I always proof read my article 3-4 times before submitting. You can ask Josh, he almost never has to make corrections. I am surprised I missed those, although cup of Team does sound cooler than cup of tea lol.
Truth is, I was really trying to secretly promote my new Sports Drink called Cup of Team......look for it in your local supermarket soon.
I also think the flavor of the set is good, but they definitely had some misfires.
Fortress Crab? That was the best they could do?
At the prerelease, we were discussing the similarity of some
of the names in the set to real-life places.
Innistrad/Innsbruck
Thraben/Schwaben
Gavony/Saxony
Avacyn/Avalon
Does this mean anything? Probably not, I just threw that out there for free.
Good article, but it needed some proofreading. I got a chuckle when
I read, "Not really my cup of team". Also, it should be "would've"
and not "would of" (this is a pet peeve of mine).
Minor quibbles aside, I thought it was good and informative. It's a
brave new world out there without Mental Misstep.
One thing I liked about that card is that it forced a shake-up of
the metagame and I think that's a good idea from time to time.
I believe Pete meant that it comes back albeit randomly and while that isn't quite survival's function it is closer to that than demonic tutor which puts a card in hand. Actually Id compare GSZ to cards like Tooth and Nail, Wild Pair, and Defense of the Heart but it is much faster and not a one-shot.
I agree completely with your assessment about GSZ being banned to hurt Zoo without crippling it. Goyf banned would make the field much harder for aggro players.
Sadly today of all days Gatherer.Wizards.com is down (along with much of the rest of the site) as people are working on stuff so all the links do not work at the moment. Hopefully later this will be fixed.
I love the idea behind storm conspiracy (aka Zombie apocalypse) I look forward to designing something along these lines.
One thing I caught here that I am sure you did not mean: "If I luckily have a second pod, I will then use it during my opponent's turn and sacrifice a Birds of Paradise this time." No, you could do this on your turn but pod is done at sorcery speed.
I too am happy to see Dissipate back as I like having the option to play real counters. Particularly in an environment where countering something does not usually mean it is gone for good. Exile is really important imho.
Where is your podium??? I miss the podiums as a summary.
It isn't really a reusable tutor like Survival - you can't pay 5 and search up multiple Goyfs or anything. It is actually similar to Demonic Tutor, in that it creates redundancy at the cost of mana, albeit one instead of two, and it is limited to green creatures.
Still, that allows decks to run 5-8 copies of any green creature at basically no cost since it can be played at any point in your curve.
I think they wanted to hurt zoo, but didn't want to ban Goyf, so that was their only option. You can't really ban anything else in that deck.
In sealed, it happened all the time where I would cast a spell (the werewolf) and my opponent couldn't cast anything. Or, if they did cast something, it might have been a spell they didn't want to cast. Werewolves control the game by forcing players to empty their hands, which is the most significant advantage in standard.
I guess if I was playing the blue trampler I would use Swiftfoot Boots. That's a card that I think ought to be in every aggro/beat down deck in standard.
I certaintly wouldn't put snare in my deck with the intentions of countering Daze, obviously if I had the mana to pay for Daze, I would just pay for it and not counter the spell with snare. But, hopefully you got the point of how important snare is with the other examples of two drops I listed.
No need to apologise, I understand it can be very difficult to play and comment at the same time.
I really enjoy the videos, and that you have many decks to show us. Keep it up, it's great for us who do not have decks yet.
Good podacast, as usual, but I don't agree with your assessment of GS Zenith. The big problem was the turn one ramp with Dryad Arbor. Pretty much every green deck ran GSZ and Arbor. Not every green deck ran Goyfs. The Cloudpost decks didn't.
The other reason was that while Cloudpost decks were insane, the Urzatron decks were not that much slower, not when they could use GSZ.
The big problem, however, was the reusable tutor. That proved broken when it was called Survival of the Fittest, and while GSZ is not Survival, it is not Worldly Tutor, either.
I'm actually really upset Stoneforge Mystic was banned in Modern, as she is the only Goyf you can get at a reasonable cost. In Legacy you are punished for every splash by wasteland, but in Modern it doesn't matter as long as you are willing to pay life, and most decks running Goyf are beating down early anyway. Every successful "control" deck that did well pre-ban was running 4 Goyfs and a bunch of disruption, and I don't see that changing.
