CorruptShadow
Member
Eh...I think Hexproof makes more sense as a blue ability. Green already has so many abilities.
Magic: the GAFering |OT2|
- Thread starter The Technomancer
- Start date
Eh...I think Hexproof makes more sense as a blue ability. Green already has so many abilities.
Red:
Fight
First strike
Double strike
Haste
Trample
White:
First strike
Double strike
Flying
Lifelink
Vigilance
Green:
Fight
Deathtouch
Flash
Haste
Hexproof
Regeneration
Reach
Trample
Blue:
Flash
Flying
Hexproof
Black:
Deathtouch
Lifelink
Regeneration
You're right in that Green has a shitload of abilities, but that's also because it's so heavy on creatures. Which is why, I think, Hexproof makes the most sense on Green, because they are the ones "dying to removal" most often.
Persist, Undying and Thragtusk not withstanding.
Fight
First strike
Double strike
Haste
Trample
White:
First strike
Double strike
Flying
Lifelink
Vigilance
Green:
Fight
Deathtouch
Flash
Haste
Hexproof
Regeneration
Reach
Trample
Blue:
Flash
Flying
Hexproof
Black:
Deathtouch
Lifelink
Regeneration
You're right in that Green has a shitload of abilities, but that's also because it's so heavy on creatures. Which is why, I think, Hexproof makes the most sense on Green, because they are the ones "dying to removal" most often.
Persist, Undying and Thragtusk not withstanding.
Maybe if her ultimate was -6 or a bit stronger? Maybe damage dealt by you is +3 and dealt by opponent is -3?
That Chandra is a little better than good, I think. I'd say she'd still see tournament play at +1 and -2. Across all formats except vintage.
Still love your design on her, though. I really want to see that card printed similarly to how you made it.
If the spider has hexproof, I will rage the fuck out.
It needs to at least trade w/ BSA.
I'll try to stick to sub $3 cards, occasionally going up a bit for finishers.
GREEN:
Nature's Lore
Cultivate
Kodama's Reach
Sakura-Tribe Elder
Boundless Realms (NUTS)
You probably already realize these are solid, but ramp is significantly better than most people think. With the stigma against mass land destruction in Commander, you've basically got indestructible ramp going, which leads to early wins and unbeatable boardstates.
Boundless Realms, if you're running enough basics, is just a stupid fucking card that'll win you the game when you untap.
Life from the Loam is necessary if you're running lands like Terramorphic Expanse and fetches. Hell, it works well with a card in the blue section, too!
Genesis Wave is one of the most fun cards ever printed.
RED:
Hoard-Smelter Dragon
Hellkite Tyrant
Evasive finishers who give you some very relevant bonuses. I've had people scoop to Hoard-Smelter before. People with powerful, $300+ decks. Easily underestimated, splashy, and fun -- definitely cards that improve an average EDH game.
BLUE:
Forbid.
You're playing green. You have lands in your hand lategame.
Yes, it's oppressive and kind of unfun if your opponents don't have a way of dealing with it, but it's a 0.50 card that can take our your opponents' massive threats. It also encourages people to interact rather than go RAMP RAMP RAMP FAT GG.
Rite of Replication
OH GOD WHAT
Archaeomancer & Mnemonic Wall
Are you playing riku? Enjoy your two fuckin' cards from the 'yard. Twice.
Blue Sun's Zenith
It's Sphinx's Revelation. The life isn't too relevant in commander, and you can kill your opponent with it.
MULTI:
Simic, Izzet, and Gruul have some of the worst multicolored cards (for EDH) of any guild. I like Trygon Predator, but there isn't much else. Oh, and Fire//Ice is cool.
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
Queen of the Swarm
Reach, vigilance, deathtouch
ETB: Put 3 1/1 spider tokens with deathtouch and reach onto the battlefield. 1GG: Put one of these tokens into play.
Probably too powerful. Definitely too powerful.
Reach, vigilance, deathtouch
ETB: Put 3 1/1 spider tokens with deathtouch and reach onto the battlefield. 1GG: Put one of these tokens into play.
