Apollo was originally on the list I had for Heliod, but I didn't include him as he didn't fit quite as well as the other two. Given the structure of Greek myth each of the Theros gods could have a list far longer than I gave, I just wanted to keep it down to make it more digestable. It is very open to interpretation!
Thanks for the referrence on Ashiok, I hadn't even thought of doing anything on the planeswalkers but it does make sense (anyone know if Xenagos' home plane is theros?)
Kuma, Blue does "transform" things, but not in the way you're thinking. Blue has NEVER exiled opponents creatures. EVER. The only times it has exiled creatures is when it does it to your own creatures, usually for a random effect. Blue's previous answers were either tapping down or bounce, or Turn to Frog temporary cards.
Now, not only is Blue being given the ability to exile opponents' creatures (wha???), but it has the ability to do so with pinpoint accuracy (WTF??!!?!!). This isn't a card like Evacuation, where EVERYONE gets their stuff bounced. This isn't even destroying just one creature. This is massivley powerful, out of flavor, and out of color pie. Even White, who's main ability is to EXILE CREATURES doesn't have the ability to exile a bunch of targeted creatures at once. White gets Final Judgment, and even Merciless Eviction, hitting everything.
Nulos (nylos) means, approximately, 'Grass', so it wouldn't surprise me if there is a more generic word for "growth" or "nature" from which Nylea takes her name.
As I said, if it was in plain English you would indeed be correct :/ It is quite bad for the game when the plain English version means something else than the magic terminology version I think.
I should point out that they are doing similar things with say Sylvan library though (the ruling from 2007 on gather - if you replace some of the draws the "if you do" part of the effect still happens, even though you didn't draw 2 cards), so it might not be a recent rules change...
Well, you see to know how the world goes pretty well. Good for you.
I live in a different world, for better or for worse. In my world, I use Seedborn Muse every time I run green, and the average result is to untap the creatures I just attacked with. Nobody even said anything about it. The broken cards in my world are others. Your world is probably more sheltered.
And the blue decks that really drive me bonkers don't even have a real use for something like Curse of the Swine. They do infinite turns already, so it doesn't really matter if you have 5 Dragons or 5 Boars on your battlefield.
Well, that's the ruling, so okay. It still looks to me like they came up with sort of an awkward explanation (and you can see it happened a few months ago, so after I checked the last time) to justify the fact that the card couldn't possibly reference the Command Zone in its text (as no card does, and the Command Zone didn't even exist back then — or the exile zone for that matter), and there's no other possible way a card successfully exiled doesn't end in the exile zone.
If the card was written in plain English that would indeed be true. In this case it is written in magic terminology and thus the effect might differ. I am not a judge and therefore not really sure that I know all the rules involved. I believe that the appropriated thing to do in case where you are unsure is to ask someone else.
4/15/2013 In a Commander game, you may send Iname to the Command Zone instead of exiling it during the resolution of its ability. If you do, its ability still works. Iname's ability only requires that you attempted to exile it, not that it actually gets to the exile zone. This is similar to how destroying a creature (with, for example, Rest in Peace) doesn't necessarily ensure that creature will end up in the graveyard; it just so happens that the action of exiling something and the exile zone both use the same word: "exile"
Seedborn Muse only does broken things. Nobody is using it to get an extra 1/1 token out of Vitu-Ghazi the city tree or whatever. And the people that combine it with Teferi in their Momir-Vig deck to play and tutor all the creatures in their deck in one trip around the board are especially lame.
A 1UU Curse of the Swine that transformed 2 dudes into boars and exiled them would be a perfectly fine way to do the Pongify thing. Doing it with an X in a world of Caged Suns is just giving Blue an unconditional mass exiling board wipe which far far more white. They players that use this and then untap into a Cyclonic Rift that removes all the tokens will drive me bonkers
"You may exile it. If you do..."
If you do = if you exile it = if you take it and put it in the zone marked "Exile". Not if you express the intention of doing it, then change your mind because of another effect. Since when abilities trigger on the intention of doing something?
Iname is working correctly. The "if you do" refers to choosing to exile it and the fact that the exiling gets replaced does not change what you choosed. Jurgan on the other hand triggers on being put into gy after being on the battlefield (the long version of dying), so if you choose to not put it into gy it does not trigger.
When I saw Fabled Hero I just knew you would put him in one of your WW decks! :)
So, are we agreeing that Heroic looks very hard to fully exploit? (In fact, I think these decks don't have any way to trigger it). How many beneficial spells that target a single creature can one expect to put in a deck, when the usual amount is zero, if not for the occasional Rancor (that's not even in Standard anymore)?
That was great. Strangely enough, I didn't think of Helios when looking at Heliod (duh!), my first reaction was to think of one of the 12 Olympians, and so I immediately went to Apollo (who also represents the Sun), elevated to Zeus status. You believe Apollo was entirely out of the picture with Heliod, then?
