Exile

madwren

Dear @Hibernum_JC,

While looking at the masterpieces, I could not help but notice that there are two cards, Vindicate and Wrath of God, with exile-based removal effects. I was excited to see this! Having answers to recurring cards and interacting with another zone of play is a staple of paper strategy, and it definitely should be carried over to MTGPQ.

Interestingly, while you had no problem changing the destroy effects on those two cards to exile, I couldn't help but notice that the black removal, Final Reward, was changed from exile (in paper) to destroy (in PQ).

Please do not make exile-based removal a masterpiece-only level mechanic going forward. Exile is useful, but not overpowered, and it is not something that should be gated away from the majority of players. Exile-based removal belongs in the other rarities as well.  This appears, on the surface, to be solely motivated by the desire to make certain Masterpieces more tempting.  Making Masterpieces powerful is one thing. Stripping away what should be core mechanics and only making them accessible to a small, random subset of the community is another.

speakupaskanswer

There are four cards in Amonkhet with Exile, so it's not masterpiece-only.

EDHdad

First, I'd like to see what Exile actually does.

When I pitch a card from my hand, does it go to the same exile zone as a creature which is exiled with Wrath of God?

If someone casts 4 Prized Amalgams, and then I exile what's on the board, is one copy exiled, or all 4?

If someone has 1 vehicle in their deck, and one of these is exiled, and then they use Saheeli Rai's ultimate ability, are 3 copies of the card fetched?

If a player's entire library is exiled, do they lose the game when they try to draw, or do they just fail to draw additional cards?  Or does the whole game stall / crash / reset due to some unforeseen bug?

madwren

Perhaps I should have been more clear, but I'm specifically talking about creature removal, and the difference between destroy and exile efffects. 

There are two non-masterpieces in Amonkhet with exile:

Aven Mindcensor - top card of library
Compelling Argument - top 2 cards of library

I'm not sure what the other cards you're referring to are. 
https://mtgpq.info/cards/search?abilities=171,OR shows the four exile cards
https://mtgpq.info/cards/search?desc=exile shows the 6 with exile in the card text. The last two, Shadow of the Grave and Oketra's Attendant, do not have exile effects.

speakupaskanswer

madwren said:

Perhaps I should have been more clear, but I'm specifically talking about creature removal, and the difference between destroy and exile efffects. 

There are two non-masterpieces in Amonkhet with exile:

Aven Mindcensor - top card of library
Compelling Argument - top 2 cards of library

I'm not sure what the other cards you're referring to are. 
https://mtgpq.info/cards/search?abilities=171,OR shows the four exile cards
https://mtgpq.info/cards/search?desc=exile shows the 6 with exile in the card text. The last two, Shadow of the Grave and Oketra's Attendant, do not have exile effects.

Okay, fair enough, but you said Exile shouldn't be a masterpiece-only effect and it isn't. Granted, I wondered myself why it didn't show up more in the set given that they included the "Exile zone" now. The necessity for this hasn't been made clear, I think.

speakupaskanswer

Though I wonder now for the first time: does cycling mean the card is exiled when cycled? Otherwise, I don't know what the card is supposed to do. And if that's true then exile is much bigger than it seems.

Matthew

speakupaskanswer said:

madwren said:

Perhaps I should have been more clear, but I'm specifically talking about creature removal, and the difference between destroy and exile efffects. 

There are two non-masterpieces in Amonkhet with exile:

Aven Mindcensor - top card of library
Compelling Argument - top 2 cards of library

I'm not sure what the other cards you're referring to are. 
https://mtgpq.info/cards/search?abilities=171,OR shows the four exile cards
https://mtgpq.info/cards/search?desc=exile shows the 6 with exile in the card text. The last two, Shadow of the Grave and Oketra's Attendant, do not have exile effects.

Okay, fair enough, but you said Exile shouldn't be a masterpiece-only effect and it isn't. Granted, I wondered myself why it didn't show up more in the set given that they included the "Exile zone" now. The necessity for this hasn't been made clear, I think.

I think what he's getting at here is that if they're going to put the mechanic in the game, they need to do so on a wider basis. Right now, there is an imbalance in the various levels of rarity where Exile as a mechanic exists, which will make it available to only a certain few players.

Furthermore, when they pushed their pre-release notes, they mentioned they were going to start experimenting with the exile stack (I'm paraphrasing that because I can't be arsed enough to look it up, but it is definitely in there). Four or six cards, whichever it is, is a pretty poor way to start that process, particularly when you need struck-by-lightning-twice, winning-lottery-ticket level luck just to get two of them.

madwren

speakupaskanswer said:

Okay, fair enough, but you said Exile shouldn't be a masterpiece-only effect and it isn't. Granted, I wondered myself why it didn't show up more in the set given that they included the "Exile zone" now. The necessity for this hasn't been made clear, I think.

I'll edit the OP to clarify the "exile-based removal" focus of my post.

madwren

Matthew said:

  ight now, there is an imbalance in the various levels of rarity where Exile as a mechanic exists, which will make it available to only a certain few players.

Right. If you don't have those two masterpieces, you cannot exile opposing creatures. Since they deliberately changed Vindicate/Wrath from destroy to exile, and deliberately changed Final Reward from exile to destroy, it seems to be a clear signal of their intentions going forward to limit exile-based removal to masterpieces.

EDHdad

See, again, that presents more questions than answers.  If a cycled card goes to exile, and an exiled card is never shuffled back into the library, could you thin your library so that your 40-card deck eventually becomes a 16-card deck which is all gas?  (For example, with a card like Day's Undoing, some 2 or 3 card combo, and 6 or 7 cycle cards where the cycle cost is 3 or less)?

Ohboy

Brigby has clarified. The deck works as it always has. 

The library gets another 40 cards generated at the bottom of it once a search for a card reaches the end of the deck(fetch/draw) 

Exiled cards are just cards that don't go into the graveyard. It has nothing to do with the generated cards because it's not shuffling graveyards back into libraries. 

Formulator

So... is there any benefit at all in exiling the top card of your opponent's library? Like, what if there was a card that exiled the top 35 cards of a library? Is there any statistical difference?

Also, is it me or is there a much larger divide between the Mythics and Masterpieces in this set when it comes to quality? It seems like all the Masterpieces are staple cards whereas the Mythics are really niche and gimmicky. Kinda the opposite of the last set.

toastie

Formulator said:

So... is there any benefit at all in exiling the top card of your opponent's library? Like, what if there was a card that exiled the top 35 cards of a library? Is there any statistical difference?

Technically? Yes.

Will affect your win rate? Almost certainly not.

Will you ever notice it? No.

Gaitreli

I think the benefit of exile, in the rare cases it may apply, is that it may not trigger death effects. Which in some cases could be nice. But that's just my conjecture until seeing it actually play out. 

James13

It would certainly provide an advantage versus scrapheap scrounger/embalm heavy decks by preventing those from ever seeing the graveyard/play.  Your odds of relevant exiled cards increase in that scenario.  Unfortunately, you'll never know what you exiled unless those stacks become viewable in the future.

Something with an "exile opponent's graveyard" effect would be nice in the future for that same reason.

Brigby

@Gaitreli

That is correct. Exiling does not trigger death effects. In addition, Graveyard effects such as Embalm do not work if the card is exiled.