Conversation: Recent Activity
| Conversation: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| Mechanics |
Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2025-07-08 12:04:41)
| Conversation: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| Mechanics |
Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2025-07-08 12:04:41)
Yes, I was surprised by Prowess and Scry too, but Mark's explanation was persuasive.
It's true, cycling feels more natural, but maybe they serve slightly different functions: cycling lets you have more niche cards, but scry makes your deck slightly more consistent overall. I also wonder, if they've been more willing to use "scry 1" as a rider. "Scry 1" doesn't really feel like scry, so it was never really used before Theros, but maybe it works better as a "slight bonus" especially outside blue, like clash but less intrusive, that wizards feel better about scattering across core sets.
And yes, I was surprised Prowess was chosen, so quickly, and that it seems more potentialy more complicated than most evergreen keywords (in terms of board complexity, not understanding the rules). But it seems like a good niche to find.
It's interesting seeing things work in conjunction with one another. The Menace ability has been floated before as a keyworded ability but never as something necessary or common enough to warrant it. Likewise, the swingy landwalk and intimidate have been problematic for a while. It just took putting both of those ideas together to come up with this solution.
I think I like these, though I'm a little meh about scry.
The only thing here that really surprised me is Prowess.
Eliminating protection concerns me primarily because the white protection spell has been (to my eyes) an important piece of flexible protection for limited (and sometimes constructed: heroic decks would have been impossible without Gods Willing) that nothing existing can replace quite as effectively.
Very sensible set of changes indeed! Landwalk, intimidate and protection are very matchup-dependent, making the game much more about the metagame and less about choices you make when actually playing. Protection was also incredibly complicated and confusing. I'd still expect to see "Indestructible by red" and "Untargetable by red" turn up eventually (as on Gaea's Revenge), but I'm very happy with them taking protection out.
Scry is great; I'm fine with it becoming evergreen; but I'd really have expected cycling to become fully evergreen before scry did.
Prowess's elevation to evergreen surprises me a little bit, but it is a nice fun mechanic. It makes combat more tense, but it does have the drawback of encouraging lower-skilled players to put fewer creatures in their decks.
Oh, cool. Mark Rosewater describes latest evergreen keyword changes, including some which we've wondered what wizards were going to do with for a while.
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/evergreen-eggs-ham-2015-06-08
Wizards upgraded Prowess immediately to an evergreen U/r mechanic, which they've wanted for ages. I've barely played with it but I like it a lot. That makes sense: combat-relevant, but tied to spells somehow.
Intimidate and landwalk are retired, being too swingy, from unblockable against some decks to useless against others (which would make sense as a hoser, but doesn't fulfil the role they apparently wanted of "a bit of evasion for red")
Protection has been semi-retired to "sometimes but not every block".
And they've been replaced by keywording Menace as "Can't be blocked except by two or more creatures", now replacing intimidate in B and R.
Scry is evergreen, including in red. (Might not be every set, but can be. Maybe we'll see some basic-effect-plus-scry cards become one of the baseline staple cards?)
Overall, that seems like a very sensible set of changes, even though there's quite a few of them.
I like looking back at my old comments and seeing how wrong I was. I quite like the new modal formatting.
Heh, dude's comment here proved to be amusingly wrong: not only has Profane Command been reprinted with the new formatting, but also DTK brought an entire new cycle of commands - Dromoka's Command etc :)
Oh yes, I think I was going to count swamp bending as G. And bloodbending as B.
I'd have G under water benders, though that's because of plant bending. I'd do Earth: G/r, Air: W/u Water: U/w/g Fire: R/b. I guess it depends on what location you were looking to source a card from too. The Northern Water Tribe feels U/w while the Foggy Swamp Benders feel U/g. Ba Sing Se would eel W/g while most unnamed Earth Kingdom villages would feel closer to G/r. I put b in the Fire Nation because I took selfishness in the form of "I'm doing this for myself" as a spiritual element of learning firebending.
Gah, this reminds I still need to get on with finishing Korra.
I'm always fascinated to learn how other people would assign things to colours! It tells me a lot I hadn't thought of. I was going to go:
Earth: G
Water: U/w
Air: W/u
Fire: R
Spirits: W, B, maybe other colours
Animals: All colours
And I'd put some bad guys in B, though I don't think firebenders in general are more B.
