Aeroplane said: Blue definitely has the best range and power cards in the game right now. Tag them with the 2 Bolas or Tef, it becomes illogical not to use blue if you can. Red seems to be hurting right now even though it can tap into stv, Black has good exile and kill spells, Plains seems to be balanced, and Green still has its ramp. However, they just don't compare to blue as it covers all the bases and more than any other color. BSZ is pretty broken. Omni just took a back seat to this card.
Mburn7 said:One thing I'll say is that Green really doesn't have much ramp anymore. There are just 2 spells that convert gems to green in standard, and neither of them is fantastic (although Thunderherd isn't bad for a common)
dovvyb said: jimpark said: All i can say for certain is before when you couldn't use bounce until their hand was reduced to 5 or less.... it was terrible. I wouldn't say terrible! Harbinger, Galestrike, Unsummon, Consign, Winds of Rebuke... these are all very good cards, even now!
jimpark said: All i can say for certain is before when you couldn't use bounce until their hand was reduced to 5 or less.... it was terrible.
jimpark said: Going to try not to write a novel.
Wyrven said: If bounce worked to bounce a single creature (without reinforcements) or perhaps a reinforcement only if reinforced, still requiring an open slot in hand?
Mburn7 said: The change to bounce and steal do destroy if there isn't any room in hand/on board has always bothered me, since it makes powerful abilities even more so (especially the bounce, since those are usually very cheap to cast).The problem is those abilities have been confirmed by the devs several times to be working as planned, and we can't seem to come to a consensus as to if it is in fact a problem or not.
Blue just has very few weaknesses. The reason for this is because PQ is a poor translation of the paper game (which one might argue was inevitable). There are too many strategic layers that are missing from the game.
Blue has card draw, removal, mana denial and acceleration. The only thing it generally lacks are strong creatures (clearly there are some exceptions), but because we have a limit on the number of creatures in play, this weakness is minimized. Only having three creatures in play at a time also means that it's easier for blue to control the tempo. Without a "go wide" strategy, it's much harder to overwhelm blue or force it to make choices.
Relatedly, because of the ability to both generate and store mana in large quantities, it's harder to attack blue by trying to overwhelm it with cost-efficient threats. That's what makes cards like Vault so powerful. Once blue gets a Vault online, which is not hard, it's very difficult to lose because you can no longer overwhelm them. They'll just counter every threat you have, and draw the cards back, and fill them with full mana, all while you're taking 3 turns to cast a creature that will immediately be neutered.
Blue isn't supposed to destroy things. It's supposed to control or copy or morph or weaken them. "Destroy" isn't even one of its primary, secondary, or tertiary slices of the color pie, which you can see in this 2017 article by Mark Rosewater:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/mechanical-color-pie-2017-2017-06-05
Yet it does--and by making bounce and control ALSO kill, it removes one of blue's only weaknesses. Cards like Harbinger are weaker than Academy Journeymage, but they were far more balanced.
Blue's other weakness (besides having a lot of uninspiring creatures) is dealing with supports, but that only really affects a handful of planeswalkers that aren't really played. Kiora, Bolas, Saheeli? They don't care that blue can't deal with supports, because their other halves can.
All the other colors have glaring weaknesses, but blue compensates for all of them. Blue lets green draw its creatures and control the board without NEEDING creatures to do so. Blue lets white draw and generate obscene mana and give it less conditional removal options. Blue lets red actually affect things permanently (control or kill) when normally red sees something with 8 toughness and says, "tinykitty." Only blue-black retains the combined weakness, and that indeed is T2's biggest flaw.
dovvyb said:In paper mtg, multicolored cards are generally better than monocolored, because you have to pay ALL of the different colors of mana.In MTGPQ, you can play ANY of the colors of mana, and so card effects should be *worse* than their monocolored counterparts.