I feel very strongly opposed to phantom events. You literally GET NOTHING. I HATE HATE HATE PHANTOM. I don't care how much fun anybody says the MTGO Cube is, I will never do it because it is phantom. You are paying solely for the experience, which isn't what we've come to expect over the years. I really enjoyed IPA drafting, but I wouldn't pay $4 to sit down at my computer alone in a room and do an IPA draft without any chance to pull a money card, as that anticipation of cracking your packs is a big part of the fun for people who aren't just QP grinders. It's also cool, and part of the fun, that you can look back through your collection and say "THIS was the dragon that won me that epic final in that draft!" You don't get any of that, you get NOTHING AT ALL, from phantom.
I don't buy the excuse that "clutter" or "splitting the player base" is a real concern. It costs them nothing to list the format up there, if it doesn't fire, nobody on MTGO or at WotC is inconvenienced by it.
I also think you underestimate the affect those drafts had on prices. Wasteland got back down to below 30 tix the last time Tempest was drafted, and it's currently over 50. LED dipped about 20 tix from Mirage drafts even if those drafts weren't popular as you say. The price of legacy staples on MTGO is largely illusory, because the demand is so low that any increased supply leads to people selling cards at bargain rates in the classifieds just to unload them, and there are huge splits between buy/sell on those big ticket low-volume cards with the bots.
Eternal Magic survives those high prices (and it only survives in certain areas, I'd have to drive at least 2 hours to find a paper legacy match despite living only about an hour from a major midwestern city with 3 pro sports franchises). But it survives only because people are heavily invested in the format for a long time, people have owned their Shops or Bazaars since the cards were unrestricted, they completed their set of ABU duals years ago. There are cities (alas, not St. Louis), where there are real, thriving legacy communities, older and more mature players who come back every week or two and will for years to come. MTGO doesn't have that volume of players or loyal playerbase for eternal magic, and if they ever DO have that growth, old sealed will be part of meeting that demand. I had huge hopes that promo FoW would make it widely available enough to help legacy, and I got my set, but now it's already back up there. I don't want 4 in a Merfolk event deck, I want my investment to mean *something*, but I don't want them hitting 120-130 tix again and driving away potential legacy players either.
Yeah, I'm going to try and flesh out the recaps a little better in the future. But you're right, it's definitely worth doing them.
Wow you really haven't been on for a while, they got rid of the multiplayer room last summer I think. There are 2 methods I use to get games on ver. 3 (not the Beta). The first is to sort all the games in the Just for Fun room by clicking on the tab on the top and only getting "Waiting" games. That will weed out all the games that have started already, or ended and are just cluttering things up. There are usually like 20 games or so waiting at any single time, and sometimes there's a multiplayer Commander game waiting. Hop on in there.
If there aren't any games waiting, you gotta make your own. There are 2 seperate tabs where you have to pick "Commander" when you create the game, don't forget that. Also, in the comments section, make sure to put "4 player" or something to indicate that you want a multiplayer game. Because there are a bunch of people that like 1v1. On top of that, you will probably want to increase the time limits from 30 minutes per person to 60.
I've had to wait up to 10 minutes to get a game going. Seems like forever, but really that's really just like 10 SportsCenter highlights, so it's really not that bad.
What a great idea!! For theme, if I could give this a kabillion ratings I would - I'm a HUGE Halloween fan, what a fun list...for me, spooky doll and/or any doll art is creepy as hell..even the old pacifism card with that goat shaman guy with the big belly, creepy stuff!
I've asked the ORC's what that error is, and they say something along the lines of it's a new vs old client issue. I have a feeling they will let these go to annoy people over to the new client. I'll stay on the old one until the bitter end.
I like the recaps. I usually don't have the time to watch videos and it allows me to get the flavor of the games.
I haven't been on MTGO in a long while and decided to fire it up last week and play some Commander. After finding the multiplayer room gone I spent ten minutes in the main room trying to find out what I could join. I finally gave up. Any advice on finding a multiplayer Commander game?
They wouldn't lose money they'd lose potential money. It would cause them to make less than they could, not less than they already do. It would be money not spent on packs by players, at a certain point they have to buy tickets. Even if a player goes infinite their ability to go infinite forces other players to continue spending money. There is no realistic scenario where people continue to play in tournaments and Wizards loses money.
