Magic: The Gathering C/D

I don't know if these bans will fix Standard, but they make sense to me. These cards allowed energy and mono red to ignore the natural drawbacks of their colors/archetypes. Attune allowed you to play a 3+ color deck while skimping on lands, which meant you could cram in more ridiculously powerful spells, plus it powered up your energy. Any multicolor strategy that didn't use Attune just felt bad by comparison because it was forced to pack in more lands and was still less consistent. Rogue Refiner gives you free card advantage and enegry accrual on a stick. The only way to stop Attune and Refiner is through countermagic, which never feels good because then you waste critical answers for finishers like Hydra or Scarab God. So, in most cases, they are just free spells with basically zero opportunity cost.

Red has similar problems. A red deck traditionally must win in the early game and would be outclassed if a game extends for a long time. Key weaknesses for red decks are mana flood and lifegain. Ruins invalidated mana flood and gave a way to win in the late game that was nearly impossible to stop. Weirdly, mono red decks often play more lands now than energy decks, which should be an indication of how messed up things have been. Ferocidon is more controversial, it takes away lifegain, but is also pretty easy to kill. I think mostly it was killing off go-wide and token strategies. Apparently it was created to fix the Saheeli combo, but then that got banned and only the hoser remained.

So again, Standard may just be swapping one set of problems for another. I think Scarab God, in particular, is only going to get more obnoxious in U/B decks. But I think these cards were having a unhealthy impact on the format.

I get that these were popular decks and the bans are going to cause a lot of invested players to be unhappy. For me, Standard over the last few months has been a grindy nightmare. I stayed away from both Attune and mono red decks, and instead spent my time beating my head against the wall with control variants and Grixis midrange. Both seem like they should be decent options, but the just don't have the consistency of energy and red. I've gotten really burned out on Standard, so I hope that these changes are a shot in the arm for the format. We'll see.

On a more positive note, this weekend I played some Modern burn for the first time in many months and did a couple prereleases. Both were really fun and a breath of fresh air. With Modern, it was just nice to have games that ended in a reasonable amount of time instead of the endless grind of Standard. With the prerelease, I think they've made a big improvement from the misery of Ixalan sealed. I put together a couple fun decks that did a bunch of interesting things and had fun playing with them. I'm now considering going to GP Houston to try my hand at some more Rivals sealed.

even though standard is (was?) pretty bad, I wonder how much of this is due to the magic growth plateau'ing and wizards freaking out. there were some other pretty terrible standards in recent history (pack rat...) and they seemed to be okay with waiting them out.

One big mistake they made was abandoning the twice per year rotation before really testing it out. Kaladesh was supposed to be rotating out in a couple months, but got an extra 6 months of life, which just seems too long for such an overpowered set.

With that said, I'm seeing a lot of people saying that Kaladesh is one of the all-time worst sets, and I have to strongly disagree. I think it is a truly great set that felt like a really fun change from the tentacle-fest of Battle and Shadows blocks. It had great design, lots of fun new mechanics and a ton of interesting cards. Unfortunately, too much of the set was ridiculously overpowered. I hope all these bans do not discourage WOTC from going out on a limb with design innovations in the future.

yea I like the idea of sucking it up and rushing good counterstrategies into the next set. would really bother me to get invested in a deck and then be told that the deck isn't banned outright, but will get like 25% weaker. that's the sort of thing that would make me quit playing for a while.

pack rat standard at least had a healthy 2nd tier of decks that weren't far behind the pack rat deck and the thassa deck - i played the red devotion deck to good success in that one as it had a favorable black matchup and non-terrible blue matchup if played correctly. standard is always going to have 1-3 consensus best decks just due to the nature of competitive play, and that's okay, but good standard formats will have those angles and openings for other decks to exploit and i'm not sure we've had as much of that since kaladesh

as cliche as the '5 factions' (or 4 in ixalan case) set structure has become, i think it's secretly acted as a failsafe for a long time against decks like energy or affinity dominating standard, as it prevents linear decks from getting too high a percentage of the format's real estate

too bad Ixalan failed to do that

Lol four cards banned, huh? Well, I would love Standard to be fixed, but given the history of the last year, some other deck will become the new best deck soon enough. I liked this article about what can be done to fix Standard: http://www.starcitygames.com/article/36311_How-To-Fix-Standard.html

https://www.facebook.com/events/147687632599509/

mtg is one of those things where 'weird mtg' is for normies and normal mtg is for weirdos

^^^^ so otm

i had a sealed pool with tetzimoc and nearly no other playable black cards, so i didn't run it. i have since realized that was incorrect.

there are a LOT of very dumb cards in this set

Truly a prince format

Catching up on the weekend's SCG and I... don't get how Jadelight Ranger is okay.

