Magic: The Gathering C/D

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.

it's kinda amazing really

especially if you read the weekly "update reports" and find out how many things were broken - for example Domri Rade giving your opponent's creatures hexproof, Bane Alley Broker being able to return Ciphered cards to your hand via it's second ability, Dinrova Horror having the rules text of an enchant land in the name field in the "card" view, or Cipher sometimes not working at all (which caused me to lose a game). as a software dude myself I really don't envy what those programmers have to all account for, especially since the base rules code seems shaky and incomplete to begin with. but I have to wonder how small their staff really is!

did you complain when that happened? it seems like they give refunds pretty freely

no because i won the match. what happened was the ciphered card (it was Shadow Slice) just appeared in "newgamezone" by my hand, but clicking it did nothing, nor did clicking it then the player, or moving things around, nothing. could only hit "cancel"

just in the past month or so there's been more bugs than i remember there being all of last year. pillar of flame currently doesn't exile as of this week's patch, which is kind of funny but also annoying as it's a staple card in standard

my favorite bug was during innistrad limited where blazing torch couldn't target foil creatures. it took them a while to fix it too, since it's not a situation that came up a ton due to involving foils

Nah it makes sense. The light of the torch bounces off of the foils, blinding the wielder.

that is quite amusing since it implies that foil cards somehow work differently in mtgo

the pillar of flame thing is especially crazy since there's a standard MOCS this weekend and people could try to game it by playing strangleroot geist or geralf's messenger decks and hoping their opponents aren't aware of the bug

also if anyone's looking for a cheap standard deck, apparently pump spells on Wandering Wolf is good enough to cash standard dailies right now...
http://mtgstats.com/Deck.aspx?DeckID=576165

I saw this one and was intrigued, but I think Wandering Wolf and Dryad Militant are odd choices here. I'd much rather run Gyre Sage and Experiment One.

thats an ilxor ain't it

moodles nothing in the deck evolves those guys more than once. evolve is more of a midrange strategy, this deck wants to get in damage fast with pump spells so you don't want to wait around for your creatures to evolve. wandering wolf's ability is actually pretty nice at getting around boros reckoners when you slap a rancor on it.

do you guys think it's a good idea to stock up on Deathrite Shamans? it's $15 on SCG now, about $10 where I live, maybe $5 online - I think in 5 years it may be one of those Modern staples that's $35+...thoughts?

it's one of the best creatures ever printed for competitive eternal formats. past comparables include Noble Hierarch (now $30), Dark Confidant (now $50), Snapcaster Mage (still $20ish). Hierarch was in a set with a much shorter print run than RTR so i'm not sure the Shaman will reach $30 anytime soon but its a good bet to be $15-20 long-term

Yeah the print run was what really worries me about it. Then again SCG is still selling the shocklands for $12-15 and I'd thought they'd be really devalued by now.

snaps seem to have settled @ $25. i doubt deathrites will ever go above that considering the amount of rtr thats been printed and general playability of the the two. i've been trading for shamans for the last month or so - they were down to $12 for a bit - but i wouldnt got out of my way to buy them either unless i didnt have a playset. i have picked up a second playset of rtr shocks tho considering how cheap they got

fwiw last night on mtgo the blink trigger on resotration angel wasnt working either which was p lol