Magic: The Gathering C/D

yeah having a good minotaur deck depended on having +1 uncommon minotaur lords and getting them like 13th pick cause nobody else wanted that deck. and there are now fewer of them.

I think roughly 100% of the time I have lost to a minotaur deck they had two of them out. anything less and you just kill the 1st one and are sitting across from 2/3s.

that guy's still my favorite card in the format

minotaurs are rad

breaking the reserve list, just once, for didgeridoo would have been a great idea

fallen empires is such a dope magic set, all i want is a return to sarpadia w/ a real draft format

i realize that didgeridoo was homelands but i had to double check that homelands is in fact on the reserve list (its all the way up to masques! for some reason i thought it was like '93 special) and then i saw that autumn willow is on the reserve list and it got me thinking

yeah fallen empires and homeland had such great flavor and characters, that's why it was painful how much they sucked

i think a little bit of homelands's aesthetic got rolled up into innistrad

ice age is my favorite old set flavor-wise but fallen empires is up there too yeah

i was really bummed to find out that coldsnap was an almost-objectively-poor set gameplay-wise, its still my favorite modern-era set aesthetically just because it's an ice age sequel.

haha i point out the an-hava township/gavony township thing to people all the time now. innistrad def feels like it was the closest to 'return to homelands' we're ever gonna get and its not like i am holding out hope for sarpadian chronicles vol. next but i think its pretty fertile ground, esp for limited. like there are a lot of really good ideas in fallen empires they just got pushed into unplayablility for some reason. i esp like all the different land cycles

yeah it seems like a big missed opportunity and hopefully it doesn't stop them from doing more retro stuff. there is definitely hugeee potential.

xp

Coldsnap still felt better designed than Ice Age and Alliances were. We did a "full block" draft of that once and the other packs were so weak that you'd play nearly every Coldsnap card you got. I agree that the world was one of the coolest (barf) they ever did.

'better designed than ice age' is not the strongest praise

i like how adding the ice age/alliances packs in breaks all the coldsnap mechanics

yeah if nothing else it took the Cumulative Upkeep and Snow Mana concepts and laid them to rest, I think it did both those things well. also it showed why a set needs to be a certain size before draft can really work

90s magic ::sigh::

yeah like i was saying upthread i hope there's a more retro/trad fantasy block in the works since it's been a while since the last one of those. i don't really like ravnica as a fantasy setting at all.

All the complaints about Fallen Empires at the time that I remember were because it was massively overprinted and had all its best cards at common/uncommon, so the cards didn't hold value. Also nothing super broken like Lotus or Moat, so people probably thought it had nothing to add to their stupidly overpowered decks. IMO the designers did a much much better job reducing chaff cards in the set than, say, Legends. I played type 2 (Standard) at the time and many of the best cards available for white and black decks were in Fallen Empires. Homelands I can't really defend tho

i bought a bunch of packs of fallen empires to do a chaos sealed thing w/ some friends and the cards are all slightly underpowered. everything comes into play tapped or falls slightly off curve or has just bad enough stats to not line up w/modern magic but theres so much complexity and interesting cards at common that i imagine it will be at least challenging if not fun to play well in limited.

I started around Ice Age and all I ever knew of Legends was the overpowered stuff like Mana Drain, Moat, Nether Void, Abyss, etc. plus the Elder Dragons of course. I remember going through a guide that had pictures of all the cards much later and being astounded at just how godawful 90% of those cards were. Fallen Empires was the first set I ever bought (I pulled a Deep Spawn) and yeah in context it was quite good!

yeah fallen empires was cool (and cheap) there just wasn't a chase rare, you can't be excited about opening a pack w/ no chase rares

Yeah I'm sure the set design and printing of FE and Homelands was in response to people complaining about how they couldn't afford to buy cards like Moat, Mana Drain, etc, but they're a good lesson in why making sets without chase rares gets even more complaints

Yeah but we'd buy it up b/c it gave us enough to fill out our decks. I remember Alliances was the set that had all the real cool designs and chase rares (Lord of Tresselhorn and Balduvian Horde obviously). Visions was the first set that I thought was really well designed at each level.

Hmm looking at the close release dates of these early sets, now I'm wondering if it WAS a response after all, or just coincidence

xp Yes! Alliances and Visions were my two favorite sets from the time before I quit Magic because it was unpopular among my peers, even though quitting didn't make me any less unpopular

alliances def felt the most groundbreaking w/ horde, free spells, lots of cool lands

yeah there were a lot of really creative and unique cards in that set, much different than Fallen Empires or Homelands which were mostly full of dull creatures. according to the early designers if Alliances hadn't been a big success Magic probably wouldn't exist today. kinda like Tempest where there were more ideas than they had room for.

finally locked in my lion's eye diamond promo and just noticed that next month's promo is force of will - they're really being transparent now about wanting to keep people playing despite the MOCS being suspended

i'm kind of down on all the current competitive formats right now though so grinding out these promos is feeling more and more like a chore, but at the same time my interest in eternal formats is up so i want to get the cards.

