Magic: The Gathering C/D

unless there is also faerie tribal in the set i would be v bummed to play that in limited, and actually more bummed if i had the multiples it rewards.

just draft u/r with the enchantment that tutors for itself

basically unbeatable imo

I was thinking more in constructed with ways to repeatedly bounce your own stuff or whatever. Even if I got 3 in Limited I dunno if I'd want to stuff my deck full of one-drops. If I could get 4 or 5 I'd try it. I thought going for the Timberpack Wolf deck was pretty fun so I'm glad there's a lot more of that.

Very much liking magic origins, it looks pretty powerful. The merfolk that got spoiled at GP Singapore (where I was this weekend) is extremely good, huge card for modern merfolk.

Just had my worst GP finish ever here, 1-3 drop. And my deck was almost card for card the same as the tournament winner, heh. Lost to Jund, Grixis Twin, and Elves.

Apparently PT:Origins is going to test out a new rule where mulligans come with a free Scry 1 - I like it

pulls a bit of equity away from the risk averse jund-like deck choices which is nice for variety

origins up. my initial impression is that red jumps out as strong. BR aggro looks like it will be v good.

to me this looks like the highest power level set in a while, especially at lower rarities. my main worry for limited is that if the elf or thopter deck all goes to one person at a table they are going to steamroll, kinda like the venerated teacher deck in ROE. elves in particular has a lot of strong cards that the non-elf decks don't want.

anyone prerelease?

also, anyone played Magic Duels, free for iPhone and iPad?

I did a couple prereleases, looks like a promising set. Renown is super powerful, so many creatures need to be killed immediately before you take a hit or you just fall way behind.

Some cards that impressed me:

Rhox Maulers - with trample it's very easy to get this up to a 6/6, which pretty much ends the game

Fetid Imp - evasion lets you get some attacks in without having to trade with your opponents early drops, you can then pivot to defense when a juicy target hits the board

Boggart Brute - the chances of getting in for 3 or 2-for-1ing your opponent with this guy are very high

Prickleboar - 5/3 first strike for 5cc seems very good in this format

Foundry of the Consuls - if you can grab one of these, a 1-of is going to be good in just about any deck, not just Thopters. It's very nice to have in the late game when both players are short on resources, you can sink some mana into it and then start chipping away the last few life points.

this set seems fine, i will certainly draft it but am glad it's a 2 month format since it doesn't seem too deep

good 2-drops and having a smooth curve in general are more important than usual

breaking open stalled games is harder than usual

my intuition from looking at the spoiler was that 2 drops would be important but also decent 2 drops would be thin on the ground, so even the meh commons will be fought over and the nice uncommon 2s that most colours have will probably be premium picks.

can't wait for this to pop up on mtgo.

so i did the math on these new constructed payouts on MTGO, assuming 1 booster pack = 40 play points which would be MSRP; in actuality it'll probably still be less but since the payouts are no longer 100% in packs now they have more stability relative to pack prices.

Daily Event - 1920 points in, 1800 points out per 16 players for a rake of 6.25%
8-man - 480 points in, 440 points out for a rake of 8.33%
2-man - 40 points in, 35 points out for a rake of 12.5%

-DEs will still be the best value event but not by nearly as big a margin over queues as before, you'll likely now need a ~55% winrate to break even rather than 50%
-Queues will be a better option than before unless packs rebound all the way up to store value in which case they'll be slightly worse

Wizards confirmed that there will be no Fetchlands in Battle for Zendikar, but there will be full-art lands, plus a new cycle of rare duals.

this was interesting i thought. 27 cards (17 creatures) what do you cut?

