So I edited this last night, put it on my account, and hopefully if my screen capture program doesn't blow it, I will have gameplay for it in my article tomorrow.
While I agree with some of what you said I feel it is somewhat hyperbolic and think you can do better. Perhaps the fact that you are personally being bullied makes it too hard to be dispassionate enough to see how this interaction between spikes and non-spikes is very much a two way problem. The conflict is not merely about mockery or other forms of bullying but a complete lack of empathy on either side for what the other person is going through.
A couple thoughts regarding this. Adults do not behave this way. Let me explain that thought a little. We all mature at different rates but generally speaking adults are supposed to avoid engaging in petty meanness and stupid shenanigans. Unfortunately many people who are adult-aged are actually pretty underdeveloped. That's where the internet bad behavior comes in (ala Gamer Gaters doxing/threatening gamer women for basically just being successful or in some cases for just existing.)
Tiu's execrable behavior does not excuse the threats or other retaliatory bad behavior but as I said, adult children abound. And what did he expect opening being elitist and defamatory to other players? I suspect he did not, and does not care. Maybe just stirring the pot was all he really wanted? Who knows. He did certainly stir the pot.
Hopefully (the wannabe pros for the most part) spikes will eventually decide that elitism does not work for them. Looking at the behaviors of the pros I have known (many in the HOF,) some were indeed shady or a little petty/mean but most were actually pretty decent folks. Ready to lend a hand, offering to let a worse off player take back a questionable move etc. I've had pros offer advice, give courteous remarks when they weren't obligated to do so and even been friendly for the most part.
BTW: "Rules-Lawyer" is a term far older the magic interestingly. It started very similarly in usage in the early days of D&D. It refers to a player who used the books as a way to get what they wanted from their DM and group and generally developed into a sort of pre-internet meme (most in the form of cartoons in hobbyist magazines.) Similar to "Munchkin" (a player who doesn't like role playing at all) and "Min-maxer" (power gaming at its finest), it's a derogatory term.
If people are misusing it to describe overly formal, rules oriented, stiff-necked Spikes, they should be corrected. In magic as you indicate its a form of trying to bend the rules in your favor when perhaps they should not be bent. Generally you can tell the rules-lawyer by the amount of times they call a judge on someone for slightly slow play, minor infractions like half tapping lands, or forgetting proper terminologies to indicate priority, step movement, triggering etc. In my experience players like that rarely succeed past minor victories. Minutia tends to defeat the unwisely attentive.
So I said all that in spirit of critique because I think you have a lot of potential as a content creator and would love to see you move towards a more positive way of talking about these important subjects. You are perfectly within your rights to complain and be heard but I think your argument has more sway if it isn't about you, and isn't about how angry you are. Instead maybe focus on positive ways people can find to change the behaviors THEY don't like in the game, without descending to pettiness or bickering or internet meanness.
Keep making these and hope your personal travails become less irksome over time.
Charmed Pendant and Holistic Wisdom are rares (and aren't spectacular), but Painbringer is one of black's stronger uncommons. The lack of that card means that there isn't as much tension in black between maintaining Threshold and using your graveyard as a resource.
I was following your UW Control build, and it seems like the main advantage of white as your second color is adding recursion via cards like Kor Skyfisher. Azorius Kitty was a UW Control deck of sorts, but you're packing a lot more white removal into yours. I personally prefer point-and-click red removal, especially when it means I get to have Pyroblast in my sideboard, but red doesn't add much card advantage. The main advantages of Black seem to be the UB multicolor cards like Forbidden Alchemy, Mystical Teachings, and Probe as well as the ETB synergies like we see in Dimir Flicker.
Thank you Jason. I appreciate your work as well. We have a solid cadre of Pauper writers here at PureMTGO. I had a request for you since you build a lot of decks and like deck crafting theory. Could you do an article exploring the different kinds of U / x control and what the advantages are to each second color?
This was very well done. In particular I appreciated your ability to blend general advice with specific metagame trends and deck examples. I also enjoyed your use of MBC as a point of reference. I'm going to absolutely revisit this in the future. Solid work!
You need to delete this line from the Ramunap Red decklist (including the tags)
div class="mtgodeck" style="border-right: black 1px solid; border-top: black 1px solid; border-left: black 1px solid; width: 800px; border-bottom: black 1px solid; position: relative; background-color: rgb(204,204,204)"
and delete the closing DIV to this at the end of the article.
(the styles that are used for the hover should be there just once at the top of the 'document', but it's not breaking it, so you keep it there)
Honestly this isn't so much your fault as a fault of the site not being well set up for editing. Seems like it sucks a great deal of your time and effort to keep it running smoothly and you do a great job!
