The cycles you describe of formats coming and going as the prizes & spikes come pretty much mirror what I've seen in my brief few years on MtGO.
I guess what I would like to see are more "supported" formats (ie more restrictions to shape a format you can apply to deck verification & game type) that are NOT EVER going to be used in tournaments.
Ideally, allowing us to create & define our own casual forms would be awesome. At minimum, something like combining existing rulesets: tribal + pauper = Tribal Pauper, Extended + kscope = etc. (And yes, I keep trying to play my Tribal Pauper spiders deck and getting my butt kicked by tuned competitive pauper decks...). At best, something like allowing us to create our own banned & restricted lists in addition to setting the boundaries for the sets to pull cards from would be great.
The elephant in the room is that the formats are bad.
There are huge underlying problem with Tribal Wars, Stairwell, EDH, Singleton, and the other "casual" formats.
If you want a format that doesn't end on the fifth turn to comboing out the whole table, then craft the format in such a way that that cannot happen.
The fact of the matter is, the stuff like the EDH judge not being allowed to play with the other because his deck is "too good" is a big problem that hurts the community.
The formats need to be developed and designed in such a way that they hold up to the intense scrutiny and 1000's of hours of thought being put into them to destroy the format.
Ive actually played three games where decking myself or the opponent was the win condition. This is due to drafting the UWB horse deck with a bunch of card draw and life gain and not enough win conditions. Make sure you can kill them, rather than just out card-drawing them.
Secondly, I think Stolen Grain should make the list of Undervalued Cards. That card in BR burn is amazing. You end up outracing the Horse decks and the expensive Legends decks and win with stuff like Fire Drake and the flying 2/2 Masticore look-alike. I won 5 games with it in the one BR deck I drafted.
Finally, I'd agree that the Wu Longbowman is overvalued in the UWB horse decks. Hes ok but not great. However, when combined with a Red based aggro deck hes very good. Pack it full of late pick Blood Lust's, cheap creatures, burn, Blue Horses, and the Wu Longbowman. I got blown out by that deck with what I thought was the best deck I'd drafted. He burned my early guys with Chain Lightning/the other 3-damage red sorcery and Wu Longbowman'ed with Blood Lust my bigger guys.
It really doesnt seem like a dream draw to go Plains-Steppe Lynx, Mountain-Plated Geopede attack for 2, Any of many sac lands - Sac it - attack for 9 with 3 mana open. I think that draw will happen several times in Sealed even.
Better run your 1-damage spells if you got em in the release events.
Thanks for the positive comments so far. I realize that it is a little bit late for the article but some people are still considering giving it a shot and ME3 will be coming back again and again as "Nix Tix" in the future.
To answer your question, Paul, I believe that "Strategic Planning" is a fine card to dig for answers in the late game and helps to find land or an useful early drop early game. The card is strangely least useful in the mid-game state where players have established a mana base and are busy casting their creatures. I think the card is valued just right - I see it sometimes going quite late but most of the time people pick it up when they are in blue. An interesting interaction with "Loyal Retainers" and "False Defeat" can occur when you drop a big creature into the graveyard and reanimate it with one of the two spells. Does not happen often but its strong when it does.
Blood Lust is a good card in any type of aggressive build. While you can use it as removal in combat, most of the time you go 1 for 2 when doing it (losing a blocker and the spell) unless you have a "pinger" as you mentioned. There are not many pingers or first strikers in the game though - only Blue provides 2 pingers and one is uncommon.
I will try to do drafts overviews like this a bit earlier when a set is released. You will find them either on mtgoacademy.com or here.
I’m sorry but if your idea of tribal is just a bunch of creatures attacking then you will always have problems. This is Classic after all the home of the most broken cards on MTGO, you have to use the most synergetic cards that are available to go with the tribe you choose to play. You can’t just through in a two card combo and expect to win it’s not as easy as that.
I didnt even think about using Samurai of the Pale Curtain, I only decided to play the event the night before and dont have many Kam block cards to pull a Samurai deck together.
I think I would have still run Rogues though as the discard was very useful from Oona's Blackguard.
I haven't played Me3 at all but I have to say this is a very fine article for those who want to. It gets to the point and gives the reader some real meat to chew on. What do you think of cards like Strategic Planning? Overrated? Underrated? One thing that is rather silly but is a funky card interaction: Blood Lust can be removal, if followed up with a pinger or first strike damage. (By the way nice quote and illustration from Sun Tzu.)
Thanks Stealth, it's always nice to bring a deck that surprise's people and has them off guard and u right it was a shard.
