Magic: The Gathering C/D

it's a more satisfying way to win the game

mystic genesis is only $1 preorder on starcity, i am tempted to order a playset. i was hoping they'd put up Clan Defiance and Firemane Avenger cheap too but those are both $4. the Avenger kind of seems boxed out of standard by a lot of other good 4-drops but i can imagine it being very good down the road

how much is the gr tutor? feel like that might end up being good

i dunno, not much, but i figure these are all cards i can pickup for a buck or 2 after the set is out.

firemane avenger matches up quite poorly vs restoration angel, but imagining a world where your opponent doesn't have that card, it seems like it utterly breaks aggro mirrors. i kind of like it.

imo crypt ghast is the biggest sleeper so far. i'm seeing nirkana revenant at like $9 and crypt ghast is just so, so, so much better. ramping from 4 to 8-10 is insane. still not sure if it'll be constructed playable - too much of that deck seems like it revolves around only that one card - but the mana doubling effect just looks crazy powerful. the 4CC is so key

yeah crypt ghast also seems like a p good fit w/mind grind. have been wondering if a playset of m13 liliannas might be worth picking up but it might be too late to get them really cheap

firemane seems like sort of card that has to be bad, otherwise magic doesnt work anymore

Crypt Ghast is probably the one card I'm most excited about so far because I definitely have a couple decks that could benefit greatly from black ramp.

I misread Ghost Council; yeah that thing is even better than I thought. Anyway I guess I am just overrating Gideon, didn't really think about how the presence of Thragtusk kinda nerfs other midrange resilient dudes. Still Predator Ooze is GGG so you won't be seeing that in many control decks.

RG creature tutor seems pretty awful. I really hoped theyd reprint Eldamri's Call at some point and this seems a good deal worse.

Firemane is not that good, even once Resto rotates. Hellrider is a good comparison, since neither card is efficient enough on its own, but quite good with lots of creatures out. But Hellrider has haste and activates the turn it comes down, even if it doesn't attack. Also, 3 toughness means it dies to almost every removal spell so it's not even that good in the mirror. I still think it's a really fun card, and a bomb in limited, just not good enough for Constructed.

I'd like to see a well-costed Battalion guy with haste, I could see that getting a lot of play.

xp Yeah that creature tutor is a joke. Would love to see Eldamri's Call come back instead.

hellrider is a card i was picking up as a $1-2 throw-in a year ago, i think the potential reward of doing the same with something like firemane outweighs the risk. these are the types of cards i look for when new sets come out, the actual home run constructed cards are generally pretty obvious but the fringe ones aren't.

I too tried hard to pick up 4 Hellriders and I'm glad I got them. I thought it would settle in around $4-5 at least because it's got a great aggro ability that no other card really has right now and if it doesn't catch on in Standard there's a chance something like that could work in Modern. Firemane would have worked better IMO as 3RW and haste. Battallion seems interesting but it feels a bit "win more" unless there are some good Signal Pest-type dudes in development (by the way, Battle Cry would have been an excellent Boros mechanic)

So far my favorite thing about the set are the crazy creature types on the Simic cards. Seems like the most fun guild by a mile.

Haha wow, I had not noticed the Simic creature types. That's awesome. I bet it's the kind of thing that comes across way better when you're looking at actual cards vs. reading text on a screen.

Whoa. For a half second I thought the new preview card was called "Syndic of Titties"

can't find a way to hotlink this but the G/U mythic seems really excellent; maybe not great if many sweepers are running around but in an enviroment w/ Thragtusk it feels like it could often be a better Titan?

also Frontline Medic has perhaps one of the strangest abilities I've ever seen on a card lately, guess Sphinx's Revelation is just running wild these days?

http://media.wizards.com/images/magic/tcg/products/gtc/9js3k7phym_en.jpg

also an answer for Bonfire

xpost

I haven't seen a band-aid card this clumsy since Teferi's Response. Still it's an exciting card.

The Prime Speaker seems like a nice tool in a certain type of deck - I already desperately want to make a Corpsejack Menace deck w/ the doubling Hydra and Predator Ooze, this guy would be absolutely ridiculous there.

Also seems pretty stupid with Deadeye Navigator! (as do a lot of cards)

Medic is such a mish-mash of a card. It's a Medic that is apparently a fighter (why is a Medic 3/3?), and sacs to Mana Leak an X spell? Pretty much screams "card made by development to fix problems in Standard".

zegana is pretty good yeah, not sure if its better than garruk primal hunter which has a similar draw ability but can't be blinked etc for more cards. medic is the first card spoiled that might actually make it into my current standard deck (naya humans)

i'm adding the cipher plague thing to my sleepers list though it's a pretty loose one since its the type of card i think they'd pay special attention to to make sure its not good

