Magic: The Gathering C/D

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

like if the current client looks like it's from the 90s this new one looks like it's from 2002 or so

not to mention the way the chat box blocks off the last phase and the time boxes. and the tiny ok button. and the horrible stacking of common permanents (okay for basic land, but kinda dumb for creatures)

and the incessant flashing every time it's your turn to do anything - everything about this client is so damn obnoxious

i still someimtes cant quite believe that mtgo is actually the official wotc product and not some adequate but unfortuante piece of fan-made software or s.thing

i mean it was to be ugliest and unweildiest game interface still operating rn right?

would it just be impossible model it off of the look and feel of DotP? That might not be perfect, but it would be an improvement.

I feel like they have a team of 40 people working on getting the triggers right and like 1 intern on graphics

wizards shutting cockatrice down!!

three questions:
1) on what grounds, exactly? doesn't cockatrice just use gatherer data?
2) are they going to go after MWS next?
3) what threat do they think cockatrice is to overall sales?

MWS is abandonware, hasn't been worked on since 2005 or so, so it's less of a threat i guess. cockatrice is in current development and is much more forthright about being MTG software and not 'generic TCG software' like workstation pretended to be.

http://forum.cockatrice.de/index.php?topic=2129.0

1. I imagine the basic rules of the game are copyrighted
2. maybe?
3. who knows. it's not crazy to think it takes a bite out of modo sales but not a huge one.

I think it's ultimately probably more about what cockatrice could be than what it currently is

first off, had no idea that MWS wasn't updated since 05. it crashes my computer so I wouldn't really know. i had no idea this was illegal. not like "oh that CD was out of print so I had to torrent it", but like literally, had no idea you could copywrite the things that cockatrice does. because gatherer is public data and I don't think they host anything.

anyway not to really compare this with file sharing but I do feel like most everyone on cockatrice are those who spend big on Magic anyway or just buy entirely off the secondary market so i really dont know the logic behind this. this sucks and will definitely result in me playing less Standard but oh well

gatherer is not really public data, like lets say I started printing out the cards and selling them for money. you wouldn't think that's violating copyright?

i think having the centralized server is what put cockatrice over the edge into infringing on MTGO territory

I'd consider it more akin to proxying up cards and using them for playtesting? Again I have no idea on the legality of anything, I think just printing a scan and gluing it to a land is illegal while writing "TIME WALK" on an island is not but to me Cockatrice resembled the latter. I just can't see how canning it benefits WoTC at all.

like I said I think it's more about the future - where mtgo plays an even bigger role and cockatrice could potentially take away more sales - than the present

i don't see how shutting it down has much downside for them, the people who were dependent enough on cockatrice to be outraged by this probably weren't buying many cards in the first place

the downside is mostly that wizards has a fairly positive company image among players and 'we're actually a big corporation' moves like this puts a tiny dent in it.

esp given the context, where the product that this was a substitute for is clearly very flawed

yeah the last time they did something like this was probably when they went after rancored_elf (the spoiler guy), but even then they basically just set "spoilers have a measurable effect on card sales and prerelease attendance so we have to shut this down". Here - maybe you're right about the future iatee but I don't see it effecting sales any more than online poker effected attendance in card rooms. Like you're probably right that people who rely on Cockatrice are the type who really just buy off the secondary market, which maybe WoTC isn't making much profit from, but it'll certainly effect tournament attendance in a small way and I can't see it driving people to MTGO - MTGO and Cockatrice are really very different things

i don't think it will affect tournament attendance at all, and i don't think they care if it drives the current userbase to MTGO or not, they just don't want a competing product out there that can suck away potential new players

I assume that shutting down Cockatrice will not also result in a "proxy" option in MTGO. That would be nice, but I can't imagine it ever happening.

they will probably create more phantom-like-things in the future, sorta a system of tiered pricing, but a real proxy 'you can play w/ whatever you want' is def not gonna happen

Mtgo allows for all sorts of really cool things to happen (Cube and Momir Basic are two great examples) but they seem to be really squirrley in what they'll actually do. Ultimately it feels like theyre more concerned with stopping people from getting around the profanity filter than they are making a useable product. The fact that they require a 9 hour downtime for weekly updates in 2013 is a good sign as to how behind the times they really are.