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Alex, James and Cameron are with you for this weeks TTC and they're answering your Twitter questions

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That black space can be fixed. My avatar is a scaled down version. Here are two full sized above http://i.imgur.com/XgczHpb.png and below http://i.imgur.com/nF7LQGa.png .
Simply crop the video, or tilt the camera up and add a second overlay.

So, Ensoul didn't win the last PT, RDW did. Ensoul does get some play in Modern affinity, and Prophesies was all about whether or not all your lands were tapped. (i.e. utter trash.)

Prophecy had this whole theme of getting benefits for being tapped out. (Back in the days when you could get mana burned for doing so.) That, on its own, is pretty iffy, but what's even worse is the fact that the enablers had you sacrificing lands.

It's like:
Person A: "Let me teach you this new martial art I developed."
Person B: "Okay, I'm listening."
Person A: "It's all about powerful techniques you can perform while you're keeping low to the ground."
Person B: "So you have to stay crouched a lot? That doesn't seem like a good idea..."
Person A: "Actually, I was thinking I'd amputate your legs to facilitate your mastery of my martial art!"
Person B: "I'm leaving now."

The prospect of saccing land gets worse when you consider the fact that the two big mechanics of Masques block were Rebels/Mercenaries and Spellshapers, both of which are extremely mana hungry.

Any chance you can take questions from the forum next time? I don't use twitter, but I have a lot of cool questions I would like to ask

Also, you guys have got to stop referring to human as a relevant creature type. It only mattered in Innistrad. Never before or since. That's one block. If you're gonna count human as relevant, then you need to count stuff like bird, beast, giant, and kavu as relevant, too.

BenMarc wrote:Also, you guys have got to stop referring to human as a relevant creature type. It only mattered in Innistrad. Never before or since. That's one block. If you're gonna count human as relevant, then you need to count stuff like bird, beast, giant, and kavu as relevant, too.

This fellow disagrees

A way to make Disciple of Deceit usable, for Cam:

Freed from the Real + High Tide + Disciple of Deceit.

Also worth noting that Disciple basically gives all your nonland cards Transmute.

korvys wrote:This fellow disagrees

Click to Expand

That's still not enough to make human relevant.

If "referenced by other cards" doesn't make something "relevant", then I'd be curious to know what your definition is.

Human is a relevant subtype to both Falkenrath Aristocrat and Champion of the Parish, which are Highlander staples.

As Ben Marc said it mattered in Innistrad

Sure.

And because it was relevant in Innistrad, it is relevant in Highlander. Because artifacts were relevant in Mirrodin, they are relevant in Highlander. Because Fairies were relevant in Lorwyn, they are relevant in Highlander.

Just because there isn't a deck in standard right now doesn't mean that a type or subtype or archetype isn't relevant.

Also from Theros, Cavalry Pegasus also cared about humans. Xathrid Necromancer also cares about humans.

I know that's only a couple of cards but that kind of gets in the way of the claim that they only mattered in Innistrad and "never before or since". Especially since some of the cards that cared about humans in Innistrad are still relevant in formats like Highlander.

Right. I mean, they're not Slivers, or Goblins, or even Wizards, but Human is a hell of a lot more relevant than say Scout, or Archer.

Sure, Theros and the core sets had a tiny sprinkling of human-matters cards, which I forgot about, but even archers got Greatbow Doyen, and I doubt any of you will argue that your average player gives a hoot whether any given creature counts as an archer. If less than 1% of a set's card pool cares about something, then I'd hardly call that thing "relevant" in the set. Enduring Ideal was in Saviors of Kamigawa; does that alone make enchantments relevant in that set?

My point was simply that the LRR crew is inconsistent in what creature types they label relevant. They've written off beasts and birds as not having relevant creature types, but if one block is all it takes to meet their threshold of relevancy, then they should start counting cards' interactions with the likes of Keeper of the Nine Gales, Wirewood Savage, Sunrise Sovereign, and Kavu Mauler amongst the cards' positives.

Consistency. That's all I want.

One block does not make a type, subtype, or archetype relevant. Having good cards that interact with them makes a type, subtype, or archetype relevant. Falkenrath Aristocrat, Xathrid Necromancer, and Champion of the Parish all interact with humans and are powerful cards within their strategies, making "human" a relevant subtype when sleeving up. Alex's current brew includes Falkenrath Aristocrat as a win condition so it's something he considers when evaluating cards.

We don't discuss birds and beasts as relevant subtypes not because we're lazy or inconsistent, but because, even within the situations where they have synergies, they're just not very good. Falkenrath Aristocrat can sacrifice creatures regardless of subtype to fuel synergistic Aristocrat strategies. She gets a bonus when those creatures are human. She is a game-winning engine that can occasionally get extra value off of certain cards. Keeper of the Nine Gales is a weak card that gives a handful of decent cards a function that is generally unrelated to what makes them good. I'm not including Keeper of the Nine Gales in a deck that runs Aven Mindcensor because Keeper is not a good card and when I want to bounce something I'll run a man-o'-war equivalent instead of tapping three evasive creatures that should be swinging in with a sword of fire and ice. I wouldn't play Kavu Mauler in a deck that runs Flametongue Kavu because if I wanted a 5/5 for 6 I'd run Shivan Dragon, and I'd never run Shivan Dragon.