It would be neat if we lived in a world without Sunfall so a creative wrath effect like this had some room to breathe.

I definitely understand feeling like the spoiler posts are too much, I wasn’t always subscribed myself, but like… this is what you signed up for, if you do subscribe to /c/spoilers.

Saw someone playing a Merfolk deck in ranked a few weeks ago. Deeproot Pilgrimage has a lot of potential. Seems like it could be a real deck with a little help. Is this that help?

There are some Esper enchantment decks that are running Tithing Blade and recurring it with stuff like Nurturing Pixie. This card is probably an upgrade over Blade because it also procs Optimistic Scavenger.

Interesting to note that it doesn’t care who owns the cards in exile.

I wonder if you could justify maindecking Rest in Peace with this guy.

I don’t know what deck wants this but it does so many things for such a low cost that I feel like we’re bound to see it show up somewhere. Maybe in that Selesnya tokens deck that’s been popular recently?

So compared to Hangarback Walker:

• Adding a counter costs 4× as much but doesn’t require tapping.
• When it dies you draw cards instead of making Thopters.

It’s not a direct replacement but I think this has the potential to be a stronger card overall, especially in a deck that can make a lot of mana. I don’t know if there are any existing Standard decks that want this, unless maybe Domain Control or other Overlord of the Hamhocks decks could use it as a mana dump. But there are some fringe Selesnya decks with stuff like Ozolith and Innkeeper’s Talent and Dusk Legion Duelist that might get a boost from this.

I don’t play Pioneer but I agree, being able to get itself into the graveyard has got to be a big deal. I have to think the designers knew what they were doing.

Missed opportunity to make a cycle of Cycles, each with cycling.

Love the pun but I think the mana cost and/or crew cost would have to be lower for this to see constructed play.

Four Sunbillows are going straight into my Boros Caretaker’s Talent control deck.

I was rolling my eyes about how Speed is yet another effect that isn’t represented by a permanent and can’t be interacted with, and then as I read on I discovered it’s even more confusing than that. Gaining the first speed level happens instantaneously, but if I’m reading right, gaining levels 2 through 4 is a triggered ability (albeit one with no source, not even an emblem?) and could be Stifled.

I’m not just being cynical when I say that the point is that Wizards won’t make enough money if your collection fills up too efficiently. I guess they might say something like “we want the experience of opening digital packs to closely mirror paper”. But if you pursue this line of questioning you pretty quickly end up at “why doesn’t everybody just get four free copies of every card so personal wealth isn’t a factor in deckbuilding?” And the answer is that that’s not WotC’s business model. They have to make money – even if we set aside the matter of profit, they have to fund maintenance & development somehow – and selling you packs that aren’t guaranteed to contain anything you need is part of how they stay afloat.

Maybe the more pertinent question is “how do they justify selling you things they know you don’t need?” If we’re asking about Arena, duplicate commons and uncommons contribute to your Vault progress, and periodically you’ll get to open your Vault and get six extra wildcards. It’s not much, but it’s not nothing. If we’re asking about MTGO, theoretically you can trade your excess cards or sell them to bots, though typically for less than a penny apiece.

“My other car is a brushwagg.”

A lot of what he’s saying here matches my own experience playing ranked games on Arena. I made it to Mythic (playing Standard) a few days before the end of December. When I finally broke in, my rank was 92%. That’s a pretty high number, and it’s actually even better than it sounds: I’m not just in the 92nd percentile of all Magic players worldwide, I’m in the 92nd percentile among people who take Magic seriously enough to play ranked matches on Arena.

Surely an accomplishment one could be proud of, right? But the whole time I was getting there, I felt mediocre, because I kept losing about as much as I was winning. I also wasn’t experimenting. I wanted to get to Mythic, so I stuck to decks that I knew were good and that I was experienced with.

As soon as I reached my competitive goal, I switched to playing more offbeat or experimental decks. And honestly, I started having more fun, if only from the change of pace, even though my rating dropped into the 80s. And then something interesting happened: I got more comfortable with those decks, and/or started facing lower-ranked opponents, and my rating climbed back into the 90s.

So I think Richard is right about ladders’ capacity to suppress one’s enjoyment of the game. However – I’m still not sure I would want to play without one. From time to time I play unranked games with decks that I think are fun, but pretty far (even intentionally far) from Tier 1. But I can never put up with it for very long: the caliber of the decks that I face varies too widely. I’ll stomp someone’s precon in one game and then get stomped in turn by a tournament deck in the next. I keep coming back to the ladder because, as unfair as the cards and decks I see there may be, at least both players agree at the start on what power level we’re aiming for. (Having separate lobbies for “unranked play with tournament decks” and “unranked play with casual decks” might sound like a solution, but some players would still join the wrong ones.)

As for tournaments: I’ve been on Arena for two or three years now and I’ve never joined a constructed tournament. The prize structure makes them effectively single-elimination, and I’m not sure I’ve ever won five matches in a row on the ladder, so what would make me think I could do it when there was even more on the line? My gold and gems are much more wisely spent doing drafts so I can build my collection.

But that may not be a refutation of Richard’s point so much as a criticism of Arena’s tournament structure. If Arena had Swiss-style tournaments, with flatter prize structures, I would be more likely to join them.

This all sounds reasonable to me. An understandable motivation for changing, and a sensible way of approaching it.

It’s not clear and it’s going to just be used to further whatever conclusion they’ve already come to.

Yeah, whatever the results of this poll are, I guarantee Mark/WotC are going to learn the wrong lesson from it. Like when they look “it’s too hard to maintain a collection for Standard” to mean “cards should stay in Standard for longer” and raised the format’s power level by half.

Yeah, I found this pretty unintuitive in a few ways. To name the card, you have to click “Guess card”, then type out the name (even though it looks like the fields are disabled), then click the button again. If that isn’t working for you then I don’t know.

Are we talking about cookie tins, or what? The article doesn’t have pictures of the actual product, and doesn’t describe them as anything other than “promotional tins”. We know they’ll contain five booster packs plus two cards, so I guess that puts a floor on how small they could be.

I’d expect you could fit about four cookies, depending on their size and shape, in the space taken up by five booster packs.

Commander players have a thing called “Rule 0” that basically says you can change whatever rules you want as long as your whole playgroup agrees to it. But if you want to get your changes accepted on a broader scale, so that you could go to a store event or a big tournament and expect other players to be familiar with them, that’s a much taller hurdle. Can you convince the community that your banlist is better than the official one and also better than any other fan-made ones? Can you get stores to support it – keeping in mind that they have to curry favor with Wizards in order to maintain WPN certification, be allowed to pre-order the amount of product they want, etc.? If you could do it successfully, you’d basically be building a grassroots competitor to the Commander Format Panel. Not impossible, but it would be an uphill battle for sure.