Personally this is something has always gotten on my nerves a little as a user. I don't want to see 5 sections of an article printed separately. Taking too much time and effort to write that many words? Be more concise. Plan the outline better so you don't have to split the article at all. Worried you are going to run out of words because of some mystical/mythical quota? Don't worry they replenish themselves if you just put a little thought into it.
I could go on. I recognize this is a pet peeve so mostly I have stayed quiet on the subject but the submitting 2 articles in a week then expecting multiple paydays and getting upset when it doesn't pan out? Annoying.
And while I recognize that the credits awarded for articles doesn't come close to covering a professional writer's typical fee, this is a free content site. We provide the entertainment ourselves and somehow still get something to show for it. So thanks to Josh and Heath we have a decent flow of articles without it being a total mess and some of us have managed to do quite well collection wise over a long period of time because of that.
fwiw, I have no complaints about the speed of my article publications. They're always published within a couple of days submission (and I'll be a day later than normal submitting this week due to trying to get some more DGM testing in before publishing!).
I think the only issue might be if certain authors try to submit multiple articles per week, I don't think more than one per author is published every week.
The average turn around on articles from my inbox to publication is 2 days. Of course some of those are pushed back due to the weekend, planned content for the site, and certain features that I want to run. I try to group things like new set content together and rush publish those.
I've sadly not heard these complaints, and will always be open to them, I do not have any idea if something is wrong if I do not hear about it, so please email me at joshua.claytorATGmail.com so we can open a line of communication!
To illustrate this, tonight's content is a planned day of stuff, we're going to be featuring writers of MTGO only content, SilverBlack, Pauper, Peasant and an MOCS qualifiers path to the event. Tuesday will be draft day, with looks at triple DGM, Shadowmoor, and the podcast, I try to match content up because I think it will be the most entertaining for the readers!
This is in now way a dig to this article, just that lots of player/writers are complaining about stuff being weeks, even months late after they write it. It seems to be getting worse - is there less admin on that end now?
I'm not going to touch the stats, but I will say that Dimir is the best guild in DGM/DGM/DGM. For one reason: Woodlot Crawler. Holy crap, what a bomb in draft.
I will take the Sealed Pool bait. For what it's worth, I do think that was a pretty deep card pool. Some people at our pre were very unlucky and could barely build a solid 2-3 color deck.
The only certain thing I'd say was that not playing Transguild Promenade was wrong. The pre-release format was relatively slow and you could easily use that to help set up all 3 of your colors. Being able to consistently hit that T3 split of Lyev Skyknight or Firstblade would have been strong.
Now, the mostly opinionated stuff.
If you had to play W/R/U, then I think you should probably have run the Palisade Giant and Protect/?Serve. In this format, the Giant could totally wall out the opponent and would make it a lot easier for your flyers to race. Protect//Serve is a sweet combat trick and if you get to play both sides it might turn into a blow out at the right moment.
If sticking with W/R/U, you could also have added in the the promenade, the simic gate and the selesnya gate to splash in Alive//Well, Ruric and Armed//Dangerous (I'm pretty sure that is hiding down there). All 3 of those cards help win races in a variety of ways. Blaze commando seems sad since you only have 2 cards to activate it with (Mugging and BoG is all I see...)
But that brings me to - you probably should have gone Naya or Jund.
Naya could have been pretty good. You get to run the very flexible two drop of Kraul Warrior, who still can remain relevant in the late game "stompy" fights. You get the Zhur-Taa druid to both ramp and be able to deal damage in a ground stall. Ruric is just a huge chunk of beef and Armed//Dangerous is often going to win you the game (remember that you can target two different creatures with it). Alive//Well also helps you pull ahead so your big guys can get in the last few swings. Splashing for Lyev may not have been out of the question.
Jund may have been best. You get both of your good maze runners (Ruric, Valroz), Putrefy, 2x Gorgon (who is just sweet with Armed//Dangerous) Ubal Sar Gatekeeper as well adds some more removal. The Maze Behemoth's become better when you have those good gold creatures that could be getting Scavenge counters as well. You have the gates (and promenade) to splash in the Firemane Avenger and another white card if you want (probably Alive//Well again).
So yeah, I think Jund/white was the right choice. It just gives you a lot of powerful, must answer cards that could help win out at slower sealed events.
You did have a lot to work with though. I think I see a Far//Away hiding in there to make U/B/W look appealing, and Junk colors may not have been totally out of the question either.
