Magic: The Gathering C/D

thinking about running this. but i'm not sure if i'm too ambitious on running 4 Deaths Approach or the high end stuff. I don't have much Cipher at all so I feel like I kind need some finishers.

http://i.imgur.com/B0ijkCG.jpg

shadow slice is a must

think its a better finisher than mind grind or the lord?

absolutely

mind grind is always ambitious tho your deck really does have enough graveyard stuff that you could imagine it being useful as a not-win-condition

lord a little too ambitious

I'd also consider keymaster over one of the 4 death's approaches...they do work better in batches but they also work worse in batches. you might end up w/ 2 in an opening hand and never have a chance to get something graveyarded.

maybe even the sprite. you have a cool deck but def leave yourself open if you don't have a fast start.

thats what i was thinking w/ mind grind. you don't really need to win with it. but then again Paranoid Delusions may be a better card in that spot. I'll probably side out Lord for the Faerie, at least.

Keymaster I'm not too sure of...don't really reliably have much to return with it. Plus without Cipher its upside is not really worth it.

also I'm going 11 swamp 6 island. this is a problem because I'm on my third game and haven't drawn an island before turn 6 yet

paranoid delusions doesn't have the same win-cond upside tho. (I mean it sorta does.)

yeah keymaster prob less important than the faerie

I think your worst matchup is gruul. ember beast or the 4/4 trample dude will be rough.

I don't know if this is 'correct' as they say but I def go for more even land ratios than the colors dictate. I would prob be 10/7 there, possibly 9/8.

i did 11/6 because i always wind up short on black mana w/ extort. usually I wont do that. that said I don't have much cipher/extort going on so yeah 10/7 is probably best.

i've played dimir vs gruul before and you're right, it's not a good matchup. i actually find it easier to nerf the smaller/quicker stuff that boros gets out.

pretty easy 3-0 with it, too. lost two games due to not getting my 3rd land but every other game was pretty easy. beat Boros and Simic, then wound up in finals vs. a B/R/W super removal/extort deck which was obnoxious because he dropped a bunch of 1/1s that I had to deal with. Dinrova Horror was by far the MVP here since it kept taking out dudes w/ enchantments and giving them a hard decision afterwards. definitely did not regret playing 4 Deaths Approaches, by the way

btw it was Mind Grind that won me that final match. neither one of us could really do anything so I just hit him for 6 with that and that was game.

so looks like cider's deck is pretty good...

haha i lost to my own deck at gameday the other day, complete with the 1-of skarrg guildmage. i was playing the undercity informer reanimator combo deck that ended up the GP finals the next day. it was pretty weird.

I had such a crazy sealed pool at the GP. 2 Daring Skyjek, 3 Ember Beast, Sunhome Guildmage, 2 Martial Glory, Mugging, Syndic of Tithes, and then Wrecking Ogre, Angelic Skirmisher, and Glaring Spotlight to top it off. The deck built itself, apart from the decision to splash green for Swine and Rampager (which I did). Was 8-1 after day 1 and I was so excited I had a hard time sleeping because I had a really good shot at finishing in the money. Naturally, I lost the two sealed rounds on day 2, and despite drafting a good Boros deck, I lost two close matches with it. At that point I was out of contention for money and we wanted to get home so I dropped, but I'm happy I got to taste day 2 again.

Maybe I should have forced Dimir in that draft after all. It was way underdrafted, I stole an 11th pick Deathcult Rogue from someone. But when your first four picks are Boros Reckoner, Sunhome Guildmage, Daring Skyjek, Angelic Edict, you feel pretty locked in from the start.

cider, is your deck the Jund one that took several of the top slots in Quebec?

nobody drafted dimir in the final 8

Vinnie it was the naya humans deck that won, though i had ghor-clan rampager instead of giant growth

Nice! That deck looks extremely fun to play.

attn Lamp: there's a grixis delver/duskmantle seer deck that's popped up on MTGO in the past few days:
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Digital/MagicOnlineTourn.aspx?x=mtg/digital/magiconline/tourn/5061652
5th place here

