Typically going into pack three with an aggressive GW deck, which is basically what you got to this point, Im looking for mana fixing which will allow the Domain cards to be great. You will almost always be able to pick up one or two Might of Alara's and a Macta Rider mid to late. With a way to get full domain then those cards are awesome in GW aggro. Also, grabbing the mana fixing makes it easy to grab the on-color 5c-activation guys like the Dragonsoul Knight (or the white version).
The Kraniocerous looks good on paper but hes decidely mediocre, especially in GW aggressive. You dont want to leave mana open to activate him and that 2-defense for a 5-drop is not good.
My picks for pack 3 that are different than yours would be Aven Squire pick one, Armillary Sphere pick two, and Dragonsoul Knight pick 8. Id run the Drag Down main with one swamp to make the Might of Alara better and potentially activate the Knight.
What's "Watchmen"? :) Seriously, I had never heard of it, much less its release date, apart from this thread. Current Hollywood fare usually upsets me, so I tune it out.
Yes, I live on an island an hour off the US coast, have no t.v., and play Magic too much, so that makes me one US citizen who was clueless. :)
Whiffy, I respectfully but strongly disagree that starter lists for a new set have to equate casual lists. Evan Erwin of The Magic Show had this to say about another writer's Conflux review:
[quote=Evan Erwin"]"All I'm saying is, I would cater toward your audience, which are hardcore Spikes looking to get an advantage. There are few things a Spike likes more than to dissect and investigate every new decklist to find its strengths, weaknesses, and to improve it. At this early stage in set release, players are dying to know what Proven Professionals (tm) are intrigued by.
This line: "It seems to me like Naya/Bant beatdown could work" should have been followed by a decklist. Who cares if its sketchy -- when I read about someone "Brainstorming" a format, I usually imagine someone throwing out deck ideas to see which one sticks. This is an expectation I'll keep in check in the future, but it left me feeling underwhelmed after reading your thoughts on the format(s).[/quote]
Whiffy, you are one of those Proven Professionals, at least by Classic standards. On Scepter of Fugue, you write the similar: "I could see it being useful..." Take a shot - give us a list, a discussion piece. Even if it's bad, we won't hold it against you, and it would spur interest and deckbuilding fervor, and you would get all the glory for starting it :)
If the intent of the article is to say, "hey note that card A and card B have been featured in this list, and cards C and D have potential in this list", you could have just linked the respective list(s) and/or report(s) and the thread discussing the conflux cards on cq.com. I would expect more than that though, in general.
In a nutshell, set review articles deserve more exploration, even if you have to come up with a new article concept series just for this type of articles. Bottom line, however, give us what you can, as anything you produce is still great.
im with you spg.. i was one of the ones trying to join that one stuck on 22. unfortunately i didnt have enough tix.. but someone from the event was willing to spot me them. but the trade took over 20 minutes to complete and by the time it did the event was canceled.
Eventhough I had no such intentions, it seems that my article created a discussion: Is flavor a part of Magic or not? Is Magic a game of fantasy or strategy?
The answer, very surprisingly, came today directly from WotC. Did you check magicthegathering.com today? If yes, then you saw the Feature Article written by Marcus Shirley (right above MaRo's article). The below part is simply copy/pasted from it:
[copy/paste begins]
Magic is, at its core, a game based on stories; a veritable plethora of tales, forged in the white-hot furnace of fantasy. When you play the game, you are a powerful, godlike being, wielding magic and mayhem across multiple worlds, strange and alien places spinning in an eternal multiverse.
[copy/paste ends]
So I guess that this ends the discussion; yes Magic is a game of fantasy and yes flavor (stories, tales etc...) are a part of it. How can it not be when magicthegathering.com has even a column called "Savor the Flavor" every Wednesday written by Doug Beyer?
But the real question is whether you as a player, like flavor or not. I see from the posts here, that some completely ignore that part of Magic, whereas some do like it. That is absolutely fine. I personally have no problems with this. For some, Magic is nothing more than competitive decks, ratings, winning etc... But to some, it is more than that. Some enjoy this game because of those elves and dragons which are mentioned here (and for the record, I don't like elves either but the dragons are nice).
I have the utmost respect to all who don't like flavor. To those who skip Doug Beyer's articles on magicthegathering.com. To those who never ever in their entire life even looked at a flavor text on a single Magic card. To those who think this article is a piece of crap.