For me the ones I recommended are easier to remember because they were for a long time the best default for commander when discussing color id. "Oh I am building an Oros build or a Teneb build." Not necessarily meaning those particular dragons being used as commanders, just those color groups.
In other news Auto complete sucks. Turn it off. :)
Yeah, people got really focused on the mill deck. I never played a single Paranoid Delusions in any of my Dimir decks. But I did mill a lot of people out. You just wanted to be playing incidental mill, not dedicated mill.
I streamed something like 12 Dimir drafts and put up an insane win record with them. It was definitely a difficult deck to draft, and it required you to make a lot of tough decisions between different kinds of synergies, but it was very powerful for the people who did figure it out.
We could have also used the volvers, or the commanders. You'll notice that I used a mix. That's mostly just because I wanted to pick short names that were easy for me to remember, and that didn't take as much energy to type.
When I do the articles where I watch games and record the results, I use these names to note the deck archetype. I've changed the names around a little bit based on what is easiest for me to type.
For example, I actually don't like Doran/Damia because excel will often autocomplete whichever one I last used. I don't use Vorosh, though, because I always misspell it as Vorsh or Vorohs or Vrosh, which makes it more of a hassle to organize the results. I originally used Teneb, tried Ghave, but settled on Doran just because that is what people tend to use to refer to that wedge, but it's still annoying.
I also really hate "Numot" because it autocompletes to Naya, but I don't like Zedruu because it is hard to spell and has too many letters. I would use Ruhan, but when I did use that, noone knew what I was talking about. People remember Numot a little bit better.
I guess there are just a ton of factors to consider, and I mostly chose the names for ease of typing. I would love it if WotC would make a "wedges of alara" kind of set, so that we could have a standardized nomenclature.
The other options are Ana, Ceta, Dega, etc. But I found that I always got those ones confused :(
shouldn't the Color Wedges be named after the original dragons of those colors (Oros, Intet, Numot, Teneb, and Vorosh) rather than the newer and equally silly commander set names?
Ham on Wry 2 was a blast even if I brought an extremely subpar Pod deck (still went 4-3 with it so I guess it could have been worse ;)) It was interesting to note that the top 8 pretty exactly mirrored the Classic Daily events usual suspect winners, unlike last year when I was a top 8er (though with affinity) and there were plenty of rogue players.
Is "life from the pox" the name that deck owner gave it? I've been calling it Pox Loam. Especially the version I almost ran for Ham On Wry suited out for Classic.
They aren't going to get to the fix until next Wed. Sad times.
This also means that next week I won't be able to get to Political Puppets. Expect the Dragon's Maze Overview instead! (BTW, why are there no dragons in Dragon's Maze? I want more flavor!)
I think the same could be said for any Magic Eternal clan member, many of us are drafting when we are around and not playing in a classic tournament but many of us can field whatever deck you want some practice against.
The classicquarter.com forums is the best place to find a lot of classic players. My bet is if you made a post there and the times you wanted play you would get people. Many classic players are around and available to play games but you might need to pm them. You can msg me and if I am around I would be happy to play some with you.
I built a classic deck for Ham2, and banked hard on there being a lot of budget red decks. I was right about that, but my matchups weren't what I expected overall, underprepared for Dredge and overprepared for artifacts. (And what's with Classic Dredge having so many free slots in their deck? Legacy dredge has maybe a Nature's Claim and a Chain of Vapor to stop your hate card, this guy had like 3 Ingot Chewers and 2 Claims at least.)
Anyhow, I wanted to keep playing with it, but it's nearly impossible to practice or play with "real" classic decks anywhere on MTGO. The "classic" they play in the casual room isn't actually classic, and all week I've found maybe two or three matches in Tourney Practice. Only one of those was even a real deck (reluctantly calling no-land Belcher a real deck, because maybe it is in Classic, and the pilot seemed to know what he was doing, though what the hell he does against Null Rods I haven't the slightest idea.) If nobody plays in Tourney Practice, is there a chat room or something?
Let me ask you this, do you think that there is an aggressive deck to be drafted in an 8 man pod if people decide to draft at least 3 colors? Is forcing a two color deck 100% a bad idea, or is it something that is high risk/high reward? What guild should you be drafting if you decide to throw conventional wisdom out the window?
