Someone over MTGSalvation noticed (Although this couldn've worked with the black cards too) that the blue relentless rats also "combos" well with Sphinx of the Chimes - the trick is figuring out how many Persistent Petitioners you have to run for the Sphinx to read "Win the Game" (you can run firestorm and simian spirit guide FTW or something else. Also important to note that you will probably draw into other dublicates, so you don't have to run the exact number of PPs to keep drawing 2).
Just pointing out that you cannot cast firestorm unless you have x targets, so a 20 damage firestorm requires 20 different targets.
This is not that big of a deal because you can just end the game as modern ANT does, either by using conflagrate, the storm or labman.
Still, lets say that the requirement for this combo to work is ~20 guys, you are extremely likely to draw hands with just lands and dudes, not so exciting
"You either die a Onesto-Player, or live long enough to see yourself become a Dredger"
Petitionners somehow comboes with arcane adaptation also...
Whole set is up now. The reveal Sphinx is not part of a leyline throwback cycle. It's just it's own thing.
Sphinx of the Guildpact 7
Artifact Creature - Sphinx
Sphinx of the Guildpact is all colors.
Flying
Hexproof from monocolored (This creature can't be the target of monocolored spells or abilities your opponents control.)
5/5
Any use for this as a welder target or any other reanimator/artifact regen shenanigans?
It's hard to come up with ways that it's better than Inkwell Leviathan.
Final Payment WB
Instant
Common
Destroy target creature.
Additional cost: pay 5 life, or sac a creature, or sac an enchantment
Useful for Hatching Plans and Veteran Explorer, probably some other random stuff I'm not thinking of. Amazing for Abzan with Journey to Eternity or whatever the flip BG enchantment is.
This set seems like a pretty big bust for Legacy, unfortunately. I'm not sure there are really any cards that break into the format - maybe Light Up the Stage or Skewer the Critics, both in Burn, though that's not a great deck these days.
Azorius cards probably would have had the biggest impact on the format because of the natural strength of those two colors, but unfortunately I think that guild had to get hollowed out to keep Teferi in check in Standard, and nothing in the set stands out to me. Warrant // Warden feels like it could have been playable under old split card CMC rules and/or if Warden were one mana cheaper, but that's the closest the guild gets.
Gruul and Simic (the guilds) don't particularly do anything that Gruul and Simic (the color combinations) do in this format, so those were destined to be a bust.
Orzhov isn't really a thing and Rakdos is only a thing when in combination with blue or green, so neither of those two were likely to make waves. Good Orzhov cards might have incentivized Esper over straight Azorius, Jeskai, or Bant, and I think Revival // Revenge and Kaya both come close based on flexibility if nothing else, but they're both too expensive. Revival would actually probably be fine if Revenge were a realistic card in this format. Abzan isn't really a thing competitively, and saying a card would be good in Nic Fit is basically the modern-day equivalent of what saying any moderately controlling mono-white or artifact card would be good in Stax was ten to fifteen years ago (shit, has it really been that long since I started Legacy?).
Can we see U/G elf opposition control? Symbiote + elf lizard wizard seems like it could be hilarious.
I also like mono green stifle and gruul has a bunch of cards that have considerable potential for punishing maverick.
I don't think this deck ever realistically beats Miracles or SnT.
The big issue with tribal decks in this format is that they rely on getting a critical amount of stuff on the board in order to make up for the fact that all of their cards individually are quite bad. Legacy has tons of tools to punish people trying to get board position at a one-to-one card-to-permanent rate (as opposed to multiple-to-one card-to-permanents like Lingering Souls). Opposition sees no play because it requires you to have traction on the board to work, but if you have traction on the board in this format you should probably just be trying to win. Elves in particular can combo people out explosively with Ezuri or Craterhoof, so it has even less need to drag the game out with Oppo.
Brainstorm Realist
I close my eyes and sink within myself, relive the gift of precious memories, in need of a fix called innocence. - Chuck Shuldiner
You also have to compare any Opposition deck like this to running 2x Trop in Elves! and having a copy of Stasis and Leovold somewhere. Especially true with Stasis since Elves is about the only deck in legacy designed to play without an untap step. Bonus points for Cavern on advisor to cast Teeg and Leo. That's the hypothetical test I put every Stasis and Opposition deck up to and most are just worse than barely hijacking Elves!.
The main issue with enchants like Opposition is that sometimes you actually draw them, so you can't really play more than 1....and you're not on white to up virtual copies with E Tutor.
I guess my question would be, what problems does adding Opposition and Stasis to Elves solve for that deck? Does it gain you percentage points in your problematic matchups without losing you points elsewhere? Does it make the deck more consistent?
I'm not sure the change is particularly necessary.
Precisely the point; you'd be making a deck that's worse than Elves! with a Stasis or two, which is worse than just Elves!. Lots of decks fall into the: why are you playing something arbitrarily worse than a known entity which can do the same thing? I'm sure that any build of Stasis or Opposition probably feels different than Elves!, but at their core they're just a worse version.
This phenomenon of doing basically the same thing with worse tools is most often seen with Snapcaster decks (like Blade) failing to play CB or Hymn (miracles or Grixis Jammy Jams). This is even more evident when one takes a Delver deck and boards in Strix and Hymn to become a horrid version of Jammy Jams b/c they needed more value to compete vs Jammy Jams strats when mana denial fails.
Does work to cast something like Ancestral Visions?
I tend to think a bigger issue is that something like Natural Order -> Craterhoof Behemoth will just win the game in almost all situations where you'd get a viable lock from Opposition. (AFAICT that's also what Aggro_zombies was saying.)
I think that roughly the same[ish] lock is just as easy by casting a singleton Stasis in Elves! (which isn't worth it). So if Elves! is a perennial tier 1.5-ish deck, and they could execute the same[ish] lock cheaper (as low as 1 not-land slot, with lower cmc) and stay right at their same power level, then at some point you have to set the bar for Stasis/Opposition decks to start out at least as good as Elves!, or you're choosing to play an arbitrarily worse deck. When you're playing a tier 2 deck (or theorycrafting an experimental deck), you should generally strive to be doing something profoundly different which does something more powerful (this is where novel win % increases come from) while trying to supersede the inconsistency (where loss % comes from). I would argue that the novel win % angle of Stasis and Opposition are too similar to an Elves! deck trying for that Stasis 'gotcha' factor to not immediately go straight to win % comparison between a peer group.
Put another way: take your results from either Opposition/Stasis, then sleeve up Elves! with a Stasis and two Trops swapped-in; if your win rate goes up by doing this, the former is doing the same thing, just worse~less-winning. If the previous is observed, repeat by reverting Elves! [with a Stasis] to actual Elves! - we'd hypothesize that the winrate will go up again. There's a difference in between doing something different and choosing to do something worse.
Edit: to spend a little more time on Opposition this is basically the trajectory: 4x Symbiote + 4x Visionary + 4x SnakeElfDruid (w/e his name is) -> you keep losing to Delver -> add black, make some cuts, add Strix -> notice that Counterbalance floating a 2 drop is game over, add some Decay -> notice that the 3-4x FoW isn't cutting it vs combo so add Thoughtseize -> now you're a crappy Grixis "Control" clone that is probably BUG with a single Cradle floating around. Otherwise you're staying not-black, and we probably need to start talking about the Elves! comparison.
Anyways getting back to the set at hand, I for one am getting tired of the stupid pre-release price of every card that can alt-cast an Ancestral Visions in modern getting spiked. The one that is more surprising is the simic split card that can exile and Pongify or Stirrings for a dude pre-sale price (going off mtggoldfish). What is going on with that one? Is this some "it slots into modern Spirits" thing accounting for the price?
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