Damn, this makes me pretty sad. Firebat has without a doubt been my favorite HS personality ever since I started playing back during GvG. Hopefully he'll still be doing his own thing in the background like he has been since I religiously watch his content pretty much. Whatever he chooses though, hope he's able to do well with it.
It's less about combining other commander decks and more about swapping cards out for ones that would perform better with what you are trying to do. For example, in the precon I had, it had cards that would not be great in the deck, such as Desolation Twin in it, which would be generally fairly bad. Because of that, I took out that card and added in Martyr's Cause as it would be significantly better. In Commander, the only main rules of deck building are that you cannot have cards outside of your commanders colors, so I cant run a Blue Green deck and have Red cards in it, your deck has to be a singleton deck, and it cannot include cards from the banlist listed here. Anything else is fair game unless your playgroup wants to restrict something else for being unfun.
As for commander decks to pick from, this year has been sort of strange in regards to how they have been selling the commander decks. The last several years they have sold the commander products on their own as a set of 4-5 decks. This year, they've decided to use "themed commander" decks, so theres been two from the most recent set of Zendikar Rising and 4 from Ikoria: L:air of Behemoths. Instead of just buying the ones from Zendikar Rising, I'd probably take a look at all 6 of those since all of them should still be on the cheaper side of precons (some of the older decks have gotten very pricy). All of the decklists are also publicized online, so I'd recommend finding one that seems to do something that your interested in.
Oh and something else. If none of the precons interest you, you can usually build a decent deck for 40-50 dollars, not including lands which you can usually get for free at an LGS. A great website for just finding other commanders to build is EDHrec under their commanders dropdown.
When it comes to expanding your decks, it's totally dependent on what you go with. Challenger decks were for Standard, although they have since mostly rotated out or been banned. This is to say if you do buy them, you'll most likely just be playing kitchen table magic, which basically just means you can do whatever you want, hence why you might want to set up some rules for you and your playgroup to make sure nobody exceeds a certain budget or plays an unfair deck.
As for commander decks, this once again boils down to what you want to do. Both Kitchen Table and Commander are very diverse formats, to the point where tonight I played a game where I let people cheat on casting mana and sped up the game by about 15 minutes from doing so. The next match I ended up dragging the game by 30 minutes by denying people resources and it would have gone on longer if my opponents did not decide to concede. It really boils down to finding something that you enjoy and making it work. The commander precons all provide a great out-of-box experience and for even just 10-15 dollars, you can make them much stronger or for a specific niche. For example, about a year ago I picked up the precon staring [Hearthstone Card (Ghired, Conclave Exile) Not Found], who is all about flooding the board with tokens and beating them down with it and for about 20 dollars, I was able to swap it up to instead being a combo deck based around creating then destroying eggs to flip into different creatures with [Hearthstone Card (Atla Palani, Nest Tender) Not Found].
All that being said, I understand all that stuff might be daunting, so if you want some help picking out a deck or any further questions about how to get started, just let me know and I'll get around to it when I can.
The best ways to start off would be first to just pick a way you want to play. MTG has a ton of formats all with different power levels/budgets so finding the best ones before jumping in would probably be the best. If i were to recommend something, the planeswalker decks are a great way to start. Relatively low power level, but they are designed to be played against each other in a casual setting.
Aside from that the main format I'd recommend trying out if you have some money to spend would be Commander. instead of being 2 players, there's 4 and it's a completely different dynamic to the game more focused on politics and working together to shut down a certain person if they are about to win. For these I would suggest picking up one of the commander decks WotC has released recently. There are only a few that are really iffy and all have some cool shenanigans you can do with only a 10-20 dollar upgrade. Something else to note is that despite being designed for 4 players, it is still totally possible to play with 2 players.
If your worried about investing money into these, since buying two commander decks would be somewhat on the pricier side, you can always just pick up some random cards, put them in sleeves then print out pictures of the cards and play via proxies. It's a great way to try something out and figure if you like it or not before spending money on actually making it.
If there's any other questions you have, just let me know and I'll see what I can find.
While I'm personally heavily biased towards MTG, seeing as how I've played it for almost half my life now and write about it here on the site, I think your best option would be with finding a single player digital card game, as typically its hard to find communities to play some of the more niche card games. There's stuff like Slay the Spire and Monster Train, which I'd both rate fairly high. The other thing I would reccomend are "board game"-esque card games, where you just need to find another person to play with since all the cards come with the board, this would be stuff like Munchkin and Codename, though these types of games are for more than 2 people, so that might not be the best option.
