@protoaddict said in [CMR] Jeweled Lotus:

@joshuabrooks said in [CMR] Jeweled Lotus:

I think they would because many commander players don’t have $200-$600 for duals and never will.

Again, that does not work. If they backdoored dual lands like this all it would do would be add another dual. The ideal manabase for that deck would likely still want the original dual and the new one and cut something else like a shock land.

I agree, they would need some awkward form of text like "Volcanic Island 2.0 may not be in play at the same time as Volcanic Island," or whatever needs to be done.

That said, this is the closest they have come to toeing the RL line and commander provides a way to do it.

I think they would because many commander players don’t have $200-$600 for duals and never will.

If they “reprint” true duals (with commander backdooring), they will sell lots of packs.

That’s why they would circumvent the RL with commander only RL cards.

@protoaddict

This is a gateway to reprinting “functional identical” RL lands.

True duals lands that can only be the colors of your commander.

A true black lotus that can only give you colors of your commander.

A gaea’s cradle that can only be a color of your commander.

A Mox that can only give you a color of your commander.

A time walk that works any turn you haven’t cast your commander.

You get the point. This is a great “cheat” to the RL.

I suspect we’ll be seeing the duals soon.

...and I’m sure we’ll see them try to force commanders into constructed again soon. Companion didn’t work, maybe their next try will.

I think this is Wotc's doorway into reprinting the RL list. If they can put it under the shadow of "commander," they can reprint almost anything.

Is there any place where they’ve announced the winners and decks?

Mana crypt was printed around late 1995 I think, I can’t remember if it was legal or not, but there were plenty of decks that could use it.

MirrorU decks could have considered 1-2, as they often needed to damage themselves for the mirror kill.

Some zoo decks ran ernham, serendibs, and serras, so they could have considered it.

Mono-artifact was pretty rare, at least in the tournaments I went to, but it might have worked well.

As I mentioned before, I did see it in some pretty fast Atog decks (cursed scroll, vice, bolts, factories, etc), but that wasn’t till 1996?

Academy decks were extremely fast and likely would have preferred some extra mana.

Tinker and Welder were popular decks, albeit much later.

I’m not saying it was optimal, but maybe just overlooked because people evaluated cards differently then?

I think if we replayed Vintage these days (free plug: http://www.themanadrain.com/topic/2795/vintage-redux-a-new-format-for-your-consideration) we would find that it was way more playable than we thought.

So is there three champions this year?

I wish they would have made something up as a placeholder then. I'm not a "sky is falling" kind of guy, but the last 2-3 years of Wizard's decisions, certainly has me very worried.

@benjamin_berry said in The Walking Dead Secret Lair to be Unique Cards:

Looks like their solution is to use Oracle to retcon the names of the cards

Won’t that mean that players who own The Walking Dead cards can now play both versions in their deck?

No, it does not. The cards, in Oracle, would identify that they represent the same card and would be treated by deck building rules as if they were the same. Think of them as functioning identically to the Godzilla skins..

So why not print them identically to Godzilla skins

So I was just talking to a friend today and we were reminiscing about the early days of Tolarian Academy (not pleasant of course for anyone playing at the time), but for some reason early versions of the deck didn't include Mana Crypt, even though it was a 95+% turn 1 kill deck and seemingly would have been improved.

It got me to thinking, so I went through some old decklists from the late 90s and couldn't find any that featured Mana Crypt. The only one I could find was a speed-kill Atog deck (Vise, Atog, Factories, Crypts, Bolts, Psi Blast), but even that only had three crypts.

I'm pretty sure it was legal at the time (when was it printed?), but wasn't restricted until 10/99, 9 months after Academy (1/99).

This card seems like a no-brainer for at least the MirrorU decks of the time, as I am pretty sure the meta at the time of Saga was mostly Zoo-Necro-Mirror-WW, Burn.

Anyone have insight as to why Crypt was such a slow burn?

My only guess is that mono-red kept it in check for that long. Back then, the first deck you tested against was 4-turn mono red. You had to have a sligh plan.