Magic: The Gathering C/D

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

I was shocked to see Show and Tell reprinted because I was 100% sure it was on the reserve list. Guess it wasn't because it was a garbage rate at the time the Reserve List was created? If so, lol

Garbage rare*

yeah something like that. the logic of what went on that list is not always clear though, lion's eye diamond was similarly considered pointless at the time and it's on there

Oh yeah good point. I remember LED was a joke among my friends back in the day - we'd give it to each other as a gag gift. Crazy to think what it's worth now. Really curious how the Reserve List was decided, then

at one point all rares that had never had a reprint went on the list after a certain point (3 years?). when they stopped adding to the reserved list in like 2002 they exempted a bunch of rares that hadnt been reprinted yet that they thought they might want to reprint in core sets or w/e in the future. thats why all the shitty homelands rares are on the list but stuff like show & tell is not

I actually remember the previews of Mirage and Visions - "A 12/12 for 1 mana!" "A card that's just like Black Lotus, but with one extra line!" Dreadnought was fun to figure out - I actually figured out a 4-card combo that let you cast it on turn 4. When LED was released we were all sorely disappointed. "So this thing is unusable then?" Looking back that was the first Future Sight-style joke card, of course if we knew then how long Magic would stick around we might have figured out this thing would one day be useful.

Of course the very next set brought Lotus Vale which in some sense DID function like a Black Lotus, thanks to some rules loophole. Good times.

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-digital/magic-online-leagues-circle-complete-2016-08-24

draft leagues coming early sept. 3 rounds of games but not within the draft pod, but matchmaking at same record only. replacing swiss queues entirely, and only 8-4s remain as traditional in-pod tournaments. no change to entry and prizes.

love draft leagues, love the league leaderboards

this is prob my favorite feature add since before V4 release

i've very much got my mtg spark back in the past month or 2, if kaladesh is any good at all i will draft the he** out of it

i made the decision during SOI to switch from 8-4s back to swiss and was v pleased by the addition of the current format 6-2-2-2s recently so my first reaction to the news was to be a bit bummed to be losing the "pure" experience for swiss but realizing that i have played sealed league more than draft this format because it has been hard to get the necessary block of time i think i should and will be glad about this development.

the change definitely makes sense in terms of helping people manage their time better without locking them into multi-hour blocks of game time, but it is a little weird to me to play against people outside of the original pod, it will take some getting used to.

this is prob my favorite feature add since before V4 release

Absolutely. I love drafting but I'm kind of a quick player and often times I'd finish a match in 15 minutes and have to wait nearly 40 minutes for the next round to start. It's frustrating to me since I have a kid now and if I'm playing it's usually at like 9:30-10 PM, so if there's just one slow guy in the pod I might not make it to bed until 12:30. Playing decks outside the pod is kinda weird but I doubt I'll even notice, if anything it just means I don't have to defensive draft

defensive drafting is bad anyway unless there's nothing in the pack in your colors at all

eh I'll take a good offcolor uncommon vs. something that likely won't make my deck anyway, depending on the set of course. some sets like Origins had so many garbage commons that you'd struggle to get to 23.

i caught an episode of limited resources with chris fennell guesting a while back and that was the only time i can remember a pro player arguing in favour of proactively hatedrafting. he was saying as the draft goes on you have to realize there are certain cards your deck can never beat and you have to take them out of the game. the numbers go so hard against that though, it really doesn't make any sense. even so, however ill advised it might be, losing that element of the draft experience and that part of strategy is an actual cost. tracking the cards you pass so you know what your opponents might have is i think of a much smaller benefit, and more dubious, than ppl make out but again that is still a real thing. i'm just hoping stuff like this seems more important than it actually plays out.

yeah I mean when most people think of hatedrafting they think of first-picking a bomb rare they can't play in Pack 3 so no one else can get it, IMO that's pretty dumb, but if you're in say Pack 3 Pick 4 and you've got 20 playables I'm okay just picking the best card if there's nothing I want, knowing if nothing else there's a ton of deck filler coming my way

i tend to prefer to build up an on-colour sideboard even if i am good for my main playables. more often than you might think you can board in even some usually pretty bad cards to give you an edge in a specific match up.

yeah i have won lots of limited games via sideboarding in of cards that i picked up late in packs. if your opponent's deck is slow, bring in some of those mediocre draw spells or mind rots and crush them with card advantage. if they're trying to swarm you out with 2-drops, your 1/1 for 1 might be live and better than a decent 5-drop

I sometimes hate-draft later picks that are extremely good against my deck, e.g. Dual Shot if I'm playing lots of 1-toughness guys, over marginally useful cards for my own deck. But usually I prefer to add to my sideboard, like you guys are saying

next block after kaladesh is amonkhet, an egypt-like word ruled by nicol bolas. hmmm

also modern masters 3 is out in march, will go thru RTR block this time

i like the idea of egypt world. egyptian mythology is a bit too obscure i think to have the same depth of resonance as e.g. theros achieved but as long as they get the feel right it should go over well. at any rate, i personally am more interested in that than "steampunk" world.

I'm just happy to get two new worlds. I know they said that we're gonna have "return" blocks about half the time from now on, but doing 2 in a row has felt like a lot of returning. And that was with two blocks I mostly liked - can't imagine if it was blocks I didn't like

yeah i would prefer a much lower sequel rate than 50%. with all of RTR, BFZ, SOI i feel like they've somehow simultaneously whiffed on replicating the feel of the old sets and bringing enough new stuff to be exciting. i think scars of mirrodin was actually the best-executed sequel block despite being the first one that they did.