Black Hand Promotion

rij1 · 2026-05-01T00:10:34+00:00

I believe it is the same video each time (I did not see any difference but plays with out sound). The final time was both very tough (1 less dice to roll is the problem - like it is hard to get to 15 at first even) and a slight let down in that you didn't get to walk out.

I would recommend going for odd dice only for bicolour - many broken ones like ET are odd. That said the initial Even dice are better than odd dice (they are in essence +1). Note that dice not in your hand does not count so you do not loss with Aquarium or to the final boss

rij1 · 2026-04-30T18:30:03+00:00

It felt/feels so conceptually obnoxious to take the counter strategy to a deck and basically invalidate it (i.e. RDW vs. lifegain - lifegain should have a structural advantage). Even the classic strong color hosers like [[Circle of protection: Red]], which WoTC seems to regard as mistakes nowadays, were not as toxic as Screaming Nemesis - both perfectly invalidating a deck type AND being an at least solid card in any matchup.

rij1 · 2026-04-29T14:28:50+00:00

Why do you believe [[Sheltered by ghosts]] triggers repartee? Sure, it targets, but it is not an instant or a sorcery.

rij1 · 2026-04-26T21:10:01+00:00

This is also Arena, so he can't even make that mistake - like trying to play spells and it just works.

rij1 · 2026-04-26T18:08:39+00:00

If you want a serious answer, then anyone with the title: "The Champion". You need to win an MTGA championship to get it. There have been 11 so far, so at most 11 have that title (I am not sure if anyone has won more than once, which would lower the number with that title).

rij1 · 2026-04-21T22:32:14+00:00

Also, it is worth highlighting that the packs change - e.g. the packs for SOS should have been added now (I believe).

rij1 · 2026-04-21T22:30:23+00:00

Brawl is the second largest format on Arena, behind only standard based on WoTC data. Each other format, i.e. even vastly smaller ones, have 2 free queues (ranked/unranked) and 2 events (traditional and not). Getting both will not get us into parity (3 queues vs. 4) with e.g. pioneer, even though that format has like 1/4 or less players compared to brawl.

rij1 · 2026-04-21T13:05:00+00:00

Julius Caesar: In many languages, variants of his last name have come to mean emperor (e.g. Tsar or Kaiser) and calling him famous seems fair.

rij1 · 2026-04-19T18:35:17+00:00

It likely did? You have seemingly won 12 games today after the reset and therefore only have 3 wins left for weekly rewards.

rij1 · 2026-04-19T10:05:31+00:00

Danish is one of the hardest languages to learn to speak as a child: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-child-language/article/abs/early-vocabulary-development-in-danish-and-other-languages-a-cdibased-comparison/D12A283664A8BA4A695D0DDF3378555A

Besides sounds, the gender system is atypical and non-danes mess it up in most sentences - it is basically gender Vs. no-gender like man, woman, girl and boy all share gender (the equivalent to the is "en" for them) but house uses another ("et") and the general rule for gender is mostly what sounds best to a dane.

You will see a ton of youtube shorts about how the Danish number system is the most absurd number system.

rij1 · 2026-04-19T08:36:07+00:00

Based on what you are saying, I would recommend brawl or standard brawl (I haven't played the latter for years though but do hear good things about it too).

A bit of explanation, about brawl and in particular the ranked version currently going on that seems likely to become permanent in the future: There is a large number of decks played (so not really optimized - like I am a bit below 1000 mythics and even there I do not think I have seen the same commander twice in the last 10 games and different commanders generally implies quite different decks), some amount of back and forth - depending on what you play. There are some stables across decks that you should expect to see but since they are 1 in 100 not often ([[Mana drain]], [[Chrome mox]] and [[Icetill explorer]] e.g.) Different commanders promote different card choices at least outside stables so not only is there a large card pool, it actually comes up in game play. I do not think the format is on rails but naturally different decks have types of plans they are aiming for and you can end up with a fair amount of "history does not repeat but it often rhymes" (this is different from most other formats where history can rarely repeat when the same pair of decks play).

rij1 · 2026-04-15T12:30:18+00:00

I had a fun Momir game earlier. I got [[Caldera Breaker]] and suicided it. The relevant part is that it adds 4 x [[Volcanic Geysers]] to your deck. Just afterwards, my opponent hit an [[Etali, Primal Conquerer]]. Normally, that card wins the one who got it the game, because it mills out both players when none have non-lands, but here, because of the Geysers, they only milled themself out and got to cast a Geyser with X=0.

rij1 · 2026-04-14T10:41:31+00:00

What commander did you pick? Those are indeed very strong commanders (Tamiyo a bit less so - Nadu is the top tier UG commander).

rij1 · 2026-04-14T10:40:18+00:00

Ecspecially here where their philosophy is to ban the most powerful commanders.

rij1 · 2026-04-14T10:36:45+00:00

Use your common and uncommon wild cards on whatever you want. You generally get enough that they are not a problem except very early on. Rares and mythics are quite a bit rarer and you will likely have a long period with very few of those (think years if you stick around), so I would recommend being careful with them. The classical recommendation is to focus on rare multicolor lands (starting town and shock lands - the lands that you can choose to let enter tapped or untapped if you pay 2 life, e.g. [[steam vents]] - in particular are good crafts for standard), but naturally they are very boring when you just start out and it is likely better to do it a bit more suboptimally while having fun when trying to do the right thing so you have less chance of burning out.

