BloomBurrow Leaks + MTG Banned & Restricted Update

it's another wacky Day In The World of Magic the Gathering wizard to the coast has just released a very underwhelming banned and restricted update announcement on top of that we have a bloomo leak this is my most hyped set of the year and if that wasn't enough we also have a hilarious modern Horizon 3 scam to discuss magic I am a wizard history I'm an old wizard The Magic historian my bones hurt greetings owners of fine luxury cardboard rectangles my friends I hope the day finds you well because we have gathered for another cramp packed installment of Mega Magic news not only do we have a ban announcement bloomo spoilers and a scam to talk about but we've got some extra news to cover as well specifically the creation of Arena direct and this is something that I can actually get on board with one of my biggest problems when it comes to the digital version of card games especially Magic the Gathering is the fact that it's just that digital versions I've been playing physical magic for 30 years now which is insane I'm a dinosaur so I really don't don't like the idea of not being able to own my cards and mtgo gives you the ability to build up a set and then you can cash it out and go give me the physical cards and they'll mail them out to you but Arena has never really had a way for you to get physical magic cards well that's where Arena direct comes in now this isn't the same thing as MTG it's not build up a set and you can redeem it no Instead This is you can win actual booster boxes of Magic the Gathering cards so how it works is they're going to have specific tournaments for arena direct the entry fee is 5,000 gems that's roughly the equivalent of about $30 American dollar so depending on where you live in the world and the exchange rates for your currency it may or may not come in on that level because as far as I understand different regions pay more it might cost more in Europe but how it works is if you can enter this event and get six wins you can win an entire box of modern Horizon's 3 play boosters and that seems like a pretty good incentive box- wise I feel like if they had tried something like this with marov Manor or thunder Junction it wouldn't be nearly as exciting but modern Horizon's 3 has a higher price point as well as just having more juicy exciting cards for people so this is a good place to start with the arena direct so like I said you have to get six wins to get the booster box if you lose twice you're out of the event so you're only allowed to lose one time it's pretty strict in that regard so it's sealed best of one games using modern Horizons 3 packs so it's going to be beef Caked Up in terms of the crazy bombs that are going to be flying around the environment's going to be pretty nuts but because it's sealed it doesn't require you to have a high level of draft skill so it makes it more accessible to every body cuz you just get what you get but on the other hand you also can't focus on building a crazy good deck and you're kind of left to the luck Gods if they give you a good pool you're good if they give everyone else a good pool you're hosed so essentially you take your six wins down the road and they will give you that full-on booster box it is applicable for a whole slew of countries there's a few I think that aren't included but Wizards didn't list those they just listed like this huge laundry list of all the countries that were included and looking over all the tax specifics and additional information because they have all the disclaimer saying we're not responsible for any of your taxes anything that we're not legally required to cover we will not cover and I notice specifically that if you live in Slovenia then you have to file with your tax Authority within 15 days of winning one of these booster pack booster packs booster boxes that's it the only priz is a booster box they don't have lower tiers where you get a certain amount of booster packs basically it's as you move up the chain you're going to win more gems if you get five wins you get your fullon what is it 5,000 gems back so you have to cut you have to get five wins to break even six wins gives you the booster box other than that you're just going to get a certain amount of gems based on where you place but it's absolutely wild to me that there is one place in the world where you get this box you got two weeks to tell the government you do not want to mess around with the tax authorities things will get ugly for you real swiftly so as far as I'm concerned this is a step in the right direction allowing you to take your Arena goodness and turn it into physical goodness if you want to and you can totally as a free-to-play player also get into these events it's going to take more work obviously because you have to build up the gems through ja drafting or drafting whatever that is I don't know that's joke drafting either way there's a few ways you can build up gems in Arena so you could theoretically build up 5,000 and get into the event I'm afraid to play Arena player and I have over 13,000 gems so I could enter into two of these if I so chose to do that right so I like that that's a move in the right direction now let's talk about moves in the wrong direction let us talk about the ridiculous modern Horizon 3 collector booster box Amazon scamazon because this one is next level all right you you may be thinking okay it's an Amazon scam what do you got for me buddy same thing as before people order boxes and they get them and they're like oh somebody's already tampered with the booster packs and taken out all the rares we've seen that right different variations of reseals where they go yo somebody's taken all the rares out of this or somebody stuck cards from different sets in here or I can just tell all these packs have been torn open and resealed well no that's not what's going on here at all what happened was a if it's too good to be true