Magic: The Gathering C/D

the 1W guy in this set that makes a +1/+1 counter every turn looks like it ought to be a t2 -> runaway win card in that sort of way though not as extreme

yeah it was slept on for a while because everyone made the same assumption as you, frogbs, but eventually it proved pretty good in constructed

I guess my gauge of that is if they're worth any tix on mtgo, I don't think Pack Rat ever was.

and yeah if you play turn 2 Pack Rat you don't need to play anything else

people would run 39 swamps 1 pack rat and mulligan to it and that would have a better success rate than playing a real deck if your pool wasn't otherwise strong. would be even better today with the new mulligan rules

and i think it took thoughtseize for it to be good in constructed, it wasn't secretly good in the thragtusk format or anything

xp one big difference though, Pack Rat needs to be killed the same turn its played and I remember there only being like 2 ways to do that in common (assuming it's played on turn 2), one of which was a red card you really didn't want to play.

just realized now how neat the design of the new Jace is

i was against the whole static abilities on planeswalkers thing but i'm glad it's led them to set mechanics on planeswalkers which is good

yea making every PW "+1 small effect -3 medium effect -8 you win" was getting pretty boring

anyway I'm proud to say I have found my "sick of constantly losing to this" rare early on, it's Maul of the Skycleaves. wtf are you supposed to do against that

disenchant it

Steal it with the blue rare for style points.

just wanna point out that I'm on the 8th match of my Sealed League and FIVE of my opponents have had that card

i saw it in a 5-0 modern deck earlier

do you wanna hear a sad story

once upon a time, maybe 15 years ago, my local store had a tournament where the 1st place prize was a pack of Antiquities

I wound up winning the tournament. Thanks to some peer pressure I wound up opening the pack. Wound up paying off because the pack had a Mishra's Workshop in it. At the time I believe the price had inflated to $300 because it had just gotten unrestricted in Type 1. in fact that was really the whole reason why a pack of Antiquities was worth anything at all.

anyway, I immediately put it in a hard case and filed it away. and just never touched it.

We moved about 4 years ago. recently I've had serious thoughts about selling off my collection. actually I would do it if I could get everything sorted and organized. anyway, I open the box where I thought I put it, and...it's gone

now I recall at *some point* moving it to somewhere safe because I knew it was valuable. the trouble is, I can't remember exactly where I put it. I've searched everything. It's just not there. Maybe there's a chance it was stolen, I brought that box to the store a few times and maybe someone took it when I went to the bathroom and I never noticed. idk, I'm a pretty trusting person. I've had a Lotus stolen off me before (back when it was "only" $350)

so I'd say there's a 50/50 shot it's *somewhere* in this house, but I cannot for the life of me figure out where. I just looked up the price - they sell for like $2,000 on average now but I am pretty sure I could get this PSA graded and score at least a 9. I mean this thing went straight to a hard case and wasn't touched. It might be worth as much as my car.

Wherever it is.

my only speculative mtg holding is a playset of serra's sanctums i bought in 2012 because i figured it'd break tolarian academy style on a long enough timeline. hasn't happened yet but commander has really propped it up instead

Uro banned in standard, no action on Omnath. unclear if this will change anything or if we still have a mono-ramp format

Wow, that sucks. I hope you find it.

I have a few cards that have gone missing that are probably worth some $$$ like some Arabian Nights/Legends stuff that I know I had at one point.

