Magic: The Gathering C/D

yeah there's no reason oko should have gotten past them with those loyalty numbers. not even most 4 mana pws are allowed to go to 6 the turn you play them and they certainly aren't allowed to have their removal ability be a plus

Veil of Summer is the one that confuses me, is that actually too powerful or is this just an attempt to swing the balance back

the latter, it's the most effective of its cycle in the color that needed it least

the thing that gets me is them pontificating in their article over how green ought to deal with creatures if they can't just give it OP flametongue kavus, when the historical actual answer to that (go over the top) is the strategy they rushed to ban at the start of the format

I surprisingly enjoyed watching the most recent MC, even though it was the least diverse MC I've ever seen (er I think). Playing Standard on Arena has been decidedly less fun

Veil was definitely too good in the pre-ban Standard. when you can answer the most popular over-the-top cards in the format - Mass Manipulation and Casualties of War - for one mana and draw a card, that's pretty insane. it's possible Veil is fairer in a meta not defined by Oko, but I'm ok with them banning it now

got MTGO going again for Holiday Cube. so far I've gone 0-3 with an insane G/U deck where I got nearly every card I wanted and 3-0 with a pretty bad B/W deck that played several subpar cards because my computer crashed halfway through the draft. Cube is back baby!!!

the fun police white creature decks are always the most underdrafted in cube relative to their power level, you can usually just force them and win

yea one of those wins was because I had Containment Priest and it literally shut down my opponent's entire deck

man I just drafted the most insane Goblin Welder deck, I had the Scrap Servant, Tinker, a bunch of draw/discard stuff, 3 bomb artifact creatures, Mindslaver, not to mention Ancestral Recall & Mox Jet

went 0-3 obv

i hope you learned your lesson about goblin welder

the one game I won was a lot of fun though

I like this new Chaos Draft thing they're doing. its sort of the anti-Cube, there's no synergy and the decks are super weak but it's kind of fun anyway. there's something immensely satisfying about winning a match because you managed to rip a Marker Beetles off the top

every time I do one of those I regret it before the draft is even over

I've played a lot of higher powered chaos drafts with friends and I think it's actually a surprisingly great format once you start including masters packs because the decks aren't complete garbage and you get to look for weird new synergies across sets

back in the day "booster draft" just meant mix and matching 3 packs of whatever you wanted, since the sets weren't really designed for that back then. so I guess it gives me nostalgia for that time. I feel like a lot of modern draft formats hold your hand a little too hard, I miss having to figure out how to get the most out of your cards on your own. I agree the draft itself can be frustrating but the games are actually pretty fun

idk I feel like there are usually 2 cards in your deck that do anything. it does remind me of magic 20 years ago though. the gameplay reminds me of the game 20 years ago as much as the draft - a lot of draw go because both decks are so bad, you have a 1/3 and they have a 1/3.

it definitely challenges you to figure out how to generate card advantage and yeah it brings back some bad memories of "well I just drew 3 lands in a row, guess I lose". but I do love how each matchup is its own thing, you genuinely have no clue what your opponent is about to do

would be nice if they left the Vintage Cube up until we've defeated Covid-19. Drafts seem to be firing every 45 seconds or so.

wound up scrubbing out of one in about 30 minutes with this terrible R/B burn/storm deck, unless I'm just awful with it I have come to the conclusion that the red storm/Wheel of Fortune/Past in Flames decks simply DO NOT WORK. but what made this funny is that out of the 6 games I lost, 5 of them were due to god draws - turn 2 Grieselbrand, turn 2 Sundering Titan, turn 2 Channel/Emrakul, turn 3 Natural Order into Progenitous, and another one who played that "can't draw more than 1 card a turn" Walker and then Timetwistered, the bastard. funny that it all happened against a deck that could barely win on its own. though I did get one guy down to 8

as I don't play Arena/MTGO I'm fuckin jonesing. played socially-distant magic in the back yard the other day, which was fine, but man. just miss playing.

there was a full beta set on antiques roadshow that aired last wk, it was cool - https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/season/24/phoenix-az/appraisals/1993-magic-the-gathering-beta-cards--201901A18/

i haven't played in a couple years now but kinda looking forward to seeing the next set since its a totally new from-scratch one. i guess eldraine technically was too but it was so heavily based on real world stuff

Most of my knowledge of storm is received wisdom from lsv's streams and even he loses with it more often than not. I think it's intended to be a tier 2, "challenge yourself to win with this" deck. You're at the mercy of so much: what people at the table open and whether you're the only drafter, the draws you get off a draw 7 or Mind's Desire, and whether your opponent just incidentally locks you out with a Thalia or Sulfuric Vortex. but the wins are so satisfying when everything comes together. Wheel is sometimes a good card in storm decks, but PiF seems slightly too expensive

I'm still plugging away at Arena but mill in Eldraine wore thin pretty quick and Theros is also a so-so set. The mostly unconfirmed rumors of Ikoria look enticing though

yea Storm is arguably the worst combo option in Cube because it relies on getting so much specific stuff and a lot of the cards that really make it work are in high demand anyway. last time I drafted Storm I had the Lotus, a Mox, Ancestral, Sol Ring, and most of the cards I wanted (like Yawgmoth's Will) and still only managed 1-2. in general I think decks like that and Splinter Twin are sort of a trap (cuz who knows when the key cards are coming). even Reanimator can sorta be that way, for one you really really want to grab the Grieselbrand, for two if someone nabs the Putrid Imp or Oona's Prowler you're kinda screwed. the decks I've had the most success with are way more open ended, stuff like Green beatdown (Questing Beast is such an MVP type card, it's nearly first pick material) or standard U/W control, man I forgot how great Force of Will is in formats like this

another cool revelation is how much stuff gets nerfed by Containment Priest, the fact that they gave that Flash is pretty funny

