I may be in the minority here, but I don't think Dig Through Time should be banned in Legacy. Only one deck uses a playset of Dig, the others use only about 2. If it was really ban worthy I think players would be jamming 4. It's a powerful card but so are countless others in Legacy. It doesn't seem right for Wizards to ban it when people are just sprinkling it into their decks. The only reason why I could see it getting the hammer is if OmniTell becomes too good, which I don't think it is right now.
Enjoyed the article! I look forward to the Eternal Spotlight every week.
But it's not unrealistic or absurd. It's not that difficult, it just needs a lot of time and most people can make much more in a real job. However, it's a nice option for some extra money or for people who live in certain countries.
He didn't say it could NOT be done...he said its unrealistic and absurd..which is very much accurate. It's also absurd for a football or baseball player to make 25$ million a year, but it happens.
"its unrealistic and absurd for people to expect to make a consistent profit PLAYING a (collectible card) GAME."
This part is where you are very wrong. The fact that some people can profit means many others will try and fail and in the end that gives Wizards more money. Also, no matter how much you win, tix can only be bought in the store, so even if someone wins a lot and trades packs for tix to sell them to other players, those tix also came from the store.
The before/after table was great. I'm still sad that I sold my foil Griselbrand for 20 tix after it got banned from EDH. Also I had no idea that Infernal Tutor was that high, I have a ton of those.
in general response to: "Opinion Section: Investing in MTGO Cards"
its unrealistic and absurd for people to expect to make a consistent profit PLAYING a (collectible card) GAME.
its unrealistic and absurd for people to expect to use any service provided by other living humans for free.
if you want to produce "income" or multiply your wealth for your own benefit, i might suggest being a bank robber, or finding a job, or hiring a financial planner. maybe mtgotraders is hiring. i wonder how their profit margin is.
if you're actually using mtgo as an "investment"... im scared. upon further reflection, if you do decide to hire a financial planner, don't tell him about this hobby of yours.
I smiled a lot during the before/after price breakdown. (A few of those cards I've suffered from and profited from myself.) Out of curiosity, I copied and pasted the whole chart into Excel, and added up the sum for each column.
At 1x of each card (which I realize is not what you bought or sold), it would come out a net expenditure of $1019.81 and a net gain of $1026.62. In other words, buying those cards at the times you did saved you almost $7 versus buying them all today!! (It could have been worse.)
I like this idea, and is a great way to confound an opponent.
Looking on my own, I've found very little available to pauper magicians wanting to tax their foes. Oppressive Rays is just one card...
Any suggestions, or is taxation a weak and unviable strategy for pauper (in any format)?
As always a fun ride. I don't ever want to see Time Vault in Commander. I play Derevi and like him but I think that would be awful. As it is there are a few OTHER items which might be totally broken doing the same thing (infinite turns). With enough mana Magistrate's Scepter could go infinite with Derevi. I like that your deck does not sport that.
I would go straight by the numbers: 4 months left this year= 8 regular but just 4 underdog. All together we will have 26 regular this year, so I think 25 are enough and substitute that with a Singleton, which then will be 3 (!) times this year.
Thanks for the compliments. I do try to be respectful.
The biggest issue with banning cards in a format like Pauper which lets be serious is really "Legacy Pauper", is that these cards are all in relative balance with each other. Yes I agree the common card has been pretty well nerfed in more recent sets (except in specific examples like Gary who dominated with MBC for a while and of course Treasure Cruise (yikes!).) But banning specific legacy cards hoping that this will fix the brokeness of the older commons as a group is a vain one. Others will gain supremacy as has been repeatedly shown. What bans are good for is keeping the uber commons from being the only options for reasonable play and for breaking up trends where the only tournament decks played include the offending card(s). Even if there are great answers to those cards if everyone is playing the same thing, WOTC has shown it will step in and make bans. Sometimes that cripple the archetype (Birthing Pod in Modern and yes I am still bitter about this :)), sometimes that just make it less popular (Storm in any format).
As to budget building in pauper well yeah. You can pay through the nose for some commons. Daze on MTGO comes to mind in particular at 21.03 per non foil version. And there are other outliers. Sometimes it has to do with rarity of set (MM was poorly drafted as a cycle and Nemesis was even less drafted.) Interestingly Daze in paper is 1/7th the online price (which is still 3x the price of your deck.) So sometimes the oddity of MTGO economics works the other way around. And still there will be expensive cards.
