Now this I disagree with. The way Luck is mitigated in magic is through consistency and repetition. The more copies of a card (or type of card) in the deck the likelier you are to draw it when you need it. Having better quality cards ensures more consistency and also a wider selection to choose from. You need 12 forms of exile but you only own one 1 path to exile, 2 swords to plowshares and 3 Unmakes? You better shell out the money for the rest or you will be LUCKY to see those cards in a given draw.
well i dont think any would seriously try to compare skill levels in a matchup between Jund and squire.dek, so i really dont think money has anything to do with it. Some current standard decks are far cheaper than other and still do well. Same with extended. Also money in no way would mitigate the luck factor at all.
i'll play mine in classic if need be...though i did just remember i should totally be running indestructibility in my enchant deck and im totally not...
I was actually hoping to update the article before it got published. I'll try to fix up those mistakes though.
Anon #1 - I do sideboard out rancor in most of my matchups. I've sometimes been keeping it against combo, WW, and burn lately however. The thing is, like Putrid Leech, it's an incredibly powerful standalone card and is never "bad" in any matchup. Post-SB I usually have more relevant card hate to bring instead, like Nausea (which is actually Festercreep now) to kill WW's prot black creatures.
Kensiky - The two missing cards are "Gorgon Recluse." It's a solid 2/4 creature with an ability that can kill prot black creatures, all for a mere BB madness cost. I also cut a Gathen Raiders for a stinkweed imp and added two imps in the sideboard to deal with flyers trying to race me, which I will also hopefully update.
Kalandine - My decks are intended to be competitive. I'll admit though, the BGTempo one should probably stay in the casual room for now. But my madness deck is hopefully competitive and I've gone 2-1 in 2man queues so far (which I'll also talk about).
I'm surprised Steamworks is being played. I didn't know anyone else was playing it -- good that it's catching on!
EDIT: Article has been updated with playtest results. It also made the article insanely long. Sorry about that! Next article will be less all over the place, promise.
I think we tend to downplay the shuffler in magic alot. We talk about "bad luck" when we have a bad starting hand, or when we have no more cards in hand and have to resort to topdecking. But every single card we draw in a game is luck, either good for our current situation or bad, we just often neglect this while our hand still has other options.
In poker, the strategy is to play each hand as efficiently as possible, minimizing your losses on bad draws and maximizing your profits from the good ones. We're not even considering the opponent's hands here which adds many more layers of complexity. If you're playing hold em and crack a 2 and 7, you could simply fold, and sometimes not even lose anything for it.
In magic, we must also try to maiximize our hand's potential every game and that does take skill, however a bad hand will likely lose regardless. We can't "minimize" our loss, a loss is a loss. That's what really sours my opinion of skill in magic the most.
There's alot more rules in magic to know, alot of ways to play hands efficiently, and signals to correctly read your opponents. But the fact that you're "all in" each game makes me wonder if it's really more skillful than poker.
To me, the percent of skill in a game is proportional to the maximum amount of information that one player can obtain regarding the game state. For example, games such as chess, tic-tac-toe, or connect-4 can be described as 100% skill due to the fact that both players have complete knowledge of the entire board, while magic and poker are lower because one doesn't know the entire contents/ordering of decks, etc.
From this, I believe that poker (at least at a professional level) is actually more skill intensive than magic, due to the fact that top professionals have the ability to determine the contents of their opponents hands. Even though one can obtain the same kind of read in magic, the fact is that in magic each player has a randomized deck from which they (generally) draw a card every turn. The randomness in top-decks from each player over the course of an entire game outweigh the randomness of the 5 additional cards flipped in hold-em. Plus a best 2/3 match in magic is much shorter than a poker tournament where the average player sees hundreds of hands.
The only reason people believe skill plays such a high factor in magic is the fact that the difference in skill levels between players in magic is higher than that in more popular games (mostly due to the smaller player base). Personally, I am a ~1850 PTQ grinder, and even among people around that level, in my experience a tiny percent of them actually use all of the information available to them. Magic is one of, if not the most complicated competetive game ever develpoed, and every game people make plenty of mistakes they never even realize.
I agree with you on the nature / nurture idea. I think most of us have a preference for what playstyle we enjoy. I agree that at least initially we pilot our preferred archetypes better than other ones. I think this is more a case of practicing what we like more.
