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[Boros charm]

Full Spoiler is out: http://www.wizards.com/magic/tcg/article.aspx?x=mtg/tcg/gatecrash/cig

Boros charm seems to be one of the best cards of the set. Hope to see more boros action soon

Domri seems playable and synergizes well with wordly tutor.

Ghor-Clan rampager is pretty nice compared to colossal might.

Spell rupture is a slap in tha face for each muc lover

Hellkite Tyrant is my personal favorite card of the set

All other cards r pretty disapointing and overcosted. Did i miss anything good?

Thanks for the invitation, too . I'm in.

I also do not get why there is this fetish about maximum card diversity. Every other format has its staples, even more so than singleton. It is like aces in poker, some cards will be best, no matter what.
/rant

Each other format has a sidebord which hard counters heavy staples.

Maximum card diversity is what makes this format so different and fun (for me). Its one of the mainreasons for me to play it. If i want to play the same broken cards over and over again i would play T1. Cards like NO/SFM destroy a lot of decks and mechanics. So do the combo decks because the clock and randomnes of fast wins is to heavy.

I really do like Tabris deck previews each week. Honestly 50% are not playble in a tournament, but im sure the rate of playble lists would increase to at least 75% without these broken staples. Alot of the previews cant handle these cards. Mechanics get reduced to single cards (But there are a lot of interesting mechanics to build around but u dont because its easier to just play the staples). Stonforge is never bad (if you dont play a _very_ specific list including oath). Manadrain is never bad. You can always add these cards to any list in these colors no matter what your deck is aiming to do and have game winners without even thinking.

I would appreciate a rainbow meta like the previews. Imagine if each deck would be playble. Thats the way for me to go. But if the majority wants to hold status quo - and the discussion leads to that way, i'll accept. Thx for the replies

I have to add one thing which i read a lot in the discussion:

I did not open this thread because of the GP. I do criticize combo-decks in general because they weaken control decks even more in my opinion. I dont want to ban them i hope to make these decks just a bit slower.

I played many games with coldrow (one of his favorite decks was tps - even before we got these unbannings). I agree with the gp winner (statement on german forum): His deck is not even a "real" TPS. He plays a unique style of the deck.

Try to avoid using tournament results as indicator (because to less tournaments, local meta, to less players in general etc, combo decks gets rarely used for testings). I played the decks TPS/Cephalid (not his version) and started this thread because of my experience in gaming, not because of a tournament. A very good statement about this comes from user nina (german forum):

She/he? said that only the minority of the players chooses to play TPS in general and on kitchen table. I totally agree.

If you want to judge about the deck - play it. I played a list from here http://www.magicplayer.org/forum/index.php?topic=840.0 and a cephalid combo list from tabris (but without 2nd winoption buried alive ooze combo, instead i added sylvan safekeeper, divert, flusterstorm and apostels blessing)

[all]

First of all i wanna say that i like the discussion. Alot of interesting opinions.

Natural Order: A lot of ppl say its like a green tinker, well its not. First of all its double green, secondly its 4 mana and you need a green creature (that are obvious facts but it seems they dont get in the calculation for the rating of the card). It is a very powerful card and I think it is indeed one of the strongest green cards (for the delicious midrange/goodstuff decks) besides Sylvan Library. But that is the point were ppl mix powerfull effect with overpowered/broken effects. As Christoph said we play an eternal format and its in the nature of our format that we have strong cards (Mana Drain is the next one)

Not a rare scenario: it goes like "first turn manaelf" 2nd turn a nice 2/3 drop 3 rd turn NO. Game. Double Green is absolutly no restriction neither is the creature. Ive never seen NO staying on my hand as i played a random bant list. Never. Futhermore NO keeps it strenght for the entire game. You are always happy to draw it.

And if i remember our games we played in cup 2011 and our games played for the deck test - all games got decided by Natural Order. Games were totally uninteresting after resolving. Even if i lose the titan the next turn, that just means my opponent stays in the game with a ressource disadvantage which he can barely recover from (wasteland is nearly always the first card hitting the battlefield by titan).

There's one thing that i really like to state here.

Tinker is much more broken than Natural Order. I don't know how one could think otherwise.

