Friday, July 4, 2014

M15 constructed playables and limited bombs!

Hey guys, I know we're all getting pretty excited for M15 so let's talk M15!

As of writing this, the entire set has been spoiled, so if you haven't seen it all yet...what do you live under a rock or something?

Basically, I want to take a look at some of the cards that could shake up the Standard format a bit. It is a core set after all so you usually don't get anything that just blows your mind and crushes formats but there are some interesting tidbits here that might help existing archetypes or create new ones. Personally, I'm looking forward to a format with a little less Mono...

So to start, I'm pretty excited about the enemy colored "Pain Lands" cycle from Apocalypse(Already got my playsets!). These lands probably get a lot of praise and hate from players because they are not quite obvious on how good they are. Personally, I think they're fantastic. I've been complaining about how slow the format is for a while now and these lands finally speed it up a bit, granted, for certain color combinations.
If you haven't noticed, these lands come into play untapped... UNTAPPED!! Finally... Aggro decks have been limited to mono colors since if you add colors, you add Temples to fix mana and slow yourself down too much. I think aggressive decks have the advantage right now with Esper control decks running 12 temples and 12 shock lands and just about every other deck with two colors has their 4 temples and shocks too. The Pain Lands allow you to play a second color and have mana fixing that let's you curve out too. This is exactly what this format needed. With these in standard now, I wouldn't be surprised to see a little less control running around. You can make a competitive aggro deck with just about any of these 2 color combinations and I'm excited to try all of them.

Garruk, Apex Predator

Many people either love or hate this guy and I won't lie, when I first saw him spoiled a few days ago, I was leaning towards the hate side. After some second thoughts, I actually think he'll be amazing in Standard. One of the things I believe people forget about is that he is green. Green has two of the most powerful mana accelerators in Sylvan Caryatid and Courser of Kruphix and they'll be even better after rotation pending something even better in Khans. You also have access to some of the best removal spells standard has ever seen in Abrupt Decay, Hero's Downfall and Thoughtseize. Why people think he will never work at 7 mana is beyond me. All of the cards I just mentioned can control the game enough for a turn 6 Garruk. His -3 ability is probably the weakest. Unless you need to kill a Stormbreath Dragon or something with evasion(Unblockable, Trample, etc.), then you just put Deathtouch Beasts in front of them and suddenly they're not attacking you anymore. Plus, you can probably just kill it with a Downfall or something. After awhile, the Beasts will overwhelm your opponent and close out the game. I'm pretty sure he'll close out many games just like Elspeth does, but Garruk eats Elspeth for breakfast.

The Souls are being hyped a bit but more-so the Soul of New Phyrexia. I've heard people saying that he's an auto include for Modern Tron and my question is what do you take out for it? I've heard people say Wurmcoil Engine and that just blows me away. How can you possibly think that Soul of New Phyrexia is better than a Wurmcoil Engine?! Time will tell I suppose, but my guess is that none of the entire cycle will see competitive play, maybe some commander or casual stuff, but not competitive.






The Chain Veil
If you haven't heard the buzz, there's an infinite combo with this in Standard that I'm sure someone will try to make... it might be me. So the combo is Veil, Ral Zarek, Nissa Worldwaker(Or Xenagos, the Reveler with 4 or more creatures on board). How it works is you +1 Ral Zarek, +1 Nissa, activate Veil. The Veil lets you activate your planeswalkers as if they haven't been activated yet this turn so you +1 Ral to untap your Veil, +1 Nissa to untap 4 lands to use on the Veil activation and repeat as needed. Once Ral is around 200 loyalty, you can use Ral's ultimate and grab some extra turns(every turn), and beat in with 4/4 Lands from Nissa since their entire board is tapped down from Ral's +1. It's a little cutesy, but it works and it's been a while since there was a legitimate combo in standard. Not to mention that it's in good colors; Red, Blue and Green. This gives access to Mizzium Mortars, Cyclonic Rift, Courser, Caryatid and Kiora. There could be a reasonable shell around this so we'll see if it's actually competitive or not.

