You Make the Masters Set

[Thomas David Baker]

I loved Innistrad.  I believed Maro when he said New World Order made things better for experienced players too and used Innistrad as an example.

Then Modern Masters came out and despite having to include a bunch of rares and only being allowed cards from Mirrodin to Shards it was way better than anything we've seen since Innistrad, and most of what came before, too.

It will be minimum one year until the next Modern Masters.

So, my idea is, let's make our own Modern Masters.

Random ideas that are very much half formed:

* 6 of each of 60 commons, 3 of each of 60 uncommons, 2 of each of 50 rares, 1 of each of 10 mythics is 650 cards.

* Use old cards, pre-Mirrodin, for spell-based funtimes and novelty even for players that have been playing for a while.

* Invent cards where necessary to fill holes.

* Some possible seeded archetypes: free spell necro, ug madness, gro, draw-go, astral slide, reanimator, artifact control, mill, auras, tokens, birthing pod, pox, sacrifice, prison, wizard tribal.

* Possibly include a lot of Legacy playables and call it "Legacy Masters".  What wizards would print if they said fuck it to the secondary market and the reserve list and tried to support legacy via a "Masters" release.

What do you think?  Interested in being on the development team?  Could make for some cheap Tuesday nights during the long reign of M14* ...

* = Bit of a cheap shot.  I've actually really enjoyed 3 of the last 4 core set drafts.

[Thomas David Baker]

GWur Card Advantage Ramp Control anyone?

2 Master Decoy
2 Wild Mongrel
2 Yavimaya Elder
1 Trained Armodon
1 Angel of Mercy
1 Anarchist
1 Noble Templar
1 Shoreline Ranger
3 Krosan Tusker
1 Firebolt
1 Strafe
2 Pacifism
2 Fertile Ground
1 Deep Analysis
1 Radiant's Judgment
1 Rush of Knowledge
5 Plains
2 Island
1 Mountain
9 Forest

This format is officially starting to look fun ...

[Thomas David Baker]

I wonder if there is any point in Accumulated Knowledge in this format.

How many do you need to run before it is good?  Certainly at least two, maybe three?  How often will that happen?  That very much depends upon how many of each Common we print.  If we're only printing three I think Accumulated Knowledge gets cut.  If we're printing 6 it's possibly another story.

Six of each Common is a 720 cards before adding other rarities, which means 1000 cards+ probably.

If we try and keep the entire cube to 720 cards (which seems like a top end of what we would want, really, for portability purposes) we're looking at something like 4 x 120, 3 x 60, 2 x 50, 1 x 20 = 780.  Is it worth including Accumulated Knowledge if the average 8 man draft has 1.8 copies?

Even with 1000 cards and 6 copies of each Common that only rises to 2.16 copies per 8 man.  I guess it is a constructed card.  I'll cut it for Obsessive Search or Curfew.

[Thomas David Baker]

With the current setup I think our problem is going to be making cycling less good.  You have very good Uncommons in the form of Lightning Rift and Astral Slide.  And if Stoic Champion stays at common he seems basically like a 4/4 for WW with the caveat that Firebolt can sometimes kill him.

So cutting Akroma's Blessing or pushing it back to Uncommon makes a lot of sense to me.  (I've never played with the card.)

It's not clear to me which set of cycling lands makes sense or if we even want any in at all.  There's already a five color cycling cycle in the form of the big landcyclers and lots of incidental cycling.  We obviously don't want a dominant five-color cycling deck that makes everything else look tame.

The colored cycling lands play nicely only if you are in their colors.  The others can go in any deck.  I *think* that means we want the colored ones but would you play, say, the B one in a WB deck that otherwise doesn't care about cycling?  I think you almost always do but I haven't played with them outside of graveyard cube so I may be wrong.

