Yeah, Torbran definitely is a strong commander. I've been thinking of taking a swing at him but a lot of the time the deck just feels like it makes itself and since I find the most joy in deck building, I just haven't messed around with him.
As for aggro decks and control decks, something that has always interested me is how the community reacts to both the archetypes. From what I've seen in a lot of the larger MTG community, aggro decks are a lot more accepted while control decks are the big bad evil, while in Hearthstone it is the opposite. Because of that, I think you are mostly in the clear for liking to play him the most.
Also, I totally agree with you on Agent of Treachery, it is probably my least favorite card in standard right now and while standard is now free of it, unfortunately, it is still kicking around in brawl.
Edgar Markov is such a fun card to mess around with. He used to be my go-to aggro commander since, as you mentioned, he pumps out such an absurd amount of tokens, but unfortunately, when Battlebond came out with Najeela, I quickly swapped over to her because she can enable a lot of other fun tribal shenanigans. I don't think I've ever seen an aristocrats build of him though so I'll have to check it out sometime.
Another Harth themed card! Gimme your thoughts on it. This card would probably be given to players on their Birthdays. You can at max earn 100 gold from this card like with your daily winnings maxing out at 150 and would show if you and your opponent are good sports. It'd be nice to show that HS isn't as toxic as many ppl think. This is a meme card, but I think it'd be a fun meme card that players could do and something streamers could do to play with fans and celebrate the day. Thoughts?
This card is absurdly good just because each of the Golden Pouches burn a draw. It is essentially a Bad Luck Albatross on steroids that provide your opponent with even an even worse card to play. I'd make each of the gold pouches draw a card so at least the opponent can still get their normal draw. I like the idea though and the flavor fits well, its only a minor oversight that makes it unfair to play against.
Some games that I have been playing a ton of recently have been Terraria, both vanilla and modded now that mod client is official DLC, Tales of the Deck, MTG:A, and Full Metal Furies. For a quick rundown of each of the games...
Terraria is a 2D sandbox game that is similar to Minecraft, but a lot more focused on fighting bosses and exploration. Its hands down one of my favorite games of all time and it just got its final update a couple of weeks ago after being worked on since 2011. It can be a bit confusing if you've never played it before but its the type of game you can get lost in, in a good way. It also has a fairly active modding scene where there are mods that redefine the entire game, which is pretty nice.
Tales of the Deck is a cute singleplayer card game where you construct an 18 card deck consisting of three different classes, then taking the decks you've designed to clear several waves of enemies. Its a bit content dry after you've played it for a while since there's no long term goal/progression, but if you like deckbuilding its pretty fun.
MTG:A is just Magic online, not much else to say about it. Its called cardboard crack for a reason and being able to afford it more easily without shelling out 100+ dollars to get viable decks is always pretty nice.
Full Metal Furies is more modern version of Castle Crashers, providing a more in-depth combat system and is incredibly satisfying to pull off combos in it. It works well with steam's online local coop as well which is pretty nice.
Hopefully one of these games is something you'd be interested in trying out since all of them are really fun. If you aren't, I hope you can find something that does fit you well.
Yeah, Companions were pretty well established in pretty much every format so the rules change is definitely going to be an interesting one. Agent I 100% agree with because it singlehandedly was the best large creature to cheat in as well as invalidating every large creature you'd want to cheat in. Fires definitely felt like it was a preventative ban to make sure nothing equally degenerate would rise up in Jeskai Yorion's spot. As for how the bannings effect paper, the good thing is that a lot of the cards in the deck are still playable, Fires of Invention has also been fairly affordable at only 1 dollar. Unfortunately, Agent ended up spiking to be upwards of 10 dollars and I doubt that it will see play in most older formats but being burned 40 dollars isn't the worst thing imaginable.
The companion changes also feels like it just ruined the mechanic for the most part. Things like Obosh and Yorion, cards that were already fit into more midrange strategies probably can still see some play here and there but I'd be surprised if Lurrus stays around seeing as how its not a three mana 3/2 lifelink that cantrips at worse.
While Fblthp is definitely a fan favorite, the fact that spoiler was apart of the cards being reprinted makes me feel skeptical, since reprinting a legendary creature that's still in standard seems questionable. The card I personally believe is going to be reprinted is Saffi Eriksdotter, which appeared on Lhurgoyf with the best flavor text of all time, "'Ach Hans, run! It's the Lhurgoyf!' - Saffi Eriksdotter, last words".