I like that you're wading into the 100s format. It's something I too am interested in playing.
Good article, I didn't think it was too long at all.
I have always wanted a chance to use the smaller set cards more, this may or may not be a solution for that. I wonder how the dispersion of the cards might vary. I assume the UB's would be available only after all components of a set are released, but normally there is the big set at the beginning and one or two smaller sets released later. Would the larger set be weighted differently (more likely to get a Knight of the skyward eye than fiery fall or grixis grimblade?
I've been playing a more combo-oriented version of this deck to good results (with 4 borderland rangers and 4 elvish visionaries as fogs which help me get land). I'm surprised about chandra not making it to the main deck. I found her to be insane everywhere I played her. Most importantly, she kills baneslayer. In builds without baloths (or bogardan hellkite) dealing more than 21 damage can be surprisingly difficult, and i've definitely lost games to having to aim two activations at the baneslayer, then an additional two to make up for the 5 life it gained my opponent.
Also, on the final question, I am strongly pro-hellkite. 8-mana is a given for this deck, and it will blow out anything except a ^*(#% baneslayer!
Hey, what happened to the Pauper article that was put up yesterday? I don't remember what the author's name was, but it was his second article in the series. I read it, but then went back to look at the decklists again, and now it's gone.
hey Boogie Beta is slave work offered by wotc under the guise of "testing a new set before anyone". Allowing them to reap the benefits of free bug testers which they should be paying for in the first place as it is their product.
Hi Boogie!
WWK beta means that you get to play with worldwake cards online before anyone else. :)
Also, VCL stands for Volunteer Community Lead, and we are responsible for editorial moderation on the official Wizards message boards.
I'm new to MTGO (though I've been playing on and off paper magic since Tempest). Can someone please explain what being a Worldwake beta tester means, in terms of playing with the new cards before they are released in particular? Also, what does VCL stand for?
Thanks a bunch.
Boogie.
I think the concept was that Legendary lands are way too annoying for players AND there have been instances in past sets of nonlegendary named lands. Frankly I like that Emeria and Valakut aren't legendary. It means we have to figure out OTHER ways of neutralizing those strategems. If we can't we lose. That they are additive to each other only makes them greater not worse. As an average player, I am almost going to want less legends and more nonlegends particularly with non-creature permanents.
@Katastrophe: You're definately right about Scute Mob; the landscape on the card is Lorwyn without doubt.
@me, myself and i: You are definately right but I'm looking at things from a different angle. For example Emeria is the name of a place and it is a proper noun. It should be legendary. There is one Crypt of Agadeem and not two. Or there can't be two Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir on table because "Teferi" is the name of a specific individual. And so is Emeria, so is Valakut, so is Oran-Rief etc...
So, those lands should have been either legendary or should have had another name like "Sky Ruin" for Emeria or "Molten Pinnacle" for Valakut. There can be many "Sky Ruin"s on Zendikar and thus the card can be a non-legendary one. But there can't be two Emerias.
I firmly believe that valakuut and emeria should have been legendary. Having them not legendary makes land destruction something that needs to be played. Considering how much most people despise LD, having it be such a big (and necessary) part of the format is bad for std and bad for magic as a whole.
I was thinking the same thing about the duals. Someone asked me in a casual game last week "How'd you get all those lands?" And I told them I traded smart. A lot of them I bought at their low point when ME2 was out. The others, I'm just patient. (Except Underground Sea.)
There are other cards that are definitely worth selling now and buying back in a month or two. Scapeshift off the top of my head. Chalice is another. Chrome Mox just spiked very high going into its last Extended season and that one is going to fall really hard since only a few Classic storm decks use it. (Was 6, currently 15, I'm predicting it'll stop at 4.5.) There are some others I'm forgetting. I should've wrote them all down.
Congratulations on going 4-0 with a new deck! Those were some exciting games.
I agree that the Dragonmaster Outcast is a Jund card. Also, the art on Scute Mob is from Lorwyn, no doubt about it. Maybe Scute Mob was cut because insects weren't a supported tribe?
