Magic: The Gathering C/D

ub seems like a bad time in this format

there's definitely more room for blowout draws / decks in m15 than there was in m14, if white tokens is open esp, there are just a lot of cards that I like playing with that just feel like well-designed limited cards that are fun to play with (forge devil, illusory angel, selfless cathar, inferno fist)

cone of flame is dumb tho, wish it weren't in the set

my overall record is 29-12 so i am not actually doing as badly as i had thought but i feel like i am rarely in the games i am losing, so losing is more irritating if that makes sense? i dont have hard evidence for this but i feel like this format is more draw dependent than is typical, like there are just a lot of reasonable cards that don't interact at all with other reasonable cards, so a higher % of games are non-interactive.

like i said, this is early impression still and could simply be some combination of variance, the way/type of decks i am drafting or some other factor i am missing but this format feels very low skill rn

i haven't drafted m15 much yet, will hit the 8-4s hard when i get back from my vacation next weekend, but my early impressions are that triplicate spirits is a stupid common and that the white and red 3-power 2-drops can get you a bunch of free tempo wins

this is my first core set as i was otherwise engaged during m14. it seems quite different - with THS and RTR blocks it was made kind of obvious what you were 'supposed' to be doing, whereas this feels more like "here's a bunch of cards, figure something out". maybe it is just more subtle and passing me by right now. i played a couple of prerelease sealed and half a dozen drafts since then. almost all of my decks have ended up being red based aggro or white based convoke. i don't know if it is just well supplied as an archetype or if people aren't interested but the good convoke payoff cards always seems to be available. one other difference is that bombs seem super bomby. i had a hell of a Rw deck for the first sealed i played, with as i posted at the time chandra (and a nissa i couldn't play), and i tore through the first 3 matches and in the final the other dude landed the red soul on time both games and that was it. the white soul and doom engine have been p disgusting against me as well. my 2nd sealed i opened a garruk and played a pretty marginal BG to 2-2, just for the chance to play the card, and of course even thru 4 rounds of sealed i never cast him once.

I've only done 3 events but thus far it seems like there are a lot more playable one-toughness creatures than normal, so stuff like Forge Devil and Crippling Blight are quite good. IMO it seems way more fun than M14, which way too often devolved into topdecking wars and was unbalanced colorwise. I agree that there is a lot more degenerate stuff available in this format (like Illusory Angel or Ensoul Artifact), not necessarily a bad thing, but it does feel like there's not enough decent removal to temper this stuff. I too have lost to the white Soul which is such an insanely opressive card, in fact it seems like there are a lot more bomb rares (and uncommons!) in this set than normal. It's way faster than M14 which is a plus but I can definitely see why it feels uninteractive to you (especially considering the high amount of evasion in the set)

Kinda considering maindecking Bronze Sable next time, it stops both the intimidate common dudes and gives the 2U 2/3 dude flying

i haven't drafted m15 much yet, will hit the 8-4s hard when i get back from my vacation next weekend, but my early impressions are that triplicate spirits is a stupid common and that the white and red 3-power 2-drops can get you a bunch of free tempo wins

haha yes this is the story of me playing m15 so far

oppressive rays is really good in this format

and bronze sable is like a solid mid-pack pick

ime so far, with the way white decks shape up in particular, the all creatures +2/+1 white get first strike is a nutty bomb

yep, either blowout combat trick or out of nowhere topdeck win

you can't really play around it very well either, if I don't block they'll do 12 damage, if I do I lose all my creatures

I wound up losing one in a real painful way due to Avarice Amulet - I misplayed hard, thinking Encrust was Claustrophobia, and didn't have enough mana to re-equip it to my Hexproof dude, so he winds up killing my guy and taking control of the Amulet, then putting it on the Razorfoot Griffin and killing me slowly with it. I look at the card again and it says "designed by Penny Arcade", great one more reason to hate those fuckin' guys

I like how many can-be-good-in-right-deck artifacts/equipment there is in the set, feel like often they design those things to either be playable or totally unplayable, but the artifacts matter theme makes most of them okay in the right deck.

i got torn up by a guy with the red tap to do damage enchantment on a typhoid rats, with 2 forge devils in my library somewhere. that card seems very good in general.

also, i played against a guy with spectra ward and twice he put it on a 2/2 and ran it into my will-forged golem. the 2nd time i was sure he had a trick, because how could you do that twice, but i needed to block regardless. i like to imagine he put in a compensation claim before finally realizing what he had done.

ha

we were doing side drafts/teamdrafts at the GP and one of my friends just kept taking all the undergrowth scavengers and satyr wayfinders every draft and crushing people with 4-mana 6/6s

yeah that + the 3/1 black dude that mills you 3 feels like a decent strategy. nobody seems to take the Scavenger.

have thought about that deck, and having a primadox or the 3/3 that makes you return to hand to 'refresh' an early scavenger if needed.

i dont like primadox as much in this set without elvish visionary, recurring a 4-drop is a lot more of a cost for drawing cards than recurring a 2-drop

there are other targets too, the +1/+1 counter dude, the frost cat, forge devil etc

I just realized that Underground Scavenger is basically just a dumb Lhurgoyf

by the way, I'm still incredibly peeved by the new client, it seems like every time I play it I discover a new, major design flaw; nothing showstopping (though having to play through a pop-up window of my previous opponent's "revealed hand" was pretty bad), but a lot to make you wonder just how little the client was beta tested

the client was beta tested plenty, i've been a beta tester for the past 2 years

still refuses to download on my computer, through googling I've found others w/ the same problem

and as bad as this is, the new wizards website is just...