You of course have the right to criticize the article and express your discontentment. However you have absolutely NO RIGHT to call people "dorks" just because they don't think the way you do and/or like some other stuff about Magic which may be meaningless for you. What you think is meaningless (stories, tales, imagining themselves as Ajani!), is for some the very reason they play Magic.
Also the Classic event that didn't fire last weekend ended with 23 people and several trying to join (including myself), but unable to because of lag...
i wouldnt go that far. this was a release weekend and historically classic events fail to fire during these. the next week we saw 2 events and this weekend we saw 2 more. thats with super awful lag.
I may be taking for granted the fact that i live in the states and some readers dont. the reason i pointed out the 3/5/09 date was that i specifacally mentioned the fact that i was going to see the watchmen premier which came out in theaters on 3/6/09 and in the states if you have working eyeballs you would have at the very least been vaguly aware of the date as hollywood promoted that movie very heavily for months. so for this i am sorry.
As for non mainstream decks for conflux cards, my mission statement for the lunchbox has always been competive classic with bits of news pertinent to mtgo. I for one would not post any of the decks using these outlier cards for multiple reasons.
1. i generally distain from writing about decks that i have not played and during release week i wouldnt have bought the psets required of these "other" cards to show a list. if you were more interseted in just seeing them in a deck it dosent take much imagination to put one together going off the blurb of each card.
2. there has never been casual decks in the lunch box and i dont see a reason to start now. spg and his outlier decks would most assurdely beat mine into the dust as myt brain dosent work in casual mode, for instance i showed off 5 budget decks a few weeks ago that all cost over a hundred dollars and one was over 300. and yes that is budget in my minds eye.
Sorry if i offended blade my intention was to show that maybe your a little callous in your judgement of the articles on this free site. I am very glad that Heath allows me to continue writing for the site but i have to say the credits i recieve are not why i write about classic, otherwise i would be cranking them out every week. The reason i do is that i enjoy writing very much almost more then magic, and the fact that i am able to write about my favorite hobby and my favorite way to spend the hobby are fantastic to say nothing of the fact that i also get to try and draw people into the format. I will say that i apoligise for the grammer and spelling but i am still learning the in's and out's of both writing and using the program that i work on. I recently went back and reread all my articles from here comes the bomberman to conflux for classic and unless im crazy ive noticed a vast improvement. Thanks to all the readers and Heath for letting me further my enjoyment of this hobby we all love.
whiffy out.
i thought this game was based on strategy... fantasy is for d & d right? i mean, in ptq's, you don't see people imagining themselves as ajani or something do you?
the bottom line is that this game wouldn't be judged by the main stream so harshly if it weren't for dorks like you and the dude writing this article.
About decks, I agree with BoB here : an "unmainstream conflux deck for classic" would be a great article . We expected the use of Progenitus/order or reliquary/loam, and there was no really suprise about archetype they could integrate. But how others cards like nyxathid, master transmuter, banefire, martial coup or even maybe parasite could be used in classic ?? this your next mission, if you accept it Whiffy ;)
once again, nice article : nice look, nice analysis.
Blade, people get paid here amateur prices (which is still a lot more than nothing - thanks, Heath!) for amateur-quality articles, which are usually pretty readable. You pay nothing to read them so please be more sensitive in your remarks.
On Blade's behalf, the 3/5/09 date is not mentioned anywhere, so he could not have been expected to know the submission date, and I was wondering that as well (but assumed it was just late since obviously you would have known about the event). It sucks the article didn't get posted earlier, but that is out of our hands.
I guess it would have been too much to ask for whiffy-the_man-whoops,no-the_penguin original exploration decklists featuring Banefire or Nyxathid or something less meanstream but still powerful. That would have really piqued my interest. Anyways, thanks for the insights.
If you see this in time, and if it's possible, I would love to see the value graphs that you do for each of the Shards Planeswalkers, in your next article.
That info is very useful/interesting, and also hard to get anywhere else (as far as I know). :-)
rather than pure decklist and analysis, he added a little flavor between the numbers. Makes the article longer but different than most other posts. I don't love elves or dragons, nor thinks the author is obsessed with it either, he's just trying to be creative with a sometimes stale topic (decklist and meta analysis).
While I have to admit that I did not read your article (too casual for my liking) I really dig your layout and gfx skills. Great work in that department!
about 2 weeks ago I won a Daily event running U/W lark its is a decent deck and gains some stuff from not running black. lately I've seen a few other of the top standard players testing around with U/W lark too so its definitely a viable deck.
Gee, I did not even criticize you directly.
