|
I started playing when Ice Age came out and the first rare I drew was a Polar Kraken, so I spent years trying to make a Polar Kraken/Unsummon/Counterspell deck work. I think that thing won one, maybe two games ever.
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2024 04:18
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 16:23 |
|
|
If we're talking about big creatures in Magic, let me tell you about my large green son Primeval Titan: Primeval Titan costs 6 mana for a 6/6 creature with Trample (when blocked, deals excess combat damage to the player it's attacking), a pretty vanilla stat block but at least it's in the color known for getting extra mana early. Speaking of extra mana, check out that other ability. When this card enters play or attacks, you get to pull two lands out of your deck and put them into play! Even though you can't use them until your next turn without some effect to untap them early. Now you might be saying "Lands? Those cards that everyone gets annoyed to draw?", to which I say that the true power of "Prime Time" is in what it can grab. Do you want to deal a bunch of colorless, uncounterable damage? Churn out a ton of 2/2 creatures? Maybe just attack with it immediately after casting it (getting another two lands!) while also making it deal double damage. This card has been one that people love to complain about it Magic's Modern format over the years, but I love it. One of the most fun cards to resolve on your end because you can do so many crazy things just by grabbing some lands.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2024 03:13
|
|
|
lmao of course it's banned in Commander
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2024 08:25
|
|
cowboy
|
FFT posted:lmao of course it's banned in Commander Seriously why? It is good, janky card. Not a format breaker. At least none of the linked cards were that op with it and require a heavy deck commitment for a card that can't even be a commander. Now if it was legendary, I would see myself doing a fun gimmick deck with it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2024 09:13
|
|
|
Whole lot of hilarious lands you can stuff in a 100-card singleton deck and the trick is you can pull out any two lands Thespian's Stage/Dark Depths Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth/Cabal Coffers Gaia's Cradle, Mosswort Bridge, Castle Garenbrig Those are just from this article which includes pictures of those cards stringless has a new favorite as of 09:28 on Jan 28, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2024 09:23
|
|
|
On top of that, it's extremely easy to recur the effect. Haste into attacks, flickers, bounces, etc. Very easy to grab a ton of lands very quickly and snowball, and there's a lot of very good non-basic lands out there that it can grab.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2024 09:37
|
|
|
I don't doubt the lands, I doubt the singleton Green fatty on 100 card deck being format breaking. You're committing a lot of cards on a gimmick that's gonna be destroyed by any removal (except red).
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2024 09:43
|
|
|
Every time the effect occurs, you're pulling lands out of your deck which serves at least two primary purposes in addition to whatever effects those lands have: Mana ramp and drawing more cards that aren't lands you don't need. EDH/C is also pretty anti-land destruction in general.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2024 09:58
|
|
|
It wouldn't be playable at the highest level of competitive Commander, as far as I know (I don't play at that level myself), but in anything even slightly more casual than that, it absolutely dominates the board. It's not that its effect is inherently too strong, it's that when there's a Prime Time on the board, the entire game revolves around Prime Time. A lot of Commander decks run copy effects; if it's not answered right away, pretty soon you'll be looking at 2+ of these on the board, being flickered and manipulated to generate all kinds of board advantage for anyone whose deck can engage with it. It's hardly the only card that can have that kind of impact, but it's one of the most egregious. That's why it ended up getting banned. Also worth noting that the Commander banlist is sort of a list of "cards that got too annoying in the personal playgroup of the people who make the official Commander banlist" so the real answer for why it got banned is probably that there was one person or a few people who got really annoyed at it showing up and dominating the game too much.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2024 10:53
|
|
|
