I’ve been really surprised by the variety of decks in Competitive. It seems like the place to go if you want to play your favorite deck and not be eternally stuck in the old Hell Queue with your pile of jank.
Can someone explain what [[Jarsyl]] is supposed to be doing, since it’s apparently (in terms of raw win percentages) so strong at higher tiers? I’ve tried the deck and it just seems to run out of gas and can’t deal with large creatures. I flash back a Lightning Bolt or similar once and maybe a Malevolent Rumble and then just roll over and die. I get the whole Blood Moon strategy but that’s not really a game plan. I’m obviously missing something…
Cards like [[Strip Mine]], [[Channel]] and [[Field of the Dead]] are obviously broken enough to be banned out of any similar format, for example Duel Commander.
However, having these cards in Competitive means that some decks get the chance to at least compete when they never would otherwise. As much as it is hated, [[Mole Man]] gets to play because of Strip Mine and [[Golos]] gets to play because tutoring for Field of the Dead is obviously a lot more consistent than randomly rolling the dice on big spells. [[Kenrith]] would just be a greedy 5 color value pile that wouldn’t quite make it without [[Channel]].
Surprisingly, I would go as far as to say that these cards actually balance the format as Dimitri and Sultai tempo and control.
Mole Man is pretty good, mostly because it actually has a game plan that isn’t dependent on the lock. Golos and Kenrith are ok but not top tier. If these cards are just enabling decent decks…
Any other strategies unique to Brawl that couldn’t exist elsewhere?
Coming over to the format from Duel Commander, there was always optimization for other hyper-efficient decks. While there are some pretty tuned decks in the queue, it seems like things haven’t really shaken out yet to a point where it’s possible to optimize. There are still a lot of what I’d consider “greedy bombs” running around from the old days of Historic Brawl before it was even just “Brawl”. River’s Rebuke, Casualties of War, Farewell, etc that would never see play in other 1-on-1 formats because they’re just too expensive. Not sure if even though the new queue is Competitive, the online anonymity and lack of actual tournament structure means that people are still just having fun without the heavy hand of the matchmaking algorithm.
TLDR: There doesn’t seem to be a defined meta (at least yet) and it’s difficult to account for 50% fine tuned lean decks and 50% old school Brawl piles.
The Cûnuroi are actually the original Progenitor species who fled their homeworld after discovering the existential horror of damnation in the Inverse Fire. This was probably a first attempt at a solution before the Ark was envisioned. Imimorûl’s mythic "descent from the sky" to “hide from hungry gods” was simply an arrival by ship using the same sort of language that the Nonmen employed to describe the fall of the Ark, and the Inchoroi, who are pale, humanoid weapons created by the Progenitors, share their appearance only because they were modeled after their creators.
Why would the Nonmen and Inchoroi (presumably coming from the same genetic stock of the Progenitor planet as the Progenitors themselves) look the same if they had evolved in different parts of the universe.
This group of Progenitors settled Eärwa specifically to exploit its unique geography, discovering and colonizing anarchane "dead zones" like the site of the Siöl to cloak their souls from the Hundred. We see these areas exist already in the form of places like Atrithau. Or if we believe that the Progenitor’s home planet was also anarchane, perhaps it was just a simple attempt to hide their souls when they didn’t understand how everything with the Outside worked yet.
Their presence on the world was a calculated move to hide from divine harvest, making the subsequent arrival of the Inchoroi a purely coincidental collision of two separate groups from the same lineage, both desperately trying to solve the same cosmic problem in the same corner of the universe.
Just a theory but it seems like there are too many coincidences to ignore completely.
Whether you want to call it “demonic possession”, “another entity” or just “split personality”, the story was already psychologically scary enough without the strange movements, etc.
The thing is, I can’t really think of what inserting some of the traditional horror tropes actually added to the story in any way.
Maybe there is the case to be made for it all being a heavy handed metaphor for BPD but the story could have played out exactly the same way without the “other Nikki” entity or personality.
A person who had reality magically altered to make them obsessed to that level still could have cooked the cat and killed people in a jealous rage.
You would have lost maybe 5 minutes of runtime in total with the inhuman movements and a few nighttime moments. It just felt so… out of place.
Edit: The consensus seems to be: “Those scenes are there because it’s a movie and they are scary”. I agree. Probably not worth overthinking.
With all the product being released, Jumpstart, Commander, etc.