Pre W6 Ban: W6 was everywhere, being present in the best Delver deck (RUG Delver, which was a huge % of the metagame and basically forced all other Delver lists out), the best control deck (Czech Pile), and the best non-blue fair decks (Aggro Loam primarily). The only combo decks that could compete ...

Thirst for Knowledge was once good enough to be restricted in Vintage. Now, granted, Vintage has a lot more artifacts, especially as pitching a moxen midgame is a lot like pitching a land, but the template here is certainly a powerful one. The immediate application is clearly something with Repleni...

image.png The first crop of Theros: Beyond Death cards has hit and this one immediately jumped out to me as a potential inclusion. 3 power for 2 with a minor drawback and a self-recursion ability reminds me a lot of Scrapheap Scrounger , which has been great. It even gets stronger when it comes bac...

Wrenn and Six definitely had to be banned for the same reason Deathrite Shaman did. It was powerful in blue lists AND in nonblue lists. Basically every deck except for non-value-midrange combo decks and Miracles had to pack it, and it was one of the best checks to itself. When Delver, UBx Control, a...

Some numbers on the Mystery Booster: Given that every single slot has its own sheet of 121 unique cards, this functionally makes every single card in the set an equivalent rarity. You are exactly as likely to open a Mana Crypt in your pack as you are an Affa Protector . So despite their claim that t...

How does a pov character do things off stage? And your Endgame metaphor lost me since in the book Dack dies and that is canon. But that's the thing: The book isn't Endgame in this scenario. War of the Spark, the set, was Endgame. The book was supplemental material that was gated off from the majori...

Also the treatment of Dack Fayden was atrocious. If you're a player with a normal level of investment - you buy the cards and you read the Mothership articles - you have no idea who Dack Fayden is, what he's done, or even that he's involved at all in this story, and now he's dead for good. He was i...

Do you have the list for Steel Stompy? I'm not really certain what that is but it sounds interesting.

The biggest thing that would have "fixed" War of the Spark would have been continuing to release the story in serialized weekly columns on their website. The novel didn't make a lick of sense because it was the middle third of the story, and we didn't get the first third until considerably...

I do remember that Hogaak has a strong alternate win condition.. with Altar of Dementia + bridge to mill a ton of cards. That combo not giving problems here in legacy? Altar-Hogaak Dredge was actually a worse build of Dredge than the post-banning version in Modern. And Legacy has more answers and m...

RW Nahiri is a pretty sweet card in any deck that can support at least a copy of Emrakul.

at worst its 16 packs of 15 cards for 450. fancy cards at that. your basically only dealing with rares and mythic rares, your getting the top corn of the set, if any mythic rare or rare goes exponential your in a significantly better spot right? your rare is better that than the pack rare right? Yo...

Yeah, Legacy is a very different format from Modern. Modern has a lot fewer answers (cards like Daze , Force of Will , Wasteland , etc) and as such, it has a lot more highly-linear decks that just try to play past each other as quickly as possible. In that kind of format, cards like Hogaak and Eye o...

It's definitely a competitive card. It showed up in the top 8 of GP Atlanta in a Dredge list, and there was two more in the top 16 and another in the top 64. And it's made some appearances in BG Dark Depths lists as well, though none of those showed up in the top 64. I don't think it's a hugely prob...

Mardu Pyromancer is probably a reasonable tier 2.5/3 list. Run a bit more targeted discard like Cabal Therapy and swap and Paths for Swords to Plowshares. You should have a decent game against fair decks, and the current top unfair decks are a bit soft to Swords so it works out well.

Good point—the mana generation rule would still limit you to the colors of your commander. If you're playing Sultai then exile your commander and pick a BG card, you can no longer generate blue mana. Wasn't the mana generation rule done away with years ago? This being the case I think it should lim...

That seems like it could be abuseable with certain planeswalkers, like, oh, I dunno, Karn Liberated just to name one. I think it would be better to limited it to only planeswalkers that can already be your commander. But then again, you'd have to be very careful regarding which legendary creature o...

Well, we got an announcement for next year's sets today: Winter - Theros: Beyond Death, a focus on Theros's Underworld Spring - Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths. Looks like a Kaiju/Monster Hunter World type plane. Summer - Core 2021 with the face being Teferi Fall - Zendikar Rising. Eldrazi are gone, shoul...

thanks for that plenty of info. I guess legacy isn't very hostile to gy strategies these days. It isn't overly *maindeck* hostile to graveyard strategies, but most decks will pack some form of graveyard hate in the sideboard. Surgical Extraction is the most-played Sideboard card, appearing in almos...

I have no idea what the Legacy scene looks outside of the US, but I live in a major US city and Legacy is basically dead, unfortunately. It's bigger on the East Coast and in California, but in the Midwest it's practically a non-entity these days. And I don't think Modern is doing it any favors. Whil...

if ever there would be a legacy tourney in my area. I plan to use the bg delirium deck that I use in modern. The deck has goyf and grim flayer as win cons. The discard should allow me to have a small chance against the combo decks, Collector ouphe from the sideboard also feels like it would be usef...

This card is *insane*. Stone nuts. It doesn't make the cut in a mono-colored list, but in any multicolored list (especially those with green) it's ludicrously easy to turn on and just does stupid things. It's particularly good with Gaea's Cradle as it vomits out bodies to power the Cradle to new hei...

t , exile Usurper's Throne: You may choose a Commander you own and control or a Commander card in your command zone. If you do, that Commander is no longer your Commander for the rest of the game, and exile it. Then, search your library for a legendary creature or planeswalker card and put it into ...

Frostfang is a decent target, but if Nic Fit really wanted a GSZ-able Coastal Piracy effect, they've had Edric, Spymaster of Trest for a while. I guess adding deathtouch on attacking makes it even slightly better, but I'm not totally sold still. Mandate of Peace is interesting, but being restricted ...

I imagine Field of the Dead is the most significant new inclusion. It provides an alternative win condition, one that calls for a completely different set of answers from Stage-Depths. With Crop Rotations and Gambles, shaving a copy of Depths doesn't make it that much harder to find when you need it...