My only problem was I had tested with Giraffe and he knew what I was going to do :(
But unless i can think of something new soon it might be the same deck ... just maybe faster :)
I wonder what would be a good cut off for a budget room? It is a hard line to define, because there are insanely expensive cards, expensive cards, not cheap cards etc. Are we banning anything that costs over .25 tickets? or over 3 tickets? What if a card fluctuates over and under that line? I agree that the average Joe should be able to build non-tiered decks and still have fun. I think it is quite possible if you make your tables and set rules to them ("No Counter Decks please!", or "No Mass LD"). Enforcing them is as simple as conceding and restarting if someone breaks the rules. That is what most casual players do now if they object to a particular type of play. It isn't perfect and occasionally a person needs to be blocked for rudeness or what not but it isn't terribly hard to just move on.
You do have a point there. I guess I find myself a bit calloused to that sort of language by now but I can see where a parent would have concerns with the spicy tone of the title if they have very young children reading it. On the other hand, most parents control what their children read online (or should) and magic is a subject I'd not want my children reading about until they were mature enough to handle that kind of thing anyway. (That said I am not a parent nor will I ever be.)
Chad how very personal from someone Ive never heard from before. I am sorry you dislike my writing. But as the saying goes: not my problem. :) I remember this js snippet you could use as a bookmark to remove comments from a forum. I don't recall it offhand but it is some kind of simple dom manipulation. Try google.
The event was nice and I hope that in the future we get more players.
I personally was well prepared against 2 card combo decks but to be honest in my first game against Flippers I seriously didn't see it coming and even discard a Disenchant during the game and obviously lost. The second game I prevented him from combo-ing and won, but our third game was decided even before it started.
The last time I saw someone starting the game with not one but two Leyline before we even played lands was... well... uhm... I seriously can't recall. But all in all, it was a fair fight and close games and I am very happy that a fellow puremtgo.com writer took the crown.
And hey Flippers, why didn't you consider a WB Samurai deck with Samurai of the Pale Curtain? It is a nice replacement for Leyline and gives you another option.
Yah. Both games I lost to you were essentially comboed out through affinity golem, bosh and composite golem, with skeleton shard if i remember correctly. In the first game, I had absolutely no idea what you were doing until you went off. Remand and repulse aren't a lot of use against free spells!
Cheetoes deck featured a sort of combo too, with life and limb and psychotrope thallid essentially drawing about 12 cards per turn at 1 point. His was more mid-range with some combo elements in there, but I'd consider your golems to be pure combo, at least the way they killed me!
Unfortunately, the closest I had to a combo was ohran viper and lorescale coatl!
i think the way the rooms are split now is fine. i'm pretty open to ld, counters, discard in the casual room if it's done in a casual (aka nontournament) way. the only thing i can't stand is people who run classic dredge (or any tourney deck) in the casual room.
my new technique when that happens...put on a movie and act like i have massive lag. then when the guy complains i tell him not to waste my time next time by using tourney decks in the casual room. just complaining to the people makes them happy. waste their time, they'll stop coming to the casual room with tourney decks.
I think that Zen could add some design space to Pauper which is great news.
To be honest I'd like to think that WotC might look into the possibility of 'Standard' Pauper. It's got a good following in it's 'Classic' form and I'd like to think that the player base is large enough to support it.
I guess it might never happen if they think it would take players away from Standard proper however.
people will whine. it was pointed out at the top here - people quit because they are villians, not to cards, not to card interactions.
Like the other article put up after this one, there are player types - spike etc. one new type needs to be added - quitter. it is an attitude you take. When I first played mtgo... way back in the day, I had no idea what the impact of quitting was. One day a player told me in pm after I quit, that I had a rep for building good decks, but quitting if it didn't go my way. Man that stung. It made me realise, that whilst it IS just a game, people are real. Since then I made a commitment to not quit unless real life gets in the way, and to not cry over a person's deck.
I say there are no rules, unless you post them in your game.
I played 2 peeps packing combos, as the first guy found out it's hard to get it consistent and Giraffe had a solid enough deck to win by others mean... ie critter beats.
As we saw with my deck i abused affinity to great effect and consider what i did to be a combo just not in the same context as what you now discussing.
But I say this with Classic tribes the guys that don't play the combo decks always have a chance.
I actually didn't know that. Thanks for enlightening me. I think it could be succesful if there was more moderation, and that it was made more clear. Perhaps renaming the casual room to "the budget room", and then forcifully removing the ones playing high tier tournament decks. Obviously I don't know how it could be done properly - being the regular Joe that I am - but I think it's unfair that casual players are having their fun "destroyed", and as a good player I find it annoying to only having to resort to the tournament practice room, when I just want to test my semi-competitive Legacy-ported list of DNT.
Saturday Sept. 26th Registration begins at 1:30pm EST. Evrything will take place in /join Tribal and matches will be in the anything goes room.
Great article.
The cycles you describe of formats coming and going as the prizes & spikes come pretty much mirror what I've seen in my brief few years on MtGO.
