Magic: The Gathering C/D

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

wow, that's way better

Walking to work yesterday there were soggy, rained-on Magic TG cards scattered all over the footpath.

hope they don't get rid of the new Sealed queues with the extended downtime. You don't even have to 3-0 that often to go infinite on these.

no changes announced to those, they're just adding a 'retro format of the week' which is triple innistrad this week

I really like that idea, and IMO the big advantage of MTGO over paper Magic is the ability to do something like this at the drop of a hat. Not surprised it's taken them 10 damn years to do it though.

as much as i'd like to kill people with demonmail hauberk again i might have to pass on these since they're a bit pricey and i still haven't mastered 3x THS whereas i've done about 100 innistrad drafts already

making these phantom would be too much to ask wouldnt it

i think phantom drafts are not somewhere they're willing to go, since cube already draws a huge amount of people away from regular drafts and fucks with the card economy every time it goes up.

if people could draft infinitely for like $30 a month it would probably ruin some peoples lives

people always suggest the monthly draft subscription without actually thinking what the results of it would be

they put up free drafts once for an afternoon, earlier this year i think, and the result was that a good chunk of people would join, draft a deck, and then immediately go join another rather than play their matches unless their deck was perfect, meaning the drafts ended up being just a series of byes with few actual matches of magic being played. just like in poker, there needs to be a decently valuable incentive or the game breaks down

or rather, there needs to be an actual cost to entering a draft, or else the drafts won't be playable, as demonstrated in an actual event that happened

I think you could create some point system or make mtgo ratings public again

like let's say you get paired w/ people of similar ranking so if you just lose and drop all the time you don't even get to play in serious drafts

i dont think ratings are enough to disincentivize people from joining a million drafts and only playing the good ones - would at the very least have to be some points system where you can only join X drafts per day by default and can win more entries, plus a ladder/ranking system

even if there's a way to make it work i suspect the subscription model violates all their business strategies and is completely off the table

yeah that last part is true for sure, but I think a ladder/ranking system is totally viable in theory. you can disincentivize losing in lots of different ways (you can't play as often, you can't play good players)

I also think such a system would make a lot of casual players into really, really strong limited players

yeah i will agree with that

i think they've said a new ranking/player stats system is on the table for the future but this server stability crap is presumably pushing everything back several months