If your dead set on finding another TCG besides MTG, I've heard generally good things about Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokemon, Cardfight, and Dragon Ball Super. Granted I never got to play a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Cardfight, and Dragon Ball Super so I'm not sure what the pro's and con's of each of them are, as well as the latter two being much smaller than the 'main three so it might be harder to fight a dedicated playgroup.
I wasn't sold on the game until the bottom of their website said "Game Fun". Absolutely sold now.
On a serious note, this game does look pretty fun. Reminds me of a mix between Advance Wars in terms of using the board and taking advantage of the landscape of the board combined with a card game, which are two of my favorite genres of games. This game will definitely go onto my watchlist, thanks for bringing it to my attention!
Yeah one of Arena's biggest flaws in my opinion is that the game has so many great formats that just never get played because they get sent to the be apart of some format rotation. MTGO does the same thing, but still keep matchmaking up for their less successful formats and I don't see why WotC doesn't do the same for Arena. It's like the same thing about them starting off with Wednesday Brawl, instead of keeping the queue up all week long.
Yeah they definitely announced all their stuff too early imo. Game development takes a long time, even with a preexisting IP like with what Second Dinner was doing and when they announced their first project, it was very much just saying "hey we got the approval for this" instead of any actual proof of concept.
Honestly given the Lithoform blight stuff, we might get a colorless version first. That being said if they don't continue the Omnath trend, and make him more colors, I'd be pretty upset, especially since WotC knows that people hate that type of stuff.
Jwari Shapeshifter wasn't supposed to be there, sorry about any confusion that caused.
As for New Tazri supporting allies, I feel like it's just WotC using it to support previous versions of her/previous Zendikar blocks for things like Commander.
You put them in replace of lands in deck building and it just gives you a ton more action. Any non-aggressive deck I can see wanting to run these because typically doing more things is better than doing fewer things. the only scenario where I can see these not being great is if the meta is fast enough where decks can't afford to bolt themselves with one of the mythic lands or just can't afford to have the land ETB tapped. Aggro decks definitely won't want to run them aside from the aforementioned bolt lands, but like any control or midrange deck is going to be running them for sure.
Wayward Guide-Beast is incredibly interesting. Always great to see cards that have a bunch of diverse applications without feeling like it'd be too oppressive/required to run in a deck.
Scourge of the Skyclaves is up there for my favorite cards this set solely because of its interaction with Nethroi. Nothing is more fun than reading "total 10 power" and then saying "haha nah I'm going to get 30 total power" in Commander.
Yeah all the Modal land spells are amazing, I'd be very surprised if they don't make a big impact on standard and other formats. Especially the bolt lands, which don't really have a downside for the most part.
Yeah this meta seems to be really polarizing for the most part. Personally I've been having a blast with it and I know a lot of others who have the same, but there's still a lot of games that go "oh well they had the nuts guess I die" which can feel pretty rough a lot of the time.
Over time card games evolve and change how they are played completely all the time, for better or for worse. Like a great example is with MTG's Modern format, where you have cards like Splinter Twin, which used to be a meta-defining card, being on the same banlist as a card like Hogaak, which for reference kills you on turn 3 like, 65%~ of the time. The format is still great to play and all, it's just different now than it was a couple years back and I don't think that is inherently bad.
As for going completely cold-turkey on the game, I'd totally recommend doing that. Playing a game that you don't find enjoyable is only going to make you become more jaded. Maybe next time a new expansion or nerfs come out, check out the meta and see if it's something you'd want to play again. Lord knows I've done that with this game numerous times. If the game never does recapture that feeling that made you fall in love with it originally, hopefully you can look back at the time spent fondly. All that said, hope to see you around still!
Yeah, Confounding Conundrum screams "We really don't want to ban Uro please hope this works to counter him". The card also can lead to a ton of fun things in eternal formats, stuff like Field of Ruin and Ghost Quarter are pretty dumb with it out.
While Uro is banned in standard, Brawl does not follow the same ban list, and so he is legal there. The cards currently banned in brawl are Drannith Magistrate, Sorcerous Spyglass, Winota, Joiner of Forces, Oko, Thief of Crowns, and Lutri, the Spellchaser. I can totally understand the confusion though, seeing as how Brawl is so closely tied to standard.
