I looked at the changes to the cube and my basic response was "eh." Overall the changes are cosmetic and designed to show off Avacyn Restored cards without changing the overall feel of the cube. The main point of the changes was to keep things pretty similar to the way they were before.
The bigger problem is the prize payout. Not only did they switch from a classic Nix-Tix draft format to a full price classic format, they also chose one of the worst options available. One that has already been featured this year to less than spectacular results.
The conspiracy theorist in me sees this as a test to see if Cube drafting will be popular regardless of the prizes. That means if this round of cubing is sucessful, prepare yourself for more horrible blocks to be paired with the Cube in the future. 8th Edition, M10, Kamigawa Block, Coldsnap, it doesn't really matter. WotC can pick the blocks and sets that are no longer relevant for anything and still get people to draft those sets because CUBE is that good....
Here's the problem, though: not everyone even knows about the beta release. The majority of people I spoke with online don't know the timetable. For them, the change is permanent. Wizards is so bad at getting the word out that they'll perceive this change as very negative and, no matter how it turns out later, that feeling will still be there as time goes on. People always remember negative things more than positive things- I can attest to that myself. It just seems that Wizards is unaware of this.
As I Multiplayer player, I know where you're coming from. It sucks.
As a beta tester, I know where you're going. You're going to like it. (Well, maybe not you. :) You hate everything.) (That's a joke!)
WotC could have given a bit more lead time and notice, and I think that's where the biggest issue is. But the room changes themselves, that's a good thing. A very good thing. Trust me. It'll all make sense when you take the new client for a spin.
So you got me excited about ol Marton again so I have been running him some today. I haven't touched the deck in months so I had to make some updates with some of your ideas here and some cards from the most recent sets. Again my version is built for 1v1, but I was having a surprising amount of success with it, and a lot of fun. I was able to win many games early. It was more resiliant than my previous attempts, and could fight trough a fair amount of disruption and still get there.
Mana echoes contined to be super for me and can really propel game big game winning turns. Nothing quite like playing out a siege gang commander and getting 16+ mana to keep going. Speaking of siege gang, with targets like him, Kiki, Ib and welder a goblin matron is a great adition.
Maybe it is just the sped that my deck wants but I found battle hymn pretty useful.
I also found having other avenues to victory was one of the things that made the deck more resilient and less of a one trick pony. Warp world, Vicious Shadows, and comet storm ended up finishing as many games as big Marton swings did.
Good times.
Last, now having seen the merged room, it doesn't seem like the end on the world. Definitely not as good as it used to be though.
You do great work and i look forward to this article every friday just wanted to give you props on the hard work you do. with M13 when I first started seeing cards spoiled and then looking at the full list this really reminds me of 5th edition and how bad the card pool was for limited and type 2 or std whatever you call it. its very underwhelming and i am very very dissapointed in this core set, i just hope return to ravnica is super awesome.
I don't *know*, but I suspect that it is because both Classic and Legacy are seeing a lot less play. That would be a small drop in demand - small because most people playing those formats already have them. The fall off in attendance may also be convincing the hoarders to sell a few, upping supply.
There are 3 FOWs in hammybot because I nabbed one a couple months ago! I was trying to get to four copies and checked prices and was about to buy from cheaper spots, but then decided I really wanted my cash to go to Erik's son.
On a somewhat related note, anyone know why FOW has dropped recently?
Removing the multiplayer room was actually a very, very bad decision from Wizards. Now when you try to join a Commander game, you don't know if you're getting into a one on one game or a multiplayer game. The same goes for the other formats. Not only that, but everyone being in the same room at once has caused the program to lag significantly. I don't know what the reasoning behind this was, but clearly whoever decided it wasn't thinking about the customers who buy cards specifically for multiplayer games.
First they sell pre cons of Commander decks and now they make it harder for someone to play a Commander game? Another strikeout here.
The working poor are often distinguished from people that can’t pay what they are suppose to pay, poor who are supported by government aid or charity. cv services
My quick math shows you would have to pump colossus 6 times to reach 200 power, or "only" 5 times if you got its power to a natural 7 before you started to double. 24 is alot of mana without having an infinite mana combo! Even with training grounds and rings of brighthearth, that's still 12 mana. What is your biggest ever Colossus?
Be aware that to unlock the 200-power achievement, you need for the creature to make it alive to combat (same for the 1000-damage one, if you use creatures for it). But yeah, there's a lot of ways to achieve huge creatures without infinite stuff (of course you need a good, Commander-like ramp). Chameleon Colossus wants a word too.
