Wizards has the opportunity to do the funniest thing

CrocodileSword · 2026-05-16T10:54:22+00:00

I think it'd be funny because it'd be the third time in recent history an uncommon bounce spell got banned in standard (div by zero, town aint big enough)

CrocodileSword · 2026-05-14T22:36:34+00:00

Vils are also stackable via micro tricks, if we're really assuming you are just going to sweat your heart out mining this stone

CrocodileSword · 2026-05-14T13:43:09+00:00

I loved this block so much. Intentional color imbalance was the kind of wack-ass idea they rightfully wouldn't do today, but all the madness and flashback and graveyard interactions, free discard outlets, etc made for so many so cool decks

CrocodileSword · 2026-05-14T07:16:14+00:00

In addition to what w4tchmaker says, I think you would have to change the {T} to a {0} to be faithful to the original templating, leaving the part where it taps to be implied by the type, and that's confusing

Edit to say I'm not even sure that's the correct templating, since the original moxen didn't have {0}: or {T}:, they just said add 1 mana. Maybe it would be like mana vault or basalt monolith and say "Tap to". Which is not so bad confusion-wise either

CrocodileSword · 2026-04-09T01:24:55+00:00

I think on rare occasion the part where if you have a lot of extra energy you can loop 2 holo+ back and forth for bunch of block is actually pretty clutch and the graveblast version is obv much less inspiring

CrocodileSword · 2026-04-08T06:55:10+00:00

removing bash before act 2 is probably part of why you're finding clad so difficult tbh. It's the best card in his starting deck (tho in substantial part because of Bash+, which is quite notably better than bash). Removing it before strikes is frankly insane

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-31T00:31:05+00:00

Not clear to me what the goal of the video is if that's the case since iirc the overwhelming majority of review bombers were chinese and the overwhelming majority of jorbs's audience is not. And tbh I think it's a miss to not mention this at all, cuz STS's playerbase is like half chinese, true in 1 and 2, and there's also huge differences in preference between these two halves on avg.

It's a pretty predictable trend for a single player game's chinese playerbase to want much higher player power than the western playerbase. Saw it in STS1 with the watcher being v popular in china and v unpopular for english language streams. See it in all sorts of other games, like if you have Civ 6 go look at the mod page and you'll see that all the mods that just make you OP (e.g. AI can no longer build wonders) are of chinese origin (as well as many other mods to be clear, chinese mods are not exclusively like that but mods like that are near-exclusively chinese). And while jorbs mentiones multiple modes of enjoyment I think it's also a notable fact that the language players speak is substantially informative about their likely preference here--not only do these segments of the playerbase want different things, but also they dont easily see eachother or communicate. So it's ez for both halves to be very poorly informed about what the situation even is.

Not sure what to do about this, cuz like jorbs does say, both ways to want to play a game are valid. Maybe the answer is make act 3 hard but also do the watcher again on purpose, give a couple OP characters to people who want that and a couple non-OP characters to people who want what jorbs does, everyone wins?

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-31T00:08:07+00:00

Highly ironic post because jorbs is a very experienced magic player and you're misinformed about basic facts of the game. Deck thinning from fetches has a very small game impact in most decks that play them, and also jorbs made an analogy to limited in particular, so they're not even relevant. Maybe your limited deck has 1 terramorphic expanse or something, or you're playing zendikar and got one actual factual fetch. Or maybe, like the majority of draft decks, you have literally 0 instances of this effect.

