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Magic: the Gathering - Oath o/t Gatewatch |OT| Look again, the mana is now diamonds!
- Thread starter SigmasonicX
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charlequin
Banned
Yes but I'm not sure where those eyebrows go. Unless they've been secretly hiring a new team to build a cross-platform rearchitected v5 from scratch I'm not sure how anything they're doing right now could be beneficial.
Harsh.
charlequin
Banned
His full list of leads:
- Tempest
- Unglued
- Urza's Destiny
- Odyssey
- Mirrodin
- Fifth Dawn
- Ravnica
- Future Sight
- Shadowmoor
- Eventide
- Zendikar
- Scars of Mirrodin
- Innistrad
- Dark Ascension
- Gatecrash (co-lead)
- Theros
- Khans of Tarkir
- Battle for Zendikar
A lot of things, at least some of which are his fault, went wrong with BFZ which fits this description, but historically the sets with Rosewater leading design and Erik Lauer leading development are some of the best.
Hopefully they're paying a secret external contractor to develop a new platform.
Legacy is so broken the best deck is UW control, and only 1 combo deck is considered Tier 1. Not to talk about the fact that you have white weenie as a top tier deck too.
I mean, it's fast in the sense that its turns are compressed and its answer cards are the best there are in the game (minus misstep), but broken? By which metric, the fact that blue is dominant? Arguably so i guess, i dislike blue as much as anyone else, but it being good mean permission is abundant and that keep stupid things out of the formats.
Legacy require your deck to either be fast, or interactive, but also give strong interactive tools: mana denial (waste-port), tax effects (thalia, thorn of amethyst), lock pieces which can be played T1 (chalice), or simply plain permission and discard (therapy, FoW, Daze). Modern on the other hand striked me as always way more focused on your own game plan (aka be fast or die) that the one of the opponents because there aren't simply enough angle of attacks, with the best being discard (IoK), permission a far second. The new eldrazi deck is a testament to this: in legacy, even while having more sol-lands and being a really good deck, it's probably still not Tier 1 , because it's still semi-soft to combo, can be contested by control (even if Miracle is still strongly favored), and has some abysmal matchups vs decks that attack heavily non-basic mana bases (lands ruin Eldrazi badly, and D&T is unfavored).
Obviously my strict opinion, but Modern is just not that good of a format. The idea of having an eternal format without strong answer cards make for a fastly inflating banlist and in general bad experience of playing against cheesy combos or linear decks all the time. Standard, draft or legacy feel much more coherently structured, either by design or just chance.
That's a good list, nice. Having him as colead for all big sets in the near future can't be bad then.
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
Isn't lands the best legacy deck? Followed by miracles
Lands is probably the best deck in a format without combo yeah. But as long as there is a little amount of combo, land just scoop to that G1, and even with 4 chalices 4 sphere from the sideboard it's extremely unfavored. Miracle has been generally more consistent in an open field.
divisionbyzorro
Member
Harsh.
The message, not the messenger. I was hugely against dropping the Modern PT and was quite vocal about it when they first tried to. I just don't like what it's become at this point.
Warping B/R updates around it is a big problem. Bloom was in the format for far too long.
yeah, Legacy was the most fun one but it died :/
"God's Beard!"
Member
Hasn't it been around there for a while now?
Bring back Brian Tinsman.
I own his book
I'm in the same boat. I already sold out of both Standard and Legacy, and I'm in the process of selling out of Modern despite having an awesome deck for the current format.
Despite that, I love OGW limited and I'm gonna try to enter every online and local PPTQ for sealed to try and qualify for Sydney. I really want to go to Australia.
If I make it I could always just play cheap aggro for standard
Etrian Oddity
Member
It's been sitting there for the past 3 months.
charlequin
Banned
What's funny to me is that Rosewater has actually noted this specifically as one of the lessons of Kamigawa (that story is much more flexible than mechanics.) I think they're gonna have to relearn another variant of it over the first few blocks of this new story approach.
Yeah, I too was pretty opposed, but I think ultimately they need to think about PTs as promo events for individual sets and showcase other formats in events outside that once-a-season calendar.
[QUOTE="God's Beard!";194651114]
Bring back Brian Tinsman.[/QUOTE]
There aren't a lot of designers who can say they led the best draft set of all time and the worst draft set of all time.
Yeah, it's crazy how he hit it so far out of the park with Champions of Kamigawa, did a bunch of other well regarded sets through the years with Time Spiral and Rise of Eldrazi, and then threw away all his goodwill with the putrid, most poorly designed limited of all time. I bet Triple Arabian Nights or Legends would play better than AVR.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
I think the problem with BFZ was that it was a fuck-up, not that the order needed to be reversed. BFZ would still be shit as the small set, it just sucked - I don't think BFZ is nearly as redeemed as you guys are suggested simply if you switched it around. It's just independently bad.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
I think a lot of it gets better if you just excise ingestors/processors from it. They both overstuff it and are spread to thin to feel like a functional theme. They needed a different Eldrazi mechanic that didn't require as much setup
Like colorless mana!
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
The problem with Ingest and Process is that there's not enough to enable it and not enough payoff for doing it.
It's one of those things where it ends up not mattering to me because OGW salvaged the block in terms of Constructed and because BFZx3 was not a particularly bad format to play.