Now this I disagree with. The way Luck is mitigated in magic is through consistency and repetition. The more copies of a card (or type of card) in the deck the likelier you are to draw it when you need it. Having better quality cards ensures more consistency and also a wider selection to choose from. You need 12 forms of exile but you only own one 1 path to exile, 2 swords to plowshares and 3 Unmakes? You better shell out the money for the rest or you will be LUCKY to see those cards in a given draw.
well i dont think any would seriously try to compare skill levels in a matchup between Jund and squire.dek, so i really dont think money has anything to do with it. Some current standard decks are far cheaper than other and still do well. Same with extended. Also money in no way would mitigate the luck factor at all.
the author was doctor anime though i was wondering the same thing
i'll play mine in classic if need be...though i did just remember i should totally be running indestructibility in my enchant deck and im totally not...
I was actually hoping to update the article before it got published. I'll try to fix up those mistakes though.
Anon #1 - I do sideboard out rancor in most of my matchups. I've sometimes been keeping it against combo, WW, and burn lately however. The thing is, like Putrid Leech, it's an incredibly powerful standalone card and is never "bad" in any matchup. Post-SB I usually have more relevant card hate to bring instead, like Nausea (which is actually Festercreep now) to kill WW's prot black creatures.
Kensiky - The two missing cards are "Gorgon Recluse." It's a solid 2/4 creature with an ability that can kill prot black creatures, all for a mere BB madness cost. I also cut a Gathen Raiders for a stinkweed imp and added two imps in the sideboard to deal with flyers trying to race me, which I will also hopefully update.
Kalandine - My decks are intended to be competitive. I'll admit though, the BGTempo one should probably stay in the casual room for now. But my madness deck is hopefully competitive and I've gone 2-1 in 2man queues so far (which I'll also talk about).
I'm surprised Steamworks is being played. I didn't know anyone else was playing it -- good that it's catching on!
EDIT: Article has been updated with playtest results. It also made the article insanely long. Sorry about that! Next article will be less all over the place, promise.
I think we tend to downplay the shuffler in magic alot. We talk about "bad luck" when we have a bad starting hand, or when we have no more cards in hand and have to resort to topdecking. But every single card we draw in a game is luck, either good for our current situation or bad, we just often neglect this while our hand still has other options.
In poker, the strategy is to play each hand as efficiently as possible, minimizing your losses on bad draws and maximizing your profits from the good ones. We're not even considering the opponent's hands here which adds many more layers of complexity. If you're playing hold em and crack a 2 and 7, you could simply fold, and sometimes not even lose anything for it.
In magic, we must also try to maiximize our hand's potential every game and that does take skill, however a bad hand will likely lose regardless. We can't "minimize" our loss, a loss is a loss. That's what really sours my opinion of skill in magic the most.
There's alot more rules in magic to know, alot of ways to play hands efficiently, and signals to correctly read your opponents. But the fact that you're "all in" each game makes me wonder if it's really more skillful than poker.
To me, the percent of skill in a game is proportional to the maximum amount of information that one player can obtain regarding the game state. For example, games such as chess, tic-tac-toe, or connect-4 can be described as 100% skill due to the fact that both players have complete knowledge of the entire board, while magic and poker are lower because one doesn't know the entire contents/ordering of decks, etc.
From this, I believe that poker (at least at a professional level) is actually more skill intensive than magic, due to the fact that top professionals have the ability to determine the contents of their opponents hands. Even though one can obtain the same kind of read in magic, the fact is that in magic each player has a randomized deck from which they (generally) draw a card every turn. The randomness in top-decks from each player over the course of an entire game outweigh the randomness of the 5 additional cards flipped in hold-em. Plus a best 2/3 match in magic is much shorter than a poker tournament where the average player sees hundreds of hands.
The only reason people believe skill plays such a high factor in magic is the fact that the difference in skill levels between players in magic is higher than that in more popular games (mostly due to the smaller player base). Personally, I am a ~1850 PTQ grinder, and even among people around that level, in my experience a tiny percent of them actually use all of the information available to them. Magic is one of, if not the most complicated competetive game ever develpoed, and every game people make plenty of mistakes they never even realize.
I agree with you on the nature / nurture idea. I think most of us have a preference for what playstyle we enjoy. I agree that at least initially we pilot our preferred archetypes better than other ones. I think this is more a case of practicing what we like more.
I like that you're wading into the 100s format. It's something I too am interested in playing.
Good article, I didn't think it was too long at all.
Even vs a Baneslayer it isn't that bad since you can toss the damage at the op for the kill.
