Dragon’s Maze Visual Spoiler (Complete)

Great start to the spoiler! Love seeing them early on my Monday morning as I head back to work. Small request – anyway we can get the fuse cards turns sideways. I know that messes up the alignment and such but now I got such a crick in my neck. Thanks again for getting these up so fast!

It seems like it is. The fact that the trigger is optional goes a long way, IMO.

Re: Wear/Tear being uncommon – we’ll have to see, but I doubt they’re going to make common split cards this time around. I think Toil/Trouble is likely to break down 90% Toil, 5% Trouble for the last 2-3 points of damage, 4% Toil myself, Trouble you because I’m mana flooded anyway, 1% Toil/Trouble for the win on you. It would be tons better if it were an instant (and could, for example, be cast right after a Revelation resolved).

Master of Cruelties will need some help to get there, but it definitely will make cards like Way of the Thief and Glaring Spotlight in Gatecrash and Rogue’s Passage and Teleportal in RTR much more valuable to go with this demon!

Sin Collector is a bit meh – should have had extort on him, and then he would be much more playable in Orzhov – for now he will be your last creature in and probably just sideboard material.

Advent of the Wurm is just bonkers! Selesyna was already one of the most powerful mid-to-late game guilds, and now this just turbo-speeds it up! Great removal on Turn 4, and then let the populate beatdowns begin!

Vorel looks like to be fun in Simic – again, just so slow to get things really going. Plus when you are drafting, you are going to have to cut Simic hard as you pass cards from Dragon’s Maze so that you can get all the good Simic cards handed back to you in Gatecrash.

The last card made me realize that if you get a bomb in any one of the Gatecrash guilds, you are going to have to draft that guild aggressively in Dragon’s Maze in order to get cards from the second pack in Gatecrash, whereas if you are looking for amazing pickups in the RTR pack, you really have to get good at reading the signals coming in the first pack. Fun time drafting!

Do remember that the environment will be very different this time and while the “return to ravnica” boosters will contain the same cards, drafting them would be a new experience.

To the first question: adding a -1/-1 isn’t part of the scavenge description, so that can’t be it. Also, since the text for scavenge says “adds +1/+1 counters equal to the creature’s power,” that would mean adding -1 counters, but I don’t think that necessarily means removing already existing ones. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this treated the same way as negative life gain/loss? That is, isn’t it just treated as zero instead?

Showstopper – “to each creature?” – agh! At first I thought this would be the perfect answer to the wraths – but it needs to say “creature or player” – oh well – a swing and a miss Wizards!

“To target creature” right I meant that. Still would like it to say “to target creature or player” that would make it playable. I guess it does give Rakdos players a combat trick that they usually don’t have, but only when they have creatures dying anyway – will always put bloodrush creatures in over this spell!

Finally Golgari and Simic getting some loving! Varolz finally makes Scavenge better to play (and cheaper most times). But Bred for the Hunt is just BOMB for Simic. Finally some faster card draw to keep the creature train rolling!

Dragon’s Maze with its emphasis on bombs and gates will definitely slow the game down. Plus you have less chances to pick up efficient removal straight up removal, so creatures should stick more often. Combat tricks will remain a premium in this format and probably end up being your most likely removal – combat math will be tricky with all three sets adding so many cards to keep considering.

I see Dimir finally gets some lovin’ with a sweet fuse card – 5 is not unreasonable to bounce the worst creature and then kill a better creature. Even better that it can happen during combat if things go awry with other combat tricks.

I see Izzet gets a goof card. Maybe someone else can see the combos in the set that aren’t immediately apparent, but how is that Goblin playable at all – he can even shoot himself down if his luck is really bad! I would love to see a big spin counter or arrows flickering on the screen in MTGO if you activate his ability. Instead there will just be a flash, and he’s gone! Oh well!

@Frizzell66 – As long as you’re only splashing blue for the Test Pilot, throw a Guildscorn Ward on him and the rest of your creatures are Reckoners he could be playable on a three card combo? Well, if you’re drafting block.

Seems like they are trying to slow the block down a fair bit, though. I look forward to it. I can start looking a little farther outside my Boros 2-drops shell in Gatecrash.

I’ll be interested to see how the fuse cards affect drafting signals as well. Grabbing a two guild fuse card for one half or getting pulled into three colors by one sounds interesting.

Far//Away is so cool. It’s so simple, but for some reason it makes me even more excited for Dragon’s Maze than all the crazy rares do.

Boros’ champion is sweet. Nice that he comes with his own indestrucibility. Sweet boost he gets with battalion. Even better he can become defense if needed at the 4-slot (although if Boros needs some defense, things are going badly).

Feeling the love yet Boros? WOW Legon’s Initiative is an interesting mythic! I see a lot of mis-plays in Boros drafters’ futures, but done right that thing can dominate! Probably not a turn 2 play, but Turn 4 on – booyah!

