Magic: The Gathering C/D

6 mana is a weird number for this guy, it's hard to picture the deck that would want him. Most of the time, he'll eat a removal spell and the opponent will take six, but what deck wants that outcome? Maybe a midrange deck, but they'd usually rather play something that can get card advantage, or a cheaper creature with the chance to attack more than once. If he was scaled down to a 4/4 for 4 with a 4 damage clause, maybe, but even then there are a lot of cards in that slot to choose from.

The other card that got spoiled, Maze's End, is hilarious.

problem is he's fighting for space with aurelia in the decks that play mostly creatures and still want a 6-drop. aurelia is better in a vacuum.

hm, i dunno if aurelia is better in a vacuum. aurelia can be blocked/removed fairly easily and there isn't really any way to deal with this one outside of countermagic.

time will tell if there's a deck for him though. i think the existence of reckoner really messes this dude up.

but i think 6 mana is not really a weird number for him. i think he plays a similar role to aurelia just in being a finisher for midrange-aggro decks.

I don't know if Aurelia is better in a vacuum, but she's a lot more explosive in the decks that would play her atm. She's capable of doing 10+ damage the turn she's played, and that's what an aggro deck wants. Ruric-Thar's biggest problem is that he does no damage and gives you no card advantage the turn he's played. There could be a deck for him eventually, but I don't see it happening in this environment. I agree with Reckoner being around, he might be a liability.

seriously considering mono-red for ptq this weekend. someone talk me out of this please

haha decided against xMiMx's geistflame + relentless deck? i looked at his list after you suggested it and was like 'this is not for me' and moved on to four color midrange decks. curious about your reasoning for mono-red - i can understand the pyreheart wolf/better against junk and midrange thing i guess but im not sure its better than blitz anyway? idk

are you playing the bonus ptq tonight? i'm playing bant delver in the daily that's happening in 15 min so maybe don't follow my deck advice

nah not playing tonight, i don't care about ptqs enough to sit at home all weekend. i'll just be playing the sunday ones when they're convenient. i still like mim's deck and i've historically done well with his lists but other than the first 6 rounds of the ptq last week, it hasn't been performing well for me lately so i was looking for other options. i'd like to just play naya midrange because it's the most comfortable deck for me in the format, but it doesn't beat the card angel of serenity so if those are still out in full force it's not a great idea.

did you see this delver deck that won the first paper ptq of the season last weekend?
http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/events.aspx?x=mtg/daily/eventcoverage/theros13ptq/0323tucson

yeah i decided to go with the bant/geist version since it had fewer awkward draws and a slightly improved aggro match-up

My friend is planning on playing that UG deck in a PTQ here next weekend for budget reasons, with some mods (Wolfir Avenger slotting in for Think Twice). Quirion Dryad is one of my favorite-ever cards, going way back to when it was first released, but this deck doesn't look that hot to me. Seems ok against midrange, but how does it beat control or aggro? And any hand without Delver or Dryad is basically a mull, right? Deck looks a lot like a weaker version of UW Flash across the board.

Yeah the Bant version is way more solid.

can't imagine you can cut think twices for a 3-drop without adding lands and then your delver flips get worse in a deck that's really dependent on flipping it, and it seems like that would snowball over the course of a long event

Yeah I'm skeptical the replacement works straight up too, but I also think Think Twice is not very good in this deck. Or Rapid Hybridization for that matter. Maybe there's just not better options. This deck feels like one of those limited decks where you've got 17 good cards and then like Furious Resistance and Tin Street Market to fill it out.

i have chosen to play both of those cards in limited before

they both go in the same archetype (gruul control) which is not something you should end up in if you're drafting the set normally but the cards exist for it

contruul

Furious resistance really isn't that much worse than Smite but Tin Street Market, god damn does that card blow hard

yeah i generally wouldn't maindeck it but if your red control deck needs some card selection in a control mirror, don't rule it out...

i still haven't gotten the crackling perimeter deck yet, i'm such a failure at this set

even vs. control it's kinda crap. Rummaging Goblin in m13 was pretty bad but if you needed a 23rd...whatever. the fact that you have to tap 6 lands just to activate it once makes it terrible even in matchups you'd think it would be okay in. i have been forced to maindeck this card and it never does anything for me.

Right, they're both playable cards but you're just like... I didn't draft anything better than this? I see Hybridization in that deck and think, "huh, I guess there's only 1 Unsummon effect in standard."

