Yeah, i'm super disappointed that we're losing that info. I've heard that there'll be some sort of replacement deck reporting based on the 8-person queues but no idea how that'll work out.
If there isn't anything, I'm planning on running a weekly deck submission contest of some sort. More details next week if that ends up being necessary.
ashen rider is hilarious. I played that list a bit last night, it's so awesome if you can cast it and it's more reasonable than you would think to do so.
So you know, your segment on this subject may not have been just a rant. They have listened to the community in this matter, at least in as much as they are going to try and fix the problem.
I am not certain I'd be as optimistic as Worth about year's end but hey we can hope.
I'm interested in how you will handle the metagame analysis now with no DE's.
As for the deck, the second option is most similar to the deck I am going to follow for my series, but tonight was the first night I could actually do a full daily so I am unsure of where to go. As for Ashen Rider: I put in a singleton to start and every time I played it it was a royal beating so I went up to 3 (2 main, 1 side). It works wonders against mono black and is pretty strong against GR as well. I also added the burnished hart to my main though I go 3 hart 2 amulet. The card that may be surprising that I moved to the sideboard was lightning strike - everything I could kill with it of relevance was killed by magma jet and I was often overloaded on removal (I still had Anger main, though that has changed since I last tested).
I like the idea behind Echoing Decay, it just came up to be useful very rarely. I like the idea of bounce, especially the good bounce in the format, and it's worth testing in the 3 cards that I am not sure of slot (The two arrows and doom blade) spot.
You mentioned bounce spells to replace Echoing Decay, I'd suggest Repeal or Repulse. They don't leave you down a card and even let you cycle through your deck faster, bounce a flipped Delver for U mana, etc. Also nutso with Excludes in the deck to bounce a dude and Exclude it on the way back down. Memory Lapse is a decent option for your deck too with the mill theme, which means for cantrips you can actually run Thought Scours as well. Lets you leave up counter mana, then cantrip EOT which is very nice for permission decks.
Furthermore, you can ponder and find like 1 card you need but the other 2 are junk, then draw the good card and Thought Scour the other two. I've been toying with these ideas in my own tempo decks and I think they might just be better in dedicated control decks rather than tempo decks.
Why not swap the dimir guildgates for the dimir bouncelands? each one adds 1.5 of a land to your deck. 21 lands with 4 of those would feel like 23 lands.
I wonder whether there really is a huge untapped income from older players? It's difficult to judge from our perspective. What I know from involvement in clubs is that yearly wastage is a high percentage, and you constantly need new recruits to make up numbers. My perception is that mtgo follows that pattern. So to pluck a figure out of thin air of 10% of mtgo players are in the untapped category, it clearly pays Hasbro to focus on the 90% of players with lots of disposable free time.
There's also the increasing problem of mtgo integrity. A mocs failed over the weekend, not the first major tournament to crash either. The beta client is junk. There's a lot of complacency and lack of expert influence in the management of mtgo today. It seems like a bad time to be developing new features when the basics are not being attended to.
Hi! Starting from today, we're running the tournament on Gatherling.com, so you'll find the registration there during the week and until the starting time.
Nobody ever played a Hermit Druid deck to my knowledge, possibly simply due to nobody in the meta thinking of it. But it's also possible that 4-man tables make it harder to pull it off than in 1v1. Several other combo decks have been successful, anyway.
Hope to see you there next week!
All I'm saying is I'm glad for Momir. $10 for all the fun in short bursts I could ever ask for playing MTGO is a great deal. Building a bankroll during the meantime is just a bonus. :)
Back at the first COmmunity Cup where we discussed with Chris the move to 50 minute rounds, and I suggested (and I can't remember if it was you, Alex and/or Erik who agreed) that you could even get away with 40 minutes - possibly only in eternal formats?
Well, no one complains about 50 anymore. Perhaps a shot at 40 minutes for DEs only would be a good start.
Wow, I didn't know you also run a Commander tournament. I prefer duels over multiplayer, but this is great. How do I join this? For some reason, the register link in the Google docs page is not working for me.
Also, I am curious. Has anyone ever tried running a Hermit Druid combo deck? I was looking at the Hall of Fame, and I didn't see any Scion of the Ur-Dragon, or any other general that hints Hermit druid. I ask because this would be the first deck I would think of for this kind of tournament, and I find it odd that no Hermit Druid deck has won it yet. Is the hate so intense that combo decks get destroyed early?
