As and when Shapeshifter loses unhallowed and loses its eligibility under the current rules. We are agreed on Shapeshifter not being valid for Underdog being A Bad Thing, at least as long as <3 decks are considered Shapeshifter.
Just finished watching. That black deck was very meh, while the green one was strange, in that it could have either ended its course in Round 1 (that concession was baffling, I didn't see you well at that point) or deserved at least the final (that game 3 mulligan was definitely unfortunate, and the game ended up being still somehow close). It didn't look that efficient, though. Lot of high-costing stuff that in the end was just vanilla (guess the ugly Slivers cursed you). The Horde is good, too bad you never got to have it on the battlefield.
You're definitely overestimating Advocate of the Beast. I kept hoping you would sideboard that out every time, because to me that was a wasted slot, but you never did. :) (Then again, you didn't draw into it much.) You had a grand total of TWO Beasts in your deck, one of which was already a top-of-the-curve bomb that wouldn't care much for the Advocate's boost. In fact, there are a grand total of just four Beasts in the whole set, one of which at rare, so I wouldn't recommend picking the Advocate unless you already have multiple Kalonian Tuskers, that IMO is the only one that really wants to be followed up by an Advocate.
I hear you about the need to change scenery every so often if you draft a lot like you do. Even great formats become stale after dozens and dozens of drafts, and even so-so formats can provide a fresh approach.
Too bad you didn't get to show a lot of MME, if I'm not mistaken. I've a feeling that Theros will be great, anyway.
Is there any returning classic draft format announced as coming back soon?
To be honest, M14 drafts in general have been so-so to me. They're not as fun as some recent formats, like MMA, RTR or ISD - but hey, they're drafts! You're talking to someone who enjoyed even Mercadian Masques limited, for crying outloud! :P
I do agree that there seems to be more chaff than usual in M14, and I also think the overall power level is a bit lower than previous years. But I guess I have historically liked Core Set drafting more than the average player, either way. Part of it is my aforementioned love of any draft format they throw my way, but I guess I also appreciate the change to a lower complexity point once a year.
The first one, I don't see why should be allowed. The second one, already is. It's a Brushwagg deck for the client, a Shapeshifter deck for Tribal Apocalypse statistics/awards. (It might be worth noting that you can replace one of those Changeling with Mistform Ultimus, which isn't a Shapeshifter, and the deck will still be a. legal, b. a Shapeshifter deck. The fact that the Changeling ability mostly appears on Shapeshifter creatures is a flavor choice of WotC, and we might see a batch of Illusion creatures with Changeling in the future - or any other tribe, including an entirely new one, they'll see fit to give Changeling to if they'll ever want to revisit that ability).
"blocking decks which consist of nonchangeling shapeshifters"
But why should we want to do that?
Going to watch the mono-colored goodness (and finally you gave us drafts where you didn't triumph! I was wondering if you always won! :P)
But first, I want to ask you an opinion about M14 drafts. Pete Jahn talked here about his dislike for the format, especially when compared to Modern Masters, and I can totally see his point. You seem to like M14 more? How so? What M14 does for you? :)
EDIT: And thanks for the shout-out! You're probably one of the few around here that could pronounce my name correctly, in virtue of Portuguese sounding very similar to Genoese. :)
I like the 'popularity ranking' idea: One way around the dividing line issue is to have it be _at least_ the 100 least popular tribes, and lump in everything as unpopular as the 100th. The 100th tribe sets the threshold, everything at that threshold is allowed.
As to the shapeshifter idea, a legal deck with 16 shapeshifters maximum needs to have another card which isn't a shapeshifter to bring it up to the full 20, and requires that there are changelings enough to bring the deck up to legality. This allows people to play with Pest, Bushwragg and Dreadnought decks whilst blocking decks which consist of nonchangeling shapeshifters. It's a bit of a kludge, though. It may be simpler to have Shapeshifters be an always-legal option regardless of the criteria.
