Looking at the list, there's a bit too much redundancy for an easy purification. It does some very powerful things, but none of them are unique. It can drop a game-ending threat on 3 or 4, any of them will do. It can wipe the board for 7 or 8 mana via AiD, Oblivion Stone or Ugin. It can produce large amounts of mana via Loci or Eldrazi Temples. It can untap lands with Candelabra or deserted temples. It benefits from uncounterability via Cavern of Souls, Titan/Artisan cast triggers and Emrakul.
Emrakul is probably the most viable candidate: Unique to the tribe, more powerful and harder to remove than the other two. But it isn't even a 4-of here, and the clear course of action would just be to increase the numbers of the other Titans and maybe add in the Newlamog.
ComixWriter, I find hard to answer your many and thoughtful questions in these comment sections, so I invite you to address any and all inquiries you may have about the event and its rules to me directly at my gmail account aicardigianluca.
I also suggest you to explore the many pages found at Tribal Apocalypse Central.
About your Achievement question: you may unlock Vanilla Flavor when you want, the way you want. Unlocking an achievement, by design, means you're giving up some efficiency (some times this is not true, and it's the reason why you find at the bottom of the Achievement page a list of cards that aren't allowed anymore for the unlocking to be accepted). Elf is stronger than Bear? Maybe, considering Elf is always one of the Top 3 tribes (Human, Elf, Goblin).
Bear in mind the whole Achievement thing is for fun, despite its big prize.
The tournament is NOT for fun only, though. It's a competition, taken pretty seriously by many players. You'll have soon the chance to (finally) read an interview to two of the most successful tribal players in recent history, MisterMojoRising and romellos, the reigning Tribal Champions from 2014; you'll see how they conceive the format and the event, from a Spike/semipro point of view.
There is a crowd of players who care about the Vorthos side of things, too, but the tournament does not cater exclusively to them, just like Magic as a whole, as Mark Rosewater often says, doesn't nor can't cater to any one psychographic profile, but to all of them.
As a host, my primary concern is monotony and repetition. A player gets beaten up by a particular power combo once, then never again for 6 months: he won't be affected by it. A player gets beaten up by the exact same thing week in, week out: he'll grow bored and ultimately quit the event. Now, everybody has different reactions to things (and somebody has bad reactions to trying to fix things, even), but some things are universally obvious, and those are fixed when they become an issue, and they become an issue only when they show up too frequently (this is also how DCI handles bans). See the fearful Doomsday.dek people is constantly afraid of, but never materialized once in 5 years. In my book, something that doesn't actually exist is not an issue.
"Have we exhausted the tribes?"
If by this you mean "is the format solved?", then the answer is "far from it". The variables in a format with tribal restrictions, no sideboard, and an almost universal pool of cards are just too many. Tribal Wars is possibly the format more impacted by new sets, because even an otherwise negligible thing like a new playable Ooze is going to have an effect on the meta, especially within the various sub-metas we use in Tribal Apocalypse. And new tribes keep being added, while old tribes get revamped: see what happened in the past couple of years with Minotaurs, Satyrs, Gods, and so on. Processor has just been added!
Finally, Homunculus has been played two times. Only Badger has never been played (Cockatrice has been played but never won a match, hence the special award you find in the page). You'll find these figures in the Tribal Popularity page, linked from the Central. You can also explore the various years to see when exactly Homunculus has been played, then find out those events on Gatherling.com (if it's in the past 2 years, which is when we've started using Gatherling), and study the Homunculus lists!
And you can freely play Puppet Conjurer in Homunculus, as Tribal Wars allows for as many off-tribe creatures as you like, provided your deck will have one third (rounded down) of creatures sharing at least one type. In Pure events, we eliminate that rule, so you can't have off-tribe creatures there, but with the exception of 1-4 copies of one God, or 1-4 copies of an off-tribe lord, which is a creature that doesn't share the type of the tribe, yet mentions it on its rule text, so Puppet Conjurer will still be allowed. (It's all explained in the Pure events rule page you'll find linked in Central).
I didn't say Emrakul was fair, in fact I analyzed Eldrazi separately, as a different category.
Knight Exemplar is one of many reasons Knight won Pure events.
