Added new interesting and powerful cards from Tarkir Dragonstorm. Replaced a few of the more situational and weaker cards.
Added new cards from Aetherdrift to replace weaker replacements from their categories. Also continued to attempt to lower the curve in black and white.
Removed some unrecognised infinite combos. Replaced with other synergistic cards
Overhaul of Azorius and Dimir was the main focus of this, as the archetypes were too narrow and weak to actually be viable to play. As such, picked out two archetypes which were quite close to the previous archetype:
Other notable changes:
Large Update to Multiple Colour Archetypes. Some general design philosophies used in this update:
Summary of Themes
Swapped out an Azorius commander for one with more reliable support.
Fix to last update not removing all cards
Minor Adjustment from Previous Update, particularly in relation to Red which had a few too many enchantments. Also swapped out some additions from the previous update.
Main focus of this update was to make the archetypes for Boros and Dimir more generally useable and fit better with the rest of the cube. Boros is more focused on blink than before and now has a human tribal subtheme. Dimir is now more Rogue focused, with a removal of all ninjitsu effects as they were not very desirable outside of the specific archetype of ninjas.
Also overhauls each guild, with a focus on lowering the number of enchantments and lowering the curve, as most decks were found to curve out at 4 mana which was not ideal for the play experience. Also added in more removal and board wipes to reduce the number of board locks.
Another notable change was increasing the number of staples per colour to 10 from 8. This was to help alleviate the lack of cards when playing with a pool of 12 players but also give more space for non-synergy pieces but important for the different colours.
Update to Commander Tags
Updated with some Aftermath Cards and removed Enter the Dungeon cards but added more initiative synergy. Having both mechanics was proving confusing. Also updated quite a few Commanders in the set
Added some more spirits to Blue for Azorius and a colourless changeling to help out the tribal decks
Added a new source of Goad to Rakdos and removed Thopter Engineer from Rakdos (Galvanic Blast is now in Izzet from Rakdos as a supplemental swap)
Major Overhaul:
Focus was on reworking Simic and Gruul. Simic's Landmill archetype was quite lacking and required a lot of bad cards to be run. Now overhauled to a more synergistic and complete archetype within the colour pairing of Card Draw/Hand Size. This gave some space to Gruul which mostly lacked a cohesive archetype and gave it some focus in Landfall, which was a space Simic was previously occupying.
Also made small improvements to many other colours, in particular removing a lot of weaker cards in Dimir and giving them an additional direction with the Rogue Mill theme. Also removed a lot of weak cards in Golgari and Selesnya, giving them a bit more power and synergy.
Also added in the check dual lands and the Kamigawa utility lands to give more interest in the land slot. Also moved out some of the weaker/specific colourless cards in favour of more ramp.
Staples also saw a minor improvement, mainly in giving more of a counterspell identity to Blue and giving more interesting cards to Black. Vandalblast was also added to help keep down the strong artifact archetypes and give more artifact desctruction to Red, which it was lacking.
Overall, helped out most colours/guilds to give them more synergy and remove the generally weak cards in favour of stronger, but also more interesting ones.
Removed some weaker cards for more interesting cards with synergy
Replaced Damning Verdict for more Lifegain synergy in Selesnya
Replaced some weaker cards for some more synergistic replacements
Removed weaker cards from the Simic pool and updated them with cards more fitting to the archetype