Evu

Ninja of the Deep Hours and Sprout Swarm are two of my favorite cards ever; it's like they made this video just for me. Great showmanship to boot.

As I said elsewhere, I'll miss the channel lands but not much else. I spent the last few days of the old Standard playing some of my decks that I don't think will survive rotation, but I'm looking forward to making some new ones. I've lucked into opening three Darkstar Augurs so far and I definitely have plans for them.

Farewell is incredibly powerful, but it hasn't even been the white sweeper of choice for a while. I've been seeing Sunfall much more often. Wandering Emperor doesn't have any analogue to take its place, though, so it'll be interesting to see how its disappearance affects white control.

Overall... it's nice to see broken cards rotate out, but they printed some new broken cards to replace them, so... meh? I'm already eagerly anticipating the day next year when Sheoldred and Atraxa will depart. But there will still be plenty of newer nonsense then....

My initial reaction to Play Boosters was "okay, whatever" and I guess I still feel that way. OTJ was a fun draft format (even though I didn't care much for the Wild West setting). Was it better or worse than sets designed with the old rarity distribution? Hard to say.

My buying habits are that I'm F2P on Arena and I buy one box of each Standard set from my LGS, which sits in my basement until hopefully I'll draft it with friends some day. Prices on Arena didn't change. I noticed that the price of the booster box went up, but not by enough to put me off buying.

So overall, seems like I'm fine with it.

They call them "Beyond Boosters" because, unlike normal boosters, they're not made from meat.

October 2023: "Having too many types of booster is hurting sales, so we're consolidating them."

July 2024: "Hey check out this new type of booster we came up with."

I must have watched too many Pre-Prereleases, because I heard this whole article in Nelson Salahub's voice as I was reading it.

If there's more fiction to come then I retract some of my complaining. I was assuming this was all there would be.

A fairly sudden ending. Feels like there's a lot more story to tell, and it just wasn't in the budget. We're really not going to see fox Jace? Not going to get any character development for Zoraline? Why didn't Glarb have the presence of mind to grab the egg before fleeing, making the party have to track him down? What's the scoop on Gev's tail? And how come there are only 16 unique cards spoiled so far and we still didn't see most of those characters or locations?

Yeah, I mean, I play Standard for a variety of reasons, but "avoiding Universes Beyond cards" is definitely one of them.

I wonder how different the answer could be if they'd asked the question in a different way.

I'd like Modern better if it didn't have UB cards, but banning UB cards alone wouldn't be enough to get me to start playing Modern. So am I interested in a UB-free Modern? No, but that's not approval of the current state of affairs.

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."

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....)