Wizards keeps an active banlist of every format here if you'd like to check it out for yourself.
Damn, this makes me pretty sad. Firebat has without a doubt been my favorite HS personality ever since I started playing back during GvG. Hopefully he'll still be doing his own thing in the background like he has been since I religiously watch his content pretty much. Whatever he chooses though, hope he's able to do well with it.
It's less about combining other commander decks and more about swapping cards out for ones that would perform better with what you are trying to do. For example, in the precon I had, it had cards that would not be great in the deck, such as Desolation Twin in it, which would be generally fairly bad. Because of that, I took out that card and added in Martyr's Cause as it would be significantly better. In Commander, the only main rules of deck building are that you cannot have cards outside of your commanders colors, so I cant run a Blue Green deck and have Red cards in it, your deck has to be a singleton deck, and it cannot include cards from the banlist listed here. Anything else is fair game unless your playgroup wants to restrict something else for being unfun.
As for commander decks to pick from, this year has been sort of strange in regards to how they have been selling the commander decks. The last several years they have sold the commander products on their own as a set of 4-5 decks. This year, they've decided to use "themed commander" decks, so theres been two from the most recent set of Zendikar Rising and 4 from Ikoria: L:air of Behemoths. Instead of just buying the ones from Zendikar Rising, I'd probably take a look at all 6 of those since all of them should still be on the cheaper side of precons (some of the older decks have gotten very pricy). All of the decklists are also publicized online, so I'd recommend finding one that seems to do something that your interested in.
Oh and something else. If none of the precons interest you, you can usually build a decent deck for 40-50 dollars, not including lands which you can usually get for free at an LGS. A great website for just finding other commanders to build is EDHrec under their commanders dropdown.
When it comes to expanding your decks, it's totally dependent on what you go with. Challenger decks were for Standard, although they have since mostly rotated out or been banned. This is to say if you do buy them, you'll most likely just be playing kitchen table magic, which basically just means you can do whatever you want, hence why you might want to set up some rules for you and your playgroup to make sure nobody exceeds a certain budget or plays an unfair deck.
As for commander decks, this once again boils down to what you want to do. Both Kitchen Table and Commander are very diverse formats, to the point where tonight I played a game where I let people cheat on casting mana and sped up the game by about 15 minutes from doing so. The next match I ended up dragging the game by 30 minutes by denying people resources and it would have gone on longer if my opponents did not decide to concede. It really boils down to finding something that you enjoy and making it work. The commander precons all provide a great out-of-box experience and for even just 10-15 dollars, you can make them much stronger or for a specific niche. For example, about a year ago I picked up the precon staring [Hearthstone Card (Ghired, Conclave Exile) Not Found], who is all about flooding the board with tokens and beating them down with it and for about 20 dollars, I was able to swap it up to instead being a combo deck based around creating then destroying eggs to flip into different creatures with [Hearthstone Card (Atla Palani, Nest Tender) Not Found].
All that being said, I understand all that stuff might be daunting, so if you want some help picking out a deck or any further questions about how to get started, just let me know and I'll get around to it when I can.
The best ways to start off would be first to just pick a way you want to play. MTG has a ton of formats all with different power levels/budgets so finding the best ones before jumping in would probably be the best. If i were to recommend something, the planeswalker decks are a great way to start. Relatively low power level, but they are designed to be played against each other in a casual setting.
Aside from that the main format I'd recommend trying out if you have some money to spend would be Commander. instead of being 2 players, there's 4 and it's a completely different dynamic to the game more focused on politics and working together to shut down a certain person if they are about to win. For these I would suggest picking up one of the commander decks WotC has released recently. There are only a few that are really iffy and all have some cool shenanigans you can do with only a 10-20 dollar upgrade. Something else to note is that despite being designed for 4 players, it is still totally possible to play with 2 players.
If your worried about investing money into these, since buying two commander decks would be somewhat on the pricier side, you can always just pick up some random cards, put them in sleeves then print out pictures of the cards and play via proxies. It's a great way to try something out and figure if you like it or not before spending money on actually making it.
If there's any other questions you have, just let me know and I'll see what I can find.
While I'm personally heavily biased towards MTG, seeing as how I've played it for almost half my life now and write about it here on the site, I think your best option would be with finding a single player digital card game, as typically its hard to find communities to play some of the more niche card games. There's stuff like Slay the Spire and Monster Train, which I'd both rate fairly high. The other thing I would reccomend are "board game"-esque card games, where you just need to find another person to play with since all the cards come with the board, this would be stuff like Munchkin and Codename, though these types of games are for more than 2 people, so that might not be the best option.
If your dead set on finding another TCG besides MTG, I've heard generally good things about Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokemon, Cardfight, and Dragon Ball Super. Granted I never got to play a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Cardfight, and Dragon Ball Super so I'm not sure what the pro's and con's of each of them are, as well as the latter two being much smaller than the 'main three so it might be harder to fight a dedicated playgroup.
I wasn't sold on the game until the bottom of their website said "Game Fun". Absolutely sold now.
On a serious note, this game does look pretty fun. Reminds me of a mix between Advance Wars in terms of using the board and taking advantage of the landscape of the board combined with a card game, which are two of my favorite genres of games. This game will definitely go onto my watchlist, thanks for bringing it to my attention!
Yeah one of Arena's biggest flaws in my opinion is that the game has so many great formats that just never get played because they get sent to the be apart of some format rotation. MTGO does the same thing, but still keep matchmaking up for their less successful formats and I don't see why WotC doesn't do the same for Arena. It's like the same thing about them starting off with Wednesday Brawl, instead of keeping the queue up all week long.
Yeah unfortunately there's nothing in place for that as of now, just gotta click it a whole bunch.
Yeah they definitely announced all their stuff too early imo. Game development takes a long time, even with a preexisting IP like with what Second Dinner was doing and when they announced their first project, it was very much just saying "hey we got the approval for this" instead of any actual proof of concept.
Honestly given the Lithoform blight stuff, we might get a colorless version first. That being said if they don't continue the Omnath trend, and make him more colors, I'd be pretty upset, especially since WotC knows that people hate that type of stuff.
Same voices as regular Jaina.
Wow spoilers. Wanted to spend 10-15 dollars only to find out there's no voicelines myself.
Jwari Shapeshifter wasn't supposed to be there, sorry about any confusion that caused.
As for New Tazri supporting allies, I feel like it's just WotC using it to support previous versions of her/previous Zendikar blocks for things like Commander.
You put them in replace of lands in deck building and it just gives you a ton more action. Any non-aggressive deck I can see wanting to run these because typically doing more things is better than doing fewer things. the only scenario where I can see these not being great is if the meta is fast enough where decks can't afford to bolt themselves with one of the mythic lands or just can't afford to have the land ETB tapped. Aggro decks definitely won't want to run them aside from the aforementioned bolt lands, but like any control or midrange deck is going to be running them for sure.
Wayward Guide-Beast is incredibly interesting. Always great to see cards that have a bunch of diverse applications without feeling like it'd be too oppressive/required to run in a deck.
Scourge of the Skyclaves is up there for my favorite cards this set solely because of its interaction with Nethroi. Nothing is more fun than reading "total 10 power" and then saying "haha nah I'm going to get 30 total power" in Commander.
Yeah all the Modal land spells are amazing, I'd be very surprised if they don't make a big impact on standard and other formats. Especially the bolt lands, which don't really have a downside for the most part.
Yeah this meta seems to be really polarizing for the most part. Personally I've been having a blast with it and I know a lot of others who have the same, but there's still a lot of games that go "oh well they had the nuts guess I die" which can feel pretty rough a lot of the time.
Over time card games evolve and change how they are played completely all the time, for better or for worse. Like a great example is with MTG's Modern format, where you have cards like Splinter Twin, which used to be a meta-defining card, being on the same banlist as a card like Hogaak, which for reference kills you on turn 3 like, 65%~ of the time. The format is still great to play and all, it's just different now than it was a couple years back and I don't think that is inherently bad.
As for going completely cold-turkey on the game, I'd totally recommend doing that. Playing a game that you don't find enjoyable is only going to make you become more jaded. Maybe next time a new expansion or nerfs come out, check out the meta and see if it's something you'd want to play again. Lord knows I've done that with this game numerous times. If the game never does recapture that feeling that made you fall in love with it originally, hopefully you can look back at the time spent fondly. All that said, hope to see you around still!
Yeah, Confounding Conundrum screams "We really don't want to ban Uro please hope this works to counter him". The card also can lead to a ton of fun things in eternal formats, stuff like Field of Ruin and Ghost Quarter are pretty dumb with it out.