Congrats, and have fun! And I don't play grixis control anymore, but when I did I went undefeated at the 5k event. And top 8 at a ptq in Sacramento. Go grixis lol! Good ol' days. I had articles and video interviews on channelfireball.com Good times...
You vastly underestimate kraken spawn. He's a top common for U/x control or evasion decks. With a trusty machette or adventuring gear he becomes a decent attacker. In reality he's the toughest 1 drop in the set to deal with. If you are u/g he is actually what gets you to your 5 And 6 mana game Enders. He also blocks and lives vrs virtually every non evasive threat you could expect to see before attack phase 6
MBC would be hated out the format if people were willing to commit themselves to do so. Unfortunatelly, thats not the case. Also a classic card pool may lead to warped like formats.
We've been playing paper Magic with Zen cards since, well, we have them here already. It's true, Zendikar is quite fast--especially with Landfall Aggro in limited and Vamps / Vamps Burn.
It's not especially viable to draft control because of the limited pieces (spell pierce is nice, and stumbling upon drafting hedron crab+archive trap is wack).
SlashRus is a heckuva player, but the originators of MBC in PDC are way before he joined up in the PDC Community. GSG, Boin, Jaknife, Bellete and others all did work on the deck and tweaking, then making it popular well before Slash started playing PDC heavily. He actually started off with MUC, and shifted over to MBC after a few events. Just want credit where credit is due.
There's a massive difference between a 4-damage-to-all-creatures spell that is conditional (threshold), a conditional "X to all creatures", and crypt rats. Crypt rats is by far the best wrath effect in pauper, and it does seriously warp the format. MBC/MBCu are the *best* decks in the format. They have been despite all the hate over the last year plus. It's time to shake up the metagame. Ban crypt rats.
*rolls eyes* Yes rats are poweful but i think you guys forget that red also has wrath effects. Infact red Has 2 that i can think of off the top of my head. (martyr and swirling sandstorm)
i'm firmly in the pro-villain/hero camp: i find it makes the whole "magical duel" thing a bit more evocative, and it's certainly handy for the author to not have to try and recall whether he played "DaNutCracka" (that still makes me chuckle) in game 1, or game 2. not being terribly into poker, i'd never read a serious analysis of a third party's play, so this article was a nice change of pace from your usual (excellent) write-ups of your own events. also, i was pleasantly surprised to find myself making many of the same play decisions you indicated you'd have made; since i began reading your articles, i've made a point of playing a bit more conservatively, which seems to have helped with the actually winning part of the game. i feel as though i'm pretty firmly in the journeyman phase of my magic development, so finding myself wanting to make those same plays was pretty gratifying. good luck in your future attempts at the ptq, both to you and your pal.
I share the same opinion, Crypt Rats should be banned. The card really hurts the format, making it almost impossible for a number of decks to survive, decks that would otherwise be good ones. Without the rats, MBC is still a great game but rats is the only accessible Wrath effect on the format.
@pierrebai: Thanks for the help! I've never worked with word before, so I have to learn much about formating and so on...
But Zendikar is really that fast. Sure, not everyone drafts aggro, but midrange decks aren't that good. A good drafted ally deck may be midrange, but the rest tends to be very aggressive ( UW, UB, WR, UR after my experience ). Control ( UB, BG ) has a hard time to keep up with this, especially if it has to handle flyer after flyer... Games don't end on Turn 4 usually, but soon after. Well, the format is still young and maybe I'm wrong, but the games I fought ended after a few turns, and I was rarely in the position to play any kicker card with kicker. Time will tell.
@menace13: I plan on doing so, but give it some time... there are also other formats I'd to talk about :)
awesome i hope you kick WotC's arse...and mr.jahn i am more than sure you guys will be okay. i used to read your extended coverage on starcity so i think you know just a wee bit about the game.
While I agree with some of the comments made above I think this is a very detailed article. It might not be 100% accurate but it is good to read what a well respected player thinks of the new format.