I realized that I did have a glaring hole in the analysis, since I didn't talk about five color:
To be brief, I think that five color could definitely be a contender for the top deck. The power level is certainly there, and it looks like the format will be slow enough that you can fix your mana. It is certainly a dangerous archetype because the fixing is less powerful in this format than it has been in other multicolor formats.
One of the reasons that I think BUG will be so strong is because it is well positioned to go into five color control. I do think that it will be difficult to build 5 color control decks at the beginning of the format. This is because the exact make up of your deck is very metagame dependent. But I think it will end up being an important archetype in the format.
Great summary, I am also excited to see some life in classic (regardless of my lucky win streak the format is very fun imo). Let's try to fire the classic DE this Saturday, who's in?
Pete I think you played Calavera round 5 not me, he ran a similar deck though...
I understand the problems encountered by drafters when it comes to payouts, but I'm not sure there's a good solution here. If the payout was "balanced", that would make DGM boosters 4 times more rare in the system than RtR or GTC (all things being equal, I'm assuming the number of drafts remain constant throughout the season, and I'm not counting people just buying boosters to open them). Sure, the set is smaller, but it's not four times as small, it's actually 60% of the size of RtR. That would be fine for drafters, but would hurt constructed players immensely with incredibly expensive DGM singles.
So yes, I see your point about low booster prices hurting constructed players, but probably not nearly as much as having too few cards in the system. I really doubt there is a solution: if you want to make sure you have enough cards in the system, and you know payouts are a sizable chunk of these cards, you can't really modify the current system.
On a lighter note, woohoo, early State of the Programme today! Thanks as always!
Wotc put pictures up on Facebook of the new slivers, and someone explained their new look but I can not find the blog post at this time, I do think that the days of slivers effecting both sides are over, and these new slivers are just weird new guys. Also they look kinda phyrexian.
I think Dimir gets a bum rap because it's by my understanding so hard to build properly. When it's done correctly (I've never done it.) it has been tearing me up.
Personally this is something has always gotten on my nerves a little as a user. I don't want to see 5 sections of an article printed separately. Taking too much time and effort to write that many words? Be more concise. Plan the outline better so you don't have to split the article at all. Worried you are going to run out of words because of some mystical/mythical quota? Don't worry they replenish themselves if you just put a little thought into it.
I could go on. I recognize this is a pet peeve so mostly I have stayed quiet on the subject but the submitting 2 articles in a week then expecting multiple paydays and getting upset when it doesn't pan out? Annoying.
And while I recognize that the credits awarded for articles doesn't come close to covering a professional writer's typical fee, this is a free content site. We provide the entertainment ourselves and somehow still get something to show for it. So thanks to Josh and Heath we have a decent flow of articles without it being a total mess and some of us have managed to do quite well collection wise over a long period of time because of that.
fwiw, I have no complaints about the speed of my article publications. They're always published within a couple of days submission (and I'll be a day later than normal submitting this week due to trying to get some more DGM testing in before publishing!).
I think the only issue might be if certain authors try to submit multiple articles per week, I don't think more than one per author is published every week.
The average turn around on articles from my inbox to publication is 2 days. Of course some of those are pushed back due to the weekend, planned content for the site, and certain features that I want to run. I try to group things like new set content together and rush publish those.
I've sadly not heard these complaints, and will always be open to them, I do not have any idea if something is wrong if I do not hear about it, so please email me at joshua.claytorATGmail.com so we can open a line of communication!
To illustrate this, tonight's content is a planned day of stuff, we're going to be featuring writers of MTGO only content, SilverBlack, Pauper, Peasant and an MOCS qualifiers path to the event. Tuesday will be draft day, with looks at triple DGM, Shadowmoor, and the podcast, I try to match content up because I think it will be the most entertaining for the readers!
I believe this is deliberate on the part of Josh and co. Also Josh has had much on his plate of late.
Puremtgo really needs to speed things up...
This is in now way a dig to this article, just that lots of player/writers are complaining about stuff being weeks, even months late after they write it. It seems to be getting worse - is there less admin on that end now?
I'm not going to touch the stats, but I will say that Dimir is the best guild in DGM/DGM/DGM. For one reason: Woodlot Crawler. Holy crap, what a bomb in draft.
I will take the Sealed Pool bait. For what it's worth, I do think that was a pretty deep card pool. Some people at our pre were very unlucky and could barely build a solid 2-3 color deck.
