Magic: The Gathering C/D

ahhh ok. I see what this is. very cool and the prize payout is really good for 6 tickets. i doubt this is just a joke

the 10 packs are obviously going to be Apocalypse Planeshift Ravnica Invasion Lorwyn Futuresight Odyssey Onslaught Legions Scourge

ie the era of magic I have 0 familiarity with

let's say I wanted to prepare for this a little bit, with that in mind. suggestions?

i hope this becomes an actual format someday. MTGO's big advantage over paper is that you can do stuff like this, but off-the-wall formats like this seem to come along so rarely.

to prepare yourself - I really don't know what to say. I've done formats like this before. there's a reason you're getting 10 packs.

good removal was a lot more common in that era, but on-board 2-for-1s (i.e. flametongue kavu, nekrataal, shriekmaw, etc) were still insane in limited so those are what i'd look for. not knowing exactly what sets are going to be in makes it hard to give specific advice

I guess we'll find out 3pm east coast?

obviously linear set mechanics become much worse with mixed sets. all the threshold cards and discard outlets in odyssey block are probably not great

same with the tribal synergies in onslaught block

i'll probably play the one at 9pm est i guess

yeah that's the only time that works for me too

maybe I'm reading it wrong but it feels like everyone just gets 10 random sets from MTGO's history? Maybe even including Masters Edition?

the old adage of Bombs, Removal, Evasion...etc is probably best here

at my store we used to do drafts and odd events like this all the time. all I remember is that Kamigawa is really, really awful for this.

I played a format like this once irl and it was a lot less interesting than I was expecting. With so many packs, the decks were all about the same power level and there was rarely any synergy. A lot of cards that could normally be good were unplayable because of lack of support, which made deckbuilding straightforward. I think you'll do best if you focus on power/card advantage and ignore synergy, as boring as that is.

feel like w/ 10 packs there will def be decks that have synergies

there'll be card-to-card level synergies but like if you get a timberwatch elf you're not going to be able to crush people with it like you could in onslaught

Right, Timberwatch Elf is exactly the kind of card I'm thinking about. There's a lot of build-around cards like that that aren't worth it in a random pack format. You might even get 6-7 other Elfs, but unless the power level of those Elves match your best cards on their own (very unlikely in 10 packs), you will want to cut the Timberwatch.

The event I played was 7 pack sealed, using one of all the standard legal sets at the time (Zendikar-New Phyrexia). I shouldn't say there was no synergy; some people were lucky enough to make an infect deck out of 3 packs and do ok with it. But most of the people at the top had very bland decks.

frogbs you're the one who wanted to play corpsejack menace in standard, right? well here is the deck for you:
https://twitter.com/Grapplingfarang/status/318720849354035200

I'm a fan!!

btw Maro's article today is really good. because it seems very plausible at first, but just gets slightly odder with each paragraph. I was like halfway through before I realized "oh yeah, this may not be for real"

i thought it was dumb and obvious!

yeah maybe my april fools vision is on a little too strong but there was no way I was gonna read a maro article today and take it seriously

Didn't they announce one of the Un-sets on April 1st? Maro's article was pretty strange, those changes are really not implausible at all. Yeah, I know that that's the joke, but I guess I don't see the point of April Fools without being a little outlandish. I was skeptical throughout, realizing what day it was, but at the end I wondered if I would actually care about these changes. For all I know, it might improve the game! The challenge flags thing was way funnier.

In fact, for one set I would like them to try the max 11 words of rules text for commons.

the 10 packs are obviously going to be Apocalypse Planeshift Ravnica Invasion Lorwyn Futuresight Odyssey Onslaught Legions Scourge

― ciderpress, Monday, April 1, 2013 9:13 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

apparently it actually is this except P is Planar Chaos and S is Saviors of Kamigawa

pretty happy they got the saviors pack in there, that's an excellent addition to any unworkable sealed pool

okay...commons of note? any abilities I can't learn in 5 seconds?

for some reason I thought Maro had already done his April Fool's thing. I had my suspicions but the "plan" was so detailed that I let my guard down a bit - a lot of the things mentioned are mechanics that new players really do have problems with

well you can probably safely ignore the saviors pack for starters

Shaper Parasite from Planar Chaos is a really good common. can't think of any other 187 effects at common in these sets but there's probably some i'm forgetting. Dead Ringers from Apocalypse actually gets better in this format, and also no one knows what it does because it's worded so horribly.

Mulldrifter from Lorwyn is really good obviously

i am work what all is going on now?

april fools sealed queues

yeah found it - is anyone else actually playing them? as someone p new to magic how feasible will playing this be? idk why i'm being so cheap about 6 tickets but i suspect i will be compelled to play this when i get home and have almost no fun playing this. lol @ me

as someone p new to magic how feasible will playing this be?

It'll be a lot of reading. I don't know how fun it would be unless you know the cards.

