Magic: The Gathering C/D

yeah except it's not quite that bad, it's still a bear and you'll play it as filler if your creature count is too low, or if you have an actual beatdown deck in black (probably doable with orzhov using the white boros cards)

right - I've seen Tavern Swindler get play in RTR though nobody ever seems to use the ability, even when it makes sense. I just don't think straight Bears are good in any deck; Drudge Beetle and Keening Apparition had just enough upside to be good but I'd never want to play Swindler - both RTR and GTC seem to have lots of low cost commons with 3+ toughness

I've used/seen people use the ability but in all cases the use was related to the fact that the decks were bad enough to be running tavern swindler

there are formats where straight bears are high picks though! walking corpse was fine in innistrad (though there was some upside to the creature type) and a bear in AVR would have also been a fine playable. glory seeker was first-pickable in onslaught. zendikar was all about who had the most bears in their deck.

people seemed to think gatecrash was going to be one of these formats going in due to the cheap boros guys being scary, but in practice, the other decks don't really care about a 2/2 if it doesn't do anything else.

It's funny, for a long time it didn't occur to me that Tavern Swindler should be used sometimes. I just saw it as "expected value: break even", one of those do-nothing cards that are for players who like coin flips. Then I saw a draft video where LSV used it and explained how the 3 extra life would buy him a turn, while the loss of 3 life made no difference. I felt dumb.

I've used/seen people use the ability but in all cases the use was related to the fact that the decks were bad enough to be running tavern swindler

lol very possible

yeah, the value of life isn't linear so depending on the game state there's some number(s) of life at which you should be using it. in general +3 life does not balance out -3 life in value though so you shouldn't just use it without a reason.

i've never played with it but i've definitely seen opponents miss good opportunities to use it - like say before combat to determine whether or not you can let dudes through and go for an all-out alpha strike next turn

i think when it comes to bears it's just a matter of how well the format supports them - is it fast, can you interact with them (such as through Soulbound), are there, say, a bunch of 3-mana 2/2s running around via Morph, etc...

it'd be more fun if the ev were positive but it still had a risk, like it were +4 -3 or something

i dont know if that would be more fun since then it would be correct to use it every turn and you'd randomly lose games when you lost 2 or 3 flips in a row

well you have to price in that risk! it's not necessarily correct at 6 life because -6 and +8 aren't the same things

I like it better as is (it hides its usefulness, at least from people like me), though I do think +4/-3 could be interesting too. Is +0.5 life EV always worth gambling for? Probably not.

I think Wizards was correct to make it +3/-3; an uncommon where the correct move would be to flip coins every turn with a 7-point swing between winning and losing would result in a lot of games where the coin flips determine the winner.

a good percentage of games are determined by coin flip like dynamics but I guess making this more explicit doesn't make people happy

if anyone is interested over the next couple of weeks id be up for testing standard for the gp - i'm leaning towards either a R/w deck or some kind of BUG or RUG tempo deck and would be interested in testing a few different variations. i also have an idea for simic manipulator build that's probably too slow and too fragile but seems like it could be really powerful if i can get it started a turn earlier

i'll be testing a bunch on MTGO starting next week whenever release events knock the card prices down to reasonable levels, will keep you posted

dimir is playable after all. still not great, but not terribad either. mortus strider is a real MVP.

btw cider i do a ton of drafting so if youre looking for anything in particular i can definitely sell at the bot buy prices

what just happened. i just drafted 7 sage's row denizens and 3 mortus strider on cockatrice. will keep you posted looool

deck dominated tonight:

2 grisly spectacle
one thousand lashes
aetherize
psychic strike
killing glare
rapid hybridization
2 smite
totally lost
orz keyrune
dutiful thrull
luinate primordial
corpse blockade
2 kingpin's pet
crypt ghast
basilica guards
bane alley broker (so good)
keymaster rogue
mortus strider
basilica screecher
duskmantle guildemage
two dimir guildgates
godless shrine
4 swamp
5 island
5 plains

had a very nice r1 showing against gruul. deck had no issues. removal was strong. r2 i played a very interesting dimir mirror match. my opponent went more the unblockable cipher route, and had some success with it, milling me out one game. one thing i've noticed is that a lot of the cipher cards that look horrid by themselves are very strong in bunches. the key is to trigger as many ETB effects as possible - so call of the nightwing actually becomes quite good if you have blue and black denizens. voidwalk too.

it has really been quite solid; a pleasant surprise. btw, about 2/3 of my dimir wins were mill wins, and the 1/3 were damage wins. you don't have to make a pure mill deck, i'm thinking. if you're doing it correctly, you'll have a lot of flexibility in your gameplan.

also, breaking news: my r3 opponent spectated my games and saw my onslaught of sage's row denizens. he thought i was cheating and ragequit

I'm working on a jund deck that's falling somewhere between aggro and midrange. Does this look viable? Will it be too slow?

