Portal - discussion of cards

[dandan]

As we all know, Portal is currently not allowed in Type I but Wizards have been taking steps in the right direction by updating Oracle and mumbling words of support at Magic the Gathering.com. I do not want to discuss the pros and cons of Portal (and its ugly step-brother Starter) here.
Instead I want to discuss which cards from Portal I, II and II (and Starter) could be considered for Type I.

Contenders

The 'good' stuff (the tutors, card drawers, manipulation, etc):

Control of the Court Sorcery (Goblin Lore) 1R
Draw four cards and put them into your hand. Then discard three cards at random from your hand.

Cruel Bargain Sorcery BBB
Draw four cards. You lose half your life, rounded up. (For example, if you have 11 life, you lose 6 life.)

Cruel Tutor Sorcery 2B
Search your deck for any card. Shuffle your deck and put that card on top of it. You lose 2 life.

Gift of Estates Sorcery 1W
If your opponent has more lands in play than you do, search your deck for up to three plains and put them into your hand. Shuffle your deck afterwards.

Grim Tutor Sorcery 1BB
Search your library for a card and put that card into your hand. You lose 3 life.

Imperial Seal Sorcery B
Search your library for any one card. Shuffle your library and put that card on top of it. You lose 2 life.

Personal Tutor Sorcery U
Search your deck for a sorcery and reveal that card to all players. Shuffle your deck and put the revealed card on top of it

Rolling Earthquake Sorcery XR
Rolling Earthquake deals X damage to each player and each creature without horsemanship. (This includes you and your creatures without horsemanship.)
(fear Horsemanship!)

Strategic Planning Sorcery 1U
Look at the top three cards of your library. Put one of them into your hand and the rest into your graveyard.

I guess I should mention

Jungle Lion G
Jungle Lion cannot block
2/1

(for those of you still playing Stompy and RG beats)

Clearly Imperial Seal, Personal Tutor and Cruel Tutor need a little thought although Cruel Tutor is costly and slow.

Are there any more worthy cards for competitive play (not that the above are all that good, just worthy of consideration)?

[Jebus]

Imperial Seal and Personal Tutor are possible candidates for immediate restriction providing they did legalize Portal.  Their sorcery speed does make them less attractive though.

Cruel Tutor looks slow enught to be safe.

[dandan]

With Vampiric Tutor being a fixture on the B&R list, I think Imperial Seal would have to join it even though it would always be the tutor that you would like to replace with something better. It would allow you to reliably set up turn 2 so probably merits a B&R slot.

Personal Tutor is a far far weaker version of Mystic and is may not be worthy of a B&R slot as it can only fetch Sorceries and is also very slow. It does allow you to get your Will reliably so might get Restricted because of that.

I would personally hate to have such cards in my deck.

Cruel looks bad enough to be safe.

[Dr. Sylvan]

Cruel vs. Diabolic doesn't come out very favorably, so yeah, it's totally safe.

Any reason why this thread was started at this moment, dandan, instead of nearer the September 1 announcement?

[dandan]

Yes. I hope to have an article come out on MTGNews about Portal soon and I thought the follow up could look at the cards themselves. I think I can handle the casual aspect of Portal but I would like the viewpoint of TMDers on the competitive aspects of Portal (if that is not an oxymoron).

In any case Portal can be made legal at any time, it is not a B&R thing as it is not technically banned, just not allowed. Of course the B&R announcement is the logical time to allow Portal (and its ugly step-brother Starter) into Type I.

Incidently the new Earthquake is a serious creature sweeper (apart from Togs of course)

[Bram]

I know you don't want to discuss the pros and cons of Portal (I'm sure both exist) but nonetheless I would like to pose the question why we would want it to become legal? Some of the cards you mentioned are possibly interesting additions to existing decktypes, but all of them are 'twists' on existing concepts (and usually suboptimal ones at that). With a new set coming out every 3 days or something, I for one have enough interesting cards (that might actually inspire NEW deck ideas) to work with to not become overly excited at the prospect of having a bunch of mediocre not-quite-magic cards available for sanctioned play.[/i]

[dandan]

I would be pleased to discuss the pros and cons via PMs.

In short it is as simple as:

Type I - the format where you can use any cards
(casual players - read this as 'the format where you can use any cards you own)

There are good reasons not to allow Unglued, ante cards and I guess the flippin' manual dexterity cards. However there is simply no reason not to allow Portal and Starter.

It is a similar but more cut-and-dried example to attempts to clean up the B&R list. There are cards there that could safely be unrestricted and virtually nobody says that a card should be left restricted because, if it were unrestricted, virtually nobody would use it anyway. In the same way, the fact that Portal and Starter don't contain a bunch of weird power cards in no argument for not allowing them (effectively banning them). Should be ban Homelands and The Dark? Should Alpha be banned? (by your logic it only adds bad Elvish Archers and confusing Birds of Paradise and Orcs)

It should also be noted that most casual players adhere to the Type I B&R list and Portal does have a bunch of interesting cards in many casual formats. Remember that owners of Portal and Starter cards are far less likely to be hardcore players and much more likely to be casual players. Can you explain to them why they can't use their cards? Are you serious that Jungle Lion is hard to understand (intercept=block OK?) but Doppleganger, Dreadnaught, Dragon and Humility are considered OK? Is it that a 3cc 2/2 cannot have a pseudo-unblockable ability but that Blue (the colour meant to be weakest in creatures) can have a 2/2 unblockable creature for the same cost?

