I really like your decklists, mainly due to the random 1-ofs that I would never think about including. That's the kind of stuff that makes a deck have replay value.
As for the CC Commander issue: based on the coverage, it sounded like the majority of the community team had no background in EDH. Along with the fact that EDH is sort of the pet format of most WotC employees, the community had pretty much resigned themselves to losing that portion. They still did Ok, considering I think they had very low expectations.
I get the idea behind Brad Nelson's Azusa deck. Unfortunately, it didn't look like he got his draw spells, so he was left with tons of mana and nothing to do. He could have definitely used a bunch more cycling lands and Life from the Loam. Ah well.
I'm taking a look at the decks the WotC team played with in my next article. Any decks designed by Aaron Forsythe and those other guys are worth taking a closer look at.
Edit - Oh yeah, I was wondering what happened to Josh. Glad I have an idea of what went on.
ever time I've seen a slinger theyve been playing std, which i avoid at all costs and the games are full in seconds, its really a pointless thing to add because such a small population of the community will even have the change to try for a win
@tribal: we had gobo burn, ele burn, ele burn, and the spirit week I won with boros "burn"... nothing about week after week of burn spells entices me to want to play, i dont claim to be an acception because I went 3-0 with giant burn too, its just getting boring
Hey Paul, thanks for your comment. What I like about Gargoyle is that it's essentially a free card. 6 mana for a 3/4 flyer is nothing to shout about, but it's taking up a land slot in the deck, which is its advantage.
The usual Sigil decks are powerful when they draw their combo pieces, here I'm using Sigil as a sub-theme rather than the overall purpose, which I think made it slightly different. Interestingly, this deck started out as a sort of mono white ramp deck, using Knight and Pilgrim's Eye to accelerate / hit land drops on the way to white's powerful finishers. I found the deck was more consistent with the Sigil subtheme though, possibly largely due to the additional removal this made me fit into it.
Either way it was fun to play, and as a fan of mono white I have to say I'm really looking forward to Sun Titan!
lol none. the 9th edition boosters are 1.75 and are sold out. the only other option that is cheaper than first place is Champions of Kamigawa and then unless you win you are still only breaking even.
I like what the you are trying to do here flippers I really do. But the entry fee is so steep it's hard to get behind pricewise.
35 columns by 35 columns does not leave much room for data. The trick with html table layouts is to make a table header row <tr><th></th></tr>
and either use a css rule for instance(in between the style tags):
TH {width: 02.85%;}
or if you know the width of the table (assuming 800px here):
TH {width: 23px;}
Or stipulate it in the heading tag and then all the td tags in the rows below it will conform to that size. Beware of overflow though. 2.85% is 1/35th approximately which at 800px width only gives you about 23 px per cell. Alternatively you could make two tables of 18 cells and 17 cells and mark them as tables 1.a and 1.b to indicate the tables were split. That should give a lot more cell space to work with (double).
The deprecated method of doing this was to just use a attribute in the th tag itself width=x% or width=x where x is either a relative number or a specific number of pixels.
that can be made on a budget, using Heritage Druid+Nettle Sentinel and Glimpse of Nature. I think NO+Progenitus is sometimes included but not necessary.
The most expensive card I believe is Summoner's Pact which you don't *need* if you have Chord of Calling.
I took it to a few Legacy Dailies but never got to 3-1 and gave up. One problem is once you get multiple Nettles rolling, you have a clickfest on your hands and I actually timed out once. It also makes it hard to win using Mirror Entity because the combo to "go off" with him can take tons of steps, generating one extra mana at a time.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure Budget combo Elves is better than this list.
Nice. The Pauper Recaps covering the PE and PREs will be back soon. Life got in the way for a couple of months, but I started putting the charts back together this week.
Hey sorry to hear poeple run off with your cards, Josh. Like i lend my friends cards all the time and if someone ran off, i'd have to find them and stab em in the eyeball.
Awesome article, Doctor! Keep them coming.
I certainly enjoy reading them, and they are very useful for people who want to get into the best format on MTGO - Pauper :)
No worries. HTML isn't hard but the way the editor wysiwyg is set up isn't the greatest at translating it properly. I recommend using the edit as html link when possible to make sure the tags are correctly nested/closed. The fact is if you didn't say anything I doubt anyone would have noticed. BUT there is a tool to help you with the deck lists: http://jamuraa.com/pure/deck_new.php
Jamuraa posted this just because it can be a little frustrating to get formatting right. Be sure and post the html in the html version I mentioned above. It should do everything you want and give you a better looking list in the process.
