When it comes to the Japanese cards, a lot of players that dont read or speak Japanese are still going to be playing with them, and that means that the most popular ones are going to be the cards that are simple and have very little text to remember
There are certainly downsides here, most notably that exiling your fallen creatures eats into your reanimation options
While this new blue dude will impact older formats, his applications in Standard are limited
The game is played by two combatants, each starting with 20 life points, obeys the same rules as a regular Magic game, and has one commander (or commanders with Partner ability) plus 99 (or 98 with Partners) cards in the starting library
Many of the cards in the deck, like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben have tax effects on them to slow down the opponent's game plan