notreallyamorningperson:

sarroth:

At heart I’m a Timmy. But I have a lot of Johnny tendencies as well. I just tend to like janky combos rather than the more powerful ones Spike leans towards. Here I would like to share some combos you may or may not be aware of. Feel free to suggest more fun and powerful combinations these cards…

Nit-picking for this: Your opponents cannot choose whether or not they draw the cards they get with Forced Fruition, it is forced card draw.

Good point. I reread that part, almost deleted it, then recalled what I meant but was unclear on: The opponents do get the choice, as in they can cast two spells, draw into the seven cards they need for that turn or the next, and then stop. Even if players aren’t using an opponents FF to stock their graveyard, FF doesnt make them discard as red Wheel effects do, so they can select their 7 favorites or even all of them if they draw into a Spellbook effect like Reliquary Tower. Hopefully I’ve made that clearer, but its late and my fiance wants to go to bed, so maybe not. I’ll have to recheck it in the morning. Thanks for catching that odd wording though it was definitely not how I meant to say that!

At heart I’m a Timmy. But I have a lot of Johnny tendencies as well. I just tend to like janky combos rather than the more powerful ones Spike leans towards. Here I would like to share some combos you may or may not be aware of. Feel free to suggest more fun and powerful combinations these cards work well in. Johnnies unite!

This time around, I’d like to discuss an aspect of “everyone draws” cards that could be counter-productive to you having fun. Normally, I love playing these cards. I run Rites of Flourishing and Howling Mine in two different decks, Jace Beleren is the only planeswalker I let stay in play as long as his controller is spreading the love, and my old group had a blast when Font of Mythos came down along with one or both of those last two. But this card…



It has its issues. First of all, it doesn’t help you. Second of all, it’s 7 cards instead of 1, or 2 in the case of Font of Mythos. And third, your opponent gets the choice of whether or not to draw in that they can cast their absolutely-needed-to-cast spell and just stop casting that turn, so for those who want to overwhelm their opponents with cards it may not even beas efficient as a Jace’s Archivist or Otherworld Atlas.

I’ve only seen this played twice, the second being the last time I played at my old card shop. I was running my Rafiq of the Many enchantment deck, and had this amazing recursion card in hand…



The deck is a usual Rafiq deck; make Rafiq big, swing, kill a player if they can’t answer your threat. Replenish is in the deck because it fits the enchantment theme and helps the deck overcome one of its greatest weaknesses; Wrath of God might as well be a Planar Cleansing. It’s not a reanimator-style deck, although as with many Commander decks it likes reusing its graveyard to perform well in long multiplayer games. Forced Fruition turned my deck into a reanimator deck.

Without my Reliquary Tower in play, Forced Fruition had me discarding a ton. I cast the spells I absolutely wanted to cast and I made sure to discard only enchantments. Eventually I used an Aura Shards trigger to remove Forced Fruition when I was tired of having to discard and was tired of sharing the drawing fun with my other two opponents and was ready to truly get my worth out of those cards my opponent was “forcing” on me.

The next turn it went: Replenish into at least Journey to Nowhere removing an opponent’s creature and Steel of the Godhead and Eldrazi Conscription enchanting Rafiq. I know Asceticism was either already in play or one of the enchantments recurred. I swung with with Rafiq and was able to take the opponent I thought was the scariest out of the game in one shot. All of this set up normally would have taken me 2-3 turns. I believe I ended up winning that game, although that shouldn’t be surprising given the outrageous card advantage I was given, as I was able to make use of those cards more so than my other two opponents.

Now, not every deck plays with the graveyard, so Forced Fruition won’t always have this negative result for you. Most Commander decks do, though. I very much encourage running Group Hug effects like Rites of Flourishing, Howling Mine, and Font of Mythos - in fact, I encourage any player with a White deck to consider adding Oath of Lieges. However, unless you’re a dedicated Group Hug or Chaos deck, I wouldn’t run Forced Fruition. Oh, and donating it with Zedruu, the Greathearted to the player who least needs the cards is certainly better than only your opponents drawing cards. But the way this card is usually played, it’s just really not that good; it’s probably not going to deck your opponents (after all, they can just stop casting spells until they draw into enchantment removal or kill you, and there are better effects to stop them from casting spells), it doesn’t give you any of those cards, and it actively hurts your game plan if anyone can play a “no maximum hand size” effect or use the graveyard resources you’re giving them. So unless you’re looking for a card that might help your opponents set up some Crazy Stupid Combos, either don’t run Forced Fruition or consider some graveyard hate to go along with it.

tabakrules:

Time and perspective are wonderful things.

I don’t know if I want to read this… I’ve had enough of “Magic is going to die from this!” arguments, and reading them when I know they’re wrong is even worse.

