Magic: The Gathering C/D

interesting - this was posted on MTGSalvation before devotion was spoiled:

Thassa, God of the Sea 2U
Legendary Enchantment Creature - God M
Indestructible
As long as your devotion to blue is less than five, Thassa isn’t a creature. (Each {U} in the mana costs of permanents you control adds to your devotion to blue.)
At the beginning of your upkeep, scry 1.
1U: Target creature you control can’t be blocked this turn.
5/5

these new mechanics seem kinda clunky

also way too expensive to affect limited, at least the examples given

set seems kinda edh friendly

well the cards shown are rares and they tend to show the big splashy stuff first. I would imagine that Limited won't be too fast, given everything we know about the set. So I think these cards are all kinda bombish. Bestow will play pretty well, so long as they don't make a lot of it. They're basically auras that don't 2-for-1 you and aren't dead draws if you don't have creatures out, seems like they'll be quite powerful in limited.

Can't remember whether it was officially said or just inferred, but the set is expected to be ROE-levels of slow. Basically every revealed card points in that direction so far. Bestow and Monstrosity both have to be costed pretty high to be fair.

by the way, if that God card actually is real, it's absurd

wait so do the auras turn into creatures even if the first-aura'd creature dies two turns later?

otherwise they still can get you two for one'd and that angel doesn't seem much better than serra angel

according to the rules manager, you cant get 2-for-1'd on those. it becomes a 4/4 whenever the enchanted creature dies (whenever that may be) or if the creature becomes an illegal target on resolution (say, with instant-speed removal) - seems like they purposely designed it to avoid the inherent card disadvantage of auras

i think this set is likely to be fast-ish in limited, not sure where people are getting the slow thing from

the fact that all the abilities seem to cost like 8 mana!

obviously it's hard to tell if we haven't seen what the commons/uncommons are like, but so far all the mechanics we've seen seem to lend themselves towards making big creatures or building up an army

monstrosity in particular has the same effect as flashback in that it gives the aggressor an additional play in the midgame before running out of gas. both the Heroic abilities we've seen are offensive-minded. devotion rewards drafting a low curve since it means you'll have more things in play to count towards it when you cast your devotion spell.

I mean that's still only worth it if the cards in that curve are worth playing

I guess we'll see

obviously we need to see the commons/uncommons but at the very least i'm comfortable predicting this to be a tempo-based format like innistrad. doesn't necessarily mean it will be fast in terms of turns per game, just that the gameplay will reward being proactive (m14 is a good example of the opposite, it rewards patience).

it rewards being patient enough to be in a draft where you got blue or green or the r/b sac deck

well i'm talking about how the games play out, not the composition of decks.

yeah I know I was joking

Monstrosity feels a bit more like Kicker to me? Like I would think the early drops with it won't be particularly useful on their own. Heroic seems like it'll have an attacking focus but there will be some assembly required. Something like "all creatures you control get +1/+1" requires you to have some sort of army + something to target your own guy in order to really be effective

Yeah I agree with frog; Heroic feels more like a combo mechanic rather than an aggro one, and if Bestow creatures are what we expect to target these guys, I can't imagine many of them costing less than 4 mana. Also Anthousa is very much a late game card - you can't target it and still have lands to attack with until late in the game. Monstrosity is basically level up. Bestow creatures can be played as creatures but I think players will be annoyed if you aren't able to Bestow them at least half of the time. I dunno, everything I see points to an environment where you play early drops but it's mostly in service of making huge creatures later on, like ROE. But I agree that we won't know until we see more commons/uncommons.

Part of what made ROE such a slow set was an abundance of defensive creatures and removal for smaller threats. If all the Monstrosity creatures are like 3/1s, the set could be very aggressive. I don't see it happening because it means many of the set's mechanics won't be useful.

came here to see if anyone had posted thasa - card seems really good y/n? also makes the chroma rework a really cool flavor mechanic imo

i dont think you can really judge the speed of the format by either the intro pack rares or the mechanics imo

It seems insanely overpowered right now (then again, I said that about Temporal Mastery when that was spoiled...) - the indestructibility makes it nearly impossible for most colors to deal with it, outside of killing the permanents that give Devotion themselves. Also the Red and Green ones are gonna be ridiculous with BTE out there. Then again you have to know they're going to make these playable and I kinda suspected they wouldn't big splashy 8CC Myojin-like dudes.

