Magic: The Gathering C/D

I've had success with B/W, not a very 'natural' pairing for this set but it works better than I thought. The white guy that lets you discard to tap something can lead to some insane blowout games if you got the right Madness cards.

oh yeah, I forget about the GB delirium deck, haven't tried it yet. seems like lots of fun. and B/W is certainly not as bad as it's cracked up to be. good luck, ciderpress, let us know how it goes!

I've had lots of good r/b decks at this point, I've probably drafted it the most. I think the key common is actually insolent neonate, get in for a few few points of damage then cheat something big into play on t3 + draw a card is really strong.

b/w doesn't have many payoff cards but it's still okay. u/w spirits is solid, not really contrarian. g/b delirium is very good, you get to play w/ a lot of good cards that just become better cards if you hit delirium.

the good u/g decks are the scariest to face, since when they go off (w/ all the key uncommon cards) they can build basically unbeatable boards. if I'm playing blue I either want to have that deck or like 10 flyers.

I 3-0'd with a 16 plains monowhite aggro deck, which was a lot of fun. prob not gonna be viable that often.

if you open thalia's lieutenant or always watching (I actually had neither) I think it's worth trying

Speaking of the UG decks you just mentioned, Ongoing Investigation has been so daunting to play against. It's good even in a non-green deck, but ridiculous in UG

Can't trade guys, can't let guys through. Can't win, basically

the worst thing is, not only do they draw their deck but they also can gain a ton of life w/ the various ug pieces, so you can't even really race them after they've 'gone off'

as expected all of the synergy decks depend on uncommons to really fire. one key way they vary is on how much they struggle if you don't get them or draw them. i love the UG deck but the commons can be underpowered, especially if you are fighting over green cards, so if you don't draw one of the good enchantments or the mole you can find yourself with a bunch of cards that don't do a great deal. green and white are the deepest at common so i do tend to favour those - those colours are supporting two quite different decks in delirium and aggro humans but even if you get caught halfway between it's not necessarily a disaster. i have seen some ppl disparage the colour pair but i think my favourite archetype is BW delirium/recursion. not only does that deck have some of the best uncommons it is also pretty strong at common. if you can get a couple each of the black 2 drop and white 3 drop that exile from the yard for tokens you just have plays for days.

GR werewolves is solid, hardly ever really bad and deep enough to be hard to get totally cut out of. because of that i feel okay taking a chance on a pick 2 howlpack resurgance whereas i'd feel a lot more iffy about say a masquerade at that point. BU seems really bad, hardly any of the common zombies are good so the tribal theme is kind of lame. a couple of the uncommon guy that grants deathtouch would make me feel better about 1/3 skaabs clogging up my deck i guess. and the gold rare is so disappointing.

the BG macabre waltz or morbid plunder or whatever-the-current-set's-equivalent-is deck is good in almost every limited format (BFZ/OGW was an exception sadly due to green being awful tokens nonsense) and my friend and i have been abusing it for a long time since it's always underdrafted around here

magic documentary on netflix is zzzzzzzzzzz. even rufus agreed with me and he lives for magic. not enough inside baseball. the magic people produced it so they probably wanted it as cuddly as possible.

competitive magic players are mostly boring people is the problem, i think you could make a good doc about magic but framing it around pro players isn't the most entertaining approach

I actually thought the more personal parts where you learn a bit about their lives was the strongest aspect of the film. Didn't really tell much about actually playing the game and the whole PT drama felt very rushed to where it wasn't really dramatic at all, I couldn't get very invested in the ups and downs of the competition because they zipped through it all so quickly.

I thought the doc did a good job giving an overview of the PT, and I thought it was dramatic enough. Though you're probably right, Scott, that if outsiders had made it we'd get a different perspective. I agree that the personal parts were the most interesting, the only parts that were new for me

I realize this ain't the brag thread but I just 9-0'd one of those new leagues with a R/W deck. Had "only" 2 rares, Bygone Bishop and Burn From Within. MVP card was the 2x Expose Evil - what a workhorse that was.

