Magic: The Gathering C/D

I borrowed and approve of your idea of playing phantom sealeds frog

roberto, i am really amused by how you keep track of this thread

i am playing mtgo now! i just have nothing material to contribute because i am such a noob. i have also been playing phantom limited events, of which i have won 1 in about a dozen, although i would've won a couple more except for horrible basic errors at critical times, e.g. accidentally casting aurelia's fury for 1 damage instead of 6. also i am super slow and have lost maybe 3 games on the clock.

i do have a question actually. i amassed 9 RTR boosters before moving onto GTC. I ended up playing 3 drafts with them, which was fun, and now i have a bunch of cards. i have enjoyed messing around with them but i am so far away from being able to play constructed. i wonder if i shouldn't have just sold the boosters and played more phantom? the most valuable card i opened was an overgrown tomb i sold for 4 tix. is there a conventional wisdom here? i mean, if i ever wanted to put together a constructed deck, i would just buy the particular cards, right?

it's really up to you. i personally like draft more than sealed but there's a lot more variance. in phantom if things go wrong you just lose 4 tix. in a draft if you get nothing back then you lose like 12 tix worth of value (assuming a booster is 3.33). MTGO card prices fluctuate a lot and the vast majority of rares are worth basically nothing. what I do when I draft is keep mtgotraders.com open so I can look up the rares I get to see if it's worth moneydrafting them. because even though it sucks from a pure EV standpoint there's really no justification for taking a really good card for your deck over something that you can sell for a couple tickets. GTC kinda sucks in that it doesn't have a big mythic right now - AVR drafting was kinda neat in that a Bonfire could finance a bunch of drafts by itself. also if you're not really comfortable with your skill level (if you're losing to the clock I would assume you're not totally comfortable with MTGO yet) then just play Swiss - you can't turn a profit packwise but you can make those 9 packs last a while. hope that helps

I'm excited that this thread gets another poster

roberto, i think you should practice on cockatrice before throwing money away as a noob on MTGO. it takes a while to develop skill and you should get to a certain level before playing on MTGO, i think. when i started, i was slow too, and also lost a lot.

anyways, cockatrice has a new server - go to woogerworks.com for more details - but basically works fine. i would be happy to play with you on there and give you some tips. let me know if you install it.

btw, on the ooze flux front, i decided to switch from orzhov into simic after seeing an ooze flux i think pack 1 pick 6. problem was, i had passed so much simic stuff from picks 1-5 that i probably sent someone else into it. 2 sapphire drakes, a pick 5 crocanura were the highlights of what i passed. anyways, i ended up with a passable deck that didn't have enough creatures. ooze flux was really good again though. i got it online and started cranking out 3/3s, but my opponent bloodrushed both ghor-clan and wrecking ogre onto an 8/8 ooze of his own (miming slime on a bloodrushed guy) and i ended up losing r1. still, though... switching rules! i think my middling simic deck would have been better than the orzhov i would have otherwise picked.

i dunno, i kind of like jumping right in to MTGO, though i'd make sure to play around in the new player room to get the hang of the interface first. i have an unfounded dislike of cockatrice, i just find it awkward and unfun to manage everything yourself, though it's true the price point can't be beat.

also (and this goes for anyone here) if you want a bunch of cards to play around with on MTGO, hit me up anytime (username = smh). i have thousands of excess cards from drafting innistrad block / M13 / RTR block so if you need to pick up some of the common/uncommon staples, like the searing spears or vampire nighthawks of the world, or whatever, let me know.

the nice thing about MTGO is that it requires you follow the rules to the t, it's terrible for someone who is trying to learn how to play from scratch, but it's prob better than cockatrice for someone trying to figure out when exactly they should be tapping this or that

I gave GTC Phantom Sealed a try and it went pretty well. I think I'm going to keep doing these until I have enough packs for Swiss Draft.

I'm planning to also trade off an M13 pack and some random cards from my collection for either tickets or a pack of GTC. My question is, which is the better or more cost effective option? My guess is the pack, but I'm not sure.

it'll be easier to get tickets than to find someone willing to make that trade unless the random cards are worth tickets, in which cases you are prob losing out if you trade it for a pack of gtc

Hmmm, I guess what I'm trying to figure out is this: is it better to trade something for tickets or for booster packs or does it not matter?

there's not really a better

packs are worth a certain amount of tix which is a 3.X number so if you try and sell your packs for tix to a bot you will get .X amount of credit. if you can sucessfully trade w/ someone instead you can avoid having .X amount of credit with randobot but finding someone who wants a m13 pack for a gtc pack and randocards will not be as easy.

gotcha - thanks!

just won a sealed where I pulled two angelic skirmishers and a reckoner

very last game I actually got oth skirmishers in play at the same time

So a couple Phantom Sealeds on MTGO this weekend were my first dip into non-casual play on the platform. My biggest obstacle is clearly a lack of understanding of some of the finer technical points of the interface. Some of the biggest mistakes I made included:

Not realizing I had a bunch of guildgates in my pool because I failed to scroll far enough to the right to see them.

