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Mentat Radnor
Apr 24, 2008

~Water flowers every day~

Eej posted:

Historic Decklists from day 2: https://mtgazone.com/september-2021-arena-open-day-2-historic-decklists/

Merfolk taking home $2,000? Who woulda thunk

That Yorion Humans WB deck looks fun, I might have to try that.

I love playing my Naya Feather deck in historic, but it's sure as hell never getting past plat so I have a hankering to netdeck something stronger.

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Ithle01
May 28, 2013
I was watching a few streamers today and I think every one of them was on Jeskai for the Arena open and they all got rocked by their opponents. On one hand, it made for bad television. On the other hand, get wrecked jeskai trash.

Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Sep 13, 2021

Eej
Jun 17, 2007

HEAVYARMS

Pablo Nergigante posted:

Interesting that so many cards from Jumpstart made it into the winning decks

You say this but the dinosaur that is Gruul Aggro is still trucking along with the only new cards since Kaladesh Remastered being Ranger Class and the AFR manlands. Three Jund Food decks that have only added one card since Kaladesh Remastered and it's 4 copies of an Uncommon Squirrel lol

Pararoid
Dec 6, 2005

Te Waipounamu pride
I've actually been happiest with Perpetual of all the new mechanics; lots of opportunities to make new plays and new situations to consider and totally un-parasitic when compared to most mechanics.

Dr Kool-AIDS
Mar 26, 2004

I've barely played historic outside of specific FNM/Midweek Magic events, so I don't have much of a dog in the fight or too much outrage about playing the game in a way Richard Garfield didn't intend, but I do hope there will someday be room for two eternal formats on Arena, and that one will correspond directly to paper, whether that's Modern or Pauper or whatever. I just think options are good, and it allows people to avoid the Arena only stuff if they don't like it or if Wizards makes a big mistake down the line. They haven't mentioned anything about adding old sets lately, which doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that it's a priority if it's still happening at all, but fingers crossed. Personally I think an Arena only format that started with Kaladesh Remastered would be totally fine if they don't want to add old sets, but then I guess people who bought the historic anthologies would probably be unhappy.

Panderfringe
Sep 12, 2011

yospos

Sinteres posted:

I've barely played historic outside of specific FNM/Midweek Magic events, so I don't have much of a dog in the fight or too much outrage about playing the game in a way Richard Garfield didn't intend, but I do hope there will someday be room for two eternal formats on Arena, and that one will correspond directly to paper, whether that's Modern or Pauper or whatever. I just think options are good, and it allows people to avoid the Arena only stuff if they don't like it or if Wizards makes a big mistake down the line. They haven't mentioned anything about adding old sets lately, which doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that it's a priority if it's still happening at all, but fingers crossed. Personally I think an Arena only format that started with Kaladesh Remastered would be totally fine if they don't want to add old sets, but then I guess people who bought the historic anthologies would probably be unhappy.

I got bad news for you. If these are popular then there will be even more. There will probably be arena only standard cards in the future.

Jabor
Jul 16, 2010

#1 Loser at SpaceChem

Panderfringe posted:

I got bad news for you. If these are popular then there will be even more. There will probably be arena only standard cards in the future.

there already are, lol

Dr Kool-AIDS
Mar 26, 2004

Panderfringe posted:

I got bad news for you. If these are popular then there will be even more. There will probably be arena only standard cards in the future.

Oh I 100% think there will be more, which is why I think keeping historic as the whatever the gently caress Wizards wants to throw into it format while establishing Pioneer or Modern or Arena Modern or whatever the gently caress alongside it would be nice. But yeah I'm not optimistic either. The small hope I do have in that regard is that I feel like MODO can't actually exist alongside this game for another decade, can it? And they might feel the need to add some more formats to make it up to the 3 people who play there. Being able to plug something like Modern Horizons 3 directly into Arena to be drafted and bought whenever that comes out might be good for them too? But who knows. If they do the Standard legal thing (beyond the tutorial cards), I hope it's at least a long way away.

Actually that reminds me, we know the Lord of the Rings set is going to be legal in modern, but have they said if it's going to be on Arena in some form or not?

Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Sep 13, 2021

Eej
Jun 17, 2007

HEAVYARMS
LOTR is Modern and Historic legal it's in the same sentence of the press release

Horace Kinch
Aug 15, 2007

Does Historic Jumpstart match you exclusively vs other Historic Jumpstart players or against Historic players in general? I ask because I've been getting matched vs lots of Sliver decks but have never seen the option to pick one.

flatluigi
Apr 23, 2008

here come the planes
jumpstart is against jumpstart

little munchkin
Aug 15, 2010
Wrote up some thoughts about the midnight hunt draft format.

Mechanics

Flashback/Disturb:


I'm lumping these together because they mostly play out in similar ways, and they're both very prevalent themes in the format. They're 2-for-1s, they both give you something extra to do with your mana later in the game, and they both incentivize self-mill. And if we're self-milling more often, things that recur spells/creatures from your graveyard get better because you'll have more things to choose from. Effects that exile cards from an opponents graveyard are more useful than normal as well.

Flashback is seen in all colors, but green has the most, and the green commons with flashback look stronger than the rest.

Disturb is almost completely white and blue, the only exception being a single black uncommon.

Day/Night:


These cards seems split between cards that gain a benefit if the phase changes, and werewolves that get bigger at night (and therefore want it to stay night). This mechanic interacts neatly with flashback, as flashback makes it more likely for someone to have a double-spell turn. Instants are also something that should be on your radar, as they let you turn things into night by spending your mana on your opponent's turn.

Werewolves are primarily in green and red, plus a handful in black. Cards that care about phase changes are seen in red, blue and white.

Coven:


Coven is one of those things that looks easy to accomplish but will be inconsistent in practice. Even if you build your deck around it, it makes it hard to trade creatures off in combat, not every hand will have 3+ creatures, etc. The payoffs are quite nice but you're not going to have access to them every single game. Be on the lookout for unique power numbers (such as the 0/2 white common), and cards that grant counters, these will greatly increase the range of draws that can achieve coven.

Coven is only seen in green and white. The payoffs are almost entirely related to attacking, so your coven decks want to be beating down for sure.

Zombies:


The U/B mechanic is making a zombie with decayed. U/B is normally controlling though which isn't supported by a 2/2 that can't block, and only being able to attack once means they're not very effective on the surface. So what can we do with a zombie? Maybe we can beat down, there's a lord at uncommon to make them attack better, plus we can back them up with blue flyers and cheap black attackers. The other option is sacrifice them for a benefit. Vivisection looks very good but the other sacrifice outlets don't look good to me, which makes me want to prioritize it very highly if i'm in u/b.

There's a lot of commons that makes zombies though, so a b/x or a u/x deck could easily have a zombie subtheme in it.

Other:


U/R cares about spells, G/B cares about creatures dying (possibly a little self-mill and graveyard recursion as well), R/B cards want you to have done damage to your opponent that turn. These are a lot less prevalent than the rest. Not that those color pairs look bad, but they might not lean very much into what the signpost uncommons tell you to do.

White:


Gavony Silversmith is pretty similar to Basri's Acolyte, which was a bomb common in M21. Will most likely be quite good again, as 4/5 worth of stats for four mana is still a good deal, plus it has extra utility by enabling coven. Unruly Mob was pretty mediocre the last time it was printed, but it plays well with a lot of the sets themes. Disturb, zombie tokens, and sacrifice themes are all conducive to creatures dying (note that a disturbed creature dying will not actually trigger it though).

White's commons lean slightly aggressive and there's a lack of card advantage so you probably want to be killing ppl instead of playing a long game. Even the card draw creatures would prefer you be attacking.

White has two removal spells but they don't look great.

Blue:


Blue gets some nice commons this time! Organ Hoarder looks super strong, it's big enough to trade with something while putting a good card in your hand at the same time. You have a lot of good stuff to do for the first four turns or so, but you'll kind of have a sizing problem later on, plus your removal is pretty bad. So you're either going to need to lean on your other color for late game, or rely on your flyers to win the game before your opponent gets ahead on the ground.

There's a lot of different synergies blue is trying to support (u/b zombies, u/w disturb, u/g flashback, u/r spells), so things are pretty diluted. After the top tier of commons there's only 1-2 your color pair is going to care about.

