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Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2025-07-08 20:54:08)
| Conversation: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| Mechanics |
Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2025-07-08 20:54:08)
Amusingly enough, between Griptide, Voyage's End, Lost in a Labyrinth, Pharika's Curse, Viper's Kiss and Shipwreck Singer as well as the above-mentioned Witches' Eye and Prescient Chimera, you can quite easily cobble a slower Black/Blue control-style deck in Limited that waits until it can ramp into a gorgon. I didn't get ordeals or aqueous forms (or even a Sip of Hemlock) and had to do with Scourgemark and still did pretty well.
I can testify to that - a blue white deck that was speed competitive with my black rats deck? Ouchie.
Yeah, the Bestow auras get attention, but the set also has a bunch of other auras that are just good, like Aqueous Form. I loved casting Aqueous Form on Wingsteed Rider, and Ordeal of Thassa on Battlewise Hoplite.
It did feel kinda odd when I cast a Vaporkin turn 2, Ordeal of Thassa turn 3, and was attacking for 3 flying on turn 3 and 4 flying on turn 4. Even blue can have randomly aggressive starts.
The set has so many 2-power 2-drops (and even three 2-power 1-drops!) that after Rise of the Eldrazi, the set it reminds me most of is Gatecrash. Which is a curious place for a set to be. But it's a heck of a lot of fun to play, so who cares? :D
Had fun. Also, I'm very impressed that Wizards figured out how to do a Voltron (one big creature) strategy at common. I ended up doing 3-2, but I saw many eyes go wide as my giant over enchanted flying creature kept growing and swinging.
Development has explicitly stated that they common scry at one because they didn't like that spells with higher scry value would be often cast strictly for the scrying. I have rarely had that much scry myself, except when I had a Witches' Eye or Prescient Chimera (Chimera is a common? I thought it was uncommon!), the former of which is IMO a lot better than people credit it for.
I played in two prerelease events, and yes, both Bestow and Monstrosity are extremely relevant in limited. I found Bestow to be quite fun. I like the design choice to make the Bestow creatures give exactly what they have (in terms of abilities and P/T) to the creatures they bestow.
I didn't get the chance to play the scry lands, because I only pulled some of those in the packs that I won. I did notice that all of the incidental scry sprinkled everywhere was fairly nice, but that the fact that it was often only scry 1 could get very annoying. Scry for 1 multiple times in a row is frustrating and useless when you already know the top card of your library and want to keep it. I often felt like I was "wasting" a card when I cast a spell with scry 1 after already having scryed my top card.
As far as monstrosity goes, I'm still not a fan of Nessian Asp, but Ill-Tempered Cyclops? Ooooh boy...
Having played with the set at the Prerelease:
1) It is a heck of a lot of fun. It plays very well.
2) Bestow looks overcosted, but the costing is well deserved. A bestow aura hitting the table means you're pretty much guaranteed to get a 2-for-1 in your favour, unless the opponent has enchantment destruction. It's particularly groanworthy if the ability being bestowed is relevant in the current game (eg deathtouch on a blocker, Heliod's Emissary on an attacker).
3) The scry lands are very good. I had a blue-white deck, and I was playing Temple of Deceit in place of an Island and was happy about it. About halfway through the prerelease I swapped in Temple of Abandon as well, despite my only other red mana symbol being on a Crackling Triton.
4) Monstrosity is very good as a late-game mana sink. It does leave even the humble commons with monstrosity as an ominous ticking time bomb. I heard of an Abhorrent Overlord being used along with his 2 tokens to just trade with some random monstrous uncommon.
I'm sorry. For reference:
Wikipedia)
Basic Rules
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spoils_(card_game)
What?
its better to give than receive
Yeah, it is the rares. Even RED gets a 4/5 for 4 in Ember Swallower! I don't really care for the direction of development right now. There's also the fact that the removal so far has been extremely weak.
Link wrote "Has anyone noticed how large creatures are for their CMC in Theros?"
More precisely, the rares are :/ There are tons of 4/5s for 4 and similar, but only at rare. The commons and uncommons are sensible sized :/
So if New Benalia is about equivalent to a Plains, then a dual colour New Benalia would be about equivalent to a Taiga? :) Not really, but I think a more valid way of judging the power level than assuming they'll be no stronger than New Benalia :)
New Benalia never really got played. I play it all the time, and I can tell you that the Scry - 1 is about worth the EBT tapped... sometimes one saves you, and sometimes the other. It really did need something else to, um, interest the players who are 'better' than me.
I will say, that I like having all this incidental Scry 1 kicking around. I'm sure they found good ways to build around that.
Has anyone noticed how large creatures are for their CMC in Theros?
I don't like it because new players, and some more experienced players, find it quite disappointing to get a land in their rare slot. The fact that these ETB tapped is going to make even more people disappointed to get them, even though Scry 1 is a great upside. I don't remember New Benalia being broken, but I wasn't around when it was being played. Was it being played?
I think wizards do tend to put dual lands at higher rarities than necessary for balance. (eg. a limited deck with only a few nonbasic lands probably isn't significantly stronger if it has shocklands instead of gates). But I'm not surprised by it; for whatever reason, that's how dual lands are usually printed: almost always at rare.
As a mostly casual player my instinctive reaction is to hate sourcing mana fixing because it seems like that shouldn't be the interesting part of deck-building, and I resent paying in time or money to make my deck N% more efficient, rather than "able to do this cool thing it couldn't do before".
But assuming wizards have to pay for R&D somehow, I don't know if forcing people to buy packs by making dual lands rare is worse than any other arrangement of cards. They could charge a lot more per pack but have rare cards be less rare. They could make dual lands common but small staple creatures rare. They could make most cards nearly free but have super super super extra rare broken cards you need to win tournaments (like planeswalkers but more so). Would those be be better? I don't especially like dual lands being rare, but I'm not sure why I don't like it.
V: In my experience, when there's an uncommon that's flexible enough to go in plenty of decks (or a cycle of such uncommons), ending up with too many of them is definitely not a problem I suffer from.
Don't worry, New Benalia. You still belong in my Isamaru commander deck...
Well, also, you only want four of (each of) them - at uncommon you'd end up with a small buckets worth.
New Benalia certainly always felt underpowered. I'm glad to see Wizards agree. I think these will be very nice. But yes, I'm sad to see them rare. They're not flashy or splashy, they don't even have basic land types. They're just smoothing. But they get to be rare because eh, it'll probably get Wizards more cash.
So, the rare dual land cycle (Temple of Triumph and friends) are just... dual-colored New Benalia. I've often felt that dual lands should be uncommon, and these feel even more so like they shouldn't be rare. I don't think that these are horrible cards, and "free" scrying that's available to all colors is nice... but these really just don't feel like rare lands.
They should bring back Madness in one of the later sets, if only to make Last Line of Defense a reality.
Bestow and Monstrosity currently remind me of Cipher. They seem to be costed way too safely, and therefore, despite the fact that they're interesting mechanics, they will probably end up as disappointments.
The visual design of the set so far, though, is amazing. I love the night-sky enchantment creatures. They're great.
They do both seem to be costed way too safely. I guess it's "Use this as a normal creature; and hey, maybe you'll get lucky and use it for more" but.. they make me want a normal vanilla creature above them, which isn't a good thing for a splashy mechanic.
I'm not clear what i want to think of Bestow and Monstrosity. They just ridiculously high costed, and especially so on the commons in Monstrosity's case.