It's one of those things where it ends up not mattering to me because OGW salvaged the block in terms of Constructed and because BFZx3 was not a particularly bad format to play.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Right, exactly. BFZ with any other mechanic in place of those two is probably a much stronger set in Limited. For Constructed, well, I think they just needed more development time.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
It's one of those things where it didn't work great and neither did allies, but the set wasn't horrible to draft, it was just a very middle of the road set. I just think a lot of the talk is a bit pointless because its not like BFZ draft was AVR tier. IDK I don't think it was worse than Theros x3 or BNG-THS-THS
Simply Sarah
Member
The idea of a format where a legit way to win a game is Turn 1 "Land, go." Turn 2 "Land, City in a Bottle" amuses me far more than it probably should.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Personally I'd put it above BNG-THS-THS, but I really liked triple Theros draft. That's just me though
Etrian Oddity
Member
Having no awareness of the card City in a Bottle prior to the post, my response is: wtf
EDH too awesome?
charlequin
Banned
I kind of want to blame development for AVR because the problem isn't mostly on the obvious design level, but the more I look at it the more clear it is that the problem is deep and fundamental. While looking at stuff about this I was amused to discover now-R&D-member Jackie Lee wrote a scathing takedown of AVR back in 2012 and with that in mind I think I understand how both of these sets came from the same designer.
What makes Rise of the Eldrazi such a good format? It does something strange and unusual, all the cards in the set are warped to support that exact strange thing, and the gameplay that strange thing brings about is interesting and strategic and deep and fun. What makes AVR so godawful? The set also does something weird, and everything is warped around it, but the weird thing it does is godawful and miserable and not fun at all. Both sets are built around these "janky combos," where you have cards that are shitty in real Magic but combine in the right ways to be incredible in their specific environments; the difference is that in ROE you have a lot more options for how to execute with those combos, and the archetypes are very evenly balanced, while in AVR everything is either garbage or a blowout.
"Redeemed" is a strong word, and I don't think it works if you take the sets as they are and swap them. I think the big thing for me is just that colorless Eldrazi with colorless mana is a coherent design, and exile is a coherent shift to fill the place of annihilator, and so if you made one set full of colorless exiley guys and then followed that up with a set of guys who pay off that exileyness it'd read better.
Yeah I consider THSx3 to be an actively good format so I wouldn't agree with this specific claim, although I agree that BFZx3 is a very middling environment, not an awful one.
And then they inexplicably drop it in the next set, so I'm left wondering why they had it in the first place.
I like the idea of Ingest and Process on a mechanical and flavor level. But the idea is worth nothing if they barely do anything with it.
BFZs various draft archetypes were pretty cool to run when they fired properly. Any of the good Devoid decks or the black white life gain deck were fun to play. I think a lot of the problems came from Green being so catastrophically awful that it put the squeeze on all the other archetypes by making no one want anything to do with 4 of the 10 color pairs.
Lol you don't know how many times I forced green for an awaken deck. That archetype is so much fun especially you're always passed bring to light.
How did Modern Masters 1 fare as a sealed format? I would think it would have the same issues as BFZ
It had some of them, but most of the non-Storm archetypes were flexible enough to work in small doses. Definitely bomb-heavy though.
Also, more SOI leaks!
http://i.imgur.com/f7FhaDB.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/VhfceEt.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/pnO8aMy.jpg
Lightning Axe reprint.
The "new" Aeolipile is hilarious.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
The flavor text makes the block sound like Jace is the detective in a murder-mystery.
Cone of blue stuff. Cute.
It's interesting to see land untapping again after so long, but I guess untapping only two lands when the spell costs 5 mana means it can't get out of hand in Standard, and costs too much to be viable in eternal formats where some lands can produce two or more mana at a time.
It's interesting to see land untapping again after so long, but I guess untapping only two lands when the spell costs 5 mana means it can't get out of hand in Standard, and costs too much to be viable in eternal formats where some lands can produce two or more mana at a time.
Pointed out on Reddit-
From several hours ago in this thread in response to the Heronless Moon theories:
I don't remember flavor text from commons from sets I've tried to purge the memories of drafting!
When I credit to Reddit it's so that I'm not just stealing shit from Reddit and pretending I'm smart.
pelicansurf
Needs a Holiday on Gallifrey
I'm running a mono green variant, with titan's presence, reality contortion(? +3/-3) as removal, a couple Hedron archives, 4x reality smashers, 4x thought knots, 2x ugin, 3x world breaker, and 2x ulamog as top end. It's truly gross.
Rattleclaw turn 2, thought knot turn 3, reality smasher turn 4, ramp or more reality smashers/thought knot on turn 5. While the opponent figures out a way to not immediately die, I keep ramping into their demise.
So good.
I played R/G and it had a lot of awkward draws, plus kozilek's return isn't all that good versus abzan or rally, so it's a dead card game 1 a lot of the time. Mono green seems so much smoother it's nuts.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
He's talking about the RG Modern variant that has Ancient Stirrings and Kozilek's Return.
pelicansurf
Needs a Holiday on Gallifrey
That makes more sense!
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
This thing with Risen Executioner is kinda funny.
charlequin
Banned
lol sealed
Yeah, much like the boogieman Modern deck, the Devoid draft deck is surprisingly enjoyable to play.
If this has got to happen, I feel like pack contents (and therefore, commons) is much less deflating than just getting all the mythics dumped on us at once.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Let's see how long it takes Trick Jarrett to blame the players for this happening as opposed to WOTC fucking up and sending boxes of SOI to someone
Infinite Stars
Member
Holy crap at that Black Common. Sure, it's an aura, but that's just insane in Draft.
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