I agree with you that Prophet of Kruphix is lame and overpowered, but the people who will choose to play were already the lame people playing Teferi and Seedborn Muse so why stress too much.
I'm much more disappointed to see unconditional mass removal in Blue from Curse of the Swine. I mean, if they'd wanted to make Double-Pongify with boars instead of apes that would have been fine. It just breaks the color pie so hard and I'm really not looking forward to seeing the Talrand decks of the world bust it out.
Purphoros is by far the most busted card for Commander in the set though, so it's hard to complain that they gave blue too much love in this set. We're going to have entire matches ending with a single a Rise of the Hobgoblins or a tap of Krenko. It'll be pretty fun the first couple times but it will be super boring before long.
Incidentally, I'm not sure that I'd ever play Read the Bones when I can add a mana and draw a third card with Ambition's Cost instead.
Bouncing will hurt bestow somewhat as it will separate the aura and creature but that won't always be back breaking. As for monstrous, bounce could be a bad thing as it could give them another chance to trigger. It's all situational, which is why I'm more hesitant before actually playing.
I am going to cover as many I as can in the next article - definitely pandora's box. There are a few characters that went into the underworld in Greek myth, I will group them most likely for the card.
Curse of the Swine is the first card to ever actually make me angry when I saw a spoiler. I have a very long rant about it that I'm putting in my overview.
I enjoyed these :)
Are you going to cover other greek mythological references in another article? Pandora's Box, that "don't look back" myth (I forget the characters' names at the moment... the one where he rescues his wife from the underworld), etc.?
Nice casual article :)
I'm having fun with the Shield deck already, although I made a some changes. I own Armadillo Cloak, so those replace Bliss. Also, I AM a fan of Safehold Elite, so those went in rather than the 4 and 5 drops you suggested. With Pridemage at 4, I have 20 dudes. Trimmed the lands to 22, thanks to my lower curve. Even 7's for the basics, four Gates, and four Evolving Wilds. Won the first few games in casual room, but don't expect it to compete elsewhere. For midrange goodness, I'd rather see Penumbra Spider than the Duo's or Safe Riders. Maybe in the mono-green version eh?
Yeah that's my bad I realized I typed banned and meant bugged. Oops.
In a lot of ways, I actually prefer Myst. Maze to Maze of Ith just because the former taps for mana on it's own. To give you an idea of how long it's been since my repeated bug reports though? It's been bugged since event 2.05 - and we're in the middle of 4.01 now. :/
The 3/5 is also meant to be a devotion enabler, because of the CC in the cost, but I agree that it seems to be lacking something.
As for blue lacking removal, I think it will be powerful to pair it up with black, for example, for what seems like a pretty sick control deck. Also, pairing up with green seems interesting since you've got a Prey Upon variant, or red, since you have a couple powerful removal spells there as well.
But I think that Voyage's End and Griptide are going to do enough work as removal to make blue pretty sweet. It's not hard removal, but I think that tempo removal will be more important anyway, since there is such a voltron feel to Bestow and Monstrous.
I didn't know about Mystifying Maze. I can swear it worked correctly back in the time, but that was probably 2 years ago. It's not very popular in SUNCOM (but it's a popular card in general, so I'm surprised they didn't fix it yet). Which is where I found out about Burning of Xinye, by the way, and that's nasty, it's not a light effect. In fact, it caused a win that I had to rectify while still giving the player his prize.
So, Living Death actually works AGAINST the player, instead. I never used it (despite loving it in regular formats), because Commander to me is multiplayer, and in multiplayer it's a bit dangerous and random.
I now realize that my confusion stemmed from you saying, "I had no idea Living Death was banned", while actually meaning "bugged", right? (I was wondering if there had been a banning I wasn't aware of!)
And yeah, the exile zone is causing funny stuff since when they created the Command Zone. I can tell you of another bugged card, except nobody really cares: Iname, Life Aspect. It should work only if you exile it, but the game asks you if you want to put it back in the Command Zone instead. And that "instead" means it's a replacement effect, so if you do it, it never got exiled, and the ability shouldn't trigger. And yet it does. (Whereas, for instance, Jugan works only if you let him go to the graveyard. If you choose the replacement effect, the ability doesn't trigger. It's only the exile zone that never got reworked properly).
I would say one of the primary issues with white is that 3 of it's commons are vanilla creatures, and none exciting. Given how quickly a 2/2 is outmoded, only the 3/5 is ok but just nothing great.
Personally I'm not as keen on blue because it has no real removal. It has a few tempo plays so they will be good against an unprepared opponent but I feel as though some will be medicore to bad late game. If a tempo deck is strong though I can see blue being the best.
