I love core set constrycted and would like to hear some more about it. I think it would also help more ppl become familiar with the format, especially pauper players with limited budgets--I have several CSC decks that cost less than pauper decks I have built =)
Forgot about Whispersilk Cloak. Enchant up an Armament Master with one of those and they're Unblockably Shrouded and giving everybody else +2/+2. Granted, 5 mana commitment to it, but still could be a good 1 of.
The Fetchlands are going to be the most valuable rares in Zendikar, and I'm not denying that they will be played in almost every format.
I'm just looking at the trends in M2010. There is a LOT of M2010 on the market. Due to this glut on the market, Mythic Rares are the only cards that have retained any significant value in that set. Everything else is $4 or less.
If Zendikar becomes as saturated as M2010, I have a hard time believing the Fetchlands will settle down to a value higher than $5.
You mentioned trying a soldier deck, but what about a WW Kor Equipment deck. naturally some combination of Armament Masters, Hookmasters, Outfitters, Duelists, Blademasters, Aeronauts and Skyfishers would be included. You could use Harm's Way, Arrow Volley or Pitfall traps to save up the Path to Exiles for another deck and Brave the Elements could be a win condition to give all your Kor protection.
The equipment options could include Behemoth Sledge (if you could sneak in a couple green sources of mana w/o hurting your curve). others includes Gorgon Flail, Quietus Spike, Trusty Machete and Bone Saw. Trailblazers boots could be SB tech against just about anything using non-basic land. Could also use Honor of the pure and Conqueror's Pledge since it makes Kor tokens as well. An armored ascension or 2 could be a nice surprise to make a beefy flying Kor dude or Windborne Charge to make 2 guys flying until EoT.
Actually I don't Thanks for the recognition. I think misconception 1 is dispelled with the ever growing presence of decks that do not use FOW. Take for example the multiple versions of Eva Green I have piloted to pay out positions. M E L K O R was also able to pilot and extremely powerful Merfolk (Fish) deck that did not use FOW. Both of us are ranked in the top 100 players of Classic and I don't think either of us really pursued the rankings to get there. It just happened. BTW never, never, ever, never counter a Thoughtsieze or Hymm with a FOW. You loose 2 card (OK you get to choose the cards but what ever) and you loose the life. I love when an opponent tosses a FOW at a Hymm or Thoughtsieze by paying the alternate casting cost. I want the FOW out of your hand most of the time and the players saves me the fuss of losing 2 life on the sieze. Anyway, totally well thought out artical. Also could be mentioned that players should look at what they have from the non-classic formats and use that as a base for buying into classic. Basically that is what I did to field Eva Green (AKA GB POX) with the advice of the Lacky. Word!!
I can do 250 I think, it might be a little more, it might be a little less. It is going to be competative. The one thing I do want to say though is that FOW mighty be included in one of the decks around 400 but lets see if I can get a coupon to discount the deck, I'll work with heath and we'll see next week!
Standard 60 card singleton is really a fun format and I dare even say that it is more fun than 100 cards; for me personally at least. If the majority wants to read about this, than I already have one half finished article about it and I will happily finish it for next week.
All what you see here in this article is based upon what I saw while testing for this article; in 2mans or in casual games. The first part of the article (the old friends part) consists of decks that I came across very often while testing.
I have seen tons of vore decks, opposition decks, mono white soldiers (strangely no Anthem but only Honor of the Pure), burn and mono black; but sadly no Urzathron deck. And I just can't write about something that I didn't play myself or something that I haven't played against even once.
The second part of the article (the new faces part) is all what I played myself in 2mans and in casual games. And it took 10 days to prepare this article, so yes, I did a lot of playtesting.
For Reanimator decks I always use this fomula: 6 targets, 6 discard outlets, 6 reanimation spells. I also looked at old known decks while building my deck you see in the article and I was happy to see that they were all similar to mine.
For reference you can check this one for example: http://www.deckcheck.net/deck.php?id=5853
This is the good old Solar Flare deck from 2006. It has five targets, six discard outlets and three reanimation spells. Three is too few for my taste, so I decided to play six.
I hope this helps to clarify things a little bit.
Thank you once again for your comment.
LE
PS: I did read your article with great pleasure by the way.
I think the simplifications the model does make it useless.
The competition in Swiss is very different from the competition in 8-4. So having an expected match win percentage that works on all three drafts format is just going to lead to poor results. Someone that wins 65% of their swiss matches will probably lose a ton of money in 8-4, because chances are they'd be under 50% in 8-4s. The difference in quality is that high.
