Avacyn Restored Card Discussion [SIMMERING POT OF FECAL MATTER]

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Originally Posted by TorpidNinja

"As Cavern of Souls enters the battlefield, choose a creature type."

Don't think you can Stifle that either.

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My bad. Was reading off GatheringMagic. Should have known better. Now I'm a prisoner to this pain.

"When Cavern of Souls enters the battlefield, choose a creature type."

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Originally Posted by nedleeds

Then ... (drumroll) Stifle the comes into battlefield ability. They never choose a type and they have themselves a Blasted Landscape.

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That doesn't work. Please refer to Iona and the following discussion (last post by Judge).

http://magiccards.info/zen/en/13.html

http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=244160

Same goes for Cavern.

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Originally Posted by DragoFireheart

Oh that is just fucking mean. R/B Goblins with that combination?

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I think maybe white black with humans and some resource denial. Wastelands, Thalia ... some nice black and white humans

- Mirran Crusader
- Bob
- Thalia
- Mom

... or run a bunch of angry Demons ... Abyssal Persecutor, Grinning Demon, Tombstalker

Edit: Get your Nether Voids now ... while they are only $96.00 ... 2 left on TCG player :)

Cavern of Souls does seem a bit strong. Getting the option of colorless mana and mana of any color for tribal creatures seems decent enough, but adding the "can't be countered" seems to put it slightly over the edge.

Of course, maybe I just think that because it poses a real problem for my Patron Wizard deck. But I guess that's what my Wastelands are for. Heck, maybe they'll be worth sideboarding for facing against control decks.

As for whether it's Stifleable...I don't think we've seen an official English version (just the Spanish), but like in English, there's a difference between "when" and "as" in regards to whether it's a triggered ability. The phrase for "when" in Spanish (for triggered abilities) is "cuando." The phrase for "as" in Spanish is "en cuanto." This card uses "en cuanto" so unless there's a translation error, it translates to "as" and thus is unaffected by Stifle.

So does cavern read 'when' or 'as'? Hoping for when..

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Originally Posted by Tombstalker

So does cavern read 'when' or 'as'? Hoping for when..

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It's going to be as.

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Originally Posted by nedleeds

I think maybe white black with humans and some resource denial. Wastelands, Thalia ... some nice black and white humans

- Mirran Crusader
- Bob
- Thalia
- Mom

... or run a bunch of angry Demons ... Abyssal Persecutor, Grinning Demon, Tombstalker

Edit: Get your Nether Voids now ... while they are only $96.00 ... 2 left on TCG player :)

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You could easily go mono-black. Demons, maybe some mana accel so you can drop it early.

Control decks might want to a few Scroll Rack to supplement their Tops in Temporal Mastery/miracle control decks. Scroll Rack goes great with shuffle effects, after all. Scroll Rack + Counterbalance = counter anything if you have the CMC in hand.

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Originally Posted by caiomarcos

decks that are built to achieve uninteractiviness is one thing, single cards that are completely unintercative is another thing.

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Especially after all the bitching they got about Thrun in Standard. I agree with this statement. Something like Orim's Chant is one thing. Emrakul, the Aeons Torn is another. You take interactivity away from a format, you lose midrange and true control. Lose true control and the only way you beat combo or ramp strategies is with aggressive hatebear decks like Maverick. Now I don't have anything against Maverick, but I don't want my format to boil down to linear strategies like burn or combo and hatebear.dec.

I like playing with fun, flexible decks. That's something that's not available in standard; midrange loses it's ass to Wolf Run. Before that it was Valakut. I don't feel like that sort of balance creates a healthy environment. Flexibility is what allows formats to shift, when you have a deck with unstoppable late game inevitability, you put an unecessary constraint on deck design that keeps the metagame from self-adjusting. Neuter counterspell strategies too much in Legacy and it will go the same way. Heavy control strategies can be easily countered and frankly, in the last 5 years have become increasingly obsolete.

The balance between aggressive and defensive strategies has shifted significantly in the last few years and it's not a good thing. Blue control has become increasingly tempo-based. While tempo decks have been viable since Labarre at PT Rome with the original Fish deck and actively good in almost any metagame since Odyssey and the printing of Nimble Mongoose and Mystic Enforcer, they've reached critical mass as of late and control, true control, simply isn't viable in the face of the aggressive threats that Wizards has been printing in every set.

This sounds great to the people like Dr. Jones who think that cutting the balls off counterspells will keep control from being the most powerful strategy, but even a cursory glance at T2 proves that this is not the case. While the format has been without decent counterspells since Invasions rotated out, control has always been the strongest strategy and blue has always been a dominating color. The number of counterspells has gone down but it has not made any of the shitty strategies casual players want more viable. All it does is increase the average curve of the format. This is because the natural predator of any given deck is the +1 deck, that is, the same deck (or, more broadly, strategy) only a little bit bigger and slower. Control serves as the cap, get too big and too slow and the control decks beat you. So you've got pressure in two different directions, modified slightly by the available card pool. Generally speaking, you need to be fast enough to beat control while remaining big enough to beat other aggressive strategies.

Counterspells are necessary for the health of the game and already, the need for situational counters is too heavy. What we need is a 1-mana Prohibit and/or a 2 mana counterspell that can counter spells that can't be countered ("exile target spell from the stack").

Sorry, I know the above has little to do with the spoiler, but I felt like it needed to be said.