Counterpoint: There are now, and there will be more over the course of Theros, enchantment tribes.
Your idea of banning combos, not cards, seems nice. A problem with this approach is that it's hard to come up with a list of offenders that's not subjective. Everyone has a different take on a format, much more with something like Legacy Tribal Wars, where you can approach the format from a lot of different directions. Who am I to say, "This is the correct way to play"? There's not such a thing. There's not a "spirit of the format", because when someone attempts to definite it, it invariably becomes "the spirit of the format according to me". Everyone is welcome to champion their own "spirit of the format", within rules flexible enough to allow them to.
What I aim to do here is to allow for any and all kinds of decks that are legal under the Legacy Tribal Wars filter to be playable at least once per month. Every deck. This is why I fight to keep the fixed ban list to a minimum. Because there are events where you don't even realize it, but our ban list equals to a couple thousands cards.
And I will also keep enforcing this principle of banning: you ban only when there's a problem. You don't ban because there might be. That's why you don't ban Doomsday until a player with a Doomsday deck shows up every other week (which I firmly believe will never happen, but once it happens, it'll be dealt with like we dealt with with Glimpse of Nature and Thopter Foundry). There are other builds where the tribe is irrelevant. None of those show up more than, I dare to say, once per year. So they are, in turn, irrelevant.
Man, I'm sorry, I don't know what happened with your video during the upload! I watched him locally and was fine. Maybe YouTube cut it and I didn't realize it? I'll try and have it re-uploaded.
I am in same boat, money to spend, not enough time to commit to a draft unless my wife and kids decide to do something without me. Draft leagues sound like a great idea, an hour is pretty easy to carve out.
Yeah, i'm super disappointed that we're losing that info. I've heard that there'll be some sort of replacement deck reporting based on the 8-person queues but no idea how that'll work out.
If there isn't anything, I'm planning on running a weekly deck submission contest of some sort. More details next week if that ends up being necessary.
ashen rider is hilarious. I played that list a bit last night, it's so awesome if you can cast it and it's more reasonable than you would think to do so.
http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/273
So you know, your segment on this subject may not have been just a rant. They have listened to the community in this matter, at least in as much as they are going to try and fix the problem.
I am not certain I'd be as optimistic as Worth about year's end but hey we can hope.
I'm interested in how you will handle the metagame analysis now with no DE's.
As for the deck, the second option is most similar to the deck I am going to follow for my series, but tonight was the first night I could actually do a full daily so I am unsure of where to go. As for Ashen Rider: I put in a singleton to start and every time I played it it was a royal beating so I went up to 3 (2 main, 1 side). It works wonders against mono black and is pretty strong against GR as well. I also added the burnished hart to my main though I go 3 hart 2 amulet. The card that may be surprising that I moved to the sideboard was lightning strike - everything I could kill with it of relevance was killed by magma jet and I was often overloaded on removal (I still had Anger main, though that has changed since I last tested).
They are very good at it, I appreciate the ones that attempt to make it sound like they went over the article.
I know, right? Especially year old articles! XD
Oh, and we know, JXClaytor. :P At least someone does actually moderate the spam here. I know plenty of places that wouldn't give a crap.
I try to take care of them as soon as possible, but I do sleep:(
I feel like I've made the "big time" if I'm worth spamming! :)
I like the idea behind Echoing Decay, it just came up to be useful very rarely. I like the idea of bounce, especially the good bounce in the format, and it's worth testing in the 3 cards that I am not sure of slot (The two arrows and doom blade) spot.
You mentioned bounce spells to replace Echoing Decay, I'd suggest Repeal or Repulse. They don't leave you down a card and even let you cycle through your deck faster, bounce a flipped Delver for U mana, etc. Also nutso with Excludes in the deck to bounce a dude and Exclude it on the way back down. Memory Lapse is a decent option for your deck too with the mill theme, which means for cantrips you can actually run Thought Scours as well. Lets you leave up counter mana, then cantrip EOT which is very nice for permission decks.
Furthermore, you can ponder and find like 1 card you need but the other 2 are junk, then draw the good card and Thought Scour the other two. I've been toying with these ideas in my own tempo decks and I think they might just be better in dedicated control decks rather than tempo decks.
Since you were gone, things haven't been the same man. Now that you're back everything can finally go back to normal. :)
That is an idea worth testing. Thank you!
