Meh I want to find a good adult clan for mtgo, but I'm just a casual player. Every time I log in I see this list of top 10 clans, but I've never seen them actively doing anything. I have seen CK doing events, but one visit there, and that was more then enough for me.
Great article spike. I was around when the UW craze was all over town, and I hopped right on that bandwagon only to be just as disappointed as every body else. It's been sort of a downtime lately with no real clearcut meta changes (until this last weekend anyway), and the UW Enchantment was sort of a fun experiment, but it's sad that we couldn't see it's obvious flaws.
I even had to look up what library of leng did...
And to give credit, I did do a google search for 'rack/balance' I'm not mentally organized enough to sort such things as color.
Great article...I had often wondered what Storm's average goldfish is.
One thing I've noticed about this deck is that it has the highest incidence of horrible misplays of any Pauper deck I've seen. A lot of people have fizzled against me in the queues because they didn't count their colored mana correctly or something like that. Definitely not a deck you want to pick up with no practice.
Excellent as usual. I've had some small amount of success in the 2 mans with a pet Steel/exalted deck. Mine is practically a std list, running all 8 UW Blades, 8 exalted critters, 3 cloaks and a 4 hindering lights and 4 shelters. Affinity and combo suck pre board but it has a lot of game against MBC or teachings. I did think the ninja's were an odd choice for a cloak style dec. I especially thought it was odd coming from you, who usually catches that kind of mistake in other peoples dex.
OTOH, I do get a little discouraged from reading too many spikey articles about pauper. Pauper can be a really fun casual format, plus healthy casual play can be a breeding ground for rogue dex.. I don't expect alex to invest his time in writing about it. Maybe I'll hafta make time. (probably during naptime).
As usual, very good article, thanks.
I missed though some reference to the firesgar's thread about prices falling. I hate that little bastard too but what he wrote is debatable at least and he got some followers there.
btw, there is a huge new factor that is making price of most rares to drop. All we know it. I guess it can't be referred here for some reason... oh well!
so it wasnt letting me install the new kicker in the copy of mtgo. something with administration bs. anyway, last time i tried to do somehting liek that, the file was erased and i cant find a download.txt anywhere on my pc.
I remember playing CF 2 back in the day. It was actually my inability to compete in the casual room against other Prismatic decks that led me to look and find the PDC people. Prismatic can be fun, but in order to compete, you do need to invest a small fortune. I combated this by building a griefer style deck, full of LD spells, cheap creatures, and Epicenter (this was pre-Armageddon). Problem is when I played the deck, the foiled-out players would be upset with me for trying to win with my "bad cards" and I always felt bad when I played against someone just trying to have fun. There was no real happy medium.
Even worse is when I would take one of my "fun" decks out, like tribal zombies or reanimator, and just get crushed and called names. I think I've submitted more people to CoC violations in Prismatic than in any other format.
Just venting, carry on.
"I'd like to respond to the above statement. WotC provides tournaments for formats they see as active. Part of that involves looking at how many games of that type are played casually. If they don't see people playing Prismatic they aren't going to offer tournaments for it.
I think you have the logic backwards on this. It's not the tournament support which sustains or grows the format, it the activity level of the format which drives the number of tournaments offered."
I understand this argument; however, I still believe that the relationship is more circular than linear.
Why do people play Standard? or more specifically why do people play a format using the 2 most current blocks along with the most current base set?
At some point WotC created Standard as a format because they realized there was a need to create a format that used the most recent cards to both help sell sets and to keep a format that would be available to new players. Because this format fits their business model so well it only makes sense to give it the most support. I don't think that there were people all over the place playing under this specific set of rules and thus WotC created a format for them. If WotC had instead decided to make it the 3 most current blocks and the most current base set, you would see everyone playing that instead. Standard is the most popular format because it is the format WotC supports the most and WotC supports it because it is popular with players. It has now become a circular relationship. That circular relationship can start with either side of the relationship it doesn't matter. KScope is another format that started with WotC support and if popular with players will continue to get that support. KScope did not start because there were many people playing and demanding the format. Pauper is an example of a format starting on the opposite side. Many people were playing it so WotC decided to support it. I would bet that if WotC decided to stop supporting Pauper that the player base would drop off just as the player base grew when it received support.
