There are a lot of ways to handle it. But, at a casual level, this can single-handedly lock a decent number of decks nearly out of the game. Not just token decks but most tribal decks can't really function under this. So it's definitely not competitive but it's a far cry from a vanilla flyer imo.

These things are so absurdly mana efficient. Like honestly wtf. Not really as much of an issue for commander, I know, but it's just crazy to me that we have a 2-drop with 3 power and toughness spread across two bodies with upside on top of upside on top of upside. A 1-drop that basically says you h...

Kinda curious. I've had partners draft, but there's not nearly as much opportunity to interact during a tournament.

My point was that Hasbro using their own property for an AI database is less problematic in the sense that most current AI models use publicly available data and\or stolen works. So perhaps I should have said it's not legally problematic (for now). The purpose of ethics (and law, which is more-or-l...

New Magda isn't getting much love, but she looks pretty rad to me. There's lots of ways to get treasure off her ability for cheap (no god-awful dwarf tribal necessary), and the haste means she can wait to start making dragons until she's ready to go for the kill. Plus she's cheap and ensures you hav...

Imo Thunderclap Drake is the obvious standout from the UR precon. Goblin Electromancer is a widely played card, and drake 1) can be played in non-red decks 2) is easier to cast 3) has flying to peck in chip damage or block in the air 4) can randomly turn your instants/sorceries into game-winning bom...

If nothing else, chucking the entirety of MtG into an AI model has none of the ethical drawbacks of the art stuff - they aren't stealing anything, and anyone designing a card is getting part of the inspiration from previous cards anyway. Excellent point. It's significantly less unethical to have a ...

So realistically how long will it be until there's an AI generated set (at least the card texts)? 2-3 years is my guess. Never. At least I'd be very surprised. AI does a reasonable job of creating semblances of things - an image generated by AI can be difficult to distinguish from a painting or a p...

Good Bad + Ugly article is up. I did have an edit that I forgot to make, though, in regards to Stella so I'll just post my updated version here. Stella Lee, Wild Card There are a few easy points of comparison for Stella - Jori En, Ruin Diver of course, and Rootha, Mercurial Artist is a good stand-in...

Okay I've got an initial decklist up.

It's currently very very curve focused, tons of 1-drops to maximize the odds that we hit a quad-copy on turn 4. Curve is low enough that I'm not even running sol ring because we have so little need for colorless mana, which is kinda wild.

I played her as the commander of my "most expensive deck ever". Can't remember if I ever actually won with it, but I flexed suuuuuuper hard.

Got a bunch of APAC-only promo materials from doing 4 prereleases over the weekend. The pins and tokens are really nice, solid metal.

I have absolutely no idea what to do with this stuff outside of hoarding it and scaring away any dwarves/hobbits who try to claim it. Thoughts?

This is a fun conversation. I'm glad I put the deck together, it's making this a lot more interesting to talk about. TLDR; I don't think defaulting to Pir's Whim everyone for a land is wrong in this list 1) You can somewhat expect to piggyback off their resources so ramping everyone else isn't as wo...

Evo Sage is gated by once/turn barring exploration effects (so a multi-card combo assuming you have extra lands). Any other proliferate is retail 4 which is a fairly extraordinary cost that you can see coming with more than enough time to react. Lemme tell you about a little something you might'a h...

I have no issue with aggro. But I do find myself annoyed with poison because of how pushed proliferate has become.

The card whose price I'm most confused at from the new set so far is Lotus Ring . I can't really see it as much more than a Vulshok Battlegear with some minor upsides. By the time you paid 6 mana and sacked a creature, it's hard to imagine a 3 mana refund is terribly exciting. And even if you can ch...

I'd pay 3 for something that draws me an extra card each turn, if I didn't have better synergies. In principle this could draw you 2 cards per turn, if you have nothing else that generated the monarch. I guess it's alright if you're playing a 2-drop evasive blue commander, but I'd want to be damn su...

Ok, Culling Ritual then, which I see somewhat regularly. The protection creatures help, but that will depend upon sequencing. Interesting, Don't think I've seen it. Maybe once or twice, idk. Not recently. Anyway unless your meta is really weird I think the broader consideration is board wipes in ge...

What happens when they do have the board wipe, or the spot removal for Ghired, and your field/hand is full of 1-drops and a couple french vanilla 4/4's? Yes, aggro is weak to board wipes. But if they don't have it, they die. You can't win them all, but that's not the goal - the goal is to win more ...

Okay, I know I rated Ghired, Mirror of the Wilds ugly on GBU (article's finished, just waiting to hear back on when it'll be put up), but considering how completely insane he looks, he is getting remarkably little hype on EDHrec. Ranked 14th in the set is crazy to me. Still, I figured the decklist w...

I got them both on board once and the resident control player immediately killed Kharn upon reading him. This was less a specific point and more that I just thought you'd find this interaction especially obnoxious since it is a turbo-charged Humble Defector upon which this thread started. I mean, t...

I can agree that I'd rather see commanders like this than some of the broken nonsense like Chulane that usually get pushed as face cards, but I don't think it needed this much complexity to get there. Maybe merge the last to clauses, so instead of the Ring tempting you when an army you control deal...

Ward 3 will generally play the same "hexproof until you really need it to be hexproof" role of discouraging targeting. I disagree. Voja is a great example since it typically comes out turn 3. Even an STP could be uncastable targeting it, let alone Beast Within or other more expensive remo...

%$#%$#% it, just realized that plotted cards can only be cast as sorceries. Why did they do that? It has very little impact on the mechanic in limited/standard/competitive formats that wotc cares about, and then they make the two plot-focused commanders - Lilah, Undefeated Slickshot and Fblthp, Lost...

Nice, I kinda wanted to talk about this guy. I disagree strongly with onering about the ward cost - I think it might be my favorite ward ability they've ever printed. Because it will rarely be trivial to pay, but it will almost always be possible to play, which means (as he says) that your opponents...