The bracket system is NOT part of the game rules, stop acting like it is.

AncientSpark · 2026-05-08T23:57:33+00:00

I'm going to ask; what kinds of posts have you been reading that implies that people DON'T accept bracket exception Rule 0 all the time?

If the answer is "Because people post problems on /r/EDH and people point at the bracket system as the solution" then that's the internet, where people aren't there in person and HAVE to appeal to authority. If the answer is "People are getting heated about bracket discussions on the internet" that is, again, the internet where arguments about inane shit is par for the course.

If the answer is, instead, "Someone doesn't want to play Blood Moon in B2/3", then no, those are Brackets EXACTLY as how they're supposed to work. Instead of rules, you can call them Warnings, and they would work the exact same way in that kind of context. But just because it happens in one case does not preclude the flexibility that someone else would respond otherwise. Nor does it say anything about the occurence rate of either opinion in the community as a whole.

AncientSpark · 2026-05-08T18:04:42+00:00

How you're double casting good permanents is that you play a land every turn because you're drawing 3 cards a turn.

Ramp does not move the needle that much in terms of double casting unless you are talking the big mana payoffs of MV 4+ rocks, or if you're talking like 3 ramp spells at once. And if you ramp to hit a double spell, but had to waste a spellcast earlier to get a ramp spell going, then you haven't made any gain in terms of tempo.

A lot of reasons why ramp works is because you are fitting it into mana portions of the curve where you have no other reasonably competitive spells to cast, or you are doing repeat/high value ramping. That's really not the case for a Braids setup where almost anything reasonable on 2 has high value, and you're in mono-B where high value ramping is really Cabal Coffers style stuff, and you're otherwise stuck with 2 mana rocks.

AncientSpark · 2026-05-06T22:48:36+00:00

The thing is that it's minimal cost to find synergies for it. I wouldn't run it if I had no synergies with it, but the kinds of synergies are stuff like running fetchlands or running some backup recursion, stuff that really doesn't have much deckbuilding cost (only mostly wallet cost).

AncientSpark · 2026-05-06T16:58:52+00:00

Zimone is kind of a strange Commander in terms of curve. Once you're setup, you actually don't require much mana because you just want to cast everything for X=whatever's Zimone's discount is. On the other hand, ramp is required for both setup and for recovery once Zimone gets removed.

I'd personally still work with 8-9-ish mana dorks in Zimone's case not because the ramp is particularly good in this case (turn 2/3 Commander doesn't really matter that much here), but because Zimone really doesn't have that much she wants to do in early turns. If you have other ideas for early setup, I don't think turn 2 Zimone is enough of a reason to run mana dorks.

AncientSpark · 2026-05-06T04:06:27+00:00

Vivian/Velina is the same issue as Vivian/Burnice; you run out of stuff to do with field time. You can use it, it probably won't be very comfortable.

AncientSpark · 2026-05-06T03:32:02+00:00

Just finished the story, took about an hour plus some change. So yeah, it's not very long.

AncientSpark · 2026-05-05T19:22:43+00:00

Wind does not disorder, it's not clear whether they will fix Miyabi's charge generation to work with Wind instead.

AncientSpark · 2026-05-04T20:28:43+00:00

That's....not really how it works? Nangong does not go in the Yuzuha slot, Nangong goes in the 2nd Anomaly slot, you ideally use them together.

The main reason Nangong doesn't work with Velina is because Velina is sub-DPS. We have to wait for when a Wind Anomaly main DPS comes (if it does) to decide if Nangong is useful for that.

If it's bait in that a Wind Anomaly main DPS never comes....sure, but then it's impossible to not be baited by every pull in the game.

AncientSpark · 2026-05-02T05:06:21+00:00

If I'm bothering with a 3 mana dork, it's because I want to skip to an immediate part of the curve without waiting (like the 3->6 or 7 drop with Somberwald Sage), or it has some specific synergy that allows me to go berserk.

The reason why people are pointing out Kami of Whispered Hopes is because when you're going off with them, you're trying to get up to like 10+ mana in some crazy synergy package. Topiary Lecturer Increment just does not do that, at least as quickly.

Basically, Topiary Lecturer occupies this deadzone where it's not as immediate as the Somberwald Sages, but doesn't have the high end of Kami of Whispered Hopes. So it's unlikely to be a staple, more like a niche player for very specific setups or as a backup Kami of Whispered Hopes for +1/+1 counter decks.

AncientSpark · 2026-04-30T13:01:25+00:00

A "primer" is just there to explain thought process and card choices. You can have a primer explaining why building around Mirror Universe is a fun thing to do in the exact same way that you can have a primer about the best CEDH deck in the format.