I do hope this might help give people making those arguments a little perspective, though.

I often think about how and why we build decks, particularly in regards to variety, as that is what drew me to Commander.  I see a lot of deck lists, from listening to Commandercast and Off Color Cast, watching CMDRDecks and TopAndGo Productions, and from reading Sheldon Mennery’s Embracing the Chaos, Dear Azami, the Bennie Smith Commander-centric articles, some Gathering Magic and Commandercast articles, and occasionally perusing tappedout.net. That’s a lot of decks, and I see lots of similarities rather than the many personal touches that are essential to the format for me.  How we build our decks affects how we will later play our games. If games are getting stale, one of the ways to drastically change that is to change how we build our decks.

If I wasn’t careful, all of my decks could have been very similar, and I think that would have decreased the time it took before I started to get bored with the decks. So far I haven’t gotten bored with a deck for more than a few weeks even though I have only three decks, and because I rotate when I play with each of them, I’m usually itching to play with the deck I was recently bored with by the time it comes up in rotating a few weeks later. I believe this is because I’m quite open with what decks I’m willing to try, and I was able to build my decks to be different enough from each other so as not to get bored playing with them.  Having more varied decks can improve the enjoyment of games for both yourself and your opponents, and also has the strategic advantage of making it more difficult for opponents to metagame against you based on your commander, colors, or playstyle.  There are those three axes and others with which a player can tweak a deck to be more original (and, by extension, likely more interesting to play and play against), sometimes even when compared to another deck running the same commander. So for this post I would like to attempt a fairly comprehensive list of those axes along with some examples to promote diversity in decks and thus games as well.

I would like to warn any potential reader who subscribes to the “tl;dr” concept on the internet. When I say this is fairly comprehensive, I mean it probably should have been a 3-parter. I don’t expect you to read it all, though, unless you really like my writing for some reason or are quite bored because you’re donating whole blood or plasma for two hours or something. Don’t be discouraged, though, as I use plenty of bolded and italicized headings to make it pretty easy to skim through and only read in-depth the stuff that already interests you. I understand that as a comprehensive list of ways to diversify deckbuilding, not every switch or knob for tuning how we build decks will appeal to every player, so I would rather you skim to headings that intrigue you and read those than give up reading entirely. It’s relatively long because I tried, where I could, to provide examples of sweet legends and other cards decks could be built around for the categories to give players who are completely knew to thinking about that particular deckbuilding topic an idea to start from in either building with those cards or getting an idea of what types of cards to be looking for. I hope this gives you some ideas to go brew with!

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dougbeyermtg:

What are the 5 main planeswalkers’ favorite sandwiches?

—whyther

Ajani likes spit-roasted Nayan jungle birds, with the feathers, on crispy palm-seed flatbread. He usually unintentionally seasons the sandwich with his own bitter tears, spilled over the loss of his brother Jazal, and…

mtgthings:

• Legend Rule now looks at each player individually. You can now have two Geists of Saint trafts on opposite ends of the board.
• Same applies to Planeswalker uniqueness rules. (You can no longer kill off an opponent’s JTMS with a Jace Beleren)
• Sideboard is now UP TO 15 cards….

You missed the land drops being counted now so players can’t do shenanigans that I didn’t even know worked.

I am also mixed on the legend / planeswalker rule. On the one hand, Clone effects never should have caused the Cloned legend to die. It doesn’t make sense at all, even if it did serve as good gameplay. With this new change though you can still do that to your own legend, so that issue wasn’t fixed. The interaction possibilities with essentially unPassifing a Rafiq by casting another one or Cloning it will take a lot of getting used to. Mostly I’m glad for legendary lands, because players rarely announce their land plays and often stack lands, so often in casual play there were opportunities to be surprised turns later that your opponent had a Serras Sanctum in play, in a public zone, but was hidden and now you both lose yours because too much has happened for takesies backsies.

In Commander I like that I don’t have to worry about playing against a deck with the same Commander, but I would have been fine with the Rules Committee or house rules specifically for Commander without needing changed for the whole of Magic. It certainly needs some flavor justification for true Vorthoses but is not unmanageable.

I will withhold judgment until major tournaments and my own play can tease out how it feels.

I am very glad for the indestructible being a keyword. It’s about time, since many players thought Ovinize could remove indestructibility granted by, say, Eldrazi Monument when it couldnt, and now Ovinize will work that way as it intuitively should. Unfortunately unblockable is not a keyword now, but at least they will stop using the unblockable term that sounded like a keyword as indestructible did.

Obviously I don’t mind the land rule. At first glance it seems to make the game work how I always thought it worked.