CUMULATIVE ANSWER (sorry, was busy in the past few days)
AJ: Fixed the Yeti/Zubera problem (was about fishing for data on another sheet - the Creature Type Database - but not fishing deep enough).
Illusion issue: Settled, they're powerful enough, welcome to the Major League (I still think people will not play them in events where they can just play Merfolk, but oh well).
AJ and others: Yeah, only 7 tribes are at risk of leaving Underdog events. But the fact is that I care about those 7 tribes being in Underdog events. Nobody would seriously think of playing stuff like Ogre or Drake elsewhere (they hardly play them in Underdog!). The idea that they still could is a false solution: they do now, they always could, they rarely did. In fact, there's more to the issue: the entire switch from Endangered to Underdog happened (in my mind, and I'm the one who conceived it) EXACTLY because of those 7 tribes (but Beast) not being allowed in Endangered. The day those 7 would become Major League, the whole purpose of the Unhallowed List as it is now would become moot.
Unpopular doesn't help with that either, because in order to have one of them win an event, you need to play it more than 3 times for sure. Also, trying to have them win an event, like I'm doing for Insect, makes for a nice challenge, and shouldn't result in a "punishment" for the tribe. To fully appreciate their situation, one should consider two things:
1. Underdog has them in it so far, and is balanced, and certainly not unbalanced by their presence. Then what's the need to change it?
2. Endangered contains a lot of tribes that are inherently stronger than those 6-7 (give or take Beast, but there's stuff stronger than Beast as well). Doesn't make a lot of sense for the Underdog concept (which is exactly as it's been defined in this discussion) to exclude a tribe that won an event because of a focused, painstaking attempt, while keeping tribes that won multiple events effortless and regularly end X-1 or better.
Of the proposed solutions, I like slug's "close access to the Major League". If we concede that Illusion belongs there, then possibly that's it, and all the others should keep being playable in Underdog forever. Unhallowed would need a new definition, and would essentially only amount to the notorious 6-7.
Rex's solution of resetting the value next year is also good, but it would require some pondering. If we just raise the threshold to 3 wins, then we suddenly bring back things we're glad they're not allowed anymore, like Druid and Soldier (of course we could just ban those, but that's less elegant).
I could make a case for Beast to stay in Underdog, because while it's a noble tribe, and a win for it is more than overdue by now, we can see how is one of the Top 8 most popular tribes, and it still has to won. (It's more popular than Cat and Wall, that both won 8 times!) That tells me that its presence in Underdog isn't causing any concern to anyone, so far.
Unpopular: A simple solution here is to stop using a threshold, replacing it with a position on the ranking. Like, Unpopular = the last 100 positions in the popularity ranking (currently that includes tribes up to 6 appearances). This way, no matter how the appearances keep piling up, there will always be 100 Unpopular tribes. (The separation point may be a bit awkward, since it might fall in the middle of a group of tribes with the same number of appearances, granting access to the ones that come last alphabetically).
AJ: "I'd suggest we have the exception be "No 'shapeshifter' tribal can have more than sixteen shapeshifters." Mmm, I'm lost here. Was one of those "shapeshifter" meant to be "creature with Changeling"?
Other topics entirely:
Rex: The "Fool King" remark was one of the good-natured jokes I was talking about. Hope it wasn't offensive. I wouldn't have said that if it involved a new player I didn't know. (Plus, you're a lawyer, so being insulted is occupational hazard :P). Given that doing well on a budget DOES constitute a merit, but doing well with expensive cards does NOT constitute a demerit, I might end up cutting the second ranking entirely and never mention it again.
Rex: "the cookie-cutter reanimation package" might be stale, but using it in conjunction with a fattie tribe you don't see often (like Insect, which I'll do) is still mildly interesting, because at that point it's not about the reanimation shell anymore, it's about evaluating the performance of those fatties. One could have chosen a safer fattie tribe, but by choosing a lesser one, they're saying that they care about playing with that particular tribe more than they care about winning with the reanimation package, or they would try and maximize its effectiveness. Meeting a turn-2/turn-3 fattie is part of the meta; if your deck can't deal with turn-2 Iona, that's excusable; if it can't deal with turn-2 Giant Adephage, you're either playing a risky deck yourself, and you get punished by such a match-up as it's in the nature of things, or you need to go back to the drawing board.
