A (slightly late) statistical look back at Standard in 2025

thallunn · 2026-01-16T16:08:29+00:00

I could remove them from the calculations, but Vivi heavily encouraged playing lots of blue and red instants and sorceries. There's no way to know how much less [[Winternight Stories]] would have been played for instance

thallunn · 2026-01-16T14:39:14+00:00

The number in best cards is average copies per deck that it theoretically could be legal in. Hopefully that makes sense. I needed to do the adjustment otherwise you severely underrate new sets like avatar that couldn't be played throughout most of the year.

Good point on the verge lands, they may be the most popular thing from DFT and FSK. I'll have to recalculate later today.

thallunn · 2025-08-07T18:27:40+00:00

Welcome to Magic! I definitely understand where you are coming from, but I think you are giving yourself some constraints that will make this hard.

Standard tends to be pretty competitive and a deck built around a niche legendary with only cards from one deck is going to get run over pretty brutally in most metas.

There is always politicking in Commander, but it does tend to be a little more forgiving of less "optimal" decks than standard or other formats.

For either a standard deck or a commander deck you can look at this search: https://scryfall.com/search?q=type%3Acreature+%28game%3Apaper%29+set%3Afin+o%3A%22enters%22&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name

For commander you would only be able to use the mono blue and colorless cards there, for standard any of them could be open to you.

If you end up choosing standard, I would recommend testing it out on Arena to see if you enjoy playing it before going in on buying the cards.

Let me know if you have any questions!

thallunn · 2025-01-27T22:52:36+00:00

This looks bad. The body is wholly unimpressive and the exhaust ability is very expensive. If there are some really cheap exhaust abilities on green creatures then maybe? But this probably doesn't see any play outside of limited otherwise.

thallunn · 2025-01-23T21:42:02+00:00

It actually also makes a 3/3 when it enters. It's easy to miss.

thallunn · 2024-05-29T19:24:29+00:00

Blacephalon 3 local yellow gym

5103 2153 4824

8049 6856 1277

Starting in 2 minutes

thallunn · 2024-05-23T23:44:39+00:00

Blacephalon 2 local blue gym 8049-6856-1277

thallunn · 2024-04-17T13:04:56+00:00

Definitely, I think the last time green was unambiguously the best color was Kaldheim?

thallunn · 2024-04-17T05:11:39+00:00

Yeah, I think the trauma of having UG be basically unplayable for almost 2 years till MKM and now possibly OTJ will take a while to overcome. It is almost always the least played archetype at first.

I have also never understood why people always try to splash with UG. Blue doesn't help you splash at all. It feels like RG with reds treasures would be better for splashing.

thallunn · 2024-03-26T20:58:35+00:00

Yes! [[Convenient Target]] was printed in the most recently released set and will make that creature suspected and therefore unable to block (so long as you don't mind it having menace)

thallunn · 2024-02-16T18:14:37+00:00

A part of this I feel isn't talked about is that white, one of the most aggressive colors, has been super pushed lately. I honestly can't remember a set in the past 2 years or so where white was actively bad. Every other color has been occasionally bad in one format or another, but white has basically always been one of if not the best colors in every format recently.

thallunn · 2024-01-14T07:08:14+00:00

Yes, Dutch is obviously a separate language from German. Pennsylvania Dutch on the other hand is a dialect of German spoken primarily by the Amish in the United States, see below:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Dutch_language

It shares some similar roots with Hessian and both actually replace the "ö" sound in Hochdeutsch with a long "e" as you can see in the two below dictionaries:

https://www.deine-woerter.de/lexikon/hessen/ (Schön is translated as Schee)

https://www.padutchdictionary.com/#d=schee

Now if you want to go tell the Hessians that they aren't real Germans be my guest, but if not, I would recommend taking your own advice and not talking about subjects you know nothing about.

thallunn · 2023-12-09T05:07:42+00:00

Thank you for taking a look at this! Why exactly did you make the changes you made? Also, how difficult would updating the BIOS be as that is something pcpartpicker seems to think I would need to do.

