Magic: The Gathering C/D

The brightness on the Unicorn art being cranked way up is pretty neat. Agreed that this thing is pretty busted at common - I assumed it was uncommon until I kept seeing it over and over

I was messing around with best-of-3 standard (usually just play standard ranked or 2022 ranked), and I finally got a game that crashed the app.

First game I saw they were doing a lot of scute swarm, whatever. Second game I sideboarded Revenge of Ravens in, and ended up with a scenario where they had scute swarms + Prosperous Innkeeper (meaning they create hundreds of 1/1s every turn and gain life correspondingly), and I had Revenge of Ravens + Vito. So their life goes up to near 100, they attack me with everything (honestly I think they kept doing it accidentally, because they were constantly pressing space bar?), my life goes up correspondingly and theirs goes down, the attacks go through, and we're back where we started.

Eventually they started getting some bigger creatures out and I kept drawing only lands, but the stack was getting ridiculous and my game just completed crashed (had to restart my laptop).

Otherwise I've been stuck in Platinum forever, my decks are very 50/50. I've got a Goblin deck for 2022 that's very dumb and fast, not nearly as fun as the life gain/drain deck but good for a quick game.

Kind of bored with AFR, I should really stop playing until after rotation so I can actually make some music rather than play Arena (although I do always practice on the drum pad while playing MtG).

they've announced all the upcoming standard sets through next year now:

Standard 2021-2022:
Innistrad: Midnight Hunt - innistrad set with werewolf focus, this was already announced and is out next month
Innistrad: Crimson Vow - innistrad set with vampire focus, this was already announced and is out in November
Kamigawa Neon Dynasty - the original kamigawa block was set way in the past compared to the main magic storyline so they're doing a 'present day' return set where its now urban and sci-fi-ish
Streets of New Capenna - art-deco mafia/gangster themed world?

Standard 2022-2023:
Dominaria United - another return to dominaria set
The Brothers War - retelling of the classic brothers war portion of the magic storyline via a full set

when I used to read Maro's blog it was funny how often the same questions would come in over and over and how Maro would always shut them down...he wouldn't say never but he'd always say it's very unlikely that we'll ever return to Kamigawa, or give black enchantment removal, or use "mill" as a keyword, or use dice rolling as a mechanic, or make non-mythic planeswalkers, etc etc...and now they've done all that

Very excited for the Brothers War set, I used to have the graphic novel as a kid and it's pretty much the only Magic lore I've ever been into

Kamigawa was the set when I got back into MtG after a 6-year break, and started to play competitively for the first time. Not sure about cyberpunk Kamigawa.

it was kind of a poster child for how not to design a Magic set - the Arcane shit was awful as was the Saviors mechanic that required you to not play any of your cards. it had the most busted card in Limited EVER which nearly ruined the format. but the game itself is so fun that it still kinda worked

champions of kamigawa was an excellent draft set and betrayers was good too as long as no one opened a jitte

champions is in the top quartile of sets in terms of overall design imo, the only knock on it is that the mechanics don't work outside the set which isn't really that big a deal, its the same as snow or a bunch of other stuff they've done in more modern sets

I don't even know how well they worked within the set...having both your main mechanics be "draft as many cards with this word on them" led to a lot of frustrating scenarios. I also remember a ton of cards that wanted you to have Legends out which I also thought was bad design...you don't build Legend Tribal decks. My lasting memory of the set is that it was just hard to get anything to work in Limited, and the set was mostly underpowered in Constructed. Also it gave us Sensei's Divining Top which is one of my least favorite cards ever, I feel like 25% of the time I've spent in my life playing Magic was just waiting for people to Top. And you couldn't even remove it! The artwork and theme of it was really cool though!

Wow, got an absolutely overwhelming slew of reward cards after the newest update.

It's funny to me that all these sets I've never heard of are considered old-school or throwback now, since they all came out after I initially stopped playing.

Similar, I cannot stand the 'guild' nomenclature people use when referring to color combinations (ie "Orzhov" for black/white). I get that these were apparently guild names from some MtG set based around them, fine, but they're not on cards before or since! Just saw black/white or B/W, it's much easier!

yeah i agree with that, unfortunately ravnica is extremely popular and after Return to Ravnica's run in standard back in 2012 all the magic broadcasts and publications decided to continue using the nomenclature even when the decks were no longer using the cards/mechanics associated with the guilds

they do it for every 3 color combo too, I remember seeing some deck recently called "Jeskai Control" and it was Red White and Blue. back in my day we just called that Captain America

i promise i will never do it myself unless the deck is built around the actual guild cards then its fine

two things I dig about AFR that I hope they do more of: Ward, which seems like a great way to make things hard to kill without making them busted, and Phasing, as it feels more useful design-wise than the exile/return shit, which is used pretty much exclusively to abuse ETB effects and blow up tokens

ward was in strixhaven too, seems to be a permanent addition

Yeah Ward is great. I'm happy if Hexproof never comes back, though Ward can't be used on instants. Ward 10 on the Tarrasque is pretty silly I guess. Phasing out I'm still not sure has enough of a place, we'll see

it's an interesting discussion, because phasing seems to be way more in the spirit of "blink" effects, while simultaneously getting rid of everything interesting about them

another thing I hope becomes evergreen are the Treasure tokens, feels like such a useful mechanic & it can make games a lot smoother

treasures have been in the last 3 sets, i think they're semi-evergreen now like hybrid mana and colored artifacts and such

right well....keep it that way

it's a great addition to red color pie to finally make up for rituals being removed a decade ago

I like Treasures but not in the large amount AFR had. I didn't like that BR could reliably splash any card with a single mana symbol

Regular standard was getting boring, so I made a Standard 2022 version of my black/white deck, and it was kinda wrecking shop yesterday?