I have always wanted a chance to use the smaller set cards more, this may or may not be a solution for that. I wonder how the dispersion of the cards might vary. I assume the UB's would be available only after all components of a set are released, but normally there is the big set at the beginning and one or two smaller sets released later. Would the larger set be weighted differently (more likely to get a Knight of the skyward eye than fiery fall or grixis grimblade?
I've been playing a more combo-oriented version of this deck to good results (with 4 borderland rangers and 4 elvish visionaries as fogs which help me get land). I'm surprised about chandra not making it to the main deck. I found her to be insane everywhere I played her. Most importantly, she kills baneslayer. In builds without baloths (or bogardan hellkite) dealing more than 21 damage can be surprisingly difficult, and i've definitely lost games to having to aim two activations at the baneslayer, then an additional two to make up for the 5 life it gained my opponent.
Also, on the final question, I am strongly pro-hellkite. 8-mana is a given for this deck, and it will blow out anything except a ^*(#% baneslayer!
Hey, what happened to the Pauper article that was put up yesterday? I don't remember what the author's name was, but it was his second article in the series. I read it, but then went back to look at the decklists again, and now it's gone.
It's a little low compared to Eric's but not by that much... He seemed perfectly audible to me.
hey Boogie Beta is slave work offered by wotc under the guise of "testing a new set before anyone". Allowing them to reap the benefits of free bug testers which they should be paying for in the first place as it is their product.
Anyone else having extreme difficulty hearing AJ?
I'm new to MTGO (though I've been playing on and off paper magic since Tempest). Can someone please explain what being a Worldwake beta tester means, in terms of playing with the new cards before they are released in particular? Also, what does VCL stand for?
Thanks a bunch.
Boogie.
I think the concept was that Legendary lands are way too annoying for players AND there have been instances in past sets of nonlegendary named lands. Frankly I like that Emeria and Valakut aren't legendary. It means we have to figure out OTHER ways of neutralizing those strategems. If we can't we lose. That they are additive to each other only makes them greater not worse. As an average player, I am almost going to want less legends and more nonlegends particularly with non-creature permanents.
Thanks for the comments.
@Katastrophe: You're definately right about Scute Mob; the landscape on the card is Lorwyn without doubt.
@me, myself and i: You are definately right but I'm looking at things from a different angle. For example Emeria is the name of a place and it is a proper noun. It should be legendary. There is one Crypt of Agadeem and not two. Or there can't be two Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir on table because "Teferi" is the name of a specific individual. And so is Emeria, so is Valakut, so is Oran-Rief etc...
So, those lands should have been either legendary or should have had another name like "Sky Ruin" for Emeria or "Molten Pinnacle" for Valakut. There can be many "Sky Ruin"s on Zendikar and thus the card can be a non-legendary one. But there can't be two Emerias.
LE
Being an entrepreneur is wonderful thing! Seize the opportunity while your lifestyle allows it.
If it's going to be named the Gamer Grill, are you going to have a menu item named The Hamtastic? You should! =)
I firmly believe that valakuut and emeria should have been legendary. Having them not legendary makes land destruction something that needs to be played. Considering how much most people despise LD, having it be such a big (and necessary) part of the format is bad for std and bad for magic as a whole.
I was thinking the same thing about the duals. Someone asked me in a casual game last week "How'd you get all those lands?" And I told them I traded smart. A lot of them I bought at their low point when ME2 was out. The others, I'm just patient. (Except Underground Sea.)
There are other cards that are definitely worth selling now and buying back in a month or two. Scapeshift off the top of my head. Chalice is another. Chrome Mox just spiked very high going into its last Extended season and that one is going to fall really hard since only a few Classic storm decks use it. (Was 6, currently 15, I'm predicting it'll stop at 4.5.) There are some others I'm forgetting. I should've wrote them all down.
Grats on the upcoming shop Hammy. Hope you prosper and bring more magic tech to the world.
Congratulations on going 4-0 with a new deck! Those were some exciting games.
I agree that the Dragonmaster Outcast is a Jund card. Also, the art on Scute Mob is from Lorwyn, no doubt about it. Maybe Scute Mob was cut because insects weren't a supported tribe?
time is a bit random atm because of some stuff, but feel free to add and ask, however not sure i have anything thats ext legal atm lol