Magic: The Gathering C/D

it's called synergy

Vinnie were you thinking about Quest for the Gravelord with your design? The card it's up against also kinda reminds me of Quest for the Nihil Stone, because QUESTS.

Not consciously, though I read the YMTC thread on mtgsalvation and Quest for the Gravelord was mentioned there a zillion times. It's exactly the same concept, but it's one of those cards that made so little impact I'd completely forgotten about it. I like my card more, haha. Necrotic Ooze was on my mind for sure though.

ok I finally tried block draft and holy cow is this complicated. I'm so confused on what to do in the DGM pack and wind up just picking like 4-5 colors worth of stuff. So many decks I want to try!!

I'm really not sure how high to take guildgates. Also I'm starting to realize that Pyroconvergence may actually be playable. Lobber Crew is nutso.

my current strategy is to try to cut a gatecrash color pair during the DGM pack because otherwise the gatecrash pack tends to go terrible

guildgates are usually all gone by the midpoint of the pack so be careful that you don't end up playing the 6-6-6 manabase

grr had a pretty good jund deck tonight. lost to a top decked aetherling, one life away from a win.

I'm always in rtr color pairings w/ terrible gtc but it still works out for me

almost all my losses so far are to UWR decks

just won a game by casting Burst of Strength on an opponent's Unleash creature, huahuahauhaha

I'm hearing the 'try to get an rtr guild and a gtc guild' thing a lot actually and I think the reason why it's not as sensible as it seems is that you're not really hedging your bets - "at least I'll get some stuff in each pack" - not necessarily - if someone to the left cuts guild 1 in gtc and someone to the right cuts g2 rtr, you got nothing. whereas if you accept that you'll prob have one bad pack, you're also going to have one good to great pack where it's almost impossible to be 100% cut.

also if you do it w/ rtr guilds and they were both flowing p1, the chances that the same guilds will be there p3 are pretty high. w/ gtc it's harder.

don't you get at least one guild of each no matter what combo you're playing? or am I misreading this

yeah sorta but one is gonna be a bit off ie UWR you 'get boros' but most boros cards suck in UWR

for UWR pack 2 i just look to get all the skyjerks and assault griffins usually

yeah 3 power flyers really do work in this format

rakdos drake is somehow really good, it's consistently overperformed for me in my first handful of events

it's a card I don't like but would never cut from my deck

a 2 power *post unleash* creature for 3 feels like such a rip-off but the format is slow enough that it's still gonna be hitting

my decks all look like trainwrecks on paper but play out pretty smoothly

thoughts on electing to defer the draw?

i wouldn't in draft unless both players have attrition-y decks. in sealed you probably should but i've still been taking the play because i'm stubborn

yeah I only would think about it if my fixing was realllly rough

that's a really important thing to get a feel for though early in a format - at the end of every game take note of whether you were in topdeck mode and whether your opponent was in topdeck mode. choosing to play is basically saying you think you can win the game before you run out of things to do and are playing off the top of your deck

it also informs the value of bounce spells, since if games are regularly ending before the players have been able to cast all the spells in their hand then bouncing becomes a lot closer to removal in value - this is why mist raven was unreal good in AVR

in other news, voidwielder has finally passed armored skaab as the card with the most copies on my mtgo account. watercourser is tied for 3rd.

maybe the real reason i didn't like gatecrash limited was because the Blue Common Defensive Creature was bad...

And now you get Murmuring Phantasm! How have you guys found the speed of the format compared to RTR and GTC?

I did perfectly fine w/ a deck w/ a single two drop and a single three drop yesterday. because it's as slow as it is, something like spike jester can win a match though.

