Does PureMTGO require you to write weekly articles?
I obviously can't speak for everyone, but I think I'd rather see you go bi-weekly and keep the same level of depth in your draft recaps than go weekly and just present us with the picks and a few play highlights. I'm sure the play-by-play commentary and the many screen caps get tedious for you, but they really make your articles (IMO) the best out there. Your articles are also a good tool for players new to draft - I've pointed several over here already.
I let my bias for playing interactive decks cloud my post. Is Storm a deck you can goldfish with for practice? Yes, and alongside burn it is the best deck to goldfish with for practice.
However, how many of those hands could win through a Distress? MBC/MBCu are heavily played, and Distress is a strong turn two play out of both.
Also, if I see someone lay a sac land turn one, I immediately change my game plan to compensate for storm. Pre-board it may not matter, but any edge is valuable.
Also, how many of these games were conducted post-sideboard? Just curious.
-Alex
That's a cool list man, I've been looking for a deck to run the real Mayael in ever since I made that one with Mayael's Aria a while back. Seems like a fun (and cheap) casual deck.
Back in 2000-01 K. Hahn (I think thats how his name is spelled) came up with something called 5 color magic. Which at first seemed a rather odd name and idea. 250+ cards? All 5 colors must be represented in quantity? etc. Soon I noticed pros and semipros at PTs with nothing better to do but sit around and play casually as they pulled out these wopping decks and had at each other.
Eventually the format became so popular offline that it started to bleed into the online game when that took off. Prismatic was the result of that. It isn't the same as http://www.5-color.com/ but it echoes it strongly. WotC took over the rules of the game in order to make it an official format.
I for one never had a chance to play it online competitively because when tourneys were available I didn't have the cards and when I started to have the cards the Version changed and I didn't have access and now that I have access again the format is virtually dead. Not entirely. I was able to pull a few games today in casual but it was a good 5 minute wait between opponents.
Anyway nice article...if a bit dramatic. I think the way things work at WotC Prismatic will get its turn again. I noticed that the V3 support for prismatic deck building is rather thin ....(numbers become blurred as your deck numbers get closer to 250) and I had to check the stats> format tab alot near the end of the build to make sure I wasn't going over the minimum. Hopefully V3 will iron out the kinks of large deck builds and prismatic will see a come back...right after they bring back leagues of course. :)
Spike is wrong. This is an excellent deck to goldfish with - particularly if you want game one results. Even though they are aware of what deck you are playing the second you drop your first land, they just don't have the hate available, nor could they mulligan to defend (Distress, Krark-Clan Shaman, Prismatic Strands, etc.) Furthermore, they will generally be busy trying to get their offense (or defense) established, which you can just wait for a good time that they are tapped out or close to it so you can go off without anything standing in your way. In that manner, it is very much goldfishing because any damage or board presence that they have will be for naught as you just storm them out. Fair article, but the decklist is poor.
Yeah undead gladiator is really good, the problem with rotting rats is that it is not a powerful card. Undead is blacks "genesis" providing a nice reusable graveyard effect. Be able to sift through multiple dead cards during a single upkeep is a really nice option in the late game. It seems like a must have target for a turn 1 entomb.
Stormblades are just more efficient in my mind for their cost than the other creature options available. Knotvine Paladin, Knight of the White Orchard, the other XBlades, Canonist are basically equally subject to removal (Purge, granted, but if someone sideboards Purge against me just for Stormblades, I have to be happy) and don't have evasion. A good argument can be made for Qasali Pridemage, a clinching one if Esper gets more love. For my money, I keep Stormblades. Mimeomancers could be more Jenara, especially for the more greedy - but they are flexible: reduce a dragon to a 3/1, pump up a Hierarch and give it flying.
That was compared to creatures. The comparison to spells is harder.
Creatures, because of Ziggurat x4 are always easier to cast, but this deck can handle at least some number of spells. Would you rather run Purge or Path that is sometimes dead/bad or a generic 3-power evasive creature for 2 to 3 mana that is susceptible to removal? My approach so far was to bring in the correct spell to replace the not-too-bad creature in sideboarded games. A gambler's approach to the metagame could be to have the spell - potentially a dud, but possibly a savior - in from the beginning of the match. Control decks have the luxury to gamble more, since they make up for cards that are occasionally bad in certain matchups with card advantage from other sources.
