Re Singleton: I really like the format, so I am happy with it being held every month. I definitely don't think Vampires can be singled out as an obviously best singleton tribe, despite them having a lot of success in the past couple events. From my modest experiences alone, singleton Goblins are a very tough matchup, and on average I expect to lose against the Constructs that Slug360 played.
Re Gatherling: As a host who is running three events per week, I can say Gatherling has really made my life easier. I have much less work since everything is automated, and it's also better for players as there are for example no 10 min "intermissions" between rounds. As soon as the last match of the round is finished, the next round begins. I don't know how it will work with all that additional stuff that you've been tracking, but I don't have a reason to think it will be badly implemented.
Is Lotus Petal a pauper card anymore?
Maybe there should be Crop Rotation added or Karvek's Torch, Diabolic Edict, I remember buying them for around 0.5 just few months ago and now they are worth couple tix.
You can research a tribe's members all you want, the number of tribes that have even the ability to field 20 members capable of all pulling in a single direction is pretty limited. You can't even really make it a "toolbox" variety thing, since you're limited to one of each tutor effect as well. Your tribe legitimately has to have 8+ members that do EXTREMELY similar things in order to build any kind of wholistic strategy into your deck. I've built enough commander decks to know there are plenty of redundant spell effects to fill one role with 8 different cards, but that redundancy just isn't there for the most part for creatures within a single tribe. There are a few tribes that share themes, to be sure, but I rarely see any broad and deep enough to really build something coherent and interesting with.
I guess there must be SOMETHING people liked about it, since they voted it up in the survey. I'd be interested in hearing what people enjoyed about it. I was only able to make it to the first Singleton event last year, played a mediocre UB Fae deck to lackluster effect, and didn't really get whatever excitement the format apparently holds for everybody else.
As far as the other thing goes, if you were getting that fed up with it, then I can't say I blame you for going that direction. You need to do what keeps you sane and happy with the event, and the event has been highly successful lately so it would be nice to see things keep going as they are.
I remain a little skeptical of Gatherling and what that site appears to be doing, but I'm going to keep my concerns about it to email for right now.
I like the idea to have Tribal Apocalypse on gatherling since it is a very clean and simple website, but I am wondering how are you going to do to translate all the data to it. Just hope it works fine and eventhought I have no idea about programming or whatever, I'll be glad to help wherever I can.
About Singleton, I am fine with it taking the place of Small Time eventhough I know you might not, but I just love Singleton and I think some of your judgments about the format are not fair. Let me explain:
As a player that has spent more time on the deck editor than in the practice room, I love the challenge that represents building a Singleton deck with so many cards and possibilities available. Maybe for Tribal Singleton can be a bit restrictive since a lot of tribes don't have enough "playable" members, but that is just the creature base, and you still have another 14-20 slots to fill which will make every deck different. And the awesome thing about it is that you can take any card you like and try to make it work, since eventhough you can build consistent decks, you are going to have more time to assemble whatever you want. Also I don't think the format is solved, there are a lot of tribes that can fight vampires.
To end, for me this feels like the true tribal fight, with every tribe fighting with their own weapons and also you get to see and play cards you don't normally do, making every game different.
1. Consider Singleton has been the most voted in the survey for favored non-regular format. Any Singleton format has the appeal of the card research, you must learn how to stop relying on the old and usual. If some tribes start dominating, we'll just ban them anyway, like we did for those in Underdog. We already established that, but need more than 3 events worth of data before doing anything. (This said, Vampire decks ended undefeated 4 times over those 3 events. They're very likely bound to be banned.)
2. Do you realize "that guy" is reading you? :) Way not to sound offensive. :P
I think Dabil is doing an amazing job on Gatherling (hell, he happily accepted to program a ton of stuff that, realistically, only TribAp will ever use), and that's the future of PREs. It's something I was talking about with Blippy since at least 1 year ago, but neither he nor I ever had the time/resources of doing. The tools it offers are amazing, you'll see. Way past what we can do now (just the fact that the decks will be automatically checked for legality, no matter how complicated our filter, is a game-changer.) More importantly, the TribAp maintenance was just driving me insane. I can see why Blippy quit, and I actually doubled the duties since then with all the paperwork and surrounding initiatives like the achievements. I can't spend 10 hours every Saturday on this, it's sucking any pleasure from it. There has been a moment, during the 32-people event, when I was trying to make the sheets work while a dozen people kept asking me stuff every minute (and legitimately so), that I was that close to quit everything myself, for good. I needed help. Gatherling is that help, and more.