Not being able to get the timing right for activated abilities because I didn't have my stops set correctly.

Once I got the abilities to fire, targetting the wrong permanent.

Poor clock management resulting in losing a match.

Waiting for a client crash to resolve itself instead of immediately killing the process and restarting.

It's frustrating, but I guess it's good that I'm learning these things so I don't keep repeating the same mistakes. Otherwise I had a good time. Despite my technical challenges, I think my game play was pretty solid. I'm sure I'll be doing more next weekend.

My one complaint is that I'm pretty sure Red and White will be prominently featured in every GTC sealed deck I play unless I pull absolutely ridiculous cards in other colors. I have a really hard time seeing myself putting together decks with blue as one of the main colors right now.

yeah boros really dominates sealed

are you on the new client Moodles? that really sounds like me after the upgrade (I decided to just stick with the old one)

and yes, Boros pretty much dominates, but I'm starting to see Orzhov do very well too. I usually go R/W/B and to be honest it's not going well...I tend to not pull the gates/Prisms I need and the Boros and Orzhov plans don't really jive together too well. But I never have the cards to go straight Boros and my Orzhov cards always wind up being better than my Gruul ones.

No, I think I'm still on the old client.

My two decks this weekend were RWB and RWG. I was tempted to throw in black as a 4th color in that second one so I could play one thousand lashes and merciless eviction, but punked out at the last moment. In hindsight, I think I could have made it work.

what was your fixing?

feel like 4c can be more doable in sealed than draft cause you're facing worse decks and are guaranteed a certain amount of fixing

it is rather frustrating for me because i always seem to open like 4 Dimir Guildgates

iatee,

I had 2 Orzhov guildgates, plus prophetic prism, verdant haven, Gyre Sage, and Burning-Tree Emissary. I probably could have swapped out a couple plains for the guildgates and then maybe a mountain or forest for an extra swamp.

also, my games were rarely aggro beatdowns, so I had plenty of land drops and was able to play my bigger spells most of the time.

sealed decks aren't necessarily worse than draft decks but sealed games do tend to be quite a bit slower. this is because players self-select for removal spells, so sealed decks will actually have more removal than draft decks, since you have a larger cardpool to work from. there are also more bombs per deck on average in sealed for the same reason, which is why people are selecting for removal in the first place

I think w/ rtr and gtc if you pull a pool that's fairly heavy in a guild that requires a tailored strategy (ie selesyna, simic, dimir, azorius) you are likely to be building what would be a subpar draft deck, because the cards that round out your deck aren't going to be as strong. but yeah, you do have a much higher chance of playing w/ 5 total bombs.

yeah draft lets you fine tune a bit more because a lot of times you'll be looking at a pack with 2 or 3 cards you really want and you just have to figure out what's best for your deck. like, are you going to be short on creatures for Boros, do you need removal above all, or did you draft too many Death's Approaches and not enough Sages/Spies...in Sealed all those strategies just have to mesh together. I don't think the decks are noticeably worse (and as mentioned they're way more bomb-heavy) but you can't really do the dedicated aggro deck unless you get real lucky.

lamp have you seen the duskmantle seer / zameck guildmage deck?

http://mtgstats.com/Deck.aspx?DeckID=579917

this guy has 4-0ed with it twice this week

it always disappoints me that Corpsejack never makes these decks :(

too expensive for this deck i think, i've seen it in some GB midrange lists though

probably true. I want to make Corpsejack + Hydra a thing. wow that would be a big hydra.

hydra gets countered by frontline medic! a pretty big drawback

thats the deck that abuses the synergy btw the guildmage and undying creatures right? i tried playing it for a bit just after rotation - it won a couple of smaller events (like a gpt and maybe a 5K?) but it seemed kinda not great. i've been playing an esper tempo list and b/w tokens in standard rn. tokens was pretty good until junk reanimator became the most played deck and it doesnt have a great esper matchup either if its the cuneo list so i've been looking for something new to play this week. i really want to play unsummon and feeling of dread so if you have an decks that play those cards, thats where im at.

also i feel like every pro player/mtgo grinder was playing the 11pm standard daily last nite, which seemed super hilarious to me

i tried cuneo's list last night and it crushes the farseek decks as expected but it felt pretty tenuous against everything else. lost to some fast starts from aggro and got burned out by a UWR deck when i missed too many land drops. then i watched him play it in the 11pm daily and it looked good there so who knows.

i haven't really figured out a good plan for beating the junk reanimator lists which are everywhere right now. i'm going to try the BWR deck again, i've got an updated list that looks better positioned against it. if that doesn't work it may be time to bring back geist of saint traft.

