The other issue with Astrolabe is being an Artifact is way more impactful than being an Enchantment. There's way more decks that abuse artifacts, and the number of artifacts, than that abuse enchantments.
More like "Man, WOTC really hates storm decks" lol Storm is fun to play, and a good, strong Archetype, but It was never particularly broken in modern and never dominated competitive play.
@@lethalweeb4415 Dragonstorm has pretty much always been a meme deck. I don't doubt people have tried it, but I do doubt this was ever much of a competitive strategy.
@@fwg1994 It was a fringe strategy in the Time Spiral/Ravnica standard of 2006-2007; it didn't dominate the era, but it was dangerous and worth looking out for. Rite of Flame, Bogardan Hellkite, and Dragonstorm made for a pretty good win condition.
A video (or more depending on how long they take) covering the storm scale in MTG would be really cool. A lot of players don't even realize it's a thing (for obvious reasons) but it's a neat piece of Magic history! 🙂
The reasons why preordain and ponder are banned in this video are the current reasons. One of the main reasons it was banned at the time was those cards slot in pyromancer ascension storm decks.
Tbh cheap cantrips are one of the main characteristics of Legacy, so one of the reason to not have them in Modern is to keep the formats different (if you think about it Ponder is restricted in Vintage). Maybe Preordain could be unbanned, but Ponder makes the best deck even stronger and focuses the meta on blue too much
I'm glad how you fixed Dig Through Time and Treasure Cruise by including more colored mana in its cost. Increasing the cost would end up making it played for the same reasons Draco is played. Taking advantage of the mana value to get some really good effect, like with Erratic Explosion.
6:56 Well, Pot of Greed is more considered to be Yu-Gi-Oh!'s Black Lotus. But considering there's nothing in Yu-Gi-Oh! that is its own dedicated resource, I can see why Ancestral Recall is Magic's Pot of Greed. I can just say that Ancestral Recall is Magic's Graceful Charity, but I'd mention Windfall too.
Yeah, the closest to a card that gives you free resources that we have in the Yugioh would be: - cards that add extra counters to other cards like Spell Power Mastery - archetypal cards that speed up the intended purpose of the the deck, like how Crystal Tree can double the amount of Crystal Beasts you slap on the backrow. - self-replenishing discard fodder like Volcanic Shell And needless to say, comparing any of these to Black Lotus is like comparing a water gun to the Death Star.
@@joanaguayoplanell4912 I mean POG is actually kinda Black Lotus in Yugioh, it gives you 2 extra resources for free, cuz Cards are your resources in Yugioh, while Lotus is 3, but still
If Rite of Flame only added one red for each Rite in graveyard (as opposed to 1 + that), it might cancel out actually. Yes, the potential to scale big is still there but the first copy would be so much worse that it might just brick a lot of hands right there. It would certainly be much more of a "investment for later" card.
16:12 You missed the other big difference between the two, Growth is an aura, so you have to choose which color you are filtering when you play it. Astrolabe lets you turn say a snow covered island and a snow covered forest into GG, UG or UU based on what you need at the time, growth you have to decide when you play it if you want to be able to get GG or UU, cutting you off from the other one (until you play more mana to make up for it) It also lets land destruction remove both the mana source and the filter in a two-for-one, where astrolabe as an artifact survives land destruction, not the most common in the format but some land destruction decks have been seen.
The Algorithm stopped recommending these after #3 Downside: I didn't get to watch all the rest of these beautiful things until I just now saw #8 while scrolling Upside: Now I get to binge FIVE AT ONCE!!
Opt was clearly the better choice for UW Control decks that wanted to keep their mana open for permission and possibly hit a miracle Terminus during the opponent's turn. But Serum Visions continued to see play well into 2021 because of UR Blitz decks, for whom the deeper scry and prowess triggers were far more important than Opt's timing flexibility.
Serum Visions isn't played in Modern anymore and Faithless Looting could absolutely come back. There are decks that do things way better than the looting decks did back then. The biggest hidden problem with Astrolabe is that it forces you to run snow basics, instead of whatever basics you want. I have nice full art basics that I wouldn't be able to play because it would be "incorrect," to in a metagame where Astrolabe exists.
Faithless Looting would make Murktide better, and Murktide is currently the most played deck in Tournaments. So, no, Faithless Looting couldn't come back, at least not right now.
Storm wasn't a problem when the cards were banned. If you go back and look at events. It was not even close to the top deck. It was a Tier 2 deck when they were banned. Pros like LSV, were surprised they banned at the time.
