Magic: The Gathering C/D

it's kind of pricey and i'm still having fun with DGR so i don't know if i will, even though it seems to have a good chunk of my favorite cards from MD5/kamigawa/TSP limited

i thought it was fun, i've done a fair number now and the interest is starting to wane but i'm glad i did a few. might do a few more of the 64-mans but otherwise i think i'm over it. i get kinda tired of cube when its available as well and am happy to have not lost tickets on it. i think dgm is the more interesting format tbh

Incidentally I dunno if you guys speculate at all but DGM/GTC/RTR boosters online have all fallen by 10%+ in the rush to sell for MMA, feel like picking up RTR now is very close to a sure thing considering prize structures and how good/enduring the DGR format is.

yeah DGM boosters are down to something ridiculous like 2 tix, even with the new redemption fees it'd be unprecedented for a set with a $40 card to stay that low

modern masters looks kind of like eating candy or whatever, it grabs a bunch of the weird fringe archetypes that gave those old formats their depth and replay value and pushes them all front and center so they'll stop being something special you can only do once every 10 drafts

this is my main issue with it i guess, i don't want to be enabled to draft spider spawning or dampen thought every time because they'll lose their novelty fast and once the novelty is gone they're not actually that rewarding to play

otoh I don't think Modern Masters was meant to be drafted more than a few times. I'd love to do a draft at the game store but don't have much of an inclanation to do it on MTGO.

gp vegas having well over 3000 people preregistered already is pretty nuts

also makes the prize structure look embarrassing but they can't really do anything about that due to gambling laws etc

I was wondering if this would be the first GP where they would run out of product. At Charlotte, they had to send someone on a run to the SCG physical store the night before to get more product, which isn't that short a drive - they must have needed a lot. And MM is probably is shorter supply.

the TO already said that he's got product for 6000 players and a backup plan to get more if it breaks 6000 which won't happen

6000 person gp seems awful

its gonna be like 3600 probably i think

did you guys end up playing in gp providence?

Nice to know they've got it covered. I did play in Providence, my account of it is somewhere in this maze of a thread.

lamp do you have anything good for standard right now? (or anyone else here who plays competitive standard) like if you were playing a ptq this weekend what would you run?

i picked up aristocrats last night and played like 10 matches with it and it felt alright but i'm not sure if i'm going to stick with it. i definitely like the blasphemous act/boros reckoner version better than the new GWB one though

on modo: probably junk reanimator with blood baron? i 3-1'd the last daily i played with the blood baron version but that was ~ the 5th. i've gone X-0 my last three fnms with junk but that's also partly having metagamed my deck for the same 30 people that show up every week.

ptq: i was thinking about four-color reanimator since it doesn't really have any terrible match-ups and i've logged a lot of time with the deck but i've also been tweaking grixis, which would've been a really smart choice for last weekend here, since a third of the field was bant enchant. i really like p much all the voice match-ups but haven't had a tonne of success against sphinx's revelation. have been running the 4 pillar, 4 far // away, 1 aetherling version rather than counter-heavy one with syncopates and essence scatters. i've played a bunch a paper test matches but haven't had the time/inclination to run it on mtgo yet.

i think aristocrats is kinda garbage rn fwiw

yeah i played like 20 matches over the past 2 nights and i think i came out like 11-9? which is not bad for my first 20 matches with a tough-to-play deck really. but the combination of synergy deck + no smoothing means your games are most often defined by whether you draw the right number of lands which gets frustrating fast

are you running farseek in your junk or 4c reanim? that's something that i've seen a lot lately

yeah, i'm running farseeks instead of arbor elves since i'm not running craterhoofs. mtgo meta has been moving back towards craterhoof but that's been less useful in paper. my current list has 3 farseek, 3 mulch, 2 abrupt decay and 1 sever in addition to the 4 salvage, 4 rites package. creature package is 4 pilgrim, 3 of each angel, 4 thragtusk, 1 obzedat, 2 fiend hunter. things i would like to try include gaze of granite (which i saw in people's maindecks and liked) and probably the arbor elf/craterhoof thing if i was playing in dailies instead of wasting money on mma. i also sold my voices on mtgo so i've been avoiding playing standard in some attempt to rationalize that decision

also there's this list which i have been interested in testing:

