Can't tell if it's just me, but I'm finding the card type Planeswalker to be very unfun. They snowball the game so quickly. In Standard Nissa and Oko do that role - untap with Nissa and big Hydroid Krasis starts coming down, while Oko ticks up too quickly. So the game is like, here's my Nissa on turn 3. Do you have a counterspell? No? gg, do you concede?

It's even worse in other formats with Jace TMS and Teferi, Hero of Dominaria.

Maybe I should really start playing Gwent more.

It’s funny cuz I played so much Red, that I would usually just ignore planeswalkers and keep slamming face to reduce clock. In fact I preferred seeing planeswalkers to creatures for the most part (Gideon being the big exception)

But yeah for midrange decks, they are an absolute nightmare

the problem is that Aggro cant afford to ignore Oko...

Ah, i don’t know this card

it can come down T2... and steal your T3 play if it does not have haste ....
gains 3 life each turn if it wants or make a 3/3 every other turn... and has a **** load of loyalty... Red has **** against OKo

Yikes

Yikes indeed these are sad times for Red mages...

I wouldn't say Oko is the reason for the UG deck's favorable matchup vs. Red. Wicked Wolf is more at fault, it's able to kill most of the red deck's creatures just by entering the battlefield. However Oko puts the game away quickly. In the mono-R gameplan, you do damage early and then topdeck burn to kill the opponent. Although Oko doesn't exactly gain 3 life a turn early-game (because it costs mana to activate the food), he really does gain 3 life a turn in the late-game. He also gains loyalty too fast for the red deck to commit to killing him, but if ignored, he makes 3/3 blockers which most of the red decks' creatures can't attack through, and stealing Torbran is backbreaking too.

When's the next B&R announcement?

You're not the only one, Banedon - and I don't mean me, but I recently saw a tweet by Jon Finkle stating just that - he considers the game pre-PWs to be better.

Regarding Oko, I don't have an opinion yet for I haven't played enough Standard. He is a massive brickwall for the classic RDW deck that now has to deal 9 more damage (6 loyalty and 3 life from the food), but I'm not opposed to seeing RDW have a hard time. It's been quite oppressive for over a year in the Bo1 queue when it was not only the fastest (good enough reason to play it anyway, even at ~30-40% winrate) but also the strongest deck.

Not sure if this is any help, but I've played a bit of Boros Knights in the Bo1 queue - totally unintended but quests wanted me to. With that deck it was often possible to kill Oko in the first combat step after he came down. Granted, I did get to go first a hilarious amount of times - so it was my t3 where I needed 6 damage through a Goose.

Thanks - I searched for and read the tweet. Kind of depressing really. I also found this article about Planeswalker hate, which I think is very well done and we could really use cards such as these: https://www.coolstuffinc.com/a/jimdavis ... heir-fault

As for Boros knights, to be honest I think at this point trying to beat food deck is only for the most dedicated. It's just too effective.

I played this unranked game recently using Sultai food with 4 maindeck Noxious Grasp. Queued into a UW player who had Brazen Borrower, Giant Killer, Cavalier of Dawn, Master Splicer, and God-Eternal Oketra. At first I was playing to win, but after Noxious Grasping one of his creatures and turning Oketra into an elk (har har har), he played Teferi's Time Twist in response to my Noxious Grasp. My brain went "click", I was clearly playing against someone who was either new or didn't have a good collection. And here I was bullying him not just with my top-tier deck, but a top-tier deck with four maindeck Noxious Grasp that happens to be really good against his UW deck. Once I realized that, I conceded.

What a crappy meta.

Not saying it's a tier deck, it just worked better than expected. I was more interested in Mardu and Rakdos, though I don't see why you would run Rakdos Knights when every card that cares about knights is white - could just go Rakdos anything then.

I'll have 3 quests piled up tonight so I'll play some games then - probably my Sultai Food in Bo3 this time, because it is a deck I actually enjoy. Not because it's #1, but because that's my kind of stuff. Though blue was never a part of my stuff until Hydroid Krasis got printed and became my favorite card in Standard.

Get a room!

I, for one, find Banedon and Sol’s discussion interesting. Feel free to continue, guys.

Haha, thank you

I don't mind some senseless bashing while waiting for an actual meta. Those cunts have hijacked this thread for their duck leader before

So while I'd love to share thoughts about my lunch with you guys, there isn't much to say on Magic. All of the sites are quite dead when it comes to Standard.

I only played one of those proposed Bo3s with Sultai Food and ended up losing to Simic Food because I had to mull to 4 in game 3. Nothing exciting really. Went on to play Gruul Cleave then, which was more interesting. Embercleave is an amazing card (also a 3 of in the aforementioned Boros Knights deck).

This is the deck. It plays some questionable cards like Zhur-Taa Goblin or Kraul Harpooner though I've always been a fan of the latter. Back then you'd shoot down Healer's Hawks, now there's bigger birds to fry. I wonder if there's no real 2-drop in Gruul now that it can't skip 2-drops with Llanowar Elves anymore. Paradise Druid is certainly no aggro card either, yet it's in every Gruul list.

And I don't think I want to be in the 4x Once upon a time camp, at least not in an aggro deck. Multiples really stink because you lose almost a full turn for it.

So what's actually good in Gruul? Questing Beast is the best wielder of Embercleave, no two ways about that. Kill 5 blockers with the first strike and then hit face + a planeswalker for 5 - also not the worst situation for a pump spell.

But what else is good in green? With Questing Beast eating a lot of green-hate, you might want to go into a color that doesn't care about Noxious Grasp and Aether Gust. Black has quality and white has quantitiy, maybe those are a better match -though white obviously dies to Noxious Grasp, too.

Oko is seeing play in legacy and may get banned at some point in modern.

Wizards should really stop printing cheap planeswalkers outside of lightning bolt range in general; but whoever play-tested turn 2 oko in standard needs to reevaluate their card evaluationing skills lol. This is the worst thing theyve done since theros ravnica, and that includes eldrazi winter.

Honestly, playing Duels and seeing what decks they built for hard mode AI made me question WoTC competency with their own game in general.

With pre constructed paper deck I could excuse it as a money thing - they don’t want to be producing decks where you can gain access to play sets of high value cards for a fraction of their individual worths. But Duels has no excuse, as that reasoning is irrelevant for in game AI decks, and easy/medium modes could house the clunky builds.

I kept running into that 6 cost 2-2 who bounces creatures

I kind of agree with Finkle. I dont know how many of you played before Planeswalkers (pre-Lorwyn) but the game was a lot more fun. Just to many free actions floating around. Mana, or land more specifically, was designed to be a resource that would restrict the power level of what you could do in a given turn that loosens those restrictions as time goes by. PWs circumvent that completely. Printing something back in the day that would give you 8 life and 3 free actions over the course of the next 2 turns, FOR 3 MANA, would have been unheard of.