Magic: The Gathering C/D

Lots of heroic stuff spoiled in the last few days. Now we just need to see the stuff we're supposed to target it with. The 1WW 2/2 double strike that gets +1/+1 seems pretty dangerous.

Red got its Slagstorm variant in a mass Annihilating Fire, seems like it'll keep the Voice/Lion decks at bay a little.

The one-mana counterspell seems like another attempt to make a big splash in old formats without messing up Standard. They're gonna preorder for way more than they'll be worth a month from now, but it's definitely a card to keep an eye on

these heroic cards would have been pretty awesome in the Mutagenic Growth/Apostle's Blessing/Gut Shot era

Spellheart Chimera is Runechanter's Pike, the creature. Not as durable as Haunt + Pike, but only one card. I'm often wrong about these kinds of things, but it seems Constructed playable. It would fit nicely into the current Standard, but I know by the time it's legal, the blue-based decks will have lost Thought Scour and Think Twice.

aaaaand anger of the gods is a good example of why you should never test new formats before you have the entire cardpool. card is potentially format-defining and a kick in the balls to aggro decks

Prognostic Sphinx also looks pretty strong. Hard to kill, blocks well, and sets up the rest of your game.

xxp well Chimera + new FoF seems pretty potent. I feel there's a (tier 4) deck somewhere out there with those two and Young Pyromancer though.

wow, anger of the gods seems incredibly overpowered. Looks like this is going to push R/x decks towards midrange. Does this mean I get to play my Ruric Thars now?

Also, I love that it shuts down voice decks.

Right now I'm thinking that B/G control may be the way for me to go post rotation, at least until the dust settles.

Prognostic Sphinx has some of my favorite art for this set so far. That dude is chill.

i wouldn't say it's the death knell for aggro decks, i survived 2 standard seasons of Slagstorm being in the format while playing creature decks. it just means you need to adjust to its presence in both deckbuilding and play

do you really think slagstorm is 'format-defining'?

not really i guess, but it does affect how aggro decks are constructed

the exile clause makes it look targeted at voice but i am curious how good certain red-based swarm decks were w/o this card: both burning-tree and young pyromancer seemed increasingly powerful given the cards spoiled. it does makes lots of things worse i think - i had been thinking about how useful wight of precinct six could be but the exile clause on this combined w/ooze means it will probably have to stay a draft all-star :(

rules question: does heroic only apply if the card is in play? if i target an agent of the fates with a recursion spell, do i still get the free edict?

what do you mean? it has to be in play when you target it, but not when the ability resolves.

rules text doesn't do anything in the graveyard unless its explicit about it

also i finally bit the bullet and picked up RTR jaces the other night. i think that card has enormous upside once all the resilient midrange creatures from ISD block + thragtusk are gone, unless there's some equivalent things in theros that we have yet to see, which is unlikely at this point unless they're trying to sweep them under the rug

Yeah, no free edict if you Grim Return your Agent.

More flavor-based cards rolling in. I don't know how useful the Fates will be in any format (I suppose removing a bomb is worth negative card advantage) but I like that this card exists, just as art I guess.

Wow, and a strictly better Jackal Pup too

The amount of cards with high-concept mechanics has been staggering

Dauntless Onslaught (+2/+2 to 2 target creatures) is gonna be a total blowout in some decks

What's funny is that the strictly better Jackal Pup might not be as good as a Rakdos Cackler or Stromkirk Noble, though mono-red will basically play any 2-power 1-drop it gets its grubby hands on.

someone decided to break their MTGO beta NDA to spoil the set early, so it's all out there now. i've been looking at it all day since it went up on the beta and it looks pretty fun

Cheap common cantrip auras are exactly what I was hoping for

No enchantress, my 40 online Mana Blooms are worthless :( :( :(

seems like something they'll have somewhere in the block, or else throw mesa enchantress back in the core set next year

here we go again
http://puremtgo.com/articles/ars-arcanum-theros-spoiler-analysis

"It’s like you’ve got a car with one person pushing the gas and the other pulling the emergency brake."

this is actually a great description of how the limited format looks

While I was very accurate in most of my predictions each season, the DGR season definitely showed the flaws in this kind of approach. Honestly, it feels awesome to correctly predict a format when everyone else is saying something different, but I don’t really think that is the best service to the community. Instead, I want to take the data and explore as many questions as I can about the format.

omg die

i think satyr hedonist is the burning-tree emissary of this set. way stronger card than it looks on the surface, lots of big red mana costs that are devastating when used a couple turns earlier than you're supposed to

like i think people are going to be activating ember swallower on turn 5 or even 4 occasionally and just sending their opponent back to the stone age

had an eh pool for my first prerelease but 4-0d the second w/ elspeth and two purpheros...pure skill

then bar drafted w/ some friends and had a sweet aggro heroic azorius deck

really like the set so far

my prerelease pool/deck were pretty crappy but i still came away w/ a positive impression of the set. i feel like there's a bit too much space devoted to all those low-impact pump spells and auras and it could use one more subtheme that isn't directly related to augmenting creatures, but i kind of suspect that this is going to be one of the ones that's augmented by the followup sets rather than diluted by them.

also apparently i like the word augment a lot

I played a RG deck that was way too slow to compete. Splashed in white for Fleecemane Lion, which was by far the most powerful card in the deck, outclassing stuff like Nylea and Boon Satyr because it can make an impact much quicker.