20 instants/sorceries is a bit light for blind delver flipping but i'm going to give it a try since duskmantle seer and desperate ravings are 2 of my favorite underplayed cards in standard

yeah i've played a lot with that list - i 4-0'd a daily on friday w/it in fact. but i played it this weekend and it was kind of a bust although it was largely my fault, there a couple of times that i savagely misplayed and a bunch of times i took suboptimal lines trying to be too aggressive with the deck. it shades way closer to the control side of aggro-control i think and i don't think its really a delver list. or maybe i just had terrible luck w/him. i was thinking about trying to run artistocrats in the list although i don't love what that does to the curve. but i often found myself really wanting that type of threat when i was playing it.

also overgrown battlement seems to be creeping its way back into modern which makes me happy. both standard and modern feel really open right now

putting charlotte's record number in context: http://imgur.com/a/nEqiw

and - worth noting I think - this was disposable spending during a huge recession

if they don't fuck up the next block there's a lot of potential growth still there I think

yeah it's incredible how much mtg has grown lately despite being a more expensive form of gaming than video games etc.

For a record-setting tournament that had about 50% more players than expected, things ran very smoothly in Charlotte. SCG is quite good at running events, and though we got started about an hour and half late (due to the huge line of people who tried to register last minute on Saturday morning), they weren't any delays past that that I recall. I've been to prerelease events that were run worse.

Oh also I pulled an Unlimited Wrath of God in my Gold Rush envelope, that was sweet.

that is p sweet. i was impressed that they had enough of the gold rush tickets to accommodate all the people that showed up.

i really want to go to the team gp in providence this spring and i can probably swing the time off but the idea of 2000+ people showing up is just daunting

yeah surely the new record won't be kept by a southern city

christ, that's WSOP levels. for all the bitching us "veterans" did about mythic rares and planeswalkers and power creep, it sure as hell paid off for them

I wouldn't put that much weight on mythic rares and planeswalkers

FNM and DOTP otoh

Lamp they had to cut the Gold Rush prizes for the side events, but yeah it was good that they still had enough for the main event.

maybe it's cuz i'm getting bored of guild mechanics, but i'm trying to revisit innistrad limited lately. it was a format that eluded me when it came out (i was newly returning to magic at the time), but now i'm trying to crack its secrets. it's an incredibly deep and complex draft format, and so much more creative and rewarding than RTR block limited, which is not so different than "draft as many guild dudes as you can".

one thing that startles me in innistrad limited is the crazy amount of removal. it seems hugely tempo-based, almost like first player to 2-for-1 wins. seems to me like sideboards are key, cuz with all the specialized jank at common, you can really do damage with draft afterthoughts. it seems pivotal to commit to two colors early and stick to them despite seeing what you perceive to be jank.

among a variety of funky limited archetypes i've been considering is the Aura Deck, which would seem to have free rein to pick from all the unpopular cards. blue, black, and green can all make this work. obvious bombs aside, the priority picks are:

- creatures that become extremely dangerous with an aura. markov patrician, rotting fensnake, the big blue vanilla zombies like makeshift mauler, invisible stalker, whatever random green dudes (green is not a great 1st color for this deck)

- counterspells and ways to avoid blowouts. obviously, the danger to running an aura deck is removal, so i think stuff like lost in the mist, dissipate, and ranger's guile (the main reason to hit green IMO) becomes super pickworthy.

- the auras themselves, which usually will go quite late. i'm actually quite partial to skeletal grimace in this deck because it sort of performs double-duty in protecting against a lot of removal while making a scarier creature. but they're all effective, really.

also, if you can grab enough ranger's guile (shouldn't be too hard) a super R/G aggro deck might be viable, centering around furor of the bitten and ranger's guile. iunno.

curious to see how this deck actually performs. i haven't actually drafted any innistrad lately, and kinda want to do it online. i may just try that out sometime this week. i think it has potential... so much of the ISD removal is so specific, so i think counterspells could be really effective, cuz they're more like contingency plans for the inevitable rainy day.

that said... playing online might have a totally different dynamic considering DKA gets thrown into the mix.

