I know, I know, the bar of competition ain’t that high.
But I’m rank 10 in Eternal Sealed League, y’all. This is fun.
(Like, 10th overall.)
I’m in that league, but I’ll never get close to top 10. I’m happy when I avoid dropping into triple digits.
Also, there’s a thread for Eternal over there.
I actually thought he was talking about Arena and I was very confused, lol
Hah! I was trying to find an Eternal thread but failed. Thanks, and sorry for the spam over here.
In my defense my goodness that thread is old and dead, heh.
Necro that bad boy! Resurrection of the dead threads is a minor hobby of mine, I encourage it!
Back in actual MTG news, today the World ChampionshipsGrand Finals start and 72% of the field is running Omnath in Standard. I’m beginning to wonder if WOTC development really keeps making the same mistakes over and over, printing insanely overpowered cards that make Standard a joke and waiting weeks/months to ban them, or if they’re doing it on purpose. It’s been long enough since Oko that the “when we were testing other cards were this crazy too” excuse doesn’t wash. There’s no excuse for not banning an obviously format-warping card, either, given how obvious the problems have been. All I can think at this point is that the development team just doesn’t care about format balance (despite saying they do) and are taking a “any buzz about our product is good, no matter how negative it is, so let’s make sure people keep talking” approach.
I don’t know. I got tired of playing Uro format too, but I’ve been wondering about the other side of it. The core issue seems to be that they’re experimenting with printing higher powered cards in Standard. They want to eat some of the eternal formats’ lunch, which I’m fine with as a player. But it puts them in an awkward situation where, if they balance with bannings, they have to kill the flashiest cards, make answer cards in already-designed future sets useless, and generally screw up their experiment.
Maybe it’s a fundamental issue with a digital card game that you can’t balance with card tweaks. An imbalanced format gets figured out instantly and the only way to balance it is to axe cards that a lot of people want to play with.
I’ve had the event coverage on in the background the last couple of days, and it’s been fairly interesting, even though I have no interest in playing the formats myself. The top 8 is set, and it includes 5 Omnath Adventures decks. Pretty much exactly what you’d expect, given the decklists submitted for the field overall.
There’s also two of the Gruul adventures decks, including one piloted by Emmy Handy, her first top 8 in a major event. She and her teammate Autumn also played an Omnath deck in the Historic portion, and between the two of them had some of the craziest turns I’ve seen outside of EDH. Omnath, Lotus Cobras, card draw, Genesis Ultimatum, all sort of ridiculous ramp stuff happening.
And Seth Manfield made his Dimir Rogues stand up, though I honestly don’t know how, since he just loses any time one of those adventures decks manages to stick a Lucky Clover. Good die rolls to avoid going second, I suppose.
Regardless of which deck manages to pull out the finals win, I think it’s pretty clear that Omnath is running rampant in the field and I fully expect Wizards to do something about it soon.
I know at least half of those words!
Boom. Omnath, Lucky Clover and Escape are gone. They really nuked that deck from orbit.
Wow…they nuked a lot of decks from orbit.
The problem is now I fear Control decks will rein supreme, which won’t be much fun either. Honestly I just don’t like Standard or related (Brawl) formats; not as many answers or built in balance mechanisms. Limited is awesome though, probably still the bets way to play Magic outside of a casual group of friends.
The Omnath ban was a no-brainer, and I’m surprised but pleased to see Lucky Clover gone as well. I didn’t think they’d have the guts to do it. I don’t think Escape to the Wilds was really necessary, but I’m not going to complain about anything that nerfs ramp right now.
As for control becoming ascendant, there will be some of that, but there’s going to be a lot of aggro too. With Omnath and its landfall lifegain gone, there’s gonna be a lot of Embercleaves around. Whatever control decks come together will have to prove they can beat mono red and Gruul aggro consistently.
WTF is the vaunted Play Design team doing?!
Well played!
I think it’s pretty clear that the design team has been given the direction that Standard needs more splashy, powerful cards without also giving them more time/resources to test. The results are predictable.
Sad thing is, they don’t need splashy powerful cards to sell the game. People love themed sets and buy them just like they do overpowered cards. Do some more Innistrads with cool vampires and werewolves, or fairy tales like Eldraine (the theme, not the power level), and you’re still gonna sell cards. Especially if you encourage streamers to do stuff around the theme, instead of just trying to break the format.
The name of my next band: General Magic and the Gathering.
You should be able to open for Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes.