I'm curious as to why you've put Nulldrifter here? It's not an artifact so doesn't help with Affinity and doesn't trigger Simulacrum Synthesizer. Added to this, I don't see any realistic way for you to actually be able to cast this... it feels like a dead card in this deck?

Also surprised to not see Frogmite here - that card is easily one of the powerhouses in the current Simulacrum Synthesizer builds.

Finally, your land count looks super low (Affinity typically runs 19-20ish lands), and is missing a density of lands which are artifacts (i.e Tanglepool Bridge), which is probably going to make it harder to cast your Affinity spells.

DemonDragonJ Wotc literally has teams of people responsible for market research, for gathering player feedback, for analysing the health of formats, for working out what players like and dislike. Heck, one of the lead people in the company has his own blog where he answers mostly-inane questions on repeat, and gets constant feedback about sets.

The designers certainly and assuredly know what most players like and dislike. They generally do a decent job of translating that into a working game.

The fact they don’t act on every poorly-thought-out whim doesn’t mean they’re not listening to the community.

(also, they definitely mess things up, we’ve seen from past messes like Magic-30 that there’s room for improvement on the sales-side of the spectrum)

DemonDragonJ to answer “edicts being the weakest form of removal”, it’s because the opponent is getting to choose what is being removed. There is a very good reason why targeted removal is overwhelmingly seen more in competitive play - because making your opponent sacrifice their most-useless creature is often just not useful enough.

On the sentence of “we, the players, know what is best for the game”, I could not disagree more. People are notoriously bad at properly evaluating what is best for them - not only in the hobby sense, but also in life (we can see this from the overwhelming amount of self-inflicted health-conditions, gambling addictions, obesity rates, etc etc throughout the world). People like to think they know what’s best, but are generally terrible at actually evaluating the implications if what they want.

I would 1,000,000% prefer Mtg to be managed by a company that has a clear direction on what the game should be and what they want out-of it, rather than its playerbase, which has a notoriously dubious grasp on the colour-pie, game-theory, the actual rules of the game, and game-balancing.

If you look at a random selection of fan-made cards online, it’d be pretty easy to assume that 90% of the playerbase don’t even know how Magic works as a game.

Some thoughts:

• Evolving Wilds is a really bad card - i’d recommend Prismatic Vista instead.

• you need more crabs to make this plan more reliable. Where’s the playset of Ruin Crab?

• I wouldn’t bother with Primordial Hydra, it detracts from the mill plan. Your deck’s never winning through damage.

• Memory's Journey serves no purpose and i’m not sure why it’s here.

• Jace, the Perfected Mind is miles better than Jace, Memory Adept

• Ghost Quarter isn’t great in mill because it doesn’t force your opponent to search, which means they can avoid being hit by Archive Trap. You want to be running Field of Ruin (field has the added bonus of letting you trigger your crabs again).

DemonDragonJ yeah I think you know all-too well by now that I consider that a “feature” and not an “issue” ;)

Just looking at the updates, some further thoughts:

• firstly, on Unbound Flourishing, it’s only going to double the value of X for Genesis Hydra, as that is a ”permanent spell”. For Genesis Wave it’s only going to copy that spell, but leave the value of X unchanged (because its a sorcery, not a permanent-spell), which is severely more underwhelming.

• I would suggest either going down the route of your genesis cards OR the Tooth and Nail strategy - but not both, as this just makes it harder to enact your plan. Specifically the genesis spells play poorly with the eldrazi titans because you miss-out on all those cast triggers (the genesis spells don’t cast the card you put into play), but also those Eldrazi titans have very high mana costs - needing 12-13 mana is a very tall ask.

• Whichever path you go down, I think you need to aim to speed your deck up. Turn 6 is too slow. You want to be representing a winning boardstate by turn 4-5 at the very latest. If you go down the Tooth&Nail path, this deck here is one a friend has played a lot and done very well with. He hasn’t updated the list on this site so it’s a bit out of date, but should give you an idea of the build, it can win as early as turn 3. If you’re sticking to the Genesis build then I suggest lowering your mana curve a bunch so that you can get out a decently-powerful threat asap… you probably don’t want any card costing more than 8 mana and you want to ensure you can reliably put one of these cards onto the board by turn 3-4.

Added a comment on the decklist

So, some thoughts:

• you’re at 62 cards, which is 2 more than you should have - i’d just ditch the two Nylea's Disciple as they’re doing absolutely nothing for you.

• Raking Canopy should never be in the mainboard of a deck as it’ll just be useless far too often. It would be dubious even in a sideboard. Nissa, Genesis Mage is too much mana for too little profit also. I would swap both for two copies of Garruk Wildspeaker, which offers you quicker ramp and some plan-b options.

• you only have 3 cards to hit off your genesis effects, which is faar too low a ratio to ever be reliable. Added to that, your description mentions Spawnsire but that card’s not in the deck.

• Unbound Flourishing doesn’t seem very good here. It would be better served as more payoff cards from your genesis effects.

Two things that might help people better evaluate this:

1) what format is this for? I assume Modern??

2) make this as a deck on the site and put the link to it here. It’s a bit hard reading the list as a wall-of-text.

