mike

I have a lot of thoughts on this but I'll keep it crazy short (lol).

First, that was incredible and I totally felt his excitement the whole time. However, what am I watching! Timeless has effectively now become Yugioh, and it's not even a joke, that's what Yugioh game play is like.

I started out really interested in Timeless as a format, but this is what you get when you take free interaction out of Legacy. It's a joke format to me right now, and adding Chrome Mox makes it unplayable. I think it was unplayable before with the prevalence of combo decks, but this is truly something else. This guy won the game on the opponent's upkeep without any lands in hand or in play...

I don't think Wizards gives a shit really, they don't care about 60 card constructed at all imo, but I can't seem them adding Force of Negation in 2025 when it was actually needed in 2024. I'm very curious to know how big that Timeless playerbase is.

I think that's okay tho, but you could also have the Vehicle stay a creature until the following turn. Like you crew it on your turn, and it stays a creature until your next turn.

This is awesome! Congrats, I haven't played it yet but it seems like Boros is a pretty strong pair for this format. Did you like playing it / Aetherdrift draft in general?

I really think the issue I have with Vehicles is that they can be crewed at instant speed. That holds up every single turn and step of the game for that action. I would have preferred crew being a sorcery speed action. Something you can only do on your turn makes more sense to me and it solves that problem.

I think this is a pretty good idea, and I like the overall take on it. It's a little confusing at first but I imagine it will get iterated on. The Game Changers are very confusing, I feel like people will just optimize against these or any list like this.

What I love most is that my old school 5c Knight Tribal Kenrith actually qualifies in the bracket 1 it's designed for. Whenever I said Kenrith before people never wanted to play against it but the deck stinks! It's just equipment and knights from the first 15 years of the game. Kenrith is only in there to get 5c and because he's an awesome and loreful king and commander.

I actually think this will revitalize the jank decks by giving them kinda of a dedicated format in Bracket 1.

This new wiki will be 100% ad-free, forever.

Can't overstate how great Scryfall is to the community.

June 20–22, 2025: Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™ at MagicCon: Las Vegas

It will never not feel weird reading this lol

I've been thinking about this more. Would Aang then have to be {W}{U}{R}{G} or would there be 4 different versions of Aang?

Yea that's pretty cool actually

Avatar at least fits in thematically with Magic, like LoTR and possibly Assassin's Creed. What's frustrating is that there aren't many other IPs that fit in very well, so once they get exhausted we're left with things like Marvel, Spongebob, etc.

As an aside, Tintin is probably my favorite IP in my life, and I will always love everything Tintin. But I don't think I would buy a Tintin magic set at all, and in fact it would kind of make me feel weird. Tintin, a journalist set in the 20s/30s, grounded fully in reality and current events, is the exact opposite of magic and spellcasting. They make as much sense as peanut butter and tomato sauce together.

And I think that right there might be my biggest underlying problem and disgust with it all -- because there is zero thematic overlap it comes off entirely as a naked cash grab. Effectively, "see! you love magic and you love tintin, you should love magic-tintin! will you give us money now?" That's how I see this in my head and that's how it all plays out to me. The "game" of Magic is now very clearly a much lower priority than the "business" of Magic and right there you lost me. They have figured they won't lose enough to impact "growth" and maybe they figure they can recapture lost fans with a "return to magic" phase in the future. But right now I have 0 interest in anything coming out this year, and I've grown too frustrated with the current state of the game regardless of UB.

I think Air would have to become White. Black doesn't really fit at all in Avatar, that one would be curious to see how they fit in.

I honestly cannot believe standard players are going to be dealing with Sheoldred until Fall 2025. Effectively another year, it feels like it's been in standard forever.

It's also really interesting to me that the next rotation sees that entire Brother's War arc rotate out. That arc was kind of the last consistent in-universe story line we got in the sets. That will rotate out after having experienced the universes beyond sets for 4-6 months, and from there on out, we are more or less in a whole new era of the game.

I'd stay this 2025 rotation is actually pretty significant. Moving into 3 year standard, so the following rotation isn't until 2027 (!) and then by then we will have 9 universes beyond sets in standard, Foundations still around for another 2 more years, and a standard format that is incorporating 19 sets in total. Gonna be a very interesting site to behold!