The irony is that I was the one who should know it, since I looked it up for another one of my articles (though I can't find where I wrote about it, since it was just at the end of another article).
BTW, the reason to look at the Welcome decks is that sometimes they put reasonable cards in them--Welcome Deck 2016 was notorious for this, with cards like Cone of Flame, Borderland Marauder, and Soul of the Harvest being reasonable choices. Then pros complained about those cards being in a random set, and now the cards are mostly unplayable (signified most-clearly by Wing Snare being included instead of Plummet--though ironically that Wing Snare is the only modern-frame black-border version of it :p )
The weird sets no one's ever heard of is part of the reason why I switched to using Scryfall for my searches for this series (that, and the nice ability to remove cards that were reprints in the set as of its release, saving me a bit of grunt work).
excellent, thanks so much for doing this! I read about dawts in JClaytor's posts and became curious as to who this person is, & i'm very glad to read more about them.
What you say is exactly right, Paul. Kaleidoscope was flawed at the root – just not enough of a pool to play with. On the other hand, Singleton has even a larger pool than regular Tribal Wars. I mean, it is the same pool (plus the banned cards that in Singleton are all available), but the format pushes you to exploit it to the fullest. Except, for the reasons you said, people don't really do that.
But I'm not sure that was the problem, even. Looking at the history, Singleton got some enthusiastic response back when it started. Then gradually, it seems, people are having enough of it. Maybe it's because there's other Singleton PREs around; as AJ noted in the room, if you want to play a singleton format, you're better off playing Commander or 100CS, Tribal Wars was never the most natural fit.
Funnily enough, I came across them accidentally myself due to Crested Sunmare. "Horse tribal? But there's only those two black shadows filler horses, aren't there? (Checks) Wait, why is Nightmare standard legal?"
So far, it's not going well at all :(
The videos that is.
The deck is a lot of fun, and a very good ramp deck though!
So I edited this last night, put it on my account, and hopefully if my screen capture program doesn't blow it, I will have gameplay for it in my article tomorrow.
Put competitors together with unclear rules and you will get what we have in magic, all sorts, that is a given.
Lets face it, mtg is slowly turning into the kid game it was meant to be from the start.
While I agree with some of what you said I feel it is somewhat hyperbolic and think you can do better. Perhaps the fact that you are personally being bullied makes it too hard to be dispassionate enough to see how this interaction between spikes and non-spikes is very much a two way problem. The conflict is not merely about mockery or other forms of bullying but a complete lack of empathy on either side for what the other person is going through.
A couple thoughts regarding this. Adults do not behave this way. Let me explain that thought a little. We all mature at different rates but generally speaking adults are supposed to avoid engaging in petty meanness and stupid shenanigans. Unfortunately many people who are adult-aged are actually pretty underdeveloped. That's where the internet bad behavior comes in (ala Gamer Gaters doxing/threatening gamer women for basically just being successful or in some cases for just existing.)
Tiu's execrable behavior does not excuse the threats or other retaliatory bad behavior but as I said, adult children abound. And what did he expect opening being elitist and defamatory to other players? I suspect he did not, and does not care. Maybe just stirring the pot was all he really wanted? Who knows. He did certainly stir the pot.
Hopefully (the wannabe pros for the most part) spikes will eventually decide that elitism does not work for them. Looking at the behaviors of the pros I have known (many in the HOF,) some were indeed shady or a little petty/mean but most were actually pretty decent folks. Ready to lend a hand, offering to let a worse off player take back a questionable move etc. I've had pros offer advice, give courteous remarks when they weren't obligated to do so and even been friendly for the most part.
BTW: "Rules-Lawyer" is a term far older the magic interestingly. It started very similarly in usage in the early days of D&D. It refers to a player who used the books as a way to get what they wanted from their DM and group and generally developed into a sort of pre-internet meme (most in the form of cartoons in hobbyist magazines.) Similar to "Munchkin" (a player who doesn't like role playing at all) and "Min-maxer" (power gaming at its finest), it's a derogatory term.
If people are misusing it to describe overly formal, rules oriented, stiff-necked Spikes, they should be corrected. In magic as you indicate its a form of trying to bend the rules in your favor when perhaps they should not be bent. Generally you can tell the rules-lawyer by the amount of times they call a judge on someone for slightly slow play, minor infractions like half tapping lands, or forgetting proper terminologies to indicate priority, step movement, triggering etc. In my experience players like that rarely succeed past minor victories. Minutia tends to defeat the unwisely attentive.