also worth mentioning that Devotion is worded in such a way that it can by affected by things other than the mana symbols. so something like "your devotion to blue is increased by 3" is definitely possible

this makes me want to cast nightveil spectre on turn 5 p badly

Haha I spent a minute trying to figure out how Brave the Elements would make the Red and Green gods ridiculous.

other sets that people thought would be ROE-type slow during previews include RTR (turned out to be moderate speed) and AVR (turned out to be very fast). it's just really hard to tell this early and 8cmc monstrous costs are not necessarily unusable in a fast format anyway. innistrad was considered a fast format and you still got to flashback your Grasp of Phantoms in enough games for it to be a much stronger card than Time Ebb.

anyway, in case anyone was wondering, these new Phantom events - I worked out the following:

Match Win Rate : Phantom Points earned
40% - 5.056
50% - 5.5
55% - 7.2655
60% - 8.064
65% - 8.898
70% - 9.772
75% - 10.6875

In other words - your win rate needs to hold around 72-73% in order to "go infinite" on these. It should be easier to do here than on the 8-4's since I would imagine a lot of newer/inexperienced players are running these. Of course if sealed is the only available phantom event then your win % will probably go down since you're at the mercy of your pool. That said, even at 60% you're only losing about 1.2 tix per event, meaning these things should be excellent for grinding out QP's, given you're willing to "buy in" the initial investment (as Phantom Points 1-9 are useless in your account)

72% is a pretty high winrate, sealed is my best format and i don't think i win at that rate still.

72+% winrate is insane - the best player on mtgo last year managed 68% and that was playing mostly constructed. during my best month ever on mtgo i managed a 67% winrate in limited and i ran really hot that month and that was about as comfortable w/a format as i've ever been

It seems particularly difficult in Sealed. maybe I just suck at it but I've had several pools where there just wasn't a decent deck possible because all the good stuff was so spread out. I never really tracked my winrate and I really wish I had.

anyway - if indeed the God card is real (and if it's on MTGSalvation's spoiler, there's a real good chance), then I would think Reckoner is about to spike again, especially since there aren't many being opened right now. I'm probably gonna pick up a few sets online and pray.

it might be the thing to convince me that playing burning-tree and ash zealot in the same deck isn't such a bad thing after all

from maro:

seabutcher asked: Monstrosity seems somewhat reminiscent of Level Up. In fact, between Monstrosity and Bestow... is Theros limited going to be more Battlecruiser Magic?

Theros limited is nowhere near that slow.

I knew it all along you are maro

well, I guess that settles that :)

y'know, I wonder if Nightveil Specter is gonna be worth something after all this? I'm suddenly glad I drafted so damn many of them...

Nah, I'm sure maro is just lying. ROE 4ever <3

gonna look at picking up 60 virtual Mana Blooms for 3 tix - a one-mana enchantment that bounces itself every turn may be a commodity

yeah good luck with that

I'm officially becoming an edh player sorry guys :(

recommend stuff for my teferi deck

hey, 3 tix is like, 80% of a M13 pack. not a huge loss if indeed it remains worthless

not being able to play mystical teachings in a teferi edh deck is pretty dumb

i now have 37 QPs on the season. i don't at all recommend playing enough mtgo to do this.

ha, weird i have 37 too!

oh no, i have 2. miscounted.

so i know you get bigger #s of QPs for bigger events. what is the most you can get, and did you mostly win a bunch of bigger ones or were you grinding smaller ones too/instead? the 'qualification' is at 15 and 35 right? i don't think i actually know what that means, altho i don't figure i ought to worry about it, my highest season total has been 6.

anyway, v well done

the most you can get from a single event is 6, for winning a premier event. i get most of mine from playing the 4-round scheduled events, where you get 3 points for a 4-0 and 1 point for a 3-1. i got lucky enough to go 4-0 quite a lot this month, otherwise i wouldn't have bothered trying for 35.

here's my current modern deck
http://i.imgur.com/7ZO7OWj.jpg

it's really good, i play like crap and still stumble into wins most of the time

yeah i'm gonna need to look up most of those cards