My biggest hope for Blizz-Con is that the dead eyes of their older employees who have had their spirits crushed by the artist destroying profiteering from EA to liberate themselves and destroy their oppressors during a live feed.
Fun day today! Made an elf/poison deck, cleric deck, and tweaked my mono-black control. Disrupting a lot of old meta strats. Did really well but I think that's partly because the new cards caught people off guard. Think the Foretell will be easy enough for people to predict as the meta settles and the obvious winners stick out. I think mono-white control may be really good.
I got back into MtG about a year ago and was thrilled with how the art has evolved. One of the biggest differences is the diversity of characters to create very cool art. I don't mean this to be a political comment, but when I used to play every human was white and very boring looking. Elves were white, demons were black, goblins were red. It honestly started becoming extremely boring after playing a few years when I was younger.
Now there is a lot of diversity with the cast of characters and looks. They also seem to be a lot better at shaking up the art and flavor expansion to expansion. The newest expansion coming out is a great example, check out that heavy metal and Norse themed artwork. Another big improvement for the digital game (and I believe many are also available for physical cards) is the alternate art. It's not just the same art or character with a slightly different pose, they have dynamic art choices to imagine the characters completely differently. They have certain cycles of art like the stained glass cycle or the heavy metal God cycle in Kaldheim.
I felt they stagnated a decade ago but have really stepped up the game to remain competitive.
Warrior tribe might be downright playable. Resplendent Marshal is solid in it's own right but with how prevalent I see rogues and milling strats it starts to empty the graveyard and buff the board, both are things that rogue's have a tough time with.
Icebreaker Kraken is downright sexy, potentially playable on turn 6 with no ramp spells. Using a splash of green you could keep the enemy units tapped a long time. Forget the names but I think there's currently 2 cards in standard that let you drop 3 lands total a turn. Might also do some really neat things with landfall decks.
Loving these control lands. All of them seem to expensive for anything but control but their effects are pretty cool. The B/W cleric game is looking to be really fun as well, lots of new toys to incorporate.
Doomskar is also so sexy. Literal turn 3 board clear can just wreck aggro decks. Many times my turn 2 in control decks is playing a land and passing, foretelling this card is a great way to spend the turn. Foretell is actually really great for mid/late game oriented decks. Either using that excess mana at the end of your turn to setup a cheaper next turn or to spend that early game setting up combo turns or strong mid game moves.
The Saga cards for this set are really cool, stuff you can build around, and flavorful. Most of them I can sort of flesh out a basic story that's going on based on the abilities and name.
Haunting Voyage is pretty neat as well. I think that's the first one we've seen with a foretell effect and cost that's greater than the straight mana cost. Only trouble with this card (and any reanimation cards) is there is so much exile from graveyard or exile from play cards going around it's tough to build a strategy around it. Anything that has black has pretty much started running a few copies of Cling to Dust. Esper Doom exiles all your best cards. I sort of wish there would be some tech card that returns all cards exiled to your graveyard or something like that.
Poison Cup is some sexy removal for a hard black control deck. I really want to a creature-less or low creature mono-black deck but it currently lacks any finisher. Been messing around the Skyclave Shade and Underworld Dreams to pick apart an opponent.
Once again, god I love this art. The alt-art is also so wonderful.
I forgot there were historic snow cards. I go in and out of the MtG scene so I have chunks missing in my knowledge outside of standard. I remember picking up a snow covered land and trying to figure out what the heck was up with that before throwing it in a binder.
Cool, a little more viable than I thought then! Still feeling like it's going to go the way of the party mechanic, neat on paper but not viable. Would love to be proved wrong though!
Unless I saw it wrong all the snow covered lands they have previewed are dual color and come into play tapped. There are some other mana sources like the Replicating ring but unless they also have snow covered single color lands that come into play untapped I think running the deck is going to suffer competitively because you are essentially always running a turn behind.
Snow mechanic seems weak. The snow lands all come into play tapped and the benefits for the 'using snow mana' cards seems underpowered considering you'll pretty much always be behind curve. The two sided legendary cycle seems fun so far. The changling mechanic seems like it may support the 'Party' mechanic a bit and maybe make a few decent decks for it (hopefully, that was about as weak as expected). Vehicles back out of nowhere. Lots of stuff going on with this expansion so far. It doesn't feel like there are too many new archetypes that are going to be coming out of this expansion but lots of nice cards to plug into some weaker decks. Lots of very decent cards here that may see play. Some of the warrior angels seem like they could pull the R/W warrior into relevance.
I think that adding a free Mastery token for a starting account would be the best way to do this. If you fill out the mastery levels before the next expansion drops you will often have enough gems for the next expansion's. This does take dedicated play, but that's the trade off for F2P. Only trick to this would be newer players may waste this free token at the end of a mastery cycle and get nothing for it.
I liked the info on the process but I've said it before and I stand by my comment... Magara needs a belt or some sort of color along the center of that outfit. I spent way too long thinking this was a dress.
My biggest hope for Blizz-Con is that the dead eyes of their older employees who have had their spirits crushed by the artist destroying profiteering from EA to liberate themselves and destroy their oppressors during a live feed.
