(Gerrard's incredible adventures in machine hell.)

Attempts: 9 Winning Deck: Red/Green

x1 x3 x5 x4 x3

#1: So we, as a prank, gave red hard removal. That is, spells that just destroy a creature instead of do this damage nonsense. The drawback? Oh you lose 3 life. Oh no, better play it carefully! Oh losing life is too scary? Okay, use Rolling Thunder instead, which is yet another multi-target X burn spell that can blow up whatever you have the mana for, opponent included. That's not the only burn spell either it has a suite of those. It also still has card-for-card the strongest selection of common creatures. Flowstone Giant is the runner-up for best common creature in the set after green's Rootwalla. The only bad thing I can say about red's commons are its stinkers of creatures. Hell red Tim is back! At uncommon, if you really want to piss off shadow players, get Searing Touch and Shadowstorm. I'll have more to say about red's uncommons when I talk about color hate later. Lastly I want to talk about Mogg Squad. I played two and demonstrated how, despite being a 3/3 for 2, it might be the worst creature I've seen in a hot minute. I'm struggling to think of worse. It's like they don't understand what a common scenario of Magic is.

#2: Right so, Rootwalla. A 2/2 for 3 that, for 2 mana once per turn you can make it a 4/4 for the turn. I know it's not the perfect ratio of stats per mana paid for a creature, but it might as well be with the way these creatures are. It's not exactly impervious to burns and pings but most of those only deal 1 damage, and the rest, the other busted card at common: Elvish Fury, can help with shrugging those off, even better if you can pay its buyback. 5 Mana for a +2/+2 combat trick as often as you want. Wins games. Skyshroud Ranger as mentioned can turn a flooded starter hand into a turn 3 5-drop in a set with a lot of powerful but expensive options. Spike Drone is also a deceptively good 1-drop since it's a 1/1 that, for 2, you can then effectively move its 1/1 to someone else. Hold 2 mana up and save it as you need to. This is on a 1-drop, in a world where Magic dislikes having 1/1s for 1 do more than just be a 1/1 for 1. Green would be higher on this list but it's unfortunately lacking consistency and secondary options. All of the usual flyerhate we can just ignore since the only concerning flyers are in blue. The shadowhate as well is pretty useless, not because no one plays shadows but because they're some of the worst ways to answer shadows. We do get effective uncommon cards like Apes of Rath for a blocker-to-closer, and Overrun for a closer with a wide board. We also get quite a few stellar rares as well like Verdant Force, but outside of these memes green is going to be a wet fart. If you get the good cards, hell yeah. Otherwise, weep. Still second despite that.

#3: Counterspell's a common in this set, with two other counterspells at common. In spite of that I never saw enough counterspells to play a control deck and the AI, being bad at control, never had much success either. Capsize sure is a funny card. If you're playing a control deck that is winning, by turn 6 it's effectively over. You also get Tim as a fish, Wind Drake in case you want something to push the cart in your color. Though as usual it's better to let another color do the cart pushing. Common blue in this set does one trick: tell you no, but it's really good at doing it this time. In fact, because it has min-maxed into doing that it has next to nothing for things like, say, creatures, or, dealing damage. So it's in this weird spot where if you want to play a control deck blue has you covered but if you want to do literally anything else you're going to have to look to other colors or hope you get and deploy Legacy's Allure to just use whatever they finally get down on the board. I want to act like Propaganda is really good but I dunno man, every time it was used the costs to attack with something was easily paid. It's probably better in constructed. And, well, you've heard of mana fixing and deck thinning, right? Well what if we printed a card that did mana UNfixing and really stupid deck thinning? Who needs lands anyway? Certainly not the color that needs enough to play its game winners. I mean, I'd rather have the flying 3/3 for 5 monster Tim, but I did find the act of mana screwing yourself on purpose funny.

#4: With creatures like Blood Pet, Pit Imp, and Darkling Stalker; coupled with spells like, every single common except for Sadistic Glee and Coercion, Black on paper seems like a powerhouse of a color. In practice, Black doesn't have good common creatures past its 1-drops. I just mentioned Darkling Stalker because in some contexts it will sweep. All the creatures with shadow black has? Well it's shadow so it's mindless swinging until you swear up a storm because they pinged your shadows or simply swung faster because you can't stop their board with shadows. Their uncommon creatures aren't particularly great either. Maybe if you luck out with all the stupid strong removal black has but, at least with my context, black has such useful removal that it's such a fiercely contested color, not because it's good, but because hard removal wins drafts...or that's how it's supposed to go. Fun fact: strongest common creature in black here is gonna be a 3/3 for 3, that snacks one of your creatures when it dies. Everything else has 2 toughness or less. Two Tims will completely annihilate black's core selection of creatures, nevermind all the burn spells. God it's like it's trying to be white. I haven't mentioned their rares because honestly there is next to nothing! That's mainly why this color is 4th: decent core, bad selection of noncommons.

