[Born of the Gods] Spoiler Thread

[Lemnear]

Let's start with the 5 prerelease rares:

Silent Centinel
Creature - Archon (rare)

Flying
Whenever ~ attacks, you may return target enchantment card from your graveyard to the battlefield.

4/6

Mediator of the Ideal
Creature - Sphinx (rare)

Flying
Inspiration - Whenever ~ untaps, reveal the top card of your library. If its an artifact, creature, or land card you may put it onto the battlefield with a manifestation counter on it. It is an enchantment in addition to its other types.

4/5

Devourer of Hope
Creature - Demon (rare)

Flying
, Sacrifice another creature: Regenerate ~.
, Sacrifice two other creatures: Destroy target creature.

6/4

Firestir Dragon
Creature - Dragon (rare)

Flying
: ~ deals 1 damage to target creature. That creature can't block this combat. Activate this ability only if ~ is attacking.

5/4

Wild Devastating Nessian
Creature - Hydra (rare)

Tribute 6 (As this creature enters the battlefield, an opponent of your choice may put 6 +1/+1 counter on it.)
When ~ enters the battlefield, if the tribute wasn't pay, you may have ~ fight another target creature.

6/6

[Lemnear]

Buy-a-Box Promo:

Nefarious Burn - 1RRR - Instant
Nefarious Bun deals 5 points of damage to target creature or planeswalker. If it is your turn, scry 2.

The only Walker in the set:

Kiora, the Crashing Wave - 2UG

Planeswalker — Kiora
+1: Until your next turn, prevent all damage that would be dealt to and dealt by target permanent an opponent controls.
-1: Draw a card. You may play an additional land this turn.
-5: You get an emblem with "At the beginning of your end step, put a 9/9 blue Kraken creature token onto the battlefield."

Loyalty 2

[johanessen]

The only Walker in the set:

Kiora, the Crashing Wave - 2UG

Planeswalker — Kiora
+1: Until your next turn, prevent all damage that would be dealt to and dealt by target permanent an opponent controls.
-1: Draw a card. You may play an additional land this turn.
-5: You get an emblem with "At the beginning of your end step, put a 9/9 blue Kraken creature token onto the battlefield."

Note that has loyalty 2.

[Aggro_zombies]

Good thing I wasn't planning on going to the prerelease because those promos sure as hell aren't motivating me to do so.

EDIT: Interesting to note the promos for this set follow the same pattern as the promos for Theros: the blue one is the best, the white and black ones are conditionally good, the red one is a reasonable body, and the green one is kind of bad.

[Jitse]

Good thing I wasn't planning on going to the prerelease because those promos sure as hell aren't motivating me to do so.

EDIT: Interesting to note the promos for this set follow the same pattern as the promos for Theros: the blue one is the best, the white and black ones are conditionally good, the red one is a reasonable body, and the green one is kind of bad.

I don't agree, I think the white one is clearly the worst. The green one is probably a lot better then you give it credit for a 6 costing 12/12 is big. the black one is the most powerful but also the most expensive the red one is better then the blue since they both need to attack to do something but the red one attacks for more and always does something where the blue one is a big gamble. So I think it's Red --> Blue --> Black --> Green --> White

[joretapo]

Lol big monsters probably useless in legacy the blue one is laregely more powerfull than the others, are they taunting the anti blue community?

[apple713]

~Silent Sentinel is the only one that might see play in legacy. Returning an enchantment from the grave to play is pretty sexy. Even at that its not very good. Its overcosted and in legacy would require reanimator with additional set up. after some thought this set seems pretty terrible.

I'll add that spring leaf drum is still the best card in the set so far.

[Barook]

I'll add that spring leaf drum is still the best card in the set so far.

That's not hard with 7% of the set spoiled.

Nefarious Burn at least somewhat tries to hide the "double the mana cost and effect"-thing that has been going on lately. Would it haven been broken to hit players? It costs tripple R, and for a rare, they could have upped the powerlevel quite a bit. It's not like Lava Axe was broken.

[miguelmatix]

The white sentinel is the best. Could be played in some moat stompy or stax IF the mana cost was 5 or less. This way none of them might get play besides reanimation decks...

Lets see the rest of the set.

[Jitse]

Lol big monsters probably useless in legacy the blue one is laregely more powerfull than the others, are they taunting the anti blue community?

Seriously, these are prerelease promo's this is sealed not legacy. None of these cards are playabel in legacy, no cards that cost 5 or more and that not immediatly win the game once they hit play are playabel in legacy (batterskull costs 2)

[TsumiBand]

That's not hard with 7% of the set spoiled.

