General [TLA/TLE] [UB] Avatar: The Last Airbender
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I honestly hope never? I stopped watching before the end of the first season and from what I've heard about the other three seasons (from a friend whose opinions on media I trust) that was a good decision.
Hm, I haven't watched Korra yet, tbh, but I like the idea of getting another set with firebending, earthbending and especially airbending.
Speaking of which.
Could this card be better than one would think? It is not exactly white Repulse but kinda close to it in low curving environments. Hitting artifact/enchantments/planeswalkers is nice. White is better suited for tempo spells like this anyway. And the cheap replay cost makes it easy to use for blink stuff too.
In a cube where Repulse is good, could this be at least as good too?
Speaking of which.
Could this card be better than one would think? It is not exactly white Repulse but kinda close to it in low curving environments. Hitting artifact/enchantments/planeswalkers is nice. White is better suited for tempo spells like this anyway. And the cheap replay cost makes it easy to use for blink stuff too.
In a cube where Repulse is good, could this be at least as good too?
I enjoyed Legend of Korra quite a lot. It's undeniably a bit of a different vibe to The Last Airbender, but I don't think necessarily in a bad way. It's more rooted in real-world issues and interpersonal relationships than TLA, for better and for worse. It's not perfect by any means; in particular it fell into the trap of ramping up the stakes massively in season two then having to backpedal in season three because there's nowhere else to go. But if you enjoyed TLA I think Korra is absolutely worth your time.
I reckon it'll happen, assuming TLA does well. There's certainly enough source material. How about a pro bending team mechanic like Party where you get an earthbender, firebender and waterbender together?!
I don't see why not. Even in formats with higher MV threats, it can be a tempo play early on, a way to reuse your own ETBs, and a way to push through damage in the lategame. It's flexible, hitting anything and particularly screwing over anything with an
in its cost. Being a Lesson is also solid upside if you have a decent density of Learn cards. It's not quite cantripping Swords to Plowshares but it's not a million miles away.50/50 on this one. On one hand, WOTC is already in bed with Nickelodeon with ATLA / TMNT as products. I don't think TLA will put up LTR / FIN numbers, but I can see it being successful to the point where they'd be talking about a follow up with Legend of Korra.
This is one of the reasons why I'd hesitate with a Korra set is because they'd be locked into repeating all the bending mechanics and maybe even allies, making LoK like +80% similar to TLA from a mechanical perspective. Korra is also nowhere near as popular / beloved as TLA. My theory with FIN / Avatar is that they'll probably at least have future commander decks / secret lairs. I think it's very likely they'll do additional FIN commander decks, some sort of combination of 4 / 8 / 9 / 12 / 13 / 15.
I enjoyed Korra, but definitely had its ups and downs and nowhere near as consistent and well written as Airbender. A good chunk of the negative parts of Korra had to do with it constantly being in production hell. TLA had the benefit of having world / story fleshed out way in advance. Nickelodeon didn't have a lot of confidence in Korra so they only ordered 1 season to start, ordered season 2 a little after season 1 launched, and then ordered seasons 3 and 4 after season 2. Seasons 1 and 2 were written as completely silo'd storylines, not to mention the seasons were roughly half as long as TLA seasons. Seasons 3 and 4 being ordered at once gave them more room to play with a longer storyline.
Korra's big weakness compared to TLA was its cast. Can't blame production hell on how badly they wrote half the characters.
The thing is that I felt like Korra handled both of those poorly - the character work didn't do enough for me to make the interpersonal relationships worth caring about, and the way the writers handled the Equalists left a bad taste in my mouth (for reasons that I don't particularly want to get into).
I agree that Korra's worth looking at if you liked TLA - different people look for different things in the media they consume, after all!
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If you're not running stuff that cares about the card being a Lesson, I feel like you're going to have to massage your white section a bit to make it feel good. Like, I have the gut feeling that White Repulse would feel mediocre in a cube where normal Repulse is good just because of how the color pie shakes out.
You keep on going. It never ends with you guys.
No I have not watched that show.
I am not the villain. I am the one standing up for justice and working against the corporate regime that I first hand know how works and you guys for some reason blindly accept.
Mechanic reuse does happen with plane revisits in general, though admittedly maybe not as high as 80%. I could see amass (Humans) being used in a Korra set, or the Party variant I mentioned before.
Yeah for sure, there were whole episodes I would've skipped in retrospect. In the end it was a show aimed at early-to-mid teens and featured the corresponding amount of teen angst and simplistic romance subplots, which probably would've resonated with me more if I wasn't in my thirties :') but I did enjoy the overarching themes that the show tackled, and ultimately it scratched that itch for more Avatar universe content.
Yeah, this thread overall is a good demonstration of that!
As in, it's not as good as the "normal" white removal suite of Path, Swords and O-Ring that people are used to seeing? Honestly we got spoiled by those, a lot of white removal these days looks like Elspeth's Smite or the fixed O-Ring. I could definitely see an environment where both Repulse and Airbending Lesson are good picks.
Interesting. It's not like I put a ton of thought into this, but my instinct was, that a straight up colorshifted Repulse in white would be better than the blue original.
The main reason I am not cubing Repulse is that I view it more as a tempo card and not really as much as a control tool. That assumption already could be off, of course. But white is a much more aggressive color (in my cube and most), it has the most efficient cheap threats and is probably the best color to pair with blue for a traditional tempo play style.
