As expected, they did not reprint anything of such value that buying the entire boxed set is cheaper than the secondary market value.  Berserk is a possible exception, but it is not really that difficult to find a played Unlimited one for under the box's MSRP with some poking around.

I still believe that foil, limited run reprints are a good partial solution to the barrier of entry to Eternal formats.  They could do a small print run on a box with a set of 40 dual lands, put the MSRP at $99.99, and give some young players a major leg up into Legacy without screwing people who have bought the old ones particularly badly.  I own duals, many of them dearly bought, and I still can't imagine anyone seriously opposing such a product.  FtV:Exiled, while neat, doesn't strike me as a major incentive for anyone to get into Eternal.  I think that most purchasers will be people who at least dabble in Eternal formats already, looking to pimp existing decks.  Honestly, who in the world longs to own a Tinker or a Trinisphere and doesn't already?

Did anybody here ever do the Vapor Ops sample test they posted years ago?  It's a list of cards they make you critique when they are screening you for a position in R&D.  Maro posted a few examples, most of which were cool at first glance but turned out to be overpowered, rules nightmares, or otherwise undesirable upon further consideration.  This reminds me quite a lot of one of those cards, which put two different proprietary counters onto things and made three different kinds of creature tokens.  It read a lot like this card, and the verdict was basically, "Nothing, no matter how well it plays, could be worth this level of complexity, confusion, and potential for disagreements about game state."

Thunderheads.  That said, I agree with your point nonetheless.

I really like the card in terms of functionality.  However, it requires a busy, complex, time-consuming interaction (find 3 cards, some or all of which are likely to be singletons, then give the opponent time to think about it, etc.).  Wizards has often permitted such things on game-breakers like Gifts Ungiven that make a serious impact every time they resolve, but this card seems like it'd be a mana-fixer/accelerant as often as a combo assembling tutor.  Death Cloud decks and such used to cast Kodama's Reach one or two times per game, and with this version, that could eat up a lot of clock.

So it's good, I'm just not sure it'd see print.

Depends on how budget you mean and whether your meta allows proxies.  Ideally, for that meta I would suggest Manaless Ichorid with a combo kill.  If your read of the meta is correct, there is probably not much graveyard hate running around, and Needle doesn't sound that optimal either, so Ichorid should thrive.  With no combo, you can always race, and Ichorid can largely ignore the permission and lock parts which seem to be dominating currently.

If, for whatever reason, Ichorid hate still abounds, I would suggest BUG Fish.  Null Rod is a real beating against this field, and Goyf should give you the edge against the WUB Fish.  Be sure to sideboard heavily against that Oath, though.

Because I have only partial power, I tend to favor generally useful cards, like a Mox, over narrower cards.  For example, I would not trade a playset of beat-up Volcanic Islands (assuming it's my only set) for a playset of mint Sea Drakes, even though this is, by most standards, an advantageous trade for me.  Sea Drakes are harder to trade and useful in fewer decks.  As such, I'd def. keep the Mox, here.

If, however, you are a player with a full set of power who has won a spare Ruby at a tournament, then I might seriously consider the trade.  You could probably not sell the Mox easily for that value, and padding your already excellent collection with a set of SPs is pretty solid.

Note that this only applies at RELs less than Professional.  I really, really like this change.

Your wording would combo with things like Mana Short, which I don't think he wants.  That said, I still don't think that the posted wording is exactly how Wizards would do it.

The main problem I see with the card, though, is the fact that nobody would play it unless it was in a set with tons of awkward mana producers, in which case it might occasionally get boarded in for a Limited g2.  In practice, how often did you see mana burn over the course of its run?  I don't think I saw someone take mana burn as often as once per tournament.  This effect would probably be fine on a 0-cost artifact with flash, which would still see no play, let alone a enchantment.  Maybe do it as a Instant cantrip with "For the rest of the game, [opponents take mana burn]."  Compare to Crimson Wisps, which does something every time you play it.  This would not.

Double strike is just too much juice without costing him to oblivion (like or something).  I am right on the same page as Wagner in pointing out that the first swing will win the game most of the time.  Have you ever seen a Dragon Tyrant in play?  It's pretty much game over.