Diabolic Edict was very expensive for a long time online as was Rancor (before UL was released online). Armadillo Cloak was super pricy a few years ago. Now it is .04 of a tix. That said, part of the reason why cards are pricy is that they become pricy when the deck they are in is highly favored. Even if it isn't good, if people love it (Birthing Pod was like this forever) the price of its cards will sky rocket and dealers will be loath to drop prices just because a deck recently goes out of favor. This leads to a perpetual "Elite" class of cards regardless of commonality.
Finding how to enjoy the format(s) with the budget you have is part of the challenge. Sounds to me like you've solved that at least partially.
Yes, I see the NM quality. Am surprised they even have the oldest version of the card, not the reprint.
My apologies about the time: Urza block was started in 1998, and and miscalculated. Still, dickering about two years when we have at least a decade and a half in the sun warrants some staying power of the card. Has nothing that good been printed in a dozen+ years? If so, why aren't those cards climbing tournaments as easily as the fey?
Paul, you seem like a spot of brilliant reason. Thanks for your critical insights.
Yes, I am frustrated that more local players in the south-central PA and MD region don't play physical cards in pauper. I thought it might be because of availability, but you and others have shown me that the cards are available for purchase. I suppose I live in a region devoid of brick-and-mortar stores offering pauper as part of their typical FNM and sponsored tournaments. This is why I went to MTGO in the first place- I don't get out of the house very often, but would attend a weekly pauper gaming event, even if just casual. Without these events in place, despite requests from myself and others interested in the format (who are, by most accounts, younger than myself (I'm 40)), I go online. In some of my first days' worth of matches, I saw a ton of Delvers and Esper combos, which seemed to reinforce my belief that MTGO is full of these archtypes. Yes, I could play them too. Maybe I SHOULD play a Delver or Esper deck as my staple; I'm pretty sure I would win with enough experience. I have a set list of actions I want to see unfold in the combo, and I could be just another "DEsper" bully.
My more important questions are these, I think: Pick any banned card in Pauper. Why was it banned but Cloud of Faeries gets a pass? What triggers needs be happen to warrant ANY kind of banning? How many of those triggers were in place for already-banned cards, and how much sunshine did their card faces see in their prime? Has Cloud of Faeries or other cards that seem to completely define tournament-worthy decks been flipping the same triggers? When an entire pauper deck can be bought for less than an Event ticket, should CoF be about a third of that price? <--- I ask because I don't know; is an investment of even .28 event tickets for a deck a smart or comparable price range? If so, I'm completely too cheap because I bought a fun MTGO homebrew for less than a ticket.
Again, thanks, Paul. You seem intelligent and respectful, which is in too short of supply these days in general.
Wouldn't a truly imaginative mind find a way to beat Cloud of Faeries? This seems if you pardon my saying so more of a pet peave you have than an actual objection.
I understand your point, but I wonder how much of it is personal salt from finding the format frustrating and how much is actual well thought out analysis.
My own experience with pauper is it is many things to many people. If you are finding it too hard, perhaps switch whom you play with or seek out the ways to improve your game so that cards like Cloud of Faeries do not hinder your fun.
That said, there is also nothing stopping you from making up your own rules with the people you play with: No cards from Before Invasion as a rule eliminates a few troublesome cards, for example.
You probably play with a full playset of these named cards.
Are you suggesting that Pauper be ONLY an online format? It seems to me that your disdain of the printed copies means you prefer to play online over in-person play with physical, not proxied, cards.
Yes, I know I'm free to play Standard pauper among friends in persona nd online. Standard Pauper isn't my threat, nor the threat to the longevity of the format.
As it stands, Pauper masquerades as an easy format to enter, but it's not meeting the needs of newer, younger players, with cards still in use that may be older than some players. Pauper is not evolving, many people either love (read: they play with 'em) or hate (read: don't have access to 'em to even try). If an opponent announces they play Delver of Esper combos, I bet a lot of players concede with their homebrewed decks that won't stand a competitive, albeit fun, chance.
