Magic: The Gathering C/D

on my first sealed league, so far pretty fun, tons of synergy across the board and all the modular stuff will make this a high skill level format. feels nothing at all like the original Kamigawa which I'm guessing was on purpose

I've been watching a lot of streams of people playing with the new set and it finally sucked me back in after uninstalling a couple of months ago. It definitely looks like a complex and fun set to draft!

I've been quarantined, then on vacation, then sick so I've also only watched streams but this new set looks great and I can't wait to do some drafts

yeah it's great. one of those sets that makes it feel like a new game entirely. I particularly love the Sagas that turn into creatures, that's a pretty clever way to do Suspend/Planeswalker-type things on a whole new card type.

not sure how much I've figured limited out, seems like a format you can easily splash in (3-4 color decks are pretty common) so there are a ton of archetypes I've seen crop up. R/W Samurai/Warrior decks are pretty good and maybe what you should aim to start with if you don't know the format. Ninjutsu decks are decent but depend on a lot of good uncommons. Kappa Tech-Wrecker is probably the best Uncommon in the set, it's surprisingly tough to play around

Re: ease of splashing/mana-fixing in this format, last week I watched Jim Davis on Twitch get wrecked by his opponent ramping into a turn 5 Kami War (the 1WUBRG saga). Not every day you see that in Limited!

I'm still just playing Sealed while I get a feel for the cards. My coolest play so far came when I topdecked a Futurist Operative (uncommon ninja that's an unblockable 1/1 when tapped but can untap anytime for 2U), used it to crew my Mindlink Mech (rare vehicle, 4/3 flyer that gains the abilities of the creature that crews it) and attack past my opponent's giant Branch of Boseiju for the win.

there's a lot of neat ninjutsu stuff you can do with the 1/1 flyer for U that taps something when it enters play. I think the best Limited formats resemble Cube in how there are all sorts of cool plays that you kinda just discover on the fly. in Sealed playing 3-colors & just stuffing your deck with cool uncommons and rares seems to produce a lot of cool results.

Ecologist's Terrarium looks like the Farfinder of this set; junk at first glance but maybe one of the most important commons in the set. It fixes your mana, provides an artifact which you can use for a number of things, and gives you a +1/+1 counter which can be used to hit the "modified" triggers

Ninja's Kunai seems similarly underrated. It's a cheap artifact to play on turn 1, a cheap modified enabler, something to do with extra mana in the mid-to-late game, and unlike the Silent Dart variants we're used to seeing it can go face.

17lands data seems to think Black is the best color. the two best "win rate when in hand" cards are Virus Beetle, which I like, and Okiba Reckoner Raid, which I thought was pretty bad. It also likes Imperial Oath a lot, which is nice because I've wondered a lot about if that card is good or not.

Most underrated cards in draft seem to be: Imperial Oath, Searchlight Companion, Suit Up, Season of Renewal, Harmonious Emergence, and Tamiyo's Safekeeping. Overrated cards seem to be Kami's Flare (!), Greater Tanuki, Intercessor's Arrest, Wanderer's Intervention & Befriending the Moths. All those cards are obviously good but I think the implication is (unless I'm understanding this wrong) removal is not quite as good as it is in other formats.
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reckoner raid is good, it does a huge amount of stuff for 1 mana

some more data: Blossom Prancer, Kappa Tech Wrecker & Behold the Unspeakable are the 3 best uncommons, on par with the best rares/mythics. Experimental Synthesizer also seems to be very underdrafted, even if red in general is overdrafted. B/G seems to be the best combo.

