Magic: The Gathering C/D

Also, even if you're buying packs I would suggest buying packs from bots - they typically sell packs at a discount to the MTGO store (I think a pack of M13 is around 3.3-3.5 tix as opposed to $4), since heaps of people are continually selling all their prize packs to bots in order to cash out.

Thanks for the tips, and thanks to ciderpress for the cards!

The deck is starting to take shape now. My plan is to use some of the affordable legendaries like nefarox and odric rather than raiding my son's college fund to buy sublime archangel, avacyn, and a couple silver blade paladins.

keep in mind odric has anti-synergy with exalted since he wants you to attack with everything (though his ability is much more powerful than exalted in constructed)

like the best way to compete in constructed on a budget is generally to play a bunch of cheap efficient creatures, keep smashing them with everything, and hope they don't have a wrath of god effect or large blocker in time

I hear what you're saying. I suppose the strategy I'm shooting for is more of a hybrid exalted/soldiers. The idea is to score a bunch of early damage with small exalted creatures and then flood the board with soldiers and cards like crusader of odric. This gives the option of hitting with a whole bunch of creatures at once or with a single powerful creature like crusader who gets amped up by both soldiers and exalted. With Odric, Master Tactician in the mix I can force some mismatched combat or just keep the other player from blocking.

It may turn out that this is not focused enough to actually work, but I'm going to try it out and see what happens.

i have a list on my home computer for a neat soldier tokens deck that would be pretty cheap to build and reasonably competitive. i think the most expensive card in it is elspeth

but: from a strict value perspective you should wait the six weeks for standard to rotate before investing money in cards. until then you should be playing 4 pack AVR sealed probably since it's both good value and AVR packs have the highest expected value. it's also a pretty good way to ease into magic although i cant remember how xp'd you are...

also if its at all a possibility and you plan on playing competitively than its better value to invest the money upfront in a tier 1 deck than to try to grind out wins with a cheap but unreliable tier 2 or 3 deck.

i dunno, i'd recommend just messing around and playing in the free play/practice rooms for a while before jumping into sealed events. i spent my first month or so of MTGO just having fun playing cheapo Grand Architect decks in the casual room

haha yeah thats fair - really my advice is only worthwhile if moodles wants to play competitively i guess?

the idea of just buying all the cards for a tier 1 deck and grinding it out seems so soul destroying

I'm really at the just having fun stage right now, though I'll probably try out a booster draft sooner or later just to get an idea of what to expect

i think new accounts now come with a couple free entries into special "new player drafts", they're phantom drafts meaning you don't get to keep the cards you drafted, but you can still win prize packs i think

One thing to be wary of is that MTGO obviously adheres very close to the rules, so be sure to read that little status bar on the left closely. For example most players who play Bone Splinters (Sac a creature: Destroy target creature) would sac their creature first, then target their opponent's creature - on MTGO, you target your opponent's guy first, then sac as a cost. If you don't read the status bar you'll end up sacrificing your own creature to destroy itself (I would see this happen ALL THE TIME).

Also, when effects are stacked, you can mouse over the card effect on the left to see exactly what it's targeting, if need be. For example if you have a creature that comes into play with a token and soulbond triggers, mousing over can let you see exactly which creature it's referring to. Again, very easy to miss this if you don't really know the interface.

I had a situation where one my guys was taken out by Oblivion Ring. I cast a spell to destroy Oblivion Ring, but apparently cast it at the wrong time as my guy didn't return to the battlefield. Not sure what happened there.

make sure you let the Oblivion Ring actually eat your guy before you destroy it, otherwise the trigger that returns your guy will happen before the one that exiles your guy, causing your guy to go away forever

LSV plays a few games with a fun Delver/Talrand hybrid that doesn't look too expensive here: http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/channel-lsv-wizards-standard-event/

that's still a reasonable amount of $ though - don't forget that Gut Shots are like $5 each despite not being rare (so absurd!). plus Inkmoth is up to 7 or 8 due to the infect deck's popularity, and Snapcaster is 7 or 8 too and irreplaceable.

i think BW tokens is the best deck for making a budget version that still does inherently powerful things. you could probably build it with no rares except Honor of the Pure and still beat people up with reasonable draws

the MTGO economy is weird like that because packs are pretty much exclusively used for drafting, nobody buys a box at a discount or opens up packs for fun because doing so is such a waste. thus "3rd sets" like New Phyrexia don't get opened up much since you only get one per draft and then 4 months later Innistrad comes along, and now Gut Shot, which is like a $1 card IRL is somehow worth upwards of 5 tix

AVR packs just hit critical mass, 3.99 a pop exclusively thanks to Bonfire's ridiculous pricing. meanwhile M13 singles are pretty much worthless so who knows what to draft now.

the answer is to draft M13 because it's a better limited format than AVR

i didn't hate AVR as much as most people, i think it was fine for a 2-3 month limited format, but i have no desire to go back to it now that there's something new, card values be damned

at 3.50 a pack I can "go infinite" with AVR (but not really turn a profit), M13 will be really tough because there's only one card you can sell for over 10. prices will probably go up but they crashed pretty hard over the last two weeks.

