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Geld ist übergeben, Deckcode lautet:

9j3e8c9c

A

The problem I meant for combo decks is not the manabase, but the dead cards in the opening hand. This applies especially to the Hermit deck. This deck has quite some cards which you never want to have in hand. But I'll of course test my druid deck against the new field.

Spoils mulligan was never a non-brainer. If you don't think while spoiling and only say ship back everything thats not a land, you were already playing bad. That said I, more often than not, saw people spoiling in the way that they ended up with too few lands.

My thoughts on the bannings:

Natural Order:
as with stoneforge mystic, I think the card is just fine. I would rate it somehow in power level like jace or so. I think the format is quite fine with some cards which do a bit more, when everything works out nice (i.e. you have a dude, and your opp. has no counter). I think the ban was somehow not necessary.

Tolarian Academy:
That was quite the right choice. I think we should unban even more cards. I'm at the moment testing a combodeck with academy and even fastbond and it doesn't seem to win as consistently as one might hope. I think the goodstuff decks have so many answers to quite a diverse number of threads today, that combo has a really hard time. On top of that playing combo is not so much fun without spoils mulligan. (My hermit druid deck is really dead now... )

Watchlist:
I think with mystical would be a bit too easy for control decks. Its ok, that they only have access to personal tutor.
Oath is quite ok. As creatures are so good, a deck without them needs some really good arguments. To keep this strategy alive I think its good to have oath. And we also see that its not so widely played.
Jitte might be a too easy autoinclude in any deck with at least three creatures... its somehow like birthing pod. It cost little colorless mana and you just warp around the game, if you have at least one creature on the board.
Then again I think, we should unban more cards to make combo and control more attractive. I would try to unban: fastbond, entomb, mindtwist, (and natural order + stoneforge)

Mulligan:
there has much been said about the mulligan, I want to add 3 things.

- games are starting faster now, which is good.
- games are a bit more random now, which is not good. i.e. with spoils each player had a nice hand, and they could play their deck as it was intended. Now it happens a bit more often, that one player has a nice curve and the other has a random mediocre draw and just looses.

- one thing I almost never heard mentioned in the discussion about the mulligan change was the following argument pro spoils:

Spoils Mulligan is more skill intensive. I see a lot of players taking bad spoils and losing due to that. This is very very good. Magic for me should be a game of skill, and the better player should win. Spoils mulligan accomplishes that in an extraordinary fashion.

Spoils mulligan was always my argument, why Highlander is the best format.

But I think its ok, if we try what happens when everybody is taking free mulligans =).

Ok, that was just my 50 cent.


PS: Dark Depths is completely ok. The combo is around for some time now. There was no winning list with it, as far as I know. I've build a deck around it myself. It was ok, but no monster with 70% against the field.