Sets [MB2] Mystery Booster 2 previews

[Erik Twice]

Like previous Mystery Booster sets, the cards are so close to being great. They are in this limbo where they are too unrefined to play as is, but too challenging to the status quo to be printed.

I'm curious about the lands and associated trickery: Ominepresent Impostor, Gobland, Madlands, Lazotep Archway all seem interesting, though it doesn't seem like they push any current archetypes nor create new ones on their own. Out of them, Madlands seems the most playable, since any discard-based deck will run it, particularly since all of them will use one of those colours.

 

[Dom Harvey]

A part of my journey as a Magic player has been seeing through more and more of Rosewater's stories. He presents himself as one of, if not the, main source of progress and innovation in Magic - if not general quality. He's not.

I don't think he really presents himself this way - he's a central figure in a lot of the stories he tells about design because he's been there forever and he's the lead designer plus a lead on a lot of individual sets, plus the main public face of R&D. My comment is that the mix of being our guide to what happens behind the curtain + someone with a clear, infectious enthusiasm for game/Magic design + the official spokesman for design all at once means that it's hard to separate out the short-term obligation of 'here's why you should love [New Set!]' from the more objective 'here's what we did right/wrong'* from his personal passion projects (Unfinity...) unless you've listened to a lot of Maro and can read between the lines.

*(which can often clash with the first thing or mutate over time - see the KillGoldfish review re. Future Sight; any nuanced criticism will also be tempered by his role and his own views e.g. in his State of Design covering Midnight Hunt/Crimson Vow he noted that [paraphrasing] 'some players noted some tracking issues with Daybound/Nightbound' which is an understatement to put it very mildly)

As a Survivor nerd it reminds me of how the host (and now longtime executive producer) Jeff Probst is very good at sounding jazzed up for whatever the New Twist is in the moment and presenting it as the inevitable future of the show - and then when they go in a completely different direction a few seasons later that new regime is also the exciting development that was inevitable and necessary to keep the show evolving etc

 

[Chris Taylor]

I'm not saying he's not contributing, just that he has his biases. I've absorbed a lot of his writing without considering them

 

[Seeker]

I don't really understand the joke here, but this card aint bad.

I'm the one person on the planet who instantly got this joke outside of the dev team and nobody else has posted the phrase "Drake Stone" in this thread (I checked) so I have to explain this!

There's a Disney movie from 2010 named The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
It has an antagonist named Drake Stone who uses his poorly-trained actual magic to be the world's most famous celebrity stage magician because nobody knows magic is real. (Or something like that, I never saw it, work with me here.)

So anyway, WotC goes to Disney and says "hey we like magic" and then wrote an article, which is now broken, over on the Mothership about the resulting crossover and the cards on the poster that appeared in the movie:

One of the characters in the movie is Drake Stone, played by Toby Kebbell. And in the world of the movie, Drake is sponsored by Wizards of the Coast. He's such a celebrity that (in the world of The Sorcerer's Apprentice) he even appears on cards.

And that means that actual cards had to be made for the movie. And instead of just mocking up regular cards, Magic R&D was called upon to make new cards for Drake Stone's appearance. They even made him a Planeswalker!

So here, for the first time anywhere, is a look into the world of The Sorcerer's Apprentice through the prism of its four custom-made Drake Stone Magic cards that only appear in the magical world of cinema (and one pre-existing card that seemed like a natural fit)!

Sadly, those images are broken. But! We have the Internet Archive! So we have a working copy of that page with images intact, so we can see the Concentrate reprint and the - honestly totally printable give or take maybe the number of permanents in the ultimate - Drake Stone card himself:

This blue discard spell which would have been meh at like 2UU (think Agonizing Memories but worse) but is, for some inexplicable reason, UU instead:

And the relevant ones, the other two Drake Stone cards that never actually existed:

And those are the two choices on Stone Drake!

 

[Seeker]

also holy shit lmao I can finally foil out my preferred Natural Order art:

green man

 

[Velrun]

I see nothing wrong with that

 

[Seeker]

I'm actually really happy about it. They've reprinted it a bunch of times but this is the first time with that art at all, let alone in foil. Now I don't have to play the Portal version! Actual rules text!

 

[safra]

That Drake Stone thing is so fun. Home run for those invested enough to care or get it.

 

[LadyMapi]

Drake Stone is probably one of the deepest cuts they could've possibly gone for.

