[[Wandering Mage]] has cool art and a great name; shame it’s totally unplayable.

Wish I could play a format where people were paying WUB to cast things like that instead of things like [[Raffine, Scheming Seer]].

Yeah, I think Wizards heard “it’s too hard to maintain a collection for Standard” and took that to mean “cards need to stay legal in Standard for longer”, when the actual takeaway should have been “cards in Standard need to be cheaper and easier to acquire”. But “cheaper” cuts into their bottom line, and “easier” is something they have only indirect control over.

Limiting rares and mythics sounds great to me. I keep thinking about how I’d like to play a format with only commons and uncommons – in other words, only cards with a reasonable power level. They won’t do it, of course, because, again, the bottom line.

I’m glad that Standard is doing well again, but deeply disappointed that they apparently consider the experiment a success. I wish I could go back to a two-year Standard. Now it’ll probably never happen.

If I’m not mistaken, Isareth’s ability is actually two triggered abilities: “Whenever Isareth attacks” is one, and “When you do [pay X]” is the other. With The Peregrine Dynamo, you could copy either ability. If you copy the first one, you can pay X twice, choosing different amounts (or the same amount) each time. If you copy the second, the value for X has to stay the same, but you can revive two creatures with the same mana value.

If instead of The Peregrine Dynamo you had a [[Roaming Throne]], you could end up returning as many as four creatures.

I’ll probably never be on the Pro Tour myself, but if nothing else, it’s psychologically important to me to know that LGS tournaments or ranked play on Arena aren’t all there is. That they go somewhere, and that some of the people whom I play against in those events might be aspiring to the Pro Tour.

So maybe Wizards agrees with me and they’re just playing 3D chess…

That’s true; this certainly doesn’t bother me as much as stuff like, say, hiring the Pinkertons.

Maybe I’m just no fun, but it makes me uneasy to see WotC/Hasbro lending any kind of credibility to what appears to be the latest fad in fortune-telling. I think we have a lot of evidence, here in 2024, that an excess of credulity is actually a fairly serious problem for humans as a species.

I’m here trying to do some web searching to gauge where this lies on the scale of “it’s just some pretty art, nobody takes it seriously” to “ignore the cards at your peril”, and it may not be all the way at the end, but I’m not super reassured by what I’m reading.

Now that I think about it, if you counter a creature spell it also negates the ETB because the creature doesn’t enter, right?

Yes, you’re right. If you [[Essence Scatter]] a creature, it will go straight from the stack to the graveyard without entering the battlefield, so any ETB triggers won’t trigger. Now let’s say you don’t have Essence Scatter but you do have [[Stifle]]. In this case you’ll have to let the creature resolve and enter the battlefield, but you can use the Stifle to counter its ETB trigger.

Your Generous Patron example is fairly simple. I think you came to the wrong conclusion when you say “the creature doesn’t yet exist when the ETB resolves.” The creature definitely does exist at that point – its existence is what triggered the ability.

If you want to use Generous Patron to put +1/+1 counters on creatures you don’t control, and thereby get to draw cards from it, you can. Generous Patron has to be on the battlefield in order for its Support ability to trigger. If you choose to target other players’ creatures with it, and if the Patron doesn’t get killed before the Support ability resolves, it will be there to see you put those +1/+1 counters on things.

If you look at the rulings for Patron in Gatherer or Scryfall, you’ll notice they point out that “Support can target a creature another player controls.” That’s trying to draw your attention to the fact that you can use Patron in this way.

Let’s dig a little deeper. As a general rule, can entering creatures trigger their own ETB abilities?

Usually creatures will use specific wording to avoid confusion. They might say “Whenever another creature enters”, like [[Celebrity Fencer]]. Or else they’ll say “Whenever [this creature] or another creature enters”, like [[Fallaji Vanguard]].

If you look at the (short) list of creatures that just say “whenever a creature enters”, I don’t think any of them meet the conditions to trigger themselves. At least, not ordinarily. But what if, let’s say, [[Sigil Captain]] enters the battlefield while [[Godhead of Awe]] is already in play? Does it give itself the counters?

I think it does. I found this in the Comprehensive Rules:

603.10. Normally, objects that exist immediately after an event are checked to see if the event matched any trigger conditions, and continuous effects that exist at that time are used to determine what the trigger conditions are and what the objects involved in the event look like. […]

So in my example, the “event” is Sigil Captain entering the battlefield, Sigil Captain is an “object that exists immediately after the event”, and Godhead’s second ability is a “continuous effect that exists at the time”.

This answer was a lot longer than I thought it would be. I hope it makes sense. (I also hope it’s correct.)

My main concern is how this will affect new players. You’re losing the opportunity to teach them what needs to be entered, as well as the opportunity to teach them implicitly about what “the battlefield” is, and zones of play in general. The more knowledge that you need to already have before you can understand what a card does, the less accessible the game becomes. And this is while they’re trying harder than ever (via Universes Beyond) to attract outsiders.

“Hey check out this new Discover mechanic; it’s a fixed version of Cascade.”

Looks like “When ~ enters the battlefield” is getting shortened to just “When ~ enters”.

Excited for this set, it’s the most classical fantasy setting we’ve seen since the last time we were in Dominaria.

That lines up with what I’ve experienced in the past. I edited the link again to use WIZARDS.

Thanks guys. The link I originally posted still works for me, so I don’t know what the deal is, but I replaced it with this one, which also seems to work for me. If it still doesn’t work for anyone, you could also try: https://survey.marketpointsinc.com/wc0224gb1/WIZARDS

I’m strictly free-to-play on Arena for a few reasons, which is to say yes, I draft less often than I would like to. Basically I play Standard to build up gold until I can afford to do a draft. Unfortunately I’m liking Standard less these days – probably because they expended the number of sets – so I’m not sure if my patience for that arrangement will last. Would be nice if they added Pauper or phantom drafts/sealed on a permanent basis, but I don’t know how likely that is.

The good news is that the booster price increase doesn’t seem to have affected the Arena economy. And I did just buy a Play booster box of MKM from my LGS, and the price hadn’t gone up as much as I’d anticipated.

(Disclosure, I didn’t actually watch this video.)

This is the second streamer I’ve heard of moving from Twitch to YouTube recently. Did something happen at one or the other of those sites?

I watch a lot more on YouTube than I do on Twitch, primarily because I prefer to watch on my own schedule, and it seems like there’s a perception that Twitch is for live streams and YouTube is for prerecorded stuff. But there’s no reason it has to be like that.

For artifact hate, [[Ancient Grudge]] is a classic choice. Not sure about the best way to deal with planeswalkers.

I felt like this story started a little slow, but the last couple of chapters have been pretty interesting.

One thing I wish this article had addressed is the memory issues invited by the “only once per turn” restriction. That clause makes it less easy to tell by looking whether an ability can be activated or not. The ability on [[Plague Nurse]], for example, really ought to require it to tap. Give it Vigilance, add the tap symbol, and remove the last sentence; it’ll be substantially the same card and the game state will be easier to keep track of.

I’m still mad that Planeswalkers don’t tap when you activate their once-per-turn abilities.