Fun day today! Made an elf/poison deck, cleric deck, and tweaked my mono-black control. Disrupting a lot of old meta strats. Did really well but I think that's partly because the new cards caught people off guard. Think the Foretell will be easy enough for people to predict as the meta settles and the obvious winners stick out. I think mono-white control may be really good.
I got back into MtG about a year ago and was thrilled with how the art has evolved. One of the biggest differences is the diversity of characters to create very cool art. I don't mean this to be a political comment, but when I used to play every human was white and very boring looking. Elves were white, demons were black, goblins were red. It honestly started becoming extremely boring after playing a few years when I was younger.
Now there is a lot of diversity with the cast of characters and looks. They also seem to be a lot better at shaking up the art and flavor expansion to expansion. The newest expansion coming out is a great example, check out that heavy metal and Norse themed artwork. Another big improvement for the digital game (and I believe many are also available for physical cards) is the alternate art. It's not just the same art or character with a slightly different pose, they have dynamic art choices to imagine the characters completely differently. They have certain cycles of art like the stained glass cycle or the heavy metal God cycle in Kaldheim.
I felt they stagnated a decade ago but have really stepped up the game to remain competitive.
Ben: "I'm glad you're on the team. Welcome everyone."
New Team: "Glad to be here, so what's the secret project."
Ben: "The secret is there is no project. Seriously, you guys have any ideas, lol?"
Warrior tribe might be downright playable. Resplendent Marshal is solid in it's own right but with how prevalent I see rogues and milling strats it starts to empty the graveyard and buff the board, both are things that rogue's have a tough time with.
Icebreaker Kraken is downright sexy, potentially playable on turn 6 with no ramp spells. Using a splash of green you could keep the enemy units tapped a long time. Forget the names but I think there's currently 2 cards in standard that let you drop 3 lands total a turn. Might also do some really neat things with landfall decks.
Is this card trash or does it spark joy?
WAAAAAAAAA?!
Dis list needs more Troll, Mon!
Loving these control lands. All of them seem to expensive for anything but control but their effects are pretty cool. The B/W cleric game is looking to be really fun as well, lots of new toys to incorporate.
Doomskar is also so sexy. Literal turn 3 board clear can just wreck aggro decks. Many times my turn 2 in control decks is playing a land and passing, foretelling this card is a great way to spend the turn. Foretell is actually really great for mid/late game oriented decks. Either using that excess mana at the end of your turn to setup a cheaper next turn or to spend that early game setting up combo turns or strong mid game moves.
I couldn't find Moorabi. It seemed like a really fun word but there's no support to make it workable. Did you guys forget it was a thing?
The Saga cards for this set are really cool, stuff you can build around, and flavorful. Most of them I can sort of flesh out a basic story that's going on based on the abilities and name.
Haunting Voyage is pretty neat as well. I think that's the first one we've seen with a foretell effect and cost that's greater than the straight mana cost. Only trouble with this card (and any reanimation cards) is there is so much exile from graveyard or exile from play cards going around it's tough to build a strategy around it. Anything that has black has pretty much started running a few copies of Cling to Dust. Esper Doom exiles all your best cards. I sort of wish there would be some tech card that returns all cards exiled to your graveyard or something like that.
Fine Fynn, OK. Just fine. You wanna do that to me? You want me to go all in on a poison/deathtouch deck? Ok. Fine. I'll do it.
Poison Cup is some sexy removal for a hard black control deck. I really want to a creature-less or low creature mono-black deck but it currently lacks any finisher. Been messing around the Skyclave Shade and Underworld Dreams to pick apart an opponent.
Once again, god I love this art. The alt-art is also so wonderful.
I forgot there were historic snow cards. I go in and out of the MtG scene so I have chunks missing in my knowledge outside of standard. I remember picking up a snow covered land and trying to figure out what the heck was up with that before throwing it in a binder.
Cool, a little more viable than I thought then! Still feeling like it's going to go the way of the party mechanic, neat on paper but not viable. Would love to be proved wrong though!
Unless I saw it wrong all the snow covered lands they have previewed are dual color and come into play tapped. There are some other mana sources like the Replicating ring but unless they also have snow covered single color lands that come into play untapped I think running the deck is going to suffer competitively because you are essentially always running a turn behind.
Snow mechanic seems weak. The snow lands all come into play tapped and the benefits for the 'using snow mana' cards seems underpowered considering you'll pretty much always be behind curve. The two sided legendary cycle seems fun so far. The changling mechanic seems like it may support the 'Party' mechanic a bit and maybe make a few decent decks for it (hopefully, that was about as weak as expected). Vehicles back out of nowhere. Lots of stuff going on with this expansion so far. It doesn't feel like there are too many new archetypes that are going to be coming out of this expansion but lots of nice cards to plug into some weaker decks. Lots of very decent cards here that may see play. Some of the warrior angels seem like they could pull the R/W warrior into relevance.
I think that adding a free Mastery token for a starting account would be the best way to do this. If you fill out the mastery levels before the next expansion drops you will often have enough gems for the next expansion's. This does take dedicated play, but that's the trade off for F2P. Only trick to this would be newer players may waste this free token at the end of a mastery cycle and get nothing for it.
Niko has a face that I just want to punch. Not sure why.
I liked the info on the process but I've said it before and I stand by my comment... Magara needs a belt or some sort of color along the center of that outfit. I spent way too long thinking this was a dress.