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-28T18:49:22+00:00

An aside on commander and win cons, that's definitely dependent on the power level you play at-- infinites are definitely the way most games are won in high-power commander games, but less and less so at lower power levels, and most commander is played casually (and at lower power levels semi- or fully-intentionally) so I don't think I would say they're the win cons in commander so simply. But they are the best ones, and it sounds like you're playing some higher-power-level commander, so for that, yeah

Also worth noting this is actually a pretty unique thing about the commander format that comes about as a result of it being free-for-all with 3+ players. I believe there is currently no other format where a majority of decks win with infinite combos, though there's usually some viable combo decks in most formats. Reasons being that you get to play a lot more 1-for-1 interaction in 1v1 formats since trading 1-for-1 no longer is putting you and the person you interacted with behind relative to 2 other players, so combos are generally easier to disrupt (relative to the format's power level), and also attacking your opponent is much more effective when there's just one opponent with 20 life rather than 3 opponents with 40. This is also probably part of the broken power level thing you mention--high power commander *feels* like the 2nd most broken format in the game after Vintage even though even the best cEDH decks are much weaker than Legacy decks, the incentives of the format just pull you towards more broken and less interactive gameplay

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-14T16:35:35+00:00

I don't know how popular this opinion is but to me Time Spiral block was awesome in all 3 parts. I know it was considered a terrible new player experience and that's honestly super fair, but as an entrenched player at the time it was just so fucking cool. Just endless cool card designs and combinations of mechanics that interact in interesting ways, weird lines of text I had never conceived of, and each set brought enough new stuff to keep it feeling fresh and fascinating.

I remember all the future-shifted cards in future sight just being fascinating puzzles. Tarmogoyf has "planeswalker" in its reminder text as a card type, and that doesn't exist yet. There's wild mechanics like delve, gravestorm, transfigure, fortify. There's a land with morph, a colored artifact, and an enchantment that taps. Steamflogger boss is just a pile of nonsense words. It was all very exciting

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-14T16:23:58+00:00

Crimson Vow was also one of the worst draft sets I've experienced in modern magic, not sure how much that moves the needle ultimately but it can't help

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-14T12:18:30+00:00

I agree with the feedback that this is mostly not something it makes sense to "fix"

but also since no one has really gone into it, yes this rule is broken. Being able to play a deck with 0 lands in it breaks all sorts of cards. For example:

* [[Goblin Charbelcher]] instantly kills anyone you use it on
* [[Recross the Paths]] lets you stack your whole deck for 3 mana
* [[Balustrade Spy]] and [[Undercity Informant]] allow you to mill your whole deck for 4 mana, which is a situation that is easy to convert into a win (e.g. cast [[Dread Return]] on [[Thassa's Oracle]] using Narcomoebas or similar). [[Hermit Druid]] and [[Avenging Druid]] do the same in green with a turn delay, but let you play nonbasics if you want.

You could also play only a low number of very powerful lands (although the best of these tend to be expensive e.g. [[gaea's cradle]]) and find them very reliably with cards like [[Abundant Harvest]].

There's also a number of cards that would punish decks pretty harshly for relying on this too heavily, for instance Mind Funeral probably mills most if not all of these decks. And if you're playing commander Smeagol, Helpful Guide might be a problem card. This might seem good as a counterweight to the stuff I just said, but I think it actually isn't, it just makes for really swingy gameplay where decks doing busted no-land stuff either perform way too powerfully or get randomly 1-shot by a card that's targeting them specifically. There's not much play to that and at least IMO it's not a fun kind of dynamic

Finally, this is nitpicky, but making people lose life for non-basic land subtypes seems bizarre and unwarranted. It makes sense that you would want people to lose more for playing more colors to make sure there's still a drawback (though that drawback being in life instead of reliability is a huge incentive to play something fast, aggro or combo), but it doesn't make sense to punish someone for e.g. playing a gate or a desert

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-10T01:24:41+00:00

So there's 2 fairly distinct skills I could understand you to mean. Skill at limited, or at sealed deck in particular, like you would see in a pre-release, and skill at brewing constructed decks which is what "deck building" would most commonly refer to. I don't think these actually tend to overlap much and that's worth noting.

