I’m sympathetic to this complaint, but COVID-19 is what took me away from paper Magic. I was out of the game for three years and I’m only back now because of Arena.

I agree with most of this.

Regarding the speed/balance issues – I really just want to play Magic with a much, much lower power level than anything that is currently supported, but WotC has been pushing the power level for so long that I don’t even know if we can get back there. I would be open to playing something like Standard Pauper or Standard Artisan, but even that is probably way beyond where I really want to be. I want to turn the clock back 15 or 20 years to when 2R got you a Goblin Chariot instead of a Screaming Nemesis.

Regarding the Arena interface – I turned off voice lines and background music, changed my graphics settings to Low, and set my default pet to none, all within about a month of starting Arena. And then after a while I just started leaving my headphones off anyway. I put up with emotes for over a year, but broke down and disabled them within the past month or so. It’s been an improvement. I feel bad that I might be missing the occasional sincere “Nice” or “Thinking”, but not as bad as I used to feel about getting a premature “Good game” or a “Your Go” during a complex turn. I would love a setting to disable non-essential animations. Sleeves, pets, ripple effects in the background. I play Arena despite those things, not because of them. And the card highlighting! I realize it actually provides information but I’d still shut it off in a second.

As for sitting through combos… Arena really needs more sophisticated skipping controls. MTGO has had “Pass until end of turn” and “Pass until next turn” for two decades.

I would like to see Sol Ring banned, partly because it’s an obviously overpowered card and partly because it reduces space in your deck. Your options are to accept that the real deck construction rules are “Sol Ring plus 98 cards”, or to accept that you’re voluntarily building an underpowered deck, neither of which are satisfactory IMO.

That said, I think it’s interesting that their logic for not banning Sol Ring echoes the reason why I thought Gush shouldn’t have been banned from Pauper: it’s “the iconic card of the format”, and telling people that they’ll get to play it is a good advertisement for the format.

Give me your Zendikar Rising draft tips! It runs for a week starting tomorrow and I’ve saved up some gold to play it. I’ve never drafted it before but I’ve been practicing a bit on Draftsim, and what I’ve got so far is that W/G landfall and U/B Rogues seem good. What about Wizards, is that a viable archetype?

Reminiscent of Caetus, Sea Tyrant of Segovia (which, to my dismay, I’ve never been able to work out a good shell for).

Both sides of this just have unlock triggers; the card doesn’t do anything as it sits on the battlefield. There’s no reason for this to be an enchantment except that they were trying to shoehorn some stuff into the set’s marquee mechanic.

Same with Meat Locker // Drowned Diner and maybe some others that I missed. If they couldn’t come up with enough actual-enchantment effects, that might be a sign that there wasn’t enough design space and they should have abandoned this mechanic or narrowed its scope. Like, maybe they could just have printed a few Rooms at rare/mythic and skipped the meta-mechanics that care about when you unlock rooms or how many unlocked rooms you have.

Hmm… does this help Insidious Roots enough to make it a competitive deck?

I get why this is a vehicle. It makes sense flavor-wise; arguably it’d be weirder for it not to be a vehicle. And I get the “creature is abducted and comes back changed” storyline. That also makes sense and is flavorful. But it’s kind of hilarious to have them both on the same card. Like, while the aliens are performing their horrifying and unnatural experiments, you can also have some random unrelated dude jump into the captain’s chair and zoom around for a while.

“Are you from the X-Files?”

“No! We’re the Phenomenon Investigators. Our lawyers want us to be very clear about that.”

I like the art on this one.

“Common or uncommon artifact creature that puts cards back in your library for two mana” seems to be a new staple.

• Transplant Theorist
• Phyrexian Archivist
• Hoverstone Pilgrim
• Tomb Trawler
• Barkform Harvester

I rarely play them or see them played. It’s true that a non-zero percentage of my draft games end in board stalls with one player milling out, and in theory I like the idea of having some insurance for those scenarios, but the cards are never impactful enough in any other situation. But this one might come the closest – a 4/4 flyer for 6 isn’t bad, and in Duskmourn it can also function as a Delirium hoser.

This is a translation so I guess we’ll see what the official English wording is, but it sounds like this uses the old Mesmeric Fiend-style templating, which means you can exile something permanently if you flicker this creature with its ETB trigger on the stack. It would have to be that way, I think, to let you get your own exiled creature back too.

But casting a six-mana creature and then being able to flicker it right away is a lot to ask. More likely we’ll see people reanimating this, or possibly doing Smuggler’s Surprise-type tricks, to get around having to exile their own creature.

This seems like a pretty solid draft pick, wouldn’t be shocked if it showed up in Constructed too. Could be a surprise blocker, could be a repeatable Delirium enabler, could just help you smooth out your draws.

Weird that a spell called “Break Down the Door” doesn’t have anything to do with unlocking Rooms. In fact, you could use it to exile a Room, making it less unlocked than before.

Someone in a Discord server I’m in pointed out that this is a potential turn 4 kill with Bloodletter of Aclazotz. Requires the opponent to have no removal or blockers, but still.

Duplicate of Wary Thespian aside from the creature type. A fine draft pick with no prospects for Constructed.

Maybe (probably) I’m missing something, but I don’t understand why you’d want this effect on a Leyline, since you can’t use it in the early turns of the game. At best you can spend turns 1 and 2 ramping and then cheat out one expensive spell on turn 3, and maybe that spell is some Eldrazi or other, but is that really a better plan than the existing Sneak Attack or Goryo’s Vengeance decks?

I’ve got an Azorious Flash deck for Standard in which I’m currently running a 2-2 split of Malcolm and Plumecreed Escort because neither of them are exactly what the deck wants. This might be worth an audition… although the lack of flying is a strike against it.

Who ya gonna call?