Magic: The Gathering C/D

I think you rarely see outright play mistakes but people make building mistakes that leave them w/ bad mana, stuff like that

i mean theres obviously correlation between inexperienced players and players unwilling to spend $25 on a sealed but who knows what will happen now that sealed DEs are gone

the phantom sealed events are pretty soft but not nearly as soft as swiss draft events ime. i think a decent # of people used them to grind qps at least from the times when i recognized user names in the queues

well i'll probably be playing some now since i enjoy sealed and i can't imagine card prices are going to be favorable for playing real sealeds over phantom

yeah it's insane that anyone ever opens 6 packs for a regular sealed event

i really hope the season 12 MOCS happens because the format is 'cube sealed'. although i wonder how easy it will be for people (and really by people i mean me) to get QPs w/o daily or premier events firing

they've already said it's not happening, in the announcement. i already have about 15 QPs sadly, was about to make another run at 35

though the more annoying thing is that the player of the year MOCS is in fact still happening, and i'm like maybe 10-15 constructed QPs away from sneaking into that, which would have been trivial to get in dailies but not in 8-man queues

The whole Magic Online team is working on a plan right now to address the events of those types that have already begun (e.g., MOCS season 12 and upcoming MOCS LCQs) and will be updating MTGO.com soon with more news on those events.

i figure they'll try to work something out to let the MOCS happen. maybe staggered queues or something else that lets them work on the server stuff while still running the event idk.

^ actually not sure if worth's announcement predates or postdates turians, where he says MOCS s12 isnt happening. i was really sure they'd try to work something else out other than 'heres a cube draft suckers'

yeah it's insane that anyone ever opens 6 packs for a regular sealed event

― iatee, Wednesday, November 13, 2013 12:43 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

getting your 6 packs back for a 2-1 is not bad at all

wow, I'm going to play as many of these 6-pack queues as possible

yeah i did the arithmetic on those and they pay out 4.5 packs per player which makes them the best sealed events they've ever had on modo. they're basically like they took a sealed daily and gave everyone a first round bye.

if Theros card prices weren't so tanked I would say you could maybe go infinite on these

well. I'm going to try anyway.

i think you still can if you're reasonably good at sealed

i'm not sure how to do sealed with this set. I tried one yesterday and it was basically me losing to Stormbreath Dragon and Ashiok over and over again.

do you have a favorite site for tracking mtgo prices? I'm not sure how accurate some them are.

MTGOtraders seems pretty accurate. You can see the Theros rares at a glance here:

http://www.mtgotraders.com/store/THS_Rare.html

http://www.mtggoldfish.com

wow, that's way better

Walking to work yesterday there were soggy, rained-on Magic TG cards scattered all over the footpath.

hope they don't get rid of the new Sealed queues with the extended downtime. You don't even have to 3-0 that often to go infinite on these.

no changes announced to those, they're just adding a 'retro format of the week' which is triple innistrad this week

I really like that idea, and IMO the big advantage of MTGO over paper Magic is the ability to do something like this at the drop of a hat. Not surprised it's taken them 10 damn years to do it though.

as much as i'd like to kill people with demonmail hauberk again i might have to pass on these since they're a bit pricey and i still haven't mastered 3x THS whereas i've done about 100 innistrad drafts already

making these phantom would be too much to ask wouldnt it

i think phantom drafts are not somewhere they're willing to go, since cube already draws a huge amount of people away from regular drafts and fucks with the card economy every time it goes up.

if people could draft infinitely for like $30 a month it would probably ruin some peoples lives

people always suggest the monthly draft subscription without actually thinking what the results of it would be

they put up free drafts once for an afternoon, earlier this year i think, and the result was that a good chunk of people would join, draft a deck, and then immediately go join another rather than play their matches unless their deck was perfect, meaning the drafts ended up being just a series of byes with few actual matches of magic being played. just like in poker, there needs to be a decently valuable incentive or the game breaks down

or rather, there needs to be an actual cost to entering a draft, or else the drafts won't be playable, as demonstrated in an actual event that happened

I think you could create some point system or make mtgo ratings public again

like let's say you get paired w/ people of similar ranking so if you just lose and drop all the time you don't even get to play in serious drafts

i dont think ratings are enough to disincentivize people from joining a million drafts and only playing the good ones - would at the very least have to be some points system where you can only join X drafts per day by default and can win more entries, plus a ladder/ranking system

even if there's a way to make it work i suspect the subscription model violates all their business strategies and is completely off the table

yeah that last part is true for sure, but I think a ladder/ranking system is totally viable in theory. you can disincentivize losing in lots of different ways (you can't play as often, you can't play good players)

I also think such a system would make a lot of casual players into really, really strong limited players

yeah i will agree with that

i think they've said a new ranking/player stats system is on the table for the future but this server stability crap is presumably pushing everything back several months

They never did anything like a tournament that you have to be at a high enough rating to enter, right? That's one way to make rating more of an incentive. But also agree there's almost no way they're switching to a subscription model at this point

Oh I don't think they should be free, I just think it would be cool if you could play 'em for $1.50 or whatever the phantom points average out to after prizes. That said if you could win packs and actually have a way to use them (say the next time the set comes around on phantom Wednesday) then that would be nice as well.

the result was that a good chunk of people would join, draft a deck, and then immediately go join another rather than play their matches unless their deck was perfect, meaning the drafts ended up being just a series of byes with few actual matches of magic being played

yep this describes why playing on MTGO >>> playing on Netdraft (which may not exist anymore)

xp not that i know of, pretty much all invite-only tournaments use QPs as the basis. i think they don't really want to use the Elo ratings anymore, they're just in there as a leftover from a previous time when they were used in paper magic too. QPs are more analogous to planeswalker points so I suspect they'll continue to be what they use going forward unless they develop a more nuanced OP system for MTGO.

Oh right, QPs. Yeah that's basically the equivalent of inviting based on rating. So I guess rating/QPs is still not enough of an incentive for many to finish the draft if drafting is free. Maybe MTGO should have a draft w/o playing option, like what ccgdecks does. That's always been the most fun part for me anyway. Everyone can just vote on whose deck is best!

haha yeah I would play drafting: the gathering

so flashback drafts are 3tix + packs, or 15tix if you don't have them, with no uptick in prizes. that's kinda shitty.

the old flashback drafts pre-cube-era were 15 tix too, this isn't some new thing, though it does seem to have offended a lot of people this time around

still, their inability to come up with events appealing enough to appease angry modo players rather than generate more invective is pretty uncanny

I thought the old flashbacks were nix tix??

old ones were either nix tix or nix pax - the nix tix ones you needed to have the packs which were often hard to find during the week they were up and would end up costing you at least 2 extra tickets anyway to buy. nix pax ones were 15 tix to enter.

either way kind of a raw deal considering that there's only a small handful of cards worth anything in sets that aren't in Standard. like I can see doing it just for kicks but IMO the Cube is a lot more fun and is cheaper, too. these really should be just the cost of the packs, or at least the same as normal drafts, adding that 3rd ticket in a time where everyone's pissed at MTGO is really off putting

those awesome sealed queues are still up though. I really don't know how they determine the structure of anything anymore.