Forbidding Spirit; Regenesis
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Magic: the Gathering |OT| Ravnica Allegiance - These 5 Lands Will SHOCK You!
- Thread starter SigmasonicX
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War of the Spark set name leaked
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Guess what's on the Coming Soon page
Eh on the name. Would have preferred Planesiege like the trademark they filed last year.
I guess we're going to see some lower rarity planeswalker variants. Perhaps uncommons with static abilities only (so they're like enchantments you can attack) and rares with no ultimate.
Eh on the name. Would have preferred Planesiege like the trademark they filed last year.
I guess we're going to see some lower rarity planeswalker variants. Perhaps uncommons with static abilities only (so they're like enchantments you can attack) and rares with no ultimate.
I feel like Magic reached it's design peak years ago. All these cards look the same to me. Very little appears new or innovative. Apart from flavor, I can't tell the sets apart anymore.
Guess what's on the Coming Soon page
Eh on the name. Would have preferred Planesiege like the trademark they filed last year.
I guess we're going to see some lower rarity planeswalker variants. Perhaps uncommons with static abilities only (so they're like enchantments you can attack) and rares with no ultimate.
What is this? A supplemental, non-Standard booster product?
EDIT: Oh, wait. This is the third Ravnica set?
I'm super curious to see if this ties into Brandon Sanderson's novella, which seemed to have some pretty serious implications for the future of the MTG story (with Entities that seem to be able to cause people to spark.)
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I basically only started playing Magic when Arena came to the open beta but I quickly got the same impression. I was told that deck archetypes mostly stay the same through history (green ramps mana and gets big creatures, red gets burn spells, blue counters everything), and I guess that means you have a ton of similar card effects when you need to create 3 expansions per year.
Honestly I've felt the complete opposite lately. Enjoying Standard more than I have in like maybe half a decade? And really like the design going on in the new set.
Yeah like Firemind, Lightning Strike, Lightning Bolt, Shock, Banefire, etc.
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I'm sure that won't have any influence on the game story for a while, and certainly not in War of the Spark. It seems to be setting up for events post-Bolas.
Concerning Magic sets feeling samey recently, one thing to keep in mind is that the last sets have been a core set and two Ravnica sets that were explicitly designed not to rock the boat too much in terms of design space. MaRo has been saying the third set, now known to be War of the Spark, is where things will get crazy. That said, what the colors do is never going to change too much.
Also, Liliana.
EDIT: The original Ravnica set design had a card type called "structure", which had enchantment effects but could be attacked as though they were players. This was rejected for adding too much to an already loaded set, but was reconfigured into planeswalkers. If War of the Spark does have lower rarity planeswalkers, we could finally see what a set with "structures" would have been like.
Ah. I thought the Ravnica stuff was the culmination of the Bolas/Gatewatch story for the near-future, which is why it felt like War of the Sparks (or whatever follows in the fall) might kick off the post-Bolas stuff. I'm not sure why I was under that impression.
Timing also depends a lot on whether Sanderson invented the entities and WotC's creative team will work them in down the road, or whether they were given to him as part of the official transition to the post-Bolas storyline. Has he discussed this anywhere?
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Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance is all setting up Bolas arriving on Ravnica with his crew. War of the Spark is when everyone fights him. Then we get a core set, then we get whatever's after.
That actually sounds quite possible, some new twist on PW that would allow to put a lot of them in the new set.
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We already knew that's what they were doing. There are two Ravnica novels being written by Greg Weisman. One coming in spring, one in fall (so both well after the sets they cover come out).
Cavalcade of Calamity
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1 power matters feels like it would be difficult to pull off. Though I suppose we have seen a fair number of 1/3s.
gynoidpoet asked: Mark, the Simic rare split card has a hybrid Stifle. Is the effect back on mono green? And what's the reasoning for it?
I think it snuck in hiding behind hybrid. It's not something we normally do any more in monogreen. I guess it's technically secondary in green (if any color), but it's not an effect we do much at all.
January 10, 2019
Surprisingly, green Stifle is a "we rarely do that effect anyway, so sure, why not"
Thanks. That makes sense. I was one set ahead, and expected the third Ravnica set to deal with aftermath of the confrontation. (I'm not a big Ravnica fan, nor Gatewatch/Bolas fan, so I haven't been paying close attention to the current story.)
If you can get your hands on some afterlife tokens then I can see this being workable. Would not synergise at all with Judith though.
A great addition to my goblin deck, on the other hand.
Is that what you took from the story? I guess I'll have to re-read it. I didn't think the Entity caused a spark in anyone that didn't already have the spark, in line with previous spark/planeswalker situations, but I admit it's possible I missed that. I kind of felt like the entities are drawn to people with sparks.
