Sorry to disappoint you Flippers but I personally see no future for Ancient Hellkite other than Limited games. It's an incredibly powerful creature in a limited environment, but it just isn't good for Constructed purposes... it is just a new and better Shivan Dragon. Nowadays we have creatures like Knight of the Reliquary at three mana, Vengevine at four mana, Baneslayer at five, Grave Titan at six. So if I pay seven for something, it better be REALLY good. Avenger of Zendikar at the moment is the only playable seven mana creature in Standard.
But of course I can be wrong about it as well(but I don't think I am).
On the other hand, it is true that the new Fork deserves at least a few words. But I can say that next week's article is about a few new deck ideas I'm currently toying with, and one will have Reverberate in its sideboard. There I will at least mention it and say what's there is to say about it.
I had the priviledge of playing with/against Destructive Force and saw firsthand what it can do... and it can do really destructive things. I will talk about it in the future in detail.
Mono Red will surely miss Ball Lightning as well as ALA elementals, but who knows what Scars will bring. This archtype never dies and I'm sure there will be enough cards for it to survive post Scars meta as well.
paul, while im not super excited to read your stuff, you do put a good effort into your articles and i respect the effort much more then the content on most peoples articles. the content would have to be simply amazing for something with so little effort to make me excited. this article actually made me want to commit seppuku.
While the karoolands have their uses I think the ability of dropping, saccing and getting a new land in play all on one turn thus getting 2 landfall triggers is too powerful to not use. Also with the panorama ou hav the option of saccing during the opponents turn to power Searing Blaze.
I think what's interesting about red is what is missing. Earthquake and Ball Lightning aren't reprints, which means that a lot of red decks might be slowing down a bit. Sure there is still the Devasting Summons / Bushwacker combo, but I think it's a bit early to dismiss Inferno Titan.
Lethal Vapors - I've never been a fan of cards that give your opponent a way out, especially relative symmetric cards. Time Warp costs 5 for a free turn, Lethal Vapors is at worst a card that can backfire on you easily and at worst a Time Warp that costs 4 mana.
As for Tribal M2011, I'm excited for Chandra's Spitfire and Fire Servant. Those along with Kiln Fiend can do somet pretty hot multiplication.
The decklist made me literally drool. Ive been trying to get a Borosfall deck to work for a while now and I really like this one. I have a question. If you were to port this over to classic for TPDC (I have no idea if it would be viable but it looks fun as hell), do you think a couple karoos would work better than the Panoramas? Some combination of Boros Garrison, Orzhov Basilica, and/or Rakdos Carnarium.
I must admit I felt the same as Whiffy and menace13 after reading the article. At the end I was left with the feeling that I read a game report with out even knowing what the deck contained. I had more of a knowledge of the decks that you were facing rather than the deck the article was based on.
Bog, Echos, anything that removes the graveyard + exile cards + remove cards from the library all are things that make Twister type effects good. If you can neuter your ops deck as you play do you care if you give them a handful of 7? Granted it is a far fetched idea in standard but classic has lots of room to abuse such cards including combining them with time walks for recursion.
I like to read these, as it's interesting seeing what someone with a generally optimistic outlook on the power of cards thinks, compared to my generally pessimistic view. I'd have to say I flat out disagree with you on angelic arbiter, time reversal and dark tutelage but that's predictable!
I don't really understand what type of deck people are thinking of putting time reversal into. timetwister and whatever the other one's called both lived in combo decks usually, and tended to get cast on the turn of "going off" if i'm not mistaken. I can't see time reversal getting tapped out for in this way, as you're still waiting at least a turn to "go off" and your opponent has just drawn 7 cards to find a duress and/or counterspell (or way to win the game first).
I am slightly interested in the idea of sticking either tutelage or time reversal in a straight burn deck though, but I can't see any other applications..
Interestingly, I think it's the rise of planeswalkers which will prevent destructive force being played. They're so commonplace in standard that your destructive force isn't guaranteed to leave them with nothing. Wildfire never had this problem really.Leaving them with Jace and you with garruk (for example) is only really a good idea if you have two lands in hand (I suspect).
