This week “Magic the Gathering Arena” had momir as it’s midweek magic challenge. In this format you are given a deck of 60 snow lands, 12 of each color. You have an emblem that lets you pay X mana and discard a card to get a random creature token with mana value X at sorcery speed once per turn. I find it terribly unsatisfying due to the amount of random luck involved in this format. I would find it more interesting if it took the best that magic has to offer (that I have to pay attention to my opponents turn and they can do things to me on my turn).
When you click the emblem you can get anything from a vanilla creature to an extremely strong creature with enter the battlefield triggers and activated abilities. It’s definitely interesting that you have no control over your board state here. It can definitely help with the understanding of whether to trade or not. However I just find it less fun because a lot of the time the abilities just straight up do not matter on the creatures. Also I feel like a lot of players just do slow play at the beginning of their turn and it’s just bizarre since there’s such a small action set.
The strategy of the game is play a land and pass for the first turns and then on every turn after 3 play a land and trigger momir using all of your mana. Then you either attack or don’t. The player who goes first gets a lot of benefits and has more tempo than the other player.
I think momir could be fixed with the following items.
- The colors of your lands matter more.
- The ability to play more on my opponents turn.
- Favor more of the alchemy cards that conjure cards into your land or library for more interesting deck building.
- Instead of tokens make them cards so that when you lose a creature they hit the gaveyard enabling more useful interactions in the card pool.
- Changing up the card pool between offers of the events. Subset it down to specific sets or blocks you want to highlight.
Overall I think it can be useful for some teaching to be a better magic player, but the card pool needs to be better balanced, and there needs to be better payoffs for your efforts. I think it definitely helps people become better magic players, but to become better you actually have to want to play, and I don’t find it particularly fun. I think the most important thing it solves for the player base is learning how to trade in combat. Email your opinions on the issues to me or if you have any other insight on how to make this more fun. I especially like the idea of using different sets or subsets of cards.