style world where people found collector boxes on Amazon remember this is collector booster boxes not regular booster boxes and remember this is modern Horizon 3 which is ultra expensive so at first people were finding boxes listed for like $200 $200 $300 like considerably discounted from the regular price point on these booster boxes so they put in their orders and lo and behold it totally turned out to be fake there was a seller by the name of Amon on Amazon that's pretty close to the actual name anyways they were apparently taking all these orders and yeah sure we'll sell you sell you many boxes as you want but here's the thing here's where you get shipped and I here's the Scoop they send you ice cream Scoops someone was literally in my live stream when their package from the seller got delivered and they were literally like yo I I just filmed myself opening this and it's an it's ice cream Scoops it's ice cream Scoops with a label stuck on it that says modern Horizon's 3 collector's box straight up like this is next level just not caring not even trying it's not like oh we repack the boxes we don't even need to have the product we're scamming you for so I it's literally they just send you like a $4 ice cream scoop enjoy that now at first my brain went wait wait why would you do this it doesn't even make any sense you're clearly going to get caught right this isn't some slick maneuver where you can say no I sent them the packages and now they're just pretending you can literally go here's the ice cream scooper with their printed out label on at Amazon I would like a refund and so it honestly took a little bit of digging to figure out why this was even going on and the reasons are twofold one is that it takes an inordinately long an inordinate amount of time to get this sorted out so basically what happens is you get this ice cream scoop it can take you up to three months to get your money back right so in that situation guess what you've essentially just given the scammer the equivalent of a payday loan where it's like yo here you go here's some hundreds of dollars and depending on where they're living right which I I presume that these scams are being operated out of China because that's where a lot of scamming is oper operating out of especially when it comes to North Americans being scammed because they're outside the jurisdiction they can't be legally chased down right all you can do is try and go back through the system you can't go I mean you could theoretically try and go to the police but they're just going to go there's nothing we can do about this this is another country you're just going to have to go through Amazon system so that's three months of keeping money from all these different people earning however much interest on it in the bank right so you've got that but then there's also fact that some people are just going to give up there are people who will I I'm not one of them obviously but there are people who will eat a huge Lo well to me it's a huge loss I guess to them it's not if you're just going to accept that you lost $200 clearly that's not a lot of money to you right and there are a lot of whales in Magic the Gathering who will just go yo hold on I got to go through all this hassle to get my money back I'm just not going to bother now I presume that's a small percentage of people but there are people who fall in that category so the scammers will be getting some money in the short term and I don't know I don't know exactly how all this works when everything gets Unwound I know that let's say for example you're using like a PayPal account or something like that and you get a whole bunch of returns and scam requests or not scam requests but St scam complaints they'll lock your account there's nothing you can do you're done with their service but can you just go and create a new one with new ID like how tough is the banking system where you are how easy is it to set up new stuff like that so I don't know how long this is going to be a thing but this isn't the first set it's happened with it's just the most prevalent example digging around people were saying this happened to them three months ago with other sets so this is not 100% a new thing but it is a hilariously ridiculous scam where it's like oh you want a collector's box you should collect ice cream Scoops instead absolutely wild now let's move on to talking about the bloomo leaks and prepare your eyeballs for the most grainy terrible looking leaks you have seen in Forever we're starting out with Ral the crackling wit so he's one red one blue and two for a four loyalty Plains Walker that says when you cast a non-creature spell put a loyalty counter on ra nice little way to boost up his loyalty his plus one is create a 1- one blue and red otter Creature if you haven't heard already Ral zeric is actually going to be an otter in bloomo right I don't think he's an otter in this artwork he does he doesn't look like an otter to me but with Bloom BR we are getting what if versions of all kinds of different ples Walkers what happens is when you travel to the plane of bloomo you automatically get turned into an animal that is like the equivalent of your inner nature so Ral gets turned into an otter his his first ability is to make ERS and I do like loyalty abilities that crank up the loyalty and give you a way to protect the ples Walker so being able to make one- one little otter donks that you can toss in front of creatures that are going to try and swing down on ra is definitely useful he's got minus three draw three cards then discard two that's not too shabby if you want to mess around with any kind of Madness nonsense although just getting to draw three and pitch two is a great way to choose through your deck and get rid of some extra lands you have kicking around but the ultimate is the biggest deal surprise minus 10 loyalty draw three cards and get an emblem that says instance and sorceries you control