@Morkje: As a matter of fact this week's deck did start as a devour deck and it even had 4x Gluttonous Slime in it because it was perfectly fitting the theme. Then I started testing and saw that I was losing most of my games in the TP Room. I needed something that I can take to 2mans and sadly I saw no way out for that devour deck. Maybe I didn't build the deck right as I was constantly losing to the best decks of the format.
And as I didn't want to write about a deck that is good in losing and bad in winning, I decided to try this deck you see in the article. Eldrazi Green was also fitting the theme even though not as perfectly as devour was, but more importantly it was constantly winning. I liked it and decided to write about it. After all, a lot of time has passed since people last took it to big events. I decided to remind people of its existence and its potential considering todays Standard meta.
@Mark: You're absolutely right. As I also said many times in the article, most of the time I had no idea what I was doing when I was sideboarding. That game was one of those moments I guess.
I really wish I could sort the collection to just show me all my cards that aren't being used in any of my decks. That way I'd know it was safe to trade away old random extras. But I guess the collection hand has no idea what the decks hand is doing.
If we're going to ban the great casual debate because its both pointless and tedious then I would ban MOANING ABOUT MTGO on the same grounds.
Sure its not perfect; you know it, I know it, WOTC knows it. But it allows me to play magic if I don't feel like schlepping all the way to some fragrance-challenged card store.
To be honest I'm amazed its works so well considering the almost infinite card interactions but then maybe I'm just a glass half full kind of guy.
There will be a new version soon. It will (probably) be better but you can bet your bottom tix that people will carry on moaning about it, just as soon as they've finished their first argument over whether its fair to play Maelstrom Pulse in the Casual Room.
The deck is pretty much just another variant of polymorph/iona which has been floating around standard for a long time. The big weakness of this (type of) deck is inconsistency. Sure, they'll be games where you'll shutdown your opponent's deck completely but I think you'll find in practice that more-often-than-not you'll lose to inconsistency (e.g. bad opening hands, bad top decks, etc). All decks are susceptible to this, but some are better than others (e.g. weenie strategies tend to always have something useful to cast early game). And of course, one of the greatest strengths of everyone's "favorite" deck to hate (Jund) is that even if it runs into inconsistency it has the chance to topdeck into Cascade spells that can swing the game back in its favor.
Leagues are great when you don't have five+ hours to sit and play a sealed tourney. So now WotC gets almost zero money from me for limited play. I am pretty sure I am not the only one who spends less on sealed type events. There are a lot of people out there who want a sealed event without the huge time constraint.
Go into the folder that launches MTGO. There's kicker.exe which you normally run, and then there's another executable. Kicker is the updater, which gets the latest version of the client and then launches the actual program. Built into kicker is code to watch for a version already running. But the program itself doesn't actually check.
So run the other program and it will bypass the updater and let you open a second. But only do that for the second program. If you do it every time you'll never update and it won't work.
(Apologies for not naming the actual file right now, I'm on the wrong computer and going off the top of my head.)
I would like to spend...1 clicks, 2 clicks, 3 clicks, 4 clicks, ... 20 clicks for X. Holy mommy its a pain to spend all that mana if you have more then 10 mana to spend. Heck you would think you could at least just have a modifier to SPEND it ALL. My poor mice are costing me more then my cards at this point.
As to #2, I have always wondered why, if you have a store online, and you want to play an event for which you don't have cards/tickets (aside from the fact that you can get stuff cheaper from internet stores), you have to go to the store, buy the items, then return to the event. Wait. They're all on the same system! Why can't I just click to join an event, and it gives me the option to buy the said items if I don't have them by loading them into my cart? There are a ton of things on MTGO like this that really bug me. Put all the functions onto the same platform, then don't allow them to interact in a smart way. Instead, it's kind of a stupid system platform, where one hand doesn't know what the other is doing, when a smart system would link all these functional systems together. Honestly, I have no idea why it was necessary to put the WotC Store online when the only thing you can do with it is exactly what we did with in in 2.0, go online, buy the items, wait for them to arrive, and THEN join the event.
Oh yeah, and leagues. I need leagues. But let's face it, leagues aren't as profitable and therefore will be knocked to the back burner time and again. I've already consigned it to Vaporware.
I really hope the next version comes out sooner rather than later and has the many fixes we collectively yearn for. What's the saying? Hope springs eternal? I mean I have somewhat gotten used to the quirks of v3 but I still find the urge to rip it to shreds creeping up on me in odd moments.
