Magic: The Gathering C/D

this would have been so much better if they gave you an hour to make your deck

I just went GB cause I had nasty removal in B and decent elfy creatures in G. splash red for one removal spell. probably had a pretty viable 4 color deck w/ all my elfy fixing but I didn't even look at my blue or white.

my best card is 4BB aura - you put it on their creature or land and they have to sac it eot and put it on another creature or land

ended up 2-2

my deck was actually pretty fun to play

had this guy:
http://8e8460c4912582c4e519-11fcbfd88ed5b90cfb46edba899033c9.r65.cf1.rackcdn.com/sales/cardscans/MAGSOK/kagemaro_first_to_suffer.jpg

and a bunch of graveyard to hand spells, so I could just blow him up and get everything (and him) back afterwards

also had an artifact that made me exile my hand on their turn but draw an extra card a turn, which was very strong

nettlevine blight! that card was brutal at times

i ended up 3-1ing mine, had 3 pingers in my pool and Freed From the Real so i just machine gunned everything down. also had the XUUU bounce X target permanents card from invasion which is like the original cyclonic rift, pretty nuts.

how sweet would a phantom draft league be? 4 tix to enter, different block every week. come on, this is what MTGO was made for!!

resto angels are currently 25 tix on mtgo, this has to be their all-time ceiling, right? i'm strongly considering selling mine off and just playing jund or mono-red for the rest of the season, seems like too good a deal to pass up. i've never seen a non-mythic rare this high before on mtgo.

that's crazy. I started MTGO around AVR season and probably went through and sold 7 or 8 of those guys for 4-5 tix apiece. whooops!!

price fluctuations on mtgo are a lot weirder to me than the ones in paper magic - 25 tickets seems probably too high for resto but i guess people really didnt like drafting that set? idk. i had five so i just sold the promo one for over 25 tickets partly because i've been on a terrible run lately and hate actually having to pay for mtgo. but i also don't really understand what influences prices on mtgo especially once a card is out of standard so i'm hesitant to have less than a playset of a card like resto

i should probably be limiting my standard deck selection anyway, i always end up hopping between 12 different decks when it'd be better to just pick 2 or 3 that have different matchups and learn those well.

i did a better job of this last standard season when i played nothing but birthing pod after huntmaster came out, then played nothing but wolf run ramp after cavern came out. i was playing a lot less back then though so i didn't get tired of decks as quickly

Another frustrating GTC Phantom Sealed last night. Round 1 was Orzhov vs. Orzhov. I won the first game, but it went really long and I chewed up a bunch of my clock. I tried picking up the pace in game 2, had momentum on my side, and was heading toward another win, but I just couldn't close it before time ran out.

What steps can I take to get better control over the clock? I feel like time just slips away for me and that I spend too much time doing little fidgity tasks like trying to fish a Deathpact Angel out the little tiny graveyard.

Man, I couldn't tell ya. I rarely have a match where I'm left with less than 15 minutes. I play fast (and that certainly leads to mistakes sometimes, such as misplaying Immortal Servitude or Mugging a Biovisionary that I thought was a 2/2), clock is never really an issue for me, but if there's one matchup that'll kill it it's the Orzhov mirror. Are you spending too much time clicking through junk on your opponent's turn?

I probably spend too much time clicking during my opponent's turn, but where I'm really feeling the time drag is on my own turns: the endless extort triggers, remembering that I need to choose a target for Balustrade Spy before it hits the battlefield, and then reviewing the revealed cards from my opponent's graveyard. It's the fact that every card seems to have its unique set of UI quirks that are rarely intuitive.

I know a lot of this just comes down to logging more play time so I get used to a lot of this stuff, but I suspect that the way I have it configured and the way I play may also be suboptimal, and I'm not sure exactly where I need to adjust that. For example, I added in a lot more stops after facing a situation where I couldn't activate an ability at the exact time that I wanted to. But maybe that's just causing a situation where every turn now takes a lot longer.

you can click on the graveyard tombstone symbol to pop out the graveyard into its own window and resize it to make it bigger, if you're playing a deck that deals with it a lot

also auto-yielding to abilities that happen a lot can save some time - when an ability is on the stack (for example, an extort trigger) you can right click it there and select "always yield to ______" and it will skip the part where you have to hit "OK" every time it pops up and will instead go straight to the effect such as paying the extort cost.

also if you're not using the keyboard shortcuts already, F2 is the same as clicking OK. F6 passes for the rest of the current turn, except for declaring attacks/blocks, just be careful since you can end up missing an entire turn if you do it by accident at the wrong time. i use it whenever i'm tapped out or empty-handed with no on-board abilities up.

Thanks! I was not aware of any of these. If you choose to auto-yield to an ability, is there a way to un-auto-yield?