So it is quite possible for 4-3-2-2s to be the optimal solution: All you need is to have an opposition in 4-3-2-2s that is very similar to the swiss in quality, and much easier than the 8-4s.
Soldiers want 4 Glorious Anthem. All sideboards should start with 4 Pithing Needle, and use a mix of COP Red and Greater Realm of Preservation (if applicable). Loxodon Warhammer is probably the biggest star artifact that belongs in half the decks you built somewhere. If you are in white, you need 3-4 Sacred Ground. For Reanimator to function, you need at minimum 8 discard outlets (you had 6).
None of your decks has Wildfire, you forgot Urzatron as a major archetype, and it looks like you didn't do any playtesting. Also mono-black fails because people board Karma, which mono-black can't do a thing about if it ever hits the table. If you're not white, Compost is the card which single-handedly beats it.
You really mischaracterized the whole situation with Millibots. If you look at the thread on the Wizards forum, you'll see about 80 posts from people who love Millibots, never had any problems and are outraged that their favorite bot / botchain is down. There is exactly one post from some guy claiming he lost cards to Milli somehow. Interesting that this guy has only one post (the post denouncing Milli) and has never been seen on the boards since. The uproar over Milli has nothing at all to do with lost cards as you discribed it, rather it's due to users of Millibots angry at what they percieve to be clearly false allegations.
One more thing, you guys mentioned that it's cheap to buy a PC to run a MTGO bot all day. While this is true, since Milli has gone down there is exactly one publicly available MTGO bot and it's not a bot I would touch with a 10-foot pole.
I vote you write about core set constructed again as I think it's just a wonderful format to play but sadly not very popular at the moment, I think you're the person who is best able to convince people to try formats.
My vote is for Standard 60 card singleton for next week's article.
It seems like an interesting format that isn't too expensive but has virtually nothing written about it. I've have some ideas for decks but I haven't had time to test anything yet as most of my time has been spent with Zendikar release events lately.
Misconception #2 - has NOTHING to do with your topic. I guess I agree that it would be interesting to see a format with Will but no Lotus, and Time Walk but no Ancestral, but what does that have to do with Classic? What does that have to do with people entering Classic? You wrote two different articles.
I'm going to add one of my own:
Misconception #3 - The game is decided within 3 or 4 turns.
Maybe if you don't pack disruption and instead play solitaire then it will be. Obviously no control deck tries to win that fast. If it did then it would be combo or aggro. People play decks like Zoo and Fish (or Merfolk). Not everything wins or creates a lock on turns 1-3 like Dredge. You might make your deck a little stronger by building it with a high threat density or by building it glass-cannon style, but you'll hate it. One, it's boring. Two, the way to improve it beyond that is to add disruption, which will make it weaker until you learn how to pilot it.
Interacting with your opponent is the heart of Magic. Counterspells like Force/Daze/Drain are one way to do that. But disruption also means Duress/Thoughtseize, Path/Swords/Condemn/Chant, Lightning Bolt, and Chalice and Needle. Part of the reason misconception #1 is true is because not every deck plays enough blue cards to make FoW worth it. But all of them play something else instead.
If Dredge is making you a sad planeswalker then chose maindeck cards that are playable against other decks, but awesome against Dredge: fog effects, moat effects, silence effects (stops Flashback), and Pithing Needle (naming Bazaar). RDW can play Volcanic Fallout. Tabernacle annoys the crap out of a lot of decks, but Dredge can't bounce it and they can't pay (assuming one Fog/Silence effect.) That's how you enter Classic. Also, buy the cheap cheap cheap MED3 duals right now.
That R/W deck most likely wants the fetches, and probably wants several of your Chandras as well, just to give it another win condition; and you might want to consider Burst Lightning for it, as a Bolt alternative (should there be Bolts in your Jund list, BTW?) and as an answer to e.g. Putrid Leech. Rupture Spire is perfectly fine in this deck, BTW, since it's slow enough and has few turn 2 plays, so that should help a lot with the mana. And I suspect the mill deck wants Telemin Performance at least in the board and quite possibly in the main too.
One category of mana fixing you missed, incidentally, is the Conflux landcyclers; they're not all great, but at least the blue one is a perfectly servicable late-game counterspell for a control deck while still getting land when you need it to.
