Magic: The Gathering C/D

Agreed, some incredible next level plays happening, great stuff

got my ass handed to me by a friend yesterday over lunch -- after building two decks that were actual winners (one a dinosaur-heavy monster, the other mill/removal which is the style of play that suits me best), I got careless.. watched the Mythic thing all weekend, just really enjoying a new whole thing to be into.

i guess this set was inevitable with the marvel-ization of the game's story that they started several years ago, but i hate it and hope they've gotten it all out of their system here so we can go back to adventuring in the fall

hasn't MaRo spent the last 10 years insisting they'll never do a Planeswalker themed block

He really needed to find out just how shitty and unplayable a planeswalker could be.

Gf and I were having a great time looking up the Unstable cards last night, so wacky and creative.

Would it be a dumb idea to buy some to make decks out of, just to play against each other? If not, it looks like there are some 'cubes' on ebay, and complete sets, what's the move?

haha this might not be the best place to ask tbh

ha, is that because you guys are serious tournament ppl? Or, like, don't keep up anymore?

I love how those un-sets are basically just excuses to make neat concept cards that they wouldn't dare to in real Magic. I wonder how much of that set is made up of rejected stuff the Rules Manager killed. the Augment-Host stuff is really cool.

Plainswalkers ruined Magic for me and I had been playing since 1993. Just so dumb and overpowered, which has totally warped the game.

I miss the old days of playing for ante. THAT was pressure.

dunno about the un-sets since stores don't crack massive amounts of those to sell singles to tournament players, but most sets you can buy bulk commons/uncommons cheap which is a lot more economical than booster packs if you just want some cards to play with and don't care about the rares

Haha PBKR, have played with the new set? Now more planeswalkers than ever!

Yeah, we bought one of those paired Planeswalkers pre-built deck sets (our only foray into modern MtG), and were not super into that mechanic. I don't think we ever had a game where they both came out, so whoever got theirs out first basically won.

xp

they work out fine in competitive play where decks are streamlined, but tend to be runaway one-card win conditions in casual play

I haven’t played much in years and when I do it’s mostly a cube with limited infinity/type 4 rules (no lands/infinite mana/one spell per turn).

That's a good idea, ciderpress xp

my issue with the Planeswalker mechanic is that they treated it like a big and important development in the game that had to be popular, so they decided to make them stupidly overpowered to ensure people would play with them. the original 5 planeswalkers felt balanced to me but they went overboard really quick, especially since so many of them have a self-defense mechanism built in. sometimes it kinda reminds me of the old days where you'd face off against a Circle of Protection that completely ruined your game.

I still play Cube every now and then (mostly online) and it is pretty obnoxious how most games just become a battle of the Planeswalkers. they have an advantage built in since they don't have "summoning sickness" and there are so few ways to directly deal with one.

I feel like the uncommon planeswalkers in war of the spark are actually fantastic designs - they’re powerful enchantments that you can kill - which solves the normal issue of ‘enchantments are too hard to interact with’

Ok we're going in on an Unstable cube, will report back

xp

I think they are cool designs, and I definitely approve of wotc going all in on creative ideas. My only complaint is that they create a lot of board conditions that get difficult to track. I think for more casual players in particular, all the static drawbacks in play can end up making the game confusing and unfun.

Yeah I’ve found this format to be incredibly cube-like, both in game play and weird niche situations that come up. More so than the masters sets even, which had generally had powerful strategies that were very streamlined. Yesterday I lost to someone using the switch-creatures sorcery mid combat because they had a teferi.

Yeah, this set is cube-like mostly because the complexity is through the roof. It must be the most complicated Standard set since Time Spiral block. The planeswalker passives make gameplay challenging to even play without accidentally breaking a rule. Pretty fun set, but still find I lose to bomb rares too often

This set is... actually really fun to draft? Realising that you really, really, really want 2-drops helped a lot.

i dunno if i like sets with the 2 drop bottleneck, i still have lingering resentment from drafting gatecrash way too many times

I bought a couple of unstable packs in Madison a week or so ago, they're a riot

WOTS is fun if to my mind a little simpler/easier than Allegiance but it's the Modern Horizons previews that're really punching my buttons

We got our Unstable cards in the mail last night, also in Madison. I think it's the whole set plus a certain amount of doubles? I think the plan is to painstakingly examine every card before trying to figure out decks, but they look hella fun.