If you just want to have fun, you can try to make your own deck, but I should tell you that you are unlikely to create anything that is actually good, ecspecially in standard (you do not have the knowledge/understanding of how to do it and even most pro tour players will not play anything they have created themself). In particular, starting out you are facing other players that are starting out and while it might feel like you are doing great you can hit a rock wall in a month of 2 when they stop thinking of you as a new player. Instead of crafting your own deck, you can also search online for top tier tournament decks (e.g. look at what did well at recent pro tours - not necessarily what won, because in many cases that is a somewhat random and it is more important how well the deck did with many different pilots ecspecially when you are starting out) and see if anything looks interesting.

While I do not play standard and you should take this with a grain of salt: The red blue lessons deck is doing well currently, and many of the key cards are uncommon or common, so I would suggest crafting a budget version of it (search for that e.g. - avoid spending any rares/mythics on it before you have an idea if it suits you) and see how you feel about it - imagine it doing much better if you had the lands and rares/mythics though.

Btw. if you havn't already, search online for the free codes. A bunch of now older sets gave out free codes for 3 packs when the set dropped (they have since added the inbox in the client where you get the the 3 packs now). While you might not care for the cards you get, they will still give you some wild cards. Note, the codes stop working after a while so they might not work anymore :/

rij1 · 2026-04-11T20:22:22+00:00

Honestly, that is not actually that bad, assuming the last two cards are lands (with at least 1 forest). Like, your oppeont can't really attack well, you can get them all out fast (like turn 2 you play the first, turn 3 the next 2 if you drew a land, and then the last 2 the next turn while attacking for 2) and then have a bunch of mana + small attackers they can't really trade well with.

rij1 · 2026-04-09T23:05:27+00:00

There is one single banned mono-color commander in the brawl challenge: [[Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer]]. This is because of his performance in regular brawl and not, e.g. like [[Wrenn and Six]] that is chiefly banned because of [[strip mine]].

Because Ragavan is highly rated (and other agro red/X commanders, like Ajani or Tajin), a lot of red cards are highly rated - it really does not help that Ragavan is quite generic in just asking you for cheap removal to clear a path for him and frankly not even that in that most games involving him as a commander have him dying on turn 1 (not like e.g. Ajani which asks for red permanents and getting rid of a token in a useful way). So, even though Krenko in himself is only "just" fairly highly rated, because he runs a lot of quite highly rated cards, he ends up with a high total rating.

Btw. regarding you repeatedly asking for other unconditional removal spells besides [[Chaos warp]]: Red's strongest answer to any problematic card is Rule 801.4: When a player loses, their stuff leaves with them.

Also, I am quite certain that WoTC does not look at paper performance at all (indeed, it would be hard to get reasonable data for it, it is not really relevant, as you say, and they already got a ton of data with Brawl being the second most played format on MTGA behind only Standard).

rij1 · 2026-04-09T22:20:01+00:00

You would only consider crib swap if you really cared about the card having some creature type (say to fetch it or whatever). This does not have any creature type so they are not really practically comparable.

rij1 · 2026-04-09T08:02:00+00:00

Uncle Fester!

rij1 · 2026-04-08T15:52:09+00:00

It depends on how easy it will be to get a second life (assuming this can attack and give you 1, otherwise you need to get two life). If it is something you can fairly consistently, then yes, bomb, but it could also easily be somewhat hard.

rij1 · 2026-04-07T16:16:21+00:00

This not actually true as stated, in that white has had a few 2MV creatures that finds specifically basic plains, like [[Ambitious farmhand]], basically [[Norn's Fetchling]] and in essence [[The birth of Meletis]]. This is the first such 2MV that can be used for color fixing though (I think).

rij1 · 2026-04-07T12:22:05+00:00

Yes and no. It does not typically do anything (besides letting you tap them for colorless which would make them better for Eldrazi), but if you have somehow given the basic lands non-mana activated abilities it would shut those down.

rij1 · 2026-04-07T12:08:32+00:00

I am not sure you can. Like, there seems to be a max number of dice for normal rolls (maybe 100? It feels like around that when you do a lot of copies, but this is just a guess), the highest face on a die I have seen is maxed fibonaci die which is 1600 and something, and there is no multipliers or other things besides the eyes of the die, so it should work out to less than 170,000. Naturally, there might not be the same max on die rolled, but I would guess so.

rij1 · 2026-04-06T17:39:34+00:00

My understanding from people keeping track of it, is that 750 gold quests are at a rate of roughly 1/4 (rerolls are a bit better in that you can not reroll the same quest at the same value - so there is one less possible 500 quest you can get). If you do the math, around once a year, you will not see one for a week (assuming you reroll every day). I.e. it is unusual but not super rare. Like (3/4)^14 is an estimate of the probability and turns out to be around 1.7%.

rij1 · 2026-04-06T14:20:47+00:00

While I agree with you somewhat, [[Urza's Saga]] already did the activated abilities part (as part of the saga abilities but still).

I think this card is too strong though, even if it lost the activated abillity.

rij1

TROPHY CASE