[JMP] Tree-hugging deck lists

[Sniffnoy]

Previewed on the Magic page for traditional Chinese:

Hm, I can only seem to do 3 attachments? Well, I'll make a second post...

[Sniffnoy]

Decklist:

[Vessiliana]

I am sorry if this is not a good place to post this, but I think I am out of the loop here.

What is Jumpstart? It is releasing literally two weeks after M21? It is listed as a "reprint set" here, but I know that I have never seen those legends before.

What kind of set is it? Is it a draft set? A set of decks? How many of them?

[The Fluff]

would these cards be legal in pioneer and modern?

[AvalonAurora]

would these cards be legal in pioneer and modern?

No, the new cards will only be legal in legacy, vintage, and commander (and the commons in pauper, presumably?).

Jumpstart is basically a faster way of doing draft/sealed like decks. You just open two different jumpstart packs and jam them together, and boom, there is your sealed/draft style deck. It seems like jumpstart packs might be a double package of some sort, you open a bunch up, and they have smaller packages inside the outer package that reveals a theme, and your group of players selects the inner packages based on themes they like (such as dogs, cats, Teferi, or rainbow) and shuffles them together. Some themes only have one set of possible cards to them, but others have multiple different potential variations, so there is some potential randomness for some of the themes even before you open the inner packs.

It's generally meant to be a product for people who like draft/sealed style play, but don't like the stress of building decks and the risks of ending up with horrible jank because of bad packs or whatnot, and making sure you get the themes you want.

I suspect the product is going to fail, not because people don't like the ideas behind it, but because WotC isn't good enough to balance it properly, and the meta will be solved ridiculously fast, and clear best decks will start to dominate too much, which will upset people who picked based on favorite themes rather than most spike-friendly themes when they get beaten easily. Wizards will then blame the failure on some combination of the sharing of data and/or the false premise that the game style was a bad idea, and won't accept blame for not properly balancing things.

[Krishnath]

I suspect the product is going to fail, not because people don't like the ideas behind it, but because WotC isn't good enough to balance it properly, and the meta will be solved ridiculously fast, and clear best decks will start to dominate too much, which will upset people who picked based on favorite themes rather than most spike-friendly themes when they get beaten easily. Wizards will then blame the failure on some combination of the sharing of data and/or the false premise that the game style was a bad idea, and won't accept blame for not properly balancing things.

I think quite the opposite, but those who will be driving the sales will be commander players. A lot of these cards are really nice in commander, both among the reprints and the new cards. And the sheer number of legendary creatures will help.

Also I think it may be a little early to call it out as easily solvable, as many of the themes, as shown above, have multiple variations.

[The Fluff]

would these cards be legal in pioneer and modern?

No, the new cards will only be legal in legacy, vintage, and commander (and the commons in pauper, presumably?).

ugh, that's a bit of disappointment. Thought I might get a few more useful dogs for pioneer.

[DirkGently]

I suspect the product is going to fail, not because people don't like the ideas behind it, but because WotC isn't good enough to balance it properly, and the meta will be solved ridiculously fast, and clear best decks will start to dominate too much, which will upset people who picked based on favorite themes rather than most spike-friendly themes when they get beaten easily. Wizards will then blame the failure on some combination of the sharing of data and/or the false premise that the game style was a bad idea, and won't accept blame for not properly balancing things.

My understanding is that the boosters are unmarked on the outside, with an inner wrapper that tells you the theme. You can't pick which themes you want (unless the TO opens the outer wrappers for some reason).

I do think some of the explanation I'd heard was that you'd get to pick your favourite theme and see "who would win" but that's not how it's going to work from what I understand. It's basically pack wars, except the packs have lands and are built to work more-or-less like real decks, instead of fully random.

I'm sure they aren't perfectly balanced, but neither are booster packs for limited. Since they are preconstructed, I'd guess they're probably more fair than a normal booster.