I am also definitely not biased towards wanting Saffi to be reprinted because she's one of my favorite cards of all time and I want to be able to shove her into every single deck under the sun in Arena.
Glad to help you find more cards for your deck! It's unfortunate that you cannot have more than 100 cards in commander because Yorion works so perfectly and would be a great companion for Brago. That being said, there are also a ton of other powerful ETB triggers in standard right now, Agent of Treachery is an absurdly good card that would be great with him. Once again I am glad that I've helped you!
I've never run into this issue myself, but I also just use the standalone program instead of the Epic Games Launcher. I have had issues in the past where the launcher gets stuck at different parts of it loading though, which might be the same type of issue. When that happens, I just close it down and try relaunching and usually it does the trick.
I'm torn on this because while on one hand, the new system is strictly better in terms of value, but on the other hand I don't like crafting golden cards but love the animations. I'm in an awkward boat where I'm not a whale, but have been playing for so long that I can afford pretty much any cards I would want to craft. Its the type of thing where I miss it, but the current system is going to be better pretty much every time.
Another thing that might be impacting your matchmaking is the time of day you queue and the format. One of my friends plays in the US server around the middle of the night in wild to test something and found out that he was queueing against low plat, even high gold just because of the lack of players.
Its probably still all just MMR stuff, but a lack of players might also play some role.
Yeah, the rewards are really lacking for the most part. The only 'restricted' rewards are the random legendaries you can earn from the Brawler's Guild Hall, which only help if you want to play the format more. Part of me understands why there is no ranked Brawl though, as the format is designed to be more casual, and adding incentives hurts that.
Strange, It has worked in the past for me so wondering if there's just something in this decklist that causes it to not work properly, thanks for catching that!
Most competitive play requires you to submit decklists before the event to make sure everything is legal. There have been tournaments that I have gone to where there are no judges but still require checklists. Like there's nothing physically preventing you from running a deck with 5+ copies of non-basic cards, except the fact you are literally cheating and you'll have to feel bad about it. Revealing a companion is basically just telling the opponent "hey if you catch me with any cards that do not follow the rules listed on the companion, I'm committing a rules infraction and can be kicked out of the event on the spot" which is probably one of the worst ways you can cheat in this game. This also means that if you want to be a scummy person, you can go to play some kitchen table with a deck breaking the companion requirements, but given that it's a casual setting against most likely your friends, the only thing you're really hurting is your friendship. In this type of setting you might be able to ask your friend for their decklist if your paranoid they are cheating but that's all up to the players, not some official rules committee to make up.
For short, in pretty much any event they can ask for decklists to make sure you aren't cheating. If you don't want to take the word of the person playing the companion and its a casual environment, you can ask for the decklist to double-check but I don't think people are going to try cheating that much in casual kitchen table mtg.
Whatever happened to that data mined Mage hero? “Celeste”?!
I have no clue honestly. When I saw this post that was the first thing I thought of as well. That's just the issue with data mining, a lot of people thought it would be included with the whole mage packs thing but that didn't happen so now we are just wondering if it'll ever see the light of day.
I think it's pretty clear which character it is going to be if you take a look at the clues dropped in this expansion.
First, we have the whole imprisoned minion thing going on throughout this entire set, all except for rogue (and shaman but I'm avoiding that because it goes against my point here), then there's the fact that DH is now a class and has the main hero being Illidan, a character that has always been locked up by a specific rogue character. Finally, as a nail in the coffin for this whole thing, notice how Ben bolds the word Legendary as if hinting that the new hero skin is already a legendary creature within the game. All these points towards one character and one character alone, Maiev Shadowsong. In fact, if you look at the game files you can find out she's already been added.
Jokes aside, I know next to nothing about Warcraft Lore to be able to predict what hero is gonna be added, but I'm still stoked to see that a new hero is going to be added for my favorite class.
The new set is all about giant monsters that mutate and do cool stuff and so WotC is doing a special promo thing where special packs can have a Kaiju art. Some of the art is really cool and as someone who loves Godzilla and almost everything he stands for, I love it to death. I'd recommend checking out some of the art, its all really nice and if you aren't familiar with all 300 trillion different Kaijus, you might get a laugh at how dumb some of them are.
