Magic: The Gathering C/D

a 3-0 GW deck, a rarity for me: http://imgur.com/a/JZnsJ

eddytrail hawk is probably the card i've shifted on the most over the course of the format, i went from never wanting to play it to never wanting to play white unless i'm playing it

yeah, a lot of cards in this set have shifted in my estimation. I don't think it's clear whether Furious Reprisal is better than Chandra's Pyrohelix, which I would have laughed off if you told me at the beginning of the format

reprisal has won me enough games that i'm sure it's better but it's not far and away better

http://mythicspoiler.com/aer/cards/quicksmithrebel.html

this + Staff of Domination seems good

a lot of things combo with staff of domination

Totally going to play the panharmonicon deck. It's a known quantity now, so probably less effective, but it looks really fun

I've gotten to the point where that's a windmill slam in draft - I didn't consider that it worked with Fabricate and all the energy creatures, there's so much value you can grind out of it

i haven't had panharmonicon in limited. i'd want to have a lot of fabricate. getting a bunch more energy doesn't seem like sufficient payoff.

managed another 3-0, the first i think without any bombs or anything broken going on, just a solid curve out. good lesson tho about building a regular deck around a single card. here i got the two marauders in my first 3 picks and so i just went all in on +1/+1 counters. in 8 games i drew a marauder one single time. all i wanted was seedsculptors and rhinos and i was actually a little bummed by the end of the draft, but the deck felt powerful to play. most of the time i could just attack into or past whatever my opponent was doing.

http://i.imgur.com/G3Z9V7H.jpg

xp

Oh it's fun and quite playable. You can build around it easily. Before this format rotates, I want to live the dream of Panharmonicon + Cloudblazer

yeah i have been across the table from that particular experience

i have done that it's okay but not as good as comboing off with whirler virtuoso

oh yeah, that is satisfying. even better when the opponent doesn't know it's there. those Era of Innovation decks are so much fun to play, but you need those Skygates to come down quick

thus far my biggest disappointment has been Fairgrounds Trumpeter, such a cool build-around type card, but the delayed counter makes it so it doesn't fit in a curve. that + Fretwork Colony is such a dream come true though

trumpeter has been good for me and i plya it a lot

it's definitely a good card and one I'll definitely pick very early on the 2nd or 3rd pack, just something I've personally never gotten to work

yeah i really like trumpeter. that are lots of ways of triggering it in green alone. ive been having a insanely hard time winning in the format though. i was planning on going to milwaukee this wknd but the other guys i was travelling with are backing out and i dont feel great about this format/going by myself/need the pro points

yeah I have resigned to not being good at this format. I don't think I really like it that much.

which was fine cause I liked the cube and <3 <3 rtr but gtc is terrible imo

someone just leaked this on reddit http://imgur.com/NHQCJYT

not confirmed real yet but it's got new art of recognizable mtg characters so it seems more likely than not?

yeah seems like faking something at that quality would be a ton of work

atlantean mesoamerica feels very on-the-nose for current mtg creative

agreed. kind of hope these are fake but they do look right.

could be mock-ups for market research, 'atlazan' sounds like a mtg plane name but 'conquest of power' is pretty dumb and could be a placeholder

i like the cat mask guy on the amonkhet pack though

is that vraska?

probably

kinda weird planeswalker for them to bring back but they do keep mentioning here in the stories

'conquest of power' is pretty dumb and could be a placeholder.

2nd/3rd set names are usually awful. That seems like exactly the kind of name they would use

https://twitter.com/wizards_magic/status/807003341444161536

I don't buy it, wizards

Is anyone else feeling the Frontier hype? Is now the time to start busing up baby Jace's?

Looking back through my friendly Kaladesh draft league decks that went at least 2-1 the rare that seems to crop up most often is Midnight Oil. That really wins a lot of games for me, and gets passed maybe more than it should.

i'm a big fan and feel like i've also had it a lot because it goes late. if you can hang around a couple turns enough to play it and let it get going then it is a massive advantage. and once or twice i have played it turned 4 or 5 as a wildcard when i already know i am behind and turned the game around.

played a couple gatecrash drafts over the weekend. so many junk commons, both times i felt i was in the right colours but ended up short a playable. took a solid simic deck to the finals (losing to the guy who got all the dimir cards) and then flamed out match 2 with an ok boros deck. i remembered evolve fondly and it stands up as a great mechanic. it is just a bad format tho i think.

GTC one of the worst modern draft formats imo. only 6 decks available and 4 of them are boring prescriptive linear things and the other 2 couldn't beat the linear ones.

also re: Frontier i don't think it's in wotc's interest to support it. by all accounts modern is doing really well at the store level and the frontier hype is from a small subset of players who don't like modern and would rather play khans standard again instead

what is the 6th deck? fixing seems to be terrible, at least in rtr you had the time and resources to easily do 3+ colours off green to give more options.

i was thinking the 5-color green deck but there's actually 2 "UB" decks (tempo cipher deck and esper control deck) so i guess there's 7 overall. None of those 3 decks does well against a decently constructed boros, gruul, simic, or orzhov deck though.

i drafted a ton of UB in that format just because it was always open but even as the only UB drafter at the table i was only on even footing with the guilds that had 2-3 drafters

the secret to gtc is to force esper removal. currently have a 100% win rate with this strategy. you need 10+ removal spells and usually at least one psychic strike but you beat everything else. also dont do this btw like 10PM and 3AM EST because im getting sick of fighting ppl for executioner's swings

has anyone been cubing? i do enjoy a holiday cube. if they gave trophies for losing in the finals boy i would be killing it. i did beat oliver tiu in a finals tho, my 2nd best all time mtgo pro scalp after reid duke afaia.

i don't like the power cube as much as the normal one so i'm just taking a break until aether revolt right now

yeah idk i shape the way i play around minimizing variance because it can be so annoying and then this dumb shit comes along and somehow i can switch it off and just be like "congratulations on your turn 1 win sir, wp" and actually enjoy myself. itsamystery

this pre-previews approach of trickling out 1 new AER card every 4-5 days is p annoying

I love power cube and yeah the variance is incredibly wacky but that's what makes it fun, I guess. I never have any clue how my decks are going to do. My problem is that I wind up with the Green ramp deck nearly everytime, nobody ever takes Joraga Treespeaker early like they ought to

I'm going to go for my first holiday cube draft today. No idea what cards to pick, unless I open Sol Ring I guess.

I prefer legacy cube in theory but I've been doing pretty well in vintage cube

here's a debate subject - what do you guys think about force spike? one of my friends who is a pretty solid player says he thinks it's really mediocre in cube whereas I think it's actually one of the more powerful cards and take it pretty high. would basically never cut it from any cube deck other than idk, the perfect 40 card storm deck, and even in storm I like playing it as flexible interaction.

I'm going to go for my first holiday cube draft today. No idea what cards to pick, unless I open Sol Ring I guess.

it's actually less difficult than drafting a standard set for the first time, since you often wind up with 32+ playables. you can switch colors halfway through and still wind up with good deck. my only advice is to avoid the W/R weenie-type strategies, just cuz Cube offers so many ways to destroy them

while getting good at cube is probably easier than mastering something like khans limited, it's not intuitive at all. a lot of it is counter-intuitive e.g. pass doom blade. cube is all about knowing the card interactions, reading archetype signals, taking mana fixing and ramp over generic bombs, knowing what kinds of interaction the format wants (e.g. maindeck disenchant is fine to good.)

just drafting a good stuff deck out of your huge pile of playables works most of the time in real limited, but it's one of the worst things you can do in souped up cube.