Similarly if WotC said that they were creating a new format, but were not going to give it any tournament support there would likely be some early interest as people play with the new format, but it would likely eventually die off. People generally like to play formats that are written about and generally people write about formats that have tournaments, which inspire metagames and decklists.
No doubt that Prismatic had many other things going against it such as cost and deck building issues, but lack of any regular tournament support certainly did not help, as without tournaments there was not much to write about to interest players and help in acquiring new players. Also lack of tournament results made the B/R list haphazard at best.
The new weekly tournaments should prove to give formats a chance to make a showing and if unpopular it is more than fair to cut them, but this at least gives them the support to possibly succeed. If that possibility is never there then it will be difficult for any format to prove itself. It can happen as in the case of Pauper, but I think that is a rare exception and I don't think that it was easy for the Pauper advocates to build their community. A lot of work had to be put into it. There is a good chance that Prismatic would have failed this test and that is perfectly fine. I'm just saying that it never got to adequately take the test.
"If you recall back to V2, the Prismatic tournaments rarely fired, and when they did they were at, or just above, the minimum."
Actually the tournaments always fired in V2 until at some point about 1.5 years prior to V3 (but I cannot remember exactly), they changed the start time and then it never fired.
Good article, Alex. I'm kind of a Johnny/spike and I like to theorize how my really cool deck ideas could really beat down on so many decks in the format (that I admittedly just read about...not so much play against). Nothing wrong with that for more casual play, but it is easy to fall into the trap of "Wow. I beat three decks in a row in the casual room with my Fate Transfer/Snakeform/Vigean Hydropon/Wall of Roots/Wild Coatl/Viridian Longbow deck. Here I come PE!" This is why discussion is good for deck design. It's better to have your pet deck shot down in the forums than to lose your time, pride, and ticket investment in a tourney. It also is good for making a good idea, but sup-par card choice deck tourney ready!
Speaking of...I'm not sure if anyone has ever suggested it, but I would love to see you do a "Pauper Deck Doctor" article or series of articles where people submit their pet decks that just don't cut it for whatever reason. You could then suggest changes...maybe do some game recaps with deck iterations and see if you can make them semi-competitive. Just a thought...
"...
I was trying to say that WotC was not providing enough tournaments regardless of the actual amount of prizes to sustain the format. I believe that there is a critical mass in number of tournaments offered to sustain a format. Without that critical mass you will never develop a metagame nor encourage people to test and build new decks for a format. When there was only 1 tournament every 3-6 months there was no real reason to build, test, and update decks.
..."
I'd like to respond to the above statement. WotC provides tournaments for formats they see as active. Part of that involves looking at how many games of that type are played casually. If they don't see people playing Prismatic they aren't going to offer tournaments for it.
I think you have the logic backwards on this. It's not the tournament support which sustains or grows the format, it the activity level of the format which drives the number of tournaments offered.
If you recall back to V2, the Prismatic tournaments rarely fired, and when they did they were at, or just above, the minimum.
Prismatic always had a smaller following then most other formats to the nature of the costs associated with it. And new player acquisition was always more difficult for that very same reason. Without a dedicated community to push it, Prismatic withered. And that was, I think, the primary cause.
I believe it was Worth who stated on the Wizards messageboards that it is possible to revive tournament support for a format. But you need to show WotC that there is enough of an interest by a large enough group of players to make it worth their while.
Thought I'd best make an account, great article as always though. I've seen FOW tank this week some are selling for 55, I've not checked to see if they have them in stock in the bots though.
Steve - another awesome article. Thanks for the shout out on topic #4. I win about half of the games I play with my version of cascadeplasm, but that's because I'm truly playing the deck as a casual deck ONLY. If I don't have Manaplasm out on the field, I tend to hold back my other potential winning threats just so I can try to win with the ooze. That's my goal each game. I'll post a decklist for everyone tonight when I get a chance.