True. My personal ban list would be: 1. Any of that one turn combo stuff. Were here to play game, not to solitaire our combos. 2. Colour Blue.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2024 10:58
|
|
|
I would like an unban of Oko, thief of crowns in legacy please. TIA
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2024 11:04
|
|
|
FFT posted:Every time the effect occurs, you're pulling lands out of your deck which serves at least two primary purposes in addition to whatever effects those lands have: DontMockMySmock posted:Also worth noting that the Commander banlist is sort of a list of "cards that got too annoying in the personal playgroup of the people who make the official Commander banlist" so the real answer for why it got banned is probably that there was one person or a few people who got really annoyed at it showing up and dominating the game too much. These are both correct, even if the Rules Committee (the aforementioned group deciding the Commander ban list) is cowards for keeping it there. Plus even in a 100-card singleton format, there are lots of ways to search up and cast a green creature from your deck. Arguably the strongest deck in Arena's new Timeless format (their equivalent of Vintage) runs 1-mana ramp creatures and 4 Natural Order to put a Titan into play in turn 3.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2024 14:18
|
|
|
ilmucche posted:I would like an unban of Oko, thief of crowns in legacy please. TIA please, no  though I do still own a few copies that I never got a chance to play  Also I think an important thing to think about regarding Prime Time in EDH is to remember that tutors are extremely powerful in a 100-card singleton format, and are somewhat against the spirit of the format. Primeval Titan lets you tutor 2 cards when it enters the battlefield and will let you tutor two additional cards every turn it sticks on the board. Yes, they're just lands, but is anyone really surprised that there is a sufficiently large pool of busted lands that have been printed over the past 30 years?
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2024 15:00
|
|
|
When it first came out I pulled a foil Primeval Titan on the release day and plopped it on ebay. Paid for the entire booster box.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2024 16:07
|
|
|
Issaries posted:True. My personal ban list would be: I found the reason why you don't like these: Issaries posted:2. Colour Blue. Being someone who plays at cedh tables, turn 1 or turn 2 combos are pretty rare because there's 21 cards worth of interaction sitting across the table from you. Can it happen? Sure, but usually combos will usually happen around turns 4-6 after people have whittled away resources and interaction away from each other.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2024 16:23
|
|
|
Phthisis posted:please, no the time for oko is now. Note: I have never owned or played an oko i thought prime time got banned because the rules committee or whatever they're called hated how much shuffling it caused
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2024 16:45
|
|
|
For some reason two Mystic Mine video essays dropped within a month https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC1wCYFUs1A
|
|
#
?
Feb 19, 2024 17:44
|
|
|
Taeke posted:I like those cards just because of the dichotomy between blue being known for low cost "no gently caress you" spells like 1 mana unsummons, 3 mana counters, etc only to have huge mana cost creatures that are big and deadly but bad. It's flavor. Blue is good at low mana cost so if they're gonna do a big mana thing it's gotta be terrible because it's out of the wheel house. That's green's thing. Stick to low mana gently caress yous and mid mana flyers with benefits because that's what you do best. I think the idea for a while at least in how the game was designed was that blue decks would use countering/denial etc. to slow the game down to the point where they had enough mana to cast the big killer creatures- like they were meant to be the "win condition" of a control deck. But yeah to facilitate this they made big blue creatures supremely inefficient to the point that they weren't worth casting to begin with.
|
|
#
?
Feb 19, 2024 22:26
|
|
|
Pretty much, they tried to play into the water theme too by being like, well, what is big and in the water? Krakens and leviathans and poo poo Magic has really gotten away from the Mana colors being elemental, which is a shame.
|
|
#
?
Feb 19, 2024 22:35
|
|
|
I’ve never played Magic. So was the idea (among players) that you would use Blue effects to shut down your opponent’s early game, then gear shift to one of the other elements to actually go on the offensive?
|
|
|
#
?
