Magic: The Gathering C/D

this set seems fun enough but already kinda seems like it's gonna be ultimately forgettable unless they've been sandbagging some stuff

clues seem like they'll play well mechanically in limited but aren't very elegant. does anyone want to play a constructed deck and have to carry around a bunch of clue tokens?

you can always just use a die for clues

What makes Clue tokens different from Eldrazi Spawn, Master of Waves Elementals, Elspeth Soldiers, Goblins, or any of the many many tokens we've seen in Constructed? And yes, you can easily use a die

creature tokens have been a part of the game since alpha, non-creature tokens are kinda weird one offs

If Delirium can't be regularly achieved in limited, it seems like the set will be a failure. There's so many Delirium cards. I thought in OTJ they set Threshold at the right number - easy to achieve if you build around, not that easy otherwise - so I have faith that they will do this right

yeah there's still 100+ commons and uncommons to be spoiled here and I would imagine a lot of them are cards that help turn this mechanic on, either artifact creatures or token-making stuff or Seal-like enchantments

iirc in the couple of boosters that were spoiled early there were several commons with incidental self mill

the issue isn't the ability to get cards into your graveyard, it's that the typical limited deck has only about 8 cards that aren't creature or land and you need to get at 2 of those. It'll happen eventually in long games but making it happen on curve seems like it'll be rare

right but they go hand in hand to an extent. like, there are already a higher than typical number of playable enchantments spoiled, some that have spell like effects (e.g. the flash werewolf anthem as combat trick) and even a couple that produce tokens. the potential for having more card type variety is being built in. my guess is that the tools will be there but it won't just come together unless you go all in.

Ah, there's the cycle of Seal enchantments. I think we're gonna see a few common artifacts along those lines too (Explosive Apparatus has already been spoiled).

lol @ "Uninvited Geist"

not very much instant speed discard at all, and no mana-free repeatable discard abilities.

aggro seems v much back on. some very aggressively costed red creatures.

looks p good afaict. tons going on.

yeah this looks pretty nice for limited

the red aquamoeba is technically a repeatble mana-free discard ability though if you do it twice in a turn it'll die

im so hype for this set

it really feels like they tossed the last 5 years of trending towards lame color wheel and creature sizing mechanics out the window and went back to what they were doing before

Very excited for this set too. I see very few outright broken rares or uncommons, so I think Limited games will come down to tight, tricky play and synergistic deckbuilding

Also, I noticed that red has five removal spells between common and uncommon (plus two Fireball effects at rare!). Is that more than usual? I feel like there's usually three or four in a large set

thats certainly not more than usual if you're counting ones that do 1 damage

BFZ had 3 common 2 uncommon, plus boiling earth which doesn't really count since you don't maindeck it

Figured I might be wrong, I'm just not used to looking at a set all at once that way

some thoughts from the prerelease:
-DFC rares replacing commons means many (most?) sealed pools have an extra rare in them. my pool had 9 rares and i got to play a super bomby deck and plenty of other people had similar situations. normal sealed loses the prerelease rare so it won't be quite as extreme but still moreso than a normal set.
-the set plays much more like Recent Magic than i expected. despite being closer to old innistrad mechanically, it's still closer to khans/bfz compositionally, if that makes any sense. there's the same recurring cards we've had for the past few years; the 1W 3/1 and 3W 2/5, the 5 mana red and black removal spells, the green +2/+2 pump spells. all these sorts of things were locked in around return to ravnica and are starting to give me deja vu
-without specifically designing my deck for it other than including the artifact bomb, i enabled delirium in 1/4th of my games and that's about what i'm going to expect going forward. you have to put in some effort to make it happen more consistently than that.
-format seemed pretty medium in speed, the RB madness decks can come out frighteningly fast with the right draw, and the green 2/1->4/2 werewolf can just kill you if you miss your 2-drop but against everything else you have time to set stuff up. definitely a slower format than innistrad 1 but not so slow that investigate takes over games
-creatures smaller than 3/3 just kinda suck on the board. there are a ton of 1/3s and 2/3s, and a ton of ways to punish 1 toughness. pick and play small creatures for their abilities. thraben inspector might be better than devilthorn fox. the only commons smaller than 3/3 that i'm excited to have are dauntless cathar and byway courier. the others are all situational roleplayers in some way or another
-skulk might as well not exist vs a lot of decks due to all the aforementioned 1/3s and 2/3s. don't play skulk creatures for skulk alone.

modern B&R changes:
Eye of Ugin is banned
Ancestral Vision is unbanned
Sword of the Meek is unbanned

i'm excited to see what a thopter foundry deck looks like in 2016

so will thought-knot seer get a price cut? I'm hoping to run standard Eldrazi and need to pick up a set

sword of the meek seems innocuous, what is the interaction that got it banned?

also re: your notes on delirium, I found that there's a bit of a weird tension between madness and delirium where the cards you want to discard for one may not be the ones you want for the other. One play I made a lot over the weekend was Tormenting Voice discarding Fiery Temper to blow up my opponent's 3 drop. The problem in an R/G deck is that it's already very easy to get instants in the graveyard. If my main goal was getting delirium, discarding a land was often a better choice, but I found myself wanting to play madness tricks while hitting my land drops.

xpost

sword of the meek + thopter foundry creates a combo of 1 mana: gain 1 life and make a 1/1 flying token. it's not an instant kill but it is very difficult for fair decks to beat once it's assembled

the sword can start the combo in the graveyard too if you have another artifact to sacrifice to make the first 1/1, so people would set it up with gifts ungiven and the like.

