Rinkles posted:

Olothreutes posted:

This would be metal as hell. Do it Wizards.

sarmhan posted:

It also doesn't fit the other clues in the set. What do sea monsters, mutated humans with the 'Innsmouth look', and madness have to do with Emrakul? How or why would Emrakul be amplifying curses? Why is everything linked to the ocean?

The potential tonal dissonance combined with a lot of flavor text and art clues that point in a different direction convince me more than a vague message in flavor text.

dragon enthusiast posted:

I think they're just going for resonant eldritch horror rather than any singular Lovecraftian trope. Blue gets sea monsters, red get insanity, etc.

Sigma-X posted:

The best thing is that you don't have to actually bring back Yawgmoth, you can have a fake Yawgmoth puppet controlled by Elesh Norn or something and have interesting civil wars / political intrigue on the Phyrexian side, and you can make Urza broken and scattered and half mad from being stitched together from various Urza-influenced artifacts. Karn can play against Urzas madness and you can generate internal conflict there.

Lilliana is the one who suggests the Jacebomb because she doesn't want to get her hands dirty and risk herself in the coming war.

Sigma-X posted:

The best thing is that you don't have to actually bring back Yawgmoth, you can have a fake Yawgmoth puppet controlled by Elesh Norn or something and have interesting civil wars / political intrigue on the Phyrexian side, and you can make Urza broken and scattered and half mad from being stitched together from various Urza-influenced artifacts. Karn can play against Urzas madness and you can generate internal conflict there.

Lilliana is the one who suggests the Jacebomb because she doesn't want to get her hands dirty and risk herself in the coming war.

suicidesteve posted:

Hot take: modern is a better format right now than it's been since before Pod was banned.

Olothreutes posted:

So Urza is unchanged?

Really though, you could do a lot of neat things with this. Yawgmoth comes back, either for real or as a fake puppet and is told Urza has died and starts to take things over. The plane-eteers resurrect a pretty screwed up and broken version of Urza but don't tell him Yawg is back, just that phyrexia is an issue still. Then they get involved the the big fight, Urza sees Yawg, and they both go apeshit and now everyone is in danger because a pair of gods are just going at it full force. Now everyone has to stop them before they destroy everything.

Death Bot posted:

i havent paid attention to modern in a bit bc it seems like no one's playing it on the streams i watch

what makes you say this

(note i barely play magic anymore rip)

TheKingofSprings posted:

Control is actually a deck right now

Panderfringe posted:

I think it'd be more interesting as urza is willing to sacrifice anything to finally destroy the phyrexians, and walkers like Gideon and Nissa are fully on board with that. But Urza stats taking it too far, and while Gideon and Nissa remain on his side, walkers like Chandra and Lilliana realize bringing Urza back was a huge mistake.

field balm posted:

Anything relevant for pauper spoiled yet?

Attorney at Funk posted:

The Emrakul thing would be more compelling if they'd given any of the Eldrazi titans a personality the first time around

Panderfringe posted:

I think it'd be more interesting as urza is willing to sacrifice anything to finally destroy the phyrexians, and walkers like Gideon and Nissa are fully on board with that. But Urza stats taking it too far, and while Gideon and Nissa remain on his side, walkers like Chandra and Lilliana realize bringing Urza back was a huge mistake.

Sigma-X posted:

I'm with the other folks that the Weatherlight Saga is the pinnacle of magic story and writing for me (and also I'm bummed I missed TSP) and I recognize that some of that is due to the nostalgia effect (it was most of my highschool time) but I also think it's the one time they really made a diverse cast and had characters with story arcs. Nobody changes over the course of the plot - our entire plot consists pretty much of Boring People Fight This Block's Villain and Prevail. We have characters vanish after getting (B) added to their casting cost (Tezz, Garruk) but we don't see characters after they make a change.

PJOmega posted:

The sac-chantment cycle is at common and could see play, there's a 3/5 black arrogant wurm at common. Nothing else caught my eye right away.

