andrew

I likewise played a TON of Mono U Flash when that deck was relevant and loved every minute of it. Also will be trying hard to make it work with similar reservations sadly. I just love that tempo style in a single color.

They love to cite how great these sets are for attracting new players but do they really become players? This is rhetorical at this point as we’ll never see the data but what is the actual player retention rate from these sets? If they knew this and it was good they would show it.

I realize the goal is to now convert them to a more accessible format like Standard but my gut says most of these buyers are one time buyers and are not actually growing the game long term. As long as they keep cranking out sets then this will be fine financially for a while but I can’t understand the long term thinking here, particularly as this pretty much forces enfranchised players to now cross the Rubicon. This is a fundamental shift/fork in the game.

So unbelievably cool that Kai Budde is in the top 8! Not only for the insane career and being back 25 years since he won Worlds in ‘99, but particularly given his very advanced cancer diagnosis not long ago. So happy for him and will definitely be rooting for him today.

Wow I never would have expected this change, or that this was even something WotC was discussing. This feels like a massive change and really hurts defending players.

Their justification is essentially:

[Blocking order is] somewhat unintuitive, adds a fair bit of rules baggage, and losing it means more interesting decisions and less double-dipping if you know the tricks.

Not sure how it’s any more or less intuitive or how it adds any more rules baggage than the new rule creates, they just hand wave these things and gloss over the reasoning. Curious how it develops but off the cuff not really happy about this change.

For a second I thought Phyrexian Dreadnought was a Phyrexian Construct before I remembered it's on the reserved list. Plus there's 0 chance they'd reprint that anyway!

My vote too is for Walker. Really cool classic card and another 0cmc for the bigger formats.

This is awesome! Love how ambitious it is.

I didn’t click through the discord server yet but how many players are the current teams looking for?

Hilarious that Nadu, designed for Commander but released in a Modern set, is now banned in Commander too (after it's collateral damage in Modern).

Kinda do not agree with the fast mana bans :-/ I understand their reasoning but I haven't thought they were banworthy at all.

This is so cool, thanks for sharing!

Do you have any more details on it? Was it just printed by another attendee (presumably Brothers Wilmot 😜) or is this an official wotc reprint?

Wow this feels like a pretty significant color pie break. I realize they’ve printed black enchantment removal a few times before (Feed the Swarm) but this is an instant and seems like they’re just shifting to giving this to black now. Seems like kind of a shame to me.

Wow that is some freaky looking artwork

Altanak, the Thrice Called

You’re absolutely right and Mark’s straw man arguments like that are pretty frustrating. I have the same meaning as you when I say stop designing for Commander as I’m sure the vast majority of others do. I don’t know if he’s being intentionally dishonest or if he just doesn’t get it still but it is 100% stop printing overstatted Commander cards that warp eternal formats and these ability soup engines-and-payoffs.

Re: playtesting I wish they would come out and say what their playtesting process is. How many people are in each group, how long do cards get active testing, etc. Barring those details I kind of disagree that they can’t do more and while they definitely cannot catch everything, their process should be sufficient to not let a Nadu get by.