How about a thread where we discuss the daily/weekly Selecting 10th Edition votes? This week is a big one for art, and we have one card selection to deal with: Earthquake or Hurricane.
Firstly I’ll just say that I went with Earthquake. Hurricane has been in Standard for a long time without ever seeing much use. I did use it as a finisher in my Elf decks several times, but really don’t agree with Green having direct damage. Earthquake, on the other hand was well-played back in Revised, and hasn’t been around much since then, so I’d like to give it a chance to see if maybe we can include a card people will actually play. With all the aggro Selesnya and Gruul decks in the format at present it seems like it might find room in sideboards at least.
Land art--here are my selections:
Plains: Mirage--easily the most interesting of the plains, and look at all the cute animals!
Island: Oddyssey--a lot of sets have great Islands, so it was a tough pick, but I think that of all the sets that don’t have the new card face Oddyssey has the most pretty ones not included in 8th and 9th. I don’t feel really strongly about this one as long as Tempest doesn’t win.
Swamp: Urza’s--I like the crispness and coloration of the art here, unfortunately it’s all very similar. Kamigawa probably had better swamps, but they already have the new face and foiling, so I went Old School.
Mountain: Mirage--again there were a lot of nice Mountians to choose from, and these seemed the nicest. Invasion and Urza’s also look great.
Forest: Onslaught--I didn’t like any of the selections as much as I like what we already have in 9th, but Onslaught has really good forests #1 and #4, so I voted for them. No strong opinion.
Artists--I don’t really want to get into this too much since it seems I’m the only one here who doesn’t like Kev Walker and tends to like crisp, detailed art (see “Opposite of Lightning Helix"). In any case, I tried to give the most playable cards to Michael Sutfin, Matt Cavotta, Daren Bader, and Terese Nielson without pairing them up against each other in order to give the most cards possible really good art. I don’t know that any of these are highly playable, but I put them on Incinerate, Story Circle, Might of Oaks, and Nekrataal. It would be too much trouble to go into this too much more, but there you have the basics. Go vote, and let us know where you stand!
). Also, Earthquake is much more symmetrical(as Fichtel noted) than Hurricane is. There are absolutely 0 green creatures that should ever die to Hurricane, and just about every Red Creature I can think of dies to Earthquake. That’s not very balanced, now is it?