Edit: Though sometimes it really is nice to have UU or UB on turn two, I can see this being useful with proper resource management
Why not swap the dimir guildgates for the dimir bouncelands? each one adds 1.5 of a land to your deck. 21 lands with 4 of those would feel like 23 lands.
Welcome back! We have missed you!
I wonder whether there really is a huge untapped income from older players? It's difficult to judge from our perspective. What I know from involvement in clubs is that yearly wastage is a high percentage, and you constantly need new recruits to make up numbers. My perception is that mtgo follows that pattern. So to pluck a figure out of thin air of 10% of mtgo players are in the untapped category, it clearly pays Hasbro to focus on the 90% of players with lots of disposable free time.
There's also the increasing problem of mtgo integrity. A mocs failed over the weekend, not the first major tournament to crash either. The beta client is junk. There's a lot of complacency and lack of expert influence in the management of mtgo today. It seems like a bad time to be developing new features when the basics are not being attended to.
Man I wish the new commander decks were available on MTGO...
Hi! Starting from today, we're running the tournament on Gatherling.com, so you'll find the registration there during the week and until the starting time.
Nobody ever played a Hermit Druid deck to my knowledge, possibly simply due to nobody in the meta thinking of it. But it's also possible that 4-man tables make it harder to pull it off than in 1v1. Several other combo decks have been successful, anyway.
Hope to see you there next week!
All I'm saying is I'm glad for Momir. $10 for all the fun in short bursts I could ever ask for playing MTGO is a great deal. Building a bankroll during the meantime is just a bonus. :)
Back at the first COmmunity Cup where we discussed with Chris the move to 50 minute rounds, and I suggested (and I can't remember if it was you, Alex and/or Erik who agreed) that you could even get away with 40 minutes - possibly only in eternal formats?
Well, no one complains about 50 anymore. Perhaps a shot at 40 minutes for DEs only would be a good start.
I can agree with you on the decks worst ten cards. It may not have the staying power, but it sure has been fun to play!
Wow, I didn't know you also run a Commander tournament. I prefer duels over multiplayer, but this is great. How do I join this? For some reason, the register link in the Google docs page is not working for me.
Also, I am curious. Has anyone ever tried running a Hermit Druid combo deck? I was looking at the Hall of Fame, and I didn't see any Scion of the Ur-Dragon, or any other general that hints Hermit druid. I ask because this would be the first deck I would think of for this kind of tournament, and I find it odd that no Hermit Druid deck has won it yet. Is the hate so intense that combo decks get destroyed early?
Thanks!
Counterpoint: There are now, and there will be more over the course of Theros, enchantment tribes.
Your idea of banning combos, not cards, seems nice. A problem with this approach is that it's hard to come up with a list of offenders that's not subjective. Everyone has a different take on a format, much more with something like Legacy Tribal Wars, where you can approach the format from a lot of different directions. Who am I to say, "This is the correct way to play"? There's not such a thing. There's not a "spirit of the format", because when someone attempts to definite it, it invariably becomes "the spirit of the format according to me". Everyone is welcome to champion their own "spirit of the format", within rules flexible enough to allow them to.
What I aim to do here is to allow for any and all kinds of decks that are legal under the Legacy Tribal Wars filter to be playable at least once per month. Every deck. This is why I fight to keep the fixed ban list to a minimum. Because there are events where you don't even realize it, but our ban list equals to a couple thousands cards.
And I will also keep enforcing this principle of banning: you ban only when there's a problem. You don't ban because there might be. That's why you don't ban Doomsday until a player with a Doomsday deck shows up every other week (which I firmly believe will never happen, but once it happens, it'll be dealt with like we dealt with with Glimpse of Nature and Thopter Foundry). There are other builds where the tribe is irrelevant. None of those show up more than, I dare to say, once per year. So they are, in turn, irrelevant.
Man, I'm sorry, I don't know what happened with your video during the upload! I watched him locally and was fine. Maybe YouTube cut it and I didn't realize it? I'll try and have it re-uploaded.
Do you have a YouTube account, by the way?
I am in same boat, money to spend, not enough time to commit to a draft unless my wife and kids decide to do something without me. Draft leagues sound like a great idea, an hour is pretty easy to carve out.
I think it's worth noting that this Wednesday FTV:20 has been withdrawn from MTGO store
Note that Drift of Phantasms can also, perhaps most importantly, tutor up Genesis Wave.