That bridge deck is quite a beating. Sits there and does nothing for a bit then suddenly bridge and skull cap and a bunch of fierce attackers and well that's the whole song. Not being able to respond in kind is painful. Open The Vaults seems like a much more sneaky and deadly combo in that you probably won't realize it is happening until it happens at least once. And if it happens once it is probably gg. next? As usual AJ is an innovative and scary builder.
Erik Vamps? Really? I'd have thought you'd go with Boss Naya which looks like a great deck. (I managed to take a look at the video of BDM's chat with Ross on his deck at PT San Diego.) If I were planning to play competitively Id definitely want that deck or some hybrid there of. What is better than White Green Red Vampires? Certainly not monoblack traditional vamps. Good luck anyway.
1. why can't i open the draft room and the seald room ? , i want to check both of them AT THE SAME FRIKKIN TIME>......... but no... its way to complex to implant (really what the problem opening multiple rooms )
2. Why when i save a draft deck and edit it on the deck editor i can't do it on the 2nd draft without getting a weird error , now i have to log out , log in and load the deck - thats just lame , very lame
3. why i can't my drafted deck right away and i get kicked from trade when i do it, i have to log out and log in to be able to do it.
Just a note about your sideboarding against Open The Vaults:
Sideboarding:
-2 Joraga Warcaller, -2 Garruk Wildspeaker, -2 Master of the Wild Hunt, -1 Nissa Revane
+4 Great Sable Stag, +3 Windstorm
Windstorm can't deal with his Sphinx of the Steel Wind but at least it's something and it's better than nothing.
Why stag? They don't run counters, have very few early plays that aren't removal and by the time they cast a blocker (sphinx summoner or sphinx of the lost truths) you're facing a next turn open the vaults anyways. You want your deck to be as fast and as aggressive as possible since their wins with inevitability using the vaults combo. The planeswalkers provide creatures, do not die to DoJ and will win you the game very quickly if not answered (garruk's over run is usually a turn too slow for them to deal with). MotWH is also an mean to quickly rebuilding your ground forces after a DoJ. Dropping 2 warcaller for windstorm seems like a good idea, though you might want to make those slingbow traps against the rest of the field (ie. real decks like vampires). I would also caution against running more than 3 eldrazi monument (3 might even be a bit much). You almost never want to have two and it's the type of card you want to draw into instead of having in your opening hand.
Pete some times you eat the bear, sometimes ... well you know the rest. Don't be too hard on yourself as you know you are a better player than this. However, perhaps this is to show that your head wasn't really in the game. If you lose consistently to the same strategy with a deck that should be able to play around it there is something funky going on. The honesty and illustration of what happens when someone goes off their rails is what rates this a 5 imho.
Nothing particular wrong? He just screwed his chances to win by playing green. The green cards are fairly vanilla and dont add much ( although the ally can be good ), in a bigger sample size this deck Deck will lose more often because its colorscrewed. If he would have splashed the Ally that would have been ok, otherwise not really. The Baloth is also just another 5 drop where early drops are more needed.
This pool def has chances of going 4-0, you always need a little luck for that anyway.
The version I heard was that sneezing expelled evil spirits from the body, and people said god bless you to thank you for having done a good thing in getting rid of them. Never heard the devil stealing your soul version of the story.
Now I'm just barely curious enough to go check wikipedia. Hmmm, they say "Several possible origins are commonly given. The practice of blessing a sneeze, dating as far back as at least 77 AD, however, is far older than most specific explanations can account for." Then they go and list half a dozen or so common stories, including that they're blessing you to make sure your heart keeps beating, or to keep you from coming down with the bubonic plague. Go figure!
Thanks for the comments guys.
@Morkje: As a matter of fact this week's deck did start as a devour deck and it even had 4x Gluttonous Slime in it because it was perfectly fitting the theme. Then I started testing and saw that I was losing most of my games in the TP Room. I needed something that I can take to 2mans and sadly I saw no way out for that devour deck. Maybe I didn't build the deck right as I was constantly losing to the best decks of the format.
And as I didn't want to write about a deck that is good in losing and bad in winning, I decided to try this deck you see in the article. Eldrazi Green was also fitting the theme even though not as perfectly as devour was, but more importantly it was constantly winning. I liked it and decided to write about it. After all, a lot of time has passed since people last took it to big events. I decided to remind people of its existence and its potential considering todays Standard meta.