So disappointed I haven't seen a Crackling deck yet! Maybe after Dragon's Maze floods us with Guildgates. I did have a game loss in Charlotte to a guy running Hold the Gates and 6 or 7 Guildgates. Have never seen the card played before or after that, but it was surprisingly good for him.

i have seen hold the gates do good work, actually. mostly in sealed though

which doesn't actually make sense to me since i'd think it would be better in draft but oh well

yeah hold the gates is totally playable in the right context

i love rummaging goblin, that card is awesome

i tried the crackling perimeter deck, it was a total bust, now i just draft M13

i never managed any fun corner case decks w/GTC except kinda izzet aggro and even that was sorta boring

i've just done the unexpected results deck i mentioned a couple of times upthread, plus some other 3-5 color ramp decks that all tend to sputter out and die in the 2nd round. the format's really just too fast to build around the non-creature gimmick cards though like razortip whip or frenzied tilling/structural collapse.

crackling perimeter is like a worse razortip whip

not really, it's only 1 card and doesn't have an activation cost,if you draft enough gates it's way better than the whip

one potentially viable gimmick deck is the all-in gruul deck where you just play spire tracers and madcap skills and the 5 power bloodrush guys and such. i actually won a draft once with a failed version of this where i was playing 3 riot gear because i didn't get enough of the good pump effects, so i think there's something there

yeah i have yet to try the ramp deck. i can't bring myself to bother, my perimeter deck was an easy 0-1 and i was losing enough playing the format regularly i had no appetite for intentionally handicapping myself

but otoh i did pretty well in a paper draft last night with a terrible jund deck with double colored spells in all three colors and no fixing - i had a clan defiane though and that won a bunch of games. i also beat someone in the last round how had gideon AND obzedat in their orzhov deck so i'm happy with myself.

the activation cost is tapping the gates!

haha yes i realized that after i submitted that post and was like 'oops i'm an idiot'

i kind of want to go back and draft innistrad more now that i have another year of experience playing limited. i was looking at my old innistrad draft decks recently and there were a lot of terrible card choices in them, i think i can do better now, and i feel like i should take advantage of the format still being up on MTGO since it's basically an all-time-great at this point.

I don't think of the madcapskillsy gruul as a gimmick deck just a variant of gruul that kinda sucks but steals enough games here and there

I guess that makes it a gimmick deck in a certain sense it just doesn't feel that way cause you see it a lot

i wanted to draft more innistrad but i sold all the packs i had at one point - i think when i was buying wastelands - and now packs are like 4 tickets each and i doubt i'm good enough at the format to really justify drafting it much. i drafted a triple AVR draft just cuz i had the packs and M13 wasn't firing and split the finals but that format is... less worthwhile to go back to.

although on the whole i feel like i should just be playing more constructed since i'm down quite a bit on the month and i feel like my initial success with mtgo was probably just a lot of positive variance :/

I've been getting some interesting exposure to innistrad block through these wacky chaos drafts my lgs keeps having. They randomly distribute packs taken from all the standard-legal sets and you basically have to cobble something together from all that nonsense. I'm not really a big fan of this although I've been winning fairly consistently, but I guess it's neat to draft with such a broad variety of cards.

yeah there's a lot going on in innistrad that you won't be able to accomplish when you mix it with other sets; the only other thing in standard-legal sets that operates on the same axis as innistrad is the golgari cards in RTR

i've been spending way too much time contemplating what the mechanical theme of theros block could be - feels like they could go way off the map with this one, since they're coming off of what's basically the most low-risk populist block possible

i'd bet on scry coming back

there's also some interesting theories about M14 giving a boost to monocolored strategies, which might tie into the upcoming block as well? i'm pretty interested in that actually since i kinda like monocolored decks

i hope the returning m14 mechanic is evoke

evoke and convoke are definitely the most robust mechanics that they haven't brought back a 2nd time yet

i don't think they're going to do monocolor-matters while a ravnica block is in standard.

So after complaining endlessly that I never get to draft GTC, I finally did a GTC draft last night and got absolutely crushed. My mediocre Gruul deck plus general state of exhaustion didn't get me very far. Noted for next time: drafting multiple copies of Foundry Street Denizen, Bomber Corps, and Scorchwalker = bad idea.

On the plus side, I completed my playsets of Stomping Ground, Temple Garden, and Hallowed Fountain. So I got that going for me, which is nice.

all in one draft?

Noooo.... I pulled a stomping ground in draft and finished off the others through trades and whatnot.

so i didn't technically win the gpt i played in today. but i got the byes anyways. it helps being actually willing to go to these things. now i have to learn modern for gp portland. pretty excited.

well I just botched hardcore against KARL THE MAILMAN MALONE by playing Immortal Servitude for 5 with a full graveyard and returning NOTHING - turns out it just gets X, not "X or less", what the hell kind of shit card is that

yeah I had assumed the same thing when I first saw it

yeah servitude is p garbage esp in limited

also cider if yr reading this gl w/the ptq - solid start at least :D

Huh pretty sure I played Immortal Servitude wrong at the prerelease.

haha thanks lamp but i am dead - started 4-0 then lost the next 2, number of entrants was 1 less than the 10 round cutoff so x-2 was dead