Never seen shapeshifter tribal before! Very sweet. And game 3 is why I hate Sylvan Primordial. That card is simply too good in comparison to the other primordials, terastodon, beast within effects.. pretty much every similar ability that already was powerful and saw play in green edh.
The exile thing has always been a problem with commanders. But it isn't all of them. Like Conjurer's Closet, for example, still works as intended. Myst. Maze is definitely the lower end of the bugginess spectrum nowadays - it's problem is returning the commander untapped instead of tapped. And I personally, don't want any kind of bug influencing any of the matches, as players could sit there and use it as a crutch to "not lose" by repeatedly activating the bugged game state - like requesting compensation from WotC CustServ for a draft event (Shards block draft used to be bugged with Skeletonize, and players would do a similar thing to pay for their draft). Fact or Fiction used to put all five cards into the player's hand regardless of how the cards were split (thank god that's fixed now though).
Good eye on Burning of Xinye, I'll keep that in mind in the event we decide to do a multiplayer venue. Thanks.
Good job as always, Zach. One of the great things about writing draft walkthroughs is that they give you a lot more time to think about the plays you make, as compared with a draft video. Both have their place, and I really think these articles are useful for how they go into depth on each decision.
Also, I like how to judge your decisions in context, and not on the previous decisions that you made. When you make a mistake, you don't dwell on "if we hadn't done this, our decision would be this." Some people do that a lot, and try to make things all about one particular decision, but you are demonstrating how it is important to rally after a mistake and work your hardest to increase your win percentage at any point in the game, and not just blame everything on one problem.
I do try to make a solid prediction at the end of the article, but like I said, I don't want to make that the focus of the article. I have strong opinions on what I think will happen, but I think it is much more important for people to look at the data, think about things, and decide for themselves what the format will come to, because that will help them more in the long run.
As for typos, gaargghghah!!! I did a lot of proofing on this, and had help from someone else as well, but obviously you can't catch everything in an article of this size. But yes, #2 should say "hard to attack."
One of the other things I do when a format is out is I go through with some of my buddies, and we rate all of the commons in the set, and then we argue about who is the most right (always me ;). After rating the cards, it felt like blue, black, and green were the deepest colors, as well as getting some powerful commons. With that said, I definitely have my radar out on white, because it has the cards that were the most difficult for me to judge. I rated it a little lower, but I also tend to like white less than most people in general, so I'm not entirely sure how much that bias is affecting my judgment. Also, the value of white depends a lot on the speed of the format.
I do think red is weaker than the other colors, although red does have a few powerful spells.
In short, I think that your list is actually a lot closer to mine than it might seem, because white is the color I'm least sure about.
The cards are bugged with commanders. They offer you the option of putting them into cmd zone then they resolve (living death does anyway) - that is the right behaviour - but if you say no, instead of returning the commanders with all the other creatures, the commanders stays exiled :/.
What's exactly the issue with Legion's Initiative? (And Mystifying Maze? Really?) And how Living Death would affect the commanders? It only cares about the graveyard and the exile zone. I'm confused.
By the way, you may be interested to know that Burning of Xinye is currently bugged since it works on all opponents rather than just one. In case you also play multiplayer sometimes. :)
(Also: when you mention an external link, you might want to make it an actual link so people can click on it. :P)
I had no idea Living Death was banned (it's never come up). I guess I'll need to add it to the temporary banlist too then, right along side Legion's and Myst. Maze). That just sucks, all these sweet cards we can't use because WotC can't figure out how to properly code the commander's interaction.
A good analysis of the format, as usual. The dichotomy over the speed of the format is interesting, and I can understand why you're hedging your bets!
Not meant as a criticism, but I spotted two small typos, and wondered whether it's possible to get them fixed before even more people see the article (though no biggie, if not):
1) "In the two charts above, Power is the line in blue, and Toughness is the line in blue." (Last word should be red.)
2) In the paragraph below the penultimate graph "This makes it hard to block." (Last word should be attack, I think.)
Finally, I'm very interested in your thoughts about: "It feels like blue, black, and green are best equipped to deal with the highly variable tempo of the format."
Is that based mainly on the lynchpin commons? If you have anything further on this point, I'd love to hear it!
Just based on reading spoilers (ie no analysis) I'd ranked colours as White, Blue, Green, Black, Red... but honestly am more inclined to go with yours!
Why is Legion's Initiative banned but living death is not (hint: what do you think happens if you do not put your commander in command zone if it was in gy when you played living death? it is mainly important for Xiahou really). Note that this is worse than Legion's Initiative because it can affect the opponent.