I feel like the quicker decks are coming but nobody really knows how to make them yet. DGM simply doesn't have that many quality 2 or 3 drops and the ones that are good are things like Nivix Cyclops or Tithe Drinker.

the quicker decks are the 2c decks. they exist, you just have to get lucky to draft a solid one. but anyone who's playing a 3c deck w/ cluestones needs to give up any dream of having a relevant board t1-4.

i've played against a lot of riot pikers so far, actually. usually i can maneuver into a position where they just kill themselves but in my very first draft match i lost to a guy who had them with the RB guildmage and every annihilating fire in the pod which really changed my perspective on the format

that's the thing tho - that guy's deck sucked going into p3 and if he didn't run into great great rakdos he wouldn't have much of anything. my friend drafted the same deck yesterday w/ the guildmage minus the fires and it was totally flat.

if you really have a burn your hand go for the gold every game aggro deck riot piker is 'okay' or maybe if you have some madcaps but overall it's pretty terrible

going 2 color seems like you're really hedging your bets on one pack being great for you. like straight up Rakdos is going to get what exactly in Gatecrash? Bomber Corps, maybe Extort Bat, Mugging, some other okay commons? Are you going to play more than 4-5 cards from that pack? Also, Riot Piker seems really terrible to me. It kind of plays like a really bad Gore-House Chainwalker and is exactly the sort of card that DGM is trying to nerf. Furthermore there are 1/4s and 2/3s and 2/4s everywhere.

Dimir and Simic are my favorite guilds in the set and that + graveyard stuff in Golgari seem real fun to play. Gruul in particular seems to benefit a lot from this as Naya seems strong, the Zhur-Taa Druid is quite excellent, and stuff like Greenslade Watcher are now almost first-pick worthy.

anyone who's playing a 3c deck w/ cluestones needs to give up any dream of having a relevant board t1-4

the big rare dudes in Gatecrash like Hellkite Tyrant, Giant Adephage, Borobobroborgous, and especially Gruul Ragebeast all feel like legit bombs again

The problem with Piker is that any card that makes him good like Madcap or removal makes ANY 2-drop good. Sometimes that's fine, but I'd play almost any other 2-drop over him.

i don't quite agree with this, in fact i think the best decks are going to be the ones that can maintain tempo through the speed bumps of playing gates and keystones. best ways to do this are to play good 2-drops and/or be able to drop an activated gatekeeper or voidwielder or big threat etc around turn 4 or 5

there just are so few good two drops and going 3c means you're not gonna be able to play them sometimes. and something like wojek becomes a gamble every game. I mean I don't disagree that it's nice to get one, esp since a t2 dude w/ 3 power can often attack 2-3 times, it's just not a strategy you can rely on. but I don't think anything is in this format.

i feel like the best decks i've played against so far have been two color decks or four color bomb decks, not sure how much that means when i've only done six drafts but i'm starting to be a little less willing to just put myself into three colors with my second pick, which was sort of what i'd been doing early.

i've been doing best with what i'd call "2.5-color" tempo decks meaning they have 2 base colors and then a 3rd color that fills out the midgame and lategame plays but isn't as strongly represented (maybe 5 or 6 spells of the 23). of course in some % of drafts it doesn't work out that nicely and i end up with just a straight 3 color mess

best deck I've seen (from a very limited sample) was a GW deck that splashed black for blood baron.

http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=142138&d=1368656652

i think they've outdone sublime archangel in the core set limited bombs category

wait that says d14...is it in m14?

i watched the ign preview - its in both but the video was mostly about duels

all the D14 cards that don't exist yet are presumably in M14, this is why they're starting to send out card previews already since the duels game comes out first and will spoil some of the set

I thought there were some duels only cards?

i have last year's duels and there are no duels-only cards in it

i was looking at thse recenttly wrt the D14 cards being spoiled. 2012 DOTP had 2 new planeswalkers in, one of whom was ral zarek, but it doesn't look like there have been any other new format-specific cards.

ral zarek had a deck in it but didn't actually have a card (dotp games don't have planeswalker cards)

if we are to believe that, then this is a card:

Enlarge 3GG
Sorcery (U)
Target creature gets +7/+7 and trample until end of turn, and must be blocked this turn if able.

which is exactly the kind of card I love

it has catsploitation art too