u/DunkeyBlast

Last night at FNM I was with my usual crowd, and one of my friends was running [[Gilgamesh, Master-at-Arms]]. He cranked out mana rocks on turns 2 and 3 and got Gilgamesh out turn 4, and on the ETB he ripped [[Leyline Axe]]. I didn’t want to catch that heat so I put Gilgamesh in [[Oubliette]] my next turn.

I didn’t really think about it at the moment, but after a couple of turns of him doing basically nothing another player was asking him what he had for enchantment removal and he said it was basically just [[Chaos Warp]] and [[Wild Magic Surge]]. He never managed to pull either over the remainder of the game and made no meaningful plays before he died. I didn’t win either in the end but I still felt kinda bad for just shutting him off for an entire game. I guess Red just doesn’t really have answers to enchantments like Oubliette or [[Imprisoned in the Moon]]. But does that mean I should avoid using those cards against mono-red decks outside of higher bracket games?

Proudspire is the huge mountain next to Quetzali Gorge. Not the one with Huey on it, the OTHER one. The MUCH BIGGER one. With basically zero content on it other than a clue step.

Now, Hueycoatl is… fine. It’s a serviceable, inoffensive group boss that’s easy to get into, has a simple teamwork mechanic that requires a little bit of co-ordination with your teammates (charging the pillars by camping different prayers), and has alright drops. But it was pitched as this epic spectacle where you “fight your way up a mountain” to tackle a final clash at the end and it… really isn’t that at all. You whack Huey’s body through the cracks in the mountain for a bit at the start, then you round one bend and there he is.

But look at Proudspire, right across the way from Huey’s dinky, anemic little mountain. It’s this big, multi-tiered mountain with a continuous path spiraling up the sides of it to the top. The sort of corkscrew design of the Proudspire calls to mind the image of what Huey’s fight was originally pitched as, and as it is now the mountain is weirdly barren for how large it is. It just feels *odd* that such a dominant piece of the landscape is so devoid of purpose or noteworthy features, especially with how its structure evokes a previous version of a nearby piece of content.

Basically my conspiracy theory is that when Huey was going to be a longer multi-stage fight where you gradually climbed the mountain in stages before reaching Huey’s head at the top, Proudspire was its home. Then when it got reworked to be a smaller, shorter encounter they no longer needed so much space for it, so it was relocated to the other mountain. Now we’re left with this huge terrain object that feels like it was made for *something*, but we only ever climb it for a clue step.