I had to search YouTube for your name to actually see your matches.
I agree that Baral needs to be banned, and even then Blue us going to be dominant in the format. Blue has the best top end spells and with 30 starting life and not many threatening 1 drops, aggro can't put any solid pressure on blue.
Nothing, it's just some glitch that duplicated the last line (same with Island in the second column). I must pay more attention to the editor's output. I like the floating cards, but I miss the old editor's automatic card count and categorization.
Lovely article, masterfully written. Messaging is generally better in the more casual rooms, though you still get the odd few whose talents far outstrip their results, and even some who like to rub in their supremacy after a win.
I am not sure hiding chat is a great idea. Except for that one section, the rest of the article is great! We need reminders of etiquette from time to time. Thanks for sharing Cotton.
What's nice about a 1 deck format like Baral Brawl is that you can build your deck to beat it. It's kind of fun playing 5 rounds of Baral Brawl when you have Hope of Ghirapur, Prowling Serpopard, Carnage Tyrant, and Nezahal in your deck.
I still don't know why they got rid of Edgar, but left Leovold and Breya alone. Sure, Edgar is powerful, but it is very susceptible to sweepers and doesn't have any real oops, I win combos like so many other decks have.
Bazaar seems nuts with reanimator, and I could definitely see some blue artifact decks utilizing workshop, grim monolith/basalt monolith/ power artifact, but I don't know how consistent it will be.
Bringing guns to a knife fight tends to put off the knife fighter. Bringing nukes to a gun fight tends to put off the gun fighter. Etc. The arms race is intolerable not just to new players but old.
The choice to really ramp up the cut throated (spiky) side of the format is part of what drove me off and I am definitely not the only one who had this cassus belli (I have talked to a number of older players who say things like "oh yeah...I remember that event. Was fun until..." and inevitably it was several runs of very bad match ups.
Another part for me was a sense of anti-sociability of my particular opponents that set me on tilt and made the probability of losing not even a little bit appealing. But that's a personal problem.
The last part of the problem for me is that to be competitive I would have to spend a lot more time on decks than I wanted to (I used to show up with about 15mins of prep time before the event sometimes.) The additional time requirement plus the (for me) inconvenient starting time has kept me away even though I sympathize with the event and want it to succeed. I help AJ test at times and I continually brew for the format but I rarely come up with a deck that I both want to play and doesn't just die to random match ups.
I am not sure the answer is curating a ban list to be more pro-active. There are tons of ways to break the game and without a sideboard there is no GOOD way to ensure good match ups.
The main solution might be to BE the ambassador for the format you want. (the chat lack of functionality really hurts you here.)
If you want new players to join then lower the arms race pressure by consensus and maybe emphasize winning as not being central to the prize structures. If you want to keep people, be more socially active. One of Blippy's most successful traits was his persistence and inexhaustible patience with individuals. I would not expect his level of activity but if you appoint more people to be involved this way then maybe attendance will pick back up again. With 6-12 regular players there are certainly enough core players to do this if done in an organized and consistent way.
I say all of this because at one time I really enjoyed the event and still love the format despite the huge hit of losing the filter. I hope you come up with something to help it survive.
Simply put, I'm not talking of a problem with grabbing a new player's interest longterm. I'm talking of the first impact, the first 5 minutes a new player experiences on Tribal Apocalypse. We say, "Come play in our event, it's fun! It's not cutthroat Legacy, it's a format with creatures!". Then they reg a list, whatever that could be, and face, as it happened, a deck that goes Entomb, Lotus Petal, Reanimate, Iona, good game. And then it does it again game 2 (or maybe it's a turn later), so they've spent the entirety of their match watching the opponent briefly play a few cards. Which doesn't really feel like playing. So they say, "This is what your idea of fun is? All right, thanks, not my cuppa, goodbye", and they drop at the end of round 1 and never come back.
This is not a hypothetical scenario, it actually happened. And I can't find that player and explain that it's not always like that, that that kind of deck sometimes jams and doesn't always draw like that. Because I can't even guarantee that it'll be true for them. It's a matter of luck. One may spend hours building and fine-tuning their deck, a deck that has some chances of winning some matches, but never an event, and they're perfectly fine with that; and then they face a "win in turn 1-3" decks and don't draw into the one card that could save them, so they never actually get to see how their deck does, lose interest in the whole thing, go do something else with their time.
If a player stays long enough, they'll understand that things don't work like that longterm, that linear aggro wins 75% of the times, as I always point out. (And it's not even that, losing to a combo deck that wins turn 10 is fun, even if you never had a chance, because at least you've got 10 turns of interacting with them, of building your own plan, as doomed as it was: it's not about winning, it's about getting a chance to play).