I still love the card, and will definitely be playing some kind of neo-wildfire deck, but I suspect that the omnipresence of planeswalkers might limit it's effectiveness.Garruk and Gideon are probably the two obvious planeswalkers to go in the deck.
I suspect that the viability of the destructive force deck will be very dependent on the metagame at the time, rather than it being a commonplace "big player" in the metagame.
I agree with Whiffy the whole thing was "hey look i beat 1 and a 1/2 good decks". List please, interactions, maybe some commentary on card choices. Instead we get" FoW sucks in cascas, peaceout"!
why? no list? no explanation of the deck? 2 game recaps on a 500 piece pile? sorry but there is no reason for this other then " hey i want to write an article because i beat a highly tuned legacy deck that is good in specific metagames. how many times did you win? how many times did u play agaionst deed still? gro? seriously, thats a cool deck and all, but why did you write this? i feel like you just wasted 5 mins of my life, and thats incredibly hard as im a magic playeing internet addicted insomniack.
jeez
The article was a good read and the deck looked like fun to play. But it's extremely easy to beat legacy control decks with decks like these, or any deck that has a large threat content and has a lot of card advantage. Because legacy control decks are so skewed in order to contain the powerful combos, they have to run cheap 1 for 1 trades that rely on messing up their opponents tempo or find areas of weakness to pick up a 2 for 1. This means that a deck full of natural 2 for 1 cards will easily overpower a control deck, which can't counter every card.
Still, the article was enjoyable and the deck seemed interesting. Out of interest, why would you suggest big decks over 100c singleton, which is 1/4 of the price and doesn't give you any lag problems?
Nice article again LE but no mention of Ancient Hellkite I was looking forward to seeing what you thought about that card. There was no mention of Reverberate either, that card could be amazing.
Baron Sengir could be a Planeswalker in Scar's. I haven't read the books if there were any for Homelands so dont know if he's still alive in the magic universe but then again he's a vampire.
How was I being dishonest? Good implies an opinion about the format. Old simply refers to the format conditions. I have no such opinion about OLD extended or new. In fact I haven't played extended much at all since last year. It was quite broken and so they changed it to be less broken and more current which is obviously a traumatic change for those invested in it.
Blinking is fine :) Flicker just has a bit more word play involved. The old crystal shard decks I ran for OLD extended were all called blinking shards. (Because the bounce acts functionally similar to blink.)
@Mel: you are better than you think. Even if you haven't been around as long. Glad you liked the decks.
@Cocheese: Reknit is an interesting idea, but does it work? I was given the impression that regeneration only works on creatures. In which case how do we make the Vapors a creature. On the other hand it's a .04 tix card so it should not be hard to test. I am not tired of Lethal Vapors itself but the decks I designed for it were extremely nonfunctional. Being able to make a functional version would be great. As I said before one of the chief problems lay in the fact that the timing sucked. Either I had no creatures and multiple copies of Lethal Vapors AND they had early creatures out already or I had creatures and no vapors and my guys were overwhelmed by their numbers/size and trample etc. Overall it was an unpleasant series of decks so definitely in need of revamping if I experiment with reknit. Thanks for the idea.
@Flips: Except for Grave Titan, my faves are 2/2s. I guess because I prefer utility over flash most of the time. Ember Hauler looks like it could replace any number of cards in current decks and I definitely want 4. Ancient Hellite is a bomb bomb Dragon Bomb which I may end up with 1 of. (Not just because of it's rarity but because one is sufficient.) On the whole Dragon tribal is just insane if hard to cast as always and Hyper Dragons may need an update.
Thanks for the comments.
Sorry to disappoint you Flippers but I personally see no future for Ancient Hellkite other than Limited games. It's an incredibly powerful creature in a limited environment, but it just isn't good for Constructed purposes... it is just a new and better Shivan Dragon. Nowadays we have creatures like Knight of the Reliquary at three mana, Vengevine at four mana, Baneslayer at five, Grave Titan at six. So if I pay seven for something, it better be REALLY good. Avenger of Zendikar at the moment is the only playable seven mana creature in Standard.
