- Lurrus of the Dream Den +1 (1 to 2)
- Mind Twist -1 (2 to 1)
EXPLANATION:
The format is reasonably stable at the moment, and there have been few big events with intermingled communities, so we’re only making a small set of changes for this release. In addition to this, the last points update was one of the larger ones we’ve done for some time. On top of these factors, if we’re bringing on a new committee member in the near future, it felt like we should involve them in any big pointing decisions.
That left us with two changes we wanted to make:
Lurrus of the Dream Den +1 (1 to 2)
Lurrus is a powerful card that has a powerful effect on the game. Whilst decks have to take some time out to pull Lurrus out of the companion zone, it provides a lot of card advantage and inevitability – particularly in concert with some already hard to interact with combo pieces.
Additionally, Lurrus squeezes a lot of fun and exciting cards out of the format by encouraging people to only play 1 and 2 drop cards. Granted, it might be that playing those cheaper cards is correct anyway, but we feel that by putting Lurrus to 2 we’re giving people more incentive to play the occasionally fun and exciting midrange card.
Mind Twist -1 (2 to 1)
Mind twist is a pretty powerful card, and some of you might be feeling a sense of deja vu as we travel back down the road of putting it to 1 point.
Several years back, Mind Twist was one of the key cards that let the Kess Control decks dominate the format, offering -at 1 point – a powerful way to ignore whatever plans the opponent thought they were putting together.
However, the format is a decent amount faster than it was then, and we think that while mind twist is still very powerful, it’s unlikely to cause a resurgence of a Kess-style control deck, and – if it did – it wouldn’t be the worst outcome we can imagine for the format if some slower more controlling decks were brought to the fore.
WATCHLIST UPDATE:
Uro (potentially +1)
Uro is a powerful, hard to deal with threat that makes life very difficult for any deck that plans to gain incremental advantage to win the game.
Flash/Protean Hulk(one of them -1 to 1 point potentially)
Flash/Hulk is a powerful combo, but it is currently overshadowed by other combo decks, and might be worth taking a point off. There are a number of reasons why we didn’t at this stage, and a key one is that if we choose to move to some version of “no reserve list bonus point” for accessibility reasons, Flash/Oracle decks are something we’d need to factor in as a risk.
At this stage we would likely depoint Hulk if depointing one or the other, but no firm decision has been made.
True-Name Nemesis (-1 to 1 point potentially)
TNN is a card that is brought up regularly by the community as needing some attention. We didn’t decide to remove a point at this time, but we’re committing to giving the subject further attention in the near future.