FYI, Curiosity may be illegal in Pauper, but Ophidian Eye is available and not only avoids 2-for-1's, it allows you to drop it on a ninja behind enemy lines.
Add Swirling Sandstorm to your list of Pauper sweepers. Like the goggles, it does NOTHING when you don't have threshold, so it doesn't go into every deck. Maybe run it in gruul colors with whiteout to ground all creatures. Or book burning for instant threshold. Well, sorcery threshold, but you know what I mean. ;)
Consider for a moment the actual costs that you are talking about.
Yes, there are costs to maintain servers, and employ people to update and maintain the system. That said, those costs are mostly fixed to a point. They wouldn't significantly change if you were to give out, say, 10-20% more packs.
Now divide those costs by the huge number of packs and tickets sold to determine the cost to wizards to provide them. It's not going to be much.
The actual cost to them on a per pack basis is likely very close to zero, because the total costs to provide them are fairly small, and the number of packs those costs are spread across is huge.
Server space just isn't that expensive a commodity these days.
I agree with thewoof2. "Back in the day" The vintage format (Type 1) decayed and died out because the only people who ended up playing were people with the Power 9 (or most of it). People who could not get their hands on the Power 9 either due to lack of availability of the cards or the sheer expense of the cards simply would not compete against such an overwhelming advantage. The same will be true on MTGO. Nobody will play against a player who can eliminate you before you can draw simply because they have super rare cards that less than 1% of the MTGO population have. (Yes FOW can prevent that but its expensive too.) It has to be available in a reasonable amount of "cards" online. Legacy in MTGO is not broken. (At least not yet) But if only a few have the Power 9 it probably will be. It is very hard to get around 3 free mana of any color, one free of a specific color, 3 cards for 1 blue, or taking another turn(usually a game breaker) for 1 blue 1 colorless in any game.
That is actually wrong. When people talk about digital cards costing nearly nothing to make they are really ignoring what it means to make and store information for hundreds of thousands of users some of whom have collections exceeding hundreds of thousands of separate data. Now I am not going to claim that the costs are anywhere near the money they make on selling these packs because we know they are making a ton of money and are doing great financially. However it is not a nearly 0 cost to provide those packs and the various services represented by those packs.
Your Lorwyn Top 10 was missing Oblivion Ring!! O-Ring, Cryptic, Garruk and 7 Thoughtseize was the correct answer!
I agree with you that Prophet of Kruphix is lame and overpowered, but the people who will choose to play were already the lame people playing Teferi and Seedborn Muse so why stress too much.
I'm much more disappointed to see unconditional mass removal in Blue from Curse of the Swine. I mean, if they'd wanted to make Double-Pongify with boars instead of apes that would have been fine. It just breaks the color pie so hard and I'm really not looking forward to seeing the Talrand decks of the world bust it out.
Purphoros is by far the most busted card for Commander in the set though, so it's hard to complain that they gave blue too much love in this set. We're going to have entire matches ending with a single a Rise of the Hobgoblins or a tap of Krenko. It'll be pretty fun the first couple times but it will be super boring before long.
Incidentally, I'm not sure that I'd ever play Read the Bones when I can add a mana and draw a third card with Ambition's Cost instead.
Bouncing will hurt bestow somewhat as it will separate the aura and creature but that won't always be back breaking. As for monstrous, bounce could be a bad thing as it could give them another chance to trigger. It's all situational, which is why I'm more hesitant before actually playing.
I am going to cover as many I as can in the next article - definitely pandora's box. There are a few characters that went into the underworld in Greek myth, I will group them most likely for the card.
Curse of the Swine is the first card to ever actually make me angry when I saw a spoiler. I have a very long rant about it that I'm putting in my overview.
I enjoyed these :)
Are you going to cover other greek mythological references in another article? Pandora's Box, that "don't look back" myth (I forget the characters' names at the moment... the one where he rescues his wife from the underworld), etc.?
Nice casual article :)
I'm having fun with the Shield deck already, although I made a some changes. I own Armadillo Cloak, so those replace Bliss. Also, I AM a fan of Safehold Elite, so those went in rather than the 4 and 5 drops you suggested. With Pridemage at 4, I have 20 dudes. Trimmed the lands to 22, thanks to my lower curve. Even 7's for the basics, four Gates, and four Evolving Wilds. Won the first few games in casual room, but don't expect it to compete elsewhere. For midrange goodness, I'd rather see Penumbra Spider than the Duo's or Safe Riders. Maybe in the mono-green version eh?
Yeah that's my bad I realized I typed banned and meant bugged. Oops.