But of course I can be wrong about it as well(but I don't think I am).
On the other hand, it is true that the new Fork deserves at least a few words. But I can say that next week's article is about a few new deck ideas I'm currently toying with, and one will have Reverberate in its sideboard. There I will at least mention it and say what's there is to say about it.
I had the priviledge of playing with/against Destructive Force and saw firsthand what it can do... and it can do really destructive things. I will talk about it in the future in detail.
Mono Red will surely miss Ball Lightning as well as ALA elementals, but who knows what Scars will bring. This archtype never dies and I'm sure there will be enough cards for it to survive post Scars meta as well.
Thanks again for the comments.
LE
paul, while im not super excited to read your stuff, you do put a good effort into your articles and i respect the effort much more then the content on most peoples articles. the content would have to be simply amazing for something with so little effort to make me excited. this article actually made me want to commit seppuku.
While the karoolands have their uses I think the ability of dropping, saccing and getting a new land in play all on one turn thus getting 2 landfall triggers is too powerful to not use. Also with the panorama ou hav the option of saccing during the opponents turn to power Searing Blaze.
I went with the assumption that it was the same deck as his last article though if so even a link to that article would have been highly beneficial
Great article
I think what's interesting about red is what is missing. Earthquake and Ball Lightning aren't reprints, which means that a lot of red decks might be slowing down a bit. Sure there is still the Devasting Summons / Bushwacker combo, but I think it's a bit early to dismiss Inferno Titan.
Lethal Vapors - I've never been a fan of cards that give your opponent a way out, especially relative symmetric cards. Time Warp costs 5 for a free turn, Lethal Vapors is at worst a card that can backfire on you easily and at worst a Time Warp that costs 4 mana.
As for Tribal M2011, I'm excited for Chandra's Spitfire and Fire Servant. Those along with Kiln Fiend can do somet pretty hot multiplication.
The decklist made me literally drool. Ive been trying to get a Borosfall deck to work for a while now and I really like this one. I have a question. If you were to port this over to classic for TPDC (I have no idea if it would be viable but it looks fun as hell), do you think a couple karoos would work better than the Panoramas? Some combination of Boros Garrison, Orzhov Basilica, and/or Rakdos Carnarium.
I must admit I felt the same as Whiffy and menace13 after reading the article. At the end I was left with the feeling that I read a game report with out even knowing what the deck contained. I had more of a knowledge of the decks that you were facing rather than the deck the article was based on.
Bog, Echos, anything that removes the graveyard + exile cards + remove cards from the library all are things that make Twister type effects good. If you can neuter your ops deck as you play do you care if you give them a handful of 7? Granted it is a far fetched idea in standard but classic has lots of room to abuse such cards including combining them with time walks for recursion.
I like to read these, as it's interesting seeing what someone with a generally optimistic outlook on the power of cards thinks, compared to my generally pessimistic view. I'd have to say I flat out disagree with you on angelic arbiter, time reversal and dark tutelage but that's predictable!
I don't really understand what type of deck people are thinking of putting time reversal into. timetwister and whatever the other one's called both lived in combo decks usually, and tended to get cast on the turn of "going off" if i'm not mistaken. I can't see time reversal getting tapped out for in this way, as you're still waiting at least a turn to "go off" and your opponent has just drawn 7 cards to find a duress and/or counterspell (or way to win the game first).
I am slightly interested in the idea of sticking either tutelage or time reversal in a straight burn deck though, but I can't see any other applications..
I guess we'll see!
Interestingly, I think it's the rise of planeswalkers which will prevent destructive force being played. They're so commonplace in standard that your destructive force isn't guaranteed to leave them with nothing. Wildfire never had this problem really.Leaving them with Jace and you with garruk (for example) is only really a good idea if you have two lands in hand (I suspect).
I still love the card, and will definitely be playing some kind of neo-wildfire deck, but I suspect that the omnipresence of planeswalkers might limit it's effectiveness.Garruk and Gideon are probably the two obvious planeswalkers to go in the deck.
I suspect that the viability of the destructive force deck will be very dependent on the metagame at the time, rather than it being a commonplace "big player" in the metagame.
