Magic: The Gathering C/D

I love that deck so much.

hey cider/anyone that knows is it better to fly into boston and take the train to providence or to just attempt a flight into providence? its ~$200 more to fly into providence but idk how easy to use the commuter train is

Take the train

it's pretty straightforward. silver line from logan to south station is prob 15 mins and that's where the providence train leaves from. if money is more of a consideration than time i wouldn't hesitate.

the commuter trains are fine, i've used that line a lot. the only caveat is the schedule is pretty sparse on the weekends and off-hours so i'd look at that ahead of time, there's sometimes as much as a 2 hour gap between trains.

in addition to it costing a bunch more its actually less travel time to fly to boston and take the train because otherwise i have to connect through jfk as there are no direct flights into providence. but it looks like the flight i want gets into boston later than the last train to providence so i might be stuck taking a direct flight anyway :/

yeah theres no trains between like midnight and 5am

are there are non-amtrack trains because the last one of those is like 9:36pm

yeah there's commuter trains that run until midnight http://www.mbta.com/schedules_and_maps/rail/lines/?route=PROVSTOU&direction=O&timing=W&RedisplayTime=Redisplay+Time

thanks thats perfect, the flight i want gets in at 10:10 so i should be good to catch one of those. ill buy you a drink if youre in providence that wknd

there's also bus lines that go between Boston and Providence - the Greyhound bus is like 10 bucks or something

http://i.imgur.com/fuLrklE.png

tfw you accidentally play your land instead of cycling it. apparently.

The internet's a cool place

So my gf and I bought one of those paired duel deck packs, Nissa v Ob Nixilis. It was really fun! Nice to know that it's basically the same game and the mechanics aren't inscrutable for someone who played in the mid '90s.

The black deck won 3 out of 3 though and feels way more interesting and powerful. It's too bad, because it doesn't seem like it would have been that difficult to make the green one a little less one-dimensional.

We don't want to go into the rabbit hole of actually buying packs and building decks, but would it be possible to buy a different duel set and then have four to choose from? Or are they at really different levels? I really like the idea of having some evenly-matched decks around where it could go either way. Since it's just the two of us playing, there's no point to one of us building the killer deck.

most of the duel decks are around the same power level so you could probably mix and match a bit. If you can find "blessed vs cursed" that's a recent one that people seem to think is well balanced. the only one i would avoid is "mind vs. might" as it's got a higher power level and i don't think it would mix and match well.

Sometimes, even when we aren't looking for it, adventure manages to find us. Who's ready to brave the unknown with #MTGXLN? pic.twitter.com/MAfLW5FhL2

— Magic: The Gathering (@wizards_magic) August 28, 2017

really like this special frame for the transformed land, nice bounceback after the gross amonkhet invocation ones

yeah i like it a lot

whoa that's a neat card

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/behind-scenes-alleged-ixalan-card-theft-2017-08-28

official reveal all of the cards that were spoiled in the leak

http://media.wizards.com/2017/xln/en_gfDHwBBPHF.png

if this uncommon is anything to go by, they have really turned the dial way down on vehicles, for limited at any rate.

lmao @ Star of Extinction, I love when they go all-out on a card like that

admittedly I've missed the last half-year or so but this set seems kinda like a retread of the last 2-3 years of Magic? I'm sure it'll play very well of course but it's starting to feel very mix n' match here

there are a couple recent mechanics reused and some other callbacks in the cards so far for sure but i think there's a good chance the flavour and the influence that has on the design will make it feel more unique. we'll get a better feel for that when we see some more commons and in particular uncommons.

gotta say I do dig dinosaur world a lot, but they've really set the bar high for this sort of thing. they've really pushed some dragons and angels in the past and thus far idk if any of these big honkin dinos look good enough to play. I think dudes like Carnage Tyrant (the 6cc 7/6 trample hexproof) have been good in the past, but I don't see any chase cards there thus far. That said I'd be surprised if they didn't make at least one that was really pushed.

love "Walk the Plank" too, definitely got a chuckle out of me

bit confused on Hostage Taker - if you cast it, what happens if Hostage Taker dies? I assume the creature only comes back if you *don't* cast it, which I think makes this quite good?

yeah that's how it works. unfortunately, if you play on an empty board it creates an infinite loop so they've had to errata it already to say another creature. now it only infinite loops if there are 2 of them...