I thought that worked fairly well, both philosophically and mechanically. But I couldn't think of any good mechanics: I considered having element subtypes, but couldn't think of anything to do with them and wanted to avoid the "arcane" problem.
I love Avatar. It would be a difficult theme, though. All of the elements fit in
, so finding a place for 
and 
might be challenging. 
. Maybe air benders could be 
and fire benders could be 
. Where does that put water benders? 
? Perhaps 
?
I wonder if, for such a set, earth benders could be
Did someone create an avatar set? I seem to remember one, but can't find it in search. And it seemed a really good theme.
I guess the better comparison might ultimately be to Retrace. In any case, I wasn't too enamored of the idea both on repetitive play grounds and for the guild.
I've explained how the spell unearth mechanic differs elsewhere: Yes it has a "rebound" element, but it is linked to going into the graveyard, not being cast.
Link's "Rebirth" seems not so much flashback as recover (Krovikan Rot). In particular, it's not limited to happening just once.
"Spell unearth" seems very close to rebound (Virulent Swipe).
Rebirth seems a little too close to a worse Flashback for comfort. I would have to avoid recreating flashback cards and I would be threading very close to a well-loved, famous mechanic.
For now I'm considering your Grudge as a very good front-runner to experiment with, with "spell unearth" as my second.
Rebirth (Whenever another creature you control dies, you may exile it. If you do, you may cast this from your graveyard.)
This might be a good fit with a more "ruthless" name.
I think this is my favorite so far. I'm tentatively using "Vindictive" for it and "Grudge" for the rebound one. (Vindicitive is my tentative final name). Gonna design a couple cards now...
Those both work. Though Rakdos Transmute may be a bit too 'thinky'. How about something that gives Black/Red some reach?
Grudge
(
, Exile ~ from your graveyard: Target opponent loses 1 life.)
It doesn't look very special. But when you start milling and looting, this could really add up.
Ah! I guess it's going to be difficult to do something else than a variation on madness... Think a graveyard transmute works?
Rakdos Transmute
(
, Exile this card: Return from your graveyard target card with the same converted mana cost as this card. Transmute only as a sorcery.)
The red costs would go mostly on instants and sorceries, and the black on creatures...
That makes me think:
Carpe Diem
(When this is put into your graveyard from anywhere except by casting it, you may cast it for 
)
Except that does nothing by itself :(
Sodkar are giving me hell in Suvnica. I want them to have a graveyard mechanic because they're the only black guild where I can still fit one, but I suck a B/R design! Thankfully they are set for set 2 of the block, so I got some room to work with.
Constraints:
If you can tweak and/or reflavor Graverush or the unnamed spell unearth mechanic, feel free to go that way.
I made ((C44067)), which has Faze, the first idea I've had for this that I really liked.
Download link
In this week's Drive to Work, MaRo talks about technology. One of the major things he talks about is Multiverse - the official one. I thought it was interesting to hear about all the particulars of actually working on sets. I figure this podcast in particular might interest this lot. (I recommend listening to all of his podcasts, of course.)
Around our group, aggro and stax have been doing a good job, so ramp isn't a guarantee. I wish I could say my Isamaru, Hound of Konda deck is leading that charge, but that deck is admittedly mediocre and could use a new shot in the arm. Edric, Spymaster of Trest, however, has been tearing into ramp players that ignore the first 3 turns of the game. By the time ramp is online, Edric draws into enough counterspells to shut the goodstuff.decs down. My own Jhoira of the Ghitu stax deck has been shutting off players with too many expensive value spells. It does play cards like Gilded Lotus, but they're more intended to be there to survive my Wildfires and whatnot and let me keep playing while I lock out the other decks. Of note: Parallax Tide is very good with Jokulhaups.
But that's an irregularity, admittedly. Ramp is a part of most games, I'm sure. But which ramp cards you use are different from player to player. And there are different types of 'ramp'. Jhoira, for example, gets me there by suspending huge threats for 4 turns. It's ramp, and it isn't.
The Sen Triplets deck wasn't a problem. I was using Sen Triplets as an example of how ramp ends up in edh, where a player will play 15 for their general an still have a bit of mana left over.
