Self-aggrandizement. It's a bit vainglorious to big up ourselves when we could be pointing out the rest of the community. You'll notice a few months back when Hamtastic was unable to do the podcast one week, Sebastian and I did plump for SotP as the best. Usually, consider it a conflict of interests. Hammy does an excellent job on SotP week in, week out, but that's pretty much a given. Everybody watches prime time, but not everyone is aware of the gems tucked away elsewhere on the schedule.
now if you mean viable as in teir 1 decks no, oath is it and the metagame better be prepared.
if you maen viable as in can make a top 8 or 3-1 a de, then yea there are a bunch of decks survival enabling at least 3 different builds with our currant card pool.
Vampires will be the dominant deck in ZEN block at least until Worldwake like it or not, which is why I doubt I'll be playing much if any more ZEN block until then. The only deck with a good MU against it is UW control and even then it's only a slightly positive MU until the Vampire player brings in the 4 Mind Sludge from the board although a lot of Vampire decks run 2-3 Mind Sludge main deck already.
The Valakut decks, Rg or mono-R aren't tier 1 at all, they were just built to prey on unprepared UW decks but lose to Vampires and any of the Kor/Mono-Red/RW Aggro decks out there. I saw a prepared UW deck destroy a Valakut deck with Felidar Sovereign and Spreading Seas is tech if that deck ever becomes popular but it won't as it's a niche metagame deck at best. The one time I saw a Valakut deck go 4-0 in a DE without dropping a game I watched some of the replays and the only reason why the deck did so well was because it was matched up against UW decks without any answers all 4 rounds.
I've tried a few rogue decks myself and it was always Vampires that were the toughest matchup unfortunately, and this article clearly illustrates why the deck is as dominant as it is and so frustrating to play against. The Vampire mirror is probably the most frustrating MU of all as there are a lot of blowouts where one player starts out with Lacerator or Quest for the Gravelord turn 1, Hexmage/Bloodghast turn 2, then Gatekeeper turn 3 when the opponent only has 1 creature and the blowout is on. Then the player with creature advantage can Feast of Blood/Disfigure the following creature the opponent plays while the opponent's copies of Feast of Blood are blanked and the game is all but over, and that type of start isn't a rare occurrence at all in the mirror.
But then again, I've read articles in the past saying that single-set block is usually a format where there's one dominant deck, so I don't exactly know why I was expecting otherwise for ZEN block.
Now that Paul metioned it... Hammy and him being unable to speak about his own creations on the podcast... I have a few things to say about it.
Yes it would be (very) odd for him to name his own articles but what about you AJ? Or you Sebastian? Why is that a taboo? I never understand that. I for example think that this week's SotP was clearly one of the best ones. And yet it goes without being mentioned (again).
So when it's prime time on Puremtgo TV, everybody watches SotP. And yet the next day you guys talk about what? "Cooking with Maggie"?!?
Cooking with Maggie is also a nice show but come one guys; at least AJ or Sebastian can mention the guy on the prime time every now and then. What's wrong with it?
Perfecting (fine-tuning) UG could be a chore, before World Wake*. UG is one of my personal favorite color combo but it is always a tough sell. Without cards like Opposition, good token generators (well you do get the range with the wolves) and few effective counters the deck will falter against the multiple enchantments that give card/tempo advantage. What UG really needs is a good reset button. (Along the lines of Nev's Disk).
I like how you lay out the metagame a little. You should log in next time and be recognized. :D Maybe even think about expounding on your ideas via an article.
*it is my hope that World wake brings some much needed good blue/green interaction.
I played against tons of Valakut decks and you can see the damage it caused me in my sideboards; Demolish in Mono White!
It is a very good deck but it can be easily hated and that's the reason why I never played it myself. During my first few tournaments I was totally unaware how to deal with it but then figured it out. And leave Valakut out of the play and that deck falls apart; at least that's what I saw from playing against it.
I also tried WU as you can see but I also saw that good players can easily play around it. Vampires.dec has a lot deadly tools at its disposal; if one fails the other surely works.
First off I'm always glad to help with technical issues if I can so thanks for the recognition.
Re: Big sets I loved the ARBx3 drafts actually but my friend who is a much better overall limited player than me pointed out its stupidity in clear details. I hope Rex3 will live up to your expectations (though so far I haven't been able to draft M10 or Zen so I'm not sure if I will have any practice by the time that happens.)