GotG was bugged when they did the RGD drafts before Return of Ravnica came out. I'm glad they fixed that bug now that we're getting previews for Dragon's Maze. Oh wait, I guess they didn't.
1. Sorry to see Small Time didn't work out, thought it had interesting possibilities. REALLY sorry to see Singleton placed into the regular rotation, as I've never been a fan of it personally. The decks lack cohesion, the strategies are scattershot at best, it's impossible to build around anything... it just has very little appeal to any of the reasons I build decks. I enjoy a little variance in gameplay (as Kuma knows, I love and defend stuff like Summoning Trap that others hate), but the deckbuilding for singleton is just so unappealing to me I can't get into it.
Apart from my own personal distaste for it, it just really doesn't feel like a once-per-month format. It's already been "solved" more or less, with the consensus best deck being midrange/control vampires -- the presence of a few aggro decks with embarassingly bad goblins in them notwithstanding. There are only maybe 10-20 tribes which are deep enough not to be embarassing, and that number is probably charitable. Playing it every month is going to get old quick even for the people who have enjoyed it in the past. Just my opinion, of course.
2. I thought you already rejected that gatherling.com guy once and preferred to stay independant? What happened? I don't really have much faith in that guy to handle the stuff being put into his hands with our event. I suppose he'll have the chance to prove otherwise.
3. C'mon people, I'm practically paying you to play with ninjas and samurai, try the Kamigawa challenge already! I got plenty more ideas and solid 5-ticket prizes where that came from once you knock it off!
Doc - didn't you create Deep Dog? I know E.Hustle took the idea and made about 3 versions of it with some sucess (depending on meta)
Rug Delver - looks fun, but not competitive...but I'm pretty sure that wasn't the intent. Great deck to learn interactions as a tool for new players to sleeve up perhaps.
Absolutely not. I actually hope your tribal traipsing will lead you to play in Tribal Apocalypse one of these days. :)
You even finally pushed me into adding Spawn to my creature types database. It's MTGO-based, but it mentions what's missing online. Spawn wasn't there because its online quantity is zero, but it feels right to put it in the list nonetheless.
Good spotlight. Deep Dog was one of my favorite archetypes back in the day. Although I can't help but wondering if you'd be much better off cutting red for traditional Deep Dog + Delver. Tricolor isn't the most consistent thing in Pauper.
Most of this stuff is a residual of failed consolidations back in 2007 during The Grand Creature Type Update. Occasionally they fix something. For instance, they created Anemone back then (what's with this obsession for marine creatures?), because of Glowing Anemone. At some point, they realized it was just stupid, and now Glowing Anemone is a Jellyfish.
Great stuff. But since it's my territory, I need to correct you about one thing: 224 are the creature types currently existing in the game. 20 of them aren't featured on the type line of any actual card, they just exist as tokens: Blinkmoth, Camarid, Caribou, Citizen, Coward, Deserter, Germ, Graveborn, Orb, Pentavite, Pincher, Prism, Reflection, Sand, Saproling, Serf, Splinter, Survivor, Tetravite, Triskelavite. (I like that we can say "There are cowards in Magic" or "There are survivors".)
So the tribes are actually 204 (203 online). Plus Nameless Race, that defies any classification. In fact, it never appears in lists. It's nameless AND forgotten.
Great stuff, I love looking at forgotten classic cards.
I never realized Siren was introducing a new type to Magic...
I think that they could still do a little consolidation here.
-Hyena could become Hound, which is applied pretty widely.
-Anteater is a weird one, but it could just lose the Anteater and be a beast. I appreciate them adding to the Beasts of this era (Slug Beast, Frog Beast, etc) but creating a type just for this seems pointless.