Just from looking at what’s there at the moment, a bunch of cards don’t seem very good/helpful - namely Nylea's Disciple (doesn’t advance your boardstate therefore doesn’t do anything), Nissa, Genesis Mage (and excessively high mana cost and basically only provides even more mana), Gelatinous Genesis (there’s just better things to be doing than this).

I’m worried you’re investing a lot of energy to maybe be cheating out some kindof-ok (but a bit meh) creatures, when you could instead just be Tooth and Nailing out an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and Xenagos, God of Revels to win the game on the spot.

Just following on from what Niko9 posted, I get that having more free spells in what is supposed to be a casual format would be a problem. The large deck-size and singleton rule means players can easily run one-of-each copy, and in a format where you have 3 opponents that will certainly make it a lot harder to assess the boardstate.

However, my commentary above was based on Modern… I couldn’t care less about edh (as many people will already know), so i’m not as worried with that formats direction (any format Wotc actively pays attention to inevitably gets warped into a mess imo, and there’s numerous larger issues with Wotc focusing on edh than just the free-spells).

From a 1-v-1 60-card format perspective, these so far feel pretty safe. There’s a limit on the density of free spells you can realistically put into a deck (for example, Merfolk likely remove Force to fit blue-Flare into it) - and generally the number of lines a deck could play are predictable (provided you know the meta), so it’s a lot easier to grasp the current state-of-play, and what an opponent is likely representing even when tapped out.

The bigger global issue with free spells is Wotcs recent push towards having lots of efficient card draw. In the past free spells were kept in-check by card drawing generally costing a premium, and so forcing card-disadvantage to use them. With cards like The One Ring concepts like card-disadvantage can quickly cease to be an issue - powering up free spells immeasurably. HOWEVER, unlike the previous iterations of MH free spells, these still require you pay something (i.e cast a creature), so they’re a bit less-free, and less abusable than other cycles, imo.

You’ve got conflicting statements here - if the Flares could sacrifice tokens they would most certainly be too strong. Questioning the strength of these cards while simultaneously wanting them stronger doesn’t make a lot of strength.

I personally want to see these cards being played before passing judgement. I like that they require deckbuilding which is more creature-inclusive, and because a creature has had to be sacrificed, you’ve likely still paid some form of mana cost at some point in this lifecycle. But time will tell how much impact they have. My first impression is that they’re weaker than the MH2 cycle (or, at least less-abusable).

Yes you would be able to, as Encroaching Mycosynth makes them artifacts, and Dance of the Manse allows you to return artifacts.

303.4f If an Aura is entering the battlefield under a player’s control by any means other than by resolving as an Aura spell, and the effect putting it onto the battlefield doesn’t specify the object or player the Aura will enchant, that player chooses what it will enchant as the Aura enters the battlefield. The player must choose a legal object or player according to the Aura’s enchant ability and any other applicable effects.

If there’s nothing legal for those auras to enchant, they’s remain in the grave. I believe is us true even if Dance of the Manse would have them additionally be creatures.

Actually - just never let the aura also be a creature, or you’ll kill it:

An Aura that's also a creature can't enchant anything. If this occurs somehow, the Aura becomes unattached, then is put into its owner's graveyard. (These are state-based actions. See rule 704.)

indieinside they will spoil all the cards before release, normally completing spoilers about a week or two before official release.

I don’t believe Wotc ever formally release a compiled list/document of all the cards in the set - but as they will all be spoiled, sites like MagicSpoiler and MythicSpoiler will display all cards in the set.

It’s super common for the internet to do “number crunches” as sets are spoiled also, which will inevitably end up with a completed list of all cards in the set - if I see one if these during spoiler season, i’ll endeavour to post a link up here (assuming I remember).

The Black Gate

Gond Gate

Most gates have a replacement effect on themselves that says they enter the battlefield tapped. On those Gates, you can choose to have them enter the battlefield tapped or untapped, by ordering replacement effects.

In the case of The Black Gate, you can have it enter untapped even if you don't pay the 3 life. You may also pay that 3 life if you still want to (for example, if you're trying to grow a Death's Shadow)

I think you need to work on some things:

• Posting a coherent sentence. Your above commentary reads more like a disjointed stream-of-consciousness than anything actually readable.

• Learning to interact civilly on the internet. I came here only to offer some (very legitimate) pointers. Your responses are absurdly combative - and completely unnecessarily so. Even if you disagree with suggestions someone is offering, there’s a way to do so without being an ass.

• Being able to think critically. Your responses indicate someone who’s put their “head in the sand” and wants to defend their case to the death without being able to properly and reasonably justify their position.

• Learn to learn. As said before, your position appears to be to chuck your “head in the sand” to any and all feedback. Thats not only going to lead to your deckbuilding skills stagnating, it’s also going to cause problems throughout life. Being ok with being wrong about things is a big step towards actually being able to grow as a person - ignoring that sets you up for repeating the same failures ad-infinitum.

Anyway, I can see there’s no point me trying to do any conversing here, as it’s entirely unproductive. So good luck with whatever mess you’ve brewed, and peace.

Correct there are still multiple instances and Odric will bestow Hexproof as you describe.