The Eldrazi are cthonic in nature? (Elementally vague diefic old ones?) That sounds pretty cool. :) the Mythos card game (which was based on Lovecraft's work) seemed a bit too esoteric for me but the art was definitely cool. Any time HP Lovecraft gets attention in games I get a little thrill.
Great advice on the beta testing guys!
Pronunciation is tough to get for made up names. Usually I go with the standard vowel/consonant pairs for the mid American accent (not mid-western) which is what you hear most often on TV. I don't have a reason why I do this, but it just seems natural to me. On the other hand it is sometimes a pleasant surprise to hear how someone changes the sound to fit their native accent.
Rushmore111 the login here is set by a cookie. That cookie actually expires every week or 2. Unfortunately, you may actually be logged in when it expires so that it seems like you are still in when you go to post but the system being proactive logs out your session by then. (Or something like that.) It would be nice if it actually notified you when your cookie was expiring (so you could munch on it :P).
*looks forward to seeing Goblin's tech on red blue since that is his namesake forté* Meantime I will do some tinkering with my own thoughts on the subject.
That extended deck you talk about is really hard to deal with. I love the concept because you can abuse both World Queller and Archon of Justice in the same trigger, particularly in combo with Emeria. Spawning Pit is just gravy in that deck imho. It adds grease if you get stuck. Kor Cartographer is not my favorite creature but seeing World Queller abuse on the table you can just sac extra lands and get them from your deck with the Cartographer, particularly with extra Emerias. The deck is indeed very un-fun to get killed with, but thus is the nature of the game right? It is a little slow to start so it can be beaten but if you leave it unmolested for long you will regret it. Relic of Progenitus is the bane of this deck I think.
Alex and Multiball! is a great read! Not perhaps the best formatting but the heart of the article is pure win. It gives us a real inside view of what many of us witnessed parts of online.
The toughest thing about playing core set is the building. It is really a chore to find the cards that are eligible that you have that aren't actually core set printings. I found using http://gatherer.wizards.com helps a little (but man is it still a chore.) A format filter on the client would be really useful.
By the way Hammy you couldn't mention your own article this week (the personality one) but I thought it had a fairly huge impact here. Lots of people chimed in to relate their magic stories because of it. Nice work. :D http://puremtgo.com/articles/state-program-november-13th-2009 for those few who missed it.
I don`t think it`s clear enough from your article that Rg Valakut-ramp is a viable deck. You mention Valakut, but nothing more as far as I can tell. Valakut has a positive MU versus Vamps, and so has UW Control. Vampires isn`t the king of Block anymore, people have started to catch up on how good UW is. It`s just a matter of time before others realize that Valakut beats UW, and Vamps get caught in the crossfire. I personally try to perfectionize (is that a word?) UG Landfall, but that`s another story. Spreading Seas will see play in the 75 of UW for sure :)
Beating Valakut will be key in Block, but not for another month. I believe RW Aggro does that, but it`s MU against UW and Vamps isn`t positive. It`s exciting how the Block-format turns out, how it changes (and will continue to change) with such a relativly small card-pool. Wizards did a good job designing it, with it`s pretty obvious "Vamps is good"-first impression.
Hammy, just today there was a nice Pyromancer Ascension deck on dailymtg.com for Standard. So I skip it and offer you this ZEN Block one (but it's not Blue/Red, it's mainly Mono Red with White splash):
35 Other Spells
4x Journey to Nowhere(this is the only white card in the deck)
4x Expedition Map
4x Pyromancers Ascension
4x Chandra Ablaze
4x Burst Lightning
4x Punishing Fire
4x Inferno Trap
4x Spire Barrage
3x Lavaball Trap
The deck has a lo of ways to win. First it has the Valakut tech and it's a very reliable tech. Secondly the deck uses Pyromancer Ascension and tons of red sorceries/instants. And finally there is Chandra and no extra words for her are needed.
Journey to Nowhere deals with Bloodghast but also with River Boa. I mainly play this deck in the casual room (and mostly win with it), so I don't have a sideboard. But you may consider cards like Demolish and Goblin Ruinblaster for the sideboard.
Hope you find this one useful. I am personally having a lot of fun playing it.