Dimir is definitely a color pairing I need to play more of. The only times I've really dived into playing with it is in Mill decks and this one, but it definitely right up my alley in terms of what it does. Hopefully Ikoria can bring some cool new UB tools and cards so I can revisit the color pairing soon.
Glad you still enjoy the articles despite not playing a whole lot Arena! One of my big 'long term' goals is to eventually start doing Commander deck techs as well as Brawl ones as the larger card pool means there is a lot more 'fun' stuff you can do but for the foreseeable future that's most likely not going to happen. That being said, I still love writing about Brawl and so far with the stuff coming with Ikoria, it looks like there is going to be a lot of fun new decks I can tinker around with.
I remember hearing about this bug in the discord server and thought it was absolutely hysterical. Given how raiding party was unnerfed and probably going to see play in wild, I don't have any doubts that blizzard will catch wind of this happening and fix it.
In my opinion, the biggest issue with the OG paladin quest is just that it's super slow (and the reward is kinda meh, but anyway). Because of that, I would try trimming down on the top end a bit as well as cutting the slower cards because if things go decently, you should be able to beat down the opponent with either Galvadon or with a very large Immortal Prelate/any other creature.
The cards I see being the most meh are both theLightforged Crusader because while generating extra librams sounds really fun, that feels unlikely due to being in wild, the Spirit of the Tiger because its pretty slow and pretty much all you make with it are small creatures that don't do much. Finally, I'm not a huge fan of the Bronze Explorers as they do not benefit much from being buffed aside from gaining you more life when they attack and the dragon you discover should not be that impactful.
Some cards I think would be good if included in the deck would be two Lightforged Zealots as, since your already all paladin cards, you might as well run the best payoff. It lets you start removing things when it comes into play and gives a body you can buff up if it survives. Another card I think would be decent is a Potion of Heroism, most likely as a 1-of. More draw is always good and the divine shield is pretty relevant for trading. Finally, since this deck needs more of an early game that does not rely on other cards to make it strong, I'd probably toss in 2 Shielded Minibots. Its a strong minion on its own and given how most likely it is going to survive, it gives you a good base to start buffing.
My biggest issue with this archetype as a whole is just that its slow and the payoff doesn't instantly win the game. It's going to be absolutely picked apart by the rest of the meta for the most part, but there's not much you can really do to fix that aside from just playing a different deck. Aside from that though, the deck does look really fun and so good luck when you get around to piloting it with the new cards!
Yeah, Torbran definitely is a strong commander. I've been thinking of taking a swing at him but a lot of the time the deck just feels like it makes itself and since I find the most joy in deck building, I just haven't messed around with him.
As for aggro decks and control decks, something that has always interested me is how the community reacts to both the archetypes. From what I've seen in a lot of the larger MTG community, aggro decks are a lot more accepted while control decks are the big bad evil, while in Hearthstone it is the opposite. Because of that, I think you are mostly in the clear for liking to play him the most.
Also, I totally agree with you on Agent of Treachery, it is probably my least favorite card in standard right now and while standard is now free of it, unfortunately, it is still kicking around in brawl.
Edgar Markov is such a fun card to mess around with. He used to be my go-to aggro commander since, as you mentioned, he pumps out such an absurd amount of tokens, but unfortunately, when Battlebond came out with Najeela, I quickly swapped over to her because she can enable a lot of other fun tribal shenanigans. I don't think I've ever seen an aristocrats build of him though so I'll have to check it out sometime.
This card is absurdly good just because each of the Golden Pouches burn a draw. It is essentially a Bad Luck Albatross on steroids that provide your opponent with even an even worse card to play. I'd make each of the gold pouches draw a card so at least the opponent can still get their normal draw. I like the idea though and the flavor fits well, its only a minor oversight that makes it unfair to play against.
Some games that I have been playing a ton of recently have been Terraria, both vanilla and modded now that mod client is official DLC, Tales of the Deck, MTG:A, and Full Metal Furies. For a quick rundown of each of the games...
Terraria is a 2D sandbox game that is similar to Minecraft, but a lot more focused on fighting bosses and exploration. Its hands down one of my favorite games of all time and it just got its final update a couple of weeks ago after being worked on since 2011. It can be a bit confusing if you've never played it before but its the type of game you can get lost in, in a good way. It also has a fairly active modding scene where there are mods that redefine the entire game, which is pretty nice.
