Magic: The Gathering C/D

i am guessing orzhov takes the hardest hit of any guild in playability

there are lots of teleportal equivalents too, gridlock, gruul charm and now gruul war chant

yeah orzhov depended on getting a critical quantity of extort and a critical quantity of removal and you're not gonna get that w/ the dgm and rtr packs

yeah with only one common extorter in DGM it looks like you can't count on getting more than 3 extort cards. i'm sure orzhov will live in some way though. it looks like most limited decks will be a combination of 2 or 3 strategies.

im interested in an orzhov-based hand destruction deck probably W/B/r i guess? i was always looking for shrieking affliction decks to be open in rtr and there are a few additions in the other sets. biggest downside is not getting access to multiple afflictions tho so it may not work.

i also think izzet and azorius will play really strong due to having a lot of cards that break board stalls

yeah i was thinking izzet is the best bet for the prerelease since it has a bunch of really nice synergies btw the various touching guilds and i think it has the most flexibility. i cant really tell what the initial default is going to be for people - my inclination is to use a single color as a base and then build around that taking any gates p high and looking to take any solid multicolor card that shares my base. but maybe thats too narrow a strategy?

so there are apparently ways to play this on cockatrice if anyone is interested

yep, works

http://www.woogerworks.com/
http://www.anothermagicblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/dragons-maze-on-cockatrice.html

from a 2 draft sample size, this format is insanely slow

fennel your cockatrice first impressions infodump for gatecrash was incredibly valuable so if you end up playing this a bunch please do the same

i only played those 2 drafts and won't have a chance to play until after the prerelease. missing that too - parents are in town so no time for magic.

but in those 2 drafts, i tried an aggro deck and a durdle deck. the durdle deck won, the aggro deck didn't. it was pretty much just "play bigger stuff than your opponent."

i think that generally you can survive to play 6-drops. having 6-drop creature synergy will probably be important, especially with those maze behemoth/abomination/etc cards. think of them basically like sapphire drakes, and prioritize 4 and 5 drops that can really benefit from them. i think the big multicolor beaters like spawn of rix maadi, golgari longlegs, armored wolf-rider, zhur-taa swine stand to benefit hugely from the DGM 6-drops.

manabases will also be shaky enough to make aggro decks difficult to play. so much of gatecrash's speed had to do with how synergistic the guilds were. like, the best aggro decks in boros and simic were just the ones where you drafted all the guild C/Us. going 3 colors takes away a lot of the obvious synergies. i do think aggro will have a place, but i think we're gonna have to relearn how to play it. i expect to shift my gameplan back to building aggro once people clue in to how effective the high drops are in DGM block draft.

it does seem a lot like a "build around a key uncommon" format. ones i like so far include:

Ascended Lawmage - start w/ this or armadillo cloak, basically the gameplan is to cobble together hexproof beaters w/ auras. rubbleback rhino becomes a p3p1 pick if you're going this route imo.

Maw of the Obzedat - draft a bunch of crappy dinks and Maw to give them utility lategame. i tried this in my first match, it didn't do great but i'm convinced it will work. i had that 6-mana boros enchantment that gives attackers +1/+1 counters, and it was surprisingly effective, but i'm not quite sold on this card anyways. i also think that Weapon Surge is a sweet card and would draft that here too.

Korozda Gorgon - i think you guys basically identified that BUG abuse-the-counters deck already

i could spew out a few more but these might not even be good to start with. i gotta get back to dealing with stuff anyways. hope you guys do well at the prerelease!!

maze glider seems like it could potentially be the best common in the set

gonna see if i can get the golgari/simic box at the prerelease, i have a hunch that it's going to be the most powerful one

yeah I have a feeling about golgari too

that 2/5 deathtouch gorgon that can turn your +1/+1 counters into creature removal is potentially bomb-rare-level impact despite being uncommon especially if you're in simic too

and golgari gets the best removal spell in the set (putrefy)

so do we know how the guilds are going to be paired up at the prerelease? or was Golgari + Simic an educated guess?

there's a box for every combo of RTR guild + GTC guild that share a color. your second guild is only as 'secret' as your prerelease organizer wants it to be, because it's on the other side of the box, so you'll know what you're getting before you open one

since it looks like its going to be raining all day on sunday anyway im going to play the prerelease on my vacation, just booked for izzet. looking to jam some bounce and counters and fliers, see how that works against 5/4s. v v excited, also v v ashamed

xpost

That's cool, I had assumed it was either just a single pairing for each guild or that you wouldn't know until you opened the box.