Any other shortcuts you can recommend?

cider's advice is good. F2 (OK) and F6 (pass priority) are the best ways to speed up your play. just getting into the habit of using F2 to click through the 'do you want to use this ability' garbage while you use your mouse to target saves a bunch of time. also once you've set an auto-yield to a trigger like extort you can remove the auto-yield (say you want to respond to a frilled occulus pump with a removal spell or w/e) you can hit F3 to remove the auto-yield. if you're clicking a lot you can also remove some stops that you don't typically use during your combat step or upkeep &c by clicking on the icon on the turn procedure thing. it'll give you an option to turn on/off stops during your and your opponents turns.

yeah I just learned about f2 and it's already won me a match

Nice. I'm determined to get better at this, but I'm sure it's going to be a painful process.

oh yeah the other shortcut you should know is F3 which removes everything you've previously agreed to yield to, it's the emergency Undo All button.

some other ones which i use infrequently but are there:
F4 passes priority for the rest of the turn as long as the stack is empty, but if someone puts a spell/ability on the stack you will be able to respond. i don't really find this necessary but if you just have a counterspell in your hand and want to zoom through everything else it's there as an option.

if you have something that generates lots of identical triggers at the same time, F7 puts all of those triggers on the stack in an arbitrary order.

F8 is 'no-bluff mode' and i only use it in momir, what it does is auto-passes priority if and only if you can't actually do anything. i wouldn't use this in a real game because a savvy opponent will be able to get reads on you based on the speed at which you're passing priority.

is momir actually fun

no

one of the few real improvements in the beta client is that it actually has modifiable keybindings for all of these and more so they're actually documented and out in the open rather than being like secret modo cheat codes

heres a list of all the hotkeys: http://wizards.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/646/~/magic-online%3A-hotkeys

but F2, F3 and F6 are the only ones i've ever used. actually i've used F7 a few times for stuff like a massive fungal sprouting w/ a griffen protector in play

i think momir is fun in moderation, i play like one or two momir dailies a month probably. the edge you can get in momir just by being good at combat math and knowing how cards interact is surprisingly high, and by high i mean like 2-3% which is about as good as you can expect really.

cider do you play much limited on mtgo?

I like the idea of a format that can't exist irl tho being creatures only seems like it would get old in about 5 minutes

I would be into a format where they gave you 40 random cards from mtg history and 20 dual lands

yeah, it depends on the formats and such though. my mtgo time was almost entirely spent on drafting during 3x ISD and during M13, but RTR and GTC have had less replay value for me so i've mostly been playing standard lately.

i've also been more into trying to Q for the MOCS this year so that requires playing more dailies and fewer draft queues, especially since i've been on an awful run ever since gatecrash came out and i need every QP i can get. if gatecrash wasn't a shitty format for sealed i'd be playing lots of those.

Momir is a lot of fun! But you get sick of it quick. Some cards are *really* unfair (including the new addition Legion Loyalist). Anyway - auto-yield is your friend, especially when it comes to abilities you are almost never going to want to respond to (like Extort or Evolve)

I do find the players with a lot of random stops to be obnoxious - I seem to play against a lot of people who have stops on both players' upkeeps even though it's been like 10 years since "during your upkeep..." was really a thing. What exactly is the upkeep phase even for these days? They've (rightfully) done away with all the "pay BB during your upkeep" type effects. Seems like everything with the word upkeep could just be "at the beginning of your turn".

if you want to do something before they can cast main phase spells it can be relevant

fer example aurelia's fury

well technically you can do that during the draw step too. but there are less chances for them to have a counterspell that way. i don't know...i think the upkeep phase is fine, but having stops on it for both players is pretty annoying

i'm one of those people with upkeep stops, i added them way back when i was playing delver last season and i've gotten so used to them now that whenever i try to take them off i always accidentally F2 through my first main phase

i think opponent's upkeep is a normal thing to have though - self upkeep was only to thought scour away cards after you see them with delver but before you draw, which happened enough that i kept it on.

also self upkeep occasionally comes up when you have a card that can tap your control opponent's lands (e.g. deceiver exarch) and you want to resolve a spell in your first main phase (e.g. kiki-jiki)

i have yet to play a game of constructed on MTGO so i guess my perception is a bit skewed. i don't think i've ever seen anyone use an upkeep effect on either player.