Black:


Black is all about killing your opponent's stuff or sacrificing your own. Black gets three really strong removal spells this time, although Olivia's Midnight Ambush stands out as the best. The night clause is actually not super relevant, as you can always pass the turn and then fire it off during your opponent's upkeep to consistently get the -13/-13. The rest of the commons aren't very exciting, but a lot of them incidentally make a zombie, so if you can figure out something to do with the tokens, you'll be happy to play them.

Red:


Red is primarily made up of aggressive cards (with a subtheme of cards that get better if your opponent has taken damage), and spells matters cards. Also Moonrager's Slash which is going to be the best common in the set unless red turns out to be a big dud.

The aggro stuff seems ok i guess, but i'm not sure what cards you're supposed to prioritize.

I'm not super high on the spells matters side, there's just not a lot of payoffs that convert the spells your casting into a favorable board state. Maybe it's not about chaining spells and more about being a control deck? Tavern Ruffian looks like it might be a solid roleplayer if you can do a red control deck, it's a great blocker when you play it and next turn you can pass the turn with an instant in your hand to flip it into a 6/5.

Green:


Green looks to be the color that cares about flashback most, and with Shadowbeast Sighting + Path to the Festival, it's got two very good flashback cards to pick early. Path alongside Rejuvinator give you access to a lot of mana acceleration and fixing. An interesting thing I noticed about the set is that the gold uncommons focus a lot on synergy and don't have as much raw power as they normally do. This leads to there being a lot fewer cards in a draft pool that you'd want to splash for. There are, however, a lot of black/red removal that's easily splashable. We also have flashback and disturb cards to help us spend all that extra mana we have.

There's also a lot of creatures. Big creatures such as werewolves to attack + block with, medium sized creatures plus power/toughness augmentation to enable coven. The creatures at common look very medium, but there's lots of them so if you see green rares/uncommons, you can take them and be pretty confident you'll see good sized bodies to fill out your curve.


No archetype tier list this time. Please don't ask what tier i put r/b in for AFR.

Jabor
Jul 16, 2010

#1 Loser at SpaceChem
One interesting facet of the day/night stuff is that you can reliably make your werewolves huge on the block, but making them big attackers requires your opponent to not be able to cast two spells.

Cabbages and Kings
Aug 25, 2004


Shall we be trotting home again?


Tome of the infinite is both a meme and an extremely unfair card. In combo shells I make my carpal tunnel issues worse as my opponent watches me cast x number of spells and usually eventually durdle to a win, or go off again the next turn, or on their turn. In control shells the card advantage is just unreal; I drew a couple fogs here that weren't relevant but everything else was and I think I drew 8 cards off of it or something. More or less when I made tome on turn 4 after some interaction, I figured I had it locked up if I untapped with it (I had a Veto to protect it early on), and that was what happened. Very, very slowly. Turn ~12 force spike was surprisingly relevant; tapped down is tapped down.

little munchkin
Aug 15, 2010

Jabor posted:

One interesting facet of the day/night stuff is that you can reliably make your werewolves huge on the block, but making them big attackers requires your opponent to not be able to cast two spells.

Yea it's not often that it'll be correct to do nothing and pass then turn when you could be developing your board more instead.

Still better than before where your opponent could just cast an instant on your turn and ruin your attempt to flip something.

Insurrectionist
May 21, 2007
Make sure you have your 2-drops ready and playable every draft unless you want to die to T2 werewolf on the draw

Also worth mentioning, there are two blue cards in this set that incidentally shuffle GY back into your deck - Devious Cover-Up is back from its last appearance in Guilds, and Covetous Castaway is an uncommon that is already a pretty nice 2-for-1 disturb card on its own (though it can't go infinite since it exiles). With at least two Cover-ups you can theoretically keep recycling your deck forever and just deck your opponent! This was a viable strategy in Guilds and worked nicely because Dimir had a lot of good removal, and its surveil theme allowed for a lot of card selection. So watch out for that! I love these decks and Ethan on the LoL podcast loves them too and is very excited about this possibility and made me a bit hyped about it. Sadly I think it is probably not gonna be as good this time around though for a few reasons:
  • Guilds was overall a fairly plodding format with exception of Boros (which was probably the strongest guild because of that), between werewolves and vampires and coven this set looks like it might be a good bit more aggressive, which is bad for this combo.
  • Guilds was also just a low-power set overall, this looks a lot higher power - especially where rares and mythics are concerned. If you don't have the right removal to deal with a bomb you probably can't stall long enough anyway.
  • As mentioned, Guilds had surveil as the theme for UB - this mechanic really helped support the whole gameplan by not only digging you to good cards like every other Dimir deck, but letting you get your poo poo cards out of the way so you could keep looping good instants/sorceries and whatever good creatures your opponent killed, and drawing them consistently. This set's equivalent is self-mill - but unlike surveil, self-mill risks putting your combo pieces into the GY, at which point you're hosed unless you have the generically good uncommon Castaway to help you out.
  • There's also a lot of incidental GY hate, so you definitely want redundancy for this reason as well. But Cover-Up is quite clunky which makes more than 2 a BIG ask. And between self-mill and hate, this combo probably won't even go off very often if you only have two.

