Magic: The Gathering C/D

yeah draft lets you fine tune a bit more because a lot of times you'll be looking at a pack with 2 or 3 cards you really want and you just have to figure out what's best for your deck. like, are you going to be short on creatures for Boros, do you need removal above all, or did you draft too many Death's Approaches and not enough Sages/Spies...in Sealed all those strategies just have to mesh together. I don't think the decks are noticeably worse (and as mentioned they're way more bomb-heavy) but you can't really do the dedicated aggro deck unless you get real lucky.

lamp have you seen the duskmantle seer / zameck guildmage deck?

http://mtgstats.com/Deck.aspx?DeckID=579917

this guy has 4-0ed with it twice this week

it always disappoints me that Corpsejack never makes these decks :(

too expensive for this deck i think, i've seen it in some GB midrange lists though

probably true. I want to make Corpsejack + Hydra a thing. wow that would be a big hydra.

hydra gets countered by frontline medic! a pretty big drawback

thats the deck that abuses the synergy btw the guildmage and undying creatures right? i tried playing it for a bit just after rotation - it won a couple of smaller events (like a gpt and maybe a 5K?) but it seemed kinda not great. i've been playing an esper tempo list and b/w tokens in standard rn. tokens was pretty good until junk reanimator became the most played deck and it doesnt have a great esper matchup either if its the cuneo list so i've been looking for something new to play this week. i really want to play unsummon and feeling of dread so if you have an decks that play those cards, thats where im at.

also i feel like every pro player/mtgo grinder was playing the 11pm standard daily last nite, which seemed super hilarious to me

i tried cuneo's list last night and it crushes the farseek decks as expected but it felt pretty tenuous against everything else. lost to some fast starts from aggro and got burned out by a UWR deck when i missed too many land drops. then i watched him play it in the 11pm daily and it looked good there so who knows.

i haven't really figured out a good plan for beating the junk reanimator lists which are everywhere right now. i'm going to try the BWR deck again, i've got an updated list that looks better positioned against it. if that doesn't work it may be time to bring back geist of saint traft.

That BUG deck looks like such a pile, but probably a fun one to play.

I can't imagine that a deck featuring Zaneck Guildmage could be described any other way.

i think cuneo's list is pretty good rn even against junk - i mean its got to be at least 50-55% right? but i've got a p sweet geist list that i like even better running the above unsummons and feelings of dread and obzedat (another card i think is pretty much absurd). it also gets to run caverns which is a plus i think

can i get the list or the general idea of it at least? does it run revelation (and how many)? so few geist of saint trafts in the DE results lately, i suspect people aren't prepared to beat it right now

also one thing i was going to try with duskmantle seer was jamming it into a UB zombies list kind of like how aristocrat topped out the BR zombies decks. i need to figure out how to not die to aggro though if i'm doing that since none of the zombies block well.

also i agree on obzedat, i want to play that card in every deck possible right now

i can give you my list when i get home but its constantly in flux rn cuz i cant decide on some of the slots i.e. is augur of bolas enough better than gloom surgeon to justify running it and making cavern worse &c &c. how playable is murder and if i cant play it whats the split btw victim/price, its basically

4 Geist of Saint Traft
X Gloom Surgeon
2 Obzedat
3 Restoration Angel
3 Snapcaster Mage

2 Runechanter's Pike

and then some mix of bounce, removal and tap. i have verdicts and revelations in my sideboard - i think it may be right to play either maindeck but idk for sure. i think both geist and obzedat are really underplayed rn and i want to play both of them. i also think people are increasingly weak to bounce effects and tempo plays in general. i'm pretty bad at getting the spell mix right but my plan is to play dailies all week and tune the list. now that its standard ptq season and with the wmcq in a month i want to have something i really like

in general i think revelation and geist of saint traft are at odds with each other but revelation is such a backbreaking card that it might be right to play them anyway

also i don't really like gloom surgeon as a maindeck card right now, and i like augur of bolas even less. except for the blitz decks, creature sizes start at 3/3 right now in standard and whiffing on an augur is really bad if it can't profitably block

cutting the surgeon is probably fine - i might want to play lingering souls then though. i had originally started with a spirit tribal deck cuz i wanted to play drogskol captain but geist + angel is too good to pass up and then you're running too many creatures. if i cut surgeons then i also want to think about verdict main because i worry about the blitz match-up. another thought i had was doomed traveler as an out to sacrifice effects, hes semi-resiliant against wrath but thats probably super bad.

but yeah i think part of the reason my b/w tokens deck did so well was because it ran obzedat main deck. i actually went 13-0 w/the deck in the three tournaments i played it in. also angel of jubilation was pretty good for me, its one of those cards that i find really appealing and want to play so it was nice to get to play with it before it rotates out. so i think focusing on geist + obzedat is the key to making the deck work and exploiting the really midrange-y meta

yeah the power level on both those cards is so high that you can't really go wrong by including them. kinda like the M10 days when you could just zip a couple Baneslayers in any white deck and instantly make it better.

made the mistake of triple queueing (e.g. forgot i signed up for an M13 draft and signed up for a GTC one as well, both fire almost simultaneously obv ) for the last three hours and bombed out of the finals of both events because i misclicked so, so many times. the most frustrated ive been w/myself and mtgo in a p long time

yeah i still haven't mastered the double queue yet even, i can do it with 2 constructed events if i'm not playing a control deck but i'm not quick enough at evaluating gamestates in limited games to double up on those effectively. i've watched some of the modo grinders play 3 or 4 matches at once on stream before and it looked like it stopped being fun anyway, so i think 2 is the limit for me even if i ever get fast enough to play more.