Wizards is a company that seems to seek customer satisfaction fairly regularly, so doing something that would have little to no impact on their income but would have a fair impact on their customerbase, I would think they might try it. Afterall, they did make standard pauper an officially supported format online. Sanctioning it is just the next step. Even if it's just an occasional TNMO it would still have an impact on the game.
They lose money by players using these won packs instead of buying packs from the store when they enter a draft. I'm sure if every added event helped maximize WOTC's profit, they would add a lot more.
As a pod dabbler, I found this article to be incredibly informative. Normally I would say putting this much content into one article is ridiculous and that the length is too long - but when the information is this rich and well laid out I cannot complain. I look forward to reading your future work!
:you have to keep in mind that it is not possible for them to lose money on adding a sanctioned event.
Of course they can lose money.
Your assumption only works in a vacuum. They are already making X dollars from these customers now. It is very much possible that people will choose to play a new cheaper format with their limited time instead of an existing one, spending x-y dollars, and costing wizards money.
You also seem to not know why low pack prices are a problem.
Again, there is a certain constant amount of sanctioned play on MTGO, and all that play pays out in packs. When the value of those packs are down, that means that the prizes are lower, but the entry fee is the same. There are a lot of people that simply do not play in sanctioned events when pack prices are low, because the payout isn't worth it. That's yet one more way that wizards loses money when pack prices go down.
you have to keep in mind that it is not possible for them to lose money on adding a sanctioned event.
The prizes are digital which means there is no production cost other than maintaining equipment.
Tickets have to be purchased, regardless of what happens in the game. Tickets are the currency to buy packs from players, to pay entry fees, and to buy singles.
even assuming there were a small elite group that won every single tournament for a sanctioned event in the game, there are still 96 tickets that leave the game. If the players sell those prizes they sell them to players not WoTC so the tickets required to purchase the packs from players had to come from WoTC at some point.
its hard to keep in perspective that this entire game is fictional, nothing we do online is anything but data on a server. All the money that is spent on the game by anybody and everybody goes to WoTC somewhere down the line simply because you can't get tickets from WoTC without paying cash and tickets are the currency to spend.
edit:
in the event pack prices crashed in real life, wizards would collapse from lack of income. but the difference is they get paid regardless of what players charge for packs online. Tickets have to come from them. They print the money. It would not be physically possible for the entire player base to play and purchase packs without givnig money to wizards even with the tournament system for the simple fact that eventually someone has to buy tickets to do anything.
other than the decks I've covered in my article series so far, plus the one I'm featuring next week (Royal's BWR control), there's a consuming aberration build out there that is fringe playable and has placed in dailies a couple of times. The better one I've seen has jace, AOT in it but there's also an even more budget version.
the reason i warped the deck for reckoner was 2 fold. other then frontline medic, it was the only 3/3 for 3. and it is a natural 2 for 1 against the mono red decks, very prevalent.
I guess i could have been a little less slavish to my 3 drop and tested it those slots as 2 drop like gyre sage, but then i would have lost rakdos return and slaughter games from the board, pretty much the only way i cant beat revalation, also prevalent.
I know its a worse jund deck, or rock deck, but it does feel sweet to resolve a fat servitude, and this was an attempt to break out of the mold.
any thoughts by anyone on what i should play with next? keep in mind i have 0 revalation.
Having abused Servitude in Standard (without the Angel of Glory tricks as well as with) I can say this deck does have teeth :) But as PB points out it could be a tad inconsistent. Particularly if you REALLY need a fully cast Mortars to stay alive long enough to cast a proper servitude. Also how do you get Servitude out if it's buried in the deck (or graveyard)?
And you're running Reckoner without any particular way to abuse it. No Act, no Pyre. Not sure it is justified without those.
I agree with everything you said. Which is why I look at it as a value midrange deck instead of a straight up reanimator. I know that std unburial rites looks the closest, but its unfair to compare a 2 set block deck to a 6 set std deck. The deck does have some theeth and if not for the mana would actually be close to teir 1.5. The terrible mana is a huge thing though. I recorded a daily event with prkmising results. Other then 1. Game I threw away from distraction it only lost games where I stalled on two mana or lacked a green/white dual for the whole game. This was with 19 duals 5 basics. 12 red. 11 green. 10 black and white.
