Magic: The Gathering C/D

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

whoa. I hadn't even looked at the art. I dont like it as much as the original Might of Oaks (I think it's a lot funnier that the squirrel looks bewildered instead of aggressive) but that is pretty wild!!

Boros Battleshaper did a huge amount of work for me last night. That card is just nasty once you get rolling with it.

So far with DGR draft, I've been picking up a ridiculous amount of rare and mythic bombs. Last night it was Battleshaper, Teysa, Archon, Utvara Hellkite, plus Sacred Foundry. Is it a trap to be picking all of these up? My biggest downfall is not ramping quickly enough and getting outpaced, yet I feel like I could be making this work if I throw in 1 or 2 more cluestones. Should I let some of these go and focus on a tighter curve or just go nuts and play as many bombs as possible?

I feel that bombs play a big role in this format as well, as A) DGM has a lot of Limited bombs, B) a lot of the big Gatecrash creatures (like Ragebeast) are now more likely to hit the table thanks to the slower format + more accel, and C) with most decks being 3 color odds are that a lot of the big multicolor stuff is going to actually wind up in a deck

Moodles ramping into bombs is absolutely a fine strategy in this format, just make sure you still have ways to interact on turn 2-4. if you're just playing lands and cluestones your first 3 or 4 turns, a good tempo deck will just run you out of the game since even once you land a big blocker they'll have all their removal/bounce sitting ready in their hand still.

if you're finding yourself getting outpaced, consider valuing the good early blockers more highly. frostburn weird and frilled oculus in particular are very strong 2-drops since they scale into the midgame, and even something like azorius arrester often does good work slowing your opponent down a bit and then trading off with one of their guys. and if those aren't available you should be able to pick up defenders like the 0/5 wall or trestle troll pretty late in packs

basically anything with 4 toughness that comes down turn 2 or 3 is going to slow down your opponent significantly unless they burn off one of their removal spells on it in which case that makes your golgari longlegs or whatever other midgame creature you're setting up more likely to stick around

I feel like smart sideboarding is even more important in this format beceause there are so many different archetypes you can be playing against - the 0/5 wall can be a essential card against some decks and terrible against slower decks

maro's been dropping hints on his blog that there might be a futureshifted card in Theros, so i went through the FS spoiler and the best i could come up with was Daybreak Coronet or Storm Entity, the latter of which i think is a lot more likely. i really like the idea of printing the future cards 'for real' but so many of them have keyword mechanics or specific placenames/identifiers in the card names that it's not too surprising they haven't been able to fit them in anywhere lately.

ha, to me "might be" reads as "almost certainly will be". I was thinking of the Warriors/Cowards card but they already printed that one didn't they?

what are some examples of FS cards that were actually fs'd?

the most recent one was bloodshot trainee in scars of mirrodin

there were a bunch from lorwyn/shadowmoor but that was the next block so they actually just planted the cards that they already knew would exist, they don't have the luxury of doing that anymore

oh nimbus maze is the other possibility, i don't think we know the plane for that yet

boldwyr intimidator, graven cairns, mistmeadow skulk are a few off the top of my head. the craziest one was goldmeadow lookout, a card that didn't get reprinted itself but instead made token copies of goldmeadow harrier which was a card in lorwyn

also tarmogoyf was the first card to mention the tribal and planeswalker card types in its rules text, both of which debuted in lorwyn

err wait, there was a tribal card in future sight, never mind. but still, goyf spoiled the coming of planeswalker cards

that's interesting, I didn't know that. must have started a few riots.

Yes, but not nearly as many as the stupid Contraption card.

Just looked up a full list of FS reprints, I completely forgot Mass of Ghouls and Phosphorescent Feast has been brought back too.

there's a few other cards that could be possible if the block has an enchantment theme, like the aura swap one or spellwild ouphe, but my money's on storm entity unless we have pre-existing info i haven't seen about what plane its flavor text refers to

storm entity also notably is pretty fun with burning-tree emissary, and not particularly stronger than the existing interaction with champion of the parish which will be gone by then

also whatever block Street Wraith is from is gonna be sweet if it ever happens

Just in terms of planning and design the whole Time Spiral block is one of the coolest things that any game has ever done. even the real subtle things like Malach of the Dawn being a male angel (because it's from the "alternate present" set and all other Angels were female) are incredibly clever even if few ever understood the significance

The story of Tarmogoyf is actually quite entertaining. The whole idea was that they wanted to spoil the Planeswalker type in reminder text and it originally was designed as a 2G */*. It then got deleted and some designer re-added it from memory, thought it was only 1G and did the toughness as *+1 because that's how all Llurgoyfs were. And bam...$100 card

Dryad Arbor feels a tiny bit Greek somehow? Love that card so much.

Didn't know Goyf was a mistake but it makes sense! I wonder how many other super-strong cards have that kind of backstory (I know that Clamp and Jitte do) versus Obzedat-style 'we know this card is nuts'

my favorite was that batterskull was an intentional "hey no one's playing this sweet stoneforge mystic card that's been around for months, let's make an equipment that's really good with it" and then the channelfireball guys broke stoneforge mystic at the pro tour before it came out and the R&D guys got to have a fun 3 months of sweating

oh nimbus maze is the other possibility, i don't think we know the plane for that yet

i like nimbus maze as the future sight plant - theres been lots of solid spec that the M10/ISD lands are leaving standard for a bit and i think that a cycle of nimbus maze lands would be a reasonable alternative to those

Dryad Arbor is one of the cards that Maro has specifically said likely won't be back because it caused too many rules issues

i really hope the days of skewed information aren't completely over now, i wasn't following the caw-blade pro tour at the time but the stories i've heard about it are great. apparently in the first several rounds opponents were consistently casting inquisition of kozilek, seeing a stoneforge in their hand, and ignoring it and choosing to take something like a spell pierce or mana leak instead. i'd love to see another pro tour where one team has a surprise stranglehold on the format.

i'm actually really excited by this pro tour since i don't really have a clear idea what the metagame will look like. mtgo is so skewed my red decks that it will be interesting to see a meta that exists with them almost entirely absent. i've been working a bit on a block deck for this weekend for the mocs prelim and keep thinking about all these silly midrange-y decks that dont have good enough matchups against red to even bother with

yeah i need a deck for this weekend too - will probably play a varolz deck but i'm not sure if the straight BG one is best or if there's room to add red and make it look more like my standard deck with domri, ghor-clan rampager, etc.

i had varloz in a draft and now kind of love that card - also have had aetherling twice and think it is basically the best limited card ever

varloz jund seems like something that doesnt quite match up w/the mtgo meta tho

i saw a list with boros reckoner, firemane avenger, lavinia that i liked too. basically i want something proactive that's a bit more robust than the mono-red deck

haha maybe thats my list - i've been playing those cards in a w/r/u kinda tempo list. its still a bit of mess but it has a really good match up against red