Magic: The Gathering C/D

many posting on my phone is hard

i'm curious how the game is selling now, i remember from OG zendikar thru theros they made a big deal of showing how sales were growing rapidly year over year and then they kind of went quiet on that front circa khans

i don't know if legacy is fucked but if it is then that probably spills into modern too. standard has been mediocre for a few seasons now so i'm not really sure what constructed format people are digging if any. it honestly feels like they've overcompensated for the mistakes of the past at this point, with white and green and midrange creature decks being overpushed. they hit a good balance circa RTR and then blasted right on past it.

the game is still good though, don't wanna be all doom and gloom, but competitive constructed definitely has some issues to sort out. modern's prob the healthiest constructed format overall right now but still has some core issues re: card availability and combo deck matchups

i havent particularly enjoyed the current standard but like the format generally. i think modern is garbage but thats a personal thing. i do think the secondary market as a whole is in a really bad place though and i think players dont realize how much that impacts the ecosystem no matter how good or bad certain formats are

players need to want to own cards more than they want to sell them basically

I think legacy is healthyish though a lot of people grumble about miracles. eldrazi is pretty dumb and I think they need to ban chalice, kinda expect it to happen one day.

modern is in a wild west state, though I have a feeling that nahiri control might end up 'the best deck' once it's solved. I think there's debate as to whether a format that's been solved and has best decks is 'healthier' than one that doesn't. I always feel like I have the least competitive advantage playing modern, my modern win % has always been way lower than my win % for every other format. (though I don't play standard.)

players need to want to own cards more than they want to sell them basically

people also refuse to take losses on anything other than standard cards and don't like trading away any of their high value stuff ever. I think this leads to a situation where all 'high value cards' end up even more expensive than they should be. e.g. nobody wants bitterblossom but nobody trades their bitterblossoms.

standard is my favorite format historically, just think it's a bit less diverse/balanced lately than usual

looks like they took EMA down. what did you guys think overall? I drafted it ~25 times online and wasn't completely sick of it yet. kinda was MM-style limited where you pick a lane and go with it but there were a lot of fun strategies and a lot of ways to build a 4/5c deck. I was always scared someone would be clever enough to price of progress me when I drafted 11 dual decks but it never actually happened.

Apparently Shkreli a lead bought a bunch of Black Lotuses. I find the whole situation pretty hilarious.

I think standard is a bit better now than during BFZ, but not great. I really enjoyed it during Khans block.

a lead = already

e.g. nobody wants bitterblossom but nobody trades their bitterblossoms.

Yeah I feel intuitively that this is very bad, but it's hard for me to articulate exactly why?

I feel like "format diversity" is what everyone wants but there's massive dishonesty re: admitting that format diversity is often to a large degree a financial effect, like in Modern people keep playing "their deck" even when it's tier 2.5 or whatever because acquiring another is just this impossible shuddering effort. So I don't know if there's a way to have both "access" and "diversity".

thats definitely the case for modern/legacy, but in standard we've had formats with as many as a dozen 'top tier' decks at once, and right now it feels really skewed towards green midrange and collected company decks which is only a few decks

i think what i dislike is more the color imbalance than the number of archetypes tbh. i didn't mind caw-blade standard since there was a good RB deck on the next step down rather than another UW deck

I'm FB friends with the dude who did the LED and Moat buyouts, used to see him a lot at PTQs. He's gotten SO much hate for buying like 40 copies of these cards, and I think maybe 0.5% of the complainers had any intention to buy these cards, if that. He not only got comparisons to Shkreli, but Hitler as well. And death threats. I'm finding it pretty hilarious and I think he is too. Now that the real Shkreli is involved I can't wait to see what happens

40 copies, really? That's all it takes to move the price that much?

