Magic: The Gathering C/D

MTGO update notes are up. we get shadowmoor drafts this week! and lorwyn during the cube/new-set-not-out-yet period. this is sweet, that's the one remaining block i've never drafted before.

also 4-pack sealed is back

So, they collect 16 extra tix and give out one additional pack? Did they miss the reason why 4-pack was so popular in the first place?

excited for the lorwyn block actually

no, that's probably why they got rid of it in the first place, because it wasn't actually producing any revenue on its own by not consuming tickets

Lorwyn's one of my all-time favorite draft sets, gotta remember to get on mtgo during that time.

yeah i've heard lorwyn was kinda a jam and while i am certainly sick of all current limited formats i dont like cube enough to want to waste my money on it

what did the 4 pack sealed cost previously?

the old 4-pack queue just cost 4 packs, no tickets. this one adds the typical 2 ticket entry fee

o i c

i caved and put more money on my account and have been playing ISD drafts to get my last two (now one!) QPs. now i want to find a way to use angelic overseer as a finisher in a constructed deck even though i realize how terrible that is.

i played it back in december! it was okay until people started playing bonfire again and mizzium mortars which both kill it, awkwardly

haha i've been thinking it's time to go slightly bigger in the naya aggro shells and she seemed pretty good. i would also like to find a deck that could use emancipation angel but i don't think shes good enough either. bonfire showing up in more of the g/r and naya ramp decks is kinda annoying because i thought i might finally be able to run my thatcher's revolt deck to some success

no, that's probably why they got rid of it in the first place, because it wasn't actually producing any revenue on its own by not consuming tickets

― ciderpress, Tuesday, April 16, 2013 5:15 PM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's not but it does take in 32 packs while only giving out 19. so there is a little profit, I guess

the "popularity" of the format was pretty much entirely based on the fact that you didn't have to pay tickets to enter. does anyone really prefer 4-pack to 6-pack, all things equal?

some people did

nothing quite as disheartening as being mana flooded through four or five turns and then having an opponent drop a balustrade spy that dumps your next dozen cards

notion thief gives me the distinct impression that while set skeletons are fleshed out far in advance, individual card design is very reactionary, almost even going last-minute. either r&d is really on top of their game or they are specifically designing cards to deal with annoying metagames (glaring spotlight, frontline medic, notion thief, the 3 GY hate cards in standard right now)

I'm not really sure what kind of deck wants Notion Thief though? Like, dispel costs one mana! If drawing a card is really important you can run Scatter Arc for the same mana and also counter every other noncreature spell not named Sphinx's Revelation. So the arguments for it come down to the 3/1 body, which is relevant for.... some sort of Duskmantle Seer aggro deck? But then you're playing an aggro deck that's leaving up 4 mana all the time, which doesn't sound very good.

Gravel you do realize it draws a card for every card your opponent would draw, right? so if they revelation for 10 you are drawing 10 instead.

also xp: i think they are just on top of their game right now in predicting what future standard will look like. the cards for a new set are all locked in at about 6 months before the set's released, so RTR was probably still just hitting the shelves when Notion Thief was finalized, and no one was actually playing sphinx's revelation yet in the real world.

though they do make mistakes still, i know they've said that internally they had more wolfir silverhearts than thragtusks in their midrange green decks

there's a 4 damage lightning helix for 2RW, apparently. i guess that's good for limited, i mean i wasn't expecting an actual helix nor did i want one.

Haha - I hadn't! But I actually still think it's too narrow, even given that it says 'counter targer Sphinx; win the game' - Negate really seems a ton better to me in the sideboarded Esper mirror as it hits Jace and Psychic Spiral, both of which are more important? Maybe I'm not talking into account that Drownyard will rotate soon. What deck do you think wants this card?

