Magic: The Gathering C/D

As soon as Theros got spoiled I went in on Tidebinders at about .80 and Nightveils at .27. Cashed out Nighveil at $2 and maybe should have held a little longer. My 60 Mana Blooms are looking fairly useless though. I am shocked on Pack Rat too. I still don't know what kind of decks those are going in.

its in the monoblack deck. as it turns out, constructed decks can't beat t2 pack rat either unless they have removal on turn 2 (thoughtseize is good at preventing this) or have supreme verdict or detention sphere.

looking at the price for sphere and supreme verdict it seems people are not playing those cards as much as I thought

i think it's cool that it's getting play though. if you were to design a card that's super broken in Limited but kinda meh in Constructed I think Pack Rat is it

its super broken in constructed too, is the point

I mean, usually it wouldn't be. This is the first time I can remember where Constructed has only one playable sweeper, but it's a gold card, AND the best one-mana discard spell ever happens to be there to pluck it right out.

super broken seems like an overstatement

maybe, but when you're playing a creature deck it is similar to stoneforge mystic in that you have a very small window of time to deal with it before it invalidates your deck's strategy

once we get the WU temple i would not be surprised to see more hybrid builds of the mono-u deck sacrificing some speed for the ability to cast detention sphere

though at the same time, all it takes is a thragtusk or huntmaster type premium midrange threat to push pack rat back out of the format, there's a reason it wasn't played in the last standard

yeah i think its just really good 'right now', am curious to see how good it ends up being. fwiw i had been playing u/w control on mtgo when dailies were still going and felt the mononblack match-up was p good. otoh there seems to be some evidence that a lot of the people playing monoblack werent v good, and that was kinda skewing its win % online. also those decks were only playing two pack rats.

xps - i inadvertently made a lot of money off desecration demons and nightveil specters simply by opening approximately 10 million of them during rtr block drafts. i actually made like $50 on spectres in paper since i had opened so many and had bought a playset of the promo ones when they were $2. i sold or traded p much all my excess paper standard cards last weekend at the gp for legacy/commander stuff because i'm tired of having so much money tied up in stuff like reckoners. i did hold on to all my scrylands since they're basically worthless right now. will probably miss the ability to just make any deck but otoh i haven't played paper standard since game day and don't see myself playing it anytime before the new year and i now have a bunch of duals and fetches so that's p sweet.

jealous

haha yeah desecration demon was by far my most opened rare in RTR and i threw all of them in my bulk box since no one cared about them at the time, now i've got a bunch of $10 cards suddenly

i'm also planning to trade off most of my standard stuff for modern cards though since i don't play standard enough times during any given rotation. i just keep the red cards since there's always a mono-red deck these days and i tend to enjoy playing those just fine

yeah the Nightveil price explosion has been nice for people like me who tried to force Dimir every GTC draft

I have a foil one that I can't seem to get rid of

foil standard good-right-now-for-like-10-minutes cards are real burdens

i tend to just trade those in to the store if i can't find anyone to trade for them since getting like 60% on a flash in the pan card is often still more than you get later if it crashes back to earth

i just noticed that the boston standard ptq is awkwardly 1 week after born of the gods comes out so i'm probably gonna have to buy cards at exorbitant prices if there's anything good in that set

also i won't be able to test for it on mtgo since it's literally the day the set comes out on there

also since we're talking about card prices this was p interesting

http://www.avclub.com/article/heres-a-halfhour-musical-about-magic-the-gathering-106186

this is bizarre

someone linked that in a chat i was in the other day, couldn't handle more than a minute or two of it

http://www.magicev.com/

that's an awesome resource

here's the cube i've been working on building for the past week or so:
http://cubetutor.com/visualspoiler/3961

the rules i have set are
1) no rares
2) modern-legal (though i just realized i have preordain in there whoops)
3) i'm not buying cards for it, everything in so far are cards that i own and i'm only going to add to it via donations/trades

still trying to figure out the right balance between control/aggro/etc cards and just how many niche cards you need to support more unusual archetypes e.g. the 'dredge' deck or 'aristocrats' deck but i think it should be fun

you could probably use more fixing than just the guildgates unless you specifically want to make greedier decks really difficult

yeah i might be a bit short on the manafixing. ideally i think i want the default to be 2-color decks (i specifically avoided putting in too many gray merchant type cards that push towards monocolor though i did keep gray merchant itself in) but for 3+ color decks to be possible especially in green.