What does it take to ban Treasure Cruise, or Grapeshot? These cards have a following that suggest banning them inn play. Why is Cloud of Faeries SO important to keep after EIGHTEEN years of use? I contend the death of Cloud of Faeries also suggests the death of cheap netdecking and unimaginative minds. This is the biggest block to overcome- tradition as a rule without growing to adapt play to newer markets and players.
What else from pre-Modern era would suffer from restrictions, if not flat-out banning? If one card is the sword on which Pauper wants to die, that is sad. I chose to target the easy and access to cards for competitive play, and find that pre-Modern ear cards provide a stumbling block.
If my test to find the cards in my area is too limited, where's your result? Please provide the names and contact information of brick-and-mortar stores who sell mint or near mint copies of pre-Modern cards; get bonus points by sharing their pricing information. You can't easily dismiss my premise without following up with your own research to prove me wrong.
Again, the card is 18 years old. Professional athletes retire after about two decades- let the faeries retire, too, and create a much needed opening in competitive decks. Else, I'll just buy my own online playset of faeries and play in competition-sanctioned tournaments...oh, wait...
You suggest that we would have a very limited card pool from which to draw if pre-Modern were banned. What else, aside from CoF, would be dented in this push? Seriously, if Standard Pauper has a following with a card pool of about a year's supply of common cards, I think we could unceremoniously dump whatever (specific cards, please) pre-Modern era cards brought to play.
Plus, there's a different aesthetic of older cards that are incongruent with new card designs and printings. Saying, "Pick any common card from whenever" actually suggests that the card pool is already too limited, and we NEED twenty-year old cards to play a competitive match. Is that what the Pauper format stands for- antiquity and broken design JUST because it's a common card? Grapeshot feels sad...
I may be in the minority here, but I don't think Dig Through Time should be banned in Legacy. Only one deck uses a playset of Dig, the others use only about 2. If it was really ban worthy I think players would be jamming 4. It's a powerful card but so are countless others in Legacy. It doesn't seem right for Wizards to ban it when people are just sprinkling it into their decks. The only reason why I could see it getting the hammer is if OmniTell becomes too good, which I don't think it is right now.
Enjoyed the article! I look forward to the Eternal Spotlight every week.
But it's not unrealistic or absurd. It's not that difficult, it just needs a lot of time and most people can make much more in a real job. However, it's a nice option for some extra money or for people who live in certain countries.
He didn't say it could NOT be done...he said its unrealistic and absurd..which is very much accurate. It's also absurd for a football or baseball player to make 25$ million a year, but it happens.
yup, reversed those. Sorry, Bob.
Fixed that.
Editing from a smartphone due to monitor failure is not exactly the most fun I've had the past two days :(
"its unrealistic and absurd for people to expect to make a consistent profit PLAYING a (collectible card) GAME."
This part is where you are very wrong. The fact that some people can profit means many others will try and fail and in the end that gives Wizards more money. Also, no matter how much you win, tix can only be bought in the store, so even if someone wins a lot and trades packs for tix to sell them to other players, those tix also came from the store.
http://magic.wizards.com/en/events/coverage/legacychamp15
yes he did.
Didn't Bob Huang win the Legacy Championships? That's the info I went with for my article?
The before/after table was great. I'm still sad that I sold my foil Griselbrand for 20 tix after it got banned from EDH. Also I had no idea that Infernal Tutor was that high, I have a ton of those.
Lol, imagine someone saying
"I spent $300 buying PS2 games over the years, and now I can't even sell them at a profit!"
in general response to: "Opinion Section: Investing in MTGO Cards"
its unrealistic and absurd for people to expect to make a consistent profit PLAYING a (collectible card) GAME.
its unrealistic and absurd for people to expect to use any service provided by other living humans for free.
if you want to produce "income" or multiply your wealth for your own benefit, i might suggest being a bank robber, or finding a job, or hiring a financial planner. maybe mtgotraders is hiring. i wonder how their profit margin is.
if you're actually using mtgo as an "investment"... im scared. upon further reflection, if you do decide to hire a financial planner, don't tell him about this hobby of yours.
I smiled a lot during the before/after price breakdown. (A few of those cards I've suffered from and profited from myself.) Out of curiosity, I copied and pasted the whole chart into Excel, and added up the sum for each column.
