Magic: The Gathering C/D

forks I live in ny and will play w/ you

yeah Wizards has a lot of products for those who want an okay Standard deck for cheap. if you're looking for bulk common/uncommons just head on down to a store where people draft and ask around. most drafters are more than happy to give away stacks of cards...hell when I draft I would say maybe 1 or 2 of the guys actually keeps what they draft. the rest just lies around. just getting a bunch of random uncommons really won't get you anywhere.

well afaik forks is pretty new to the game so getting a bunch of random uncommons could get him 'a good time', it's not like he's gonna be playing competitive constructed anytime soon

well yeah but if you just want a bunch of random cards you shouldn't have to buy them on eBay. those M13 decks aren't really competitive but for someone just coming into the game I think they're good since the cards are meant to play together. if you're stringing together cards from random sets you'll definitely wind up with something unique but you miss the synergy between mechanics which is a big feature of pretty much any modern set

again it all really depends what exactly you're looking to do

i should probably steer clear entirely honestly, i have enough addictive issues as it is.
But i will be down to try a few hands sometime.

the duel decks are actually just awesome if all you want is to have 2 decks that are evenly matched to pick up and play with anyone else. i have knights vs dragons, which is probably one of the crappier ones, and yet it's still a lot of fun to pull out when you don't really feel like playing hardcore

The more I look at the RtR cards, the more I'm thinking that Rakdos is the way to go for the prerelease as it looks like it would shine in Limited, although I think I prefer Golgari overall and might throw in some Scavenge creatures if the opportunity presents itself.

I'm digging this series of articles:

http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=10726

they're entertaining but it's weird to go back and see how inaccurate they wind up being; I think these sets are too complicated and have too many interactions for anyone to really definitively say what's great and what's not without playing the set (besides obvious cards like Talrand's Invocation)

well well well Cube draft is back

i don't like cube, i'm more excited about tempest drafts next week

i've never drafted mirage or tempest. awesome this is happening but i'm kind of sad it's only going to last a week or so. either way this is exactly the kind of thing that makes me forgive MTGO for its many many flaws

mirage was the last block with banding, make sure you know how it works before you play or you will find your creatures all inexplicably in the graveyard the first time a band attacks you

rip benalish hero

essentially it means the controller of the band gets to decide where damage goes, right?

stuff like banding + flying/trample has always confused me but i'm willing to just wing it

did a cube draft last night for the first time. it's not as degenerate as a cube a buddy of mine has (with all the power 9 and dumb stuff like Tinker and Time Spiral) but it was still really fun. went 2-1 despite completely blowing the draft after realizing that the cards needed for a Necropotence deck weren't really there. seems like big accel/bomb-ass spells is the way to go. anyway it's really fun and with their new "Cube ticket" you can actually do a bunch for not much cost.

yeah black has been unplayable in the MTGO cube so far, to the point where they removed the 2 pro-black swords this time around, which seems ridiculous when they could just improve the black options instead

and in light of that i have no fucking clue why they removed vampire nighthawk

man you guys are really tempting me w/ mtgo

translated to human money how much does a draft online usually run you?

its about the same price as irl, like $13-14, but you can cycle all your winnings right back into the next draft so depending on how good you are you can potentially end up only spending a few bucks per draft on average.

That's a tough question b/c it depends on your skill level but I'll try to break it down. Anyway, tickets sell for $1 apiece. Drafts cost 3 packs and 2 tickets. Packs of M13 sell for ~ 3.2 tickets now, so the cost is 11.6 tix/draft. But if you do Swiss (for example) you win a pack for every match you win. So say you win two, then your next draft would be 5.2 tix, but you can also sell the cards you drafted. In AVR this was a big deal since some Mythics were worth a boatload of tickets. I'm guessing RTR will be easy to sustain because a whole lot of rares look to fall in the 2-4 tix range.

On average for me I'm looking at around $2-3/draft doing Swiss. Apparently some real top pros can "go infinite" doing it but it's very tough to do.

Also, 4-pack sealed has no ticket requirement, so you can bang out a bunch of those for even cheaper. It's less fun though.

oh yeah forgot to mention, you have to buy packs from the bots. Wizards online store will charge you 3.99 apiece no matter what, but the "market price" fluctuates a lot

this is what i've been waiting for http://puremtgo.com/articles/ars-arcanum-rtr-prerelease-primer

yeah black has been unplayable in the MTGO cube so far

based on what I could see during the draft, red looked pretty bad too. not sure I'd first pick any red card there. green seems really strong though.

xpost

dude is going hard for Selesnya, interesting...