That BUG deck looks like such a pile, but probably a fun one to play.

I can't imagine that a deck featuring Zaneck Guildmage could be described any other way.

i think cuneo's list is pretty good rn even against junk - i mean its got to be at least 50-55% right? but i've got a p sweet geist list that i like even better running the above unsummons and feelings of dread and obzedat (another card i think is pretty much absurd). it also gets to run caverns which is a plus i think

can i get the list or the general idea of it at least? does it run revelation (and how many)? so few geist of saint trafts in the DE results lately, i suspect people aren't prepared to beat it right now

also one thing i was going to try with duskmantle seer was jamming it into a UB zombies list kind of like how aristocrat topped out the BR zombies decks. i need to figure out how to not die to aggro though if i'm doing that since none of the zombies block well.

also i agree on obzedat, i want to play that card in every deck possible right now

i can give you my list when i get home but its constantly in flux rn cuz i cant decide on some of the slots i.e. is augur of bolas enough better than gloom surgeon to justify running it and making cavern worse &c &c. how playable is murder and if i cant play it whats the split btw victim/price, its basically

4 Geist of Saint Traft
X Gloom Surgeon
2 Obzedat
3 Restoration Angel
3 Snapcaster Mage

2 Runechanter's Pike

and then some mix of bounce, removal and tap. i have verdicts and revelations in my sideboard - i think it may be right to play either maindeck but idk for sure. i think both geist and obzedat are really underplayed rn and i want to play both of them. i also think people are increasingly weak to bounce effects and tempo plays in general. i'm pretty bad at getting the spell mix right but my plan is to play dailies all week and tune the list. now that its standard ptq season and with the wmcq in a month i want to have something i really like

in general i think revelation and geist of saint traft are at odds with each other but revelation is such a backbreaking card that it might be right to play them anyway

also i don't really like gloom surgeon as a maindeck card right now, and i like augur of bolas even less. except for the blitz decks, creature sizes start at 3/3 right now in standard and whiffing on an augur is really bad if it can't profitably block

cutting the surgeon is probably fine - i might want to play lingering souls then though. i had originally started with a spirit tribal deck cuz i wanted to play drogskol captain but geist + angel is too good to pass up and then you're running too many creatures. if i cut surgeons then i also want to think about verdict main because i worry about the blitz match-up. another thought i had was doomed traveler as an out to sacrifice effects, hes semi-resiliant against wrath but thats probably super bad.

but yeah i think part of the reason my b/w tokens deck did so well was because it ran obzedat main deck. i actually went 13-0 w/the deck in the three tournaments i played it in. also angel of jubilation was pretty good for me, its one of those cards that i find really appealing and want to play so it was nice to get to play with it before it rotates out. so i think focusing on geist + obzedat is the key to making the deck work and exploiting the really midrange-y meta

yeah the power level on both those cards is so high that you can't really go wrong by including them. kinda like the M10 days when you could just zip a couple Baneslayers in any white deck and instantly make it better.

made the mistake of triple queueing (e.g. forgot i signed up for an M13 draft and signed up for a GTC one as well, both fire almost simultaneously obv ) for the last three hours and bombed out of the finals of both events because i misclicked so, so many times. the most frustrated ive been w/myself and mtgo in a p long time

yeah i still haven't mastered the double queue yet even, i can do it with 2 constructed events if i'm not playing a control deck but i'm not quick enough at evaluating gamestates in limited games to double up on those effectively. i've watched some of the modo grinders play 3 or 4 matches at once on stream before and it looked like it stopped being fun anyway, so i think 2 is the limit for me even if i ever get fast enough to play more.

I don't even find it fun to watch someone double-queue on streaming a lot of the time, let alone do it myself. It's hard to keep the sequence of events straight in each game, I end up missing out on a lot of the information that comes from the opponent's play sequencing. That's a lot of what makes the game interesting for me. My friends and I once tried to do an 8-man draft with 4 people, drafting decks for two of the seats at once, and it was a similar situation. In each pack, I could see my previous picks and choose accordingly, but I couldn't remember any signals from previous packs or what tabled. Just wasn't fun. Also we fucked up the passing order.

I don't mind when a streamer spends five minutes on one game, five minutes on another, rather than constantly switching, but then it's a PITA for their opponents.

here's where we are with the RBW deck right now: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BFxZ214CQAAYuKr.png:large

i've got -1 liliana +1 falkenrath aristocrat in the board but otherwise the same. i was trying to fit in a couple sorins too because i've been on a sorin kick lately but i don't think they're necessary.