Another possibility for Knight of the Reliquary that I haven't seen mentioned here is to put it into its own landfall/domain shell. More fetches would be better, but it's a deck that could comfortably play both Naya and Bant panoramas and might even be able to steal Hedron Crab if it wants it. Something like: 4 Wild Nacatl, 4 Steppe Lynx, 4 Plated Geopede, maybe Matca Rioters (not amazing, but why not?), 4 Knight of the Reliquary, 4 Rampaging Baloths, 4 Harrow, probably steal the Khalni Heart expeditions, and maybe even something like Voices from the Void here. A touch of removal (Lavalanche?) and this seems eminently viable, if clunky.
Honestly, in my opinion, a single raredrafted card can cost you a lot. Say you grab that Vess pack 3, while drafting red white instead of a lightning bolt, because you can sell her for 5 tickets. The bolt is not coming back, the chances of being passed another is slim. Also still worse, is the probability that that pass will come back to haunt you. This is less visible on V3, because without the table view, you do not get to see the names of who you pass each pack to. I miss this greatly as a drafter, since not only is it fair to be able to know this (similar to paper drafts), but also how a young drafter will learn the consequences of passing. The V3 system of "blind passes" only encourages (or is a benefit to) raredrafters, due to the fact that no one knows before the games who sucked up all the rares, and dramatically changed the pack environment, so no one gets called out on it. In paper, raredrafts still happen, and people get on with their lives, but if the person doing it is sitting to your right, his/her passes will tell you, and if you have to face them, your play-style will change accordingly even before the game.
Just my 2 cents, but I feel this feature should definitely return on v3. The visible consequence of your known (not assumed) passes coming back to haunt you is a needed learning experience for people who want to become better drafters. Or at the very least it was for me.
I love these articles. They're easily some of the best written and most entertaining articles on this site. Even if you don't play Vanguard there are tons of interesting ideas you can use in other formats.
and i just realized that Kazandu Blademaster isn't a Kor...so scratch him off the list. :-(
Good Job!
I love core set constrycted and would like to hear some more about it. I think it would also help more ppl become familiar with the format, especially pauper players with limited budgets--I have several CSC decks that cost less than pauper decks I have built =)
you guys are killing me on my articles next week lol.
Forgot about Whispersilk Cloak. Enchant up an Armament Master with one of those and they're Unblockably Shrouded and giving everybody else +2/+2. Granted, 5 mana commitment to it, but still could be a good 1 of.
The Fetchlands are going to be the most valuable rares in Zendikar, and I'm not denying that they will be played in almost every format.
I'm just looking at the trends in M2010. There is a LOT of M2010 on the market. Due to this glut on the market, Mythic Rares are the only cards that have retained any significant value in that set. Everything else is $4 or less.
If Zendikar becomes as saturated as M2010, I have a hard time believing the Fetchlands will settle down to a value higher than $5.
You mentioned trying a soldier deck, but what about a WW Kor Equipment deck. naturally some combination of Armament Masters, Hookmasters, Outfitters, Duelists, Blademasters, Aeronauts and Skyfishers would be included. You could use Harm's Way, Arrow Volley or Pitfall traps to save up the Path to Exiles for another deck and Brave the Elements could be a win condition to give all your Kor protection.
The equipment options could include Behemoth Sledge (if you could sneak in a couple green sources of mana w/o hurting your curve). others includes Gorgon Flail, Quietus Spike, Trusty Machete and Bone Saw. Trailblazers boots could be SB tech against just about anything using non-basic land. Could also use Honor of the pure and Conqueror's Pledge since it makes Kor tokens as well. An armored ascension or 2 could be a nice surprise to make a beefy flying Kor dude or Windborne Charge to make 2 guys flying until EoT.
Actually I don't Thanks for the recognition. I think misconception 1 is dispelled with the ever growing presence of decks that do not use FOW. Take for example the multiple versions of Eva Green I have piloted to pay out positions. M E L K O R was also able to pilot and extremely powerful Merfolk (Fish) deck that did not use FOW. Both of us are ranked in the top 100 players of Classic and I don't think either of us really pursued the rankings to get there. It just happened. BTW never, never, ever, never counter a Thoughtsieze or Hymm with a FOW. You loose 2 card (OK you get to choose the cards but what ever) and you loose the life. I love when an opponent tosses a FOW at a Hymm or Thoughtsieze by paying the alternate casting cost. I want the FOW out of your hand most of the time and the players saves me the fuss of losing 2 life on the sieze. Anyway, totally well thought out artical. Also could be mentioned that players should look at what they have from the non-classic formats and use that as a base for buying into classic. Basically that is what I did to field Eva Green (AKA GB POX) with the advice of the Lacky. Word!!
