Magic: The Gathering C/D

RB is def the most underdrafted aggro deck yeah. but i actually think its strength is not having to play super-circumstantial cards like akroan crusader.

Yeah but you still want some kind of one-drop ideally. Potent of Betrayal can be nuts in this deck b/c the format sometimes revolves around building up big dudes that can't be taken out by anything short of Hemlock, and it seems like nobody ever really sees it coming.

by the way I'm gonna go ahead and reverse course on Akroan Horse, it's definitely not first-pick worthy but every time I've had it played on me it's been a nuisance. There are really not any ways for your opponent to just sac it and even if the "average" game only goes on for 3 turns after you play it you have to consider that the Horse is the sort of card that really encourages long games. Maybe it would be bad vs. decks with lots of fliers but I'm turning around on the card.

Had what I thought was a sweet Dimir build this weekend at a PTQ: Bident, Gorgon, Lash, Shipwreck Singer, Sip of Hemlock, 2 Naiads, 2 Disciple of Phenax, 2 Gray Merchant, 2 Baleful Eidolon, black Emissary, Dissolve, Vaporkin, Artisan of Forms and some other cards I can't remember (it was a great curve overall). Won the first two rounds, lost the next 3 pretty handily. With PTQs, I'm starting to believe whenever I think my deck is good, it isn't, and vice versa. Is my deck about average for Theros sealed or better than average?

Oh double Omenspeaker too, that was great

were you getting outraced by heroic decks?

that looks pretty decent but I'm guessing you really needed some of those 3/3 2-drop walls?

baleful eidolon handles that role okay in a pinch

that deck sounds good, i guess you just have to run better or play better. i dunno what to say.

The 3/3 guys would have been nice but I didn't play against any Heroic decks actually. Lost to a grindy deck with Elspeth and Archon, a UR Minotaur deck that got the hasty guy all three games, and a solid UW deck. Didn't mean for it to come off as complaining - even the best sealed deck can lose to variance and I definitely could have played better anyway - I was more curious how strong the average Theros sealed deck is. The decks I played against seemed pretty good overall.

Its hard to say, your deck looks better than average here. I have lost two 0-3 Swiss drafts with decks that I thought were pretty good, and I've 2-1'd with decks where I'd missed an entire pack due to a disconnect. All I can really say is that pretty much every deck has a long game, so U/B can't just play grindy anymore.

Could some of you dudes post drafts on raredraft if you have a chance? I'd like to see how some of you approach the format. I can do the same.

a standard deck:

4 rakdos cackler
4 tormented hero
4 thrill-kill assassin
4 pack rat
4 nightveil specter
4 desecration demon

4 thoughtseize
4 ultimate price
4 hero's downfall

20 swamp
4 mutavault

sideboard:
4 lifebane zombie
3 duress
3 doom blade
3 dark betrayal
2 pharika's cure

swap lifebane<->nightveil if you expect to face a lot of decks with targets for lifebane, everyones playing mono black/red/blue right now though so i have it this way. i am 6-0 with this on the night and the friends i got it from are crushing with it too

do you not like yr g/r deck? theres a standard ptq i need a deck for that cant use any of the esper cards since i promised esper to a friend and i've actually started assembling g/r (:/)

does Pack Rat actually work in standard ?

yes, amazingly enough.

GR deck is more fun but it has bad matchups vs mono-blue and anger of the gods decks. the latter barely exist though so its been fine overall, and i'm still building it irl myself since i have 0 black cards for this one.

is rescue from the underworld good enough to support a new reanimator deck? rites had such huge card advantage, but rescue has better upside. i worry that it might be too eggs-in-basket, but i wanna make it work. the meta seems... friendly to reanimator these days.

theres definitely a real fun draft deck based around it with Gray Merchant, Returned Centaur, and the 4/3 with the Raise Dead ability

yeah return is insane in a good black limited deck

i think rescue is worse than obzedat's aid since aid can reanimate a whip that got salvaged away. either way i think you don't want too many copies of any 5cmc reanim spell, you just want a bunch of copies of whip, plus a bunch of mana dorks to reach angel of serenity naturally

Ashen Rider seems good in that sort of deck. But how do you mill yourself these days?

grisly salvage, commune with the gods

drown in filth :)

deadbridge chant, expensive but you could go crazy

i have tried a bunch of different versions of g/b and junk reanimator lists and couldn't get anything to work. the 'best' list was really just a midrange golgari deck that ran whip for value. non-shrine ramp strategies seem overly vulnerable so i didn't feel comfortable playing the 8-elves style reanimator deck like last season and you don't even have farseek to fall back on. all the reanimation spells are expensive and p inefficient and the while the top end of the reanimation suite is excellent in angels and ashen riders, there aren't as many good value targets at lower cc. really theres just shadowborn demon and thats it. maybe once the g/w and g/b scry lands are in standard a junk version might work?

gonna straight up brag itp but: won a small gpt today after scrubbing out of the ptq. was really happy with how i drafted and am glad i am working out the kinks in my sealed game. also nice for my first gp to be both free and slightly easier. final brag: got a marsh flats and some foil malestrom pulses with the credit from my win.

sorry but no one i know irl would care about this at all so

so: time to sell out of magic online?

http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/273

what have the issues been?

stability/scalability issues mostly - ever since the playerbase increased a bunch around the time RTR came out, events have been crashing often on the weekends

and yeah this is probably going to devalue constructed cards - i already sold off my standard collection except for a rdw deck

this article may have set some of this off:

http://www.starcitygames.com/article/27314_The-Magic-Online-Championship-Series-Should-Not-Exist.html

especially coming from someone who is A) one of Magic's most famous players and B) developing a direct competitor to MTGO

yeah that is balls

yeah it seems way too drastic - daily events are the most player-friendly events that they run, and are not what's been crashing

Seems like a strange overreaction though. Unless the occurrence of those big events is preventing them from fixing the stability issues. I guess that's possible?

