Pretty crappy, even in its day, but I didn't know that. All I knew was it was rare, and it was 6/8, and it was awesome because of that. I played Magic with friends in high school, and quit the day a chunk of my collection (including my newly aquired Gauntlet of Might) was stolen. I sold off most of my cards, those that I couldn't sell then, I hung onto until my early 20's when I found a shop who bought the rest of my collection.
I moved on to other table top games, but as I got older and got more responsibilities thrust upon me, I found that I didn't really have the time to play these games that take hours and hours to play a single round. That's when I saw that Wizards was putting a version of Magic on the Xbox. In a bit of nostalgia, I downloaded it and learned how to play Magic again.
Other friends had fallen under the same allure. Similar stories, played for awhile back in high school or college, but quit when the game lost its community, or a collection vanished. We enjoyed playing online enough that we asked "When does the next set come out?". That's how we started playing M2010.
Fast forward to today. We've been playing every set as it hits, and suffering to the old Jund and Bant style of decks (which I just recently learned only meant what colors were being played, not what was necessarily in the deck, though every Jund deck looks the same to me). We kept up, and while we didn't always win, we would provide some competition (maybe sometime next week I'll post my current favorite deck). And now we have the newest set coming out in just a few weeks, Rise of the Eldrazi.
I've been keeping a close eye on my favorite blog for Magic, Gathering Magic, who has spoiled about 1/4 of the set. The key things that I'm seeing are the giant Eldrazi creatures, ways to bring those Eldrazi out easier (sacrificing a creature for mana for example) and leveling type path.
I've never been a big fan of "big creature", but I've got to admit, these Eldrazi are cool. The cards look great, the flavor feels awesome, and they're going to smash up whatever they come up against. My biggest concern with them is that they're almost exclusively going to be brought out with gimicks, and while I don't have any problem with that and am actually planning a few of my own, I'm worried that gimicks won't be able to hold up to the very aggressive style decks that we're seeing right now. I see that the Eldrazi have the capability to do well against some decks (mine, for example), but I just don't think they're going to have the speed necessary to compete, at least until the alara blocks leave tournament play.
The other option to bringing these massive creatures out are with hardcasting them using different tricks to build up a large mana pool. We've seen some of these in the Eye of Ugin, and the new Eldrazi tokens, but I think we're going to need to see some other ways to play with these cards or at least survive in the early game, or the whole thing will have trouble standing on its feet.
The last bit that we've seen of the RoE set is the leveling system. So far, I'm very unimpressed by it. Sure, there's some neat cards that can fit into any archetype deck (Joraga Treespeaker, I'm looking at you), but where's all this mana coming from? Games end in 6 - 7 turns, and most of these cards will never make it past level 1 with all of the removal in the game.
So what I'm really hoping for the set is that we haven't seen everything it has to offer yet. I'm really hoping we're going to see more ways to bring more mana to the pool, and be able to bring out these larger creatures that look like a lot of fun to play with. C'mon Wizards, wow me.
