Magic: The Gathering C/D

so I'm going to the scg balt team event and need to decide on a modern deck. because it's a team event (and I'm going w/ strong players) I want to be extra-spikey about it.

what do you guys think is a good meta-call right now? could probably acquire anything for the tournament. I have a lot of experience w/ dredge, grixis delver, decent amount w/ infect, affinity. would want to practice a bit w/ anything else.

anyone have any experience w/ lantern?

have no clue what the metagame looks like after the bans + fatal push. would guess that valakut is good rn especially the through the breach builds.

to elaborate on that, it's a fast deck that didn't use probe and blanks fatal push

the Sram Modern deck is pretty hilarious

is it just sram/puresteel paladin and all the 0 cost equips and retract? that seems powerful but fragile

yeah somebody was running it at the event I went to last night, he was getting wrecked by a pox deck

http://mtgtop8.com/event?e=14527&d=287116&f=MO

that's pretty much it, yeah

kinda laughing at the idea of a Puresteel getting to 6/27 or whatever on turn 2

seems like the sort of deck that wins one event and promptly dies

jeskai ascendancy is still my garbage combo deck of choice i think, if i had to play one

i'd play something close to this list if i had an important modern event tomorrow
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/552244#online

yeah i was thinking abt playing titanshift in vancouver that same wknd, i think lands decks are pretty well positioned rn. theyre also pretty easy to play. a friend of mine has been 5-0ing leagues with amulet for the last few months and im genuinely thinking abt that but i dont know how easy a sell that is for yr teammates

i am in prague this wknd to play magic cards. life is kinda weird

yeah last year I ended up in a lot of weird trump-y parts of the country I certainly would have never ever seen w/o this game

prague seems slightly more fun than allentown

haha i was in columbus last week. before playing magic i had literally never been in ohio and now i at least drive through it every couple of months

yeah i was looking at the gp schedule and the next standard one i can go to is in omaha and its like...am i really going to omaha to play magic? maybe...

good lord does this set have some powerful Uncommons in it. Ridgescale Tusker is completely nuts. Winding Constrictor is also a bit over the top, though I guess being two colors helps.

yeah I won a sealed pptq yesterday on the back of tusker in the sealed and hidden stockpile aka bitterblossom in the draft. I hadn't had any experience with this set beyond one prerelease so I don't know how people were judging that card but it's pretty nuts as a draft around.

tusker is top 10 card in the set including rares

awesome job iatee, Tusker is indeed insane

Managed to top 8 a Frontier 1K today with my jeskai spirits, was the top seed after 5 rounds of swiss, but got immediately destroyed in the semis by an ensoul deck that shrapnel blasted me to oblivion.

it's hard to look at the results for SCG Richmond and not think that wizards did more harm than good with the bannings

please don't panic before the pro tour, the SCG players pretty much never find all the good decks

I'm not panicking, just not particularly thrilled about playing standard

Frank Karsten put Tusker as third-best card in the set. I haven't played any AVR yet, but it does seem like it could even outshine green Gearhulk in some rare instances, so I can buy it. Hooray for uncommon mythics

Yeah it reminds me of Druid Familiar which was such an ass-kicking but it's even better than that card by a decent margin

just looking over his list and karsten really phoned this one in

karsten's rankings are always a bit weird

I'm gonna stick my neck out and say that nearly all limited reviews done before the person gets to actually play the format are fairly worthless. As much respect as I have for LSV when you look back on his articles they always seem to get a lot of things blatantly wrong.

Pick order articles in general just don't make a lot of sense anymore. Decks are way more about synergy so after one or two picks, the order really is meaningless. I prefer the articles that highlight overrated/underrated cards, but even then, no one really knows until the format is more defined. I feel like there's one card per set which would be great in 90% of all formats but the format is so skewed as to make that card decent at best. All that said, I still feel like most pre-PT articles written by pros have a small insight or three

I felt that way about chandra's pyrohelix in kaladesh, I started drafting the set w/ decks w/ 3 of them thinking 'can't lose' and then I lost a lot

ari lax does the best pre-release limited articles since he uses a holistic approach rather than going through every card one by one. they're behind the scg paywall though alas.

Renegade Map seems like the potential "innocuous but surprisingly good" common in the set

but yeah the important questions never seems to be "which cards are best", but rather "do the best aggro creatures have 2 or 3 power", "which color combinations synergize the best", and "what turn does the game usually end on"

yeah map is def a very high pick in this format

having fun out there

http://i.imgur.com/NxDuRZW.png

my impression of the format so far is that the synergies have power and are well supported and playables run deep so you can and often should end up with a really good deck in draft. but having a deck that attacks every turn is still legit and probably the most consistent route to victory.

starting with Amonkhet, online set releases are happening immediately after the paper prerelease rather than 2 weeks later, it's about damn time

ooh that is excellent news. the last few limited GPs I've gone to have been close to the start of the format and I spend most of the Friday before the GP learning the format through grinders. nice to know that I can come in with more practice

in fact, I'm planning to hit GP Beijing in May, which was originally planned to be two days after the MTGO launch

yeah map is def a very high pick in this format

another potentially high pick - Scrounging Bandar. anything that lets you activate Revolt w/o a mana requirement seems good right now. Bandar has synergy with everything, it seems

i don't think bandar is better than the mana guy, prey upon, or the big trampler for green common

its much better than cavalry i think and probably better than the druid

being able to revolt on a curve is such a plus in this format. my current sealed pool is G/W and it seems like if I get my Renegade Map or Bandar out early my chances are good, and if I don't the deck tanks. might take Prey Upon over it though.

i think g/w revolt is kinda awful and am surprised by high many ppl seem to draft it

yeah cavalry is pretty hard to turn on on curve in limited

the Grixis improvise decks are really fun but I dunno if they're any good. feel like you load your deck up with some janky artifacts and you're really praying for those 3rd pack Prisms and Serpents. but I've managed to 2-1 a couple drafts with decks that look awful on paper.

just saw the Friendly Draft League, these are...uh very strange

so you get to play 10 matches, but every match is 1 game

if you win 7 you get your 120 play points back. but there's nothing beyond that

goatbots EV calc thinks they're better than the intermediate/competitive draft leagues. not by a whole lot though

anyone tried them yet?

not really interested in 1-game matches of draft but multiple people have suggested that now that they have that structure coded in they should use it for a momir league, which i fully support

absolutely, I wish MTGO would do more things like that which aren't possible in paper magic

bet Momir leagues would get a lot of new players on board

there used to be a lot of mtgo-exclusive formats like 10 years ago but people gradually stopped playing them over time other than momir and pauper

well I'm talking more about formats that would be impossible or difficult to do in Paper magic. the flashback/cube stuff is a step in the right direction.

I had a buddy that played Prismatic a lot, really did love that format though at the time none of the Vintage stuff was available so it was a totally different format than the 250-card 5-color format that was popular at the time.

glad to see Mardu Vehicles making a showing at the PT. For now, this is the most viable direction for me to go in the new standard, but I've been pretty doubtful about its effectiveness vs saheeli and G/B.