I had a Force of Virtue in a white / black changeling deck and it was disgusting, though a large part of that was due to the fact that people don't know how to play with and against alternative casting cost free spells. (For now?)
Speaking of, there is no feeling on Earth like slamming a Nimble Mongoose against an unsuspecting opponent who has no experience playing with and against shroud. The goose is loose again, brehs.
All those games with Canadian Threshold weren't lost like tears in the rain after all.
Anyway, so far Modern Horizons is making me feel like a limited god when I am not that in any way whatsoever (as my tribulations with War of the Spark will attest to). I cruised to perhaps the easiest 3-0, 6-1 ever with this deck, for example:
spoiler (click to show/hide)
1. I think this might be the first set in a long time where Regrowth is a legitimately good limited card instead of playable filler. I had a disgusting sequence of play with the deck in the spoiler tag where I went Trumpeting Herd, rebound, cast Regrowth targeting Trumpeting Herd, then recast Trumpeting Herd and all my opponent could do was kill one token.
2. While the archetypes aren't exactly alien, like Ultimate Masters they feel different enough that you don't really notice their similarities to archetypes in prior sets. Even when I played white / blue flicker I didn't think about all the flicker nonsense I did in Masters 25 drafts.
3. I guess technically this is a love letter to Time Spiral block but it doesn't feel that way to me outside of the slivers. And the slivers are sandwiched into a contemporary 2 color draft archetype that's... white and red? Virulent Sliver didn't
die for our sins to be brought to this.
4. Blue / red feels like a trap. Cantrips are often a trap in masters sets anyway (especially for more sheltered players that don't have a lot of experience playing with the most powerful ones) but it's an archetype built around them and it's not one like the blue / green Lorescale Coatl deck in Masters 25 which was essentially Miracle-Gro but filtered through contemporary design sensibilities. (That was one of my favorite limited archetypes in a long time, btw.) Blue / red is often a trap too but after War of the Spark limited I thought we were maybe through with that.
5. Black / green feels a little too packed with good stuff but this is going to be a chronic problem as long as the game is (1) creature focused and (2) Mark's warped notion of removal vis-a-vis the color pie is the dominant design ideology.
ANYWAY, great limited set. Hope the draft crew at my local shop is willing to draft it instead of War of the Spark until Core Set 2020 drops.
