Magic: The Gathering C/D

This one went from $30 to $40 quick. My guess is that she'll settle in the $20-25 range. I do agree that the thing doesn't really do much by just building to an ultimate but Rock-type decks (which love to press small advantages like these) will probably go nuts over a card like this.

Gotta say I'm not really a fan of stuff like Dreadbore or that new Smother being rares

yeah the GB spell spoiled today is probably the best or at least most useful card spoiled yet but its shitty that its a rare instead of an uncommon

i'd snap short it at $20

considering lilliana of the veil was briefly like $15 thats probably right

whats the most expensive pw in standard rn? the new ajani?

yeah and that's under $20 already

I dunno, Karn is $15 even though it's about to rotate out and only really saw play as a 1-of. Planeswalkers have a lot of appeal across every format. It looks like BG/Jund is going to be a new thing and even if this is just a Lux Cannon that starts with five counters, that's really strong. I feel like this will just be one of those walkers that really is better than it looks because it helps in a lot of situations. That said I'm a little surprised that it's preordering at $40 while new Jace is only $25.

On the plus side, I can't wait to grind out drafts on MTGO, it looks like there are a bunch of money rares already. Abrupt Decay is preordering at $14, and you know the shocklands will be probably $10 apiece. Actually in general I think it may be a good idea to short-sell everything from this set as it's pretty much guaranteed to be the highest selling set in Magic history. Just sayin'.

the average magic player is horrible at evaluating cards, is what it comes down to. if it was possible to short sell cards you could make a fortune (this is essentially what the big online retailers do by selling preorders)

yeah considering ive done several hundred m13 drafts i cant imagine how many ravnica ones ill end up doing so im not rushing to buy singles atp but sometimes stuff like the azorius mythic seems like decent value @ like $3

but i am one of those people who is terrible at evaluating cards i mean i thought tibalt might be good so

I think Tibalt is actually okay, there just isnt a deck for him yet. But everyone who think he's godawful probably isn't understanding that a two-mana planeswalker kinda has to suck.

do you guys compete in local constructed events? is the only way to win these to have a deck full of $20 cards?

if it was possible to short sell cards you could make a fortune

yeah I would have loved to do this with Temporal Mastery. I still love the card but it was pretty easy to predict a crash

shocklands are not going to be $10 for long. unless the set somehow sells out completely like Worldwake did, the total value of the set has a ceiling set by the MSRP of the sealed product, and constructed-playable mythic rares eat up a lot of that space

do you guys compete in local constructed events? is the only way to win these to have a deck full of $20 cards?

looking at the starcity preorders supreme verdict @ $5 seems about right as well day hovered at $4 iirc over the last 6 months or so

fwiw ive always wondered how much of the preoder price spike is do to heightened demand and not just people speculating or misevaluating cards? like there has to be a decent # of players who want to have playsets of cards for decks right away and are willing to pay a premium for that. like obv shocklands will fall to like $7-$10 as soon as people start drafting but you can always make up the premium in prize money after a couple of weeks? idk

do you guys compete in local constructed events? is the only way to win these to have a deck full of $20 cards?

my deck doesnt have a card over $15 and i finished top 32 at a p big tournament last month so not really

the birthing pod deck i won DKA Gameday with didn't have any $20 cards but it did have so many ~$5 cards in it that it was probably worth $200 on the whole anyway, so i dunno

generally i just draft so much that over time i end up with enough good cards to trade for the stuff i need for decks

actually kinda curious what the cheapest tournamet-viable standard deck is rn - mono-black infect?

i think the main tip i can give for getting into constructed cheap is to pick the archetype you want to play and then identify the most crucial cards for that archetype and get those ASAP, and wait on getting the cards that have workable substitutes.

for example, if you want to play control, your deck probably isn't going to work without some rare board sweepers, whereas it matters a lot less whether you're closing out games with a $15 Consecrated Sphinx or a $1 Sphinx of Uthuun. likewise, if you want to play a green midrange deck, you absolutely need 4 Birds of Paradise (or whatever the current equivalent is) but it doesn't matter quite as much whether those birds are accelerating you into a $12 Thragtusk or a $3 Wolfir Silverheart

Lamp i've seen some supposedly <$30 WB tokens lists that look pretty solid. Infect leans too heavily on Inkmoth Nexus to be the cheapest deck

i think that was $30 on MTGO though, since isolated chapel is 10 bucks each in paper

yeah i meant paper

I definitely need to find the right closer for this BW Exalted Soldiers thing I have going on. It's working really well at inflicting a bunch of damage in the first several turns, but tends to stall out and fall prey to more powerful removal. Odric, Master Tactician and Nefarox Overlord of Grixis are turning out to be a bit underwhelming mid-game.

also w/b tokens isnt really tournament-viable

I'd at least like to have a better shot at winning on Casual mtgo.

sublime? i guess shes just as weak to snag &c

probably good but $$$$

shocklands are not going to be $10 for long. unless the set somehow sells out completely like Worldwake did, the total value of the set has a ceiling set by the MSRP of the sealed product, and constructed-playable mythic rares eat up a lot of that space

I don't think the blue ones will dip below $10. I would guess the secondary market has learned its lesson w/r/t duals, especially shocklands which are basically played in every format, including casual/Commander. Does anyone remember what they went for the first time around? (I remember $8-$12, up to $15 for Breeding Pool)

once again i would gladly short them all at $10, even hallowed fountain.