I don't know which is the correct answer. I want to bring in a couple of Purges for the Mimeomancers, but before I do, I want to have a consistent sideboard plan, like I currently have without the changes.
Since mana can be tight, you want to maximize your mana by casting the Spheres as you go. This ensures that you can filter any mana without losing it, and draw cards for free.
I think you needed to start out your article defining exactly what prismatic is.
I don't think every reader will know what is prismatic (myself included), especially when you say that it's not a popular format. Only until the very end, in the player appeal/acquisition section did you finally mention that prismatic is a 250 card format, and a small lightbulb finally clicked in my head with a vague recollection of something like this ever existing on mtgo. I think this kind of information is sorely needed at the beginning of the article.
But regardless, I had no clue what prismatic is and I still read your entire article and enjoyed your analysis, so props for an interesting read!
Very enjoyable. History lessons are always fun, and this was well-written. Also, I think it is good to point the finger at WotC when they blow it as they did repeatedly with Pris, both in terms of the B/R and support for the format. You wandered around a little, but I'm often guilty of that, so I can't complain too much about that.
I like the approach. I will mention that Turn four is a lot higher % than 50 in my testing with the deck; closer to 75. The bigger fight to me was figuring out if I could kill on turn three. You TYPICALLY can with a double-grapeshot hand, which, as you mentioned, is usually the key to winning with the deck.
Interesting analysis. Prismatic was always one of the most awkward formats to build for given the deck size and color requirement. An interesting point of comparison can be made with Tribal Classic and Tribal Standard: Purely anecdotally, I have very little trouble getting a Tribal Classic game going, but it is exceedingly rare to see Tribal Standard these days. This has relevance because initially Tribal was a purely casual format, with Wizards adding tourneys and prize support later. The unintended consequence of this was Classic decks getting shoehorned into the format restrictions, which led Wizards to split off Tribal Standard and no longer support Tribal Classic as a tournament format.
When they initially made that announcement it seemed that the Classic side of tribal was being eradicated: This led to substantial uproar and the creation of the Classic to assuage the nerd rage. Shortly before the change from V2.5 to V3, they added a third tribal format, 'Lorwyn Tribal Standard', to coincide with an offline promotional format. The main difference there was noncreature Tribal cards counted towards the deck restriction. That version never made it over to V3, and the remaining formats were further impeded by the Changeling bug in which Changelings and Mistform Ultimus were no longer counting towards the restriction. That bug was eventually rectified.
As it stands, Tribal Standard is no longer supported either, and Tribal Classic still has a small but consistent following as a casual format.
There were substantial bugs in the deck filter for prismatic for most of V3's life. In between the lack of B&R updates and the deck filter bugs, the format was only really playable for a couple of weeks before it was killed. After they announced the "revival" of the format, I had bought a lot of cards to build a black/red Prismatic deck using hybrid mana and split cards to satisfy the color requirements, intending to take it to tournaments, but I was unable to join with the deck I had built. It took them months to fix this problem!
It seems to me that the best way to build the rock would be to stick to b/g and throw in Tortured Existance. Some possible creatures for a more aggro style Rock using TE are Wild Mongrel, Basking Rootwalla, Jolrael's Centaur, Krosan Tusker, Sakura-Tribe Elder, Putrid Leech, and Golgari Brownscale.
Man.. I remember this match it was terrible for both of us. Neither of us could draw any lands to get started and there was sloppy play on both sides of the table. It was nearly a mirror though, I was GWB also, not 4c CitP, but you had the bigger creatures to ride it out.
Really good article I thought. I think that goldfishing is a more then acceptle way to veiw combo. The first step in playing a deck like storm is figuring out how to play your deck. Playing live games for your first step in testing will skew the results negativly. First off you don't actually know how to play your deck, so you will react incorrectly under pressure and lose games you could have won if you knew the fundamental turns of the deck, which are hard to acquire when live. The only think that could make this article better is a part 2 where you bring a tuned version of tps into actual testing, IE the 2-mans to show how the deck works when not facing an empty chair.
I agree that the lack of Shred Memory is huge, and that the deck can't be nearly as consistent with out it. While I am not even at novice level when it comes to knowing the pauper meta game I do now how to play combo, its easy you just ignore the other decks. Here is my list that I run in 2-mans every once in a while.
