I’ve saved up some gold for the Kaldheim flashback draft that starts tomorrow; any advice you fine folks may have on that format would be welcome!

“Creatures you control get +10/+10”

I hope this one is called “Bag of Colossus Hammers”.

Artifact Creature – Phyrexian Construct

Let’s assume this is a reprint. Here are the possibilities. What’s your vote?

I haven’t heard that Snow or Poison are going to be in this set, so that rules out some things. I think Zenith Chronicler is likely because it plays well in Commander. Personally I’m rooting for one of my pet cards, Phyrexian Walker. It’s probably a dark horse but I think as zero-cost creatures go it’s one of the fairest.

It crossed that threshold for me a while ago. “Diluted” is the right word. If somebody asked me to describe Magic to them now, I don’t know what I would say.

Oh my god, they’re doing Omniscience Quick Draft.

For anyone who hasn’t done Omniscience Draft before: I strongly advise against paying currency to play it. (Since I wrote that, they changed the starting hand size to 3, but it didn’t really improve things.)

Arena could really be better about handling large numbers of triggers and/or tokens. There’s no reason why creating 250 tokens needs to be substantially more work than creating 2, and I suspect that the reason why it is is because there’s a lot of redundant stuff – animation, sound effects – that it could be skipping, but isn’t.

This isn’t a complaint, but the memorial sleeve seems like an odd choice. People would use, say, a Sheldon Menery memorial sleeve because they know who he was. But Arena team members are generally not public figures. Fewer people will use this sleeve because there isn’t that connection or context. I feel like a different kind of commemoration might have been more fitting, although I admit I don’t know what else I’d suggest. A free thematic event, maybe?

This week’s Midweek Magic is Brawl where your commander has to be from Duskmourn. Some of those commanders are questionable choices. You can use Altanak but you can’t do the Say Its Name thing, and you’d have to go to some trouble to use its discard ability. You can use Kaito but not its ninjutsu ability.* Again, I’m not complaining, I just think it’s odd.

* What do you think the chances are that ninjutsu will one day receive errata to be usable from the command zone? Affected creatures would be Higure, Ink-Eyes, Nashi, and maybe Yuriko.

For example, you could imagine bracket one has cards that easily can go in any deck, like Swords to Plowshares , Grave Titan , and Cultivate , …

Swords to Plowshares, which is currently banned from Historic and will probably never be printed into Standard again, is in the lowest power bracket? Am I misunderstanding the purpose of these brackets?

I know one-for-one removal isn’t as good in Commander as it is in two-player formats, but even so. Adding Swords or Grave Titan would noticeably raise the power level of every Commander deck I’ve ever built. Apparently my decks are in bracket zero.

It’s this one:

I’d assume the problem was with my computer or my connection if it were happening all the time, but it seems to be limited to games with this backdrop.

I’m sympathetic to this complaint, but COVID-19 is what took me away from paper Magic. I was out of the game for three years and I’m only back now because of Arena.

I agree with most of this.

Regarding the speed/balance issues – I really just want to play Magic with a much, much lower power level than anything that is currently supported, but WotC has been pushing the power level for so long that I don’t even know if we can get back there. I would be open to playing something like Standard Pauper or Standard Artisan, but even that is probably way beyond where I really want to be. I want to turn the clock back 15 or 20 years to when 2R got you a Goblin Chariot instead of a Screaming Nemesis.

Regarding the Arena interface – I turned off voice lines and background music, changed my graphics settings to Low, and set my default pet to none, all within about a month of starting Arena. And then after a while I just started leaving my headphones off anyway. I put up with emotes for over a year, but broke down and disabled them within the past month or so. It’s been an improvement. I feel bad that I might be missing the occasional sincere “Nice” or “Thinking”, but not as bad as I used to feel about getting a premature “Good game” or a “Your Go” during a complex turn. I would love a setting to disable non-essential animations. Sleeves, pets, ripple effects in the background. I play Arena despite those things, not because of them. And the card highlighting! I realize it actually provides information but I’d still shut it off in a second.

As for sitting through combos… Arena really needs more sophisticated skipping controls. MTGO has had “Pass until end of turn” and “Pass until next turn” for two decades.

I would like to see Sol Ring banned, partly because it’s an obviously overpowered card and partly because it reduces space in your deck. Your options are to accept that the real deck construction rules are “Sol Ring plus 98 cards”, or to accept that you’re voluntarily building an underpowered deck, neither of which are satisfactory IMO.

That said, I think it’s interesting that their logic for not banning Sol Ring echoes the reason why I thought Gush shouldn’t have been banned from Pauper: it’s “the iconic card of the format”, and telling people that they’ll get to play it is a good advertisement for the format.

Give me your Zendikar Rising draft tips! It runs for a week starting tomorrow and I’ve saved up some gold to play it. I’ve never drafted it before but I’ve been practicing a bit on Draftsim, and what I’ve got so far is that W/G landfall and U/B Rogues seem good. What about Wizards, is that a viable archetype?

Reminiscent of Caetus, Sea Tyrant of Segovia (which, to my dismay, I’ve never been able to work out a good shell for).

Both sides of this just have unlock triggers; the card doesn’t do anything as it sits on the battlefield. There’s no reason for this to be an enchantment except that they were trying to shoehorn some stuff into the set’s marquee mechanic.

Same with Meat Locker // Drowned Diner and maybe some others that I missed. If they couldn’t come up with enough actual-enchantment effects, that might be a sign that there wasn’t enough design space and they should have abandoned this mechanic or narrowed its scope. Like, maybe they could just have printed a few Rooms at rare/mythic and skipped the meta-mechanics that care about when you unlock rooms or how many unlocked rooms you have.

Hmm… does this help Insidious Roots enough to make it a competitive deck?

I get why this is a vehicle. It makes sense flavor-wise; arguably it’d be weirder for it not to be a vehicle. And I get the “creature is abducted and comes back changed” storyline. That also makes sense and is flavorful. But it’s kind of hilarious to have them both on the same card. Like, while the aliens are performing their horrifying and unnatural experiments, you can also have some random unrelated dude jump into the captain’s chair and zoom around for a while.

“Are you from the X-Files?”

“No! We’re the Phenomenon Investigators. Our lawyers want us to be very clear about that.”

Yeah, I was hoping to see more (or any) actual cards with Phasing, like Sandbar Crocodile. The highest Mirage block card on the list was Teferi’s Veil at #18, and there was sadly no mention of one of my pet cards, Dream Fighter, who can block first-strikers, flankers and deathtouchers with impunity. But I suppose it’s Wizards’ fault, really, for making the original batch of Phasing cards underpowered, and then never revisiting the keyword.

I like the art on this one.

“Common or uncommon artifact creature that puts cards back in your library for two mana” seems to be a new staple.

• Transplant Theorist
• Phyrexian Archivist
• Hoverstone Pilgrim
• Tomb Trawler
• Barkform Harvester

I rarely play them or see them played. It’s true that a non-zero percentage of my draft games end in board stalls with one player milling out, and in theory I like the idea of having some insurance for those scenarios, but the cards are never impactful enough in any other situation. But this one might come the closest – a 4/4 flyer for 6 isn’t bad, and in Duskmourn it can also function as a Delirium hoser.