Unicorn Tribal

ECMajor plays with cards. This blog will be full of Magic: The Gathering stuff! Visit my main blog (But be warned, it contains NSFW things.)

[unicorntribal]

I don’t know why i’m so attracted to mediocre and/or bad generals, but SIGH i am thinking of making an Autumn Willow deck

Maybe i just like generals that no one ever plays...

[unicorntribal]

Ahhh nice

One of the slew of random products Wizards is scattershotting out is a set of “guild kits” which are guild-themed preconstructed decks. Nothing to write home about really, but!! the Izzet one has Niv Firemind in it - not only with his awesome original flavour text, but also with new alternate art. It’s a lot different than his past iterations... depicted in his fullbodied glory with Ravnica sprawled out behind him in the background... pretty sweet

I kinda have a thing for collecting Niv-Mizzets... why? I dunno, maybe because he’s fucking AWESOME. Anyway that’s pretty cool...

Also Tolsimir Wolfblood’s pal and mount Voja will finally be getting her(?) lovely token self in print. Not a huge deal but as a completionist it always bothers me when a token generating thing doesn’t have an actual token to go with it xD Glad to see that fixed! (Ok i actually really like collecting tokens... they should do like... From the Vault: Tokens. sign me up)

[unicorntribal]

Last night i won a game with two 11-point Hurricanes (I copied the one i cast with Swarm Intelligence)

Good old Hurricane 😏

Not even FEMA could put my opponents (and most of me, to be fair) back together again after that

[unicorntribal]

The Creative team then split the guilds in half. Five would fall under Bolas's influence, and five would not. (Although, I should point out that each guild has elements pulling in both directions.) The five guilds that fell to Bolas would each have a planeswalker, beholden to Bolas, who would lead the guild. The creative team spent a great deal of time picking which five would fall to Bolas. Their choices were swayed a lot by the story that they wanted to tell.

...

Because five guilds were falling to Bolas and we wanted the two sets leading up to the event set to feel as if things are getting worse on Ravnica, we wanted the first set to have two Bolas-leaning guilds and the second set to have three. That way the progression felt as if Bolas is gaining in power. 

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Just idly pondering which guilds next set seem the most likely to be Bolased up. I think it’s obvious that Azorius will be, since they killed off Isperia ( 😡 ) to make room for someone else to take over. (I wonder who that might be? I hope it’s not Dovin Baan, he definitely fits the requirement but he’s boring as fuck... though i’m pretty sure whoever they assign will be boring since you just can’t fill a sphinx’s shoes... I can’t think of any other W/U morally grey planeswalkers. Tezzeret seems like a remote possibility, but... eh, he seems a little too bad to gain the allegiance of Azorius :P)

Apparently, according to some comment spat down by a rando somewhere in the dank depths of the internet, Rakdos got his brain fried, but he’s still around. Rakdos the guild definitely seems like one that would be ripe for Bolasing out... seems likely imo, just for flavour, colour alignment, and opportunity reasons.

Flavourwise i think the least likely guild for Bolas to get his claws in would be Gruul. Then again, they already have a planeswalker in Domri... i don’t know what Domri’s up to but Bolas could easily enthrall him probably.

I don’t know why i’m rambling on about this anymore, now that i’ve gotten this far. Other than Azorius being the obvious choice it seems like the other two guilds under Bolas’s sway are pretty up in the air... Orzhov seems very Bolasian even without any influence, but that could just as easily be a reason for it to not be :P Simic? Who knows. What do fish even do.

Also where did Niv Mizzet go... i hope he comes back in the 3rd set (at least in the story since it’s unlikely it’d be in a card) and gives Ral a good thrashing and a brain-melt for being so insolent.

I would be very okay with it if Niv’s gone because he planeswalked

Maybe Ugin will be around for the final showdown too

[unicorntribal]

I wonder if i should open this

EDIT: Oh nice, the spindown has the Izzet symbol on it instead of the set symbol. (And it’s blue with red numbers) I dig it (Not that i need any more of the damn things xD ...but i think this is the first one from a regular set that didn’t just have the set’s symbol)

[unicorntribal]

They really need to reprint Rhystic Study... kind of surprising they haven’t put it in a commander set since it’s such a staple blue card (Commander’s Arsenal doesn’t count) It’s powerful, but it’s not game-breaking by any means...