And yes, thank God for MTGO's automatic math in these cases. :)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not particularly against people double dipping with Endangered and Virgin. This situation should also happen less when Virgin will reset, since there are a lot of one-time-only tribes that aren't Endangered (even if we'll possibly change Endangered criteria to include larger tribes that never went well or were rarely played).
Endangered is more of the flipside of "popular, winning tribes". It's "let's determine the best player of the event overall, and then let's determine the best player of the event who was playing a less conventional tribe" (that's why Wurm or Drake or Ogre should be Endangered). Endangered almost ever happens, since the average player doesn't play with the high-profile tribes all the times. I like this form of Endangered better, because it's just a way to assess a "secondary winner", and not a bet to see who will dare to play the smallest tribe. That was cute for a while, but it doesn't really make much sense. Especially because the size of a tribe isn't a good criterion to assess anything.
Virgin is more of a special thing. It's actively looking at a list and accept the challenge. That's why I like better if the challenge has to be taken at face value: you want to try and play Unicorn, then play Unicorn. Not a Changeling deck with some of the best Unicorns. If you think playing Unicorn without Changelings will not get you far enough, then don't. It's the nature of the challenge: to build Unicorn and make it work as it is. You might win the prize just in virtue of playing the only Virgin tribe of that week. We reward the spirit you showed by accepting the challenge. The contest between Virgins only happens if there's more than one. Admittedly, I never expected to have events with 4 Virgins at once, and that's a very good thing, meaning there's more players who like this kind of challenges (I answer RexDart too here: yes, the tix prizes are more symbolic than anything. I'm sure most people do these kind of things mainly for the thrill of pulling it off). Anyway, I see Endangered Prize as a regular assessment of each event's pool of tribes; Virgin Prize as a special prize to the player who, essentially, helped us give more variety to this pool by choosing to bring to the field the most Cinderellas of tribes.
There will always be an intersection between the Endangered and the Virgin/Almost Virgin pool, since the most popular tribes are inevitably the ones that WotC supported the most over the course of the years, and vice versa.
Glad to see another article olaw :) Just wanted to correct the price guideline, it is .10 or less for commons, .20 or less for uncommons, .40 or less for rares and 1.00 or less for mythics that the legality sheet goes by. A lot of decks posted and a lot of great information about the format for any new players that would be interested in trying out the format. Keep up the great work! Hope to see you back at the events soon :)
I hear you about old PCs not being able to handle an overcrowded MTGO. People often don't realize that by PMing someone, you (mysteriously) cause a burst of CPU usage on that person's PC, causing slow performance, momentary freezing, or worse. It's the same when too many people are watching the same Google document. It's the reason I wasn't able to host Ham on Wry (it's better now that I use Chrome exclusively to handle Google stuff).
This said, I don't get how Double in itself was different than a regular event. Especially an event with more players, since that would mean a larger number of PMs at once. Double's definining characteristic should only be getting a double list rather than a single one (and I hope that was done with one single PM per player). Isn't that exactly the same that happened with Angel/Demon some weeks earlier?
Plus, in your place, I would just cut the decklists stuff entirely for these events. We survived for years without the decklists being entered during the event. Now, that's a real nice improvement you introduced there, but if that causes you to be driven crazy during certain events, just cut the crap with no mercy. After all, 90% of the PREs out there never ask players for a decklist beforehands, and probably a good 50% don't ask afterwards either.
Hey, thanks for taking the time to read and comment on my article.
Couldn't agree more with you. I think the format is surprisingly well balanced at the moment and there is still a lot of room for new deck ideas. Glad you're enjoying the format and hope you continue to.
Loved the article. I have to admit I've always had a soft spot for Marton.
As someone who is new to the format I'm definitely discouraged about the removal of the multiplayer room. Can I request that if things stabilize into some sort of informal process in either the anything goes room or the just for fun room that you let your readers know?
Have you ever been able to transform Homura? He seems custom-built for a Lyzolda deck...
Also, getting rid of the multiplayer room was one of the worst decisions I've seen on MTGO since I've been here for, what is it? Two years now? I really extremely doubtful about Wizards of the Coast at this point. Can they afford to treat their customers poorly in the midst of a worldwide recession? Yet, they seem to be constantly doing so.
A kicked Rite of Replication on a Hamletback Goliath will get you the 200 power and 1000 damage ones. Remains the most surprisingly ridiculous play I ever made in edh, thank god it was on mtgo, because I had no idea how big those things would be. It might also work if you blinked your whole team with a Planar Guide then Mirrorweaved the Goliath, but I'm not sure how to stack it, since it's reliant on everything entering the battlefield at once.
