40% is not practically 50%. It is 4/5s of 50%. :) But we both missed the mark since I was not really thinking about Borderposts which make up the difference as much as I dislike relying on them.
But our opposition mostly stems from the fact that we consider it a bad card based on our experiences on the other end and our common sense. My feeling is having faced MF many times in constructed (which is an entirely different animal) and a few times in draft that it is an inferior card except when the deck it is being used in is geared to take advantage of it and gets a little lucky. One MF is bad is the argument here. Not a horde of MFs is a bad plan.
To take it a step further the objection also stems from many personal experiences playing against mill effect cards and winning. Not because the mill player was unlucky but because their efforts were geared towards decking me not winning via men or damage in some manner. Having said that losing to a Glimpse of the Unseen or a Psychic Drain is very annoying. Heck I just milled someone with a Nemesis in an extended game last night. (That game took 38 rounds! So any reasonable deck should have beaten me before then lol.) So I get the impact of wanting to have MF for the alternate win factor. Even knowing someone is playing a MF could skew how that person plays their hand out. Extra Draw? Maybe not with such abandon. That is worth something but not a lot. If you know your opponents then maybe it is less risky because you know how they will react to the very knowledge of you playing it.
I guess I see it as the same sort of risky strategy one takes when running stone rain in a draft deck. Yes you may get lucky with one to take out the crucial land card your opponent needed in time to stop your juggernaut war machine but probably more risk than it is worth. Even a cantrip Land destruction gives me shudders. Now a deck based around land destruction and mana denial could very well be an awesome deck but you're not very likely to achieve it in limited.
As far as men being vulnerable, granted. Thats the upside as well as the downside. (Meaning we take that into account when deciding which men are best to play with.) It is not an argument for using nonmen.
This article attempts to describe the fundamental relationship between Card Advantage and Tempo. I intend to write some more theory articles in the future. I think that PureMTGO needs more articles that focus on theory, and this is a step in that direction.
i freaking knew darksteel was coming back for m10, shoudl have been 11th edition which is natually why 11/11 for 11 was coming for us....i know , wrong thread, i needed to blab. good article btw...
Its obvious that some people have a big thing for the MF. I however do not, and am going to continue counseling anyone against playing it, under any circumstance.
I can't deny that people have randomly won (or lost) games due to MF. However, just because a card can randomly win a game here or there under the right conditions does not make it a viable card. Saying MF is good just because it sometimes wins games is just like saying that Eager Cadet is good because sometimes he'll get in there twenty turns in a row and win the game all by himself.
Yes, I was not trying to make an elitist statement. At least for Magic Online, I do NOT like mana burn because it punishes new players who have trouble with the interface which is quite user hostile.
I disagree that tournaments would become unbalanced. In practice players already have access to all the cards they want, only at the high prices created by low supply. You often hear complaints about the entry cost of formats, but people still play. I'd rather pay $200 per year to be able to play any standard deck than pay $200 to buy each competitive deck.
Your suggestion that people will stop playing if cards are freely available seems unlikely to me. I would think the opposite would be true.
I think that would make MTGO ridiculous besides taking from it the main reason why better players play it, because of the testing. If everyone had acess to everything what would be the point of winning?Tix alone can't be the only thing supporting MTGO economy since if everyone had acess to the cards it would unbalance the power level of every mtgo tournament while driving players away. As for myself I see no reason to play MTGO besides as a tool for improvement. I have acess to a number of irl stores so MTGO is just a side effect used for better playing skills. If they take that away I don't see myself playing it no longer.
Nice article as always ham.
Hamtastix said "I have yet to see anyone mention on the paper board that WotC would make more money by allowing paper players to pay $15 a month and have access to all the cards they'd want. That would be ludicrous to the extreme for paper and equally strange for any online service. "
I think you're dismissing this idea too lightly. In my local area it's normal for players to need to borrow cards, or even complete decks to play competitively in PTQs, GPs, or even just FNM. There is definitely a section of players who would be interested in a pay by subscription model.
Data behind that link is updated everytime I finish a draft or any event.
On the right side theres monetary stats and also my rating which btw went all time high yesterday 1840 (ACR has been very good for me). But yea I am "average" drafter and I have twice played IRL.
I see no reason to play 8-4s since my main goal is to cut the bleeding:
I would play more Swiss if they only fired more often.
Swiss is also very good if one plays 2 or more drafts same time since rounds take full time so I won´t be slowing others play.
I played yesterday LLM 4322, ACR Swiss and SSE 4322 almost same time and I was slowing down the Swiss match a bit. I did win 2 of them and in LLM lost in 2nd round.
Only way to get those QPs with my limited time and only drafting is to play multiple sametime
"I'm not sure if you're able to play any cards or effects after first strike damage has been dealt, but I kind of doubt it, which means First Strikers and Ninjas are no longer a mini-combo. This is a significant change for 100 singleton, however, this still doesn't come up all that often."