Not that we have a brag thread. but hey. made me feel good.

forgot to mention. only 1 loss in all 9 matches. I did pull a shit ton of games out of my ass though

i just would have liked more info and facts. they spent very little time on the origin of the game. the inspiration behind it. and were just vague in general about how it got so big. an outside doc might have delved into the money aspect of it more too. how huge of a company it is. how much the pro players make. as rufus said: it didn't really tell him anything that he didn't already know. there is one scene where "The Innovator" is discussing strategy to a crowd and they cut him off after about five seconds. i would have actually liked to hear more from him. it was interesting and i don't even play.

similar actually to the pro video game doc i watched on netflix. those games that tombot likes to watch. they did the same kinda inspirational/generic sports profile thing with the top players but didn't go very deep.

x-post

yeah the doc isn't well designed for an outsider while not really giving much to the insiders, so it felt kinda pointless. I don't think the guys who made it wanted to make an advertisement but their hands were tied and any interesting storyline probably woulda been 'negative' on some level. pro players don't make a lot of money and live pretty bleak lives. there is an interesting story there but not one that the wizards pr department is gonna fund.

I think they could have easily improved on it just by making it maybe 30 minutes longer. But then I'm perfectly content to watch endless hours of mtg videos day in and out, so perhaps I'm not the best judge.

I just watched this and whilst I didn't think it was a great documentary, I still kind of loved watching it. I'm pretty much an outsider (though I've played enough in the past to know the basics) and feel compelled to start playing again immediately, but I am pretty impressionable so it's not a big statement. I really wish more of the actual gameplay had been foregrounded because you really didn't get a strong sense of the tension they were all talking about. And I'm a bit sad that the only woman in it got poached!

Where can I like, go and watch more games right now? And am I going to understand them?

https://www.twitch.tv/scglive runs and broadcasts large tournaments most weekends. you're likely not going to understand whats going on though other than at a high level of e.g. who's currently winning. this is the main issue that faces competitive MTG as a spectator 'sport'; there's no way for the commentators to describe everything on the board so you have to assume the viewers can identify a lot of the cards without assistance and know what they do.

a friend of mine was working on some software to identify cards on these broadcasts and provide a popup window with the full card image, which is the sort of thing that would help a ton if someone got it working well.

also of course https://www.twitch.tv/magic broadcasts the official WotC-run tournaments but those are a bit less frequent

the latter is going to have the events you would have seen in the documentary though (pro tour and grand prix)

Thank you! Does anyone here ever compete in the pro tour? I tried having a look at those streams, but yeah...I just have no idea what those cards are. A card ID popup would be so useful - hope your friend gets that working. There are some matches for beginners on YouTube that I think can satisfy my curiosity for now.

I have a ton of cards, but they're mostly quite old. Is it important for me to have new cards in my deck?

if you're just playing casually then use whatever cards you've got

for competitive play there's several different formats with different deck construction rules, the high-level breakdown is:
Standard - uses only cards from the past ~18 months worth of sets
Modern - uses only cards printed since 8th edition (essentially 2003 to present year) with a small ban list of cards that have proven too strong
Legacy - uses all cards, but with a small ban list of the most powerful cards
Vintage - uses all cards with no ban list but a 1-per-deck restriction on a few really powerful cards

not sure if anyone here has played in the pro tour, it's not easy to qualify and you have to be really good to stay on the tour indefinitely like the folks in the documentary. i have a few friends who have played in 1 or 2 but didn't do well enough to continue

Thanks. Casually for now, but the prospect of tournaments is very appealing for some point in the future. I just need to find people to play against now... imago is refusing to play.

you can go here to get a sense of the popular competitive decks that are currently played in various formats:
http://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/

probably a good resource if you want details on the decks you see on mtg broadcasts

I've played in two Pro Tours, but I'm not very good at Constructed formats and for the PT you need to be skilled at both. Testing a new format without a team or at least a regular playgroup is also quite difficult. Both times I didn't make it past day 1 because of my terrible Constructed deck. I agree that a newcomer would have a hard time learning from the stream. Probably best to play some with friends first to get a hang of the basics.

