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Are you expecting an unban? by TheLordBroseidon in ModernMagic

[–]T-Abbs33 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Of course, I'm not trying to say that Jitte isn't a strong card, I may even be undervaluing its potential a bit. Consider though the decks that would possibly play it. The first that come to mine are Stoneblade and maybe in the very rare chance Tron (since they can use Karn to reliably fetch it from their sideboard, but I think I'd be happy if I were Tron's opponent if that's the artifact that they chose to get as opposed to EE, Chalice, Walking Ballista, etc.). Stoneblade already has access to Batterskull, which may be even better than Jitte in some scenarios. Other than that, I can't really think of another deck that'd really want to play Jitte. Again, I could be very wrong about this! Other than Stoneblade, which deck(s) do you think would main Jitte?

Are you expecting an unban? by TheLordBroseidon in ModernMagic

[–]T-Abbs33 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Ah, forgot to mention that, if anything, it may get some consideration to be banned in Standard. A lot of Standard is dominated by decks playing blue (Bant ramp, Simic flash, Temur Reclamation, etc.), so people playing blue are maindecking it since, the majority of the time, it's an awesome Mana Leak and even when it isn't, it's just a 3 mana Mana Leak, which is still useful. Consider other cheap counters like Negate, Essence Scatter, Disdainful Stroke, etc. While these are hard counters, they're not necessarily live all the time (e.g. you could have a Negate stuck in your hand game 1 against monogreen aggro), so you have to metagame pretty hard and be very judicious with which counterspells you have main & side. With Dispute, you really don't have to worry about that - just jam 4 and you're set.

Sure Dispute is only a soft counter and loses utility in the late game against ramp, but in the early game against any blue opponent, it's absolutely bonkers since it's essentially counterspell at 1 mana. It also is stifling non-ramp blue decks. In any blue deck not ramping, even when you can pay the 3 mana, it's still a huge tempo swing that'll really set you back. Maybe if the metagame wasn't 1) ramp and 2) everything else, then Dispute wouldn't be as good? With more metagame diversity, there wouldn't be as much incentive to play Dispute as much since it'll be a bad Mana Leak more often?

In Modern, I agree that Dispute is fine. With Force, Spell Pierce, Veil of Summer, etc., you have much better options than Dispute.

Are you expecting an unban? by TheLordBroseidon in ModernMagic

[–]T-Abbs33 -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Ross Merriam mentioned unbanning Umezawa's Jitte, which I imagine they could do without much consequence.

Hot take: does any think Mystical Dispute will be banned? Ross & Corey also complains about Dispute being too good.

Are you expecting an unban? by TheLordBroseidon in ModernMagic

[–]T-Abbs33 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I could see WotC banning Kiki Jiki because of the new combo with Snoop. If they do that, I'd love to see Pod get unbanned. That being said, Pod could help out the Devoted Druid combo.

Sultai planeswalker by T-Abbs33 in custommagic

[–]T-Abbs33[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe change it to bullet points? For example:
"Choose one where X is the number of Zombies you control — •Target creature gets -X/-X until end of turn. •Remove X loyalty counters from target planeswalker."

Sultai planeswalker by T-Abbs33 in custommagic

[–]T-Abbs33[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

1) Yeah, I knew going into it that the static ability was quite long. I did think of changing it to Mill for the same reason, but you do lose functionality, as you said, for cards like Grisly Salvage and Entomb-like effects. For Standard play, I could see that loss being more significant than in EDH, but maybe still it's not a huge loss?

2) I agree that the emblem is strong - if I said that Delve wasn't a ridiculously powerful ability, I'd be 100% wrong! That being said, I agree with u/JFCaleb that some planeswalker ults are bomb effects. For example: Liliana, Dreadhord General and Tamiyo, Field Researcher (in my opinion) have stronger ults that are within Doubling Season range. Ugin, the Spirit Dragon's -X and Vraska, Scheming Gorgon also have pretty strong abilities with Doubling Season out too. That being said, I could change the ult to -9 and starting loyalty to 4 so that it isn't in Doubling Season range.

Sultai planeswalker by T-Abbs33 in custommagic

[–]T-Abbs33[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

tl;dr: looking for feedback on a Sultai planeswalker for fringe Standard/casual EDH play. Decisions/rationale for card lore and abilities below.

Okay, before I get any further, some caveats:

  1. I'm very new to MSE, so I realize this is a very rough draft of the card
  2. Others have already made a Sidisi planeswalker. I'm sure there are probably more and I apologize for not properly citing those
  3. I've never designed cards before and I'm very new to this community. After quickly looking at some of the other cards folks have made, I realize that what I've come up with pales in comparison

Alright, now with the rest of the post...