Nefarious Burn at least somewhat tries to hide the "double the mana cost and effect"-thing that has been going on lately. Would it haven been broken to hit players? It costs tripple R, and for a rare, they could have upped the powerlevel quite a bit. It's not like Lava Axe was broken.

Yeah, I thought it was a real shame that this spell says "target creature or planeswalker". 5 to the face for 4 is just too good, apparently?

I'm impelled to rehash ye olde "planeswalkers and burn spells are fucking stupid" monologue… but I'll skip the preamble and just say that it is going to generate an amount of RTFC now whenever there's a burn spell if they make a habit of printing burn that applies directly to the planeswalker. They can't print too many of those before they start wondering wtf all those burn redirection rules are actually there for, amirite?

[Looooooooo]

~Silent Sentinel is the only one that might see play in legacy. Returning an enchantment from the grave to play is pretty sexy. Even at that its not very good. Its overcosted and in legacy would require reanimator with additional set up. after some thought this set seems pretty terrible.

I'll add that spring leaf drum is still the best card in the set so far.

Lol after like 5 cards!? Really?!
And especially after the spoiler of promos, which are notably underpowered to not spoil the prerelease and such events...

- L

[Barook]

I'm impelled to rehash ye olde "planeswalkers and burn spells are fucking stupid" monologue… but I'll skip the preamble and just say that it is going to generate an amount of RTFC now whenever there's a burn spell if they make a habit of printing burn that applies directly to the planeswalker. They can't print too many of those before they start wondering wtf all those burn redirection rules are actually there for, amirite?

And they can't even errata old burn spells to target planeswalkers because due interactions which make them untargetable.

[TsumiBand]

And they can't even errata old burn spells to target planeswalkers because due interactions which make them untargetable.

That's fine, they can totally print

Bolt Two
Sorcery

Bolt Two deals 3 damage to target creature, planeswalker or player.

Arguably this is not 'better' than Chain Lightning. There are precious few times when a dedicated burn deck does not consider Chain Lightning's 'drawback' a boon. Ask a Red Mage how they enjoy throwing Chain Lightning back in their opponent's face without losing cards. But there are a ton of intangibles to consider as well, and I know that just uprooting a bunch of rules can be as careless as creating them willy-nilly.

It does begin to beg the question though -- "why does old burn work so much different than this new burn spell" or "why does targeting a creature or a planeswalker with a burn spell have no special rules, but burning a player has all these redirection rules". It really does feel like the only thing they're waiting for is a richer set of tools to supplant the current kludge.

[Barook]

That's fine, they can totally print

Bolt Two
Sorcery

Bolt Two deals 3 damage to target creature, planeswalker or player.

Arguably this is not 'better' than Chain Lightning. There are precious few times when a dedicated burn deck does not consider Chain Lightning's 'drawback' a boon. Ask a Red Mage how they enjoy throwing Chain Lightning back in their opponent's face without losing cards. But there are a ton of intangibles to consider as well, and I know that just uprooting a bunch of rules can be as careless as creating them willy-nilly.

It does begin to beg the question though -- "why does old burn work so much different than this new burn spell" or "why does targeting a creature or a planeswalker with a burn spell have no special rules, but burning a player has all these redirection rules". It really does feel like the only thing they're waiting for is a richer set of tools to supplant the current kludge.

Sure, they could print that, but since it can already damage players, there's no point to include Planeswalkers under the current rules. Maybe if they abolished the current redirection rule, but that would make red suck even more as a color and Planeswalkers even stronger.

[TsumiBand]

Sure, they could print that, but since it can already damage players, there's no point to include Planeswalkers under the current rules. Maybe if they abolished the current redirection rule, but that would make red suck even more as a color and Planeswalkers even stronger.

I'm not talking about 'current rules'. I'm imagining some weird 'in-between' place where they have this collection of burn/other spells that target planeswalkers explicitly, so that by the time they launch a new block which starts the trend of offering new burn spells (Bolt 2.0, followed closely by Shock 2.0, Volcanic Hammer, and so on and so forth, in different blocks or m-something Core Sets, whatever), there is existing Red jank to try and mind the gap for a brief period while new-burn comes trickling in. In fact, according to the BotG spoiler, that new burn is already trickling in, so… yeah.

