Magic: The Gathering C/D

they're not super conservative with organized play, they changed the pro play qualification structure constantly throughout this decade

yeah but PTs and GPs have been the core of competitive magic since the dawn of competitive play.

in any case I think that this: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/and-mtg-arena-2019-01-31 is the real eye opener. like the future of competitive magic isn't just 'not the pro tour', it's also maybe 'not the same rules as paper magic'.

this announcement is pretty discouraging for a few reasons but i think it does tie in to what i was saying upthread - i dont know how good the roi on the old model of organized play was & it feels like things really are moving in a different direction.

magic has been my primary non-work activity for like three years, its been a sorta weird few months thinking about what i want to do w/ it, how much i still want to play &c &c

yeah I didn't have a lot of time to play this year but was planning on going to a bunch of gps this year and and now my plans seem really hazy.

i havent been to a gp in a while due to non-magic reasons but would still hit up modern ones in the northeast i guess. i don't really play enough to justify keeping up with standard anymore even though it's historically been my favorite format

Dude from my LGS just took down SCG Dallas with mono blue.

yeah the blue deck seems strong

so, magic

Feeling kind of burned out lately

yeah I've been burnt out since ixalan but still follow from a distance

I've actually been playing a ton more, thanks to Arena. Love how fast drafting and playing goes, and I'm surprised how invested in the ranking system I am (just shy of platinum right now, so still a ways off from the top). Ravnica Allegiance is also one of the better draft sets in recent memory, though the bots consistently underdraft gates and gate payoffs

I don't play constructed at all unless I run out of currency for drafts, and hope not to put any real money into the game. Right now, I kind of like that if I run out of currency, I have to wait for quests - kind of a built-in control on my play time

I am new to it and am so obsessed right now. I play with a friend at lunch every day, and after the kids go to bed, I just build decks, that is my leisure activity. playing mono red today, I don't have a lot of faith in this deck as I don't have a high enough number of the right cards to make it do what I want it to do but the play is so fun to me and I have been working so fuckin hard these past few years, I really can't overstate how much good it's doing me to have this thing that's new to me that I'm getting very incrementally better at & will probably never be better than average at but which allows me to just be a guy playing a fun game & occasionally pulling a rabbit out of the hat & winning 17-0 before getting his ass handed to him by a Sharktocrab again

Yeah Sharktocrab is my bane

Cool to see you in this thread, JCLC, hope you stick around. I was wondering if you played the game at all after I saw that tie-in that was discussed upthread

good shit

JCLC if you have any free time this weekend, you should check out the mythic championship going on on right now: https://www.twitch.tv/magic

it's the biggest event in competitive magic

One of my hometown buddies made the top 8 of the MC, which made me more invested than usual, but I thought that was one of the best top 8s to watch in recent memory. five different decks, few non-games. the finals was especially good, and the winner played superbly

yeah i ended up watching the replay when i got home last night & i think this was the best played and most exciting top 8 to watch since shota played out of his mind to win pt kaladesh. this top 8 was also just incredibly solid, a real testament i think to what a skillful format this is

Agreed, some incredible next level plays happening, great stuff

got my ass handed to me by a friend yesterday over lunch -- after building two decks that were actual winners (one a dinosaur-heavy monster, the other mill/removal which is the style of play that suits me best), I got careless.. watched the Mythic thing all weekend, just really enjoying a new whole thing to be into.

i guess this set was inevitable with the marvel-ization of the game's story that they started several years ago, but i hate it and hope they've gotten it all out of their system here so we can go back to adventuring in the fall

hasn't MaRo spent the last 10 years insisting they'll never do a Planeswalker themed block

He really needed to find out just how shitty and unplayable a planeswalker could be.

Gf and I were having a great time looking up the Unstable cards last night, so wacky and creative.

Would it be a dumb idea to buy some to make decks out of, just to play against each other? If not, it looks like there are some 'cubes' on ebay, and complete sets, what's the move?

haha this might not be the best place to ask tbh

ha, is that because you guys are serious tournament ppl? Or, like, don't keep up anymore?

I love how those un-sets are basically just excuses to make neat concept cards that they wouldn't dare to in real Magic. I wonder how much of that set is made up of rejected stuff the Rules Manager killed. the Augment-Host stuff is really cool.