I don't even find it fun to watch someone double-queue on streaming a lot of the time, let alone do it myself. It's hard to keep the sequence of events straight in each game, I end up missing out on a lot of the information that comes from the opponent's play sequencing. That's a lot of what makes the game interesting for me. My friends and I once tried to do an 8-man draft with 4 people, drafting decks for two of the seats at once, and it was a similar situation. In each pack, I could see my previous picks and choose accordingly, but I couldn't remember any signals from previous packs or what tabled. Just wasn't fun. Also we fucked up the passing order.

I don't mind when a streamer spends five minutes on one game, five minutes on another, rather than constantly switching, but then it's a PITA for their opponents.

here's where we are with the RBW deck right now: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BFxZ214CQAAYuKr.png:large

i've got -1 liliana +1 falkenrath aristocrat in the board but otherwise the same. i was trying to fit in a couple sorins too because i've been on a sorin kick lately but i don't think they're necessary.

oh also i have -1 stronghold +1 vault main, i like the vault better

I don't find double queueing too stressful, but I generally play fast and my matches are usually done quick. My method of doing it (say if I wanted to try to grind out those last few QPs) is to join a draft, then once I'm done deckbuilding, to fire off a phantom Sealed queue (if my deck is slow I'll wait until after game one). You get 20 minutes to deckbuild but I usually only end up needing 3 or 4. I know that people hate doublers (and rightfully so, I guess), but my clock is usually ahead of my opponents anyway and I don't do the "5 minute break" thing because I know that pisses people off. It does get confusing at times, especially when both decks are very similar. But the idea is that if you time it all right, you won't have to be playing two games at once for too long because there's so much downtime in between rounds. By the way I am quite aware that spending more time thinking about my decisions would probably make me a better player but I've gotten better lately.

double queueing is a road I will never go down, m/l for vinnie's reasons

i can usually play a limited match and a constructed event at the same time if i time things correctly e.g. i finish a round quickly and the draft fires right away but i cant play two limited events. the M13 one just took a long time to fire and i was actually doing dishes as well and i came back and saw my round still had a bunch of matches so i entered a GTC draft forgetting i was already queued. but i ended up running my boros reckoner into what should have been p obv smites three times (and why are so many boros players running gd smite?) and i lost another game because i F6'd past blockers. then i looted away a card i needed with rummaging goblin because i forgot the 4/4 vigilance spider had reach and i couldnt actually trumpet blast for lethal and my sequencing in general was really poor. my drafts actually went pretty well aided by the fact that i got a foil reckoner and a domri rade but i def cannot actually play two limited matches simultaneously and three was a nightmare.

yeah that type of double queueing seems like the only reasonable way to do it

also isn't it like, technically not approved by wizards

its fine, the TOS says you can't intentionally stall in games but that's more referring to the people who ragequit and make you wait out their clock and hold up the round for everyone instead of conceding

why do you think they don't allow splits

also you used to not be able to play 2 constructed events at once with the same deck (unless you owned 2 copies of everything in it) but they changed that, so presumably that's an implicit acceptance of multi-tabling.

you're allowed to work out a split with your opponent, there's just no built-in mechanism for it and it's at your own risk if you get scammed out of packs. have never had that happen to me though.

i suspect built-in prize splitting is on the long list of features they'd be willing to add if they weren't putting all of their dev work into making the new client functional

i hate splitting drafts but i probably would be more willing if the function was built into the program

also cider heres the list as of last night:

4 Geist of Saint Traft
2 Obzedat, Ghost Council
4 Resotration Angel
3 Snapcaster Mage

3 Azorius Charm
1 Cyclonic Rift
2 Dissipate
2 Feeling of Dread
4 Lingering Souls
3 Orzhov Charm
2 Runechanter's Pike
1 Swift Justice
2 Tragic Slip
1 Ultimate Price
3 Unsummon

2 Cavern of Souls
4 Hallowed Fountain
2 Drowned Catacomb
3 Glacial Fortress
4 Godless Shrine
2 Isolated Chapel
1 Moorland Haunt
4 Watery Grave

1 Island
1 Plains

3 Duress
2 Liliana of the Veil
2 Negate
4 Purify the Grave
3 Supreme Verdict
1 Sphinx's Revelation

cool i'll give it a try, though i suspect i'm going to want to try to add thought scours and the 4th azorius charm

yeah, i think the creature set is really good but the spell mix can use some work... i really hate thought scour for some reason, i think because i always milled the land i needed playing grixis delver. +1 azr charm -1 orz charm could work although i really, really like orzhov charm

i like having access to thought scour to strip whatever i azorius charmed if it's something i can't actually beat on board. plus it charges up pike but that's less important than just having a 1-mana cantrip to snapcast.

i guess that matters less with the black removal though huh

are there any cards you know of that grant or have the equivalent of Trample, but for blocking creatures instead of attacking creatures?

what does that even mean? idgi

boros reckoner

like blockers that deal their extra damage to the attacking player? i don't think that exists

I guess reckoner doesn't do that

for example, you have a 3/3 with "blocker's trample" and you block a 1/1, you kill the 1/1 and deal the remaining 2 damage to your opponent

reckoner doesn't do that

why would you need that

yeah that doesn't exist on a card yet to my knowledge

I don't personally need it, just interested to know if such a card exists because I think it would be a neat idea

it would be difficult to template clearly and wouldn't be a very relevant ability (if it's going to trigger then your opponent is making a suicide attack anyway), so i doubt they'll do it unless they have a good reason

you are not attacking into bigger creatures often enough for it to be relevant that often

(xp)