Revolution Balance Changes: February 2024

Written by PTM

It’s been 2 months since our last article—largely because the December-January patch comprised pre-rotation changes for Chikyu: Chaos Rains (CCR) joining the format. If you want to catch up, I recommend CovetedPeacock’s excellent video on the subject.

CCR, the most recent addition to Revolution, has been in-format for a month and, as with many sets getting their first constructed work-over, players are rapidly finding the strongest and most broken things to do—which can necessitate a larger patch.

What follows are our considerations on changes to the following cards:

• Berry Fermenter

• Bloom Brute

• Brass Oracle

• Brief Stop

• Callisto, the Teqiarch

• Destructive Interference

• Extraction Mission

• General Diadem, Usurper

• Gubernatorial Fundraiser

• Harbor Mail

• No Time to Waste

• Opal-Eye Caretaker

• Orbinoid (plus Endangered Scinok and Ozanwood Murk)

• Planned Obsolescence

• Scrapweight

• Seductive Gorgon (plus Ne’er-do-wells)

• Smart Shopper

• Temple of Origins

• The Aqua Crew (plus The Magma Council)

• The Ruins Awaken

• Unyielding titan

• Warden of Depths

• Warden of Time

For information on any card not pictured, refer to Manifesto, Revolution’s Scryfall-alike. 

Berries

• Berry Fermenter

• Bloom Brute

• Scrapweight

• Smart Shopper

• The Berry Master

• General Diadem, Usurper

Berries was a major deck of interest, capitalising on strong in-set synergies from Chikyu: Chaos Rains. While not using Berries for their “intended” purpose of boosting stats, it was leveraging fast token generation, sacrifice outlets, and both Smiling Sludge and Extraction Ritual to convert tokens into kills. Several of these were performing better than we preferred.

Berry Fermenter was an exciting engine that unfortunately operated above rate, converting Berries into Treasures and producing an instant refund-or-better on many of the deck’s best cards—explosively, and in a way that the resource game was hard to overcome. This change will reduce its explosiveness, make the card fairer, and less of an auto-include

Bloom Brute entrenched the play-draw divide deeply, accelerating board states on the play significantly and proving far less powerful on the draw. To even this out, Bloom Brute has lost its haste but kept its token generation and gained unique typing to give it a home in Solidarity decks: Plant Kangaroo.

Scrapweight was until this rotation an inoffensive limited card. But with the addition of Berries and Smiling Sludge, it evolved: in response to activating it once, its controller could continue to sacrifice as many Berry tokens as they wanted, burning opponents out through Smiling Sludge triggers. Now sorcery speed, this unintended play pattern is removed.

Smart Shopper poured permanents onto the table at a high rate—which, with the right card or cards, could refund itself or other cards just as quickly. To slow this down, its ‘bonus’ mode now only creates two Berries.

The Berry Master is a powerful midrange topend for the Berries deck. We’re still keeping an eye on its replacement effect due to how quickly it builds out your board, but its activated ability functioning at instant speed significantly complicated combat math. This has been changed to sorcery speed, and we think the card is still playable.

General Diadem, Usurper was a late addition to the Berry deck, and enables an infinite combo with The Berry Master, trivially creating an arbitrary number of 3/3s (with the associated number of sacrifice triggers). Given other changes to Berries, we requested a change to Diadem, but due to time constraints we were unable to agree a change before the patch was due to apply. Until such a time as we can agree changes with General Diadem’s designer, Splitmoon, this card has been banned—likely until the end of the month only.

Orbinoid Combo

• Brass Oracle

• Orbinoid (plus Endangered Scinok and Ozanwood Murk)

• Extraction Mission

Players have been desperately trying to break Orbinoid since it rotated in with Cybaros, and format regular Lih finally managed it. The deck was shockingly powerful and consistent, and—more problematically—able to combo off on turn 3. Because of its consistency and ability to kill on other axes even through sideboard hate, the deck was a target for adjustments

Brass Oracle was a major backup threat in the Orbinoid deck. Able to kill blockers and planeswalkers on top of attacking for a bunch, this was out of scope for similarly-costed pingers. For example, Gelectrode in Guildpact in 2006 was the last time a similar card could hit any target. Adjustment to only hit players is a much safer spot for this, with a boost to 2/2 to compensate.

