Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of The Magic Show. BEWARE SPOILERS! (Like, completely set-ruining spoilers. I’m serious.)
Check it out:
[The following is a transcript of the show, which you really should check out.]
But this isn’t just any Magic Show, this is the new and improved Magic Show! That’s right, no more of this willy-nilly The-Magic-Show-whenever-I-want-to-make-it business, now you’ll be seeing me on a weekly basis, every Friday…
Wait. You were already seeing the show on a weekly basis every Friday? Damnit! That totally screws up the surprise! But thankfully, due to Monday’s announcement, and Craig’s wonderful alluding, you’d know that each of these new articles has… a plan. And that plan is dastardly, devious, and all around destructive to the Magic Culture at large!
Really, I could just quit this and continue on with this week’s show, but one thing I have to say first.
Now, this new change to StarCityGames is better in many ways. First, you know who writes when. I got put into Friday, my preferred day of the week, where I get to be published amongst incredible company: Flores, Jones, Bleiweiss, and McKeown. Needless to say, I’m going to have to bust ass to make sure I don’t look like a chump against such persuasive and popular writers.
That said, this new “five-articles-a-day” change kills what basically brought you the Magic Show as you know it: unsolicited submissions. This means that if you rock a PTQ like a hurricane, you currently have no way of letting StarCityGames know about it.
But that’s where The Idea comes in. Let’s check it out:
The idea is to revamp the submission system. I say StarCityGames develops a submission system much like Digg. Someone mentioned in the forums an option called “Page 2” which would be the “backside” of StarCityGames… or something.
Digg is a very popular online news service because it subscribes to groupthink. Groupthink has been called a bad word, but what I mean by groupthink is that a bunch of Magic geeks can usually tell a good article from a bad one. The idea is that not only are you going to get kudos from your fellow Magic geeks, enough submission “diggs” will boost your article to the front page.
This would entail three parts: Submission forms, digg-like code to vote and / or pan articles, and StarCityGames.com managerial staff to approve articles to the homepage.
Let’s say that Joe Blow, Magic PTQ scrub extraordinaire, decides to write an article about how his White Weenie deck is the sweet new tech. He writes it up and posts it on the site through the Submissionist Section. This then puts the article in a queue where people can read and vote on it as they see fit. These articles would be edited only by the submitters, so it would not take away any of Craig’s time.
The highest rated article of the week, that’s a full seven days of being in the digg-like system, will then get promoted to the homepage where the winner will get a prize of some sort. Maybe the prize is monetary, maybe it’s just being published, I don’t know. The point is, this idea enforces self-editing, promotes good writing and strategy, and is a way for the SCG staff to accept submissions with little or no policing once the system is in place. Bad or poorly written submissions will simply be “buried” using the same voting like system.
I don’t know if it can work. All I know is, I began with humble writing aspirations for this game we love. Over the weeks and months of writing for StarCityGames, I won the submission prize enough to convince them to make me a Featured Writer, and then I decided that bringing video to Magic was something I could contribute. Were I not featured on StarCityGames way back when, I may not have continued my journey into the video articles you see today.
And now… the Planar Chaos File
Yes ladies and gentlemen, we come to the last Planar Chaos file before the set’s prerelease this weekend. As of this writing, the full set has since been spoiled. So with this information at hand, I’ll make a few points on what we now know.
Firstly we have to congratulate Wizards on what could only be the tightest of tightly-ran ships in regards to Planar Chaos leaks. It was all the way until January 14th when the first real, unofficial leaks were coming out of the woodworks. And I don’t mean the crappy leaks, such as the early Akroma, Angel of Fury that was listed at 4/4. I mean the Russian scans that set the rumor mill on fire. Dozens of cards were spoiled, and I’m guessing there will be some pissed-off phone calls to a few Russian distributors in the near future.
The most important and impacting of these is the Black card Extirpate. Holy cow, this is ridiculous. First of all, this card is totally ninja. And by that I mean the guy looks like Ryu from Ninja Gaiden and the card is totally badass.
Next up, a few deaths to announce as a result of this card: Martyr of Sands and Firemane Angel? Gone. Decks that rely on resolving or playing and replaying a single card have no game at this point. Hell, even playing it on an opponent’s Wrath or Mortify in the yard cuts out that option for the rest of the game and lets you see their deck, hand, and library… and it’s uncounterable. Damn!
Also, Red is absolutely insane right now. This comes on the heels of Bust / Boom, which is a land destruction spell that says, “as an additional cost to play Bust, sacrifice Flagstones of Trokair,” or it’s a friggin Armageddon. Christ on a cracker, people… we got Armageddon back! Two mana more? Why, sure! The choice between Wildfire and Armageddon could be a tough one depending on what ridiculous aggro you see coming your way, but man, what a monster split card! Both cards are equally fantastic, and this will see a lot of play for a long time. Wow. And you thought my Vore deck from last week was good? Wait till this mother gets a slice.