4 Chromatic Sphere
3 Compulsive Research
4 Ideas Unbound
4 Cabal Ritual
4 Words of Wisdom
4 Irrigation Ditch
4 Chromatic Star
4 Ancient Spring
4 Manamorphose
1 Flaring Pain
4 Rite of Flame
4 Dark Ritual
2 Shred Memory
4 Grapeshot
4 Sulfur Vent
2 Island
4 Lotus Petal
Sideboard
3 Pyroblast
1 Flaring Pain
2 Echoing Truth
3 Early Frost
2 Empty the Warrens
4 Deep Analysis
It gives up a touch of the draw for more consistency and protection in shred memory/flairing pain.
The gladiator seems adequate. I'm not sure I'd go as far as to to say it's one the best ways to get targets into your graveyard.
I haven't tried it, but it is certainly good enough to warrant including. The only problem is that it's a bit slow. Using the Gladiator you can't reliably get a reanimation target into play until turn 4. (Cycle turn 2, discard turn 3, reanimate turn 4. I think Rotting Rats may be a bit quicker.
I disagree and agree with Zimbardo. While MTGO may rely on product and event ticket sales, the sales of these product in part are influenced by card prices. Higher card prices lead to more valuable packs, which likely leads to more packs purchased for drafting or cracking.
It certainly is possible for product sales to rise for other factors as well, which may or may not have any affect on card prices. The argument is not that card prices dictate product sales, but that card prices are one of many factors that helps to influence sales, and anything that can benefit sales should be something that WotC should potentially pursue.
I actually was planning to discuss something similar to this casual vs competitive labeling terminology in the second half of the series. I already planned to discuss what WotC's underlying goals are so that I can analyze some of the criteria that any new formats would have to fill.
I will use some of this discussion to help with what I write.
"Since the games were solitaire they were all done with the maindeck."
Does PureMTGO require you to write weekly articles?
I obviously can't speak for everyone, but I think I'd rather see you go bi-weekly and keep the same level of depth in your draft recaps than go weekly and just present us with the picks and a few play highlights. I'm sure the play-by-play commentary and the many screen caps get tedious for you, but they really make your articles (IMO) the best out there. Your articles are also a good tool for players new to draft - I've pointed several over here already.
Ok, a 2nd Daily Event last night with 40 players and a 2nd top 8. I hit my worst matchup in the quarterfinals, G/W Aggro and quickly lost.
Yeah.. His statistics look like they're all for Game 1 situations. I would bet the numbers would change drastically with certain matchups post SB.
and the pictures in between the plays is a good reference. i may have to adopt this style for my replays.
Kudos!
I let my bias for playing interactive decks cloud my post. Is Storm a deck you can goldfish with for practice? Yes, and alongside burn it is the best deck to goldfish with for practice.
However, how many of those hands could win through a Distress? MBC/MBCu are heavily played, and Distress is a strong turn two play out of both.
Also, if I see someone lay a sac land turn one, I immediately change my game plan to compensate for storm. Pre-board it may not matter, but any edge is valuable.
Also, how many of these games were conducted post-sideboard? Just curious.
-Alex
That's a cool list man, I've been looking for a deck to run the real Mayael in ever since I made that one with Mayael's Aria a while back. Seems like a fun (and cheap) casual deck.
Back in 2000-01 K. Hahn (I think thats how his name is spelled) came up with something called 5 color magic. Which at first seemed a rather odd name and idea. 250+ cards? All 5 colors must be represented in quantity? etc. Soon I noticed pros and semipros at PTs with nothing better to do but sit around and play casually as they pulled out these wopping decks and had at each other.
Eventually the format became so popular offline that it started to bleed into the online game when that took off. Prismatic was the result of that. It isn't the same as http://www.5-color.com/ but it echoes it strongly. WotC took over the rules of the game in order to make it an official format.
I for one never had a chance to play it online competitively because when tourneys were available I didn't have the cards and when I started to have the cards the Version changed and I didn't have access and now that I have access again the format is virtually dead. Not entirely. I was able to pull a few games today in casual but it was a good 5 minute wait between opponents.
