Kumagoro42's picture
By: Kumagoro42, Gianluca Aicardi
Sep 28 2012 12:42pm
0
Login to post comments
5156 views


 Welcome back to Tribal Apocalypse, the PRE where the biggest they are, the more noise they make when they fall down. On you.

 It was Fattie Week, guys! The Autumn Celebration where we only allowed the fattiest of fatties to join, as gigantic, living and kicking simulacra of a metaphoric, auspicious winter harvest for the world (which, given the current international situation, isn't very likely to happen, but we can still wish, can't we?)

 The main rule was that every creature, tribal or otherwise, needed to have a body (the sum of power and toughness) equals to or greater than 12. The initial definition of power and toughness both equals to or greater than 6 was tweaked this way in order to grant access to creatures like Silvos, Rogue Elemental, which was too clearly a fattie. (Well, another obvious fattie like Massacre Wurm was left out, as would have been with the other definition too, but hey, the axe had to fall somewhere.) (He wouldn't have that much fun in such an event, anyway). The body was checked as the creature entered the battlefield, with no pumping assistance from other cards or game resources, so giant-sized creatures that don't have body 12 stats printed on their cards, like Phantom Nishoba or Cytospawn Shambler, were legal; on the other hand, creatures that might enter the battlefield that big, but require a variable or a sacrifice to do so (*/* creatures like most of the Hydras, or creatures with abilities like devour or amplify and not already big enough) weren't legal.

 I was in charge of the event, and last time it happened, with the Angel/Demon showdown, I guiltily neglected to investigate the meta deeply enough, so in the end it all boiled down to Gloom vs. Crackdown. This time I wanted to be thorough and remove from the tournament each and every card that could possibly twist the meta in an unwished direction. We ended with the following 15 cards banned for the event:

THE HOSERS

     

THE CHEATERS-INTO-PLAY

    

THE CREATURES WITH DEGENERATE STATS

    

 Yep, this was probably the one and only tournament ever to ban Indomitable Ancients. The banning of the first group, the Hosers, was aimed to avoid a degenerate board status where the fatties didn't have the intended role. The Cheaters-Into-Play group collected the most popular and powerful of these spells, to push the players into finding other solutions rather than the easiest, go-to ones. The last group is apparently the weirdest: Death's Shadow and Phyrexian Dreadnought are both evident enough, as they make for combo interactions that play around the intended difficulty: handle creatures that aren't just big, but most importantly hard to cast. Not something you can consistently drop on turn 1 with just a Chrome Mox and a Stifle at hand. The other three in this category just complete the collection of creatures that, while satisfying the required body size, don't pose any inherent problem of casting cost, and might have caused an excessive presence of tribes like Elemental or Treefolk. This said, let's see how everything went down with these rules.

  • Event Number: 2.38, Week 90 BE
  • Date: September 22
  • Attendance: 16
  • Rounds: 3
  • Special Rules: Only creatures with body 12 or more are allowed, special banned list
  • Top 4: DirtyDuck (Giant, undefeated); slug360 (Demon, undefeated); Nagarjuna (Eldrazi, 1 loss); misterpid (Beast, 1 loss)
  • Special Prizes: Up-and-Coming Prize to DirtyDuck (Giant); Topical Prize to slug360 (Demon)
  • Tribes: Beast, Demon (x5), Dragon (x2), Eldrazi (x2), Elemental (x2), Giant, Wurm (x3)
  • Virgin Tribe: none
  • Event link (with all players, pairings, standings, decks, and results): here it is

 And I'm very glad to say, everything went down pretty well. Despite some talk of Humility brokenness before the tournament, none of the 16 decks tried to go around the spirit of the event, choosing instead to tackle the problem from different angles, elaborating several solutions that in some cases involved digging up obscure and forgotten cards, which was precisely my hope.

 At the top for the second consecutive week, we find one of past year's Horsemen of the Apocalypse, tribal champion DirtyDuck.

