As the instigator of the whole Herd as replacement and not CA argument, I feel like I should speak here. First off, I was wrong. I let my distaste for Herd cloud my judgement of the fact in in strict defintion, they are card advantage. However, I still feel they are too slow for Classic PDC (the format we were discussing). Additionally, the deck we were discussing used Blue as a primary color (alongside Green). The deck was post-Temmpest UG Cloudpost, using Reap and Sow to power up the Loci and then dominate the board with Capsize. In such a deck, there would be many superior card advantage options (thanks to Running Blue) that could effectively obsolete the Herd. Again, I let my distaste for the card outweigh the actual facts.
I'm really enjoying the articles on this format. It feels a bit like 2-player EDH being both singleton and full of bombs. Thanks for the decklists and evaluation of the format.
Thank you for the kind words, they're appreciated!
As for the playability! Worth (the Brand Manager) has made a few psots mentioning some soon to be seen performance improvements for machines that are a bit further away from the recommended specs, which probably includes machines like yours. So please, wait and see what SP1 has for you. Your experience may improve 'shortly'. :)
My mistake.... you can alter the window for deck searching... A)The lag associated with said search threw me off. I realized after playing more that I can increase the window size. B)Fat lot of good that did. Still takes forever for the window to load up and to fetch something. 4 out of 5 opponents concede regardless... increasing the window size takes a bit to even pull off. Guess the majority of my games will be played against buds. They are the only ones with enough patience to stick around.... Thanks again MTGO...
P.S. This is a well written post btw. I have nothing against the author nor the majority of the individuals that work for Wizards of the Coast. I have an issue though with whoever made this game unplayable for me... Curse that person to the firey pits of hell.
I'm not even sure if this is the correct place to be spaking about such things, but V.3 is driving me batty. The tiny text (which I am aware they are fixing soon) was the first thing I noticed when logging in the first time. I had to literally plaster my face to my monitor (which isn't large to begin with) to read anything. Since they are fixing that, alrighty, no prob. Then I finally got around to playing a game, and wow, I thought 2.5 had its slow moments, but searching my library for anything is absolutely insane. I play deck sizes of 600-1300 cards, and although searching in 2.5 required me to expand the search box to find things, it was at least in the "acceptable" range for the time it took to find the card I was looking for. With V.3, the search box takes a year and a day to appear, then it is pure lag even attempting to scroll up/down to find anything. Being able to expand the search box at least would alleviate the issue of having the same "Scroll up/down" box to worry about the next time I searched for something. My computer more than fits the minimum requirements for V.3 (Win XP, 2.4 Ghz processor, 376 megs of ram, and 64 megs of video ram), but it seems as if my computer doesn't even come close to being able to play the game in a speedy manner. I was more than happy with 2.5. It wasn't out to "dazzle" people with this that and the other, but was for playing the game. Of course it had issues (memory leakage, game crashing, etc..), but if they had just fixed those problems, I'm sure the majority of people playing the game would have been happy with it. I was dreading the release of V.3, and now that it is out, I can see I wasn't mistaken. I don't like the fact I *had* to change my display settings to play the game (I actually LIKE 800x600), but I figured "At least I will be able to play the game..." I have checked many posts attempting to see if there is a way for me to at least get the game running "at a good clip", but so far, no luck. I have no idea what I am going to do, but all I can do is shake my fist in the general direction of Wizards of the Coast. I don't need all the pomp. I would just like a smooth running game that doesn't require that I have a super fast system with an expensive video card jam packed with as much ram as possible, and doesn't leave my opponents extremely annoyed at the fact it takes me 5 min. to search for basic land.... I guess the conclusion to my statement is I'm quite aggrivated. Please turn 2.5 back on.... Thanks.
I'm very happy that retether seems to be working now. That is a great card to build around. I'll have to bust out a few of my old retether decks now that it's back!
Well I've not been unhappy with v3 during the beta, but now I'm using it for real there are some very annoying things I never noticed before. The redeeming feature is that actual gameplay is OK, if a bit slower than before. It responds to f9 but not f10! Clicking on cardname in the chat log doesn't preview the card any more. The file select dialogue is just awful, why couldn't it just be the standard windows file selector? It won't copy a local deck name over to your net decks, you must retype the name! I really hope they address some of these little usability issues in a big hurry, because the overall effect is to slow down everything I try to do.
As for the issue of giving enough notice, it's my experience that most people walk around with their senses closed. There was always going to be a majority of unprepared players.