Turn 1: Ancient Tomb/City of Traitors, Mox Diamond, Tinker => Blightsteel Colossus
Turn 1: Ancient Tomb/City of Traitors, Signet; Turn 2: Tinker => Sundering Titan (killing their land), 2nd land drop

Thats the same randomness like having turn 1 trinisphere. Like having T1 mox hermit druid or a turn 2 kill by Tps. And now to a much more realistic scenario: we dont have tinker and draw blightsteel or sundering titan or get a bribery. I dont think the green titan is such a dead draw like the colossus or the sundering titan. And believe me if there would be an artifact primeval titan he would get played over blightsteele for sure. Sundering titan depends on the bord.

Dont get me wrong i think tinker is op but so is NO.

Fair means in this case that players should start from a homogeneous way regarding deckchoices. That means they should be able to pick/build a deck they want and are not forced to pick cards/decks which raise their winpercentage by a huge amount (obv if you have a bad deck I dont want provide rules which allow you to win more then you should).

This is a pretty good quote and i hope we will end there someday.

So why do you want to switch back to the situation a year ago by banning all the combo enablers and strong control cards? Do you really like T8's consisting of 4x Goodstuff, 3x 3-5c Aggro and one MonoR/WW?

Thats still the common T8 according to mtgpulse for the last months. And i dont know why you say ban "all the combo enablers". I dont read that in this thread. For my point of view i just want these decks to be a turn later in comboing. And thats mostly the case if you ban the mentioned cards.

[EXACTLY]

Lash:
I did not say those things. I played agianst you quite a few times on cockatrice 2012 with you still sporting Staxx many times. I think you might be biased regarding Drain judging its power because of the Staxx experience with the card and I disagree about the need to nerf combo so control is better, which I think is the cliff notes of your second post in this thread.

Dunno what you trying to imply here but its simply not true. I might have played coldcrows trading post list a few times but thats it. You could call that a semi"stax" list.

For me it doesnt matter if you hit mana drain for 2 or for 5 mana. To be really honest, mana drain was the LAST concern as i played stax. You get troubled by spells on legs like qasali pridemage&co. What bigger spells does your opp run which you r afraid of as stax player? I dont know any, bc you have more and better high cc spells and even big creatures should not be any problem for stax. Just because i played stax in the past doesnt make me to a biased stax only player and i never mentioned the deck in this post and i dont see any connection between my post and me as "stax player". As alrdy said: According to you my propositions are bad for stax (mulligan, drain) so stop insulting me with such a bs.

Lash:
Control decks need to play a lot of cheap spot removal and need to have plan against planeswalkers and need answers for Graveyard/combo interactions to handel combo. That is the challenge of playing a truely controling deck.

EXACTLY

This can be done and has been done at the End of the year tournament: UR Control in top 8 as well as UBG Oath.

-->

Storm won vs UR-Control 2:0

22 years old Christoph Alsheimer from Fürth won with a quite innovative TPS.dec in his first Highlander Cup (GP)
he was faster than aggro and control decks were prepared to deal with creatures - so they often had some dead cards while playing vs TPS

Do you see that you are saying the contrary to what happend?

And one last quote that might give you a hint:

Combo and Control can NOT coexist as tier 1 in HL!

The years and all experience have clearly shown that rock-paper-scissors a.k.a. control-combo-aggro does NOT work in HL - simply because there's a) no sideboard in HL, b) too many different combo approaches out there (Aluren, Dreamhalls, Hulk-Flash, Angry Ghoul, Dragonstorm/TPS, Painter/Servant, Heartbeat, etc...). If all these were tier 1, or even close to tier 1, control decks CANNOT cover them all. How many cards do you want to play to battle all these approaches? And if you do, either your control matchup will be horrible or you'll simply lose against any aggressive deck. This is easy to understand!

@Lash:
Oh come on. You are playing staxx at least 3 out of 4 times online. You plan to go over the top against 4c midrange decks. Of course you have trouble against RDW and fast combo. This is a result of your deck choice. This also shows in your discussion about Drain. Drain is not that awesome in Patrick's 2nd place 4 color deck when compared to staxx where it will really ramp you. You also do not have to play big spells into UU of your opponent every chance you get. But yeah, Drain is still powerful of course. But it loses a lot of power if you do not play Wurmcoil, Gilded Lotus etc. together with it but Doran ;-). Then you can play Jace on T3 instead of T4. Not necessarily too powerful I think.