I have hope but not much for a grindy control dimir deck to be a thing despite all this. If you see someone play Cover-up try to aim any GY exile you have at it!

Captain Invictus
Apr 5, 2005

Try reading some manga!


Clever Betty
I can't imagine a more worthless cosmetic in the game than the phyrexian text praetor cosmetics in the shop. like hovering over the card shows the english text, right? it does in the shop, anyways. and otherwise, the text is basically invisible aside from the name. I don't know why they even bothered putting these in the game at all(besides the obvious money grubbing), they're completely pointless even from a stylistic perspective.

Cabbages and Kings
Aug 25, 2004


Shall we be trotting home again?

Captain Invictus posted:

I can't imagine a more worthless cosmetic in the game than the phyrexian text praetor cosmetics in the shop. like hovering over the card shows the english text, right? it does in the shop, anyways. and otherwise, the text is basically invisible aside from the name. I don't know why they even bothered putting these in the game at all(besides the obvious money grubbing), they're completely pointless even from a stylistic perspective.

phyrexian phyrexians is a flavor win? :shrug:

I spent 5k gold on the 2 I play in Reanimator shells.

MrL_JaKiri
Sep 23, 2003

A bracing glass of carrot juice!

little munchkin posted:

White has two removal spells but they don't look great.

1W unconditional instant removal of target creature or planeswalker is an amazing piece of removal, even with the downside, and there's a functional banishing light reprint. Sure they're rare and uncommon, but what's not to like (unless this is just commons in which case carry on)

MrL_JaKiri fucked around with this message at 12:40 on Sep 13, 2021

Dr Kool-AIDS
Mar 26, 2004

Captain Invictus posted:

I can't imagine a more worthless cosmetic in the game than the phyrexian text praetor cosmetics in the shop. like hovering over the card shows the english text, right? it does in the shop, anyways. and otherwise, the text is basically invisible aside from the name. I don't know why they even bothered putting these in the game at all(besides the obvious money grubbing), they're completely pointless even from a stylistic perspective.

They look cool, and even if it's not quite as satisfying as physical ownership for a lot of people, digital ownership/collecting obviously does appeal to a lot of people. The only cosmetic purchases I've made in the game so far have been in preorders or mastery passes or whatever where I'd get enough play rewards to be "worth" the value, and I'm trying to hold the line there since none of the cosmetics I've gotten have ultimately really felt worth much to me, but even knowing that I do feel tempted to get some card styles sometimes, and the Phyrexian stuff does look appealing to me.

hambeef
Aug 21, 2004

I'm 40 gems away from not having to spend a dime on the new battle pass and the FNM/midweek magic rewards 100% of the time give me gems, I am just prepped and waiting for this next one to give me 20 gems and a Flumph

Captain Invictus posted:

I can't imagine a more worthless cosmetic in the game than the phyrexian text praetor cosmetics in the shop. like hovering over the card shows the english text, right? it does in the shop, anyways. and otherwise, the text is basically invisible aside from the name. I don't know why they even bothered putting these in the game at all(besides the obvious money grubbing), they're completely pointless even from a stylistic perspective.

the lil power/toughness bar is a cool shape

Irony Be My Shield
Jul 29, 2012

I think Candletrap is pretty good unless Coven is insanely hard to enable. 2WW is a good rate for hard removal and you can throw it out for W to negate an attacker/weaken a blocker in the early game.