I very well know that I take a certain level of quality for granted and usually only point out what I found lacking. I have read so many Magic articles during the last 15 years that I dont see the need to praise for average ones (and yes the random average article is just that).
People here get paid for writing this stuff after all, and I dont see what can be so bad about trying to uphold certain standards.
1st of all Blade if you had payed attention this article was submitted on 3/5/09 pm the first after the first weekend of conflux release events which none of the 3 pe's fired and i know as i sat in all 3 ques and watched them fail at a half hour past.
2nd of all this article was formatted very nicely to my standards when i submitted it and either the editor found a reason to change the layout in the end of the peice or what is more likly is that the actual artical wrinting program funked up a little with the spacing which happens often.
I do not want to be mean here but you never seem to have anything constructive to say or its backhanded much like your above responce. I would ask that you try writing an article let alone a semi weekly column that has information that is not terribly dated while also working on a program that does not have spell or grammer checker. Other wise calm down a little I do this more for the enjoyment of actually writing and to help people see that classic is fun enough or interesting enough to give it a try then for any monetary gain.
I can't wait for the upcoming Magic Championship, definitely going to cost players without a massive collection a lot to get involved competitively. I will surely try my hand at a "season" or two this year. Due to my relative newness to MTGO it will probably end up being standard events. I hope that Wizards will continue the MTGO championship series in future years. Good luck to all who are planning to participate, and another great article Ham, keep them coming.
As a side note...any word on when leagues may be coming back to MTGO?
If you dropped the black from this build, I think it might be interesting. In place of the 17 cards you lose (9 main, 8 side), I would probably add Martial Coup (Coup for 5+ with Lark in play, nets 7+ men); Turn to Mist to "blink" the Lark (or Mulldrifter) at 2nd main phase; increase Archmage and perhaps add Spellstutter Sprites and Faerie Trickery for a more controlling build.
Typically going into pack three with an aggressive GW deck, which is basically what you got to this point, Im looking for mana fixing which will allow the Domain cards to be great. You will almost always be able to pick up one or two Might of Alara's and a Macta Rider mid to late. With a way to get full domain then those cards are awesome in GW aggro. Also, grabbing the mana fixing makes it easy to grab the on-color 5c-activation guys like the Dragonsoul Knight (or the white version).
The Kraniocerous looks good on paper but hes decidely mediocre, especially in GW aggressive. You dont want to leave mana open to activate him and that 2-defense for a 5-drop is not good.
My picks for pack 3 that are different than yours would be Aven Squire pick one, Armillary Sphere pick two, and Dragonsoul Knight pick 8. Id run the Drag Down main with one swamp to make the Might of Alara better and potentially activate the Knight.
I don't know what kind of boosters you're opening that have 2 rares in them, but send some my way! =)
What's "Watchmen"? :) Seriously, I had never heard of it, much less its release date, apart from this thread. Current Hollywood fare usually upsets me, so I tune it out.
Yes, I live on an island an hour off the US coast, have no t.v., and play Magic too much, so that makes me one US citizen who was clueless. :)
Whiffy, I respectfully but strongly disagree that starter lists for a new set have to equate casual lists. Evan Erwin of The Magic Show had this to say about another writer's Conflux review:
[quote=Evan Erwin"]"All I'm saying is, I would cater toward your audience, which are hardcore Spikes looking to get an advantage. There are few things a Spike likes more than to dissect and investigate every new decklist to find its strengths, weaknesses, and to improve it. At this early stage in set release, players are dying to know what Proven Professionals (tm) are intrigued by.
This line: "It seems to me like Naya/Bant beatdown could work" should have been followed by a decklist. Who cares if its sketchy -- when I read about someone "Brainstorming" a format, I usually imagine someone throwing out deck ideas to see which one sticks. This is an expectation I'll keep in check in the future, but it left me feeling underwhelmed after reading your thoughts on the format(s).[/quote]
Whiffy, you are one of those Proven Professionals, at least by Classic standards. On Scepter of Fugue, you write the similar: "I could see it being useful..." Take a shot - give us a list, a discussion piece. Even if it's bad, we won't hold it against you, and it would spur interest and deckbuilding fervor, and you would get all the glory for starting it :)
If the intent of the article is to say, "hey note that card A and card B have been featured in this list, and cards C and D have potential in this list", you could have just linked the respective list(s) and/or report(s) and the thread discussing the conflux cards on cq.com. I would expect more than that though, in general.
