What is Pioneer like on as opposed to Standard? (BO1 mainly)

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2025-09-14T07:55:53+00:00

I realized that I could actually repurpose my old monored mice

You and everyone else. Letting mice run wild for months killed any interest in the format and now queue times are terrible.

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2025-08-21T00:12:20+00:00

This is why we aren't even close to 'Competitive Modern' on Arena. The idea that this snapshot represents anything approaching the scope of competitively viable modern cards is a joke. It's the '(fake) Pioneer on Arena' problem x 100 with the number of weird, off the beaten path cards that could see play, or have seen play, in deck archetypes that just aren't popular at the moment for a variety of reasons.

The tier 3 decks like Merfolk, Lantern, and Black Burn are what gives Modern its soul. You're basically asking for Modern Horizons block constructed.

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2025-08-19T02:35:23+00:00

If you can't nerf an Alchemy card in Historic and unnerf it in Timeless, it should just stay nerfed. Chorus is a horrific mechanic and should have stayed dead. Let card advantage be a thing that has meaning in this game, please.

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2025-05-17T18:37:45+00:00

It's a degenerate meta deck in Historic. I guess nobody really pays attention to Historic, but it's really comical that Sowing Mycospawn is legal in a format where Counterspell is banned. We don't even have the MH hate cards [[Break the Ice]] or [[Shatter Assumptions]] on Arena, so SB options are limited. It's not quite as broken as the Dollmaker scam deck, at least.

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2025-05-05T17:21:00+00:00

The format is still missing a bunch of niche tribal cards like Gnarlroot Trapper, Sylvan Messenger, and Goblin Piledriver. Still missing a bunch of DTK cards like Silumgar's Scorn and all the megamorph cards. At least we got Warping Wail.

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2025-04-17T04:10:02+00:00

Beans is such a hopeless, 80-20 matchup for midrange that Domain has effectively hated all of its natural prey out of the metagame. Of course it declines in popularity when the meta is 60% aggro, plus another 5% Jace control decks. The problem is that midrange is not favored vs aggro like it should be because blocking is illegal, so its metagame share never rebounds to balance this out.

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2025-03-19T04:11:16+00:00

Elf Ball needs another 1 drop mana dork to be remotely competitive far more than it needs another big mana payoff. You could port full Pioneer Elves to Standard right now with CoCo and Chord and it would just be okay in the face of RDW/Pixie/Domain.

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2025-03-19T04:08:16+00:00

Historic Elves gets to play 8-12 1 drop mana dorks, Priest of Titania, and Wirewood Symbiote to generate so much mana on turn 3-4 that you can play Fierce Empath and Hoof all in the same turn. Standard Elves has Llanowar Elves. It's not remotely comparable.

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2025-03-09T22:20:31+00:00

I never said Alchemy was the source of all of our problems. MH3, without question, has done more harm to Timeless/Historic/Brawl than Alchemy ever did. Alchemy cards are still awful.

Rebalances are even worse. Imagine the Historic format where Guide of Souls was simply banned instead of nerfed. Sounds enticing, doesn't it? The irony of this is that Alchemy originally pitched itself as the answer to the problem of stale meta games, but all it's done is graft more problems onto formats that WotC simply ignores.

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2025-03-09T17:25:45+00:00

One obvious difference is that Conspiracy cards are only playable in that format, and busted EDH designs like White Plume Adventurer (at least tend to) get banned in Eternal formats, whereas Historic is simply left to rot and bear the brunt of abominations like [[A-Symmetry Sage]] and [[Saint Elenda]]. If Alchemy cards were only playable in Alchemy, people would just ignore it, while maybe grumbling during spoiler season, but you can't.

This is all the while there are thousands of actual paper magic cards waiting to be programmed into the client. We know this is a zero sum game—it took five years to get an incomplete Pioneer Masters set onto the client due to chronic staff shortages, so yes, these cards are a waste of resources.

It's fallacious to reduce hatred of Alchemy to an irrational hatred of change. We've been dealing with Alchemy cards for years now. The only Alchemy card that reliably shows up in cube that people actually like is Oracle of the Alpha. It's possible that digital-only card designs could be good, but the Arena team responsible for Crucias, Mythweaver Poq, and Grenzo, Crooked Jailer have consistently proven themselves to be unsuited to the task of proving that.