I can do 250 I think, it might be a little more, it might be a little less. It is going to be competative. The one thing I do want to say though is that FOW mighty be included in one of the decks around 400 but lets see if I can get a coupon to discount the deck, I'll work with heath and we'll see next week!
Standard 60 card singleton is really a fun format and I dare even say that it is more fun than 100 cards; for me personally at least. If the majority wants to read about this, than I already have one half finished article about it and I will happily finish it for next week.
LE
Just saying. I'd say they hold steady at 6-8, jumping upwards to 12 and down to 5 depending on the decks that they are in.
Reason? Fetchlands are better than the M10 lands and have cross format relevance (said every format period.)
Hi Jyalt and thanks for the comment.
All what you see here in this article is based upon what I saw while testing for this article; in 2mans or in casual games. The first part of the article (the old friends part) consists of decks that I came across very often while testing.
I have seen tons of vore decks, opposition decks, mono white soldiers (strangely no Anthem but only Honor of the Pure), burn and mono black; but sadly no Urzathron deck. And I just can't write about something that I didn't play myself or something that I haven't played against even once.
The second part of the article (the new faces part) is all what I played myself in 2mans and in casual games. And it took 10 days to prepare this article, so yes, I did a lot of playtesting.
For Reanimator decks I always use this fomula: 6 targets, 6 discard outlets, 6 reanimation spells. I also looked at old known decks while building my deck you see in the article and I was happy to see that they were all similar to mine.
For reference you can check this one for example:
http://www.deckcheck.net/deck.php?id=5853
This is the good old Solar Flare deck from 2006. It has five targets, six discard outlets and three reanimation spells. Three is too few for my taste, so I decided to play six.
I hope this helps to clarify things a little bit.
Thank you once again for your comment.
LE
PS: I did read your article with great pleasure by the way.
I think the simplifications the model does make it useless.
The competition in Swiss is very different from the competition in 8-4. So having an expected match win percentage that works on all three drafts format is just going to lead to poor results. Someone that wins 65% of their swiss matches will probably lose a ton of money in 8-4, because chances are they'd be under 50% in 8-4s. The difference in quality is that high.
So it is quite possible for 4-3-2-2s to be the optimal solution: All you need is to have an opposition in 4-3-2-2s that is very similar to the swiss in quality, and much easier than the 8-4s.
Soldiers want 4 Glorious Anthem. All sideboards should start with 4 Pithing Needle, and use a mix of COP Red and Greater Realm of Preservation (if applicable). Loxodon Warhammer is probably the biggest star artifact that belongs in half the decks you built somewhere. If you are in white, you need 3-4 Sacred Ground. For Reanimator to function, you need at minimum 8 discard outlets (you had 6).
None of your decks has Wildfire, you forgot Urzatron as a major archetype, and it looks like you didn't do any playtesting. Also mono-black fails because people board Karma, which mono-black can't do a thing about if it ever hits the table. If you're not white, Compost is the card which single-handedly beats it.
http://puremtgo.com/articles/core-set-constructed-detailed-analysis
I was curious about your take on the format, and you are welcome to read mine.
My best guess is that they will settle down at selling 5/buying 4.
I base this on the fact that they are reasonably better than the M2010 rare lands which stabilized at selling 4/buying 3.
I'd like to hear about your rogue decks for standard constructed.
You really mischaracterized the whole situation with Millibots. If you look at the thread on the Wizards forum, you'll see about 80 posts from people who love Millibots, never had any problems and are outraged that their favorite bot / botchain is down. There is exactly one post from some guy claiming he lost cards to Milli somehow. Interesting that this guy has only one post (the post denouncing Milli) and has never been seen on the boards since. The uproar over Milli has nothing at all to do with lost cards as you discribed it, rather it's due to users of Millibots angry at what they percieve to be clearly false allegations.
One more thing, you guys mentioned that it's cheap to buy a PC to run a MTGO bot all day. While this is true, since Milli has gone down there is exactly one publicly available MTGO bot and it's not a bot I would touch with a 10-foot pole.
I vote you write about core set constructed again as I think it's just a wonderful format to play but sadly not very popular at the moment, I think you're the person who is best able to convince people to try formats.
My vote is for Standard 60 card singleton for next week's article.
It seems like an interesting format that isn't too expensive but has virtually nothing written about it. I've have some ideas for decks but I haven't had time to test anything yet as most of my time has been spent with Zendikar release events lately.