admittedly I've missed the last half-year or so but this set seems kinda like a retread of the last 2-3 years of Magic? I'm sure it'll play very well of course but it's starting to feel very mix n' match here

― frogbs, Monday, August 28, 2017 11:14 AM (fifty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think wotc would claim kaladesh was supposed to be that

yeah agreed and it's probably true for casual play but i felt like it only got halfway there in competitive play, the contraption-y decks only came together every so often in KLD and even less so in AER draft. whereas a substantial amount of innistrad and DKA draft decks and almost 100% of ROE draft decks were Weird Magic.

kind of funny thinking about that by contrast, i was just thinking recently about how many ppl are saying the current format is an all-time limited format, and it really is quite vanilla, just strong fundamentals, good balance and range of play options. if ixalan isn't quite as fine tuned, and is also essentially pretty ordinary, it will just suffer by comparison even if it is good on its own merits. a successful vanilla-ish formal actually increases the need for the 90 degree turn of a 'weird' set.

thanks ciderpress!

my last 5 leagues with modern dredge: 4-1, 4-1, 4-1, 5-0, 4-1. I am pretty sure it is the best deck in modern and nobody realizes it. driven/despair patched up a lot of match-ups (valakut/combo).

its probably been the best deck the whole time since prized amalgam/insolent neonate came out

modern cube out next week, i think in the end i was p lukewarm on it, altho it's still cube. feel like they are forever putting things on mtgo like 2 days after a holiday weekend.

ending up playing a reasonable amount of HOU draft and recently sealed but p much done with it now

i didn't play much HOU but i do get why people liked it. i never seem to do much more than 10 drafts per set now that they're swiss drafts and i'm not constantly tilt-requeuing after a round 1 loss. my LGS changed from 8-4 to pack-per-win too so it happened on both fronts.

lmao at the new Jace art. who knew he looked like a member of One Direction all along.

there is a lot of good material in this set for a very fun limited environment. all depends on how well they have put the various pieces together and balanced them but i am hopeful

some of these blue cards are exciting

set feels a little like a reboot of pre-eldrazi zendikar which is fine, that setting deserves a better limited format than we got the first time around

also if you missed it they showed off an alpha build of their new digital game MTG Arena yesterday, it's basically a hearthstone style f2p MTG implementation that has the full rules engine and will have standard and limited but not older formats.

MTG arena is very intriguing, I hope they can get it right

it looked fine. definitely curious how it will impact mtgo.

a functioning standard with a ranked ladder is enough to get me on board tbh

The main things I'd still like to know are whether it will support full booster drafts and what options you have for building your collection. To compete with hearthstone there needs to be F2P modes that allow you to grind out games to gain rewards.

it is supposed to have drafts available on launch

I'm still trying to figure out the best option for two pre-constructed decks that are balanced and fun. These look interesting?

http://www.cardkingdom.com/catalog/shop/battle-decks

iconic masters cards are starting to get shared. new resto and kamigawa dragons art looks super nice

xxp

I'm under the impression that it is still an open question whether that means full drafts or something closer to HS arena mode

oh i see what you mean. would be a hell of a bait and switch if they said draft and then it wasn't real booster draft.

actually think several of those sound like a blast jordan but impossible to tell how balanced they'd be. tho for the price you could get 3 or 4 and see which played best.

I've never seen these 3rd party precons before - curious if they actually put anywhere close to $10 worth of cards in them or if it's just a way to move bulk. Card kingdom has enough of a reputation that id be surprised if they were complete ripoffs.

I guess being 3rd party gives them latitude to include a bunch of cheap rares and get more powerful decks out of it whereas wotc can't acknowledge that some rares are in lower demand than others.

arena seems more fun to play than mtgo already - I don't care if it looks exactly like HS and the similar games. from the preview, I saw a number of things that seemed well thought-out, like having the buttons say things appropriate to their context rather than just "ok" or "yes", and showing the suggested mana payment if you drag the card out but don't cast, in addition to the many visual tricks they are borrowing from other games. I am dubious that this will co-exist nicely alongside mtgo like they say - if they implement std and draft well enough, seems like that would essentially kill mtgo

I wonder whether arena would be better with booster draft against other players or Hearthstone-style draft. I mean, implemented right, they could work almost the same, and the advantage of HS-style is that you can go as fast as you want. I'm assuming the games would be league-style anyway so that it doesn't matter who you draft against