[Thomas David Baker]

Options to replace Akroma's Blessing are: Smite, Dismantling Blow, Benevolent Bodyguard, Angelic Wall, Phantom Nomad, Pegasus Charger, Guided Strike. There's not a clear need for any of these. Gustcloak Harrier already feels like a low-ish pick so not sure the Charger would do much good. I wonder if Shadow could *replace* flying in the set. Bit radical.

[Thomas David Baker]

I am toying with the idea of 1 multicolor card for each color combination at Uncommon and another at Rare.

RG is a distinct problem as it has no good multicolored cards in the pool apart from Fires of Yavimaya.  UR is also problematic as the two obvious cards (Suffocating Blast and Prophetic Bolt) are both insane two-for-ones that were originally printed at Rare.

Here are some options:

WU - Sawtooth Loon or Ordered Migration
WB - Gerard's Verdict
WR - Goblin Legionnaire
WG - Sterling Grove
UB - Psychatog or Recoil
UR - Suffocating Blast or Prophetic Bolt
UG - Mystic Snake or Yavimaya's Embrace
BR - Terminate
BG - Consume Strength
RG - Fires of Yavimaya

WU - Meddling Mage
WB - Vindicate
WR - Goblin Trenches
WG - Mirari's Wake or Phantom Nishoba
UB - Undermine or Shadowmage Infiltrator or Psychatog
UR - Suffocating Blast or Prophetic Bolt
UG - Mystic Snake or Yavimaya's Embrace
BR - Void
BG - Pernicious Deed or Spiritmonger
RG - Last Stand???

I'm not sure if this format can bear Mystic Snake and/or Psychatog at Uncommon.  Same for Pernicious Deed at Rare - should we have a Mythic category that is half as common as rares?

[Thomas David Baker]

Fire // Ice might make a better UR Uncommon.  Still nuttily good ...

Frenzied Tilling (!) could be the RG Uncommon and Fires of Yavimaya the Rare depending on how strong it is.  It's Fervor but you can sac it for a Giant Growth.  Can that be broken?  It was the cornerstone of a powerful constructed deck so ... maybe?

[Thomas David Baker]

Enough cards have been retired now that Multiverse is just about behaving.

http://mv.bluebones.net/

Still nicer to start with a search though.

http://mv.bluebones.net/search/?q=r:common

[Kieran Symington]

Going to put my vote in for Phantom Nomad as the new White creature - the Phantom creatures will actually be pretty nuts in the Enchantment deck and they also work well with Astral Slide or bounce effects in general.

[Simon O'Keeffe]

Suffocating Blast was actually terrible a lot of the time, certainly in constructed. you had to have a creature to target to legally cast the spell, so most of the time it just sat in your hand. I can certainly see that would be different in limited. You could print Quicksilver Dagger at Uncommon instead? Might be miserable in a format with this many removal spells, but it really fits with the wizads theme of putting an enchantment on your guy and riding it to victory.

[Simon O'Keeffe]

Regarding set size, I can see that the Kindle/Accumulated Knowledge type cycle just won't work I guess. This is probably fine as we already have a surfeit of blue card drawing and red burn, so can replace them with something different like Retromancer as a kind of anti-cycling card and Pendrell Flux in blue as a kind of removal spell?

[Thomas David Baker]

Phantom Nomad reasoning makes sense.  I had him on my shortlist because of Astral Slide.  Works with defensive Snap and the potential Sawtooth Loon at Uncommon.  I'll slot him in.

Quicksilver Dagger is definitely sweet but it felt like trebling up on Fireslinger and Lavamancer's Skill. The drawing a card does make it different, though, and of course trebling up on those effects is crazy good. Let's try it as the UR uncommon and Prophetic Bolt as the Rare.

4 is definitely going to be the toughness to have in this format. 1 toughness may be unplayable and 2 high risk.

No idea if this amount of multicolored makes any sense but some of these cards are super sweet so definitely want to give it a whirl.

[Thomas David Baker]

There's a lot of ways around Pendrell Flux in this set but perhaps that makes it more interesting rather than less.

Retromancer seems cool.