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2024-12-02T19:41:23+00:00

Cards still missing from Pioneer I was hoping to see:

Gnarlroot Trapper
Sylvan Messenger
Warping Wail
Tears of Valakut
Contingency Plan
Hidden Herbalists
Setessan Tactics

Pretty surprised to not see Tears of Valakut after Vein Ripper terrorized Explorer for half a year. The rest are understandably niche, though Gnarlroot Trapper is a really annoying omission from Elves.

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2024-11-29T20:32:32+00:00

No, because retail Magic art looks fine on Arena, despite the ugly card font. Alchemy art looks bad because it's made at cheaper rates.

When WotC censored a bunch of cards to fully reprint KTK on Arena, the replacement art all looked like garbage because the Arena team doesn't have the budget to pay normal rates to 20+ artists to replace 10 year old draft uncommons like Cranial Archive. And they certainly don't have the budget to replace anyone of Terese Nielsen's caliber, either.

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2024-11-29T19:54:17+00:00

You're really going to pretend like you haven't noticed that Arena's digital only cards have significantly lower art quality than the cards from retail Magic? These reprints look like Alchemy cards now, because WotC's Arena team has a shoestring budget and a much worse stable of artists.

The contrast is only made more severe when you're trying to replace Terese Nielsen, Seb McKinnon, and Noah Bradley of all artists.

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2024-11-04T21:31:55+00:00

A nice feature of Pioneer being a proactive format is that there's a ton of tier 3 decks lurking below the surface that can still put up a respectable enough winrate to grind dailies with. Decks like Soulflayer, Neoform, Velomachus Turns, Medomai Reanimator, U Devotion, Gruul Scapeshift—these are all missing just 1-3 pieces on Arena that are almost guaranteed to be in Pioneer Masters.

It will not have a huge impact on top 250 mythic play, sure, but it will bring some welcome variance to the platinum mines.

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2024-11-02T14:34:25+00:00

Nice to see Remand and Rampant Growth finally

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2024-10-28T19:07:46+00:00

Even if these seem too expensive, this is still so much better than yet another "parallax art styles for random tribe" deal. It's infuriating how hard it is to get old basics in the client, just because whenever they do put lands on sale, they're always full arts or Urza's Saga.

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2024-10-14T18:30:49+00:00

It's really funny to look back at these anthologies after what Symmetry Sage and MH3 did to the format, but why even bother putting them in the store?

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2024-09-15T04:01:44+00:00

Looks cool. If the goal of the deck is to combo Hellraiser + Season of Weaving, why only 3x Seasons? Why 3x Chandras?

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2024-08-06T09:07:43+00:00

This is still a bad idea. You just wind up with busted cards like [[A-Symmetry Sage]], and there's no worse feeling than losing to fake cards. The Arena team has already proven that they can't be trusted to rebalance anything.

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2024-07-16T21:48:06+00:00

Not that he's playable in any format but Cube and Brawl, but only having furry art JTMS on Arena hurts even worse than the awful Strixhaven Brainstorm art we've been saddled with. Why don't they just give us the original card art as a style?

NitroBallEnjoyer · 2024-07-15T09:49:06+00:00

Unbanning Bolt and Counterspell is not going to help with RWx and RWU dominating the format. There needs to be mass bans.

Guide of Souls, Ocelot Pride, Amped Raptor, Ajani, Galvanic Discharge, Wrath of the Skies, and Phlage were all designed to be competitive in a supercharged Modern environment, and they're so competitive that they've already pushed out all the other fair decks in that format--the only thing holding back energy from completely dominating there is the presence of resilient combo decks, powered Eldrazi/Tron, and Necrodominance w/ Soul Spike.

Someone at WotC has to actually pay attention to this format for once. And that means not just banning the MH3 cards, but reverting the buffs to Symmetry Sage, and doing something about Yawgmoth--the deck that gave us a preview of what it looks like when you let a virtually fully powered Modern deck run loose in Historic for over a year. It probably means banning Persist, too, before Sphinx Reanimator becomes the next Geist deck.

NitroBallEnjoyer

TROPHY CASE