Orbinoid, the titular combo card, created a non-deterministic but very consistent combo that required the full combo to be executed by the controller, going off a potential turn 3, and is not what we wanted for the format. The change to Orbinoid necessitated some other minor changes to Ozanwood Murk and Endangered Scinok for limited reasons.

Extraction Mission has been repeatedly examined over its tenure in Revolution and adjusted several times. While not only played in Orbinoid Combo, its role highlighted that the card has a concerningly high ceiling and would introduce a real risk for all 3-drop creatures added to the format. It has been adjusted to lower the ceiling, make it more versatile, and sacrificing its token at end of combat to better synergise with Tormenting Lightrider.

Titan Control

• Unyielding Titan

• The Ruins Awaken

The Titans deck lives in the same space as Shrine control: a synergistic package from a set turned into a powerful constructed strategy. While broadly unproblematic, two cards presented an issue.

Unyielding Titan creating instant deathtouch blockers created concerning play patterns, and synergised with Unflinching Titan’s granting of trample in a way we weren’t comfortable with. To address both, Unyielding Titan now grants menace instead.

The Ruins Awaken is a neat Krenko’s Command variant with a good rate. While its landfall ability is exciting, its ability to be activated from the graveyard at instant speed created a lot of additional board complexity—particularly when it could change whether Titans can attack or block. It can now only be activated as a sorcery.

Sultai Surface/Sultai Flash

• Harbor Mail

• Callisto, the Teqiarch

• The Aqua Crew/The Magma Council

• Warden of Depths

The winning decklist from Grand Prix Mishiro Town shone a harsh light on the power level outliers in this archetype, particularly on the play patterns of The Aqua Crew. The deck centers around surface and flashback to power incredible mid-to-late-game engines and lock opponents out of the game. 

Harbor Mail was essentially a flashback cantrip that you didn’t have to pay the flashback cost of if you cast another spell with surface. The impact of this card on the format was significant. The card triggered fairly trivially from the front half of surface cards, and being free massively increased the quality of your other spells. It’s being reined in on both axes, and we hope that this results in the card still being good, but not quite so strong.

Callisto, the Teqiarch was a 2/4 Phyrexian Arena with upside that enjoyed the break point of 4 toughness against 3-damage removal and smaller attacking creatures, to the point the difficulties interacting with him became problematic. A change to 2/3 would create further overlap with Data Weaver, so after discussion a change was suggested that maintains the limited strategy of blue-red in Cybaros while forcing the card into a more assertive role that reduces the efficacy of him as a blocker, and shortens the time window to use stolen cards.

The Aqua Crew/The Magma Council had the most warping effect of any card listed for the archetype. It could remove any permanent at the cost of improving your card quality through casting the best flashback or surface cards you had—targeting nonlands or lands multiple times per turn, which was too much. The card, and its counterpart, have thus been adjusted.

Warden of Depths giving access to a whole graveyard’s worth of stuff all at once is a huge amount of sudden card advantage, but what proved to be of greatest concern was immediately having a counterspell for free in the opponent’s turn after playing it—or a discard spell during the draw step. After discussion, the focus on end phases have narrowed down the immediate impact of the card while retaining its strong utility.

Persist Combo

• Opal-Eye Caretaker

• Seductive Gorgon (plus Ne’er-do-wells)

A significant player in the most recent Revolution Eternal Grand Prix, Persist Combo used Opal-Eye Caretaker, a persist creature like Reawakened Recruit, and a sac outlet, to go infinite. The deck was fast, resilient, and able to—quite trivially—tutor its own combo via surveil, and trying to determine means to reduce its power level was a lengthy debate.

Opal-Eye Caretaker was, in the context of the persist deck, our equivalent of Melira, Sylvok Outcast or Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit. When considering how to address the deck, we ultimately decided that one mana is too low a cost for such an effect, so requested a change. The card was reworked to still support wander but will no longer enable persist.

Seductive Gorgon has been an aristocrats favourite since day one of the format 4 years ago. However, it has often presented a question for balance as a free sacrifice outlet. After a lengthy review of free canon sacrifice outlet creatures, we found that such cards which can kill an opponent while ignoring their board state do not (and should not) live below mana value 3. The best sac outlets at 2 tend to self-buff temporarily or permanently, or do not affect the board state at all. Following a request to change, Seductive Gorgon received a rework.