http://i.imgur.com/AFKOSxb.png

lost r1 obv

if you had 1 or 2 more husks that deck would be A+, as is it's still good

easy cuts:
Dark Petition - this card is just too slow for the format, there are fringe spots it might work but this is far from being one of them
Avaricious Dragon - i don't think this card is playable except in a hyper-aggro deck, there's too many ways for it to lose you the game
Mage Ring Bully - not a good card

last cut is probably Firefiend Elemental but i'd have to see the curve laid out to be sure

having never played with or against avaricious dragon i decided that was going in regardless and i tried to make the deck faster to accommodate, cutting skyraker, petition, unholy hunger and ignition. i never really got a chance to play so i can't say how that would've worked out. if i was playing it 100% straight i wouldn't have put dragon in, the way the curve ended up. i wasn't sure about ignition, most of the creatures are so small. it seems wrong to not play it if you can but i bailed on the decision in the end. i guess sac your board to husk and then ignition is going to be a sick blowout one way or the other.

BFZ mechanics are

Eldrazi side:
Devoid (this card has no color)
Ingest (whenever this creature deals combat damage to a player, exile the top card of that player's library)
plus stuff that interacts with colorlessness and exiled opponents cards

Zendikar side:
Awaken X - an alternate cost on spells that adds turning one of your lands into an X/X creature to the spell
Landfall - same as it ever was
plus Allies but probably with a different main mechanic this time rather than ETB triggered ability hell

actual cards are in this article http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/arcana/duel-decks-zendikar-vs-eldrazi-2015-08-17

hmm ingest sounds kind of cool, depending on what the associated shenanigans are. i am sure maro had a tantrum about building a mechanic around using cards from exile. also, ingest and awaken feel quite 'new' in a way recent mechanics haven't.

maro is the lead designer of the set so i think he's probably ok with this implementation of it - eldrazi are supposed to break the 'rules' of the game anyway

other news: Constructed leagues are apparently going to release on modo alongside BFZ. should be nice, as long as the entry/prizes are consistent with the current queues

Do people generally like landfall? It's always seemed pretty miserable to me - a mechanic that makes missing your land drops feel even worse than it already does.

Really like the other mechanics though.

Yeah but it makes drawing lands late in the game that you don't need a lot better, so it's a horse apiece. You usually play 18 land in Limited so that isn't as much of a problem - my issue with it was that there was a lot of creatures that got a boost with landfall which created a very aggro-oriented game, since the attackers were almost always better than the defenders.

yeah i assume they've learned from their mistakes and aren't going to make more Plated Geopedes. the landfall creatures that were on curve stats-wise and just got a keyword ability or non-combat bonus from the landfall (e.g. Surrakar Marauder, Grazing Gladeheart, Geyser Glider) actually played pretty well since if you were stuck on lands they could still block on curve - the mistakes were the cards like the Plated Geopede cycle which were well below curve without landfall and well above curve with it

landfall also probably gets way less focus this time since there are actual other new keyword mechanics. old zendikar stretched landfall reaalllly far since it was the only new one.

Landfall is a great if unexciting mechanic. Allows you to play more lands without diluting the quality of your deck too much. I mean, if the triple Zendikar draft format wasn't so damn fast, we might have seen that more.

went to eternal weekend in philly and did pretty well going 8-2-1 at legacy. playing 11 rounds in a day is as much a physical feat as a mental one. my hands were literally cramping when I shuffled at the end of the day.

anyway eternal weekend is great. my friend threw together an unpowered d+t deck in vintage just cause he wanted the sweet tolarian academy playmat and he went 6-4, having never played the format.

i really like this scapeshift build, i hope it's not terrible
http://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/315203#online

playing with coiling oracle and compulsive research in 2015 is some sort of weird dream

BFZ full set is up http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/card-image-gallery/battle-zendikar-2015-09-18

set looks fine for limited, looks a lot faster than the ROE-esque format people thought we were getting but that is okay with me.

really nothing new that i am excited to play in constructed though. i'm just gonna sit back and draft for a while and let other people come up with the standard decks.

manabases are going to be crazy, time to polish off those 5-color decks

the knight otr / retreat to coral helm combo seems legit to me. t3 win in modern. would be cool if bant was a deck now.

