Really enjoying the writing in this one so far. Good descriptions, good use of language.

We have cards already for Mabel and Hugs. From the story we also know that Finneas is an expert archer, Zoraline is a cleric, and Helga is a minor mage. Not sure about Gev’s class yet but he’s some sort of performer: he “wielded a pair of fire maces, swinging and spinning them in a dizzying display of grace and finesse, their flames leaving trails in the twilight.”

Additional thoughts:

• If we’re losing our enchantments too often, we could build in some redundancy by going up to two copies of each. The problem with that is there’s a 33% chance you’ll get a duplicate on turn 2, in which case you’d have to wait until turn 3 or 4 to win. So I guess it’s worth it if our enchantments are getting killed in more than 33% of games.

• I was wrong about Teferi in particular, the Historic-legal version is the “fixed” Alchemy card and that doesn’t get in Chimil’s way. Other can’t-cast effects, such as Drannith Magistrate, are still a concern.

• Looking at the list of weaknesses I laid out starts me thinking about how I’d build a white prison deck for this format. Unfortunately, it would need a lot of rares and I don’t have quite that many wildcards.

There’s a decent argument that Shuko and anything else that can be activated an unlimited number of times should be banned, because this isn’t the first time a combo like this has come around. But I think this article does a good job making the case that Nadu is broken even apart from that. (That doesn’t mean Wizards won’t hide behind a Shuko ban anyway…)

I’ve been playing Magic long enough to remember when a 3/4 for 3 mana would need a pretty significant drawback to even be printable. So I’m still surprised when they come out with broken nonsense like Nadu, even though I shouldn’t be by now.

This Pro Tour had lopsided numbers and non-interactive games and just wasn’t much fun to watch. Wizards should consider it a disaster, but whether they will probably depends a lot on MH3 sales numbers.

Oh god, the page has been updated now and it really is a 60-card constructed format.

Well, if he’s cheated so much in the past that he can’t get the benefit of the doubt from the judges now, he won’t get a ton of sympathy from me either.

That’s valuable context, thanks.

It’s not like they don’t know they’re on camera, and on top of that, Van Etten was up a game already. Who would intentionally cheat in a situation where you’re pretty much guaranteed to get caught, and you don’t even need the advantage that badly anyway? The only thing I can think of is that Van Etten told the judges “Yeah, I realized it a couple of turns later but didn’t say anything.”

By the way, speaking as someone who’s played my share of paper Magic and made more than my share of judge calls: call the judges when this happens. Their top priority is to fix the game state, not to punish you. Sometimes if the game has progressed too far to fix, they’ll let the mistake stand. I don’t know offhand how enforcement differs at a high-level event like this, but I think there’s a real chance that Van Etten could have salvaged a match win out of this if he’d called the judges on himself in time.

The announcement says turn 3 of game 3, but it means game 2. Their game 2 starts at about 5:30:15 of the official coverage, and the play in question happens at around 5:34:00. Twitch chatters catch the mistake immediately, and the commentators bring it up around 5:35:35.

I could easily see myself doing something like this by mistake. I wonder what the judges heard when they interviewed the players that convinced them it was intentional.

Yeah, but they can go up to four copies of Yotian Frontliner. It’s not as good, but I don’t think it’s bad enough to sink the deck. And that’s assuming that neither color gets an artifact-producing one-drop in the next set. Or lands that make it viable to go into a third color for Spyglass Siren.

I hope it’s not a constructed format, because I found a three-card game-winning combo pretty quickly: Sanguine Bond plus Exquisite Blood plus any way to gain life, like Honden of Cleansing Fire or the last mode of Glorious Sunrise. Just put one of each of those cards plus 57 lands in a deck and you can have your combo assembled by turn 4.

Interesting that they considered banning Atraxa or Knight-Errant from Standard. While I wouldn’t shed a tear for either one, I can’t honestly say that the format is unbalanced right now. Those decks are strong but beatable, and their metagame shares are reasonable.

In fact, I’ve been playing Poison Burn for so long that I actually look forward to facing Domain Ramp. And I think losing the triomes, and thus the potential for turn-two Leylines, will slow the deck down by a lot.

On the other hand, I don’t understand the argument that losing Voldaren Epicure will significantly hurt Boros Convoke. I hardly ever see that deck play Knight-Errant on turn 2, and yet I still lose to it plenty. If I could ban one card from the deck, I’d choose Imodane’s Recruiter, or maybe Warden of the Inner Sky.

The Midweek Magic page hasn’t been updated yet to explain what “Historic Chimil” is, but assuming it’s a format with the Historic card pool where everybody starts with a Chimil emblem, what do we think the strategy is? Just stuff a deck with busted five-drops, right? Do you even need lands? Maybe if you want to put some of the discovered cards in your hand for later use. Or will it be a Momir-like format where you just get a random Historic-legal spell with mana value <= 5 each turn?

before we put our children onto the battlefield, not ‘create’ them like some rules committees would have you believe.

A real Magic fundamentalist would put them into play.

Forbidden Orchard seems like a natural fit.

The article says:

the matchmaking we’re discussing today only applies to the Best-of-One play queues … and does not apply to Ranked play, Best-of-Three play, premier events, or events that have win/loss targets.

Interesting that they exclude casual Bo3. What exactly does that mean? I could see an argument that deck weighting is less important in a format where you have access to sideboards. But they must still do player-skill-based MMR, right? Casual play would surely be a nightmare without it.

We know from the Reddit spreadsheets that they have separate weighting for Standard Brawl and Historic Brawl. I’d bet that each format – Standard, Explorer, Alchemy, etc. – has its own set of weights. The reason we only know the weights for Brawl is because only commanders can have negative weights. So no Explorer deck, for example, can ever fail to validate because of a negative total weight.

This is probably a lot easier for me to say than it would be for the programmers to implement, but: the weighting system seems to only judge cards on an individual basis. I wonder how feasible it would be to weight card combos. Like – Aftermath Analyst isn’t too scary by itself, but if you see it in a deck with Nissa, Resurgent Animist, that’s a different story.

I think it’s probably for the best that we can’t see those numbers. For one thing, being able to see your MMR would turn casual games into ranked games, effectively. Plus there’s the fact that both numbers are really just the developers’ best guess, subject to a lot of fluctuation and not guaranteed to be accurate at any particular point in time, not to mention that you sometimes get paired way up/down if the system can’t find a match fast enough. I think publicizing MMR or deck weight would lead to a lot more complaining and bad feelings, while not significantly improving the quality of your games.