I'm leaning toward Rakdos for the draft with either some overload or scavenge cards thrown in depending on what I open

my takeaways from that article (much better than the Conley Woods ones, by the way)

1) avoid drafting 3 drops because you're going to end up with a lot of them no matter what
2) may be a lot of stalemates due to a lack of lategame threats, which the guild mechanics should be able to break
3) creatures with 3 or more toughness are at a premium because there's an abundance of 2-power creatures
4) for Azorius, draft good offensive creatures high because there's a lot of good defensive ones
5) Izzet is probably the worst guild as it has lots of unplayables
6) Golgari has a glut of 4 drops
7) Selesnya has a lot of token generators, so don't worry about not being able to populate
8) Selesnya is probably the best guild (which was my hunch as well)

I think ciderpress said as much upthread, but will 'best guild' even matter after the prerelease? I'd imagine an 8 man draft will make drafting along guild-lines kinda difficult - like if you happen to be lucky enough to be the only one drafting that color combo, you are gonna be a good place regardless.

well remember, the multicolor cards are only in the 5 guild pairs, and those comprise most of the strong cards in the set. if you're in an 'off-pair' you're almost certainly going to have to splash the in-between color for multicolor cards or else your deck is going to be underpowered.

so like you don't have to be GW in draft, but if you're GR, you really want to be splashing black to get access to GB and BR spells

usually it takes a few weeks before drafters at large catch onto what the best color combinations are. basically it looks like both G/W and G/B are going to be good so I'm more likely to take a good green card over a good red one. you're right that draft "self-corrects" but unless one color is noticably weak (like black in AVR) I don't think casual players really catch on much to what the best/worst colors are

especially since each guild has a lot of support. I think a LOT of drafters are going to open a very good multicolored Uncommon or Rare and just go with it

i'm willing to believe that 1 in 10 drafts or whatever, you'll be able to get a focused deck with just an off-guild color pair but it's going to be the exception not the norm

I was more suggesting that 3 color becomes inevitable rather than people going off pair

and if you've got a solid 2 deck you're in a really good place / got slightly lucky

yeah that sounds about right to me, with the caveat being that i don't think the mana fixing is quite good enough or the format quite slow enough to do pure 3-color like you could in the old ravnica block. you'll want one of your 3 colors to only have things that are relevant late-game so that you can run fewer mana sources of it.

for example, imagine having a RWU deck where you have your early plays in red and white, and your blue is Isperia's Skywatch, Detention Sphere, Teleportal, Voidwielder, New Prahv Guildmage. That's the type of 3-color that will work here I think.

maybe I don't remember the original Rav block very well but I don't think two color decks that weren't a guild pairing ever really worked. going G/R or U/B in RTR seems like it's going to cut you off from a lot of synergy and all the gold cards, which are among the best commons and uncommons in the set.=

I'm really interested to see how the colour fixing goes in this set. It seems to have a lot less at common (bouncelands and signets being replaced by just the gates and no manadorks that i've seen), but people have pointed out that things like the gates and the uncommon man-artifacts (whatever they're called) are A LOT less appealing to people not in those colours, so they are more likely to come later.

this set is a lot of fun! i've never wanted to go back for a second prerelease before but i've now done 2. some things:

-The guilds are quite well balanced. Selesnya seems like the strongest if you get enough of the cheaper token makers to get your engine rolling but that's far from a given.
-Rakdos is pretty polarized - it's super powerful when you're curving out decently, but if you stumble and lose the initiative and have to stop unleashing, your guys are all trading down and you probably can't win.
-The format is faster than I expected - it seems faster than M13 but still slower than Innistrad due to the stretchier manabases and less efficient tempo tricks
-3-color decks are way more doable than I thought they'd be. My first pool was light on fixing, but my 2nd pool had 6 guildgates and 2 keyrunes, plus some green fixing that i didn't use. i could probably have played 4-5 colors with that pool and been fine, and this is in sealed.

I originally thought the "guildpack" + promo was kind of a gimmick that would give people powerful sealed pools, but seeing this in action I realize that pretty much everyone would have to go 3 colors if they didn't have it. I played like 12 out of the 15 cards in there.