I'm curious to know what you'll make of Anax and Cymede.
Also: I think Ashiok (who's not from Theros) takes inspiration from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman (probably fused with some other Endless, like Desire, due to the gender ambiguity), which is chocked full with Greek myths anyway, so it's a fitting choice to have him/her appear here.
I believe you're thinking of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Interesting that the magic card puts an happy ending to the story. If only Orpheus tapped 5 black mana at instant speed...
Simic is the weakest color combination in any format BUT Commander. I think it's only fair that at least Commander vindicates the guild a little bit.
Plus, you gave me the idea of doing a bit of statistics (I'll elaborate on it in one of the next SUNCOM articles). In the first 40 events of the tournament — which is 2-round competitive multiplayer Commander — the winners have been:
So, yeah, Simic is slightly ahead, but can't say it's dominating or anything (and most of those wins were by an Elfball deck that ran Momir as general but wasn't really a proper Momir deck). And I firmly reject any attempt of characterizing 3-color combinations including blue and green as Simic decks - unless the case is of a deck that's proved to run very little of the third color. A Simic deck is a deck lead by a Simic commander, not a deck lead by, say, Animar or Maelstrom Wanderer, that do things a Simic deck could never do, and are as much Simic as they are Gruul and Izzet.
Weird how little you talk about the new legends used as commanders. For instance, Medomai as commander will be more annoying than you account her for, and it won't be long before the Medomai players will become the instant first target at any table.
And the Gods as commanders is also an interesting topic. You can have Thassa as commander and essentially never turn her into a creature, turning your deck into something that awfully looks like Vanguard.
Re: the Prophet rant. Well, I guess it hasn't been designed with Commander in mind, you know? It happens most of the times. :)
In other formats it's not going to call for banning, and even in Commander, not being eligible as your general, it's just a strong card that will see a lot of play, but if a 4-man table lets a 3-toughness creature decide the outcome of the battle, then something it's really wrong with the other 3 players' decks.
Are you serious with the Hydra tribal thing? Because I'm going to do that. :)
And as much as I'd love a tribal Gorgon in 100-card singleton decks, there's still just 11 of them (plus another one offline). That's far from tribal-worthy, alas.
@Tromni
How is playing Seedborn Muse in a green deck lame? It's just a strong card in your arsenal. Then I suppose it's also lame for a white deck to play Hallowed Burial and for a black deck to play Demonic Tutor?
So great when people slap general labels to something that's just their opinion. Can I say people that think this way are... lame?
And by the way, Curse of the Swine is perfectly in color pie. I'm not crazy about blue getting what essentially boils down to mass removal, but this was the only way it could be accomplished because blue transforms things, and it always did. (If anything, the frequently addressed mistake was with previous cards like Rapid Hybridization and even Polymorph NOT exiling the creature, since that's being transformed, not killed, so there shouldn't be nothing left in the graveyard to reanimate, the creature being still on the battlefield in its new form.)
Respect to a fellow White Weenie brewer. Been a fan ever since I discovered the Hold the Line event deck and how much fun Angelic destiny could be when thrown on Mirran Crusader. Good times.
I'm annoyed because the majority of decks I come across already are UG and this card is going to increase simic's popularity even higher and make them even more difficult to stop. But yeah, tryhard players are going to be doing this sort of stuff anyway.
Agreed on Curse. I think mass exiling is more White's domain.
I'm okay with Purphoros because it's a Red card. Red doesn't have enough nice things.
I like Read the Bones not because it's better but it's comparable to your other options and in a different mana cost slot. I think it's definitely in line with Ambition's Cost and Sign In Blood. Scry 2 is very good.
Yeah, I agree with criticisms that it's too powerful and not in the right color. Blue has Pongify effects but mass exiling is a bit extreme. It sounds like White's territory. Still love the flavor :P
And Jace Beleran! And I think in my mind now Merrow Reejery. It was a joke between me and the TO, but someone posted that to my facebook wall when it was spoiled that thoughtseize would be back and I thought it was funny still :D
Apollo was originally on the list I had for Heliod, but I didn't include him as he didn't fit quite as well as the other two. Given the structure of Greek myth each of the Theros gods could have a list far longer than I gave, I just wanted to keep it down to make it more digestable. It is very open to interpretation!
Thanks for the referrence on Ashiok, I hadn't even thought of doing anything on the planeswalkers but it does make sense (anyone know if Xenagos' home plane is theros?)
I'm assuming the missing card from the legacy deck is Release the ants since that is mentioned as the win con...
