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Since I do not play Arena but still feel curious I have to ask.

Did the Vault count go up whenever you opened a card you already had four copies of before or is this a strict finansial upgrade from the players’ point of view?
 
I'm pretty sure this is unchanged, but it used to be that rares and mythics got fairy dusted into vault progress earlier. Now it seems like they're making the rewards for getting all rares/mythics better.
 
As far as I can see, rares and mythics don't go into the vault any more, they either get turned into another rare/mythic you don't have 4 of or, if it's from a limited event or you already have 4 of every rare/mythic in the set, you get some gems for it instead. 5th copies of uncommons and commons still go in the vault.
 
MTG Salvation is shutting down in 24 hours.

Last chance to go there to ‘recruit’ new people from the Cube section (And perhaps also the Custom card section)

Anything written on www.mtgsalvation.com will be able to be read for a very long time but as of tomorrow it will not be possible to write anything new in there.
 
I could see green being in neither madness nor flashback. But I really really hope it is in one at least. Also new morphs are always welcome too.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Well, I'm interested in flashback at least. Can't imagine the other three are going to sway me, though madness might slot in my Grixis madness-less madness archetype if enough decent support in black and especially blue is added. Populate and morph though, not going to touch either with a ten-foot pole.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Synergy wise no, but there's always the possibility a card or two could be self contained: think exalted angel or scion of vitu ghazi

I'm a fan of having mechanics show up at least a few times if I can help it. I mean, sometimes a card like Abzan Falconer pops up, which is just such a boon to one of my archetypes that I ignore the fact that no other outlast card is playable. That said, I did run Sundering Growth as the only populate card in my cube at one time, so I'll admit that that mechanic isn't entirely out of the question. Morph, though. feels really silly if you know exactly what's hiding underneath that "mystery" 2/2 because your opponent is on Plains, and the only logical option is Exalted Angel. Hard pass on that mechanic, especially because it asks for a different environment than mine.
 
It definitely never plays like echo
It's an alternative cost that makes your card more flexible like a charme creature almost.
 
Seems I was quite lucky; all of those mechanics have a place in my cube! Other than Flashback, they were a bit lacking in options too. Populate especially; there's some good multicolor options, like Growing Ranks and maybe Vitu-Ghazi Guildmage, but there's almost nothing in monocolor.

To weigh in on morph, I would never run it without having at least 10 or so instances of the mechanic. But my players always find it cool when it becomes a minigame (having 3+ morph cards and the opponent being faced with a wide array of possibilities even in game 3). I also have a couple unique reasons to run it. With the lack of manafixing from land sources, morph helps to alleviate manascrew and provide an incentive to splash. The floor of a 3cc 2/2 is still weak, but in my environment, a colorless card that can become something powerful at instant speed cuts it, and contributes a lot to game texture. So I would consider it a well-designed mechanic, although the 2/2 floor is often hard to scale to modern sets, making the value of morphs today much more tied up in their unmorphed version than 20 years ago in Onslaught block. Power creep sucks, but the more powerful morphs are still great in a low-powered environment.

I also totally support changing the P/T or cc of morphs if needed. I think the biggest reason they are often excluded in cubes is not so much their floor (this is RTL after all, if people liked morph enough they would errata the hell out of it), but that they are difficult to tie in to other themes. Paying mana to flip a creature upside-right doesn't naturally synergize with much in the way that, say, Dredge meshes with Flashback. So people see a few isolated morph cards that they sort of like, and that ends up not being enough incentive to give morph the density necessary for the mechanic to work properly. This all makes sense, but it's a shame that morph isn't explored much for these reasons.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
May i ask why you dislike morph so much? My playgroup loves the poker-like element it provides

I don't dislike morph at all. As a matter of fact, I quite like it! Khans was a wonderful limited format! That said, a 2/2 for 3 mana isn't going to cut it in my cube, and it's a mechanic that needs a certain density to achieve that poker-like element you're talking about. If you only run three or four, in different colours, it becomes really easy to guess which one your opponent just played. In other words, morph is not the right fit for my cube, but that doesn't mean I dislike morph as a mechanic.
 
I tried doing a morph theme before but I had to cut it all because a cube has to be reaaaaally built around that mechanic. The three drop slot really gets eaten up by morph creatures. At some point, I may make a morph cube. It needs to have no good answers to colorless vanilla 2/2s except at high mana costs. Shock is super duper banned.
 
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