I question whether or not control is even possible when the format has all of legacy's best creatures, none of the best counters and aether vial is legal. They obviously have no grasp on the format considering they made affinity excellent while banning the only cards from it other decks cared about, instead of the actual best card cranial plating. Now instead of needing creature removal to beat it, you need artifact removal or you are basically dead to any topdeck, and between Blinkmoth and Inkmoth sweepers alone just won't cut it.
Without Force, without Jace, there just aren't any reasons to play blue control - just gifts and that is easily splashed. Are you seriously supposed to play Cryptic Command to beat decks with Goyf, Nacatl and KoTR? What about Mana Leak vs. Merfolk, or Affinity? They even killed all the decks cheap counters were GOOD against. The format is just a complete wreck.
Erm actually I think the reason was a t1 dryad arbor, elves really isn't a competitive deck in modern. It also nerfs zoo a little bit (not nearly enough IMO). I think the bans came much too late however, as Modern is already suffering badly. A shame because it had a lot of promise.
I think wizards went about the ban list the wrong way. Yes outrageous decks like blazing shoal, hypergen and stoneforge needed to be stopped but banning cards like Jace, Ancestral Visions and Ponder/Preordain which are not overpowered at all in this format has put people off playing it already. It's become a case of 4 x goyf + 4 x Knight of Reliquary or you won't win anything.
the reason to ban green sun's zenith? Elf Decks. Watching elves get a second turn infinite mana, and infinite draw was more than enough reason to ban green sun's zenith. I know it woun't completely kill elves, but it will hurt elves a little.
"Snare is an obvious choice in a meta full of strong two drops. Tarmo, Stoneforge, Landstill, Counterbalance, Jitte, Dark Confidant and Daze just to name a few."
I dunno how often I would run Spell Snare in order to counter Daze, it just doesn't seem like a great play. It also is completely dead to Force Spike ;)
I forgot you needed exact targets for Firestorm. Discarding Ichorid x2 and Bridge isn't Terrible, but you had to have a dredger there to profit off of it.
1 Sun Titan in hand is less useful than 2 Dredgers and Lands for Ghasts.
I understand. Just present your scenario for drafting or looting (in this case) and why you would pick to do or not do a particular choice. People may disagree but this is the best discussion to have.
@artlee
I discarded and re dredredged the dakmoor so that i could see more potyential bloodghasts, and bridge from belows.
-edit, what i meant to say is im terrible. sorry, was just a mistake.
@Menace
14.03 the knight is a 4/4 i would have to discard 6 spells to kill it since he had a stripmine out. there are not 6 targets for firestorm though, and discarding a bunch of non dredge guys wont help.
23.30 I was sbed down to only 1 titan and wanted to keep it so i could go nuts once i had removed the lotv
and yess I had a cold for the video if you couldnt already guess :)
"Blue also gets Trample at last, proving that blue will get everything magic ever had."
Blue has trample since 1994. There have been already 10 mono-blue creatures with trample. More than white.
"Fight is an interesting mechanic that appears to give a variety of colors ways to deal with creatures."
Err, Fight is the new keyword defining a classic green and red mechanic. No other color ever had it (except for Arena, that was a promo-only card btw), and apparently they're not changing this since only green cards have Fight in Innistrad (Prey Upon, and that one you mentioned using a red activation). It was first introduced in 1994 (again) on the green creature Tracker.
"For those players who don't use sleeves with paper cards, it will be apparent what they have in their hand."
Do you mean while drafting? It's not about the sleeves (you can't sleeve the cards for drafting), it's a new rule, and it allows you to just hide your cards in your hand, poker-style, and piling them so that the double-faced card (they're not "flip cards", those are the Kamigawa ones) will be under another card. After you finished drafting and for constructed play, you either use opaque sleeves or the checklist card.
Transform is an Innistrad mechanic, just like Morph was an Onslaught one. There will be more transfomers in the Innistrad block, but that's it (barring some future Time Spiral-like, "blast from the past" block).
It seems to me like you are giving a lot of trust to the fact that a werewolf will be already transformed on your next turn. It doesn't transform on the first opponent upkeep, since you have casted at least one spell in your turn (the werewolf!), and it will transform on your upkeep only if the opponent didn't cast anything during his turn. Unless you're planning to have a Moonmist in hand every time. :)
I like Ludevic's Test Subject but just as a Timmy card. It requires for you to put 12 mana in it, and at the end you get a creature vulnerable to every spot and mass removal in existence (including the ones that affect 0cc cards). The opponent will be very happy to see you put all that effort on a defender, while waiting for your final activation with a Dismember in hand. :)
Thanks, I actually submitted it with that as a concern to the editor. My worry was that it is a strategy article and that including too much information would either make it overly obtuse or too boring.
