Those are some awesome changes! Thank you Wizards for not being tight-lipped and Dimir about serious changes to MO. They even gave us warning that soon they're going to re-assess the formats that are unique to MO. (HINT: Keep supporting pauper and prismatic if you really like them.) Heh.
I was a cabin counselor at a summer camp for Jr. High and High School students. The entire camp was split up into 4 teams. One counselor from each team lay down on a tarp and our faces were covered with chocolate pudding. The campers stood at our feet and spit Cheerios onto our faces. Whoever got the most to stick to our faces won. Delicious!
For some reason, people on Magic sites and forums are extremely serious on average. Anything you write as a joke, no matter how obvious, someone will misconstrue. (This is a general statement and not at all a critique on this article, which I could see both sides of)
Thanks for spelling it out for me. I think I know where you are coming from now. Maybe I can clarify some things.
1)My draws may have been above average, but that is usually the case with decks that win tournaments. The majority of my matches were 2-0 wins, so even if I had gotten mana screwed a couple of times, the results would have been similar. I managed to avoid all of my bad match-ups which certainly contributed to my success.
2) Ok.
3) I don't get how this is showing off. Yes, I'm excited that I won, but how often do you see tournament reports when someone goes 1-2 drop. I would hope that successful players don't refrain from posting their tournament reports for fear of appearing pretentious.
4) Maybe this wasn't as obvious as I thought it was, but my comments at the end of the article were a tongue-in-cheek joke.
I hope that clears some things up, but I will definitely keep your comments in mind, and try to avoid coming off as a poopface in future articles.
Congrats on the win. If you don't really know what Blade finds pretentious, I guess I'll say it more explicitly: 1) you appeared to have good luck and good draws, 2) everyone already understands your deck before you even wrote a single word about it, 3) had you not made top 8, you probably would not be writing this, so in a way you are 'showing off', 4) you imply that anyone can just enter the format and win with a random deck thus downplaying skill and research. I don't mind this article at all; it made you happy, and I guess someone else thought well enough of it to publish it. Apparently it has its fan readersip, too. I wish you continued success with the list.
Thank you for the constructive criticism Blade. I agree that the list is suboptimal and needs more testing and tweaking, but the list we came up with was meant for a very specific metagame that we happened to very accurately predict. Good blue-based control decks can beat it, as can most average to above average Necrostorm hands. However, traditional RDW and heavily creature based decks such as Merfolk and Elves have a really tough time against this deck. I haven't played against non-blue based rock, but I assume that would be a tough matchup for this deck as well.
This is my first article, so what did you find boring about it? I will certain to consider your criticism in further articles. As far as being pretentious goes, I'm not sure what you are referring to.
To be honest I found this rather pretentious and the article format boring.
The whole "home-brew" and "building a deck" stuff and in the end you are simply playing a suboptimal and random Zoo list that has its lucky day.
You gotta look at the team that built the deck. I personally was afk playing std when it was built but FatManInALittleCoat is like #3 in Player of the year currently and one of the best classic deck builders around and If I remember right Whiffy was there and bigalw so 3 of the best classic players online. So it was a group that knew the format numbers and wanted answers to all deck. I know last time i ran a STD rouge deck I had multiple 1-3x's just as format hosers to what I was expecting.
Classic is a fairly soft format so not shocking when random decks t8/win in this case. Because lets be honest, the only way the numbers in this deck could be right is 100+ games getting it just right. As a deck thrown together the numbers are clearly off.
What program are you using to record your videos? I've attempted to use Camtasia before, but I haven't been able to get it to work properly for me. I'd love to see a walkthrough on how to make a video.
In all fairness, I have been talking with my round 3 opponent quite a bit since the tournament, and he is actually a decent guy. Extremely cocky, but decent. There is no real excuse for trying to intimidate or put down other players who aren't being jerks themselves. Even then, it is usually best to take the high road and say something like "Good game."
WOtC should break into peoples accounts who havent played for a year, and take all their cards back. lol Just kidding, but Im pretty sure the Code of Conduct says they can take your cards back at anytime so....
Glad to see more writers embracing the game videos - I think Flores is pretty dull, but his videos are excellent. I'd recommend you only present interesting games, and do what you can to trim the length; either breeze through the game with the replay function, or hack out downtime using your video editing program.
I believe it's one of the fixes coming up in the Conflux build.
However, in the meantime, I've found that using the spreadsheet view (one of the buttons in the upper right corner) and then right clicking and selecting 'Increase tradeable quantity' is much more reliable way of setting items to tradeable. I'll often do it this way after I get the same issue that you just mentioned and it will allow me to set things to tradable.
One of the bugs I encounter a lot is the event that I can't seem to change the tradability manually without the number of tradable first going all the way back to 0.
Example:
I have 12x Agony Warp in my collection (6 are set 'tradable'). Lets say I want to change that number into 9. So what do I do? Right: I push the up-arrow. But instead of chaging from 6 into 7, it goes 7, 6, 5. So I push up again, it goes: 6, 5, 4. And so on and on all the way down to 0.
Also I don't seem to be able to make that single card all tradable again after this happens (only by right click 'set all cards tradable'). It always stops at the top-1. So in the before given example I am never able to set more than 11 (=12-1) tradable manually.
So thats what happened last night. I think I have my settings to auto yield to combat so I couldnt ping with my Stingers in that draft. You guys are great!
Those are some awesome changes! Thank you Wizards for not being tight-lipped and Dimir about serious changes to MO. They even gave us warning that soon they're going to re-assess the formats that are unique to MO. (HINT: Keep supporting pauper and prismatic if you really like them.) Heh.
So I might as well get this out of the way.