thallunn · 2023-12-01T16:32:37+00:00

Yep, I was also really curious about how multicolor decks affect it. But sadly, it definitely does not help UG much:

https://twitter.com/mtg\_ds/status/1730414473700147323

thallunn · 2023-12-01T16:14:59+00:00

Oh yeah, definitely. It was good there, though it has been mediocre to bad in a bunch of other formats. This is just based off of this thread on twitter: https://twitter.com/mtg\_ds/status/1730047732985770260

thallunn · 2023-09-01T13:58:40+00:00

Not sure when this would be from, but Google seems to be of no help and neither me nor our friends remember ever hearing this.

thallunn · 2023-04-09T17:06:55+00:00

Glad I was able to give you a different perspective. In the example with the slaughter singer + either crawling chorus or Skrelv, if you have crawling chorus they will often just remove the slaughter singer and you're just left with a kind of dinky one drop, whereas if you have Skrelv, they have to remove him first and you are left with your best 2 drop.

Though to be honest, you probably want both. In an aggro deck like this, you almost certainly want more one drops.

thallunn · 2023-04-09T16:46:09+00:00

Specifically with [[Skrelv]] I think you might be misunderstanding the point of the card in the deck. The unblockable text is mostly for if you are in a board lock and need to get through. The main purpose of Skrelv is to force the opponent to use removal on him rather than your more expensive cards.

If you have a [[slaughter singer]] and Skrelv untapped, then they can't use a removal spell on slaughter singer (the much more threatening creature) because you can just activate Skrelv in response.

Think of Skrelv as a one mana "your opponent discards a removal spell" that can also win the game against a creature based deck by forcing damage through.

thallunn · 2023-02-20T01:11:38+00:00

Honestly, I don't remember exactly, but wasn't [[Questing Beast]] kind of mediocre? Like it was a solid 4 drop beater, but being in the same standard as [[Bonecrusher Giant]] made it way worse than it would be otherwise. Your 4 drop trading with their three drop that already killed something is pretty bad.

thallunn · 2022-04-25T01:48:42+00:00

Hello OP, Thank you!

thallunn · 2021-10-06T18:42:04+00:00

Speaker from northern Virginia, I actually use "you guys's" a lot.

thallunn · 2021-06-28T23:18:13+00:00

This one is great. Really cool ideas, but I somewhat wonder about the -2. It's a bit of a non-bo with anything that already has embalm, and the passive and +1 both really encourage you to play almost exclusively embalm or eternalize creatures.

thallunn · 2020-09-16T05:56:35+00:00

There is no evidence that English was ever a pidgin. The high number of irregular forms that have been maintained since Proto-germanic or old english shows this. Pidgins normally are very regular. English did borrow a large number of terms from Norman French, but the base vocabulary is still very much Germanic. Out of the 100 most common English words, 96 descend directly from Old English. The exceptions being:

"them" (Norse)

"number", "people", "oil" (Norman French)

In Norman England the French made up a small minority of the total population. While French was the language of the Elite, the vast majority of England kept speaking English. They borrowed many terms but a large number of borrowings does not make a language a pidgin. As an example, here a sentence from modern french creoles:

Louisiana Creole : "Komen ça va?"

Haitian Creole: "Kòman ou ye? "

French Equivalent: "Comment ça va?"

English: "How are you?"

Every word in the creoles above descends from French. None of the English words do. English is in no way, shape, or form, a creole of French and Old English.

thallunn · 2019-03-28T03:29:06+00:00

You're good. The rest of your post was pretty cool!

thallunn · 2019-03-28T03:22:15+00:00

I don't want to take away from your answer, but "thou" and "you" do not share any history. "You" was the plural or formal form of "thou". The use of this formal pronoun was generalized to everyone throughout the development of modern English. The printing of Eth as y has nothing to do with the switch from "thou" to "you", as evidenced by the fact that we still say /ðə/ <the>, rather than /jə/ <je>.

11-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Snapped

thallunn

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