@murgatroid99 It sounded from the first look article like they might not occupy the Mythic slot:
> There are 25 different lands that can be found in Battle for Zendikar packs, and you can expect to open one only a little more frequently than a premium foil Battle for Zendikar mythic rare.
If I have a colour combination I'm very interested in though (e.g. Abzan or Jeskai) and an idea of what I want the deck to be like, it will probably be unrelated to the commander, or the commander will place different demands on me.
e.g. Jeskai has four commanders: a dragon who destroys lands, a goat who is based around you kindly giving your stuff to other people (unless it's Aggressive Mining or Akroan Horse), one who attacks a random person each turn, and Narset who kinda demands your deck be full of noncreature cards so it's going to carry something like 20-ish token generators.
Of those, Narset is awesome. But if I have a Jeskai gameplay plan I want to try out that doesn't make heavy use of one of those offerings, it's probably going to involve making my commander not that relevant.
The two Tarkir commanders I'm not sure how I'd put to strong use in a Commander environment.
If I have a specific commander I adore and want to realize them - like Surrak Dragonclaw or Narset - things get a lot easier, but it's harder to bring specific gameplay goals involving X colour combination and Y strategy to the table and have commander who will be relevant and enjoyable.
(Otherwise I just go with the type of deck where I never actually summon my commander.)
This is probably mostly Commander growing pains though as I figure out my way around the format. There are definitely some decks and commanders I am going to enjoy a lot, and the C13 Oloro deck is a blast.
@murgatroid99 I think it would be neat if someone wrote a function that took in "color identity" and output "color identity minus subset identities" in a form that MagicCards.info could understand.
And potentially wrapped it in some JavaScript that appended an extra textbox to the search page. Then saved that in a bookmarklet.
@doppelgreener For Jeskai don't forget the Legend from Fate Reforged, Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest. But yeah, in general the wedges don't have the best support when it comes to legends, they are slowly working on giving us more choices though. Since before the first commander decks there were the 5 Planar Chaos dragons and Doran.
Soul Fire Grand Master would be kinda fun, but it pushes very hard towards combo and repetitive gameplay. And I don't mind combo, but Soulfire will go infinite with enough lands and Turnabout and I already did that deck with Riku and got bored of it.
I mean, I don't mind combo (even infinite ones) but in EDH I find 2 card 'Oops I Win' combos to be boring. I prefer ones that require 4+ pieces and are somewhat easy to disrupt.
@Rainbolt Possible alternative: it could comprehend when you've entered a colour identity filter into magiccards.info, and offer "hit this key / button and we'll add in subset eliminations."
@doppelgreener Or, since the exclamation mark currently seems to do nothing, make ci!rug search for exactly that color identity
Though, that would be a little weird, because it would have to do under-the-hood client side rewriting and you'd end up on a search page with a different search than you typed in
Yeah, messing with what a user's trying to do like that without their deliberate action and you telling them that's what you're doing is a recipe for a poor experience.
Could work decently though if the user's aware enough.
But I'm actually thinking the best solution would be to have it add a "Commander" search box, that does the transformation and adds `t:legendary t:creature"
Plus, that's something that can more reasonably be turned into a browser extension
We're getting a lot of Eldrazi with a new tentacle-faced aesthetic that I think wasn't there before. It's either an Ulamog variant, or an all-new Eldrazi we're not seeing yet.
And from what I understand, the other two have left Zendikar
But their spawn can't travel between worlds, which is why Emrakul's hatcher is still there
Oh hey, Coastal Discovery is something I've been wondering about since they revealed Awaken: it doesn't target in its normal state. Which means that if you cast it for it's Awaken cost, the entire spell can be countered by destroying the land it's targeting
@murgatroid99 Actually from commentary on panels from Pax it seems that Kozilek may still be around, but is doing something inside of Zendikar. The flavor text on Kozilek's Channeler mentions 'something horrible' growing in dark places, and them being more numerous that expected
@diego The way I interpreted that, I also looked at the flavor text of Incubator Drone and took it to mean that the corruption that the Eldrazi are spreading actually creates more drones
@Waterseas That's not the only Landfall trigger in the set
And it's not like people will actually strictly segregate their Allies and Eldrazi into different decks. Breaker of Armies could be a great finisher in just about any ramp deck
Requiring having the enchantment in play before hand : p And any ally deck isn't going to have much landfall abilities, unless there's a ton of overlap.
So far, it's looking to me like this set is generally going to be split into two parts: Zendikari with Landfall and Allies, and Eldrazi with Ingest and colorless synergy
The thing is that story-wise, there are entities trying to save Zendikar, and entities trying to destroy Zendikar, and the land itself is firmly on the "save" side
There aren't a lot of options, but there are enough that I was able to cut things that were fairly useless like Panoramas while not spending super huge amounts of money (though it did help that I already had things like Blinkmoth Nexus and Eye of Ugin)
Because that's not the correct way to say it without you already understanding where I'm going. I literally said 'play a land the next turn'. Dunno how much more clear one can get.
It's not that unusual in a high land count deck, especially if that deck has card draw of any sort.
You just said "10 mana" and didn't say whether you meant that great aurora costs 10 or that Nissa's Renewal got you to 10 (and in fact you meant neither, so you were off topic)
A rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question that is asked in order to make a point rather than to elicit an answer. Though classically stated as a proper question, such a rhetorical device may be posed declaratively by implying a question, and therefore may not always require a question mark when written. Though a rhetorical question does not require a direct answer, in many cases it may be intended to start a discussion or at least draw an acknowledgement that the listener understands the intended message.
A common example is the question "Can't you do anything right...