Look, I understand the arguments against making a change for change's sake when we have a working model for burn redirection to include a card type that was never a consideration when 99% of the burn spells in the game were already printed. And I'm legit not trying to turn the thread into a bitchfest about how planeswalkers are or aren't a giant monkey-patch into the game's previous set of permanents and methods for interacting with other cards. However - and this is of course an opinion, so take it however you like - IMO it's a poor practice to start introducing these spells (damaging spells in particular) that all have different methods for dealing with the same permanents. The fact that Lightning Bolt AND NewBurnSpell interact with planeswalkers - but one is explicit and the other is implicit - is exactly the kind of rules garbage that WotC tries to get rid of lately.

There are two sets of cards for two sets of rules to accomplish the same game action - I'm not talking about "everything is a Time Walk" here, I'm talking about literally casting a red burn spell that deals damage to a planeswalker as part of the spell's actual resolution and rules text. The only reason to even print this card in this way is to introduce the possibility of seeing more burn spells that damage one or more targets but exclude a particular kind. You can't print "[this] deals damage to target player or planeswalker" under the current rules, not because it isn't allowed, but because the rules of the game currently make that a really subversive card to print. For example, giving your permanents shroud becomes meaningless against such a card, under the current rules. Take the rule away, and this card has limited potential to be okay.

In fact -- take the rule away, and now change "target" to "each"! That card should never exist under the current rules because redirection makes it super good against players with walkers, and there isn't even actually a good way to print that card under the current rules without breaking a lot of things or having a shitpot of convoluted text.

So yeah, I mean… again I don't want to derail here, but look at the most recent series of blocks. There are more damage prevention spells that just say "permanent" instead of "creature or player". There are "destroy" spells which target planeswalkers. There's going to be a burn spell that excludes players in favor of planeswalkers. IIRC they weren't even going to print Dreadbore when 'walkers originally came out because they built all these goofy rules up around them, so why bother with targeting them at all? Now I can just Dreadbore a motherfucker, which to me feels like the question of "why bother" is now being applied in reverse internally. I mean given enough cards and time, at some point someone will look at Gatherer and go "there are like 27 different Red spells that target planeswalkers, and we have all these shitty rules on file to fix… what problem, exactly?"

[Aggro_zombies]

I don't agree, I think the white one is clearly the worst. The green one is probably a lot better then you give it credit for a 6 costing 12/12 is big. the black one is the most powerful but also the most expensive the red one is better then the blue since they both need to attack to do something but the red one attacks for more and always does something where the blue one is a big gamble. So I think it's Red --> Blue --> Black --> Green --> White

The green one is a vanilla 12/12, though, and it's only a 12/12 if your opponent lets it be a 12/12. Actually good cards with Punisher-type mechanics have historically given you insane card advantage and/or allowed you to make some decisions to mitigate those of your opponent (see: Gifts, FoF). This card doesn't do either of those things.

Reading the red one again, it actually is better than I gave it credit for. The problem is that red in Theros Sealed is painfully mediocre. Maybe Born of the Gods changes that, but my suspicion is it doesn't, so in that case I think the blue promo edges it out for being in a stronger overall color.

EDIT: I sure hope there's more mechanics in this set than Tribute and whatever Inspiration is supposed to be (my guess is that the relevant bit is making other permanents enchantments for whatever reason). If not, I'm calling it now: Bad Set in a Row #5.

[TsumiBand]

The Green one is Not Great if your opponent has a creature that doesn't give a shit whether or not it fights anything. I'm not sure when a vanilla 6/6 for 6 became "not great", but there it is; if they have no reason to pay Tribute, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a very expensive chump blocker.

Little kids will eff up the Red one because no one ever seems to activate abilities/play spells before they pass priority for blockers. :/

Blue Sphinx is a weird S&T that works with untapping things? Hm.

It's all pretty EDH-y right now. Eh.

[Meekrab]

I'm not sure when a vanilla 6/6 for 6 became "not great", but there it is;

A vanilla six mana creature of just about any size is pretty meh.

[Bed Decks Palyer]

Crap, I'm starting to hate the PWs and the rules associated with them more and more and more. I guess time will come when I may throw my Lightning Bolts into garbage can because they won't hurt PWs anymore.
I'd love if Pws were never made. Or, if at least they made them with shroud (cause they're mighty PWs hiding in mist of their knowledge and powaful magick and stuff), so only the creatures may eat them because reasons why powaful magick and hiding in the mist don't work on creatures.
Wow, this game sucks.

EDIT: Otoh, maybe this is the first step before removing the rules' garbage and errating the burn that it targets the PWs. Idk...