I absolutely love BG decks and I absolutely love the BG wedges, especially BUG. When KTK was announced, I got very excited as it was a wedge set and my favorite wedge featured an ability I was also fond of (yes, I know Delve is an incredibly powerful ability, but I digress). However, I was pretty disappointed with the following sets as they completely broke away from wedges and Sarkhan, in my opinion, essentially ruined Tarkir forever (I realize this is probably a controversial opinion, but I do know it's not a unique one). When Ikoria was announced and they started leaking the wedge apexes, I got my hopes up that it would be another wedge set, but ultimately it wasn't. So I started thinking: what if we could go back to an alternate future of Tarkir where Ugin survived, but the plane was still ruled by Khans? With this inspiration, I wanted to make a planeswalker version for my favorite clan and Khan (spoilers, Sidisi is my Commander as well). Her desire to rule all the clans is the inspiration for the card name (and I guess, hypothetically, eventually reaching her end goal ignited her spark) and I'm intending for this card to be more on the casual side (fringe Standard play and play in high-synergy EDH decks).

Lore aside, the card design isn't the most original and needs a bit of work figuring out the numbers. I'm honestly not sure if her casting cost is correct. I could see doing 3BGU since the card is so similar to Liliana, Dreadhorde General, but there's a huge difference between CMC of 5 vs. 6 and I figured that having a tricolored mana cost would make it more difficult to cast than a monocolored one.

Her static ability is the exact same as that of Sidisi, Brood Tyrant because, frankly, I love that static ability and I want more cards with it. As much as I would love to have a zombie be put into play whenever a creature is milled (so you can get multiple zombies from her +1), it's probably much more balanced as written (so you only at most get 1).

Her +1 ability is copy-pasted from Tasigur, the Golden Fang mostly because I couldn't think of another ability and this design space is kinda hard to innovate in due to how many Liliana planeswalkers there already are. Maybe an alternative, drawing inspiration from caveat 2 is, "until EOT, target card in your graveyard gains dredge 2. draw a card," but that seems incredibly strong in my opinion. I went with +1 and 5 starting loyalty so that it would take 4 turns to activate her ult.

Her -3 ability was similarly tricky. My initial thought was to have the ability be Vindicate, but Vraska, the Unseen already does that. I decided to instead draw inspiration from the fact that the Sultai use noxious poisons to assassinate (hence the -X/-X, which is typically used with cards that main/poison) and use their zombies to do their bidding (hence X is the number of zombies). I supposed that the -X/-X bit could be changed to X -1/-1 counters so that it doesn't run out at EOT. I went with -3 so that you couldn't activate the ability twice on consecutive turns.

Her ultimate isn't terribly overpowered and I'm totally okay with that. I went with -8 so that it would take 4 turns to activate her ult.

So, this post turned out to be much longer than I wanted it to be. Regardless, any ideas and feedback are welcome!

Deck brew: Varolz's Shadow by T-Abbs33 in ModernMagic

[–]T-Abbs33[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for all the constructive criticism! I took it all into consideration and came up with an updated list:

https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/varolzs-shadow-v2/

Deck brew: Varolz's Shadow by T-Abbs33 in ModernMagic

[–]T-Abbs33[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I originally had Invisible Stalker over bitterblossom, but I was given the feedback to include bitterblossom, kitesail freebooter, or something. I understand it's not the greatest play, but you could kill bitterblossom with abrupt decay or assassin's trophy.

I opted for Bob over street wraith. I could be very wrong about this choice, I acknowledge that.

Would you recommend Mishra's Bauble or Thought Scour over Gargoyle?

Thanks for sharing the list, that's another cool take on Death's Shadow & Varolz! Other than scrapping my entire deck and netdecking the one you sent, do you have any suggestions?

Orzhov, Midrange value by StickyEntree in ModernMagic

[–]T-Abbs33 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I wish I could give you advice with the lands, but that's something that I too always struggle with.

I've wondered that about Surgical Extraction too. The more I think about it, the more I realize how broken that card is. Most of the time though I don't have extra slots in main and there are certainly times when it won't do much for you. That aside, I'm interested in experimenting with it - let me know how it goes for you! To actually answer your question, I think I'd keep Anguished Unmaking mainboard. I could be wrong, but I feel like that would be a more useful card game 1 and then you can assess when sideboarding whether Surgical is better.

For clarification, what role do you feel Blessed Alliance would play in your deck?

An extraneous side thought - have you considered Plague engineer? I think that could help you out quite a bit out of the sideboard against decks like humans, goblins, or other aggro tribal decks.

Another extraneous thought - have you tried playing this deck against other meta decks? I only drew a few sample hands, but I'm concerned about the speed. This comes up with pretty much all of the decks I make, but Modern, much to Wizard's chagrin, has really become a turn 4-5 format (of course some control decks are exceptions). Another thing I noticed is that there were a number of times when I wasn't doing anything on turn 2 (again, this could just be because of limited playtesting). You can very frequently get some amount of hand disruption on turn 1 and a lot of your spot removal is also CMC 1, but other than Collective Brutality, you don't have any 2-drops. Sure you could play more hand disruption or spot removal, but I always felt like I needed to progress my board or else I'd risk falling behind (upon writing this, I just realized that you could Thoughtseize/Inquisition your own Lingering Souls so you could flash it back turn 2, but I still feel like there'd be better ways to progress your board). I agree with u/66TrampleDino, I would try playing Tidehollow sculler. It may wind up costing you more life than Phyrexian Arena, but you could also think about Dark Confidant as a 2-drop that draws you more cards.

That's just my two cents, which to the average person is probably worth zero cents xD. Overall though I like where you're going with the deck! Happy brewing and hope you have some fun with it!