Take The Crown Playthrough

If you can't get eight players to draft, screw it, do four. That's what I say.

So we did. And this is what it looked like.

I ended up with a R/B deck that had a lot of removal but not a lot of win conditions. My plan was to patiently wait as other players represented threats, and then step in after one or if I was lucky, two players had been eliminated.

And it almost worked. First, because as it turns out, Sangromancer is an absolute house in multiplayer. Holy cow that card is good. The first time I cast it, Noah stole it from me with Desertion (a card I passed to him because 'who plays countermagic in multiplayer?') and proceeded to go from 6 life to 27 life.

After Matt destroyed the Sangromancer, I was able to use Raise Dead and re-play Sangromancer, which took me from 7 life to 22 before being killed again, I believe this time by Caitlin.

While I didn't see anything too bonkers from my opponents in terms of card selection, the decks were varied and things got interesting specifically because of the Monarch mechanic. Attacking became very important because of the extra cards.

Matt had it worked out though, putting a Pariah on my Havengul Vampire.  As the Vampire got bigger and bigger, Matt had time to add in a Ghostly Posession on top of it all! At one point I had a 17/17 vampire that couldn't do anything for me and left Matt comfortably in the position of Monarch.

But.

As the game wore on the extra card draw became detrimental to Matt, who saw his library run down to nothing and couldn't find an answer for the board. The aggressive nature of being the Monarch had a price and eventually it got paid.

Which is very cool, because multiplayer games often struggle due to people turtling up. They get laggy and boring, with nobody wanting to take any risks. The extra card draw is worth getting for a little while but multiplayer draft games means that A) It's harder to capitalize on those extra draws and B) if it goes on long enough the reward becomes a bad thing.

First test of Take The Crown: Approved.

You Best Not Miss

So the new Conspiracy full spoiler is out, Take The Crown and you know what they say about comin' after the king...

First things first: I think this is the biggest risk that WotC has taken in years. The reprints of Show & Tell, Inquisition of Kozilek and Berserk alone show a genuine if tentative willingness to address the rising costs of popular cards in the Legacy and Modern formats. Add in Serum Visions, Burning Wish and even Birds of Paradise-which I've never heard anyone complain about-and the evidence points to Wizards being willing to introduce some necessary cards into the available pool.

While I can't agree with everything said by SaffronOlive, (notably, I think reprints in Standard are fine and people just like to complain) I am certainly on board with the notion that Take The Crown represents a genuine step forward. It is not be the step WotC ought to take, because there are still some big issues revolving around the reprint policy and the shunning of younger or more impoverished players, not to mention the flat out gouging of consumers that was Eternal Masters/Modern Masters 2. But Take the Crown is at least pointed in the right direction.

Now, looking at the rest of the set:

I think the Monarch idea is an interesting one and allows for some rapidly shifting power dynamics in multiplayer. That's a good thing and the implementation doesn't appear to be overpowered.

White is so clearly the bees knees in this set it's hard to overstate it. And this comes down to two cards: Recruiter of the Guard and Sanctum Prelate. Even reprints like Berserk and Show & Tell haven't gotten as much attention as those two cards and with good reason. Nothing I'm seeing in this set has the same level of impact on Legacy.

In draft? Well, that's a horse of a different color. It looks like a whole lot of OK.

Blue's cards seem overcosted to me-at least for draft. Making sure you hit 4+ mana is going to be important but even if you do, what's the payoff? Probably a solid support color and Desertion is always an interesting card for multiplayer. The shiny shiny that is Show & Tell doesn't really distract me from the fact that there doesn't seem to be a lot to do.

Black provides some interesting stuff: first, the Archdemon of Paliano, as difficult as it may be to use in draft, in Constructed offers a 5/4 flier for four with zero drawback in black. This is better than Mindwrack Demon. That could make it a contender for a finisher in a lot of decks. Even in draft, if it's a pack 1 pick, the drawback is really zero. After that, there is a lot of removal here; Murder and Death Wind are at common, Infest at uncommon; if you can get it to work, Black should go a long way for you.

Red gets a bit weird; I really like Grenzo but Subterranean Tremors feels out of place. It doesn't fit thematically (there are only 10 artifacts in the set) but as a solitary flavor win, I dig it. What remains to be seen is how mechanics like Goad work in practice. It's a weird political mechanic for multiplayer and I suppose that fits in with Red's general themes. I'm just not sure how strong it is. The removal isn't as awesome as Black's but it looks like there's enough to keep you in the game.