overall the set is fine, not super exciting but limited should be fun for a while at least

considering knight is still bugged on mtgo a friend was theorizing you cld build a pretty broken modern combo deck w/it for the ptq today, although part of me worries theyd refuse to honor the win if you gamed a programming error

what's the bug?

you can sacrifice any permanent (incl. itself) to knight's ability. looks like as of latest bug update its still a problem

haha that's insane

so I feel like Standard has found itself in a pretty unhealthy place with the release of BFZ. The battle lands have had this perverse effect of making it so every deck wants to play all the most powerful cards, and now singles prices, which were already on the rise, have shot up to crazy levels. Is this an unforeseen circumstance or is this the direction that WotC is trying to push the game? I know these types of situations have happened before, but it feels like a letdown after the more open environment we saw during Khans block. Is this just a return to the norm? Is new Jace headed for a banning?

I've been out of it for a while, what's shooting up to crazy prices?

don't know about paper but new jace is about 70 tix online now. i think i opened three during origins and prob sold for 70 total.

Delve is a degenerate mechanic and fetch lands are dumb as shit, this is what we get when they bring them back. Luckily with the new standard rotation scheme they'll be gone in 6 months rather than a year.

Also there's definitely other strategies that work, it's just easier to build the goodstuff midrange decks so if they're not worse than the other options then there's no incentive to test other stuff

Origins jace is strong but its power seems appropriately gated if fetches don't exist

ok so I haven't been following the BFZ stuff at all (we had a baby...)

I know they've reprinted all the fetches/shocks in some fashion, but does this mean they're all standard legal now? Because if so, that's really dumb - resulting in exactly the sort of enviroment that Moodles is describing, where everyone plays Modern Jund-type decks full of overpowered mythics.

There are ally colored fetches and new ally colored duals that are worse than shocks but are fetch-able in standard currently, yes. Having only the ally ones leads to a weird situation where playing 4 colors is no harder than playing 3 colors so there's just a lot of 4 color midrange decks.

Right, the issue is the combination of fetches & battle lands makes mana bases too open-ended, plus you have all these ridiculous graveyard interactions with cards like Jace, Kolaghan's Command, Ojutai's Command, Den Protector, Deathmist Raptor, delve cards, allowing you to recur and re-use cards endlessly. It feels oppressive to me, but maybe I was just spoiled by the way things had been going over the past year.

some solid graveyard hate could possibly help the situation

The PT was pretty silly, with deck names like Dark Jeskai and Blue Abzan. I remember reading something the developers said about how they wanted lands that would encourage two color decks. Don't know if they meant post fetches, but right now it's pretty dumb how every deck can play any card.

I do like BFZ limited now that I've played it a bit. There's a bit of variety of decks to make, and it feels like there's less bombs (though Rolling Thunder at uncommon increases the number). I still get confused what cards are allies and what cards have ingest though. I think they failed a bit on the theming.

Shadows Over Innistrad confirmed for April

i did a few bfz prerelease sealeds on mtgo when it came out even tho they are shitty value but i 4-0'd nearly all of them and had some good opens so i went into the format with like 40 packs and a bunch of tix. since then my limited rating has dropped exactly 150 points from 1856 to 1706 and the cupboard is bare. think i ought to take a break until April maybe.

None of this is surprising to me, but it's interesting to see this spelled out in such detail:
http://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/the-most-expensive-standard-since-caw-blade

I'm not super upset about the high prices, I've resigned myself to playing mediocre decks like R/G Landfall and Aristocrats. The frustrating thing for me is that local standard play has absolutely bottomed out in Austin, TX. During Khans block, my LGS would get between 20-30 people for FNM standard. Now, it's a struggle to get even 8 people, and this is the case across a bunch of stores. I'd be ok with my crappy decks if there was a consistent pool of players to compete with.