Magic: The Gathering C/D

congrats vinne!

whoa congrats

awesome, great job!

Thanks y'all

damn homie gj. ilx takes over the pt

iatee - I'm on my phone but I'll send you a list I liked. I 5-0d a league this wknd but idk how good the deck is. when do you leave for NM?

thurs morning - I'm prob just gonna play monored tbh, since it's what I know and I'm not gonna have a lot of time to test in the next few days

GOOD LUCK ILXORS

Went 3-5, felt like I got pretty unlucky overall, wasn't super outplayed or anything. Most of my matches went to G3.

My friends who decided not to wimp out and stuck with that mono white vampires deck we were brewing ended up doing pretty well (8-2 in matches) and were all over the coverage. That deck really isn't that good though, I've played like 15 leagues with it.

I mean it's okay. But they def had good hands and the deck has some real bad ones.

Oh cool, that was your team? That's rad!

PTs don't have a day 2 cutoff anymore, right? Good luck tomorrow, you can still place well

no, 4-4's the cut off :(

my draft deck was a pretty good but not insane merfolk deck - a 2-1 deck that I 1-2d with. my only rare was the control magic, but I had a lot of cheap creatures and 4 run agrounds. merfolk seemed pretty open but I opened poorly. I won r1 vs ur pirates, getting him with the +5/+5 spell out of nowhere. lost to legion's landing r2g1 and got color screwed r2g3. lost to a ub deck that splashed sunbird's invocation r3 - just got buried in card advantage.

with monored I won the mirror pretty cleanly r4, lost to black cartouche on a hydra out of 4c energy r5, lost a close mirror r6 where my opponent mulling helped him get his hazoret online first. r7 lost again to 4c energy, actually beat a cartouche g2 but g3 he just had too many good cards. and won my pride match r8 vs esper reanimator.

I got to play magic arena, which was pretty cool. I think it'll be big.

this was my draft deck:

2 Jungle Delver
2 Shaper Apprentice
2 Shipwreck Looter
2 Ixalli's Keeper
1 Atzocan Archer
1 Sailor of Means
1 Vineshaper Mystic
1 Ravenous Daggertooth
1 Tempest Caller
1 Jade Guardian
1 Prosperous Pirates
4 Run Aground
1 River Herald's Boon
1 Entrancing Melody
1 Emergent Growth
1 Chart a Course
1 Crash the Ramparts
8 Forest 8 Islands

my friend who played our mono-w brew ended up 22nd, I kinda feel a tinge of regret for not being ballsy enough to play it and instead didn't even convert my safe-choice-deck into d2. he did get very lucky and knew it - every time he was on camera he had insane draws and not the 3 legions conquistador 4 plains hands. I think I maybe underrated how good the deck is against temur. I just wasn't winning online but he went 6-1 vs temur in the end, so at the very least it's probably favored. we noticed that pros were way better at figuring out how to play the matchup than everyone else. unsurprisingly I guess. anyway, I had fun, maybe one day when I have more time I'll try to grind my way back on.

glad to hear you had an ok time. its so hard to q for a pt i wish it were a little more rewarding to play one although ive never q'd for anywhere good, which might change things

boy i hope iconic masters is fun

ixalan draft hasn't been horrendous, it was just shallow. there were fun elements for sure, and games played out well more often than i'd have expected, but the experience of actually drafting was really bad. the only draft strategy was to try not to trainwreck. on reflection, i do think i liked 3x amonkhet even less, the big difference being the games played poorly in that format. up to amonkhet i was definitely still in that noobish phase of any limited is good limited but that format broke me out of that, and i had no compunction about just quitting on ixalan and doing something else.

i haven't loved any of the masters sets in draft yet, theyve all ended up being 5-10 different "on rails" synergy decks except MM3 which was just horribly unbalanced in favor of UBx control

i liked mm2 a lot but it definitely fit that description. i ended up lukewarm on mm3 and vm. i wish i had played mm1, that seems to be the one that gets the most positive mentions.

I think ixalan ended up being a pretty bad format. in the end everyone just realized that you wanted to be playing bogles.

i did my first draft in a few weeks a couple days ago and an opponent played the 4/3 2 drop, one with the wind turn 3, mark of the vampire turn 4, and i died with ixalan's binding in hand and no fourth land. a truly fitting final memory of the format.

looked thru the iconic masters cardset again and altho there are clear themes they are not anything like as deliberate or synergy heavy as we have seen previously. hopefully a positive sign.

Basically the more transparent a set is about having you pick from a menu of strategies, the less I like it. Tribal sets like Ixalan are the worst offenders here

an opponent played the 4/3 2 drop, one with the wind turn 3, mark of the vampire turn 4

These are the games of this format that I hate, but I don't think they're all like that. Maybe one in four. This set plays a bit better than I first thought, though drafting is boring

played a bunch of IMA over the weekend. it's good. v much less on rails than other masters sets

The Immortal Sun
6
Legendary Artifact

Players can't activate Loyalty abilities of Planeswalkers.

At the beginning of your draw step, draw an additional card.

Spells you cast cost 1 less to cast.

