Magic The Gathering

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

Chances are for almost every degenerate plan you might

Anyone that plays degenerate strats really isn't going to play budget for long anyways; degenerate combos don't really engage with the game on a social level, a political level, a mechanical level, or a flavor level. The only enjoyment that something vis-a-vis Thoracle-Consultation brings... is winning. And those types will either proxy everything (and lo, it is revealed that metagaming commander makes it a fucking boring format), or they'll splurge a few mortgage payments to get duals for their strat.

There are some casual-5C: Allies, Party, non-Jodah legends. I find that the budget tapped strats work just fine in them, provided you aren't playing against someone pubstomping ~$100-150 decks with a $1100 kit. So I suppose, yes, you'd avoid most gamestore groups, but you aught to be doing that anyways. A store in which Chromatic Lantern is unplayable is one in which you're going to see people chimping out when they lose.

the Guild ones barely pass muster in my Jund Landfall deck because each one you play increases the chances of a really awkward opening hand.

The tradeoff is that they let you re-play MDFCs and they're effectively card advantage, so long as no-one in the group packs Blood Moon, Back to Basics, or land destruction.
I personally find them to be easy auto-includes as a result, but I also don't play in a meta that needs to tempo out turns 2-3.

If I was making a "tuned" 3c, I would probably cut them unless it was reanimator / discard / landfall etc whereby the bounce to hand has a more overt use beyond just MDFCs et al. Tuned here meaning shocks, triome, slowlands, checklands, etc. for the 3 color pairs.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

The tradeoff is that they let you re-play MDFCs and they're effectively card advantage

The problem is the front side of most MDFCs are not that good.

Recovery, Glasspool and Valakut Awakening are the only 3 that I think are good as spells on their own.

About half the rest are "Eh sure I guess that is okay"

and all the others are outright junk, like I don't think I would be happy casting Zof Consumption unless my Lifegain deck has Lich's Mastery or Vito on the field.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

Recovery, Glasspool and Valakut Awakening are the only 3 that I think are good as spells on their own.

I think the mythic suite (even if that is weighted towards U/B), inversion, mauling, and rebirth are good on their own, and the rest do depend on the deck. Inversion and Mauling I honestly build around the expectation of playing as a tapland and bouncing mid-game, admittedly.

The creature ones are good to have in a deck that has Beast-Whisperer payoffs for playing creatures, Stampede isn't a great overrun but it does work in go-wide, and Kazuul's Fury is great in go-tall strategies to fuck one guy in particular. I also personally like Spikefield Hazard in spells-matter decks, since it's easy to turn into advantage from a 'whenever you cast' trigger. But yeah, there are plenty that are fairly shit. It's more that I personally find them a boon to the bouncelands. I also tend to always run the 1-mana cyclers, for similar reasons.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

I think the mythic suite (even if that is weighted towards U/B)

White and Green are okay

Red..is an acceptable Removal spell sort of

The Black one is really dependent on your deck, like if you are in aristocrats and have a 3, 2 and 1 target that are all good reanimation effects and are just casting it for 3BBB but once you get to 7+ you are just kind of casting a..lackluster breach the multiverse or might as well go all in at 9 CMC and cast a Rise of the Dark Realms.

I think the Blue one is kind of really..bad at what it is meant to do, You are casting it for Card Draw but if you really need card Draw that badly chances are your hand is too small to really get you much of anything from it.

mauling

I do not like Hagra Mauling at all, Threat Diversity is at the point where a Removal Spell that isn't Swords to Plowshares and only targets one Permanent type is just unplayable..and I am not huge on Swords to Plowshares.

Inversion

I presume you mean Silundi Vision, This one I think is a good C card, I run it in My Mono-Blue deck (and a Particular Deck that Runs more MDFCs than I normally would because of the deck theme)

But yeah, there are plenty that are fairly shit. It's more that I personally find them a boon to the bouncelands.

But that is kind of my point, you are playing a bunch of mediocre lands..for very thin benefits instead of just making things good.

Like do you know what is secretly the second best land in all of commander?



Cast your Commander once and it scrys on Par with the Temples, cast your commander twice it is better than the Temples and even in Mono Color decks it will probably accidently scry for cards that aren't your Commander. If your commander is a Human chances are you will scry several times incidentally..and unlike alot of the "Tribal Utility" cards..the mana you spend isn't limited to creature spells.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

But that is kind of my point, you are playing a bunch of mediocre lands..for very thin benefits instead of just making things good.