4 Arbor Elf
1 Experiment One
2 Ulvenwald Tracker
4 Strangleroot Geist
3 Flinthoof Boar
4 Dreg Mangler
2 Deadbridge Goliath
2 Desecration Demon
2 Ghor-Clan Rampager
1 Wrecking Ogre

2 Vraska the Unseen
1 Domri Rade

2 Searing Spear
4 Dreadbore
3 Rancor

4 Overgrown Tomb
4 Woodland Cemetary
2 Blood Crypt
1 Drogonskull Summit
4 Rootbound Crag
1 Stomping Ground
1 Gruul Guildgate
6 Forest

Sideboard
1 Abrupt Decay
4 Ultimate Price
1 Rancor
2 Golgari Charm
1 Gruul Charm
1 Rakdos Charm
1 Tragic Slip
2 Pit Fight
2 Deathrite Shaman

I'm probably going to track down a couple more copies of Experiment One to swap with Ulvenwald Tracker and also a set of Skullcrack for the sideboard.

set redemption on MTGO just shot up from $5 to $25 - ouch. not good for online card prices

That's steep! I still haven't fully embraced MTGO and this isn't really helping much.

actually isn't that better for online card prices but worse for paper prices? redemption was a non-trivial source of paper mythic rares and was also the thing that kept mythics really expensive on mtgo relative to the other cards

if there are fewer paper cards they'll increase in price, so it depends on your definition of worse

oh right. i'm in the higher price = worse mindset, i don't care about the value of my collection either irl or online

lower prices for mythics/chase rares on mtgo makes drafting more expensive

yeah, sorry - that's what i'm talking about

to be honest I dont really know the effect this'll have because I don't know how many sets ultimately get redeemed but it was nice to pick up junk foil mythics as a 3rd pick and know you'll probably get 5-6 tix for it

for context, how much does say, the rtr complete set go?

go for

in human monies

price complete sets depends on the price of the chase rares/mythics - ravnica is probably like 250+ whereas something thats out of standard but still redeemable like nph is way less

but thats retail - if you cashed in your complete set of rtr and just wanted cash quickly you'd probably be able to get like $150 for it

I guess $20 is pretty significant then

in general online card prices are about half of paper but when it comes to garbage rares, they're way way cheaper. RTR has what, 80 rares? of those I bet you could get 60 of them for about 3 tickets.

do you guys think there's a good reason why they haven't allowed fractional tickets as currency?

allowed meaning 'actually created'

my guess is that people end up buying more tickets when they can't make fractional purchases

i dont think theres an explicit reason - its just one of a hundred ways mtgo could be improved if the programming team wanted to take the time. also WoTC doesn't usually make moves to appease the secondary market unless the price of certain cards is driving people away.

moodles' guess makes sense too

like I think wizards doesn't want the mtgo economy to get *too* efficient. things like bots don't really need to exist, in theory. it wouldn't be that hard to design a single open market. but if it became too easy to get rid of stuff, prices would fall even further.

ah. good thing the 2 RTR sets i've been sitting on aren't affected. but i suppose it's time to finally cash out.

i've been going heavy dimir on my cockatrice drafting lately. i'm "forcing" it, but considering nobody drafts it, it hardly needs to be forced. i've actually been having quite solid success. as usual, the age-old wisdom of "follow signals" stands up. last draft, i got passed 2 stolen identity, 2 dinrova horror, lord of the void, among other goodies. simic was open too, so i made a very nice BUG deck with 3 cloudfins and 3 drakewings to tune up the early part of the curve while giving me some guys to cipher spells onto.

at this point I wouldn't really be surprised with any new development on MTGO that nerfs the players. not to say they'll actually do this but I fear that one day they'll stop making the packs tradeable to stop drafters from getting draftsets for slightly cheaper (in the same way Cube tix aren't tradeable, which is real fucking stupid)

they won't do that. the problem with cube was that the first time they released it, in just one weekend it absolutely destroyed the economy for dark ascension packs and that set has never recovered in value since. so now they're super wary about cube since it's actually just too popular a format to have real prizes without repercussions

I downloaded this game on ipad the other day and have no idea what you guys are talking about

thats DoTP - different thing

dunno why DKA tanked so hard - could it be because you only need 1 of those and 2 INN, while prizes gave them out roughly equally?

i think that's almost certainly why frog. i imagine the #1 thing driving pack prices is availability of prize packs. so now with RTR phantom events, there's a glut of RTR packs out there, driving down RTR value. i don't think it has anything to do with quality of the set. i think it's just a product of prize packs vs. draft packs.

the evidence I have of pack prices being affected by quality of set is AVR - don't think they still are, but when Bonfire blew up as this 30+ tix mythic, the price of AVR packs went to 3.99. can't say it's a direct coorelation but it did occur to me that this happened despite the fact that nobody really liked drafting it.

anyway - onto a different topic. what do you guys think of bluffing attacks early on? here's a situation I faced last night - opponent and I are both playing Selesnya. I play Drudge Beetle, he plays Call to get the 3/3 Centaur. If he attacks I'm not gonna chump the Beetle so I decide to just attack and bluff Swift Justice or Giant Growth or Common Bond...and he takes the damage. Of course, he doesn't want to potentially lose the Centaur. I realize that these bluffs actually have worked a lot - I do this fairly often. It wouldn't work on me however, since unless my hand is particularly dire, I tend to just make them play the trick. I don't know if this is a good idea or not. Basically my theory is that if you attack a 2/2 into a 3/3 and he takes it, not only did you get 2 damage in, but your opponent is going to be playing around a combat trick you don't have. Thoughts?

really depends on who you're playing, there's sorta a game theory element to it