#5: White has shadows and I'm not too sure why. Probably something about it being cast from the light of God or whatever. Anyway, return of Circles. This time we have one for shadows as well! (Wow!) If you're playing this color you're doing the shadow meme, because you won't have a better way to deal damage to your opponent with common cards. At least we got the blowjob brothers to help facilitate that. And the reason why white's still at the bottom despite this is because putting 2 damage per turn on the table, even if it has shadow, is significantly slower than the nonsense red and green and even black can do. White doesn't have options for good board interaction either except for the single card that is Pacifism. Pacifism's your best bet for board interaction. We'd have better but 6 of our common slots is taken up by Circles! Jesus Christ. Thankfully at uncommon white does get better with cards like Flickering Ward, Gallantry, Knight of Dawn, Repentance, Soltari Crusader, and Staunch Defender. I would say something like "Having to rely on uncommons does not make it a good color" but it's white; no one drafts it so you don't compete for those. I am having a hard time deciding whether black or white is 5th. White at least has a better suite of creatures but black does have much more better removal to interact in the no-interaction set, so regretfully white remains bottom tier.

Set Observations:

I hate this set.

I'm looking at my notes from Mirage and the "disgusting colorhate" bulletpoint from there is still here. It's not as egregious, but it is stuff like "destroy all islands" and "islands don't untap". Once again, fuck blue. Magic would be better without blue, and I'm at least glad this set agrees.

This has happened often enough to become a noticeable trend: Magic as the game today had to build upon decades of good and bad designs to eventually figure out a good way to design each individual set, and we're definitely better for it because the mainstay color identities of Magic are quite pliable and familiar, making new sets easy to get into. Anyway it's entirely because they did 25 years of throwing science at the wall. ...And unfortunately this is the second block that's "designed" for "limited", in a world where shadow exists in the same world flying does.

This means despite there not being that many flyers there's now substantially more evasive creatures we have to deal with. The meta revolves around that as a result. Boards are gonna run as fast as they can and only the fastest will win. They printed plenty of ways to outspeed an opponent playing shadow creatures, or otherwise keep them in check. Playing shadows is honestly a bit of a booby trap as a result. You are either foolish to play this set ignoring them, or foolish to go all in on them and then have them be regularly blown up because shadows lose to either playing better creatures, playing burn spells, or having Tims. There isn't really creature interaction as a result and that's why I hate this set.

There's also buyback. Buyback is kind of interesting but does mess with card advantage in a boring and unbalanced way. I can't recall how many times a game was won simply because I or the AI started spamming a buyback card. Modern magic has few ways to just let you keep casting a card over and over again without running it in and out of a graveyard first, or sticking it onto something that can be blown up. Cards like Capsize and Elvish Fury are why.

And finally, something I haven't talked about at all, there's Slivers! Slivers debuted here! Despite there being 6 common slivers and 5 uncommon slivers drafting slivers is a bad idea, (except this one because it's a regenerator) and I think even just playing Slivers in constructed right here is also pretty bad, at the moment. (Future me: I'm wrong. Sliver decks were pretty okay, especially with later sets.) It's because the Sliver meme, as it'll evolve into, is just having your Slivers get expoentially better the more Slivers stick on board, to justify running more than 2 colors since they're a 5 color tribe. Problem is none of the Slivers save for a paltry amount are worth having in the first place, and they're not common enough to be able to get a reliable core of. You instead just play one of the good Slivers that are actually really busted and call it a day.

Oh what's that? There were also Licids that were weird 1/1 for 2s that could become auras and revert back? ...In a set where I talked about how egregious the pings were. Okay. Smart.

There's so many bad cards and all the new mechanics either don't add anything to Magic or twist it in a worse way. Even when I drafted right, I still just had to throw my hands up in the air and hope for the best. That sounds like the way Magic should be but it really all just revolves around how the new mechanics dumb down the meta and, once again, the cards that outperform everything else because of said metawarping. I still think shadows are a trap even when I luck out with a bunch of them, and some colors just don't have good choices for closers outside of shadows. We're still in the highly experimental part of Magic and this is just another chapter of no one having a great idea how to move the game forward. At least shadows didn't stick around after this block because they did at least learn that a set doesn't need two evasion abilities. You'll see it pop up every now and then like fear does but it'll never make a bad limited meta again.

Wait, I gotta play this set two more times for the other block sets? Aaaaaaaahhhhh.