Magic: The Gathering C/D

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?

grisly salvage, commune with the gods

drown in filth :)

deadbridge chant, expensive but you could go crazy

i have tried a bunch of different versions of g/b and junk reanimator lists and couldn't get anything to work. the 'best' list was really just a midrange golgari deck that ran whip for value. non-shrine ramp strategies seem overly vulnerable so i didn't feel comfortable playing the 8-elves style reanimator deck like last season and you don't even have farseek to fall back on. all the reanimation spells are expensive and p inefficient and the while the top end of the reanimation suite is excellent in angels and ashen riders, there aren't as many good value targets at lower cc. really theres just shadowborn demon and thats it. maybe once the g/w and g/b scry lands are in standard a junk version might work?

gonna straight up brag itp but: won a small gpt today after scrubbing out of the ptq. was really happy with how i drafted and am glad i am working out the kinks in my sealed game. also nice for my first gp to be both free and slightly easier. final brag: got a marsh flats and some foil malestrom pulses with the credit from my win.

sorry but no one i know irl would care about this at all so

so: time to sell out of magic online?

http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/273

what have the issues been?

stability/scalability issues mostly - ever since the playerbase increased a bunch around the time RTR came out, events have been crashing often on the weekends

and yeah this is probably going to devalue constructed cards - i already sold off my standard collection except for a rdw deck

this article may have set some of this off:

http://www.starcitygames.com/article/27314_The-Magic-Online-Championship-Series-Should-Not-Exist.html

especially coming from someone who is A) one of Magic's most famous players and B) developing a direct competitor to MTGO

yeah that is balls

yeah it seems way too drastic - daily events are the most player-friendly events that they run, and are not what's been crashing

Seems like a strange overreaction though. Unless the occurrence of those big events is preventing them from fixing the stability issues. I guess that's possible?

Based on my friends list of people who play MTGO, it sounds like they are willing to put with the instability to play DEs. It's not like this is a new issue for them.

so is now the time for a cheapskate like me to buy into an MTGO deck? I'm looking at some lengthy downtime in the coming month due to surgery, so if I could kick back and play some standard online, that would be sweet.

i think Theros cards are probably at an all-time low right now

don't forget to hit up your ol' buddy frogbs if you need standard stuff. I really just play limited so I have some surplus.

all that said I really hope something like Hex or Hearthstone can take advantage of this. I see people in limited chat every time I log in that say they're switching over. dunno how many of them are serious but MTGO is kind of a raw deal to begin with and you're adding stability issues and a terrible interface on top of it. I mean if there was a game 80% as good as magic that had a decent interface and better value I'd probably switch over too.

Moodles yeah wait a week or two for the effects of this partial shutdown to hit card prices, and you shoul dbe able to get some good deals, unless they put up more appealing queues which is not out of the question given the amount of rage directed at them right now for taking down DEs.

though actually these sealed queues they put up are really not that bad, its just that constructed DEs paid out packs as if they were worth like 2.5 -3 tix rather than the usual 4 they value them at, and the replacement queues don't do this

I'll keep an eye on it. I'm looking to run a B/g variant on mono-black devotion, which is what I've been working on in paper.

has anyone played much theros sealed? it is kind of bad. for all that it trends more slow most of the time ime it is decided by whoever opens most cards towards a faster heroic deck. in rtr and m14 i felt i could usually make something competitive out of whatever i got but in theros it seems like if you don't have the right cards for a particular type of deck you are SOL because someone else will. it has actually worked out for me okay because it has pushed me into drafting more instead and that has been going pretty well.