Kuma, Blue does "transform" things, but not in the way you're thinking. Blue has NEVER exiled opponents creatures. EVER. The only times it has exiled creatures is when it does it to your own creatures, usually for a random effect. Blue's previous answers were either tapping down or bounce, or Turn to Frog temporary cards.
Now, not only is Blue being given the ability to exile opponents' creatures (wha???), but it has the ability to do so with pinpoint accuracy (WTF??!!?!!). This isn't a card like Evacuation, where EVERYONE gets their stuff bounced. This isn't even destroying just one creature. This is massivley powerful, out of flavor, and out of color pie. Even White, who's main ability is to EXILE CREATURES doesn't have the ability to exile a bunch of targeted creatures at once. White gets Final Judgment, and even Merciless Eviction, hitting everything.
I hate this card so much.
Nulos (nylos) means, approximately, 'Grass', so it wouldn't surprise me if there is a more generic word for "growth" or "nature" from which Nylea takes her name.
If you see it as an anglicisation of por + phyros in Ancient Greek, it means something like 'Red Flame' or 'Burning Red'.
As I said, if it was in plain English you would indeed be correct :/ It is quite bad for the game when the plain English version means something else than the magic terminology version I think.
I should point out that they are doing similar things with say Sylvan library though (the ruling from 2007 on gather - if you replace some of the draws the "if you do" part of the effect still happens, even though you didn't draw 2 cards), so it might not be a recent rules change...
Well, you see to know how the world goes pretty well. Good for you.
I live in a different world, for better or for worse. In my world, I use Seedborn Muse every time I run green, and the average result is to untap the creatures I just attacked with. Nobody even said anything about it. The broken cards in my world are others. Your world is probably more sheltered.
And the blue decks that really drive me bonkers don't even have a real use for something like Curse of the Swine. They do infinite turns already, so it doesn't really matter if you have 5 Dragons or 5 Boars on your battlefield.
Well, that's the ruling, so okay. It still looks to me like they came up with sort of an awkward explanation (and you can see it happened a few months ago, so after I checked the last time) to justify the fact that the card couldn't possibly reference the Command Zone in its text (as no card does, and the Command Zone didn't even exist back then — or the exile zone for that matter), and there's no other possible way a card successfully exiled doesn't end in the exile zone.
If the card was written in plain English that would indeed be true. In this case it is written in magic terminology and thus the effect might differ. I am not a judge and therefore not really sure that I know all the rules involved. I believe that the appropriated thing to do in case where you are unsure is to ask someone else.
This is from the rulings appearing on gatherer for Iname, life aspect: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=80282
4/15/2013 In a Commander game, you may send Iname to the Command Zone instead of exiling it during the resolution of its ability. If you do, its ability still works. Iname's ability only requires that you attempted to exile it, not that it actually gets to the exile zone. This is similar to how destroying a creature (with, for example, Rest in Peace) doesn't necessarily ensure that creature will end up in the graveyard; it just so happens that the action of exiling something and the exile zone both use the same word: "exile"
The perfect Hydra general is Rosheen Meanderer. The right colors and she ramps all the X-spell Hydras extra hard!
Seedborn Muse only does broken things. Nobody is using it to get an extra 1/1 token out of Vitu-Ghazi the city tree or whatever. And the people that combine it with Teferi in their Momir-Vig deck to play and tutor all the creatures in their deck in one trip around the board are especially lame.
A 1UU Curse of the Swine that transformed 2 dudes into boars and exiled them would be a perfectly fine way to do the Pongify thing. Doing it with an X in a world of Caged Suns is just giving Blue an unconditional mass exiling board wipe which far far more white. They players that use this and then untap into a Cyclonic Rift that removes all the tokens will drive me bonkers
"You may exile it. If you do..."
If you do = if you exile it = if you take it and put it in the zone marked "Exile". Not if you express the intention of doing it, then change your mind because of another effect. Since when abilities trigger on the intention of doing something?
Iname is working correctly. The "if you do" refers to choosing to exile it and the fact that the exiling gets replaced does not change what you choosed. Jurgan on the other hand triggers on being put into gy after being on the battlefield (the long version of dying), so if you choose to not put it into gy it does not trigger.
When I saw Fabled Hero I just knew you would put him in one of your WW decks! :)
So, are we agreeing that Heroic looks very hard to fully exploit? (In fact, I think these decks don't have any way to trigger it). How many beneficial spells that target a single creature can one expect to put in a deck, when the usual amount is zero, if not for the occasional Rancor (that's not even in Standard anymore)?
That was great. Strangely enough, I didn't think of Helios when looking at Heliod (duh!), my first reaction was to think of one of the 12 Olympians, and so I immediately went to Apollo (who also represents the Sun), elevated to Zeus status. You believe Apollo was entirely out of the picture with Heliod, then?
I'm curious to know what you'll make of Anax and Cymede.