Also, maybe a thing that's being lost to many here is that we don't analyze the tribe as a whole for Purification. We analyze the SPECIFIC LIST a SPECIFIC PLAYER piloted. That's why some very powerful cards are still to be Purified: because they never happened to be included in a winning deck so far. Purification is a game in itself, with a random aspect, it's not an attempt to lay down the rules about what's fair or what's broken.
Please all cheer up. If Pure becomes a point of dispite, I'll just end it.
I don't think Exemplar defines knights, at least in the burn metagame we have and will likely enjoy for years to come. I don't think I would play it in a knight deck in a Regular subformat. Fiendslayer Knight is always my #1, and I usually consider my #2 Stillmoon Cavalier, Mirran Crusader, or even Phyrexian Crusader depending on the metagame. Knight of the Reliquary is often better depending on what my deck is trying to do (LD, DarkStage combo). To add knights 9-12 I might consider Knight Exemplar, but the 2 drops need attention to have a resemblance of a curve, and Riders of Gavony at 4 is often better as well.
Emrakul is hard to evaluate, I assume broken with the right deck, though I haven't tried myself. In the particular deck AJ beat me with above, I think he was fair.
As a fan of tabletop RPGs, many within our play group like reading Class and Race Guides. While they have a general idea of how they envision their wizard's spells, a quick glace to a popular, community-reviewed online "wizard how-to guide" helps polish their character. Again, players can take certain liberties, and by no means is the guide the absolute source for how to have fun; they merely look at common ways to exploit the rules, even if that suggests how a half-orc alchemist is one of the most broken characters per game rule interpretation.
If we had a meta-game guide for each 1) archtype or 2) tribe, maybe we would begin to see common themes emerge. If 80% of blue decks use either Card A or Card B, those cards would get a red flag for purification. Then, if that Card A or Card B helps the deck win/go undefeated, the community would look at those cards with greater scrutiny.
Also, a meta-game guide could help new players see some strategies that have worked and basic tips. For example, I never worried about so much board-sweeping effects as a Pauper player, so this change was new to me. Like AJ_Imy said, MonoRed aggressive decks could include goblins, humans, elementals, warriors and shaman. He also suggested that there would be some commonly-shared staples within these decks. What might those decks include?
For one, I'd like to see some of those guides with updates. Forgive me if I've missed some article cache, but AJ_Impy has done a lot of great work in this vein on this site. Have we exhausted the tribes? Are there no new strategies (i.e. An infinite combo using common cards - blue monks, specifically - has surprised Standard Pauper recently, but a key card is merely another common card with the exact rules text and cmc available to all of us in Tribal Wars.)?
Finally and incongruently, would Puppet Conjurer be allowed in a Homunculus Tribe? Has anyone fielded a Homunculus Tribe to date? Thanks in advance! Keep tappin'
A fair point, but Pure is more about Tribal dominance than archetypal dominance. You could play monored Aggro with Goblins, Elementals, Humans, Warriors or Shamen, with many cards in common between those decks. If one of those tribes was successful, would it be better to remove a card common to all of them or a card specific to one?
While debating the merits of All Is Dust, may I ask this question (because I'm unsure of the outcome)?
To unlock the Deckbuilding Achievement, "Vanilla Flavor," we could easier suppose how "Bears" may fit the bill. Bears would be an Underdog Tribe, and it's unsupported tribe has equal footing against lesser powerful tribes. What about Elves, though? There are exactly enough vanilla elves to sleeve-up a Vanilla Tribe. However, playing "elves" may lock me into a far more difficult environment. Would the "Vanilla Flavor" achievement only be unlocked during an Underdog event? I mean, really - elves or not, if I show up with vanilla critters of a Pure Tribe, well, isn't part of the reason the Pure Tribes are so dominant because of their supported cast? Vanilla Tribes have an unequal footing by design (hence, 'vanilla'), but how could we ever see a vanilla elf deck hit the scene? I chose green for more than one reason, but wanted to highlight the imbalance of power between bears and elves as a tribe.
I agree with Bazaar of Baghdad.
Basically, it's the same thing like Sensei's Top and Altar of brood, if you create a 'normal' tribe you can not counter/remove all copies there, if one at all, or in case of 'All is dust' there is no way to play a tribal deck without colors, unless you play Eldrazi/Myr/artifacts yourself. 7 mana is easily reached with cloudposts, Desecrated Land, Explorer's MAp,etc. In one game, that was on Turn3! So 'All is dust', wipes out all opposition.