or you cast I should say have storm so that means that for every spell that was cast before them in the turn you get to copy that spell this is going to lead to insane Shenanigans I really did notice the power level increase when it comes to cards like this because in the past the ultimate would have just been you get an emblem that gives your incense and sorcery storm but nowadays the power needle has moved up so much that they're like yo slap draw three on top of it so you've got fuel to go off with the storm right away most likely if you get to Ultimate ra you're going to win the next turn and that's pretty much the power level of ultimates when it comes to plains walkers almost across the board not all of them but if you can't win by by going ultimate with it most of the time the Plaines Walkers unless they have really great like lower level utility abilities are just going to get passed over so this is not too shabby again artwork is absolutely miserable on this because of the image quality now if you thought Ral was bad when it came to the art take a look at parting gust I don't even know what's going on in this artwork but who cares about that it introduces a brand new ability a magic we've never seen before parting gust costs two white it's an instant that has the ability gift a tapped fish so long thanks for all the fish right so how does it work you may promise an opponent a gift as you cast this spell if you do they create a one one blue fish token before the other effects of this spell come into effect so it's interesting to me the wording of it at first when I'm like okay promise an opponent something and then can you can you just go I'm breaking my promise but the way it's worded is if you choose to do the promise you have to live up to it you have no choice to do otherwise so how does it work well if you gift them a fish token then the rest of the spell functions differently than if you don't the spell goes like this Exile Target non- token Creature if the gift wasn't promised return that creature to the battlefield under its owner's control with a plus one plus1 counter at the beginning of the next end step so this is a standard sort of blink that we've seen before obviously the idea is you can use this to Blink your guys out if you want and bring them back as bigger or you can go ahead and say guess what I'm going to give you a fish and then the creature just gets exiled so for essentially the equivalent of two white and give your opponent a one- one fish you can Exile any creature on the board and that is obviously a very unfavorable trade it's like hey man I promise that I'll give you this fish if you let me lock your big powerful demon away in some crazy kind of gust of wind oh look the wind blew it away but it blew a fish into your hands it's so weird honestly I feel like there are other cards that probably illustrate the gift concept better from a thematic flavor standpoint but I think it's hilarious that this is our first introduction through it through this random leak oh and on the side note Wizards of the Coast is apparently taking leaks and things that nature into account now when they're doing their surveys because they just released the survey for modern Horizons 3 and they said how did you engage with modern Horizons 3 when it came to learning about the set and one of the categories is on official sources unofficial leaks right so Wizards is trying to gauge how much that's impacting things up until now people have said Wizards of the Coast has been doing intentional leaks of their own I don't think that they were but they might start to if they're taking a look at the data and going okay the set sold really well modern Horizon 3 is doing great let's find out if the leaks are actually a negative for us is this something we really need to be worried about do we maybe not need to send out the old pink boys in the future if uh somebody gets some stuff early either way I found that to be interesting right now that we have finished cuz those are the two leaks that we have and again I'm super super hyped for Bloom bro my favorite kind of Magic the Gathering is old school swords and sorcery style Magic the Gathering right and bloomo really does feel like that's what we're going back to we don't have a whole bunch of technology in the world you got a bunch of animals of varying cuteness which if it was just them on their own be kind of like it's just a bunny but when you put little swords and shields in their hand oh that changes everything mice Soldiers with tiny Spears all that Vibe really really cool to me so I'm super looking forward to that now let's move on to talking about the band and restricted announcement because Wizards of the Coast came out and basically went band and restricted time guess what while they gave like information for a bunch of different formats they ultimately said we are not going to do anything in any of the formats so we're going to talk about some of the thoughts that they specifically had starting out with standard and you can tell that they have become super super reticent about when it like basically doing any kind of Bannings for standard at all the language that they used was really interesting to me and they qualified Bannings as something that were an easy exit for people and that language is strange to me because it makes it feel like when they're sitting there they're not like how do we give people the best experience it's like how do we make it hard for people to exit the game this is an easy exit we don't want easy exit like it comes across as if they're trying to trap us right it's not it's not the greatest sort of look Wizards of the Coast has been scrambling to try why maybe scrambling isn't the right word because it feels like they're not really trying that hard to fix standard for those of you who don't know if you're newer to the game standard wasn't actually always a three-year format for the entire