Let’s see… they also got the best Limited cards since ever with their other splits, with both Dead / Gone and Rough / Tumble being 100% solid first picks.
They will break both Extended and Vintage as a now red Elvish Spirit Guide rocks us like we’ve never been rocked before. I would say it’s going to go directly into Standard decks like Vore and Red/Green beats, but we’ll just see how that pans out.
I think the most surprising card for me was a red Berserk at just three mana. There’s a reason Berserk was ridiculous, and once restricted, and we’ll soon know why. Between the new Berserk, Red also got a Man-o-War for an opponent’s creatures (because, you know, you spent so much time with Man-o-War winning games by returning your own creatures), and a Timeshifted Black Knight that is going to see a ton of play in Boros Deck Wins and will probably be in Extended for quite some time.
Torchling turned out both better and worse than originally thought, as he no longer makes himself untargetable but rather changes the target of a spell that targets him. So I guess this means that you’ll need to either Sudden Death his sorry ass or kill virtually every other creature on the board before dealing with him. Then there’s that whole built in Lure and Trample and pumping that goes both ways… when Wizards said they were going to flood the environment with Tier 2 cards, they weren’t kidding. [Trample? – Craig, confused.]
At this point, with the entire set known, there is just so much to talk about I’m trying to fit it all in. So let me see if I can sneak a few more highlights in before we depart.
White’s primary theme with this set is Rescue. The “rescue” mechanic is focused on bringing creatures back to your hand. And all I gotta say is: White was pretty bad in triple Time Spiral draft, but I don’t think they’re going to be that way for long. These new guys are just incredible!
Let’s take, for instance, Dust Elemental. While 187 creatures are a virtual must for this guy, he basically guarantees that White Weenie will always have an out against mass removal for decks that don’t pack counterspells. Damnation? I guess I’ll throw this guy out, pick up my team, and replay them next turn.
Let me just get this out of the way: Calciderm is probably the biggest question mark in the set right now. Of all the cards I could say are great and are horrible, Calciderm sits somewhere in the middle. He’s sorta Blastoderm, but he doesn’t have Fires of Yavimaya to give him haste. White’s Rescue mechanic helps it quite a bit in this regard, and before those creatures were spoiled I had completely written him off as a crap rare—now I’m not so sure.
Then, of course, there is the biggest White bomb of them all in Porphyry Nodes, officially the stupidest name ever. Honestly, “White Drop of Honey” would’ve been better. Did you know that porphyry is a rock, and that it’s Latin for purple? What does this have to do with killing creatures with the lowest power again?
Blue gets what is probably the coolest casual and scariest limited card, Chronozoa. Nice work Wizards! However it is Dichotomancy that is the scariest constructed card I’ve seen. This gets a copy of each of your opponent’s nonland permanents when it goes off. And with a Suspend cost of just three mana, and with cards like Timecrafting to make sure it goes off at Instant speed, this could be one extremely frightening weapon. Of course, the most popular blue spell that will emerge from Planar Chaos is – get this name – Pongify, a.k.a. Swords to Monkeyshares, which it will be called from now on.
As for Green… well, we’ve come a long way since Jedit completely underwhelmed us. We now have Ana Battlemage, which for some reason causes your opponent to discard three cards when its Blue kicker is paid yet its Black kicker taps an untapped creature and does the hokey pokey or something. Did anyone keep reading after the Blue-kicker-makes-them-discard-cards bit? Neither did I.
Life and Limb will be rocking kitchen tables the world over—I can hear Abe Sergeant squealing now—as Saprolings become Forests and Forests become Saprolings and then some prick Pyroclasms and somebody gets a bloody nose.
Oh, and Concentrate? Stay Green for awhile, wouldja? That won’t see any play in Constructed, noooo.
One last thing about Green: My apologies to Jamie Wakefield for last week, his late wife’s name is Marilyn and not Marian. Still, Timbermare is awesome in all aspects, isn’t it?
So that’s Planar Chaos highlights for me, at least for this week. Next week we’ll have our Prerelease show, where I’ll be showing up at a local prerelease and giving you the real, live opinions from Magic dorks like you and me.
Are you ready for that jelly? I don’t think so. I also don’t think we’re ready for Planar Chaos. I can honestly say I’ve not been this impressed with an entire set in a long time – probably not since Ravnica. The cohesion of Planeshifted cards versus furthering the Suspend ideas from the base set… this one looks like a winner.
And while Damnation can spur plenty of articles on whether or not it breaks Magic, like I said last week, it sure sells cards. So congrats to Wizards for finding easy ways to make money.
Hey, I know – for Future Sight they’ll print Wrath of God in Blue! That would sell cards… right?
Thanks for watching, I’ll see you next week (and if you’re in Kentucky or Nashville, I’ll probably see you this weekend).
Evan “misterorange” Erwin
dubya dubya dubya dot misterorange dot com
eerwin +at+ gmail +dot+ com
Written to while listening to My Chemical Romance’s “The Black Parade”
(Which rocks. A lot.)