So I said all that in spirit of critique because I think you have a lot of potential as a content creator and would love to see you move towards a more positive way of talking about these important subjects. You are perfectly within your rights to complain and be heard but I think your argument has more sway if it isn't about you, and isn't about how angry you are. Instead maybe focus on positive ways people can find to change the behaviors THEY don't like in the game, without descending to pettiness or bickering or internet meanness.
Keep making these and hope your personal travails become less irksome over time.
Update: Because MTGO is MTGO, three cards won't be in collation for the Flashback:
https://twitter.com/MagicOnline/status/895328826368040960
Charmed Pendant and Holistic Wisdom are rares (and aren't spectacular), but Painbringer is one of black's stronger uncommons. The lack of that card means that there isn't as much tension in black between maintaining Threshold and using your graveyard as a resource.
I was following your UW Control build, and it seems like the main advantage of white as your second color is adding recursion via cards like Kor Skyfisher. Azorius Kitty was a UW Control deck of sorts, but you're packing a lot more white removal into yours. I personally prefer point-and-click red removal, especially when it means I get to have Pyroblast in my sideboard, but red doesn't add much card advantage. The main advantages of Black seem to be the UB multicolor cards like Forbidden Alchemy, Mystical Teachings, and Probe as well as the ETB synergies like we see in Dimir Flicker.
Wotc want to have scouting in mtg.
I agree with AJ. This was quite useful and the control-A tip is especially time saving.
That's a good idea. Probably won't be my very next article topic, but that's definitely something I can do. I appreciate the request!
Useful and informative!
Thank you Jason. I appreciate your work as well. We have a solid cadre of Pauper writers here at PureMTGO. I had a request for you since you build a lot of decks and like deck crafting theory. Could you do an article exploring the different kinds of U / x control and what the advantages are to each second color?
This was very well done. In particular I appreciated your ability to blend general advice with specific metagame trends and deck examples. I also enjoyed your use of MBC as a point of reference. I'm going to absolutely revisit this in the future. Solid work!
You need to delete this line from the Ramunap Red decklist (including the tags)
div class="mtgodeck" style="border-right: black 1px solid; border-top: black 1px solid; border-left: black 1px solid; width: 800px; border-bottom: black 1px solid; position: relative; background-color: rgb(204,204,204)"
and delete the closing DIV to this at the end of the article.
(the styles that are used for the hover should be there just once at the top of the 'document', but it's not breaking it, so you keep it there)
Honestly this isn't so much your fault as a fault of the site not being well set up for editing. Seems like it sucks a great deal of your time and effort to keep it running smoothly and you do a great job!
yes, I messed up pasting the deck builder code somewhere and worked 4 hours trying to find it.
In an effort to not further break the article and ruin the rest of Eddie's work, I asked him to look at it and see if that was acceptable to him.
Added a little character to the piece, and my apologies.
Yeah, me and Josh both had an issue with that. In the end we decided to run it as is.
Huh looks like something broke the auto card script.
The irony is that I was the one who should know it, since I looked it up for another one of my articles (though I can't find where I wrote about it, since it was just at the end of another article).
BTW, the reason to look at the Welcome decks is that sometimes they put reasonable cards in them--Welcome Deck 2016 was notorious for this, with cards like Cone of Flame, Borderland Marauder, and Soul of the Harvest being reasonable choices. Then pros complained about those cards being in a random set, and now the cards are mostly unplayable (signified most-clearly by Wing Snare being included instead of Plummet--though ironically that Wing Snare is the only modern-frame black-border version of it :p )
The weird sets no one's ever heard of is part of the reason why I switched to using Scryfall for my searches for this series (that, and the nice ability to remove cards that were reprints in the set as of its release, saving me a bit of grunt work).
excellent, thanks so much for doing this! I read about dawts in JClaytor's posts and became curious as to who this person is, & i'm very glad to read more about them.
You had list, and this had more of a theory feel
I did not mean for this to go up last night. Sorry about that.
we both seemed to write about the same thing today
What you say is exactly right, Paul. Kaleidoscope was flawed at the root – just not enough of a pool to play with. On the other hand, Singleton has even a larger pool than regular Tribal Wars. I mean, it is the same pool (plus the banned cards that in Singleton are all available), but the format pushes you to exploit it to the fullest. Except, for the reasons you said, people don't really do that.
But I'm not sure that was the problem, even. Looking at the history, Singleton got some enthusiastic response back when it started. Then gradually, it seems, people are having enough of it. Maybe it's because there's other Singleton PREs around; as AJ noted in the room, if you want to play a singleton format, you're better off playing Commander or 100CS, Tribal Wars was never the most natural fit.
Funnily enough, I came across them accidentally myself due to Crested Sunmare. "Horse tribal? But there's only those two black shadows filler horses, aren't there? (Checks) Wait, why is Nightmare standard legal?"