At 1x of each card (which I realize is not what you bought or sold), it would come out a net expenditure of $1019.81 and a net gain of $1026.62. In other words, buying those cards at the times you did saved you almost $7 versus buying them all today!! (It could have been worse.)
I like this idea, and is a great way to confound an opponent.
Looking on my own, I've found very little available to pauper magicians wanting to tax their foes. Oppressive Rays is just one card...
Any suggestions, or is taxation a weak and unviable strategy for pauper (in any format)?
I would love to play anyone with a competitive deck.
I played 5c Premiere Events when they existed.
The_Sensei
As always a fun ride. I don't ever want to see Time Vault in Commander. I play Derevi and like him but I think that would be awful. As it is there are a few OTHER items which might be totally broken doing the same thing (infinite turns). With enough mana Magistrate's Scepter could go infinite with Derevi. I like that your deck does not sport that.
Good work as always! Keep it up!
Correction: Brian's overall record was actually 12-1, not 12-1-1 as stated above. All the more impressive!
So would I. A 50% increase in Singleton events is excessive.
I would go straight by the numbers: 4 months left this year= 8 regular but just 4 underdog. All together we will have 26 regular this year, so I think 25 are enough and substitute that with a Singleton, which then will be 3 (!) times this year.
Thanks for the compliments. I do try to be respectful.
The biggest issue with banning cards in a format like Pauper which lets be serious is really "Legacy Pauper", is that these cards are all in relative balance with each other. Yes I agree the common card has been pretty well nerfed in more recent sets (except in specific examples like Gary who dominated with MBC for a while and of course Treasure Cruise (yikes!).) But banning specific legacy cards hoping that this will fix the brokeness of the older commons as a group is a vain one. Others will gain supremacy as has been repeatedly shown. What bans are good for is keeping the uber commons from being the only options for reasonable play and for breaking up trends where the only tournament decks played include the offending card(s). Even if there are great answers to those cards if everyone is playing the same thing, WOTC has shown it will step in and make bans. Sometimes that cripple the archetype (Birthing Pod in Modern and yes I am still bitter about this :)), sometimes that just make it less popular (Storm in any format).
As to budget building in pauper well yeah. You can pay through the nose for some commons. Daze on MTGO comes to mind in particular at 21.03 per non foil version. And there are other outliers. Sometimes it has to do with rarity of set (MM was poorly drafted as a cycle and Nemesis was even less drafted.) Interestingly Daze in paper is 1/7th the online price (which is still 3x the price of your deck.) So sometimes the oddity of MTGO economics works the other way around. And still there will be expensive cards.
Diabolic Edict was very expensive for a long time online as was Rancor (before UL was released online). Armadillo Cloak was super pricy a few years ago. Now it is .04 of a tix. That said, part of the reason why cards are pricy is that they become pricy when the deck they are in is highly favored. Even if it isn't good, if people love it (Birthing Pod was like this forever) the price of its cards will sky rocket and dealers will be loath to drop prices just because a deck recently goes out of favor. This leads to a perpetual "Elite" class of cards regardless of commonality.
Finding how to enjoy the format(s) with the budget you have is part of the challenge. Sounds to me like you've solved that at least partially.
Yes, I see the NM quality. Am surprised they even have the oldest version of the card, not the reprint.
My apologies about the time: Urza block was started in 1998, and and miscalculated. Still, dickering about two years when we have at least a decade and a half in the sun warrants some staying power of the card. Has nothing that good been printed in a dozen+ years? If so, why aren't those cards climbing tournaments as easily as the fey?
Paul, you seem like a spot of brilliant reason. Thanks for your critical insights.
Yes, I am frustrated that more local players in the south-central PA and MD region don't play physical cards in pauper. I thought it might be because of availability, but you and others have shown me that the cards are available for purchase. I suppose I live in a region devoid of brick-and-mortar stores offering pauper as part of their typical FNM and sponsored tournaments. This is why I went to MTGO in the first place- I don't get out of the house very often, but would attend a weekly pauper gaming event, even if just casual. Without these events in place, despite requests from myself and others interested in the format (who are, by most accounts, younger than myself (I'm 40)), I go online. In some of my first days' worth of matches, I saw a ton of Delvers and Esper combos, which seemed to reinforce my belief that MTGO is full of these archtypes. Yes, I could play them too. Maybe I SHOULD play a Delver or Esper deck as my staple; I'm pretty sure I would win with enough experience. I have a set list of actions I want to see unfold in the combo, and I could be just another "DEsper" bully.