Thats not really true. My last stax list is from the hl online cup 2011. And i kinda think that stax is not a viable choice and never will be. Btw rdw is one of the best stax mu' dont know why u bring this up?(Crumbling is kinda autowin). So is any storm combo deck because u kinda have big threats with nethervoid/trinisphere and armageddons. And i want drain out of the enviroment and punish my favorite deck the most accoriding to you? Does that make any sense? And trinisphere? I want a healthy meta no matter what cards need to see the banhammer for that.

[because you need to build around them]

Both Cephalid and TPS have serious trouble with the all out aggro decks in the format. Cephalid because their kill condition is killed over and over again. TPS simply has trouble goldfishing against the clock of say mono red burn.

But i was talking about the control decks in the first place. I know that RDW has a proper mu vs the hermit combo. I know control its alrdy a rare archetype, but it still exists.
For now control decks got such nice prints to get back to the road (supreme verdict, terminus, entreat, consecrated sphinx etc). Not that it is still hard to beat aggro, now you need additional slots vs storm/combo. Aggro decks are not that much troubled by the current unbannings. They play the same strategy and have a clock. This in mind, does it mean if i wanna successfully play a tournament i have to choose aggro because these decks dont lose to combo as much? Classic UW has 3 early answers (if no early counter) to a 2 turn hermit, while rdw has about 15?

Why ignore EDH?

Because our format is supposed to be more competive? If u wanna play 12cc spells each game edh is your choice.

Y-Will and Past in Flames shouldn't be banned, because the amount of storm combo decks is not that high and also are really hard to play.

One of them should be banned. Not both. The amount of the combo decks is not an indicator for an overpowered archetype. Exspecially since the majority of the community doesn't like combo decks. (Neither do they like counterdecks).

What I really dislike is the inconsistency (Natural Order ub, Tinker b; Wordly tutor ub, Mystical Tutor b; etc.).

I agree.

1) I really would like to know why the hermit combo is ok but the slower combo painter servant + grindstone isn't.

2) Same for Natural order and Tinker

3) The 1 mana tutors from mirage are all imbalanced. They don't belong in a healthy environment. Either unban all (which i heavy dislike, or ban all).

For each unban currently, the powerlvl is increasing ALOT. I dont see any healthy changes due to the new unbannings. Games are just more unfun. (playing vs combo IS unfun at least for me.) Playing vs t1 trinisphere IS unfun.

Should we ban those cards? Maybe. I can only speak for myself though and since the HL-council is democratic in nature there might never be a situation where all of us are of uniform opinion.

I would seperate them into these categories:

Hard win:

NO, Hermit druid, Stoneforge, Y-will

NO is an autopilot (such as tinker). Have the removal or die. Even if you have the removal you alrdy have ressource disadvantage. Same goes for hermit - kill or die.

Hard counter:
Oath, tabernacle, black vise, b2b, blood moon, pop.

They strongly punish different archetypes. These cards are essential to keep the balance. All of these cards have hard disadvantages (because you need to build around them).
And btw black vise is pretty often a dead card (--> situational)

Ramp: Workshop, Drain

I dont see the imbalance in workshop. In my opinion there is only a single artifact out there which is so undercosted to make the shop broken and thats trinisphere. All other artifacts are still fair compared to the undercoast creatures nowdays. Even if u pull out an early wurmcoil decks can handle it. Futhermore you have to build around it so much. Ive seen list running 15 artifacts playing workshop. You will have a dead land drop to often.

Drain on the other hand is again an autoinclude. No need to build around and thats a huge difference for me. What did tabris say in his last video? (something like: playing doran and manadrain in one deck-...) Think about it.

ChristophO
Aggro decks don't need spoiler mulligan, because they are consistent. Midrange, Combo and Control Decks need the spoiler mulligan because they are less consistent/inconsisten (Depending on the deck itself). If the spoiler mulligan is removed, only aggro improves, so ask yourself: Does aggro really need improvement? The whole metagame is flooded with it aggrodecks or very agressive midrange decks like Naya, I really don't want to see a meta in which aggro is even more favored than now.
I think the spoiler mulligan enables a more diverse meta, because the consitency of many decks is increased, which would otherwise less or not be viable in this format.

