Thoughts on Armageddon if it were printed in standard.
Standard forum
Posted on Nov. 8, 2013, 10:01 p.m. by WovenNebula
What are your opinions if and only if Armageddon was printed in Theros block???
Mine are:
It would help slow down the format.
It would take out most of the three color decks in standard.
It would give white weenies more power.
Those are just a few of my thoughts. I have been playing MTG for over 15 years if not more. I personally think three color decks are played out in standard besides the recent surge in mono decks, and I would like to see more dual and mono decks being successful a lot more frequently, More like nostalgia to me that I crave. Give more oomph to mono white and green since the other colors have been proving themselves recently in standard. Again this is theoretical and speculative.
gnarlicide says... #4
See, we are almost the same. My favorite thing back in the day was Skull of Orm
, Copy Artifact
and Jester's Cap
. That's why I didn't have many friends. Lol.
November 8, 2013 10:16 p.m.
GoldGhost012 says... #5
Armegeddon seems a little too extreme for an exact reprint. Maybe a functional one with a mana cost of 4WW.
November 8, 2013 10:16 p.m.
WovenNebula says... #6
I did love Jester's Cap , Cursed Scroll , and Hammer of Bogardan
November 8, 2013 10:28 p.m.
WovenNebula says... #7
I don't think it's too extreme. Maybe similar to supreme verdict in cmc but red and white maybe but still could be countered.
November 8, 2013 10:30 p.m.
gnarlicide says... #8
GoldGhost012, too extreme? We played magic hard back in the day, son. Shit got so real, they banned uncommons in standard!!! Damn, I remember playing for ante. If you lost, you lost a sweet card from your collection. Also, standard tournaments were double elimination. I didn't know about Swiss rounds until after Stronghold came out.
November 8, 2013 10:33 p.m.
GoldGhost012 says... #9
Well, maybe not too extreme for players back in the day, but for me, with only a couple years under my belt? Pretty extreme. I mean, the most extreme cards I've played with are from Theros and their strange enchantment creatures.
November 8, 2013 10:39 p.m.
WovenNebula says... #10
gnarlicide creatures were mostly useless except in goblin decks and a few others but spells were dreamy back in those days.
November 8, 2013 10:41 p.m.
BlastercoolWeird says... #11
I don't feel Armageddon is a good thing to bring back, for a few reasons.
First and foremost is that I just really dislike the idea of good land destruction. Armageddon doesn't actually slow aggro down that much. I could totally see playing it in Boros aggro because a good Boros deck can survive off of two or three lands whereas a control or midrange deck probably couldn't.
second, I feel that the format is slowing down. When RTR block cycles out a ton of the hyper-aggressive cards being built around now will be gone: Burning-Tree, Ash Zealot, Rakdos Cackler, Boros Elite, Boros Reckoner, Desecration Demon and Ghor-Clan Rampager will all be leaving. I don't think the Theros aggro decks be anywhere near as brutal what with the push towards slowly building up heroes and monsters and legions of devotion.
third, on that topic of devotion, I don't think tri-colored deck are THAT big right now. Outside of the control decks, which are primarily tri-colored out of necessity, I've generally been seeing monocolored devotion decks and dual-color strategies in most of my player community. People seem to have really taken to devotion as a mechanic.
so yeah I don't think Armageddon is necessary.
November 8, 2013 10:52 p.m.
WovenNebula says... #12
I would really like to see a good ol fashioned control blue deck but in this environment blue wouldn't be able to keep up. With RTR rotation armageddon would be more viable to reprint, maybe in next block. I do like a lot of your points.
November 8, 2013 10:56 p.m.
Standard still has Burning Earth in the meantime for tri-color hate. But the truth is that yes, in one way pre-modern control and land destruction were fun...for the player using them.
I strongly believe that the current direction WotC is taking is more of the "Employ a solid strategy. Build it well. Get lucky here and there. Win." route. Cards like Armageddon make things look more like "Do this before your opponent does. Win."
Which is why cards of this sort haven't been reprinted. I think WotC wanted its current players to think they have a reasonable chance to win or come back given an unfavorable board state, without a single, easily playable card destroying their resources to make said comeback. Though some cards/combos can accomplish nearly the same task. At least for what it costs, an effective reprint is too powerful for Standard.