Probably too powerful. Definitely too powerful.
Keru_Shiri
Member
@joelseph: To add to what Lucario said, I also slide in a copy of Insurrection into any Red EDH deck I play. If it resolves, you win, and sometimes you just need to put the rest of the table in their place.
Deathtouch would probably work well with vigilance and reach, but deathtouch on a large creature is mostly redundant. Gumming the ground up with mini-spiders would probably be too strong against creature decks while still being underwhelming against control sweepers.
I still think regeneration would be a good fit for the card, since it'd get to dodge some of the removal while still getting hit by exile or bounce effects. It'd probably have to be slightly tamer overall to avoid going overboard power-level wise, sort of:
Perhaps it could have flash as an ability as well, possibly instead of regeneration. With flash it'd be able to ambush stuff once and have pseudo-haste, while still being easily seen coming by anyone paying attention to their opponent keeping so many lands up, but that could be a bit of a problem if there's a viable high-tier UG deck in post-M14 standard.
Black also gets flying and haste.
Green doesn't get first strike by Maro's definition of the color pie, I don't think he'd let that slid even for a mythic. Besides, Thundermaw can't trade with a BSA since BSA has pro-dragons.
Edit:
Also I think hexproof in general needs to be taken into account with the mana cost. Like Invisible Stalker at 1U is so undercosted. It should've been 1UU. If it was shroud instead I wouldn't care if Invisible Stalker was just U.
I also think green should get hexproof and blue should get shroud. Blue has counters to protect their creatures.
MaRo doesn't work on Core Set design and tends to get overruled on it.
Well that list will get ugly if we start doing non-evergreen stuff.
The problem is a hexproof creature is makes creatures too annoying. Now that I think about it, green has only gotten hexproof cards at common so far (other than Thrun and the old Troll Ascetic), while blue has gotten slightly more hexproof creatures at higher rarities and, therefore, higher power levels.
The thing is shroud works well on larger creatures which can hold their own (say, Sphinx of Jwar Isle), while hexproof is better when the creature is fairly small, fragile and/or has little to no evasion (since the only way some colors can remove them is through combat). I like how they make auras a lot more viable, but even then they're merely being used to add pushed effects (that +1/+1 for each enchantment one for W) or adding the evasion the creatures lack.
I guess hexproof wouldn't be that bad if Geist of Saint Traft didn't make an angel token, or if Invisible Stalker wasn't unblockable, or in Thrun's case not being so annoying because there was a 2-mana clone effect available in the format, but then again the remaining hexproof cards are mostly underwhelming... it seems like a very difficult ability to balance properly, and one which mostly appeals to spikes because they're non-interactive and negate aura's tendencies to 2-for-1-ing yourself.
Dungrove and Lumberknot were rare and uncommon.
Damn, how could I forget my favorite card back from when it was legal? I loved my mono-green deck which had 4x Dungrove Elders.
I think that's an interesting case study, since it was a creature that was really hard to remove and got large rather quickly, but the forest-based P/T setting ability limited it to monocolored decks (oh, what I'd have paid to see it share standard with the shocklands...). It was a back-breaking card against very few decks and the lack of evasion worked against it...
Yeah, I guess we could get viable but still not-broken hexproof cards, but that really hinges on the non-targeted removal and evasion-inducing auras in the format as well.
keeblerdrow
Member
What's the best strategy on getting a good base of cards to play with in MGTO. Paying full price for boosters hurts. It hurts bad. I'm usually the type to buy booster boxes at a time for substantial discount.
I signed up for MGTO this winter and have not even really played a game on it yet because I only have the starter cards. The interface leaves much to be desired, especially after using Duels of the Planeswalkers so much in the last couple years. I can't really figure on how to grow and get a good play set of commons and uncommons. Probably in trading, right? I'm still not even sure how the interface works for that. And do I need to hook up a debit card to this account or something?
