Magic: The Gathering C/D

i'm reading the tracks poll and realizing that i've enjoyed magic more than music this year :|

lol truth bomb

can't believe i missed the jessie ware album all year though. other than that i'm like zzzz

anyways i was trying to figure out voidwalk combos. it can be quite strong and very underdrafted! wondering if voidwalk is the key to successful dimir.

uses:

dinrova horror (the one card i would play dimir for)
that angel generating 4WW d00d (limited esper control!!)
leyline phantom & other evolve triggermen
balustrade spy
sage's row denizen

not to mention bouncing undesirable auras, counters, tokens, etc

wanna try a voidwalk control deck out.

yeah it resets your opponent's evolve creatures and such too

damn. this jessie ware album is so nice. i'm pretty sure i initially avoided it cuz i mixed her up with jessie j. loool

yes im posting music stuff in here, the big ilx threads are scary

its really hard to get a handle on how good/bad Cipher is. at best it's like an artifact that you can tap to activate the effect, which you can use twice the first turn (making every single one really good). at worst, they're just really overcosted spells. i wonder if they'd be costed any differently had Invisible Stalker not been printed...

most of them are costed such that you get your mana's worth as long as you get the guy through once, which seems reasonable to me. the draw one could have been 2U by this metric though

well I think in most cases you play it when you know you can get a guy through unblocked, so you get it twice on turn one. so after that it's kind of a freeroll.

based on my limited experience playing w/ it that seems about right

so what do we think about the guildmages, charms, keyrunes?

in Limited? well - as for charms, it doesn't look like there's anything unplayable like the Rakdos one was. Boros is obviously very good. Dimir is small removal which is always good. Gruul seems like it can get stuck in your hand at times but it can kill flyers and if they don't have flyers than it makes your dudes unblockable which is also good. Orzhov - again, removal. Simic may actually be the best in Limited because all three abilities are things you really would like to have at certain times.

Guildmages - not too impressed with any of them the way I way with Vitu-Ghazi Guildmage, but they all seem like solid, high picks. Zamec (the Simic one) is the one I'm most curious about, I have no idea how it'll actually play but both abilities are cheap and feel like they can add to a major advantage over time.

Keyrunes - the Dimir one is probably the best, but they all seem decent. Simic's is a little weak.

there really aren't that many flyers in this set, so I'm wondering how often someone would maindeck gruul charm

guildmages are def all playable cause there are so few decent two drops regardless

keyrunes seem kinda crap to me, boros maybe unplayable

these guildmages seem like less of an immediate threat than the RTR ones, several of them are more in the long-game-advantage style of the izzet one from RTR than the good ones from RTR. sunhome is my guess for the best, just because it's a riff on selesnya guildmage from old ravnica which was undoubtedly the best of the original 10. duskmantle is the scariest in a long game though.

i want to guess simic charm is the best for limited, all 3 modes are relevant while orzhov and dimir will be played mostly just as removal.

keyrunes are all fine but orzhov and dimir look way better than the other 3

keyrune power level seems real flat to me. you draft/play them if you're getting a lot of 5/6 drops, otherwise don't take them. that said I can see Boros being not good, Orzhov maybe being the "best" since it looks like you'll usually be able to dump that one mana

if your opponent has no flyers then Gruul Charm is "all creatures are unblockable" which is a big deal for a guild with two common 5/x's and a mechanic that leads to alpha strikes.

oh I think I misread it as the reverse

which seems more in flavor really

dimir keyrune seems like an ideal thing to cipher onto in the mid to lategame (yes, the cipher stays on it)

I was wondering bout that

Would rank the Guildmages thusly (for limited):

Zameck > Skaarg > Sunhome > Vizkopa > Duskmantle

Zameck is strong, it's almost UG for a card, given Simic's MO. Skaarg and Sunhome are really similar to each other and probably have about the same power level. Vizkopa is situationally good, but most of the time not great. Duskmantle almost seems unplayable, except that it's still a bear. I guess if mill is a decent strategy, it has a place there, but 4 mana is a lot for only two cards. Overall, none of these are close to Vitu-Ghazi or Rakdos though.

Charms go:

Dimir > Orzhov > Simic > Boros > Gruul

These are weird because the Vendetta effect on Orzhov is probably the best single effect, but Dimir and Simic are more versatile. Orzhov Charm will probably always be Vendetta, whereas the others could be anything. Boros is a big step down, but still pretty good. Ironic because it's the best Constructed charm by a lot imo, and because double-strike is possibly the most useful mode in Limited, least useful in Constructed. Gruul is ehhh.

http://mtgaaron.tumblr.com/post/41336783700/because-my-camera-sucks

this is kind of what i'm hoping my sealed deck looks like tonight

ha otm

Dimir charm isn't really that versatile, is it? First mode seems only good vs. other Dimir decks and third only when you absolutely need to mill or need to prevent your opponent from topdecking (?). I find it hard to really rank the charms since they all have different functions, I agree that Gruul is probably the worst but far from unplayable. Simic Charm may even be the best since there should be so many game situations where one of those effects is the difference between winning and losing.