In a nutshell, set review articles deserve more exploration, even if you have to come up with a new article concept series just for this type of articles. Bottom line, however, give us what you can, as anything you produce is still great.
im with you spg.. i was one of the ones trying to join that one stuck on 22. unfortunately i didnt have enough tix.. but someone from the event was willing to spot me them. but the trade took over 20 minutes to complete and by the time it did the event was canceled.
Okay, here's what I have to say:
Eventhough I had no such intentions, it seems that my article created a discussion: Is flavor a part of Magic or not? Is Magic a game of fantasy or strategy?
The answer, very surprisingly, came today directly from WotC. Did you check magicthegathering.com today? If yes, then you saw the Feature Article written by Marcus Shirley (right above MaRo's article). The below part is simply copy/pasted from it:
[copy/paste begins]
Magic is, at its core, a game based on stories; a veritable plethora of tales, forged in the white-hot furnace of fantasy. When you play the game, you are a powerful, godlike being, wielding magic and mayhem across multiple worlds, strange and alien places spinning in an eternal multiverse.
[copy/paste ends]
So I guess that this ends the discussion; yes Magic is a game of fantasy and yes flavor (stories, tales etc...) are a part of it. How can it not be when magicthegathering.com has even a column called "Savor the Flavor" every Wednesday written by Doug Beyer?
But the real question is whether you as a player, like flavor or not. I see from the posts here, that some completely ignore that part of Magic, whereas some do like it. That is absolutely fine. I personally have no problems with this. For some, Magic is nothing more than competitive decks, ratings, winning etc... But to some, it is more than that. Some enjoy this game because of those elves and dragons which are mentioned here (and for the record, I don't like elves either but the dragons are nice).
I have the utmost respect to all who don't like flavor. To those who skip Doug Beyer's articles on magicthegathering.com. To those who never ever in their entire life even looked at a flavor text on a single Magic card. To those who think this article is a piece of crap.
You of course have the right to criticize the article and express your discontentment. However you have absolutely NO RIGHT to call people "dorks" just because they don't think the way you do and/or like some other stuff about Magic which may be meaningless for you. What you think is meaningless (stories, tales, imagining themselves as Ajani!), is for some the very reason they play Magic.
Thank you!
LE
Also the Classic event that didn't fire last weekend ended with 23 people and several trying to join (including myself), but unable to because of lag...
i wouldnt go that far. this was a release weekend and historically classic events fail to fire during these. the next week we saw 2 events and this weekend we saw 2 more. thats with super awful lag.
I may be taking for granted the fact that i live in the states and some readers dont. the reason i pointed out the 3/5/09 date was that i specifacally mentioned the fact that i was going to see the watchmen premier which came out in theaters on 3/6/09 and in the states if you have working eyeballs you would have at the very least been vaguly aware of the date as hollywood promoted that movie very heavily for months. so for this i am sorry.
As for non mainstream decks for conflux cards, my mission statement for the lunchbox has always been competive classic with bits of news pertinent to mtgo. I for one would not post any of the decks using these outlier cards for multiple reasons.
1. i generally distain from writing about decks that i have not played and during release week i wouldnt have bought the psets required of these "other" cards to show a list. if you were more interseted in just seeing them in a deck it dosent take much imagination to put one together going off the blurb of each card.
2. there has never been casual decks in the lunch box and i dont see a reason to start now. spg and his outlier decks would most assurdely beat mine into the dust as myt brain dosent work in casual mode, for instance i showed off 5 budget decks a few weeks ago that all cost over a hundred dollars and one was over 300. and yes that is budget in my minds eye.
Sorry if i offended blade my intention was to show that maybe your a little callous in your judgement of the articles on this free site. I am very glad that Heath allows me to continue writing for the site but i have to say the credits i recieve are not why i write about classic, otherwise i would be cranking them out every week. The reason i do is that i enjoy writing very much almost more then magic, and the fact that i am able to write about my favorite hobby and my favorite way to spend the hobby are fantastic to say nothing of the fact that i also get to try and draw people into the format. I will say that i apoligise for the grammer and spelling but i am still learning the in's and out's of both writing and using the program that i work on. I recently went back and reread all my articles from here comes the bomberman to conflux for classic and unless im crazy ive noticed a vast improvement. Thanks to all the readers and Heath for letting me further my enjoyment of this hobby we all love.
whiffy out.
i thought this game was based on strategy... fantasy is for d & d right? i mean, in ptq's, you don't see people imagining themselves as ajani or something do you?
the bottom line is that this game wouldn't be judged by the main stream so harshly if it weren't for dorks like you and the dude writing this article.
sorry to be so blunt.