I'm tired of missing every FNM due to work and never getting to flex my deck building muscles because I have no one to play with. : /
I signed up for MGTO this winter and have not even really played a game on it yet because I only have the starter cards. The interface leaves much to be desired, especially after using Duels of the Planeswalkers so much in the last couple years. I can't really figure on how to grow and get a good play set of commons and uncommons. Probably in trading, right? I'm still not even sure how the interface works for that. And do I need to hook up a debit card to this account or something?
I'm tired of missing every FNM due to work and never getting to flex my deck building muscles because I have no one to play with. : /
divisionbyzorro
Member
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Hexproof should be a primary green keyword. Green is the color that has the least amount of options for interacting directly with opponent's creatures, so it should be the color that gets creatures that are hard to interact with. It blows my mind that blue gets so many hexproof creatures when blue is traditionally considered the "best" color and the "fuck blue" mentality is so prevalent.
http://www.mtgotraders.com
http://www.mtgotraders.com
Don't open boosters buy singles.
OneEightZero
aka ThreeOneFour
I'd like to see a database of the same breakdown among multicolored creatures. ^_^
NEVER NEVER NEVER open boosters. There are plenty of bots that will sell you hundreds of cards for single tickets. You could probably turn 10 tickets into a full standard common play serif you looked in the right places
I think the idea is basically that hexproof makes most sense in green and shroud makes the most sense in blue, but since they don't want both keywords to co-exist, they essentially said "fuck it" and give blue creatures hexproof.
Yup. Technically every color but red gets Exalted, but red had faux-exalted first.
I left out First Strike, Haste and Flying from black for a few reasons.
1) First strike on black is usually only found on rehashes of Black Knight, and this is mostly to parallel White Knight rehashes
2) Haste on black seems to be a recent thing, and it's limited to zombies, because it's the only way to get aggro zombies to work.
3) Flying has similar problems with Haste and First Strike, in that they're a core part of the Vampire flavor, which is predominantly black driven. The same applies to Demons.
For these three keywords, they're not so much as characteristic of "black" so much as specific black tribes. Actually, including Haste in green was a mistake as well. I was thinking only of Strangleroot Geist, which is a fringe occurance. A search for Haste on Creatures turns up only 1-2 pages of black and 1 page of green.
EDIT: A search for flying on black turned up a lot, so I guess flying belongs on black at least. As long as it's on an Imp, Vampire, Demon, Horror or some corrupt Angel, Bird or Dragon.
1) First strike on black is usually only found on rehashes of Black Knight, and this is mostly to parallel White Knight rehashes
2) Haste on black seems to be a recent thing, and it's limited to zombies, because it's the only way to get aggro zombies to work.
3) Flying has similar problems with Haste and First Strike, in that they're a core part of the Vampire flavor, which is predominantly black driven. The same applies to Demons.
For these three keywords, they're not so much as characteristic of "black" so much as specific black tribes. Actually, including Haste in green was a mistake as well. I was thinking only of Strangleroot Geist, which is a fringe occurance. A search for Haste on Creatures turns up only 1-2 pages of black and 1 page of green.
EDIT: A search for flying on black turned up a lot, so I guess flying belongs on black at least. As long as it's on an Imp, Vampire, Demon, Horror or some corrupt Angel, Bird or Dragon.
Actually, the very first creature to have haste was black: Nether Shadow. Black has always had haste, but it seems like ever since future sight they've been more willing to print it more frequently on black cards.
Yeah, yeah, just a trivia. There's black creatures from all eras of magic with haste though.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Eh, the number of black cards with Haste was significant even pre-NWO: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?output=standard&text=+[haste]&color=|[B]
So they announced a bunch of changes to Organized play today http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/244pp
The only thing relevant to 99% of the people in this thread is that Grand Prix Trials now award 2 byes instead of 3, and Grand Prixs are capped at 9 rounds day 1, 6 rounds day 2 (if there are more than 1200 players, everyone with at least 39 pts gets a PT inventation)
The only thing relevant to 99% of the people in this thread is that Grand Prix Trials now award 2 byes instead of 3, and Grand Prixs are capped at 9 rounds day 1, 6 rounds day 2 (if there are more than 1200 players, everyone with at least 39 pts gets a PT inventation)
Gatekeeper
Member
4 pack sealed. If you are even halfway decent 16 tickets turns into 7 packs.