I'm holding out for RTR - quite frankly it'll be shocking if that doesn't turn out to be an excellent Limited format

here is some art from RTR:

http://media.wizards.com/images/magic/daily/features/feature209_trdtfghjdfujdgfhdfbndfigkdgd.jpg

if that ain't Temple Garden I'll stick my dick in a mashed potato

funny, i said the exact same thing to someone else last night when that went up

I hope they've learned from Alara block, which didn't have quite enough color fixing at common to play 3 color decks. the bouncelands and signets from original Ravnica were too good because they were card advantage and acceleration respectively, but it would be nice to have some sort of equivalents this time around

the exact same thing? whoa

I'm sure there will be some color fixing at common. I think they know that Limited isn't really fun for either player if one guy is sitting with five spells they can't cast because they don't have Red mana; if this set is like a quarter gold cards, that's only gonna be a bigger problem

Have Wizards actually even printed a card in which the life-cost penalty was actually sufficiently punitive?

Like (of the top of my head):
Phyrexian Arena
Ravnica Lands
Ice-Age Pain Lands
City of Brass
Dark Confidante
Off-color Dismember/Gutshot/etc
Griselbrand
Necropotence
Channel

All super playable and often strong to the point of broken-ness.

You forgot Bitterblossom! What do you mean by sufficiently punitive? Like unplayable? I feel like shocklands, fetchlands, and the phyrexian mana permanents (for example) are all pretty balanced. The fact that the shocklands are almost certainly going to be reprinted implies that R&D doesn't think they're too broken. Plus there are a bunch of cards that are only limited playable, like Sign in Blood/Phyrexian Rager.

sign in blood and phyrexian rager have both been in constructed decks (rager mostly the first time around when it was in apocalypse)

zombie cutthroat is a good example of a limited one, that was an easy first pick in onslaught block draft despite taking a huge chunk out of your life

Oops, yeah, that's a big one!

I guess by 'sufficiently punitive' I meant: "Has a meaningful impact on your decision to maindeck the card". I mean, sure, fetchlands aren't *broken* in the 'lol u printed Skullclamp' sense, but I've never heard any player over 12 years old ever say "hmm, that's a whole life point! I think I'll run this island instead". With Sign In Blood by contrast you could totally remove the lifecost, and it'd still be, like, Divination.

Zombie Cutthroat is a great example of what I'm looking for - if it were [(3),1 life] for a 3/4 zombie that's definitely meaningfully different to [(3),5 life] for the same thing.

well sometimes they add up. I've seen a game of Modern where a guy cracked a fetch to get a shockland untapped three turns in a row, essentially starting him at 11 life. But that's a good point and a good reminder of how little life really matters anymore, unless you're playing against mono-red, I guess. Don't forget Force of Will!!

i remember when Modern first came out online, i watched a game where someone went turn 1 fetch shockland, thoughtseize, turn 2 fetch shockland, dark confidant. they're at 14 life on turn 2 with a bob in play, were playing against an aggro deck, and they ended up winning anyway. i guess that was more the power of Dark Confidant than irrelevancy of life loss, but all those incremental life payments do add up sometimes.

i play splinter twin in Modern, and i have won games at 1 or 2 life before because i played my Steam Vents tapped on turn 1 rather than firing off a Serum Visions right away. managing your life total is still important!

err that was actually 12 life on turn 2, not 14

Ok, I got one, Moonlight Bargain:

Moonlight Bargain 3BB
Instant

Look at the top five cards of your library. For each card, put that card into your graveyard unless you pay 2 life. Then put the rest into your hand.

I always wondered why Sligh wasn't more popular in Modern; decks running Thoughtseize and Bob must be dealing themselves 6-7+ damage a game

moonlight bargain seems playable to me, i assume it didn't get played much because it was in the same format as Dark Confidant and Compulsive Research which are both more mana-efficient ways to draw cards

if you're talking about straight-up burn, that's pretty popular on MTGO (mainly because it's cheap). Jund is the only popular Dark Confidant deck though and it runs Kitchen Finks too. Thoughtseize isn't actually bad against burn, since it just prevents 1 damage which is better than not being able to interact at all

and sometimes you hit their goblin guide and prevent more than 1 damage

i'm surprised it's an instant. still if it was 3BB: Draw 5, it would have gotten a lot of play, but the life requirement may be a bit much there.

don't get me wrong I don't know anything about Modern, it's crazy that Jund finds a way to play Finks, that's got to be a crazy manabase