I think that Personal Tutor might also prove to be a benchmark in how bad a tutor in Type I has to be in order to be unrestricted (it would either be the weakest Restricted tutor or the strongest [as it gets YawgWill for U] unrestricted Tutor).

The addition of Jungle Lion would undoubtedly help budget aggro decks and although Stompy and co are hardly a force to be reckoned with at present, you see budget RG decks crop up occasionally in top 8s. A while ago I thought that Jungle Lion was a bad distraction from the main argument for Portal. However now, he may be a useful example of how Portal increases the options to deckbuilders. Do you want more or less options?

OK that wasn't exactly in short, so sue me.

[Jebus]

I wouldn't sweat it.  I'm fairly certain from some things I've seen that it will eventually be made legal.

[dandan]

I agree, but it needs a little pressure on Wizards in order for it to happen. I was sure that it would happen after Oracle was updated (hell, I thought it would happen when D'Angelo put up Oracle wordings for Portal about 2/3 years ago).

The strange thing is, nobody at Wizards seems to be against it.

In any case, this particular brick wall has found its way in front of my head and I would like to think that the bricks will crumble before my thick skull does.

Believe it or not I personally don't have many Portal cards. I also don't expect to gain any secret Type I tech to make my decks unbeatable. I just think that Type I should be the format where you can use your cards.

[Methuselahn]

Personally, I think Cruel Tutor and Personal would be a huge boon to decks that abuse the hell out of Tinker, Time Walk, and of course, Yawg's Will.  I'd restrict all of these tutors that can find any specific card and release the set to Vintage.

Great thread Dandan.

[dandan]

Cruel Tutor + YawgWin= 4BB= win
Yawgmoth already did that and made it a Bargain.

I think Imperial Seal would become Vampiric Tutor number 2 (I can't imagine it would be left unrestricted despite it being a lot worse than Vampiric) and so would slightly help combo decks although the fact that it puts the card on top of the library rather than into your hand hardly suggests brokenness.....

I stand by my statement that Personal Tutor could define the lower limit of what needs to be restricted. It is so much less powerful than Mystic Tutor which itself is not exactly broken. However Personal Tutor fetches YawgWin so that is probably sufficient on its own to restrict it.

I think that a lot of people are missing the point  when they look at Portal as a source of cards for competitive play. The 'toned-down' versions may serve as versions 2, 2-5 or 5-8 of existing cards but in some specialised cases they may be better (Burning Wish for Imperial Seal?). In any case current decklists are so tight that it is a challenge to fit in any new cards. Would a deck with 4 Personal Tutors be better than one that currently uses either other search or card drawers in that slot? Would Rolling Earthquake be better than Fire against Fish? Could Parfait use Gift of Estates? (Remember Parfait?)

[mrieff]

If I remember correctly, Zodiac Dragon has been rewritten in the Oracle to equal Squee.

So we have Squee #5-8 if we need them. In Dragon combo, the Zodiac Dragon will be superior to Squee because of its animation potential

[dandan]

Sorry but that is not true

For reference the original wording was "If Zodiac Dragon is put into your graveyard, you may return Zodiac Dragon to your hand." and is now "When Zodiac Dragon is put into your graveyard from play, you may return it to your hand."

It isn't a bad reanimate target as it negates the Animate Dead+card disadvantage but there are far better cards to reanimate. It is, however, a mighty good looking card

[Bram]

Doubple post deleted, yo

And a mighty expensive card, too. I saw one in a binder at GP Brussels the other day. Sadly, the owner was aware of it's price. Anyone know which language is the most expensive one for this card?

[dandan]

They'll all go down to less than $10 soon so I wouldn't worry about it.

The Oracle wording is clear. I would expect simplified Chinese to be worth slightly more than English Portal Three Kingdoms cards.

Sorry about the double post, I couldn't delete the first one!! (there were differences so I didn't want to delete the second one)

[Hi-Val]

Who wouldn't want to use Corrupt Eunuchs?

[Bram]

'Corrupt Eunuchs' is a card? What's a corrupt eunuch do? Lie about having cut off his dick and then proceed to screw the sultan's harem or something?

[mrieff]

Ok, thanks for pointing out its new wording

They'll all go down to less than $10 soon so I wouldn't worry about it.

Any particular reason?

I would expect simplified Chinese to be worth slightly more than English Portal Three Kingdoms cards.

From what I know, English ones are worth more than any asian versions.

[Bram]

Yeah, I heard something like that in Brussels. It kinda surprised me, as it's value is derived more from it's collectability than its playability. I'd think Asian cards about asian themes would be worth more, but apparently, they're not.

[dandan]

I expect the Dragon's price to go down as its price rose because people thought it was a super-Squee. Obviously the new wording is only very slowly becoming known but there has been a clear drop in the cards price recently (Zodiac Dragon). It will probably stay at $10 rather than fall further as Portal is a fairly rare set and it is a cool card but that is all that separates it from $1-2 junk rares.

I can't understand why English ones are more expensive than Chinese ones. I think this is a statistical error caused by Portal being rarer in English speaking countries. A higher percentage of trades involving English versions involve someone from a country where Portal 3 was not released and so the average price of English versions appear higher. That is the only reason I can think of.

Chinese versions also make it easier for you to remember to use the official Oracle wording!!!