Victor Surge
Feb 2, 2006

If Thomson hadn't disabled the louts' aeroplanes with well tossed wrenches, I dare say those uncouth vandals would have made off with your victuals and garments.

Captain Invictus posted:

I can't imagine a more worthless cosmetic in the game than the phyrexian text praetor cosmetics in the shop. like hovering over the card shows the english text, right? it does in the shop, anyways. and otherwise, the text is basically invisible aside from the name. I don't know why they even bothered putting these in the game at all(besides the obvious money grubbing), they're completely pointless even from a stylistic perspective.

If you got the Secret Lair it was included (but I would have like a sweet sleeve instead)

little munchkin
Aug 15, 2010

MrL_JaKiri posted:

1W unconditional instant removal of target creature or planeswalker is an amazing piece of removal, even with the downside, and there's a functional banishing light reprint. Sure they're rare and uncommon, but what's not to like (unless this is just commons in which case carry on)

ya just commons

Irony Be My Shield posted:

I think Candletrap is pretty good unless Coven is insanely hard to enable. 2WW is a good rate for hard removal and you can throw it out for W to negate an attacker/weaken a blocker in the early game.

candletrap is pretty bad imo. Leaving them with a blocker is a big downside if you're an aggressive deck, and the prevalence of the sacrifice theme means aura-based removal is a vulnerability.

coven is going to be difficult to enable, and every non-creature you put in your deck increases the failure rate. if you're trying to minimize your spell count then i don't think candletrap is good enough to make the cut often

little munchkin
Aug 15, 2010

Insurrectionist posted:

Make sure you have your 2-drops ready and playable every draft unless you want to die to T2 werewolf on the draw

Also worth mentioning, there are two blue cards in this set that incidentally shuffle GY back into your deck - Devious Cover-Up is back from its last appearance in Guilds, and Covetous Castaway is an uncommon that is already a pretty nice 2-for-1 disturb card on its own (though it can't go infinite since it exiles). With at least two Cover-ups you can theoretically keep recycling your deck forever and just deck your opponent! This was a viable strategy in Guilds and worked nicely because Dimir had a lot of good removal, and its surveil theme allowed for a lot of card selection. So watch out for that! I love these decks and Ethan on the LoL podcast loves them too and is very excited about this possibility and made me a bit hyped about it. Sadly I think it is probably not gonna be as good this time around though for a few reasons:
  • Guilds was overall a fairly plodding format with exception of Boros (which was probably the strongest guild because of that), between werewolves and vampires and coven this set looks like it might be a good bit more aggressive, which is bad for this combo.
  • Guilds was also just a low-power set overall, this looks a lot higher power - especially where rares and mythics are concerned. If you don't have the right removal to deal with a bomb you probably can't stall long enough anyway.
  • As mentioned, Guilds had surveil as the theme for UB - this mechanic really helped support the whole gameplan by not only digging you to good cards like every other Dimir deck, but letting you get your poo poo cards out of the way so you could keep looping good instants/sorceries and whatever good creatures your opponent killed, and drawing them consistently. This set's equivalent is self-mill - but unlike surveil, self-mill risks putting your combo pieces into the GY, at which point you're hosed unless you have the generically good uncommon Castaway to help you out.
  • There's also a lot of incidental GY hate, so you definitely want redundancy for this reason as well. But Cover-Up is quite clunky which makes more than 2 a BIG ask. And between self-mill and hate, this combo probably won't even go off very often if you only have two.

I have hope but not much for a grindy control dimir deck to be a thing despite all this. If you see someone play Cover-up try to aim any GY exile you have at it!

I'm a little nervous about cover-up mostly because of how poorly a control gameplan matches up against flashback/disturb/zombies. There's a lot of cards that are not cleanly answered by a 1-for-1 trade, so you can't just fill your deck up with blockers/removal or you'll just slowly fall behind. Plus there's not many ways for a u/b control deck to leverage the zombie tokens.

