Well, I don't think the threshold for playabilty on the crab is THAT high, but ok. I rarely rarely play blue in zendikar sealed, there are just way too many crap commons (trapmaker, expedition, spreadin seas etc) and its depth is usually too low. Black, Red and White comprise most of my decks, and sometimes green can be pretty good (ive learned to stay away from the "green fatties" plan though, usually. A 5/6 for 6 mana isnt going to help u when opp plays a first turn steppe lynx or lacerator).
Nah, what I'm saying is in that particular game the player got so enamored with the notion of a turn 1 crab and a milling victory he forgot the goal of the game is winning, through whatever means possible. And that can mean throwing the crab to the wolves (or allies as the case may be). :)
Ive been playin way too many sealeds. My latest fad is doing three at the same time. It's hectic. Last night I managed to pull off a 2-2, 3-1 and 4-0, with many matches almost lost to time. Splitting my attention between 3 simultaneous games is also a challenge. :)
My personal vote would be for additional restrictions beyond the currently used ones but WoTC for Classic Tribal.
Now as to what those would be is a much more difficult thing to figure out as it would have to be player driven and policed. Though I have heard several good ideas and then other that were not as exciting. Now just to throw some ideas out there to get some brain cells to wake up I have the following ideas. This list would not be all inclusive take a few, leave a few, or just throw the whole thing out the window...
1. Limit non-creature cards to 1 of, 2 of, or 3 of.
2. Creatures from any format. All others limited to Extended or Standard.
3. Ban the "Bad for the Format" cards/combos
4. Port over Ban lists from other formats (honestly I think is a poor idea but there for consistency)
Either way I just glad so far over all the people I have met and played with during tribal games have been civil. I tried out a 2Headed Giant PRE a few weeks ago. And that was just a plain horrible time. It was full of Rude Players and appeared to be very poorly managed by my observations. So keep up the great job Shard and thank you once again for running these events in a courteous and professional manner.
Once I finally looked for myself, the EV on Zendikar Constructed is not as bad as I'd been led to believe, although it decreases for those who are already qualified. Are they firing? I'd hate to acquire the cards, build a deck, and then not have anything happen.
I always figured Millibot was circumventing the client. They did impossible things at impossible speeds. But I considered it a good thing. Also the revelation strikes me as "the fruit of a poisonous tree" although that wouldn't strictly apply in this private matter.
normally u just attack with the 0/4 kraken. But yes, sure its situational. And yes,it is way better in a draft than in sealed. But its nearly never a filler except maybe u play a 8 creature deck.
Expect something from me on the new Pauper scene sometime soon. Both of the Pauper events I participate in are off for the week, but next week I should have some new thoughts to share on the new decks that appear to be contenders, at least in Standard Pauper.
One suggesting, I'd like to see the EV for all draft sets currently draftable on MTGO. I'm less interested in seeing the charts of the past as seeing the current snapshot of sets like LLM, SSE, whatever else is Nix Tix for the week. It would help determine if it would be better to play the Nix Tix queue or one of the current ones. Thanks!
Love the article and good luck in the Comunity Event. Win me a Mormir :).
I don't think we're really disagreeing about the crab, are we? That linked game is just one example, and even if you say he shouldn't have had it in the deck because of X, Y, and Z...the bottom line is you are saying it shouldn't have been in the deck, despite double Harrow and Living Tsunami, right? That means the edge cases where a singleton crab is justified over some other piece of filler (an extremely controlling deck with multiple landfall enablers, several pieces of good equipment, and a weak bottom end needing to be filled with *something*) are fairly rare.
(re: war paint: you say "beloved," I say "lame but still better than a blood seeker," let's call the whole thing off.)
Right, but the discussion is about a singleton, and again, anecdotal evidence of perfect crab/crab draws (and T1 crab-->lose stories like the one below) are cool but not as useful as math for forming a reasonable opinion.
That guy severely misplayed in my opinion. He should have blocked the cleric with the crab. Even IF his opponent had vines of vastwood, as his hand was mostly a hand of aggressive evasion beats, he would pretty much die to a timely vines anyway. Might as well make your opp spend a turn , a card and mana to kill the crab. That was some serious bad playing - putting the crab in the deck is defensible, in my opinion, but then avoiding blocks because he thinks it is too valuable? thats wrong. At the end of the day, a crab that absorbs a 5/5 creature attack (1/1 + vines) is a good crab.