Yeah; like eggs, Storm is just one deck Wizards has it in for in Modern. It gets hit by all the bans targeted at the real degen combo decks, and if it’s ever viable, it gets an extra-special ban all to itself
@@connormchalehu2351 Yeah. before seething was banned, the highest placement storm song got in a gp or pt, was 3rd. It was banned not because it was doing well, but because it could get t3 kills.
@@WesternSpace Storm is the epitome of solitaire combos in mtg. If you don’t understand how storm is toxic you’re either inexperienced, bad at the game, toxic yourself, or some combination of those.
Treasuire Cruise is too good even for Legacy and even Vintage where is restricted to 1 alongside Ancestral Recall itself. Those 2 Delve cards when elgal warped the format so much that even Burn decks started to add blue to the deck just for these cards
That's a different environment where blue is already insane. It wasn't the case in modern, when blue was the worst color outside of kiki combo. People just prematurely freaked out.
Astrolabe is also REALLY good at hiding information. In something like a Jeskai control build, one untapped mountain could represent a multitude of different spells, anything for opt/consider to unholy heat/bolt to path to exile back in the day. Now that counterspell is in the format the same problem just gets worse.
Could probably fix rite of flame by only having the graveyard proc be "if there is another in your graveyard plus one additional Red" admittedly still stong as 2/3/4 copies would add 3 for 1 red
Faithless Looting is the one where I think it is worth experimenting with to see if it can be unbanned. Currently, of the top tier decks, I think only Murktide and Living End would run it. Of the decks that caused it to be banned in the first place, Hogaak is banned, B/R Hollow One is probably no longer good enough with all of the much stronger interaction, and Izzet Phoenix is probably just a worse version of Murktide Regent. While giving Regent decks another tool is probably not a good thing, it could shake up the meta and make graveyard decks stronger again, especially if they finally ban Ragavan at the same time. Just my hot take... Also, Wizards rarely ever prints cards like Blood Moon now, and the ones they do print are not very good, since they want STAX to die as an archetype.
Decks that would run Looting aren’t in the format right now BECAUSE looting is banned. If it were unbanned, we would not have the same decks on top. Similar to Mox Opal, Looting should stay banned. It’s a card that only gets better with time as more graveyard synergies arise, and is just too good at enabling them.
Funny you say the Blood Moon imitators they do print now are not very good, because Urza's Saga has kind of just made them preferable alternatives to Blood Moon, on account of having some other upside like being cheaper or drawing a card while still dealing with Saga. Murktide also really doesn't need pieces. It's currently the most played deck in tournaments by a pretty significant margin. It sits somewhere in the range of 14-16% of registered lists in a given month, while the next most popular deck is I think around 11%. Also Living End wouldn't run Faithless if it could. The deck relies on 3 mana cascade spells to hit Living End, which means it can't run any 1 or 2 mana spells.
The strength of Phoenix is to push recurring 3/2 hasty fliers to repeatedly bolt your opponent. It is what murktide wishes it was. Also we'd just see the rise of dredge again.
There's a card similar to Astrolabe that must be sacrificed in order to add 1 of any color, and also draws a card only after you sac it but even then not immediately but during your next upkeep. The name escapes me. That's a pretty good fix I think.
It's also worth mentioning that because Pyretic and Desperate Ritual only net 1 mana, Modern Storm has to play cost reducers like Baral and Electromancer to go off. If they had access to not only more rituals, but better rituals, they could potentially cut those cards, letting them blank opposing removal spells.
Is storm getting better really that bad though? The decks like solid tier 4 right now. The only reason to play it is because Storm has been a cornerstone of Modern since the start of the format, and some people refuse to let that come to an end. I mean, there's just decks like Belcher that do the whole rituals to combo off similar to storm, but don't have to commit to the board like Storm and still is like a tier 2 deck.
@@fwg1994 the longer I play MtG, the more I feel like Storm unfairly treated like a boogeyman. Its been nerfed into the ground by Wizards literally just because they don't like it. It's never been OP in competitive modern. It's fine as an Archetype, but WoTC hates it.
4 or 5 colors deck have access to cards like chromatic lantern to fix their mana, I personally like those kinds of decks since they can cast cards that are usually hard to cast like The Kami War
I run a 5(6 if you count colorless) deck in vintage. You need an incredibly large deck to run every color. Mine 389 cards. I use a card shuffler machine to shuffle it.