I don't have much in Green to get excited about. Sevala is the nuts and of course Berserk's reprinting is cool but it's just 'make more mana than you to win' and feels pretty linear.

The artifacts are a pretty sorry bunch, with only Spy Kit doing something unusual but even that oddity doesn't have much payoff. Sure, there's the bridge to the Conspiracies and "note" cards but the advantage seems so incremental for four mana. I can't get excited about Platinum Angel and would rather have seen Platinum Emperion. The lands do a little better, having more obvious functionality but it's a cold day before anyone is hyped about Dread Statuary.

The Conspiracy tactics have an interesting new slant to them, requiring colored mana to offer more variety. Nothing groundbreaking but at least there's some room in that mechanic to breathe which makes me hopeful for Conspiracy 3: Revolution (or whatever they call it).

Lastly, of the six new multicolored cards, only three really catch my eye: Leovold, Kaya, and Daretti II. The reprints aren't terribly exciting, if reasonably curated for multiplayer but I'm glad to see Dragonlair Spider, since that card was only really available in the Planechase set.

(Limited) Mechanical Animals

So I said this at Reddit's Magic forum, in response to revelation of Angelic Field Marshall.

People didn't like that. For those of you who don't want to click the link, here's what I said:

I generally do not like mechanics that are focused on specific formats-I think that any Magic card should be useful/playable in any format. (This is setting aside questions of 'quality'). AFM's ability only triggers in Commander and I think that's a negative.
This mechanic is also a clear reply to the problems that Oloro presented that people (rightly, in my opinion) complained about. It should be interesting to see how the next Commander set tries to set against what we don't like about this Commander set.

However, so long as cards with this kind of drawback are infrequent, I can't fault WotC for poking around in that design space a little and this card is a pretty solid one. Giving all your dudes Vigilance is a nice way to mess with combat math.

It's strange that people took such a dislike to what I said, because I wasn't rude about it. I just had an opinion: All cards made for Magic should be fully playable in any game of Magic. It isn't a radical idea. Hell, it's even really easy to fix! Just have the Angelic Field Marshall ability be contingent on controlling a Legendary creature. Boom. It's even a much better ability.

But then, of course, WotC wouldn't get to shove Planeswalkers as Commanders in and have the Lieutenant ability work. And to that I say: So what? I would rather have a card that I can use in any format of Magic than the Glory Of Cool Things.

What was worse was that it felt like nobody really read what I wrote. I had people asking me if I had an issue with cards that were only usable in Draft like Ainok Tracker or thought that I hated Conspiracy.

Ainok Tracker is fully playable in any format of Magic and yes, I wish that the cards in Conspiracy that had abilities that were only playable in draft (the Constructs being the clearest example) they had found a way to make playable in every format. However, the impact of that Draft mechanic was shallow and so long as it stays that way I'm comfortable with it. In addition, I rather enjoyed the set.

Those aren't radical notions but they certainly seem to create havoc. Which had me fighting to not be reactionary because people were being...people.

Comprehension before response. This might be a good mantra. Wise in reading, wise in Magic.

Conspiracy Draft (final)

Last Sunday I got to hold a draft of Conspiracy with the box I'd bought; we had nine players and all in all, things were pretty cool!

Once again, though, I got a lesson in seeing things from the other player's point of view.

Lauriel has 3 Lurking Automatons on the board set to 9/9. So that's scary. Caitlin has the most life, at 31 via Sevala shenanigans. Merrick is sitting tight with token creatures and Scott has all but nothing going on and is dwindling on life until he takes my Magus of the Mirror, via Extract from Darkness.

Well, someone's got to get this party started, right? So I cast Drakestown Forgotten, netting me a 15/15. Nobody does anything for a bit except Caitlin, who starts building up walls including Vent Sentinels.

I put Unquestioned Authority on the Forgotten and now I have a choice; attack Lauriel, who's got the most (and largest) creatures on board or Caitlin, to bring her down to a regular life total so that when Scott activates the Magus, he doesn't just leap ahead. I'm at 13 life.

And I choose poorly, attacking Caitlin with not nearly enough mana available to me to keep her Vent Sentinels from doing damage to me.

Scott has no reason to take Caitlin's life, Caitlin proceeds to do 15 damage to me via Sentinel and I'm out.

Sigh. The correct play would be to wait until I had all my mana open, then attack Lauriel. I'm threatening but until I take action, I'm nothing and Lauriel couldn't kill me outright without opening herself up to losing, unlike Caitlin's board state. Let Scott swap Caitlin's life and be (briefly) the hero of the day for eliminating the swarm of huge creatures that were going to end us all.

