Magic: The Gathering C/D

I guess I'd like to figure out the best way to start accruing some passable card so I don't just get killed constantly

The quickest way: Look at the decks that are winning daily events, and then buy all of the cards you need to make one of those (this will be costly unless you concentrate on relatively inexpensive formats, like block or pauper. Even then you should be prepared to pay a fair amount)

The cheapest way: Take note of the most expensive cards in a given format, and then try to make a deck using none of those cards. The Magic economy is usually set up such that the ten or so chase rares are worth heaps, but then everything else is five cents or less. Obviously the expensive cards are the most powerful, but you can still have fun trying out tier two options, especially if you stick to casual (i.e. non-tournament event) games. If you go this route you might want to lean heavily on the cards in M13; almost everything in that set is pretty cheap at the moment.

The most fun way: Start playing limited (sealed or draft) events, and build decks with the cards you get.

Oh, also there are some bots on MTGO that give away free commons, and if you know anyone on MTGO they will probably be willing to give you a bunch of commons/uncommons, since having more than four copies of a single card is pointless and selling them to bots generally nets you a small fraction of a cent.

i've got shitloads of innistrad commons/uncommons if you need any of those, since i did dozens of triple innistrad drafts last fall. might have some excess stock of core set cards and other recent sets too.

my MTGO username is smh

I really wish that you could trade away more than 75 cards at once. My client freezes sometimes when I even try to do that many.

xpost

Thanks! I'll look you up.

Is it ever worthwhile to buy cards from bots or does it make more sense to just try to win them in competition.

How much does a deck have to rely on super expensive mythics in order to win in Constructed online? Or is it viable to pull something together on a budget and still compete?

what format are you looking at playing? there are a couple cheap Standard decks, BW tokens and mono-green infect come to mind. those still need some rares to function properly but not as many as other decks. Tokens is probably the most scalable in terms of being playable without all the rares, while infect absolutely needs the 4 Inkmoth Nexus (~7 tickets each) but the rest of the deck is cheap

though on second thought i don't think i'd recommend buying into infect decks right now since those cards are all rotating out of standard in a couple months

Mostly interested in standard or innistrad block. Working on building a bw exalted deck.

It also depends how competitive you intend on being. If you want to enter daily events or 2-man queues (i.e. put up some entry money and play for prizes), then you are probably going to have to cough up some money - giving up a significant number of percentage points of winning in order to save a few bucks just doesn't really make sense from an EV standpoint. However, if you just want to play casually, there are always people who either also can't afford to spend a billion dollars on mythics or who just prefer to play strategies off the beaten path, and there's no reason why you can't have a tonne of fun playing a deck you built around a junky rare in the casual room.

If you're just looking to acquire cards, buying individual cards from bots is always better than cracking packs - the expected value of cards in a pack is significantly lower than what a pack actually costs. The only reason to acquire packs is to play limited, wherein you have a bunch of fun and end up with cards at the end of it.

Also, even if you're buying packs I would suggest buying packs from bots - they typically sell packs at a discount to the MTGO store (I think a pack of M13 is around 3.3-3.5 tix as opposed to $4), since heaps of people are continually selling all their prize packs to bots in order to cash out.

Thanks for the tips, and thanks to ciderpress for the cards!

The deck is starting to take shape now. My plan is to use some of the affordable legendaries like nefarox and odric rather than raiding my son's college fund to buy sublime archangel, avacyn, and a couple silver blade paladins.

keep in mind odric has anti-synergy with exalted since he wants you to attack with everything (though his ability is much more powerful than exalted in constructed)

like the best way to compete in constructed on a budget is generally to play a bunch of cheap efficient creatures, keep smashing them with everything, and hope they don't have a wrath of god effect or large blocker in time

I hear what you're saying. I suppose the strategy I'm shooting for is more of a hybrid exalted/soldiers. The idea is to score a bunch of early damage with small exalted creatures and then flood the board with soldiers and cards like crusader of odric. This gives the option of hitting with a whole bunch of creatures at once or with a single powerful creature like crusader who gets amped up by both soldiers and exalted. With Odric, Master Tactician in the mix I can force some mismatched combat or just keep the other player from blocking.