What is funny is I talked with Louigi abit about the format because while I don't own the cards to build with it adds some interesting new mechanics to explore. GW (very similar to yours in fact) is one of the decks we discussed. Particularly re Iona and Summoning trap. Some interesting decks there LE. :) Anyway one of these days we will face off in the TWC PE events. I look forward to this.
A pretty dope podcast, with some good insight on modo as usual, but seriously if you need a deck list, I may bust out the super secret ultra tech fatmaninalittlecoat special color list. It's like if you've ever wanted to just destroy your opponent in a way that he'll sit there and blink, it's the list for you!
Where do I even sign in? I have never been able to figure it out, heh. I am guessing this is a main reason why there are so many annonymous comments on each article.
Another INFP chiming in as a Johnny experimenter. Specifically expresses itself in me as a desire to compete with the dominant decks with Jank. So you're mostly right.
I wholly appreciate that you are taking a look at Exodus and how it'll play out in limited. I quit playing magic after attending the stronghold pre-release in NYC and didn't start again until Time Spiral, so I am going to need all the help I can get with this format. I'm also an avid classic drafter, so articles like this are a boon to my success.
I also wanted to note that I have been reading your articles on here for the past few weeks and you have a very good understanding of classic and provide valuable insight. Keep up the good work man. We need more writers like you.
Thank you all for your comments! I have learned a great deal about a lot of you in a very short amount of time. I'm actually amazed that I was even close to some of them. I expected to miss a lot more than I did. Of course, I was waaayyyyy off on a lot as well. :)
I am a strong ENTP, and I play Magic a ton. I also am bored by poker. It is the same every game, you see. Only 52 cards to worry about.
The reason why I have stuck with Magic as long as I have? Variance. I play Magic to do different things all the time. In my local judge community there are two of us (and I would guess he is the same type as I), that have an absurd number of EDH decks. He has 11 currently, while I just culled back down to 6 so I could free up sleeves to build another three or four again.
We discussed making our decks unified constructed just so we could see more cards between games. We also lend out decks constantly, and are tickled when others see patterns of play we missed in them. (Case in point. I watched someone use my Lorthos deck as a devastating control deck last night, combining Vedalken Shackles and a fistful of bounce and draw spells to lock up the board so he could attack effectively with Inkwell Leviathan. Which is not how I play that deck at all. It made me happy that it had that much flexibility.)
Simply put, I play Magic to try different things. I rarely rebuild decks from the past I have built before, just because I know how they work. I play EDH so I can have higher variance game to game with the same deck while still getting to test out and engineer new ideas. I play a two man draft format we call "idiot drafting" because it forces us to use more of the cards in a booster, so I get to do things like build a Howling Mine powered beatdown deck in limited. (Verdict on that deck was that it was terrible, but it gives me ideas.)
I love to know more about Magic, and I am always seeking cards I have not built decks yet, fun and interesting interactions in formats, and new and different ways to play. Magic is not *a* distraction from other things, other things are the distraction from something that changes constantly and which is thus the only thing that has held my flighty ENTP focus for over a decade.
And note that I am not random or haphazard about my playing Magic. I am committed to trying new things about the game all the time. I was logistics team lead for the second day of GP Minneapolis. Three drafts, two of them with 140 people, all with stamped product. The event ran buttery smooth because it was a new fun problem to solve, and I got to spend the whole day figuring out how to make it tick like a clock. We rolled 6 rounds and 2 drafts in well under 9 hours, and a decent chunk of that was having the drafts take under an hour from draft start to end of build.
I am also a terrible tournament player. I don't take the deck I am best at, or draft my standby every time. I could win more with Zoo than anything else, ever, but I will do things like play creatureless control decks in Mirrodin standard or some iteration of a midrange aggro deck that plays Vexing Sphinx alongside Slay to offset card advantage issues. Why? It is more interesting if I don't always know what will happen next even with excellent information on the format.
Self-aggrandizement. It's a bit vainglorious to big up ourselves when we could be pointing out the rest of the community. You'll notice a few months back when Hamtastic was unable to do the podcast one week, Sebastian and I did plump for SotP as the best. Usually, consider it a conflict of interests. Hammy does an excellent job on SotP week in, week out, but that's pretty much a given. Everybody watches prime time, but not everyone is aware of the gems tucked away elsewhere on the schedule.
now if you mean viable as in teir 1 decks no, oath is it and the metagame better be prepared.
if you maen viable as in can make a top 8 or 3-1 a de, then yea there are a bunch of decks survival enabling at least 3 different builds with our currant card pool.