 

 Giants gave Dirty one of the lowest-costing fatties within the defined meta, Ruhan of the Fomori, a Commander dude who's just way better in 1-on-1. Was it a card I just forgot to ban? Quite the contrary, as it's not a creature very simple to cast (it asks for 3 different colors, one of which, blue, isn't traditionally linked to the Giant tribe), and more importantly, doesn't play defensively. The issue with Tree of Redemption was the fear of seeing it included in every deck (since the Plant tribe wouldn't offer enough fatties to be built on its own), just as a way to clutter the battlefield and make any fattie beatdown strategy harder: less of a "clash of the titans" and more of a "titans glaring at each other from behind the big tree". Ruhan doesn't pose this kind of problem, as what he wants to do is just to smash stuff.

 Dirty's deck is interesting for many other reasons as well. First of all, speaking of Titans, here they are, doing an almost complete parade. One of the results of having 4-color-wide 2-colored activations, though, is that this deck has become the most expensive undefeated deck since when I started monitoring this aspect. That land base is really something, with Farseek as the ramp/fix of choice. There are also two sub-themes, both very cool as they delve deep into the history of MTG. No Show and Tell available? What about taking a real gambit with this weird, never-before-played card from Nemesis?

What the hell is this?!

 Here's Dirty's gambit: we were in an environment where every creature was a fattie, with a foreseeable average casting cost of 6 or more. However, his own fatties managed to stay all within the 4-6 CMC range, especially thanks to Ruhan and another inconspicuous card like Deep-Slumber Titan (calling in itself for a weird double combo with other unusual stuff: Freed from the Real and Honden of Infinite Rage, both also useful when directed towards the opponent). Chances were, then, that a turn-2 Stronghold Gambit would give Dirty a huge advantage by dropping a 7/7 beater in the worst case scenario, or a high-profile Titan in the best one. All of this makes for excellent deckbuilding, which is where the difference is shown between a great player and a player who just owns a juicy collection.

 And now let's also give some due credit to the highest-ranked Demon player (Demon ended up being the most featured tribe, due to the inherent high quality of its fatties, especially the super-fast Grinning Demon, and that gave birth to the first 5-sided battle for the Topical Prize, with specialist AJ_Impy's own build ending very near at 5th place). Here's the 2nd place deck by European bannerman slug360:

 

 Again, what I like about this deck is that it's not the more usual way to build Demons. It ramps via Ancient Tomb and Grim Monolith, rather than Cabal Coffers or Heartless Summoning (without losing the flavor). It uses the often shunned sacrifice-asking Demons, pitting Xathrid Demon directly against the morphing Liege of the Pit to get rid of the latter once he gets annoying and hit the opponent hard in the process. It uses cool, rarely seen cards like Druidic Satchel and Phyrexian Processor as token makers. It uses Consuming Vapors, Liliana of the Veil and Chainer's Edict's repeated effects to get rid of its own Abyssal Persecutors (too bad for the absence of Innocent Blood, it would have been wonderfully flavorful). It's all a complex ecosystem of death!

 More straightforward was the Eldrazi deck by Nagarjuna, scoring 2-1 for a 3rd place finish after losing to DirtyDuck's powerhouse (the same exact fate of the other Eldrazi player, fliebana, who was 6th in the final ranking).

 

 It's a classic and very effective Cloudpost build, reminiscent of some of the current Tron archetypes in Modern, down to the green being present uniquely for Sylvan Scrying, and Karn Liberated, Oblivion Stone, and All Is Dust as a fattie-sized removal suite. 

