Magic: The Gathering C/D

also although the ordeals have a high win % they also have a high 'this is why you lost' factor when you get lightning striked

I keep complaining to lamp about them, I think they are the biggest mistake in the format

yeah ordeals are some of the most swingy high risk/high reward cards we've gotten in a while

also i am reasonably certain now that nimbus naiad is the best common, stats be damned

I wouldn't take it over voyage's end or lightning strike but yeah...it's really good...

I'd take it over Voyage's End at least!

Sea God - yes it definitely seems a little overrated. My first thought was that it was almost an Uncommon Cyclonic Rift but THS is faster than RTR and doesn't have a token strategy, plus the sorcery speed really does hamper it. As good as it can be I think it fits into that category of "expensive + situational" which does not make for great limited cards.

I seem to get murdered by the Ordeals over and over - turn 2 play on a Hoplite is nearly unbeatable unless you have the Voyage's End right then and there. I'm surprised that anyone would diss the Hoplite, it's a 1-drop that's revelant late game and is really hard to block.

ehh come draft w/ me and give me all the voyage's ends and sea god's revenges

yeah stupid ordeal wins are (among) the reasons why lightning strike and end are even better than normal

I'm fully aware of the strength of Voyage's End, just that my evaluation of the 3 strongest commons are Lightning Strike/Nimbus Naiad/Voyage's End. The Naiad just does so much in this set, I think just in general I tend to value proactive cards over reactive ones. Maybe to a fault.

the numbers actually push god's willing ahead of all of those

i don't like the rescaling by CMC for cards with 1-4 CMC since its rare to be able to win a game where you don't hit 4 regardless of how many cheap spells you have

i think gods willing is the 2nd best white common but there's no way it's better than wingsteed rider.

i think satyr hedonist is the burning-tree emissary of this set. way stronger card than it looks on the surface, lots of big red mana costs that are devastating when used a couple turns earlier than you're supposed to

― ciderpress, Wednesday, September 18, 2013 11:40 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i agree, the reweighting by cmc is superflawed. also agree that rider is better than gods willing. i also take eidolon over willing. in the comments to that article someone suggests a better way of weighting the win % and he and his friend rejig their formula a bit. i think those results are probably better although its still annoying to be basically guessing at these likelihoods.

haha fwiw i have used hedonist that way exactly once

my friend tried to convince me it was great and so I tried it exactly once and ramped into a 5 and got voyage's ended immediately and now I will never do it again

well i was talking about constructed there

but i completely missed on nykthos doing the same thing without having to play or throw away a 2/1

in limited its basically there to threaten monstrous early so you can attack your ill-tempered cyclops into a 4/4 on turn 5 or whatever. pretty circumstantial for it to matter

what is this...constructed...you speak of

constructed is an awful timesink, please continue to ignore it. don't end up like me, devoting actual brainpower towards single-set block constructed and the like

I'm slowly trading towards a modern deck

which one? modern is actually pretty sweet, probably my favorite format though i'm finally getting tired of birthing pod and shopping around for a new deck to learn now

uwr

which I know isn't very t1 atm but it's just how I like to play magic

cool, uwr not my style but like jund it's always a safe bet to be playable

the zendikar fetchlands are probably the worst part of modern now, i'm feeling pretty dumb for trading some away before they rotated from standard. had to buy them back later at like 25 bucks each instead of 10 and they're even higher now

yeah I have a friend in my edh group that has full sets of them and he's cool w/ sharing so I think I might just build the deck minus those and borrow for an event

cause spending $50 on a scalding tarn seems like a bad investment

yeah it seems very likely to get a reprint within the next few years, either in a modern masters 2, or a zendikar 2 since zendikar seems like the most likely set to get a sequel other than the inevitable ravnica 3.

its pretty weird in retrospect how zendikar was the set that saved magic commercially despite being a mediocre-to-bad limited format. i guess quality of limited play is just not that correlated with overall sales though.

iatee and i have talked about this - i would bet actual money on a reprint of zendikar and onslaught in the fall 2015 block. i'm not sure if they'll do zen II set but 2015 would be the same gap btw zen and zen II as they had btw rav and rtr. and it gives people enough of a break from shocks and 'good mana' in standard. and fetches are the biggest barrier to wider adoption of the modern format imo. mm 2 also showed that reprints of high-value utility cards don't hurt the price of original printings that much so people that have sunk money into onslaught fetches won't lose too much, they will still command a premium.

xp well look at avacyn restored, that set sold huge

I'm tooling around with B/R decks in Limited and it's actually working quite well. Akroan Crusader is working really well for me, you can put a Dragon's Breath, Ordeal, or Scourgemark on him and hit for 3 on turn two and even gain a little card advantage. Even Titan's Strength seems good, you can get in for 5 right away. Scry seems real good too since your plan is so well-defined. Two-Headed Cerberus is also quite good with all those cards. All of these are late picks too. I also love Kragma Warcaller as a late drop since it essentially can throw 8 power worth of attacks with haste out of nowhere. Runs smooth with 16 lands too.