This does still work. The steps still happen, just the damage doesn't use the stack. Otherwise, first strike wouldn't work (SBE wouldn't be checked until regular combat damage had gone through)
In your article, you stated "To me, mana burn seems like a way to punish new players for not knowing the magic online interface."
Frankly, the MTGO interface and GUI is one of the worst I've come across, and is often counter-intuitive. It takes repetition and experience to get used to it, and it still does things I don't expect it logically to do. Making a comment like this is not only elitist, but talks down to other players because they haven't gotten used to the interface. With mana burn going away, this doesn't matter, but I just felt I had to step in here and say something, the comment just rubbed me the wrong way when WotC makes a horrible GUI, the players should be the last one to incur blame for bad design.
I did one to q for the championship and got a really sick Black Red Green deck and went 3-2 got 7th then won t8 after drafting a nice UB deck but lost to a UW drafter in t4. The format is really fun if you know what your doing. Alot of people don't so if you even partially know what your doing you will do well.
I didn't even realize it was you I played round one. I read your articles from time to time and didn't even notice, however the bone harvest and fog elemental must have been another player I didn't have those in my deck. You were definitely one of the better players in the event, but I would like to add that MVW sealed is a tough format. The pools are usually hard to piece together to make a great deck. I almost always have to go 3 colors and just take the best of each color to do well in MVW. I am glad to hear you stuck it out and ended up going 2-1 :D. This format is insane I have made a killing just drafting and doing sealed with MVW I would highly suggest getting into it if you have not already.
Is an absolute bear. That said I am signed up currently waiting on a queue. Hopefully I won't be waiting in vain. :) Sounds like you did ok with a lousy pool. I think I would have gone with the 2nd build despite Melisse Spirit but who knows? It is hard to say until you are in the moment what you will do.
Two is extremely risky, as you are likely to only see one, and only seeing one means it acts a lot like a singleton Mind Funeral that shows up in twice as many games.
40% is not practically 50%. It is 4/5s of 50%. :) But we both missed the mark since I was not really thinking about Borderposts which make up the difference as much as I dislike relying on them.
You said it better than I. :)
But our opposition mostly stems from the fact that we consider it a bad card based on our experiences on the other end and our common sense. My feeling is having faced MF many times in constructed (which is an entirely different animal) and a few times in draft that it is an inferior card except when the deck it is being used in is geared to take advantage of it and gets a little lucky. One MF is bad is the argument here. Not a horde of MFs is a bad plan.
To take it a step further the objection also stems from many personal experiences playing against mill effect cards and winning. Not because the mill player was unlucky but because their efforts were geared towards decking me not winning via men or damage in some manner. Having said that losing to a Glimpse of the Unseen or a Psychic Drain is very annoying. Heck I just milled someone with a Nemesis in an extended game last night. (That game took 38 rounds! So any reasonable deck should have beaten me before then lol.) So I get the impact of wanting to have MF for the alternate win factor. Even knowing someone is playing a MF could skew how that person plays their hand out. Extra Draw? Maybe not with such abandon. That is worth something but not a lot. If you know your opponents then maybe it is less risky because you know how they will react to the very knowledge of you playing it.
I guess I see it as the same sort of risky strategy one takes when running stone rain in a draft deck. Yes you may get lucky with one to take out the crucial land card your opponent needed in time to stop your juggernaut war machine but probably more risk than it is worth. Even a cantrip Land destruction gives me shudders. Now a deck based around land destruction and mana denial could very well be an awesome deck but you're not very likely to achieve it in limited.
As far as men being vulnerable, granted. Thats the upside as well as the downside. (Meaning we take that into account when deciding which men are best to play with.) It is not an argument for using nonmen.
This article attempts to describe the fundamental relationship between Card Advantage and Tempo. I intend to write some more theory articles in the future. I think that PureMTGO needs more articles that focus on theory, and this is a step in that direction.
i freaking knew darksteel was coming back for m10, shoudl have been 11th edition which is natually why 11/11 for 11 was coming for us....i know , wrong thread, i needed to blab. good article btw...
Its obvious that some people have a big thing for the MF. I however do not, and am going to continue counseling anyone against playing it, under any circumstance.
I can't deny that people have randomly won (or lost) games due to MF. However, just because a card can randomly win a game here or there under the right conditions does not make it a viable card. Saying MF is good just because it sometimes wins games is just like saying that Eager Cadet is good because sometimes he'll get in there twenty turns in a row and win the game all by himself.
Yes, I was not trying to make an elitist statement. At least for Magic Online, I do NOT like mana burn because it punishes new players who have trouble with the interface which is quite user hostile.
Whiffy, you da man. Lookin forward to part duece.