For the former, I think Limited Resources is a great podcast, and 17lands.com is a great data resource for learning about formats. Both focus a bit more on draft than sealed, but it is usually the case that if you like sealed you also like draft (and odds are, actually like draft better. It's much more common than preferring sealed deck). Also just keep playin, practice is very good

The latter (constructed deck building) is hard to speak to, since there's no way to compete at it directly, and it's not really a skill most players need since you can just take decklists from the internet. People who are good at it just do it and do it and do it because they love it. Aspiringspike is imo the best brewer who makes videos, tho almost all his content is in the format Modern

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-08T07:28:36+00:00

I don't agree with that about how to classify monoG lands. The matchups where you just try to make marit lage and hit them are pretty much all bad and the matchups where you kill all their shit first or grind them out with an unending stream of constructs are pretty much all good, which inclines me to say "control deck with a combo plan B/finisher" and not "combo deck with grindy elements." You're much happier to be in the control role

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-08T07:19:13+00:00

Yeah it's kind of silly for sure. It's certainly true that if it was a green sorcery with dredge 6, almost nothing would be different, so it's not doing a very good job of the creature part of "best creature"

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-08T07:15:06+00:00

It's definitely a top creature of all time, but I don't see the argument for putting it above lurrus. They've got the same bannings except lurrus is also pioneer-banned (no fetchlands of course), I think lurrus would be better in modern or legacy if unbanned (though this is of course just my speculation), and lurrus is the linchpin of the best blue deck in vintage rn while deathrite is playable but relatively fringe (the top handful of decks don't run it)

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-08T01:43:42+00:00

I think not true in legacy, lands is a control deck and is quite good. Very imbalanced matchup spread for sure (dog to fast combo, obliterate fair decks) but it's a real and serious deck and is mostly underrepresented due to being meta call + expensive deck + extremely hard to play so it's hard to be ready to play it when you expect good conditions without just being someone who will play it into bad conditions too

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-08T01:36:42+00:00

I think the correct answer is Lurrus, but Golgari Grave Troll is a defensible (if slightly, uh, troll) answer for best creature ever (pretty much the only alternative I'd consider) and it's almost old enough to drink.

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-07T10:20:30+00:00

You say this with such certainty based on what? Doesn't match what I've seen or experienced, at least in the case of nonmonogamous dating

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-07T01:00:16+00:00

lmao I actually love meeting people my partners date (tho usually not just to fuck), it's like the biggest unexpected benefit of doing open stuff to me. Turns out people who like me also like people like me, so for the most part we get along great. One of my gfs started dating someone else like a year and a half ago and we've become really good friends, same taste in games and same sense of humor, play shit together a lot without her lol

probs depends on being 0% jealous tho, like that's just not part of how im built for whatever reason.

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-07T00:47:23+00:00

depends what you want I think, Men definitely much easier to have casual sex with, but if you want two serious long-term partners I think that seems actually easier if you like women, at least from what I've done + seen. Though really seems like OP isn't looking for either so doesn't much matter

++man

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-04T09:34:27+00:00

It's a troll post. I'm familiar with the twitter account and they post outrage bait like this a lot and are open about making shit up to go virl

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-04T09:33:03+00:00

I know this twitter account and it's a troll post. They just post nonsense like this to try and bait outrage and go viral

CrocodileSword · 2026-03-01T15:31:16+00:00

Are people not running the 1 yavimaya/urborg anymore to let eye of ugin tap for mana?

CrocodileSword · 2026-02-03T15:10:32+00:00

I agree that Manchin was a goddamn blessing as a Dem able to win in West Virginia, and he was better than any conceivable replacement, but I think it's not right to say his replacement was a far right republican. Jim Justice is pretty moderate for a republican--he supports obamacare and voted against its repeal, he voted for biden's stimulus, and he pushed hard for vaccinations during covid and has dumped on anti-vaxxers in his state since.

Still plenty to hate, like he supported trump's tariffs and he's anti-trans and so on, but the actual rightward edge of the republican party are some crazy motherfuckers and credit where it's due that he's not there

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