That was one of the reasons I was surprised Efreets had never been tried before. Still, I played all 4 of the tournament-caliber ones that had seen play. Frenetic Efreet, while playable, was basically just in my deck to imprint on Chrome Mox. Since the Tomb/Chalice thing was pretty essential, I couldn't really splash a third color to reach the playable green and black ones, which both had double-mana costs to boot, so if I hadn't run Taurean Mauler I was left with Shimmering Efreet or Burning-Palm Efreet. I don't really think weakening the deck by running one of those would have enhanced mine or anybody else's experience.
I actually didn't think the virgin/endangered were overlapping, because I thought you and I split the special prizes that week, when you went 3-1 with those Gorgons (?) we were testing beforehand. I don't know whether a few tix really are much incentive anyhow, I generally end up spending way more finishing an endangered or virgin brew than I could win in one week, and I don't typically play them in the event more than once. The tix are nice, don't get me wrong, but I'm usually going into these things looking to just get some experience playing an old card or mechanic I liked, and hopefully do well enough to get invitational points and make it into Kuma's article.
Thanks for the shout out. I am glad you liked Heat Shimmer. It is one of those cards that is difficult to quantify while building a deck, but is always seems so good when you draw it in an actual game.
I have have tinkered with Marton decks quite a bit so it was fun to see your updated take on it. I recently tweaked my version to be a duel focused version.
You are spot on with all your haste enablers, it is so important to get Marton into an attack phase. I almost think of him a big creature pumping sorcery. You are right Fire cat blitz is a total all-star in the deck and is probably one of its best cards.
Also thanks for the tip on Star Storm, it is one I had not thought of.
I do enjoy the Warp World back up plan in my version, and it can be a ton of fun. I also love Mana Echos in my deck. With so many armies in a can you can build up a lot of mana. I have chained a few creatures together and won simply on huge Firecat Blitzes or Comet Storms. Speaking of armies in a can I also like Snake Basket, and Thopter Assembly, although they are a bit slower.
I had not yet realized they removed the multiplayer room. That is ridiculous. Why would you steer all games into the same over full, and hard to navigate room? Seems dumb.
Anyway fun article. I really am liking the videos you have been doing.
I looked at the changes to the cube and my basic response was "eh." Overall the changes are cosmetic and designed to show off Avacyn Restored cards without changing the overall feel of the cube. The main point of the changes was to keep things pretty similar to the way they were before.
The bigger problem is the prize payout. Not only did they switch from a classic Nix-Tix draft format to a full price classic format, they also chose one of the worst options available. One that has already been featured this year to less than spectacular results.
The conspiracy theorist in me sees this as a test to see if Cube drafting will be popular regardless of the prizes. That means if this round of cubing is sucessful, prepare yourself for more horrible blocks to be paired with the Cube in the future. 8th Edition, M10, Kamigawa Block, Coldsnap, it doesn't really matter. WotC can pick the blocks and sets that are no longer relevant for anything and still get people to draft those sets because CUBE is that good....
Those stats are sick!
Here's the problem, though: not everyone even knows about the beta release. The majority of people I spoke with online don't know the timetable. For them, the change is permanent. Wizards is so bad at getting the word out that they'll perceive this change as very negative and, no matter how it turns out later, that feeling will still be there as time goes on. People always remember negative things more than positive things- I can attest to that myself. It just seems that Wizards is unaware of this.
As I Multiplayer player, I know where you're coming from. It sucks.
As a beta tester, I know where you're going. You're going to like it. (Well, maybe not you. :) You hate everything.) (That's a joke!)
WotC could have given a bit more lead time and notice, and I think that's where the biggest issue is. But the room changes themselves, that's a good thing. A very good thing. Trust me. It'll all make sense when you take the new client for a spin.
So you got me excited about ol Marton again so I have been running him some today. I haven't touched the deck in months so I had to make some updates with some of your ideas here and some cards from the most recent sets. Again my version is built for 1v1, but I was having a surprising amount of success with it, and a lot of fun. I was able to win many games early. It was more resiliant than my previous attempts, and could fight trough a fair amount of disruption and still get there.
Mana echoes contined to be super for me and can really propel game big game winning turns. Nothing quite like playing out a siege gang commander and getting 16+ mana to keep going. Speaking of siege gang, with targets like him, Kiki, Ib and welder a goblin matron is a great adition.
Maybe it is just the sped that my deck wants but I found battle hymn pretty useful.
I also found having other avenues to victory was one of the things that made the deck more resilient and less of a one trick pony. Warp world, Vicious Shadows, and comet storm ended up finishing as many games as big Marton swings did.