Obviously, when a set has legends spoiled, Commander players tune in extra hard to spoilers. Return to Ravnica block has given us a whopping 20 new legends to play with, half in the enemy color pairs that still have few choices in terms of commanders. Since last month I wrote of the mechanics of Return to Ravnica, this time I would like to write on the legends. Rather than ranking them worst to best as I did with the mechanics, I would prefer to score them individually on how much new deck design space they open up with their abilities and/or flavor.  I prefer this system for the legends, as I play casual Commander, and thus it’s more important to me that legends encourage deck building diversity than that they are powerful. Thus the scores do not necessarily reflect on the cards’ power level, so I may rate highly a legend that is really weak and rate poorly the most powerful legend in the block if that weak legend leads to a new type of deck whereas the powerful legend may only encourage the same exact decks types already existing.

I will rate each legend on a 5-point Likert-type scale from 1 meaning “So similar to other cards in its colors that it wasn’t worth printing” to 3 meaning “Just enough exploration of new space that cool things may be done with it” and 5 meaning “This card begs you to do something different from the other legends in its colors, and baring a good stuff deck, that’s just what you’ll probably do with it.” Obviously, since we’re looking for legends that encourage diversity in deckbuilding, a 5 would be a better rating than a 1. I’m just going to cover each legend in alphabetical order by guild name to make things easy. Click through the jump to see Azorius’s legends.

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dougbeyermtg:

Several of you have have asked:

“Why the art change to the new slivers?”

In case you hadn’t heard, today the official Magic Twitter account @wizards_magic tweeted pictures of some new sliver cards from the upcoming set Magic 2014. Slivers have evolved a bit since you last saw them.

I’m not sure if I’m ready for how drastically slivers have changed, but some change is certainly needed given that the flavor is that they evolve and their previous forms have been pretty much exhausted artwisr. I just wish we weren’t st bipedal slivers just yet.

As for slivers granting abilities only to your slivers like New lords and not like old lords and old slivers, this makes sense flavorfully too as slivers could recognize when their species is being pitted against each other and could form a pack mentality for their mental transference of mutations. I still prefer slivers the old way, even though the new ones are easier on the gamestate, but I can’t hate R&Sd decision as it is the right call moving forward and, as I said, can be justified with the tribe.

Happy Dragon’s Maze release date!

Given the set’s release, for this week and the next post two weeks from now, I would like to look back on this fantastic block and examine some of the aspects it’s given us: Specifically, the cool new mechanics (there are a lot more than usual this block) and the new legendary creatures (again, a lot more than usual this block). The latter seems obvious for me, as Commander is my favorite format, but the former was particularly fun to write about, as I am a huge fan of Magic’s flavor (it was the art and flavor text that got me into the game) and enjoy writing about the flavor to share this love with others.

So earlier this year, a Q&A on Mark Rosewater’s BlogAtog really caught my attention because it was a flavor question I had been too busy to consider before. One of his early “Questions of the week” was “Which guild mechanically feels the most like its flavor? Which guild feels the least?” This is a great Vorthos question, because the mechanics are often used to represent the flavor of a set’s plane, and this is even more important to a plane like Ravnica that has so many different guilds with their own distinct flavor. I answered MaRo’s question then, but the reply function on Tumblr only allows for so long of an answer, and this question really deserved more.

So I began writing an in-depth response during some scraps of free time in February, thinking it would be a quick afternoon of writing and I would post it as soon as I had finished. But it wasn’t just one afternoon of writing, as I started contemplating my gut reactions to MaRo’s question more and more in-depth, and I began questioning my initial responses. So I was using some free time in March, and before I knew it the writing bug had hit me again. As I said last week, I will be posting more often this summer as I use some of the free time of my break from school to write more about Magic and feed that inkling I got from crafting this post. Posting this on the release date for Dragon’s Maze seemed appropriate given that the release is a week after school gloriously gave me a break, and the re-experiecing of these new mechanics in even newer ways gave this topic some relevance it wouldn’t have had had I posted it in March, a month or two after MaRo’s Q&A.

I’ve spent a lot of time on this list, and I hope it shows in not only my order but my explanations. I feel pretty good about my choices, but in the end they are my choices, my opinion, so if you disagree (and actually have a good reason to back up your differing opinion and aren’t just griping) - I’d love to hear it.

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tabakrules:

Whoa, my tumblr phased in with a new look. Spiffy! Why did it phase out? These things happen. Who can predict anything in this unsure universe? Will i phase out again? I can’t say. Probably not. At any rate, it’s here for now. Or maybe… it never really left. Suffice it to say, if you had any abilities that triggered whenever a blog left the battlefield, they didn’t trigger.

Very glad to see Mr. MtG Rules back, and with such wit too. Follow him, but be careful not to scare him off! : )