Creatures you control get +1/+1.

cube staple at the very least

presumably they put all of their energy into making this weird ass set play really well because they appear to have invested no effort at all into design aesthetics or flavour. case in point, this 'blood sun' card is p revolting next to the beautiful design of blood moon, but i imagine it will play much much better.

urzatron decks certainly like it since it turns off ghost quarter but not their bullshit

i loled when i saw the squadron hawk vampire in the card gallery again

have any of you sold off a lot of cards at once and what channel did you do it through? i don't really play irl constructed anymore and don't want to own 2k worth of modern cards

ive buylisted stuff at GPs before and it was always a pretty good process - once with scg once with face to face and once with some smaller midwestern vendor. i sent them a list of what i had (or in scg's case used their on-line trade tool) and indicated which gp i'd be at. in general i got like 75-80% of what id have gotten selling directly to other players but i got paid in cash and it took very little time

I've sent a bunch of cards to cardkingdom and was always pretty happy w/ their grading. I think you probably get worse prices at a GP because people who are dumping cards are more willing to take whatever. kinda case by case though, sometimes vendors at events have very good buylist prices for random cards.

rip standard

what happened

loooool

okay I don't keep up with Standard at all but wtf at banning those four cards specifically. how the hell is that land ban worthy ??? Attune w/ Aether? wow

my guess is that event attendance is way down and ixalan has sold like shit to the point where they're okay doing heavy handed stuff to make it relevant. i don't know anyone who's actually played this standard willingly. anecdotally pretty much all my mtg friends and acquaintances have tuned out and are waiting to see what happens with dominaria

'ban-worthy' is all context dependent here. they're trying to allow the decks to still exist in a nerfed version, not necessarily kill the best cards.

it does feel like they have completely changed the philosophy when it comes to the standard ban-list though. it used to be 'uh well I guess memory jar probably shouldn't...be a magic card' whereas now they're willing to ban pushed but not broken cards just to tweak the standard environment in one direction or another. eg none of the current banlist is even played in modern.

I don't know if these bans will fix Standard, but they make sense to me. These cards allowed energy and mono red to ignore the natural drawbacks of their colors/archetypes. Attune allowed you to play a 3+ color deck while skimping on lands, which meant you could cram in more ridiculously powerful spells, plus it powered up your energy. Any multicolor strategy that didn't use Attune just felt bad by comparison because it was forced to pack in more lands and was still less consistent. Rogue Refiner gives you free card advantage and enegry accrual on a stick. The only way to stop Attune and Refiner is through countermagic, which never feels good because then you waste critical answers for finishers like Hydra or Scarab God. So, in most cases, they are just free spells with basically zero opportunity cost.

Red has similar problems. A red deck traditionally must win in the early game and would be outclassed if a game extends for a long time. Key weaknesses for red decks are mana flood and lifegain. Ruins invalidated mana flood and gave a way to win in the late game that was nearly impossible to stop. Weirdly, mono red decks often play more lands now than energy decks, which should be an indication of how messed up things have been. Ferocidon is more controversial, it takes away lifegain, but is also pretty easy to kill. I think mostly it was killing off go-wide and token strategies. Apparently it was created to fix the Saheeli combo, but then that got banned and only the hoser remained.

So again, Standard may just be swapping one set of problems for another. I think Scarab God, in particular, is only going to get more obnoxious in U/B decks. But I think these cards were having a unhealthy impact on the format.

I get that these were popular decks and the bans are going to cause a lot of invested players to be unhappy. For me, Standard over the last few months has been a grindy nightmare. I stayed away from both Attune and mono red decks, and instead spent my time beating my head against the wall with control variants and Grixis midrange. Both seem like they should be decent options, but the just don't have the consistency of energy and red. I've gotten really burned out on Standard, so I hope that these changes are a shot in the arm for the format. We'll see.

On a more positive note, this weekend I played some Modern burn for the first time in many months and did a couple prereleases. Both were really fun and a breath of fresh air. With Modern, it was just nice to have games that ended in a reasonable amount of time instead of the endless grind of Standard. With the prerelease, I think they've made a big improvement from the misery of Ixalan sealed. I put together a couple fun decks that did a bunch of interesting things and had fun playing with them. I'm now considering going to GP Houston to try my hand at some more Rivals sealed.

even though standard is (was?) pretty bad, I wonder how much of this is due to the magic growth plateau'ing and wizards freaking out. there were some other pretty terrible standards in recent history (pack rat...) and they seemed to be okay with waiting them out.

One big mistake they made was abandoning the twice per year rotation before really testing it out. Kaladesh was supposed to be rotating out in a couple months, but got an extra 6 months of life, which just seems too long for such an overpowered set.

With that said, I'm seeing a lot of people saying that Kaladesh is one of the all-time worst sets, and I have to strongly disagree. I think it is a truly great set that felt like a really fun change from the tentacle-fest of Battle and Shadows blocks. It had great design, lots of fun new mechanics and a ton of interesting cards. Unfortunately, too much of the set was ridiculously overpowered. I hope all these bans do not discourage WOTC from going out on a limb with design innovations in the future.

yea I like the idea of sucking it up and rushing good counterstrategies into the next set. would really bother me to get invested in a deck and then be told that the deck isn't banned outright, but will get like 25% weaker. that's the sort of thing that would make me quit playing for a while.

pack rat standard at least had a healthy 2nd tier of decks that weren't far behind the pack rat deck and the thassa deck - i played the red devotion deck to good success in that one as it had a favorable black matchup and non-terrible blue matchup if played correctly. standard is always going to have 1-3 consensus best decks just due to the nature of competitive play, and that's okay, but good standard formats will have those angles and openings for other decks to exploit and i'm not sure we've had as much of that since kaladesh

as cliche as the '5 factions' (or 4 in ixalan case) set structure has become, i think it's secretly acted as a failsafe for a long time against decks like energy or affinity dominating standard, as it prevents linear decks from getting too high a percentage of the format's real estate

too bad Ixalan failed to do that

Lol four cards banned, huh? Well, I would love Standard to be fixed, but given the history of the last year, some other deck will become the new best deck soon enough. I liked this article about what can be done to fix Standard: http://www.starcitygames.com/article/36311_How-To-Fix-Standard.html

https://www.facebook.com/events/147687632599509/

mtg is one of those things where 'weird mtg' is for normies and normal mtg is for weirdos

^^^^ so otm