Love to see you dabble in Magic! ONE thing tho! Card draw like Ancestor Recall can also TARGET your OPPONENT! Which opens up to a lot of strats, like milling, or using cards that do dmg based on hand size or dmg/draw! I think drawing or giving your opponent cards its always bad in Yugioh, not so much in Magic though!
Dig would probably still be busted at 3 blue mana, since it has the draw 7 put 5 on bottom of the deck effects is really good so it becomes a divination except that you get to toss five of your worst cards in addition to it which is really good effect towards fixing your deck and hand.
it doesn't put your bad cards from your hand on the bottom though, its more like scry 7 then draw 2. UUU for that would still be super strong though, but UUU is a lot more of a commitment than UU
I think most of these could be tweaked back into the game, except Preordain. There's already Serum Vision (swap the order), Opt (reduce scry) and Deliberate (costs 1 more). You'd have to change the design entirely. Here are my suggestions: Rite of Flame: Costs RR, adds RRR, +R per other copy in GY. Makes it in line with other rituals (costs 2, makes 3), potentially better if you draw multiples, but can't be reduced by Goblin Electromancer (which is a key piece of current storm lists) so it'd likely be the worst of them. Seething Song: I agree with you, just make it RRR. Treasure Cruise: Cost down to 6U (from 7U), draw 2 cards instead of 3. Can't make it too cheap because delve is strong, but a +1 is still good. Dig Through Time: Cost down to 5UU (from 6UU), adds 1 card from the top 8 instead of 2 from the top 7. Alternatively, cost of XUU, adds 1 card from the top X (X can't be 0). Ponder: Swap the effects. Or only look at 1-2 cards to see if you shuffle. Or shuffle, then reorder the top 3, then draw. Looting: Flashback cost up to 2RR (from 2R), maybe up the cost to 1R (from R). There are already cards that can do that (with more options) for UR, like Izzet Charm and Sorcerer Class, and they don't see any play. A big part of what makes Looting good is the flashback, letting you sculpt your hand again later too - or if you mill it. Arcum's Astrolabe: Replace the draw with Scry 2. If you have the draw, it's too good. If you remove it, you have a snow Mana Cylix, a very old card that probably no one played back then, and definitely no one would play now. Scry 2 is a good middle-ground.
I have no idea how you managed to make cards better than they already were or just make them cards that already exist. The treasure cruise/dig changes make no sense when you’re reducing their costs. They don’t need the cost reduced. The decks that would run them already don’t care about the cost. Making cruise a 1 mana draw 2 while not as strong as draw 3 is still broken and making dig 1 card in 8 for 2 is still pretty strong, just keep it to 2 out of top 7 but make it a sorcery.
They did make “deliberate” which is preordain but its 2 mana 1 generic 1 blue. I’ve been testing it in my storm deck and its actually not bad, its almost always 1 mana anyway because of Baral
For fixing Rite of Flame, just make it cost 2 mana (1 and 1 red), and I think it'll be nerfed hard. On that, maybe just make the card add 1 mana (mana neutral) first before the scaling effect kicks in. Manamorphose is a VERY good example of why mana neutral is good. As for Seething Song, there's also a card called Goblin Anarchomancer. So changing the cost to 3 red is really wanted.
Manamorphose makes you draw a card though. The first Rite making you waste a card and not giving you anything basically would make it terrible. Of course, later Rites would be good so it might cancel out. I suggested this very same thing but I don't think it would be another Manamorphose, I just think it would be more of a risk/reward card.
Astrolabe can never be unbanned. It's a cantriping artifact (if the deck cares about that) that fixes your mana, makes you immune to blood moon, and adds to any incidental artifact synergy on top of being an ETB trigger. Do you want to play against 4C yorion money pile with an extra blinkable cantrip? Didn't think so.
Could fix looting (FL) by making it a look instead of a draw. For R: “Look at the top 2 of your lib you may put up to 2 of those cards into your hand. Discard that many cards.
You didn't mention about Treasure Cruise that non-blue decks would splash blue just to play it. My favourite ever modern deck with Burn with Treasure Cruise. It was so ridiculous and I had an unbelievable winrate with it.