As someone (newly) interested in this format, I find the above-arguments very interesting and promising for the format. Experienced veterans interpret this format with humility and eyes towards balanced and welcoming play. Some players would willingly neuter their own or future decks to ensure fair play.
Here are some summarized thoughts while reading this thread:
1) I agree with ML_Berlin at least twice: 1) Nobody should have to buy an answer to a specific threat, especially when this single card or smaller card pool can be relatively expensive. When a playset of probable solutions to dangerous decks cost more than some undefeated decks combined, I think the card in question (read: All Is Dust), merits a red flag. Like ML_Berlin, 2) I too mourn the loss of playing viable knight tribes since their (winning) centerpiece is purified. There is a reason why I don’t like (Modern) Pauper: I don’t have Delver of Secrets or the engines it needs. It’s not a monetary hang-up, it’s more of principle. One card strongly dictates that format, and other decks are designed around beating one card (or its combination engine). This constipated entry point isn’t fun for me, personally. I’d hate to see Tribal Wars turn into: Buy this card or you’re sunk, or at least FAR behind the game play curve.
2) I stumbled upon the Achievements for Tribal Wars. It’s there, but perhaps if more attention was given on unlocking achievements, we wouldn’t be looking at All Is Dust with a magnifying glass. Is a card like All Is Dust making a splash in Underdog Tournaments for example?
3) Finally, I think that discussing how crippling a card may be is healthy for the format. Simply acknowledging a problem exists is good, but having an action plan in place also makes sense. Is there a cut-off for making a decision for a card like All Is Dust? What more needs to be considered?
Sadly, I missed the events for today’s Underdog tournament due to a prior birthday celebration commitment. I like seeing what others think about the format, some problems noted, and collective reasoning on a possible solution. Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you online soon! Keep tappin’
It's never been this drastic. For starters, it was defined as a rule only affecting the Major League tribes and nothing else (another reason why Myr needed to be there). And the card that defines the decklist must exist. Some decks just end undefeated without relying on any particular "unfair weapon". Those decks do not need to be punished; more so, they have to be REWARDED.
Other cases are tribes, like Eldrazi, that rarely if ever get there. In fact, Eldrazi never did before (their status as Major League tribe is even uncertain; it might become more clear after BFZ, we'll see). You also have to reward, not punish these accomplishments. Not doing so would mean keeping the same distance between the tier-1 tribes and their competitors: you take away dangerous Goblins and Elves, then you also take away the few weapons the other tribes have to perform at the same high levels, it would result in a zero-sum game, it would be an exercise in futility.
The purification process seems indeed quite arbitrary, meaning that we are not on the same page of what the precise underlying logic is (judging by all kinds of different arguments why something should and shouldn't removed). I think the initial idea was good (hope I remember it correctly) - when a powerful tribe/archetype wins, the most impactful card of that deck is removed to hopefully shake up things. Important Goblins (tribe) and WW (archetype) pieces were cut one by one, and I liked this idea for it's simplicity, but when you start mixing in additional lines of criteria, the process loses it's elegance IMO.
The only thing we should be debating when a strong deck wins is which card was the most essential to that deck's success, and not whether there exists a possible answer for this card, or if this card is a sweeper, or a staple in other similiar decks or whatever (and as you can see in my previous post, I also used justifications that don't follow from the principle that I just stated, heh). At least that is how I see the logic of the format - maybe wrongly and too simplisticly.
'Land Destruction decks prey very nicely on post even with just 4 wastelands'
Come on, I don't own one of em! 4 that's 260 US$ !
What's next? 'That xyz deck can easily be disrupted, you just need 4 Rishadan Ports. 'Just 171.00 US $ each'
And for Purification: The definition of the goal of the 'Purification Process' seems to be changing over the time. I don't understand, why there should be a problem when Emrakul get eliminated, but it's fine to kill Knight Exemplar , which completely shut down the knight tribe.
"Cloudpost/Vesuva/Glimmerpost/Forgotten Temple/Expedition Map: No. Colourless ramp is a format staple all its own, and has powered out everything from Myr and Eldrazi this week to Golems, Constructs, Scarecrows, even Shapeshifters and Gargoyles."
Isn't the point of the purification process to shake up format staples? If something is going to be purified, my vote is definitely for Cloudpost.
