Sunday, August 31, 2014

The Underpowered Era, or how I miss Scars of Mirrodin/Innistrad Standard, or Welcome, Molasses Standard

I was wrong when I stated logic about how the Fetchlands could not be in Standard.

[here is a link to that flawed logic]

The announcement of the Onslaught Fetchlands now in Modern and Standard is bigger news for Modern than it is for Standard. This means that the sets in Khans of Tarkir block containing Fetchlands might as well have blank cards in the booster packs other than the Fetchlands and they will still be a huge sales success.

I am not as interested in Fetchlands because I want to play in Vintage, Legacy, Modern, and Standard and don't have the budget I would need to be competitive in at least one of these formats. Remaining a casual player allows me to play for fun in all four formats. To do so, I need to avoid as many of the expensive cards as possible, and the Fetchlands are currently in that category.

With the announcement that the namesake set of the next block, Khans of Tarkir, will be a wedge set, I will be able to spend less on Standard and more studying Legacy. You see, cards with multiple colors in their casting cost are more likely to be stuck in you hand, even after you run a bunch of mana fixing, and you have to run mana fixing-it is not optional! Well, add to that a third color and you are in EDH-Commander-Unplayable-otherwise land. Look at Shards of Alara: the staples from that block are mostly mono-colored or in two colors. Not a single three-color card from an entire three-color block is a hot competitive staple. The same fate is guaranteed for the three-color cards in Khans of Tarkir.

Scars of Mirrodin block was mostly colorless because of all those artifacts, and Innistrad block had a mostly-mono-colored focus. Add that both blocks had many powerful cards that have defined decks in Modern, and even Legacy, and this is why I miss blocks with powerful cards in Standard.

Theros has been fun, especially with the Strive cards in Journey into Nyx, but is under-powered. Heroic is mostly a fail and the block has a mountain of Heroic cards. Bestow sucks even more than Heroic except for a few cards that have low Bestow costs. Add to that a three-color block and you have a Standard that is as slow as molasses, and that contributes a small number of new staples to the eternal formats, AND has a low chance of generating new archetypes for the eternal formats.

I hope I am wrong, and I will be on the lookout for the next Wurmcoil Engine, Birthing Pod, Delver of Secrets, Liliana of the Veil, Griselbrand, Snapcaster Mage, but it looks like Theros/Khans will be the molasses Standard. I will have a lot of fun with the format because I like longer games, but I will be a little disappointed that none of the cards will be Scars of Mirrodin/Innistrad good. .....I hope I am wrong.

[here is a link to my next post pondering the Khans of Tarkir block announcements]