Today is another round of quick hits, since I don’t plan on doing a true Commander set review, and I didn’t want to do a Vintage Set Review. I still kinda feel like Kaladesh just came out (because it did), so I don’t want to keep inundating you will set analysis. I do want to talk about some of the new cards, but I’ll uh… try to keep it relatively uninformative.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE: We are really jumping in on the deep end this week. Be ready!
I’m gonna start by stating something that really took me a while to realize that you may or may not have noticed. Magic, just like every other thing involving multiple parts, has a formula. It has since Alpha, and it continues through Shadows over Innistrad. Now, that formula has certainly changed, both in the short and long term sensabilities, and the definitions of what those pieces are have expanded, but that’s just part of organic growth. Before I get too much further, let me show you what I mean:
Every large Magic set needs a Wrath of God (“Destroy all Creatures”) effect.
Every large Magic set wants between 2 and 4 Planeswalkers.
Every large Magic set needs a degree of mana fixing, typically with dual land cycles at more than one rarity.
Every large Magic set needs to have some form of the most basic utility spells (Disenchant, Shatter effects) at Common or Uncommon.
Do you see what I’m trying to get at? Even though Alpha iconics like Wrath of God and Birds of Paradise are no longer themselves part of the formula, their legacy is. Now, this is being written before the rest of the set is dumped on Friday, but we’ve already seen some of the new underclassmen for these staple effects.
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I am really excited about Shadows over Innistrad. The cards are all extremely evocative in terms of flavor, Madness is one of my favorite abilities, and moreover I love playing my games out of the graveyard. I’m also the kind of person who gets really excited by big swings in Standard, and I think that the new rotation schedule is going to be a huge benefit to the game in the long-term. Today is not going to be my end-all preview (because we are still missing way too many cards), and from what I’ve heard, we ARE going to be divvying up the eventual set reviews (I called dibs on Green a few weeks back, hopefully that pans out). I want to talk about a couple of the new cards that we have seen so far, as well as some older ones that may benefit from the change in scenery.
Before we get going, I want to make a clarification that some of these cards will not themselves be cards worth buying low on, but rather they may be indicative of larger trends. Cards shape Standard regardless of rarity- things like Lightning Bolt can have a huge ripple effect regardless of the fact that the card itself may never go up significantly in price. These elements are tough to predict (unless they are super obvious like with Lightning Bolt), and often don’t present themselves until the entire set is revealed and played with for a little bit (typically around PT time). Assume that any commons or uncommons that we discuss today fit somewhere into this discussion.
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Editor’s Note: Say a welcome to Ardon, who is bringing some much-needed hard data to answer some of the more difficult questions we face in the game. I think you’ll like this piece, so enjoy! – Corbin
One of the great appeals of Magic is that it tests our skills. But powerful cards cost more money, which leads to some awkward tension: did we win because we outmaneuvered our opponents, or did we simply outspend them? Are we becoming better players, or just more invested? The idea of “pay-to-win” is Magic’s biggest elephant creature token in the room. I’m a graduate student, so I thought, why not collect data? I found evidence that money influences results, but not in the way I expected. As a result, I think we should pay less attention to win percentage, and focus instead on consistency.