Hmmmm, well I want this deck to work because servitude is sweet. Also, I played angel of glory's rise humanimator in the last block environment and that was awesome fun. But I just cannot see this deck working I'm afraid.
First of all is the mana base, which looks hideous. To get your engine working and have any chance of staying alive until turn 6 (your nut draw can't go off before 6!!!! Not 4, cf unburial rites - a huge issue with the deck) you need to hit exactly BGW by turn 3, for troll/salvage and then healer/smiter. Shocks help but are PAINFUL and you're still running 6 basics. Idk, I feel like you need to both run 26 lands and cut down to 3 colours, or have less colour intensive spells (you have 6 lands which can't be used to cast boros reckoner for eg.) or something for this to have any sort of consistency.
Second, there doesn't seem to be enough digging here. The old humanimator decks ran 4x faithless looting and 4x mulch, all of which helped to both fill the graveyard AND dig for your reanimation spell, which actively wanted to be binned. Here you have literally no way of digging for servitude, and only grisly salvage which does any sort of job of cycling through your deck. Salvage is good, but I can't see it being good enough to get there on your own.
So what this looks like is a sort of midrange value deck, with awful mana, which sometimes might be able to return a lot of its creatures if it hits 6 mana, which it might do some of the time. and the reanimation is very unlikely to win you the game on the spot, you're really just playing it for value. It's not a terrible plan, but I think the archetype has some real and fundamental problems in the current card pool.
Hey there! Did you come back to normalcy, connection-wise?
I feel very strongly opposed to phantom events. You literally GET NOTHING. I HATE HATE HATE PHANTOM. I don't care how much fun anybody says the MTGO Cube is, I will never do it because it is phantom. You are paying solely for the experience, which isn't what we've come to expect over the years. I really enjoyed IPA drafting, but I wouldn't pay $4 to sit down at my computer alone in a room and do an IPA draft without any chance to pull a money card, as that anticipation of cracking your packs is a big part of the fun for people who aren't just QP grinders. It's also cool, and part of the fun, that you can look back through your collection and say "THIS was the dragon that won me that epic final in that draft!" You don't get any of that, you get NOTHING AT ALL, from phantom.
I don't buy the excuse that "clutter" or "splitting the player base" is a real concern. It costs them nothing to list the format up there, if it doesn't fire, nobody on MTGO or at WotC is inconvenienced by it.
I also think you underestimate the affect those drafts had on prices. Wasteland got back down to below 30 tix the last time Tempest was drafted, and it's currently over 50. LED dipped about 20 tix from Mirage drafts even if those drafts weren't popular as you say. The price of legacy staples on MTGO is largely illusory, because the demand is so low that any increased supply leads to people selling cards at bargain rates in the classifieds just to unload them, and there are huge splits between buy/sell on those big ticket low-volume cards with the bots.
Eternal Magic survives those high prices (and it only survives in certain areas, I'd have to drive at least 2 hours to find a paper legacy match despite living only about an hour from a major midwestern city with 3 pro sports franchises). But it survives only because people are heavily invested in the format for a long time, people have owned their Shops or Bazaars since the cards were unrestricted, they completed their set of ABU duals years ago. There are cities (alas, not St. Louis), where there are real, thriving legacy communities, older and more mature players who come back every week or two and will for years to come. MTGO doesn't have that volume of players or loyal playerbase for eternal magic, and if they ever DO have that growth, old sealed will be part of meeting that demand. I had huge hopes that promo FoW would make it widely available enough to help legacy, and I got my set, but now it's already back up there. I don't want 4 in a Merfolk event deck, I want my investment to mean *something*, but I don't want them hitting 120-130 tix again and driving away potential legacy players either.
Still more bugs?? Yucky. Seems trading away my entire collection last night wasn't such a mistake.
I blame it on the slow Internet in my neck of the woods.
Pete you may want to update your CQ Qualifier "Round 3 is about to start".
We are currently in Round 6 and are about to start Top 8 on Monday.