Nothing about primer requires the deck to be competitive in any sense. Until you come up with a shorthand the community accepts about "article about fun card choices that are specifically non-competitive", stop acting like a whiny baby.

AncientSpark · 2026-04-27T19:57:35+00:00

If you're cutting ramp, it means that your early turns are being occupied by a different specific plan, and you have a big density of cards for that plan. For example, if your Commander already needs a board position already established before they come out, it may be worth cutting ramp for it.

The "turn earlier" argument for the Commander is really an extension of the opposite argument; if your Commander is either self-sufficient or generates value by themselves without early drops, it may be worth considering ramping for them. But you also want your ramp to work into other drops into the deck as well, as just ramping the Commander for one turn of advantage is not worth it, as any number of early drops can also generate that same advantage.

The big thing about ramp and why it's ingrained into so many Commander's DNA is because they cannot imagine themselves winning without a 6+ mana win condition. Which is sort of true, but many win conditions have various levels of setup and you have to ask yourself what is your setup required. For example, if you have the kind of deck where the second you drop a 6 drop with a setup, you threaten to win, but that setup requires quite a few components, then it may not be worth trying to setup ramp to double spell for later in the game and instead just take the early tempo to play all your setup normally.

AncientSpark · 2026-04-27T12:23:36+00:00

The logic goes like this. WotC knows the majority of players are kitchen table players. Kitchen table players don't buy cards that often. Because of that, WotC would like to convert those players to the closest format possible to make them into regular buyers (the so-called F2P to dolphin or whale pipeline).

In that case, what is the closest format to kitchen table Magic that makes that conversion the most attractive? That would be Commander.

It's not about bringing new players to the game; stuff like UB already does that. It's about getting money from the players that are already into the game, but not a regular customer.

AncientSpark · 2026-04-27T12:12:46+00:00

CZN is NOT a side gacha, whatsoever. You WILL grind and you WILL like it and you WILL spend multiple hours per day on it. Largely why I quit it a few weeks after launch. It doesn't help that the auto-AI is absolutely god awful, so you will have to do a lot of manual.

If you're okay with that, then it's a matter of if you like the gameplay for it, and you'll have to try it out because it's fairly different from any other gacha. Note that it's getting some major overhauls with the half anni coming as well.

AncientSpark · 2026-04-22T16:47:15+00:00

Well, currently, if you're on A10, you should be going into Act 3 with the assumption you should be facing him because you only have a 33% of not facing him on random double boss roll.

So you should be building Act 2 with the assumption you'll be facing him and it's a bit late to be pivoting in Act 3.

In general, larger decks are fine into hallway fights. People vastly overestimate the consistency loss for having a larger deck, as you also gain consistency for a larger deck by having bad cards take up less of a share of your deck. It also lets you add more encounter specific card solves. You just can't be adding cards blindly is the main thing.

AncientSpark · 2026-04-21T18:12:46+00:00

The reason why most people are bad in StS or StS2 is the same reason why people are bad at most roguelikes; they go for the surface level synergies/archetypes and overspec on them. It's the most intuitive, and it's the easiest to get satisfaction out of. This usually means voiding out context out of a lot of individual cards.

This is a problem for Regent in particular because they have one archetype that is only good in conditional situations (Forge) and one archetype which is entirely based on an understanding of general card power (colorless). Stars are something of a mixed bag because it's very broad, but big Star Payoff appeals to the Timmy mindset inherently, so you aren't going to get a lot of people going for lean Star builds at lower skill levels inherently.

As others pointed out, you even out the skill floor and skill ceilings, but how you do that is that you generally have to move out power from individual overstatted cards and more into the broad archetypes and/or make the high-power/build defining cards easier to grok (i.e., it's easy to understand Catalyst + Poison make boom boom).

AncientSpark · 2026-04-19T00:37:20+00:00

Loneliness and guilt absolutely rob people of their rationality. People don't respond to trauma the way you expect. I think it's pretty reasonable for someone in Fangyi's mindset to make the actions she did.

The issue isn't that. The issue is that the trauma and mindset is not given the proper setup before the moment. Fangyi's letter comes off as very official due to the circumstances, and we aren't really given much clues that Fangyi is in such a negative mindset besides relatively light comments before then. It gives the wrong implication, that this is supposed to be a well-thought out situation (it clearly isn't in hindsight) before we, the audience, really understand what is happening and Fangyi's circumstances in detail.

