Well, if he’s cheated so much in the past that he can’t get the benefit of the doubt from the judges now, he won’t get a ton of sympathy from me either.

That’s valuable context, thanks.

It’s not like they don’t know they’re on camera, and on top of that, Van Etten was up a game already. Who would intentionally cheat in a situation where you’re pretty much guaranteed to get caught, and you don’t even need the advantage that badly anyway? The only thing I can think of is that Van Etten told the judges “Yeah, I realized it a couple of turns later but didn’t say anything.”

By the way, speaking as someone who’s played my share of paper Magic and made more than my share of judge calls: call the judges when this happens. Their top priority is to fix the game state, not to punish you. Sometimes if the game has progressed too far to fix, they’ll let the mistake stand. I don’t know offhand how enforcement differs at a high-level event like this, but I think there’s a real chance that Van Etten could have salvaged a match win out of this if he’d called the judges on himself in time.

The announcement says turn 3 of game 3, but it means game 2. Their game 2 starts at about 5:30:15 of the official coverage, and the play in question happens at around 5:34:00. Twitch chatters catch the mistake immediately, and the commentators bring it up around 5:35:35.

I could easily see myself doing something like this by mistake. I wonder what the judges heard when they interviewed the players that convinced them it was intentional.

Interesting that they considered banning Atraxa or Knight-Errant from Standard. While I wouldn’t shed a tear for either one, I can’t honestly say that the format is unbalanced right now. Those decks are strong but beatable, and their metagame shares are reasonable.

In fact, I’ve been playing Poison Burn for so long that I actually look forward to facing Domain Ramp. And I think losing the triomes, and thus the potential for turn-two Leylines, will slow the deck down by a lot.

On the other hand, I don’t understand the argument that losing Voldaren Epicure will significantly hurt Boros Convoke. I hardly ever see that deck play Knight-Errant on turn 2, and yet I still lose to it plenty. If I could ban one card from the deck, I’d choose Imodane’s Recruiter, or maybe Warden of the Inner Sky.

before we put our children onto the battlefield, not ‘create’ them like some rules committees would have you believe.

A real Magic fundamentalist would put them into play.

Forbidden Orchard seems like a natural fit.

When they started doing borderless cards and showcase art, I thought they were going to use those things as an excuse to stop printing foils. “Let’s face it, we’ve never been able to figure out how to make foils that last, but it’s okay because we’ve got multiple other cool, popular premium treatments to take their place.” But here we are years later and they’re just… still printing foils? Even though they don’t have to?

If I were in a draft and got passed a foil and non-foil version of the same card, I would most likely take the non-foil.

As someone who rarely plays older formats, the only reward I value in here is the draft token. Drafts normally cost 1,500 gems. Unlocking the Horizon Hideaway costs 2,300 gems. Are a bunch of cosmetics, mostly for cards I won’t play often, worth 800 gems to me? When I put it that way, it doesn’t sound like they should be. I guess we’ll see what they look like?

The Ashling avatar looks pretty cool, although I prefer my avatar not to be a named character (currently using the Dreadhorde one).

When they announced Pioneer I assumed it was going to be the revival of Extended. I couldn’t, and still can’t, fathom why they chose to make another non-rotating format. It’s just Modern Jr., and with every passing year the difference between them becomes smaller. I’d be much more interested in a six- or eight-year rotating format. It could target newer players who have smaller collections but are turned off by the churn of Standard.

Yeah, there’s been an Affinity deck in Pauper for as long as the format has existed. I have no concerns that banning All That Glitters, a relatively recent addition, might change that.

No need to explain it to me, Mark; please feel free to do as many original classical fantasy settings as you want.

I mean, I didn’t remember them until this article reminded me. Looks like the Noggles were all blue/red hybrid – this was the block where hybrid mana was introduced, IIRC.

There may have been a very brief period where people experimented with [[Noggle Bandit]] in some Pauper decks? Or I might be making that up.

It’s interesting to me that this article, written for a general audience, doesn’t mention what the card does. On the one hand it doesn’t really matter, the point of the story is “man has odd hobby of collecting many copies of cheap card”. On the other hand, it wouldn’t take more than a sentence to say “In Magic you use lands to pay for your other spells, and Stone Rain sets your opponent back by removing one of their lands.” Arguably one of the simplest cards for an outside audience to understand.

Always nice to see a variety of countries represented in the Top 8.

My sole Pro Tour prediction (which I didn’t actually say out loud, but take my word for it) was that Boros Convoke would put 1 - 2 decks in the Top 8 but would not win. So I was right about that. I would not have guessed Domain Ramp would be the winner, though. It’s a strong deck for sure but I feel like it’s been on the wane recently. Probably would have predicted Esper Midrange as the overall winner.

For real. Shroud and Ward are interesting because they make you make decisions. With Shroud you’re making trade-offs during deckbuilding and with Ward it’s during the games. But Hexproof doesn’t force any decisions. It just says “sorry, no interacting”. I can sort of see Hexproof being okay on instants like [[Tamiyo’s Safekeeping]], but even then, what percentage of games would actually play out differently if that card granted Shroud instead?

The coolest show ever to be on television. Please, Wizards, don’t make it into some stupid Universes Beyond thing.

I would never want to play for ante, but I kind of get it. Garfield envisioned a world where cards were just “out there”, in circulation, and you’d primarily refine your collection by trading with other players, the way earlier generations had done with baseball cards. Home internet access was still new and Amazon hadn’t been founded yet. He thought you’d just play whatever you had; he couldn’t foresee a “metagame” where players stacked their decks with four-ofs, and he certainly could never have imagined a marketplace like TCGPlayer.

Part of me wishes Magic were more like he’d expected, but that ship sailed ages ago. Given that the internet does exist, I think our process for card acquisition is pretty much optimized.

I’ll always have fond memories of [[Aurochs Herd]]. I know a lot of people don’t like Coldsnap draft, but I’ll play it anytime, and I’ll probably try to force green.