Sounds like a blast! This is an awesome idea from Wizards, and seems like it's going to be a total blast to participate in. Can't wait to see how it goes down...
good to see you on this site. for those of us that do not know, dunkle is mtgo's resident pox "master" with more top 8's with pox than you can shake a stick at. look forward to seeing a classic article from you in the future!
Nice informative article. I had no idea for example that Alex (SpikemBoy) was from my turf. Sad bout NG closing last year. Bah the economy! It's almost like meeting the people I read on a weekly basis. Cool beans.
I think you're going to like the lists that platipus10 and the community are putting together for 100CS. Unless they assign a department to work on that for the next two weeks, they're not going to be able to match the level of insight that he and various others have in the format, and they'll miss a lot of things. There are a lot of nuances to catch and obscure useful cards to identify, so hopefully people will go on the forums and continue to offer their observations. The link to lists-in-progress can be found on page 4 of the official 100CS thread.
Banning Crypt Rats would mean Aggro had a real chance. Aggro doesn't recover well in Pauper (put any aggro into topdeck mode, and they fold over if you wipe their board). I would not be opposed to that.
Incidentally the Fish matchup is pretty good, too, for MBC. Fish plays counter control without generating loads of CA (except through ninja of the deep hours, and the inherent 2-1 that is Spellstutter Sprite), and against MBC, can't play either Control or Aggro very well.
And please, you and the others need to post in the constructed threads, we've got some good frameworks for the decks, but without knowing what any of you guys are wanting to play, it can be a bit difficult, like if nobody wanted to play Grixis control or something like that. So far only DL and Sam have posted there (We'll give Hammy a pass for this weekend :D )
I think the author overestimates how fast zendikar is. Aggro is NOT the only way to go, control/removal/mana ramp decks do exist and can be quite good.
I'm not sure, but it was very "starbuck-ish" in that half of the MTGO section.
I'm sure lots of people felt very at home with the aroma of coffee during their play... ;)
Congrats, and have fun! And I don't play grixis control anymore, but when I did I went undefeated at the 5k event. And top 8 at a ptq in Sacramento. Go grixis lol! Good ol' days. I had articles and video interviews on channelfireball.com Good times...
Does the smell of coffee count as a performance enhancing drug?
You vastly underestimate kraken spawn. He's a top common for U/x control or evasion decks. With a trusty machette or adventuring gear he becomes a decent attacker. In reality he's the toughest 1 drop in the set to deal with. If you are u/g he is actually what gets you to your 5 And 6 mana game Enders. He also blocks and lives vrs virtually every non evasive threat you could expect to see before attack phase 6
MBC would be hated out the format if people were willing to commit themselves to do so. Unfortunatelly, thats not the case. Also a classic card pool may lead to warped like formats.
We've been playing paper Magic with Zen cards since, well, we have them here already. It's true, Zendikar is quite fast--especially with Landfall Aggro in limited and Vamps / Vamps Burn.
It's not especially viable to draft control because of the limited pieces (spell pierce is nice, and stumbling upon drafting hedron crab+archive trap is wack).
SlashRus is a heckuva player, but the originators of MBC in PDC are way before he joined up in the PDC Community. GSG, Boin, Jaknife, Bellete and others all did work on the deck and tweaking, then making it popular well before Slash started playing PDC heavily. He actually started off with MUC, and shifted over to MBC after a few events. Just want credit where credit is due.
There's a massive difference between a 4-damage-to-all-creatures spell that is conditional (threshold), a conditional "X to all creatures", and crypt rats. Crypt rats is by far the best wrath effect in pauper, and it does seriously warp the format. MBC/MBCu are the *best* decks in the format. They have been despite all the hate over the last year plus. It's time to shake up the metagame. Ban crypt rats.