What about limited? Pre-release is coming up next weekend and I'm excited to get my hands on the new cards. So what's gunna be good? Well there's a few things, let's take a look at some prospective limited bombs;

First off, flying creatures are good and they can be tough to deal with so I'm looking at cards like Welking Tern which is basically a Vaporkin reprint, Geist of the Moors, a 3 mana 3/1 vanilla flyer, Soul of Ravnica, Ob Nixilis, Unshackled. All great creatures that will put insane clocks on your opponent. The removal isn't great, so they'll do some work.

Speaking of removal, there are a few decent spells however. Polymorphist's Jest is a bomb here as it can make all their guys 1/1's and you basically have perfect blocks set up even with your smallest creatures. Considering it can possibly be a 3 mana wrath on your opponent's side, I'd play it every time as long as I'm in blue.





Other than that, the removal is pretty light and situational. Ulcerate is decent by being a Bile Blight for 1 less mana at the cost of 3 life(and it only hits one creature) but the life loss might prove to be too much for a 1 for 1. There's Flesh to Dust for 5 mana and various blue cards that bounce permanents so removal is pretty bad here. Just play your biggest guy and let him do his thing.

For value creatures, the ones I'm liking the most are;

Goblin Rabblemaster

He puts out tokens every turn that can put a lot of pressure on your opponent if they get a slow start or have creatures with 1 toughness that will die to the tokens.








Ajani's Pridemate

This guy can get out of hand real quick with any life gain. If you have access to something that gives you life every turn, then he'll win the game on his own. Like I said, the removal is bad so committing a bit to your creatures is probably a safe bet.

Chasm Skulker

This guy isn't amazing at first, but if he's left alone for a few turns, he gets to be quite the nuisance. Then, if they manage to kill him, he floods the board with a ton of tokens so not bad.

Ancient Silverback


Ancient Silverback is a pretty nice bomb at Uncommon. 6 Mana isn't terrible especially for limited and M15 sealed/draft looks to be a little slow too. A 6/5 means he can trade with just about anything else and he's incredibly hard to deal with since he comes with the ability to regenerate at the low cost of only 1 mana. You should be jamming this guy everytime if you're in Green.

There are a few other decent guys like Frenzied Goblin, Kalonian Twingrove, Hornet Nest, All of the Paragons(Anthems for the color). But they're self explanatory.

The format looks like it'll be pretty fun because there's not a lot of disruption which means both players get to play their deck each game. You can always lose to your lands, but for the most part, I think I'll enjoy just being able to jam my guys and get in as much as possible.

For pre-release weekend, the 5 playable promos makes me want to choose black because it's a 5/3 flyer for 5 and let's you draw extra cards unless they sacrifice a creature or lose 3 life each turn. However, the rest of black is pretty weak so I think it's a bit of a trap. I actually think that while the white promo costs 7 mana, the rest of white in the set is fairly powerful. Lots of token generators, life link, combat tricks, flyers and decent creatures. So I'll probably be going white next weekend. I also think that Blue has a lot of good creatures and spells but the promo isn't very good so I'd rather pick white and throw in the supporting blue cards I end up with in my pool. That being said, Red is probably a close second choice. The dragon can just crush games and the rest of the red cards in M15 are pretty nice. Lots of burn, good creatures and combat tricks so if they don't have white up for grabs, I'll take Red most likely. Green isn't terrible either but the promo is pretty bad in my opinion. It can trade with just about anything which is nice, and then it comes back on it's own, however it comes back tapped on your next upkeep so everytime he dies, you don't get to use him again until 2 turns later. Still not the worst creature ever printed, but not amazing.

Well, those are my thoughts on the set for constructed and limited. Let me know what things you're excited to play this weekend in the comments below!

Until next time,

DannyO
WizardDen.com

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