Feb 19, 2024 22:53
|
|
|
Regalingualius posted:I’ve never played Magic. So was the idea (among players) that you would use Blue effects to shut down your opponent’s early game, then gear shift to one of the other elements to actually go on the offensive? Not necessarily. You can choose to have any combination of the 5 colors in your deck, including just one, so it was often a good idea to stick to one color. Mono blue carries a lot of counterspells (that is, you play them in response to someone else's thing they're doing to stop them from doing it) and controlling effects (using persistent effects to stymie your opponent's ability to build a threatening presence or resources), and early on their creature selection (creatures being the main method of attacking and lowering a player's life total) trended toward big slammin' creatures and evasive flyers that were resource intensive to commit to the board. That is, they're expensive to put down, but they hit hard, but also it's a big deal if you lose them. White has similar kinds of things and eats into blue's part of the pie a bit, but white is less concerned with slowing an opponent down than it is with playing catch-up. An example is a card like Tithe that allows you to search for a Plains card in your deck, but if an opponent has more lands than you, you can get two instead, in an attempt to reestablish parity. White and blue together is commonly referred to as an "Azorius" color pairing and is generally considered the kind of strategy one uses if one wants to slow their opponents to a crawl and effectively ice them out of the game (in fact, many blue-white cards are ice themed.) So it isn't a matter of switching elements as it is developing a strategy by combining their strengths.
|
|
#
?
Feb 19, 2024 23:06
|
|
|
No, the idea was that blue had mostly early game counters and inefficient removal (putting a card back into the opponents hand instead of destroying it) and huge creaters for the late game as a win condition, but no win condition in the early or mid game. Their mid game spells were usually about drawing cards to get that removal in hand, or flying creatures but those were generally vulnerable because of their low stats. Green has a similar strategy only instead of hindering the opponent in the early game they would ramp up their resources (by being able to play extra lands or have cheap and weak creatures that produce mana) so they'd be able to play the big creatures sooner, or a lot of small creatures by using their mana to create tokens. White was more about surviving the early game by protecting yourself and your creatures and gaining life, then win in the mid game with decent creatures like flying angels, creatures that would give you health as they did damage, etc. Black would do a lot of killing the opponents creatures and being a powerful generalist, but at a cost. Usually sacrificing your own creatures or life points. Red would go the direct damage route with spells (simple 1 mana cost deal 3 damage cards and stuff) and a lot of small creatures that could attack quickly to win in the early game. Nowadays those are still the mono color archetypes, but all the color combinations also have their own archetypes that are kinda a mix, so you do get decks that use blue for the early game to stall the opponent and then use another color to win the game. Also there's so many cards now that all colors can mostly do what the other colors specialise in, but worse, but also there's so much synergy that you get things like white+green where the white cards focus on the life gain because the green cards get more powerful when you gain life.
|
|
#
?
Feb 19, 2024 23:13
|
|
|
Taeke posted:No, the idea was that blue had mostly early game counters and inefficient removal (putting a card back into the opponents hand instead of destroying it) and huge creaters for the late game as a win condition, but no win condition in the early or mid game. Their mid game spells were usually about drawing cards to get that removal in hand, or flying creatures but those were generally vulnerable because of their low stats. Blue is a lot about card advantage nowadays - drawing extra cards on top of what you're already doing, slowing them down while getting ahead yourself, and often still going "I'm not doing anything on my turn, and depending on what you do, I can instantly (heh) react". Also, cheap efficient fliers. The game is much more about good creatures now and Blue is following suit. Also, a major theme that gets reiterated and expanded on all the time, is noncreature spells. Rewards for playing them, having played them (they're in the Graveyard now and thus a resource), having them in hand... Black is not doing the "hurt yourself for advantage" that often anymore, because they're trying to get away from cards that might make you feel bad for playing them (I disagree with that, but it's a general design philosophy). Also, cards across the board have gotten so good that even an all-time favorite card like Phyrexian Arena (every turn, draw an extra card but lose a life) isn't cutting it anymore - it's too slow (costs 3 mana, does nothing on the turn you play it) and doesn't help you directly, immediately, while the opponent is setting up something disgusting starting Turn 3/4 which you just took off. What black is still really good at is direct removal, cheap, generalized, no questions asked - and its creatures can often swing with the better ones of other colors, by being either aggressive for a cost (think less "this hurts you" and more "this can't protect you") or by being simply very efficient if you can set it up right. And also, Black is ALL about the Graveyard, with reanimation, recursion, stuff that profits from it being full, and so on. Red has gotten less and less direct damage to opponents - probably because it feels bad in Limited to stabilize a game and then they draw a burn spell and you just lose as they point it at your face? Instead, Red is the secondary noncreature spell color, often pairing that with Blue, and has the most aggressive cheap creatures. It's all about coming out swinging and casting lots of stuff early on. There's of course also Big Red strategies (think dragons, but also expensive spells that do in fact burn hard) but those have fallen a bit by the wayside because the game is just really fast at the moment. Green still loves its big creatures, ramp has been toned down a bit but you can still do it, however a lot of green stuff is simply big now for the same cost as others. It's the secondary Graveyard color too, so there's a lot of cards made that care about that, especially for lands. It has been struggling a bit recently because just Thing Big doesn't cut it anymore, but it is still excellent support - there just hasn't been a notable monogreen deck in Standard for a while, as far as I understand it (I don't play competitive Magic but I read posts by people who do).