yeah simic is super strong...it's both removal and counter removal in the same card

unsummon isn't really removal, its a tempo play

i dunno if anyone here plays legacy/vintage but people are semi-freaking out right now because of Balustrade Spy and Undercity Informer, which are 1-card kills if you have 0 lands in your deck, which is not an impossible restriction in eternal formats. Goblin Charbelcher was already a turn 1 combo kill deck that a lot of people played, and this is basically like having 8 charbelchers instead of 4 and they cost 4 mana instead of 7 to kill (you mill your deck putting 4 Narcomoebas in play, then flash back Dread Return on an Angel of Glory's Rise which returns Laboratory Maniac and Azami, Lady of Scrolls, either of which taps to win the game; if one of these ends up in your hand somehow you can use the 4th Narcomoeba with Cabal Therapy flashback to discard it)

shouldn't everyone who has 0 lands in their deck get what they deserve

iatee - you use it on yourself!

I only thought of those cards as being great *against* the Belcher/Dredge decks. going "Target player" instead of "Target opponent" seems like a conscious decision to me so maybe the intent was to shake Legacy up a bit? I know that R&D talks a lot about finding ways to impact Legacy without breaking Standard (Mental Misstep was a good attempt at this)

that said doesn't stuff like Leyline, Surgical Extraction, or Grafdiggers Cage nerf this still?

ohhh

adding a better turn 1 kill deck to legacy isn't exactly the best way to intentionally shake it up imo

leyline of the void is the only guaranteed way to stop it, the others require you to be on the play and/or for the combo player to not have something like Unmask. obv the deck is going to lose to itself some % of the time when you're relying on chrome mox and dark ritual instead of lands, but in my experience Charbelcher is super scary to play against even if youre playing hate for it

in other Undercity Informer news, i have a cool combo deck for standard with it but i need to do a bunch of testing before i reach a shareable list

combo is looping angel of glory's rise with it and a fiend hunter to mill your opponent out, using the guy who adds RG to your mana pool to go infinite

which sounds like a lot of cards but they're all humans and you can use the informer to mill yourself into all the pieces before you start milling your opponent

played the midnight prerelease last night, went 3-1 with gruul, losing to a good player i knew in the last round who had a very Smite-heavy orzhov pool

fennel was right about bloodrush not mattering a whole lot, i only used it twice all night and both times were to lava axe someone out with a scorchwalker. in general i think with gruul you want to just be playing big creatures that don't get blocked by a 1/4, rather than burning through your hand trying to get through one. ruination wurm is a very nice thing to have access to at common.

my deck's MVPs were gyre sage, which let me get away with playing a ridiculously high curve since my pool had almost no 2-3 cmc creatures, and surprisingly gruul charm which stole me some games with both the first and the third modes.

do you think gruul will be splashing white or blue more often?

magic prerelease weekend update #1

went 4-0 to finish my playset of fnm promo searing spears with a pretty sweek rakdos good. it was a nice farewell to the format and i got to turn 4 rakdos someone for the first and likely only time

i also decided to play the midnight release with some friends and the only guild they had left was orzhov. i think orzhov is actually p nutty - the 1/2 flier and the 2/4 vigilance knight in particular seemed really good. really any of the extort creatures were better than i was expecting. i also really ended up liking both smite and the instant that exiles a card from the graveyard to make a 1/1 both as good defensive plays and as cheap ways to get multiple extort triggers. pool was super sweet as well since i got a crypt ghast, the mythic and two breeding pools. crushed an attempt at aggro simic and then beat the mirror but i just scooped to both opponents since i knew i wasnt going to stay long enough to win prizes.

then i got roped into playing another prerelease this afternoon since i had enough store credit to make it technically 'free'. went with simic solely because i liked the promo. not sure if the pool was terrible or i built it wrong or what but i lost to two boros players w/o really putting up much of a fight. i dropped at 0-2. evolve was really hard to make work, and my creatures never seemed as good as just generic M13 commons wouldve been in the same spot. i also had a pool with multiples of the same cards which makes evolving p hard - like i had 4 of the 1/4 defenders and 3 of the 1/3 reach evolve creatures in my pool and none of the 2/1 flash or the 0/1 flier or the 1/1 human. i did really, really like 3/2 unblockable that returned a creature. also i made really good use of hands of binding on both him and the 3/1 trample flier. also the enchantment that give -5/0 to a creature that you can return to your hand is a kinda cool combo with the 0/1 mind control creature. i got that set-up twice and won both games.

xp i splashed blue in my deck for the U spell that turns a creature into a 3/3 token (was very good) and the XUG X/X flier (was very very good). these cards are both good in 'big gruul' decks since you can always beat a 3/3 in combat and you often have a lot of mana but no way to get through so a giant flyer is perfect.