My first draft of the article had sample hands but it is very hard to evaluate looter in a vacuum and I had too many paragraphs explaining the hand itself rather than the decisions.
Thanks for the criticism and I agree with you, I just wasn't sure how to solve that particular problem with this article. Hopefully as I write a bit more about magic I can flesh out articles better without diluting the content, I'm just not quite there yet. Thank you for the praise as well.
For rating. I want to knock a fireball off for being so brief when you could have presented some situations but I do really like this article for what it does.
Historically blue's decision trees have been really complex but also insanely over-powered if you can solve them. The last 5-8 years hammering of blue has made it still-awesome but much less stupidly late-game dominating compared to the first 15-or-so years of magic.
Thank you all for the responses, this is my first real attempt at an article and I hope it was informative or at least interesting. I want to do draft videos but I'm going to wait for Innistrad to come out, since core sets are almost never drafted once the next set comes out. I wanted to do a focus on limited that I thought would be relevant to this draft format while simultaneously remaining relevant through Innistrad, and looting seemed like an obvious choice given the set mechanics.
It is a shame they didn't unban Jace in Extended because I had a great article planned on just him, but if he is only legal in the two eternal formats I don't think he has enough appeal or relevance and those formats are by far my weakest.
@Seydaneen - I respectfully disagree, I think decks are only as hard to play as the decisions they present. I have recently found aggro decks to be fairly challenging to play properly, particularly since Zendikar block when many decks used landfall triggers requiring turns be planned out well in advance and lands properly utilized as spells. While I regret we don't have as many excellent filters, Gifts Ungiven and Fact or Fiction style cards anymore, I'm excited to play with Forbidden Alchemy, and I wouldn't be surprised if it and Thirst for Knowledge made a big impact on Modern after Innistrad. As I said in the article, it isn't blue itself that is harder to play than other colors such as red, just a disproportionate number of cards in blue color that create complex decisions. I certainly wouldn't be bothered if they were to bleed the color pie in that regard.
I always proof read my article 3-4 times before submitting. You can ask Josh, he almost never has to make corrections. I am surprised I missed those, although cup of Team does sound cooler than cup of tea lol.
Truth is, I was really trying to secretly promote my new Sports Drink called Cup of Team......look for it in your local supermarket soon.
I also think the flavor of the set is good, but they definitely had some misfires.
Fortress Crab? That was the best they could do?
At the prerelease, we were discussing the similarity of some
of the names in the set to real-life places.
Innistrad/Innsbruck
Thraben/Schwaben
Gavony/Saxony
Avacyn/Avalon
Does this mean anything? Probably not, I just threw that out there for free.
Good article, but it needed some proofreading. I got a chuckle when
I read, "Not really my cup of team". Also, it should be "would've"
and not "would of" (this is a pet peeve of mine).
Minor quibbles aside, I thought it was good and informative. It's a
brave new world out there without Mental Misstep.
One thing I liked about that card is that it forced a shake-up of
the metagame and I think that's a good idea from time to time.
Johnny says there is a UG combo with Xenograft and Moonmist that makes it a bit easier to transform. :D (Not that it is not still convoluted at +7cmc)
"You sir are no broccoli!" Yep that was a lol moment and worth at least 5 fireballs!
I believe Pete meant that it comes back albeit randomly and while that isn't quite survival's function it is closer to that than demonic tutor which puts a card in hand. Actually Id compare GSZ to cards like Tooth and Nail, Wild Pair, and Defense of the Heart but it is much faster and not a one-shot.
I agree completely with your assessment about GSZ being banned to hurt Zoo without crippling it. Goyf banned would make the field much harder for aggro players.
Sadly today of all days Gatherer.Wizards.com is down (along with much of the rest of the site) as people are working on stuff so all the links do not work at the moment. Hopefully later this will be fixed.
I love the idea behind storm conspiracy (aka Zombie apocalypse) I look forward to designing something along these lines.
One thing I caught here that I am sure you did not mean: "If I luckily have a second pod, I will then use it during my opponent's turn and sacrifice a Birds of Paradise this time." No, you could do this on your turn but pod is done at sorcery speed.
I too am happy to see Dissipate back as I like having the option to play real counters. Particularly in an environment where countering something does not usually mean it is gone for good. Exile is really important imho.
Where is your podium??? I miss the podiums as a summary.
