Magic: The Gathering C/D

attn iatee: i played a local standard cash tournament today with... three maindeck assemble the legions. i didnt do that well - finished @ 5-2 in like 19th place but people still learned to fear the legion. i also started 3-1 and had a good shot @ top 8 except i had some unfortunate mulls/draws in my win and in.

I bought a big batch of GTC rares to fill out my various casual guild decks this past week including sets of Assemble the Legion and Spark Trooper for my son's Boros deck. Now I'm regretting it because those cards can be real back breakers.

I think the trooper has potential for competitive play because connecting for a 12 point swing can be absolutely devastating. If you don't counter or kill it immediately, you will suffer.

i'm kind of surprised that armada wurm is only $3, i can easily imagine some future standard metagame where it's the premier high end creature

i guess it gets trumped by angel of serenity from the same set though

i'm thinking of rebuilding Seance and Armada Wurm feels like a neat fit there. I feel like the card was made to be abused in some way - $3 seems awfully low for such a powerhouse mythic.

btw those phantom sealeds are super soft and I have yet to not get to 2 wins (so worse case is 4 tix for a pack). forgoing bots entirely and just phantom sealeding for packs then drafting feels like the future for me

http://www.mtgquiz.com is a neat little time-waster, it starts with RTR/GTC only and unlocks other sets in reverse chronological order as you progress. i can get back to alara block most of the time but then i start getting stuff i haven't really played with and lose.

has anyone had any success drafting the prophetic prism/verdant haven/greenside watcher decks in gatecrash yet? i know one guy who just crushes draft after draft with them, but whenever i try it i either flood out or get the wrong mix of blockers/removal/trumps. trying to figure it out still, since people are so allergic to taking the 6-7 mana bombs in this format and that has to be exploitable.

i had a lot of fun drafting these decks in RTR but that set had cards like coursers accord and voidwielder and even isperia's skywatch that were good at pushing the board back in your favor in the midgame by handling 2 of their attackers the following turn with 1 card. this set doesn't have anything quite that obvious.

I've tried it a few times with limited success. Does that guy set out to do this from the beginning? Because I feel it's a big risk - the prism, greenslade, haven, and a lot of gates all seem essential to this archetype. I did it once as a 4-color deck (everything but red) and it worked fine, but ultimately I had 22 mana-producers in my deck which left you real prone to flooding out. You're right that the set doesn't really have that Courser's Accord card advantage-generating big mana common and a lot of your big mana rares can be taken care of with a Grisly Spectacle, 1000 Lashes, Angelic Edict, etc. As I see it you really have to have a lot of things go right, even if your draft is good. You have to get the Greenslade, and either a Prism or the right Gates early on. Your opponent can't have a fast Boros start because if you start to trade things, you're not going to be set up well. And once you get all the mana stuff out, you can't flood out. I'd be curious to see how that guy does it.

anyway. can someone tell me how the MOCS works? I have 10 QPs now and I think I can get 15 by the 20th. Where do I register to get the promo card? Do you just play in the preliminary, and that's it?

I had 3 greenside watchers and a verdant haven in a simic deck today tho ramp wasn't really my thing

the problem is you need the watcher, the haven and a gate before you even have...the setup for what could then be a good deck?

frogbs: you get the promo card automatically at the end-of-season server downtime (so on 3/20 for this one). the prelims are fixed 6-round events that friday/saturday and cost 15 QP to enter, then pay out 35 QP to everyone who goes 5-1 or 6-0. 35 QP is the entry fee for the finals the following weekend.

i see. it's GTC sealed - if I have the 15 QP and enter, do I get to keep my cards? if I don't enter...I get the promo card anyway, correct?

its phantom sealed, you don't get cards

you'll get the promo card regardless of whether you sign up

Where do I register to get the promo card? Do you just play in the preliminary, and that's it?

you get the promo after the first downtime when the seasons over iirc - you can score additional copies of the promo by doing well in the prelim, you get those at the end of the tournament

the problem with the verdant ramp deck is that you still have to make a good curve. higher-than-normal, sure, but you still need early drops. i think if you can land a frilled oculus or two, go for it. but, like all decks, those colors have to be open and you need legit bombs. i steamrolled a draft the other day drafting one of those. admittedly, i lucked into a p3p1 biomancer that helped make my p1p4 ooze flux work without a lot of evolve creatures, but yeah. 2 oculi to sink my mana into, among other treats. it was a fun deck in open colors, which was, of course, the key.