The only certain thing I'd say was that not playing Transguild Promenade was wrong. The pre-release format was relatively slow and you could easily use that to help set up all 3 of your colors. Being able to consistently hit that T3 split of Lyev Skyknight or Firstblade would have been strong.
Now, the mostly opinionated stuff.
If you had to play W/R/U, then I think you should probably have run the Palisade Giant and Protect/?Serve. In this format, the Giant could totally wall out the opponent and would make it a lot easier for your flyers to race. Protect//Serve is a sweet combat trick and if you get to play both sides it might turn into a blow out at the right moment.
If sticking with W/R/U, you could also have added in the the promenade, the simic gate and the selesnya gate to splash in Alive//Well, Ruric and Armed//Dangerous (I'm pretty sure that is hiding down there). All 3 of those cards help win races in a variety of ways. Blaze commando seems sad since you only have 2 cards to activate it with (Mugging and BoG is all I see...)
But that brings me to - you probably should have gone Naya or Jund.
Naya could have been pretty good. You get to run the very flexible two drop of Kraul Warrior, who still can remain relevant in the late game "stompy" fights. You get the Zhur-Taa druid to both ramp and be able to deal damage in a ground stall. Ruric is just a huge chunk of beef and Armed//Dangerous is often going to win you the game (remember that you can target two different creatures with it). Alive//Well also helps you pull ahead so your big guys can get in the last few swings. Splashing for Lyev may not have been out of the question.
Jund may have been best. You get both of your good maze runners (Ruric, Valroz), Putrefy, 2x Gorgon (who is just sweet with Armed//Dangerous) Ubal Sar Gatekeeper as well adds some more removal. The Maze Behemoth's become better when you have those good gold creatures that could be getting Scavenge counters as well. You have the gates (and promenade) to splash in the Firemane Avenger and another white card if you want (probably Alive//Well again).
So yeah, I think Jund/white was the right choice. It just gives you a lot of powerful, must answer cards that could help win out at slower sealed events.
You did have a lot to work with though. I think I see a Far//Away hiding in there to make U/B/W look appealing, and Junk colors may not have been totally out of the question either.
Thoughts?
That definitely makes sense. I didn't get into Commander until the Commander product was released, so I am much more familiar with that product.
For me the ones I recommended are easier to remember because they were for a long time the best default for commander when discussing color id. "Oh I am building an Oros build or a Teneb build." Not necessarily meaning those particular dragons being used as commanders, just those color groups.
In other news Auto complete sucks. Turn it off. :)
Yeah, people got really focused on the mill deck. I never played a single Paranoid Delusions in any of my Dimir decks. But I did mill a lot of people out. You just wanted to be playing incidental mill, not dedicated mill.
I always tried to force mill because I enjoy milling people but ended up with like 2 paranoid delusions and never enough men to cipher it.
I streamed something like 12 Dimir drafts and put up an insane win record with them. It was definitely a difficult deck to draft, and it required you to make a lot of tough decisions between different kinds of synergies, but it was very powerful for the people who did figure it out.
We could have also used the volvers, or the commanders. You'll notice that I used a mix. That's mostly just because I wanted to pick short names that were easy for me to remember, and that didn't take as much energy to type.
When I do the articles where I watch games and record the results, I use these names to note the deck archetype. I've changed the names around a little bit based on what is easiest for me to type.
For example, I actually don't like Doran/Damia because excel will often autocomplete whichever one I last used. I don't use Vorosh, though, because I always misspell it as Vorsh or Vorohs or Vrosh, which makes it more of a hassle to organize the results. I originally used Teneb, tried Ghave, but settled on Doran just because that is what people tend to use to refer to that wedge, but it's still annoying.
I also really hate "Numot" because it autocompletes to Naya, but I don't like Zedruu because it is hard to spell and has too many letters. I would use Ruhan, but when I did use that, noone knew what I was talking about. People remember Numot a little bit better.
I guess there are just a ton of factors to consider, and I mostly chose the names for ease of typing. I would love it if WotC would make a "wedges of alara" kind of set, so that we could have a standardized nomenclature.
The other options are Ana, Ceta, Dega, etc. But I found that I always got those ones confused :(
shouldn't the Color Wedges be named after the original dragons of those colors (Oros, Intet, Numot, Teneb, and Vorosh) rather than the newer and equally silly commander set names?