i don't have any tri-lands but those would be a good addition i think if i can dig some up

oh man, RIP awesome sealed payouts :(

have been doing pretty well in THS draft recently but had a howler today losing two games with misplays involving artisan of forms. #1 cast ordeal of thassa on artisan, copied polis crusher, ordeal falls off. #2 enchant nimbus naiad onto artisan, copied my own daxos...

i've been doing well too, though i'm entering the late-in-format phase of reaching for silly decks rather than drafting consistent ones

e.g. i drafted a UR 'combo' deck with meletis charlatan and flamespeaker adept and a dozen scry spells the other night. it had 2 spellheart chimeras in it too which are not as embarrassing as i expected

I'm there too. Right now the Rescue from the Underworld deck with Nemesis/Gorgon/Commune/Centaur is my favorite. Got a sweet U/R deck with 3 Triton Fortune Hunters and 3 Dragon Mantles which was incredible (still lost a match to mana troubles)

Rescue from the Underworld is quickly becoming a favorite for me. I'm currently working on a reanimator deck for standard that aims to abuse Rescue with Abhorrent Overlord.

post a list when you can!

recently played some standard with a mono-black devotion deck vs. a red one (with some green for Domri Rade). I suspect both decklists are quite popular as they're quite nuts. Nythkos seems like an absolutely crazy card and maybe one to stock up on for next year.

i think nykthos is at its peak right now, we're not gonna have RRR and UUU etc. permanents in standard all the time

peak playability i mean, not sure about price

well historically lands that can produce more than one mana have always been valuable. I mean it's likely not gonna be a Standard staple for long but it feels like something that can find a few homes in other formats.

theres a green genesis wave deck in modern with it but its like half a turn too slow in my experience

Holiday cube is back, I know it's a strictly losing proposition but most MTGO events are and this thing is fun as hell. There's really nothing like it in any other card game.

tonight I'm going to a friends house w/ some other edh/cubey friends and we're gonna communally mtgo cube on his huge projector for hours on end

Most fun I've ever had on MTGO was communal triple-Innistrad drafting with my buddy on his account. The draft was a trainwreck because we kept arguing, but we played so tightly during the games cause we had two brains working on each decision. We won one match with about 20 seconds left on the clock, it was glorious

Trainwreck may be overstating it I guess (we made the finals), but let's just say we disagreed a lot.

yeah one of my friends is a streamer and he attributes a lot of his success to having people yell at him when he's about to do something stupid

sounds like a fun night. I don't play anywhere close to perfect in 'normal' draft but Cubes have such deep strategy, almost to the point where all you can do is wing it and hope for the best. For example I just played a game where we both had Consecrated Sphinxes out (I Imaged his) and got into a feedback loop when he casted Sphinx's Revelation. The card I really wanted was Regrowth to get back my Time Walk, but it turned out to be in my last 2 cards, thus if I drew it and Time Walked, I would have been decked. But I failed to realize that I had an Eldrazi in hand to discard at the end step to reshuffle my deck. And I kinda beat myself up a bit over it, but also wondered, how many people would've caught that?

xp I guess if you're not that big a streamer, that would work well. Every time I watch Michael Jacob's stream, people yell 100 different conflicting things at him so the chat is just noise.

yeah my friend rarely has a ton of people watching, mostly just a core group of followers

most of the time when someone is yelling something at mj about how he's playing incorrectly it's actually the chat person who is wrong

and then because of that 75% of mj's stream is him dragging out an explanation of how wrong they are

ive been doing power cube all weekend and it is really fun however my record is terrible because i dont really know what cards do or why theyre good and so i just keep drafting kinda fair control decks

I think control decks / fair decks are better in regular cube than power cube, the acceleration and ancestral recall etc. etc just make anything but a highly tailored unfair deck not very good

they are incredibly swingy games. I seem to go from "I am definitely going to win this game" to "how the hell did I lose this" very quickly (and vice versa!)

yeah the unfair decks seem like the best decks and i think the fast aggro decks are also fairly strong. i watched dzy draft this insane r/w stax deck that won on turn 4-6 almost every game. multiple games he won w/ his opponent having no permanents in play. but i get nervous trying to draft combo so i just take all the counterspells and hope i can counter w/e their key play is