 

[Aston]

These "playtest cards" are what unfinity should've been, just with real art and frames, and un-sets would still be a thing.

Having one "silly card" per pack feels like the right amount. Unfinity (and Unstable to an extent) both felt like they were fighting between being funny and being playable sets, and ended up not really being either; with the playtest cards being such a small part of mystery boosters, it doesn't really matter how playable they are, so they can lean fully on the funny/interesting side.

 

[LadyMapi]

My understanding (which I might've gotten from someone on here) is that the original intent behind un-sets was they'd be the last set of packs in the draft. By that point, you've drafted 30 cards so you're only looking for a handful of playable cards in the un-packs. However, people ended up drafting them by themselves, which isn't a great experience.

Which is to say that the Mystery Boosters are probably closer to the original intent of un-sets than either of the modern un-sets.

 

[alvoi]

My understanding (which I might've gotten from someone on here) is that the original intent behind un-sets was they'd be the last set of packs in the draft. By that point, you've drafted 30 cards so you're only looking for a handful of playable cards in the un-packs. However, people ended up drafting them by themselves, which isn't a great experience.

Which is to say that the Mystery Boosters are probably closer to the original intent of un-sets than either of the modern un-sets.

Now I really want to try to draft unsets this way though!

 

[Chris Taylor]

Oh I forgot to post my findings:

This card is cool, lotta good moments, lot of interesting but not backbreaking variance. I think more cubes can handle the high/low rolls of this card than you might think at first blush.
HOWEVER the retrace on this card completely cracks it. My friends love this card so much that I will probably keep running it, but I need to change the retrace to flashback or something more reigned in.

I thought the average casts of this thing would be like 2-3 per game, but it turns out it's a lot more like 5-10, big pack rat vibes, but sometimes you need to pick the 2nd best option of just casting the cards you drafted.

 

[Velrun]

Does one get to cascade from that Bloodbraid Elf?

Seems a lot above curve compared to the rest. Like the default mode unless board state is a certain way.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Does one get to cascade from that Bloodbraid Elf?

Seems a lot above curve compared to the rest. Like the default mode unless board state is a certain way.

You do, but also sometimes 3/2 plus cascade is just less than what goyf ends up doing for you.
It's hella strong, for sure. I got Blightning'd before I untapped on my T2!

 

[Jamie]

As a Survivor nerd

Ha, turns out you definitely weren't kidding there... just started engaging with Survivor again myself these last ~18 months for the first time since, like, Boston Rob's initial attempt back in the day and have just recently caught all the way up, so here I am last night with a week to go before the new season begins and I'm thinking to myself that's plenty of time to consume some "extended-universe" content before the new stuff from CBS starts (well... maybe not int'l seasons like Australia or South Africa, wowza those are long) so dive into the pre-season roundtable for University of Maryland All-Stars only to find—wait, what the heck!—is that Dom Frickin' Harvey on the podcast...


But annyyyways... (having now finally snapped back to reality...) got a couple inquiries for ya real quicklike before relinquishing this thread back to its original purpose...

First, just curious what other amateur productions you might find to be worthwhile (e.g. anything underrated or not even mentioned by these old° reddit° posts°). And also then I wonder what other sort of topical content you find to be worth keeping up with (I see now of course you've got your own podcast and I'm already familiar myself with RHAP, but that's pretty much it).

Cheers!

 

[Kirblinx]

Just wanted to point out that the release notes for the Playtest cards came out a couple of days ago.
You can read it here: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/mystery-booster-2-release-notes

There are some pretty good jokes in there and was a fun read. Here are a couple to whet the appetite:

• No, it doesn't have flying.

• I bet you Wish you could put this in your deck! You'll have to figure out a Cunning way to get access to this. Perhaps you should do some Research (// Development). Worst case, you could stage an Invasion of Arcavios.
• If you do manage to get Can't Quite Recall into your game, make sure to put it back in your sideboard before the next game.

• I'm not sure what wizard would want Lazav, Familiar Stranger as their familiar, but to each their own. (I would pick Owl Familiar, personally.)

• Questing Beast's abilities are as follows: "Vigilance, deathtouch, haste ..." You know what? It has a lot of abilities, so instead of typing them all out here, I'll remind you that you can see its official text by using the Gatherer card database at Gatherer.Wizards.com.