-Brushwagg could be a Cat Elemental Beast or something else weird to keep its weird flavor.
-Nautilus could be Squid. They're related, and Squid could use some help.
-Sheep should probably be Goat, I agree.
-Spawn could just be Elemental. Spawn doesn't really mean anything and there's other cards with Spawn in the title that don't have it as you say.
Re the facebook comment (don't have FB sorry!) - the shocklands, ie. temple garden, steam vents etc., from the original Ravnica block have all been reprinted and so are legal in the current format whether you use the new or the old version. Block currently has both RTR and GTC sets in it, so all 10 shocklands are legal to play.
Re Singleton: I really like the format, so I am happy with it being held every month. I definitely don't think Vampires can be singled out as an obviously best singleton tribe, despite them having a lot of success in the past couple events. From my modest experiences alone, singleton Goblins are a very tough matchup, and on average I expect to lose against the Constructs that Slug360 played.
Re Gatherling: As a host who is running three events per week, I can say Gatherling has really made my life easier. I have much less work since everything is automated, and it's also better for players as there are for example no 10 min "intermissions" between rounds. As soon as the last match of the round is finished, the next round begins. I don't know how it will work with all that additional stuff that you've been tracking, but I don't have a reason to think it will be badly implemented.
Is Lotus Petal a pauper card anymore?
Maybe there should be Crop Rotation added or Karvek's Torch, Diabolic Edict, I remember buying them for around 0.5 just few months ago and now they are worth couple tix.
You can research a tribe's members all you want, the number of tribes that have even the ability to field 20 members capable of all pulling in a single direction is pretty limited. You can't even really make it a "toolbox" variety thing, since you're limited to one of each tutor effect as well. Your tribe legitimately has to have 8+ members that do EXTREMELY similar things in order to build any kind of wholistic strategy into your deck. I've built enough commander decks to know there are plenty of redundant spell effects to fill one role with 8 different cards, but that redundancy just isn't there for the most part for creatures within a single tribe. There are a few tribes that share themes, to be sure, but I rarely see any broad and deep enough to really build something coherent and interesting with.
I guess there must be SOMETHING people liked about it, since they voted it up in the survey. I'd be interested in hearing what people enjoyed about it. I was only able to make it to the first Singleton event last year, played a mediocre UB Fae deck to lackluster effect, and didn't really get whatever excitement the format apparently holds for everybody else.
As far as the other thing goes, if you were getting that fed up with it, then I can't say I blame you for going that direction. You need to do what keeps you sane and happy with the event, and the event has been highly successful lately so it would be nice to see things keep going as they are.
I remain a little skeptical of Gatherling and what that site appears to be doing, but I'm going to keep my concerns about it to email for right now.
I like the idea to have Tribal Apocalypse on gatherling since it is a very clean and simple website, but I am wondering how are you going to do to translate all the data to it. Just hope it works fine and eventhought I have no idea about programming or whatever, I'll be glad to help wherever I can.
About Singleton, I am fine with it taking the place of Small Time eventhough I know you might not, but I just love Singleton and I think some of your judgments about the format are not fair. Let me explain:
As a player that has spent more time on the deck editor than in the practice room, I love the challenge that represents building a Singleton deck with so many cards and possibilities available. Maybe for Tribal Singleton can be a bit restrictive since a lot of tribes don't have enough "playable" members, but that is just the creature base, and you still have another 14-20 slots to fill which will make every deck different. And the awesome thing about it is that you can take any card you like and try to make it work, since eventhough you can build consistent decks, you are going to have more time to assemble whatever you want. Also I don't think the format is solved, there are a lot of tribes that can fight vampires.
To end, for me this feels like the true tribal fight, with every tribe fighting with their own weapons and also you get to see and play cards you don't normally do, making every game different.
1. Consider Singleton has been the most voted in the survey for favored non-regular format. Any Singleton format has the appeal of the card research, you must learn how to stop relying on the old and usual. If some tribes start dominating, we'll just ban them anyway, like we did for those in Underdog. We already established that, but need more than 3 events worth of data before doing anything. (This said, Vampire decks ended undefeated 4 times over those 3 events. They're very likely bound to be banned.)