Molybdenum posted:

http://www.magiclibrarities.net/196-rarities-hachette-french-magic-encyclopedia-inserts-french-cards-index.html

my store has a bunch of the rat cards from this set. What's the story behind them?

Sigma-X posted:

The Eldrazi as they're created aren't really characters, though, they're more like a force of nature, and personifying them would, I think, decrease their interest as an antagonist.

Conversely, though, they make poo poo villains for multi-planar arcs because you can't develop them. The original Zendikar Gods / Eldrazi thing was about as close as you can get with that. Cthulu doesn't have a personality.


Yeah, this is what I want - Urza's expected endgame is Phyrexia destroyed, some vestige of life and some planes still intact. Urza's acceptable endgame is Phyrexia destroyed and no known planes or life intact (because he can assume that there is something safe that he just doesn't know about). To that effect, weaponizing entire planes (like Rath but instead of a transport it's just going to ram the other plane or drown it in lava or something) is completely fine and OK with him, and then you get to have philosophical differences on the team.

Writing an actually interesting and compelling conflict just requires you to pit two determined forces against each other wherein both sides are not unilaterally in agreement with the methodology of their leadership, be it for selfish reasons (Phyrexians would be great at this) or for philosophical / moral reasons (The Power Rangers got this on lock).

From there you just insert different settings and McGuffins that each side has to react to based upon their pre-determined characterization and honestly if you have diverse enough characters much of the actual conflict should write itself pretty much. Chandra totally thinks that drowning everything in Lava is cool, Gideon meets the indigneous peoples and objects, Urza demands victory at any cost, Superfriends have to figure out how to solve this under the duress of time as driven by Discovery/MacGuffin Shields/ Encroaching Forces / etc.

I'm with the other folks that the Weatherlight Saga is the pinnacle of magic story and writing for me (and also I'm bummed I missed TSP) and I recognize that some of that is due to the nostalgia effect (it was most of my highschool time) but I also think it's the one time they really made a diverse cast and had characters with story arcs. Nobody changes over the course of the plot - our entire plot consists pretty much of Boring People Fight This Block's Villain and Prevail. We have characters vanish after getting (B) added to their casting cost (Tezz, Garruk) but we don't see characters after they make a change.

I'm probably exaggerating some since I don't read the fiction any more whereas I used to read all the Weatherlight books, but like the entire plot of Mercadian Masques basically revolves around the joke character Squee suddenly becoming an important part of the crew because he's a goblin in a weird Jaynetown type scenario. Squee continues to consistently be who he is but he has that elevation and he has a joke execution of Ertai, who actually flipped properly (stuck around afterwards) in a way that was consistent with his character and not corrupted magic, but simply the pinnacle of Douchey Blue Mage - he got pissed when it wasn't all about him and sought more power and ran with the wrong crowd to do so.

And these characters had less card characterization than any of the loving planeswalkers do but all I know is that Gideon is JusticeBro, Jace is DoucheyBlueMage, Chandra lburns things, and Nissa is the nature mage. Two of those four aren't even personalities, they're jobs.

Sigma-X posted:

Nobody changes over the course of the plot - our entire plot consists pretty much of Boring People Fight This Block's Villain and Prevail.

Sigma-X posted:

The Eldrazi as they're created aren't really characters, though, they're more like a force of nature, and personifying them would, I think, decrease their interest as an antagonist.

Attorney at Funk posted:

When I say "personality" I mean, like, an aesthetic and memorable way of interacting with the world. All this "Emrakul warps biology" poo poo didn't come up on Zendikar. None of the titans' shticks were apparent in the first set they showed up in.

Alaan posted:

bhsman posted:

It's been a thing of Emrakul's ever since Zendikar.

GeneX posted:

It's emrakul and I'm okay with that so long as it's not emrakul and the emrakul spawn

whydirt posted:

The Weatherlight Saga was pure garbage

Attorney at Funk posted:

If it's Emrakul, then its "spawn" are probably going to be all the things that are being mutated by its presence.