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Stream of Consciousness #5

I’ve been spending way too much time this week watching coverage of the League of Legends World Championships. Thousands and thousands of words have been written about Magic coverage and how it needs to be getting better numbers, and LoL streams are oft cited as the example. I think the comparison though is a poor one. Watching the LoL casters, they have a very fast-paced game about which to talk with natural lulls and periods that warrant cranked-up energy. Magic has very little of the latter and commentators yelling with crowds cheering in the background would feel very adventitious.

A lot of Magic players seem to be LoL fans too, as my Twitter feed had a lot of commentary on the event this week. It also had a lot of Magic players complaining about the non-Magic content on their feed. Funny, none of the non-Magic people who follow me ever complain about all the Magic content. Work on your tolerance, guys and gals. There is more to most people than just Magic.

With a new set comes an update to the Banned and Restricted list. This time around we only had an update to Pauper, seeing the oppressive Storm and ramp decks take a big hit with the banning of [card]Temporal Fissure[/card] and [card]Cloudpost[/card]. From what I have heard from those in the know, these bannings are widely appreciated.

One thing we did not get was a change to Modern. In the wake of GBx (mostly Jund) decks dominating the top tables of GP Detroit, a lot of the Twitter chatter on Sunday night was calling for [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card], [card]Thoughtseize[/card] and/or even fetchlands to be banned with the Monday announcement. Leaving aside the correctness of those calls (until the next paragraph at least), just how quickly do you think these decisions get made? I highly doubt a card could be banned overnight in this day and age, even if the post about the bannings hadn’t already been written and approved to go live at midnight.

Having said that, a banning of [card]Birthing Pod[/card] on Monday would not have surprised me. Melira and Kiki versions of Pod decks have been winning consistently, and the combo can be hard to disrupt because of all the utility silver bullets the decks can run to hate the hate. It probably still would have been premature, but I would not have been shocked.

I will be utterly flabbergasted though if fetchlands ever get banned in Modern though. They basically define the format right now, and although I can see the argument for removing the shuffling that should not be an issue as long as players are keeping their opponents to a reasonable length of time.

I can’t see Thoughtseize eating the ban hammer when it just got reprinted, but Deathrite Shaman is a real possibility as it is virtually ubiquitous in any green OR black deck, with many Bx or Gx decks splashing the off colour just to maximise activations. Omnipresence has in the past lead to a ban with things like [card]Wild Nacatl[/card], so keep that in mind.

On his podcast last week, Mark Rosewater talked about the Pro Tour’s history on the Queen Mary. Hearing those stories really made me nostalgic for those days, which turned to sadness when he said that the ship no longer seemed viable for a Pro Tour due to size constraints. Perhaps you could hold the World Championship on the ship (heh), with the World Magic Cup somewhere nearby? So much history tied to that ship, it would be a shame to not make more.

Speaking of the World Championship, I really liked Kai Budde’s suggestion to let the winner pick a card from an upcoming set and have them in the art of it. Signing a non-disclosure agreement would obviously be required but it’s not like Wizards never uses those, and the reward of being an actual card has always seemed significant to me. Since the card submitted by the winners rarely resembled the one they ended up being on, the whole design part isn’t really important anyway.

Wizards announced last week that they would be changing the way the released sealed queues worked on Magic Online. The entry fee is down 4 tickets to 20 but the prize payout is also down by 27 packs across the event. The usual suspects instantly started whining about this, until someone with a more level head pointed out that draft wasn’t changing, and the prize to ticket ratio on sealed was exactly the same. Essentially the change only affects those people who grind value on MTGO and try to farm these queues for easy packs. For those who just want to play Theros it’s an excellent change as it reduces the cost to do so. It also serves as a great reminder to read a little deeper into things before climbing on your soapbox.

Rotation is generally a season of mixed feelings for me. On the one hand I get to brew with a whole bunch of new cards and take some older ones out for a spin in a new environment. On the other hand I have to say goodbye to a bunch of old friends. We spoke about a lot of the cards we’ll miss on episode 88 of Horde of Notions, which you can check out on ManaEchoes.