 So far, we have seen three different approaches to the problem "How should I handle these cumbersome fatties that are clogging my hand?" We have had an unusual cheat-into-play spell; a mix of artifact and land ramp and tempo advantage; and a pure land ramp. And here's another solution entirely, that relies on what I had described as the real challenge within the challenge: choosing the right fatties. For instance, fatties that don't enter the battlefield as themselves in the first place:

 

 Introducing: misterpid's morphing Beasts. All the ones that are rarely even considered as viable finishers, since they don't do much once on the battlefield other than being big (Krosan Cloudscraper was for several years the biggest creature in the game). But what if we decided to see then as 2/2s for 3, in a universe where nobody else is that fast? They might get flipped over by Cloudshift, then followed by a well-timed Armageddon, possibly with a Greater Gargadon lurking from the Blind Eternities. Again, a meta-call that answered the fattie dilemma through good research and deckbuilding: the Johnny Answer. This deck in particular is simultaneously very direct and focused, yet capable of taking the opponent by surprise with an unexpected move. It happened to me, for instance.

 Speaking of which, I resolved to play this cute, experimental Wurm deck, knowing all too well that it wouldn't perform very consistently. In fact, it ended up carrying out its battleplan only every third game or so, but when it did, it was a lot of fun.

 

 My own obscure card of the week was this one:

 And of course the best creature to strap this onto is one of the self-sacrificing Spawn tokens created by Awakening Zone. Which leads to Pattern of Rebirth as a secondary plan. I also had Dramatic Entrance as a backup, but in hindsight I think it would been better to ditch it and focus on the sacrifice strategy more (a truly ruthless/sensible player might want to include a singleton Ulamog for the Rebirth to fetch, too). What's cool in the pairing of Deathrender with the Wurms is that it gives life to fun interactions like having a freshly summoned Symbiotic Wurm coming with the sword already attached, so you can dribble any attempt at removal while dropping yet another big Wurm on the battlefield, ending up with 7 Insect tokens as a bonus. There are several Wurms with this kind of recycling theme: Wurmcoil Engine, Pelakka Wurm, Penumbra Wurm, and of course this deck can't wait to put its hands on the upcoming Armada Wurm and especially Worldspine Wurm from Return to Ravnica. Also good: flash-casting an Engulfing Slagwurm during the unsuspecting opponent's combat phase, right after they attacked with their own juicy, juicy fatties. This deck is mostly silly as it is, but it might be worth some fixing. Here's a couple games where it delivered. Against misterpid's Beasts, Round 1 Game 1, where my evil plans have been constantly delayed by Unsummon and Swords to Plowshares, and I also have to survive an Armageddon (thank God for Awakening Zone) and the coming of the Gargadon:

  And here I am in Round 3 against Chamale's other Wurm build, a 250-card deck designed to clear the Battle of Wits achievement. In Game 1 he even managed to have it on the battlefield, only one turn too late:

 In Game 2, I got to do the Symbiotic Wurm fragmentation, then successfully bluffed my way to victory when I purposely made Chamale believe my Novablast Wurm would stop me from attacking for lethal damage (a rare case where I actually managed to plan my moves in advance during a game, and a strong argument in favor of Dramatic Entrance):

 And thus ends Fun with Fatties.


THE HIGH PRICE OF WINNING

 Also known as: how much do the Top 4 decks cost? As of September 28, 2012, here's the answer (MTGO Traders prices; the cheapest version of each card is always used; basic lands count zero):

 We simultaneously have what so far are the highest-costing deck and lowest-costing tribal base (a feature I just introduced and that might be interesting to monitor: the tribal creatures can amount to a negligible cost, like in misterpid's case, but sometimes they greatly influence the money value of the deck, like in Nagarjuna's case).

 Let's do a brief recap of all the undefeated decks I evaluated since I started this section five articles ago. In bold you can see the deck whose cost was below the $50 threshold at the time of the article:

 What we see here, and I'm including this week in the analysis, is that in 4 out of 12 cases an undefeated deck (3 of which ended 1st place too) didn't cost more than about $40. In one case, the price even remained under $20.


REXDART'S DECK TECH SERIES

 Hello again, we're back for the third installment in my ongoing audio/video deck tech series! This time I examine the Ramp archetype. Ramp, like all the non-aggro archetypes in Legacy Tribal Wars, faces some unique deckbuilding challenges incorporating the creature requirements, and successful Ramp decks have adapted to the format in a variety of ways. I take a look at three successful real decklists that finished Top 4 or better in the Tribal Apocalypse PRE, as well as three historical Ramp lists that demonstrate the common strategies, strengths and weaknesses of the archetype and how you can adapt those when building your Tribal Wars deck.