Hi, I can't see the videos I embedded in this article - can anyone verify or is this just my browser acting up? If not, the videos should be available here on my Youtube channel.
Ah, that makes sense now.
BTW The promos are reversed, Sliver is for Store purchases and Door is for playing events (and it was paper MOR prerelease promo)
I'm surprised Fiendslayer isn't maindeck. Seems like a real house for many popular decks. Also is purify the grave really worth a slot? Wouldn't Rest in Peace just be better?
Ahhh ok ok thanks for clarifying. In that case if only 7 more tribes could make to the "Major League" it might not be that problematic, well maybe for some of these tribes when it comes to fighting with humans, goblins and what not but there will still be a good amount of Underdog tribes to chose from.
This changes things since before I thought changes should be made but now I don't, since the changes will probably make things more complicated for the players and much more for Kuma, vantar, Rex or whoever keeps track of the statistics and data, sorry dont really know who does it exactly XDD.
" There's also the combination of any random fattie tribe with the cookie-cutter reanimation package, which has grown rather stale, but again the results show it isn't overwhelming the field and isn't particuarly expensive either (the tribal creatures might actually be more pricey in that deck.)"
Hey now I was making cookies with those spells/creatures long before cookie cutters were invented :p
I was thinking about giving a similar deck to this a spin, seems like good fun. A bit of hard luck in some of those matches though.
23 lands does seem quite a lot for a deck that has a top end of 3. Also, I can't help but feel that Knight of Glory and Boros Elite don't have a lot of synergy together. Certainly seems like there's room for some tweaks and changes in the list.
Basically, there are three criteria for Underdog legality. Any tribe that does not meet any of these criteria is 'Major League'.
Firstly, 'Endangered'. Any tribe with less than fifty separate members.
Secondly, 'Unpopular'. Any tribe that has been played less than four times in the Blippian era.
Thirdly, 'Unhallowed'. Any tribe that has not won in the Blippian era.
A tribe can be played in the event if it meets any one of those criteria. If a tribe which is not endangered and not unpopular wins the event, it becomes 'major league', since by winning it is no longer 'unhallowed'.
If a tribe is Endangered, Unpopular and Unhallowed (A 'true underdog meeting all three criteria) and wins the event, it will still be playable next time but will just be Endangered and Unpopular (Or just endangered if that was its fourth appearance at the event).
As it stands, there are seven Unhallowed tribes which are not Endangered, and of those two which are still unpopular. If one of those seven wins an event, it becomes major league. (Unless it is still unpopular.)
I don't believe it is worth our while changing the rules for those seven tribes. If they win and thus get major league status, that's fine. If they don't they're still playable in the event.
"But why should we want to do that?"
As and when Shapeshifter loses unhallowed and loses its eligibility under the current rules. We are agreed on Shapeshifter not being valid for Underdog being A Bad Thing, at least as long as <3 decks are considered Shapeshifter.
Just finished watching. That black deck was very meh, while the green one was strange, in that it could have either ended its course in Round 1 (that concession was baffling, I didn't see you well at that point) or deserved at least the final (that game 3 mulligan was definitely unfortunate, and the game ended up being still somehow close). It didn't look that efficient, though. Lot of high-costing stuff that in the end was just vanilla (guess the ugly Slivers cursed you). The Horde is good, too bad you never got to have it on the battlefield.
You're definitely overestimating Advocate of the Beast. I kept hoping you would sideboard that out every time, because to me that was a wasted slot, but you never did. :) (Then again, you didn't draw into it much.) You had a grand total of TWO Beasts in your deck, one of which was already a top-of-the-curve bomb that wouldn't care much for the Advocate's boost. In fact, there are a grand total of just four Beasts in the whole set, one of which at rare, so I wouldn't recommend picking the Advocate unless you already have multiple Kalonian Tuskers, that IMO is the only one that really wants to be followed up by an Advocate.