November 8, 2013 11:31 p.m.
vampirelazarus says... #14
Also, consider the impact on modern. Once reprinted in standard, its in modern, although I'm not too familiar with modern, so maybe it won't make much impact...
November 8, 2013 11:37 p.m.
GoldGhost012 says... #15
Pretty sure it would be pretty powerful in Modern. Just a hunch.
November 8, 2013 11:45 p.m.
gnarlicide says... #16
Modern is too quick of a format for Armageddon. Unless you ramp it, by the time you get to use it, you're getting steamrolled anyways. And if you do ramp it, the only person getting hurt by it is you.
The above statement is true, creatures didn't matter back in the day. Unless it was Cyclopean Mummy . They banned the shit out of it for four years by my count, then you could only have 1 in a deck after that.
November 9, 2013 12:06 a.m.
gnarlicide says... #17
There was some twisted ass combo with that card that guaranteed an infinite board prescience.
November 9, 2013 12:08 a.m.
Armageddon would be amazing in Modern. Turn two Liliana of the Veil off of Deathrite Shaman into turn three Armageddon ? Combo and control can't do anything and now they're stuck dealing with a planeswalker and creature that can tap for any color of mana for the next five or six turns.
As for Standard, midrange probably would play it. It's good in decks like White Weenie when you can play a bunch of low-drops then starve your opponent off of mana to Wrath of God . But, it's even better when you can play something that is hard to kill, like Obzedat, Ghost Council or Stormbreath Dragon , then Armageddon to put your opponent into top deck mode.
Like emrakool said, it would just come down to who could resolve their Armageddon first.
November 9, 2013 6:18 a.m.
detentionsphere says... #19
Armageddon in Standard would be waaay overpowered. In the Magic TV "Top 8 cards we want to see in Modern" from about a year ago, Armageddon was on the list, and LSV commented that it might be too powerful even for Modern - so if it's considered possible to good for Modern, then it would definitely be WAY too good for standard, especially with no efficient counterspells.
The simple fact is, getting ahead on board in Standard is really easy right now with the high amount of powerful 1, 2, and 3 drops, and a for a control or midrange deck, dealing with the creatures AND playing around a T4 Armageddon would be too much. I could see all-in red decks with Burning-Tree Emissary splashing just for Armageddon .
And to the OP, it would not slow down the format - it would do the opposite, pushing any non-aggro deck out of the realm of playability.
Armageddon would probably break Standard, in a bad way.
November 10, 2013 12:29 a.m.
WovenNebula says... #20
Your right where it may aid aggrieved but only weenie aggro, for control it would end the three color control decks. When armageddon was standard legal control was mono or even splashes of another color, though spells in General had more of a kick and most creatures were underpowered. Now the opposite is happening, when thoughtseize was announced everyone thought the same thing about the power level, armageddon is a 4 dollar rare that in the day was used decks that were tailored around it. We just need better land destruction personally, maybe a world eater creature with ability to target lands rather than creatures. Everything has a lower cmc these days. The standard formats ten years ago were much slower than today and every few years did we ever get a few lands worth talking about. Not this plethora of a mana pool that is now and was before theros. Decks types out of question aggro or control but in aspect to the mana pool we have, we need better land destruction . Just my thoughts though.
November 10, 2013 3:58 a.m.
megawurmple says... #21
Yeah, I reckon Wizards could reprint Armageddon ... If they wanted to destroy fun forever. Armageddon is possibly one of the most degenerative cards in existence. And it's really overpowered; most spells that destroy 1 land nowadays cost 4 or 5 mana. You can't destroy everything for the same cost as destroying 1 thing. It just doesn't work like that. I would be really really unhappy if Armageddon ever gets reprinted.
November 10, 2013 6:55 a.m.