 The PRE decks used in the video are: Valakut Scouts by _Kumagoro_ (1st place on TribAp 27, July 9, 2011); Wall-Drazi by NemesisParadigm (one of the decks used in the 2012 Invitational, January 21, 2012); 12-Post Eldrazi by fliebana (4th place on TribAp 41, October 15, 2011).
 The historical decks are:The Claw, Onslaught Block Constructed, by Darwin Kastle (Top 8 at PT Venice 2003); Valakut Titan, Standard, by Thomas Bilek (27 pts. at PT Paris 2011); Tooth and Nail, Extended, by Kyle Goodman (4th place at GP Charlotte 2005).


INTRODUCING: THE UNDERDOGS!

  

 The glorious Endangered Species Week is going into retirement, in part to give more tribes the access to the traditional special event held in the first Saturday of each month (now every other month, in rotation with Singleton), in part to eliminate any confusion with the Endangered Prize (which remains unchanged). In fact, the Endangered event is only going to get itself a new moniker and an enlarged platform: starting from the October 6 Event, it will be renamed Underdog Week, and it will feature all the Underdog Tribes. But what exactly are the Underdog Tribes, you might ask. Well, they are, as their name suggests, all the tribes that have less chances to shine in regular events compared to, say, Human, Goblin, Elf, or even Elemental, Demon, Shaman, and any other tribe that has been either played a lot or frequently piloted to some degree of success. Simply put, an Underdog Tribe is any tribe eligible to one of the special prize awarded in regular Tribal Apocalypse event (with the exception of the Topical Prize, as the Topical Tribes are usually strong tribes). If a tribe is eligible for either the Endangered Prize, the Virgin Prize (soon to become Almost Virgin), or the Up-and-Coming Prize, then it's an Underdog Tribe and will be granted access to the Underdog Events. Here's a complete list of all the three categories that compose the Underdog World. If a tribe appears in each category, then it's a True Underdog and will be eligible for a special prize during Underdog Events. But we'll talk more about this at the proper time. What's important is that now both size, popularity and success are factors in deciding which tribes are the most neglected, making for a good deckbuilding challenge. Wurms, Drakes and Ogres rejoice: they now will be able to fight for their honor alongside Elks, Pegasi and Skeletons.


ANNOUNCEMENT TIME!

 Just to remind you of a few things:

 We are returning to Ravnica! What is still arguably the most beloved block ever is coming back 7 years later, and with it are coming back some neglected creature types like Archon, Dryad, Elk, Fungus, Horse, Nightmare, Scorpion, Viashino, and even Weird and Slug. There's a new Slug, guys! (Blippy doesn't like it too much, understandably, but the silver lining is: they still remember Slugs exist. If we wish for a legendary mythic Slug that'll cause the opponent to do everything at half speed and has, "If you get to turn 100, you win the game", we have to put up with common vanilla dorks first.) I'll do a full tribal overview of the set (like I've done for Magic 2013), so that's just a heads up, but it sure is nice to see some old or minor tribes getting some new blood. It'll also cause a rotation of the Topical Prize, effective starting from Event 94 on October 20 (since for Return to Ravnica's online release we'll have to wait, alas, until October 15). I was trying to define which tribes might represent better each of the 5 guilds featured in Return to Ravnica (Azorius, Izzet, Rakdos, GolgariSelesnya) and/or the set as a whole; then I realized the set itself was already telling us this:

    

 So, starting October 20, Angel and Demon (the Avacyn Retored tribes) will be replaced as Tropical Tribes by Bird, Elemental, Devil, Insect, and Wolf. Enjoy.