But if they don't stay because there are decks in our meta that are off-putting that way, and not because they win (again: not the problem here), but because they might win in such a way that doesn't let the opponent play one single spell, or at least not without knowing you've already lost anyway, then they never get to learn the ropes, and we lose them.
And we can't afford to lose them. We can't afford to say, "This is an event for serious Legacy players only", or "for people who don't get annoyed by things like Entomb/Reanimate". Because those players are not enough anymore. We're having 6-player events. In 13 events this year, the average attendance is 9. Those players are gone. Life changes, people can't be counted to play TribAp all life long (except maybe AJ), so new blood is needed. And PREs must compete with the leagues now (and MTGA soon, which might well be the end for all of us), most players won't probably care to come to us and be subjected to that kind of negative game experience, when they can play whenever they want in environments where that never happens, and you're sure to play a number of matches where your deck does actually play.
Penny Dreadful does 4 events per week, and they all have a 20-player attendance, I'm told. But those are decks with cards that don't cost more than one penny, so good luck winning turn 1 with those.
And I don't think it's about the budget. Players play $3 decks here and are happy. Every once in a while, maybe they'll scoff at the screen, but mostly they don't even care, as long as they can play their decks, but like, actually play them. You can do that against Cloudpost, against Aluren, against a lot of cutthroat combos, even against prison decks to some extent. But not against fast win builds. And reanimator is singled out because it's cheap to build, easy to pilot, popular, typically attractive (Nagarjuna says in the interview how it speaks to his Timmy side).
I don't event want to really regulate what can and can't be played. I never like to add stuff to the ban list. You want to play Entomb/Reanimate? Be my guest. Sooner or later you'll lose turn 2 to someone who's playing Rest in Peace, and it'll be negative game experience for you. (I personally think it's a very crude, very inelegant, not at all creative way to play reanimator. But I'm a Recurring Nightmare/Living Death kind of guy.)
But what I'm saying is, if you care about this tournament surviving, if you're not here just to try and grab some tix and run (which seems unlikely, since we have $300 decks winning 2 tix), then play in a way that won't push those new players away. Go crazy against veterans, not against newbies. Maybe even play your Entomb/Reanimate deck, but don't pull the trigger until mid-game. It could be a challenge to oneself, too. (I personally can't think of winning turn 1-3 as fun. You wait all week for a chance to play Tribal, then try to have your games end as quickly as possible?)
Believe me, I've tried some very, very silly things in my time. Hitting animated doubling seasons with kicked rites of replication on a Panoptic Mirror. Research/Development on an Isochron Scepter to win with battle of wits starting with a 60 card deck. I've been pushing for the limits for over fifteen years now.
Fairly sure life is capped as well. As to deck sizes well at some point one can get pretty ridiculous and I expect there are caps on ALL of those things because of this.
If not tokens, what does break the server? How about 5.6 quintillion life? How about creating a macro that adds items to the stack - how big can it get before the server surrenders? How about a loop that copies Living Wishes getting basic lands and puts them into play? If I can still have a sideboard over 15 cards in a freeform deck, then I can put 13,000 non-token basic Mountains into play. (That's how many I have in my collection - I could p that to 50,000 if I create a macro that gets each basic land in turn.) How about maxing the storm count? If I have a couple of Myr Retrievers and Ashnod's Altar, can I get the storm count to 69 googolplex? How about if I create a loop that takes infinite turns? Cloudstone Curio, Palinchron and Snapcaster Mage, Time Walk plus some lands that tap for lots of mana does that easily.
Even if Wizards has capped tokens and limited sideboard size, have they capped everything else? EVERYTHING else?
"If Wizards were to create a macro to allow that, how long before some player would try to find out how many tokens are required to crash server? Five minutes? Two? And once the servers come back up, how long before it is going to crash again? Wizards is never going to create any such macro."
This can't happen. We have already reached max tokens max p/t, per side and not crashed the server. (There is a reason for the max tokens.)
I don't generally follow vintage prices, but is there a reason why Rishadan Port's price fell so much? It can't be just getting reprinted in Masters 25, as that hasn't really affected other chase cards all that much.
Been waiting to see this card in its full glory. Very interested in its implications for the Modern format. Definitely seems like bad news for Tron and Eldrazi decks and has splash damage on decks like Storm.
Goatbots.com runs an EV calculator that estimates winnings per event participation based on ELO rating or win percentage. A 1679 Elo rating corresponds to a 50% win percentage.
I had to search YouTube for your name to actually see your matches.
I agree that Baral needs to be banned, and even then Blue us going to be dominant in the format. Blue has the best top end spells and with 30 starting life and not many threatening 1 drops, aggro can't put any solid pressure on blue.
The worst part is that I for sure removed the second copy of Collected Company.