I really contemplating making a janky Possibility Storm deck. Even if it doesn't win, I feel like it could make for some interesting games.
The game plan will be something like this:
Turn 1: Land, Mana Dork
Turn 2: Land, Burning Tree-Emissary, use red from BTE to cast Infernal Plunge (sacrificing BTE), Possibility Storm.
I figure it'll be full of Bloodrush creatures, one or two Ruric Thars and Maybe Domri.
The game plan will be something like this:
Turn 1: Land, Mana Dork
Turn 2: Land, Burning Tree-Emissary, use red from BTE to cast Infernal Plunge (sacrificing BTE), Possibility Storm.
I figure it'll be full of Bloodrush creatures, one or two Ruric Thars and Maybe Domri.
And an incentive problem's immediately found with the Silver invite, lol. (If you Q via a GP, you don't want to actually go over 20 points.)
divisionbyzorro
Member
So there was actually a semi-interesting change to the comprehensive rules, and it regards split cards:
Yeah, they should extend you an invite to the next PT if you break that barrier with an active invite.
Yeah, they should extend you an invite to the next PT if you break that barrier with an active invite.
Keru_Shiri
Member
Just found out that I will be able to attend my prerelease! I'm thinking of going Gruul, and hoping my secret ally will be Izzet.
This change seems like the set-up to printing existing cards (like Shock for Shock/Awe or Death for Death/Taxes) in split cards.
Gatekeeper
Member
Good god I hate that fucking aura deck.
FieryBalrog
Member
Staff of Domination unbanned in EDH/Commander, this will be fun.
Black and White also have Extort.
Gruul could be a good choice depending on what secret ally you get:
- GRB (Golgari or Rakdos): This will be your most likely color combination, since two of your secret ally guilds support this. Golgari looks a bit weird since the guild tends to favor the late-game, but Rakdos will supply you with lots of creatures you'll want to attack with.
- GRW (Selesnya): Populate helps you build an army while you spend your bloodrush creatures as pump spells, and you'll have access to Boros and their interesting early-to-midgame creatures.
- GRU (Izzet): The Izzet guild tends to be a bit weird here, since it isn't particularily suited for the early-game, but you'll also be in Simic colors, which could afford you some interesting evolve creatures or just some powerful fatties. The 6/6 frog that bounces your own creatures could be an evolve enabler as well as letting you play bloodrush from creatures you had on the board, meaning playing the creatures rather than pitching them early on could be quite advantageous.
I might end up playing Izzet for the second event, but I'm still not too sure... There's a 50% chance of getting RUG as my colors, but getting Dimir or Boros would be quite bad. Orzhov, on the other hand, has a 50% chance of ending up as a WBG deck (another color combination I like) with either Golgari or Selesnya, and Azorius fits the Orzhov's plans as well (however, Rakdos isn't that good with them).
BigJonsson
Member
I would have pwned you all with my necro deck 10 years 12 years ago!
Or with my Polar Kraken, he was a beast
Or with my Polar Kraken, he was a beast
Reeeeeeeeeeeally...?
EsotericManiac
Banned
That's 'cause the card was banned faster than you could say Necropotence
I honestly don't get why people care so much about the EDH ban list. I'd say it's good like a basic guideline, but it isn't like EDH is (always) a hypercompetitive environment where bans are necessary for the health of the metagame. As long as your playgroup can settle on what is and isn't allowed to be played, you can play around with this ban list.
At most, you might be looked at wrong by a group other than the one you frequently play with, but seeing as how the format is mostly about politics, I see nothing wrong with playing banned cards, since you're likely to get ganged up on if your deck plays degenerate combos anyway.
1v1 commander is a completely different story, though, so I guess bannings make more sense there.