It may turn out that this is not focused enough to actually work, but I'm going to try it out and see what happens.

i have a list on my home computer for a neat soldier tokens deck that would be pretty cheap to build and reasonably competitive. i think the most expensive card in it is elspeth

but: from a strict value perspective you should wait the six weeks for standard to rotate before investing money in cards. until then you should be playing 4 pack AVR sealed probably since it's both good value and AVR packs have the highest expected value. it's also a pretty good way to ease into magic although i cant remember how xp'd you are...

also if its at all a possibility and you plan on playing competitively than its better value to invest the money upfront in a tier 1 deck than to try to grind out wins with a cheap but unreliable tier 2 or 3 deck.

i dunno, i'd recommend just messing around and playing in the free play/practice rooms for a while before jumping into sealed events. i spent my first month or so of MTGO just having fun playing cheapo Grand Architect decks in the casual room

haha yeah thats fair - really my advice is only worthwhile if moodles wants to play competitively i guess?

the idea of just buying all the cards for a tier 1 deck and grinding it out seems so soul destroying

I'm really at the just having fun stage right now, though I'll probably try out a booster draft sooner or later just to get an idea of what to expect

i think new accounts now come with a couple free entries into special "new player drafts", they're phantom drafts meaning you don't get to keep the cards you drafted, but you can still win prize packs i think

One thing to be wary of is that MTGO obviously adheres very close to the rules, so be sure to read that little status bar on the left closely. For example most players who play Bone Splinters (Sac a creature: Destroy target creature) would sac their creature first, then target their opponent's creature - on MTGO, you target your opponent's guy first, then sac as a cost. If you don't read the status bar you'll end up sacrificing your own creature to destroy itself (I would see this happen ALL THE TIME).

Also, when effects are stacked, you can mouse over the card effect on the left to see exactly what it's targeting, if need be. For example if you have a creature that comes into play with a token and soulbond triggers, mousing over can let you see exactly which creature it's referring to. Again, very easy to miss this if you don't really know the interface.

I had a situation where one my guys was taken out by Oblivion Ring. I cast a spell to destroy Oblivion Ring, but apparently cast it at the wrong time as my guy didn't return to the battlefield. Not sure what happened there.

make sure you let the Oblivion Ring actually eat your guy before you destroy it, otherwise the trigger that returns your guy will happen before the one that exiles your guy, causing your guy to go away forever

LSV plays a few games with a fun Delver/Talrand hybrid that doesn't look too expensive here: http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/channel-lsv-wizards-standard-event/

that's still a reasonable amount of $ though - don't forget that Gut Shots are like $5 each despite not being rare (so absurd!). plus Inkmoth is up to 7 or 8 due to the infect deck's popularity, and Snapcaster is 7 or 8 too and irreplaceable.

i think BW tokens is the best deck for making a budget version that still does inherently powerful things. you could probably build it with no rares except Honor of the Pure and still beat people up with reasonable draws

the MTGO economy is weird like that because packs are pretty much exclusively used for drafting, nobody buys a box at a discount or opens up packs for fun because doing so is such a waste. thus "3rd sets" like New Phyrexia don't get opened up much since you only get one per draft and then 4 months later Innistrad comes along, and now Gut Shot, which is like a $1 card IRL is somehow worth upwards of 5 tix

AVR packs just hit critical mass, 3.99 a pop exclusively thanks to Bonfire's ridiculous pricing. meanwhile M13 singles are pretty much worthless so who knows what to draft now.

the answer is to draft M13 because it's a better limited format than AVR

i didn't hate AVR as much as most people, i think it was fine for a 2-3 month limited format, but i have no desire to go back to it now that there's something new, card values be damned

at 3.50 a pack I can "go infinite" with AVR (but not really turn a profit), M13 will be really tough because there's only one card you can sell for over 10. prices will probably go up but they crashed pretty hard over the last two weeks.

I'm holding out for RTR - quite frankly it'll be shocking if that doesn't turn out to be an excellent Limited format

here is some art from RTR:

http://media.wizards.com/images/magic/daily/features/feature209_trdtfghjdfujdgfhdfbndfigkdgd.jpg

if that ain't Temple Garden I'll stick my dick in a mashed potato

funny, i said the exact same thing to someone else last night when that went up

I hope they've learned from Alara block, which didn't have quite enough color fixing at common to play 3 color decks. the bouncelands and signets from original Ravnica were too good because they were card advantage and acceleration respectively, but it would be nice to have some sort of equivalents this time around

the exact same thing? whoa

I'm sure there will be some color fixing at common. I think they know that Limited isn't really fun for either player if one guy is sitting with five spells they can't cast because they don't have Red mana; if this set is like a quarter gold cards, that's only gonna be a bigger problem

Have Wizards actually even printed a card in which the life-cost penalty was actually sufficiently punitive?

