I just want to recognize the fact that Wizards of the Coast made a new card type and it didn’t break anything. No battles have been banned and nobody’s talking about banning any battles. Some decks play battles, but you don’t have to play battles to compete. Battles function on MTGO and Arena. They’re fun and flavorful and they add strategic depth.
Probably the lesson Wizards learned from this is “we need to push battles harder” and they’ll come back in a year or two with some broken ones. But for now, I’m appreciating that they tried something new and it went okay.
They also gave themselves plenty of room for new variations. Some of the behaviors associated with battle cards today are actually tied to the Siege subtype.
You are correct that they got the power level just right and that they deserve major kudos for that, that can’t have been easy 👍🏻
Another compliment they deserve is that they were a very good way to represent all planes (together with a couple of other cards from each plane) truly making MOM feel like it spanned all the planes.
But overall I’m not too fond of them.
Flavor-wise the sieges are weird. So you play a card named Invasion of Segovia (for example). What would you think such a card would represent? It represents… the Segovians fighting back at the Phyrexians—both sides of the card are flavored as Segovians doing Segovian stuff vs them.
OK, so it’s called a “siege”. Like Helm’s Deep. And it’s a pro-Segovia, anti-Phyrexia card. So you’d think you’d want to defend it and defend it and defend it, like the Segovians in the story defended agains the Phyrexians. Siege. Simple. But no! You are trying to attack it down to release the sea tyrant Caetus who’ll help you fight the Phyrexians.
So when your opponent plays a Siege, that means you are suddenly forced to represent someone who is invading Segovia (Phyrexians, presumably, whether or not you’d ever put any Phyrexian cards in your deck) and trying to defend the—not defend Segovia, but defend the invading force so they can’t release the sea tyrant or whatever.
I liked the battle cards in draft, but I haven’t put any in my EDH decks. I think the ones that will end up being iconic haven’t been printed yet.
Agreed, I love em. My only complaint is we’ve only had one set of them so far, and while there’s a few standouts ([[Invasion of Segovia]] in Locust God is nasty), overall they were obviously designed on the safer side. Excited to see where the design space leads as they get more confident in the card type