Ham on Wry 2 was a blast even if I brought an extremely subpar Pod deck (still went 4-3 with it so I guess it could have been worse ;)) It was interesting to note that the top 8 pretty exactly mirrored the Classic Daily events usual suspect winners, unlike last year when I was a top 8er (though with affinity) and there were plenty of rogue players.
Is "life from the pox" the name that deck owner gave it? I've been calling it Pox Loam. Especially the version I almost ran for Ham On Wry suited out for Classic.
Just in cased you guys missed it, multiplayer Commander games are bugged:
http://community.wizards.com/magiconline/blog/2013/05/08/multiplayer_com...
They aren't going to get to the fix until next Wed. Sad times.
This also means that next week I won't be able to get to Political Puppets. Expect the Dragon's Maze Overview instead! (BTW, why are there no dragons in Dragon's Maze? I want more flavor!)
I think the same could be said for any Magic Eternal clan member, many of us are drafting when we are around and not playing in a classic tournament but many of us can field whatever deck you want some practice against.
The classicquarter.com forums is the best place to find a lot of classic players. My bet is if you made a post there and the times you wanted play you would get people. Many classic players are around and available to play games but you might need to pm them. You can msg me and if I am around I would be happy to play some with you.
I built a classic deck for Ham2, and banked hard on there being a lot of budget red decks. I was right about that, but my matchups weren't what I expected overall, underprepared for Dredge and overprepared for artifacts. (And what's with Classic Dredge having so many free slots in their deck? Legacy dredge has maybe a Nature's Claim and a Chain of Vapor to stop your hate card, this guy had like 3 Ingot Chewers and 2 Claims at least.)
Anyhow, I wanted to keep playing with it, but it's nearly impossible to practice or play with "real" classic decks anywhere on MTGO. The "classic" they play in the casual room isn't actually classic, and all week I've found maybe two or three matches in Tourney Practice. Only one of those was even a real deck (reluctantly calling no-land Belcher a real deck, because maybe it is in Classic, and the pilot seemed to know what he was doing, though what the hell he does against Null Rods I haven't the slightest idea.) If nobody plays in Tourney Practice, is there a chat room or something?
Let me ask you this, do you think that there is an aggressive deck to be drafted in an 8 man pod if people decide to draft at least 3 colors? Is forcing a two color deck 100% a bad idea, or is it something that is high risk/high reward? What guild should you be drafting if you decide to throw conventional wisdom out the window?
I realized that I did have a glaring hole in the analysis, since I didn't talk about five color:
To be brief, I think that five color could definitely be a contender for the top deck. The power level is certainly there, and it looks like the format will be slow enough that you can fix your mana. It is certainly a dangerous archetype because the fixing is less powerful in this format than it has been in other multicolor formats.
One of the reasons that I think BUG will be so strong is because it is well positioned to go into five color control. I do think that it will be difficult to build 5 color control decks at the beginning of the format. This is because the exact make up of your deck is very metagame dependent. But I think it will end up being an important archetype in the format.
Great summary, I am also excited to see some life in classic (regardless of my lucky win streak the format is very fun imo). Let's try to fire the classic DE this Saturday, who's in?
Pete I think you played Calavera round 5 not me, he ran a similar deck though...
I understand the problems encountered by drafters when it comes to payouts, but I'm not sure there's a good solution here. If the payout was "balanced", that would make DGM boosters 4 times more rare in the system than RtR or GTC (all things being equal, I'm assuming the number of drafts remain constant throughout the season, and I'm not counting people just buying boosters to open them). Sure, the set is smaller, but it's not four times as small, it's actually 60% of the size of RtR. That would be fine for drafters, but would hurt constructed players immensely with incredibly expensive DGM singles.
So yes, I see your point about low booster prices hurting constructed players, but probably not nearly as much as having too few cards in the system. I really doubt there is a solution: if you want to make sure you have enough cards in the system, and you know payouts are a sizable chunk of these cards, you can't really modify the current system.
On a lighter note, woohoo, early State of the Programme today! Thanks as always!
Wotc put pictures up on Facebook of the new slivers, and someone explained their new look but I can not find the blog post at this time, I do think that the days of slivers effecting both sides are over, and these new slivers are just weird new guys. Also they look kinda phyrexian.
I think Dimir gets a bum rap because it's by my understanding so hard to build properly. When it's done correctly (I've never done it.) it has been tearing me up.