history of the game until very recently standard has been a two-year format but Wizards messed up with standard so badly that they started going okay okay look we have a lot of booster boxes that are for standard that haven't sold and they're about to rotate so what do we do and they're like why don't we tell everybody that we're trying to fix standard and we'll just make it another year longer so that people will keep buying the boxes and that's pretty much all they did right they still haven't turned around and brought standard decks back in terms of you can walk into the game store and go okay I see all these decks on the wall but they all look like Commander decks which are the ones I can grab and just play in standard this is going to sound insane to you if you're new to Magic but once upon a time they made Challenger Decks that were like 30 bucks you could grab them and you could genuinely like throw down in like a Friday magic or whatever now they weren't top tier but if you took two of them and put them together you would have four copies of particularly playable mythics like they put genuinely good Cards into these Challenger decks and you could get them for like 30 bucks but at this point there's literally nothing you can buy as a deck and just hop into standard so in the ban announcement they talk about how we're trying different initiatives and it's heartening to see that more people are playing standard in stores but that's not really being born out in reality from what I can see it's the same way that the CEO Hasbro was just like all of our LGS partners are super happy and things are going great for them and when you actually take like the lifeline of the game stores you can see a bunch of them struggling going bro we're getting hosed you're hosing us so hard here like Wizards pretends they're on the lgs's side but they also got rid of MSRP intentionally so that you would think it's the game store that's hosing you if people go to game stores they see modern Horizon 3 costing more and they think that set costs the same for the stores to buy as regular sets oh this cost him as much as Thunder Junction or marov Manor but they're chargeing pretty much double what's this all about you know there're actually people who defend Wizards practices of this going what wizard should charge more for modern Horizon 3 because modern costs more and the cards should cost more cuz they're more exciting it's like no no no no no no no no no no look man look especially since they're using artwork they already had kicking around these sets don't cost them more money to make they cost less money to make they don't have to develop a whole world for them modern Horizon sets should not be more expensive than regular sets so Wizards isn't on game store's side in this way and as far as I'm concerned they haven't done enough to juice up standards so are there more people playing standard I don't know there are more people playing Commander for sure everywhere you go and it seems like standard events are having a really hard time firing off with even eight people so I find this to be disingenuous they basically say we're not going to do any Bannings we looked at a traxa maybe Banning a traxa but then they went well when the rotation hits the trands will be gone that should pull atraxa back a bit they looked at the boros action using night erand of EOS and they went well voldar and Epicure is going to get hit when we do the rotation so again we're just going to leave it alone now to me they need to take a stronger hand because the whole argument of Bannings are an easy exit a completely unchanging standard environment that uses basically the same handful of cards to the point where they become oppressive that's also an easy exit right remember when oo that was the start of the new design by the way that's when everything started to go the rails the new oo dominated The Meta to the point where it was like you play OKO or you play something that you hope can beat OKO but like 80% of the field was OKO and guess what that's really bad for the game too Bannings are necessary what this is what's really crazy is that they refuse to make balance cards anymore they just come up with whatever insane nonsense they don't even spend that much time really massaging it into something that makes sense think about the wording of what we just looked at of the giving promising a gift and if this gift was promised if the promise was paid like you just go okay this is really really clunky so you're trimming down enters the battlefield into enters but then you're making these crazy unwieldy worded abilities so balance has gone out the window now I'm not going to list every format because some formats they didn't really give any information for but for Pioneer they're keeping an eye on the Amalia combo right they're just like we're keeping an eye on it especially since it can lead to tied games and it's like the tied part is the problem you have with it not the overpowered nature of the combo uh I mean all right at least they're paying some attention I guess but no changes for Pioneer modern what they said for modern was pretty funny they're like all right Nadu is strong and he's he's definitely causing problems for people in modern but people are adapting here's how they're adapting R the Monsoon Mage and combining with Ruby Medallion has actually made a deck that's faster than Nadu and it's just like uh what and it's like yeah look look we know this new card from Modern Horizons is causing problems we understand that we get that but we've got these other cards from Modern Horizons they're going to be an even bigger problem so don't worry that cancels that out and you're we're leaving we're leaving n with no Pro I mean let's be real modern Horizon 3 this is actly what it was supposed to do they're not going to say that they're not going to be like but that's the plan the plan is to go yo we made these cards we shoved