Sprout Swarm from Future Sight is another insane common, way better than it looks. Like Pack Rat, it can quickly win the game on its own.

this would have been so much better if they gave you an hour to make your deck

I just went GB cause I had nasty removal in B and decent elfy creatures in G. splash red for one removal spell. probably had a pretty viable 4 color deck w/ all my elfy fixing but I didn't even look at my blue or white.

my best card is 4BB aura - you put it on their creature or land and they have to sac it eot and put it on another creature or land

ended up 2-2

my deck was actually pretty fun to play

had this guy:
http://8e8460c4912582c4e519-11fcbfd88ed5b90cfb46edba899033c9.r65.cf1.rackcdn.com/sales/cardscans/MAGSOK/kagemaro_first_to_suffer.jpg

and a bunch of graveyard to hand spells, so I could just blow him up and get everything (and him) back afterwards

also had an artifact that made me exile my hand on their turn but draw an extra card a turn, which was very strong

nettlevine blight! that card was brutal at times

i ended up 3-1ing mine, had 3 pingers in my pool and Freed From the Real so i just machine gunned everything down. also had the XUUU bounce X target permanents card from invasion which is like the original cyclonic rift, pretty nuts.

how sweet would a phantom draft league be? 4 tix to enter, different block every week. come on, this is what MTGO was made for!!

resto angels are currently 25 tix on mtgo, this has to be their all-time ceiling, right? i'm strongly considering selling mine off and just playing jund or mono-red for the rest of the season, seems like too good a deal to pass up. i've never seen a non-mythic rare this high before on mtgo.

that's crazy. I started MTGO around AVR season and probably went through and sold 7 or 8 of those guys for 4-5 tix apiece. whooops!!

price fluctuations on mtgo are a lot weirder to me than the ones in paper magic - 25 tickets seems probably too high for resto but i guess people really didnt like drafting that set? idk. i had five so i just sold the promo one for over 25 tickets partly because i've been on a terrible run lately and hate actually having to pay for mtgo. but i also don't really understand what influences prices on mtgo especially once a card is out of standard so i'm hesitant to have less than a playset of a card like resto

i should probably be limiting my standard deck selection anyway, i always end up hopping between 12 different decks when it'd be better to just pick 2 or 3 that have different matchups and learn those well.

i did a better job of this last standard season when i played nothing but birthing pod after huntmaster came out, then played nothing but wolf run ramp after cavern came out. i was playing a lot less back then though so i didn't get tired of decks as quickly

Another frustrating GTC Phantom Sealed last night. Round 1 was Orzhov vs. Orzhov. I won the first game, but it went really long and I chewed up a bunch of my clock. I tried picking up the pace in game 2, had momentum on my side, and was heading toward another win, but I just couldn't close it before time ran out.

What steps can I take to get better control over the clock? I feel like time just slips away for me and that I spend too much time doing little fidgity tasks like trying to fish a Deathpact Angel out the little tiny graveyard.

Man, I couldn't tell ya. I rarely have a match where I'm left with less than 15 minutes. I play fast (and that certainly leads to mistakes sometimes, such as misplaying Immortal Servitude or Mugging a Biovisionary that I thought was a 2/2), clock is never really an issue for me, but if there's one matchup that'll kill it it's the Orzhov mirror. Are you spending too much time clicking through junk on your opponent's turn?

I probably spend too much time clicking during my opponent's turn, but where I'm really feeling the time drag is on my own turns: the endless extort triggers, remembering that I need to choose a target for Balustrade Spy before it hits the battlefield, and then reviewing the revealed cards from my opponent's graveyard. It's the fact that every card seems to have its unique set of UI quirks that are rarely intuitive.

I know a lot of this just comes down to logging more play time so I get used to a lot of this stuff, but I suspect that the way I have it configured and the way I play may also be suboptimal, and I'm not sure exactly where I need to adjust that. For example, I added in a lot more stops after facing a situation where I couldn't activate an ability at the exact time that I wanted to. But maybe that's just causing a situation where every turn now takes a lot longer.

you can click on the graveyard tombstone symbol to pop out the graveyard into its own window and resize it to make it bigger, if you're playing a deck that deals with it a lot

also auto-yielding to abilities that happen a lot can save some time - when an ability is on the stack (for example, an extort trigger) you can right click it there and select "always yield to ______" and it will skip the part where you have to hit "OK" every time it pops up and will instead go straight to the effect such as paying the extort cost.

also if you're not using the keyboard shortcuts already, F2 is the same as clicking OK. F6 passes for the rest of the current turn, except for declaring attacks/blocks, just be careful since you can end up missing an entire turn if you do it by accident at the wrong time. i use it whenever i'm tapped out or empty-handed with no on-board abilities up.

Thanks! I was not aware of any of these. If you choose to auto-yield to an ability, is there a way to un-auto-yield?

Any other shortcuts you can recommend?

cider's advice is good. F2 (OK) and F6 (pass priority) are the best ways to speed up your play. just getting into the habit of using F2 to click through the 'do you want to use this ability' garbage while you use your mouse to target saves a bunch of time. also once you've set an auto-yield to a trigger like extort you can remove the auto-yield (say you want to respond to a frilled occulus pump with a removal spell or w/e) you can hit F3 to remove the auto-yield. if you're clicking a lot you can also remove some stops that you don't typically use during your combat step or upkeep &c by clicking on the icon on the turn procedure thing. it'll give you an option to turn on/off stops during your and your opponents turns.

yeah I just learned about f2 and it's already won me a match

Nice. I'm determined to get better at this, but I'm sure it's going to be a painful process.

oh yeah the other shortcut you should know is F3 which removes everything you've previously agreed to yield to, it's the emergency Undo All button.

some other ones which i use infrequently but are there:
F4 passes priority for the rest of the turn as long as the stack is empty, but if someone puts a spell/ability on the stack you will be able to respond. i don't really find this necessary but if you just have a counterspell in your hand and want to zoom through everything else it's there as an option.

if you have something that generates lots of identical triggers at the same time, F7 puts all of those triggers on the stack in an arbitrary order.

F8 is 'no-bluff mode' and i only use it in momir, what it does is auto-passes priority if and only if you can't actually do anything. i wouldn't use this in a real game because a savvy opponent will be able to get reads on you based on the speed at which you're passing priority.