General Modern Horizons

1 toughness to start out gives red decks a much better opening to deal with it to start, and it will interact a lot more with the rest of your deck (as noted), as well as with more of the opponent's creatures (ground-walker).

Shoutout to Everdream, mentioned a bit back. That's a sweet splice effect for a spells deck!
 
Going through the full spoilers for cards I'd add, but first I must say this: Is Rain of Revelation just a picture of some girl during Woodstock '69? Psychedelic.

I'm gonna be the dissenting voice as well: this set kind of disappointed me. Now I don't play Modern (and older formats), so the power of some these cards may be lost on me, but a lot of the spoilers have not impressed me or seem flat. Maybe it's the overall attention to tribal/snow cards that have turned me off of this, at least for my cube environment. Maybe besides a few cards to help Gruul Wildfire be a thing, I don't think there will be a lot of cards I will be adding.

That being said, I do like how they incorporated some mechanics into colors that wouldn't normally have them. My favorite among them was Feaster of Fools, a card so close of getting in my cube (needed Haste or perhaps more safely Trample). Also Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis, but I don't think you would be able to get his out reliably in cube enough. (I must have a thing for convoke... there's like three cards with convoke I like so far).
 
The set was explicitly designed for enfranchised players, so yeah you're probably not going to appreciate all the little nods to older stuff if you're a newer player. There is also admittedly a lot of tribal stuff in the set, which I also generally don't care for in cube. On the other hand there's a lot of support for graveyard, discard, artifact, spells, and blink archetypes as well as a ton of interesting power max style cards.

What kind of stuff were you expecting that didn't show up here?
 
No madness or discard outlets :(
I rrally hope we'll get MH2 with less tribal components.
Guess I'll add this mana rock as well:

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I'm gonna be the dissenting voice as well: this set kind of disappointed me.
You are not the only one, I've seen others express the same sentiment.

Personally, and while my card evaluation skills may be rusty, I don't see this set doing much for modern. Many of the cards included are cool, but they seem way to cute, too costly and too fair to do anything in a format dominated by Turn 3 Karns, linear aggro rush and Infect. It's nice to add cards like Astral Slide, Genesis or Fact or Fiction, but I don't see them ever impacting competitive play. They were questionable back when I played Extended and I can't imagine them fairing much better in Modern, which has a far higher power level and is much less fair. You are not playing a slighty better Hermit Druid, that's for sure.

On a cube level, I hoped for some changelings to boost a potential Rebels deck but there are only a handful and they are all pretty weak.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
The flavor text. Ha!

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Also, there's a few gems between the unspoiled cards:

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What kind of stuff were you expecting that didn't show up here?

You are going to get me on this one: I'm not sure what I was expecting.

I guess where one of the first reveals was Astral Slide, I thought there was going to be more cycling support overall. I guess in general, I was expecting WotC to do the typical set design thing of introducing 5-6 mechanics/keywords, and provide broader archetype support, other than this hodge-podge of every mechanic/keyword ever (though admitting, some that they returned were pretty cool and were well implemented, see Feaster of Fools as one example). The tribal-based color pairings cards (Dimir Ninjas, Boros Slivers, Rakdos Goblins) are narrow, and thus feel that I'd be railroading drafters if I were to introduce them into a cube environment. I guess the other disappointment is that I didn't get my Selesnya +1/+1 Counters bomb I've been waiting for! Nor did I get the bicycling enemy lands either.

All that aside, that's not to say that this all sucks.There are a few cards that I will be picking up to fit into my cube (Darth Yawgmoth is causing me problems with my Black 4-slot when he was revealed). I guess the hope was that they would introduce cards that would breed new archetypes altogether. The set did appear to help out Gruul lands matter with Wrenn and Six and some other support cards, which I will definitely play around with. This disappointment stems from the fact however that I'm running perhaps a cube more power-loaded than average, so I guess my expectation was set too high.

Anyone else have any hot-takes so far? You people usually have good ideas when introduced to new cards.
 
MH1 gave us 13 new Sliver cards and 21 new Snow permanents, which I find baffling. Why print Slivers into a draft format instead of the yearly commander precons?

And how did Snow permanents of all things get greenlit for a revisit?
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
MH1 gave us 13 new Sliver cards and 21 new Snow permanents, which I find baffling. Why print Slivers into a draft format instead of the yearly commander precons?

And how did Snow permanents of all things get greenlit for a revisit?

Snow got greenlit because this is realistically the only place they could do it, and people had been asking for snow basics reprint for a while.
In terms of slivers, it could be both?

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This seems like the best green two-drop attacker since... Scavenging Ooze? Wild Mongrel? In an aggro deck this is just always going to be attacking as a 4/4

While it's still great, this is either a 2/2 or a 4/4, it doesn't get a bonus for each creature you've played.
 
MH1 gave us 13 new Sliver cards and 21 new Snow permanents, which I find baffling. Why print Slivers into a draft format instead of the yearly commander precons?

And how did Snow permanents of all things get greenlit for a revisit?

Might be a consequence of them wanting to reprint snow basics but not make it irrelevant for draft.
 
Snow is a bad mechanic, yet has a lot of rabid fans, so yeah this was probably a good way to placate them using the smallest slice of product resources.


Might be a consequence of them wanting to reprint snow basics but not make it irrelevant for draft.

I think one of the preview articles on the mothership explicitly says this. They wanted to do full-art snow basics as a way to drive sales and backdoored into making G/U the snow deck for limited.
 
Snow is like tribal, but it can go on noncreatures and is much cooler imo because I really those arctic vibes.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
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All pretty cool stuff! I'm actually incluing phantasmal form in my cube, as most +1/+1 counter creatures are base 0/0, so it's quite the pump spell

Oh. Someone suggested you could use this as a removal spell, and I totally didn't catch that! Another way to read this card is: "Sacrifice an untapped creature you control, then destroy target attacking creature. Draw a card." Huh, neat!
 
Yeah this is definitely one of the coolest sets ever. Sadly, it lot of it's main theme's are far from what my cube is about (Tribal, Snow, Loam, Tempo in {U/B}). These are the card I'll be adding for testing immediately:



That may not seem alot compared to Peters list, but it is the biggest immediate impact a set had on my cube since Shadows over Innistrad block. I'm really careful with changes and try to keep the core balance of the cube during most updates.

All that being said, there are MANY cards in this set that peaked my interest and are up for consideration when the need comes up.
 
I'm going to start a separate Testing/Includes thread for MH1 so that people coming to the site don't have to sort through 13 pages of previews before seeing what people want to run. Since MTGS is shutting down, I think it will be prudent to have clearer spaces for new set test results.
 
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