RB is def the most underdrafted aggro deck yeah. but i actually think its strength is not having to play super-circumstantial cards like akroan crusader.

Yeah but you still want some kind of one-drop ideally. Potent of Betrayal can be nuts in this deck b/c the format sometimes revolves around building up big dudes that can't be taken out by anything short of Hemlock, and it seems like nobody ever really sees it coming.

by the way I'm gonna go ahead and reverse course on Akroan Horse, it's definitely not first-pick worthy but every time I've had it played on me it's been a nuisance. There are really not any ways for your opponent to just sac it and even if the "average" game only goes on for 3 turns after you play it you have to consider that the Horse is the sort of card that really encourages long games. Maybe it would be bad vs. decks with lots of fliers but I'm turning around on the card.

Had what I thought was a sweet Dimir build this weekend at a PTQ: Bident, Gorgon, Lash, Shipwreck Singer, Sip of Hemlock, 2 Naiads, 2 Disciple of Phenax, 2 Gray Merchant, 2 Baleful Eidolon, black Emissary, Dissolve, Vaporkin, Artisan of Forms and some other cards I can't remember (it was a great curve overall). Won the first two rounds, lost the next 3 pretty handily. With PTQs, I'm starting to believe whenever I think my deck is good, it isn't, and vice versa. Is my deck about average for Theros sealed or better than average?

Oh double Omenspeaker too, that was great

were you getting outraced by heroic decks?

that looks pretty decent but I'm guessing you really needed some of those 3/3 2-drop walls?

baleful eidolon handles that role okay in a pinch

that deck sounds good, i guess you just have to run better or play better. i dunno what to say.

The 3/3 guys would have been nice but I didn't play against any Heroic decks actually. Lost to a grindy deck with Elspeth and Archon, a UR Minotaur deck that got the hasty guy all three games, and a solid UW deck. Didn't mean for it to come off as complaining - even the best sealed deck can lose to variance and I definitely could have played better anyway - I was more curious how strong the average Theros sealed deck is. The decks I played against seemed pretty good overall.

Its hard to say, your deck looks better than average here. I have lost two 0-3 Swiss drafts with decks that I thought were pretty good, and I've 2-1'd with decks where I'd missed an entire pack due to a disconnect. All I can really say is that pretty much every deck has a long game, so U/B can't just play grindy anymore.

Could some of you dudes post drafts on raredraft if you have a chance? I'd like to see how some of you approach the format. I can do the same.

a standard deck:

4 rakdos cackler
4 tormented hero
4 thrill-kill assassin
4 pack rat
4 nightveil specter
4 desecration demon

4 thoughtseize
4 ultimate price
4 hero's downfall

20 swamp
4 mutavault

sideboard:
4 lifebane zombie
3 duress
3 doom blade
3 dark betrayal
2 pharika's cure

swap lifebane<->nightveil if you expect to face a lot of decks with targets for lifebane, everyones playing mono black/red/blue right now though so i have it this way. i am 6-0 with this on the night and the friends i got it from are crushing with it too

do you not like yr g/r deck? theres a standard ptq i need a deck for that cant use any of the esper cards since i promised esper to a friend and i've actually started assembling g/r (:/)

does Pack Rat actually work in standard ?

yes, amazingly enough.

GR deck is more fun but it has bad matchups vs mono-blue and anger of the gods decks. the latter barely exist though so its been fine overall, and i'm still building it irl myself since i have 0 black cards for this one.

is rescue from the underworld good enough to support a new reanimator deck? rites had such huge card advantage, but rescue has better upside. i worry that it might be too eggs-in-basket, but i wanna make it work. the meta seems... friendly to reanimator these days.

theres definitely a real fun draft deck based around it with Gray Merchant, Returned Centaur, and the 4/3 with the Raise Dead ability

yeah return is insane in a good black limited deck

i think rescue is worse than obzedat's aid since aid can reanimate a whip that got salvaged away. either way i think you don't want too many copies of any 5cmc reanim spell, you just want a bunch of copies of whip, plus a bunch of mana dorks to reach angel of serenity naturally

Ashen Rider seems good in that sort of deck. But how do you mill yourself these days?