  

 The Bad Boys (and Girl) are back! Galvanized by his recent vacation, our leader BlippyTheSlug has thusly spoken about the proposed change in the Banned List: the whole Trifecta of Doom is back (effective next event) in a restricted form, i.e. uniquely as members of their own tribes. That means Progenitus will only be allowed in Avatar and Hydra decks, Iona, Shield of Emeria in Angel decks, and Emrakul, the Aeons Torn in Eldrazi decks. It's similar to what we did for Stoneforge Mystic, but unlike with the Kor Artificer, only one copy of the three Big Bads will be allowed in their tribal decks. This further limits their impact, adds to their legendary feeling, and encourage the use of "search & exile" spells, such as Cranial Extraction, Sadistic Sacrament, and the upcoming Slaughter Games, to better keep any degenerate combo in check. Of course, this is just a test run, and they will be monitored in the Watch List, so don't panic. My previsions? The singleton Emrakul will be barely noticeable in Eldrazi decks (while at the same time will feel right for them to bring their big brother along). Avatar and Hydra decks are almost never played (Avatar has 5 appearances in the last 2 years, Hydra only 2), so if Prog will cause them to show up more, good for them. Besides, Natural Order doesn't help Hydras much. Iona might cause problems within Angel, though, a relatively popular (18 appearances) and definitely strong tribe (Top 27 in the Hall of Fame ranking). They can easily go black and perform a turn-1 or turn-2 Entomb/Exhume trick on Iona, entirely wrecking most monocolored builds. Then again, more Angels and less monocolored around might not be such a bad thing (and the latter was already very likely going to happen in the near future given the new Ravnica block's new tools and probable inspiration).

 The Rules: we now have a page with all the rules listed, so we won't have to repeat all of them before any tournament. Yay for time saving!

 The Watch List: some particular, archetype-defining cards have been put in a specific Watch List, giving them Annoyance Levels based on how frequently they show up and their degree of success. Once a card gets to Level 3 or more, I'll recommend it to Blippy for banning until the following year. So far, with 12 cards on watch (now including the Trifecta of Doom), the situation is as follows:

 Feel free to suggest more cards to be monitored this way.

 The Tribal Achievements: Clan Leys, which is in charge of any Special Prize, has launched and is handling the Tribal Achievements: a way to have fun within Tribal Apocalypse, challenge yourself to do all kinds of strange MTG feats, and make some tix in the process. You can find the complete list of achievements here on the Hall of Fame. 21 unlocked, 29 to go. Remember to call in a witness from Clan Leys (me, SBena, or Leys7) before moving on when an In-Game or Endgame achievement is involved, or we'll have to resort to replays and such, and that's easily a pain in the ass.

 The Virgin Prize is ending its first run: only 2 tribes are still standing, Mongoose and Squid. What will be the last one standing before switching to Almost Virgin mode (tribes played 3 times or less)?

 The Hamtastic Award: after its first edition ended with Leys7 taking the 5 tix for running 10 different tribes in a row, the Biodiversity Prize dedicated to the memory of Erik Friborg has started again. Currently we have slug360 and vantar6697 are leading the group with 8 tribes played. Only 2 more to go. Remember that you have to play all the rounds of an event in order for the tribe to be added to your sequence. If you repeat a previous tribe, your whole sequence resets.

 The Kirin Challenge is still unclaimed: I'll give 1 tix out of my pocket to the first player who'll win a proper match (no bye, no opponent forfaiting) with a Kirin deck featuring 4 copies of each of them. Clear this and we'll pass to Nephilim. C'mon, folks! Are you men (and women) or sissy elves?

 Videos: Send me replays of your games, please! Don't know how? Read this quick guide in 6 easy steps and start saving your tribal feats for posterity!

 What's Next: the upcoming Tribal Apocalypse events of the Blippian Era are:

  • 2.39 (Week 91 BE), on September 29: regular tribal.
  • 2.40 (Week 92 BE), on October 6: Underdog Week.
  • 2.41 (Week 93 BE), on October 13: regular tribal.
  • 2.42 (Week 94 BE), on October 20: regular tribal.

 Welcome back to hosting, Blippy! And see you all on the Tribal room!

