Magic: The Gathering C/D

I thought you only get rats when your own creatures die. Guess he's better than I realized.

so yeah, steep learning curve on ambitions and expectations for dgm sealed. after bombing a couple times i realized that most of the time instead of some fun 3+ colour deck you really want to end up with something that looks more like what you'd have put together for rtr or gtc, i.e. 2 colours and maybe a splash, except it will inevitably be crappier with each guild mechanic much harder to come by. so with my new insight i went from zero to hero, winning with a BW deck splashing green for 2 cards, featuring a grand total of 1 extort card (and 3 populate). i just concentrated on consistency and a good curve, pitched hardly any higher than i would've for an individual set.

my previous time out i'd built a deck around trying to get some bigger creatures out quickly. i dropped that 7/5 gruul beastie that makes lands give 2 mana in 2 games - followed in the first by my opponent playing a 15/15 slime molding and in the second dying immediately to debt to the deathless

yeah i've still never seen that guy played but word on the street is avoid

I think w/ block limited you also have to accept that there is so much variance in what you're opening that you don't need to think of a hard and fast rule. 4c fun might be the right choice in one situation, 2 color boring creatures in another.

that recognition - understanding what i have in my pool of cards and how i can cobble that into something effective - is obviously going to be far harder than the relative hand-holding of the rtr and gtc sealeds. still, i am glad i had a little time to get used to those more forgiving formats, even if i have to unlearn some of my assumptions.

i don't mind building around cards or interactions in this sealed format but i'm not sure that's right, there are just lots of fun things to do that are fairly powerful. i vastly prefer drafting to sealed in this format tho, so i haven't really been doing much of it

first 5 picks in DGM are two Fluxchargers, two Nivix Cyclopses, and a Turn/Burn, this deck is incredible. btw Nivix Guildmage always seems to go until like the 12th pick in RTR.

I'm starting to think that 2-color strategies are generally best. I tend to go 2-1 a lot with 3 colors because I can never get enough gates and always end up losing one match to missing a color. Most of my 3-0s thus far have been straight Boros or Gruul. Surprisingly both times I think I wound up playing more cards out of RTR than GTC. It's not as risky as I thought...

yeah nivix guildmage is way better now that the format is slower

also particularly good in that deck

last night I had a super solid 2 color speed dimir deck and I still lost a match to a noob playing 4c w/ horrible fixing because of bad luck w/ lands. otoh I managed to beat someone else w/ that deck while stuck on 3 lands.

I think 'two colors is a successful strategy' is misleading though - two color decks are going to be 3-0ing a lot because someone who had their two colors open is going to have a v. strong deck regardless, not necessarily because 2 color decks are the better strategy in any given circumstance. sometimes they are. but other times they're not.

quick question: which is more effective against UW control in standard, Aetherling in particular, Slaughter Games or Pithing Needle?

burning-tree emissary?

yeah lamp otm, they can beat any or all of those cards but they can't beat fast starts where you out-tempo them by playing free creatures and creatures with haste

lol this ptq

what about it?

frozen @ the end of round 7

btw i added you on my main mtgo account not sure what the etiquette is there

I drafted again tonight and had a pretty sunk draft because it took me way too long to figure out I was esper not grixis but I did manage to win a bunch of games with whispering madness and place 3rd (out of 6)

whispering madness...kinda playable?? sometimes.

more than in gatecrash at least

standard update: 4-0ed two daily events in a row with this:
http://i.imgur.com/VWaaIdo.jpg

i think it's pretty good, though not exactly the pinnacle of innovation

whats the split card?

turn // burn presumably?

i tried a rug walkers list that had mostly the same creature base at fnm two weeks ago, went 3-1 but played some p loose opponents. i can't even remember exactly what was in it except i didn't have statiscaster main and had tamiyo.

how is the caster used?

that was what I was guessing. I like that card a ton and I'm hoping it sees some play

staticaster is maindeck because there's a ton of lingering souls decks on modo right now, or at least there were last weekend. in matchups where its 'dead' you can still use it to stretch your burn spells an extra point of damage on bigger creatures game 1, or combo it with turn so you can send the burn half elsewhere, or use it with ral zarek to kill 2-toughness creatures

did you get many ral ultimates?