In a lot of ways, I actually prefer Myst. Maze to Maze of Ith just because the former taps for mana on it's own. To give you an idea of how long it's been since my repeated bug reports though? It's been bugged since event 2.05 - and we're in the middle of 4.01 now. :/
The 3/5 is also meant to be a devotion enabler, because of the CC in the cost, but I agree that it seems to be lacking something.
As for blue lacking removal, I think it will be powerful to pair it up with black, for example, for what seems like a pretty sick control deck. Also, pairing up with green seems interesting since you've got a Prey Upon variant, or red, since you have a couple powerful removal spells there as well.
But I think that Voyage's End and Griptide are going to do enough work as removal to make blue pretty sweet. It's not hard removal, but I think that tempo removal will be more important anyway, since there is such a voltron feel to Bestow and Monstrous.
I didn't know about Mystifying Maze. I can swear it worked correctly back in the time, but that was probably 2 years ago. It's not very popular in SUNCOM (but it's a popular card in general, so I'm surprised they didn't fix it yet). Which is where I found out about Burning of Xinye, by the way, and that's nasty, it's not a light effect. In fact, it caused a win that I had to rectify while still giving the player his prize.
So, Living Death actually works AGAINST the player, instead. I never used it (despite loving it in regular formats), because Commander to me is multiplayer, and in multiplayer it's a bit dangerous and random.
I now realize that my confusion stemmed from you saying, "I had no idea Living Death was banned", while actually meaning "bugged", right? (I was wondering if there had been a banning I wasn't aware of!)
And yeah, the exile zone is causing funny stuff since when they created the Command Zone. I can tell you of another bugged card, except nobody really cares: Iname, Life Aspect. It should work only if you exile it, but the game asks you if you want to put it back in the Command Zone instead. And that "instead" means it's a replacement effect, so if you do it, it never got exiled, and the ability shouldn't trigger. And yet it does. (Whereas, for instance, Jugan works only if you let him go to the graveyard. If you choose the replacement effect, the ability doesn't trigger. It's only the exile zone that never got reworked properly).
I would say one of the primary issues with white is that 3 of it's commons are vanilla creatures, and none exciting. Given how quickly a 2/2 is outmoded, only the 3/5 is ok but just nothing great.
Personally I'm not as keen on blue because it has no real removal. It has a few tempo plays so they will be good against an unprepared opponent but I feel as though some will be medicore to bad late game. If a tempo deck is strong though I can see blue being the best.
Never seen shapeshifter tribal before! Very sweet. And game 3 is why I hate Sylvan Primordial. That card is simply too good in comparison to the other primordials, terastodon, beast within effects.. pretty much every similar ability that already was powerful and saw play in green edh.
The exile thing has always been a problem with commanders. But it isn't all of them. Like Conjurer's Closet, for example, still works as intended. Myst. Maze is definitely the lower end of the bugginess spectrum nowadays - it's problem is returning the commander untapped instead of tapped. And I personally, don't want any kind of bug influencing any of the matches, as players could sit there and use it as a crutch to "not lose" by repeatedly activating the bugged game state - like requesting compensation from WotC CustServ for a draft event (Shards block draft used to be bugged with Skeletonize, and players would do a similar thing to pay for their draft). Fact or Fiction used to put all five cards into the player's hand regardless of how the cards were split (thank god that's fixed now though).
Good eye on Burning of Xinye, I'll keep that in mind in the event we decide to do a multiplayer venue. Thanks.
Good job as always, Zach. One of the great things about writing draft walkthroughs is that they give you a lot more time to think about the plays you make, as compared with a draft video. Both have their place, and I really think these articles are useful for how they go into depth on each decision.
Also, I like how to judge your decisions in context, and not on the previous decisions that you made. When you make a mistake, you don't dwell on "if we hadn't done this, our decision would be this." Some people do that a lot, and try to make things all about one particular decision, but you are demonstrating how it is important to rally after a mistake and work your hardest to increase your win percentage at any point in the game, and not just blame everything on one problem.
Thanks for the comments!
I do try to make a solid prediction at the end of the article, but like I said, I don't want to make that the focus of the article. I have strong opinions on what I think will happen, but I think it is much more important for people to look at the data, think about things, and decide for themselves what the format will come to, because that will help them more in the long run.
As for typos, gaargghghah!!! I did a lot of proofing on this, and had help from someone else as well, but obviously you can't catch everything in an article of this size. But yes, #2 should say "hard to attack."
One of the other things I do when a format is out is I go through with some of my buddies, and we rate all of the commons in the set, and then we argue about who is the most right (always me ;). After rating the cards, it felt like blue, black, and green were the deepest colors, as well as getting some powerful commons. With that said, I definitely have my radar out on white, because it has the cards that were the most difficult for me to judge. I rated it a little lower, but I also tend to like white less than most people in general, so I'm not entirely sure how much that bias is affecting my judgment. Also, the value of white depends a lot on the speed of the format.
