Because we are talking about Ice Age block era, here, from Inquest Magazine, is a Financial review for the just released Homelands set!
Oh man, this is amazing, especially thinking about what "MTG Finance" is like these days. "Thanks to Chronicles, who amongst us doesn't have at least one Elder Dragon Legend and a handful of other legends like Gabriel Angelfire or Dakkon Blackblade?"
Also, incredible seeing someone talk about how Ancestral Recall is going to start dropping from $45.
I still can't fathom that they went 7 months between releases
They were thinking about it like hobbyist-oriented board games, where you do maybe two releases in a year
if it's particularly successful. By the time they realized how much volume they needed to keep things running, they literally didn't have enough people to design them. Homelands is where they ran out of the stuff they had banked from all their design teams and just had to wait out on the stuff coming from their internal teams (Alliances and Mirage).
I really don't think anything that's ever happened in 20+ years of the game since has come nearly as close as this did to killing MTG completely.
Here's the problem I have with Emrakul ...... All of these people, pro tour level players have known about the card for weeks, it didn't take me past the first week of the SCG open with online testing to figure out to have a plan for an Emrakul, Stasis Snare, Clip Wings, Declaration in Stone.
I mean, I think you have to look at this type of situation and try to figure out, given the assumption that the pros
aren't all stupid, what the facts you see really imply. These days the big pro teams test really extensively, and they universally solve at least the first iteration of the metagame (i.e. what's good enough that it'll definitely make up a ton of the field.) If the Pantheon came into this event without running a lot of sideboard hate for Emrakul, you can feel certain that they have some reason for it -- either that sideboard hate isn't good enough against it, or it's not as good as hate against other decks that could use the same slots, or there's a better choice for targeting the decks Emrakul is actually run in, or whatever.
BREAKING: Randy Buehler is retiring from coverage. This will be his last Pro Tour! He's going to be moving into a behind-the-scenes role. Less travel, no commentary.
What... does this mean? Like, he's not a WotC employee, so... what kind of role is he gonna have exactly?