Anyway nice article...if a bit dramatic. I think the way things work at WotC Prismatic will get its turn again. I noticed that the V3 support for prismatic deck building is rather thin ....(numbers become blurred as your deck numbers get closer to 250) and I had to check the stats> format tab alot near the end of the build to make sure I wasn't going over the minimum. Hopefully V3 will iron out the kinks of large deck builds and prismatic will see a come back...right after they bring back leagues of course. :)
Spike is wrong. This is an excellent deck to goldfish with - particularly if you want game one results. Even though they are aware of what deck you are playing the second you drop your first land, they just don't have the hate available, nor could they mulligan to defend (Distress, Krark-Clan Shaman, Prismatic Strands, etc.) Furthermore, they will generally be busy trying to get their offense (or defense) established, which you can just wait for a good time that they are tapped out or close to it so you can go off without anything standing in your way. In that manner, it is very much goldfishing because any damage or board presence that they have will be for naught as you just storm them out. Fair article, but the decklist is poor.
Yeah undead gladiator is really good, the problem with rotting rats is that it is not a powerful card. Undead is blacks "genesis" providing a nice reusable graveyard effect. Be able to sift through multiple dead cards during a single upkeep is a really nice option in the late game. It seems like a must have target for a turn 1 entomb.
Stormblades are just more efficient in my mind for their cost than the other creature options available. Knotvine Paladin, Knight of the White Orchard, the other XBlades, Canonist are basically equally subject to removal (Purge, granted, but if someone sideboards Purge against me just for Stormblades, I have to be happy) and don't have evasion. A good argument can be made for Qasali Pridemage, a clinching one if Esper gets more love. For my money, I keep Stormblades. Mimeomancers could be more Jenara, especially for the more greedy - but they are flexible: reduce a dragon to a 3/1, pump up a Hierarch and give it flying.
That was compared to creatures. The comparison to spells is harder.
Creatures, because of Ziggurat x4 are always easier to cast, but this deck can handle at least some number of spells. Would you rather run Purge or Path that is sometimes dead/bad or a generic 3-power evasive creature for 2 to 3 mana that is susceptible to removal? My approach so far was to bring in the correct spell to replace the not-too-bad creature in sideboarded games. A gambler's approach to the metagame could be to have the spell - potentially a dud, but possibly a savior - in from the beginning of the match. Control decks have the luxury to gamble more, since they make up for cards that are occasionally bad in certain matchups with card advantage from other sources.
I don't know which is the correct answer. I want to bring in a couple of Purges for the Mimeomancers, but before I do, I want to have a consistent sideboard plan, like I currently have without the changes.
Since mana can be tight, you want to maximize your mana by casting the Spheres as you go. This ensures that you can filter any mana without losing it, and draw cards for free.
I think you needed to start out your article defining exactly what prismatic is.
I don't think every reader will know what is prismatic (myself included), especially when you say that it's not a popular format. Only until the very end, in the player appeal/acquisition section did you finally mention that prismatic is a 250 card format, and a small lightbulb finally clicked in my head with a vague recollection of something like this ever existing on mtgo. I think this kind of information is sorely needed at the beginning of the article.
But regardless, I had no clue what prismatic is and I still read your entire article and enjoyed your analysis, so props for an interesting read!
Very enjoyable. History lessons are always fun, and this was well-written. Also, I think it is good to point the finger at WotC when they blow it as they did repeatedly with Pris, both in terms of the B/R and support for the format. You wandered around a little, but I'm often guilty of that, so I can't complain too much about that.
I like the approach. I will mention that Turn four is a lot higher % than 50 in my testing with the deck; closer to 75. The bigger fight to me was figuring out if I could kill on turn three. You TYPICALLY can with a double-grapeshot hand, which, as you mentioned, is usually the key to winning with the deck.
Interesting analysis. Prismatic was always one of the most awkward formats to build for given the deck size and color requirement. An interesting point of comparison can be made with Tribal Classic and Tribal Standard: Purely anecdotally, I have very little trouble getting a Tribal Classic game going, but it is exceedingly rare to see Tribal Standard these days. This has relevance because initially Tribal was a purely casual format, with Wizards adding tourneys and prize support later. The unintended consequence of this was Classic decks getting shoehorned into the format restrictions, which led Wizards to split off Tribal Standard and no longer support Tribal Classic as a tournament format.