Vampires will be the dominant deck in ZEN block at least until Worldwake like it or not, which is why I doubt I'll be playing much if any more ZEN block until then. The only deck with a good MU against it is UW control and even then it's only a slightly positive MU until the Vampire player brings in the 4 Mind Sludge from the board although a lot of Vampire decks run 2-3 Mind Sludge main deck already.
The Valakut decks, Rg or mono-R aren't tier 1 at all, they were just built to prey on unprepared UW decks but lose to Vampires and any of the Kor/Mono-Red/RW Aggro decks out there. I saw a prepared UW deck destroy a Valakut deck with Felidar Sovereign and Spreading Seas is tech if that deck ever becomes popular but it won't as it's a niche metagame deck at best. The one time I saw a Valakut deck go 4-0 in a DE without dropping a game I watched some of the replays and the only reason why the deck did so well was because it was matched up against UW decks without any answers all 4 rounds.
I've tried a few rogue decks myself and it was always Vampires that were the toughest matchup unfortunately, and this article clearly illustrates why the deck is as dominant as it is and so frustrating to play against. The Vampire mirror is probably the most frustrating MU of all as there are a lot of blowouts where one player starts out with Lacerator or Quest for the Gravelord turn 1, Hexmage/Bloodghast turn 2, then Gatekeeper turn 3 when the opponent only has 1 creature and the blowout is on. Then the player with creature advantage can Feast of Blood/Disfigure the following creature the opponent plays while the opponent's copies of Feast of Blood are blanked and the game is all but over, and that type of start isn't a rare occurrence at all in the mirror.
But then again, I've read articles in the past saying that single-set block is usually a format where there's one dominant deck, so I don't exactly know why I was expecting otherwise for ZEN block.
Now that Paul metioned it... Hammy and him being unable to speak about his own creations on the podcast... I have a few things to say about it.
Yes it would be (very) odd for him to name his own articles but what about you AJ? Or you Sebastian? Why is that a taboo? I never understand that. I for example think that this week's SotP was clearly one of the best ones. And yet it goes without being mentioned (again).
So when it's prime time on Puremtgo TV, everybody watches SotP. And yet the next day you guys talk about what? "Cooking with Maggie"?!?
Cooking with Maggie is also a nice show but come one guys; at least AJ or Sebastian can mention the guy on the prime time every now and then. What's wrong with it?
LE
Perfecting (fine-tuning) UG could be a chore, before World Wake*. UG is one of my personal favorite color combo but it is always a tough sell. Without cards like Opposition, good token generators (well you do get the range with the wolves) and few effective counters the deck will falter against the multiple enchantments that give card/tempo advantage. What UG really needs is a good reset button. (Along the lines of Nev's Disk).
I like how you lay out the metagame a little. You should log in next time and be recognized. :D Maybe even think about expounding on your ideas via an article.
*it is my hope that World wake brings some much needed good blue/green interaction.
Thanks for the comments guys.
I played against tons of Valakut decks and you can see the damage it caused me in my sideboards; Demolish in Mono White!
It is a very good deck but it can be easily hated and that's the reason why I never played it myself. During my first few tournaments I was totally unaware how to deal with it but then figured it out. And leave Valakut out of the play and that deck falls apart; at least that's what I saw from playing against it.
I also tried WU as you can see but I also saw that good players can easily play around it. Vampires.dec has a lot deadly tools at its disposal; if one fails the other surely works.
LE
First off I'm always glad to help with technical issues if I can so thanks for the recognition.
Re: Big sets I loved the ARBx3 drafts actually but my friend who is a much better overall limited player than me pointed out its stupidity in clear details. I hope Rex3 will live up to your expectations (though so far I haven't been able to draft M10 or Zen so I'm not sure if I will have any practice by the time that happens.)
The Eldrazi are cthonic in nature? (Elementally vague diefic old ones?) That sounds pretty cool. :) the Mythos card game (which was based on Lovecraft's work) seemed a bit too esoteric for me but the art was definitely cool. Any time HP Lovecraft gets attention in games I get a little thrill.
Great advice on the beta testing guys!
Pronunciation is tough to get for made up names. Usually I go with the standard vowel/consonant pairs for the mid American accent (not mid-western) which is what you hear most often on TV. I don't have a reason why I do this, but it just seems natural to me. On the other hand it is sometimes a pleasant surprise to hear how someone changes the sound to fit their native accent.
