Magic: The Gathering C/D

Bet he would have been singing a different tune if it had been a Blazing Shoal

didnt even realize there was a new set out. very much feels like a different game, or at least back to the Eldrazi days. but I think this set is a lot more dynamic. lots of reprints w/ old borders too

there is a card called "The Stone Brain" which looks like a potential game changer against certain combo decks

The Stone Brain

this set looks really cool on paper i haven't played it yet though. fun to see them return to the 90s storyline (also the one MTG novelization i read as a kid)

fwiw I totally called the next set being some artifact thing based on the Dominaria Karn. they love to do that sort of thing.

the Powerstone stuff is interesting, it definitely changes how you view the various mana costs in this set. a lot of the artifacts with activated abilities are probably better than they look.

well the brothers war set was always going to be an artifact set, the original version of it was Antiquities which was an artifact set

the powerstone ramp thing is a neat way to go though

I'm casually interested in getting into MTG after having played and enjoyed Inscryption on the PS. I've got one friend who plays it and we've been up to Forbidden Planet to buy a starter pack. She gave me a very quick lesson in a noisy pub, but I still need to get my head around the basics. Any good resources?

MTG Arena is the online free-to-play version, I think you could pick up a lot of the basics from that. I'm sure there's some good YouTube tutorials too but I don't know any specific ones to recommend

And yeah, LSV played Brothers War draft today and it looked really fun to play

it definitely is. I love sets that seem to tweak the balance of the game in a fundamental way. also think it fixes the problem the Eldrazi set had where you had to figure out how to kill the big mana stuff right away or die within 2 turns. I also really dig slotting in the random artifacts from the past. I have clue what's in there so it's pretty fun to just see random shit like that. less fun when you're starting down a Wurmcoil but still.

also I really like all the little references to Antiquities in there. some pretty subtle ones in there!!

ok so after getting trucked by Phyrexian Processor, Wurmcoil, and Sundering Titan in consecutive matches I'm not such a fan of the reprints anymore

After my grousing upthread, I actually love this set. Been drafting the hell out of it. Despite the doomsaying, this set and Kamigawa from this year would probably be in my all-time top ten (that might be a fun list to make)

Although yes playing against Processor sucks

speaking of reprints, I opened a Charbelcher and built a whole mono-red deck around it only to realize it does NOT count the land you flip towards the damage it deals, so it can sometimes deal 0! I guess I had never seen the card operate in a fair context

hmm, not familiar with that one

*reads text of card*

Vinnie, we've got to fine tune your reading

not sure how they managed this but phyrexia is empirically the most coinflippy draft format in a long time

https://i.imgur.com/AMC0a6z.png

I've only done one sealed league but my impression was that there are a ton of good aggro cards and you often just find yourself needing to put down as many bodies as possible. Also there seems to be a lot of insane rares that can drop on turn 3 or 4 and just take over the whole game

Bit surprised that it's higher than all other recent sets but it's obv a tempo format. I've had way more success with aggro decks than control ones. I just played against a deck that played a couple cheap toxic creatures, then Mesmerizing Dose for my turn 2, turn 3, and turn 4 plays - I'm never winning that game on the draw, but I might have had a shot on the play

Despite that, I have been having fun with the format, but I don't think it'll have the legs of Kamigawa or Brothers War

phyrexia ia some weirdo poison mechanic bullshit we’re all going to have to adjust for in Arena for the time being. honestly, you can go poison or artifact mechanic in the drafts and poison/corrupted is better

I've heard a lot more positive stuff about this set than I have in a long time. I started playing not long after the last phyrexia/poison block, so never got to do that whole thing. Not sure if it's enough to get me back into it but it has my attention.

still feel like I'm learning the format, but RG oil is as good as the poison decks imo, have had a lot of success with it. Blue only seems to work well with white, but I think all the other pairs can be good, as long as you're curving out

RG is way ahead of the other decks very OP

when it was just Fynn, poison counters were a cool sometimes thing that relied on deathtouch synergies - Toxic is kinda irritating in Standard already just because there's not much you can do against it except "win faste" although Cemetery Desecrator could help out if you make it to T6, also Dramatist's Puppet -- but a lot of these new Toxic creatures get active a lot quicker than T6. in Historic run 4x Solemnity to halt the plague of poison counters deck in Historic imo

Reprint Leeches, you cowards

poison is way neutered this time compared to its previous run in standard from 2011. toxic can't kill people on turn 2 like infect could

I got into Arena a couple years ago after a nearly 25 year hiatus from the game. I’ve been mostly playing standard but got into alchemy recently

It’s nice to win, but I mostly like having fun? I keep creating green/black decks where winning is contingent on milling as many of my own cards as possible

lol did you just whip my ass on arena

was the player name “watts”

Still haven't gone back to Arena but my Fynn deck was probably my most fun/memorable deck. These new poison/corrupted cards look insane though.