When they initially made that announcement it seemed that the Classic side of tribal was being eradicated: This led to substantial uproar and the creation of the Classic to assuage the nerd rage. Shortly before the change from V2.5 to V3, they added a third tribal format, 'Lorwyn Tribal Standard', to coincide with an offline promotional format. The main difference there was noncreature Tribal cards counted towards the deck restriction. That version never made it over to V3, and the remaining formats were further impeded by the Changeling bug in which Changelings and Mistform Ultimus were no longer counting towards the restriction. That bug was eventually rectified.
As it stands, Tribal Standard is no longer supported either, and Tribal Classic still has a small but consistent following as a casual format.
Is there anything to do in the mirror match other than try to combo off first?
There were substantial bugs in the deck filter for prismatic for most of V3's life. In between the lack of B&R updates and the deck filter bugs, the format was only really playable for a couple of weeks before it was killed. After they announced the "revival" of the format, I had bought a lot of cards to build a black/red Prismatic deck using hybrid mana and split cards to satisfy the color requirements, intending to take it to tournaments, but I was unable to join with the deck I had built. It took them months to fix this problem!
Sorry, didn't see this before I posted my comment. I endorse this suggestion though, obviously.
It seems to me that the best way to build the rock would be to stick to b/g and throw in Tortured Existance. Some possible creatures for a more aggro style Rock using TE are Wild Mongrel, Basking Rootwalla, Jolrael's Centaur, Krosan Tusker, Sakura-Tribe Elder, Putrid Leech, and Golgari Brownscale.
Man.. I remember this match it was terrible for both of us. Neither of us could draw any lands to get started and there was sloppy play on both sides of the table. It was nearly a mirror though, I was GWB also, not 4c CitP, but you had the bigger creatures to ride it out.
Really good article I thought. I think that goldfishing is a more then acceptle way to veiw combo. The first step in playing a deck like storm is figuring out how to play your deck. Playing live games for your first step in testing will skew the results negativly. First off you don't actually know how to play your deck, so you will react incorrectly under pressure and lose games you could have won if you knew the fundamental turns of the deck, which are hard to acquire when live. The only think that could make this article better is a part 2 where you bring a tuned version of tps into actual testing, IE the 2-mans to show how the deck works when not facing an empty chair.
I agree that the lack of Shred Memory is huge, and that the deck can't be nearly as consistent with out it. While I am not even at novice level when it comes to knowing the pauper meta game I do now how to play combo, its easy you just ignore the other decks. Here is my list that I run in 2-mans every once in a while.
4 Chromatic Sphere
3 Compulsive Research
4 Ideas Unbound
4 Cabal Ritual
4 Words of Wisdom
4 Irrigation Ditch
4 Chromatic Star
4 Ancient Spring
4 Manamorphose
1 Flaring Pain
4 Rite of Flame
4 Dark Ritual
2 Shred Memory
4 Grapeshot
4 Sulfur Vent
2 Island
4 Lotus Petal
Sideboard
3 Pyroblast
1 Flaring Pain
2 Echoing Truth
3 Early Frost
2 Empty the Warrens
4 Deep Analysis
It gives up a touch of the draw for more consistency and protection in shred memory/flairing pain.
The gladiator seems adequate. I'm not sure I'd go as far as to to say it's one the best ways to get targets into your graveyard.
I haven't tried it, but it is certainly good enough to warrant including. The only problem is that it's a bit slow. Using the Gladiator you can't reliably get a reanimation target into play until turn 4. (Cycle turn 2, discard turn 3, reanimate turn 4. I think Rotting Rats may be a bit quicker.
I disagree and agree with Zimbardo. While MTGO may rely on product and event ticket sales, the sales of these product in part are influenced by card prices. Higher card prices lead to more valuable packs, which likely leads to more packs purchased for drafting or cracking.
It certainly is possible for product sales to rise for other factors as well, which may or may not have any affect on card prices. The argument is not that card prices dictate product sales, but that card prices are one of many factors that helps to influence sales, and anything that can benefit sales should be something that WotC should potentially pursue.
I actually was planning to discuss something similar to this casual vs competitive labeling terminology in the second half of the series. I already planned to discuss what WotC's underlying goals are so that I can analyze some of the criteria that any new formats would have to fill.
I will use some of this discussion to help with what I write.
Thanks