Magic: The Gathering C/D

and golgari gets the best removal spell in the set (putrefy)

so do we know how the guilds are going to be paired up at the prerelease? or was Golgari + Simic an educated guess?

there's a box for every combo of RTR guild + GTC guild that share a color. your second guild is only as 'secret' as your prerelease organizer wants it to be, because it's on the other side of the box, so you'll know what you're getting before you open one

since it looks like its going to be raining all day on sunday anyway im going to play the prerelease on my vacation, just booked for izzet. looking to jam some bounce and counters and fliers, see how that works against 5/4s. v v excited, also v v ashamed

xpost

That's cool, I had assumed it was either just a single pairing for each guild or that you wouldn't know until you opened the box.

I'm doing Gruul with the hopes of getting paired with either Golgari or Rakdos. My guess is that there will be fewer synergies with these pairs than Golgari/Simic, but I want a chance to play my favorite guilds together.

should i play the dark ascension prerelease tournament it means getting up at 8am on a saturday

― roborally.rar (Lamp), Thursday, January 19, 2012 5:23 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how far we've come :D

considering doing a midnight release

i always do the midnight one and then deeply regret it when it's 4am and i feel gross and dirty from being in a crowded basement room all night and still have a round left to play

i haven't done one sober since like 2007 and I too regret it around bar close time when you still have two rounds left and everyone's a little testy

I'm not 100% at this point but the alternative is being home alone tonight so it seems like a reasonable idea

like just bar-hopping with some of the cooler Magic players I know in preparation for the pre-release is twice as fun as the actual pre-release

I don't know any cool magic players

other than myself I guess

ignore what I said 2 minutes ago about how I'm only doing this because I have nothing to do tonight

well obviously its more fun than sitting at home

my store actually rents out a larger space sometimes for the saturday ones which is a vast improvement in comfort. i still go to the in-store midnight one though because i'm dumb

they're not the kind of people you want to hang around with every week but they're definitely fun every once in a while

the store I go to actually is pretty roomy

20 sided in bklyn notsomuch

my store has tables/chairs for like 80-90 people which used to be pretty roomy but they're drawing at least twice as many people for magic events now as they did 2 years ago when i started playing there. they've started having to turn people away from FNM some weeks which is insane.

you live in boston, right?

yeah

i'm hoping ~*capitalism*~ will cause a nicer game store to open since there's clearly become a market for it, but right now it's the only one in the city with play space for more than like 1 or 2 draft pods

yeah there is a huge scene in new york but few actual stores because of rent, I guess

ars arcanum thing is up http://puremtgo.com/articles/ars-arcanum-dragons-maze-limited-primer-part-i

nothing too bold this time around, tldr version is that the format will slow down by a ton, the long-game guilds obviously profit more from this than the aggro ones, and the exception is selesnya which takes a big hit due to no common token makers in the new set.

he picks about 10 different guilds for best guild of the format

cider i thought you were out west MA for some reason. which store do you go to? i can't think of anywhere that might have that much room.

so does that Ars Arcanum article really say anything besides "the format will be slow" and "populate isn't as good"?

I always find the power/toughness ratio interesting, but yeah I guess not a lot of new information there.

I had to sign up for the prerelease last week before the full set was spoiled since my LGS is small, and I picked Orzhov as my guild. Sounds like a decent choice?

I don't think it's gonna be a good archetype in draft but who knows w/ the prerelease

officially doing the midnight release gah

xp i go to pandemonium in cambridge

just got back from the midnight one, did decently with golgari/simic. format is slow but not glacial, it feels like a slightly clunkier RTR. out of the 100 people there, orzhov seemed to be the best performer and selesnya the worst but it's reasonably balanced.

ha orzhov was easily the worst performer at my event, along w/ boros

I went 3-0-draw-to-go-home-"early" w/ a fun to play izzet splash white deck. two nivix cyclops, ral zarek, lotsa burn, cyclonic rift, big flyers. nivix is fantastic in a real izzet deck - hits hard, is v. intimidating to attack because they don't know if they're attacking a 1/4 or a 4/4. deputy of acquittals is also fantastic in a deck that can take advantage of it but that was pretty obvious. both are p1p1 commons I think.