You could look at some kind of drawback, like "Dragon spells you play cost more to play."  Since he is low on the curve, it creates tension between running him out early and curving into a fattie vs. getting the fattie at fair value and playing this guy later.  It's also sort of flavorful, like the added expense of training or whatever.

Glacial Chasm also lets you go off after Nomad Stadium has been removed from the game, making it both disruption and an alternate kill.

I couldn't agree more.  In fact, Canonist does next to nothing, and I did not mean to refer to it.  What I meant to say was Aven Mindcensor, which shuts down Intuition and Wargate.


Very true, and I would not normally set Meddling Mage to Fastbond in this matchup.  I would instead set it to Intuition, which makes it virtually impossible to assemble the large number of components needed to start going off.  At that point, you must draw into your singleton Echoing Truth or one of the two tutors that gets it, which means you are not using those tutors to find other cards like Gush or countermagic.  A Fish deck playing out any sort of clock (Goyf, maybe Jotun Grunt) should be able to kill within that extra window of time, given the lack of relevant anti-aggro cards you are maindecking.  Balance is obviously a house in game 2.

That said, I don't think the deck is that much weaker to Meddling Mage or Aven Mindcensor than plenty of other good decks, and neither of those is getting an enormous amount of play currently.  The bigger concern is probably, as you point out, combo.  The more popular Fish builds, like BUG, rely more on some combination of Null Rod, Wasteland, permission, and discard.  All of these are clearly suboptimal here except for the permission, and few Fish builds run much more than the 8 slots you have, so no big deal there.

Why Null Rod in the board?  Drains make up such a large portion of the meta right now that having it maindeck seems worthwhile if you are going to run it at all.  But I don't see what you are taking out for them that doesn't make your deck so clunky as to fold almost instantly against a strong permission suite.  Seems like either the deck should be rebuilt to fully accommodate them or they should be left out entirely.

You're happy with 2 Crypt, 4 Wasteland, 1 Strip, 3 Crucible, and 1 Echoing Truth against Ichorid?  That's a high probability of getting in at least one broken Bazaar activation and potentially forcing you to find Echoing Truth or die to zombies.

Sarnath'd by wiley while typing this, but in case it isn't clear to anyone I'll post it anyway:

1. Tap Tundra for W.
2. Strip Mine Tundra.
3. Replay both with Crucible, taking 2 damage from Fastbond.
4. Gain 4 life with Nomad Stadium.
5. Replay Nomad Stadium, taking 1 damage from Fastbond.
6. Repeat until you have infinite life.
7. Repeatedly play and Strip Tundra for U.
8. Use Cephalid Coliseum on yourself until you get a perfect hand of countermagic to protect your combo.
9. Deck the opponent with Cephalid Coliseum.

Is this really the way to go?  I'm sure you have tested the deck much more than I have, but this kill and this build seem incredibly vulnerable to a lot of stuff.  A single Ethersworn Canonist or Meddling Mage is very bad news.  And what about a Tormod's Crypt or Relic of Progenitus in play?  Seeing one maindeck is not all that uncommon, and activating it just one time to remove Nomad Stadium from the game seems, as I read your decklist, to win the game instantly.  And unless you counter it on the way down, you can't beat it game 1 except by getting them to misplay it.

Just to update, I'm still having trouble contacting desolutionist.  If you're reading this, shoot me a PM or get me on AIM at EarlCobble.

Flame Rift bears a substantial drawback in addition to its mana:damage ratio.  It's like saying that Inspiration at would not be overpowered because, after all, just look at Words of Wisdom.  A better comparison would be Flames of the Blood Hand, but I would still argue that 5 damage is better than 4 unpreventable damage that can occasionally counter Loxodon Hierarch's 187.  One of the main ways Wizards keeps burn decks in check is by restricting the amount of damage they can do with each individual card on the low end of the curve (Philosophy of Fire, anyone?), and dealing a fourth of the opponent's life total for 3 mana is pushing it, even if it does seem to jive, mana-wise, with Lava Spike +2.  I feel like they would have printed this by now if they were ok with it, and the repeated inclusion of Lava Axe in the core set would tend to agree with me.

@Harlequin
I agree with you and Anusien that Gifts + Fact, as stated, is not interesting.  I am just saying that some kind of tutor/manipulation/card draw spell with two strong effects balanced by letting your opponent choose which one you get could potentially produce a good card.