And my thinking with every point of yours is, "But it's also a land." Everything they're compared to can rot in your hand, especially the more expensive cards - but you always have a buy-out with the MDFCs. Sea Gate restoration isn't a good draw spell: it's because it's a tapped land, a bolt-yourself land, or a draw spell that it's played. Agadeem Awakening is worse than cards that you'll never be able to touch if you don't get beyond 5 mana, but I can play it as a land.

Hagra Mauling is a bad removal spell but it's also a land, which can't really be said of anything else. Ondu Inversion is an expensive planar cleansing... that can be a land, whereas planar cleansing would rot in your hand. If you don't value modality effectively at all, sure, none of those benefits matter. In CEDH, the non-mythic ones are inefficient (the ability to enter untapped bumps all of the mythics up). At any other power level, the modality is fantastic and is the entire selling point.

But then, I suppose I also ensure that each deck has 50 sources of mana. When you run 36 lands standard, dumping 4-5 of them for MDFCs isn't a big cost at all in 1-2 color decks, and even arriving there in 3 color is doable depending on the color pair / strategy.
I also still run cards like Oblation in certain decks, because I value the vesatility of either being able to hit an oponent's must-go thing, or turning a token into an instant-speed draw-2.

Path of Ancestry is also just good though, yes. I run it in every 2-color deck, and in mono-colored tribal decks. It's a great card in Burakos / Haunted One, since entering tapped is a fine price to pay for scrying once a turn guaranteed.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

And my thinking with every point of yours is, "But it's also a land." Everything they're compared to can rot in your hand, especially the more expensive cards - but you always have a buy-out with the MDFCs. Sea Gate restoration isn't a good draw spell: it's because it's a tapped land, a bolt-yourself land, or a draw spell that it's played. Agadeem Awakening is worse than cards that you'll never be able to touch if you don't get beyond 5 mana, but I can play it as a land.

Hagra Mauling is a bad removal spell but it's also a land, which can't really be said of anything else. Ondu Inversion is an expensive planar cleansing... that can be a land, whereas planar cleansing would rot in your hand. If you don't value modality effectively at all, sure, none of those benefits matter. In CEDH, the non-mythic ones are inefficient (the ability to enter untapped bumps all of the mythics up). At any other power level, the modality is fantastic and is the entire selling point.

But then, I suppose I also ensure that each deck has 50 sources of mana. When you run 36 lands standard, dumping 4-5 of them for MDFCs isn't a big cost at all in 1-2 color decks, and even arriving there in 3 color is doable depending on the color pair / strategy.
I also still run cards like Oblation in certain decks, because I value the vesatility of either being able to hit an oponent's must-go thing, or turning a token into an instant-speed draw-2.

Path of Ancestry is also just good though, yes. I run it in every 2-color deck, and in mono-colored tribal decks. It's a great card in Burakos / Haunted One, since entering tapped is a fine price to pay for scrying once a turn guaranteed.

I agree with the supposition, I just don't think they are good enough at either when you expand beyond two colors.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

I agree with the supposition, I just don't think they are good enough at either when you expand beyond two colors.

I definitely cut back on them myself when I go beyond 2, but I still have a fair amount in 3-color decks. It sortof depends - if the ramp I'm using is green search-based, I'll usually whittle down on MDFCs since I need to keep a decent basic count. If it's artifact or dork based, I'll replace basic slots with MDFCs.

In four color and above, I run effectively none, other than Glasspool mimic -- and even then, only in strategies (like Allies) where having an extra clone tucked in goes well.

Part of it is that I don't tend to play 3+ color as much anymore myself. I have a gates and a domain deck (Global Ruin is hilariously secret tech), and beyond that I mostly find myself interested in 2-color and below anymore, since there's a certain freedom in having fewer no-brainer auto-includes.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

I definitely cut back on them myself when I go beyond 2, but I still have a fair amount in 3-color decks. It sortof depends - if the ramp I'm using is green search-based, I'll usually whittle down on MDFCs since I need to keep a decent basic count. If it's artifact or dork based, I'll replace basic slots with MDFCs.

In four color and above, I run effectively none, other than Glasspool mimic -- and even then, only in strategies (like Allies) where having an extra clone tucked in goes well.

Part of it is that I don't tend to play 3+ color as much anymore myself. I have a gates and a domain deck (Global Ruin is hilariously secret tech), and beyond that I mostly find myself interested in 2-color and below anymore, since there's a certain freedom in having fewer no-brainer auto-includes.

>.> I am a retard who has a deck of every color combination.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

>.> I am a retard who has a deck of every color combination.

The problem for me is that I like making janky designs function, so I wind up having a lot of color overlap. Lucius the Eternal, for example, is a pretty dogshit worthless legendary from the Chaos WH40K deck, which interests me because it triggers the Wildstorm Surge effects every time it comes back. And so I start brewing around recursive 5-power creatures (as they also benefit from Where Giants Tread), the idea of giving my opponents creature tokens to have him haunt, and I'll get to work brewing.