Mysteriously it reappeared after I posted that comment..
well I asked someone to deliver a message too, maybe that did the trick, maybe someone realized that its a bad idea to axe an angry but reassonably outspoken and thinking thread.
I was reading through some of your prior posts... I agree with the majority of your statements; but, I would like to provide my opinion if you don't mide... Within your posts you indicated that Wizard's was unable to determine an effective notification method, and that quite possibly, the Adepts could have passed along notifications within the rooms. I agree but, not only should they have provided messages, they should NOT have denied the upcoming shutdown!!! A fellow clannie (a retired Captain) and real life buddy, had briefly mentioned the possiblily of a shutdown for "syncing" and an Adept jumped on him with a pm, telling him that if he continues to post "inaccurate statements" and continues to lie, he will be "banned". That''s NOT the way this fine Adept should have approached the situation. Why should another user be permitted to treat other users in such a manner? I don't care if he is an Adept, HIS behavior was completly unacceptable!!! The remarkable fact regarding this "incident"? It occured approximately one week prior to the shutdown. Hmmm, I wonder who was the individual spreading the "innacurate statements", aka LIES!!! Unfortunatly, I do not recall the Adept's screenname, well atleast not at this moment; since, I gladly would have included it here. After witnessing "Mr. Adept's" statements and behavior, I must admit that I am VERY happy that it was a cyber game! Had it been a "real life" game, he would have had an interesting evening and I would have been "locked-up"...
I agree that that response is extremely frustrating. I've had similar experiences in the past where I submitted a bug only for it to not only go unfixed, but also be 'closed' and go uncommunicated to me.
So what did I do? I made it public, and kept bringing it back into the light from time to time. So, I'd probably recommend to you (and anyone else who has a bug that they feel isn't being seen) to post it on the WotC boards, and bump it from time to time. Tell your opponents who see the bug to post in your thread. Essentially, keep it visible, and let others know. I know this has helped get focus on certain bugs in the past. It's not ideal, at all, but it's seemed to work for me and other. Hopefully as V3 gets ironed out they can fix up the bugs a bit better, but really, I think the crux of this concern is a lack of visibility into the bug process.
Thank you for taking the time to post though! I appreciate it!
I have to say, this, beyond anything else, is what has stopped me personally from reporting bugs. It got to the point where I was only reporting bugs to ask for refunds. Not by choice, but becuase it seemed like that was the only way to get issues fixed (or at least get paid to beta).
During Leaping Lizards era (early v2.0) I found a bug in Lobotomy in that it wasn't properly shuffling libraries after resolving (The Seer's Vision card didn't change). I reported it, got a mail back from an LL dev tech, and it was fixed in a week.
Two weeks ago, I found Scapeshift/Vesuva/Cloudpost was bugged. Vesuva was treated as a triggered ability as opposed to an 'as comes into play ability' allowing you to sacrifice all you lands, get one Cloudpost and 4 Vesuva, and end up with 5 Cloudpost. This isn't how it works, and I included a snippet from the actual judge's list by L3 Gavin with the real ruling. The first email exchange told me, I was wrong and it wasn't a bug. The second said they'd let their supervisor know, but they were marking the issue closed. It was never fixed, and likely is broken even now. This is typical of how bug reporting issues are handled with MTGO.
Great article. IMO bigmana isnt that good even with a lack of control decks though. The deck is very slow and has a lot of weaknesses. Examples being weenie rushes, rdw, tempo decks. Even if that deck had 4 sulf blast instead of incin it would still be hurting bad vs kithkin or elves.
James Wheelers has written a must read article. It is important in today's age to write articles such as this one. While I don't want to come off as jaded, it appears that too many writers have been focusing on bland subjects recently. Yet, Wheeler doesn't do this. "BG Corrupter" is a breath of fresh air, insofar as it is certainly a unique deck. In order to keep Magic the Gathering captivating, it is important that we as a community introduce new decks. I can remember a time when one would not compete against the same deck twice in a tournament, but those days are no more. Wheeler's article is something that we haven't seen in ages, and it is important that he and other authors continue to produce works of this magnitude in order to keep Magic healthy.
As the instigator of the whole Herd as replacement and not CA argument, I feel like I should speak here.
First off, I was wrong. I let my distaste for Herd cloud my judgement of the fact in in strict defintion, they are card advantage. However, I still feel they are too slow for Classic PDC (the format we were discussing). Additionally, the deck we were discussing used Blue as a primary color (alongside Green). The deck was post-Temmpest UG Cloudpost, using Reap and Sow to power up the Loci and then dominate the board with Capsize. In such a deck, there would be many superior card advantage options (thanks to Running Blue) that could effectively obsolete the Herd.