I hear you about the need to change scenery every so often if you draft a lot like you do. Even great formats become stale after dozens and dozens of drafts, and even so-so formats can provide a fresh approach.
Too bad you didn't get to show a lot of MME, if I'm not mistaken. I've a feeling that Theros will be great, anyway.
Is there any returning classic draft format announced as coming back soon?
To be honest, M14 drafts in general have been so-so to me. They're not as fun as some recent formats, like MMA, RTR or ISD - but hey, they're drafts! You're talking to someone who enjoyed even Mercadian Masques limited, for crying outloud! :P
I do agree that there seems to be more chaff than usual in M14, and I also think the overall power level is a bit lower than previous years. But I guess I have historically liked Core Set drafting more than the average player, either way. Part of it is my aforementioned love of any draft format they throw my way, but I guess I also appreciate the change to a lower complexity point once a year.
Maybe I'm slow, but I'm still lost. I don't understand if you want to allow for this deck:
4 Clone
4 Vesuvan Doppelganger
4 Morphling
4 Duplicant
4 Brushwagg
or this deck:
4 Chameleon Colossus
4 Taurean Mauler
4 Mirror Entity
4 Woodland Changeling
4 Brushwagg
The first one, I don't see why should be allowed. The second one, already is. It's a Brushwagg deck for the client, a Shapeshifter deck for Tribal Apocalypse statistics/awards. (It might be worth noting that you can replace one of those Changeling with Mistform Ultimus, which isn't a Shapeshifter, and the deck will still be a. legal, b. a Shapeshifter deck. The fact that the Changeling ability mostly appears on Shapeshifter creatures is a flavor choice of WotC, and we might see a batch of Illusion creatures with Changeling in the future - or any other tribe, including an entirely new one, they'll see fit to give Changeling to if they'll ever want to revisit that ability).
"blocking decks which consist of nonchangeling shapeshifters"
But why should we want to do that?
Going to watch the mono-colored goodness (and finally you gave us drafts where you didn't triumph! I was wondering if you always won! :P)
But first, I want to ask you an opinion about M14 drafts. Pete Jahn talked here about his dislike for the format, especially when compared to Modern Masters, and I can totally see his point. You seem to like M14 more? How so? What M14 does for you? :)
EDIT: And thanks for the shout-out! You're probably one of the few around here that could pronounce my name correctly, in virtue of Portuguese sounding very similar to Genoese. :)
These cards are really good. I like the idea on this. Keep it up. - Integrity Spas
I want to master this game. It is really exciting. - Integrity Spas
I want to master all these cards. I think they are interesting. Keep it up. - Integrity Spas
I like the 'popularity ranking' idea: One way around the dividing line issue is to have it be _at least_ the 100 least popular tribes, and lump in everything as unpopular as the 100th. The 100th tribe sets the threshold, everything at that threshold is allowed.
As to the shapeshifter idea, a legal deck with 16 shapeshifters maximum needs to have another card which isn't a shapeshifter to bring it up to the full 20, and requires that there are changelings enough to bring the deck up to legality. This allows people to play with Pest, Bushwragg and Dreadnought decks whilst blocking decks which consist of nonchangeling shapeshifters. It's a bit of a kludge, though. It may be simpler to have Shapeshifters be an always-legal option regardless of the criteria.
CUMULATIVE ANSWER (sorry, was busy in the past few days)
AJ: Fixed the Yeti/Zubera problem (was about fishing for data on another sheet - the Creature Type Database - but not fishing deep enough).
Illusion issue: Settled, they're powerful enough, welcome to the Major League (I still think people will not play them in events where they can just play Merfolk, but oh well).
