Magic: The Gathering C/D

any store will have a land box you can pull from and you can just use a notepad and pen to keep track of life + everyone will have dice to borrow if you need to, the first couple of times i just showed up w/nothing but the draft entry fee and it was totally fine

i drafted tonight as well but did p horrible, i was passed nicol bolas and just kinda went w/ it but ended up spread too thin across all three colors and my mana was horrible (despite two dual lands), i was p lucky to go 2-2

that's what I vaguely remembered but again I am pulling up memories from the 4th grade

nicol bolas is the dream everyone has to reach for. shame on whoever passed it to you

Sometimes you fly too close to the sun. I had a buddy first pick a Nicol and force those 3 colors, winding up with a really awful deck, but when he landed it's like...ohhh who's laughing now?

Also anyone on MTGO should try Momir Basic. Basically the rules are: your deck is all basic land, and during your turn you can pay X and discard a card to summon a RANDOM creature that costs X. If you're a skill guy you'll probably wind up disliking it but it's a pretty fun way to kill twenty minutes!

more limited tips - iatee you might know all this crap already but might as well have it in this thread somewhere

a useful mnemonic that people use for pick orders/card evaluations in limited is BREAD:
B = bombs. basically any card that can swing the game heavily in your favor if not immediately dealt with. large flying creatures, planeswalkers, mass removal, etc. these are usually rares and they're usually obvious.
R = removal. cards that can deal with all or most of your opponent's threats. examples: Pacifism, Murder, Searing Spear. Situational removal spells (e.g. Divine Verdict, Crippling Blight, Prey Upon) and temporary removal like Unsummon are trickier to evaluate so make sure your deck can use them properly.
E = evasion. flying, unblockable, trample, intimidate, sometimes first strike. creatures with abilities that make them difficult to block and can often break through a board stall.
A = aggressive cards. this is sort of a catch-all for solid creatures, good combat tricks, etc. look for guys with high power relative to their casting cost. also you want your early plays to be able to 'trade up' with a larger creature and your later plays to avoid 'trading down' with a smaller creature. A 3/3 is often better than a 4/2 for this reason.
D = defensive cards. yeah, sometimes you can draft a sweet control deck, but in general, especially as an inexperienced player, you're going to win more games by pressuring your opponent and putting the onus on them to make the right decisions. leave the walls and blockers in your sideboard unless they're likely to trade with something efficiently (e.g. the 1/2 deathtouch spider is actually a high pick because it's essentially removal).

Yeah that's a good start. When I began drafting a lot the only tips I got was "creature removal first, then creatures, everything else sucks". Basically the implication there was "don't take goofy creature enchantments" like so many newer players do. The problem with that acronym is that say in M13 there are many times I'd take a Fog Bank over Wind Drake even though the E is higher than D.

My only real tip for draft is to be aware of mana costs. If two cards are about equal value, go with the one that isn't a 3-drop. Because pretty much every limited format is FULL of good 3-drops. Also be weary of cards with double mana symbols (something that costs WW is tough to play turn 2, really)

specific tips for M13:

-the format is fairly slow compared to other recent sets. bears (2 power guys for 2 mana) without relevant abilities should be considered filler if you're short on turn 2 plays or creatures. don't be afraid to cut them from your maindeck.

-despite being a slow set, there isn't much color fixing so i'd avoid playing more than 2 colors

-the exalted mechanic plays a lot stronger than it looks. every creature with exalted is a solid playable, even the 0/4 wall.

-Faerie Invaders is the only common i can think of that's a potential blowout, so be wary of its existence when attacking

Also, W/G and B/G decks with exalted and tramplers (such as the 4/2 guy for 3G) can be very powerful. Like the last set with Bloodthirst, Exalted is more powerful than it looks because the set is designed to take advantage of it.

do mtg players make good or bad poker players and how strong is the correlation

let's ask d3athdr0n3

the 2 MTG/poker crossover guys i can name off the top of my head are David Williams and Eric Froelich, not sure how good they are at poker though since i don't follow that

if you don't think i have a long post on this on the way, you got another thing comin

in my experience with both (much more w/ poker than mtg tbh) some game proficiency carries over throughout a bunch of different games, but the skillsets are different enough (and the stakes and level of competition in poker so much higher than mtg) that i wouldn't expect a great mtg player to necessarily be a great poker player. i do think a great poker player could probably pick up mtg at a high level fairly quickly.

