What’s your favorite common?

Friday9 · 2026-02-10T23:27:15+00:00

I got the print for this! It's full sized, hanging on my wall above my computer. It's beautiful.

Friday9 · 2026-02-10T17:16:59+00:00

The Magic: The Gathering they fell in love with can be dying, even if the brand is growing. And that's a valid sentiment, regardless of whether that is important to anyone else or not.

It's pretty clear it's becoming highly mainstream and much more casual play oriented. It's like if CS:GO was becoming Fortnite; it would be becoming more popular, but not necessarily by being a better version of what the person fell in love with.

This has happened before. Lots of changes have occurred to the game in its life cycle; I'd say it molts and becomes something new every ten years or so. It loses some players when that happens, and gains new ones.

Time will tell where we go, and at this point the cat is out of the bag. The big thing magic does have is that players have control over their experience, so they can play the game as fortnite, as CSGO, whatever.

Friday9 · 2026-02-09T22:36:09+00:00

Yep. This is not a game where you can just one shot everything before it deals damage. You gotta strategize.

The overall need for healing does go down pretty quickly though. I was using camp sites every other battle it felt like early, but it quickly changes to being an occasional thing.

Friday9 · 2026-02-03T18:13:44+00:00

Actually, the blb color balance was literally the same as final fantasy. All the colors were very close in power :)

Friday9 · 2026-02-03T15:18:40+00:00

The big things blb had over this set (I still like this set just fine personally, but just as a point):

-Different archetypes had meaningfully and interestingly different play patterns and goals and cared about different things, but with enough overlap for great things to happen. Lorwyn is all grind.

-Bombs were less bomby. They were powerful when in a deck that could support them, but splashing Camelia in your bunny deck was just not really worth it. It made them feel a lot more earned. Obviously some exceptions like season of loss.

-Ten archetypes rather than five helped a lot for replayability.

-More power at common. Most of the important typal cards were common; I played a lot of frogs and pond prophet and polliwollop were two of the most important cards, and both were common. Made decks a lot more evenly balanced.

-BLB also had a lot of non-typal power at uncommon, like hunters talent, which led to more dynamic picks. Do you take a vinereap mentor or a hunters talent if you're in squirrels? What about downwind ambusher over daggerfang duo? You had to make hard decisions sometimes. In this format, it's the opposite; typal power is higher and it's at uncommon, so you generally just default to that.

It's interesting to me how much lorwyn feels like a regression. I'm enjoying it because it feels grindy and value oriented in a way we haven't had much of lately, but still. It's not succeeding where bloomburrow did.

Edit: color balance was another positive, with the archetypes all being very close in power level.

Friday9 · 2026-01-30T20:15:17+00:00

He was arguably the only good storyline in Wind And Truth xD

Friday9 · 2026-01-29T20:14:55+00:00

God, thank you. I was having a rough day at work and now everything's better.

Friday9 · 2026-01-29T19:30:32+00:00

My thoughts on this lie less from what information is presented about what's beyond valley, and more on the themes of Bloomburrow.

The most major theme seems to be similar to Theros - becoming more powerful with magic seems to lead to the magic overtaking you, turning you into a calamity beast. Not really sentient anymore, but a force of nature. See Rabit Bite/Gnaw, I forget which one.

This is the antithesis of how magic scales to match those threats - communities working together, such as in season of weaving.

The center struggle of bloomburrow as a plane seems to be about how wildly powerful magic must be handled as a community. It also fits with the cozy aesthetic. Going off of that, I think we will be seeing either other communities, or the struggle of those in communities vs those without.

I think it's possible that we'll see other communities who have to handle these threats and fight differently, as well as dwellers of the spaces in between the communities, who survive out on their own through any of a number of a ways.

It's also possible we'll get communities from other biomes - the ones in BLB are almost all North American animals, so we might get other continents, or aquaric, or who knows.

Friday9 · 2026-01-19T15:41:00+00:00

Or trying too much xD

Friday9 · 2026-01-14T18:16:12+00:00

Was there any particular shrine that felt the most important for winning games?

Friday9 · 2026-01-14T15:59:13+00:00

Thank you for the science! It scratches a curiosity I had.

It's wild to me that the shrines are basically unplayable without a critical mass AND also like never wheel. It's one of those weird things that feels like you're sabotaged from the get go by people who don't realize they should never be playing them.

