Sets [EMA] Eternal Masters Spoilers Thread

sigh

sigh

Eric Chan said:
Speaking of assumptions. Who out there's saying Modern Masters 2 is "obviously cool and widely appreciated"? The most I've ever heard are that it's "okay", "fine", and "has some redeeming qualities". It's also not very deep when it comes to drafting, and has a lot less replay value than you'd expect for a set that costs $30 a pop to try. Are there actually folks out there who are raving about its supposed virtues?


If you want to talk about assumptions, here's another one. You're making the assumption that opened product is worth the same as sealed product, based on some dollar amounts from vendor price lists. What your assumption overlooks is the fact that bulk rares are essentially non-liquid - good luck getting anyone to give you a quarter for that Inexorable Tide. What's more, EV is really only applicable when you open large numbers of boxes; otherwise, individual pack EV and even box EV is highly variable, and more akin to playing the lottery. Sure, you might open that foil Tarmogoyf to make back your money and then some; but chances are, that outcome's not in the cards for you. So, who are these casual players cracking reams and reams of Modern Masters 2 product, leaving draft value that's just "gravy" on the table?

If your argument is simply that the set increases supply for dealers opening case after case, thereby lowering the barrier to entry into Modern, you'll get no argument from me. But let's not go overboard and deliver praise where it isn't due. Aside from meeting that goal - a very modest one, by all standards - the set was merely adequate at best, and a major disappointment at worst, especially after how well the first Modern Masters played.
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Fair enough, everyone makes assumptions.

Me, and everyone else that I've interacted with has liked it quite a bit. And I tend to over review things anyway, cuz it keeps me happier, ya know?

My assumption is only from MTGGoldfish, where he Ebays them back to arbitrary people, at a loss from expected price. Did you read the article? He was working on the EV of a box to a person if they were to try to resell it themselves (multipliers of like 0.2, 0.4, and stuff like that).

That was actually exactly my argument. All of today seems to have been erryone bashing about the Bulk sentence. Also me trying to be positive about things, and expose that the sets isn't all as bad as it can be made out to be. And if it seems like I'm going overboard, I'm dealing with the set getting called "Awful", they should never do things this way, etc.

I'm sorry if this is like why is he still beating on this topic all day, I'll be going now, don't you worry. I'm just trying to put some thought into these sorts of sets. All starting from wanting to see how much prices actually dropped.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Common nimble mongoose looks like it could be a lot of fun, and I like the new art. It will be neat to see the limited deck they have in mind for it.

Daze reprint is really good for legacy, and conceptually good for pauper, but delver is already something like 20-25% of the meta at any given time. The only reason everyone isn't running daze is the price.
 
Peter LaCara

Peter LaCara

Necropotence at Mythic is a weird choice, considering it's banned in legacy. That Daze art is sweet, though I'll probably stick with the classic naked dude.

Anybody ever run Nimble Mongoose in their cubes? How's that guy play out?
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Yeah, agree with Dom. This isn't the set for the average Riptide cube it doesn't seem, but man is it looking loaded so far! Lots of stuff for classic high power cubes of course :)
 
genericco

genericco

Sure seems like Wizards is marketing this set to cube owners and is trying to bring cube in as a supported format, much like they did with Commander.

In the spoilers today Deathrite Shaman is presented as "One of the great Cube all-stars" and lead designer Tom LaPille's job is summarized as "making a cube, something he's well known for and one of the things that helped him land his job in R&D in the first place".
 
vennythekid

vennythekid

Alphez said:
This is the part I don't like. At least 50% of it will be unplayable chaff outside of limited, much like Modern Masters. Which would be fine, if booster packs weren't so expensive.
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Unless they go full "Powered Cube Draft" on us. Which, judging by the spoilers (so far, at least), looks like it might happen!
 
Tzenmoroth

Tzenmoroth

enlightenedtutor.jpg
vampirictutor.jpg


Does anyone even run topdeck tutors around here? I haven't run them yet but the new arts tempt me...
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
entomb.jpg


Eh? Eh? I never bothered with this card, but I know this is quite popular with some cubers, and the new art and flavor text are pretty iconic!
 
Laz

Laz

Developer
sigh said:
Well, it's definitely a set designed for draft, that's for sure. Loving the art, and the foil prospects, but wouldn't exactly be thrilled to open this uncommon as my rare. Worldgorger Dragon even worse at Mythic!
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I agree, but there is still time, even MM1 a tiny handful of kind of 'eh' cards at Rare (though it also had a lot of sweet Rarity downshifts on cards that wouldn't break the format, like Worm Harvest and Masked Admirers).

Like you, I am totally digging a lot of the new art.
 
sigh

sigh

Can't be sure yet with so few spoilers, of course, but seems like they are putting plenty of poison-y drafting into this set. Find one elf -> find more elves.

Also check out that Top tho. Mobile and pictures aren't friends, or I'd put it...
 
whydirt

whydirt

I think this quote from the mothership is pretty enlightening:
When developing Eternal Masters, we wanted to do a strategy for each color pair like we do with the majority of our sets. So Eternal Masters has green-white enchantments and blue-black reanimator as two of the ten primary strategies. However, we also wanted there to be overlap between the strategies. This meant finding strategies that can have some amount of overlap. If we want blue-black to be a reanimator strategy, then green-blue can be a threshold strategy. This allows the blue cards that fill up your graveyard to work in multiple strategies while enabling different things.

Another good example comes from using cards to bridge strategies that may not appear to have much in common. Green-white enchantments and red-green fast aggro don't appear to have much in common, but a strong Aura can help your small creatures break through in a red-green deck while triggering the enchantment rewards in your green-white deck.

Another cool benefit of these overlaps is now you have some additional flexibility when drafting. You can overlap two strategies, or even do strategies that aren't in the colors they were intended. You might get some cool red-green threshold decks, or white-black reanimator decks. While the format is still built around ten color pairs, there are definitely more things to explore.

Finding these strategies that have a significant amount of overlap was difficult, but also one of the most rewarding parts of working on Eternal Masters. One of these challenges had to do with finding the right amount of tribal for the set. Tribal strategies are really cool, and one of the best ways to link "Eternal" cards and "Modern" cards. However, it can be difficult to link up tribal strategies with each other. The first Modern Masters did this with changeling cards, but we did not want to repeat this. The design handoff had lots of tribal strategies, but in the end, only Elves survived. The competitive success of Elves in Eternal formats helped inform our decision to keep them, as well.

All in all, I believe that Eternal Masters is a great set. It has an excellent mix of nostalgia, great gameplay, and exciting cards. I hope you get the chance to draft it at least once, whether it's with your friends, at your local store, or on Magic Online.
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Looks like G/B elves will be the only pure tribal archetype.
 
whydirt

whydirt

Given that there are only three blue cards with threshold (four if you count Cephalid Coliseum) in all of Magic, I'm assuming that it's really more of a self-mill archetype than just that mechanic in particular.
 
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