I had no idea what you guys were on about until I saw that Notion Thief had flash. That's pretty cool then!

i think the decks that want this card are UBx decks that are trying to do something else other than sphinx's revelation but don't want to lose to sphinx's revelation every time. i don't know if these decks will actually exist but there you go. also it combos with whispering madness to make your opponent discard their hand and you draw a bunch, so if you can find a deck that's okay playing whispering madness then that's good.

also a trusted source on legacy thinks that it will be at least fringe playable there despite the 4cmc because of how badly it fucks up brainstorm and jace

it's an awful lot like Plagiarism which is a card that everyone really wanted to make work in Legacy but IIRC it never really did. it was a real menace in 5-color though! (Contract from Below became B: Discard your hand. Ante another card. Your opponent draws 7 cards)

plagiarism doesn't stick around and prevent your opponent from digging for answers to it though

control decks in legacy lean on brainstorm really really hard, even to the point of playing too few land for a deck that can't brainstorm reliably, so anything that prevents that card from working is worth a look regardless of cmc. last time i played legacy i had chains of mephistopheles in my sideboard and resolving that vs control was often an instant-scoop from your opponent (if they actually understood what it did).

it's definitely better than Plagiarism. I really do like this whole genre of Magic card (flash creatures that can hose degenerate strategies, such as Aven Mindcensor)

That's really interesting about Brainstorm! Not a legacy player but I'd be fascinated if that happened. The brainstorming player still has to put two cards back, right? So brutal.

Hahaha did not consider Notion Thief against Brainstorm, that's insane! 7-for-1 card advantage, right?? They spend a card, put back two, you draw 3 and get a dude. Rogue will get played even in Standard, I think, it's very powerful. Note that it is Human, which means we might see Cavern of Souls forcing it through.

Dunno why I said Rogue, meant Thief. But it is a Rogue also.

yeah that sounds about right. jace also becomes a 7-for-1 if they don't have a blocker since this guy can attack it to death

ok shadowmoor is a weird format, almost all of the cards are terrible on their own but there's a ton of unbeatable 2-card combos

a little lttp but i really, really like notion thief and would like to find a space for him in standard. maybe resurrect my old bug tempo lists? man i want a blue-based or even blue-splash tempo list to be good in standard again...

also i managed to qualify for the MOCS prelim this season despite my best efforts. this is perhaps the greatest accomplishment of my week

Good job! That was what the QPs were for? (I don't know much about mtgo tournaments)

Yeah Shadowmoor isn't the greatest draft set, feel like I've complained about it before.

it's kind of neat still but i'm more excited about lorwyn drafts in a couple weeks

also awkwardly i think i finally stumbled on a standard deck that i really like, now that we're in the obsolete format window of time

which deck?

damn, "Skylasher" would have been the perfect Delver-hoser circa June 2012

yeah i was laughing at that last night, for every sphinx's revelation and unburial rites that they successfully plan ahead for, there's sometimes a delver that they didn't expect and then the hate card for it shows up months too late.

lamp it's the GR midrange aggro deck with domri, it turns out if you take the experiment ones out of that deck it gets better. this is probably gonna be my go-to deck post-DGM unless any of my deckbuilding friends find something insane again

http://mtgstats.com/Deck.aspx?DeckID=588551 this but with a few tweaks and a different sideboard

ready/willing is gonna lead to some total blowouts

yeah, i like that deck a lot. i actually spent last night trading/buying the cards i needed for it in paper so i can play a version of it at the ptq/wmcq this weekend. i'm not running the gyre sage 'version' and only two domris but its been pretty good for me so far. my only match losses so far have been to g/b aggro (which i think is just a bad match-up and thankfully a fringe deck) and the prime speaker list. i was worried about jund but you can run them out of answers reasonably well

so the Dimir mythic is pretty much what everyone expected, right?

if its real then yeah it's not great. would still like to see one more pushed dimir card, since so far the guild has been completely absent from standard other than the occasional 1-of dimir charm. far//away and notion thief seem playable, not sure about warped physique. cipher is still lacking the constructed-pushed card that all the other guild mechanics have, though i'm not sure what it'd look like. maybe they actually thought people were going to play soul ransom, or find a way to break whispering madness?

and of course duskmantle seer has a really high power level but i have no idea how to use it still, might have to wait for rotation

the hate card for it shows up months too late

My favorite is Seedtime, the supposed answer to Fact or Fiction. Wizards hyped this card up a ton in the previews, didn't make a dent in Standard. The metagame had moved a bit past FoF by the time it came out anyway.

armadillo cloak is back! with a new name though since lifelink isn't quite the same rules-wise

http://media.wizards.com/images/magic/tcg/products/dgm/tiwoirwiixix/spzkwz3www_EN.jpg

BUG suddenly doesn't seem so horrible...

ha, I remember Seedtime opening around $10. it quickly settled around 10 cents.

i do like R&Ds new policy of making the hate cards useful otherwise so they're not just dead if you don't hit the thing you're hating