likely surely they've seen the traffic just crater

i think the new website actually looks fine aesthetically, its just buggy and not actually intuitive to use or find anything

like its clearly an out-of-the-box CMS that hasn't been tailored to their content or use cases at all

who cares how it looks if people will actually completely stop visiting because it's too hard to find anything

like this kinda thing should result in people fired

it seems like they tried so hard to keep it simple that they accidentally made it really really complicated

someone high up heard that mobile was the future and said "our site needs to look good on an ipad, do whatever it takes!"

wotc has never been very good at software but as of late they seem to be falling even further behind the curve, in addition to a sudden strange insistence at doing everything in-house with their underpaid devs - it seems pretty clear to me at this point that they either don't have money or someone at the top doesn't think any of this stuff is important

even duels, their one remaining successful software venture, seems to have crashed and burned this year, i haven't played it but saw bad reviews and negative feedback across the board

its troubling that a game that's claimed to have huge sales growth for the past 4 years is unable to reinvest any of those profits into the game but that seems to be what's going on

i impulse bought the new dotp the day it came out and it is super thin. i wondered if maybe they are going to add in some of the missing features and modes as dlc. but tbf, i did get something like the going rate for the amount of mtg entertainment 15 bucks buys!

I realize how tough it is to write a client for such a complex game - those who gripe about MTGO by pointing out that Hearthstone or SolForge have much better interfaces seem to be missing just how wide a lattitude of things have to be given in Magic (especially considering that it has to support like 10 years worth of cards that weren't designed with the rules being like they are now) - but what bothers me is just the easy design stuff, like how there's so much blankspace on the battlefield now and yet the colorless mana symbols are basically unreadable on a 19" monitor, or how hopeless it is to get the chat or preview panes to stay anywhere, like it's the kind of stuff you'd think would get immediately pointed out during testing. At least the life total isn't a Font Size 7 number off in the corner anymore.

the website has no similar excuses - a basic site where you can find and read articles w/ text and photos shouldn't take a company w/ the best programmers in seattle or w/e, it should be something any competent company can get done in 2014

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/2015-pro-tour-and-grand-prix-schedule-revealed-2014-08-02

so dumb, no more modern protours (at least next year)

Upset at that announcement - Of the three PT formats, Standard is my least favorite to watch and play (not that I'm likely to play in another Pro Tour again soon, heh). Also, are they just done having PTs in Asia?

i really wonder what prompted that decision - my first thought was 'wow you really dont want to have to reprint fetchlands' but maybe they just feel like standard is the most profitable/worthwhile format to promote? idk

i missed most of the video coverage of the pt but quickly glancing at the the top 8 records it looks like jund planeswalkers may have been the most successful deck which is kinda interesting

White seems to be really powerful in M15 draft. I thought it would be since White was so underpowered in M14 (similar to how Blue was nearly unplayable in M13 but a powerhouse in M14) but I think it's even better than it looked on the spoiler, Triplicate Spirits is maybe the best common in the set, and that + Raise the Alarm gives you plenty of Convoke fodder and as mentioned here that +2/+1 instant is such a killer, as iatee mentioned you can't play around it even though you pretty much always know when they have it

I'm really liking these planeswalker builds, they look like lots of fun. I'm hoping to play my own version at next FNM.

Between SCG Dallas and PTM15, I think I watched about 20 hours of mtg broadcasts this week, it was pretty crazy. I wanted to go to Dallas, but then forgot about it until like a day before and had to bail.

if the white token deck is open, it's def the best deck in the format, I've seen / played games that weren't far from being the b/w modern tokens deck

red is also very good. infero fist, l strike, forge devils, cone, enforcers. I have found lava axe to be very playable in this format.

i really wonder what prompted that decision - my first thought was 'wow you really dont want to have to reprint fetchlands' but maybe they just feel like standard is the most profitable/worthwhile format to promote? idk

it 'makes sense' if the protour is about advertising the set - born of the gods was a particularly bad set to release before a big modern event, but rarely will a set lead to new decks in the format. and standard post-release does reward the teams that have tested/brewed well.

but standard gameplay is pretty clearly not the highest level of play and that's supposed to be a big part of what a protour is

I've mainboarded 2 Festerglooms just to take care of the tokens deck, only to have White Paragon come down and destroy me :(

Just paging through the spoiler it really looks like White has the best ratio of great uncommons, lots of solid bears + benefits, and Heliod's Pilgrim which can be really great, especially since it grabs Opressive Rays in a pinch. Losing Pacifism kinda sucks but you can really beat through just about anything, even Selfless Cathar can be a killer in this deck.

Blue on the other hand seems just not good, lots of overcosted flyers and some okay bounce but not much else. I've heard a number of good players say Black was the worst color in M15 but I think it's Blue. Black gets a lot of solid uncommons and I think the Rotfeaster is quite underrated.

blue is not a good core color for a deck but throwing some bounce/terns/illusory angels to an otherwise good deck is v good

maybe not saying much because red and white are already good but WU fliers and UR tempo/artifacts seem like p good archetypes in m15. my wins to date have been those two and GW.

jund will always be at the top as long as they continue to be more willing to ban 'unfair' cards than 'fair' ones

Thinking about this a bit over the past couple of days, I've realised a card I really don't like is abrupt decay - I'm not really a Johnny at all and I can see that it could be positive for Legacy as an answer to Counterbalance but in Modern it's just a silent death-knell to so many fun and interesting cards.

yeah there was a time not too long ago when people had to play Smother if they wanted to be able to kill tarmogoyfs and dark confidants with the same card, now they get to hit all the artifacts/enchantments that used to be blind spots too

the card itself doesn't seem oppressive (wasn't it mostly designed to give legacy people a break from top-locks?) it just sucks that it fits so well into the already best decks in modern