I think the other blue decks might be the place for cover-up. U/W has disturb and U/R + U/G have flashback so there's already incentive to be self-milling. the prevalence of mill and exile effects make it risky to count on as your wincon, but a single cast still does a lot if you have a small library and a big gy

Insurrectionist
May 21, 2007

little munchkin posted:

I'm a little nervous about cover-up mostly because of how poorly a control gameplan matches up against flashback/disturb/zombies. There's a lot of cards that are not cleanly answered by a 1-for-1 trade, so you can't just fill your deck up with blockers/removal or you'll just slowly fall behind. Plus there's not many ways for a u/b control deck to leverage the zombie tokens.

I think the other blue decks might be the place for cover-up. U/W has disturb and U/R + U/G have flashback so there's already incentive to be self-milling. the prevalence of mill and exile effects make it risky to count on as your wincon, but a single cast still does a lot if you have a small library and a big gy

I feel like a big issue with the non-UB versions is that Black has a ton of removal including three good common removal spells, and the other UX combos generally don't. And a deck like this won't be able to actually fight head-on on the board much against these decks so relying on trading/eating with creatures often spirals out of control fast.

Additionally this deck wants to play on your opponent's turn as much as possible in order to accommodate the stupidly high 4MV counterspell that defines the deck, and White does not seem like a good pair with Blue for this specific purpose - as has been noted in the thread, White's playable removal at common and uncommon are enchantments and you can't leave your mana up to cast those.

I think a generic UW control deck might work if there is enough removal and stalling going on, but I don't see it matching super well with the Cover-Up gameplan.

UR feels to me like it has other things to do, but might work out. Its common removal seems a bit flimsy against Werewolf decks though.

babypolis
Nov 4, 2009


very nice post munchkin. some small things i noticed

u/b has a lot of cards that say tap 3 untapped creatures to do something, this is your decayed payoff besides vivisection and the big black guy that either requires an extra cost 1B or a sac

the basri acolyte guy is even better than basri acolyte because it can target itself, which is insanely good for a card of that type

i think coven is going to be easier to turn on that you think. lots of things make free 1/1s and there creatures with 0 power running around, plus the counter stuff.

MrL_JaKiri
Sep 23, 2003

A bracing glass of carrot juice!
We'll have to see as it shakes out, but for now the safest bet is to ignore the coven text when evaluating cards imo

The Klowner
Apr 20, 2019

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
some random thoughts

- ur and ug both care about spells so maybe Temur spells (or UG splash R) can be a thing. See seize the storm, rootcoil creeper at uncommon. Path to the festival and Jack o lantern to fix at common. There are some token-creating spells and several spell buyback creatures running around. Dunno if there's something there, or if it will even be fast enough to deal with aggro, but it's something to look out for.

- pack's betrayal costs 3 mana. eaten alive costs 1 and ecstatic awakener costs 3 to activate if it's already on the battlefield. It won't be as good as in AFR but it's going to be powerful if it comes together. There are uncommon sac outlets too, but you have to go outside Rakdos (white gets you rite of oblivion and fleshtaker, blue gets you corpse cobbler and vivisection)

- following from the above, I think jack o lantern is much better than it looks. it enables splashing incredibly well, once you crack it it sits in your graveyard forever (there are some graveyard exiling effects running around which may mess with this). If the format isn't too fast I think you're gonna want a bunch of these to enable 1+1=3 synergies at uncommon

- duress is normally not very good, little more than sideboard fodder, but since every spell has flashback in this set it's basically unplayable

Huxley
Oct 10, 2012



Grimey Drawer
Thanks to the Inferno list yesterday, I finished my 10 Brawl Commanders 10 Times Each self-challenge before the new set!

I played Mux (10 wins), Winota (7), Inferno (7), Zacama (6), Svyelum (6), Arcades (5), Freyalise (5), Yarok (4), Kinnan (4), and Chatterfang (2) for a final record of 57-43. I felt like I went out of my way to play a mix of T1 and T2+ commanders and was playing pretty standard lists. I naturally skew aggressive and proactive, but I also went out of my way to play a couple of decks that wanted to grind or at least value people out. I didn't play a hard control commander because control mirrors blow on an ipad, and I didn't play a pure combo commander because they were generally too wildcard heavy for my tastes.

In 100 games I played against 60 unique commanders, including a kind of mind-boggling 40 that I only saw once. I saw Golos 9 times (6-3), Slivers (4-1), Sythis (0-4), Freyalise (2-2), Bolas 5 (1-3), Kinnan (1-3) and nobody else more than 4 times. I was 9-10 vs planeswalker commanders.