Misconception #1 - right on the money.
Misconception #2 - has NOTHING to do with your topic. I guess I agree that it would be interesting to see a format with Will but no Lotus, and Time Walk but no Ancestral, but what does that have to do with Classic? What does that have to do with people entering Classic? You wrote two different articles.
I'm going to add one of my own:
Misconception #3 - The game is decided within 3 or 4 turns.
Maybe if you don't pack disruption and instead play solitaire then it will be. Obviously no control deck tries to win that fast. If it did then it would be combo or aggro. People play decks like Zoo and Fish (or Merfolk). Not everything wins or creates a lock on turns 1-3 like Dredge. You might make your deck a little stronger by building it with a high threat density or by building it glass-cannon style, but you'll hate it. One, it's boring. Two, the way to improve it beyond that is to add disruption, which will make it weaker until you learn how to pilot it.
Interacting with your opponent is the heart of Magic. Counterspells like Force/Daze/Drain are one way to do that. But disruption also means Duress/Thoughtseize, Path/Swords/Condemn/Chant, Lightning Bolt, and Chalice and Needle. Part of the reason misconception #1 is true is because not every deck plays enough blue cards to make FoW worth it. But all of them play something else instead.
If Dredge is making you a sad planeswalker then chose maindeck cards that are playable against other decks, but awesome against Dredge: fog effects, moat effects, silence effects (stops Flashback), and Pithing Needle (naming Bazaar). RDW can play Volcanic Fallout. Tabernacle annoys the crap out of a lot of decks, but Dredge can't bounce it and they can't pay (assuming one Fog/Silence effect.) That's how you enter Classic. Also, buy the cheap cheap cheap MED3 duals right now.
i see them down to 5 or so, i have no idea what to expect! ack
(d'oh, got a timeout on my first send and didn't realize I'd double-posted. Oops.)
That R/W deck most likely wants the fetches, and probably wants several of your Chandras as well, just to give it another win condition; and you might want to consider Burst Lightning for it, as a Bolt alternative (should there be Bolts in your Jund list, BTW?) and as an answer to e.g. Putrid Leech. Rupture Spire is perfectly fine in this deck, BTW, since it's slow enough and has few turn 2 plays, so that should help a lot with the mana. And I suspect the mill deck wants Telemin Performance at least in the board and quite possibly in the main too.
One category of mana fixing you missed, incidentally, is the Conflux landcyclers; they're not all great, but at least the blue one is a perfectly servicable late-game counterspell for a control deck while still getting land when you need it to.
Another possibility for Knight of the Reliquary that I haven't seen mentioned here is to put it into its own landfall/domain shell. More fetches would be better, but it's a deck that could comfortably play both Naya and Bant panoramas and might even be able to steal Hedron Crab if it wants it. Something like: 4 Wild Nacatl, 4 Steppe Lynx, 4 Plated Geopede, maybe Matca Rioters (not amazing, but why not?), 4 Knight of the Reliquary, 4 Rampaging Baloths, 4 Harrow, probably steal the Khalni Heart expeditions, and maybe even something like Voices from the Void here. A touch of removal (Lavalanche?) and this seems eminently viable, if clunky.
By the way, please keep passing me bolts in M10 drafts...
Honestly, in my opinion, a single raredrafted card can cost you a lot. Say you grab that Vess pack 3, while drafting red white instead of a lightning bolt, because you can sell her for 5 tickets. The bolt is not coming back, the chances of being passed another is slim. Also still worse, is the probability that that pass will come back to haunt you. This is less visible on V3, because without the table view, you do not get to see the names of who you pass each pack to. I miss this greatly as a drafter, since not only is it fair to be able to know this (similar to paper drafts), but also how a young drafter will learn the consequences of passing. The V3 system of "blind passes" only encourages (or is a benefit to) raredrafters, due to the fact that no one knows before the games who sucked up all the rares, and dramatically changed the pack environment, so no one gets called out on it. In paper, raredrafts still happen, and people get on with their lives, but if the person doing it is sitting to your right, his/her passes will tell you, and if you have to face them, your play-style will change accordingly even before the game.
Just my 2 cents, but I feel this feature should definitely return on v3. The visible consequence of your known (not assumed) passes coming back to haunt you is a needed learning experience for people who want to become better drafters. Or at the very least it was for me.
I love these articles. They're easily some of the best written and most entertaining articles on this site. Even if you don't play Vanguard there are tons of interesting ideas you can use in other formats.