one game, i got the biomancer/ooze flux combo online and started cranking out oozes that were 3/3, 4/4, etc. a turn after my first ooze barrage he dropped high priest of penance. next turn, i topdecked sapphire drake. it was a good look.

started listening to limited resources podcasts the other day - they're quite good, i'm learning a lot, if you guys don't already you should tune in

I actually had biomancer and ooze out tonight. so much math.

my opponent took a picture of the board afterwards

thanks for the info guys. dunno what an alt-art dual could be worth but it's definitely worth grinding out a few more.

btw if you're really into odd boardstates in GTC limited, here's one you will probably never see again:
http://i.imgur.com/hUrgYtb.jpg

i thought the mocs S3 promo was the gp lotus cobra?

my fav part about that picture is how close the dude is to all his removal. what's that expression for those grapes that are just out of reach again?

yeah it's lotus cobra for this season. savannah is next.

also, can't read the removal dude's name, but has anyone else noticed the mtgo fad of people having their usernames as all-caps nba jam era stars? ok, 2 doesn't exactly make a fad, but still, i've seen CHRISTIAN LAETTNER and CLYDE THE GLIDE DREXLER. have you guys seen more of these? thinking of reincarnating as DETLEF SCHREMPF or something

clyde the glide has been around for a while, havent noticed any others yet

the S4 mocs promo is savannah? is it the cube alternate art?

yep it's that one

format is M13 sealed for some reason

If you win with Biovisionary, you should automatically win the match. I think the expression that came out of that story is "sour grapes", but that's only if the bottom dude was saying that he didn't want his removal anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantalus

Tantalus (Ancient Greek: Τάνταλος, Tántalos) was a Greek mythological figure, most famous for his eternal punishment in Tartarus. He was made to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, with the fruit ever eluding his grasp, and the water always receding before he could take a drink.

also derivation of tantalizing

I borrowed and approve of your idea of playing phantom sealeds frog

roberto, i am really amused by how you keep track of this thread

i am playing mtgo now! i just have nothing material to contribute because i am such a noob. i have also been playing phantom limited events, of which i have won 1 in about a dozen, although i would've won a couple more except for horrible basic errors at critical times, e.g. accidentally casting aurelia's fury for 1 damage instead of 6. also i am super slow and have lost maybe 3 games on the clock.

i do have a question actually. i amassed 9 RTR boosters before moving onto GTC. I ended up playing 3 drafts with them, which was fun, and now i have a bunch of cards. i have enjoyed messing around with them but i am so far away from being able to play constructed. i wonder if i shouldn't have just sold the boosters and played more phantom? the most valuable card i opened was an overgrown tomb i sold for 4 tix. is there a conventional wisdom here? i mean, if i ever wanted to put together a constructed deck, i would just buy the particular cards, right?

it's really up to you. i personally like draft more than sealed but there's a lot more variance. in phantom if things go wrong you just lose 4 tix. in a draft if you get nothing back then you lose like 12 tix worth of value (assuming a booster is 3.33). MTGO card prices fluctuate a lot and the vast majority of rares are worth basically nothing. what I do when I draft is keep mtgotraders.com open so I can look up the rares I get to see if it's worth moneydrafting them. because even though it sucks from a pure EV standpoint there's really no justification for taking a really good card for your deck over something that you can sell for a couple tickets. GTC kinda sucks in that it doesn't have a big mythic right now - AVR drafting was kinda neat in that a Bonfire could finance a bunch of drafts by itself. also if you're not really comfortable with your skill level (if you're losing to the clock I would assume you're not totally comfortable with MTGO yet) then just play Swiss - you can't turn a profit packwise but you can make those 9 packs last a while. hope that helps

I'm excited that this thread gets another poster

roberto, i think you should practice on cockatrice before throwing money away as a noob on MTGO. it takes a while to develop skill and you should get to a certain level before playing on MTGO, i think. when i started, i was slow too, and also lost a lot.

anyways, cockatrice has a new server - go to woogerworks.com for more details - but basically works fine. i would be happy to play with you on there and give you some tips. let me know if you install it.