Like (of the top of my head):
Phyrexian Arena
Ravnica Lands
Ice-Age Pain Lands
City of Brass
Dark Confidante
Off-color Dismember/Gutshot/etc
Griselbrand
Necropotence
Channel

All super playable and often strong to the point of broken-ness.

You forgot Bitterblossom! What do you mean by sufficiently punitive? Like unplayable? I feel like shocklands, fetchlands, and the phyrexian mana permanents (for example) are all pretty balanced. The fact that the shocklands are almost certainly going to be reprinted implies that R&D doesn't think they're too broken. Plus there are a bunch of cards that are only limited playable, like Sign in Blood/Phyrexian Rager.

sign in blood and phyrexian rager have both been in constructed decks (rager mostly the first time around when it was in apocalypse)

zombie cutthroat is a good example of a limited one, that was an easy first pick in onslaught block draft despite taking a huge chunk out of your life

Oops, yeah, that's a big one!

I guess by 'sufficiently punitive' I meant: "Has a meaningful impact on your decision to maindeck the card". I mean, sure, fetchlands aren't *broken* in the 'lol u printed Skullclamp' sense, but I've never heard any player over 12 years old ever say "hmm, that's a whole life point! I think I'll run this island instead". With Sign In Blood by contrast you could totally remove the lifecost, and it'd still be, like, Divination.

Zombie Cutthroat is a great example of what I'm looking for - if it were [(3),1 life] for a 3/4 zombie that's definitely meaningfully different to [(3),5 life] for the same thing.

well sometimes they add up. I've seen a game of Modern where a guy cracked a fetch to get a shockland untapped three turns in a row, essentially starting him at 11 life. But that's a good point and a good reminder of how little life really matters anymore, unless you're playing against mono-red, I guess. Don't forget Force of Will!!

i remember when Modern first came out online, i watched a game where someone went turn 1 fetch shockland, thoughtseize, turn 2 fetch shockland, dark confidant. they're at 14 life on turn 2 with a bob in play, were playing against an aggro deck, and they ended up winning anyway. i guess that was more the power of Dark Confidant than irrelevancy of life loss, but all those incremental life payments do add up sometimes.

i play splinter twin in Modern, and i have won games at 1 or 2 life before because i played my Steam Vents tapped on turn 1 rather than firing off a Serum Visions right away. managing your life total is still important!

err that was actually 12 life on turn 2, not 14

Ok, I got one, Moonlight Bargain:

Moonlight Bargain 3BB
Instant

Look at the top five cards of your library. For each card, put that card into your graveyard unless you pay 2 life. Then put the rest into your hand.

I always wondered why Sligh wasn't more popular in Modern; decks running Thoughtseize and Bob must be dealing themselves 6-7+ damage a game

moonlight bargain seems playable to me, i assume it didn't get played much because it was in the same format as Dark Confidant and Compulsive Research which are both more mana-efficient ways to draw cards

if you're talking about straight-up burn, that's pretty popular on MTGO (mainly because it's cheap). Jund is the only popular Dark Confidant deck though and it runs Kitchen Finks too. Thoughtseize isn't actually bad against burn, since it just prevents 1 damage which is better than not being able to interact at all

and sometimes you hit their goblin guide and prevent more than 1 damage

i'm surprised it's an instant. still if it was 3BB: Draw 5, it would have gotten a lot of play, but the life requirement may be a bit much there.

don't get me wrong I don't know anything about Modern, it's crazy that Jund finds a way to play Finks, that's got to be a crazy manabase

1GG is not that crazy to get in a deck with fetches/duals! i'm confused what you mean

i often forget that finks is also a white card, since i haven't seen it played as such in about a year

also the problem with burn decks in modern is they can't interact in a format where most decks have either a combo kill or Geist of Saint Traft

I can see that. but I'd think a card like Blightning would be really good. to be honest I don't know what post-Onslaught Goblins even looks like. anyway, what I mean about Jund is that 1GG is kind of a crazy mana cost for a 3-color deck that isn't even heavy green, isn't it?

jund plays treetop village, tarmogoyf, and bloodbraid elf, it's pretty heavy on green. and even if it wasn't, fetches/duals and twilight mire would get you there anyway. casting double color spells is just not an issue in eternal formats.

i was playing a dredge deck for a bit that had birds of paradise, hedron crab, faithless looting, and gravecrawler as its turn 1 plays, and boarded into 4 thalias against spell-based decks. the manabase worked out fine.

hmmph. something just seems wrong about that. on the other hand I guess I see why the fetches and shocklands are so high now.

call me old school but I just don't think playing a 3-color deck should be so easy