Magic: The Gathering C/D

although I didn't realize this would be an open printing, kinda figured they'd do it like mma but its nice to think they learned a lesson there

legacy players are willing to drop money for sure, but I think the supply will just overwhelm the demand by a good margin. like, how many people really need that new planeswalker?

is he even good? there are no viable legacy decks that could fit him in really, not that im an expert &c&c

like I said I think the big draw is reprints, particularly the existence of foil versions of duel deck/alternate art staples, they were pretty good about getting a lot of money uncommons into mma, i can easily imagine ponder, hymn, daze &c being in this set and that tends to make actually opening packs appealing to people

mostly though this just doesn't look like any fun to actually play, unlike mma

i've thought about building a recyclable draft set for innistrad but i'm not sure if it'd be more or less fun to have than just building a cube.

i haven't done the math on how many copies of each common or uncommon you need to make reasonably realistic packs. for rares you just need 2 of each regular rare and 1 of each mythic and you're fine, but uncommons are real important to get the ratios correct on so that stuff like burning vengeance shows up at the correct frequency for it to be draftable some % of the time.

haha it's not aimed at your demographic xp

cider do you know the breakdown of rarity for the dfc in innistrad? tbh if you have all the rares and mythics it shouldn't be that hard to get a playset of uncommons and a double playset of commons from isd (i don't know if those are the right numbers either, i think its probably more like 3/6 but) to round out the set

in some ways getting to do 'throwback' drafts is actually more appealing than cubing to me

somebody should start packaging draft sets and put them on ebay or something, I bet they would sell

then they should give me one for having the good idea

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ISD-Innistrad-Complete-Set-Factory-Sealed-W-Mythics-/271488035661?pt=Trading_Card_Games_US&hash=item3f35f2ab4d

jeez you could build a draft set for not much more than a box itself

I would imagine those foil prices would be insane. Foil Daze is still something like $120 even though it's a freakin' common. I'm positive I used to have a few too.

man i should redeem some of my full sets from wizards before they stop honoring them

damn m13 sets are pretty cheap maybe I should build one of those

i think 3x uncommons 6x commons would work fine but i wouldn't go lower, at least for recapturing innistrad it's real important to have the occasional draft where there are 3x rakish heirs or 5x delvers that all go to one person. the problem is that's close to 900 cards not including lands, which is a lot if you want to keep them sleeved.

the posts from 2003 in this thread are hilarious btw, less hilarious and more :/ is frogbs talking about selling underground seas for $15 or the ebay listing for an mp alpha black lotus (sold at $970)

I agonized over buying a single Savannah for $10 back in the day, but went for it. That was the most I'd ever spent on a single card. Of course I was young enough that $10 was way more meaningful than it is to me now

re: Dack, he might not be good enough for Legacy but he's still a three mana PW with some powerful abilities. Should have lots of appeal for casual players, and Cube and Commander. I think he'll be a chase card at least in the short-term

yeah all planeswalkers are chase-y for a while, I am sure he will be $20+ out of the gate..but he's kinda constrained the commander-demand by being two colors. he is a very strong turn 3 play in the format though.

exploration and misdirection are in conspiracy, there's your money cards frogbs

man, i think everyone kind of just assumed exploration was on the reserved list since it's never been reprinted to date even as a promo

while a lot of the "conspiracy" type cards have been kinda tame this one is incredibly amusing:
http://mythicspoiler.com/cpy/cards/worldknit.jpg

I wonder if they spent the time to balance that ability or just assumed it sucked but was funny.

Because correctly balancing that would have been a very odd experience.

I don't think it sucks at all! Basically it allows you to take the best card in every pack regardless of color, but it forces you to play all the 14th picks as well. I don't feel like there's going to be the same ratio of chaff cards that most drafting sets have so you probably won't be forced into too many unplayables but it may make some things much more unworkable. I'm not sure how they could "balance" it correctly - there aren't really any variables to play around with. Either way it's an awesomely designed card.

Sorry you're right, there's no balancing it because there's nothing they could change - I meant finding out if it IS balanced. My first thought was that it was broken actually, since it lets you take the best card in the pack for every single pack. Also greatly changes your draft based on when you open it. So I could either see them testing it a lot and deciding it was fair, or testing it a little and deciding it was bad but fun. If it was broken, it probably would have gotten cut.

If it was broken, it probably would have gotten cut.