I agree with Whiffy the whole thing was "hey look i beat 1 and a 1/2 good decks". List please, interactions, maybe some commentary on card choices. Instead we get" FoW sucks in cascas, peaceout"!
You are making me glad you didn't comment on my article lol. Harsh much?
why? no list? no explanation of the deck? 2 game recaps on a 500 piece pile? sorry but there is no reason for this other then " hey i want to write an article because i beat a highly tuned legacy deck that is good in specific metagames. how many times did you win? how many times did u play agaionst deed still? gro? seriously, thats a cool deck and all, but why did you write this? i feel like you just wasted 5 mins of my life, and thats incredibly hard as im a magic playeing internet addicted insomniack.
jeez
The article was a good read and the deck looked like fun to play. But it's extremely easy to beat legacy control decks with decks like these, or any deck that has a large threat content and has a lot of card advantage. Because legacy control decks are so skewed in order to contain the powerful combos, they have to run cheap 1 for 1 trades that rely on messing up their opponents tempo or find areas of weakness to pick up a 2 for 1. This means that a deck full of natural 2 for 1 cards will easily overpower a control deck, which can't counter every card.
Still, the article was enjoyable and the deck seemed interesting. Out of interest, why would you suggest big decks over 100c singleton, which is 1/4 of the price and doesn't give you any lag problems?
Nice article again LE but no mention of Ancient Hellkite I was looking forward to seeing what you thought about that card. There was no mention of Reverberate either, that card could be amazing.
Baron Sengir could be a Planeswalker in Scar's. I haven't read the books if there were any for Homelands so dont know if he's still alive in the magic universe but then again he's a vampire.
I stand corrected. I forgot about those two cards. I even played with Sylvan library in my zoo deck a long time ago. I will chalk it up to being old:)
"Paying life for a card has a long history in Magic going all the way back to"... Greed, in Legends. Also Sylvan Library in Legends.
I enjoyed the article overall! Just don't forget to fact check :)
i just dont find the options as far decks to bee as inventive...probably just because i still remember time spiral and lorwyn like it was yesterday
How was I being dishonest? Good implies an opinion about the format. Old simply refers to the format conditions. I have no such opinion about OLD extended or new. In fact I haven't played extended much at all since last year. It was quite broken and so they changed it to be less broken and more current which is obviously a traumatic change for those invested in it.
just be honest paul...not OLD extended, GOOD extended. Ive made a couple new extended decks. It just feels like standard to me.
Thieves and Tunnelers ftw?
Blinking is fine :) Flicker just has a bit more word play involved. The old crystal shard decks I ran for OLD extended were all called blinking shards. (Because the bounce acts functionally similar to blink.)
Thanks for the comments guys! :)
@Mel: you are better than you think. Even if you haven't been around as long. Glad you liked the decks.
@Cocheese: Reknit is an interesting idea, but does it work? I was given the impression that regeneration only works on creatures. In which case how do we make the Vapors a creature. On the other hand it's a .04 tix card so it should not be hard to test. I am not tired of Lethal Vapors itself but the decks I designed for it were extremely nonfunctional. Being able to make a functional version would be great. As I said before one of the chief problems lay in the fact that the timing sucked. Either I had no creatures and multiple copies of Lethal Vapors AND they had early creatures out already or I had creatures and no vapors and my guys were overwhelmed by their numbers/size and trample etc. Overall it was an unpleasant series of decks so definitely in need of revamping if I experiment with reknit. Thanks for the idea.
@Flips: Except for Grave Titan, my faves are 2/2s. I guess because I prefer utility over flash most of the time. Ember Hauler looks like it could replace any number of cards in current decks and I definitely want 4. Ancient Hellite is a bomb bomb Dragon Bomb which I may end up with 1 of. (Not just because of it's rarity but because one is sufficient.) On the whole Dragon tribal is just insane if hard to cast as always and Hyper Dragons may need an update.
My first reaction was a GB Deck (Vengevine, Bloodghast, Bloodthrone Vampire) with her as a way to fetch the 'Vines and 'Ghasts.