It isn't really a reusable tutor like Survival - you can't pay 5 and search up multiple Goyfs or anything. It is actually similar to Demonic Tutor, in that it creates redundancy at the cost of mana, albeit one instead of two, and it is limited to green creatures.
Still, that allows decks to run 5-8 copies of any green creature at basically no cost since it can be played at any point in your curve.
I think they wanted to hurt zoo, but didn't want to ban Goyf, so that was their only option. You can't really ban anything else in that deck.
I don't know if I could handle playing Legacy competitively...all those counterspell wars would wear me out.
In sealed, it happened all the time where I would cast a spell (the werewolf) and my opponent couldn't cast anything. Or, if they did cast something, it might have been a spell they didn't want to cast. Werewolves control the game by forcing players to empty their hands, which is the most significant advantage in standard.
I guess if I was playing the blue trampler I would use Swiftfoot Boots. That's a card that I think ought to be in every aggro/beat down deck in standard.
I certaintly wouldn't put snare in my deck with the intentions of countering Daze, obviously if I had the mana to pay for Daze, I would just pay for it and not counter the spell with snare. But, hopefully you got the point of how important snare is with the other examples of two drops I listed.
Thanks for your comment.
No need to apologise, I understand it can be very difficult to play and comment at the same time.
I really enjoy the videos, and that you have many decks to show us. Keep it up, it's great for us who do not have decks yet.
Good podacast, as usual, but I don't agree with your assessment of GS Zenith. The big problem was the turn one ramp with Dryad Arbor. Pretty much every green deck ran GSZ and Arbor. Not every green deck ran Goyfs. The Cloudpost decks didn't.
The other reason was that while Cloudpost decks were insane, the Urzatron decks were not that much slower, not when they could use GSZ.
The big problem, however, was the reusable tutor. That proved broken when it was called Survival of the Fittest, and while GSZ is not Survival, it is not Worldly Tutor, either.
@Bauch
I'm actually really upset Stoneforge Mystic was banned in Modern, as she is the only Goyf you can get at a reasonable cost. In Legacy you are punished for every splash by wasteland, but in Modern it doesn't matter as long as you are willing to pay life, and most decks running Goyf are beating down early anyway. Every successful "control" deck that did well pre-ban was running 4 Goyfs and a bunch of disruption, and I don't see that changing.
I question whether or not control is even possible when the format has all of legacy's best creatures, none of the best counters and aether vial is legal. They obviously have no grasp on the format considering they made affinity excellent while banning the only cards from it other decks cared about, instead of the actual best card cranial plating. Now instead of needing creature removal to beat it, you need artifact removal or you are basically dead to any topdeck, and between Blinkmoth and Inkmoth sweepers alone just won't cut it.
Without Force, without Jace, there just aren't any reasons to play blue control - just gifts and that is easily splashed. Are you seriously supposed to play Cryptic Command to beat decks with Goyf, Nacatl and KoTR? What about Mana Leak vs. Merfolk, or Affinity? They even killed all the decks cheap counters were GOOD against. The format is just a complete wreck.
Erm actually I think the reason was a t1 dryad arbor, elves really isn't a competitive deck in modern. It also nerfs zoo a little bit (not nearly enough IMO). I think the bans came much too late however, as Modern is already suffering badly. A shame because it had a lot of promise.
I think wizards went about the ban list the wrong way. Yes outrageous decks like blazing shoal, hypergen and stoneforge needed to be stopped but banning cards like Jace, Ancestral Visions and Ponder/Preordain which are not overpowered at all in this format has put people off playing it already. It's become a case of 4 x goyf + 4 x Knight of Reliquary or you won't win anything.
the reason to ban green sun's zenith? Elf Decks. Watching elves get a second turn infinite mana, and infinite draw was more than enough reason to ban green sun's zenith. I know it woun't completely kill elves, but it will hurt elves a little.
"Snare is an obvious choice in a meta full of strong two drops. Tarmo, Stoneforge, Landstill, Counterbalance, Jitte, Dark Confidant and Daze just to name a few."
I dunno how often I would run Spell Snare in order to counter Daze, it just doesn't seem like a great play. It also is completely dead to Force Spike ;)
I forgot you needed exact targets for Firestorm. Discarding Ichorid x2 and Bridge isn't Terrible, but you had to have a dredger there to profit off of it.
1 Sun Titan in hand is less useful than 2 Dredgers and Lands for Ghasts.
I understand. Just present your scenario for drafting or looting (in this case) and why you would pick to do or not do a particular choice. People may disagree but this is the best discussion to have.