I'm a huge spike, anyone who knows me knows that. However you'll never catch me wasting my time in the casual room. Just like it bothers me when someone takes junk to the tourny practice room. In fact that happens to me so often that now i use solitare, my friends, and 2 player queues to test exclusively. Sad really. I wish people understood the reverse of the frustrations they have in the casual room. When you walk into the tourny practice room, and i'm trying to grab some playtest data, and someone sits down with 60 card zombies in extended, it drives me nuts as it wastes both of our time. Just my 2 cents.
5c was my favorite format (offline). I will never forget my college days of playing it. However, I wasn't good enough off financially (or at magic in general) to build prismatic decks until right before the format died. Oh well.... maybe someday they will zombify it. If so expect lots of prismatic info right here :)
First off, I want to say that I really respect that you took the time to write a response to my article and I appreciate the history of 5Color as a format as a background.
I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say about WotC support for the format. Your interpretation of what I said was that WotC was not providing enough prizes or paying players enough to play the format. I was trying to say that WotC was not providing enough tournaments regardless of the actual amount of prizes to sustain the format. I believe that there is a critical mass in number of tournaments offered to sustain a format. Without that critical mass you will never develop a metagame nor encourage people to test and build new decks for a format. When there was only 1 tournament every 3-6 months there was no real reason to build, test, and update decks. Also few players are likely to enter such a format. This basically puts the format into a downward spiral where players don't have any motivation to play the format and WotC doesn't have any motivation to support it. This is also tied to the lack of any articles for the format. There really wasn't much to write about a metagame, when there was no metagame to write about since there were no tournaments.
One of the best things WotC has recently done for the fringe formats is to institute the new weekly tournaments. I hope that they do this for any new format that they try to institute. I actually thought they made a mistake by introducing KScope and then not having a tournament for the format until 3-4 months later. I think they should have had a tournament at the very latest 1 month after the announcement if they want to try and push a new format.
I also think that you misinterpreted the desire of many in the prismatic community to use the 5Color B/R List. It was very obvious to most who were suggesting it to WotC that the 5Color b/R list was born out of a different pool of cards and the way in which the format of 5Color grew. Many of us were confused why some cards like Panoptic Mirror were even on the list (thanks for the explanation) and knew than many of the cards were not the same as what was needed for Prismatic; however, using that list was far superior to the alternative. The absolute lack of any sort of reasonable attention and explanation that WotC was giving to the Prismatic list. This was extremely frustrating to the community and the idea was that we could at least get a halfway decent list by just copying the 5Color list. This solution also had the added benefit that it
required virtually zero overhead for WotC, they only had to update their list when 5Color did without putting in any other effort, since they did not seem to want to put in any effort for the format.
I'm sorry that you had such bad experiences with players in the format. I really never seemed to have the problem that you described. I started playing the format probably 2 years before the switch to V3 and most people I played with regularly were very encouraging towards newer players, but none of that makes you wrong or me right. There are always those jerks that can ruin it for everyone when you are unlucky enough to encounter them before the the more encouraging players.
I think one problem with the fringe formats is that the player base for them is not large enough that players are willing to split between the to practice rooms. What ends up happening is that players tend to just stay in Cas Cas because it is easier. When you see 10+ listings for SNG100 in Cas Cas and 0 in TP, it is not very encouraging to start your game in the TP room.
Overall, great article and thanks for writing somethign to compliment my article. I will be interested to hear if you have feedback on my second article.
Meh I want to find a good adult clan for mtgo, but I'm just a casual player. Every time I log in I see this list of top 10 clans, but I've never seen them actively doing anything. I have seen CK doing events, but one visit there, and that was more then enough for me.
Great article spike. I was around when the UW craze was all over town, and I hopped right on that bandwagon only to be just as disappointed as every body else. It's been sort of a downtime lately with no real clearcut meta changes (until this last weekend anyway), and the UW Enchantment was sort of a fun experiment, but it's sad that we couldn't see it's obvious flaws.