@Mark: You're absolutely right. As I also said many times in the article, most of the time I had no idea what I was doing when I was sideboarding. That game was one of those moments I guess.
Thanks again for the comments.
LE
I really wish I could sort the collection to just show me all my cards that aren't being used in any of my decks. That way I'd know it was safe to trade away old random extras. But I guess the collection hand has no idea what the decks hand is doing.
I really liked the idea of using the seven sins for deckbuilding.
Having said that, it does seem a bit weak to just grab a known deck and strech the imagination to make it fit.
When I saw you were going to do gluttony I thought about devour.
It would fit the theme way better imho.
Looking forward to the next article, but really hope it fits the theme better.
If we're going to ban the great casual debate because its both pointless and tedious then I would ban MOANING ABOUT MTGO on the same grounds.
Sure its not perfect; you know it, I know it, WOTC knows it. But it allows me to play magic if I don't feel like schlepping all the way to some fragrance-challenged card store.
To be honest I'm amazed its works so well considering the almost infinite card interactions but then maybe I'm just a glass half full kind of guy.
There will be a new version soon. It will (probably) be better but you can bet your bottom tix that people will carry on moaning about it, just as soon as they've finished their first argument over whether its fair to play Maelstrom Pulse in the Casual Room.
Hey. You can play magic on your laptop. Wow!
Ted
Tarmogoyf just went down to $35 a day or two ago!
The deck is pretty much just another variant of polymorph/iona which has been floating around standard for a long time. The big weakness of this (type of) deck is inconsistency. Sure, they'll be games where you'll shutdown your opponent's deck completely but I think you'll find in practice that more-often-than-not you'll lose to inconsistency (e.g. bad opening hands, bad top decks, etc). All decks are susceptible to this, but some are better than others (e.g. weenie strategies tend to always have something useful to cast early game). And of course, one of the greatest strengths of everyone's "favorite" deck to hate (Jund) is that even if it runs into inconsistency it has the chance to topdeck into Cascade spells that can swing the game back in its favor.
haha, soo very true! I don't know how many time's I've done that. You have to be SO careful not to mulligan unintentionally.
Leagues are great when you don't have five+ hours to sit and play a sealed tourney. So now WotC gets almost zero money from me for limited play. I am pretty sure I am not the only one who spends less on sealed type events. There are a lot of people out there who want a sealed event without the huge time constraint.
Go into the folder that launches MTGO. There's kicker.exe which you normally run, and then there's another executable. Kicker is the updater, which gets the latest version of the client and then launches the actual program. Built into kicker is code to watch for a version already running. But the program itself doesn't actually check.
So run the other program and it will bypass the updater and let you open a second. But only do that for the second program. If you do it every time you'll never update and it won't work.
(Apologies for not naming the actual file right now, I'm on the wrong computer and going off the top of my head.)
ok, how does one open the client twice on the same computer?
I would like to spend...1 clicks, 2 clicks, 3 clicks, 4 clicks, ... 20 clicks for X. Holy mommy its a pain to spend all that mana if you have more then 10 mana to spend. Heck you would think you could at least just have a modifier to SPEND it ALL. My poor mice are costing me more then my cards at this point.
I'm sorry but how is Squee's +3 hand size better than Malfegor's +7 hands size?
Done that been there lol...Though USUALLY it doesn't mull for me unless I get too impatient. And it seems to not be lag but an actual interface error.
As to #2, I have always wondered why, if you have a store online, and you want to play an event for which you don't have cards/tickets (aside from the fact that you can get stuff cheaper from internet stores), you have to go to the store, buy the items, then return to the event. Wait. They're all on the same system! Why can't I just click to join an event, and it gives me the option to buy the said items if I don't have them by loading them into my cart? There are a ton of things on MTGO like this that really bug me. Put all the functions onto the same platform, then don't allow them to interact in a smart way. Instead, it's kind of a stupid system platform, where one hand doesn't know what the other is doing, when a smart system would link all these functional systems together. Honestly, I have no idea why it was necessary to put the WotC Store online when the only thing you can do with it is exactly what we did with in in 2.0, go online, buy the items, wait for them to arrive, and THEN join the event.
Oh yeah, and leagues. I need leagues. But let's face it, leagues aren't as profitable and therefore will be knocked to the back burner time and again. I've already consigned it to Vaporware.
