consistency. then the rest of the deck is just tempo spells to get your team through. i don't know if voice is actually good here or if you want geist of saint traft instead but its worth a try

I guess resto destroys populate doesn't it

destroys it how?