Rushmore111 the login here is set by a cookie. That cookie actually expires every week or 2. Unfortunately, you may actually be logged in when it expires so that it seems like you are still in when you go to post but the system being proactive logs out your session by then. (Or something like that.) It would be nice if it actually notified you when your cookie was expiring (so you could munch on it :P).
*looks forward to seeing Goblin's tech on red blue since that is his namesake forté* Meantime I will do some tinkering with my own thoughts on the subject.
That extended deck you talk about is really hard to deal with. I love the concept because you can abuse both World Queller and Archon of Justice in the same trigger, particularly in combo with Emeria. Spawning Pit is just gravy in that deck imho. It adds grease if you get stuck. Kor Cartographer is not my favorite creature but seeing World Queller abuse on the table you can just sac extra lands and get them from your deck with the Cartographer, particularly with extra Emerias. The deck is indeed very un-fun to get killed with, but thus is the nature of the game right? It is a little slow to start so it can be beaten but if you leave it unmolested for long you will regret it. Relic of Progenitus is the bane of this deck I think.
Alex and Multiball! is a great read! Not perhaps the best formatting but the heart of the article is pure win. It gives us a real inside view of what many of us witnessed parts of online.
The toughest thing about playing core set is the building. It is really a chore to find the cards that are eligible that you have that aren't actually core set printings. I found using http://gatherer.wizards.com helps a little (but man is it still a chore.) A format filter on the client would be really useful.
By the way Hammy you couldn't mention your own article this week (the personality one) but I thought it had a fairly huge impact here. Lots of people chimed in to relate their magic stories because of it. Nice work. :D http://puremtgo.com/articles/state-program-november-13th-2009 for those few who missed it.
I don`t think it`s clear enough from your article that Rg Valakut-ramp is a viable deck. You mention Valakut, but nothing more as far as I can tell. Valakut has a positive MU versus Vamps, and so has UW Control. Vampires isn`t the king of Block anymore, people have started to catch up on how good UW is. It`s just a matter of time before others realize that Valakut beats UW, and Vamps get caught in the crossfire. I personally try to perfectionize (is that a word?) UG Landfall, but that`s another story. Spreading Seas will see play in the 75 of UW for sure :)
Beating Valakut will be key in Block, but not for another month. I believe RW Aggro does that, but it`s MU against UW and Vamps isn`t positive. It`s exciting how the Block-format turns out, how it changes (and will continue to change) with such a relativly small card-pool. Wizards did a good job designing it, with it`s pretty obvious "Vamps is good"-first impression.
Very nice article.
I also get attached to certain ideas and stick with them even after I have enough painful losses to prove that those ideas aren't tier 1 competitive.
Hammy, just today there was a nice Pyromancer Ascension deck on dailymtg.com for Standard. So I skip it and offer you this ZEN Block one (but it's not Blue/Red, it's mainly Mono Red with White splash):
25 Lands
4x Arid Mesa
3x Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
2x Plains
16x Mountain
0 Creatures
None whatsoever
35 Other Spells
4x Journey to Nowhere(this is the only white card in the deck)
4x Expedition Map
4x Pyromancers Ascension
4x Chandra Ablaze
4x Burst Lightning
4x Punishing Fire
4x Inferno Trap
4x Spire Barrage
3x Lavaball Trap
The deck has a lo of ways to win. First it has the Valakut tech and it's a very reliable tech. Secondly the deck uses Pyromancer Ascension and tons of red sorceries/instants. And finally there is Chandra and no extra words for her are needed.
Journey to Nowhere deals with Bloodghast but also with River Boa. I mainly play this deck in the casual room (and mostly win with it), so I don't have a sideboard. But you may consider cards like Demolish and Goblin Ruinblaster for the sideboard.
Hope you find this one useful. I am personally having a lot of fun playing it.
LE
What is funny is I talked with Louigi abit about the format because while I don't own the cards to build with it adds some interesting new mechanics to explore. GW (very similar to yours in fact) is one of the decks we discussed. Particularly re Iona and Summoning trap. Some interesting decks there LE. :) Anyway one of these days we will face off in the TWC PE events. I look forward to this.
A pretty dope podcast, with some good insight on modo as usual, but seriously if you need a deck list, I may bust out the super secret ultra tech fatmaninalittlecoat special color list. It's like if you've ever wanted to just destroy your opponent in a way that he'll sit there and blink, it's the list for you!