As loathe as I am to reduce my chances of winning even more tix at the end of the year, I'm pretty sure I don't have 16 annual achievements; that would require me to have got 10 achievements last quarter, which I'm almost entirely sure I didn't do. I'm not 100% on this, but I think my annual score is 10 achievements.
The famous line people give when asked why they climbed such an arduous and unrewarding summit (not that the view sucks or anything but it kills more people than get to its top) is because it was there. That's how I feel about deck building challenges. That is not to say I am good at it. Just am drawn to the effort.
I will be happy to participate also without the prizes..... as long as Telir is also in for it ;) Maybe you could keep a highscore list instead counting the number of wins. Top of the list is the most casual player :)
Be warned that next week is the last contest I'm running. On the one hand I like playing Santa Claus but on the other hand it's annoying to rearrange my schedule to give somebody 8 cents' worth of cards.
I almost agree except in my experience Land Destruction decks prey very nicely on post even with just 4 wastelands and a few creatures that do double duty killing lands is enough to put them on the back heel. That said I don't consider my opinion to matter since I am not a regular anymore.
Cloudpost decks are really powerful, and I wouldn't mind actually purifying Cloudpost or Glimmerpost, since they are cards with a relatively specific purpose (ramp in colorless control decks) and there are other alternatives (good old Ancient Tomb+City of Traitors package, Urza's lands, artifact ramp …). All the lifegain from the various lands make it very unlikely to successfully attack a Cloudpost pilot down to zero before they stabilize, so aggro decks can't realistically compete with it, and other control decks just don't do nearly powerful enough stuff in the late game to stand a chance (good points by Bazaar why All is Dust is so powerful). You basically have to play combo to have a good winning percentage against them or play a lot of counterspells (and hope they aren't the Eldrazi deck), the latter not being a particularly good idea in tribal wars. If I missed a deck type that can go toe to toe with Cloudpost decks, please correct me. In this light I think the deck needs to lose some key piece, as have other powerful decks in the past, and I think Cloudpost/Glimmerpost is the best option.
Looking at the list, there's a bit too much redundancy for an easy purification. It does some very powerful things, but none of them are unique. It can drop a game-ending threat on 3 or 4, any of them will do. It can wipe the board for 7 or 8 mana via AiD, Oblivion Stone or Ugin. It can produce large amounts of mana via Loci or Eldrazi Temples. It can untap lands with Candelabra or deserted temples. It benefits from uncounterability via Cavern of Souls, Titan/Artisan cast triggers and Emrakul.
Emrakul is probably the most viable candidate: Unique to the tribe, more powerful and harder to remove than the other two. But it isn't even a 4-of here, and the clear course of action would just be to increase the numbers of the other Titans and maybe add in the Newlamog.
ComixWriter, I find hard to answer your many and thoughtful questions in these comment sections, so I invite you to address any and all inquiries you may have about the event and its rules to me directly at my gmail account aicardigianluca.
I also suggest you to explore the many pages found at Tribal Apocalypse Central.
About your Achievement question: you may unlock Vanilla Flavor when you want, the way you want. Unlocking an achievement, by design, means you're giving up some efficiency (some times this is not true, and it's the reason why you find at the bottom of the Achievement page a list of cards that aren't allowed anymore for the unlocking to be accepted). Elf is stronger than Bear? Maybe, considering Elf is always one of the Top 3 tribes (Human, Elf, Goblin).
Bear in mind the whole Achievement thing is for fun, despite its big prize.
The tournament is NOT for fun only, though. It's a competition, taken pretty seriously by many players. You'll have soon the chance to (finally) read an interview to two of the most successful tribal players in recent history, MisterMojoRising and romellos, the reigning Tribal Champions from 2014; you'll see how they conceive the format and the event, from a Spike/semipro point of view.
There is a crowd of players who care about the Vorthos side of things, too, but the tournament does not cater exclusively to them, just like Magic as a whole, as Mark Rosewater often says, doesn't nor can't cater to any one psychographic profile, but to all of them.
As a host, my primary concern is monotony and repetition. A player gets beaten up by a particular power combo once, then never again for 6 months: he won't be affected by it. A player gets beaten up by the exact same thing week in, week out: he'll grow bored and ultimately quit the event. Now, everybody has different reactions to things (and somebody has bad reactions to trying to fix things, even), but some things are universally obvious, and those are fixed when they become an issue, and they become an issue only when they show up too frequently (this is also how DCI handles bans). See the fearful Doomsday.dek people is constantly afraid of, but never materialized once in 5 years. In my book, something that doesn't actually exist is not an issue.