Plainswalkers ruined Magic for me and I had been playing since 1993. Just so dumb and overpowered, which has totally warped the game.

I miss the old days of playing for ante. THAT was pressure.

dunno about the un-sets since stores don't crack massive amounts of those to sell singles to tournament players, but most sets you can buy bulk commons/uncommons cheap which is a lot more economical than booster packs if you just want some cards to play with and don't care about the rares

Haha PBKR, have played with the new set? Now more planeswalkers than ever!

Yeah, we bought one of those paired Planeswalkers pre-built deck sets (our only foray into modern MtG), and were not super into that mechanic. I don't think we ever had a game where they both came out, so whoever got theirs out first basically won.

xp

they work out fine in competitive play where decks are streamlined, but tend to be runaway one-card win conditions in casual play

I haven’t played much in years and when I do it’s mostly a cube with limited infinity/type 4 rules (no lands/infinite mana/one spell per turn).

That's a good idea, ciderpress xp

my issue with the Planeswalker mechanic is that they treated it like a big and important development in the game that had to be popular, so they decided to make them stupidly overpowered to ensure people would play with them. the original 5 planeswalkers felt balanced to me but they went overboard really quick, especially since so many of them have a self-defense mechanism built in. sometimes it kinda reminds me of the old days where you'd face off against a Circle of Protection that completely ruined your game.

I still play Cube every now and then (mostly online) and it is pretty obnoxious how most games just become a battle of the Planeswalkers. they have an advantage built in since they don't have "summoning sickness" and there are so few ways to directly deal with one.

I feel like the uncommon planeswalkers in war of the spark are actually fantastic designs - they’re powerful enchantments that you can kill - which solves the normal issue of ‘enchantments are too hard to interact with’

Ok we're going in on an Unstable cube, will report back

xp

I think they are cool designs, and I definitely approve of wotc going all in on creative ideas. My only complaint is that they create a lot of board conditions that get difficult to track. I think for more casual players in particular, all the static drawbacks in play can end up making the game confusing and unfun.

Yeah I’ve found this format to be incredibly cube-like, both in game play and weird niche situations that come up. More so than the masters sets even, which had generally had powerful strategies that were very streamlined. Yesterday I lost to someone using the switch-creatures sorcery mid combat because they had a teferi.

Yeah, this set is cube-like mostly because the complexity is through the roof. It must be the most complicated Standard set since Time Spiral block. The planeswalker passives make gameplay challenging to even play without accidentally breaking a rule. Pretty fun set, but still find I lose to bomb rares too often

This set is... actually really fun to draft? Realising that you really, really, really want 2-drops helped a lot.

i dunno if i like sets with the 2 drop bottleneck, i still have lingering resentment from drafting gatecrash way too many times

I bought a couple of unstable packs in Madison a week or so ago, they're a riot

WOTS is fun if to my mind a little simpler/easier than Allegiance but it's the Modern Horizons previews that're really punching my buttons

We got our Unstable cards in the mail last night, also in Madison. I think it's the whole set plus a certain amount of doubles? I think the plan is to painstakingly examine every card before trying to figure out decks, but they look hella fun.

Gonna have to use the dog for the cards that require a person outside the game to make a decision.

I think WAR is the set I’ve enjoyed drafting the most, although I only started (after an 18ish year break) with Kaladesh.

you just missed my favorite by 1 set then

flamed out of gp providence after a 4-0 start, but at least we got to scalp the rietzl/williams/sperling dream team along the way by playing to a low chance out. I'm like 60% sure rietzl whispered to sperling that he saw my hand was a forest, which is legal but put a bad taste in my mouth. they had a pretty nutty pool too, time wipe, widespread brutality, red god, bolas, bolas's citadel, massacre girl.

nice! i've never gotten a good read on any of those three

they pretty much lived up to expectation, sperling was pretty dour, williams was nice though

Think I've played Rietzl three times, very friendly before the match each time, serious when it started. First time I played Williams he was extremely unfriendly; found out later his Vintage deck had just been stolen. My team also played Sperling/Rietzl/Williams at a prior GP Providence and everyone was in good spirits, even us after we lost to them. Team GPs are the absolute best

decided to check out spoilers for the latest set. I knew there would come a time when new Magic cards are basically unrecognizable to me but I didn't think it would be so soon.

I've started playing magic. i suck