I just spent most of the afternoon playing around with the new Pioneer format on Xmage, and I’m feeling the pull to go buy some cards to build a real deck. Wish it was available on Arena!
Sure seems like Pioneer is set up to eventually merge with Arena’s Historic. All they have to do is add the entirety of the Pioneer-legal sets instead of just the small selection of “old” cards currently planned. Certainly a much easier lift than doing all of Modern!
Yeah, I understand why they’re not jumping in to implement all those cards right away. It would be a lot of work for an unproven format.
But they do seem to be going full steam ahead on it, with a bunch of upcoming competitions and prize money. Hopefully it makes it’s way to Arena sooner or later.
Took 'em long enough.
Daaaaaayum. Green finally got a long-overdue nerf.
I’ve got this weekend’s Mythic Championship on in the background while I wrap Christmas presents this afternoon. Ally Warfield has been featured in the last few rounds with her BG adventures deck and it’s been a fun watch. Just barely pulled out the last round win. I’m definitely pulling for her this weekend. Nice to see a fairly new player on the scene who is doing well, if a bit overwhelmed that she’s made it this far.
New set drops on Arena on Wednesday. Can’t wait to try out some of the new cards, especially this bad boy:
I’ve got visions of some sort of unholy Cat/sacrifice deck dancing in my head.
Just signed up for my local pre-release sealed event on the way home tonight. The first one runs at 3 PM on Friday, which is a huge improvement over the midnight events of the past. Going to do a two-headed giant event on Sunday, too.
Pre-release today went great, had about 30 folks at the 3 PM, and then the 7:30 PM event was a max capacity with over 70. They needed literally every play table in the store for that one, so my friends and I had to decamp to a home to play some after-event games.
Went 3-0 with a heavy black-some white deck that basically built itself from my rares and uncommons: Heliod, Elspeth Conquers Death, Nightmare Shepherd, Gravebreaker Lamia, Pharika’s Spawn, Tymaret, Banishing Light. Only drew Heliod in one game and never did make him a creature, but that didn’t matter with everything else going on. Escape can be just a brutal game swing, especially when you get something like Pharika’s Spawn that is huge and eats one of their guys. If you get a Gravebreaker Lamia and any sort of support for it, play it…4/4 lifelink that enables your best escape creature is amazing.
New set seems pretty good. Having a lot of fun with Dimir (indestructible Thassa and her endless Gray Merchants ETB effects) and trying to get Esper working.
In between, breaking down other control decks with UW Flyers and the new Curious Obsession: Staggering Insight.
That’s awesome!
My son has been playing as well (on Arena) this weekend and he pulled out a combo with a Hydra enchantment that doubles counters every turn on enchanted creature, and put it on a guy that gets counters whenever enchantments are played. He sent me a screenshot of the guy with 100 counters on it, for some reason he hadn’t won yet.
I have a box on pre-order, but couldn’t get to the store to pick it up due to inclement weather here in the mid-west this weekend. Now it’s too late - I’ll have to wait until next weekend to get it on launch day. Ah well. If I get some good stuff I’ll post about it here.
Played in a 2-headed giant event tonight, despite winter finally coming to West Michigan. Made the trip to and from the store a bit slower than usual, that’s all. We got some solid cards and built a RG aggro deck paired with BW control, the latter with a splash of blue for Thassa (the blue god). Unfortunately one or both of us got mana-flooded in two of the three games, so our opponents basically rolled over us, but during the one game that our decks cooperated we won handily. Combining Thassa with Gary (aka Gray Merchant of Asphodel) or the Blight-Breath Catoblepas is kinda ugly, and I had two Shatter the Sky for board resets when needed. I really like the two-headed giant format, gives the event a more casual feel, and even when I lose I tend to have more fun playing since it’s a group thing.
But fortunately not Oko or Once Upon a Time pushed.
Nylea seems kind of bad, actually.
Dream Trawler and Uro are fucking all-stars, though. So far, anyway.
I heard this sentiment a few places, but I disagree. I guess it depends on the kind of decks you play though - maybe it won’t be great in Standard, but we don’t play that. Around our table, a card like this is going to be bonkers. A nearly impossible to remove enchantment that makes creatures cheaper and has built-in card advantage? Yeah, I’m cool with it.
On another (somewhat related) note, I opened my box and in addition to the above cards I had picked up as singles, I got some pretty good treats. I didn’t pull my first Mythic (the hydra) until my 13th or so pack, so I was getting a little nervous, and then I didn’t pull any other Mythics until I was down to 8 packs. It was… less than ideal, but then I ended up pulling some incredible Mythics so I can’t complain.
Mythics:
Cool Alternate Art Demi-Gods:
Some of the Rares I pulled (the ones I’m going to be putting in existing decks, eagerly):
And about $18 worth of sweet full-art lands. I personally think these look incredible. The Islands and swamps in particular.
Those lands are very, very sweet. Can’t wait for them to come to MTGA and if I had paper copies, I’d use them in all my decks!
They’re really knocking it out of the park with the art lately.
I’m a sucker for full art land, and I like the new ones from this upcoming UN set (which I believe are just pre-con decks with a few new cards made for them, and otherwise re-prints of past UN stuff? I didn’t read the link, I’m not super into the UN stuff), but I don’t love them like I did the last UN set’s full art stuff.
I think I actually like the new full art Theros lands better, and while I know there is a raging debate about how those Theros lands look like “Pokemon” I still think they look great.