That chart shows the expected value of the cards *after* you open a booster.
im confused as to were you can get ACR for 5 tix?
I disagree that tournaments would become unbalanced. In practice players already have access to all the cards they want, only at the high prices created by low supply. You often hear complaints about the entry cost of formats, but people still play. I'd rather pay $200 per year to be able to play any standard deck than pay $200 to buy each competitive deck.
Your suggestion that people will stop playing if cards are freely available seems unlikely to me. I would think the opposite would be true.
What's the reason for the really low prices on ACR packs?
I think that would make MTGO ridiculous besides taking from it the main reason why better players play it, because of the testing. If everyone had acess to everything what would be the point of winning?Tix alone can't be the only thing supporting MTGO economy since if everyone had acess to the cards it would unbalance the power level of every mtgo tournament while driving players away. As for myself I see no reason to play MTGO besides as a tool for improvement. I have acess to a number of irl stores so MTGO is just a side effect used for better playing skills. If they take that away I don't see myself playing it no longer.
Nice article as always ham.
Hi.
You have in sideboard Crimson Acolyte, than in text is Obsidian Acolyte :))
Take Care
Hamtastix said "I have yet to see anyone mention on the paper board that WotC would make more money by allowing paper players to pay $15 a month and have access to all the cards they'd want. That would be ludicrous to the extreme for paper and equally strange for any online service. "
I think you're dismissing this idea too lightly. In my local area it's normal for players to need to borrow cards, or even complete decks to play competitively in PTQs, GPs, or even just FNM. There is definitely a section of players who would be interested in a pay by subscription model.
Not sure if you understood that part of the article. He seems to share your sentiments exactly concerning the MTGO interface.
Data behind that link is updated everytime I finish a draft or any event.
On the right side theres monetary stats and also my rating which btw went all time high yesterday 1840 (ACR has been very good for me). But yea I am "average" drafter and I have twice played IRL.
I see no reason to play 8-4s since my main goal is to cut the bleeding:
I would play more Swiss if they only fired more often.
Swiss is also very good if one plays 2 or more drafts same time since rounds take full time so I won´t be slowing others play.
I played yesterday LLM 4322, ACR Swiss and SSE 4322 almost same time and I was slowing down the Swiss match a bit. I did win 2 of them and in LLM lost in 2nd round.
Only way to get those QPs with my limited time and only drafting is to play multiple sametime
And yes nice articles!
Where does one get raw price data for MtgO and how is it collected? I'm just curious :)
"I'm not sure if you're able to play any cards or effects after first strike damage has been dealt, but I kind of doubt it, which means First Strikers and Ninjas are no longer a mini-combo. This is a significant change for 100 singleton, however, this still doesn't come up all that often."
This does still work. The steps still happen, just the damage doesn't use the stack. Otherwise, first strike wouldn't work (SBE wouldn't be checked until regular combat damage had gone through)
In your article, you stated "To me, mana burn seems like a way to punish new players for not knowing the magic online interface."
Frankly, the MTGO interface and GUI is one of the worst I've come across, and is often counter-intuitive. It takes repetition and experience to get used to it, and it still does things I don't expect it logically to do. Making a comment like this is not only elitist, but talks down to other players because they haven't gotten used to the interface. With mana burn going away, this doesn't matter, but I just felt I had to step in here and say something, the comment just rubbed me the wrong way when WotC makes a horrible GUI, the players should be the last one to incur blame for bad design.
Otherwise, nice article.
I did one to q for the championship and got a really sick Black Red Green deck and went 3-2 got 7th then won t8 after drafting a nice UB deck but lost to a UW drafter in t4. The format is really fun if you know what your doing. Alot of people don't so if you even partially know what your doing you will do well.
I didn't even realize it was you I played round one. I read your articles from time to time and didn't even notice, however the bone harvest and fog elemental must have been another player I didn't have those in my deck. You were definitely one of the better players in the event, but I would like to add that MVW sealed is a tough format. The pools are usually hard to piece together to make a great deck. I almost always have to go 3 colors and just take the best of each color to do well in MVW. I am glad to hear you stuck it out and ended up going 2-1 :D. This format is insane I have made a killing just drafting and doing sealed with MVW I would highly suggest getting into it if you have not already.
Thanks!!
Is an absolute bear. That said I am signed up currently waiting on a queue. Hopefully I won't be waiting in vain. :) Sounds like you did ok with a lousy pool. I think I would have gone with the 2nd build despite Melisse Spirit but who knows? It is hard to say until you are in the moment what you will do.
We're talking about a singleton Mind Funeral.
Which is flat-out terrible.
Two is extremely risky, as you are likely to only see one, and only seeing one means it acts a lot like a singleton Mind Funeral that shows up in twice as many games.
Which is flat-out terrible.