Magic: The Gathering C/D

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

yeah dzyl is amazing at cube

I just go for the green insane manaramp with Gaea's Cradle and Rofellos most times, splashing for whatever brokenness I can get otherwise. I'm kinda shocked that nobody seems to want Channel, even despite a wealth of colorless "you win" cards in the format.

I think GG is an awkward fit in a lot of broken decks and rampy green creatures still want a lot of G

not that I wouldn't take channel

what seems most mysterious to me is how to properly draft the manabases. good cubers will take like, off color pain lands over seemingly good cards and then later it turns out to be the right decision

well I mean I've never wound up with a deck where I didn't get enough playables, and lots of decks will want access to 3/4/5 colors for all kinds of reasons (say, to play a card like Channel?)

i had a really good natural order deck that i 3-0'd with but i generally avoid green in power cubes. i dont really think of channel as a green card though

my pet card is metalworker - its not nearly as good as i think it is but its often available like 6-8th pick and can do some p broken things

I seem to end up UG ramp an awful lot in Cube - pretty much every good draft I've had has been a variation on that deck.

i always feel alienated during cube times because i don't really like the mtgo cube at all. the power version is a bit more interesting but tends to not produce exciting games of magic, whereas the regular version of the cube is just bland to me

well actually i guess wnning on turn 2 is exciting but it doesn't produce interactive games

No idea if you're a longtime player but I think half the appeal is there, getting to play with all sorts of broken shit from the past like Balance, Channel, Tinker, Academy, etc. If you weren't around for those cards I can see why it would feel like a bunch of random things happening. I agree that the games tend to not be very interactive and often get to the point of, "I think I can win here, but I don't really know how"...and vice versa I've had games where I know my opponent can win if he figures things out.

i am a longtime player but i never enjoyed the super-broken cards for the most part. i like fact or fiction or primeval titan-level 'broken' cards, not actual broken cards like balance or workshop

I think the abundance of busted stuff in everyone's deck balances it out to the point that it can be fun, and they were aware enough to stock it with a lot of cards like Ancient Grudge/Wasteland/Null Rod to give players some recourse. Oddly enough I've probably played more drawn out, back-and-forth games of Cube than any other Limited format; the super-degenerate turn 2 or 3 kills don't really happen that often in my experience.

i think i just don't like cube in general - i enjoy playing with normal weak-ass cards as the default

http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/279

i like this card a bunch

xp yeah I can understand that. like if someone makes a suspicious attack in Theros with two untapped Plains, you know that they could have Battlewise Valor or God's Willing, and not a lot else. whereas in Cube you never know when a Thundermaw is going to take out all your Bitterblossom tokens or whatever

I was at 12 life w/ a grave titan, tapped out and the other guy had geist and aetherling, left open one blue and made aetherling an unblockable 8/1 and swing w/ geist and the 4/4. I blocked geist, slaughter pacted the aetherling forcing him to exile it, then control magic'd the aetherling next turn.

best format

http://i.imgur.com/2O9xNjq.jpg

I lost to a red deck due to bad hands and should have played underground sea and cursed scroll maindeck

but this was my favorite cube deck so far. it basically looks like my edh deck.

if my edh deck had loa mox sapphire ancestral recall and workshop

that looks amazing! only thing it lacks is Tinker :)

yeah I don't think there was one in the pool :(

hardest pick was grim monolith / mana drain / academy ...took the monolith, prayed for the academy to wheel

good call then - I would've definitely taken Academy. as awesome as Monolith is, Academy is the brokenest land ever printed, I couldn't risk it (that said, I never expect anything to wheel in Cube, even though the cards I want very often do)

yeah it def was the most busted card in the context of this deck, but it can be only-okay-to-bad in lots of decks. I knew there wasn't a storm deck and I was getting passed lots of power blue, so I decided to risk it.

so I've traded/bought my way into the entire uwr modern deck and am pretty set on playing as many local events as possible

owning a bunch of expensive fetchlands seems like a good short-term decision but a terrible medium-term decision but this is a hobby not a retirement fund so w/e

what do we think of the m15 card frames?

its jarring but understandable i guess? considering the secondary market price of standard staples i can see why they want the hologram and from experience the collector's numbers are a pain to read when you're sorting cards so thats p nice.

I wonder if this is a measure to stay a step ahead of counterfeiters. Anyway I agree that it's sort of jarring but I hated the 8th edition frames at first and grew to eventually prefer them so I trust they know what they're doing. I'm all for getting more goofy shit on the cards by the way.

yeah i don't really mind/care about this cardframe change at all, and the potential to eventually have some sort of machine-reader to register sealed pools using the bottom left info is kinda sweet though probably far off

i'm more interested in the other new things implied by
"I spent most of 2013 leading the design of M15, an ambitious set that will introduce a few new things to the game, not the least of which is an update to the existing card frame."

yeah you def couldn't say that about m14

i wish i had played more m14, i enjoyed what of it i did play. maybe now is a good time while waiting to move on from 3 x ths. i played a lot of gtc and ths but not a great deal in between at least as i remember it. full block return to ravnica ended up not being very good i thought, comparatively.

I loved full block rtr

yeah it was pretty fun though I think it turned more into "draft as many good cards as you can" rather than trying to build really synergistic decks (which RTR and GTC on their own were big on)

M14 limited was pretty bad I thought, not nearly as fun as the last couple core sets. Colors were wildly off balance (blue had such a ridiculous amount of great commons in comparison to every other color), the format was incredibly slow with almost no good 2-drops and a ton of creatures with higher toughness than power, and there was almost no way to get anything more than a 1-for-1 (hence why Divination was so solid). Too many games came down to who topdecked the least amount of lands in the end. That said some bits were fun - Blightcaster, Angelic Accord, and Tenacious Dead were all neat build-around uncommons, and the Bogbrew Witch deck was awesome if you could get it. Plus Mutavault is worth an obscene amount so it might be worth doing for EV purposes.

I hated how the rogue build around decks were pre-designed "what a coincidence this card gains you 4 life..." vs organically discovered

exception being the mono-blue deck w/ staffs

M14 limited was fun during the period where you could force r/b sacrifice and then not very much fun before or after but i hated full block rtr - def my least successful draft format and also pretty boring. i feel like i am probably not good enough at limited to really enjoy/'get' dgm/gtc/rtr but i hated how dead dgm packs were most of the time and hated the 'force gtc guilds' strategy and hated how unbalanced it felt

M14 was less fun than M12 and M13 for me but its probably good value right now in terms of the cards you can open esp. with Mutavault being a regular rare worth 25 tix

full block RTR was my most successful sealed format ever so i'm probably too biased to give it a fair evaluation. draft was just okay though.

yeah full block rtr sealed was great, I usually hate sealed because pools so often build themselves but w/ that much fixing you had a lot of flexibility