Magic: The Gathering C/D

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.

have you gone phantom-infinite? I'm thinking of attempting it though I'm not huge on Sealed. Seems to be a good way to pick up those MOCS dual lands and play for really cheaply.

phantom drafts (especially of old sets) would be incredible but I'm not holding my breath.

well I've done like 25 sealeds off 6 bucks, so for now I have, I could still have a losing streak

thats still pretty good entertainment value for 6 bucks even if you run out of points imo

yeah def

i did calculate what kind of winning % you'd need to go infinite. my win % in draft is good enough to do it, but I'd imagine sealed would have a little more variance.

that's really great actually. you don't have to go too long between 3-0s for your points to disappear, even going 2-1.

i suspect the level of competition in those queues is a bit lower than in, say, a sealed DE though. i played a couple of them during DGM and my opponents weren't completely awful but i still felt favored regardless of my pool

yeah for sure

4-pack sealed had a lot of terrible players too, I imagine this is where a lot of them went

I think you rarely see outright play mistakes but people make building mistakes that leave them w/ bad mana, stuff like that

i mean theres obviously correlation between inexperienced players and players unwilling to spend $25 on a sealed but who knows what will happen now that sealed DEs are gone

the phantom sealed events are pretty soft but not nearly as soft as swiss draft events ime. i think a decent # of people used them to grind qps at least from the times when i recognized user names in the queues

well i'll probably be playing some now since i enjoy sealed and i can't imagine card prices are going to be favorable for playing real sealeds over phantom

yeah it's insane that anyone ever opens 6 packs for a regular sealed event

i really hope the season 12 MOCS happens because the format is 'cube sealed'. although i wonder how easy it will be for people (and really by people i mean me) to get QPs w/o daily or premier events firing

they've already said it's not happening, in the announcement. i already have about 15 QPs sadly, was about to make another run at 35

though the more annoying thing is that the player of the year MOCS is in fact still happening, and i'm like maybe 10-15 constructed QPs away from sneaking into that, which would have been trivial to get in dailies but not in 8-man queues

The whole Magic Online team is working on a plan right now to address the events of those types that have already begun (e.g., MOCS season 12 and upcoming MOCS LCQs) and will be updating MTGO.com soon with more news on those events.

i figure they'll try to work something out to let the MOCS happen. maybe staggered queues or something else that lets them work on the server stuff while still running the event idk.

^ actually not sure if worth's announcement predates or postdates turians, where he says MOCS s12 isnt happening. i was really sure they'd try to work something else out other than 'heres a cube draft suckers'

yeah it's insane that anyone ever opens 6 packs for a regular sealed event

― iatee, Wednesday, November 13, 2013 12:43 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

getting your 6 packs back for a 2-1 is not bad at all

wow, I'm going to play as many of these 6-pack queues as possible

yeah i did the arithmetic on those and they pay out 4.5 packs per player which makes them the best sealed events they've ever had on modo. they're basically like they took a sealed daily and gave everyone a first round bye.

if Theros card prices weren't so tanked I would say you could maybe go infinite on these

well. I'm going to try anyway.

i think you still can if you're reasonably good at sealed

i'm not sure how to do sealed with this set. I tried one yesterday and it was basically me losing to Stormbreath Dragon and Ashiok over and over again.

do you have a favorite site for tracking mtgo prices? I'm not sure how accurate some them are.

MTGOtraders seems pretty accurate. You can see the Theros rares at a glance here:

http://www.mtgotraders.com/store/THS_Rare.html

http://www.mtggoldfish.com