Nothing, it's just some glitch that duplicated the last line (same with Island in the second column). I must pay more attention to the editor's output. I like the floating cards, but I miss the old editor's automatic card count and categorization.
Kuma what is supposed to be in the 2nd instance of Collected Company's place in the Merfolk deck?
Lovely article, masterfully written. Messaging is generally better in the more casual rooms, though you still get the odd few whose talents far outstrip their results, and even some who like to rub in their supremacy after a win.
I am not sure hiding chat is a great idea. Except for that one section, the rest of the article is great! We need reminders of etiquette from time to time. Thanks for sharing Cotton.
I wish this were facebook so I could like this comment.
Also did you have any issues with a spam filter warning?
What's nice about a 1 deck format like Baral Brawl is that you can build your deck to beat it. It's kind of fun playing 5 rounds of Baral Brawl when you have Hope of Ghirapur, Prowling Serpopard, Carnage Tyrant, and Nezahal in your deck.
I still don't know why they got rid of Edgar, but left Leovold and Breya alone. Sure, Edgar is powerful, but it is very susceptible to sweepers and doesn't have any real oops, I win combos like so many other decks have.
Bazaar seems nuts with reanimator, and I could definitely see some blue artifact decks utilizing workshop, grim monolith/basalt monolith/ power artifact, but I don't know how consistent it will be.
I like the idea of Zuberas!
Bringing guns to a knife fight tends to put off the knife fighter. Bringing nukes to a gun fight tends to put off the gun fighter. Etc. The arms race is intolerable not just to new players but old.
The choice to really ramp up the cut throated (spiky) side of the format is part of what drove me off and I am definitely not the only one who had this cassus belli (I have talked to a number of older players who say things like "oh yeah...I remember that event. Was fun until..." and inevitably it was several runs of very bad match ups.
Another part for me was a sense of anti-sociability of my particular opponents that set me on tilt and made the probability of losing not even a little bit appealing. But that's a personal problem.
The last part of the problem for me is that to be competitive I would have to spend a lot more time on decks than I wanted to (I used to show up with about 15mins of prep time before the event sometimes.) The additional time requirement plus the (for me) inconvenient starting time has kept me away even though I sympathize with the event and want it to succeed. I help AJ test at times and I continually brew for the format but I rarely come up with a deck that I both want to play and doesn't just die to random match ups.
I am not sure the answer is curating a ban list to be more pro-active. There are tons of ways to break the game and without a sideboard there is no GOOD way to ensure good match ups.
The main solution might be to BE the ambassador for the format you want. (the chat lack of functionality really hurts you here.)
If you want new players to join then lower the arms race pressure by consensus and maybe emphasize winning as not being central to the prize structures. If you want to keep people, be more socially active. One of Blippy's most successful traits was his persistence and inexhaustible patience with individuals. I would not expect his level of activity but if you appoint more people to be involved this way then maybe attendance will pick back up again. With 6-12 regular players there are certainly enough core players to do this if done in an organized and consistent way.
I say all of this because at one time I really enjoyed the event and still love the format despite the huge hit of losing the filter. I hope you come up with something to help it survive.
I want to elaborate on that opinion section.
Simply put, I'm not talking of a problem with grabbing a new player's interest longterm. I'm talking of the first impact, the first 5 minutes a new player experiences on Tribal Apocalypse. We say, "Come play in our event, it's fun! It's not cutthroat Legacy, it's a format with creatures!". Then they reg a list, whatever that could be, and face, as it happened, a deck that goes Entomb, Lotus Petal, Reanimate, Iona, good game. And then it does it again game 2 (or maybe it's a turn later), so they've spent the entirety of their match watching the opponent briefly play a few cards. Which doesn't really feel like playing. So they say, "This is what your idea of fun is? All right, thanks, not my cuppa, goodbye", and they drop at the end of round 1 and never come back.
This is not a hypothetical scenario, it actually happened. And I can't find that player and explain that it's not always like that, that that kind of deck sometimes jams and doesn't always draw like that. Because I can't even guarantee that it'll be true for them. It's a matter of luck. One may spend hours building and fine-tuning their deck, a deck that has some chances of winning some matches, but never an event, and they're perfectly fine with that; and then they face a "win in turn 1-3" decks and don't draw into the one card that could save them, so they never actually get to see how their deck does, lose interest in the whole thing, go do something else with their time.
If a player stays long enough, they'll understand that things don't work like that longterm, that linear aggro wins 75% of the times, as I always point out. (And it's not even that, losing to a combo deck that wins turn 10 is fun, even if you never had a chance, because at least you've got 10 turns of interacting with them, of building your own plan, as doomed as it was: it's not about winning, it's about getting a chance to play).