About fucking time, well done indeed. -svg
Clicklag.
do you want to play first? YES
do you want to play first? YEEEESSSS
do you want to play first? YEEEESSSSS
..mulligans to 6
..mulligans to 5
:=0(
I really hope the next version comes out sooner rather than later and has the many fixes we collectively yearn for. What's the saying? Hope springs eternal? I mean I have somewhat gotten used to the quirks of v3 but I still find the urge to rip it to shreds creeping up on me in odd moments.
That bridge deck is quite a beating. Sits there and does nothing for a bit then suddenly bridge and skull cap and a bunch of fierce attackers and well that's the whole song. Not being able to respond in kind is painful. Open The Vaults seems like a much more sneaky and deadly combo in that you probably won't realize it is happening until it happens at least once. And if it happens once it is probably gg. next? As usual AJ is an innovative and scary builder.
Erik Vamps? Really? I'd have thought you'd go with Boss Naya which looks like a great deck. (I managed to take a look at the video of BDM's chat with Ross on his deck at PT San Diego.) If I were planning to play competitively Id definitely want that deck or some hybrid there of. What is better than White Green Red Vampires? Certainly not monoblack traditional vamps. Good luck anyway.
I have a few more (that are not Leagues)
1. why can't i open the draft room and the seald room ? , i want to check both of them AT THE SAME FRIKKIN TIME>......... but no... its way to complex to implant (really what the problem opening multiple rooms )
2. Why when i save a draft deck and edit it on the deck editor i can't do it on the 2nd draft without getting a weird error , now i have to log out , log in and load the deck - thats just lame , very lame
3. why i can't my drafted deck right away and i get kicked from trade when i do it, i have to log out and log in to be able to do it.
Just a note about your sideboarding against Open The Vaults:
Sideboarding:
-2 Joraga Warcaller, -2 Garruk Wildspeaker, -2 Master of the Wild Hunt, -1 Nissa Revane
+4 Great Sable Stag, +3 Windstorm
Windstorm can't deal with his Sphinx of the Steel Wind but at least it's something and it's better than nothing.
Why stag? They don't run counters, have very few early plays that aren't removal and by the time they cast a blocker (sphinx summoner or sphinx of the lost truths) you're facing a next turn open the vaults anyways. You want your deck to be as fast and as aggressive as possible since their wins with inevitability using the vaults combo. The planeswalkers provide creatures, do not die to DoJ and will win you the game very quickly if not answered (garruk's over run is usually a turn too slow for them to deal with). MotWH is also an mean to quickly rebuilding your ground forces after a DoJ. Dropping 2 warcaller for windstorm seems like a good idea, though you might want to make those slingbow traps against the rest of the field (ie. real decks like vampires). I would also caution against running more than 3 eldrazi monument (3 might even be a bit much). You almost never want to have two and it's the type of card you want to draw into instead of having in your opening hand.
Really like your layout & rundown...very easy om the eyes
Shoulda gone with the BR build, though your list could have done with the Akoum Battlesinger.
Pete some times you eat the bear, sometimes ... well you know the rest. Don't be too hard on yourself as you know you are a better player than this. However, perhaps this is to show that your head wasn't really in the game. If you lose consistently to the same strategy with a deck that should be able to play around it there is something funky going on. The honesty and illustration of what happens when someone goes off their rails is what rates this a 5 imho.
Nothing particular wrong? He just screwed his chances to win by playing green. The green cards are fairly vanilla and dont add much ( although the ally can be good ), in a bigger sample size this deck Deck will lose more often because its colorscrewed. If he would have splashed the Ally that would have been ok, otherwise not really. The Baloth is also just another 5 drop where early drops are more needed.
This pool def has chances of going 4-0, you always need a little luck for that anyway.
The version I heard was that sneezing expelled evil spirits from the body, and people said god bless you to thank you for having done a good thing in getting rid of them. Never heard the devil stealing your soul version of the story.
Now I'm just barely curious enough to go check wikipedia. Hmmm, they say "Several possible origins are commonly given. The practice of blessing a sneeze, dating as far back as at least 77 AD, however, is far older than most specific explanations can account for." Then they go and list half a dozen or so common stories, including that they're blessing you to make sure your heart keeps beating, or to keep you from coming down with the bubonic plague. Go figure!
Man calm down guys! Great pics and layout - look forward to your next one