Old Skool.
I even had to look up what library of leng did...
And to give credit, I did do a google search for 'rack/balance' I'm not mentally organized enough to sort such things as color.
-Mep.
Great article...I had often wondered what Storm's average goldfish is.
One thing I've noticed about this deck is that it has the highest incidence of horrible misplays of any Pauper deck I've seen. A lot of people have fizzled against me in the queues because they didn't count their colored mana correctly or something like that. Definitely not a deck you want to pick up with no practice.
Excellent as usual. I've had some small amount of success in the 2 mans with a pet Steel/exalted deck. Mine is practically a std list, running all 8 UW Blades, 8 exalted critters, 3 cloaks and a 4 hindering lights and 4 shelters. Affinity and combo suck pre board but it has a lot of game against MBC or teachings. I did think the ninja's were an odd choice for a cloak style dec. I especially thought it was odd coming from you, who usually catches that kind of mistake in other peoples dex.
OTOH, I do get a little discouraged from reading too many spikey articles about pauper. Pauper can be a really fun casual format, plus healthy casual play can be a breeding ground for rogue dex.. I don't expect alex to invest his time in writing about it. Maybe I'll hafta make time. (probably during naptime).
As usual, very good article, thanks.
I missed though some reference to the firesgar's thread about prices falling. I hate that little bastard too but what he wrote is debatable at least and he got some followers there.
btw, there is a huge new factor that is making price of most rares to drop. All we know it. I guess it can't be referred here for some reason... oh well!
These insights would not have been made without the aide of Greg Weiss, prodding me to examine the deck and not just look at it.
-Alex
ohh,
so it wasnt letting me install the new kicker in the copy of mtgo. something with administration bs. anyway, last time i tried to do somehting liek that, the file was erased and i cant find a download.txt anywhere on my pc.
sucks for me i guess
I remember playing CF 2 back in the day. It was actually my inability to compete in the casual room against other Prismatic decks that led me to look and find the PDC people. Prismatic can be fun, but in order to compete, you do need to invest a small fortune. I combated this by building a griefer style deck, full of LD spells, cheap creatures, and Epicenter (this was pre-Armageddon). Problem is when I played the deck, the foiled-out players would be upset with me for trying to win with my "bad cards" and I always felt bad when I played against someone just trying to have fun. There was no real happy medium.
Even worse is when I would take one of my "fun" decks out, like tribal zombies or reanimator, and just get crushed and called names. I think I've submitted more people to CoC violations in Prismatic than in any other format.
Just venting, carry on.
-Alex
"I'd like to respond to the above statement. WotC provides tournaments for formats they see as active. Part of that involves looking at how many games of that type are played casually. If they don't see people playing Prismatic they aren't going to offer tournaments for it.
I think you have the logic backwards on this. It's not the tournament support which sustains or grows the format, it the activity level of the format which drives the number of tournaments offered."
I understand this argument; however, I still believe that the relationship is more circular than linear.
Why do people play Standard? or more specifically why do people play a format using the 2 most current blocks along with the most current base set?
At some point WotC created Standard as a format because they realized there was a need to create a format that used the most recent cards to both help sell sets and to keep a format that would be available to new players. Because this format fits their business model so well it only makes sense to give it the most support. I don't think that there were people all over the place playing under this specific set of rules and thus WotC created a format for them. If WotC had instead decided to make it the 3 most current blocks and the most current base set, you would see everyone playing that instead. Standard is the most popular format because it is the format WotC supports the most and WotC supports it because it is popular with players. It has now become a circular relationship. That circular relationship can start with either side of the relationship it doesn't matter. KScope is another format that started with WotC support and if popular with players will continue to get that support. KScope did not start because there were many people playing and demanding the format. Pauper is an example of a format starting on the opposite side. Many people were playing it so WotC decided to support it. I would bet that if WotC decided to stop supporting Pauper that the player base would drop off just as the player base grew when it received support.