Seems to me U was right to target you. You imho were the clearest threat. In addition you won proving that you needed to be kept in check. Nice deck. Very synergistic for the most part. I probably wouldn't play Royal Force at all. I would definitely play Harmonize and Elvish Visionary. Wall of Blossoms, and his clone would be a boon to you too. Also Sensei's Divining Top is just a beating (particularly with some of the wacky enchantments you were running and with dealing with flood/famine) which you know since you included Krosan Grip to deal with it.
Thanks for the mention of the Coalition League, I’m hoping the word will spread about this.
Also in regards to the gunslingers the other day I was on at the same time as one for the first time and they were going to do Tribal Classic which would have been yesterday, sadly I have never had the chance of joining a game against one.
I’ve also heard that the next promo is Maze of Ith before the release of ME4 which is going to put an instant high price on that card.
In regards to the CC cup I felt it didn’t have the same hype as last year as well, I didn’t see much going round to spark any interest.
hmm Tribal Apocalypse really does have a problem with what power level is allowed and what’s frowned against which is the reason I’ve stopped playing it for now as well. You can’t play combo or expensive cards or even red decks with burn spells without getting some flak.
My apologies on the format of this article. I wanted to make the card images appear inside the decklists and have a cleaner looking presentation but I was having a difficult time getting it format correctly. One of those problems that has a simple fix but can be insanely difficult to figure out when you start getting frustrated.
I really like your decklists, mainly due to the random 1-ofs that I would never think about including. That's the kind of stuff that makes a deck have replay value.
As for the CC Commander issue: based on the coverage, it sounded like the majority of the community team had no background in EDH. Along with the fact that EDH is sort of the pet format of most WotC employees, the community had pretty much resigned themselves to losing that portion. They still did Ok, considering I think they had very low expectations.
I get the idea behind Brad Nelson's Azusa deck. Unfortunately, it didn't look like he got his draw spells, so he was left with tons of mana and nothing to do. He could have definitely used a bunch more cycling lands and Life from the Loam. Ah well.
I'm taking a look at the decks the WotC team played with in my next article. Any decks designed by Aaron Forsythe and those other guys are worth taking a closer look at.
Edit - Oh yeah, I was wondering what happened to Josh. Glad I have an idea of what went on.
ever time I've seen a slinger theyve been playing std, which i avoid at all costs and the games are full in seconds, its really a pointless thing to add because such a small population of the community will even have the change to try for a win
@tribal: we had gobo burn, ele burn, ele burn, and the spirit week I won with boros "burn"... nothing about week after week of burn spells entices me to want to play, i dont claim to be an acception because I went 3-0 with giant burn too, its just getting boring
Seems like a cool idea. Way to take some initiative man.
Hey Paul, thanks for your comment. What I like about Gargoyle is that it's essentially a free card. 6 mana for a 3/4 flyer is nothing to shout about, but it's taking up a land slot in the deck, which is its advantage.
The usual Sigil decks are powerful when they draw their combo pieces, here I'm using Sigil as a sub-theme rather than the overall purpose, which I think made it slightly different. Interestingly, this deck started out as a sort of mono white ramp deck, using Knight and Pilgrim's Eye to accelerate / hit land drops on the way to white's powerful finishers. I found the deck was more consistent with the Sigil subtheme though, possibly largely due to the additional removal this made me fit into it.
Either way it was fun to play, and as a fan of mono white I have to say I'm really looking forward to Sun Titan!
The cheapest upfront cost for a very powerful deck would be Morningtide at $3.00.
8th Edition is in stock and cheap $1.75, but I'm guessing that would be horrible choice to play with.
If you are looking to see how to minimize your losses with the possibility of opening money cards, there are these choices...
Alara Reborn (not block) is a strong choice because it is a very deep set with few unplayable cards and it has Bloodbraid Elf as a valuable uncommon.
Tempest is almost worth cracking. It has some $2-$3 commons, a $5 and $16 uncommon, as well as some valuable rares.
Thank you for providing that link for me, it will definitely make things easier in my future articles.
lol none. the 9th edition boosters are 1.75 and are sold out. the only other option that is cheaper than first place is Champions of Kamigawa and then unless you win you are still only breaking even.
I like what the you are trying to do here flippers I really do. But the entry fee is so steep it's hard to get behind pricewise.