It had me logged on already as rushmore111 when I hit the forum link ... but not here ... hmmm
~ rushmore111
There isn't anything on the right side of the screen.
Do I need to go to something like the forums to sign in there first?
~ rushmore111
I do have 3 lists, but I'd be spoiling part three of the primer!
any thoughts on what the set will make viable in classsic aside from oath?
like recurring-survival or just survival in bant/progenitus shell?
the history part of the article, where you spoke of the sets many 1st poineering features, was awesome
as deckwizard said the site needs more writers that cater to non casual mtgo players
On the right side of your screen you should see.a link. For "create new account". All data collected is kept confidential, of course.
Where do I even sign in? I have never been able to figure it out, heh. I am guessing this is a main reason why there are so many annonymous comments on each article.
~ rushmore111
Another INFP chiming in as a Johnny experimenter. Specifically expresses itself in me as a desire to compete with the dominant decks with Jank. So you're mostly right.
I wholly appreciate that you are taking a look at Exodus and how it'll play out in limited. I quit playing magic after attending the stronghold pre-release in NYC and didn't start again until Time Spiral, so I am going to need all the help I can get with this format. I'm also an avid classic drafter, so articles like this are a boon to my success.
I also wanted to note that I have been reading your articles on here for the past few weeks and you have a very good understanding of classic and provide valuable insight. Keep up the good work man. We need more writers like you.
They got cut off in editing. They are the three missing cards.
-Alex
try as i might i cannot see ant mols shamblers in that bant list
Thank you all for your comments! I have learned a great deal about a lot of you in a very short amount of time. I'm actually amazed that I was even close to some of them. I expected to miss a lot more than I did. Of course, I was waaayyyyy off on a lot as well. :)
Great stuff, and thank you all again!
I am a strong ENTP, and I play Magic a ton. I also am bored by poker. It is the same every game, you see. Only 52 cards to worry about.
The reason why I have stuck with Magic as long as I have? Variance. I play Magic to do different things all the time. In my local judge community there are two of us (and I would guess he is the same type as I), that have an absurd number of EDH decks. He has 11 currently, while I just culled back down to 6 so I could free up sleeves to build another three or four again.
We discussed making our decks unified constructed just so we could see more cards between games. We also lend out decks constantly, and are tickled when others see patterns of play we missed in them. (Case in point. I watched someone use my Lorthos deck as a devastating control deck last night, combining Vedalken Shackles and a fistful of bounce and draw spells to lock up the board so he could attack effectively with Inkwell Leviathan. Which is not how I play that deck at all. It made me happy that it had that much flexibility.)
Simply put, I play Magic to try different things. I rarely rebuild decks from the past I have built before, just because I know how they work. I play EDH so I can have higher variance game to game with the same deck while still getting to test out and engineer new ideas. I play a two man draft format we call "idiot drafting" because it forces us to use more of the cards in a booster, so I get to do things like build a Howling Mine powered beatdown deck in limited. (Verdict on that deck was that it was terrible, but it gives me ideas.)
I love to know more about Magic, and I am always seeking cards I have not built decks yet, fun and interesting interactions in formats, and new and different ways to play. Magic is not *a* distraction from other things, other things are the distraction from something that changes constantly and which is thus the only thing that has held my flighty ENTP focus for over a decade.
And note that I am not random or haphazard about my playing Magic. I am committed to trying new things about the game all the time. I was logistics team lead for the second day of GP Minneapolis. Three drafts, two of them with 140 people, all with stamped product. The event ran buttery smooth because it was a new fun problem to solve, and I got to spend the whole day figuring out how to make it tick like a clock. We rolled 6 rounds and 2 drafts in well under 9 hours, and a decent chunk of that was having the drafts take under an hour from draft start to end of build.
I am also a terrible tournament player. I don't take the deck I am best at, or draft my standby every time. I could win more with Zoo than anything else, ever, but I will do things like play creatureless control decks in Mirrodin standard or some iteration of a midrange aggro deck that plays Vexing Sphinx alongside Slay to offset card advantage issues. Why? It is more interesting if I don't always know what will happen next even with excellent information on the format.
So, yeah. ENTPs are more than poker players. ;-)
weird comment conversation by weird people regarding a weird article :() weird.