I got into the game very early on and bought tons of packs but was never a big tournament player. I sold off the most valuable cards I had in 1999, including the red and blue moxes (at least one of which was black border, meaning Alpha or Beta), Ancestral Recall, and Timetwister (black border) along with a bunch of OG dual lands. None of these cards went for more than about $150, which seemed crazy back then. It always makes me wince when I see the prices they go for now.

xp to frogbs

xp that sucks, hope that you find it or remember where it is. My (possibly annoying) zen take is that Magic cards are inherently impermanent though. I've had my entire collection stolen, I've lost cards, I've had cards get wet or damaged, I've had friends borrow cards and forget to give them back, I've thrown away copies of commons and uncommons that shot up in price years later. Not to mention the old cards I still own but was foolish enough to play without sleeves back in the day. Just seems part-and-parcel in a way that doesn't apply to all collectibles. But I still hope you find it

I've pretty much given up on it, my last hope is that next time we move it'll miraculously appear

i've had a number of regrets - sold a Beta Mox Sapphire for $300 because I had to fix the head gasket on my car. don't even wanna see what that's worth now. back in the days of 250 (AKA "5-color") I always left my deck in my car and the cards got warped by the sun, including a full set of dual lands. I know one guy who collected Wastelands and drew all over them.

My wife & I just went camping for a week, and we took a couple decks in case we had a rain day and had to stay in the tent. The days were beautiful and we never played, but it did rain overnight and we left one plastic box of stuff out accidentally. Turns out it wasn't water tight and one of the decks was ruined, oops.

Not a big deal in terms of value, it's just one of those Duel decks (Nissa vs Ob Nixilis), but the most fun way we've found to play after picking it back up is a mirror match with two Ob Nixilis decks. Since we're not trying to buy cards or build decks it was an easy way to play a fair game once in awhile.

played a match on MTGO that was lopsided in my favor - he was stuck at 2 lands game 1, game 2 I curved out and played all my bombs by turn 5. dude keeps berating me in the chat for getting lucky, which I don't like to respond to because these guys tend to go on and on forever. then he started saying stuff like "you are what's wrong with Magic. players like you are the worst. you should apologize". so I say "I'm sorry, I won't do it again" and he suddenly strikes a new tone - "that's okay man, it happens. I just hope you learned something". Magic players are truly bizarre individuals sometimes

Love those players who like to make it clear that the only possible way they could be beaten is by pure dumb luck. They usually have endless war stories about all the times they were horribly unlucky.

There was one guy at my LGS who often beat me, but on the rare occasions where I'd win, he'd piss and moan endlessly about his bad luck. My favorites were the times I'd draw the sideboard card I'd included that hosed his deck, which was a travesty of course because "the standard version of that deck usually doesn't have that card in the sideboard."

Just received 400 mixed cards in the post today. Having played (casually) with red the whole time, I recently decided to build a black deck and I'm finding it infinitely more effective. Probably down more to the individual cards I have than any specific colour imbalance, but things like lifelink just feel wonderfully OP in a lot of games.

one tournament memory that sticks with me was at some PTQ when I was 15. I won the first two matches and wound up at Table 1, against a player who was apparently fairly well known. won the first game, lost the 2nd, then on game 3 I remember attacking all-out and watching this guy think for like 2 minutes. he made his blocks and I cast Might of Oaks on the unblocked guy for the win. the dude just erupted. "FUCKING MIGHT OF OAKS. FUCKING MIGHT OF OAKS KID." maybe his frustration was somewhat understandable, nobody really played that card and honestly it might have been the only card in the game that would've won me that game, but still. dude was talking about it several rounds later, and I could tell because he was so loud. definitely put me off big tournaments for a while.

i realized pretty quickly after switching to online magic only (bec pandemic) that i don’t ever want to go back to playing paper magic against people outside my circle. there are too many miserable people who have way, way too much personal investment in winning matches. and many of them have bad personal hygiene. and you can play like three times as many games on arena in the same amount of time as you would in a paper tournament