But then I'll realize I already have like 4 Rakdos decks, two of which are hellbent/madness decks, and start thinking about how to mix them. Then WOTC releases 88 new legendaries, like Alistair, a dogshit legend from WHO that actually makes for a stellar bant soldiers commander. And the brew begins again, except I already have a bant Lagrella "trade, then steal my thing back" deck. And so it's gonna get scuttled.

Several color pairs, I have nothing for at the moment. UG is probably my least favorite pairing, but Nicanzil is finally an explore payoff in the command zone that I can't ignore. Byfar one of my favorite damn mechanics of the last decade, and it's on a draft uncommon.

 

[PonderosaPete]

>.> I am a retard who has a deck of every color combination.

If you don't have multiple Mardu and izzet decks, you're doing it wrong.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

multiple Mardu

I only fucking need One, It exists for me to summon as many Blood Avatars as I can using Vampires. (vampires got good at making lots of tokens yo)

 

[PonderosaPete]

I only fucking need One, It exists for me to summon as many Blood Avatars as I can using Vampires. (vampires got good at making lots of tokens yo)

My nigga in Extus, at least you play the most fun of Mardu decks. It always gives me a good time having to explain the backside to new players. It doesn't help I may have cast the front side twice the entire time I've owned the deck. Which is not long after stryxhaven came out.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

My nigga in Extus, at least you play the most fun of Mardu decks. It always gives me a good time having to explain the backside to new players. It doesn't help I may have cast the front side twice the entire time I've owned the deck. Which is not long after stryxhaven came out.

I will cast the front side to grab my token making vampires, if I have to...but Anointed Procession + Kalitas is hilarious when you cast Blood Avatar.

 

[Abella]

I’m not too happy about swiftspear being banned in pauper. I wasn’t too big on it but it wasn’t any more of a problem than a lot of what’s allowed on the format.

 

[Peep Plops]

If you don't have multiple Mardu and izzet decks, you're doing it wrong.

This man speaks the truth. Sometimes you just wanna make a million treasures and shit out tons of legendaries with Dihada or alternatively control the board and politic your way to victory with Queen Marchesa.

 

[Flexo]

OG Karoos required untapped but the Ravnica ones are better..and they get lumped in with the OG Karoos

Yeah the ravnica ones are way better but I never heard of those being lumped with the karoo cycle or knew you were including them. The original cycle was so bad you had to bounce a specific TYPE of land and can't bounce themselves.

Because you have 3 Guild colored Bounce Lands, that can bounce themselves and the Guild ones barely pass muster in my Jund Landfall deck because each one you play increases the chances of a really awkward opening hand.

It's almost like if you're in singleton formats you want more bounce options since drawing 4 out of 99 cards is better odds than 3 out of 99.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

It's almost like if you're in singleton formats you want more bounce options since drawing 4 out of 99 cards is better odds than 3 out of 99.

And having 4 instead of 3 increases your chances of having to Mulligan or pulling it off the top as land number 3 or 4 when you didn't want it. If I want a Karoo in my hand it is usually exactly one because usually I am using Karoos to pitch to one of the Windgrace cards and being able to bounce itself back to my hand when it etbs from the graveyard so I can do it again is the only reason the Karoos get a spot and they are options 2-4 on that train because Dakmoor Salvage returns itself to my hand without having Lord Windgrace attack or one of the various "Play lands from GY" effects.

 

[Flexo]

If I want a Karoo in my hand it is usually exactly one because usually I am using Karoos

Stop calling the Karros. Call them the guild lands. (They literally have the guild names in the title.)

 

[DOUBLE_WHEEL]

Speaking of guilds, I hate that this set takes place on ravnica. The setting was already watered down, but this moves focus of the plane further away from guilds and their mechanics/interactions to a random story that could have taken place on any more civilized plane. A murder mystery would have even fit some of those planes better, new capenna feels like it was made for this sort of story.

 

[Flexo]

A murder mystery would have even fit some of those planes better, new capenna feels like it was made for this sort of story.

They even admitted that their biggest problem in crafting new capenna was that "crime families" is largely meaningless when there's no law or government to oppose them. Otherwise they are just the governing factions.

This would have been the perfect time to fix that issue. Have Ob Nixilis be the one killed and a new organization be the one to investigate. The beginning of law on the plane.

MaRo talked about making Ixalan the setting for their "underground" set. If they wanted a detective/noir set (without a whole plane) I can't believe they didn't pick New Cappena.