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Originally Posted by DragoFireheart

You could easily go mono-black. Demons, maybe some mana accel so you can drop it early.

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5 color evoke elementals .... with nether voids ... :confused:

Cavern is just going to push Treefolk over the top. Tier 1, here we come.

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Originally Posted by SpikeyMikey

Sorry, I know the above has little to do with the spoiler, but I felt like it needed to be said.

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No need to excuse yourself, I definetly understand what you are trying to point out. Sadly, most of what you're saying is completely true and Standard is uninteresting as fukc since years.

"As far as what I miss - I feel like magic used to be a game of fighting for small advantages and building them up over time. Then they decided to make planeswalkers and huge creatures good in constructed and now someone can play a spell turn 3 or 4 that just wins the game if you cant deal with it, or 6 mana creatures that just totally swing things. Seems like it takes lots of the thought and nuance out of the game when everyone can just land haymakers left and right."

-Jon Finkel

Magic has never been solely about "building small advantages". It's always been a game of either doing something broken or stopping it since the days of Channel + Fireball.

So... Cavern of Souls is pretty amazing and will clearly shake the eternal formats up. I mentioned this over on TMD, but I'll mention it here again as I figure it's probably more relevant:

Do you think this card paves the way for reprint of Force of Will?

Because surely, only a standard environment with a card like Cavern of Souls in would be able to stand up to FOW. I think it could be safe - so maybe we'll see it pop up in RTR or hell, why not M13?

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Originally Posted by I am the brainwasher

No need to excuse yourself, I definetly understand what you are trying to point out. Sadly, most of what you're saying is completely true and Standard is uninteresting as fukc since years.

"As far as what I miss - I feel like magic used to be a game of fighting for small advantages and building them up over time. Then they decided to make planeswalkers and huge creatures good in constructed and now someone can play a spell turn 3 or 4 that just wins the game if you cant deal with it, or 6 mana creatures that just totally swing things. Seems like it takes lots of the thought and nuance out of the game when everyone can just land haymakers left and right."

-Jon Finkel

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personally i think legacy is the only format available that still has those kinds of scrappy matches that are played at the margins.

also while i understand this is not a particularly popular position to hold i like when legacy has decks like UW stoneblade and URx delver. i find playing with and against those decks to be fun. in fact the only deck i dont like playing against right now is maverick, its just annoying most of the time.

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"As far as what I miss - I feel like magic used to be a game of fighting for small advantages and building them up over time. Then they decided to make planeswalkers and huge creatures good in constructed and now someone can play a spell turn 3 or 4 that just wins the game if you cant deal with it, or 6 mana creatures that just totally swing things. Seems like it takes lots of the thought and nuance out of the game when everyone can just land haymakers left and right."

-Jon Finkel

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Pretty ironic coming from a guy who Tinkered for a Phyrexian Colossus to become world champion and who recently lost a huge tournament because of the incremental advantage lost from a seemingly minor blocking decision.

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Originally Posted by Kuma

Pretty ironic coming from a guy who Tinkered for a Phyrexian Colossus to become world champion and who recently lost a huge tournament because of the incremental advantage lost from a seemingly minor blocking decision.

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That's what I was thinking. I think it's more mis-remembering the past than anything. The fact that creatures are powerful now vs spells before is the only real difference. What kind of incremental advantage was there in Windfalling on turn with Academy, etc...

Fucking land is fucking stupid. Why would they even print something like this?? They really killed blue this time round. I guess they're fine with combo raping asses for awhile before they ban everything until everything is an aggro deck.

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Originally Posted by Metalwalker

Fucking land is fucking stupid. Why would they even print something like this?? They really killed blue this time round. I guess they're fine with combo raping asses for awhile before they ban everything until everything is an aggro deck.

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I hope this is hyperbole. My e-sarcasm detector's been in the shop since near the beginning of this thread, you see.

Anyway, I think this land will be not unlike Aether Vial in terms of what it does, assuming it sees play. For starters, it's not fetchable, and that's pretty big considering fetches and duals are Legacy's bread and butter and that many decks already run unfetchable Wastelands. Merfolk was an experiment in how shitty you could make a mono-colored deck's manabase; I'm assuming this land will end up in a similar spot in semi-tribal or multicolor-tribal decks, wherein it can only be used to cast some spells well and ends up mucking up your mana for other creature types or non-creatures. It also doesn't make multiple mana, which means it doesn't stack up favorably against Aether Vial when you have multiple creatures you want to play.

So yeah, I'm a lot less sanguine about this land than some people. A land that either taps for colorless or taps to Boseiju only some of your guys just does not seem good enough to me. And if I'm wrong...well, maybe it's WotC's penance for Snapcaster and Delver.

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Originally Posted by Metalwalker

Fucking land is fucking stupid. Why would they even print something like this?? They really killed blue this time round. I guess they're fine with combo raping asses for awhile before they ban everything until everything is an aggro deck.

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i'm biting on this troll .... right because blue having 8 stp maindeck, along with force and 4 spell snare wasnt ridiculous. Hearing "fans of the island" complain after 6 months of snapcaster and delver, and having to end every legacy match with like 7 men in my exile zone and another 5 in my yard that got spell snared or forced is PRICELESS.

I cant wait to cast a Tidehollow Sculler off this thing with no fear of spell snare.