I loled. I started the whole discussion about the mulligan because the aggro decks abuse it at most. Able to run 25-30 lands in 3-4c, something a control deck cannot.

[Mulligan:]

I wanted to share some of my thoughts about the current meta.

Mulligan:

I think the spoil-mulligan needs a review. The majority liked the introduction back in the year 2006/2007 (myself included). We had several issues in the past (for example: color-screw, not enough 1/2 to drops to have early interaction) that made this special rule pretty good for the format. I think things changed alot in magic in the last years.

So what crucial changed:

1) 10 fetchlands up from 5
2) much more 1/2 drops (for aggro (Many new 1 drop creatures for aggro/color fixing/ramp, and control got new tools(path, forked bolt, ponder-preordrain, probe etc)

Why i dont like the mulligan anymore:

We had a discussion about banning the fetchlands. I think changing the spoil mulligan back to the roots would solve this issue. Lets be honest. Actually you can build a 4c deck (with a good manacurve on spells) and only run 30 lands. 10 fetchlands with the spoil mulligan generate this advantage. You could never run such a small manabase without the spoil mulligan. The spoil mulligan generates nearly a constant 1 drop mana elf nowadays because so many of them got printed.

Not having the perfect manabase or drops is part of magic. Mana-screw and taking a mulligan to 6 is part of magic. Having a 5cc spell on your starthand is part of magic if you choose to play these cards. Miracle cards got printed and get absurdly strong with spoil-mulligan (even if only 4 r playble). A special mulligan rule only for this format is strange. No other format is changing the basic concept of the game (mulligan and life (lets ignore EDH ).

To many cards got printed to help avoiding those situations. It should be about deck building to prevent you from colorscrew and high cc spells not about abusing the spoil mulligan.

So i think it would be time to check if the spoil mulligan is really necessary nowdays.

Combo decks in general:

I wanna talk about the 2 playable combo decks right now: Cephalid combo and storm.

In general: Combo decks cant get the hate they get in each other format because of no sidebord. You cannot run to much graveyard removal maindeck because its pretty bad in other matchups. Thats the reason control deck's cant handle combo decks in highlander like they do in other formats.

Cephalid combo

It is okay to have a 2 card combo deck that straight ends the game by activation. I absoluty don't like a _1_ card combo in this format (playing hermit druid-activate-end the game). I vote for a ban of hermit druid. This format should only allow to run 2 card combos. It feels wrong to force decks to have extremly fast creature-removal on each hand to handle the druid. By banning the druid the combo does still work by cephalid+x and mesmeric orb - basalth monolith, but there would not be a 2 drop creature in the format that wins the game by itself. Futhermore decks can handle the combo by creature removal, grave removal or artifact removal and simply have more time to get those (1 turn is crucial here).


Storm Combo

Tps dominated the format back in 2004 according to this forum. Thats why the council banned cards like yawgmoth's will, LED. I dont know why the council decided to bring this deck back to the format. First of all, the deck is very fast, in some situations hard to play, but - very constant and fast (turn 3/4 kills possible). On the other hand its very slow (time based) and only 1 player is playing once he started the combo (it can take up to 10-15min until he finally kills you, while you watch him playing). Only experienced players can pilot this deck to a top 8. But they will do, because its so hard to interrupt this deck (discard/counter is a must have, grave removal helps alot but both of them don't prevent the tps deck to start the combo the turn after). I vote for a ban of yawgmoth's will or past in flames. These cards give the deck the boost (and reduce the effect of counter/discard) and 2 of this kind make it so much more constant. Both dont get played in any other list.

I can see these deck still exisiting but they need to get slower and easier to disrupt.

About the ban-list:

For april i vote to ban:

-Past in flames or Y-Will
-Hermit druid
-Stoneforge mystic
-natural order
-mana drain

Reasons for the other 3 cards got discussed enough. All of these cards are ridiculous in their effect. Pls stop thinking the banned list needs to be as short as possible. SFM is banned in each other format for a reason. The right cards need to get banned and they are not.