them into modern you deal with it because we're forcing rotation in now we're not just going to put in a couple cards that maybe can like change different archetypes if you weren't around before they did all of these like modern Horizon sets here's how it used to work before the Throne of alrin days back in the day it went like this standard sets and standard is the gateway to Magic so we need to keep standard balanced and playable and anything that's like not too strong for standard means okay how much problems can it cause going into modern and stuff so the standard environment would keep the power level at a particular level and modern players and Commander players would come in and pick different items like a buffet go num num num I'll take this for my deck right that's how it used to work then thona Val drain comes along and they say okay fire design we want cards that reach Legacy we want cards that reach modern all this stuff basically they're saying hey we know that you're playing these other formats the reason people end up in formats like modern is because they get tired of running on the standard treadmill you build up a collection for two years all of a sudden one year that stuff just gets rotated out and now you're going yo I put a bunch of money and time into this and I can't use these cards anymore and modern's going oh YooHoo Hey Big Boy come on over here you can play with me right and so they go oh cool I'm going to go play Modern I can still use the cards that I already have and so Wizards looked at all this they did this everywhere they even did it on Arena where they went it's not fair that our players have paid us hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars and just want to use the cards they already have that's not all right you have a format there that's specifically designed in this way where nothing rotates out of it so we can't force you to rotate the cards so why don't we create a pseudo forced Rotation by just making cards that are so powerful that you can't ignore them are you playing Modern well guess what you have to engage with the newest crop of cards and it's a compounding problem because look at modern Horizons 2 modern Horizons 2 brought in stuff that forced out a bunch of stuff from Modern Horizons 1 and earlier and guess what modern Horizons three is more of the same that is the new nature of the Beast where they're just going to keep making any set that they create specifically that is allowable in modern will have broken cards that are there to shake things up why do you think orcish bow Masters was so pushed why do you think the one well the One Ring the One Ring obviously was super pushed because a they want to do stuff for modern but also it's literally the one ring this is going to be a card that people are keenly interested in and if you're playing Lord of the Rings you want Lord of the Rings stuff it makes sense that the one ring is beefed but random Orcs with bows why are they so powerful because Wizards has to make insanely powerful stuff to force it into modern and they don't put any forethought into it they literally just go all it has to do is force its way in Bow Masters messed things up so much that people asked hey Wizards um you bow Masters makes it really hard to play with one toughness creature creatures and Wizard's official response was don't worry about it we've taken it into account in card design so now we're making way more creatures with two toughness instead of one which means now the next time they want to do a bow master style card they're going to have to make it slam creatures with two toughness so we are like Full Throttle with the power creep it's everywhere they took historic they jammed Arena into it they did they talked about Arena Bannings and they're like oh you know we don't need to do any Alchemy ban because like Heist decks are making their way in Heist is the most busted mechanic ever where you just get to feed cards out of your opponent's deck like oh look I can pick three cards out of your deck and whale on you with them there's so many people complaining about Heist on the magic Arena Reddit but Wizards considered Heist a win that's shaking things up so that continues the way that it is and speaking of Arena guess what brawl is nightmare right now I wonder what's causing it I wonder what green blue bird creature oh yeah no it's Nadu it's it's Nadu Nadu right he is totally messing up brawl hardcore and they're just like we we look like it looks like he's going to need some heavy rebalancing or whatever so that just means they're going remember when we talked about the points ratings that they use for arena matchmaking natu is about to Skyrocket up those ranks and rightfully so they knew what they were making it's not a surprise the thing is an advantage engine I talked so long about this that my camera shut off and I was just wrapping up saying that Nadu is an insane card Advantage engine essentially and it's just going to get worse from here right they're going to at a certain point they'll come out and be like you know what maybe is too powerful but even if they do ban him they're just going to come along with the next set and go how do we do the same thing they consider that a success these cards being instantly adopted means that people had to go and buy the packs oh now you got to play Ral if you want to compete with n oh it's all new stuff right so that's the way it's going ultimately the ban and restricted announcement was a whole bunch of twilling their thumbs going oh we're looking at stuff it's all good we're just not making any changes right now because everything's golden and we don't want you making an easy exit anyhow thanks for coming and hanging out my friends I'll be doing a live stream on my other channel tonight if you want to come by and say hello big shout out to my patrons for supporting my channel you guys Rule and I will see you all my friends in the next video