I locked mine in as well, wound up taking 46 drafts to do but it was well worth it, now kinda feeling I gotta do it all over again for the FoW

Been doing some Mirage block drafts lately, which is certainly interesting and has a lot of money cards across all rarities. Despite some claims that Mirage block was the first to really be draftable, it's kind of a mess, with a huge imbalance in power level from card to card, and outside of River Boa there really is not a single "over-the-curve" creature - mostly a bunch of 2/2s for 3 with some upside. Still fun though considering I never drafted it back then (I don't think anyone really drafted then. I believe I was like 10.)

sealed was bigger than draft back then (ime)

yeah i feel like booster draft wasn't really a big thing until invasion block which was the first block that was really well balanced for it

i'm actually excited for scars block to get its first retro appearance next week, one of the most underrated limited formats imo.

I think I drafted mirage and I def drafted tempest a bunch but yeah it wasn't what you wanted it to be

100x superior limited play is what got me back in the game over the last few years

cider do you play block constructed? or was it lamp who was posting a few weeks ago about that? i stopped selling my cards on mtgo a little while before BTG came out with the vague notion of eventually putting together a block deck as my first foray into constructed. i just have no idea what i would play.

yeah i feel like booster draft wasn't really a big thing until invasion block which was the first block that was really well balanced for it

you're probably right. I think up until then a "draft" was just "buy 3 packs of anything". I remember most ppl would do Masques block or Urza's but I would always do 6th Edition, mostly because most 6e packs would only contain one truly good card ;) - suffice to say those kinds of drafts don't really work well with modern sets where the cards clearly were meant to work together. With Mirage and Urza's blocks there really isn't much synergy, you just cross your fingers and hope to get enough playable creatures.

i used to play a lot of block during scars and innistrad, but i haven't liked the past couple block formats as much, and they cut back on the number of block dailies, so i don't at the moment.

i haven't really touched theros block since BNG came out, but it looks like a reanimator deck just took over the format, which is kind of neat, i was getting tired of endless GR monsters.

yeah decent playable creatures at common was kinda the missing factor, esp across the color spectrum

xp

the major problem with Urza's block is that there are so many "protection from x" creatures which really lead to bad and frustrating gameplay; I forgot how dumb it was when a common 2/1 flyer would shut down your entire deck

yeah that's the other thing, devastating color hosers were everywhere in early magic, and those are terrible for limited cause the cards are either autowins or useless

Some of those Urza's block cards had Cycling too, so you were free to jam those with little repercussion. I've only drafted the set once, in a retro draft, but I'm not crazy about the format (or any of the early formats)

yeah Constructed was rife with that too. cards like Boil, Choke, Flashfires, and Perish were brutal. I remember building decks and thinking "if my opponent sides in Perish, I just lose"

imo chronologically the first good draft format was invasion block, and the 2nd good draft format wasn't until champions of kamigawa, after which their hit rate became much higher

i liked the mirage draft i did, much more than any of the old-border drafts i've done actually. i thought invasion was really terrible when they had the throwback drafts a few months ago (?) but i can see it working better in a non-mtgo context if that makes any sense.

generally i have not enjoyed any of the throwback drafts except innistrad

cider do you play block constructed? or was it lamp who was posting a few weeks ago about that? i stopped selling my cards on mtgo a little while before BTG came out with the vague notion of eventually putting together a block deck as my first foray into constructed. i just have no idea what i would play.

ive been playing mostly block on mtgo since born of the gods came out and opened the format up a bit. before that every block daily was 75%+ naya mythics which is still a good deck and has plenty of cards that will probably be staples in future standard as well, so its not a bad deck from an investment perspective. i've been playing a junk graveyard deck that i really enjoy and its quite a bit cheaper than the naya deck. i've also played a bit with the monoblock aggro deck but i think that list still needs works - peoples numbers are all over the place. however its probably the cheapest of the three decks to build and is reasonably fun to play. despite reducing the number of block dailies its also a good way of staying positive on mtgo since the pool of competitors is a little more shallow and the decks themselves arent as deep as modern or even standard ones. also contrary to cider i think ths/bng is the best block environment since isd/dka after they banned souls and virtue since in addition to the three decks i mentioned there are at least two other reasonable deck choices and everything except naya mythics is genuinely pretty fun to play

yeah i am willing to believe that ths/bng block is good, i just hated ths-only block so much that i didn't bother looking back in until today, when i noticed that graveyard deck is suddenly everywhere and it looks pretty fun so i might give it a try

do you have an exact list for that deck that you like? or should i just grab one from DE results

xxmixx list is the one i've been using, havent really seen much need to change it up yet

http://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/225639

OK that looks pretty interesting. i am like 3 cards short of the main deck too.