Magic: The Gathering's Bloomburrow Rules Update Breaks Classic Commander

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Joe Parlock

Published Jul 24, 2024

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Summary

Bloomburrow's rules update may seem minor, but it ruins Neheb's powerful infinite combat loop.
The change to "second main phase" affects Neheb, restricting its mana generation to once per turn.
Players are calling for Wizards to revert the Neheb errata to maintain its original functionality.

A seemingly minor rules change is coming to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Magic: The Gathering with the imminent reඣlease of Bloomburrow, but it’s going to have massive implications for one of the game’s most popular commanders.

In a rare instance of a functional errata for existing cards, Neheb the Eternal&rsquo𓃲;s infamous infinite combat loop has been completely destroyed thanks to one small change to its wording.

Magic often tweaks the language (or ‘templating’) it uses on 🎐its car꧑ds to make things more streamlined. With the launch of Bloomburrow, for instance, all mentions of “enters the battlefield” have been shortened to “enters”, and back in 2021’s Strixhaven: School Of Mages, “shuffle your library” was shortened to just “shuffle”.

Many cards mention the “postcombat main phase♒” – the phase of your turn after combat where you can cast non-instant spells, play lands, and carry out the bulk of your tur🐻n. But Bloomburrow will be completely removing the phrase from its rules, and any cards that mention it will now be read as "second main phase" instead.

In most situations, this won’t have a big material impact on the game. Cards like Brazen Cannonade, Sphinx Of The Second Sun, and Belb😼e, Corrupted Observer all function the same, with the only difference being they could potentially trigger sooner than your🦩 combat phase if a card that adds main phases before combat is ever printed.

Neheb The Not-As-Eternal

Neheb The Eternal, on the other hand, has been nerfed to the point of being useless by this change. Neheb’s ability gives you one red mana for each life your opponents lost in a tur🔥n at the beginning of your postcombat main phase. It’s a popular mono-red aggro deck that likes to swing lots as often as it can.

Neheb is one of the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:most popular mono-red commanders, currently sitting in n.

Mosꦆt decks that use Neheb then use Aggravated Assault, an enchantment that allow🌳s you to pay five mana to untap all your creatures and have an additional combat and main phase. You go to combat again, and Neheb triggers again – as long as you can deal at least five damage per combat, you’ve got infinite activations of Aggravated Assault. Or, rather, you did.

Neheb explicitly triggers “at the beginning of your postcombat main phase”. Now that that terminology has been replaced with “second main phase”, Neheb’s mana-generating ability only triggers once 𝓡each turn, no matter how many times you go to combat. The combo that defined Neheb and made it such a powerhouse just flat-out doesn’t work anymore.

This was confirmed by principal Magic edi🐬tor Matt Tabak, the person largely responsible for templating. In clarifying the rules change, Tabak said “there are functional changes to a few cards. ‘Second main phase’ is only the second one, not the third, fourth, and subsequent ones, if applicable”.

On being asked explicitly about Neheb, “Once a turn, at the beginning of your second main phase. If you have subꦏsequent ma꧃in phases, it won’t trigger at the beginning of those”.

Functional errata, where how a card plays is chang🉐ed after it is printed, are incredibly rare for Magic, and only usually happen in either the most extreme circumstances or when a card just don’t work within the rules because of a templating mistake. Neheb is neither of 🍬these, making the errata controversial.

Players have since been calling on Wizards to issue another errata for Neheb, to change it ba🐠ck to how players were actually using the card. For instance, one Twitter user asked for Neheb to be changed to read “At the beginning of each of your main phases except the first one”. This would keep the more simplistic language of “second main phase” in place, while still allowing edge cases like Neheb to do what they do best.

Magic is the only game to have errata troubles lately, with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Disney Lorcana nerfing Bucky right into the ground.

As this largely applies to the Commander format, Neheb players don’t need to worry too much. You can clarify with your table before you play that your deck relied on the pre-errata rules, and most reasonable groups would al🔥low you to run Neheb as intended with little issue. More competitive formats like Legacy and Vintage will need to find new ways to break Aggravated Assault. Savage Ventmaw can do the same thing, for example.

These rules come into effect wit🍸h the launch of Bloomburrow on August 2.