I do think red is weaker than the other colors, although red does have a few powerful spells.
In short, I think that your list is actually a lot closer to mine than it might seem, because white is the color I'm least sure about.
The cards are bugged with commanders. They offer you the option of putting them into cmd zone then they resolve (living death does anyway) - that is the right behaviour - but if you say no, instead of returning the commanders with all the other creatures, the commanders stays exiled :/.
What's exactly the issue with Legion's Initiative? (And Mystifying Maze? Really?) And how Living Death would affect the commanders? It only cares about the graveyard and the exile zone. I'm confused.
By the way, you may be interested to know that Burning of Xinye is currently bugged since it works on all opponents rather than just one. In case you also play multiplayer sometimes. :)
(Also: when you mention an external link, you might want to make it an actual link so people can click on it. :P)
I had no idea Living Death was banned (it's never come up). I guess I'll need to add it to the temporary banlist too then, right along side Legion's and Myst. Maze). That just sucks, all these sweet cards we can't use because WotC can't figure out how to properly code the commander's interaction.
A good analysis of the format, as usual. The dichotomy over the speed of the format is interesting, and I can understand why you're hedging your bets!
Not meant as a criticism, but I spotted two small typos, and wondered whether it's possible to get them fixed before even more people see the article (though no biggie, if not):
1) "In the two charts above, Power is the line in blue, and Toughness is the line in blue." (Last word should be red.)
2) In the paragraph below the penultimate graph "This makes it hard to block." (Last word should be attack, I think.)
Finally, I'm very interested in your thoughts about: "It feels like blue, black, and green are best equipped to deal with the highly variable tempo of the format."
Is that based mainly on the lynchpin commons? If you have anything further on this point, I'd love to hear it!
Just based on reading spoilers (ie no analysis) I'd ranked colours as White, Blue, Green, Black, Red... but honestly am more inclined to go with yours!
Why is Legion's Initiative banned but living death is not (hint: what do you think happens if you do not put your commander in command zone if it was in gy when you played living death? it is mainly important for Xiahou really). Note that this is worse than Legion's Initiative because it can affect the opponent.
This doesn't actually work.
* Heroic abilities will trigger only once per spell, even if that spell targets the creature with the heroic ability multiple times.
FYI, Curiosity may be illegal in Pauper, but Ophidian Eye is available and not only avoids 2-for-1's, it allows you to drop it on a ninja behind enemy lines.
Add Swirling Sandstorm to your list of Pauper sweepers. Like the goggles, it does NOTHING when you don't have threshold, so it doesn't go into every deck. Maybe run it in gruul colors with whiteout to ground all creatures. Or book burning for instant threshold. Well, sorcery threshold, but you know what I mean. ;)
Consider for a moment the actual costs that you are talking about.
Yes, there are costs to maintain servers, and employ people to update and maintain the system. That said, those costs are mostly fixed to a point. They wouldn't significantly change if you were to give out, say, 10-20% more packs.
Now divide those costs by the huge number of packs and tickets sold to determine the cost to wizards to provide them. It's not going to be much.
The actual cost to them on a per pack basis is likely very close to zero, because the total costs to provide them are fairly small, and the number of packs those costs are spread across is huge.
Server space just isn't that expensive a commodity these days.
I agree with thewoof2. "Back in the day" The vintage format (Type 1) decayed and died out because the only people who ended up playing were people with the Power 9 (or most of it). People who could not get their hands on the Power 9 either due to lack of availability of the cards or the sheer expense of the cards simply would not compete against such an overwhelming advantage. The same will be true on MTGO. Nobody will play against a player who can eliminate you before you can draw simply because they have super rare cards that less than 1% of the MTGO population have. (Yes FOW can prevent that but its expensive too.) It has to be available in a reasonable amount of "cards" online. Legacy in MTGO is not broken. (At least not yet) But if only a few have the Power 9 it probably will be. It is very hard to get around 3 free mana of any color, one free of a specific color, 3 cards for 1 blue, or taking another turn(usually a game breaker) for 1 blue 1 colorless in any game.
That is actually wrong. When people talk about digital cards costing nearly nothing to make they are really ignoring what it means to make and store information for hundreds of thousands of users some of whom have collections exceeding hundreds of thousands of separate data. Now I am not going to claim that the costs are anywhere near the money they make on selling these packs because we know they are making a ton of money and are doing great financially. However it is not a nearly 0 cost to provide those packs and the various services represented by those packs.