Sword of the Meek makes a powerful, but slow, combination with Thopter Foundry. This combination was part of a format-dominating deck in the Extended format that Modern replaced. However, another element of that deck (Dark Depths, used with Vampire Hexmage) is also banned. Sword of the Meek might enable some slower combo decks, perhaps of the combo-control variety. It could be used as an alternate win condition in Lantern Control, which is powerful when unexpected but not currently a large part of the metagame. To allow for an increase in the number of controlling combo decks in the format, we are unbanning Sword of the Meek.

not doing a great job selling this to us

in what way? it's certainly not going to take over the format

lantern is the most miserable deck in the universe so it's probably better to not even suggest that more people could play it

i'm hopeful that's not the destination for thopter foundry given that ancient stirrings doesn't get it

they should ban ancient stirrings

anyone else trapped in the broken mocs monthly?

i opened chandra and wanted to force red but it was very shallow. ended up with a choice between

http://i.imgur.com/7BmWM4v.jpg

and

http://i.imgur.com/z2rRwr8.png

i haven't had chandra in limited but it seems like she's a bit awkward in WR? i'd play the blue version there but i'm not excited about either one

i started the wr because both builds were only ok and chandra is a real bomb, she can do so much. maybe a mistake because i sided into wu both matches, vs a rampy deck for the more advantageous interaction and vs a flyer heavy deck. 0-2

just ran into an Avacyn in Sealed, that has got to be the most broken card in limited since Pack Rat at least

also - I was playing BG and getting Delirium was easier than I thought. that's definitely the ideal combo for it, unless I'm underestimating the blue cards.

BG is definitely intended to be the turbo delirium colors

sealed league is great though, being able to just crack a sealed pool and mess around with it with no time limit is wonderful, as is the ability to save multiple deck configurations

the friendly league looks intriguing - tough to blow through tickets very fast on those I gather. I assume taking the extra pack during rounds 2 and 3 is -EV, right?

extra pack probably makes your deck a reasonable amount better, I think it'd be tough to win without it especially in the last stage where people have 8 packs

i'm sticking to the normal ("competitive ") queue, 5 matches with 1 pool is about right for me

yeah I can imagine 9 matches being a slog though I would imagine getting the extra pack and potentially rebuilding your entire deck could make it more fun. trouble is I think the competitive queues are going to get harder since a lot of the not-as-good players are going to be moving over to friendlies, and you can blow through tickets really fast in these leagues. I bombed the 2 SOI ones I did, one I had a godawful pool and didn't win a game, the other I started 2-0 but ran into a dude with Avacyn and Jace, round 4 my opponent topdecked to win 2 very close games, round 5 I got hopelessly flooded. what can ya do?

(it is very possible that I just don't get this format yet)

have had a good time with some of the grindier/build around cards in sealed but not sure how well they will carry over the draft. had 4 wins with a very fun 4c spells deck based around the enchantment that gives you a clue when you cast a sorcery/instant and rise from the tides. could rip through the deck very fast and then drop 18+ zombies (doubled with geistblast). tried similar in my first draft and put together a more streamlined version that could go off earlier and was unstoppable against another slower opponent but was completely steamrolled by a pretty run of the mill aggro deck. still feel like potential is there tho.

its definitely been fun to play so far. I like formats where cards that would be unplayable otherwise can suddenly become important pieces in your deck (think Fork in the Road, or that 3-mana Altar's Reap). I know it's unexciting but investigate is really a cool mechanic.

one thing I've noticed is that some of those 2-mana flippies are brutal. both Lambholt Pacifist and Duskwatch Recruiter are a total nightmare if they flip on turn 3, essentially punishing you for getting off to a poor start. at least the 4/2 red one can be traded for, but 4/4s are tough to deal with so early and the Recruiter/Howler can really pile it on - both times its happened (thus far in my favor) it's felt like the game was over before it really started. (the original Innistrad had this issue as well)

innistrad 1 was way more punishing than this format if you missed a play on turns 2-4

freaking silent departure, that card gave everyone nightmares. a turn late on your stabilizing blocker? now you're 3 turns late, good luck

flyers seem really good in this format

yeah that is becoming evident to me as well

just lost my 3rd sealed match to Avacyn, how the hell do people keep opening this card??

other than that the format is really fun

so who's going to gp ny?