*rolls eyes* Yes rats are poweful but i think you guys forget that red also has wrath effects. Infact red Has 2 that i can think of off the top of my head. (martyr and swirling sandstorm)
i'm firmly in the pro-villain/hero camp: i find it makes the whole "magical duel" thing a bit more evocative, and it's certainly handy for the author to not have to try and recall whether he played "DaNutCracka" (that still makes me chuckle) in game 1, or game 2. not being terribly into poker, i'd never read a serious analysis of a third party's play, so this article was a nice change of pace from your usual (excellent) write-ups of your own events. also, i was pleasantly surprised to find myself making many of the same play decisions you indicated you'd have made; since i began reading your articles, i've made a point of playing a bit more conservatively, which seems to have helped with the actually winning part of the game. i feel as though i'm pretty firmly in the journeyman phase of my magic development, so finding myself wanting to make those same plays was pretty gratifying. good luck in your future attempts at the ptq, both to you and your pal.
Run Poly-progenitus!! Sick props if you do!! Don't think, just run it :P
jedroguski
I share the same opinion, Crypt Rats should be banned. The card really hurts the format, making it almost impossible for a number of decks to survive, decks that would otherwise be good ones. Without the rats, MBC is still a great game but rats is the only accessible Wrath effect on the format.
@pierrebai: Thanks for the help! I've never worked with word before, so I have to learn much about formating and so on...
But Zendikar is really that fast. Sure, not everyone drafts aggro, but midrange decks aren't that good. A good drafted ally deck may be midrange, but the rest tends to be very aggressive ( UW, UB, WR, UR after my experience ). Control ( UB, BG ) has a hard time to keep up with this, especially if it has to handle flyer after flyer... Games don't end on Turn 4 usually, but soon after. Well, the format is still young and maybe I'm wrong, but the games I fought ended after a few turns, and I was rarely in the position to play any kicker card with kicker. Time will tell.
@menace13: I plan on doing so, but give it some time... there are also other formats I'd to talk about :)
Yeah Zim and Plat did a lot of work on the unified 100s strategy and gave us some sneak previews there.
awesome i hope you kick WotC's arse...and mr.jahn i am more than sure you guys will be okay. i used to read your extended coverage on starcity so i think you know just a wee bit about the game.
While I agree with some of the comments made above I think this is a very detailed article. It might not be 100% accurate but it is good to read what a well respected player thinks of the new format.
Sounds like a blast! This is an awesome idea from Wizards, and seems like it's going to be a total blast to participate in. Can't wait to see how it goes down...
good to see you on this site. for those of us that do not know, dunkle is mtgo's resident pox "master" with more top 8's with pox than you can shake a stick at. look forward to seeing a classic article from you in the future!
Nice informative article. I had no idea for example that Alex (SpikemBoy) was from my turf. Sad bout NG closing last year. Bah the economy! It's almost like meeting the people I read on a weekly basis. Cool beans.
Go Team!
I think you're going to like the lists that platipus10 and the community are putting together for 100CS. Unless they assign a department to work on that for the next two weeks, they're not going to be able to match the level of insight that he and various others have in the format, and they'll miss a lot of things. There are a lot of nuances to catch and obscure useful cards to identify, so hopefully people will go on the forums and continue to offer their observations. The link to lists-in-progress can be found on page 4 of the official 100CS thread.
It's quite awesome that Wizards is doing this. Have fun guys!
Banning Crypt Rats would mean Aggro had a real chance. Aggro doesn't recover well in Pauper (put any aggro into topdeck mode, and they fold over if you wipe their board). I would not be opposed to that.
Incidentally the Fish matchup is pretty good, too, for MBC. Fish plays counter control without generating loads of CA (except through ninja of the deep hours, and the inherent 2-1 that is Spellstutter Sprite), and against MBC, can't play either Control or Aggro very well.
Congrats, Pete!
And please, you and the others need to post in the constructed threads, we've got some good frameworks for the decks, but without knowing what any of you guys are wanting to play, it can be a bit difficult, like if nobody wanted to play Grixis control or something like that. So far only DL and Sam have posted there (We'll give Hammy a pass for this weekend :D )
Good luck to all of you!
Good luck to all of you. Go there and make us proud. Oh and take pictures.
LE
I think the author overestimates how fast zendikar is. Aggro is NOT the only way to go, control/removal/mana ramp decks do exist and can be quite good.