But if they don't stay because there are decks in our meta that are off-putting that way, and not because they win (again: not the problem here), but because they might win in such a way that doesn't let the opponent play one single spell, or at least not without knowing you've already lost anyway, then they never get to learn the ropes, and we lose them.
And we can't afford to lose them. We can't afford to say, "This is an event for serious Legacy players only", or "for people who don't get annoyed by things like Entomb/Reanimate". Because those players are not enough anymore. We're having 6-player events. In 13 events this year, the average attendance is 9. Those players are gone. Life changes, people can't be counted to play TribAp all life long (except maybe AJ), so new blood is needed. And PREs must compete with the leagues now (and MTGA soon, which might well be the end for all of us), most players won't probably care to come to us and be subjected to that kind of negative game experience, when they can play whenever they want in environments where that never happens, and you're sure to play a number of matches where your deck does actually play.
Penny Dreadful does 4 events per week, and they all have a 20-player attendance, I'm told. But those are decks with cards that don't cost more than one penny, so good luck winning turn 1 with those.
And I don't think it's about the budget. Players play $3 decks here and are happy. Every once in a while, maybe they'll scoff at the screen, but mostly they don't even care, as long as they can play their decks, but like, actually play them. You can do that against Cloudpost, against Aluren, against a lot of cutthroat combos, even against prison decks to some extent. But not against fast win builds. And reanimator is singled out because it's cheap to build, easy to pilot, popular, typically attractive (Nagarjuna says in the interview how it speaks to his Timmy side).
I don't event want to really regulate what can and can't be played. I never like to add stuff to the ban list. You want to play Entomb/Reanimate? Be my guest. Sooner or later you'll lose turn 2 to someone who's playing Rest in Peace, and it'll be negative game experience for you. (I personally think it's a very crude, very inelegant, not at all creative way to play reanimator. But I'm a Recurring Nightmare/Living Death kind of guy.)
But what I'm saying is, if you care about this tournament surviving, if you're not here just to try and grab some tix and run (which seems unlikely, since we have $300 decks winning 2 tix), then play in a way that won't push those new players away. Go crazy against veterans, not against newbies. Maybe even play your Entomb/Reanimate deck, but don't pull the trigger until mid-game. It could be a challenge to oneself, too. (I personally can't think of winning turn 1-3 as fun. You wait all week for a chance to play Tribal, then try to have your games end as quickly as possible?)
Believe me, I've tried some very, very silly things in my time. Hitting animated doubling seasons with kicked rites of replication on a Panoptic Mirror. Research/Development on an Isochron Scepter to win with battle of wits starting with a 60 card deck. I've been pushing for the limits for over fifteen years now.
Fairly sure life is capped as well. As to deck sizes well at some point one can get pretty ridiculous and I expect there are caps on ALL of those things because of this.
If not tokens, what does break the server? How about 5.6 quintillion life? How about creating a macro that adds items to the stack - how big can it get before the server surrenders? How about a loop that copies Living Wishes getting basic lands and puts them into play? If I can still have a sideboard over 15 cards in a freeform deck, then I can put 13,000 non-token basic Mountains into play. (That's how many I have in my collection - I could p that to 50,000 if I create a macro that gets each basic land in turn.) How about maxing the storm count? If I have a couple of Myr Retrievers and Ashnod's Altar, can I get the storm count to 69 googolplex? How about if I create a loop that takes infinite turns? Cloudstone Curio, Palinchron and Snapcaster Mage, Time Walk plus some lands that tap for lots of mana does that easily.
Even if Wizards has capped tokens and limited sideboard size, have they capped everything else? EVERYTHING else?
I don't think they will ever let us find out.
Can confirm. Mycoloth and Cathar's Crusade hits both limits in very short order.
"If Wizards were to create a macro to allow that, how long before some player would try to find out how many tokens are required to crash server? Five minutes? Two? And once the servers come back up, how long before it is going to crash again? Wizards is never going to create any such macro."
This can't happen. We have already reached max tokens max p/t, per side and not crashed the server. (There is a reason for the max tokens.)
It was also given a promo which was widely distributed and hence was already dropping the price for a while before MA25.
I don't generally follow vintage prices, but is there a reason why Rishadan Port's price fell so much? It can't be just getting reprinted in Masters 25, as that hasn't really affected other chase cards all that much.
Crocpot. That's terrible. Bravo, sir.
Great write up!
Been waiting to see this card in its full glory. Very interested in its implications for the Modern format. Definitely seems like bad news for Tron and Eldrazi decks and has splash damage on decks like Storm.
Goatbots.com runs an EV calculator that estimates winnings per event participation based on ELO rating or win percentage. A 1679 Elo rating corresponds to a 50% win percentage.
How do you know that the average mtgo elo rating is 1679 ?
Thanks for the feedback about this card, appreciate it.