Discuss 

thought i start a topic for anybody who has any info/standings/coverage/player attendance on the hl grand prix that is going on in hanau TODAY

maybe someone has some info since there does not seem to be any coverage (unlike last year)

Hi i dont have much infos but according to a friend: 119 players and he's facing only aggro decks.

This is the best post so far in this thread. GW Piledriver. Thats exactly the problem of these cards and the format.

The problems are never the tutors, they are the problem-cards by themselves.

Not 100% true exspecially not in a singleton. Tutors can make "innocent" cards to a problem (for example mystical would pump the miracle theme). If you have the ability to abuse tutor's in a standard format you get a silverbullet decklist: Examples: https://sales.starcitygames.com/deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=20264 or http://www.mercadia.de/home/page.php?site=magic/deck2/deck&id=185

Tutor's alow to ONLY play the best cards at 1 off. If you dont have tutor's you are forced to play specific cards more often (in highlander it means u have to play more artifact hate instead of just harmonic sliver).

Cutting ONLY the cheap tutor's will result in diversity as MMD alrdy pointed out pretty well. Thats the right direction.

Also, there is no such thing as "Goodstuff hate". Goodstuff decks are just that - piles of cards that are really really good on their own, no synergy requirements or hoops to jump through required. There is typically a very loose plan consisting of "aggro or midrange?" and that is it. There is no vector other than the mana base to attack them at to "hate them out".

There is goodstuff hate. Alot to be honest. But these cards are hard to bring into game or you have to build around them which makes your deck weak (b2b, humility, PoP for example). Futhermore these cards are real 1 off's while goodstuff has many options in each slot (o-ring, vindicate, maelstrom pulse, detention sphere). Would be a different story if you could play 4 copies of b2b or if you would have 3 cheap tutor's to cheat b2b into play.

Tutors are a nice bonus for Goodstuff decks, but that's it. For other decks however, they are essential. And this is what matters. Tutors guarantee deck diversity in the format. Can't emphasize this enough.

Tutor's are the reason decks like stax can never build up a lock. Tutor's are the reason that many decks can't be as competive.
The toolbox strategy is enabled via tutor's. (Kitchen finks vs RDW, Harmonic Sliver vs any artifact based, Thrun vs counter, stoneforge - if u dont know what u play against, OOze vs Graveyard based decks or simply mana acc everything u need).

These decks just need to run silverbullets and thats because of the flexibilty based on Tutors.

Believe me, the mentioned decks WILL care about the tutor's and it will enable other archetypes to raise up again.

And the banning of Survival/birthing pod was the absolut right decision. Take the next step here and ban the rest finally.

I agree with piledriver - Tutor's yes but not at instant speed for 2 mana or less. There would still be many balanced tutor's out there (green zenith, idyllic tutor, fabricate etc, which support different game strategys BALANCED)

[Quote: 20-04-2011 If at all something must be done, then it is to nerf creature-based aggro.Nothing else.]

Quote: 20-04-2011 If at all something must be done, then it is to nerf creature-based aggro.

Nothing else.

About the Watchlist.

Demonic tutor is not as powerfull as any other instant tutor. Instant reacting is much more powerful, demonic is usually at least one turn later. This makes it a slow reactive card. There is no autowin card out there to tutor, but alot of spells on legs to tutor eot to handle anything on the bord with body.
Question about the tutoring: Why is nobody playing sylvan tutor? Because its sorcery speed.

Sorcery Speed tutors are balanced in HL.

You want a healthy format? Stop unbanning combo cards. Stop unbanning broken cards. Not even the most broken cards in the format (oath/workshop/jar/ywill etc) can actually constantly or effective stop the creature dominance. Start BANNING, not UNBANNING.

Ban all instant tutor's (eladamri's call, worldy, enlightened)
Start banning problematic creatures (Stoneforge Mystic - 2 years to late)

To quote goblinpiledriver: It would be better for the format if the people need to draw at random the needed SPELLS, or search for it for more mana cost than 1X at INSTANT speed.

Who cares to have a long banlist? Rather a longer banlist with deck difference than a short one with 1 archetype dominating each tournament and combo decks around who can explode turn 2 or do nothing. Who has fun playing only mirror's or to face T2-4 combo decks in HL?