Sunday, August 30, 2015

I'm a little less depressed about Magic now

Embedded image permalinkHi Everyone!
So, Ulamog is back! He exiles two permanents and doesn't have annihilator, but he does exile cards from libraries. Maybe R and D decided that their grandiose Eldrazi were a little too grandiose. There's a mechanic that lets us do things using exiled cards, it's pretty bazaar and seems way, way underpowered (one card let us take two cards from an opponents exile and put them in their graveyard for 3 1/1 tokens, wow, what an overwhelming power).

The other notable announcement is that Zendikar fetches will be in the set as foil, full art and as rare as foil mythics, there will be 40 of these "Expedition" cards.

There's also a new cycle of dual lands for the allied colors. They have basic land types and come into play tapped unless you control two or more basic lands.

So there are some cool things going on but the absence of annihilator makes me sad. I think the mechanic was very powerful and essentially unbeatable. Wizards probably wanted the Eldrazi to have less of an impact on the board at least. The new Ulamog is only a 10/10 that's indestructible that mills 20 cards when it attacks. The mill will kill you, but it won't hinder you from winning in the mean time.

The Expedition lands....they seem neat but are a pure cash grab from Wizards. They are foil mythic rarity cards (15 of 20) aren't even standard legal. They are trying to get players who don't play standard to buy packs of cards. They will be available online but not redeemable so I'm not expecting them to be expensive on Magic Online.

So yeah, Battle for Zendikar isn't looking so bad anymore, but Wizards is being transparent in their desire to do things to make players buy more packs without doing anything to make the game better.

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