Magic: The Gathering C/D

i did a bunch of sealed leagues in the past on another site using increasing card pools (i think we started at 4 or 5 packs, adding 1 each week) which worked out nicely. there was also some sort of mechanism for the people with bad pools to catch up, like the people with losing records got to choose a common from the set to add to their pools each week, or something like that.

how did you pick the packs?

ciderpress whats yr mtgo account i can ship you the stuff for the storm/burn tokens deck

lamp you are playing in our league I have decided for you

lamp i meant irl, i have everything on mtgo

that league just went block by block so like one season was just lorwyn/morningtide packs alternating or whatever. if we wanted to mix it up more we could but you can't just let people decide what their 5 packs are going to be because some of the older sets are really imbalanced for limited.

I want to mix things up

but same sets for everyone

ie one week everyone gets a visions pack

i think this has been discussed a lot in various places but if you could do a sealed with 6 packs of your choice the correct ones to choose are weird. i think darksteel was one of the best options just because it's a small set with fireball in it. i'd probably consider going all lorwyn because of extreme synergy and 5 planeswalkers at regular rare

what if we started w/ 6 first sets and just added chronologically?

everyone getting the same pack type every week works fine though yeah. just don't throw in a set like champions of kamigawa that has a lot of mechanics that don't do anything outside of that block.

for chronological i would consider starting at mirage since that was the first set that was designed for limited play, everything before that is kind of miserable to work with in limited. though maybe thats what you want

though that would mean our additional packs each week would be from masques block which is super underpowered and wouldn't help much. hmmm

err wait they'd be from urza block nevermind. that seems okay as an option

but if we start w/ alpha somebody gets a mox or something

lamp i meant irl, i have everything on mtgo

oh :(. i have the deck mostly built in paper magic (for some reason the only copies i have of past in flames are two foils) but i havent been that impressed w/ it. feel like it folds too easy to stuff people are already playing but i also might just be bad at playing it. its funny that rites decks/midrange goodstuff decks have been doing so well in premier events after i took mine apart tho :/

what if we did alpha -> ice age

i'm fine w/ starting from alpha but our decks are going to be horrifically bad. might be entertaining though, let's try it

those packs make for terrible limited play, is the thing

also sorry to distract from yr planning but once winter break starts all my magic time will be devoted to cube and the MOCS sealeds

I meant we skip from alpha to ice age

so it'd be like

alpha
ice age
alliances
mirage
visions
weatherlight

haha you should throw in coldsnap (don't actually do this)

wait what are the MOCS sealeds i thought MOCS was over until january

every time i actively try to qualify for MOCS i go on an insane losing streak and end up with 12 or 13 points on the last day and give up

there are two last chance sealed events on the 22nd and the 29th that im qualified for before the championship or w/e its called next year

oh i thought those were public, are they invite-only? i was gonna play the 22nd one

http://i.imgur.com/TCZ5C.gif

this is what the draft pool would look like

playable? sorry its sloppy I did this in 3 mins on paint

its playable sure

feel like stormbind would be in that deck 10 weeks later

stormbind is an old favorite of mine

i think my favorite deck i've ever drafted was a 5-color green deck in time spiral block that had stormbind and 2 of the dragon legends

I had no idea it was reprinted!

are we talkin about doing this on MTGO or something else? man I come from the old days of Netdraft, I dunno what's out there now.

cockatrice. it's free.

I'd just pull up packs like I did and put up all the info once a week. everything would go in a google docs and the card pools would be public.

I played netdraft too tho!

oh i thought those were public, are they invite-only? i was gonna play the 22nd one

yeah i was mistaken i forgot that its the poty on the 15th i had qualified for which i doubt ill play. the two lcq sealed events are 30 tickets and open to everyone

drafting after a company event w/ open bar. will be interesting.

that sentence would look a lot different without autocorrect

Maybe we could rotate the choice of pack between the players, so each week we're all opening a pack of a set that one of us thinks is cool (or feels gives them some minute tactical advantage, according to taste)?

Is the right starting size definitely 6 packs? One thing I've really enjoyed about starting from a super tiny pool is the way guys like my pack one Pierce Strider have been through a real narrative but idk if more experienced players feel like that's just being silly.

drafting while wasted was a grand success, got two shocks and a deathrite in my prize packs

I think the prob w/ starting w/ fewer than 6 is that you can only play so many 2-3 pack sealed games w/ the same cards before it gets boring

think i just had an opponent stroke out vs. my double Slime Molding/quad Rootborn Defenses deck, literally every card I played was followed by a tirade (though I also had Collective Blessing, Pallisade Giant, and Martial Law)

Haha, quad Defenses, what an annoying experience that would have been to play against.

I'd be down for some kind of ILX sealed league, I haven't gotten to play since October. If we're using older sets, would not recommend starting with less than 6 packs. Alpha has an average of like 5 playable cards per pack...

it's like 1/3 totally unplayable, 1/3 okay, 1/3 broken

maybe less than that broken but still tons, I was opening up sample packs for fun / to see

Word of advice, don't draft anything before Mirage block. I know drafting with early sets seems like such a cool idea but it's a lot like reject rare draft but only half the fun. Early Magic is full of really weird conditional spells and underpowered creatures. I remember Netdrafting a draft with Beta + the first four expansions and it was really awful. Also when Coldsnap came out I remember doing a "full block" draft with Ice Age/Alliances/Coldsnap and you wound up basically being forced to use 11-12 of your Coldsnap picks because half your picks from the other sets were unplayable.

well we were gonna do sealed and would be getting progressively more packs over time. the cardpool.jpg upthread seems playable?

I just tried "opening" a few sample Alpha boosters online, it's a little bit better than I remember, although in pack 3 the best card was Hill Giant haha. I think the site I used took out the basic lands - didn't Alpha have a few basic lands in each pack that replaced commons? Certainly helps the quality of the packs to remove those.

Sometimes the lands replaced rares! One of the quirks of early Magic is that Richard Garfield didn't want players knowing which cards were which rarity so they decided to make some rareless packs to confuse those who thought they had figured it out.

sample alpha packs best cards:

1. white knight, lightning bolt
2. scrubland, rod of ruin, serra angel, sengir vampire, fireball, dark ritual
3. shivan, demonic tutor, invisibility, disintegrate, howl from beyond
4. terror, fireball, invisibility, disintegrate
5. wheel of fortune black vise, disintegrate

where are you doing this?