Just saw this card now and I love it. Nihil Spellbomb is my favorite grave hate spell, and was a 1-of in any non-pure-combo black deck I've played for years. I literally yesterday was working on a Trinket Mage deck thinking "this list would be better as RUG over BUG, but I really want to run Nihil Spellbomb. This will be good in small numbers for a wide spread of archetypes. I get that this isn't particularly as sexy as Breach, but I suspect in the long run this is the Theros card that will see the most play and win the most games.
I banned the spam account but if anyone is actually running an MtG tournament with DevOps training, please DM me, I'm very interested in attending.
I don't want to dismiss anyone's feelings on the format but can we please keep this kind of stuff out of a spoiler thread? I'm trying to build a Doomsday deck over here and I'm getting depressed.
Is anyone in the Boston area planning on going here who could give me a ride? I can meet people at a T Stop or on any commuter line if the timing works out
@brass-man said in 5-8 December - Lucca, Italy - Nebraska's War 7:
Here's our up to date streaming schedule:
6th December: Start around 12:30 am CET Replay Artists Interviews
6th December: Start around 15 am CET Vintage All Stars and Alpha 40
7th December: Start around 11am CET Modern Main Event
7th December: Start around 12am CET Vintage Main Event
8th December: Start around 11am CET Legacy Main Event
Wanted to let people know that we're going to be doing live coverage of the Vintage event here, and I flew all the way to Italy to do it!
I'll be streaming with with my Italian cohost, Niccolo Covoni (@CovoniNiccolo on twitter)
the event will be streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/nebraskaswar_mtg
It's a full weekend, multi-format EW style event. The exact streaming schedule isn't completely fixed, but the current plan is the following:
tomorrow, Friday the 6th, 11am CET (5am ET) we'll be streaming Pioneer, Alpha 40, and Vintage All Stars.
Saturday the 7th, 11am CET, we'll be streaming matches from the main Vintage and Modern events (Vintage starts at noon)
Sunday the 8th, 11am CET, we'll stream the the Legacy main event.
The original plan was to stream more Modern than Vintage, but we talked the TO into upping the Vintage content if we promoted the event, so let's try and get some eyes on this and show them some Vintage love!
@trius said in November 18, 2019 Banned and Restricted Announcement:
I think that encapsulates the unhappiness perception. Vintage frequently doesn't feel like the vintage we're used to playing.
I agree entirely, but don't forget that "the vintage we're used to playing" is pretty ambiguous. I got into the format around 17 years ago, and back then there were plenty of players who were upset that their 5-color Keeper control decks couldn't keep pace with the bleeding-edge new style of play brought about by Fetchlands and Quirion Dryad. The game is constantly changing year over year, and almost by definition you're going to love the version of the Vintage that people played when you first became passionate about it (because if you didn't love it, you never would have gotten hooked). So almost by definition, as it changes you're going to run into patches where you enjoy it less than you used to. People tend to interpret this as a steady decline from some golden age, but it seems more like a sampling problem to me.
@protoaddict said in November 18, 2019 Banned and Restricted Announcement:
I'm not sure it is ok for you to be the arbiter of what is universally fun or unfun in any circumstance, as it is by definition a subjective judgement, including it being a neutral one.
I think we're in agreement here. That was entirely my point. Brainstorm is a card that makes the game more fun for me, and less fun for you. Therefore we can't just blanket state that it's fun or unfun, because that's subjective. I wasn't trying to make the claim that the card is fun-neutral. I certainly don't believe that I can arbitrate which cards are universally fun, my position is that nobody can do that, that different people like different games and it's impossible for any card to be universally fun or unfun.
Maybe my post needed more context. Even though the WotC explanation for the Narset restriction was "fast mana and draw spells", there have been several high profile comments in high visibility places about Narset being fun police. What comes first to mind is LSV's tweet that Narset stops him from doing the things he enjoys in Vintage. Make no mistake, of the people involved in the B&R decision process, more of them follow LSV on Twitter than have accounts on TMD. The idea that Narset stops people from having fun doing "Vintagey" things is one of the reasons why it was restricted. It is very probably not the only reason, but it's the one I was reacting to.
Anyway, my point is that judging anything from the perspective of fun is not a good metric.
That's trouble, because I think you make some good points there, and I strongly believe that making policy decisions based on fun has some real problems. Some cases seem clear cut, but others get vague very quickly, and I think it ultimately always comes down to picking specific groups of players to exclude, whether the deciding body is conscious of it or not.
But on the other hand, it's also sort of the only thing that matters. Because more easily measurable metrics like card diversity, strategic diversity, metagame penetration, win rate, game length, decisions per game, deck cost, etc ... these are all just proxies for the only question that matters: Do I want to spend my afternoon playing Vintage, or have a cup of coffee?
We know that basing policy decisions on fun doesn't work, but at the same time, we know that the only way to make policy decisions is to base them on fun, if only indirectly. C'est Absurde!
The last few posts here have gotten me thinking. At least to an outsider, it does sort of look like the format is circling around itself, eating its own tail maybe. But I think more precisely this is a back-and-forth between two or more separate factions.
I think, for the most part, there are players who want certain strategies hated out, and those are not the same players who want those hate cards restricted. (And for any given player, they probably lie in a different camp regarding each card/strategy etc). You have a rotating group of vocally angry players as the metagame moves month to month. Sometimes it's a near-consensus, and sometimes it's just a vocal minority, but at the scale of players we're talking about, to anyone outside the community (read: WotC) it just looks like Vintage players are always unhappy.
If Narset was bad specifically because it stops people from playing fun cards like Preordain, then you could restrict it. But if cards like Preordain are fun and you want to let people play more of them, you could also just unrestrict Brainstorm instead.
But of course, Brainstorm isn't a fun card. Neither is it an unfun card. Brainstorm is a card that some players enjoy and some players don't. There's no cohesive view of which sorts of cards and decks and play patterns are considered vintage-appropriate (in the way that Modern has a more clear vision), and therefore all B&R decisions end up being reactive, which can often make things self-contradictory.
Please don't read too much into this as an opinion on Narset specifically ... the same could be said about Chalice of the Void and Lotus Petal, Mental Misstep and Ancestral Recall, Gush and Thorn of Amethyst.
The completely reactive approach we have isn't necessarily the worst possible approach, it may even be the best approach available, given what WotC has to work with, but certainly isn't without its flaws.