Short story is this: all the Millibot accounts were locked while WotC investigated a claim that Millibot stole someone's cards (as is usual in such circumstances). This of course launched complaints about how easy it is to shut a bot down without any evidence (at least temporarily). Late in the thread came the realization that Millibot does not run the MO client at all, but rather interacts with the server directly, which of course would violate the ToS in fact, if not in intent.
and here's the thing: the problem is that the kind of deck that was being played was aggressive (windrider eel makes a horrible blocker and adventuring gear only triggers on attack). On an aggressive deck, playing a 0/2 for 1 is a bad deal - he'd be better off with a kraken hatchling to hold off attackers. But we don't know what kind of pool he had. Maybe that was just a 23rd kind of card, like your beloved war paint :) That's how I see the crab. Just a tiny warm body to flesh out the last cards for your sealed deck if you want one. The difference here with archive trap is that archive trap is not a cheap 1 mana creature. A hedron crab as a 0/2 for 1 is bad as far as creatures go, but it will always have SOME board impact, no matter how small, simply because it is a creature.
Well my comment right now was mainly aimed at sealed play, as in draft you can maximize the value of a hedron crab much better. In sealed you'll usually have only one crab, if any, and not much in terms of enablers. However, sealed is a slower format and the possibility of games lasting 8-9 turns you need to win with it is much higher. I have run it in sealed and my experience was this: I got it down on turn 1/2 a few times, and it basically won me a game I would already win by beating down my opponent, as he had a slow start. In that kind of situation simply playin bear, scathe zombie, hill giant, etc, backed by a bit of removal and pump would already be devastating, and crab didn't really do anything special (i'd still run it though if I have at least a couple of enablers like khalni gem or whatnot and dont have anyth much better to run instead, like, say, a welkin tern). Its value also goes up with cheap equipment you have too.
In draft, however, things are pretty different. Consider this scenario which actually happened in a game of mine: I play island, crab. TUrn 2: crab, land (mill for 6). TUrn 3: khalni heart expedition, land (mill for 6). Turn 4: land (mill for 6), harrow (mill for 12), pop the khalni expedition (mill for 12). That's a full milling victory on turn 4. It happened only once, but it was pretty amazing. :)
"If some of this doesn't apply to you yet it certainly could eventually. If and when that does it would behoove you to be prepared to figure out which George you want in control of the situation when the time comes."
It's amazing how the way you spend your time changes after graduating from college, getting married, and having kids. In college I never really had to think about balancing my time between worlds. I had a relative abundance of time. Now most of my time seems to be spent on keeping my family happy. Not that it's a bad thing. It's just a change I couldn't imagine 6-8 years ago.
Downtime 2 weeks ago brought back lots and lots of little annoying bugs that where fixed a couple of months ago. These little bugs have risen from their tombs and are back to haunt us once more. Very disappointing if you ask me!
For instance:
- LAG! Lag! LaG! lAg! lag......you know it, I know it, it's everywhere!
- Bugs in 'collection' makes it impossible to use 'make all cards tradable' or when it does work not all cards are set tradable properly. Even more annoying is the fact that after a draft the cards you drafted are appointed to your account but you cannot set them tradable (not even manually). You first have to restart and hope it works properly.
- Drawing cards after a match is through used to work great and fluently. Since a week or two it doesn't work fluently anymore. You can press all you want but usually it takes about 3/4 clicks to draw 1 card.
- Starting a draft I get an error message 1 out of 5 times.
Most annoying (i think) are the collection-bugs. I just set 'all cards untradable' just to find out it won't let me set 'all tradable' again. Have to set tradable 20.000+ cards? Yeah right! Thanks Wizards for taking us back in time.
Well, I don't think the threshold for playabilty on the crab is THAT high, but ok. I rarely rarely play blue in zendikar sealed, there are just way too many crap commons (trapmaker, expedition, spreadin seas etc) and its depth is usually too low. Black, Red and White comprise most of my decks, and sometimes green can be pretty good (ive learned to stay away from the "green fatties" plan though, usually. A 5/6 for 6 mana isnt going to help u when opp plays a first turn steppe lynx or lacerator).