Tales of the Deck is a cute singleplayer card game where you construct an 18 card deck consisting of three different classes, then taking the decks you've designed to clear several waves of enemies. Its a bit content dry after you've played it for a while since there's no long term goal/progression, but if you like deckbuilding its pretty fun.
MTG:A is just Magic online, not much else to say about it. Its called cardboard crack for a reason and being able to afford it more easily without shelling out 100+ dollars to get viable decks is always pretty nice.
Full Metal Furies is more modern version of Castle Crashers, providing a more in-depth combat system and is incredibly satisfying to pull off combos in it. It works well with steam's online local coop as well which is pretty nice.
Hopefully one of these games is something you'd be interested in trying out since all of them are really fun. If you aren't, I hope you can find something that does fit you well.
Yeah, Companions were pretty well established in pretty much every format so the rules change is definitely going to be an interesting one. Agent I 100% agree with because it singlehandedly was the best large creature to cheat in as well as invalidating every large creature you'd want to cheat in. Fires definitely felt like it was a preventative ban to make sure nothing equally degenerate would rise up in Jeskai Yorion's spot. As for how the bannings effect paper, the good thing is that a lot of the cards in the deck are still playable, Fires of Invention has also been fairly affordable at only 1 dollar. Unfortunately, Agent ended up spiking to be upwards of 10 dollars and I doubt that it will see play in most older formats but being burned 40 dollars isn't the worst thing imaginable.
The companion changes also feels like it just ruined the mechanic for the most part. Things like Obosh and Yorion, cards that were already fit into more midrange strategies probably can still see some play here and there but I'd be surprised if Lurrus stays around seeing as how its not a three mana 3/2 lifelink that cantrips at worse.
While Fblthp is definitely a fan favorite, the fact that spoiler was apart of the cards being reprinted makes me feel skeptical, since reprinting a legendary creature that's still in standard seems questionable. The card I personally believe is going to be reprinted is Saffi Eriksdotter, which appeared on Lhurgoyf with the best flavor text of all time, "'Ach Hans, run! It's the Lhurgoyf!' - Saffi Eriksdotter, last words".
I am also definitely not biased towards wanting Saffi to be reprinted because she's one of my favorite cards of all time and I want to be able to shove her into every single deck under the sun in Arena.
Glad to help you find more cards for your deck! It's unfortunate that you cannot have more than 100 cards in commander because Yorion works so perfectly and would be a great companion for Brago. That being said, there are also a ton of other powerful ETB triggers in standard right now, Agent of Treachery is an absurdly good card that would be great with him. Once again I am glad that I've helped you!
I've never run into this issue myself, but I also just use the standalone program instead of the Epic Games Launcher. I have had issues in the past where the launcher gets stuck at different parts of it loading though, which might be the same type of issue. When that happens, I just close it down and try relaunching and usually it does the trick.
I'm torn on this because while on one hand, the new system is strictly better in terms of value, but on the other hand I don't like crafting golden cards but love the animations. I'm in an awkward boat where I'm not a whale, but have been playing for so long that I can afford pretty much any cards I would want to craft. Its the type of thing where I miss it, but the current system is going to be better pretty much every time.
Another thing that might be impacting your matchmaking is the time of day you queue and the format. One of my friends plays in the US server around the middle of the night in wild to test something and found out that he was queueing against low plat, even high gold just because of the lack of players.
Its probably still all just MMR stuff, but a lack of players might also play some role.
Yeah, the rewards are really lacking for the most part. The only 'restricted' rewards are the random legendaries you can earn from the Brawler's Guild Hall, which only help if you want to play the format more. Part of me understands why there is no ranked Brawl though, as the format is designed to be more casual, and adding incentives hurts that.
Strange, It has worked in the past for me so wondering if there's just something in this decklist that causes it to not work properly, thanks for catching that!
Most competitive play requires you to submit decklists before the event to make sure everything is legal. There have been tournaments that I have gone to where there are no judges but still require checklists. Like there's nothing physically preventing you from running a deck with 5+ copies of non-basic cards, except the fact you are literally cheating and you'll have to feel bad about it. Revealing a companion is basically just telling the opponent "hey if you catch me with any cards that do not follow the rules listed on the companion, I'm committing a rules infraction and can be kicked out of the event on the spot" which is probably one of the worst ways you can cheat in this game. This also means that if you want to be a scummy person, you can go to play some kitchen table with a deck breaking the companion requirements, but given that it's a casual setting against most likely your friends, the only thing you're really hurting is your friendship. In this type of setting you might be able to ask your friend for their decklist if your paranoid they are cheating but that's all up to the players, not some official rules committee to make up.