I picked Selesnya and it really did work well - starting as early as turn 2 you can just pump out 3/3's nonstop. Also they have a lot of combat tricks that can turn your opponent's attacks into blowouts. But it really is more balanced than I thought.

also Radkos having a 1/4 reach and a 3/3 lifelink is kinda weird isn't it

the 1/4 reach is BG isn't it?

and the lifelinker has haste so that's fine. helps race vs other aggro decks when you can't block

i won so many games with Stab Wound, its got to be the best common in the set

i guess you're right. guy I was playing was mostly Rakdos but now I remember he splashed some green. I remember that card well b/c I kept a sketchy hand because it had all 3 Eyes in the Skies I got and he didn't seem to have much vs. fliers. that card = ouch

as for the other guilds, Azorious looked actually pretty decent, but you really need to get the right dudes out. someone speculated that it really wasn't going to be a good draft strategy since a lot of the good commons/uncommons will just get taken by other guilds (whereas, say, the Populate cards are not very good in non-Selesnya decks). Izzet did not look good but the 2/2 for 2R that zaps your opponent for 2 on every instant/sorcery seems really good. I expected a lot of people to go Izzet but it seemed to be the least popular by far.

Had lots of fun at the prerelease. I chose Rakdos and ended up going 2-2. The store I went to was very generous with prizes, so I went home with a couple extra boosters and a $5 gift certificate.

The highlight for me was pulling Vraska, my first planeswalker! I didn't come up with too many creatures in Rakdos colors, so splashing green was a no brainer. I agree that color fixing is very easy with cards like Transguild Promenade. I think going with more than 3 is absolutely workable. Playing Vraska was excellent and completely demoralizing for my opponents and won me several games.

My biggest challenge was getting off to a fast enough start because I didn't have enough 1 and 2 drops. I also had a tendency to stall out mid-game.

Deviant Glee was probably the biggest surprise all star for me. You get a ton of value for one swamp and a bonus mountain. Slitherhead (aka Tony Harrison's corpse) also played a surprise role in support of Launch Party.

Here's my final deck list:

Slitherhead
Deviant Glee
Grim Roustabout
Ogre Jailbreaker
2x Stab Wound
Dead Reveler
Dark Revenant
Launch Party
Brushstrider
Towering Indrik
Rakdos Shred-Freak
2x Gore-House Chainealker
2x Splatter Thug
Lobber Crew
Annihilating Fire
Auger Spree
Skull Rend
Rakdos Ringleader
Carnival Hellsteed
Vraska the Unseen
2x Transguild Promenade
Rakdos Guildgate
Golgari Guildgate
5 Swamps
6 Mountains
2 Forests

cool, looks good except that i'm not sure you want to be playing a 2-drop (brushstrider) off of a splash. you want splashed cards to have some late-game value because you won't always have access to your green right away, and i think a 3/1 fails the late-game test.

Yeah, it definitely wasn't my ideal choice, but I was starved for cheap creatures in black or red. Brushstrider ended up seeing a fair amount of play and I always seemed to have green available. Being able to hit for 3 in the early game fit well with the Rakdos theme, but then the vigilance gave me a blocker when I needed it, which was lacking due to unleash.

Several guys that gave me fits and are now on my must kill list:

Corpsejack Menace
Rix Maadi Guildmage - a pain in the ass if you ignore him
Frostburn Weird - this dude is really slippery

frostburn weird has to be one of the best commons, no?

G/W guildmage has to be on that list too, jesus that thing gets nuts in the late game. Also want to say "thank you R&D" for making Scavenge sorcery speed. It would be such an annoying mechanic otherwise.

Really looking forward to drafting this set. I'm thinking 3-color is really not going to be that hard. Things like the 1G wall that searches up "gates" singlehandedly can fix your mana problems.

Interestingly enough my store has a "buy a box" tournament next week for the release. It's basically 36-pack sealed. I'm guessing it's just going to be "go where the bombs are" but I'm wondering if a U/W deck full of the good detain guys would work. Not sure if I really want to drop the cash but I'm really interested in seeing how it plays out.

yeah it was good for me

rix maadi guildmage is fucking brutal, i think it's the best guildmage now - vitu-ghazi guildmage is more powerful but you have until turn 6 to kill it before it takes over the game while rix maadi does it the moment it hits play