One “tradition” we have started locally is to make the last FNM before rotation (typically the one before the midnight prerelease) into “Jank Night.” Each year the number of players taking part has increased, to the point where this year more people were playing fun brews than “real decks,” and those that were on real decks actually felt kind of bad about it. I highly recommend doing something like this in your local groups, it’s a lot of fun and lets you play with cards you wished you could but never dared to try. I know Don of Don’s Magic and Sundry does something similar and has had great feedback.

What did I play? I’m so glad you asked. I went over a lot of options: a Curses deck, something with [card]Omniscience[/card], running back [card]Séance[/card], [card]Gilded Lotus[/card] into [card]Nicol Bolas[/card]…but ultimately I couldn’t let a certain Spirit and his Rhino Monk buddy ride off into the sunset without a fond adieu, and a double-sided cup by which they could remember me.

What? Oh, fine. Ghosty McJazzhands, [card]Rhox Faithmender[/card] and [card]Chalice of Life[/card].

Marshall Sutcliffe is possibly the biggest inspiration to me in the content-producing side of my life. His podcast is seen as the model of what a Magic cast should be, his articles are popular and well-written and he does commentary for Wizards as if he were born into it. When he left his job to focus on producing that content full time, I was envious. Still am. That he chose to run a Kickstarter to help him continue to provide this content surprised me, but I was happy to support it and him as I enjoy what he does. The reaction to it on Twitter astounded me, as much because of the forcefulness of it as because of who drove it. Nobody held a gun to anyone’s head to make them donate, nobody lied about anything. Don’t like it? Don’t donate. It’s his podcast and he can choose to raise money for it however he wants, so saying things like “just get a job” are insulting and inappropriate.

There will not be a Horde of Notions Kickstarter. Unlike Marshall I don’t earn my living from Magic (unfortunately) and we don’t have a website to pay for or anything close to that sort of thing. You want to support the cast and/or me? Leave comments. They mean more than a donation right now.

Having now played in five prerelease events for Theros I can say that I really enjoy what the format is trying to do. I got a good enough feel of cards like [card]Fleecemane Lion[/card] and [card]Boon Satyr[/card] (both better than you think) that I know what I want to do in Standard to start with, and also affirmed my view of [card]Whip of Erebos[/card] (ridiculous).

The sealed format, which will be slightly different from what we all played this weekend due to the lack of prerelease promos, feels a little slower than average but I also got the impression that it’s deeper than you might think on first glance. I played 3 distinctly different decks over 5 events and faced at least 2 more, and that’s with limited exposure. My favourite was probably a UR build with a lot of scry, a fair bit of evasion, [card]Flamespeaker Adept[/card] and [card]Spellheart Chimera[/card]. Oh, and [card]Sea God’s Revenge[/card] is mental.

I need to find a way to bring 4 [card]Gray Merchant of Asphodel[/card] into play at the same time in Standard. [card]Immortal Servitude[/card] would cost BBB5, at that point I’d almost prefer to cast [card]Rise of the Dark Realms[/card] for one more mana. Bringing back 3 with any other black permanent in play is still a one-shot kill, but graveyard hate is a very real thing.

Doug Beyer revealed on his Tumblr that [card]Guardians of Meletis[/card] is the first representation of a same-sex relationship on a Magic card. This seemed like the sort of revelation that could have started a brush fire, but the response once again was welcome: nobody seems to give a flying rat. It’s a cool little Easter egg that shows Magic is a game played by largely tolerant people…or unobservant ones. It’s great that our game is progressive enough to do this, but I would rather it stayed as “not a big deal.” I thought Doug’s response was perfect in that regard.

That was the way my Stream of Consciousness flowed this week. You can always catch me on Horde of Notions with a new episode every Thursday on ManaEchoes, and I’ll be back next week to once again take you down the Stream. Thanks for reading!

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