Good times.
Last, now having seen the merged room, it doesn't seem like the end on the world. Definitely not as good as it used to be though.
You do great work and i look forward to this article every friday just wanted to give you props on the hard work you do. with M13 when I first started seeing cards spoiled and then looking at the full list this really reminds me of 5th edition and how bad the card pool was for limited and type 2 or std whatever you call it. its very underwhelming and i am very very dissapointed in this core set, i just hope return to ravnica is super awesome.
I don't *know*, but I suspect that it is because both Classic and Legacy are seeing a lot less play. That would be a small drop in demand - small because most people playing those formats already have them. The fall off in attendance may also be convincing the hoarders to sell a few, upping supply.
Fow had dropped??
There are 3 FOWs in hammybot because I nabbed one a couple months ago! I was trying to get to four copies and checked prices and was about to buy from cheaper spots, but then decided I really wanted my cash to go to Erik's son.
On a somewhat related note, anyone know why FOW has dropped recently?
Removing the multiplayer room was actually a very, very bad decision from Wizards. Now when you try to join a Commander game, you don't know if you're getting into a one on one game or a multiplayer game. The same goes for the other formats. Not only that, but everyone being in the same room at once has caused the program to lag significantly. I don't know what the reasoning behind this was, but clearly whoever decided it wasn't thinking about the customers who buy cards specifically for multiplayer games.
First they sell pre cons of Commander decks and now they make it harder for someone to play a Commander game? Another strikeout here.
You should probably add Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker to the Modern card list. It jumped from under $7 to over $13 in the last three weeks.
The working poor are often distinguished from people that can’t pay what they are suppose to pay, poor who are supported by government aid or charity.
cv services
My quick math shows you would have to pump colossus 6 times to reach 200 power, or "only" 5 times if you got its power to a natural 7 before you started to double. 24 is alot of mana without having an infinite mana combo! Even with training grounds and rings of brighthearth, that's still 12 mana. What is your biggest ever Colossus?
Be aware that to unlock the 200-power achievement, you need for the creature to make it alive to combat (same for the 1000-damage one, if you use creatures for it). But yeah, there's a lot of ways to achieve huge creatures without infinite stuff (of course you need a good, Commander-like ramp). Chameleon Colossus wants a word too.
And yes, thank God for MTGO's automatic math in these cases. :)
And that's all because of you! :)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not particularly against people double dipping with Endangered and Virgin. This situation should also happen less when Virgin will reset, since there are a lot of one-time-only tribes that aren't Endangered (even if we'll possibly change Endangered criteria to include larger tribes that never went well or were rarely played).
Endangered is more of the flipside of "popular, winning tribes". It's "let's determine the best player of the event overall, and then let's determine the best player of the event who was playing a less conventional tribe" (that's why Wurm or Drake or Ogre should be Endangered). Endangered almost ever happens, since the average player doesn't play with the high-profile tribes all the times. I like this form of Endangered better, because it's just a way to assess a "secondary winner", and not a bet to see who will dare to play the smallest tribe. That was cute for a while, but it doesn't really make much sense. Especially because the size of a tribe isn't a good criterion to assess anything.
Virgin is more of a special thing. It's actively looking at a list and accept the challenge. That's why I like better if the challenge has to be taken at face value: you want to try and play Unicorn, then play Unicorn. Not a Changeling deck with some of the best Unicorns. If you think playing Unicorn without Changelings will not get you far enough, then don't. It's the nature of the challenge: to build Unicorn and make it work as it is. You might win the prize just in virtue of playing the only Virgin tribe of that week. We reward the spirit you showed by accepting the challenge. The contest between Virgins only happens if there's more than one. Admittedly, I never expected to have events with 4 Virgins at once, and that's a very good thing, meaning there's more players who like this kind of challenges (I answer RexDart too here: yes, the tix prizes are more symbolic than anything. I'm sure most people do these kind of things mainly for the thrill of pulling it off). Anyway, I see Endangered Prize as a regular assessment of each event's pool of tribes; Virgin Prize as a special prize to the player who, essentially, helped us give more variety to this pool by choosing to bring to the field the most Cinderellas of tribes.
There will always be an intersection between the Endangered and the Virgin/Almost Virgin pool, since the most popular tribes are inevitably the ones that WotC supported the most over the course of the years, and vice versa.