Fallen Empires :p
Anybody have any suggestions as to what the best packs to crack are if you're on a budget but still want to be competitive?
i love pie...i mean pie charts. Great article though.
Good commentary with the wrap-up. I like the suggestion on what to play.
35 columns by 35 columns does not leave much room for data. The trick with html table layouts is to make a table header row <tr><th></th></tr>
and either use a css rule for instance(in between the style tags):
TH {width: 02.85%;}
or if you know the width of the table (assuming 800px here):
TH {width: 23px;}
Or stipulate it in the heading tag and then all the td tags in the rows below it will conform to that size. Beware of overflow though. 2.85% is 1/35th approximately which at 800px width only gives you about 23 px per cell. Alternatively you could make two tables of 18 cells and 17 cells and mark them as tables 1.a and 1.b to indicate the tables were split. That should give a lot more cell space to work with (double).
The deprecated method of doing this was to just use a attribute in the th tag itself width=x% or width=x where x is either a relative number or a specific number of pixels.
that can be made on a budget, using Heritage Druid+Nettle Sentinel and Glimpse of Nature. I think NO+Progenitus is sometimes included but not necessary.
The most expensive card I believe is Summoner's Pact which you don't *need* if you have Chord of Calling.
I took it to a few Legacy Dailies but never got to 3-1 and gave up. One problem is once you get multiple Nettles rolling, you have a clickfest on your hands and I actually timed out once. It also makes it hard to win using Mirror Entity because the combo to "go off" with him can take tons of steps, generating one extra mana at a time.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure Budget combo Elves is better than this list.
;)
Thanks kalandine
I am so looking forward to this.
I will try to get this advertised to the old League Warriors clan as I suspect quite a few might have an interest.
Nice. The Pauper Recaps covering the PE and PREs will be back soon. Life got in the way for a couple of months, but I started putting the charts back together this week.
Hey sorry to hear poeple run off with your cards, Josh. Like i lend my friends cards all the time and if someone ran off, i'd have to find them and stab em in the eyeball.
Awesome article, Doctor! Keep them coming.
I certainly enjoy reading them, and they are very useful for people who want to get into the best format on MTGO - Pauper :)
No worries. HTML isn't hard but the way the editor wysiwyg is set up isn't the greatest at translating it properly. I recommend using the edit as html link when possible to make sure the tags are correctly nested/closed. The fact is if you didn't say anything I doubt anyone would have noticed. BUT there is a tool to help you with the deck lists: http://jamuraa.com/pure/deck_new.php
Jamuraa posted this just because it can be a little frustrating to get formatting right. Be sure and post the html in the html version I mentioned above. It should do everything you want and give you a better looking list in the process.
Great article, pity the chart didn't quite come together in time.
I hope everyone enjoyed this level of detailed analysis, check the raw spreadsheet for a taste of what's to come next week!
I just saw that today about Maze of Ith. Very nice art by the way. I would love to get one, so of course it will be outrageous at 40 tix or so.
I look forward to reading about the exploits of the coalition league members. I would definitely join up if I had the packs.
Seems to me U was right to target you. You imho were the clearest threat. In addition you won proving that you needed to be kept in check. Nice deck. Very synergistic for the most part. I probably wouldn't play Royal Force at all. I would definitely play Harmonize and Elvish Visionary. Wall of Blossoms, and his clone would be a boon to you too. Also Sensei's Divining Top is just a beating (particularly with some of the wacky enchantments you were running and with dealing with flood/famine) which you know since you included Krosan Grip to deal with it.
Thanks for the mention of the Coalition League, I’m hoping the word will spread about this.
Also in regards to the gunslingers the other day I was on at the same time as one for the first time and they were going to do Tribal Classic which would have been yesterday, sadly I have never had the chance of joining a game against one.
I’ve also heard that the next promo is Maze of Ith before the release of ME4 which is going to put an instant high price on that card.
In regards to the CC cup I felt it didn’t have the same hype as last year as well, I didn’t see much going round to spark any interest.
hmm Tribal Apocalypse really does have a problem with what power level is allowed and what’s frowned against which is the reason I’ve stopped playing it for now as well. You can’t play combo or expensive cards or even red decks with burn spells without getting some flak.
My apologies on the format of this article. I wanted to make the card images appear inside the decklists and have a cleaner looking presentation but I was having a difficult time getting it format correctly. One of those problems that has a simple fix but can be insanely difficult to figure out when you start getting frustrated.