Again, I let my distaste for the card outweigh the actual facts.
-Alex
I'm really enjoying the articles on this format. It feels a bit like 2-player EDH being both singleton and full of bombs. Thanks for the decklists and evaluation of the format.
Thank you for the kind words, they're appreciated!
As for the playability! Worth (the Brand Manager) has made a few psots mentioning some soon to be seen performance improvements for machines that are a bit further away from the recommended specs, which probably includes machines like yours. So please, wait and see what SP1 has for you. Your experience may improve 'shortly'. :)
My mistake.... you can alter the window for deck searching... A)The lag associated with said search threw me off. I realized after playing more that I can increase the window size. B)Fat lot of good that did. Still takes forever for the window to load up and to fetch something. 4 out of 5 opponents concede regardless... increasing the window size takes a bit to even pull off. Guess the majority of my games will be played against buds. They are the only ones with enough patience to stick around.... Thanks again MTGO...
P.S. This is a well written post btw. I have nothing against the author nor the majority of the individuals that work for Wizards of the Coast. I have an issue though with whoever made this game unplayable for me... Curse that person to the firey pits of hell.
-Bill
test
I'm not even sure if this is the correct place to be spaking about such things, but V.3 is driving me batty. The tiny text (which I am aware they are fixing soon) was the first thing I noticed when logging in the first time. I had to literally plaster my face to my monitor (which isn't large to begin with) to read anything. Since they are fixing that, alrighty, no prob. Then I finally got around to playing a game, and wow, I thought 2.5 had its slow moments, but searching my library for anything is absolutely insane. I play deck sizes of 600-1300 cards, and although searching in 2.5 required me to expand the search box to find things, it was at least in the "acceptable" range for the time it took to find the card I was looking for. With V.3, the search box takes a year and a day to appear, then it is pure lag even attempting to scroll up/down to find anything. Being able to expand the search box at least would alleviate the issue of having the same "Scroll up/down" box to worry about the next time I searched for something. My computer more than fits the minimum requirements for V.3 (Win XP, 2.4 Ghz processor, 376 megs of ram, and 64 megs of video ram), but it seems as if my computer doesn't even come close to being able to play the game in a speedy manner. I was more than happy with 2.5. It wasn't out to "dazzle" people with this that and the other, but was for playing the game. Of course it had issues (memory leakage, game crashing, etc..), but if they had just fixed those problems, I'm sure the majority of people playing the game would have been happy with it. I was dreading the release of V.3, and now that it is out, I can see I wasn't mistaken. I don't like the fact I *had* to change my display settings to play the game (I actually LIKE 800x600), but I figured "At least I will be able to play the game..." I have checked many posts attempting to see if there is a way for me to at least get the game running "at a good clip", but so far, no luck. I have no idea what I am going to do, but all I can do is shake my fist in the general direction of Wizards of the Coast. I don't need all the pomp. I would just like a smooth running game that doesn't require that I have a super fast system with an expensive video card jam packed with as much ram as possible, and doesn't leave my opponents extremely annoyed at the fact it takes me 5 min. to search for basic land.... I guess the conclusion to my statement is I'm quite aggrivated. Please turn 2.5 back on.... Thanks.
-Bill
I don't play Rainbow Stairwell, but I really like the way you formatted the decklists. Crisp, clean, and looks pretty.
I'm very happy that retether seems to be working now. That is a great card to build around. I'll have to bust out a few of my old retether decks now that it's back!
Yeah, I saw that post and was quite happy that it came back. It'll be in next week's state of the program for sure..
retether is working so far (from my limited testing experience)
Well I've not been unhappy with v3 during the beta, but now I'm using it for real there are some very annoying things I never noticed before. The redeeming feature is that actual gameplay is OK, if a bit slower than before. It responds to f9 but not f10! Clicking on cardname in the chat log doesn't preview the card any more. The file select dialogue is just awful, why couldn't it just be the standard windows file selector? It won't copy a local deck name over to your net decks, you must retype the name! I really hope they address some of these little usability issues in a big hurry, because the overall effect is to slow down everything I try to do.
As for the issue of giving enough notice, it's my experience that most people walk around with their senses closed. There was always going to be a majority of unprepared players.
The thread talking about the vanishing of the draft-thread vanished.
Yay for irony.
Mysteriously it reappeared after I posted that comment..
well I asked someone to deliver a message too, maybe that did the trick, maybe someone realized that its a bad idea to axe an angry but reassonably outspoken and thinking thread.