I think what people are maybe missing with Experimental Synthesizer is you can sac it in other ways besides paying the 2R

i don't put too much faith in the 17lands data but blossom prancer and behold the unspeakable are obviously "mythic uncommons"

synthesizer is at its best when it's being sacrificed to other stuff yeah. a slow 2/2 is simply the fallback option. the first time i read it i missed that it 'draws' a second card on exist

*on exit

Iron Apprentice seems to be another card that is playable along those lines

After 10 drafts or so, I'm loving this set. Most of the color combos seem viable and the mechanics are all fun. Many cool synergies and opportunities to outplay. The flavor is also great, a nice bonus. We'll see how I feel after another 10 drafts but this is comfortably better than the last three sets for me

I've been enjoying it a lot too, it seems to have a lot of legs. outside of the R/W deck what you see now is a lot different than what you got matched up against at the start. in Sealed I see a lot of 4-color decks that splash a lot of goofy shit. it helps that this format has a lot of cool individual cards that really make you think. I love the design of The Reality Chip, for instance.

my only complaints are 1) the Legendary Dragons are way too good (though at least you have Tamiyo's Compleation to deal with them) and 2) the board states get insanely complex sometimes. when both players have 7 creatures out and you have to keep track of which ones are artifacts and which ones are enchantments and which are "modified", not to mention all the Sagas which have goofy interactions...idk there are a lot of "whatever, lets see what happens" moments

The dragons were insane the first time around. Auto four-of for many decks.

dont often post SL pitches here but want to put this thought somewhere:

Fay Jones is a one-time MTG artist & Richard Garfield's aunt.
She illustrated "Stasis"

At 86, she still resides in the Pacific Northwest

although unlikely, i think a FJ Secret Lair could be very compelling pic.twitter.com/6YSYsoOrW3

— MTG HISTORY — Daily facts on the worlds best game (@MTGHistory) March 14, 2022

Would totally buy it if they ever decided to make something like this

I just checked what that card is going for even in heavily played condition and oh boy.

That card = Stasis

not much?

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/price/Revised+Edition/Stasis#paper

unless you're looking at Alpha/Beta/Unlimited, where everything is expensive

god, I fucking hated that card. so many people built Stasis decks back in the day and it just felt like you weren't even playing Magic anymore. even beating them never felt good because they tended to just beat themselves. at the same time I kind of love the card too just for how deeply bizarre it is. my friends and I had many discussions in 5th grade about what the fuck the artwork was supposed to be

looking back it's amazing the game survived as long as it did back then, given how terrible some of the mechanics were. like Flying/First Strike/Trample were all great and are evergreen today but everything else was so dumb - either incredibly obnoxious like Protection or Regenerate or useless/confusing like Banding or Rampage. Even funnier that once the game had been out for a while they still couldn't seem to come up with better than shit like Cumulative Upkeep, Phasing, Shadow, or Buyback. I wonder what the first new mechanic was that actually worked well from a design perspective? Maybe Fading?

rampage worked fine though wasnt that interesting since double blocking doesnt happen a ton in the first place especially in old magic

flanking also worked fine if you dont like rampage

yeah both mechanics "worked" but Rampage was basically never relevant (outside of that one 2/3 with Rampage 2 that had to be blocked by 3 creatures? that was neat)

Flanking was neat but the fact that it instantly killed 1-toughness creatures was weird. also the fact that it didn't work against non-Flankers, people kept forgetting about that

the Flanking card I most remember is Knight of the Mists which set off a long debate at our store about whether it was a misprint or a developer getting too clever

unless you're looking at Alpha/Beta/Unlimited, where everything is expensive

My cards are in storage so i don’t remember which it is, but it’s one of those. I should probably unload all those.

Stasis plus Serra Angel was tournament tech in like 1995-96.

