Magic: The Gathering C/D

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

thank god they made Impervious Perfect a rare, I got flashbacks of losing to that repeatedly

vma is probably my favorite draft format of all time so im v excited for this, although i doubt ill play any of it irl

This set looks so great - I love the cube feel, like I read the spoiler and it's hard to construct a pack where I wouldn't excited about like a 5th pick common.

Red looks like an intimidatingly effective Fun Police though, hope that's not the case to an extent where self-indulgence and winning end up strongly polarised.

also can we talk abt how sick it is that strange fbook dudes keep using magic card art for their macros?

https://twitter.com/dasharez0ne/status/735663199941361664

lol im a fan of that account

anyone got anything fun in modern rn? i still haven't really landed on anything post-birthing pod

I got Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet in a pack recently, but I really have no clue at this stage if it is good or anything, it just had the shiny bit on it so I thought maybe!

Does anyone play/know of anywhere to play in London that isn't terrifying?

that card is quite popular currently

I have mostly been playing legacy (going to columbus actually...) and grinding lorwyn/10th edition drafts online but I would probably play the death's shadow aggro deck if I were playing modern right now, that deck is a lot of fun

oh i forgot there was a legacy gp this weekend, i should probably take advantage of that to play some matches while there are more people in queue

yeah the gauntlet will be online soon, should be fun

i dont really care about the gauntlet, i just want some practice with my deck (aluren)

aluren is pretty cool, I might try that in paper one day since I have a playset of recruiters and can borrow my friend's shardless bug deck

Sorry to be here asking so many beginner's questions, but what are these pre-named, pre-made decks? Does anyone ever build their own deck from scratch or is that not generally what is done if you are playing in tournaments?

There's plenty of people who build their own decks, but most competitive players are content to start with a proven strategy and make tweaks from there.

Ty, good to know. I'm far from that stage yet

I haven't played competitive constructed in a long long time but I think it's a lot harder to be successful with your own homebrew these days, since formats get effectively solved and sorted into tier 1/tier 2/fringe decks very quickly. Also I think the cards are in general more powerful now, it's tough to really metagame well for some of the better decks in the format.

yeah, to elaborate, there's so many people playing this game that generally every time a new set is released, all the powerful strategies/interactions get found within a few weeks and then competitive deckbuilding becomes more about picking your preferred one of them and slowly evolving it to match up well against whatever's popular.

of course, you could always be one of the people who found a major strategy in those first few weeks but the odds are against you

man, I remember it taking like...a month before people figured out you could effectively "cheat" Tangle Wire, and suddenly there were copies in what seemed like every Standard deck. those were the days.

also sometimes you dust off some old idea that was publicly known but discarded as a gimmick and stumble on a slightly different build of it that's a bit more consistent and win a bunch of events with it on magic online and then some pro tour player sees it and brings it to the next PT and then a year or 2 later a card gets banned in modern

>Does anyone play/know of anywhere to play in London that isn't terrifying?

Your choices are mostly Dark Sphere in Lambeth or Leisure Games in Finchley. I don't know anything about the latter but it's meant to be nice. I have only good things to say about Dark Sphere - it's super nerdy obviously but they try hard to make it pleasant and friendly.

How did folks do drafting Eternal Masters? I had a ton of fun playing a BR aggro/sacrifice deck with 3 copies of Dragon Egg. Love that card. Gonna draft it a couple more times this coming weekend :)

Draft the set, that is. Maybe not the same deck

didn't sign up for the local drafts in time, gonna draft it on magic online whenever it's out on there (probably next week?)

it's friday. i am starting to get a cold already. maybe the flu. something at any rate.

I went 11-4 at gp columbus this weekend but finished out of t64 on breakers. woulda liked to do a little bit better but I do have my first pro points.

still haven't touched eternal masters but it does look like a good limited set.

not bad! you still playing the recruiter taxes deck?

yep. in prague someone ended up one misplay away from t8'ing with it http://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/430202#paper

it's a very strong list, vial + imperial recruiter is super broken in a format where card advantage is hard to come by and mana is super tight

Hope you're feeling better, Roberto! xp

thx, have a feeling i'll be fine by friday evening

so this new set looks uh...pretty nutso thus far. everything's turning into an Eldrazi. plus they're finally doing a merge mechanic where two specific creatures become one super-creature.

there's 3 things i'm particularly tired of right now: 1) eldrazi 2) multicolor sets 3) sequel sets throwing so much of their weight into callbacks e.g. second iterations of legendary creatures

we've been getting a lot of 1 and 3 lately so my engagement level is low. this set looks fine, i'll play it, but nothing's gotten me too excited yet.