There's not a ton on the tcgplayer market at any one time so if you buy that many people see them 'sold out' and panic

really feel like I ought to sell out right now, Library of Alexandria is hitting a grand

i've been trying to downsize my collection for a while but a big chunk of it is old standard staples that are marginal in modern and thus have low demand, i've found a lot of these cards aren't actually worth nearly the amount they're supposedly selling for when you look at tcgplayer price. e.g. restoration angel is $12 median currently but no one actually needs them.

yeah that's the issue I'm gonna have to. my collection is supposedly worth like 20k or something according to these websites but I can't imagine anyone giving me more than 5k or 6k in a single shot. like someone is telling me "SELL YOUR CRADLES NOW!" which I get, it's over $200 now, but is there really any liquidity at that price?

you could look at the major vendor online buylist prices or do it at the next big event near you

i'd like to go down to 1 deck per format but ever since the birthing pod ban i haven't been able to figure out the 1 modern deck that i'd be happy running forever. i was playing scapeshift for a while but the emergence of infect as a popular deck has made that kind of frustrating

i've been waiting for someone to come up with a good thopter foundry list since i love thirst for knowledge decks but that doesn't seem to be happening

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/card-image-gallery/eldritch-moon

first thing i noticed is common removal is total garbage. murder and exile lightning strike at uncommon feel like bombs

also, the missing zombies from SOI have arrived

i just want to kill people with Stensia Banquet, that concept is really funny to me

xp yeah he's only buying from tcgplayer, not eBay, so yeah 40 copies is everything available

i'm playing dredge in Modern and this deck should not exist. highly recommended

I have yet to see modern dredge in action...how fast does it goldfish? I hate dredge btw

its pretty wildly variant depending on how many prized amalgams you hit off your first couple dredges but it's enough to overwhelm all the fair decks

also i play burning inquiry in my list which is a card that will sometimes just make your opponent concede on turn 1

ha that's pretty mean

a typical start might look something like t1 insolent neonate, discard and dredge a stinkweed imp or grave troll, t2 dredge something and play a land returning 1-2 bloodghasts and 1-2 prized amalgams, maybe you have a narcomoeba in play too, if your draw is real good you can maybe even get some more stuff into play off a faithless looting but the point is you're putting as much as 10 power into play on turn 2 and it's mostly guys that will come right back turn 3 if they get removed

Interesting changes announced for the next year, especially the change to top 8 bracket. What do y'all think?

Top 8 bracket for PTs, specifically

I think that style of bracket only serves to emphasize how dumb the tiebreaker + hard cut system is

at some point there's gonna be a PT where seeds 2 thru 5 have the same number of match points and it will look really silly for 2 people who performed equally in the swiss to have dramatically different chances in the top 8

after a couple weeks of complaints & despair about bant company being unbeatable, having the PT standard rounds open with t1 vessel of nascency on both sides in a non-mirror-match was a pretty great/weird moment

just finished my second sealed league. some quick observations: Blue is way more playable, White seems a bit worse. there are so many good instant/sorcery triggers that even the U/R deck that's usually poison actually winds up being quite good. B/G self-mill is a lot of fun to play but decking yourself is a very real threat. Emerge seems...not worth it. The cost reduction is clunky and there aren't enough sac triggers to make it work - punting tokens doesn't help either, usually it plays like the Champion mechanic from Lorwyn but the creatures aren't quite as good. you could probably draft something out of it I guess.

emerge has been good in my experience, the blue common one is one of the better commons. overall, red is strong, white is kinda weak because theres so many cards that punish x/1s and white relies on x/1s. blue is better than usual as a base color since the 2s and 3s are good. green is deep but low ceiling like usual. not sure about black yet

yeah emerge is very strong in draft at least, where you can set it up with good enablers.

strong in constructed too if this PT is any indication

PT top 8 is happening right now fyi due to insane time difference

so that dredge deck eh? I have a suspicion there will be a card banned within a year...

probably just send GGT back to the banlist, the deck isn't super out of line right now just very good

in theory everyone can pack a ton of gravehate, but modern sbs are already so taxed. it makes the 'which fast linear deck have you decided not to lose to' problem even worse.

http://static.starcitygames.com/www/images/article/16August2016Preview01.png

only relevant for legacy, but I'm excited

i was trying to think of the most relevant things you can get with that but not imperial recruiter, all i've got so far is true name nemesis, plus the good value creatures like vendilion clique and flickerwisp and such. not sure it opens up any combos of the same degree as painters servant or the aluren chain

that plus flickerwisp is degenerate enough. not sure there's a cute infinite combo, but yeah, it's mostly a value card. too bad it's not modern legal, though it would potentially be a little too busted?

http://227rsi2stdr53e3wto2skssd7xe.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Sanctum-Prelate_EN.png

http://media.wizards.com/2016/azetllnwjpxztp2b_CN2/en_mGqRiQAwg3.png

this seems p mental. look forward to seeing it in cube