Midnight Hunt looks cool, lots of vampire-themed cards with life drain + gain within black alone, looking forward to rotation and making yet another version of this deck.

my biggest disillusionment moment with MTG was when they introduced the more frequent rotation schedule, and then almost immediately went back to the old schedule

that was a bad idea from the start imo. the stability of full year long 'seasons' is good

it just gets dull much quicker than that for me, cards wear out their welcome but then linger around for 2 years. I like keeping it fresh.

i think eldraine kinda poisoned the well on this topic, obviously people want to get rid of that set but do they really want to get rid of any arbitrary set faster? wait a few more months until january and then ask yourself 'do i really want to get rid of kaldheim from standard right now' because thats when it would be leaving under fast rotation

I played a bunch of Standard 2022 when AFR came out and found it a very refreshing change of pace, though I haven't been spending money so don't have the wildcards to really fill out my decks.

Instead I've started playing a lot of Historic with a U/R Dragon's Rage Channeler deck, after a streamer I follow pointed out that it's fairly budget-friendly for a competitive historic deck. (Not so much the manabase, but I did already have full sets of all the U/R duals). I got to Diamond Rank 1 with it this weekend, and am hoping to hit mythic for the first time ever very soon!

I've still never made it out of platinum. :( This might be my shot though.

I'm very happy to have spent $0 though, and at this point I have plenty of wildcards and gold saved up for the Innistrad sets.

I don't know the exact details of how it works but there's currently a huge bug affecting Mythic players - they are unable to win or lose games! A lot of people couldn't play in the recent Arena Open because of it. Just a word of warning to bernard or anyone else shooting for mythic this season

lol

It didn't end up mattering as I promptly reeled off an epic losing streak, including losses to fucking MERFOLK of all things (never found my third land, drew 4 Wizard's Lightning in a row with nary a wizard to be seen)

Couldn't get back to sleep this morning, so I drafted a b/w Midnight Hunt deck and so far I'm up 3 wins with 1 loss, this is unprecedented.

I think this is the first time I've actually had fun playing draft (and not just because I'm winning, it feels like an actual deck of sorts).

(also I'm assuming that Midnight Hunt is draft-only for the moment and not quite in Standard? It didn't look like I was able to search for or craft cards for my standard deck)

it's in Standard upon release, might be a bug? the servers were crapping out a lot yesterday

also note that as the September set, it rotates standard so your deck may not be standard-eligible anymore.

Yep, I made this deck to be 'standard 2022' a few days ago, and it said standard in the search window. Weird, I'll mess around with it later.

i'd guess its just a search/filter bug then

Reddit to the rescue: "You have to change the deck type from standard 2022 to just standard."

Went 7-1 in a draft today! I played blue/black, with a splash of green for Briarwood Tracker and Old Stickfingers. Wasn't sure about Sticky, but then I ran into someone who had turn 5 Wrenn & Seven. I managed to tap down the treefolk token with Skaab Wrangler (amazing card in this format) while my fliers chipped away at the walker's loyalty to stop her making a second one. Eventually they killed my Wrangler and I just started throwing dudes into the meatgrinder until my X/X was big enough to trade for theirs.

*Briarbridge Tracker, the 2/3 vigilance that gets +2/+0 as long as you control a token of any kind, and makes a Clue token when it ETBs

initial thoughts for draft:
-blue is the best color, red is the worst color
-organ hoarder is the best common, treat it like sarulf's packmate from kaldheim. better than common removal and many uncommons.
-UR spells archetype is a trap that doesnt have enough commons to come together often, don't try to force it based on having a payoff card, you need to make sure you're getting a lot of good spells first
-RG werewolves archetype just sucks, i wouldn't play this without some rares. treat all the common werewolves as curve filler, none of them are good and the more you have the harder it is to beat a good deck since they'll be able to keep it daytime via card advantage and flashback. i suspect there may be a backdoor RG 'control' deck you can make out of unwanted RG cards if people adjust to this situation but that's idle speculation.

I've done 5 drafts so far but had 7 wins with the three black decks I made (UB, UB, BW). Black has crazy good removal options this time around at common (all three close to hard removal), and Diregraf Horde also gives a ton of value at common. Several great uncommons like Morbid Opportunist. I had a very good RG Werewolf deck but I do feel cider's point that it came down to the uncommons and rares

I've only played 1 match but it seems U/B decks have a lot they can do with those dumb Zombie tokens

G/W seems to have a lot of explosive potential. I haven't quite figured out how to build it myself, but I lost some matches to it where I went second and OP was like: T1 Trapper, T2 Join the Dance, T3 3/3 vigilance with coven that pumps their whole team, T4-5 tap down my best blocker and swing for 8

Ummm what's "U"?

I did two drafts just sticking to B/W which made it much less stressful, made remarkably similar decks and went 3/3 both times.

Meanwhile my new constructed B/W deck has been fun, I had a ridiculous game where someone kept attacking with Angel of Destiny against my Marauding Blight Priests and Celestial Unicorns for some reason, I ended up with something like 116 life, lol.

Sorry, "U" is blue because mtg players try to make it as hard as possible for new players to learn heh

U is blue because B is black and L is land so U is the next available letter in 'blue'