I agree that Satyr Hedonist is also going to be a major player in limited. I would even go so far as to say that if you are in RG, you need a couple copies just to make the archetype work at all because you don't have too many small creatures available to make an impact in the early game.

Going back tomorrow to try it all over again.

i was talking about constructed for hedonist. in limited its just a 2-drop curve-filler that has some lategame value.

also splashing fleecemane lion seems bad, its best when you can play it on curve which you generally can't do with a splashed card

went 4-0 in mine and didn't lose a single game. my sealed pool was bonkers, I chose white and had a really good W/R deck going already, then pulled Fabled Hero and Anax and Cymede in my last 2 packs. got 3 of those +0/+2 draw a card 1W auras which were awesome. 2 of the WW heroic that +1/+1s all your dudes and 2 of the red aura that puts +1/+1 every attack then sacs for 3 damage (which of course works awesome when you can sac it the turn you play it thanks to heroic effects). This set will be nice for MTGO because you don't have to calculate exactly how big your creatures are all the time. Also I was kinda shocked how many people were totally thrown for a loop on what Heroic does.

did one saturday and one sunday, overall 7-3. the good: i opened three thoughtseize and a red god. the bad: my play. not really sure if i came to any obvious conclusions about this format, most of my games were pretty interesting and interactive and most were fairly slow. all the ordeals seem really strong. heroic was fairly marginal with the 1U clone on heroic being dead way too often. monstrous seems really good when its on a lower-cost common.

I had a boring RG deck with two removal spells, no evasion. Many of my guys were monstrous, but if my opponent could produce even a single early flyer, I would be too slow to trigger them. Round 1 my opponent had literally one creature on the board both games, and kept adding Bestow auras on it. Once it had lifelink + flying, that was game. Pretty frustrating tournament, but I think it's just my pool that was dumb. One thing I was probably doing wrong was playing my Ordeals and Monstrous triggers conservatively. There's not much instant speed removal to blow you out on that kind of play.

two removal spells, no evasion

Yesterday I played a BUG control deck with some heavy hitters like Shipbreaker Kraken, Abhorrent Overlord, and Mistcutter Hydra, and then Ashiok and Psychic Intrusion to steal my opponent's dudes. It ended up working pretty well.

I'm getting the sense that this set provides a lot of temptation to pack your deck with huge beaters. I had to make a conscious effort to swap out some attractive looking 5-drops for some fairly weak 2- and 3-drops just so I wouldn't get outraced. In draft, I think I will be valuing some of the weaker looking 2-drops more highly than I normally would. For example, Vaporkin was a lot better for me than it initially looked.

I agree that the ordeals are very good, I'll be picking these very highly. My favorite uncommon though was Rescue From The Underworld. It was a complete blowout every time I played it.

One of the best decks I played against was a RW deck that was packed with 1-drop heroic dudes and lots of 1- and 2- drop enchantments and pump spells to trigger them. It was extremely fast and hard to deal with.

xp Well I did pick green. :P Oh I also had 4 Boulderfalls in my pool - I played one of them and never got the chance to cast it.

I played another yesterday and had a very good aggro gruul deck w/ 3 lightning strikes but ran into dude with 2 polukranos, reaper of the wilds, nemesis of mortals and I think it was keepsake? he was a bad player but it is really hard to misplay a deck like that. then I ran into elspeth. bombs seem bombier with so little hard removal. divine verdict seems better than usual when it's one of the few ways to take out a 10/10.

def gonna aim to force azorius or boros heroic in drafts, if only because they're fun to play. you can get crazy value out of auras and heroic triggers.

other than read the bones and minotaur tribal, black seems kinda bad.

even 'kinda bad' might be going too far, but it has the most clunky midrange creatures which just don't seem very relevant when the best decks appear to win in 5 turns or make a 10/10.

Yeah in my limited experience it seems like Heroic is really the way to a solid, aggressive, synergistic deck. the cantrip enchantments are obviously great for this and the one-mana cycle of uncommons that target two creatures can be absolute blowouts.

I do like the recent strategy of limiting good hard removal to uncommon but I do wonder the consequence now that we have a set that's really all about building up one dude to epic proportions. The 1U bounce/scry 1 feels like it may be one of the best commons in the set if the format is really going to play like that.

griptide even better for the same reason

griptiding a monsterous dude basically costs your opponent 3 turns

Sea God's Revenge was a ridiculous blowout on me one game in case anyone was wondering whether Cyclonic Rift is good.

black/x looks like a weird attrition combo deck that is going to reward the people who build it just right and fail for everyone else

i am sympathetic to wotc's new paradigm for removal in limited, since i have been working on designing a C/U cube and i initially started with all the various doom blade and lightning bolt variants in it, but i was finding that it was generally correct to just draft a deck with 12 removal spells because almost none of the creatures at common/uncommon are good enough to take over 1-2 mana removal. so i started cutting some of the redundancy on those effects and everything seems to play much nicer now. i feel like it's probably a similar process that magic R&D went through, though in a lower-power context than a cube

well it also seems particularly logical for this set because so many abilities are about going all in on a creature

like 'I spend 2000 mana on this creature, oh, doom blade' kinda ruins what they're going for

yeah exactly - you can still get some pretty big tempo swings just by knocking a creature out from under a 6-mana bestow attempt or a 7-mana monstrous attempt, which is why the blue bounce spells are so nuts