While not a card in Persist Combo, Ne’er-do-wells was impacted by the changes to Seductive Gorgon in the set Secrets of the River Cities. Due to the limited archetype needing to be functional, some mana values needed to be shuffled around—and Ne’er-do-wells lucked out, receiving a limited-focused buff.

Flicker

• Brief Stop

• No Time to Waste

Everyone loves a good ETB, and flicker has been a recurring strategy in Revolution for a long while. However, we wished to move away from flicker-steal effects in the Standard environment (though it is still a valid strategy in Eternal via In Search of Peace) due to the player experience of such strategies.

Brief Stop was flagged for change due to enabling permanent thefts. It has been some time since canon Magic printed a flicker-to-your-control spell into Standard, and for good reason. The play pattern of this card was not one we wanted to leave around. Brief Stop has been reworked to instead offer some interesting modality to its caster.

No Time to Waste is a very powerful limited card with more disruptive impacts on constructed and that creates risk through potential future interactions. The card has been adjusted to be somewhat more limited while still working within its limited environment’s parameters, where artifacts are very common.

Destructive Interference

A card we never anticipated would be problematic in constructed, Destructive Interference trivialized the activated-abilities-matter cards from Chikyu: Chaos Rains such as Feeble Fish and Seal Shoals in multiple decks, activating for 0 multiple times per turn cycle. This has been adjusted so the cost is no longer free, which should help reduce the card’s impact.

Gubernatorial Fundraiser

Changed by designer request due to overlap with other low-mana red creatures which die into a Treasure token, and because it was not matching the intended flavour. After some debate, the new version of the card was settled on: acting as an engine of some power while still being fragile.

Planned Obsolescence

Also changed at designer request to better reflect design flavour, the Curators requested that the card be unable to affect other enchantments while still being able to hit artifacts, creatures, or planeswalkers. The change is not only thematically resonant, it introduces a powerful constructed answer.

Temple of Origins

Temple of Origins fills a hole in the format: namely a great 2-colour land that does not oversimplify running decks that are 3 or more colours. However, the land simply stopped functioning completely if you wound up with a land that could produce a third colour. With this adjustment, the card will continue to allow you to produce mana—albeit colourlessly.

Warden of Time

Finally, Warden of Time’s creature type was incorrect. An easy fix—Celebi was always meant to be an Avatar, like the other Wardens.

Closing Out

As explained earlier, this is an extensive changelog for a reason. We don’t expect to see another this length this season. Despite the power outliers, plenty of different strategies saw play in GP Mishiro Town and in League, and I’m personally looking forward to getting some games in with aggressive decks.

We’re going to have some exciting announcements coming up for the format—so pay attention to #revolution-news on the Custom Magic Discord.

Remember: the Revolution World Championship is rapidly approaching, with only two slots left to earn your place in a tournament where the winner will be able to work with the Curators to add their very own card to the format in the May rotation.

There’s a huge range of reasons cards can change, from their power level, interaction with other cards and strategies, to plain old being too luck dependent. We’re constantly learning through emergent gameplay where the power and the knobs on the format are. Wizards of the Coast having the Play Design team constantly testing and adjusting is a necessary investment, and we’re incredibly grateful to Revolution’s dedicated playerbase for helping us constantly work to make the format the best it can be.

If you want a chance at breaking the format, come on down and get brewing!

ItaiUukl Averts Disaster at GP Mishiro

Written by AllWhoWander

Revolution, January 2024

The first tournament of Revolution’s thirteenth rotation concluded this past month at Grand Prix Mishiro! As the first GP in a new rotation, Mishiro brought with it a new set: Cajun's Chikyu: Chaos Rains. With its wedge-colored focus built around a variety of different strategies, CCR really shook up the meta and drove the development of some exciting new strategies! 31 players brought 23 different decks to the tournament, including old favorites like RW Aggro or 3-color Acid Hydra, as well as exciting new brews like Sultai Golems or Orbinoid Storm!

Congrats to Itai, well played to RickyRister, and remember: if you want a chance to play an awesome custom format (now complete with pokemon!), there's never been a better time to join the revolution!