innistrad was really hard as a returning player at the time, my decks always ended up with too high a curve and i would just get tempoed out by silent departure over and over. that card is just unreal at common.

i actually think gatecrash is the most interesting draft format since innistrad, there's less depth due to the guild setup cutting out half the color pairs, but it still feels kind of similar in that the power level of cards at lower rarities is really flat and thus it's about constructing synergies rather than playing the best cards. also it's about the same speed as triple innistrad.

idk it's really not that hard to construct synergies for boros, orz or simic. "lots of 2 drops are good", "lots of extort is good", "having a critical mass of the simic evolve dudes is good". gruul and dimir have multiple builds but for the most part there seems like there's less room for creativity than m13 and rtr.

i think that's generally on purpose, between RTR and GTC there's a push towards a more linear model of whatever guild you wind up playing and the goal is obviously to get the most synergy. one thing I loved about all the populate cards was that they were all overcosted without populate, good if you have the Bird, and great if you have the Centaur. likewise Cipher is terrible if once, decent if twice, very good if 3+ times. evolve has its own little world of what's good and bad.

now granted - triple Innistrad is probably the greatest draft format ever, and I do feel like full block with Dragon's Maze is going to be incredible. because that set is pretty much guaranteed to be incredible, the way things are going. it has to do so much so I don't think there's going to be any Razortip Whip or Guildscorn Ward type filler.

those cards always exist by necessity, even in the tightest sets. also there's a pretty big difference between razortip whip and guildscorn ward. whip is the type of bad common that i like the existence of because it presents a challenge, whereas ward is just a too-narrow/inefficient sideboard card

razortip whip has def won some people games

whip also turns on bloodthirst in unified ravnica limited! synergy!

I actually played the thing in Orzhov once (it sucked bad) but I was just trying to come up with dumb/inefficient commons off the top of my head. I don't think Dragon's Maze will have much room for stuff like that. It will definitely be interesting to see how well these sets were designed to play with each other - I always wish that Orzhov had more cantrip type stuff like Cremate, for example.

I think it sucks because its kinda just like a shittier version of extort and you could have a 2/2 dude who did the same thing and also gained you life and blocked. and the format punishes you for missing creature drops. but if the full block is slower it might work. like it's not terrible in izzet, for example.

like lets say you have two lobber crews and a razortip and some burn

if it didn't cost mana to activate it would be not completely horrible but Lobber Crew is a hundred times better

it's 100 times better but you will not be getting 3 lobber crews. the question is whether it can fit into a larger strategy. which right now it can't, cause its just shitty extort. but I can totally visualize a URW deck w/ crews, some extort dudes, razortip and blue control.

i don't think it's playable in the general sense, like i said it's a 'challenge card' for people who want to be that guy who won with razortip whips. i like having a few of those cards per set.

but yeah i could see it being better in full block which should be a slower format

well if my prediction is right and the power level of DRM cards is quite high you would probably not have much of a chance to use it as a 23rd. both Izzet and Orzhov are the guilds that can live and die on one point of damage but sadly they don't share a color.

well the fixing looks like it will be good, and izzet splashes white. you can imagine URW being all kinds of decks really. boros + overload. flyers. lockdown control.

Dimir/Izzet is going to be a ton of fun I'm guessing

well I just grabbed the Beta - I know that I'll likely wind up thinking it's okay once I'm used to it but I really, really dislike it now. having to individually click each player in the tournament lobby to get some idea of where all the matches are at is really frustrating. in game there's a ridiculous amount of blank space while important stuff like life total/hand size is reduced to a tiny number in the corner. slow animations everywhere; the constant "zoom in" and "zoom out" during the attack step is a little nauseating. the original was pretty bad but for every feature I like about this (the draft interface is probably better, at least) the application crashes as soon as I try to access my collection. definitely have to 'downgrade' this asap

yeah i'm waiting on more improvement sbefore i start using it

i really wish they'd go for a minimalist GUI instead of the super stylized giant-pictures-of-liliana-everywhere one. maybe there was a way to change that but i never found it