I feel that even if they thought it was broken they'd probably let it slide, it's a casual draft-only format and it's on a card type that you can't play in constructed.

the card vinnie links also seems like it interacts well with drafting conspiracies, since those dont dilute yr deck but dont break the cards starting requirements

I would imagine the Conspiracies would go early, since they all are net positives and you can begin with as many as you got

i'm getting mildly excited by standard again now that some actual new decks have shown up. i like gerry t's new build of nykthos green and there's also a big naya list with the new ajani that i want to try.

meanwhile, modern feels super stagnant. after all the hype around the january changes, wild nacatl and bitterblossom have failed to crack 2% of the metagame while the same few decks continue to sit on top. i don't really know what the solution is here, but other than possibly splinter twin and birthing pod, i favor addition over subtraction at this point and i think part of the problem is that theros block by nature isn't likely to add staples/archetypes to the format. some new sets centered on something other than creature augmentation could help.

i'd like them to leave the banned list along right now tbh. modern isnt exciting right now but there are a decent collections of strong, interactive decks at the top of the metagame and range of less competitive but possibly more interesting decks that are viable. i think im happier than you are to just pilot boring but effective lists other people come up w/ tho, i can see being frustrated as a deck-builder.

also, w/o a fetchlands reprint i have a hard time taking modern seriously as an alternate to legacy - i think my legacy deck cost me less than modern jund did to build, and over half my fetches came from tournament wins. its boring to gripe about it so much, but i feel like the cost of modern staples is the biggest problem by far facing the format

yeah i mostly agree with you - what i was trying to say was that i'd rather see the format grow & develop via new sets rather than banlist curation. and there's absolutely still room for that to happen power-level-wise; RTR block put a lot of cards into the format.

aaron forsythe straight up admitted in an interview recently that R&D was blindsided by how fast modern prices inflated, and that because they work so far ahead we shouldn't necessarily expect much for a while but that they're getting stuff into the pipeline now.

maybe we discussed this before but wasnt the issue that Modern Masters wound up doing the opposite of what was intended? instead of reducing prices by putting more copies of these cards into print, it got way way more people interested in Modern which made the scarcity of Bobs/Goyfs even more pronounced

iirc it did do what was intended for every card in the set other than those few headliners though. a lot of the regular rares are still half the price they were before MMA while comparable ones that weren't reprinted in MMA have ballooned.

I love Modern right now, basically for the reasons Lamp mentioned. 6 very distinct archetypes made up the top 16 at Minneapolis, and there's a handful of other decks that can do well with good metagame positioning, but of course it's quite stagnant compared to Standard. I would like it to be a slowly-changing format where I can (hopefully) learn one deck and keep it for years, maybe updating a card or two now and then.

Was a little surprised to learn that the most expensive Zendikar fetches now sell for as much as the cheapest original dual land, but that really illustrates how much people like Modern.

I think modern is pretty sweet atm, but I think they need to cultivate more control (unban ancestral visions) non-affinity aggro decks in the long-term

idk what the solution for the pod problem is, banning pod seems wrong, but it's a hard card for them to print the right hate for

the solution is to have access to enough strong midrange threats that don't work in pod decks, such as, say, bloodbraid elf

to elaborate, you need creatures that are worth playing for abilities that aren't ETB or death triggers, or creatures that need to remain in play for multiple turns to generate advantage.
some good midrange creatures that aren't at their best in pod decks: knight of the reliquary, geist of saint traft, vengevine, falkenrath aristocrat, hero of bladehold

there's a bunch more than that, and all of these show up a little bit right now but they don't have a strong enough supporting cast to match up to pod at the moment

also, not creatures, but elspeth knight errant, garruk relentless, sorin lord of innistrad are all good midrange threats that can't be podded into but want to be in creature decks

the problem with most of these cards is that they're 4-drops. what you really need are more 2-drops that encourage building non-pod midrange decks. lotleth troll is a good example of this actually, though i don't know if it's quite strong enough for the format. but that type of card is key.

there's too much midrange already!

also they should reprint wasteland

obv will never happen but would allow for the cooler tempo and prison decks

i've seen people cash mtgo daily events with a monowhite enchantment-based prison deck but it's pretty niche

tempo is pretty much just U/x delver until they make new cards to enable some other tempo deck. U/R delver is reasonably good right now.

i don't think wasteland is necessary or desirable card to have in a format without broken lands but ymmv

yeah wasteland just seems hateful. if you wanted to punish greedy manabases i feel like price of progress would be better? also i like that urzatron is fringe strategy in modern

price of progress / blood moon seem 'worse' than wasteland to me

I like the ur tempo deck I might play that for a while

full Conspiracy spoiler out now. looks like there a lot of things to keep track of but the power level seems high and I like the multiplayer mechanics that keep things moving. kind of amused by all the one-shot returning mechanics. really excited to be able to play Spiritmonger and Pernicious Deed again. Spiritmonger was the first creature I can remember that felt really unfair. I guess that power level is the standard now!

haha the only context I have experienced spiritmonger in has been in cubes where it was unplayable

spiritmonger was really exciting when it came out, it was sort of the first time that they pushed a creature way above the established mana curve without a drawback

would it even see play in current standard?

i think it might actually, since it can attack into desecration demon and doesn't die to hero's downfall. in most recent standards it wouldn't though

Spiritmonger did seem really pushed in terms of power at the time, but it goes to show that you need more than big p/t numbers at 5 mana. It wasn't even played much in Standard when it was legal, IIRC. If you opened it today in sealed, it would be a good but not great rare. I don't think it would get played in Standard today unless the metagame was set up right for it.