Magic: The Gathering C/D

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

and when you're casting sip of hemlock for 6 you're often killing a threat that your opponent spent more than 6 mana to create

casting voyage's end in response to monstrous was probably the best play i made all weekend. i wasn't even scrying off it because idk

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

there's a black creature with bestow that allows you to discard a creature to give it +2/+2 that worked really with the whip, i was sort of proud of myself to have caught that when building my pool. black also has a bunch of interesting etb triggers - i was surprised at how powerful the 3BB drain life guy was and being able to reuse him w/the whip was p strong. but i think theres probably a decent r/b aggro deck there too, the 2/3 1R creature that has regen for 2B (?) was really good for me and there are some good ways to trigger heroic in black as well, which is really important for the cheap r guys.

almost none of the creatures at common/uncommon are good enough to take over 1-2 mana removal

I think that's a worthy goal for development, it's not really good for a limited format to have such well-defined first-pick commons (for example Mist Raven and Trusted Forcemage). I liked the various removal options in M14 - every color had some way of dealing with creatures, but outside of one 5-mana sorcery (Liturgy of Blood) everything was conditional. Either it only hit small dudes, or it left the creature in play, or you needed to have something else out to make it work if you wanted to hit something bigger (Quag Sickness, Hunt the Weak)

If I try to monster up my Stoneshock Giant and it gets bounced in response, the Falter effect doesn't happen, right? The monstrous ability will "resolve", but since the creature is no longer in play, there's no second trigger? I always get confused by last known information effects.

Whereas if the monstrous ability is allowed to resolve, the Falter trigger goes on the stack, at which point it can be responded to but not prevented from happening short of a Stifle. I think.

correct, the monstrous trigger is separate from the monstrous activated ability so if the creature isnt in play it can't trigger

really enjoying theros limited so far in my small sample size of 3 events. aura stacking is less of an issue than i thought it would be, since the bestow costs are so high and there are enough good tempo plays to punish it. colors seem reasonably well balanced. i'm happy for now.

also a strategy tip: ive run 18 lands in all my decks so far and been very happy with it even in the aggressive decks, the set has more ways than usual to get more out of your mana late, plus scry to help keep you find late action, so i think it's much more likely to lose from screw than from flood in this format

I lost a game from flood while playing 16 lands tonight. drew 12...

main decked 4 dragon mantle and would do so again

so ftr ars arcanum predicted:

4. I think that blue is the best color in the format, and I’m torn between black and green for the second best color. However, both red and white could be quite surprising, because Heroic is such a difficult mechanic to evaluate. It feels like blue, black, and green are best equipped to deal with the highly variable tempo of the format. The lynchpin commons that I see defining these colors are Nimbus Naiad, Gray Merchant of Asphodel, and Leafcrown Dryad.

which is already lol (I mean not on blue)

explain for the slow kids plz

white-based heroic decks are probably the best archetypes, red aggro is good in all its forms

green/black are fine in the right decks but neither of them is the 2nd...or 3rd best color

i'm all for trying to prove the guy wrong but it seems way too early to try to figure out what the best color is - at this point in RTR season everyone was convinced that Rakdos Unleash aggro trumped all

I just want him to be wrong faster

in any case doing the opposite of what he says seems like a good strategy given his 'data-based' takes on the last few sets

Don't worry, he'll be proven wrong soon enough, but I agree with frogbs that before a format hits MTGO it's basically impossible to tell how things will shake out

his M14 article was good! but yeah it definitely seemed like he drew some pretty dodgy conclusions about the last block, as I recall he named perennial 10th-pick Runner's Bane as one of DGR's best commons

runner's bane was pretty good in my experience but yeah not a premium removal

i think the colors are pretty balanced in theros, white has the lion's share of nut draw decks though which tend to perform best early in the format before people realize they need to actually interact before turn 4

see also people thinking rakdos was best early on

and gw aggro in innistrad

black and green have terrible options for the first 4 turns. aggro black doesn't even get its vanilla bear to be a vanilla bear.

I feel like the 3/3 for 1GW that draws a card if you have any +1/+1 counters on anything is gonna be nuts

green has reach bear and mana guy which are both fine, and the scorpion if you're planning to go long. agree that black is lacking in early game though the 1/1 deathtouch is reasonable in this set, and pharika's cure is actually pretty important there i think

1GW guy not particularly nuts from what i've seen so far. its fine though

yeah small deathtouch dudes are always good, especially if the set revolves around building up your dudes. I remember the 1/1 deathtouch for B in Innistrad being really underdrafted.

xp well it seems like both colors have a lot of things to add counters so the trigger should almost always go off, plus a 3/3 for 3 seems solid here

1/1 deathtouch is pretty good value when you can bestow him, but that still doesn't help you early game. cure is good.

1gw is a good card in a weak color pairing

the white heroic deck is also kind of shallow at common, theres only so many wingsteed riders in a draft pod whcih will cap its effectiveness a bit since everyone wants those

yep and if you flame out w/ heroic and don't get the triggers your deck is pretty shallow and can't deal w/ a 4/5 on turn 5. but when someone has all the pieces it's almost as fast as gtc-boros.

like one drops are highly relevant in this set

yeah i was surprised at how reasonable the 1/1 lifelink bestow guy is

set feels a lot like innistrad in how curving out well is a huge advantage

yeah the bestow guy seems always playable, the 1/1 token maker and the 1/2 white dude are all easy maindeck choices. the black 2/1 gravecrawler and satyr are both also easy includes if you get them.

already bragged to lamp about this but opened xenagos *and* elspeth in last night's draft

had a funky 'play lots of walls and bounce and the trojan horse card until you draw elspeth' deck

sending the trojan horse on a rescue mission to the underworld is fun since when it comes back your opponent gets it back and is stuck with it

I'm a big fan of the card even tho it's bad in most decks

seems really good to me in any deck that wants to go long

well it discourages you from attacking on the ground so a lot of green monstrous decks, despite wanting to go long, aren't gonna be getting much value from trojan horse into asp. but it's really good in basically any base blue deck - stalling til you get your bounce cards / smashing w/ vaporkins etc.

it seems pretty terrible, you skip your 4 drop in order to instead give your opponent a blocker that will, by turn 7, have produced three 1/1 creatures. play it any later than that and it gets even worse. plus it stops you from attacking with any ground creature bigger than a 3/3. at least there aren't a lot of sac effects.

that said, my Zedruu EDH deck loves it :)