I have no clue what the matchmaking is. Mux got almost exclusively power matchups, Winota faced some absolute jank, Chatterfang of all things I got a nonstop stream of Baral and Sythis and Winota matchups. Just zero-agency games.

If your goal is to farm wins/hour, the answer is red. If your goal is to play fun matches with a medium chance of victory, you either need a commander you only need to resolve once, a commander that costs 2 and you expect to cast 2-3 times, or a commander you don't actually need to resolve at all.

If your goal is to win games, what you absolutely cannot be is needing your 3- or 4-drop commander to survive the turn.

I feel like shatter effects are underrated. People keep a lot of "two land, mana rock, four drop" hands that fold up to Abrade.

Inferno was the only decklist I played with Ugin in it. I literally never had it cast against me even one time in 100 games.

Huxley fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Sep 13, 2021

little munchkin
Aug 15, 2010

The Klowner posted:

some random thoughts

- ur and ug both care about spells so maybe Temur spells (or UG splash R) can be a thing. See seize the storm, rootcoil creeper at uncommon. Path to the festival and Jack o lantern to fix at common. There are some token-creating spells and several spell buyback creatures running around. Dunno if there's something there, or if it will even be fast enough to deal with aggro, but it's something to look out for.

i don't think a deck that needs a critical mass of spells plus a bunch of payoffs has room for lantern. good point about green in a spells deck though, shadowbeast sighting seems like a good way to cast spells while still affecting the board

Pablo Nergigante
Apr 16, 2002

Quick question, I know the renewal rewards are coming in a few days, do we know what kinda stuff we get?

resistentialism
Aug 13, 2007

Last time it was 10 Rare/Mythic ICRs and some packs, I think?

I hope they don't gently caress up and give out already rotating ICRs again

Dr Kool-AIDS
Mar 26, 2004

First, you'll immediately get ten ICRs: nine rares and one mythic rare. Four will be rares, one from each of the sets remaining in Standard (Zendikar Rising, Kaldheim, Strixhaven: School of Mages, and Adventures in the Forgotten Realms), and the remaining six will include five rares and one mythic rare from Innistrad: Midnight Hunt.

Additionally, when the renewal egg opens, it will unlock Innistrad: Midnight Hunt packs and uncommon ICRs (which may upgrade to a higher rarity) on the free Set Mastery track, which you'll receive as you earn XP.

Pablo Nergigante
Apr 16, 2002

resistentialism posted:

Last time it was 10 Rare/Mythic ICRs and some packs, I think?

I hope they don't gently caress up and give out already rotating ICRs again


Sinteres posted:

First, you'll immediately get ten ICRs: nine rares and one mythic rare. Four will be rares, one from each of the sets remaining in Standard (Zendikar Rising, Kaldheim, Strixhaven: School of Mages, and Adventures in the Forgotten Realms), and the remaining six will include five rares and one mythic rare from Innistrad: Midnight Hunt.

Additionally, when the renewal egg opens, it will unlock Innistrad: Midnight Hunt packs and uncommon ICRs (which may upgrade to a higher rarity) on the free Set Mastery track, which you'll receive as you earn XP.

Oh sweet

Pablo Nergigante
Apr 16, 2002

Might spring for the mastery pass for MID tbh. When I first got into Arena I thought it was extremely cool that the latest set was a D&D crossover but the more I played it the less I liked the set. It was cool to see stuff I knew like Minsc and Drizzt and the Tarrasque but the new mechanics they came up with like dungeons and d20s kinda sucked and it's a surprisingly unimaginative set overall

Dungeon Ecology
Feb 9, 2011

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydg9QjVpm1w

all this talk of 'coven' reminds me of one of my fav movies

Gramps
Dec 30, 2006


Dungeon Ecology posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydg9QjVpm1w

all this talk of 'coven' reminds me of one of my fav movies

American Movie fuckin owns

Pablo Nergigante
Apr 16, 2002

I never saw American Movie but from what I understand the documentary is a million times better than the actual movie the guy made

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Pablo Nergigante
Apr 16, 2002

Anyway I got kinda good at doing drafts and I'm curious about the tinkerer's cube draft, any tips for it? I know it's more focused on crafting cool synergies

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