There's definitely a lot of ways to read into it—and, like you, I'd have to do another reread specifically thinking about this from the get-go to really form a solid opinion. But, I just thought:
It seemed very coincidental that Tacenda gained full control over both halves of the Entity and immediately sparked. It could have been the trauma/new power that caused a dormant spark to trigger, which is consistent with pasting sparkings, but it felt more purposeful than that, especially given Davriel's experience with his own entity, which obvious acted in a very purposeful manner. Davriel acquired his after he had sparked, which definitely lends to the idea that they seek out people with the potential to become planeswalkers—but, theoretically, Tacenda could have sparked without the entity, and there was no indication that it was specifically seeking her out, but rather fleeing the powers of the church by entering the body of an unborn child.
In the end, we need to know a lot more about the entities before we'll really know whether they're relationship to planeswalkers is causative, correlative, or both.
In the end, we need to know a lot more about the entities before we'll really know whether they're relationship to planeswalkers is causative, correlative, or both.
Eyes Everywhere
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Any nonland permanent? That could lead to some real shenanigans. I also predict future blue-blue matchups to have a lot more tug-of-war going on.
9 mana to gain temporary control of a nonland permanent while giving the opponent 1+ turns of scry seems incredibly expensive to me. Does blue not normally have a way to steal control otherwise?
And/or are most other steal control cards non-planeswalker-compatible?
And/or are most other steal control cards non-planeswalker-compatible?
I mean, obviously it's no In Bolas's Clutches but I would play this. It's not temporary control if your opponent isn't playing blue. So it's true it might work better in the sideboard.
Best of One paper drafts coming
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I'm not sure in logistics terms that actually leads to playing more and waiting less unless you're the sole aggro player in a store full of people who try to force durdly control decks in draft.
Like you're just increasing the frequency pairings have to be done, which seems like it's going to dramatically increase the non-playing time overhead as a ratio to actual time spent in games.
Like you're just increasing the frequency pairings have to be done, which seems like it's going to dramatically increase the non-playing time overhead as a ratio to actual time spent in games.
If I played paper Magic I think I would definitely be more into that format. I hate long games. Even Destiny and KeyForge, which are my normal store games, run 35+ minutes sometimes.
Sideboarding is usually less relevant in Draft than constructed formats so I'm not totally against the idea if it stays in Draft. I do think this would change what kinds of removal that the game should have at common rarity. Fewer cards like Plummet and Naturalize and more modal removal spells like Abrade would help.
Edit: That said, winning a best of 3 feels so much more satisfying than the sliver of time that is a best of 1 game.
Edit edit: I thought about it more and screw BO1.
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BO1 vs BO3 is not just about sideboarding. Play vs draw and opening hand variance are bigger factors.
They just recently printed this:
I just put one of these in my Izzet Control sideboard to steal opponents Niv Mizzets. This is probably a dumb idea but I wanna try it. Can also leave outs to the Christmasland "steal your planeswalker, ultimate it" scenario.
Sideboarding in limited can be super relevant. Many times you can be sideboarding into completely different decks.
Edit: oh I completely forgot about play vs draw. On arena it seems draw has such a massive advantage in the hundreds of matches that I've played.
Edit: oh I completely forgot about play vs draw. On arena it seems draw has such a massive advantage in the hundreds of matches that I've played.
Bo1 in Arena has its own little meta too, people there hate Teferi so much because the deck they run into the most with him is turbo fog, a deck that doesn't even exist in bo3 but runs loose in that format cause of so many creature decks and no sideboards.
draft has lots of sideboarding even if it's not about sideboard cards
putting in plummets and disenchants is only a small part of it
putting in plummets and disenchants is only a small part of it
Hand variance is part of the reason they are allowing free mulligans in the format.
Can we get the free mulligan on Arena, then?
Best of One paper drafts coming. Please be excited.
I think the theory is that best of 1 on Arena has the mana fixer bias which replaces the free mulligan.
Less relevant, but still super relevant. If you think otherwise, you're probably drafting wrong.
Hasn't looked like that from my own experience. At least, not since we left closed Beta.
According to the developers it's still that way as far as I know for casual best-of-1? There's a non-guaranteed bias towards having a land-to-nonland ratio that best approximates your deck, as far as the developers have said, and I'm not aware of any announcement otherwise. There was even a big thread about it, plus an ingame announcement in open beta -- one of those hint things that popup during loading.
It should be pretty easy to check through statistical analysis if anyone were so inclined.
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