Im with blandestk, the oddity adds a flavor and the article itself is well thought and rather fun if looked fromt he right point of view.
About decks, I agree with BoB here : an "unmainstream conflux deck for classic" would be a great article . We expected the use of Progenitus/order or reliquary/loam, and there was no really suprise about archetype they could integrate. But how others cards like nyxathid, master transmuter, banefire, martial coup or even maybe parasite could be used in classic ?? this your next mission, if you accept it Whiffy ;)
once again, nice article : nice look, nice analysis.
An excellent idea! I'll break those down in the next article!
Blade, people get paid here amateur prices (which is still a lot more than nothing - thanks, Heath!) for amateur-quality articles, which are usually pretty readable. You pay nothing to read them so please be more sensitive in your remarks.
On Blade's behalf, the 3/5/09 date is not mentioned anywhere, so he could not have been expected to know the submission date, and I was wondering that as well (but assumed it was just late since obviously you would have known about the event). It sucks the article didn't get posted earlier, but that is out of our hands.
I guess it would have been too much to ask for whiffy-the_man-whoops,no-the_penguin original exploration decklists featuring Banefire or Nyxathid or something less meanstream but still powerful. That would have really piqued my interest. Anyways, thanks for the insights.
Hi there
If you see this in time, and if it's possible, I would love to see the value graphs that you do for each of the Shards Planeswalkers, in your next article.
That info is very useful/interesting, and also hard to get anywhere else (as far as I know). :-)
Also thanks for the great articles!
rather than pure decklist and analysis, he added a little flavor between the numbers. Makes the article longer but different than most other posts. I don't love elves or dragons, nor thinks the author is obsessed with it either, he's just trying to be creative with a sometimes stale topic (decklist and meta analysis).
awesome i will test out U/W Lark and see do a break down of both decks. thanx for the tip guys:)
Love the oddity. Things get too stale around here and around the Magic world. Thumbs up.
hmmm, game based on FANTASY, guy tries to throw in some flavor and people rip him
While I have to admit that I did not read your article (too casual for my liking) I really dig your layout and gfx skills. Great work in that department!
about 2 weeks ago I won a Daily event running U/W lark its is a decent deck and gains some stuff from not running black. lately I've seen a few other of the top standard players testing around with U/W lark too so its definitely a viable deck.
yeah, this is a really weird article and i didn't enjoy reading it at all. i play MTGO - none of this weird stuff pls
Gee, I did not even criticize you directly.
I very well know that I take a certain level of quality for granted and usually only point out what I found lacking. I have read so many Magic articles during the last 15 years that I dont see the need to praise for average ones (and yes the random average article is just that).
People here get paid for writing this stuff after all, and I dont see what can be so bad about trying to uphold certain standards.
1st of all Blade if you had payed attention this article was submitted on 3/5/09 pm the first after the first weekend of conflux release events which none of the 3 pe's fired and i know as i sat in all 3 ques and watched them fail at a half hour past.
2nd of all this article was formatted very nicely to my standards when i submitted it and either the editor found a reason to change the layout in the end of the peice or what is more likly is that the actual artical wrinting program funked up a little with the spacing which happens often.
I do not want to be mean here but you never seem to have anything constructive to say or its backhanded much like your above responce. I would ask that you try writing an article let alone a semi weekly column that has information that is not terribly dated while also working on a program that does not have spell or grammer checker. Other wise calm down a little I do this more for the enjoyment of actually writing and to help people see that classic is fun enough or interesting enough to give it a try then for any monetary gain.
I can't wait for the upcoming Magic Championship, definitely going to cost players without a massive collection a lot to get involved competitively. I will surely try my hand at a "season" or two this year. Due to my relative newness to MTGO it will probably end up being standard events. I hope that Wizards will continue the MTGO championship series in future years. Good luck to all who are planning to participate, and another great article Ham, keep them coming.
As a side note...any word on when leagues may be coming back to MTGO?
Great article.
If you dropped the black from this build, I think it might be interesting. In place of the 17 cards you lose (9 main, 8 side), I would probably add Martial Coup (Coup for 5+ with Lark in play, nets 7+ men); Turn to Mist to "blink" the Lark (or Mulldrifter) at 2nd main phase; increase Archmage and perhaps add Spellstutter Sprites and Faerie Trickery for a more controlling build.