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| You will not be missed. |
I've written before about how my friends and I began playing Magic: The Gathering again after being gone for something like 15 years. We came back for M2010, and the Zendikar block. Unfortunately, to play in the standard format, we knew we would be one set behind. That set was Shards of Alara. We weren't going to go back and get those cards because they wouldn't be good in a year. Because of this decision, we would spend the next year getting smacked around by those cards, and unable to build decks because we were crippled without cards which
everyone used.
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| Screw you, Blightning |
You see, there was this deck that dominated everything for a very long time called Jund. The basic make up of it was Black / Red / Green, and it was best known for one spell to Cascade into another, essentially paying 4 mana for a 3/2 creature with Haste, and then getting a spell like the Blightning you see above for free. It was impossible for new players like us to keep up with.
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| Burn in Hell, Bloodbraid Elf |
So what do we do as new players? We go online and try to find something, some counter that will let us rookies go toe to toe with these cards. They were build out of commons and uncommons, they can't possibly be unbeatable! Every deck we found was just a rehash of the same handful of decks. Do you want to play red/green? Well then you NEED to put in Bloodbraid Elf! How about white?
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| Oh, you need 4 of these |
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| And these |
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| Oh and her, too |
And since you're playing white
already, you should probably compliment it with green! Let me suggest some good cards for that!
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| Ugh |
And even if we did want to go and dip into some of these power house cards that we were getting steamrollered with week after week, they were
expensive. I paid $20 for a set of the Path to Exile cards, and those are only
uncommon.
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| $14 for ONE right now on Coolstuffinc.com and it leaves standard on Friday, imagine it 6 months ago |
Am I whining here? Yeah, I am. It was disheartening to be beaten so often with the same decks and the same tricks and not have something to counter it in our Zendikar packs. Eventually new tricks began to come out of our Zendikar cards, but they were made incredible when comboing with cards from the Alara block.
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| Not to name cards or anything... |
With the new tricks that came out, we were able to invent tricks of our own. Not quite as powerful, but some countered Jund and Bant nicely. They eventually fell by the wayside, but even now if you search for standard decks, you'll find many Alara staples in them, and without those staples, the deck will not work.
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| Can't count how many times I've been screwed by this one |
Light is at the end of the tunnel, though. This Friday, October 1st, Scars of Mirrodin officially hits store shelves, making the Shards of Alara block (as well as the M2010 block) retire from Standard, and be forced into Extended. We are ready for this set, and can't wait to see what new challenges they bring. A small part of me feels bad for the new players who are coming in now who won't go a set back to pick up cards, but what could we possibly have that will cause them grief?
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| *cough* |