Good state, but a large, and mostly reasonable worded thread over at the boards talking about the draftfiasco just got erreased, No warnings, no PM's.
Worth said a few things in there.. well. Poop.
I was thinking about this today while I was reading your article.. why don't you add the "report a bug" link in the bug section.
I was reading through some of your prior posts... I agree with the majority of your statements; but, I would like to provide my opinion if you don't mide... Within your posts you indicated that Wizard's was unable to determine an effective notification method, and that quite possibly, the Adepts could have passed along notifications within the rooms. I agree but, not only should they have provided messages, they should NOT have denied the upcoming shutdown!!! A fellow clannie (a retired Captain) and real life buddy, had briefly mentioned the possiblily of a shutdown for "syncing" and an Adept jumped on him with a pm, telling him that if he continues to post "inaccurate statements" and continues to lie, he will be "banned". That''s NOT the way this fine Adept should have approached the situation. Why should another user be permitted to treat other users in such a manner? I don't care if he is an Adept, HIS behavior was completly unacceptable!!! The remarkable fact regarding this "incident"? It occured approximately one week prior to the shutdown. Hmmm, I wonder who was the individual spreading the "innacurate statements", aka LIES!!! Unfortunatly, I do not recall the Adept's screenname, well atleast not at this moment; since, I gladly would have included it here. After witnessing "Mr. Adept's" statements and behavior, I must admit that I am VERY happy that it was a cyber game! Had it been a "real life" game, he would have had an interesting evening and I would have been "locked-up"...
Oh, btw GREAT work here bro, and many thx!!!
My two cents, Madman 610
No.
I agree that that response is extremely frustrating. I've had similar experiences in the past where I submitted a bug only for it to not only go unfixed, but also be 'closed' and go uncommunicated to me.
So what did I do? I made it public, and kept bringing it back into the light from time to time. So, I'd probably recommend to you (and anyone else who has a bug that they feel isn't being seen) to post it on the WotC boards, and bump it from time to time. Tell your opponents who see the bug to post in your thread. Essentially, keep it visible, and let others know. I know this has helped get focus on certain bugs in the past. It's not ideal, at all, but it's seemed to work for me and other. Hopefully as V3 gets ironed out they can fix up the bugs a bit better, but really, I think the crux of this concern is a lack of visibility into the bug process.
Thank you for taking the time to post though! I appreciate it!
"Nothing happens when I report them anyway"
I have to say, this, beyond anything else, is what has stopped me personally from reporting bugs. It got to the point where I was only reporting bugs to ask for refunds. Not by choice, but becuase it seemed like that was the only way to get issues fixed (or at least get paid to beta).
During Leaping Lizards era (early v2.0) I found a bug in Lobotomy in that it wasn't properly shuffling libraries after resolving (The Seer's Vision card didn't change). I reported it, got a mail back from an LL dev tech, and it was fixed in a week.
Two weeks ago, I found Scapeshift/Vesuva/Cloudpost was bugged. Vesuva was treated as a triggered ability as opposed to an 'as comes into play ability' allowing you to sacrifice all you lands, get one Cloudpost and 4 Vesuva, and end up with 5 Cloudpost. This isn't how it works, and I included a snippet from the actual judge's list by L3 Gavin with the real ruling. The first email exchange told me, I was wrong and it wasn't a bug. The second said they'd let their supervisor know, but they were marking the issue closed. It was never fixed, and likely is broken even now. This is typical of how bug reporting issues are handled with MTGO.
Great column -- thanks for your hard work
There is no way all of that bolded stuff were links.
Is there no editor on this website, it would have taken 5 minutes to 'un-bold' it and make it readable without getting a headache.
Great article. IMO bigmana isnt that good even with a lack of control decks though. The deck is very slow and has a lot of weaknesses. Examples being weenie rushes, rdw, tempo decks. Even if that deck had 4 sulf blast instead of incin it would still be hurting bad vs kithkin or elves.
Not studying law. Just been watching too much Law and Order recently.
James Wheelers has written a must read article. It is important in today's age to write articles such as this one. While I don't want to come off as jaded, it appears that too many writers have been focusing on bland subjects recently. Yet, Wheeler doesn't do this. "BG Corrupter" is a breath of fresh air, insofar as it is certainly a unique deck. In order to keep Magic the Gathering captivating, it is important that we as a community introduce new decks. I can remember a time when one would not compete against the same deck twice in a tournament, but those days are no more. Wheeler's article is something that we haven't seen in ages, and it is important that he and other authors continue to produce works of this magnitude in order to keep Magic healthy.
-Ben Angel