13 Comments

First of all, as one of the by RexDart at Fri, 09/28/2012 - 15:03
RexDart's picture

First of all, as one of the biggest fans of the endangered week, and somebody who was very sad to see it go to every 3 (now 2) months, I am 100% in support of this change, no objections at all. It makes more rarely seen tribes playable in the event, and I am all for that. I think it will be much improved once somebody wins with Eldrazi, Slivers, and a couple of the other power tribes that are on the unhallowed list. I also thought Plant was disqualified after it became just another way to sneak wall-drazi into endangered events. But overall I'm very satisfied with the look of the Underdog Week, and by early next year hopefully the power tribes will be culled from it. I think disqualifying the more ubiquitous tribes on an ongoing basis is a good idea, as how assassins was taken out of the event earlier this year, and we should continue to do that every few events (so about every 6 months) take a look to see if anything reaching an assassins-level of ubiquity needs to be made ineligible.

I wish I could say I was surprised that Monguises are still waiting on the unplayed list. They're cute and vicious and awesome, all at the same time, but there's no deck design space there. The best I could ever do was some sort of U/G tempo deck which was still rather underpowered. Even worse, the shroud ones don't have the same potential impact in this event as they do in real legacy, because nobody in real legacy plays sweepers that would catch them, so they're usually only vulnerable to edicts there.

I have severe doubts that we will see any increase in Cap/Lobotomy effects, since those effects are a wasted card against aggro, and therefore dead against 70% of the field. You might run them in something that crushed aggro but folded miserably to combo and wanted to up its percentages in a tough matchup, such as a midrange creature deck in Doran/Junk colors. I continue to believe control decks should be fighting combo by splashing either blue for counterspells or black for thoughtseize and duress, as those are the most generally useful answers that aren't totally dead against the field. I also think that small enlightened tutor packages in the non-blue aggro decks, allowing them to fetch one of 2-3 silver bullets in the deck at need while also fetching swords when the bullets aren't needed, would improve their matchups against combo considerably as well. But by all means, Sadistic Sacrament is a nice card against combo, I don't discourage anybody from trying it, I just think you'll find it to be more dead against your other opponents than countermagic or hand disruption would be.

Oh no, Eldrazi should be by Kumagoro42 at Fri, 09/28/2012 - 22:24
Kumagoro42's picture

Oh no, Eldrazi should be banned everywhere, that was a mistake. Fixed. Ally, Artificer, Assassin, Eldrazi and Kor are banned for the Underdog Week as they were banned for the old Endangered Week.
But yep, the Unhallowed list will get thinner in time. Even by winning an Underdog Event a tribe isn't Unhallowed anymore. I'll come up with something when that list will start making less sense.

Btw, there's a chance Underdog will be more than 6 times per year (while Singleton still being 6 times next year). But it depends on something I can't talk about right now.

C'mon, you don't need to rationalize Mongoose too much in order to play them. Vantar cleared some Virgin tribes that were a lot less playable, it wasn't really a matter of deckbuilding space with those. :)

And I feel like a first turn (up to 3rd-4th turn) Sadistic Sacrament taking away 3 Lightning Bolts or 3 Swords to Plowshares isn't a good thing for an aggro deck too. It's also a way to make them draw more lands. The second Sacrament might prove devastating. It's kind of a proactive Chalice of the Void strategy. And of course, against most combo is lethal.

Btw, what I was alluding to by Kumagoro42 at Tue, 10/02/2012 - 00:03
Kumagoro42's picture

Btw, what I was alluding to when I wrote here of the chance of having Underdog every month was Blippy's retiring plan. I had hoped to talk him out of this, or at least having him on charge until the end of the year, but this failing, I'll work on a schedule with 12 Underdog events and 4-6 Singleton events per year.

Ive got several Kirin builds by Paul Leicht at Fri, 09/28/2012 - 21:10
Paul Leicht's picture

Ive got several Kirin builds one of which might even steal a match given a soft enough opponent. My trouble is just not being available for the entire time the events take place. Particularly when they go 4-5 rounds.