Main Deck
4 Glacial Fortress
4 Hallowed Fountain
9 Island
2 Moorland Haunt
5 Plains

4 Augur of Bolas
4 Restoration Angel
4 Snapcaster Mage

2 Azorius Charm
2 Dissipate
3 Renounce the Guilds
2 Rewind
1 Runechanter’s Pike
3 Sphinx’s Revelation
3 Supreme Verdict
2 Syncopate
2 Think Twice
3 Thought Scour
1 Unsummon

Sideboard

1 Aetherling
2 Increasing Confusion
2 Dispel
1 Negate
1 Renounce the Guilds
1 Oblivion Ring
2 Purify the Grave
1 Supreme Verdict
1 Righteous Blow
3 Terminus

i also sold my voices on mtgo so i've been avoiding playing standard in some attempt to rationalize that decision

also i've basically sworn off sphinx's revelation decks, i don't enjoy playing anything more controlling than jund in this format

that UW deck is the most annoying control build to play against, i can tell you that much. whcih probably means it's good

i'm starting to become convinced that the RG aggro deck is actually the best deck in standard, since i've been trying everything and losing a lot except for with that one deck, and i still consistently get rolled by it when i'm playing decks that are supposed to be good vs it.

there's a guy who plays at my fmn that won the toronto ptq a week ago with a very fast r/g deck with rancors. amusingly a lot of regular players think he's not very good, just very lucky but i think that deck is just really good at weighting the dice. i don't like it but that's not because i think its a bad deck or am averse to some gambling i just get too tight playing superfast aggro decks because i feel like there's so little margin for error. i did beat him playing a practice match with the u/w deck listed above (which seems p good against r/g) but he's gone X-0 the last two or three fnms

could you post a list cider? kinda thinkin about building that one myself

11 Mountain
4 Rootbound Crag
4 Stomping Ground
2 Temple Garden
21 lands

4 Ash Zealot
4 Boros Reckoner
4 Burning-Tree Emissary
4 Flinthoof Boar
3 Ghor-Clan Rampager
3 Hellrider
3 Rakdos Cackler
4 Stromkirk Noble
29 creatures

3 Pillar of Flame
4 Rancor
3 Searing Spear
10 other spells

Sideboard
2 Blasphemous Act
2 Domri Rade
3 Mark of Mutiny
1 Mizzium Mortars
3 Skullcrack
2 Vexing Devil
2 Volcanic Strength
15 sideboard cards

that does look pretty damn good. though lol @ the two temple gardens

8 mountain
4 rootbound crag
4 stomping ground
2 temple garden

4 stromkirk noble
4 rakdos cackler
4 ash zealot
4 burning-tree emissary
4 flinthoof boar
3 lightning mauler
4 boros reckoner
4 ghor-clan rampager
2 hellrider

4 searing spear
3 pillar of flame

sideboard:
1 pillar of flame
2 mizzium mortars
3 skullcrack
2 volcanic strength
2 mark of mutiny
3 domri rade
2 hellrider

won two 8-mans with this today, while crapping out of some standard dailies with gwb rites. the rites deck still really struggles vs aggro whenever i play it, i draw so many hands that just can't interact until turn 4 even after sideboarding in abrupt decays and centaur healers and such, and the deck doesn't mulligan well. lamp, can you give me a typical sideboard plan vs for example this deck i just posted? what do you do?

the temple gardens are because you need a couple more green sources to cast your boars reliably but you want every land in your deck to cast reckoner

i guess my main question about boarding w/ rites vs aggro is which parts of the top end do you cut? craterhoof and slimes seem obvious but do you just cut the angel of serenities too and have your plan be to put thragtusk into play as many times as possible? or do you find that you need angels to win

cider it depends to an extent what version of junk rites you're playing - if you're playing a more graveyard-focused, combo-style rites deck with craterhoof than i think you have the option of just trying to be faster and boarding out anything that doesn't accelerate you into your combo e.g. midrange creatures. otherwise you bring in fiend hunters and abrupt decays and voice if you're running it, take out some mulches and a rites and any non-life gain midrange stuff and focus on surviving until you can grind them down with thragtusks. i've been playing a more value-based rites deck my sideboard right now is -2 mulch - 1 rite - 2 sin collector +2 decays +1 trostani +1 sever +1 fiend hunter. i've also moved fiend hunters main. centaur healer is probably worse than loxodon smiter, both are worse than fiend hunter and voice. if i had voices i would probably run two side over the trostani and hunter. i'm really willing to go to six with junk rites fwiw

sorry also -1 slime

ok that makes sense thanks - i feel like the 4-color rites deck is probably a better combo rites deck though so i may just stick with that