Oh, I completely agree.  But we can see that Browbeat does this (2R for 5 damage and 2R to draw 3 are both quite overpowered), and Browbeat is not a problem.  It should be done carefully, but it can create some interesting cards.

I think that letting your opponent choose between two undercosted effects is an interesting, unexplored design space.  Mostly this has dealt with choosing brokenness or damage (Browbeat, Dash Hopes, Choice of Damnations).  I think that letting you choose between two search spells, possibly balancing between quality of search and card advantage, has some potential.  Fact or Fiction can generate as much as +3 CA, but it has only a 5/X chance of finding a certain card (X being the number of cards in your library, obv), whereas Gifts Ungiven will always find the card while always generating only +1 CA.  The opponent chooses whether to give you consistent, fixed brokenness (keep in mind that Gifts is not GG outside Vintage, it's just really good) or the potential for really explosive power alongside a chance to see 5 lands.  In theory, I like all that.

However, Anusien has a good point that taping two classics together, while it does sex the card up a bit, might be too constraining.  It just depends on what you want.

What about if it lets you Gifts, and then the opponent sees what you got and can either complete the Gifts or make you shuffle them back in and do something else?  Like, "Nope, that's a really good Gifts pile.  You can't have it."  And then you get to draw 4 cards, Fact or Fiction (wall of text danger), or some pseudo-search thing like "draw 6, discard 4."

I had trouble getting in touch with desolutionist this weekend.  I'm PMing him now.

Unless there were some mulligans here, he should win just by taking infinite turns.  He has 6 cards in hand (he played 7 cards and drew 6 cards) plus 2 Moxes and Vault/Key in play.  He needs 1 mana to keep his combo going, so he can go 7 turns before he has to bust it up.  You played 4 cards, giving you 3 left, and have one Mox and a land in play in addition to the Portal itself.  You can go 5 turns before you are forced to sacrifice the Portal to its own ability.  At that point he just goes right on taking turns while you have no permanents and no cards in hand, winning easily.  So although AmbivalentDuck is correct, you do still lose there.

That would be an interesting exercise, but I would actually prefer the one I mentioned above:  doing "optimized" builds with cards that might actually come off the list, or that some people would like to see come off it, at least.  If done right, it could even provide useful information to the DCI, which it doesn't really have time to gather on Vintage.

I'll agree with Anusien that green gets both of these effects fairly rarely.  But it does get them.

I think that this card looks outrageous when you first see it.  "It's like Mana Drain!"  "And for such a low cost!"  "And in such a strange color!"  But the more you look at it, the more sense it starts to make.  "Oh, like Bind."  "Oh, like Channel the Suns."  "Actually, is this even all that good?"  Cards that generate this type of reaction but end up not being overpowered are difficult to design but, clearly, quite desirable.  That's why I like the card.  You might disagree?

I would like to see you do this again, this time with a Jar deck, Flash, and Trinistax.  Alternatively, maybe an article where you take a couple of the controversial cards people have occasionally advocated for unrestriction, like Fact or Fiction, Enlightened Tutor, Grim Monolith, Entomb, etc., and build decks to abuse them, seeing how they fare against a gauntlet from the current meta (and maybe against each other).  Near as I can tell, though, you get both of these requests, in some form or another, pretty often.

Are you putting these into Excel as you go?  I'm picturing a spreadsheet with each row corresponding to a card name and each column corresponding to a competitor, with numbers of copies in each cell (so column K is a Tezzeret player, he has a value of "0" for Smokestack, "0" for Painter's Servant, "4" for Force of Will, etc.), with the same card names then repeated, having separate data points for sideboard cards.  Then have dummy variables for each competitor's placement in the tournament.  This would allow you to regress things like the prevalence of various kill conditions in decks playing Mana Drain, controlling for one another, the relationship between these kill conditions and placement, etc.

If I were doing it for a paper, I would also code all of the individual round pairings into data.  It would then be possible to run a logistical regression predicting the probability of winning a given matchup based on maindeck and sideboard hate cards.  It would be possible to mix and match controls to avoid multicollinearity between hate cards and archetypes, I think (like "Oath beats Painter" versus "Gaea's Blessing beats Painter").  Someone would have to pay me to do this, though.