What my gut tells me is that the way you'd make Repulse good in a format is just putting a bunch of instant-speed three drops in blue in there to make "hold up three mana until villain's end step" a supported play pattern, which is something that's pretty easy to do at varying power levels. White, on the other hand, would need some massaging for White Repulse to feel as natural, and you'd also run into the whole "white has better options for both removal and repetition" thing.
Had a great time at the pre-release yesterday. Got extremely lucky with pulls, and that's not considering the extra black-theme booster that I decided not to use since it'd give me an additional unfair advantage (besides my charm and good looks, that is). My top Cube card from the main set was my promo (Obsessive Pursuit) which is neat because now I can remember this night better in the future but it also unfortunately means I have to run a foil, and it's already started to curl. I think the comparisons I've seen made to Proft's Eidetic Memory are fair, but the real benefit is the extra cards and extra tokens. The +1/+1 counters can get out of control, but the value engine works on so many different fronts that it feels worthwhile across many board states.
I also got a Phoenix Fleet Airship, which I only drew once, but it was for the final game in round 3 to see who would end up as one of the 3 3-0s. I waited until I had enough mana to sac a clue (from my Obsessive Pursuit, of course) and cast in in the same turn, which then negated any hope my opponent had of catching back up. It felt cool and ominous to play and even play against, and my opponent was right to marvel at it. If I were to lose in the final round, I'd feel better knowing I got beat by a sweet mythic that plays in a novel way.
Earthbending was fun, and it felt great to sacrifice lands to get them back, or to stack counters on an already-beefed land. The Boulder, Ready to Rumble was an MVP in this way. The Legend of Kyoshi was a massive bomb too, but that's to be expected, and I don't think it's resilient enough for consideration in my kind of Cube environment.
However, Dai Li Indoctrination absolutely was. Having two of those and two Corrupt Court Officials made me a menace for sealed, and made up for my relatively small volume of removal. It feels like the retail format in general may end up being a little removal-light, so having so many discard spells was really helpful. I love the modal discard spell, and was wrong to not include it in my first draft of Cube inclusions.
Great set for retail limited already. People were jazzed to be playing with the cards, and individual designs were quite fun. Feels like a step above a core set, just above LotR in terms of complexity. This isn't Duskmourn, but it's more dynamic than a Bloomburrow, that's for sure. Excited to get my reps in with this and start grinding sealed RCQs.
I've made some changes to my Cube from the initial testing list for Avatar based on the last week of plotting and the performance of cards last night, namely the unfortunate realization that Unlucky Cabbage Merchant tucks himself on the bottom of his library. I wanted to chain food tokens into basics, but you can generally only do it once unless you airbend the guy away in response or something. I sacrificed him to June, Bounty Hunter more than once, who was also quite good and fun to play with (but sadly not quite enough for me to put into consideration for Cube). I feel dumb for not reading the Cabbage Merchant all the way through, and go back to my initial stance that Spider-Ham, Peter Porker is probably the better card for my environment. But I decided to take this chance to instead try out Bumi's Feast Lecture in that slot.
Cool set. People love Avatar, and it made me feel old hearing everyone gush about their origin stories with the franchise. I should finally watch season 3 one of these days, I liked Korra well enough.
I also got a Phoenix Fleet Airship, which I only drew once, but it was for the final game in round 3 to see who would end up as one of the 3 3-0s. I waited until I had enough mana to sac a clue (from my Obsessive Pursuit, of course) and cast in in the same turn, which then negated any hope my opponent had of catching back up. It felt cool and ominous to play and even play against, and my opponent was right to marvel at it. If I were to lose in the final round, I'd feel better knowing I got beat by a sweet mythic that plays in a novel way.
Earthbending was fun, and it felt great to sacrifice lands to get them back, or to stack counters on an already-beefed land. The Boulder, Ready to Rumble was an MVP in this way. The Legend of Kyoshi was a massive bomb too, but that's to be expected, and I don't think it's resilient enough for consideration in my kind of Cube environment.
However, Dai Li Indoctrination absolutely was. Having two of those and two Corrupt Court Officials made me a menace for sealed, and made up for my relatively small volume of removal. It feels like the retail format in general may end up being a little removal-light, so having so many discard spells was really helpful. I love the modal discard spell, and was wrong to not include it in my first draft of Cube inclusions.
Great set for retail limited already. People were jazzed to be playing with the cards, and individual designs were quite fun. Feels like a step above a core set, just above LotR in terms of complexity. This isn't Duskmourn, but it's more dynamic than a Bloomburrow, that's for sure. Excited to get my reps in with this and start grinding sealed RCQs.
I've made some changes to my Cube from the initial testing list for Avatar based on the last week of plotting and the performance of cards last night, namely the unfortunate realization that Unlucky Cabbage Merchant tucks himself on the bottom of his library. I wanted to chain food tokens into basics, but you can generally only do it once unless you airbend the guy away in response or something. I sacrificed him to June, Bounty Hunter more than once, who was also quite good and fun to play with (but sadly not quite enough for me to put into consideration for Cube). I feel dumb for not reading the Cabbage Merchant all the way through, and go back to my initial stance that Spider-Ham, Peter Porker is probably the better card for my environment. But I decided to take this chance to instead try out Bumi's Feast Lecture in that slot.
Cool set. People love Avatar, and it made me feel old hearing everyone gush about their origin stories with the franchise. I should finally watch season 3 one of these days, I liked Korra well enough.
Huh. I also misread him and didn't realize that he effectively swaps himself with a land. That's neat and has potential, though it definitely powers it down in a "normal" format.