MTGO has Invasion drafts now, my god the game has come so far since then

Flagbearer mechanic might be the single most obnoxious mechanic ever printed. it's got so many pingers & cards that go from suck to overpowered if your opponent happens to have the right color creature in play. the drafts are set up to lead you down a dead end. even Kicker & the split cards, which felt like such cool mechanics at the time, now seem boring as hell - who gives a shit about modal cards if one of the modes is just Mons' Goblin Raiders?

that set was a big step up for limited design at the time, imagine that

I came back to Magic after a three-year break, just in time to catch the tailend of Invasion block. That block, Odyssey, and Onslaught excited me a lot from a design standpoint - it was the first time the mechanical themes of a set came through strongly imo, like Invasion was THE multicolored block, Odyssey THE graveyard block. for sure I had fun playing drafts of those sets at the time, but they seem flawed compared to modern sets. The mechanics were really cool but not always well-utilized in the cards, as frogbs illustrates

right and after Mirrodin (THE artifact block) you kinda figured they were running out of broad themes to explore. but yeah at the time it was all pretty exciting. I guess a big difference is that online Magic hadn't really ramped up yet so you couldn't just do 15 drafts in a week like you can now. back in the days of Theros I'd play online and then do the weekly drafts at the store & just clean up because I knew exactly what was good and what wasn't. I forgot how long it usually takes to figure that out!

in retrospect it's kind of fun to see the power level rules they used to have in place when it came to creatures - everything seems so underpowered. and then there will randomly be a card like Quicksilver Dagger which can ruin an entire game. at least it's not like Urza's block where a 2/1 with protection can win by attacking 10 times

i'd consider the eras of limited design to be like

Alpha thru Alliances - sets are non-functional in limited
Mirage block thru Masques block - sets are draftable but not fun or interesting, only a few cards are good enough to matter
Invasion block thru Mirrodin block - limited plays alright now but there's not a lot of interesting deckbuilding choices yet
Kamigawa block thru Innistrad block - there are now some color pair archetypes as we think of them today and deckbuilding choices become interesting but there's still a lot of unplayable cards
RTR block thru present - set structure becomes more rigid to ensure that most cards are playable and that color pair archetypes are well defined and supported, often heavy-handedly

I think MaRo wrote some article a while back where he split them up in roughly the same way

still remember when Coldsnap came out and stores tried to do the "Ice Age Block" draft. and you'd basically just wind up playing as many Coldsnap cards as you possibly could.

we also did an Ice Agex3 draft way back when. just stunningly unplayable even though most of us remembered Ice Age as the first "good" set. the MVP was like, the 3/3 Swampwalker for 3B

this actually made me laugh out loud

http://mythicspoiler.com/CAP/cards/witnessprotection.html

This card seems like a bad idea

http://mythicspoiler.com/CAP/cards/quezaaugurofagonies.html

seems fine to me

KO combo with griselbrand, probably some other stuff too but not a big deal its an understatted creature

that costs 4 i should say

My first instinct is also that it looks acceptable, but I don't have a great track record at spotting broken cards

well I can't break it offhand but it feels like one of those cards that may eat an emergency ban in like Commander or something

http://mythicspoiler.com/CAP/cards/lagrellathemagpie.html

God this takes me back to the old days where you’d have to read a card 5 times to figure out what it does

I’m pretty sure this was not intended to be a one-sided wrath so I’m wondering why they didn’t just write it as “for each player”

yeah that is a genuine disaster of templating. it exiles one creature per player

When I read it the first time I also thought "wow, all the creatures come back under your control?"

I remember when we did the first Apocalypse draft and people were half-jokingly suggesting that Dead Ringers should be banned until we figured out what the hell it was supposed to do

that card just seemed like a too-clever wording, this one almost seems designed to be as confusing as possible

Jewel Thief and Inspiring Overseer feel like two of the best commons we've seen in ages

this new set looks kind of fun, almost makes me want to get back in

getting gatecrash vibes. multicolor set but all the 2-drop commons are good and all the 4+ drop commons aren't

https://tappedout.net/mtg-card/tainted-indulgence/

another really weirdly worded one, it's very easy to interpret this in two ways and I think the most intuitive interpretation is actually the wrong one

What are the two ways? I only see one (and think I'm right?)

one way is "5 different mana values" and another is "5 cards WITH mana values"

the former is how I interpret it but the latter makes more sense b/c it's incredibly hard to trigger otherwise AND the set does have a "discard a non land" mechanic