Regardless of how robust the findings turn out, I'm really excited to see what results you come up with using these lists.  I have not renewed my Premium membership in a while, but based on what I hear about your analyses on this front, I might consider signing back up.

Ability Drain

Instant
Counter target activated ability.  At the beginning of your next main phase, add to your mana pool, where X is the amount of mana spent on that ability's activation cost.

Pretty straightforward.  In the "new Mana Drain" thread, I got to thinking about how blue can't really do the "ritual" thing anymore, making a Mana Drain remake kind of sketchy from a color standpoint.  But green can do rituals!  And green can counter things (kinda)!  So this seemed like an elegant, unexplored combination of those two abilities.

I believe that this templating is correct.  Compare to Protective Sphere.

I recognize that the costing is pretty aggressive, but Bind cantrips instead of ramping mana, Bind sucks, and the mana is not that much better than a cantrip given how few activated abilities actually cost that much mana.  If anything, you might even get away with this at .  I think that the card is cool and definitely worth printing, but I don't think it's all that playable.

Well, I don't feel that way necessarily, but I can see why someone would.  Wizards has a history of printing many different "fixed" versions of overpowered cards.  Remember the buzz garnered by Scattering Stroke when it came out?  And look at Lion's-Eye Diamond, Lotus Petal, Lotus Vale, Lotus Bloom, etc.  They just can't get enough of "fixing" Black Lotus, and every time they do it, the card generates enthusiasm.  The same goes for anything that draws parallels to an old, powerful card; it gets people talking and generates free advertisement.  You could list examples of such cards all day.

@the current wording
Why "non artifact spells?"  Why not "colored spells?"  Is there a special reason why you don't want people to cast Windwright Mage with this?

Color wheel?  A blue card has produced mana only twice (Ceta Disciple only fixes; it doesn't count) since Ice Age, including gold cards:  Vedalken Engineer, whose mana can only be spent on artifacts, and the aforementioned Scattering Stroke, which produces mana only at random.  Is this maybe a problem?

By "theme decks," do you mean the preconstructed decks released 4 at a time with each Expert-level set for a long while?  If so, then no, they are not all balanced.  They are reasonably balanced within each individual set, but even there it varies.  "Bait and Bludgeon" (Affinity, from Mirrodin) jumps to mind.  But between sets the variance is even higher; we used to have a league going with only preconstructed decks back in college, and I distinctly recall the decks from Betrayers of Kamigawa, especially "Dark Devotion" (demons/ogres) and Rat's Nest (black aggro), being abnormally powerful, for example.

Local shop had 3 Mana Crypts for $15 apiece.  But that wasn't so much a mistake as it was the total lack of Vintage in TN and the shop owner's unwillingness to fool with eBay.

What did I say that made you think that I thought Dredge required action?  I specifically said that it is NOT a problem right now.


Not really.  Without Drain, most blue archetypes could just use other countermagic and adapt pretty well.  Force of Will allows these decks to fight combo in the early turns and to occasionally tap out when necessary.  Restricting Drain would just require the kill conditions to get shuffled around; restricting Force would kill the whole deck type.  That's what the article meant.

I ordered a playset online, but my order was canceled when they quadrupled the price!

This one interests me most of all.  If Wizards decides that Ichorid decks are a problem, what gets restricted?  Any one card, even Bridge From Below, leaves the deck with plenty of weapons.  Would it get the Long treatment and have several axes fall simultaneously?  It seems like a very hard deck to solve with the Restricted List.  It seems more like a candidate for an Anvil of Bogardan/Tsabo's Web/Kataki, War's Wage-style card, except that Yixlid Jailer and Leyline of the Void are already practically there and still don't do enough (or at least, would not be doing enough in the hypothetical where Wizards/the DCI decides that the deck requires action).

I don't think that MWS horror stories are funny.  I hate when that happens on MWS.  This comic is funny because it questions what it would be like if people behaved in this manner without the protection of anonymity.  It's an old source of humor, by internet standards, but MWS is, I think, a particularly stark example of a single activity which adopts a completely different character when it is done remotely.  Perhaps this speaks to the sort of people who play Magic, since online Scrabble, for example, does not feature this behavior?  It's a truth, told in an extraordinary way, the epitome of observational humor.