Had an interesting past 24 hours. Sprained my ankle at indoor soccer (we have a magic player's team: Myself, Dan, Neeman, Isaac, Paddy and others). So I've been scooting around the house on Dan's computer chair. Sucks that I can't walk but I also couldn't go to work so it's been refreshing. Also! recently on my trip to the Auckland GP I got fined $400NZ by NZcustoms for not declaring a couple apples in my bag which I'd forgotten about...but today they emailed me to tell me they revoked the fine, which was pretty nice :)
Anyway, this is a highlander blog so let's get on topic:
The most interesting (and my favourite) points change to happen in a while is the pointing of Karakas. The card is not particularly powerful or annoying to play against so it wasn't pointed for traditional reasons. It was pointed because it singlehandedly made about 50 good highlander cards close to unplayable.
Karakas will still see a little but of play as a 7th point throw in card but it'll go from being in 70% of decks to about 5% of decks. A quirk of this is that targetable legends will now start getting played and so Karakas will ACTUALLY get to bounce more legends than it did before!
I went through Gatherer and compiled a list of Legends which I can imagine myself playing thanks to Karakas being pointed: (I didn't bother to get the 'hover links' going, I do like them though)
There's a lot of writing material in that list!....hmmm will people stop reading if I go through every one of the legends?....I kind of want to....a bit unnecessary though. The main idea of this blog entry is to make people aware of all these sweet legends that they may have forgotten about or haven't seen before. If you don't know some of these cards, it's worth looking them up just so you can keep them in the back of your mind.
Maaannnnn that's a sweet list.
Putting a point on karakas was like wizards printing a whole new set.
Midrange gets some help with this points change. Midrange has a really tough time in highlander due to U decks having access to good counters. I'm grateful that Highlander is not a midrange f**kfest like every standard format in the last few years, but midrange is very under-represented in highlander.
I've already chucked Jeska into monored. I'll give you some feedback on how that goes in my mono-red blog post that I intend to do (I realise in my last post I mentioned that this post would be the mono-red post).
Pointing Karakas made reanimator a little better. Isaac had a red hot go at building reanimator a little while ago, the deck was really good but he ended up playing Kurgan instead (the deck that got karakas pointed, hehe).
Pointing Karakas makes survival of the fittest better! that card's been needing some love. The most powerful thing you can do with Survival is tutor for iona/griselbrand/emrakul, discard it to tutor for loyal retainers and reanimate your bomb....which used to get bounced by karakas.....
Pointing Karakas makes channel better! no longer will emrakul get bounced by karakas.
So many tier 3 decks got better :)
- format slightly more balanced
- more diversity in cards = more fun
- points change making a difference
- +'s everywhere!
If you remember anyone saying "why did karakas get a point?" or "karakas doesn't deserve a point", please direct them towards this blog post.
Anyway, I'm frickin hungry and need to stretch as I've pretty much been sitting on my arse all day due to sprained ankle (except for the few hours where Neems was an awesome pal and took me to chemist to get crutches and then to the doctor to get med certificate for my sneaky sick day...Neems waited an hour with me at the doctor's, what a guy. He studied and I watched Macgyver lol) {was going to say I went to the GP to get a med certificate but in context you guys would've been "wtf, the GP was a couple weeks ago?"}
Ok the foods, catchyas
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