I don't have a problem with tutors in edh, I was questioning the decision that they're included in order to deal with tuck cards. Demonic Tutor and Vampiric Tutor will be used if you're running black simply because they're good cards that pretty much have a place in any deck with access to black. Worldly Tutor and Eladamri's Call spring to mind as the most efficient non-black tutors for getting one's general out of the library, but they're also cards that would be played in most decks with access to them anyway. Enlightened Tutor and Idyllic Tutor work with a more limited number of commanders, but are in most-cases still very playable cards. Tutors are good cards, that's why they see play.
It might be my metas, but not-ramping is not a thing, so expensive commanders can hit the field multiple times in most cases, so spot destruction/exile removal delays the player by all of a turn most times, so unless your deck was about to fire you accomplished nothing. For some commanders, like Sharuum the Hegemon they only need to hit the field, in which case it's not uncommon to kill your own creature into something to use it again. While tucking is almost exclusively
it seems like the best option. It's feel-bad on both ends waste a creature control spell to take their commander which may have no value on your side of the board while its owner has to sit there looking at it do nothing. Ability removal is a decent option although it may draw the ire and aggression of other players.
As cards that appear in most decks using their colors, there's a lot of color-based staples beyond tuck cards. Consecrated Sphinx is the first that comes to mind, and Tooth and Nail is the first non-creature spell that I think of. If cards being staples are a problem, then it seems silly to only punish one type of card with any staple status.
I suppose I'm most irate because the committee admitted that tucking was the best way to keep problematic commanders in check. Figuring out which commanders are problematic and need to be banned
You're right. EDH (and Tiny Leaders) are somewhat of a contradiction at heart: they want to make the cards you draw less predictable, except for one card that you have an absolute guarantee to have available all the time.
Hmm, I think we're hitting something of a culture clash - between those who like Elder-Dragon and those that like highlander.
Highlander format would like to ban tutoring - the whole point of the format is to have 100 completely different cards; not to have 3 important cards, and a bunch of ways to make sure they actually hit the table.
Meanwhile elder-dragon says "Whaddya mean I can't use my funky powers on my one privileged card. This format is all about my funky powers 'cause I can guarantee I get to show them off; which in normal magic I'd never get to!" So anything that gets rid of its ability to play that creature is going to seriously annoy it.
Sorrow: Tuck cards don't directly make the format more same-y. But in a format where the rules privilege tuck removal over most other removal, some players in some groups (and it seems, a lot of players in a lot of groups) will play lots of tutors as a way to try to get back their cherished card. So tuck cards indirectly make the format more same-y.
And it might be that any given group of players don't actually play lots of tutors - in which case, great! But if they do, that's obviously going to make the format more same-y, so taking away the rule causing tutors to be played so heavily is a good thing.
As for "there are plenty that are threats and are best removed from the board ASAP" - well, yes. But that's not specific to the commander - cards in the 99 can fulfil that criterion just as much. And all colours have a variety of forms of removal or ways to neutralise attackers. The subtlety here is the ability to "easily" recast a commander once it's removed - but in my experience, unless the commander is 3 mana or less, it takes the player a while to draw enough mana to be able to recast the commander more than once or twice.
The exception is huge ramp decks. And I find it rather odd to imagine a white-blue-black deck that can ramp to 15 unless the game is going very long indeed. Ramp is problematic for its own reasons, but it has vulnerabilities - mass artifact destruction, for example, or early aggression to put the ramp player on the back foot. I can imagine a deck that plays a lot of defensive cards, as well as a lot of ramp, in order to be able to exploit their commander without fear of getting it killed... but at that point, you're not talking about the format as a whole, you're talking about one very specific kind of deck piloted by a kind of player who it sounds like doesn't mind being rather annoying. And at that point, the needs of all the other kinds of player and all the other kinds of deck take priority; if one particular deck gets annoying then the solution is to ask the player not to play that deck (or to just refuse to play against that deck).
Finally "Tucking then becomes the best and only way in some colors to deal with them" - I think this is just wrong. What colours are you talking about? In blue and white, there's lots of tuck, but there's also lots of control-change effects, tapping, ability removal, prohibition etc. Outside
there's virtually no tuck effects anyway - Chaos Warp is about the only played tuck effect outside 
, right?