Even after all these years i cant get over the fact that Cruise was printed at common. Anyone whos played a graveyard deck in whatever format its been legal in would tell you it feels so much stronger than its rarity, cuz its functionality Recall at that point
there is no way you think astrolabe wouldn’t change the meta astrolabe made aggro into control matchups worse, as before control would have to fetch->shock or sacrifice tempo, whereas with labe you could just fetch basics. astrolabe also is an artifact, and it isn’t green which is huge because a huge draw to abundant growth is getting to fetch basics over shocks, and fetching forest is definitely worse than fetching for ANY of your (snow) basics. preordain’s unban did much less than astrolabe would have, and imo even looting is safer considering the amount of power creep in the format since it’s ban and the fact that *we never saw dredge with looting and no bridge from below*. it also likely wouldn’t even be played in rakdos scam, the best red deck in the format
Rituals are a neat idea that aren't thaaat broken in a normal deck, but always end up enabling super degenerate strategies. Stuff that makes mana less of a consideration always end up risking being super degenerate. Delve being a prime example of that. It almost doesn't matter how expensive the delve cost was, as high power decks could meet it.
Preordain would be a safe unban. Serum Visions sees limited play at best, and Preordain wouldn't be good enough for blue decks that choose not to run Serum Visions. Ponder is too good, and is the cantrip of choice in legacy next to Brainstorm.
Astrolabe is banned because the metagame became 4-5 color soup due to that one dinky artifact. Also, people couldn’t play their favorite basics anymore because they all had to be Snow-covered, literally astrolabe winter
Isn't the fix version of (Faithless Looting) the (Cathartic Reunion) card? From what I understand, I thought Faithless Looting was banned because of Hogaak.
"Wizards print cards to punish decks that play too many nonbasic lands like blood moon" Blood Moon was first printed in 1994 and MTG was released in 1993 for reference. So I think using blood moon for that statement might be a bit of a stretch.
How does Magic do FTK (or turn 2 or 3 kills)? Lots of the combo sounds like it's too inconsistent given they need 3 4 card combos not even counting the lands.
FTK decks are extremely rare. Even Vintage, the most powerful format, and Legacy, the next one up, don't use them all that much. True T3 kills are actually uncommon in Modern; the only ranked ones I can think of are Burn and Storm. Burn just has consistent draws. It only needs seven 3 damage spells, sometimes fewer, and there are enough cards that are similar enough to feed it. It's one of the few decks that can actually win on only two lands. Storm is built around card and mana advantage; its win condition is literally the cards it uses to find its finisher. Its mana advantage is enhanced by cost reducers, which turn Manamorphose into a true ritual rather than a net neutral. With a T2 cost reducer, its game plan is fully online by T3 with mana positive and card neutral cards. Both of these are easily disruptable. Life gain, counterspells, and removal delay or even end the deck's momentum, allowing the opponent to stabilize and return to kill them. Most Modern decks have a "functional T3 kill", where the game is pretty much over except the life totals haven't run down. A powerful T3 board presence, like with Dredge, can be difficult to disrupt unless the opponent has the right cards. Excessive card and mana advantage, like with Ragavan or Through the Breach/Goryo's Vengance, means that the game quickly tilts in that player's favor. In short, most true T3 decks are glass cannons and thus lower ranked, whereas most "functional T3" decks are just consistent in their execution. It's speed vs consistency, and the ban list helps solidify that dichotomy. Take this all with a grain of salt; I haven't played in years but keep up through social media posts and podcasts.
Magic ftks aren't really a thing you can expect often (most players only even know the acronym from yugioh), but when they do exist it's mostly because of fast mana. Cards like black lotus, dark ritual, seething song, etc. that give more mana than you put in. Like you said, lands slow things down, and fast mana breaks that.