I've found most success starting with dual lands and blue card filtering/draw like Ponder and Preordain. Lets you easily move into whatever combo is open (Storm, Twin, Reanimator), or control like UW, and can even be decent in UG ramp. By contrast, if you start with Storm or Reanimator pieces, the cards are useless outside those archetypes. And yeah, like you said, if anyone fights you for the key pieces, you're screwed. I don't think Twin is as narrow as those two decks because other than Twin itself, the key cards aren't useless, e.g. Kiki as a value card, Exarch as a blocker, Conscripts as a finisher

yeah twin is very strong in cube - it leads you towards drafting cards you want in your deck anyway (blue and red cards, counterspells) and it's really not that hard to put together a 2 card combo in limited. plus your backup deck if the twin pieces aren't there is going to be fine. in vintage cube especially, people don't play a lot of instant speed removal, so the combo wins at a pretty high %. and if it doesn't, you probably have some planeswalkers or something to win with - you don't just fold to a counterspell.

you can find yourself accidentally drafting a U/R deck with a bunch of great cards but no real way to win though

don't sound like great cards to me if they can't win the game

cube is more about not-losing than about winning. the strong decks are usually doing something very powerful, very fast and if you have the right answer for that (a counterspell vs combo, a wrath vs a mono-colored deck) then it doesn't take much to pull ahead w/ a fair blue deck - your win cons barely matter, and you'll incidentally end up with some planeswalkers or creatures that attack. when I'm playing cube to win I force fair blue and take counterspells over basically anything non-power.

cards I think are underrated:
riftwing cloudskate
force spike (sadly out of the current iteration) / mana tithe / daze
moat
karakas
ashiok and shelldock isle are underrated insofar as they should never be passed and sometimes are

overrated:
signets

tangle wire is overrated in that it sees play in greater than 0% of decks

every deck should start with a tangle wire in play

are there really people who haven't figured out shelldock isle still

ashiok is 2 colors at least

err wait its hybrid isnt it whoops

theres like 50 cards of every planeswalker now and i hate it

no it's not hybrid, so there's def some people who should be passing it pack 3, but it's a solid p1p1 over anything but power.

Control Magic seems a bit overrated to me. I used to 1st pick that card but it's never really performed well. Treachery on the other hand is still good

one 'gift' card I've gotten a ton of utility out of is Flickerwisp. I love that that card's still in there, it has interactions with like half the cards in the Cube

what's this Modern Horizons set they're doing? did they really print a whole new set that's legal in Modern but not Standard? pretty cool

not cool, its bad

it broke all formats its legal in while ruining the 'sanctity' of modern only containing cards that were considered sane enough for standard at some point

yeah it basically ruined modern and legacy

fun limited set though

mind expounding on that a bit? just curious. I never actually played Modern, even when I was still big into the game. That new FoW seems like a bad, bad idea

look at wrenn and six and imagine that card in a format with wasteland (and lots of decks built around 1 toughness creatures)

and in modern Hogaak put dredge back over the edge

also a bunch of decks have to play snow basics now because arcum's astrolabe is stupid efficient and combos with various stuff, which is a pain since now even your few basic lands are hard to come by

to be fair now that hogaak is banned there are a lot of cool new modern decks but its weird for such an established format to have changed so much overnight and some peoples decks theyve been playing for ages probably suck now

isn't Wrenn and Six banned in Legacy? Wasteland ain't modern legal is it?

Acrum's Astrolabe...that's super annoying

it is now, yeah. we're back to "normal" but modern is still pretty different than it was before

i am pretty tempted by the thopter foundry modern deck but the game has been so unstable the past couple years that i'm not at all willing to re-enter right now. if that deck's still there and decent in a year i might trade off the remainder of my collection for it

yeah I have pretty little desire to get back into organized paper play anytime soon - that's assuming paper events even happen again in the next 6 months. feel like coronaworld might be a catalyst for them moving pretty much all serious OP away from paper, can you imagine going to a GP right now? it's also hard to imagine wanting to go to a local draft again anytime soon, and that was most of my paper play w/ strangers in the last half year. still been playing a lot of sealed at home with my s/o (mystery boosters are fun) and MTGO still exists.

maybe for the best. when I was big into the game as a teenager I lived for those kind of events but at some point realized I pretty much never had fun at them. on the contrary I've had some pretty bad experiences. I did manage to finally live my dream of making a unique & funny combo deck that was actually very good, wound up dominating one of those tournaments until I got deck checked and DQ'd because I didn't shuffle my sleeves properly. made me feel like quitting the game for good. managed to do it again about a decade later with an even weirder combo deck based around Laboratory Maniac and a very bizarre rules interaction (which had to be confirmed by a judge in 4 separate matches) but after playing perfectly all day I messed up Game 3 of the semis in a pretty simple way

of course these things are poorly run slogs for a number of other reasons

I still enjoyed going to gps for the social aspect but in the last year I definitely turned into a side event player. Legacy had been my go-to format but competitive legacy went from hanging by a thread to dead this year. I really enjoyed my one pro tour a few years ago but have zero desire to qualify for the players tour or grind arena competitively. I still play a lot of magic but the high level competitive play has really lost any appeal.

Yeah basically same for a while now. The last tournament I went to was PT Dominaria, and though I had fun, I honestly regret the amount of testing I put into it. Constructed is always gonna feel like a chore to me, and you practice for PTs to get to other PTs, and the PT is always gonna have Constructed. The realization really made me rethink my relationship to competitive Magic. Now with a young son and COVID-19 around, even limited GPs are the last thing on my mind. I'll stick to Arena