Magic: The Gathering C/D

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

its really hard to balance a set full of contextually powerful cards for both draft and sealed which is how we ended up with GTC sealed and Theros sealed which are both not great and kind of take the hit for a good draft format. M14 has no excuses like that though, that was just a mistake from the development team making white so weak.

i think Innistrad is probably the best job they've done getting a good sealed format with a Maro-style synergy-heavy set. but yeah Innnistrad was the stars-aligned perfect limited format all around so it was probably just a positive fluke

I thought RTR/GTC were both good draft formats but frustratingly linear; I think their stated goal was to give each guild an aggro strategy and a more controllish one, but in many cases one strategy was clearly better than the other. I also wish they hadn't made Izzet so damn underpowered because there were some really cool things you could do with it. Full block kinda threw everything into a blender and sorta forced the game to care more about overpowered cards over synergy, but it did allow for some awesomely goofy decks with 7 Gates and like 6+ rares in it to function.

I thought izzet was fine, golgari was the clunky one

I liked Golgari much more when I realized how good Zanikev Locust was. Izzet just feels underpowered as a whole; not clunky but rather like U/R in Theros where the P/T of your creatures just aren't on par with your opponent, and the spells don't quite make up the difference either.

frostburn weird/chainwalker/splatter thug are on par w/ anything. and you could prioritize them because good izzet spells would go late.

whereas even if I had a deck filled w/ golgari rares and uncommons I couldn't feel guaranteed to 3-0

all three of those felt better in Rakdos to me

def not weird, you wanted to be curving out and thus had a 1/4 a lot of the time

and yeah rakdos was better overall but izzet could emulate rakdos w/ its early picks and then get 6th pick izzet charm

Well the big problem is that outside of that Charm, Izzet doesn't really have too many good exclusives, especially at common. All the cards you really want are going to be taken by other decks (including the Weird, which yes is definitely better in Izzet). There are some great uncommons like Thoughtflare, Charm, and Teleportal, but all guilds have those. Best case scenario is like you said, nobody goes Izzet and you get late Charms and Guildmages (the Izzet Guildmage is pretty bad but still playable). Or you open Chemister or Niv-Mizzet and just go with it. I just think in general even the best Izzet decks tend to just snipe around and find a way to win one turn before they lose through Teleportal or Blast or whatever. It's hard to just dominate someone unless you get like 3x Lobber Crew or whatever.

it's not about dominating really, it's about making your opponent unsure of whether or not they're actually ahead, when you always reserve the potential to do tons of damage in 1-2 turns

still it's not like I think it's the best guild or even t2 just quite playable esp given the meta

hence why the Weird and Lobber Crew are so important, otherwise you get overwhelmed by 3/x's early on. so it sucks that those are both plenty playable in other decks

Dimir in GTC though I will maintain as being quite playable

like golgari, dimir was playable when open but even a very good dimir deck wasn't a guaranteed winner

only Dimir decks that felt "guaranteed" to me were the ones with lots of incidental mill + 2-3 Death's Approach and a Wight and a Horror or two. much easier to get because Dimir seemed to always be open when I drafted. I was always shocked to have to go against another Dimir deck.

holiday cube tonight had me losing to t1 black lotus -> true name nemesis

think I have officially had my fix

anyone know any good strategy articles i can read to kill some time?

what format?

i guess i am really only interested in limited atm

the sam black article that was posted upthread was really good

http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/generallimited/24692-Draft-The-Cards-You-Want-To-Play.html

this one?

yeah any of sam black on M13 limited: http://www.starcitygames.com/article/24646_Drafting-M13.html are p good. i remember watching him streaming a lot that summer, it was def helpful in improving how i play/think about limited

awesome thx dudes

would be nice to read something about Theros on that level

this was good iirc though its pretty basic stuff:
http://www.starcitygames.com/article/27005_Timing-Your-Removal-Spells-Theros-Limited.html

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/arcana/1404

at $75 there's gotta be a fetch or something in here

given how good these products have been in the past I would guess a $75 deck like this probably contains multiple money rares

I mean like FTV:20 level

i was wondering, have the standard equivalent of these been good in the past? this seems like simultaneously both an obvious and weird idea.

holiday cube tonight had me losing to t1 black lotus -> true name nemesis

just wanted to say wow @ this card, it's like they took everything that people disliked about protection and hexproof and evasion and put it all on the same overpowered blue card

i was wondering, have the standard equivalent of these been good in the past? this seems like simultaneously both an obvious and weird idea.

― Roberto Spiralli, Thursday, January 9, 2014 10:07 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah true name nemesis is a dumb card that should have never been printed but I drafted and won with it a lot in cube. maybe they want to destroy legacy by adding purposely unfun but strong cards to the mix.

i find it really funny how legacy players have always been fine with cards that create unfun uninteractive games like wasteland and show and tell, but suddenly are up in arms when the unfun uninteractive card is explicit about being so

yeah i've played two legacy events since true name came out, its hardly a less fun card than wasteland

v curious to see whats in the modern event deck. i've spent the last 6 months or so investing in modern staples i mean 'investing' isn't really the right word but i am kinda ambivalent about reprints rn

i saw some people guessing a take on melira pod, which seems like a decent guess because you can do lots of one ofs and birthing pod is obv never getting reprinted in a standard-legal set again. it also allows them a lot of flexibility over how many and which fetches they include

I have always found land destruction fun, I don't think it's worse than hand disruption really

doing Cube and the flashback Saga drafts is pretty interesting just to see all the stuff that's been rather subtly phased out of the game. part of me feels like they are tailoring the game a tad to accomodate MTGO.

my guess for the modern event deck was BW tokens - its not really a popular tier 1 deck in modern right now but it's playable, easy to pick up, and it explains the inclusion of the 2-sided tokens mentioned in the presser thing (spirits b/w soldiers). i don't think they're gonna do a combo deck and they're also obviuosly not handing out playsets of tarmogoyfs etc so that deck falls in a good spot where they could actually put in enough copies of the exciting cards (marsh flats, thoughtseize, etc) to make the deck playable without causing a panic

I think I'm gonna get into Modern soon, the stores here are alternating FNMs between that and Standard, and Modern seems to be drawing a lot of people. I haven't built a new standard deck in nearly 18 months so it kinda sucks to see all my stuff rotate out.

modern is in a pretty decent spot right now imo though i wouldn't mind a ban or unban this time around just to shake things up

my question is, how do I make Seance work

tokens is also pretty friendly to newer players, doesn't depend on a weird combo or lots of decisions

also

ban drs unban ancestral visions

the modern ban list:

Ancestral Vision
Ancient Den
Bitterblossom
Blazing Shoal
Bloodbraid Elf
Chrome Mox
Cloudpost
Dark Depths
Dread Return
Glimpse of Nature
Golgari Grave-Troll
Great Furnace
Green Sun's Zenith
Hypergenesis
Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Mental Misstep
Ponder
Preordain
Punishing Fire
Rite of Flame
Seat of the Synod
Second Sunrise
Seething Song
Sensei's Divining Top
Stoneforge Mystic
Skullclamp
Sword of the Meek
Tree of Tales
Umezawa's Jitte
Vault of Whispers
Wild Nacatl

feel like the 'best' card to unban is ponder most likey idk - bitterblossom? there really arent that many cards on here that couldnt come off except like skullclamp, top and depths. although i have no idea why blazing shoal is banned.

infect I think?

Please not Skullclamp, that card is so stupid

I don't see why Top needs to be banned but I really dislike that card so I'm fine with that

helps combo / makes games take too long