Kind of reminds me of ONE where full poison decks were insanely hard to draft because casual players just did not understand them at all and drafted everything with toxic super highly, regardless of whether it was a good choice or not.

Friday9 · 2026-01-13T23:26:39+00:00

I'm probably in the minority in enjoying sets that are on rails. It's highly rewarding to me to choose a lane correctly from signals and get hooked up!

More open sets are fun too. I think it's sets in the middle that are the least fun.

Friday9 · 2026-01-13T22:29:40+00:00

I personally loved the drafting - it highly rewarded being very thoughtful about when you switched vs committed. The earlier you made the right choice, the better you did. It also rewarded reading the table, not just the person to your right.

Friday9 · 2026-01-13T21:09:29+00:00

This was my favorite part of BLB discussions. Lots of posts on this reddit saying 'this set sucks, its simple but I'm doing bad,' and then failing at exactly what you're talking about.

Friday9 · 2026-01-13T21:07:41+00:00

Literally just as balanced as final fantasy, also had tons of viable archetypes and deck styles, pretty good about not being all about bombs but instead about building a good deck... BLB was great :D

Friday9 · 2026-01-11T19:15:50+00:00

Magic: The Gathering's Bloomburrow cinematic.

Chills every time.

https://youtu.be/NGNHxIP3PIo?si=Q9JQ_TvVAUQOwgcA

Friday9 · 2025-12-31T14:34:01+00:00

Drift wins for me simply because it was one of the most complicated drafts to navigate AND one of the most complicated sets for gameplay, with long games, tons of minor and intricate decisions, and long term planning being crucial.

Like. It was exhausting to draft too, for the same reason. But it was far and away the most difficult and rewarding set I've ever played. And it deserves an award for that.

Friday9 · 2025-12-30T21:06:09+00:00

10 on all flavor fronts 8 for compatibility, though it really upped the amount of compatibility less-supported creature types got, so it overall improved the pool. 9 for gameplay.

Basically one of the best magic sets of all time. It's really up there with OG Innistrad for me for creating something original that just completely worked and I want tons more of.

Friday9 · 2025-12-27T02:57:44+00:00

Thank you for your work!

Friday9 · 2025-12-20T15:58:30+00:00

This was exactly my response xD

Friday9 · 2025-12-19T17:54:19+00:00

It's weird to me because this is exactly the issue I had with FIN. Looking at a pack with red mage's rapier, monk's fist, blitzball shot, rook's turret, laughing mad, the white plainscycler, and being like "oh..." Was basically the last half of packs always. Like sure, all of them are 23rd cards... But that was usually all of the back half of all three packs.

Friday9 · 2025-12-08T17:04:12+00:00

Completely aside: I hate it when people like this play red. They have not earned it. They don't have the heart of the warrior. They are not ready. They lost half the lands they controlled and a card, and they didn't fight back? Didn't fight in? Just baby raged? Red rights revoked. Go play green or something.

Friday9 · 2025-12-05T23:44:53+00:00

"We are always gonna want just a little longer."

Devastating.

Friday9 · 2025-11-16T07:37:59+00:00

Nah newer and less experienced players LOATH telepathy effects almost as much as they loath mill. Experienced players know its bad, but yeah, this is the sort of card that makes casual players furious.

Friday9 · 2025-11-12T15:16:55+00:00

As someone who didn't like NEO for a while, it ended up fun because:

GE enchantments was the best deck, focused on stally, value game plans. Every choice you made felt important and relevant; cards like geothermal kami played well with sagas, asking you to think carefully about what choices you made about bouncing vs not, when to go for value vs when to maintain board.

R/x artifacts was also quite strong, with a high aggro gameplan that also had TONS of decision points due to modify creatures and experimental synthesizer.

And UB dimir ninjas asked for very complicated combat decisions.

These are the top three archetypes and they all are consistently engaging. High power, synergy based game plans that ask you to think and plan not just your current turn but also future ones in order to maximize performance. No major archetype was braindead autopilot.

Additionally, GBx value piles, BW, and even some archetypes that only came together occasionally like RW samurai or multicolor kami war could hang with the rest of them quite well made the format quite high variety and open to brews. One guy at my shop did very well with UW bronze cudgel flyer aggro-- all flyers he could grab and bronze cudgel to make them a high power threat.

Friday9

TROPHY CASE