I went 3-1 at FNM this week with a similar r/g aggro deck that I'm pretty happy with. It's pretty amusing to watch your opponent try to Farseek into something and just blow right by them.

4 Rakdos cackler
4 stromkirk noble
4 firefist striker
4 burning-tree emissary
4 flinthoof boar
3 boros reckoner
1 Pyrewild shaman
3 hellrider
4 ghor-clan rampager

2 madcap skills
1 Mizzium mortars
3 pillar of flame
3 searing spear

4 stomping ground
4 rootbound crag
2 temple garden
10 mountains

Sideboard
2 Gruul war chant
1 Mizzium mortars
2 domri rade
2 electrickery
4 skullcrack
2 volcanic strength
1 tormod's crypt
1 forest

Probably will tweak the sideboard a bit, swapping out war chants and forest for something like mark of mutiny, but overall it worked well, especially the bloodrush dudes. Hellrider also ends the game very quickly. I found myself sitting around a lot on Friday because my matches were so short.

Funny how GP Charlotte set an impressive record number of players, and then Vegas completely blew it out of the water. So many people that 19 players went X-2 and won PT invites. Wish I had gone just to see how they fit that many people in one room. Also amusing is that in this tournament rare drafting might make sense. Let's say you're X-2 on the first draft of day 2 and you open foil Goyf (foils got left in the packs for this event). It's very average in the format, certainly not the best card in the pack, but that's more money than you're likely to win!

i am interested in how long it takes for a 'regular' gp to break 3000 players now - if the first theros limited gp wasn't in oklahoma of all places, i think that would have had a shot but as is i think it will happen next year

All the recent East Coast limited events have had pretty high numbers so we'll see 3000 sooner or later, but I think it'll still be a perfect storm of right location, right weekend, right format, etc. I'm wondering if Charlotte's then-record numbers were influenced by the Gold Rush envelopes they were giving out - couple of my friends said that was the deciding factor for them. Might explain why the attendance was so much higher than say, Pittsburgh.

anyone having success drafting 5-color? I've gotten into it lately but think I'd do better if I went in with the mindset of drafting it. A few observations:

1. It's easy to get 8-9 guildgates if you're open to taking all ten. Plus you can prioritize them because you can play pretty much every card you draft and thus you should always have 23 playables.
2. All of the 2/4 Gatekeepers are excellent, especially the black and blue ones...2 for 1s that slow the game down are excellent
3. Essentially my strategy for the DGM pack is to prioritize good removal/bomby cards, then gates, then gatekeepers, then try to pick up some cluestones with the last 3-4 picks
4. After that, you just pick bombs, more gates, mana accel type stuff, and anything that can either slow down the game or give you card advantage
5. Have fun?

yeah i don't really like doing the 5-color thing, the main reason being that i want to play with the actual spells from the DGM pack since they're the cards i've played with the least already in the format. if it's obviously open i'll do it but i won't force it.

most of my decks are 3-color tempo decks still with the occasional tons-of-5-drops-and-cluestones deck which can branch into 4 or 5 colors if necessary but it usually isn't

getting a booster worth 2 tix for going 2-1 in phantom sealed instead of 3+ tix has basically ground my mtgo to a halt, plus the full block sealed is awful to play anyway. i have been drafting occasionally but i have not really developed a good instinct for it. the 5 drop/cluestone approach is the only way i've had any success. i've tried 5 color but there haven't seemed to be quite enough bomby cards up for grabs to really make it worthwhile, on top of having to pass some in pack 1 to get your gates. also, whenever i have really lasered in on a particular guild and end up with what feels like a strong 2 color, maybe with a light splash, i seem to get totally hosed.

