Magic: The Gathering C/D

i will be playing 4 ghor-clan rampager in standard, i'm like 90% sure

yeah with everyone geeking out over Boros Charm dealing 4 for only two mana I'm surprised nobody really seemed to get excited about this one

well to be fair boros charm is insane because of the middle mode, i would love to maindeck rootborn defenses but its practically dead in some matchups while the charm still 4's them

i'm pretty sure RG aggro in standard just wants to be like 3 bonfire 3 domri 30 creatures, so the rampager is important for letting you still run 'spells' while having your deck half creatures for domri value

oh yeah all 3 modes on Boros Charm are great and it's probably a better card overall but +4/+4 and trample for only RG is really good - have they ever done +4 power and trample for 2 mana?

yep it's called Colossal Might and it saw a bit of standard play

Dimir's "mill until you hit a land" theme is pretty neat. Looks like there will be some games where you have Undercity Informer out and have to calculate how much land is left in your opponents deck so you can go alpha-strike mill. And then your opponent sides in an extra land to foil you.

or holds 3 land in their hand

i like the B removal and the 1B creature that get better as you mill them, those were nice touches

thats a good point, holding land in hand vs. them might be an effective strategy. I think it all depends how big mill is for Dimir.

speaking of nasty Dimir cards, Call of the Nightwing (the Cipher spell that puts out 1/1's) is going to be nasty. seems like an abundance of fairly cheap removal may curb it a bit but I can see that getting out of hand quick

its decent but all you need is a removal or blocker for the one with the spell on it

Dimir has quite a few creatures with evasion though, and if I understand Cipher right you can put it right on the 1/1 flyer if you want. I do agree that Cipher is extra bad vs. removal but at least it's not straight card disadvantage.

feels like dimir's problem is probably going to be getting into a position where they can be on the offensive - like that's a game winning card if you have some blockers and an evasion dude to put it on or if they have a crap start, but against a faster deck you're not gonna win a race w/ it

exactly - the comparison to Izzet is about right, I feel a lot of people are gonna have these awesome looking Dimir decks and will just get trounced. I feel they really need a Doorkeeper-like card, some early drop that comes around late in the draft and can stave off Boros and Gruul, for a turn at least

maybe splash for white for basilica guards etc?

yeah thats my worry too - in order to be attacking for cipher casts you have to spend your early mana on these small evasive creatures that can't block well, and then hands of binding is the only cipher effect that actually helps you race or stabilize when your board consists of those types of creatures. it's like you're playing azorius except that there's only one card with detain instead of half a dozen

will predator's rapport be semi-playable? seems like the likelihood of a simic deck having a 5/6 out sometime during a game is pretty high

combined w/ a combat trick or whatever and you can imagine someone gaining 15 life

on the flipside though, this set doesn't really have equivalents to splatter thug or dead reveler, or even a centaur courser unless i missed it, and those 3cmc 3/3s tend to be the cards that punish the blue tempo decks. 3/2s are just so much easier to trade evenly or profitably with

well if a boros player curves out, the wojek are basically splatter thugs

one drop, wojek and skyknight legionnaire seems like it would be the equivalent to a rakdos start

dimir has access to lots of good cards for breaking up battalions though. the 3U bounce all attackers spell is just so brutal

yeah esp in a meta where 3 of the 5 abilities are combat-related, that has got to be a v. high pick

fennel you havent found the boros strat to easy to disrupt? you said the format is slower than you expected but is that because gruul/boros have a hard time closing games out or because the decks are looking to kill a few turns later than you'd expect?

feel like i need to play a bunch w/this set before im at all close to being good w/ it

the thing about boros is that you actively want to avoid trading in the early turns if you have a good battalion guy, which means there can be situations where you just pass the turn without attacking even if your attack is 'profitable' by a normal definition in limited

this set seems like it could be very difficult in limited

yeah even the more straightforward guilds require fairly nuanced decision making

my initial idea was that orzhov could potentially be really powerful cuz theres all these places to gain minor advantage over the course of the game and because it can disrupt aggro strategies fairly well but i really do need to play with the cards

i want to figure out a way of making the two mana black land enchant that drains life good because im going to draft a deck with four of them

that one was in ROE and i never saw anyone make it work

someone play cockatrice w/ me tonite dammit

I'd like to try this out, but I'm new to Cockatrice, so I'm not exactly sure how to make this happen. How exactly does that gatecrash draft site work?

if I save the xml file and then join a draft queue on cockatrice will the draft then happen within cockatrice or does it happen on a separate site?

cockatrice doesn't have a draft feature but people draft on one of the sites that do and then play on cockatrice

I'd like to play prerelease (sealed) prep rather than draft if you have time later!

prerelease sealed works for me, I'll be available around 9:00 cst.