I guess what I would like to see are more "supported" formats (ie more restrictions to shape a format you can apply to deck verification & game type) that are NOT EVER going to be used in tournaments.
Ideally, allowing us to create & define our own casual forms would be awesome. At minimum, something like combining existing rulesets: tribal + pauper = Tribal Pauper, Extended + kscope = etc. (And yes, I keep trying to play my Tribal Pauper spiders deck and getting my butt kicked by tuned competitive pauper decks...). At best, something like allowing us to create our own banned & restricted lists in addition to setting the boundaries for the sets to pull cards from would be great.
The elephant in the room is that the formats are bad.
There are huge underlying problem with Tribal Wars, Stairwell, EDH, Singleton, and the other "casual" formats.
If you want a format that doesn't end on the fifth turn to comboing out the whole table, then craft the format in such a way that that cannot happen.
The fact of the matter is, the stuff like the EDH judge not being allowed to play with the other because his deck is "too good" is a big problem that hurts the community.
The formats need to be developed and designed in such a way that they hold up to the intense scrutiny and 1000's of hours of thought being put into them to destroy the format.
Ive actually played three games where decking myself or the opponent was the win condition. This is due to drafting the UWB horse deck with a bunch of card draw and life gain and not enough win conditions. Make sure you can kill them, rather than just out card-drawing them.
Secondly, I think Stolen Grain should make the list of Undervalued Cards. That card in BR burn is amazing. You end up outracing the Horse decks and the expensive Legends decks and win with stuff like Fire Drake and the flying 2/2 Masticore look-alike. I won 5 games with it in the one BR deck I drafted.
Finally, I'd agree that the Wu Longbowman is overvalued in the UWB horse decks. Hes ok but not great. However, when combined with a Red based aggro deck hes very good. Pack it full of late pick Blood Lust's, cheap creatures, burn, Blue Horses, and the Wu Longbowman. I got blown out by that deck with what I thought was the best deck I'd drafted. He burned my early guys with Chain Lightning/the other 3-damage red sorcery and Wu Longbowman'ed with Blood Lust my bigger guys.
-M
Oh, and Scute Mob in a UG control deck seems insane. It gets those 4 counters every Upkeep...wow.
It really doesnt seem like a dream draw to go Plains-Steppe Lynx, Mountain-Plated Geopede attack for 2, Any of many sac lands - Sac it - attack for 9 with 3 mana open. I think that draw will happen several times in Sealed even.
Better run your 1-damage spells if you got em in the release events.
-M
Thanks for the positive comments so far. I realize that it is a little bit late for the article but some people are still considering giving it a shot and ME3 will be coming back again and again as "Nix Tix" in the future.
To answer your question, Paul, I believe that "Strategic Planning" is a fine card to dig for answers in the late game and helps to find land or an useful early drop early game. The card is strangely least useful in the mid-game state where players have established a mana base and are busy casting their creatures. I think the card is valued just right - I see it sometimes going quite late but most of the time people pick it up when they are in blue. An interesting interaction with "Loyal Retainers" and "False Defeat" can occur when you drop a big creature into the graveyard and reanimate it with one of the two spells. Does not happen often but its strong when it does.
Blood Lust is a good card in any type of aggressive build. While you can use it as removal in combat, most of the time you go 1 for 2 when doing it (losing a blocker and the spell) unless you have a "pinger" as you mentioned. There are not many pingers or first strikers in the game though - only Blue provides 2 pingers and one is uncommon.
I will try to do drafts overviews like this a bit earlier when a set is released. You will find them either on mtgoacademy.com or here.
I think there was eight of us, the next event is this Saturday 13:30 EST I think (18:30 GMT). Correct me if I'm wrong Shard
I’m sorry but if your idea of tribal is just a bunch of creatures attacking then you will always have problems. This is Classic after all the home of the most broken cards on MTGO, you have to use the most synergetic cards that are available to go with the tribe you choose to play. You can’t just through in a two card combo and expect to win it’s not as easy as that.
How many people participated?
And when is the next event - just to make sure everyone knows.
too late for me friend, but welcomed none the less
I didnt even think about using Samurai of the Pale Curtain, I only decided to play the event the night before and dont have many Kam block cards to pull a Samurai deck together.
I think I would have still run Rogues though as the discard was very useful from Oona's Blackguard.
I haven't played Me3 at all but I have to say this is a very fine article for those who want to. It gets to the point and gives the reader some real meat to chew on. What do you think of cards like Strategic Planning? Overrated? Underrated? One thing that is rather silly but is a funky card interaction: Blood Lust can be removal, if followed up with a pinger or first strike damage. (By the way nice quote and illustration from Sun Tzu.)
Thanks Stealth, it's always nice to bring a deck that surprise's people and has them off guard and u right it was a shard.