1GG is not that crazy to get in a deck with fetches/duals! i'm confused what you mean

i often forget that finks is also a white card, since i haven't seen it played as such in about a year

also the problem with burn decks in modern is they can't interact in a format where most decks have either a combo kill or Geist of Saint Traft

I can see that. but I'd think a card like Blightning would be really good. to be honest I don't know what post-Onslaught Goblins even looks like. anyway, what I mean about Jund is that 1GG is kind of a crazy mana cost for a 3-color deck that isn't even heavy green, isn't it?

jund plays treetop village, tarmogoyf, and bloodbraid elf, it's pretty heavy on green. and even if it wasn't, fetches/duals and twilight mire would get you there anyway. casting double color spells is just not an issue in eternal formats.

i was playing a dredge deck for a bit that had birds of paradise, hedron crab, faithless looting, and gravecrawler as its turn 1 plays, and boarded into 4 thalias against spell-based decks. the manabase worked out fine.

hmmph. something just seems wrong about that. on the other hand I guess I see why the fetches and shocklands are so high now.

call me old school but I just don't think playing a 3-color deck should be so easy

goblins doesn't exist in modern, the good ones are all in onslaught. blightning is not a very good card because there are few of the slower attrition decks it's good against (pretty much just jund and U/W midrange), while there are decks like affinity that can have no cards left in hand by turn 3

i guess you missed out on lorwyn/shadowmoor/alara standard, when people were playing cloudthresher and path to exile in their cruel ultimatum decks.

i missed out on that too but it seems absurd in retrospect now that we have more typical mana in standard again

Yeah I kind of skipped the Cruel control era. Either way I think the mana-fixing in Standard has been really good for a long time and I kind of miss the days when people were at least somewhat encouraged to build mono-color decks. Nowadays I guess there's Stompy every once in a while and there's always a tier-4 Sligh deck but I miss the days when 3-color decks were not easy to pull off without some trickery.

mana fixing is tight enough that you are definitely paying a cost to run 3-colours in standard rn tho

Well the two dual types in Standard right now don't really play nice with each other but in general I don't find 3-color decks tough so long as you don't play a bunch of double-costed cards. Or at least, not as hard as I remember it being.

mana fixing is a double edged sword kinda. if the power level of cards in standard is low and/or balanced across the spectrum, then the best decks are more heavily defined by which ones have good mana (we see this in block constructed a lot, it's why Borderland Ranger is a 4-of in almost every ISD block deck). if you improve the mana in this sort of environment, you can produce a pretty radically diverse metagame. this is what happened with the first Ravnica block, and led to the era that people have dubbed the 'tier 2 metagame' because there were dozens of viable Standard decks and none of them were really powerful enough to beat up on random homebrew decks.

the flipside is that if there are a few overpowered cards in Standard and the mana is good, the format warps around those cards, because there's nothing keeping you from dropping them into your off-color deck and then tweaking the manabase to fit.

in general i think having 2 sets of duals per color pair is the sweet spot - we're a bit shy of that now but looks like we'll be heading there or beyond with a new Ravnica set

Well Ravnica was before the era of Mythics. I remember Baneslayer Angel being the start of something newer and shittier, where the metagame wasn't so much tier 1 decks as it was tier 1 cards, and who could fit the most into their manabase. I haven't played Standard in a while but from what I remember there were a ton of archetypes, but in reality it was just a dozen ways different ways to lose to Wurmcoil. Nowadays I'd guess there are a bunch of decks with tortured mana bases that just want to get their Huntsmasters and Bonfires in as both cards are way over the curve. I remember feeling like Baneslayer was so stupidly overpowered that EVERY white deck should be packing them, no matter what (at least, before Dismember was printed). Jace 2.0 was the same way. And soon that kind of spilled over into, "if I've got a two color deck, can I make it three so I can play Jace?"

baneslayer, huntmaster, and wurmcoil are all strong cards, but i wouldn't call any of them format-warping - i would call jace and bonfire that though...

Well the Baneslayer/Titan/Wurmcoil era really brought about an era where they were SO far ahead of any other 5-7 drop that you could hardly play anything else in those slots, even if they had abilities that fit your deck perfectly. I had a deck set up to abuse Flayer of the Hatebound in several ways, then found out that just straight up swapping them for Inferno Titans made my deck better, even though the synergy wasn't there anymore.

Anyway to make this fit my argument a little better I don't think Titans/Wurmcoil are the problem when it comes to excess mana fixing as any deck can play those. They are problematic, but for different reasons. But low-cost mythics like Lotus Cobra, Geist, Bonfire (sort of), and Jace do encourage a lot of dumb off-color splashing. I remember the Zendikar era being the same thing, "just play fetches and Lotus Cobra and your deck will rule"