Magic: The Gathering C/D

haha i feel like if you can afford the other pieces of birthing pod than you can probably stretch for $25 chord of callings

they were $35 apparently, crazy

i never thought to check in on them recently or i probably would have tried to trade mine away, i'm finally tired of pod after playing it for a year in standard and 2 years in modern

idk I think a lot of people might open a few and then say 'okay I can be building/trading towards a modern deck now'

though i'll probably still have to run pod at the GP unless i can throw together UR delver before then

Bleh, I picked up the last Chord I needed at the GP this weekend for $35. Feel like all the signs were there - no Modern Masters reprint, Convoke returning in M15 - I just didn't see them.

Liking new Garruk. I'm all in favor of expensive but super powerful Planeswalkers like Nicol-Bolas and Karn.

Actually I think my like boils down to +1: Destroy target planeswalker

cider what cards do you need for u/r?

pretty sure i have the whole maindeck except for remands, and then i need some random sideboard stuff like threads of disloyalty or whatever people run. i'm 99% sure i can get everything from the people i'm going to the GP with though, its just a matter of whether i want to pull the trigger on playing that deck over pod, which i have way more experience with but is much more taxing to play in long events.

I feel like someone w/ a lot of pod experience would find it less taxing than delver, which I think is one of the hardest decks in modern

though secretly i just want to play zoo, maybe i can make this happen

i've been playing delver gifts lately and its been fairly good for me. i may be going to boston but even if im not some people i know are already committed to going so i can lend you some cards for the event if you need

if i had the cards and xp i would def play pod over it though

thanks but i know plenty of folks here in boston who will lend me stuff, i think i'm good

yeah i figured. threads were actually pretty difficult for me to find

why is it so expensive?

like it spiked after the protour I remember, but it should have gone down by now

it was already on its way up before that pro tour

where is the demand coming from though? it's a one of sideboard card

whereas pod itself is still like $12

its a rare in a small set from a block that wasn't very popular and happened a long time ago, also it's never been reprinted in any form. also it's a blue card.

pod is a much more recent card from a set that sold a lot better and had post-zendikar-boom print run sizes, also it was in an event deck as a 2-of.

kira fits all those criteria, also has more casual appeal, and has roughly the same amount of modern play

oh it was reprinted duh

yeah it's hard for me to have a mental context for pre and post boom sets, since it's all just 'before I came back to the game' sets

you know what would be useful, a graph that estimated the player base / amount each set was opened

basically kamigawa block through alara block have lower supply because the game was in a rut sales-wise during those 5 years due to all the people who quit during affinity standard and the difficulty/complexity of a lot of those sets keeping new players out. alara started to pick things up a bit but it didn't really take off again until m10/zendikar and since then every block has outsold the previous one afaik

so, speaking with very little experience of previous formats as comparison, i thought full block theros was really pretty good for draft? 3xTHS was good, adding BNG made it a bit crappy but then full block kind of made everything work and just opened things up a lot. super balanced i thought. i've done a bunch of drafts and it is still fun and engaging, although m15 will be coming at the right time for me without having been able to benefit from the distraction of vma.

yeah i haven't drafted much since Journey came out but i've enjoyed the ones i've done. i do think they've done a reasonable job with most of the limited formats recently, it's just that to me innistrad was 2 steps above their usual level of quality and is still recent enough that i can't help but judge everything against it.

I think they've done a good job patching up the color disparities etc. and it's probably a very skill-intensive format atm because it's so balanced, but at the same time I'm just sick of seeing theros cards

i had a fun deck the other night where i killed someone from ~14 with grim guardians and recurring renowned weavers

basically i always try to draft decks around the JOU cards because i'm tired of the theros ones

i do think 'format fatigue' is a real issue now with more people playing magic online and the amount of video/streaming content etc out there now meaning that people are experiencing more drafts per set now even when they're not actually playing more themselves. I think magic R&D understand this though which is why most recent blocks have had double large sets.

haha yeah I'm sick of vma and I haven't played it once

one thing that has kept things a little fresher for me is that the archetypes that i have enjoyed/had success with have evolved through the block so i feel like i am more often playing with theros cards i saw less of earlier. for example BU went from a colour combo i couldn't win with in THS to my most successful pairing in full block.

my favourite deck to date was a BG early into JOU that had all of the gold cards, inc 2x nyx weaver and 2x mender, and eidolon of blossoms, bestow creatures and a couple font of return. it was just card advantage for days and days. every time i have tried to do something similar since it has been disastrous.

