I don’t have that much experience with either set and I would rather do this later, when I’m more familiar with it, but on the other hand, my job won’t let me play very much after my summer vacation, so I might as well do his now.
The problem with many white-collar jobs is that you never really let go of your work. Your brain is always working on something. I have realized in my dreams that there’s a bug in my code, woken up, went to read the code and seen that I was right. I have solved mathematical problems in while sleeping. Yesterday, I came up with a very interesting card design in a dream.
Despite the domninace of the so-called Ramunap Red, there’s several interesting decks out there.
Starting with this one, that didn’t even make day two, but is just too cool to not mention.
There aren’t GPs in Europe during my (rather long) summer vacation, so I decided to go to Canada instead. In many ways an interesting experience, but I’ll stick to talking about the GP itself here. This was my 20th Grand Prix and as far as I remember, the first one since my second one where there weren’t plenty of other Finnish players who I already knew.
In fact, the only person I did know before hand, was Charlotte, a level three rules expert, who runs tha Ask a Magic Judge Tumblr. I know her from judging circles back in Finland, but she’s originally from Canada, so it was natural for her to be there for this event.
Anyhow, when you don’t travel in a group, you tend to mix more with different people, so I would like to talk about some of them.
I’ve been silent here for a while (okay, about two weeks, but that’s quite a bit for me). The reason is that I decided to use my summer holiday (as a teacher, an extended one) to write a book on Commander.
Not the best or the most flexible ones, just the ones I enjoyed the most. Usually ones with weird interactions or ones that do something special in that specific deck. Basically just stuff I tried out.
Is this Burn? I don’t know. In any case, [scryfall]Torment of Hailfire[/scryfall] seems like it’s not very good. However, in a right shell it might work quite well.
As usual, there are some potentially very impactful cards hidden in the final bunch of spoilers. One of them could very well be this one.
I didn’t really expect that to be back any time soon, as they have recently nerfed this ability somewhat, but it is a good answer to Eternalize. However, in Standard, just the tempo can also be important.
It might be subtle, but the most impactful cards in most sets are the rare lands. They are the piece of the puzzle that enable different builds. For example, right now because of the fast lands, wedges are faster than shards, which informs the way people design their decks. This time it might be different. It might be the uncommon lands. Like this one:
This cycle enables plenty of Eldrazi decks.
The reason I’m thinking about this is “Ammit Eternal”. Don’t know if that’s the real name, as it was spoiled in Japanese. The translation, via MythicSpoilers, reads like this:
“Ammit Eternal”
2B
Creature – Zombie Crocodile Demon
Afflict 3Whenever an opponent casts a spell, put a -1/-1 counter on Ammit Eternal.
Whenever Ammit Eternal deals combat damage to a player, remove all -1/-1 counters from it.
5/5
That should work well with [scryfall]Hapatra, Vizier of Poisons[/scryfall]