Anyway, I don't think the coorelation is strong, but I would think that MTG players turned poker players in general would be better than randoms. MTG is more about figuring out how a bunch of moving parts are going to interact while poker is more about figuring out how your opponent is going to react to a certain action and how he's going to play certain groups of hands. Case in point; if you could see your opponent's cards in poker you would never lose. In MTG knowing what your opponent has is only a small advantage. The card Gitaxian Probe lets you see for 2 life or one blue mana, plus it replaces itself. That would be like something in poker allowing you to see what your opponent has by throwing out a small blind. Plus in poker, everyone plays off the same deck. A good MTG deckbuilder is not going to get into situations often where their cards are worthless because his or her decks are going to be set up to maximize their resources. Whereas the best poker players get dealt 72 and miss flush draws all the time (regardless of what the Bond movies tell you).

The best poker player I know is really bad at Magic; he misses a lot of minor advantages all the time. The best Magic player is a guy who very rarely makes a mistake and is a great deckbuilder and he's such a huge fish at poker that we actually kind of lamented the fact that he moved away.

wouldn't you need a bunch of them in your deck though? if peek for one blue or two life was attached to er a permanent it seems like it'd be way overpowered. nb i have not played magic in ten years.

poker to me seems like a weird meta-game/superstructure of pushing counters around, the apparent 'game' part with the cards just an algorithm ... which isn't much like anything in the interlocking systems in magic, though i guess the meta-gaming/'reading people' stuff gets displaced to deck-building

its interesting because knowing your opponents hand is not actually considered to be worth a card - Telepathy has been around for more than 10 years and was never played in competitive decks

huh, fantastic. i suppose there's few ways to action it - there's no 'discard target card from opponent's hand'

there is, and its a tournament staple: http://magiccards.info/lw/en/145.html

though i guess that lets you look anyway

haha er never mind then! well.

is there any way to search all this stuff by effect? or do you learn about x thousand cards via harried study of past games by candlelight etc etc

http://magiccards.info/search.html is the best card search engine i know of - i mostly just know this shit from playing the game on and off for my whole life

ha, there are 108 cards with some version of 'target player reveals hand'. also this:

http://magiccards.info/scans/en/9e/114.jpg

i think a large part of why i never got into magic all that much was that there's this vastly complex set of possibilities for different interacting effects of various kinds, but unfortunately it always has to come down to 'get this one number from 20 to 0'. i guess at high level play there's people doing y'know 'combos' and stuff and trying to set up win conditions but then it's kind of, do it before your opponent reduces this one number from 20 to 0

haha zur's weirding was one of the 2 rares in the first magic thing i ever bought (5th edition starter deck). the other rare was Nightmare which i was a lot more excited about at the time

xp well there's mill strategies too but I think that whole idea is kind of disengenuous, a deck focused on creature combat vs. a deck that tries to do a massive Tendrils of Agony feel completely different even though they accomplish the same end goal

its kind of like saying, football is boring because it always comes down to who scores the most touchdowns and field goals

When the real reason it's boring is that it takes 800 years to complete 60 minutes of gameplay.

Kind of obsessed with this game right now.

Thinking of trying out a FNM booster draft to see what it's like, but I feel pretty intimidated.

its kind of like saying, football is boring because it always comes down to who scores the most touchdowns and field goals

this works and doesn't work, i guess

i went to the nerd store yesterday. no one was playing magic: the gathering, though there was an ad for midnight d&d sessions.

Do it! I have drafted twice since coming back to magic, coming 2nd and 3rd, and you're at least as good as I am. Seriously you'll be at a table with 8 dudes and three will be pretty bad, you might seriously be surprised how well you do.

Read this before drafting M13, it's amazing:
http://legitmtg.com/competitive/of-limited-interest-your-complete-guide-to-drafting-m13/

Kind of obsessed with this game right now.

haha me too! i was super proud because i finally got my rating above 1800 and then was filled with shame, disappointment

i dont think that legitmtg article is v otm tho, triple AVR was a really good draft format for one and her card rankings arent great

OK so I tried out this Magic Online thing a bit. I've got a dilemma though, because while MtGO has an advantage in terms of actually getting to play without having to go to a game store and hang out with creepy teens, the prospect of paying $4 a booster for non-real cards doesn't really entice me from an ownership perspective. Also the app is so terrible building decks for constructed (as if) seems like it'd be a shitshow.

Also if it's digital why are the old expansions out of print? Does Hasbro take a cut of the digital secondary market?

theres no real defense for mtgo pricing it just is although i havent had to deposit since i first started drafting seriously

don't ever buy boosters from the store; buy tix then get boosters from a bot.