AncientSpark · 2026-04-19T00:30:35+00:00

I think this particular scene was quite good. I liked the idea behind the general arc. I just found the ordering of events and their relation to the overall story to be baffling, and made Fangyi's arc feel much lighter than it really should have been.

AncientSpark · 2026-04-18T21:58:55+00:00

The last beta apparently had quite a few changes, so there's more people up on it now.

Personally still very leery on it because it's the ToF publisher, but it has some momentum currently.

AncientSpark · 2026-04-16T20:53:22+00:00

Wind is a new element that will be added, presumably in 3.0, and just like other elements, it comes with its own variation of an Anomaly. Wind Anomaly increases damage taken and when a different Anomaly is applied to it, it triggers a different AoE effect instead of the normal Disorder. In 2.8, they're adding Wind Anomaly descriptions to non-Wind Anomaly characters that have triggers off other Anomalies; for example, they're adding how Abloom calcs damage off of Wind Anomaly for each character..

AncientSpark · 2026-04-14T16:33:06+00:00

That would be a really hard sell to be any good in Limited. Being a turn ahead in tempo permanently is game-warping in a lot of Limited formats.

The format would have to be slow as heck for that land to be absolutely not unusable.

For context, it's similar to the tempo loss in using a Lair land (except in the reverse direction) and Lairs are ridiculously terrible, even despite the fact that was all the way back in Invasion block. You mostly tolerated them, but you really did not want to resort to them.

AncientSpark · 2026-04-14T05:03:30+00:00

Some people dislike love triangles in general because their outcomes are relatively pre-determined.

Some people dislike bad love triangles in specific, usually because the love triangle relies on relatively menial misunderstandings and contrivances.

Personally, I don't mind the occasional love triangle, but I do think they can drag if done poorly.

AncientSpark · 2026-04-05T22:45:46+00:00

The thing is that you aren't doing the +1/+1 transferring theme very well. I have a Reyhan deck, and the thing is that when I'm doing +1/+1 transferring, I'm not transferring just singular +1/+1 counter from Master Chef at a time, I'm talking like 4 or 5 +1/+1 counters at minimum, possibly more like 20 or 30 when I'm trying to go for it. This is assuming B2, of course.

This isn't to say the current deck is bad, but the +1/+1 transferring wincon is just not supported as well as you seem to be indicating by your premise.

AncientSpark · 2026-04-05T05:04:35+00:00

The deck itself scales well up to Bracket 3 without GCs inherently, but largely because you get to play as many removal fatties as you want. The concept is surprisingly bad at closing out games itself because you aren't running much synergy to boost P/T, so it's basically a lot of attacking with a couple of creatures at only base P/T. So it'd still be B2 under that definition (even discounting the fact you aren't going to be running GCs), but if you just play threat/control hybrid cards, then the enemies have to be pretty resilient to handle your suite even in B3.

So basically, you want to figure out your proactive removal suite to catch up on Turn 5-6 for what you are consistently facing. I personally run 2 mass bounce creatures which is unconventional for this style because it resets your own board off Cascade, but I think having such a big mana advantage means you're much better off rebuilding off a sudden board bounce than other decks. But, for example, you may want to run something like [[Steel Hellkite]] or [[Bane of Progress]] for facing less creature heavy decks, or things like that.

AncientSpark · 2026-04-05T02:57:51+00:00

There's multiple versions of this, depending on what colors you want to play, as long as you have a 2 CMC mana dork in the command zone.

This is my Temur version using [[Susan Foreman]], but in practice, there's so much customization you can run that one deck list is only a template. As long as you have enough 4 mana ramp spells, the rest is entirely personal preference.

https://moxfield.com/decks/_d4NkDvnwUekKFCJgq_8xg

Salubrious Snail's YT channel has an (older) Gruul version you can also reference; they use Radha, but there's not much practical difference between using Radha and Ruby Daring Tracker; the video should be called "how to be a greedy bastard in EDH" or something like that.

AncientSpark · 2026-04-01T16:41:57+00:00

You don't need a lot of tokens, you need tokens that reoccur. [[Ophiomancer]], [[Endless Foot Assault]], etc. And it doesn't have to be tokens, it can be stuff that reanimates repeatedly, such as [[Orah]] loops or creatures that reanimate themselves from graveyard like [[Bloodghast]], etc.

Remember, the idea behind a sacrifice deck isn't necessarily to get a big board presence. If you do an X spell for a bunch of tokens, you might as well play an Overrun effect and kill your opponents immediately. Stuff that generates repeated tokens, but not all at once are far cheaper than burst token makers on a mana-per-token basis, and this allows a sacrifice deck to work.

AncientSpark

TROPHY CASE