I swear, one of these days I'll get it right.

A Conspiracy Draft and The Diversion

Noah got a box of Conspiracy and was willing to draft a 4 person pod so we broke packs and went after it.

Drafting with four people is a different animal, since you really can go mono-colored if you want to; Noah ran a pretty strong mono-Green deck that had just enough color fixing via Secrets of Paradise to run the occasional powerful offshot like Fires of Yavimaya. The other two players both went B/W but only one of them understood that the format was a multiplayer one. This meant that he let cards like Syphon Soul go, while she snapped them up.

I went U/R, because I had a couple Volcanic Fallouts passed my way, and while one player was collecting a ton of artifacts, I was getting Torch Fiend. Eventually, I was able to cast Fact or Fiction and turn a Dack's Duplicate into a Terastodon and that solidified my position for the game.

I think I would have preferred the eight-player draft though, just because it would have made deckbulding decisions a little more challenging. That said, the Conspiracy format has legs and I think will enjoy playing the box that I bought, especially if I can get a full group together.

..........

I got in a game with the Legacy deck, losing 1-2 to a Hypergenesis/Show & Tell combo. I foolishly sideboarded in Pernicious Deed instead of Diabolic Edict in game 3 and lost because of Blazing Archon.

There were also a few test games against Fuz; he piloted WW and Delver (R and B based) and I got trounced hard in the WW games. I've cut Garruk Wildspeaker and Duress for a Progenitus and Inquisition of Kosilek but I think the Sideboard really needs to do bad things to White Weenie. Namely: I need the global reset of Pernicious Deed to appear. It just absolutely has to show up. 

That may mean cutting the Pithing Needles for another Deed, to maximize my chances and perhaps putting in another Thragtusk to give me time and negate the power of Swords to Plowshares.

Another likely necessity? Silklash Spider. The ability to block fliers and kill small nasty creatures like Aven Mindcensor is probably worth the price right there.

Conspiracy Video & Khans of Tarkir Spoiled.

I don't draft often: I find the format a bit too expensive for my blood but I understand the attraction. It's very dynamic and full of choices that reward or punish you right away.

I do like the direction that Wizards has taken the Conspiracy set, though. There's a very cool video of it in action here, and though it's long I think it's a really nice way to give players a taste for what the set is about.

Conspiracy feels a bit like WotC's take on the draft format, in much the same way that Commander sets are their method of approaching the Commander (formerly EDH) format. The video even mentions the 'Command Zone' as a space for the Conspiracies that can be drafted and used, which I think is a very clever way to add to the draft format without creating more rules complexity. Kudos to WotC for coming up with such an elegant solution.

I also like that they're reprinting some critical spells for the eternal format, like Brainstorm, Misdirection and Fact or Fiction. Which, of course, I also don't like because those spells do not have correspondingly powerful analogs in the other colors.

Bitch, bitch, bitch. The important part is that some valuable staples are being reprinted in a format where the goal is to open packs, not to build constructed decks. And besides, it's not true; cards such as Exploration, Swords to Plowshares, Vampire Hexmage and Decimate (a fantastic Commander card) are also being included. These are all useful cards many of which have gotten expensive and if reprints can help keep or bring the prices down, all the better.

Except for Tarmogoyf. Jesus that card is insane.

Next we have the Khans of Tarkir fall set announcement and yeah, there's very, very little to go on.

But here's what I am deducing: the set's symbol and name suggest a Persian influence which is exciting to me for multiple reasons.

First, this harkens back to one of the earliest, actually I believe the first Magic expansion, Arabian Nights. That is an area of culture that Magic hasn't touched on in a long, long time and after Arabian Nights was completed, they decided they wouldn't use established settings for a Magic set again, so Arabian Nights occupies a fairly unique place in Magic's history. This could be a way for Wizards to reclaim some of that history.

There is also a high possibility of a Mongolian theme instead and that works for me as well because I believe it's important for Magic to reach into worlds that are not dominated by white people, which they have been for 2 of the past 3 sets, and Western concepts for 3 of the past 3. And that's the other part that's exciting to me: a chance to see a Magic spin on different myths from cultures I'm very unfamiliar with, because there will inevitably be some brief discussion about where those myths spawn from. A chance for me to learn something interesting is always cool.

There is a huge maybe of the opportunity for Magic to reclaim juuuuust a little bit of the Arabian Nights history via this set, even if it does tilt heavily towards a Mongolian vibe. Allusions, if you will, which I think would be an opportunity for cool little Easter eggs.