Finally got out to a FNM booster draft. Was a little caught off guard because I was expecting it to be M13 but it was Dark Ascension/Innistrad instead. Ended up with a RG deck heavy on werewolves and spiders and went 1-1-1. It was fun but I found competing against people who seemed much more knowledgable about MTG to be a bit stressful.

thats weird, most places only run the newest set, and DKA/ISD is definitely a much harder format than M13 so don't be discouraged or anything

my local shop has run triple AVR and triple ISD the last two weeks because theyre out of M13 boosters. which has been p fun cuz im a little bored of M13 draft and also because i made the finals of both weeks

I've been thinking a lot about draft strategy / playing some online test draft thing against computers. do you guys have any interesting articles/insights about how quickly to pick colors, how willing you should be to switch if you can read your neighbor's picks etc? I guess it probably depends a lot on the set, too.

also going mono seems like almost always a bad idea, but at what point is it not?

my feeling w/M13 is that you can place some premium on staying open in pack one primarily because the format is balanced enough that you want to make sure you're in the 'right' colors for your seat and second because i like having the option of taking a bomb rare or uncommon from pack two w/o regardless of color

i've only drafted a monocolor deck once and it was the obvious open krenko, mob boss p1p1 get passed arms dealer p1p2 sort of thing. i don't think its bad idea though there are decent mono decks in all five colors

I guess I didn't mean bad idea in a 'you're doomed' but more that the marginal gain you'd get from having fewer mana problems is rarely going to be worth playing those last 6 or so subpar cards if you coulda had 6 more playable cards in a 2nd color.

yeah i don't think that mana consistency is enough of an issue in this set that it's desirable to force a mono deck but every color (except maybe blue) is def deep enough and has enough range to support it, provided it's open for your seat

I'm also concerned that I have some bias against green, cause I almost never end up w/ it in the fake drafts

green is the best color!!

yeah I know that's why I'm afraid I have a subconscious bias, also I think I prob like captain's call a little too much cause I always end up w/ 4. maybe the computers just don't like it enough.

I definitely went in to last night with the idea that I'd be playing either green/red or green/black.

I think there's nothing wrong with going for colors you like so long as you have some decent choices available to you.

I think its more that I misjudge the power of midsized green creatures compared to more obviously good stuff in other colors

I guess I didn't mean bad idea in a 'you're doomed' but more that the marginal gain you'd get from having fewer mana problems is rarely going to be worth playing those last 6 or so subpar cards if you coulda had 6 more playable cards in a 2nd color.

basically this; most cards you play are only going to require a single colored mana, so playing 11 Forests and 6 Mountains or whatever instead of 17 Forests is rarely going to screw you out of playing a lot of spells. that said I've done drafts where one color was super open, it just happens from time to time, especially if you're sitting by a drafter who chooses their colors before the draft even starts

reading your neighbor's cards is tough; I think it's easy to figure out what the two guys to your left are playing based on what you're passing, but sometimes it's tough to figure out whether two packs w/ no good White cards is a sign or a fluke. In AVR this was really hard because so many commons were just unplayable.

the problem with green is that often its creatures just aren't actually much better on-curve than the other colors. Centaur Courser is such an important card to have access to, even though it looks pretty simple, since other colors generally need a 4-drop or even a 5-drop to handle it. having access a 2-drop with deathtouch is pretty important too since if you're in green you'll have less access to hard removal

The two cards I'm trying to figure out most are Mindclaw Shaman and Sands of Delirium. Mindclaw seems like it has the potential to swing games, but I'm always unsure of when to pick it, or when to side it out. If Duress is not very playable due to the possibility of striking out then I wonder how much a 5-drop 2/2 is when it seems much more likely (as they will have had chances to cast their spells by then). Sands I wonder about as a 1st pick; assuming no foil rare (so the pack is all commons and uncommons) would you take anything p1p1 over it? How about p2p1, when you're already in (say) Black, would you take Murder or Vampire Nighthawk over it? Sands just seems so good at winning games that may not be winnable otherwise, as well as giving you the luxury to just say "all I have to do is stay alive for a few turns and I win". I'm not sure if I'd ever pass the thing.

sands is tricky since your deck has to be good enough at stabilizing the board that it can do it with one fewer card, which hasn't been the case a couple of the times i've had it. it's definitely a strong card though in the right deck.

mindclaw is awesome and i pick it pretty high, within red i have it about equivalent to furnace whelp, i.e. worse than spot removal, better than other creatures except for flunkies if you're a beatdown deck. you can side it out vs green-white decks since they don't have as many targets for it

Oh wait, did we not link to this? AV Club did a thing this week:

Revisiting Magic: The Gathering as a grown-up nerd

http://www.avclub.com/articles/revisiting-magic-the-gathering-as-a-grownup-nerd,84662/

http://media.avclub.com/images/413/413016/16x9/627.jpg?4667

yeah I've had a fun time with Sands lately. seem to always get it in my opening hand which is not really optimal. then I had one game that I won on turn 28 (!) because it was the 5th-last card in my deck. was actually DOA the turn before if he had swung with all his flyers but I guess he played it safe not thinking about getting ducked.

my problem with Mindclaw is that you'd never say, side out a Furnace Whelp, so I tend to be careful about taking it too early. I've gotten destroyed by them (one took a Predatory Rampage, barf), and saved (by hitting a Sleep), but it's such a hard one to evaluate. I'll take your word for it.

cool game