For short, in pretty much any event they can ask for decklists to make sure you aren't cheating. If you don't want to take the word of the person playing the companion and its a casual environment, you can ask for the decklist to double-check but I don't think people are going to try cheating that much in casual kitchen table mtg.
I have no clue honestly. When I saw this post that was the first thing I thought of as well. That's just the issue with data mining, a lot of people thought it would be included with the whole mage packs thing but that didn't happen so now we are just wondering if it'll ever see the light of day.
I think it's pretty clear which character it is going to be if you take a look at the clues dropped in this expansion.
First, we have the whole imprisoned minion thing going on throughout this entire set, all except for rogue (and shaman but I'm avoiding that because it goes against my point here), then there's the fact that DH is now a class and has the main hero being Illidan, a character that has always been locked up by a specific rogue character. Finally, as a nail in the coffin for this whole thing, notice how Ben bolds the word Legendary as if hinting that the new hero skin is already a legendary creature within the game. All these points towards one character and one character alone, Maiev Shadowsong. In fact, if you look at the game files you can find out she's already been added.
Jokes aside, I know next to nothing about Warcraft Lore to be able to predict what hero is gonna be added, but I'm still stoked to see that a new hero is going to be added for my favorite class.
The new set is all about giant monsters that mutate and do cool stuff and so WotC is doing a special promo thing where special packs can have a Kaiju art. Some of the art is really cool and as someone who loves Godzilla and almost everything he stands for, I love it to death. I'd recommend checking out some of the art, its all really nice and if you aren't familiar with all 300 trillion different Kaijus, you might get a laugh at how dumb some of them are.
Dimir is definitely a color pairing I need to play more of. The only times I've really dived into playing with it is in Mill decks and this one, but it definitely right up my alley in terms of what it does. Hopefully Ikoria can bring some cool new UB tools and cards so I can revisit the color pairing soon.
Glad you still enjoy the articles despite not playing a whole lot Arena! One of my big 'long term' goals is to eventually start doing Commander deck techs as well as Brawl ones as the larger card pool means there is a lot more 'fun' stuff you can do but for the foreseeable future that's most likely not going to happen. That being said, I still love writing about Brawl and so far with the stuff coming with Ikoria, it looks like there is going to be a lot of fun new decks I can tinker around with.
Thanks again for the support!
I remember hearing about this bug in the discord server and thought it was absolutely hysterical. Given how raiding party was unnerfed and probably going to see play in wild, I don't have any doubts that blizzard will catch wind of this happening and fix it.
In my opinion, the biggest issue with the OG paladin quest is just that it's super slow (and the reward is kinda meh, but anyway). Because of that, I would try trimming down on the top end a bit as well as cutting the slower cards because if things go decently, you should be able to beat down the opponent with either Galvadon or with a very large Immortal Prelate/any other creature.
The cards I see being the most meh are both theLightforged Crusader because while generating extra librams sounds really fun, that feels unlikely due to being in wild, the Spirit of the Tiger because its pretty slow and pretty much all you make with it are small creatures that don't do much. Finally, I'm not a huge fan of the Bronze Explorers as they do not benefit much from being buffed aside from gaining you more life when they attack and the dragon you discover should not be that impactful.
Some cards I think would be good if included in the deck would be two Lightforged Zealots as, since your already all paladin cards, you might as well run the best payoff. It lets you start removing things when it comes into play and gives a body you can buff up if it survives. Another card I think would be decent is a Potion of Heroism, most likely as a 1-of. More draw is always good and the divine shield is pretty relevant for trading. Finally, since this deck needs more of an early game that does not rely on other cards to make it strong, I'd probably toss in 2 Shielded Minibots. Its a strong minion on its own and given how most likely it is going to survive, it gives you a good base to start buffing.
My biggest issue with this archetype as a whole is just that its slow and the payoff doesn't instantly win the game. It's going to be absolutely picked apart by the rest of the meta for the most part, but there's not much you can really do to fix that aside from just playing a different deck. Aside from that though, the deck does look really fun and so good luck when you get around to piloting it with the new cards!