Based on my friends list of people who play MTGO, it sounds like they are willing to put with the instability to play DEs. It's not like this is a new issue for them.

so is now the time for a cheapskate like me to buy into an MTGO deck? I'm looking at some lengthy downtime in the coming month due to surgery, so if I could kick back and play some standard online, that would be sweet.

i think Theros cards are probably at an all-time low right now

don't forget to hit up your ol' buddy frogbs if you need standard stuff. I really just play limited so I have some surplus.

all that said I really hope something like Hex or Hearthstone can take advantage of this. I see people in limited chat every time I log in that say they're switching over. dunno how many of them are serious but MTGO is kind of a raw deal to begin with and you're adding stability issues and a terrible interface on top of it. I mean if there was a game 80% as good as magic that had a decent interface and better value I'd probably switch over too.

Moodles yeah wait a week or two for the effects of this partial shutdown to hit card prices, and you shoul dbe able to get some good deals, unless they put up more appealing queues which is not out of the question given the amount of rage directed at them right now for taking down DEs.

though actually these sealed queues they put up are really not that bad, its just that constructed DEs paid out packs as if they were worth like 2.5 -3 tix rather than the usual 4 they value them at, and the replacement queues don't do this

I'll keep an eye on it. I'm looking to run a B/g variant on mono-black devotion, which is what I've been working on in paper.

has anyone played much theros sealed? it is kind of bad. for all that it trends more slow most of the time ime it is decided by whoever opens most cards towards a faster heroic deck. in rtr and m14 i felt i could usually make something competitive out of whatever i got but in theros it seems like if you don't have the right cards for a particular type of deck you are SOL because someone else will. it has actually worked out for me okay because it has pushed me into drafting more instead and that has been going pretty well.

yeah theros is definitely one of those sets that works better in draft than sealed. i've felt like sealed is just all about the bestow creatures, since you have no control over whether you get the right ratio of creatures and pump spells for the good aggressive decks, but if you have a bunch of bestow guys you're way more likely to be able to build a deck with the proper ratios since they play both halves.

i only did one sealed and wound up with Anax and Cymede, Fabled Hero, and 2 Phalanx Leaders, Coordinated Assault and a bunch of Dragon's Breaths. it pretty much played itself. lately I feel like everyone's been trying to draft that deck.

i think anax/cymede, hammer and the dragon are the only cards that would make me go into red. i have found you can do pretty well with a midrangey RG tho with green being so deep and red often being underdrafted. it is a decent escape plan to jump on if your plan A is falling apart.

Black/Red aggro is a ton of fun. Dragon's Mantle (whoops) is such a great, undervalued card. I also feel like scry in red decks is better than it is in other decks.

That said Black/Green Rescue from the Underworld decks are easily my favorite things to draft right now. Milling yourself with Commune with the Gods and then playing Rescue to blink a Gray Merchant and bring back Abhorrant Overlord is amazing. Plus if you get a Whip you can really have some fun.

dragon's mantle suddenly makes the oread and 2h cerberus a lot more interesting, and there seem to always be a ton of those knocking around the mid/late picks

so is now the time for a cheapskate like me to buy into an MTGO deck?

probably, i'm going to keep an eye on the price of older format staple cards in particular, i guess banking on the hope that after a decade they're going to figure out how this works eventually

red is probably the worst color in theros limited by i've had a lot of success w/ it, maybe because people keep exaggerating the degree to which its worse than the other colors

So I'm cashing out. Anyone know anything about how reliable MTGOTraders is for buying collections? They've made me a fine offer and I just wanna make sure I get paid

exactly. the difference between the best color and the worst color in Theros is much much smaller than say, Blue >>> White in M14, or say Selesnya > Izzet in RTR. there's no color, or even color combination I would avoid drafting now - everything seems to work (though R/G feels a little wonky) I feel Red is a bit underrated at the moment since you can get a lot of turn 5-6 kills with it and cards like Portent of Betrayal can be such a backbreaker against a lot of strategies.

So I'm cashing out. Anyone know anything about how reliable MTGOTraders is for buying collections? They've made me a fine offer and I just wanna make sure I get paid

i've used them before and they were fine. ticket to cash conversion wasn't the best but they paid right away

i'm keeping 1 deck each for standard, modern, and pauper. i liquidated everything else but i'm not planning to cash out, just gonna sit on the tickets for the long haul and hope that we get real progress

or more accurately, i'm gonna draft them all away

has anyone played much theros sealed? it is kind of bad. for all that it trends more slow most of the time ime it is decided by whoever opens most cards towards a faster heroic deck. in rtr and m14 i felt i could usually make something competitive out of whatever i got but in theros it seems like if you don't have the right cards for a particular type of deck you are SOL because someone else will. it has actually worked out for me okay because it has pushed me into drafting more instead and that has been going pretty well.

I've been playing a tonnnn of sealeds over the last week..the new phantom points system actually ended up making it pretty easy to go phantom-infinite. I don't think I've ever opened a pool I felt was straight unplayable but I'll often be able to say 'this won't 3-0'. heroic decks almost always peter out faster in sealed than draft so you just need to be able to survive the early assault.