Welcome to the Gatherling family of events! Woo hoo! I do believe there will be MP options (FFA/Commander, 2HG) available soon, as well.
Yeah, I'm going to try and flesh out the recaps a little better in the future. But you're right, it's definitely worth doing them.
Wow you really haven't been on for a while, they got rid of the multiplayer room last summer I think. There are 2 methods I use to get games on ver. 3 (not the Beta). The first is to sort all the games in the Just for Fun room by clicking on the tab on the top and only getting "Waiting" games. That will weed out all the games that have started already, or ended and are just cluttering things up. There are usually like 20 games or so waiting at any single time, and sometimes there's a multiplayer Commander game waiting. Hop on in there.
If there aren't any games waiting, you gotta make your own. There are 2 seperate tabs where you have to pick "Commander" when you create the game, don't forget that. Also, in the comments section, make sure to put "4 player" or something to indicate that you want a multiplayer game. Because there are a bunch of people that like 1v1. On top of that, you will probably want to increase the time limits from 30 minutes per person to 60.
I've had to wait up to 10 minutes to get a game going. Seems like forever, but really that's really just like 10 SportsCenter highlights, so it's really not that bad.
What a great idea!! For theme, if I could give this a kabillion ratings I would - I'm a HUGE Halloween fan, what a fun list...for me, spooky doll and/or any doll art is creepy as hell..even the old pacifism card with that goat shaman guy with the big belly, creepy stuff!
Great read as always!
I've asked the ORC's what that error is, and they say something along the lines of it's a new vs old client issue. I have a feeling they will let these go to annoy people over to the new client. I'll stay on the old one until the bitter end.
I like the recaps. I usually don't have the time to watch videos and it allows me to get the flavor of the games.
I haven't been on MTGO in a long while and decided to fire it up last week and play some Commander. After finding the multiplayer room gone I spent ten minutes in the main room trying to find out what I could join. I finally gave up. Any advice on finding a multiplayer Commander game?
They wouldn't lose money they'd lose potential money. It would cause them to make less than they could, not less than they already do. It would be money not spent on packs by players, at a certain point they have to buy tickets. Even if a player goes infinite their ability to go infinite forces other players to continue spending money. There is no realistic scenario where people continue to play in tournaments and Wizards loses money.
Wizards is a company that seems to seek customer satisfaction fairly regularly, so doing something that would have little to no impact on their income but would have a fair impact on their customerbase, I would think they might try it. Afterall, they did make standard pauper an officially supported format online. Sanctioning it is just the next step. Even if it's just an occasional TNMO it would still have an impact on the game.
They lose money by players using these won packs instead of buying packs from the store when they enter a draft. I'm sure if every added event helped maximize WOTC's profit, they would add a lot more.
Same :)
if someone gave me mod powers, I'd happily squash them. I check the site often enough during the day at work to do pest control.
The problem I think is that they need to be both ip banned and individual account banned.
Or alternatively divert their spam to some script that makes the bot programmers think the spam is hitting the target.
Is there anything we can do about this mass of spambots? More stringent capcha?
As a pod dabbler, I found this article to be incredibly informative. Normally I would say putting this much content into one article is ridiculous and that the length is too long - but when the information is this rich and well laid out I cannot complain. I look forward to reading your future work!
:you have to keep in mind that it is not possible for them to lose money on adding a sanctioned event.
Of course they can lose money.
Your assumption only works in a vacuum. They are already making X dollars from these customers now. It is very much possible that people will choose to play a new cheaper format with their limited time instead of an existing one, spending x-y dollars, and costing wizards money.
You also seem to not know why low pack prices are a problem.
Again, there is a certain constant amount of sanctioned play on MTGO, and all that play pays out in packs. When the value of those packs are down, that means that the prizes are lower, but the entry fee is the same. There are a lot of people that simply do not play in sanctioned events when pack prices are low, because the payout isn't worth it. That's yet one more way that wizards loses money when pack prices go down.
you have to keep in mind that it is not possible for them to lose money on adding a sanctioned event.
The prizes are digital which means there is no production cost other than maintaining equipment.