|
|
#
?
Feb 20, 2024 00:04
|
|
|
Magics color wheel is imo responsible for a lot of the games long term health and diversity. The fact that you can theoretically play any combination of cards you want but have to worry more and more about consistency with every color you add is a really elegant self-correcting balance. It's a great idea, especially considering how haphazard the early design was. The only thing that compares in my mind is the consistent presence of fast red decks and blue control decks in basically every format, they ensure that you have to be able to answer them. Decks aren't allowed to do nothing for the first 4-5 turns and you can't easily build a strategy around having any single card not get countered. They stop people from getting a little too cute. Usually.
|
|
#
?
Feb 20, 2024 00:16
|
|
|
IDK if it's toxic, but the new set just gave us Slime Against Humanity, a 2G Sorcery that puts a 0/0 Green Ooze Creature Token with trample on the field, with X +1/+1 counters on it, where X is 2 plus the number of cards in your Graveyard that are Oozes or named Slime Against Humanity. Also a deck may have any number of cards named Slime Against Humanity. There are a good amount of artifacts and enchantments that can do silly things with tokens, counters, and copying spells. I built a Green/Black commander deck around SAH, and it may not go off every game, but boy howdy when it does...
|
|
#
?
Feb 20, 2024 01:25
|
|
|
Mr. Bad Guy posted:IDK if it's toxic, but the new set just gave us Slime Against Humanity, a 2G Sorcery that puts a 0/0 Green Ooze Creature Token with trample on the field, with X +1/+1 counters on it, where X is 2 plus the number of cards in your Graveyard that are Oozes or named Slime Against Humanity. That card name sounds like it belongs in an Un-set, haha
|
|
#
?
Feb 20, 2024 02:26
|
|
|
Hempuli posted:That card name sounds like it belongs in an Un-set, haha wouldn't call it toxic but it's not my thing
|
|
#
?
Feb 20, 2024 12:44
|
|
|
Simply Simon posted:yeah the latest set has some, uh, whimsicality issues This is the last few sets, they're just making it full on wacky now
|
|
#
?
Feb 20, 2024 15:03
|
|
|
Mr. Bad Guy posted:IDK if it's toxic, but the new set just gave us Slime Against Humanity, a 2G Sorcery that puts a 0/0 Green Ooze Creature Token with trample on the field, with X +1/+1 counters on it, where X is 2 plus the number of cards in your Graveyard that are Oozes or named Slime Against Humanity. How many cards (other than basic lands) are now allowed to have more than 4 in the deck? I know there's Relentless Rats from...Time Spiral? And now this slime.
|
|
#
?
Feb 20, 2024 15:12
|
|
|
DrBouvenstein posted:How many cards (other than basic lands) are now allowed to have more than 4 in the deck?  Honorable mentions:  
|
|
#
?