I did just finish four or five matches and won a couple. I smoked some blue/artifact guy who for some reason blocked my legendary with deathtouch with his 8/8 trample artifact and ended up in a deadlock with some all-wolves deck

I think I snuck in a Dreadhound/Ghoulcaller’s Harvest combo in, too.

Love to damage an opponent by killing my own guys

wolves decks are hard to beat and kinda boring, though some of the more bonkers wolf guys are at least funny

they slap down that guy who lets you draw more wolves and I start groaning

placed 2nd in a private pauper gathering this weekend

mono red blitz ftw!

I don't read the spoilers in advance anymore so let me just say this format has been full of me reading the text of some rare a few times and going "yeah there's actually nothing I can do about that, gg"

putting first strike and deathtouch on the same creature just feels wrong to me. especially a 3-drop 3/3 that ALSO has another ability. don't even get me started on the 4 mana 5/5 that you can't even deal damage to

yeah, that 5/5 is obnoxious

I am looking forward to the day where I drop a Meathook Massacre on that stupid thing

I started playing in like 1998 I think. I was 12. Ice Age and Alliances were the most recent sets. Back then there just weren't a whole lot of cards around so we did this thing in our group where we allowed people to make up their own cards on printer paper and play 2 copies in their deck. And of course some people would design the dumbest shit like "2R for a 3/5 flying, first strike, 2: deal one damage to any target" which our group would have to veto. But they really do design cards like that now. I guess it all started with Spiritmonger, the instant I saw that I was like "wow, that's insane and probably bad for the game"

I threw in the towel around Eldraine, but the steady rise of feel bad cards started well before that for me

the shit that broke me was playing against endless wilderness reclamation/nexus of fate decks

thats like the complete opposite from undercosted/bloated creatures though. was a brief moment of magic decks playing like what they were in the late 90s / early 00s

yes, thanks for reminding me why I don't post here

I remember around the time I started, Fallen Empires was the current expansion. It was kind of a dire time to get into mtg, because they had realized that some things were insanely overpowered and seemed to be paranoid about creating anything that’d break the game. There were some interesting bits, but overall, it was an underpowered and boring set. And magic had just gotten really big, so they printed eight zillion cards.

i really like the visual look of the cards in that set at least. i remember stores sold packs of it really cheap but it still wasnt worth it

looking it up now and Fallen Empires packs are going for $15 apiece, nothing in them is particularly valuable (Rainbow Vale is 7 bucks) so I guess it's just a nostalgia thing. though it's hard to tell if any of these are actually selling. iirc Homelands was even worse, just a real weird era of Magic design where the cards were not only underpowered but also had basically no utility. some of that bled over into Ice Age, I remember cards like Balduvian Shaman and Ice Cauldron that were so wordy and strange and when you actually did figure out what they did you realized they were essentially useless. I remember Necropotence seeming like that too until a few months later when some guys were like "wait a second, this is insane"

I mean they went through the trouble of doing the snow-covered land thing which is inherently confusing especially since there was very little benefit to them, especially compared to the number of cards which would punish you for them. One of my early Magic memories was playing snow-covered Forests cuz they looked cool only to lose to something which randomly had "snow-covered Forestwalk"

all this makes the Urza's stuff so surprising, idk if the game was flagging around then (didn't Tempest block do well?) but good lord, some of those cards were just obviously insane. I remember coming back to the game and seeing cards like Tinker and Time Spiral and wondering what the hell was going on in the design room.

Ice Age at least seemed cool at the time. I can’t remember if it was the first time they made an expansion that was also standalone, in that you could buy both decks and boosters and they included land

not to mention it had Scaled Wurm, a 7/6 (!!!!) for the low low price of 8 mana. most importantly it was a common. god, I still remember scouring the store's box for 4 of those, plunking down two quarters, putting all 4 in my deck, not being able to cast one until like eight games in, and then immediately having it die to a Terror

lmao

I wonder if kids today still experience the joy that comes from actually getting that one card in play that you always wanted to