"Have we exhausted the tribes?"
If by this you mean "is the format solved?", then the answer is "far from it". The variables in a format with tribal restrictions, no sideboard, and an almost universal pool of cards are just too many. Tribal Wars is possibly the format more impacted by new sets, because even an otherwise negligible thing like a new playable Ooze is going to have an effect on the meta, especially within the various sub-metas we use in Tribal Apocalypse. And new tribes keep being added, while old tribes get revamped: see what happened in the past couple of years with Minotaurs, Satyrs, Gods, and so on. Processor has just been added!
Finally, Homunculus has been played two times. Only Badger has never been played (Cockatrice has been played but never won a match, hence the special award you find in the page). You'll find these figures in the Tribal Popularity page, linked from the Central. You can also explore the various years to see when exactly Homunculus has been played, then find out those events on Gatherling.com (if it's in the past 2 years, which is when we've started using Gatherling), and study the Homunculus lists!
And you can freely play Puppet Conjurer in Homunculus, as Tribal Wars allows for as many off-tribe creatures as you like, provided your deck will have one third (rounded down) of creatures sharing at least one type. In Pure events, we eliminate that rule, so you can't have off-tribe creatures there, but with the exception of 1-4 copies of one God, or 1-4 copies of an off-tribe lord, which is a creature that doesn't share the type of the tribe, yet mentions it on its rule text, so Puppet Conjurer will still be allowed. (It's all explained in the Pure events rule page you'll find linked in Central).
I didn't say Emrakul was fair, in fact I analyzed Eldrazi separately, as a different category.
Knight Exemplar is one of many reasons Knight won Pure events.
Also, maybe a thing that's being lost to many here is that we don't analyze the tribe as a whole for Purification. We analyze the SPECIFIC LIST a SPECIFIC PLAYER piloted. That's why some very powerful cards are still to be Purified: because they never happened to be included in a winning deck so far. Purification is a game in itself, with a random aspect, it's not an attempt to lay down the rules about what's fair or what's broken.
Please all cheer up. If Pure becomes a point of dispite, I'll just end it.
I don't think Exemplar defines knights, at least in the burn metagame we have and will likely enjoy for years to come. I don't think I would play it in a knight deck in a Regular subformat. Fiendslayer Knight is always my #1, and I usually consider my #2 Stillmoon Cavalier, Mirran Crusader, or even Phyrexian Crusader depending on the metagame. Knight of the Reliquary is often better depending on what my deck is trying to do (LD, DarkStage combo). To add knights 9-12 I might consider Knight Exemplar, but the 2 drops need attention to have a resemblance of a curve, and Riders of Gavony at 4 is often better as well.
Emrakul is hard to evaluate, I assume broken with the right deck, though I haven't tried myself. In the particular deck AJ beat me with above, I think he was fair.
And the card that defines the decklist must exist. Some decks just end undefeated without relying on any particular "unfair weapon".
Emrakul is completely fair, while Knight Exemplar is such an unfair card, especially as you need 2 on battlefield, to be save.
As a fan of tabletop RPGs, many within our play group like reading Class and Race Guides. While they have a general idea of how they envision their wizard's spells, a quick glace to a popular, community-reviewed online "wizard how-to guide" helps polish their character. Again, players can take certain liberties, and by no means is the guide the absolute source for how to have fun; they merely look at common ways to exploit the rules, even if that suggests how a half-orc alchemist is one of the most broken characters per game rule interpretation.
If we had a meta-game guide for each 1) archtype or 2) tribe, maybe we would begin to see common themes emerge. If 80% of blue decks use either Card A or Card B, those cards would get a red flag for purification. Then, if that Card A or Card B helps the deck win/go undefeated, the community would look at those cards with greater scrutiny.
Also, a meta-game guide could help new players see some strategies that have worked and basic tips. For example, I never worried about so much board-sweeping effects as a Pauper player, so this change was new to me. Like AJ_Imy said, MonoRed aggressive decks could include goblins, humans, elementals, warriors and shaman. He also suggested that there would be some commonly-shared staples within these decks. What might those decks include?
For one, I'd like to see some of those guides with updates. Forgive me if I've missed some article cache, but AJ_Impy has done a lot of great work in this vein on this site. Have we exhausted the tribes? Are there no new strategies (i.e. An infinite combo using common cards - blue monks, specifically - has surprised Standard Pauper recently, but a key card is merely another common card with the exact rules text and cmc available to all of us in Tribal Wars.)?