My only problem was I had tested with Giraffe and he knew what I was going to do :(
But unless i can think of something new soon it might be the same deck ... just maybe faster :)
I wonder what would be a good cut off for a budget room? It is a hard line to define, because there are insanely expensive cards, expensive cards, not cheap cards etc. Are we banning anything that costs over .25 tickets? or over 3 tickets? What if a card fluctuates over and under that line? I agree that the average Joe should be able to build non-tiered decks and still have fun. I think it is quite possible if you make your tables and set rules to them ("No Counter Decks please!", or "No Mass LD"). Enforcing them is as simple as conceding and restarting if someone breaks the rules. That is what most casual players do now if they object to a particular type of play. It isn't perfect and occasionally a person needs to be blocked for rudeness or what not but it isn't terribly hard to just move on.
You do have a point there. I guess I find myself a bit calloused to that sort of language by now but I can see where a parent would have concerns with the spicy tone of the title if they have very young children reading it. On the other hand, most parents control what their children read online (or should) and magic is a subject I'd not want my children reading about until they were mature enough to handle that kind of thing anyway. (That said I am not a parent nor will I ever be.)
Chad how very personal from someone Ive never heard from before. I am sorry you dislike my writing. But as the saying goes: not my problem. :) I remember this js snippet you could use as a bookmark to remove comments from a forum. I don't recall it offhand but it is some kind of simple dom manipulation. Try google.
The event was nice and I hope that in the future we get more players.
I personally was well prepared against 2 card combo decks but to be honest in my first game against Flippers I seriously didn't see it coming and even discard a Disenchant during the game and obviously lost. The second game I prevented him from combo-ing and won, but our third game was decided even before it started.
The last time I saw someone starting the game with not one but two Leyline before we even played lands was... well... uhm... I seriously can't recall. But all in all, it was a fair fight and close games and I am very happy that a fellow puremtgo.com writer took the crown.
And hey Flippers, why didn't you consider a WB Samurai deck with Samurai of the Pale Curtain? It is a nice replacement for Leyline and gives you another option.
LE
Yah. Both games I lost to you were essentially comboed out through affinity golem, bosh and composite golem, with skeleton shard if i remember correctly. In the first game, I had absolutely no idea what you were doing until you went off. Remand and repulse aren't a lot of use against free spells!
Cheetoes deck featured a sort of combo too, with life and limb and psychotrope thallid essentially drawing about 12 cards per turn at 1 point. His was more mid-range with some combo elements in there, but I'd consider your golems to be pure combo, at least the way they killed me!
Unfortunately, the closest I had to a combo was ohran viper and lorescale coatl!
i think the way the rooms are split now is fine. i'm pretty open to ld, counters, discard in the casual room if it's done in a casual (aka nontournament) way. the only thing i can't stand is people who run classic dredge (or any tourney deck) in the casual room.
my new technique when that happens...put on a movie and act like i have massive lag. then when the guy complains i tell him not to waste my time next time by using tourney decks in the casual room. just complaining to the people makes them happy. waste their time, they'll stop coming to the casual room with tourney decks.
I think that Zen could add some design space to Pauper which is great news.
To be honest I'd like to think that WotC might look into the possibility of 'Standard' Pauper. It's got a good following in it's 'Classic' form and I'd like to think that the player base is large enough to support it.
I guess it might never happen if they think it would take players away from Standard proper however.
people will whine. it was pointed out at the top here - people quit because they are villians, not to cards, not to card interactions.
Like the other article put up after this one, there are player types - spike etc. one new type needs to be added - quitter. it is an attitude you take. When I first played mtgo... way back in the day, I had no idea what the impact of quitting was. One day a player told me in pm after I quit, that I had a rep for building good decks, but quitting if it didn't go my way. Man that stung. It made me realise, that whilst it IS just a game, people are real. Since then I made a commitment to not quit unless real life gets in the way, and to not cry over a person's deck.
I say there are no rules, unless you post them in your game.
I played 2 peeps packing combos, as the first guy found out it's hard to get it consistent and Giraffe had a solid enough deck to win by others mean... ie critter beats.
As we saw with my deck i abused affinity to great effect and consider what i did to be a combo just not in the same context as what you now discussing.
But I say this with Classic tribes the guys that don't play the combo decks always have a chance.
@ AJ_Impy
I actually didn't know that. Thanks for enlightening me. I think it could be succesful if there was more moderation, and that it was made more clear. Perhaps renaming the casual room to "the budget room", and then forcifully removing the ones playing high tier tournament decks. Obviously I don't know how it could be done properly - being the regular Joe that I am - but I think it's unfair that casual players are having their fun "destroyed", and as a good player I find it annoying to only having to resort to the tournament practice room, when I just want to test my semi-competitive Legacy-ported list of DNT.
Provided you aren't trying to keep the deck Standard-legal I see no reason to run Broken Ambitions over the far superior Counterspell.