I was a cabin counselor at a summer camp for Jr. High and High School students. The entire camp was split up into 4 teams. One counselor from each team lay down on a tarp and our faces were covered with chocolate pudding. The campers stood at our feet and spit Cheerios onto our faces. Whoever got the most to stick to our faces won. Delicious!
For some reason, people on Magic sites and forums are extremely serious on average. Anything you write as a joke, no matter how obvious, someone will misconstrue. (This is a general statement and not at all a critique on this article, which I could see both sides of)
Thanks for spelling it out for me. I think I know where you are coming from now. Maybe I can clarify some things.
1)My draws may have been above average, but that is usually the case with decks that win tournaments. The majority of my matches were 2-0 wins, so even if I had gotten mana screwed a couple of times, the results would have been similar. I managed to avoid all of my bad match-ups which certainly contributed to my success.
2) Ok.
3) I don't get how this is showing off. Yes, I'm excited that I won, but how often do you see tournament reports when someone goes 1-2 drop. I would hope that successful players don't refrain from posting their tournament reports for fear of appearing pretentious.
4) Maybe this wasn't as obvious as I thought it was, but my comments at the end of the article were a tongue-in-cheek joke.
I hope that clears some things up, but I will definitely keep your comments in mind, and try to avoid coming off as a poopface in future articles.
See to me it just looks like you were beaten up while drunk. LOL
Congrats on the win. If you don't really know what Blade finds pretentious, I guess I'll say it more explicitly: 1) you appeared to have good luck and good draws, 2) everyone already understands your deck before you even wrote a single word about it, 3) had you not made top 8, you probably would not be writing this, so in a way you are 'showing off', 4) you imply that anyone can just enter the format and win with a random deck thus downplaying skill and research. I don't mind this article at all; it made you happy, and I guess someone else thought well enough of it to publish it. Apparently it has its fan readersip, too. I wish you continued success with the list.
BoB - also a Classic Zoo player
In your further experienc with the deck, have you made any changes to the list?
nice article. more thorough than mine was.
Thank you for the constructive criticism Blade. I agree that the list is suboptimal and needs more testing and tweaking, but the list we came up with was meant for a very specific metagame that we happened to very accurately predict. Good blue-based control decks can beat it, as can most average to above average Necrostorm hands. However, traditional RDW and heavily creature based decks such as Merfolk and Elves have a really tough time against this deck. I haven't played against non-blue based rock, but I assume that would be a tough matchup for this deck as well.
This is my first article, so what did you find boring about it? I will certain to consider your criticism in further articles. As far as being pretentious goes, I'm not sure what you are referring to.
To be honest I found this rather pretentious and the article format boring.
The whole "home-brew" and "building a deck" stuff and in the end you are simply playing a suboptimal and random Zoo list that has its lucky day.
You gotta look at the team that built the deck. I personally was afk playing std when it was built but FatManInALittleCoat is like #3 in Player of the year currently and one of the best classic deck builders around and If I remember right Whiffy was there and bigalw so 3 of the best classic players online. So it was a group that knew the format numbers and wanted answers to all deck. I know last time i ran a STD rouge deck I had multiple 1-3x's just as format hosers to what I was expecting.
Classic is a fairly soft format so not shocking when random decks t8/win in this case. Because lets be honest, the only way the numbers in this deck could be right is 100+ games getting it just right. As a deck thrown together the numbers are clearly off.
Thanks for the little shout out. Yeah we have had a knack this month for untested craziness in classic.
I was wondering about that....lol
What program are you using to record your videos? I've attempted to use Camtasia before, but I haven't been able to get it to work properly for me. I'd love to see a walkthrough on how to make a video.
By the way, in my profile picture, my face is covered with chocolate pudding, not poop despite popular belief.
In all fairness, I have been talking with my round 3 opponent quite a bit since the tournament, and he is actually a decent guy. Extremely cocky, but decent. There is no real excuse for trying to intimidate or put down other players who aren't being jerks themselves. Even then, it is usually best to take the high road and say something like "Good game."
Yay for trade fixes, good bye relogs at last!
WOtC should break into peoples accounts who havent played for a year, and take all their cards back. lol Just kidding, but Im pretty sure the Code of Conduct says they can take your cards back at anytime so....
Great recap of your PE experience.
The ability to build a winning deck minutes before the tourney and pilot it to the win (with little or no testing)shows great abilities.
I just wonder what your round three "good" sport was saying when the results were finalized....LOL
Glad to see more writers embracing the game videos - I think Flores is pretty dull, but his videos are excellent. I'd recommend you only present interesting games, and do what you can to trim the length; either breeze through the game with the replay function, or hack out downtime using your video editing program.
Yep!
I believe it's one of the fixes coming up in the Conflux build.
However, in the meantime, I've found that using the spreadsheet view (one of the buttons in the upper right corner) and then right clicking and selecting 'Increase tradeable quantity' is much more reliable way of setting items to tradeable. I'll often do it this way after I get the same issue that you just mentioned and it will allow me to set things to tradable.
One of the bugs I encounter a lot is the event that I can't seem to change the tradability manually without the number of tradable first going all the way back to 0.
Example:
I have 12x Agony Warp in my collection (6 are set 'tradable'). Lets say I want to change that number into 9. So what do I do? Right: I push the up-arrow. But instead of chaging from 6 into 7, it goes 7, 6, 5. So I push up again, it goes: 6, 5, 4. And so on and on all the way down to 0.
Also I don't seem to be able to make that single card all tradable again after this happens (only by right click 'set all cards tradable'). It always stops at the top-1. So in the before given example I am never able to set more than 11 (=12-1) tradable manually.
Anyone experienced the same?
So thats what happened last night. I think I have my settings to auto yield to combat so I couldnt ping with my Stingers in that draft. You guys are great!