Today's magic has such an emphasis on winning through creatures, I would be happy to see a reprint of Armageddon . You can have Land Tax and Zuran Orb . Heck take Balance too. Azorius control FTW, baby. BUT... if you're going to do that, you need to give something to everyone, i.e. a way to give a power card to each color. So what do the other colors get? Let's give green Drop of Honey . Let's give blue Counterspell back or do we need to go even further, maybe Force of Will and Control Magic ? or let's go crazy and give blue direct damage with Psionic Blast or something broken like Show and Tell ? What to give black? How about the original overpowered land destruction Sinkhole or reprint the best discard: Hymn to Tourach and Mind Twist . Hmmm mono-black devotion, how fast can Mind Twist destroy a hand? Or give them Drain Life , that (X) with mono-black devotion would be fun. What does red get? It would seem unfair to give them something as marginal as Stone Rain or Pillage , how about some good old fashioned (X) direct damage so that mono-red devotion can get that alpha strike out by T3-4: how about Earthquake ? That would go great with Boros Reckoner in standard. Or if we want to say screw you blue, let's go Banefire . Now you're dead T4 and you can't stop it. Of course, if there's going to be land hate and discard back in the mix, we have to bring back my old friends Black Vise and The Rack . Now G/W ramp to recurring Armageddon through Codex Shredder is a real possibility, and you get to laugh while your opponent get's squeezed by the vise.
On one hand I'm sure you can see that I'm being a little sarcastic. But on the other hand, I played back in the day when all of this was around, plus the power 9. If I could play in a world where all of the older players had the power 9 and I was buying packs of Fallen Empires and Homelands to play against them, today's players can afford to feel the pain one experiences at a little Armageddon . It's only overpowered if one side gets the card and the other colors don't. As long as the overpowered nature of cards are balanced between the colors, that's great. I'm fine with shaking things up and having the game get away from creature centric win-conditions. But give all sides what they want. Put them all in M15 and see how it goes over a year. It will certainly shake things up, be chaotic, and lead to some interesting game play.
November 13, 2013 11:14 a.m.
vonbittner says... #23
I can't even imagine what R&D was like back in the day. They had no idea what kind of beast they had back in the 90's. No wonder so many of those cards have been shunned.
November 13, 2013 12:37 p.m.
Honestly, it was fun. And often you didn't win through creatures. I preferred prison decks (turbo stasis into vice), discard/control (B/U, hymns/H. specter/control/counter), big blue/ramp/control, and white weenies with some prison elements (meekstone/kismet/winter orb). Not that these should all come back, but shaking things up isn't a bad thing. How quickly did Standard settle into the archetypes after Theros dropped? Less then a month and the meta is already settled? Maybe the answer is to not publish all of the top deck-lists and have no video or analysis of formats or recordings of tournaments. I know, impossible.
November 13, 2013 12:56 p.m.
hiddengibbons says... #25
It'd get Thoughtseize d before you could do anything with it. There needs to be a zero costing card that can't be discarded, countered, destroyed, exiled, targeted, and instant speed that says "The card Thoughtseize can't be played"
November 13, 2013 1:26 p.m.
Rhadamanthus says... #26
The biggest problem with Armageddon ever being legal again for Standard or Modern is that creatures are so much better than they used to be. Consider a basic "Erhnamgeddon"-esque shell from the old days, but replace Erhnam Djinn with a creature on the power level of Thrun, the Last Troll , Geist of Saint Traft , or heck even Benthic Giant . Holy crap.
November 13, 2013 2:14 p.m.
HarbingerJK says... #27
like gnarlicide I would commit violent crimes, I absolutely loathe land destruction, it just feels like the cheapest, most low-balling sort of control
November 13, 2013 5:17 p.m.
Land destruction used to be more of a thing then mill.
November 13, 2013 7:36 p.m.
detentionsphere says... #29
@WovenNebula: First of all, not only white weenie would play it, as we have a set of 8 good duals right now, so any aggro deck would be able to easily splash it.
And secondly, I fail to see why it would punish 3 color control more than it would punish 1 or 2 color control? Something like Ruination would do that, but Armageddon hurts them all equally. Armageddon , as I've stated before, would ruin the format by pushing slow decks into unplayability. Can't have a counterspell up on turn 4 AND be surviving against an onslaught of Firedrinker Satyr s and Ash Zealot s at the same time? Oops, your deck's unplayable.
gnarlicide says... #2
I would commit violent crimes if that was ever reprinted. I have bad memories.
November 8, 2013 10:05 p.m.