I went to the prerelease sealed generator site that Fennel linked. Once you generate a pool, what do you do with it?

pretty much just look at the cards then add them one at a time to your cockatrice deck

so do you have to generate it at any particular time or could I just do it now and then play later on?

yup

moodles, the draft happens on a separate site. they'll tell you in the cockatrice draft queue. cockatrice people often use CCGdecks.com - i would preemptively make an account there.

iatee, i might be up for a quick sealed game in the next like couple hours or so but i have plans tonight so can't play for too too long. i don't actually know how to p

lamp, so far the most reliable way i've found to disrupt boros is to just put fatter creatures in front of them. nailing their battalion enablers like armored transport also is quite helpful. i know direct damage is always good, but it seems, like, extra good in gatecrash.

and guys... call of the nightwing really sucks. it's basically a 4 mana midnight haunting with mild upside. i dunno. i am really pessimistic about dimir. too many of the cards are there to enable a mill strategy that in and of itself is much too all-in. i think that the best comparable for dimir is NOT izzet, but AVR monoblack. a potentially powerful strategy that you need to be the only one at the table drafting. but, like, unplayable in sealed, etc.

i also disagree that dimir is good at breaking up battalions. in fact, i think it is hands down the worst guild at doing so. aetherize is a sweet spell, but it's at 4 mana and at uncommon. i'm surprised that red seems to be the best battalion-breaker color. mugging is crucial to nail those armored transports etc.

emailed you back

in my head the limited comparisons are

rakdos = gruul best aggro deck
selesnya = simic best guild mechanic to build around, relies on synergy to make cards better
boros = azorius second best aggro deck with potentially more controlling builds, can be hard to assemble because its always getting taken by the shared guilds
izzet = orzhov hard to draft optimally deck relies on maximizing small advantages, will quitely probably be the best archetype for most of the format
golgari = dimir crappy overcosted mechanic that development was scared would be too good in constructed, ends up being underdrafted and two months from now ppl on mtgo 3-0 with five color mill/control magic decks

i look fwd to being wrong about all of this

also iatee ill be home tonite after 1 if you're still up @ that point

lol...we'll see

i hope this ends up being a decent sealed format, i actually prefer sealed to draft these days and i thought RTR was a particularly fun sealed set with all the mana fixing. this set looks like it's more synergy based so its a matter of whether there's enough redundancy in the various effects or not (what i said earlier re: hands of binding being the only board control cipher is an example of the lack of this)

i'm always skeptical of these early impressions though, the month after RTR came out everyone thought izzet was close to unplayable in limited, and then the ars arcanum guy ran his numbers and lo and behold it was actually the 2nd best performing guild

exactly - it's not until 2-3 weeks after the prerelease that I feel people are really getting a handle on the format. Dimir definitely looks like the worst guild for Limited but I doubt its anything like AVR black; kinda feel like the 5 guilds in RTR were balanced pretty well and if Dimir were really that weak I'd think they would have tweaked it in Development

dimir's REALLY bad. iatee and i just played a dimir/orzhov match which was positively atrocious. 2 long, arduous and annoying games. i bet there are gonna be lots of timed draws at prerelease.

yeah anyone going dimir at the prerelease is in for some lols

dimir wins are just kinda absurdist

i dunno. wizards r&d is hardly infallible even though we like to think they are. dimir is different from izzet and similar to avr black in that it relies on an extremely specific and janky strategy. i can definitely see it being as bad as it seems.

neovoidwielder, aetherize, a few other strong control cards, you just can't count on getting enough as they're uncommon