yea ritual spells need a big buff in YGO. like what makes ritual spells shit is that you go -1 at best (and that is assuming your tribute for it is one monster, which is essentially just relinquished) since you need to tribute, you need to play your ritual spell and summon the ritual monster from your hand. just making the spell able to pull the ritual monster from your deck would be huge buff, but probably not enough to make them competitive, which is why i'd say ritual spells should have the unique ability to summon the monster from anywhere, hand, deck, GY and when banished face up (i would leave face down banished alone here) another option would be to move ritual monsters to the extra deck like the other special summoning methods, but then they'd have to compete with the other broken summoning methods for extra deck slots so i don't think that would be a good idea. third option would be to remove ritual monster cards entirely and making it so rituals summon tokens with the same properties that the ritual monster used to have, without you needing to run the ritual monster card at all (would still be nice for people who already own the ritual monster cards as they could still use those cards for the tokens i guess)
14:45 ... "They'll be able to play all the same cards, leading to a very homogenous metagame"... Completely the Opposite from a certain other game in which all decks end-goal is to spec summon spam to cheat out Bosses from main or extra deck that either destroy cards on field and/or provide negates as to not let Ur opponent play, which coupled with powerful generic staples... Makes every deck have virtually the Same Strategy ... Figure Out which is better game 😉 ... Ps: to further solidify the point above... a video about strategies/archetypes in MTG would be a good idea. You could refer to Nitpicking Nerds - Commander Archetypes for guidance on that format as an example
Preordain and Ponder have the same issue as Mox Opal and Faithless Looting. They're super powerful, rather generic enablers and will always tip very strong cards/archetypes into broken territory. You have to ask, how much do we neuter all the other cards to allow the enablers to stay in the format. It's actually worse for the cantrips because they slot into combo, tempo, and control decks. In the current meta it's arguable that Murktide needs a ban. In a Ponder/Preordain meta there wouldn't be any arguments to make. Combo cards like Breach or Neoform, control cards like Teferi or Narset, or midrange cards like Omnath are all things that potentially would have to die for Ponder's sins. They just really limit the acceptable design space for Modern so much.
Arcum's Astrolabe did nothing wrong. It wasn't the culprit for 4c being good. Wrenn and Six is the enabler for 4c decks, and is one of the most overpowered planeswalkers ever made. Astrolabe was unfairly targeted for causing the consistency, but it's not very good of a card and doesn't affect the board state significantly like Wrenn and Six does. It should be unbanned, with Wrenn and Six taking its place. Wrenn and Six is also responsible for the Yorion ban, because Yorion wouldn't be playable without the perfect mana.
treasure cruise at UUU is garbage .. because it requires to sacrifice the graveyard-resource.. in that case, concentrate is better. Adding a mill cost is actually a benefit in this case. Paying life may be an easy fix, maybe to the whole delve mechanics, like 1 life for each removed card.
I don't think Murktide would play Treasure Cruise / Dig Through Time. All of these are pretty high delve costs, and there are only so many cards you can bin without dedicating self-mill slots. Murktide can already have trouble casting their big beater without needing 4+ lands, especially the second one or in games 2&3 when the opponent has GY hate.
One of two things would happen. Either Cruise/Dig would go in as a 1 of to just add a bit more consistency, or the experimenting back when New Capenna first came out to cut Murktide would come back, trading Murktide for Cruise/Dig and go all in Ledger Shredder as the big beater of the deck. Ledger Shredder fills the graveyard pretty well for Cruise/Dig, while Cruise/Dig make it easier to double spell and fuel the Ledger Shredder. Murktide might become a sideboard option against decks that run Prismatic Ending.
Because it's the kind of fun that gets old really quickly. If Mana is too good, then the format devolves into a generic mush of the best cards in the format. (Such as when 4c Omnath/Uro/Yorion piles were dominating)
They don't want the game to get too samey. The point of the color pie is that each deck has access to different stuff, so it's much harder to make two different decks that do the same thing. Five colors is absolutely fun one or twice, but if it's common then a core design philosophy for the game is gone.
When selecting background music, you shouldn't use songs that have sudden increases in volume it distracts from the video itself, and the song itself is so short you get that same swell repeatedly.
At the end of your turn you have to discard down to 7*. Any time other than that you can have more than 7 cards in your hand. *unless an effect says otherwise.
Arcum's Astrolabe is kind of a joke if you think about it. Yeah, they banned it, then just made MH2 with a bunch of pitch spells(elementals) in addition to the MH1 pitch cards. Then they made every type of triome you could ever want to fetch up. A high percentage of the top decks in the format are 3+ colors anyway, with many being 4-5 colors. The fact that this requires specific snow mana to be played means that people have to make a choice between turn 1 shock/triome, turn 2 triome/shock. Then they would have to find a lowly snow land to play this, already only breaking even on the ETB, then you have to activate it. I honestly think this DID make multi color decks more accessible but that wasn't the problem. It was the fact that it is printed at common and is cast off of cheap lands. Why buy product when they reprint shocks or any other fan favorite land when every common joe is just playing 3-4 color astrolabe with a $1 mana base? I would argue that if this had been printed at rare, it would have never been banned.
What a horrible take. The mana fixed by astrolabe put you immune to blood moon, and urza decks were out over the top having access to cantripping one mana artifacts that they can filter or tap mana with.
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