it's not so much about bomby cards as it is versatile cards that can mess up an opponent's plan, do multiple things, or create card advantage. the uncommons in DGM you look for are Putrefy, Turn/Burn, the 4/5 dude that fights something at random, Warped Psyche, Trostani's Summoner, Fluxcharger, Haunter of Nightveil, Woodland Crawler, Krasis Incubation, Sin Collector, Helix, Unflinching Courage, Far/Away, and Alive/Well. then pick up gates, gatekeepers, and a couple cluestones. You play like 11-12 cards from the pack if it goes well.

that said for all the success I've had with it I'm sure much of it is positive variance. you lose a lot to 2-color decks, especially Gruul.

yeah the bottoming out of the pack market this year is really unfortunate - it's great for people who just buy packs and draft them and do little else, but makes playing to break even close to impossible. just about every set through AVR had its packs selling for the full 4 tickets at some point, and now it's just been a downward spiral with 2-ticket DGM packs being a new ridiculous low.

hopefully there will be a correction in the future, the factors that are causing this are hard to pin down exactly (we think it's mostly the combo of higher redemption fees plus the changes in limited offerings, especially the removal of the old version of 4-pack sealed which was popular and ate a lot of packs)

I can see the higher redemption price really hurting small set single prices. I like to give WoTC the benefit of the doubt but the way they handled 4-pack sealed was pretty tone-deaf, bringing it back due to "popular demand" without realizing that the fact that it cost no tickets was pretty much the only thing that made it popular. I think the 6-pack phantom is going to remain pretty popular and that'll probably deflate pack prices a bit.

at this point i'm happy if DGM just gets back up to 3 tix, i've got dozens of packs on my account that i'd like to liquidate but the current price is too low for even my value-ignorant self

I'm banking pretty hard on the shocklands hitting 5-6 tix once the next block comes around, but worried that they're just too oversaturated now to ever be worth that again.

those will absolutely go up a bit next year. for some reason i get the sense that there's not a lot of oversaturation of the singles market and that GTC and DGM prices are low due to low demand for the cards in those sets. pretty much everything in there short of Voice is a reasonable buy-low right now if you want to put some money into speculating, but the shocklands are the surest of them all

also if you don't have your red staples for standard (at least ones for midrange/control decks) i would pick them up immediately, like right now, before chandra is spoiled. mizzium mortars, boros reckoner, steam vents, etc. i really think they are going to deliver on this one.

oh yeah since Reckoner dropped to the 5-6 range I've been hording them. Morters were also on my "never pass" list though they haven't been worth much lately (if nothing else, there's no worse feeling than passing a rare like that and then getting destroyed by it, my God do I hate that card in Limited)

buying mtgo shocks seems terrible to me unless you still need any for your playsets. i agree that they'll probably hit 5 tickets but that seems like the ceiling. i think stuff like reckoner and abrupt decay are better things to speculate on, but i think supply is just too high for any rtr singles. the increase in the cost of set redemption coupled with the decrease in demand for packs has kinda wrecked the secondary market in mtgo imo and i'm curious how much of that is intentional.

about two months ago i sold most of my rotating standard stuff and all my packs - not sure if that's a wise choice or not but i needed money and i had someone willing to buy tickets from me for actual cash. since then i haven't been playing nearly as much mtgo as i was the first 5 months of the year but i enjoyed mma drafts and won enough (and opened well enough) that i can draft again without worrying about a bad run leaving me completely modobroke. i also got a webcam and am going to try streaming drafts and sealeds in anticipation of M14/limited ptq season

sorry i wrote that in chunks over the course of like half an hour so it sort of seems like i'm just randomly blogging

other thoughts: i still really like blue in full block drafts, i'm also still doing well positioning myself for an rtr guild instead of trying to force a gtc one although predictably it seems like people have moved away from the 'force a gtc guild as hard as you can' strategy. rn i really want to be azorius or izzet, really anything with some tempo and solid fliers seems like it's the best positioned to beat the other dominant strategies. i also really, really like the new garruk for standard - this is probably wrong - but it just seems like such a nuts + ability? i also really want some of sdcc promos but imagine they will cost a fortune on the secondary market ::sadface::