My more important questions are these, I think: Pick any banned card in Pauper. Why was it banned but Cloud of Faeries gets a pass? What triggers needs be happen to warrant ANY kind of banning? How many of those triggers were in place for already-banned cards, and how much sunshine did their card faces see in their prime? Has Cloud of Faeries or other cards that seem to completely define tournament-worthy decks been flipping the same triggers? When an entire pauper deck can be bought for less than an Event ticket, should CoF be about a third of that price? <--- I ask because I don't know; is an investment of even .28 event tickets for a deck a smart or comparable price range? If so, I'm completely too cheap because I bought a fun MTGO homebrew for less than a ticket.
Again, thanks, Paul. You seem intelligent and respectful, which is in too short of supply these days in general.
Wouldn't a truly imaginative mind find a way to beat Cloud of Faeries? This seems if you pardon my saying so more of a pet peave you have than an actual objection.
I understand your point, but I wonder how much of it is personal salt from finding the format frustrating and how much is actual well thought out analysis.
My own experience with pauper is it is many things to many people. If you are finding it too hard, perhaps switch whom you play with or seek out the ways to improve your game so that cards like Cloud of Faeries do not hinder your fun.
That said, there is also nothing stopping you from making up your own rules with the people you play with: No cards from Before Invasion as a rule eliminates a few troublesome cards, for example.
Event Horizon Games in Raleigh has them for 89 cents each.
http://eventhorizongames.crystalcommerce.com/products/search?q=Cloud+of+...
Also, Urza's Legacy was released in 1999. That's only SIXTEEN years ago, not EIGHTEEN.
You probably play with a full playset of these named cards.
Are you suggesting that Pauper be ONLY an online format? It seems to me that your disdain of the printed copies means you prefer to play online over in-person play with physical, not proxied, cards.
Yes, I know I'm free to play Standard pauper among friends in persona nd online. Standard Pauper isn't my threat, nor the threat to the longevity of the format.
As it stands, Pauper masquerades as an easy format to enter, but it's not meeting the needs of newer, younger players, with cards still in use that may be older than some players. Pauper is not evolving, many people either love (read: they play with 'em) or hate (read: don't have access to 'em to even try). If an opponent announces they play Delver of Esper combos, I bet a lot of players concede with their homebrewed decks that won't stand a competitive, albeit fun, chance.
What does it take to ban Treasure Cruise, or Grapeshot? These cards have a following that suggest banning them inn play. Why is Cloud of Faeries SO important to keep after EIGHTEEN years of use? I contend the death of Cloud of Faeries also suggests the death of cheap netdecking and unimaginative minds. This is the biggest block to overcome- tradition as a rule without growing to adapt play to newer markets and players.
What else from pre-Modern era would suffer from restrictions, if not flat-out banning? If one card is the sword on which Pauper wants to die, that is sad. I chose to target the easy and access to cards for competitive play, and find that pre-Modern ear cards provide a stumbling block.
If my test to find the cards in my area is too limited, where's your result? Please provide the names and contact information of brick-and-mortar stores who sell mint or near mint copies of pre-Modern cards; get bonus points by sharing their pricing information. You can't easily dismiss my premise without following up with your own research to prove me wrong.
Again, the card is 18 years old. Professional athletes retire after about two decades- let the faeries retire, too, and create a much needed opening in competitive decks. Else, I'll just buy my own online playset of faeries and play in competition-sanctioned tournaments...oh, wait...
You suggest that we would have a very limited card pool from which to draw if pre-Modern were banned. What else, aside from CoF, would be dented in this push? Seriously, if Standard Pauper has a following with a card pool of about a year's supply of common cards, I think we could unceremoniously dump whatever (specific cards, please) pre-Modern era cards brought to play.
Plus, there's a different aesthetic of older cards that are incongruent with new card designs and printings. Saying, "Pick any common card from whenever" actually suggests that the card pool is already too limited, and we NEED twenty-year old cards to play a competitive match. Is that what the Pauper format stands for- antiquity and broken design JUST because it's a common card? Grapeshot feels sad...