Yeah JBT draft is awesome, I think they did a great job making everything come together there. I dont feel that Born really hurt things too much but BTT was just too similar to TTT to really make much of a difference, they shook up the archetypes in ways that were maybe too subtle to notice (for example, Green devotion getting a little better, Minotaurs getting a little worse), it didn't feel much like a new set had been added.

theros itself is so powerful that most of the changes in this block have really been 'you get less theros'

ie the grey-merchant deck went from 3 to 2 to 1

that's true. grey merchant was probably most affected single card, certainly only having one pack of ordeals made a big difference. and it felt like having a decent number of bestow dudes if you wanted them was no longer a foregone conclusion.

i do think 'format fatigue' is a real issue now with more people playing magic online and the amount of video/streaming content etc out there now meaning that people are experiencing more drafts per set now even when they're not actually playing more themselves. I think magic R&D understand this though which is why most recent blocks have had double large sets.

there's a lot of truth to this, there's a very clear difference in my drafting strategies before I played MTGO and after - you can now do like 10 drafts a week if you want, whereas before I would probably do 10 drafts over the life of a set. I think you need about 15 or 20 before I feel like you really get a good handle on how a limited format really plays out and just playing live you really struggle to play that much.

i like(d) jbt but i wish it had been a little more challenging to draft and explore. none of the journey cards really bent the format in an interesting direction even if they opened some previously too weak strategies up for consideration. i was trying to think of a single uncommon that really let you do something different in jou and the closest i could come up with is strength of the fallen, which is really only an expansion of theros's b/g deck. i do wish that knowledge + power had been costed a little more aggressively, that would've been a genuinely different style of draft deck

Yeah I thought not having a viable linear scry deck in limited was a real missed opportunity, especially because UR seemed the most likely color combo for it and UR didn't have much of an identity this block

UR scry is there, i've drafted it, but the payoff is not quite good enough for how tricky it is to get all the parts

you need more things like the Flamespeaker Adept. the problem is that outside of Spite of Mogis most of the deck's best cards are plenty good in other decks. also that constantly scrying does you no good when your card quality is less than your opponents. there's not a very clear path to victory there.

adept could've been at common without hurting anything and that might've been enough to give UR a deck that instead basically barely existed

It's obvious they wanted the deck to happen, because they wouldn't make cards like Knowledge and Power otherwise. Just seems like the developers didn't care enough about the deck to cost the cards appropriately or put in enough support. I guess "viable" is vague. I'm sure the deck has been made as cider says, but it seems like you have to get very lucky with your opens

Or more likely, the developers ran out of time to cost it right

reminds me a bit of Izzet in RTR, it was rather frustrating how clearly it was the weakest guild - I think they try not to make spell-based strategies very good in Limited which nerfs U/R.

Heh, many of the best repeated Scry cards are creatures though

I thought Spellheart Chimera was kinda supposed to be the "basis" of the deck, you play a bunch of instants and sorceries that pump it while stalling your opponent's creatures. I think I once was able to kinda-successfully build that deck in 3xTHS.

izzet was so not the weakest guild, golgari was the weakest guild

u and r were both great support colors for an aggro-tempo w deck in theros block, but they lacked good two drops - vaporkin and the suicide minotaur (who's generally terrible in ur because you don't have an aggressive deck to back him up) were really all you had

yeah common 2-drops are incredibly important and are often what define which archetypes are viable in limited formats