that was fun but exhausting

did not luck out w/ my pull - two 'signal the clans' were the only note-worthy things about my very mediocre gruul deck. almost zero early game, only removal was pit fights.

still went 2-2 cause my first two matches were against even weaker decks. got crushed after that by super strong simic deck and a gruul deck that beat me twice in 10 mins.

pulled a Gideon in my winnings at least.

feel like a very good simic deck might be the best 'strong deck'. sorta selesnya like in that if you have it you really have it.

ugh

dropped after 0-2 and can't even complain about my pull. aurelia's fury ffs. then, boros reckoner and firemane angel.

problem is i WANT to complain about my pull, as i got quite hosed by a lack of good C/U, which was the reason i went into boros in the first place. i was quite the fan of, in no particular order: mugging, madcap skills, massive raid, wojek halberdiers, court street denizen. i got exactly zero of all of the above. my curve was therefore slow and awkward; i had a hard time putting 13 creatures in there, even though i ended up with 15 or so.

to make matters more embarrassing i played against a noob in r2 and still lost. i was probably doing something untoward re: missed trigger rules when i neglected to tell him to choose his angelic skirmisher's abilities like 4 turns in a row... but still. man. if he had just chosen to turn vigilance on he could have won way faster instead of going to 3 games.

anyways, bad taste in my mouth, but ehh. that's the way magic works sometimes i suppose

magic prerelease weekend update #2

played in the morning event w/ a gruul deck that wasnt that great. i had three experiment ones in my deck but they ended up being somewhat hard to trigger since my 2-4 drops didnt have wildly varying power or toughness, so it usually stalled out @ 3/3. not even really sure what cards where good in gruul tbh since i was either completely mana-screwed or just ran over mana-screwed opponents. my last round opponent no-showed so i managed to squeak into prize contention w/o actually winning that many games.

my boros pool in the afternoon event was the total nut tho - i opened two of the r/w mythic angels and a bunch of the quality uncommons and commons. i had seven two drops in my deck. the most surprisingly good one was burning-tree emissary - being able to play two bears on turn two was often a huge boost, particularly against the mirror and gruul decks. i had mostly red two drops fwiw, i can see it being worse in lots of other builds but it was really good for me. mostly just ran over my opponents - i beat one person in 9 minutes and another in 12. i ran into the mirror in the last round and lost game one on a mull to five and game three he just curved out on the play. i probably lost the game but not blocking the 3/1 for 1W with my 1/2 and at least forcing him to bloodrush or trade. i think working out blocks in the boros mirror will was the most challenging part of the playing the deck since most good boros decks can easily kill turn 5 on the play, but trading can cripple your own ability to trigger bloodrush &c &c. mostly i was just sour to lose because my opponent didn't want to prize split which means that i could've just left after my game in round 4 instead of waiting around for another hour and then losing. :/

best play of the night was casting act of treason on an opponents 3/1 battalion minatour that gets double-strike putting madcap skills on it and then swinging with that, the 3/2 for RW and the 3/1 for 1W for 18, killing my opponent exactly.

overall record for the weekend was 9-5 which is a little underwhelming, probably didnt play my best magic in any of the events.

bloodbraid elf and seething song banned in modern

i have mixed feelings about both of these since they're both cards i enjoyed using for things other than the decks they were banned for

went 3-1 with Dimir. didn't want to play it but nobody signed up for it so I felt kinda bad. I guess they had 2 at midnight and then for the one I was at the word was out: Dimir sucks. It really wasn't that bad. Funniest loss: got Consuming Aberration out, emptied his library on the last turn, then he played Grisly Spectacle on it and I milled MYSELF to death. I also got the 4UU copy a creature rare with Cipher and abused the hell out of that. That card was a real bomb. Got into an odd discussion over what happens if you copy a Dimir Keyrune with it (neither of us knew what we were talking about). Had a good time. Those guild sheets are pretty cringeworthy though, outside of the Gruul one which did make me laugh.

i really wanted to play dimir after seeing the U/B cards in my pool, didn't have a chance to go back for a 2nd event though since they were all full on pre-regs. i did sealed deck practice with my 6 prize packs though and the best deck in that pool was dimir by far so it's not like it's unplayable or anything.

yeah I think it will be pretty playable in draft

like gruul and dimir are both winning decks w/ strong builds but the drop off is sharp

dunno how you guys could handle multiple prereleases. just one was enough to make me oversleep my alarm the next morning. tho this was 4.5 hours in a very compact playspace in ny.

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/arcana/1156

this is very interesting; the 15th card in Dragon's Maze boosters is not going to be a basic land, but rather a nonbasic, presumably usually one of the gates, but also potentially a shockland. awesome idea for smoothing out mana in Limited considering that the full block draft seems like it would force you into two colors.

and by that I mean = two guilds, three colors

seems like that's gonna flood the already flooded shockland market?