yeah Nivix Cyclops definitely reads like a p1p1 to me

are the guilds as lopsided as they were in GTC prerelease or does it feel more balanced?

more balanced but I don't think this event is gonna be representative at all

my son and I are headed to prerelease in about 30 minutes, any last minute tips? We'll be playing Gruul and Boros.

don't feel afraid to not stick w/ your guild pairing

cluestones are pretty nice, better than a clunky keyrune most of the time, play them

why are cluestones better than keyrunes?

maybe not across the board, but keyrunes are 'I'm giving up a card for expensive ramp/fixing/and a bad mana sink creature'. cluestones are 'expenive ramp/fixing but you'll get the card back later'. dimir and orzhov keyrunes can hold their own but generally you'd rather just be cycling through your deck in a slow game than paying mana for some clunky 2/3.

i think the good keyrunes are rakdos, azorius, dimir

really? at this point I think azorius keyrune is barely playable. along w/ simic and boros.

I'd go something like:
dimir
golgari
orzhov
rakdos
izzet
selesnya
gruul
azorius
simic
boros

my experience w/ azorius is you don't need the ramp or the fixing so it's just a wind drake w/ an upkeep cost

Golgari did everything I wanted - nice mana, removal, an endgame plan, etc. Mossdog is crazy good - the Ars Arcanum guy called it the best common in the set, right? Certainly didn't seem far off.

i don't know what the best common in the set is - maze glider is really high impact in the right deck but as a 6-drop it probably won't be snatched up early. the common removal isn't particularly efficient except for runners bane and that one doesn't really deal with anything you were scared of anyway. most of the multicolor commons seemed good, deputy of acquittals might be the early frontrunner

another random thought - the red gatekeeper was really impressive at the prerelease. this format is much closer to RTR than to older slower sets in how the games play out tempo-wise. i think a lot of 'aggressive decks' are going to be looking to play a more midrange game and set up a couple big attacks rather than come out fast with 1 and 2-drops, and the gatekeeper's threaten effect is exactly what you want here. i didn't really think about this much before but it's actually the highest-cost effect on any of them (act of treason is 2R, the rest of the gatekeeper effects are all 1-2 mana cards on their own)

also i think zhur-taa druid is in the running for best common

the green and black ones are both great too

7 life swing is pretty huge and if you have, say, dramatic rescue

to expound on druid a bit, i think 2-drops with long-game value are going to be a hot commodity in this format, and it's one of the best in a world where everyone else is ramping on turn 3 or not at all. other than pack rat and gyre sage, i can't think of anything else i'd want to see less than it from my opponent on turn 2.

as for other 2-drops, the guildmages all get a bit better, and even something like the grizzly bear with 6-mana pump ability is probably better than it looks.

I loved my Junk deck for the prerelease. Very slow and grindy, six Gates and two Cluestones so no mana issues, two black Gatekeepers that always hit, and Teysa. If I got to turn 7-8, I couldn't lose.

the thing that makes it tricky is that that druid, cyclops and deputy are all great early picks but you can't justify committing to those two colors for them. split cards where either card is playable seem like even better picks given how a draft is gonna operate - turn/burn has like an 80% chance of ending up in your deck if you p1p1 it.

most of the big losers in the 2-slot are from gatecrash really - metropolis sprite, bomber corps, gutter skulk, even skinbrand goblin and disciple of the old ways are all things i'm not as happy to have anymore

and the split cards are all uncommon, i'm trying to pin down the best commons still and i don't think any of the removals are them except maybe runner's bane. i do think there's a high probability that you will be first picking either an uncommon/rare or a gate every draft, since most of the commons in the set just aren't impressive enough to commit to them p1p1 while the uncommons are mostly insane and you want to set up to play as many as you can.