Also: I think Ashiok (who's not from Theros) takes inspiration from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman (probably fused with some other Endless, like Desire, due to the gender ambiguity), which is chocked full with Greek myths anyway, so it's a fitting choice to have him/her appear here.
I believe you're thinking of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Interesting that the magic card puts an happy ending to the story. If only Orpheus tapped 5 black mana at instant speed...
Simic is the weakest color combination in any format BUT Commander. I think it's only fair that at least Commander vindicates the guild a little bit.
Plus, you gave me the idea of doing a bit of statistics (I'll elaborate on it in one of the next SUNCOM articles). In the first 40 events of the tournament — which is 2-round competitive multiplayer Commander — the winners have been:
Mono-White: 1
Mono-Blue: 5
Mono-Black: 1
Mono-Red: 1
Mono-Green: 1
Azorius: 3
Selesnya: 4
Simic: 6
Esper: 3
Grixis: 1
Jund: 2
Naya: 1
Wedge White (WBR): 2
Wedge Blue (RUG): 4
Wedge Black (WBG): 1
Penta-color: 4
So, yeah, Simic is slightly ahead, but can't say it's dominating or anything (and most of those wins were by an Elfball deck that ran Momir as general but wasn't really a proper Momir deck). And I firmly reject any attempt of characterizing 3-color combinations including blue and green as Simic decks - unless the case is of a deck that's proved to run very little of the third color. A Simic deck is a deck lead by a Simic commander, not a deck lead by, say, Animar or Maelstrom Wanderer, that do things a Simic deck could never do, and are as much Simic as they are Gruul and Izzet.
Weird how little you talk about the new legends used as commanders. For instance, Medomai as commander will be more annoying than you account her for, and it won't be long before the Medomai players will become the instant first target at any table.
And the Gods as commanders is also an interesting topic. You can have Thassa as commander and essentially never turn her into a creature, turning your deck into something that awfully looks like Vanguard.
Re: the Prophet rant. Well, I guess it hasn't been designed with Commander in mind, you know? It happens most of the times. :)
In other formats it's not going to call for banning, and even in Commander, not being eligible as your general, it's just a strong card that will see a lot of play, but if a 4-man table lets a 3-toughness creature decide the outcome of the battle, then something it's really wrong with the other 3 players' decks.
Are you serious with the Hydra tribal thing? Because I'm going to do that. :)
And as much as I'd love a tribal Gorgon in 100-card singleton decks, there's still just 11 of them (plus another one offline). That's far from tribal-worthy, alas.
@Tromni
How is playing Seedborn Muse in a green deck lame? It's just a strong card in your arsenal. Then I suppose it's also lame for a white deck to play Hallowed Burial and for a black deck to play Demonic Tutor?
So great when people slap general labels to something that's just their opinion. Can I say people that think this way are... lame?
And by the way, Curse of the Swine is perfectly in color pie. I'm not crazy about blue getting what essentially boils down to mass removal, but this was the only way it could be accomplished because blue transforms things, and it always did. (If anything, the frequently addressed mistake was with previous cards like Rapid Hybridization and even Polymorph NOT exiling the creature, since that's being transformed, not killed, so there shouldn't be nothing left in the graveyard to reanimate, the creature being still on the battlefield in its new form.)
Respect to a fellow White Weenie brewer. Been a fan ever since I discovered the Hold the Line event deck and how much fun Angelic destiny could be when thrown on Mirran Crusader. Good times.
Here's a link to the Swirling Sandstorm deck I eventually came up with http://puremtgo.com/articles/fun-pauper-using-graveyard
I'm annoyed because the majority of decks I come across already are UG and this card is going to increase simic's popularity even higher and make them even more difficult to stop. But yeah, tryhard players are going to be doing this sort of stuff anyway.
Agreed on Curse. I think mass exiling is more White's domain.
I'm okay with Purphoros because it's a Red card. Red doesn't have enough nice things.
I like Read the Bones not because it's better but it's comparable to your other options and in a different mana cost slot. I think it's definitely in line with Ambition's Cost and Sign In Blood. Scry 2 is very good.
Yeah, I agree with criticisms that it's too powerful and not in the right color. Blue has Pongify effects but mass exiling is a bit extreme. It sounds like White's territory. Still love the flavor :P
There are two potential sources in Greek Mythology for a whip. The first is The Erinyes or Furies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erinyes
http://www.theoi.com/Khthonios/Erinyes.html
The second is Nemesis, Daughter of Erebus and Nyx.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(mythology)
Both carried scourges and are born of Nyx.
And Jace Beleran! And I think in my mind now Merrow Reejery. It was a joke between me and the TO, but someone posted that to my facebook wall when it was spoiled that thoughtseize would be back and I thought it was funny still :D