And yet not as busted as attuned + refiner

yeah the commons/uncommons in this format just don't seem that powerful

https://i.imgur.com/TXICbqu.png

love too interact with the magic online community

mtgo v3 stored the word list for the curse filter as just a plain text file in the game directory which was pretty funny

it was quite a piece of technology

lmao

does anyone still have that list

haven't played a ton of RIX but it seems p good overall. and again - u kno i have to point it out - every single BBA format of the 2 block era now either clearly or arguably better than the AAA. we'll see what happens with dominaria i guess.

theros flashbacks later this month, seems weird

theros was pretty average in limited, probably not gonna touch that one. if it's full block the renowned weaver/grim guardian shenanigans decks i used to draft were kinda fun though

every single BBA format of the 2 block era now either clearly or arguably better than the AAA

Aether Revolt hurt the Kaladesh format a fair amount, I thought

that's the closest for sure. the first couple of weeks, when there seemed so many possibilities and fun combos to explore, was the peak of the block and a brief highlight of recent limited magic in general. it was quickly ground into the earth by renegade freighters though. in the end you were either beating face with freighters or you were trying to do something cool and either not quite having the time or all the pieces; and the promise of that made the eventual disappointment worse. AER stabilized things and made the format more ordinarily but ultimately more fun to play than the bulk of the lifespan of 3xKLD, imo.

Hit a personal goal today of making top 8 in a PPTQ. I ended up 3rd out of 48 and took home $100 with Grixis Energy. My overall record was 5-2-1. Feeling pretty proud as it's the first time I've won actual cash in an event, and I'm looking forward to tuning the deck some more and running it back again next week.

nice one!

congrats Moodles

xp yeah Freighter sucked. apart from games involving it, I thought Kaladesh draft was quite fun. Aether Revolt took away some of what made the format fun, even if it had less Freighter games

jace and bloodbraid elf unbanned in modern. im ok with this

BBE is fine. I think there will be a Jace backlash some time in the next 12 months.

Funny that they got unbanned when every single take I read was "modern is good, don't risk fucking it up". I'm sure Wizards is happy to have a new chase mythic for a master's set

losing to jtms is really unfun

yeah it does the same thing as lantern control where it puts you 99% dead in a lot of games rather than 100% so you feel obligated to play it out

yeah exactly

I still remember seeing JTMS on the spoiler and thinking "that's horrendously broken" even though I'd misread the CMC as 5

whatever they did to the mtgo decklist reporting, it's uncovering some next level shit now: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/943097#paper

that's a good one

Oh hey, another set where half the cards are leaked early. So far looks like this will be a very flavorful set, almost like a core set

standard looks pretty fun now tbh. we're back to just Slow Midrange Stuff being the consensus deck which gives so much more breathing room

https://i.imgur.com/kjRUxp1.png

did it

masters 25 seems v good to me, if anyone was on the fence about trying it

*claps*

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/ways-play/join-brawl-2018-03-22

60 card standard-legal commander on mtgo

The short version is this: You build a 60-card Standard-legal deck around a legendary creature or planeswalker. You can only have one copy of any given card in your deck other than basic lands. Your legendary creature or planeswalker starts in the command zone and works the same way that you might be used to from Commander: you can cast it for its mana cost, and then again for an additional two mana each time. Each player starts with 30 life.

that sounds more fun than commander to me but i bet commander players will see it as infringing on their format and throw a fit

also lets them have a commander-like format on Arena which i'm sure was a big consideration here

xp that's exactly what i thought. there's a p good chance i will at least give it a try. curious how the meta might develop for it, the singleton format with a smaller card pool might make it more susceptible to having 1 or 2 dominant decks than regular standard is.

generally in these singleton formats you get a lot of just ramp + haymaker decks and control decks but theres not as good redundancy for those archetypes in standard so will be interesting to see what people come up with

I feel like I've been at a crossroads with this lately. I've been playing since Alliances (when I was in 5th grade) and for the next decade Magic was a huge part of my life. Back in the day that *was* my social group and even now I'm still in touch with a lot of those people. Even after college, I still played, though only casually. But it's probably been about 3 years since I played an actual, physical game of Magic. MTGO used to fill the void but this last year I've been playing online poker, since I've been actually making money at that. I don't really know anything after Kaladesh.

The thing is, I've still got loads and loads of cards. I spent a lot of my paper route money buying cards, including a large collection which had several P9 cards and 40 dual lands. Over the years I drafted a ton but never actually sold anything, since MTG prices always trended upwards. I have a few sealed boxes and probably about 200 various unopened boosters. Yesterday I was crawling through MTGGoldfish and realized that my collection is probably worth way more than I thought. There are a ton of cards that I never gave a second thought to that are now worth $15-25. Celestial Colonnade is up to $70, christ. I don't really have much of a plan here. One day one of my kids may get into the game, but that seems like a silly reason to hold onto so much old stuff. Everything is so scattered and disorganized, it would probably take an entire day to make a box full of "money cards", and even then, I don't know what I'd do with them. It kind of seems wrong to sell out, but at the same time I feel like it would be stupid not to. Anyone else ever feel that way?

i've been gradually selling off my collection lately and it feels nice, no real regrets. i'm holding onto a couple longboxes of common/uncommon constructed staples, and a bunch of useless cards from the late 90s sets for nostalgia's sake, but everything else is gonna go

just noticed they sent me a MTG Arena beta invite in January and i missed it until now lol