both Constructed and draft*

I did watch a LoadingReadyRun stream where they had an excellent card ID popup thing. Whenever a player played a card, they put it in the middle of the table and it would get scanned and pop-up on stream. I hope they can introduce that on the PT. It didn't seem to slow the game too much.

pretty entertaining article on the history of Limited here:

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/oral-history-limited-2016-05-09

Steve: My second Top 8 was also Rochester—the win in Los Angeles. My semifinal match with Terry Lau might be one of the only Top 8 matches to ever go to six games. I don't think anyone had ever drawn a game in the Top 8 before. That was the Mono-Black Befoul/Corrupt deck in the Top 8. It's probably the only time in Magic I've ever been threatened to be punched in the face. I was playing against Mike Long. I went first and played a Swamp. He played Pouncing Jaguar. I went Swamp, Dark Ritual, Befoul his Forest so he couldn't pay the echo and would lose the Jaguar too. He tried to put his Pouncing Jaguar in the graveyard and not his Forest. "Nope," I said and pointed to his Forest. Later he ripped a Forest and played his Acridian. I played my fourth Swamp and Befouled the only green source he had to pay the echo with.

This I've had happen to me and yeah it is probably the most frustrating thing that can happen in Limited

Saga was so poorly designed, in retrospect

yeah it took them a while to go from 'we're now thinking about limited play when making sets' (mirage) to 'this is actually fun to play limited with' (invasion) and then it's not for another several years after that that you get the first limited format that resembles their current design approach (champions of kamigawa)

Did y'all watch the talk Mark Rosewater gave at GDC? Pretty great talk about the lessons R&D has learned designing Magic, though maybe not much new if you've been reading his column over the years. I think Echo is a more interesting mechanic than a fun one (it's kind of a pain, really), and he talks about how mechanics should be fun rather than interesting. His example was how in Odyssey it was advantageous to dump your hand for Threshold, which I agree was not very fun

nyc people: are there any good places to FNM in manhattan these days?

montasy comics is okay. are you in town?

no, was asking for a friend who just moved down there and is trying to find the spot with the most competent players

okay here's the scene:

montasy (midtown) - decent standard/draft fnm, nice people, competitiveness depends on who you end up playing but your average fnm draft pod and standard fnm is about 50% casuals 50% srs players. also has legacy/modern nights which are roughly the same casual/srs ratios. the playerbase is generally pretty friendly but the store is poorly run and just coasts off being the only real option in midtown.

uncommons (village) - also has fnm and some other stuff, generally runs more casual than montasy

geekery (queens) - my favorite store, I'm friends w/ the people who run it and has pretty competitive modern/legacy scene, decent drafts at fnm. doesn't have a standard scene.

20s (brooklyn) - still runs some magic stuff but it's spotty. I know the run fnms at least, I don't know who shows up. it was more competitive in general than the other stores when they were more magic focused.

king's games (brooklyn) - I have never actually been here, it is very far in brooklyn and everyone hates it

nebulous (LES) - kinda out of the way and not a reliable choice for events, but they have the occasional gpt etc.

I run a google group w/ a lot of fairly competitive friends and we have lots of social+magic get togethers if he's interested in meeting people

thanks, appreciate it

art on the EMA animate dead is a real treat. actually some real nice new art in general in what's been spoiled so far

http://mythicspoiler.com/ema/cards/animatedead.jpg

Too bad they can't update the ugliness of how the card works as well

I mean, it works intuitively, but it's such a shame that the card is still so wordy and hard to parse after all these years

yeah "enchant dead creature" is just something that doesn't work within the rules. and yes it sucks because I really like that effect - it's powerful but there's an extra way of killing it. Makeshift Mannequin I liked because it played around in that space.

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/card-image-gallery/eternal-masters

full spoiler up

nice set

i am very disappointed that they commissioned new art for Roots though, the original is a masterpiece

boooo @ the new Mother of Runes art. everything's gotta be sexy these days

serious lol at Prodigal Sorcerer though

pauper gains elite vanguard and desperate ravings, also nimble mongoose though idk if that will be relevant