Finally and incongruently, would Puppet Conjurer be allowed in a Homunculus Tribe? Has anyone fielded a Homunculus Tribe to date? Thanks in advance! Keep tappin'
A fair point, but Pure is more about Tribal dominance than archetypal dominance. You could play monored Aggro with Goblins, Elementals, Humans, Warriors or Shamen, with many cards in common between those decks. If one of those tribes was successful, would it be better to remove a card common to all of them or a card specific to one?
While debating the merits of All Is Dust, may I ask this question (because I'm unsure of the outcome)?
To unlock the Deckbuilding Achievement, "Vanilla Flavor," we could easier suppose how "Bears" may fit the bill. Bears would be an Underdog Tribe, and it's unsupported tribe has equal footing against lesser powerful tribes. What about Elves, though? There are exactly enough vanilla elves to sleeve-up a Vanilla Tribe. However, playing "elves" may lock me into a far more difficult environment. Would the "Vanilla Flavor" achievement only be unlocked during an Underdog event? I mean, really - elves or not, if I show up with vanilla critters of a Pure Tribe, well, isn't part of the reason the Pure Tribes are so dominant because of their supported cast? Vanilla Tribes have an unequal footing by design (hence, 'vanilla'), but how could we ever see a vanilla elf deck hit the scene? I chose green for more than one reason, but wanted to highlight the imbalance of power between bears and elves as a tribe.
I agree with Bazaar of Baghdad.
Basically, it's the same thing like Sensei's Top and Altar of brood, if you create a 'normal' tribe you can not counter/remove all copies there, if one at all, or in case of 'All is dust' there is no way to play a tribal deck without colors, unless you play Eldrazi/Myr/artifacts yourself. 7 mana is easily reached with cloudposts, Desecrated Land, Explorer's MAp,etc. In one game, that was on Turn3! So 'All is dust', wipes out all opposition.
As someone (newly) interested in this format, I find the above-arguments very interesting and promising for the format. Experienced veterans interpret this format with humility and eyes towards balanced and welcoming play. Some players would willingly neuter their own or future decks to ensure fair play.
Here are some summarized thoughts while reading this thread:
1) I agree with ML_Berlin at least twice: 1) Nobody should have to buy an answer to a specific threat, especially when this single card or smaller card pool can be relatively expensive. When a playset of probable solutions to dangerous decks cost more than some undefeated decks combined, I think the card in question (read: All Is Dust), merits a red flag. Like ML_Berlin, 2) I too mourn the loss of playing viable knight tribes since their (winning) centerpiece is purified. There is a reason why I don’t like (Modern) Pauper: I don’t have Delver of Secrets or the engines it needs. It’s not a monetary hang-up, it’s more of principle. One card strongly dictates that format, and other decks are designed around beating one card (or its combination engine). This constipated entry point isn’t fun for me, personally. I’d hate to see Tribal Wars turn into: Buy this card or you’re sunk, or at least FAR behind the game play curve.
2) I stumbled upon the Achievements for Tribal Wars. It’s there, but perhaps if more attention was given on unlocking achievements, we wouldn’t be looking at All Is Dust with a magnifying glass. Is a card like All Is Dust making a splash in Underdog Tournaments for example?
3) Finally, I think that discussing how crippling a card may be is healthy for the format. Simply acknowledging a problem exists is good, but having an action plan in place also makes sense. Is there a cut-off for making a decision for a card like All Is Dust? What more needs to be considered?
Sadly, I missed the events for today’s Underdog tournament due to a prior birthday celebration commitment. I like seeing what others think about the format, some problems noted, and collective reasoning on a possible solution. Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you online soon! Keep tappin’
Hmmmmmm both of you write articles on here. After my article next week, do one of you want to take over and be the one to hold the contests?
It's never been this drastic. For starters, it was defined as a rule only affecting the Major League tribes and nothing else (another reason why Myr needed to be there). And the card that defines the decklist must exist. Some decks just end undefeated without relying on any particular "unfair weapon". Those decks do not need to be punished; more so, they have to be REWARDED.
