The General Magic the Gathering Thread

This here is purty.

That’s this one:

As always, Planeswalkers are the dumbest thing to happen to Magic since Fallen Empires.

Me and my pod love ‘em.

Flavor-wise, I love planeswalkers. Mechanics-wise, I hate them. Way too hard to remove, particularly if they hit the battlefield early. Though hopefully this helps a bit:

Even better:

Nice! Between that and Questing Beast, I think WotC knows that low cost Planeswalkers need some hate.

Let me tell you about the time my son and I battled with literally hundreds of oozes and zombies. This was 10 minutes ago.

So, it starts off poorly for me, with him getting to Ultimate a flavor of Liliana that gives him an emblem that reads “gain X zombie tokens on your end step, where X is the number of zombies you control plus two” or something. So he had a few on the table already, and gained four or so zombies. Not great.

Meanwhile, I have a few Biogenic Oozes and other oozes, and a decent army built up to try and overwhelm him. I drew Vigor (my guys don’t take damage, but gain that many counters instead) and decide to put down a Vedalkin Orrery so I can play anything at instant speed, and I attack. He double blocks with most of his zombies, and I flash out Vigor and my guys only grow in power while he loses several zombies.

Then he drops Endless Ranks of the Dead where on his upkeep, he gains half again as many zombies as he controls. This coupled with the Emblem is going to get out of hand, fast.

However! Then I draw and play Nyxbloom Ancient, all my stuff is worth triple mana! I use all the mana I can to make three oozes with the Biogenic Ooze, then tap my Gaea’s Cradle for like 30+ mana and make even more oozes - none of my guys take damage and only get stronger, and I have more zombies than he does now!

Then he plays Coat of Arms, so all creatures are +1/+1 for each other creature that shares a type with them. My oozes and his zombies are individually so large it only takes one to get through and kill someone.

A few turns go by, and at one point I tapped the cradle for almost 300 mana, but it wasn’t enough, he eventually overwhelmed with over 260 zombies, and I only had 225 or so blockers on the board.

It was an absolutely nuts game, and we loved every minute of it. Here are some shots from the game - I stopped recording +1/+1 counters very early in, each Ooze was really about 80/80 or so at this point due to the Coat of Arms, so it wasn’t necessary. I think if this happened in a game of Arena or MtGO it would have crashed it.

That’s… epic. I enjoy paper magic, but I don’t envy you both having to keep track of the board state during that insanity.

The Magic community does occasionally step up and support inclusion. Still tons of work to do, though.

I haven’t play MTG in 21 or 22 years.

But I was fascinated by this lengthy WaPo article and the authors description of some of the players as heroes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/07/29/after-nearly-30-years-game-magic-gathering-is-bigger-than-ever-best-players-may-also-be-teaching-us-about-heroism/?arc404=true

Fucking hell.

Standard

Wilderness Reclamation is banned.

Growth Spiral is banned.

Teferi, Time Raveler is banned.

Cauldron Familiar is banned.

Historic

Wilderness Reclamation is suspended.

Teferi, Time Raveler is suspended.

Brawl

Teferi, Time Raveler is banned.

Hopefully they’ve learned a lesson here.

Also, those few left playing Pioneer, WotC just dropped a bomb on it.

Pioneer

Inverter of Truth is banned.

Kethis, the Hidden Hand is banned.

Walking Ballista is banned.

Underworld Breach is banned.

To be clear, “those few left playing Pioneer” is why WotC dropped a bomb on the format. The playerbase had abandoned the format, to the point where MTGO events weren’t firing, because it was dominated solely by efficient combo decks.

Hahahaha. They never learn. It goes in cycles. Nerfs/bannings, then some underpowered sets where everyone complains that nothing interesting is happening, the power level creeps back up, repeat.

You’d hope that with all the digital tools and data they have, they can avoid format-breaking stuff like the current cat-oven sac decks. I guess they’re always going to want to touch that stove, though.

“Constructed has been shit for decades, don’t bother”?

Way ahead of you!

Ramp’s gonna need to pack some enchantment removal, I think.

The thing I like about that card is… everything.

The new modal lands/spells look like an interesting new design space. I’m not quite clear on how they work when cast from somewhere other than the hand (like what happens when they’re milled to graveyard and then revived from there), but I assume updated rulings are coming.

Hopefully there’s nothing too broken in there, because I don’t see the downside of including them in decks considering that the worst thing is you get an untapped land. And the dual lands basically help relieve color screw.

My guess is if you are talking about something like Yawgmoth’s Will to play cards from your graveyard, you decide just as though they were in your hand how you want to play them. If you are told to “play an instant” from your graveyard, that’s pretty cut-n-dry: you can’t play the land side of the instant spell. If a card reads “return a land to your hand” you can probably put the modal card into your hand and then later play it however you want. If I had to guess.