Nah, what I'm saying is in that particular game the player got so enamored with the notion of a turn 1 crab and a milling victory he forgot the goal of the game is winning, through whatever means possible. And that can mean throwing the crab to the wolves (or allies as the case may be). :)
Ive been playin way too many sealeds. My latest fad is doing three at the same time. It's hectic. Last night I managed to pull off a 2-2, 3-1 and 4-0, with many matches almost lost to time. Splitting my attention between 3 simultaneous games is also a challenge. :)
My personal vote would be for additional restrictions beyond the currently used ones but WoTC for Classic Tribal.
Now as to what those would be is a much more difficult thing to figure out as it would have to be player driven and policed. Though I have heard several good ideas and then other that were not as exciting. Now just to throw some ideas out there to get some brain cells to wake up I have the following ideas. This list would not be all inclusive take a few, leave a few, or just throw the whole thing out the window...
1. Limit non-creature cards to 1 of, 2 of, or 3 of.
2. Creatures from any format. All others limited to Extended or Standard.
3. Ban the "Bad for the Format" cards/combos
4. Port over Ban lists from other formats (honestly I think is a poor idea but there for consistency)
Either way I just glad so far over all the people I have met and played with during tribal games have been civil. I tried out a 2Headed Giant PRE a few weeks ago. And that was just a plain horrible time. It was full of Rude Players and appeared to be very poorly managed by my observations. So keep up the great job Shard and thank you once again for running these events in a courteous and professional manner.
On when?
ok ignore that...family issue totally resolved tonight. Tribal Apocalypse IS ON!
i love the weekly, but i hate the pit of knowing i sold too early! eesh
Once I finally looked for myself, the EV on Zendikar Constructed is not as bad as I'd been led to believe, although it decreases for those who are already qualified. Are they firing? I'd hate to acquire the cards, build a deck, and then not have anything happen.
I always figured Millibot was circumventing the client. They did impossible things at impossible speeds. But I considered it a good thing. Also the revelation strikes me as "the fruit of a poisonous tree" although that wouldn't strictly apply in this private matter.
normally u just attack with the 0/4 kraken. But yes, sure its situational. And yes,it is way better in a draft than in sealed. But its nearly never a filler except maybe u play a 8 creature deck.
Expect something from me on the new Pauper scene sometime soon. Both of the Pauper events I participate in are off for the week, but next week I should have some new thoughts to share on the new decks that appear to be contenders, at least in Standard Pauper.
It was not a very good week for pauper submissions, therefore there were 0 posted
Excellent synopsis bubba, spot on.
It's been a strangely winding story so far. I don't know where it will end, but where ever it lands will be supremely important to the future of MTGO.
Are you saying that the only good crab is a dead crab? :)
(Plus: did you win the final game in thursday's sealed? Hope you did!)
sorry again for the offtopic but...
Wheres the paupers articles?
we are expecting the new ideas and decks!
tnx
One suggesting, I'd like to see the EV for all draft sets currently draftable on MTGO. I'm less interested in seeing the charts of the past as seeing the current snapshot of sets like LLM, SSE, whatever else is Nix Tix for the week. It would help determine if it would be better to play the Nix Tix queue or one of the current ones. Thanks!
Love the article and good luck in the Comunity Event. Win me a Mormir :).
I don't think we're really disagreeing about the crab, are we? That linked game is just one example, and even if you say he shouldn't have had it in the deck because of X, Y, and Z...the bottom line is you are saying it shouldn't have been in the deck, despite double Harrow and Living Tsunami, right? That means the edge cases where a singleton crab is justified over some other piece of filler (an extremely controlling deck with multiple landfall enablers, several pieces of good equipment, and a weak bottom end needing to be filled with *something*) are fairly rare.
(re: war paint: you say "beloved," I say "lame but still better than a blood seeker," let's call the whole thing off.)
Right, but the discussion is about a singleton, and again, anecdotal evidence of perfect crab/crab draws (and T1 crab-->lose stories like the one below) are cool but not as useful as math for forming a reasonable opinion.