Sorry to hear that. Anyway, by Kumagoro42 at Fri, 09/28/2012 - 22:10
Kumagoro42's picture

Sorry to hear that. Anyway, TribAp never went 5 rounds in the Blippy years (we wish! 41 players are needed for that), and last time it was 4 (21+ players) was on May. I hope we get 21+ again, though. I just did the math, the 52 events last year gave a grand total of 910 registered players. This year we are at 675 with 14 events to go. We need to average 17 players per event to beat the 2011 total.

Fine with the underdog change by AJ_Impy at Sun, 09/30/2012 - 06:11
AJ_Impy's picture

The underdog change is all right, but restricting the three big bads to one per deck? My oath, are you missing the point. :( You DON'T WANT more than one or two if you're tying to cheat with them. You've just made it good for decks planning to do things with them alongside tutor cards to fetch them or other components, and pretty much useless for anyone else. Whoever came up with that one-of restriction needs to rethink it.

Ah well. Starting the three month campaign for the OTHER three Progenitii here.

Better would be to restrict by Paul Leicht at Sun, 09/30/2012 - 14:38
Paul Leicht's picture

Better would be to restrict them to 4x per deck.

ehh by Ranth at Sun, 09/30/2012 - 21:00
Ranth's picture

For monetary reasons if nothing else i can't say i can agree with this logic.

Oddly enough, the monetary by AJ_Impy at Mon, 10/01/2012 - 03:01
AJ_Impy's picture

Oddly enough, the monetary reason might be a good one in Paul's favour.

Going by MTGOTraders prices, Progenitus is about 7.1 each, Iona closer to 19 each, Emrakul about 6 for the promo version. Which one is most susceptible to entomb-exhume shenanigans? The expensive one. Let's require a commitment for those trying to run these cards. All or nothing.

I can't imagine running Iona by RexDart at Mon, 10/01/2012 - 09:55
RexDart's picture

I can't imagine running Iona as more than a 1-of in Angels. I do think you could run a fairly nice Angel ramp deck, as there are plenty of bombs in the 5-7 cmc range, and Iona would just be a miser's curve topper there probably. In the reanimator decks, she would just be a one-of as well. Only in S&T decks would you want 4 of her maybe.

Progenitus seems to be a 2-of in Natural Order decks, but I could see running more copies in other shells.

Emrakul will likely be played as a 4-of in S&T/Sneak Eldrazi decks. That will be a pricey deck to play, even if Tempest block drafts bring down the price on Lotus Petal, City of Traitors and Ancient Tomb. S&T itself is a big money legacy staple these days.

Since I'm in charge now by Kumagoro42 at Mon, 10/01/2012 - 09:34
Kumagoro42's picture

Since I'm in charge now (Blippy!!! What will I do without a boss to give all the blame to?), and I seriously prefer not to get stuck in an endless discussion about this, I thereby decree that they are all unrestricted and can be used, within their tribes, as a 4-of. There, done, bless you.

I want to go on record, though, with saying that I see through your evil plan, my dear AJ, since you needed 4 Progenitus for your Avatar deck. :P
(And there's shenanigans to be done with 4x of them, too. Possibly WORSE. Show and Tell, anyone? Oh, that's so much preferable as a deck archetype than just NO-Prog, I suppose. So fun to have a Shown-and-Told Emrakul on turn 2, isn't it?) (I'll be absolutely trigger-happy with the Trifecta, anyway. They're not like Doomsday, they WILL be played. First signs of general discomfort, they go back in jail and we throw out the key. They will be specially watched. Details on that will follow).

I and my evil plan thank you by AJ_Impy at Mon, 10/01/2012 - 12:39
AJ_Impy's picture

I and my evil plan thank you for your magnanimity.

I was hoping theyd be by Paul Leicht at Mon, 10/01/2012 - 12:43
Paul Leicht's picture

I was hoping theyd be restricted TO 4 ofs. Despite the benefits of duplication they can somewhat mitigate those by being duplicated.