TTC - M14 Prerelease

[Graham]

Graham talks about his M14 prerelease, and the crew cracks a pack of OH SNAP! Er, ICE BURN! ...oh, no it was Coldsnap.

[korvys]

I'm only part way through, but for future reference, in Coldsnap limited, you can only play with the snow-covered land you draft/open. You can't just add them like you do with other lands, you have to fill out the rest with normal lands.

Also, snow mana comes from any Snow permanent, so the Thermapod also makes snow mana (and so you can sac a creature to give him haste), as does Coldsteel Heart.

[Lancer]

A cantrip's cost seems to be pretty well cemented at 2 mana. Take Zap from Invasion, for instance. 2 and a red to deal one damage and draw a card at instant speed. Or take the walking cantrip that is Think Twice, one and a blue to draw a card.

Also, I NEED this lightning storm card in my silly/crappy red EDH/casual deck now.

[Eric the Orange]

Oh kathleen, always trying to keep the boys on schedule.

[Muondecay]

The prerelease tale was eerily similar to my own. I also ran a sweet black and blue deck, though more value in black. Got both Liliana AND her Reaver, along with Liturgy of Blood, Clone, bunch of counters (essence scatter and negates), along with various blue flyers and black zombie fillers.

Favorite moment - I also went up against the crazy sliver deck but was able to shut it down with the Accorder's Shield (apparently a sliver's mortal enemy is a large butt...). Ended up killing him slowly with the shield on a seakite. Next round, I managed to fire a traumatize off early and empty his deck of all his removal. Felt good man, Felt good.

I found that while yes, blacks creatures were generally underwhelming (Reaver an obvious exception), there were some amazing sacrifice synergies in limited, notably blood bairn and Tenacious dead. Having both of them on the field basically gives bairn +2/+2 for each (1)(B) you spend.

One of these days, I wanna try and draft the witch/newt/cauldron synergy deck. Looks like fun.

[erjhunter]

Rite of Flame: Banned in Modern.

Yeah, I was gonna say the same thing korvys said about the slug: basically it is either a 4/3 for 5, a 4/3 haste for 6 or a 4/3 for 5 with "sac a creature: this gains haste". Still not really a great card by any stretch, but slightly more versatile than it looks.

Coldsnap was a weird, dumb set. One of the more interesting things about it was that before they decided to make it a wink wink "lost set" from the Ice Age block, they were considering making it a 4th set in the original Ravnica block which would have functioned like Dragon's Maze, bringing back all of the guilds and giving each of them a little love in one small set. I think it is kind of interesting that both times they have done Ravnica blocks they have considered stretching it to 4 sets in order to try to fit in all of the guilds.(Avacyn Restored was originally going to be a prequel to RTR block, rather than a continuation of Innistrad block, which would have reintroduced all of the guilds and set the stage for the story beginning with RTR. They ultimately decided against it since it would both have to exist in a weird space where all the guilds were present but had none of their guild mechanics from the RTR block [so as not to diminish the excitement and hype for the new cards], or where none of the guilds were present, at which point it wouldn't have felt like Ravnica at all.)

[TheHokeyPokey]

(I guess links with "sales" get flagged as spam. It's just a deck list.)
The effect you are looking for, Graham, is Boomerang. They hesitate to print them ever since the Eminent Domain deck during Kamigawa/Ravnica standard:
http ://sales.starcitygames.com/deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=13475

Kathleen trashing Rite of Flame was a hilarious face-palm moment. You should never underestimate rituals. It was banned in modern, and is a major part of Dragonstorm:
http://wiki.mtgsalvation.com/article/Standard_Dragonstorm_deck

Also, cards with "draw a card at the beginning of the next turn's upkeep" or "slowtrips" were introduced in Ice age. They stopped making them after Mirage Block, but since Coldsnap was supposed to be part of the Ice Age block they brought it back.

[Graham]

There's no reason it would get flagged. Even if it did, we have to DO something to it first. Not sure what happened.

[TheHokeyPokey]

When I hit preview with both links intact, "This message was flagged as spam and has been denied" is printed in red above the subject line. If I put the space in for the star city link, it accepts the post. I tried it again just now, and it happened again.

[Graham]

Huh. Ashton must've added additional spam-stopping filters. I'll mention it!