Similarly if WotC said that they were creating a new format, but were not going to give it any tournament support there would likely be some early interest as people play with the new format, but it would likely eventually die off. People generally like to play formats that are written about and generally people write about formats that have tournaments, which inspire metagames and decklists.
No doubt that Prismatic had many other things going against it such as cost and deck building issues, but lack of any regular tournament support certainly did not help, as without tournaments there was not much to write about to interest players and help in acquiring new players. Also lack of tournament results made the B/R list haphazard at best.
The new weekly tournaments should prove to give formats a chance to make a showing and if unpopular it is more than fair to cut them, but this at least gives them the support to possibly succeed. If that possibility is never there then it will be difficult for any format to prove itself. It can happen as in the case of Pauper, but I think that is a rare exception and I don't think that it was easy for the Pauper advocates to build their community. A lot of work had to be put into it. There is a good chance that Prismatic would have failed this test and that is perfectly fine. I'm just saying that it never got to adequately take the test.
"If you recall back to V2, the Prismatic tournaments rarely fired, and when they did they were at, or just above, the minimum."
Actually the tournaments always fired in V2 until at some point about 1.5 years prior to V3 (but I cannot remember exactly), they changed the start time and then it never fired.
Wow glad I got my 4x. I knew it was going to go up but by a whole ticket? Just wow.
Good article, Alex. I'm kind of a Johnny/spike and I like to theorize how my really cool deck ideas could really beat down on so many decks in the format (that I admittedly just read about...not so much play against). Nothing wrong with that for more casual play, but it is easy to fall into the trap of "Wow. I beat three decks in a row in the casual room with my Fate Transfer/Snakeform/Vigean Hydropon/Wall of Roots/Wild Coatl/Viridian Longbow deck. Here I come PE!" This is why discussion is good for deck design. It's better to have your pet deck shot down in the forums than to lose your time, pride, and ticket investment in a tourney. It also is good for making a good idea, but sup-par card choice deck tourney ready!
Speaking of...I'm not sure if anyone has ever suggested it, but I would love to see you do a "Pauper Deck Doctor" article or series of articles where people submit their pet decks that just don't cut it for whatever reason. You could then suggest changes...maybe do some game recaps with deck iterations and see if you can make them semi-competitive. Just a thought...
Thanks again for the great pauper articles!
"...
I was trying to say that WotC was not providing enough tournaments regardless of the actual amount of prizes to sustain the format. I believe that there is a critical mass in number of tournaments offered to sustain a format. Without that critical mass you will never develop a metagame nor encourage people to test and build new decks for a format. When there was only 1 tournament every 3-6 months there was no real reason to build, test, and update decks.
..."
I'd like to respond to the above statement. WotC provides tournaments for formats they see as active. Part of that involves looking at how many games of that type are played casually. If they don't see people playing Prismatic they aren't going to offer tournaments for it.
I think you have the logic backwards on this. It's not the tournament support which sustains or grows the format, it the activity level of the format which drives the number of tournaments offered.
If you recall back to V2, the Prismatic tournaments rarely fired, and when they did they were at, or just above, the minimum.
Prismatic always had a smaller following then most other formats to the nature of the costs associated with it. And new player acquisition was always more difficult for that very same reason. Without a dedicated community to push it, Prismatic withered. And that was, I think, the primary cause.
I believe it was Worth who stated on the Wizards messageboards that it is possible to revive tournament support for a format. But you need to show WotC that there is enough of an interest by a large enough group of players to make it worth their while.
And unfortunately, I don't think that there are.
Thought I'd best make an account, great article as always though. I've seen FOW tank this week some are selling for 55, I've not checked to see if they have them in stock in the bots though.
Thanks eddie!
If it's good enough for google, it's good enough for ol' hammy. :D
No real comment. I wait every friday for these.