playing instant speed stuff on your opponent's upkeep if they leave mana up during your turn is a pretty common thing! it forces them to use their mana less efficiently if they have a counterspell or bounce spell or whatever, while not giving them another draw step to find one if they don't actually have it. you should even do it in limited at times if it's relevant

i've used gridlock on my opponent's upkeep for some reason when i was still drafting gtc although i cant remember why i thought that was necessary. i think the only time i've used upkeep stops on my own turn was during ISD for stuff like memory's journey. typically though i only havde combat and end step stops turned on

i've also been more into trying to Q for the MOCS this year so that requires playing more dailies and fewer draft queues

yeah i've been playing solely limited since the new season started and only have like 9 QPs although i also have three on a different account which is irritating. forgbs i don't know how you play only limited on mtgo my match win % since the start of the new season is over 60% and i still am down tickets

maybe i should be playing more limited actually, i only have 2 QPs this season after playing a ton of constructed for 2 weeks. i used to feel like i had a more significant edge at constructed but post-GTC i feel like i have much less with burning-tree decks and reanimator being the 2 most popular decks and both having an 'oops i win' quality to a lot of their wins

Rare drafting like a fiend can really do it. I got a ton of Epic Experiments passed in RTR draft which sells for 2 tix easily. You get passed shocklands a lot. Also people dont seem to be aware of the value of foil mythics (doesn't matter which one). Plus having some diligence as to what cards to hold on to and what not to. For example Silverblade Paladin is something I could have dumped at a ticket apiece but I held on to them until I could get like 4. Abrupt Decay now sells to the bots for like 3 tix apiece and that was one of the few rares I actually tried to buy in bulk in anticipation of a price jump. Even with the duels you can kind of jump on trends - for example Stomping Ground is probably at a real high point since Burning-Tree decks are everywhere. Dump planeswalkers immediately since the price on those drops hard if no one plays them (but they always start out high). Get lucky pulling money mythics when your ticket supply gets low. I'm sure I'm still down on the year (my first year on MTGO by the way) but for the amount of drafting I do it's a pretty small amount.

looks like some shop got their buy-a-box promos early:

Render Silent
WUU
Instant
Counter target spell. Its controller can't cast spells this turn.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BHGKoy_CYAAf-5z.jpg

sort of lame to treat this thread like a bad beat repository but i just went 0-2 with maybe the best M13 sealed pool i've ever had losing in the first round to someone playing triple bond beetle w/o primadox (or giving him the benefit of the doubt w/o him ever drawing his primadox) and round two to a person playing index. i'm stuck on 12 QPs and kinda just wanna give up on this month/magic in general. i played like garbage both games and probably had some outs i missed but it's just like gah. i really wish i hadn't preregistered for the WMCQ in two weeks cuz i think i need a break for a bit

yeah I've been through the same and it sucks, just no fun at all. kinda like a massive downswing in poker, not only is it frustrating when you get super unlucky but you also start to really doubt yourself. I dunno I'd just say take a break and try to come back with a fresh head in 2 weeks. a month is a long time.

anyway. the Izzet general was just spoiled and he's a doozy. 1UR for a 2/2 unblockable, every time it hits your opponent you either deal 2 damage divided or draw a card. sorry I can't find a picture right now

yeah Lamp i'm going through the exact same thing right now. haven't cashed a standard daily in about a month and i've played lots of them. stuck on 5 QPs when i've put in as much time as i did the month i got 30 QPs. hate GTC limited now because there's no room for personal preference, you either draft the deck that's correct for your seat or lose, and i don't want to lose when i'm at less than 15 QP.

on the bright side, DGM preview weeks start tonight. i love preview weeks.

the one thing i've learned about standard during this though is that there are no good decks, so you should just pick a non-terrible one that you like and master it. i haven't figured out what that deck is for myself yet, before GTC it was xMiMx humans for sure but i'm really souring on the post-burning-tree version of it.

are you playing his new version of humans? at some point he was like 12-0 in dailies with it.

i thought the izzet general was a fake off /tg/? i saw the scan last night and had no opionion either way but iirc it was a 2/2 unblockable electrolyze which seems... better... than the officially spoiled gruul champion at least.

if its real it's gonna result in some lame games in limited

that was my first thought too. there are plenty of ways to take care of a 2/2 in both sets, but if you don't have one it'll be real dumb. if its a fake it's a damn good one..scan looked good to me

yeah i have no real basis for judging but that seemed to be the consensus. it is seriously nuts in limited although i'm not sure how good he is in constructed rn.

that card image that was going around was very clearly photoshopped to my eyes, the lightning and perspective were all off and the typeface on the card looked like it had been resized digitally to get the angle right for the perspective

re: xmimx, i was running the build he top 4ed the ptq and premier event with last weekend. it's okay but you get so many awkward draws and he's cut back on the huntmasters/restos which makes it more difficult to play from behind. i get that it's a necessary evil to have a chance vs the reanimator and UWR decks that are popular, but i feel like it's lost its status as the aggro deck that crushes the aggro mirror which is what i liked about it in the first place.