Feb 20, 2024 15:17
|
|
|
Heath posted:Pretty much, they tried to play into the water theme too by being like, well, what is big and in the water? Krakens and leviathans and poo poo IMO they were never solely about elemental magic, which is what made them an interesting representation of schools of magic. I have a how to play guide from Ice Age (circa 1995, a couple of years after the game was first released) and I love its descriptions of the colors of magic because they still hold true: quote:Black Magic: Black magic's power comes from the swamps and bogs; it thrives on death and decay. Many Wizards shun black magic's self-destructive nature even as they long for its ruthlessness. Black's traditional foils are green and white. So simple yet evocative  Herbotron posted:Magics color wheel is imo responsible for a lot of the games long term health and diversity. The fact that you can theoretically play any combination of cards you want but have to worry more and more about consistency with every color you add is a really elegant self-correcting balance. It's a great idea, especially considering how haphazard the early design was. Wizards has gotten a lot better about making at least every two-color pair a viable strategy, especially pairs of "enemy" colors. There were a number of early single-color cards that completely hosed one or both of that color's "foils" as described above. See Dread of Night, Chill, Choke etc.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2024 15:42
|
|
|
I've really fallen off white since it went from a control color to another mostly aggro color in recent days. I remember it being great for a more defensive kind of control compared to Blue's 'offensive' counterspells and bounces. Huge walls, life gain, attack prevention, and big nukes when the opponent's board was full.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2024 14:48
|
|
|
Gloomy Rube posted:I've really fallen off white since it went from a control color to another mostly aggro color in recent days. I remember it being great for a more defensive kind of control compared to Blue's 'offensive' counterspells and bounces. Huge walls, life gain, attack prevention, and big nukes when the opponent's board was full. The problem that Wizards addressed by moving White towards organized armies is that it was slow. This isn't a problem with mono-white decks because they're slow until they're very, very fast, the real problem was Blue/White Control archetypes, where white was used to slow your opponent to a crawl and blue was used to mostly negate that crawl and comb through your deck for your (few) win conditions. Back when I was a judge (Onslaught through the first Ravnica block) we always knew that U/W control decks, even if they weren't necessarily top tier, would drag games out to the end of the clock, while other color combinations rarely even got halfway there.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2024 16:45
|
|
|
UW control rules, Moat rules, Humility rules, wincons are for red mages
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2024 17:43
|
|
|
UW control still exists and people are still extremely happy to call it toxic
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2024 18:18
|
|
|
poo poo Fuckasaurus posted:The problem that Wizards addressed by moving White towards organized armies is that it was slow. This isn't a problem with mono-white decks because they're slow until they're very, very fast, the real problem was Blue/White Control archetypes, where white was used to slow your opponent to a crawl and blue was used to mostly negate that crawl and comb through your deck for your (few) win conditions. Back when I was a judge (Onslaught through the first Ravnica block) we always knew that U/W control decks, even if they weren't necessarily top tier, would drag games out to the end of the clock, while other color combinations rarely even got halfway there. I was also a judge around that time, and one of my favourite judge stories happened at a single elimination Last Chance Qualifier for Canadian Nationals during Onslaught/Mirrodin standard. In a single elimination tournament, you can't have a draw because one of the players MUST advance to the next round. If the round goes to time and the players are still tied in game wins after the 5 additional turns have passed, the tiebreaker is whoever has a higher life total. If the life totals are also tied, you continue playing until one player has more life than other. One of the matches that went to time was a Blue/White control mirror match. One player was up 1-0 but the other player tied up the match in extra turns to tie the match 1-1, so a third game had to be started to break the tie. There's a HUGE crowd around this one game because the entire tournament is waiting for it before the next round can start. Both players are sideboarding in a bunch of lifegain and whatever creatures they could scrape together in their control decks and mulliganned aggressively to get to their "win conditions". The game sequence goes something like this: Player A plays Island, passes the turn Player B plays Island, passes the turn Player A plays City of Brass, taps both for UW, Brass' trigger goes on the stack, in response cycles Renewed Faith, gain 2 life trigger on the stack Player B casts Stifle, countering the 2 life trigger, City of Brass's damage resolves, A goes to 19 life and loses the match, crowd goes bananas Just an unreal series of events that can only happen in a LCQ because they are the only events that are single elimination with a hard round time duration.   
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2024 19:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 16:23 |
|
|
lmao that's great
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2024 19:59
|
|