Other cases are tribes, like Eldrazi, that rarely if ever get there. In fact, Eldrazi never did before (their status as Major League tribe is even uncertain; it might become more clear after BFZ, we'll see). You also have to reward, not punish these accomplishments. Not doing so would mean keeping the same distance between the tier-1 tribes and their competitors: you take away dangerous Goblins and Elves, then you also take away the few weapons the other tribes have to perform at the same high levels, it would result in a zero-sum game, it would be an exercise in futility.
The purification process seems indeed quite arbitrary, meaning that we are not on the same page of what the precise underlying logic is (judging by all kinds of different arguments why something should and shouldn't removed). I think the initial idea was good (hope I remember it correctly) - when a powerful tribe/archetype wins, the most impactful card of that deck is removed to hopefully shake up things. Important Goblins (tribe) and WW (archetype) pieces were cut one by one, and I liked this idea for it's simplicity, but when you start mixing in additional lines of criteria, the process loses it's elegance IMO.
The only thing we should be debating when a strong deck wins is which card was the most essential to that deck's success, and not whether there exists a possible answer for this card, or if this card is a sweeper, or a staple in other similiar decks or whatever (and as you can see in my previous post, I also used justifications that don't follow from the principle that I just stated, heh). At least that is how I see the logic of the format - maybe wrongly and too simplisticly.
'Land Destruction decks prey very nicely on post even with just 4 wastelands'
Come on, I don't own one of em! 4 that's 260 US$ !
What's next? 'That xyz deck can easily be disrupted, you just need 4 Rishadan Ports. 'Just 171.00 US $ each'
And for Purification: The definition of the goal of the 'Purification Process' seems to be changing over the time. I don't understand, why there should be a problem when Emrakul get eliminated, but it's fine to kill Knight Exemplar , which completely shut down the knight tribe.
You're right, I read the table wrong, the total was already including the ones from this quarter.
"Cloudpost/Vesuva/Glimmerpost/Forgotten Temple/Expedition Map: No. Colourless ramp is a format staple all its own, and has powered out everything from Myr and Eldrazi this week to Golems, Constructs, Scarecrows, even Shapeshifters and Gargoyles."
Isn't the point of the purification process to shake up format staples? If something is going to be purified, my vote is definitely for Cloudpost.
As loathe as I am to reduce my chances of winning even more tix at the end of the year, I'm pretty sure I don't have 16 annual achievements; that would require me to have got 10 achievements last quarter, which I'm almost entirely sure I didn't do. I'm not 100% on this, but I think my annual score is 10 achievements.
The famous line people give when asked why they climbed such an arduous and unrewarding summit (not that the view sucks or anything but it kills more people than get to its top) is because it was there. That's how I feel about deck building challenges. That is not to say I am good at it. Just am drawn to the effort.
Everest?
Maybe others could be lured in with with Fame and Glory. Even if you are immune to it :)
I don't compete for prizes or glory but merely because Everest!
I will be happy to participate also without the prizes..... as long as Telir is also in for it ;) Maybe you could keep a highscore list instead counting the number of wins. Top of the list is the most casual player :)
As you wish!
Be warned that next week is the last contest I'm running. On the one hand I like playing Santa Claus but on the other hand it's annoying to rearrange my schedule to give somebody 8 cents' worth of cards.
I almost agree except in my experience Land Destruction decks prey very nicely on post even with just 4 wastelands and a few creatures that do double duty killing lands is enough to put them on the back heel. That said I don't consider my opinion to matter since I am not a regular anymore.
Congrats and gl :p
Cloudpost decks are really powerful, and I wouldn't mind actually purifying Cloudpost or Glimmerpost, since they are cards with a relatively specific purpose (ramp in colorless control decks) and there are other alternatives (good old Ancient Tomb+City of Traitors package, Urza's lands, artifact ramp …). All the lifegain from the various lands make it very unlikely to successfully attack a Cloudpost pilot down to zero before they stabilize, so aggro decks can't realistically compete with it, and other control decks just don't do nearly powerful enough stuff in the late game to stand a chance (good points by Bazaar why All is Dust is so powerful). You basically have to play combo to have a good winning percentage against them or play a lot of counterspells (and hope they aren't the Eldrazi deck), the latter not being a particularly good idea in tribal wars. If I missed a deck type that can go toe to toe with Cloudpost decks, please correct me. In this light I think the deck needs to lose some key piece, as have other powerful decks in the past, and I think Cloudpost/Glimmerpost is the best option.