I’d like to have more than one but $14 for a common is a bit obscene (It’s the most expensive card from Prophecy by far, which is kind of hilarious and sad... the second most pricy card in the set currently is like $5 xD)

[unicorntribal]

I honestly think one of the best things about building monocolour EDH decks is that i only have to dig through like 1/5 of my cards xD

So much less work. My collection is far too big >.<

[unicorntribal]

They killed Isperia x.x

Ixalan’s story arc made me like Vraska, but murdering my sphinx is unforgivable. Vraska’s dead to me

[unicorntribal]

Crackly smugboy <3

[unicorntribal]

Damn, i gotta say i didn’t really have a lot of interest in Vivien ...her backstory, though it sounded promising, was pretty sparse when she was introduced... and she seemed like just another random human planeswalker like all the others. But reading a story has a way of making a character more interesting and giving them some dimension.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-story/unbowed-part-1-2018-08-29

Liked this a lot more than i thought i would... maybe because of how strongly i could identify with how she was feeling throughout and her completely justified ...reaction xD The writing is really good too. Magic stories have as wide a spectrum of quality in their writing as they do authors writing them, but I’d say Cassandra Khaw is one of the good ones. I think i discovered like... 4 new words? hah.

I have no idea why Vivien is on Ixalan in the vampire city, but i assume there must be a reason for choosing this event/location/character to commit to lit.

It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Ravnica yet, but i assume they’re going to lead in to that somehow?

[unicorntribal]

Where Are They Now: Uncle Istvan

[vorthosjay]

Do you think Skyscanner is from Ravnica or Kaladesh?

I don’t think it is from either. It doesn’t fit either plane.

[unicorntribal]

I found that one interesting as soon as i saw it spoiled. The style of its design, the architecture in the background, and the flavour text about the “municipal senate” don’t seem like they fit in any plane we’ve seen to my knowledge. Of course those places are large so who knows... And since it’s a core set it could be a past or future Ravnica (Ravnica’s aesthetics changed quite a bit in the time between the original block’s setting and RTR) ...BUT i think that’s a stretch, especially with how nonsensical it would be to include something out of time so close to an actual re-return to Ravnica (one that has not changed much since we last saw it, this time) I feel like later on we’ll see some new place and someone will be like “Hey, this style reminds me of that Skyscanner from a few years ago”

[unicorntribal]

Yennett, Cryptic Sovereign good for you?

YES i love her!

Not sure what, if anything, i’ll do with her… sphinx tribal is tempting since Unesh was a bit disappointing as a general (not for his abilities, which were awesome, but for being locked into playing mono-blue) but unfortunately a lot of the good sphinges don’t take advantage of Yennett’s free casting ability. 25 of the 45 sphinges that exist have odd CMCs (24 of the 43 if you exclude Petra Sphinx for being bad/nonflying and Arjun for being the sole unusable sphinx outside of esper colours) and that might be enough for tribal, but so many of the good ones are 6 :/

But yeah, regardless of being unsure where to put her Yennett is awesome, and it’s really cool to have an esper coloured sphinx who’s not actually Esper and doesn’t care about artifacts. I wonder where she’s from? I hope the product contains some info about the characters. There’s usually a small blurb… which is not nearly enough to be satisfying, but which is definitely better than nothing at all!

[unicorntribal]

I’m sorting my old basic lands since i got a new storage box, and finally looked up the identifying features of so-called “alternate 4th edition” cards - because sure enough, it turns out the 4 basic lands i have in my non-revised white-bordered section that are slightly bigger (you can feel the edges sticking out slightly if you have the cards in an even stack) are alt 4th cards. That slight size difference always bothered me, i guess it’s good to know there’s a reason for it xD

There are two other very obvious features that they have too... the printing pattern is a lot different, and the easiest thing of all to spot is that the top of the “A” in MAGIC on the back is dark, whereas it’s light on every other card.

So i went through all the other 4th edition cards i have and found 3 more... Karma, Weakness, and Red Elemental Blast.

They’re very ugly cards, as far as printing goes, even moreso than regular 4th Edition. But i guess it’s neat having a few cards that were supposed to’ve been destroyed and never released.

I’m certain i don’t have any “Summer Magic” though, unfortunately. Those are the really rare, pricy ones...

[unicorntribal]

Discovering that almost all of the cool cards i wanted from M19 aren’t even in the regular set and are planeswalker deck cards...

Man, why are nearly all the awesome, flavourful rares in there and not the set xD

[incorrect-mtg-theories]

Vraska has two sisters named Alaska and Nebraska who turn their foes to ice instead of stone

[unicorntribal]

I don't know if you know but Lord Windgrace was spotted in the Dominaria art book, despite not having a card. Odds are he's going to be a planeswalker in the next commander set.

I saw that! Pretty nice art, it definitely looks like something they were (or possibly are) planning to use for something. I’d love to see him get a card