AJ and others: Yeah, only 7 tribes are at risk of leaving Underdog events. But the fact is that I care about those 7 tribes being in Underdog events. Nobody would seriously think of playing stuff like Ogre or Drake elsewhere (they hardly play them in Underdog!). The idea that they still could is a false solution: they do now, they always could, they rarely did. In fact, there's more to the issue: the entire switch from Endangered to Underdog happened (in my mind, and I'm the one who conceived it) EXACTLY because of those 7 tribes (but Beast) not being allowed in Endangered. The day those 7 would become Major League, the whole purpose of the Unhallowed List as it is now would become moot.
Unpopular doesn't help with that either, because in order to have one of them win an event, you need to play it more than 3 times for sure. Also, trying to have them win an event, like I'm doing for Insect, makes for a nice challenge, and shouldn't result in a "punishment" for the tribe. To fully appreciate their situation, one should consider two things:
1. Underdog has them in it so far, and is balanced, and certainly not unbalanced by their presence. Then what's the need to change it?
2. Endangered contains a lot of tribes that are inherently stronger than those 6-7 (give or take Beast, but there's stuff stronger than Beast as well). Doesn't make a lot of sense for the Underdog concept (which is exactly as it's been defined in this discussion) to exclude a tribe that won an event because of a focused, painstaking attempt, while keeping tribes that won multiple events effortless and regularly end X-1 or better.
Of the proposed solutions, I like slug's "close access to the Major League". If we concede that Illusion belongs there, then possibly that's it, and all the others should keep being playable in Underdog forever. Unhallowed would need a new definition, and would essentially only amount to the notorious 6-7.
Rex's solution of resetting the value next year is also good, but it would require some pondering. If we just raise the threshold to 3 wins, then we suddenly bring back things we're glad they're not allowed anymore, like Druid and Soldier (of course we could just ban those, but that's less elegant).
I could make a case for Beast to stay in Underdog, because while it's a noble tribe, and a win for it is more than overdue by now, we can see how is one of the Top 8 most popular tribes, and it still has to won. (It's more popular than Cat and Wall, that both won 8 times!) That tells me that its presence in Underdog isn't causing any concern to anyone, so far.
Unpopular: A simple solution here is to stop using a threshold, replacing it with a position on the ranking. Like, Unpopular = the last 100 positions in the popularity ranking (currently that includes tribes up to 6 appearances). This way, no matter how the appearances keep piling up, there will always be 100 Unpopular tribes. (The separation point may be a bit awkward, since it might fall in the middle of a group of tribes with the same number of appearances, granting access to the ones that come last alphabetically).
AJ: "I'd suggest we have the exception be "No 'shapeshifter' tribal can have more than sixteen shapeshifters." Mmm, I'm lost here. Was one of those "shapeshifter" meant to be "creature with Changeling"?
Other topics entirely:
Rex: The "Fool King" remark was one of the good-natured jokes I was talking about. Hope it wasn't offensive. I wouldn't have said that if it involved a new player I didn't know. (Plus, you're a lawyer, so being insulted is occupational hazard :P). Given that doing well on a budget DOES constitute a merit, but doing well with expensive cards does NOT constitute a demerit, I might end up cutting the second ranking entirely and never mention it again.
Rex: "the cookie-cutter reanimation package" might be stale, but using it in conjunction with a fattie tribe you don't see often (like Insect, which I'll do) is still mildly interesting, because at that point it's not about the reanimation shell anymore, it's about evaluating the performance of those fatties. One could have chosen a safer fattie tribe, but by choosing a lesser one, they're saying that they care about playing with that particular tribe more than they care about winning with the reanimation package, or they would try and maximize its effectiveness. Meeting a turn-2/turn-3 fattie is part of the meta; if your deck can't deal with turn-2 Iona, that's excusable; if it can't deal with turn-2 Giant Adephage, you're either playing a risky deck yourself, and you get punished by such a match-up as it's in the nature of things, or you need to go back to the drawing board.
Hey, I see them now. Not sure what changed, but they're up, makes me happy! Thank you.
How about now, I can still see the videos, but can anyone else see them?