@artlee
I discarded and re dredredged the dakmoor so that i could see more potyential bloodghasts, and bridge from belows.
-edit, what i meant to say is im terrible. sorry, was just a mistake.
@Menace
14.03 the knight is a 4/4 i would have to discard 6 spells to kill it since he had a stripmine out. there are not 6 targets for firestorm though, and discarding a bunch of non dredge guys wont help.
23.30 I was sbed down to only 1 titan and wanted to keep it so i could go nuts once i had removed the lotv
and yess I had a cold for the video if you couldnt already guess :)
"Blue also gets Trample at last, proving that blue will get everything magic ever had."
Blue has trample since 1994. There have been already 10 mono-blue creatures with trample. More than white.
"Fight is an interesting mechanic that appears to give a variety of colors ways to deal with creatures."
Err, Fight is the new keyword defining a classic green and red mechanic. No other color ever had it (except for Arena, that was a promo-only card btw), and apparently they're not changing this since only green cards have Fight in Innistrad (Prey Upon, and that one you mentioned using a red activation). It was first introduced in 1994 (again) on the green creature Tracker.
"For those players who don't use sleeves with paper cards, it will be apparent what they have in their hand."
Do you mean while drafting? It's not about the sleeves (you can't sleeve the cards for drafting), it's a new rule, and it allows you to just hide your cards in your hand, poker-style, and piling them so that the double-faced card (they're not "flip cards", those are the Kamigawa ones) will be under another card. After you finished drafting and for constructed play, you either use opaque sleeves or the checklist card.
Transform is an Innistrad mechanic, just like Morph was an Onslaught one. There will be more transfomers in the Innistrad block, but that's it (barring some future Time Spiral-like, "blast from the past" block).
It seems to me like you are giving a lot of trust to the fact that a werewolf will be already transformed on your next turn. It doesn't transform on the first opponent upkeep, since you have casted at least one spell in your turn (the werewolf!), and it will transform on your upkeep only if the opponent didn't cast anything during his turn. Unless you're planning to have a Moonmist in hand every time. :)
I like Ludevic's Test Subject but just as a Timmy card. It requires for you to put 12 mana in it, and at the end you get a creature vulnerable to every spot and mass removal in existence (including the ones that affect 0cc cards). The opponent will be very happy to see you put all that effort on a defender, while waiting for your final activation with a Dismember in hand. :)
Thanks, I actually submitted it with that as a concern to the editor. My worry was that it is a strategy article and that including too much information would either make it overly obtuse or too boring.
My first draft of the article had sample hands but it is very hard to evaluate looter in a vacuum and I had too many paragraphs explaining the hand itself rather than the decisions.
Thanks for the criticism and I agree with you, I just wasn't sure how to solve that particular problem with this article. Hopefully as I write a bit more about magic I can flesh out articles better without diluting the content, I'm just not quite there yet. Thank you for the praise as well.
For rating. I want to knock a fireball off for being so brief when you could have presented some situations but I do really like this article for what it does.
Historically blue's decision trees have been really complex but also insanely over-powered if you can solve them. The last 5-8 years hammering of blue has made it still-awesome but much less stupidly late-game dominating compared to the first 15-or-so years of magic.
Thank you all for the responses, this is my first real attempt at an article and I hope it was informative or at least interesting. I want to do draft videos but I'm going to wait for Innistrad to come out, since core sets are almost never drafted once the next set comes out. I wanted to do a focus on limited that I thought would be relevant to this draft format while simultaneously remaining relevant through Innistrad, and looting seemed like an obvious choice given the set mechanics.
It is a shame they didn't unban Jace in Extended because I had a great article planned on just him, but if he is only legal in the two eternal formats I don't think he has enough appeal or relevance and those formats are by far my weakest.
@Seydaneen - I respectfully disagree, I think decks are only as hard to play as the decisions they present. I have recently found aggro decks to be fairly challenging to play properly, particularly since Zendikar block when many decks used landfall triggers requiring turns be planned out well in advance and lands properly utilized as spells. While I regret we don't have as many excellent filters, Gifts Ungiven and Fact or Fiction style cards anymore, I'm excited to play with Forbidden Alchemy, and I wouldn't be surprised if it and Thirst for Knowledge made a big impact on Modern after Innistrad. As I said in the article, it isn't blue itself that is harder to play than other colors such as red, just a disproportionate number of cards in blue color that create complex decisions. I certainly wouldn't be bothered if they were to bleed the color pie in that regard.