Been enjoying this guy's MTG song parodies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nwtHai3fMc

might start playing some modern again. standard seems to have fully switched over to arena where i have no cards and it also seems like a nightmare to switch decks on there every 3 months like i used to do

last 3 Sealed results: 0-5 drop, 0-5 drop, 9-0. turns out the 3 color landfall decks really blow while the focused tribal decks are quite excellent

i'm currently 2-1 in my sealed run. got a pretty good UB deck with Gonti, Torrential Gearhulk, Baral's Expertise and Metallurgic Summonings. nice to be back in Kaladesh this way :)

lol 2-3 i'm dead

No Renegade Freighter makes Kaladesh Remastered a so much better experience

the balance patch

so in arena sometimes people are dicks and they use the "good game!" emote to taunt you when they think they're about to easily win a one-sided game against you—as some nerd did to me just now.

this time i decided i'd teach him a lesson, so i commenced to play as slowly as possible, letting the timer fuse nearly run out during every phase of every turn. maybe it would teach him some manners. i could at least get the moral victory.

i was the BW life gain draft deck, and i managed to scrape by for quite a while... more than half an hour passed where my average game takes five, maybe ten minutes.

then he got that artifact that makes a dude fly, and he thought he could start closing, so he made a little swing to knock my life total back down. but i had the little nerd that pumps the whole team, and a pretty wide board, so in my following i ended up swinging back for lethal.

it felt nice. ppl should learn not to abuse the emotes.

Nice

lol i did the GG emote back before the last damage step because i'm petty

finally decided to bite the bullet and pick up arena since mtgo is kind of dead other than modern (though modern is pretty nice). gonna just accumulate gold for 2 months off the daily bonuses and hope that kaldheim is a good draft set

I once pulled a pretty egregious angleshot on some dude I was getting frustrated by because he was taking so damn long. Game 3 he had less than 2:30 on his clock and I had like 17 minutes. As usual when I'm in this situation he curves out perfectly while I have to mull and find myself unable to really play anything. Anyway with about 30 seconds left on his clock he swings for lethal with a big pump dragon (Hellkite Punisher), my only card in hand is a Grasp of Darkness. not enough to buy me another turn cuz he can pump it 4 times. but I figure maybe if I just keep clocking and make him believe I ragequit (the MTGO way) I can play it and catch him off guard. indeed the plan worked. but I felt pretty guilty about it. still, fuck him for taking so long.

Time for Kaldheim!

yup, time to get into this the way I do every new format: base my entire deck around some mediocre rare and marvel at the variety of insane shit I get owned by

i've caught the bug again so i'll be drafting this one a bunch

I'm gonna have to memorize all the Forecast cards aren't I

there's like 40 cards with foretold, just memorize the instant/flash ones like you would in any set

definitely enjoying this so far, there's a bunch of stuff going on at once and a lot of powerful things to do. Between Foretell and Boast you're kind of forced to think differently about your mana.

Foretold is such a nice way of dealing with leftover mana, and the boast mechanic is (at least in this early stage) genuinely surprising for opponents.

I'm still new to Arena (as of last month) and it's a bit difficult to tell where I should be focussing my attention. I like dimir decks the best, but that doesn't seem to be where all the action is with the new expansion and so far I'm drafting much better in every other colour. Any tips on how to get a jump on this season? I like the cat very much.

this set has so many 2-color cards at uncommon that i feel like you'll get rewarded unusually strongly in draft for being the only person in your color pair (assuming we're talking about player drafts here and not bot drafts). good incentive to work on reading the table.

in Sealed I see a lot of people trying 3 and 4 color decks. it seems kinda doable and the gold cards are generally worth it. all the Sagas are pretty good & there's a lot of stuff you'd think would be rare, like the U/W legendary flyer that lets you draw every time you play a Foretold card. I've had a lot of games feel like Cube despite not a single rare being played

i honestly don't like it when the uncommons are closer to rares than to commons but that seems to be their current experiment

the RG uncommon saga does a disgusting amount of stuff for a 2 mana uncommon

yeah that thing's kicked my ass a number of times already. it's all three modes of the 3GG rare inscription from the last set in one.

the way Skull Raid handles discard is neat (where you draw the difference if they don't have enough in their hand) - I hope they do this much more from now on