I see them, but I'll take it down and make sure it's not just my browser :D
Hi, I can't see the videos I embedded in this article - can anyone verify or is this just my browser acting up? If not, the videos should be available here on my Youtube channel.
Here is the drafting one. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TQ7c7pWpwo
Ah, that makes sense now.
BTW The promos are reversed, Sliver is for Store purchases and Door is for playing events (and it was paper MOR prerelease promo)
Hah! perhaps Seb should have titled it 'First ever MOJO I played in" instead.
Yeah, it always seems to be the way that mere hours after we record a more official source of information comes out.
Thanks!
First ever MOJO? Oh, c'mon, google doesn't bite. It was 7th one:
http://wiki.magicjudges.org/en/w/MOJO
Super duper early Theros Spoilers, this is the proper link:
https://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/261
I am not sure yet, I've not played with this version, I just noticed it while doing my daily deck research!
I'm surprised Fiendslayer isn't maindeck. Seems like a real house for many popular decks. Also is purify the grave really worth a slot? Wouldn't Rest in Peace just be better?
Here is a different mono white list that went 3-1 yesterday (8-19-2013)
4 Mutavault
17 Plains
4 Azorius Arrester
4 Banisher Priest
4 Boros Elite
4 Champion of the Parish
1 Dryad Militant
4 Frontline Medic
4 Imposing Sovereign
4 Precinct Captain
4 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
4 Brave the Elements
2 Oblivion Ring
Sideboard
3 Celestial Flare
3 Dryad Militant
3 Fiendslayer Paladin
1 Gideon, Champion of Justice
1 Immortal Servitude
2 Purify the Grave
2 Renounce the Guilds
Knight has actually be better than I expected thanks to the rise of lifebane zombie, I feel elite is there because it's another human to be cast.
Ahhh ok ok thanks for clarifying. In that case if only 7 more tribes could make to the "Major League" it might not be that problematic, well maybe for some of these tribes when it comes to fighting with humans, goblins and what not but there will still be a good amount of Underdog tribes to chose from.
This changes things since before I thought changes should be made but now I don't, since the changes will probably make things more complicated for the players and much more for Kuma, vantar, Rex or whoever keeps track of the statistics and data, sorry dont really know who does it exactly XDD.
" There's also the combination of any random fattie tribe with the cookie-cutter reanimation package, which has grown rather stale, but again the results show it isn't overwhelming the field and isn't particuarly expensive either (the tribal creatures might actually be more pricey in that deck.)"
Hey now I was making cookies with those spells/creatures long before cookie cutters were invented :p
I was thinking about giving a similar deck to this a spin, seems like good fun. A bit of hard luck in some of those matches though.
23 lands does seem quite a lot for a deck that has a top end of 3. Also, I can't help but feel that Knight of Glory and Boros Elite don't have a lot of synergy together. Certainly seems like there's room for some tweaks and changes in the list.
Basically, there are three criteria for Underdog legality. Any tribe that does not meet any of these criteria is 'Major League'.
Firstly, 'Endangered'. Any tribe with less than fifty separate members.
Secondly, 'Unpopular'. Any tribe that has been played less than four times in the Blippian era.
Thirdly, 'Unhallowed'. Any tribe that has not won in the Blippian era.
A tribe can be played in the event if it meets any one of those criteria. If a tribe which is not endangered and not unpopular wins the event, it becomes 'major league', since by winning it is no longer 'unhallowed'.
If a tribe is Endangered, Unpopular and Unhallowed (A 'true underdog meeting all three criteria) and wins the event, it will still be playable next time but will just be Endangered and Unpopular (Or just endangered if that was its fourth appearance at the event).
As it stands, there are seven Unhallowed tribes which are not Endangered, and of those two which are still unpopular. If one of those seven wins an event, it becomes major league. (Unless it is still unpopular.)
I don't believe it is worth our while changing the rules for those seven tribes. If they win and thus get major league status, that's fine. If they don't they're still playable in the event.