Especially since you'll be able to play Invisible Stalker for a good while in Standard. I would think development would spend a lot of extra time tweaking those cards to ensure nothing gets out of hand. You'd think after Urza's block they'd be a lot better identifying things that have the potential to be seriously broken, but then again we've gotten Storm and Affinity/artifact lands since, not to mention Dredge. I think every Cipher card deserves a second look, especially when you consider that if you build around them you can activate them twice the first turn. Still I fear that Development may price nearly all of them out of Standard play.

well Boros just got A) a stupidly good Charm and B) the most flexible, upside-loaded Fireball ever printed

Just saw Boros Charm, probably the best charm of the lot. Double strike not too relevant in Standard, but a combination Flame Rift/2-mana Rootborn Defenses is insane for aggro decks. I've been waiting for them to make an anti-Wrath card that actually has some value against non-Wrath decks. This plus the new Flames of the Blood Hand makes control look a lot worse.

yeah that XRW card in limited is uhhh

also consider that Boros Charm is nearly an instant "destroy target planeswalker" too. this card seems like it's going to be nuts in pretty much every format (Flame Rift still gets played in Legacy doesn't it?)

the issue with boros charm in burn in modern/legacy is that deathrite shaman already improved burn by so much. i've been running deathrite burn in modern and it's nuts but you really want that one fetchable green source to interact with reanimator, kitchen finks, etc so its essentially a 3-color deck now and boros charm would make that 4 which is pretty loose for a deck whose appeal used to partly be perfect mana/no wasteland losses

i read this whole thread over the holidays. it was like reading a long, very strange play. the cast of characters seemed unconvincing but by the end they had become like old friends, each with their own quirks and idiosyncrasies. so, in summary, we are old friends now.

now i'm trying to figure out how you'd build the dice factory deck in modern, god someone stop me please

I've been away from tournament play for a while but now that I think of it, Deathrite Shaman is a pretty ridiculous card for multiple reasons. If you make the mana work it's almost like a better Grim Lavamancer. Might be a $25 card in a few years.

it IS a better grim lavamancer, except for in the mirror. plus black gives you access to bump in the night and rakdos charm which are better cards than some of the red ones you'd play

actually its good in the mirror too, i just had a bad experience the other day where my opponent always had a lavamancer and i drew all my lava spikes instead of lightning bolts, which i think is clouding my judgment

gd boros charm huh

for anyone keeping track btw i am terrible at rtr draft again but am awesome at opening sphinx's revelation so i dont know how to feel

also should i grind the 6 qps i need to get a fow? doubt v much that im gonna actually play the mocs... one day...

6 qps for a fow? what do you mean

i need 6 more 1ps to qualify for the season 1 mocs at the eotm for which registering in you get a promo force of will or maybe thats for registering the prelims or something - idk i read a thread on mtgsalvation about it and 6 seems doable in two weeks but kinda a grind. otoh netting a fow seems like its worth it

fow is worth like 100 tix and I can win 6 drafts in 2 weeks, there has to be a catch

all of that for an online fow??

what would you even do w/ it

i have 18 points on the season already somehow despite being away without MTGO last week. might actually take a shot at getting the full 35 to skip the first round of the mocs, though its legacy this month which is not a format im comfortable with

enough people are grinding FoWs from this that the new promo ones will probably only be like 40 tix not 100. the old ones are already down to 85 before they've even started giving the new ones out.

well you need to win 15 to qualify and then you need to register in the prelim. if you actually have a legacy deck you can actually win another by doing well in the prelim. you can also win a third by doing well in the actual mocs. so you can come really close to getting a playset by winning a bunch of legacy matches which seems kinda '...' but there you go

yeah i'd probably enter with a draft deck if you really just need QPs to get it

iatee - you just sell it. 40 tix can finance many a draft.

the 40 figure is just an uneducated guess, could quite possibly be more depending on how many people actually make it to 15 points. usually its not too many but the attendance in daily events since they announced the FoW promo has doubled or tripled so people are really trying for them

what are you planing on playing? elves? was thinking about playing jund cuz i have most of the cards for it

i sold a shitload of standard/modern cards i wasn't using at the moment and bought wastelands, will probably play a maverick variant with some black for deathrite shamans. i dont want to buy goyfs or FoWs so that rules most things out.

basically whatever i play will just be for this event, then im gonna scrap it for tickets to buy gatecrash cards

sam black zombies seems like it might be a decent fit then? i feel like a jund is my only real option because i know how the modern deck works reasonably well and its not like im going to figure out storm or high tide or w/e atp

i don't like the zombies deck, i just want to play maverick since its the only legacy deck i've really played in the past, and even though it hasn't had high profile success lately i think its because people are just jamming the old lists rather than tuning it.

Classic!

If the Medic wasn't strange enough, Army Loyalist has a rather odd "cannot be blocked by token creatures", which I believe is one of the few cards now ever printed to actually reference creature tokens (outside of populate/Phantom General in RTR)