Tickets have to be purchased, regardless of what happens in the game. Tickets are the currency to buy packs from players, to pay entry fees, and to buy singles.
even assuming there were a small elite group that won every single tournament for a sanctioned event in the game, there are still 96 tickets that leave the game. If the players sell those prizes they sell them to players not WoTC so the tickets required to purchase the packs from players had to come from WoTC at some point.
its hard to keep in perspective that this entire game is fictional, nothing we do online is anything but data on a server. All the money that is spent on the game by anybody and everybody goes to WoTC somewhere down the line simply because you can't get tickets from WoTC without paying cash and tickets are the currency to spend.
edit:
in the event pack prices crashed in real life, wizards would collapse from lack of income. but the difference is they get paid regardless of what players charge for packs online. Tickets have to come from them. They print the money. It would not be physically possible for the entire player base to play and purchase packs without givnig money to wizards even with the tournament system for the simple fact that eventually someone has to buy tickets to do anything.
Try something boros maybe??
other than the decks I've covered in my article series so far, plus the one I'm featuring next week (Royal's BWR control), there's a consuming aberration build out there that is fringe playable and has placed in dailies a couple of times. The better one I've seen has jace, AOT in it but there's also an even more budget version.
the reason i warped the deck for reckoner was 2 fold. other then frontline medic, it was the only 3/3 for 3. and it is a natural 2 for 1 against the mono red decks, very prevalent.
I guess i could have been a little less slavish to my 3 drop and tested it those slots as 2 drop like gyre sage, but then i would have lost rakdos return and slaughter games from the board, pretty much the only way i cant beat revalation, also prevalent.
I know its a worse jund deck, or rock deck, but it does feel sweet to resolve a fat servitude, and this was an attempt to break out of the mold.
any thoughts by anyone on what i should play with next? keep in mind i have 0 revalation.
Having abused Servitude in Standard (without the Angel of Glory tricks as well as with) I can say this deck does have teeth :) But as PB points out it could be a tad inconsistent. Particularly if you REALLY need a fully cast Mortars to stay alive long enough to cast a proper servitude. Also how do you get Servitude out if it's buried in the deck (or graveyard)?
And you're running Reckoner without any particular way to abuse it. No Act, no Pyre. Not sure it is justified without those.
I agree with everything you said. Which is why I look at it as a value midrange deck instead of a straight up reanimator. I know that std unburial rites looks the closest, but its unfair to compare a 2 set block deck to a 6 set std deck. The deck does have some theeth and if not for the mana would actually be close to teir 1.5. The terrible mana is a huge thing though. I recorded a daily event with prkmising results. Other then 1. Game I threw away from distraction it only lost games where I stalled on two mana or lacked a green/white dual for the whole game. This was with 19 duals 5 basics. 12 red. 11 green. 10 black and white.
Hmmmm, well I want this deck to work because servitude is sweet. Also, I played angel of glory's rise humanimator in the last block environment and that was awesome fun. But I just cannot see this deck working I'm afraid.
First of all is the mana base, which looks hideous. To get your engine working and have any chance of staying alive until turn 6 (your nut draw can't go off before 6!!!! Not 4, cf unburial rites - a huge issue with the deck) you need to hit exactly BGW by turn 3, for troll/salvage and then healer/smiter. Shocks help but are PAINFUL and you're still running 6 basics. Idk, I feel like you need to both run 26 lands and cut down to 3 colours, or have less colour intensive spells (you have 6 lands which can't be used to cast boros reckoner for eg.) or something for this to have any sort of consistency.
Second, there doesn't seem to be enough digging here. The old humanimator decks ran 4x faithless looting and 4x mulch, all of which helped to both fill the graveyard AND dig for your reanimation spell, which actively wanted to be binned. Here you have literally no way of digging for servitude, and only grisly salvage which does any sort of job of cycling through your deck. Salvage is good, but I can't see it being good enough to get there on your own.
So what this looks like is a sort of midrange value deck, with awful mana, which sometimes might be able to return a lot of its creatures if it hits 6 mana, which it might do some of the time. and the reanimation is very unlikely to win you the game on the spot, you're really just playing it for value. It's not a terrible plan, but I think the archetype has some real and fundamental problems in the current card pool.