The tone of this article sounded so much like a farewell letter or a eulogy, I really was not expecting it to end with “and that’s why I’m excited to continue being a part of the Commander Format Panel”.
I’ve been playing Magic off and on since the mid-'90s, though some of the “off” periods have been pretty long.
I used to help run Pauper events on MTGO, before Pauper became an officially sanctioned format.
Check out this Magic-related web site I made: https://housedraft.games/
The tone of this article sounded so much like a farewell letter or a eulogy, I really was not expecting it to end with “and that’s why I’m excited to continue being a part of the Commander Format Panel”.
I’m not going to think of Magic as a canvas no matter how many times some suit at Hasbro who probably doesn’t even play the game tells me I should.
Three unrelated thoughts:
Brineborn Cutthroat and Spectral Sailor were at the core of a mono-blue flash deck I played, and enjoyed, in Standard ca. 2019. I will definitely be trying to resurrect it. But power creep has been so bad that I’m not sure it really has chance anymore. Is putting a counter on your 2/1 two-drop every turn still good enough in a world of Emberheart Challengers and Mosswood Dreadknights? I have a deck with Ayara’s Oathsworn in it and even that is kind of underwhelming in the current metagame.
I like Llanowar Elves, and it’s an iconic card, but I’m not sure it should ever be in Standard again. Are you ready for turn-two Glissa Sunslayers?
This spoiler list is the first time I’ve realized that “Extended Art” and “Borderless” were considered to be different treatments. The difference between them is pretty slight.
This is probably one of those cases where most players were already doing it this way anyhow, because they weren’t aware of the actual rule (which I’d have to say is not intuitive).
The initial shock of Universes Beyond is well behind us at this point.
No, it isn’t.
I could complain about this, or explain why I don’t want it, but what good would it do? The fact that they’re making this announcement means it’s already too late to stop it.
“Creatures you control get +10/+10”
I hope this one is called “Bag of Colossus Hammers”.
Artifact Creature – Phyrexian Construct
Let’s assume this is a reprint. Here are the possibilities. What’s your vote?
I haven’t heard that Snow or Poison are going to be in this set, so that rules out some things. I think Zenith Chronicler is likely because it plays well in Commander. Personally I’m rooting for one of my pet cards, Phyrexian Walker. It’s probably a dark horse but I think as zero-cost creatures go it’s one of the fairest.
It crossed that threshold for me a while ago. “Diluted” is the right word. If somebody asked me to describe Magic to them now, I don’t know what I would say.
Arena could really be better about handling large numbers of triggers and/or tokens. There’s no reason why creating 250 tokens needs to be substantially more work than creating 2, and I suspect that the reason why it is is because there’s a lot of redundant stuff – animation, sound effects – that it could be skipping, but isn’t.
For example, you could imagine bracket one has cards that easily can go in any deck, like Swords to Plowshares , Grave Titan , and Cultivate , …
Swords to Plowshares, which is currently banned from Historic and will probably never be printed into Standard again, is in the lowest power bracket? Am I misunderstanding the purpose of these brackets?
I know one-for-one removal isn’t as good in Commander as it is in two-player formats, but even so. Adding Swords or Grave Titan would noticeably raise the power level of every Commander deck I’ve ever built. Apparently my decks are in bracket zero.
I’m sympathetic to this complaint, but COVID-19 is what took me away from paper Magic. I was out of the game for three years and I’m only back now because of Arena.
I agree with most of this.
Regarding the speed/balance issues – I really just want to play Magic with a much, much lower power level than anything that is currently supported, but WotC has been pushing the power level for so long that I don’t even know if we can get back there. I would be open to playing something like Standard Pauper or Standard Artisan, but even that is probably way beyond where I really want to be. I want to turn the clock back 15 or 20 years to when 2R got you a Goblin Chariot instead of a Screaming Nemesis.
Regarding the Arena interface – I turned off voice lines and background music, changed my graphics settings to Low, and set my default pet to none, all within about a month of starting Arena. And then after a while I just started leaving my headphones off anyway. I put up with emotes for over a year, but broke down and disabled them within the past month or so. It’s been an improvement. I feel bad that I might be missing the occasional sincere “Nice” or “Thinking”, but not as bad as I used to feel about getting a premature “Good game” or a “Your Go” during a complex turn. I would love a setting to disable non-essential animations. Sleeves, pets, ripple effects in the background. I play Arena despite those things, not because of them. And the card highlighting! I realize it actually provides information but I’d still shut it off in a second.
As for sitting through combos… Arena really needs more sophisticated skipping controls. MTGO has had “Pass until end of turn” and “Pass until next turn” for two decades.
I would like to see Sol Ring banned, partly because it’s an obviously overpowered card and partly because it reduces space in your deck. Your options are to accept that the real deck construction rules are “Sol Ring plus 98 cards”, or to accept that you’re voluntarily building an underpowered deck, neither of which are satisfactory IMO.
That said, I think it’s interesting that their logic for not banning Sol Ring echoes the reason why I thought Gush shouldn’t have been banned from Pauper: it’s “the iconic card of the format”, and telling people that they’ll get to play it is a good advertisement for the format.
Reminiscent of Caetus, Sea Tyrant of Segovia (which, to my dismay, I’ve never been able to work out a good shell for).
Both sides of this just have unlock triggers; the card doesn’t do anything as it sits on the battlefield. There’s no reason for this to be an enchantment except that they were trying to shoehorn some stuff into the set’s marquee mechanic.
Same with Meat Locker // Drowned Diner and maybe some others that I missed. If they couldn’t come up with enough actual-enchantment effects, that might be a sign that there wasn’t enough design space and they should have abandoned this mechanic or narrowed its scope. Like, maybe they could just have printed a few Rooms at rare/mythic and skipped the meta-mechanics that care about when you unlock rooms or how many unlocked rooms you have.
Hmm… does this help Insidious Roots enough to make it a competitive deck?
I get why this is a vehicle. It makes sense flavor-wise; arguably it’d be weirder for it not to be a vehicle. And I get the “creature is abducted and comes back changed” storyline. That also makes sense and is flavorful. But it’s kind of hilarious to have them both on the same card. Like, while the aliens are performing their horrifying and unnatural experiments, you can also have some random unrelated dude jump into the captain’s chair and zoom around for a while.
“Are you from the X-Files?”
“No! We’re the Phenomenon Investigators. Our lawyers want us to be very clear about that.”
Yeah, I was hoping to see more (or any) actual cards with Phasing, like Sandbar Crocodile. The highest Mirage block card on the list was Teferi’s Veil at #18, and there was sadly no mention of one of my pet cards, Dream Fighter, who can block first-strikers, flankers and deathtouchers with impunity. But I suppose it’s Wizards’ fault, really, for making the original batch of Phasing cards underpowered, and then never revisiting the keyword.
Commander players have a thing called “Rule 0” that basically says you can change whatever rules you want as long as your whole playgroup agrees to it. But if you want to get your changes accepted on a broader scale, so that you could go to a store event or a big tournament and expect other players to be familiar with them, that’s a much taller hurdle. Can you convince the community that your banlist is better than the official one and also better than any other fan-made ones? Can you get stores to support it – keeping in mind that they have to curry favor with Wizards in order to maintain WPN certification, be allowed to pre-order the amount of product they want, etc.? If you could do it successfully, you’d basically be building a grassroots competitor to the Commander Format Panel. Not impossible, but it would be an uphill battle for sure.