Gonna have to use the dog for the cards that require a person outside the game to make a decision.

I think WAR is the set I’ve enjoyed drafting the most, although I only started (after an 18ish year break) with Kaladesh.

you just missed my favorite by 1 set then

flamed out of gp providence after a 4-0 start, but at least we got to scalp the rietzl/williams/sperling dream team along the way by playing to a low chance out. I'm like 60% sure rietzl whispered to sperling that he saw my hand was a forest, which is legal but put a bad taste in my mouth. they had a pretty nutty pool too, time wipe, widespread brutality, red god, bolas, bolas's citadel, massacre girl.

nice! i've never gotten a good read on any of those three

they pretty much lived up to expectation, sperling was pretty dour, williams was nice though

Think I've played Rietzl three times, very friendly before the match each time, serious when it started. First time I played Williams he was extremely unfriendly; found out later his Vintage deck had just been stolen. My team also played Sperling/Rietzl/Williams at a prior GP Providence and everyone was in good spirits, even us after we lost to them. Team GPs are the absolute best

decided to check out spoilers for the latest set. I knew there would come a time when new Magic cards are basically unrecognizable to me but I didn't think it would be so soon.

I've started playing magic. i suck

Have been feeling seriously burned out on Standard for a while. Thinking of shifting my focus to limited and seeing if that's more fun. New set looks pretty cool. Yes, the Adventures are pretty exotic, but I personally love the design.

havent really been following previews that closely but got a good laugh out of them accidentally previewing "trapped in the tower" on 9/11

i like this set's mechanics, haven't drafted regularly since amonkhet but i'm ready to give it a spin again

yeah that was the thing that made me realize there's a new set being previewed. that's like "cardId=1488" levels of 'c'mon, who did this'

i dont really see whats unrecognizable here though. theres a split card mechanic with a weird frame, theres food which works the same as clues but for life, and theres a monocolor subtheme

doing my periodic check in and it appears that they've just banned the color green from standard

I can see how oko got past them (it’s considerably more powerful than it reads) but I have no idea what got them to print once upon a time. There’s no way that card wasn’t going to lead to ridiculously consistent starts for green decks.

Oko is egregiously bad. I'm not convinced it should be legal in any format.

yeah there's no reason oko should have gotten past them with those loyalty numbers. not even most 4 mana pws are allowed to go to 6 the turn you play them and they certainly aren't allowed to have their removal ability be a plus

Veil of Summer is the one that confuses me, is that actually too powerful or is this just an attempt to swing the balance back

the latter, it's the most effective of its cycle in the color that needed it least

the thing that gets me is them pontificating in their article over how green ought to deal with creatures if they can't just give it OP flametongue kavus, when the historical actual answer to that (go over the top) is the strategy they rushed to ban at the start of the format

I surprisingly enjoyed watching the most recent MC, even though it was the least diverse MC I've ever seen (er I think). Playing Standard on Arena has been decidedly less fun

Veil was definitely too good in the pre-ban Standard. when you can answer the most popular over-the-top cards in the format - Mass Manipulation and Casualties of War - for one mana and draw a card, that's pretty insane. it's possible Veil is fairer in a meta not defined by Oko, but I'm ok with them banning it now

got MTGO going again for Holiday Cube. so far I've gone 0-3 with an insane G/U deck where I got nearly every card I wanted and 3-0 with a pretty bad B/W deck that played several subpar cards because my computer crashed halfway through the draft. Cube is back baby!!!

the fun police white creature decks are always the most underdrafted in cube relative to their power level, you can usually just force them and win

yea one of those wins was because I had Containment Priest and it literally shut down my opponent's entire deck

man I just drafted the most insane Goblin Welder deck, I had the Scrap Servant, Tinker, a bunch of draw/discard stuff, 3 bomb artifact creatures, Mindslaver, not to mention Ancestral Recall & Mox Jet

went 0-3 obv