Magic: The Gathering C/D

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.

I made a fairly horrible blue deck with ancestral recall, bribery, snapcaster, and ashiok plus mana stuff, removal and filler. Won one match out of the three, having been fairly close in one of the others. The one I did win involved losing horribly in the first game, decking them in the second game, and beating them down with a pack rat in the third after they mulliganed to five - so I was fairly lucky to win any matches at all.

Generally I felt I need to know what I'm doing a bit more in order to build a decent deck; but I'm not really willing to invest time and resources into multiple drafts when it's fairly likely I'm going to build bad decks to start with. It seemed difficult to pick cards to a curve.

I think curves are less important in cube than synergies. partly because almost everyone is playing some form of ramp.

obviously you want to avoid playing 10 five drops, but there's a big difference between your turn 4/5 play being polukranos into some dragon (fast clock but beatable if your opponent has anything going on) and it being opposition into deranged hermit (close to unbeatable.) so you mostly want to maximize your opposition into deranged hermit type plays that your deck has. in fair limited, curve is super important because nobody is doing anything too stupid and you win a lot of games off small tempo margins. in cube, you just want to have the more powerful haymaker + you want flexible answer cards (hard counterspells, board resets) to whatever their broken play is gonna be. it's okay to miss a land drop or not play a card for a turn if you straight up win the game when you do hit the land drop.

you mostly get punished for having a bad curve vs the pure aggro decks (mono-r, mono-w) but they are a minority of opponents overall, so you can just hope to dodge them or have some sb plan. in a league I think you see those aggro decks less often than you do in a normal 8 man, since mono-r is generally very good and often the inevitable r3 end boss in a pod.

incidentally curve is ridiculously important for those aggro decks for a similar reason - because they're playing fair, they have to win ASAP. there's a ticking clock on the other side of the board, and as soon as the opponent's deck starts working, they're going to have to deal with emrakul or whatever. I played a solid mono-red deck recently and my opponent had a tinker + sphinx of the steel wind / batterskull deck. even once he had one of those cards on the table I still had about a turn to win past it, and I lost both of 2/3 games on super thin margins (would have won with the top card of my deck in my hand both times.)

Agree that curve is not really what you're thinking about in powered cube. Most often you want to prioritize fast mana. What you do with is it much less important, there's always something. Sol Ring and any power Mox get picked over literally everything. I personally like the high cost planeswalkers eg Karn, Ugin, the 6 mana Elspeth and Chandra as pretty straightforward and reliable game winners that can be brutal if dropped early. Watch out for Upheaval and draw 7s, these can go late and are busto with a lot of mana. Counterspells are much better than removal and cheap cantrip and selection spells to help find your good stuff are great which is why blue rules. There are a number of broken/combo style things to do that usually revolve around getting something huge down early eg sneak, show, channel, tinker, order. Try to identify redundancy if you go this route so you don't rely on drawing a single card to win. But if you do need one card, get tutors!

I think those are some fundamentals but there are tons of other things, powerful interactions and 2/3 card combos to discover, etc. That's a big part of the appeal. Watching cube streams and videos is usually a good time and you'll find out a lot that way.

btw if this is all breaking your head a bit I will say the Stompy decks with Rofellos, Gaea's Cradle, Treespeaker (as Sol Ring), and 4-5 planeswalkers can be nuts, those sort of "mono-green" decks (usually with some splash of U or B) almost always go at least 2-1 for me

Counterspells are much better than removal

this is definitely true but I think most people figured that out - Bolt/Doom Blade type stuff winds up going very late. but having some good catch-all removal stuff is always key - Banishing Light/O-Ring/Vindicate/that thing that turns permanents into forests. every deck's gonna have a couple planeswalkers and those are just as likely to dominate the game as some big honkin' fattie.

yep counterspells > removal that hits walkers > creature removal that exiles > creature removal that kills. much like KLD the enchantment removal is a little softer here than eg in non-powered cube because there's so much incentive to main artifact removal that often incidentally kills enchantments.

also because there's so little instant speed removal in decks and so few creatures on board, swords that give you card advantage or just win (u/g, u/r, b/g) are even more bomby than usual. fair magic equipment like jitte and batterskull are actually a little worse. I keep getting passed the u/g sword like 6-7th pick, which is absurd. (I also really like playing sfm decks.)

yeah those swords are great, the two colors of protection is often very relevant. I'd also throw Lightning Greaves on that list, not giving your opponent a chance to prepare for something big is huge

one other thing - as tempting as it is, avoid the storm deck, since the cards that make that deck work are the same that everyone else wants, and it's all too easy to Empty the Warrens for 20 and lose anyway. even Brain Freeze doesn't work sometimes since the Elradzi instantly shuffle back. on the other hand it is by far the most fun deck to play and Cube is pretty -EV in general so

the u/g sword wheels! some of the cards ppl don't take, i literally have no idea.

"i have trinket mage, manic vandal, clique and glen elendra as creatures. guess i will take this 2nd last pick sword of body and mind"

I don't think storm is a trap, you just have to be careful about diving into it because if it turns out not to be open you've wasted a lot of picks on unplayables. when it is open you get the lane to yourself, similar to mono red, and you can pick all the ramp and fixing while LED wheels. when it is good it's one of the best decks and it's probably the most rewarding to draft and play. but you really need to know what you're doing.

I had a really annoying draft the other day where I had sapphire/jet/ruby/recall plus led/will/bargain but my storm deck still sucked cause either the key storm win cons were scooped up early by someone who switched out of storm or just weren't in the packs. brain freeze is just so much easier to win with than the other win cons, seeing an early brain freeze is one thing that might make me go into storm. opening a p1p1 lotus or crypt or something like that also makes me more willing to consider it.

I will say, though I generally don't care much about pods vs. league in general, in Cube it's kind of jarring seeing the same power cards in 3 straight matches