btw, on the ooze flux front, i decided to switch from orzhov into simic after seeing an ooze flux i think pack 1 pick 6. problem was, i had passed so much simic stuff from picks 1-5 that i probably sent someone else into it. 2 sapphire drakes, a pick 5 crocanura were the highlights of what i passed. anyways, i ended up with a passable deck that didn't have enough creatures. ooze flux was really good again though. i got it online and started cranking out 3/3s, but my opponent bloodrushed both ghor-clan and wrecking ogre onto an 8/8 ooze of his own (miming slime on a bloodrushed guy) and i ended up losing r1. still, though... switching rules! i think my middling simic deck would have been better than the orzhov i would have otherwise picked.

i dunno, i kind of like jumping right in to MTGO, though i'd make sure to play around in the new player room to get the hang of the interface first. i have an unfounded dislike of cockatrice, i just find it awkward and unfun to manage everything yourself, though it's true the price point can't be beat.

also (and this goes for anyone here) if you want a bunch of cards to play around with on MTGO, hit me up anytime (username = smh). i have thousands of excess cards from drafting innistrad block / M13 / RTR block so if you need to pick up some of the common/uncommon staples, like the searing spears or vampire nighthawks of the world, or whatever, let me know.

the nice thing about MTGO is that it requires you follow the rules to the t, it's terrible for someone who is trying to learn how to play from scratch, but it's prob better than cockatrice for someone trying to figure out when exactly they should be tapping this or that

I gave GTC Phantom Sealed a try and it went pretty well. I think I'm going to keep doing these until I have enough packs for Swiss Draft.

I'm planning to also trade off an M13 pack and some random cards from my collection for either tickets or a pack of GTC. My question is, which is the better or more cost effective option? My guess is the pack, but I'm not sure.

it'll be easier to get tickets than to find someone willing to make that trade unless the random cards are worth tickets, in which cases you are prob losing out if you trade it for a pack of gtc

Hmmm, I guess what I'm trying to figure out is this: is it better to trade something for tickets or for booster packs or does it not matter?

there's not really a better

packs are worth a certain amount of tix which is a 3.X number so if you try and sell your packs for tix to a bot you will get .X amount of credit. if you can sucessfully trade w/ someone instead you can avoid having .X amount of credit with randobot but finding someone who wants a m13 pack for a gtc pack and randocards will not be as easy.

gotcha - thanks!

just won a sealed where I pulled two angelic skirmishers and a reckoner

very last game I actually got oth skirmishers in play at the same time

So a couple Phantom Sealeds on MTGO this weekend were my first dip into non-casual play on the platform. My biggest obstacle is clearly a lack of understanding of some of the finer technical points of the interface. Some of the biggest mistakes I made included:

Not realizing I had a bunch of guildgates in my pool because I failed to scroll far enough to the right to see them.

Not being able to get the timing right for activated abilities because I didn't have my stops set correctly.

Once I got the abilities to fire, targetting the wrong permanent.

Poor clock management resulting in losing a match.

Waiting for a client crash to resolve itself instead of immediately killing the process and restarting.

It's frustrating, but I guess it's good that I'm learning these things so I don't keep repeating the same mistakes. Otherwise I had a good time. Despite my technical challenges, I think my game play was pretty solid. I'm sure I'll be doing more next weekend.

My one complaint is that I'm pretty sure Red and White will be prominently featured in every GTC sealed deck I play unless I pull absolutely ridiculous cards in other colors. I have a really hard time seeing myself putting together decks with blue as one of the main colors right now.

yeah boros really dominates sealed

are you on the new client Moodles? that really sounds like me after the upgrade (I decided to just stick with the old one)

and yes, Boros pretty much dominates, but I'm starting to see Orzhov do very well too. I usually go R/W/B and to be honest it's not going well...I tend to not pull the gates/Prisms I need and the Boros and Orzhov plans don't really jive together too well. But I never have the cards to go straight Boros and my Orzhov cards always wind up being better than my Gruul ones.

No, I think I'm still on the old client.

My two decks this weekend were RWB and RWG. I was tempted to throw in black as a 4th color in that second one so I could play one thousand lashes and merciless eviction, but punked out at the last moment. In hindsight, I think I could have made it work.

what was your fixing?

feel like 4c can be more doable in sealed than draft cause you're facing worse decks and are guaranteed a certain amount of fixing

it is rather frustrating for me because i always seem to open like 4 Dimir Guildgates

iatee,

I had 2 Orzhov guildgates, plus prophetic prism, verdant haven, Gyre Sage, and Burning-Tree Emissary. I probably could have swapped out a couple plains for the guildgates and then maybe a mountain or forest for an extra swamp.