I'm doing Gruul with the hopes of getting paired with either Golgari or Rakdos. My guess is that there will be fewer synergies with these pairs than Golgari/Simic, but I want a chance to play my favorite guilds together.

should i play the dark ascension prerelease tournament it means getting up at 8am on a saturday

― roborally.rar (Lamp), Thursday, January 19, 2012 5:23 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how far we've come :D

considering doing a midnight release

i always do the midnight one and then deeply regret it when it's 4am and i feel gross and dirty from being in a crowded basement room all night and still have a round left to play

i haven't done one sober since like 2007 and I too regret it around bar close time when you still have two rounds left and everyone's a little testy

I'm not 100% at this point but the alternative is being home alone tonight so it seems like a reasonable idea

like just bar-hopping with some of the cooler Magic players I know in preparation for the pre-release is twice as fun as the actual pre-release

I don't know any cool magic players

other than myself I guess

ignore what I said 2 minutes ago about how I'm only doing this because I have nothing to do tonight

well obviously its more fun than sitting at home

my store actually rents out a larger space sometimes for the saturday ones which is a vast improvement in comfort. i still go to the in-store midnight one though because i'm dumb

they're not the kind of people you want to hang around with every week but they're definitely fun every once in a while

the store I go to actually is pretty roomy

20 sided in bklyn notsomuch

my store has tables/chairs for like 80-90 people which used to be pretty roomy but they're drawing at least twice as many people for magic events now as they did 2 years ago when i started playing there. they've started having to turn people away from FNM some weeks which is insane.

you live in boston, right?

yeah

i'm hoping ~*capitalism*~ will cause a nicer game store to open since there's clearly become a market for it, but right now it's the only one in the city with play space for more than like 1 or 2 draft pods

yeah there is a huge scene in new york but few actual stores because of rent, I guess

ars arcanum thing is up http://puremtgo.com/articles/ars-arcanum-dragons-maze-limited-primer-part-i

nothing too bold this time around, tldr version is that the format will slow down by a ton, the long-game guilds obviously profit more from this than the aggro ones, and the exception is selesnya which takes a big hit due to no common token makers in the new set.

he picks about 10 different guilds for best guild of the format

cider i thought you were out west MA for some reason. which store do you go to? i can't think of anywhere that might have that much room.

so does that Ars Arcanum article really say anything besides "the format will be slow" and "populate isn't as good"?

I always find the power/toughness ratio interesting, but yeah I guess not a lot of new information there.

I had to sign up for the prerelease last week before the full set was spoiled since my LGS is small, and I picked Orzhov as my guild. Sounds like a decent choice?

I don't think it's gonna be a good archetype in draft but who knows w/ the prerelease

officially doing the midnight release gah

xp i go to pandemonium in cambridge

just got back from the midnight one, did decently with golgari/simic. format is slow but not glacial, it feels like a slightly clunkier RTR. out of the 100 people there, orzhov seemed to be the best performer and selesnya the worst but it's reasonably balanced.

ha orzhov was easily the worst performer at my event, along w/ boros

I went 3-0-draw-to-go-home-"early" w/ a fun to play izzet splash white deck. two nivix cyclops, ral zarek, lotsa burn, cyclonic rift, big flyers. nivix is fantastic in a real izzet deck - hits hard, is v. intimidating to attack because they don't know if they're attacking a 1/4 or a 4/4. deputy of acquittals is also fantastic in a deck that can take advantage of it but that was pretty obvious. both are p1p1 commons I think.

yeah Nivix Cyclops definitely reads like a p1p1 to me

are the guilds as lopsided as they were in GTC prerelease or does it feel more balanced?

more balanced but I don't think this event is gonna be representative at all

my son and I are headed to prerelease in about 30 minutes, any last minute tips? We'll be playing Gruul and Boros.

don't feel afraid to not stick w/ your guild pairing

cluestones are pretty nice, better than a clunky keyrune most of the time, play them

why are cluestones better than keyrunes?

maybe not across the board, but keyrunes are 'I'm giving up a card for expensive ramp/fixing/and a bad mana sink creature'. cluestones are 'expenive ramp/fixing but you'll get the card back later'. dimir and orzhov keyrunes can hold their own but generally you'd rather just be cycling through your deck in a slow game than paying mana for some clunky 2/3.

i think the good keyrunes are rakdos, azorius, dimir