Glad to see another article olaw :) Just wanted to correct the price guideline, it is .10 or less for commons, .20 or less for uncommons, .40 or less for rares and 1.00 or less for mythics that the legality sheet goes by. A lot of decks posted and a lot of great information about the format for any new players that would be interested in trying out the format. Keep up the great work! Hope to see you back at the events soon :)
I hear you about old PCs not being able to handle an overcrowded MTGO. People often don't realize that by PMing someone, you (mysteriously) cause a burst of CPU usage on that person's PC, causing slow performance, momentary freezing, or worse. It's the same when too many people are watching the same Google document. It's the reason I wasn't able to host Ham on Wry (it's better now that I use Chrome exclusively to handle Google stuff).
This said, I don't get how Double in itself was different than a regular event. Especially an event with more players, since that would mean a larger number of PMs at once. Double's definining characteristic should only be getting a double list rather than a single one (and I hope that was done with one single PM per player). Isn't that exactly the same that happened with Angel/Demon some weeks earlier?
Plus, in your place, I would just cut the decklists stuff entirely for these events. We survived for years without the decklists being entered during the event. Now, that's a real nice improvement you introduced there, but if that causes you to be driven crazy during certain events, just cut the crap with no mercy. After all, 90% of the PREs out there never ask players for a decklist beforehands, and probably a good 50% don't ask afterwards either.
Hey, thanks for taking the time to read and comment on my article.
Couldn't agree more with you. I think the format is surprisingly well balanced at the moment and there is still a lot of room for new deck ideas. Glad you're enjoying the format and hope you continue to.
Loved the article. I have to admit I've always had a soft spot for Marton.
As someone who is new to the format I'm definitely discouraged about the removal of the multiplayer room. Can I request that if things stabilize into some sort of informal process in either the anything goes room or the just for fun room that you let your readers know?
Have you ever been able to transform Homura? He seems custom-built for a Lyzolda deck...
Also, getting rid of the multiplayer room was one of the worst decisions I've seen on MTGO since I've been here for, what is it? Two years now? I really extremely doubtful about Wizards of the Coast at this point. Can they afford to treat their customers poorly in the midst of a worldwide recession? Yet, they seem to be constantly doing so.
A kicked Rite of Replication on a Hamletback Goliath will get you the 200 power and 1000 damage ones. Remains the most surprisingly ridiculous play I ever made in edh, thank god it was on mtgo, because I had no idea how big those things would be. It might also work if you blinked your whole team with a Planar Guide then Mirrorweaved the Goliath, but I'm not sure how to stack it, since it's reliant on everything entering the battlefield at once.
That was one of the reasons I was surprised Efreets had never been tried before. Still, I played all 4 of the tournament-caliber ones that had seen play. Frenetic Efreet, while playable, was basically just in my deck to imprint on Chrome Mox. Since the Tomb/Chalice thing was pretty essential, I couldn't really splash a third color to reach the playable green and black ones, which both had double-mana costs to boot, so if I hadn't run Taurean Mauler I was left with Shimmering Efreet or Burning-Palm Efreet. I don't really think weakening the deck by running one of those would have enhanced mine or anybody else's experience.
I actually didn't think the virgin/endangered were overlapping, because I thought you and I split the special prizes that week, when you went 3-1 with those Gorgons (?) we were testing beforehand. I don't know whether a few tix really are much incentive anyhow, I generally end up spending way more finishing an endangered or virgin brew than I could win in one week, and I don't typically play them in the event more than once. The tix are nice, don't get me wrong, but I'm usually going into these things looking to just get some experience playing an old card or mechanic I liked, and hopefully do well enough to get invitational points and make it into Kuma's article.
Thanks for the shout out. I am glad you liked Heat Shimmer. It is one of those cards that is difficult to quantify while building a deck, but is always seems so good when you draw it in an actual game.
I have have tinkered with Marton decks quite a bit so it was fun to see your updated take on it. I recently tweaked my version to be a duel focused version.
You are spot on with all your haste enablers, it is so important to get Marton into an attack phase. I almost think of him a big creature pumping sorcery. You are right Fire cat blitz is a total all-star in the deck and is probably one of its best cards.
Also thanks for the tip on Star Storm, it is one I had not thought of.
I do enjoy the Warp World back up plan in my version, and it can be a ton of fun. I also love Mana Echos in my deck. With so many armies in a can you can build up a lot of mana. I have chained a few creatures together and won simply on huge Firecat Blitzes or Comet Storms. Speaking of armies in a can I also like Snake Basket, and Thopter Assembly, although they are a bit slower.
I had not yet realized they removed the multiplayer room. That is ridiculous. Why would you steer all games into the same over full, and hard to navigate room? Seems dumb.
Anyway fun article. I really am liking the videos you have been doing.
I just want to say I'm impressed by you guys still keeping this going. Great work!