Sorry 3/3 Skynight – didn’t notice the +1/+0 – +0/+1 disparity between your white and red creatures – makes sense. See, I told you mistakes would be made with this card!

Wowwee! I don’t see Boros getting slowed down at all! Another 3-drop that is attacking immediately – Battalion will come quite swiftly. And with a splash of blue, this is know a 3rd card that steals opponents creatures for a turn. I see some insane Boros draws – 1, 2, 3 creatures of your own to start and then steal 1, 2, 3 creatures in a row!

@Rez

An important thing to note with shaman is that he can just come down as a 3/1 on turn 3, then trade with a creature, get recovered and replayed. He’s not just a bloodrush card you can use over and over, he’s also a creature with recursion. It’s definitely slow to recover him, and he’s probably not constructed playable, but he’s definitely worthy of being a rare for limited purposes.

I really love the art of Orzhov Guildgate.

Though the “morphling” is kind of clunky. But i think it is a bomb in limited nontheless.

@neuhier – that’s not quite how it works. Any changes to P/T that you apply will go away upon exile, which means it returns as its base 4/5.

I think its power lies in how difficult it is to get rid of it. It isn’t your typical flicker that doesn’t stop things like Devour Flesh, so it can avoid things like that and wrath effects with a single U. I’d say that’s incredibly useful.

What’s “Hidden Strings”?

It’s certainly real – very interesting card at common.

I hope that in Hell Mark Rosewater will be forced to play decks only made of “necessary” terrible cards. A BWG One With Nothing, Angel’s Mercy, Bountiful Harvest deck would be appropriate. Basically, what I’m saying is that I haven’t found a set remotely interesting since Rise of the Eldrazi.

Triple Innistrad was okay, but it was not fun to draft live and like New Phyrexia before it was shackled to a corpse. DKA was a poor rehashing of Innistrad. AVR was an abject failure if the point of this game is to have fun. Return to Ravnica block is like an unnecessary movie remake, many of the characters are there, the setting is similar, but something is just completely off. Playing even more recent sets like Shadowmoor has convinced me that the New World Order has been bad for the game. With internet tech rampant and the ability to draft instantaneously on MTGO, set fatigue is at an all time high. The solution to keep gamers coming back for more is to make the game more complex, with intersting interactions that are not at first obvious. Instead, by catering to the only demographic that craves simplicity (new gamers that don’t know how good it once was[I disagree with Rosewater's assessment that all new gamers are Timmies who can't build a good deck, but he is a narcissist and sees himself in the world around him]), they have taken the game in the exact opposite direction than they should. The result is that newer gamers approach the game like a sugar high, they get overly excited about Dragons, burn out and move on to more rewarding pursuits. There is a limit to the number of times you can draft the same uninteresting common and uncommon runs with only slight variation due to rares and call it fun.

For what it’s worth, I will draft this set a few times, probably have a few decent moments and then chuck 75% of my new cards in the dumpster. That is where intelligence insulting garbage belongs.

Give it time. By the time you reach the third set in five featuring reprints of Angel’s Mercy and Bountiful Harvest or experience deja vú facing the same slightly tweaked green 2/2 for two or red first striking 3/3 or blue 2/2 with flying, you’ll know what I mean. Limited is now designed to be easy to learn. It aspires to be chess. What it has become is Candyland.

On the flip side of the commons and uncommons, WotC has a bad habit of *pushing* certain cards for various reasons; to meddle with the meta (from standard to legacy), to promote certain color combinations, to herald in a legendary figure. Unsurprisingly, these cards tend to be mythic. Also unsurprisingly (as we have had twenty years of lessons by now) Wizards is RELLY BAD at pushing things responsibly. For example, Lingering souls’ mana cost was lowered to make a card from Dark Ascension that played well with Sorin. On the one hand they were successful, in that every Sorin deck runs Lingering Souls. Lingering Souls’ existence propped up Sorin’s price at launch and it continues to this day. Yet it isn’t called a Sorin Deck.

While today’s sets’ uncommons and commons rot in purgatory, increasingly silly things are happening with mythics at high mana costs. I am convinced that WotC does not have a system after six mana. Once you hit ten, anything goes. Savvy deck builders see this, anyone who follows streams knows how thoroughly Travis Woo has broken the game in the past year. Four words, attacking for TWO BILLION. There is no graph that can chart the difference between paying one for a 1/1 and ten to cast every spell for free. It’s like a car going from zero to infinite in ten seconds. I am worried that the loose design of mythics and rares from Omniscience to Beck//Call to Obzedat’s Aid to the new Mana Drain (Simic design strategy: double the mana cost of banned and restricted cards) has us beyond the point of no return. With power creep inevitable, the only direction to go from here is cheaper, somehow more broken.