haha yeah i did the ultimate for the first time today

5 heads

i'm sort of annoyed with myself for wanting to buy some ral zareks on mtgo now, i wanna try the deck out. i'm assuming it has a p solid junk aristos match-up with statiscaster and bonfire main?

yeah it should, so far i've mainly played vs aggro and jund though which both go fine. turns out the way to break the jund mirror is to play an aetherling, not too surprising

i'm in the market for a new modern deck now, with voices pushing 50 tix and thoughtseizes spiking after their absence from modern masters was confirmed, i want to sell high on those and play something without them until they come back down

i'm still playing u/w/r control which is fine on mtgo but probably not great irl - i like the idea of scapeshift but have never played it so certainly can't recommend it. also there's kibler's deck from gp portland or maybe san diego - the one that eggs won - with knight of the reliquary

i like the idea of kibler's decks but there's so much combo on mtgo right now that i'm not sure a midrange deck without thoughtseize is playable

i know i am late to the party here, but boros battleshaper is insane

I had a foil one tonight in my deck

never got to cast it cause I also had firemane avenger, which also wins the game and comes out 3 turns earlier

but yeah battleshaper just takes over the board. if you're playing a 7 drop you want it be more than just a big creature.

managed to trade my voices and thoughtseizes into two entire modern decks, did not expect that

hopefully voice won't get into JTMS price territory and make me look like a fool but i can't imagine a 2-color card surpassing bonfire or sword of war and peace which both topped out at 50

does it get played a lot outside of Standard? because that seems to be the deciding factor.

it's been showing up in various pod decks where it seems pretty good - i don't think legacy is particularly welcoming to g/w rn. i have sold mine when they were @ 41 when i sold most of my mtgo stuff and don't particularly regret it

what decks did you buy into cider?

splinter twin and rg tron

twin was basically a freeroll since i was only missing the twins/kikis which are reasonably cheap right now, and i've played the deck to a bit of success in the past. tron isn't great right now and i don't know how to play it well (yet) but it's my favorite modern deck and has the opposite matchups to twin so it seemed like a good complement

so 3(586) people for providence? that doesn't break charlotte right?

magic players not having friends probably played into this

Yeah it was a lot less people than Charlotte. Did you guys end up going? I ended up having no time to think the past week, forgot to check on this thread.

My team's pool was ass but I think we built it as well as we could. We started with an BWu deck that was quite strong, but after that was a struggle. Every deck we built that used green had a horrible curve so we ended up ditching green altogether. We made UWR to make use of Archon of the Triumvirate and Niv-Mizzet, the remaining bombs we had, and the deck was decent. That left a godawful Rakdos deck, that was slightly improved after we plundered the Orzhov deck for black cards. We went 4-4 with several close matches, and we didn't play the last round so we could eat. After the tournament, we went over the pool again and didn't see any better decks to make.

I still had a blast. If my deck is gonna be lousy, I'd rather be playing alongside friends. The communication aspect was really interesting but it took some time to get the rhythm of when we should ask for help.

I almost went w/ a friend but we couldn't coordinate a solid third

the hipster magic store in wburg is doing invasion block draft tonight

kinda want to go but can't justify $25 for drafting sets where I don't know the cards

its a fun draft format - not too different from the DGR drafts of today - but $25 is quite steep when you know you'll likely walk away with less than two bucks worth of cards. those rares have not really held up outside of Vindicate/Deed/Orim's Chant.

I just won a game on mtgo where the other dude cast armed and dangerous for the win while I had a teysa out - the double strike killed the unblocked creature via teysa before the 2nd strike came. opponent only saw it after he played it, I didn't even realize it until it happened.

he was like "oh no...teysa" and I thought he was mocking me

both those cards are so sick in limited

I kinda hate 'win out of nowhere' cards

looks like travis woo is spreading the gospel of nivix cyclops

fluxcharger is the one I seem to get every draft and it's worked wonders for me

speaking of cards that just win out of nowhere, played against a Blood Baron the other day and it dawned on me just how much I hate protection, especially when it's from two colors in a multicolor-oriented format