That guy severely misplayed in my opinion. He should have blocked the cleric with the crab. Even IF his opponent had vines of vastwood, as his hand was mostly a hand of aggressive evasion beats, he would pretty much die to a timely vines anyway. Might as well make your opp spend a turn , a card and mana to kill the crab. That was some serious bad playing - putting the crab in the deck is defensible, in my opinion, but then avoiding blocks because he thinks it is too valuable? thats wrong. At the end of the day, a crab that absorbs a 5/5 creature attack (1/1 + vines) is a good crab.
"This was a great article, and I'mma let you finish... but... Hamtastic has one of the greatest articles of all time!"
XD
Short story is this: all the Millibot accounts were locked while WotC investigated a claim that Millibot stole someone's cards (as is usual in such circumstances). This of course launched complaints about how easy it is to shut a bot down without any evidence (at least temporarily). Late in the thread came the realization that Millibot does not run the MO client at all, but rather interacts with the server directly, which of course would violate the ToS in fact, if not in intent.
and here's the thing: the problem is that the kind of deck that was being played was aggressive (windrider eel makes a horrible blocker and adventuring gear only triggers on attack). On an aggressive deck, playing a 0/2 for 1 is a bad deal - he'd be better off with a kraken hatchling to hold off attackers. But we don't know what kind of pool he had. Maybe that was just a 23rd kind of card, like your beloved war paint :) That's how I see the crab. Just a tiny warm body to flesh out the last cards for your sealed deck if you want one. The difference here with archive trap is that archive trap is not a cheap 1 mana creature. A hedron crab as a 0/2 for 1 is bad as far as creatures go, but it will always have SOME board impact, no matter how small, simply because it is a creature.
Well my comment right now was mainly aimed at sealed play, as in draft you can maximize the value of a hedron crab much better. In sealed you'll usually have only one crab, if any, and not much in terms of enablers. However, sealed is a slower format and the possibility of games lasting 8-9 turns you need to win with it is much higher. I have run it in sealed and my experience was this: I got it down on turn 1/2 a few times, and it basically won me a game I would already win by beating down my opponent, as he had a slow start. In that kind of situation simply playin bear, scathe zombie, hill giant, etc, backed by a bit of removal and pump would already be devastating, and crab didn't really do anything special (i'd still run it though if I have at least a couple of enablers like khalni gem or whatnot and dont have anyth much better to run instead, like, say, a welkin tern). Its value also goes up with cheap equipment you have too.
In draft, however, things are pretty different. Consider this scenario which actually happened in a game of mine: I play island, crab. TUrn 2: crab, land (mill for 6). TUrn 3: khalni heart expedition, land (mill for 6). Turn 4: land (mill for 6), harrow (mill for 12), pop the khalni expedition (mill for 12). That's a full milling victory on turn 4. It happened only once, but it was pretty amazing. :)
"If some of this doesn't apply to you yet it certainly could eventually. If and when that does it would behoove you to be prepared to figure out which George you want in control of the situation when the time comes."
It's amazing how the way you spend your time changes after graduating from college, getting married, and having kids. In college I never really had to think about balancing my time between worlds. I had a relative abundance of time. Now most of my time seems to be spent on keeping my family happy. Not that it's a bad thing. It's just a change I couldn't imagine 6-8 years ago.
Downtime 2 weeks ago brought back lots and lots of little annoying bugs that where fixed a couple of months ago. These little bugs have risen from their tombs and are back to haunt us once more. Very disappointing if you ask me!
For instance:
- LAG! Lag! LaG! lAg! lag......you know it, I know it, it's everywhere!
- Bugs in 'collection' makes it impossible to use 'make all cards tradable' or when it does work not all cards are set tradable properly. Even more annoying is the fact that after a draft the cards you drafted are appointed to your account but you cannot set them tradable (not even manually). You first have to restart and hope it works properly.
- Drawing cards after a match is through used to work great and fluently. Since a week or two it doesn't work fluently anymore. You can press all you want but usually it takes about 3/4 clicks to draw 1 card.
- Starting a draft I get an error message 1 out of 5 times.
Most annoying (i think) are the collection-bugs. I just set 'all cards untradable' just to find out it won't let me set 'all tradable' again. Have to set tradable 20.000+ cards? Yeah right! Thanks Wizards for taking us back in time.