Steve - another awesome article. Thanks for the shout out on topic #4. I win about half of the games I play with my version of cascadeplasm, but that's because I'm truly playing the deck as a casual deck ONLY. If I don't have Manaplasm out on the field, I tend to hold back my other potential winning threats just so I can try to win with the ooze. That's my goal each game. I'll post a decklist for everyone tonight when I get a chance.
I enjoy the fact that your pirate hat is the first one under Google Images.
Pirate hats rock!
Nice article... again.
Nice hat, but I think you should try for a real one as AJ said :)
Its going to be all the rage soon!!!
I can shoop you a pirate hat if you want! All the cool kids are doing it!
... I finally registered. Now, to just get a usable picture. Blech to this one.
Just saying.......
I'm a huge spike, anyone who knows me knows that. However you'll never catch me wasting my time in the casual room. Just like it bothers me when someone takes junk to the tourny practice room. In fact that happens to me so often that now i use solitare, my friends, and 2 player queues to test exclusively. Sad really. I wish people understood the reverse of the frustrations they have in the casual room. When you walk into the tourny practice room, and i'm trying to grab some playtest data, and someone sits down with 60 card zombies in extended, it drives me nuts as it wastes both of our time. Just my 2 cents.
5c was my favorite format (offline). I will never forget my college days of playing it. However, I wasn't good enough off financially (or at magic in general) to build prismatic decks until right before the format died. Oh well.... maybe someday they will zombify it. If so expect lots of prismatic info right here :)
First off, I want to say that I really respect that you took the time to write a response to my article and I appreciate the history of 5Color as a format as a background.
I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say about WotC support for the format. Your interpretation of what I said was that WotC was not providing enough prizes or paying players enough to play the format. I was trying to say that WotC was not providing enough tournaments regardless of the actual amount of prizes to sustain the format. I believe that there is a critical mass in number of tournaments offered to sustain a format. Without that critical mass you will never develop a metagame nor encourage people to test and build new decks for a format. When there was only 1 tournament every 3-6 months there was no real reason to build, test, and update decks. Also few players are likely to enter such a format. This basically puts the format into a downward spiral where players don't have any motivation to play the format and WotC doesn't have any motivation to support it. This is also tied to the lack of any articles for the format. There really wasn't much to write about a metagame, when there was no metagame to write about since there were no tournaments.
One of the best things WotC has recently done for the fringe formats is to institute the new weekly tournaments. I hope that they do this for any new format that they try to institute. I actually thought they made a mistake by introducing KScope and then not having a tournament for the format until 3-4 months later. I think they should have had a tournament at the very latest 1 month after the announcement if they want to try and push a new format.
I also think that you misinterpreted the desire of many in the prismatic community to use the 5Color B/R List. It was very obvious to most who were suggesting it to WotC that the 5Color b/R list was born out of a different pool of cards and the way in which the format of 5Color grew. Many of us were confused why some cards like Panoptic Mirror were even on the list (thanks for the explanation) and knew than many of the cards were not the same as what was needed for Prismatic; however, using that list was far superior to the alternative. The absolute lack of any sort of reasonable attention and explanation that WotC was giving to the Prismatic list. This was extremely frustrating to the community and the idea was that we could at least get a halfway decent list by just copying the 5Color list. This solution also had the added benefit that it
required virtually zero overhead for WotC, they only had to update their list when 5Color did without putting in any other effort, since they did not seem to want to put in any effort for the format.
I'm sorry that you had such bad experiences with players in the format. I really never seemed to have the problem that you described. I started playing the format probably 2 years before the switch to V3 and most people I played with regularly were very encouraging towards newer players, but none of that makes you wrong or me right. There are always those jerks that can ruin it for everyone when you are unlucky enough to encounter them before the the more encouraging players.
I think one problem with the fringe formats is that the player base for them is not large enough that players are willing to split between the to practice rooms. What ends up happening is that players tend to just stay in Cas Cas because it is easier. When you see 10+ listings for SNG100 in Cas Cas and 0 in TP, it is not very encouraging to start your game in the TP room.
Overall, great article and thanks for writing somethign to compliment my article. I will be interested to hear if you have feedback on my second article.