Also if it's digital why are the old expansions out of print?

because of people who think this:

the prospect of paying $4 a booster for non-real cards doesn't really entice me

for me, I do a lot of 4-pack sealed, which have no entry fee in tix, just the 4 boosters. prizes are 5 packs for 3-0, 3 for 2-1, and 1 for 1-2. I win about 65-70% of my matches so I average three packs per event, therefore each booster (which are like 3.2 tix right now) is really about four, which makes it a lot better.

the cards ARE backed by something physical (if you collect the whole set, they will allow you to trade in the digital cards for real ones), and outside of the money mythics, the prices of MTGO cards are about 50% less than in real life. for AVR, I would venture that 3 tickets can buy you like, 85% of the entire set. basically; if you're not doing sealed or draft, just buy individual cards from bots.

i dont think that legitmtg article is v otm tho, triple AVR was a really good draft format for one and her card rankings arent great

yeah I think there's a lot of hyperbole on her criticisms of AVR; you can reduce every format to dumb stuff like that

I think a lot of her advice is good, but saying Elderscale Wurm (a huge bomb that many decks simply won't be able to win against) is anything like Omniscience (a 10-mana "do nothing" in Limited) is truly bizarre. I skimmed over the pick orders and think some of it is out of whack (I really do think Goblin Battle Jester is trash - you don't get to "controlling your opponent’s ability to block" unless you have a bunch of red spells queued up), but pick orders are dumb to begin with. Also Switcharoo over Sleep is ridiculous.

1800 is pretty impressive to me!

Yeah I don't think that list is perfect or anything but if you haven't drafted in a million years / ever it's a really good read and a lot better than going in blind!

I think Battle Jester is pretty playable? Like, the ability seems a lot better than haste, which it's costed comparable to.

What do you guys make of Sands of Delirium?

I've seen Battle Jester do okay, the problem is it costs four for a 2/2 creature which is just not going to keep up with any other color, and it doesn't do anything unless you cast another spell. If you've curved out you may not have many red cards left to play. If you haven't, "target creature cannot block" isn't going to help you much. I'd get behind this card as a 2R 2/1, but as is I'm not a fan.

As for Sands; very few cards in any color that I'd pick over it, it's this set's Moonsilver Spear, as in it's an artifact that sucks up a lot of mana but basically says if you can't deal with it in 2 or 3 turns you lose. I look forward to losing a lot of games against that in 4-pack Sealed!

I do visit Mt Gox at times

worryingly tempted to start playing mtg online

it's like an online poker addiction you can't kid yourself you'll ever get rich from!

hard to blow a thousand tix in two hours though

As for Sands; very few cards in any color that I'd pick over it, it's this set's Moonsilver Spear

haha this sets moonsilver spear is staff of nin! idk there are quite a few more outs to sands including one that just stone kills it so i dont think its quite as strong although its p good in sealed, yeah.

with battle jester i think the biggest problem is where he fits on the curve - the deck that wants him the most needs him to come down earlier or have an immediate impact on the board the turn hes cast. thats why haste is so much better - you get to immediately push through damage or at least effect the board on turn four instead of just doing nothing. like if you're curving into arsonist - flunkies - brute than youd much rather have canyon minatour to help block or even two drop + spear or w/e. combined with the fact that its very easy to have a decent board presence on turn five against an aggro red deck and what the red deck really wants to do is use stuff like trumpet blast or chandra's fury to trade UP against the other decks better creatures his ability just seems fairly anti-synergistic to me and a waste of a card slot

I find what Lamp just posted pretty convincing! (re: Jester). I have definitely seen high-ranked players praise him (on streams etc) but I'll think more about it.

thomp u live in london right? (i have asked you this like 8 times I think). Come along to dark sphere or something!

this sets moonsilver spear is staff of nin! idk there are quite a few more outs to sands including one that just stone kills it so i dont think its quite as strong although its p good in sealed, yeah.

Anything that kills Spear will kill the Staff too, though I kind of see where you're coming from, Staff also has that feeling of "if this is out for a few turns, you're going to lose", though Sands and Spear were win conditions in themselves

And agreed on Battle Jester, I don't think he's a bad 23rd card in a quick red deck, especially as it allows you to do stuff like turn 5 a Trumpet Blast/Searing Spear massive blowout. I just am not sure if this is the set for this, with so many good defensive creatures/big boppers (in green) a "cannot block" effect needs to be more repeatable than this, again, really wish this thing cost 3 or at least triggered when entering play

I have definitely seen high-ranked players praise him (on streams etc)

yeah i heard sam black claim battle jester was 'really good' but then i have yet to see him actually play w/it in his deck. i might be underrating it because of how much worse it is than fervent cathar in an aggro red deck. the aggro red decks are my fave deck to play online because i think people in general undervalue the cards and i end up getting like 10th pick chandra's fury and stuff so i'll try him out again, but he hasnt been that successful for me

Anything that kills Spear will kill the Staff too

haha i was mostly thinking of elixir