2. Do you realize "that guy" is reading you? :) Way not to sound offensive. :P
I think Dabil is doing an amazing job on Gatherling (hell, he happily accepted to program a ton of stuff that, realistically, only TribAp will ever use), and that's the future of PREs. It's something I was talking about with Blippy since at least 1 year ago, but neither he nor I ever had the time/resources of doing. The tools it offers are amazing, you'll see. Way past what we can do now (just the fact that the decks will be automatically checked for legality, no matter how complicated our filter, is a game-changer.) More importantly, the TribAp maintenance was just driving me insane. I can see why Blippy quit, and I actually doubled the duties since then with all the paperwork and surrounding initiatives like the achievements. I can't spend 10 hours every Saturday on this, it's sucking any pleasure from it. There has been a moment, during the 32-people event, when I was trying to make the sheets work while a dozen people kept asking me stuff every minute (and legitimately so), that I was that close to quit everything myself, for good. I needed help. Gatherling is that help, and more.
GotG was bugged when they did the RGD drafts before Return of Ravnica came out. I'm glad they fixed that bug now that we're getting previews for Dragon's Maze. Oh wait, I guess they didn't.
I appreciate the work.
Thanks for the Leagues update! I didn't see anything about that on Twitter or Reddit (I haven't been on forums in years).
I just faced this in the daily in ROUND THREE! I was shocked it managed to win two rounds.
Pauper Cards Price Last W Change % Change
Crypt Rats [VI] 3,63 3,63 0 0,00%
Snap 4 4,11 -0,11 -2,68%
Chain Lightning [ME3] 1,78 1,58 0,2 12,66%
Gorilla Shaman [ME2] 5,15 5,15 0 0,00%
Prohibit 3,08 3,08 0 0,00%
Cloud of Faeries 7,3 7,89 -0,59 -7,48%
Cloudpost 1,47 0,82 0,65 79,27%
Lotus Petal 4,87 4,62 0,25 5,41%
Daze [NE] 10,09 9,34 0,75 8,03%
(Nettle Sentiel) 2,66 2,89 -0,23 -7,96%
Accumulated Knowledge 2,31 2,31 0 0,00%
Serrated Arrows 7,98 9,07 -1,09 -12,02%
Brainstorm [MM] 3,57 3 0,57 19,00%
Pyroblast 4,57 4,46 0,11 2,47%
Hydroblast 3,52 2,97 0,55 18,52%
Fireblast [Visions] 2,83 2,7 0,13 4,81%
Quirion Ranger [VI] 2,83 2,19 0,64 29,22%
Earth Rift 0,99 1,48 -0,49 -33,11%
Gush 4,58 4,25 0,33 7,76%
Deep Analysis 0,89 0,77 0,12 15,58%
Rancor [M13] 1,09 1,09 0 0,00%
Ancestral Mask 5,49 5,16 0,33 6,40%
Armadillo Cloak 1,99 1,99 0 0,00%
Mogg Raider 1,73 1,49 0,24 16,11%
Standard Bearer 2,77 2,46 0,31 12,60%
Spinning Darkness 1,38 1,06 0,32 30,19%
1. Sorry to see Small Time didn't work out, thought it had interesting possibilities. REALLY sorry to see Singleton placed into the regular rotation, as I've never been a fan of it personally. The decks lack cohesion, the strategies are scattershot at best, it's impossible to build around anything... it just has very little appeal to any of the reasons I build decks. I enjoy a little variance in gameplay (as Kuma knows, I love and defend stuff like Summoning Trap that others hate), but the deckbuilding for singleton is just so unappealing to me I can't get into it.
Apart from my own personal distaste for it, it just really doesn't feel like a once-per-month format. It's already been "solved" more or less, with the consensus best deck being midrange/control vampires -- the presence of a few aggro decks with embarassingly bad goblins in them notwithstanding. There are only maybe 10-20 tribes which are deep enough not to be embarassing, and that number is probably charitable. Playing it every month is going to get old quick even for the people who have enjoyed it in the past. Just my opinion, of course.
2. I thought you already rejected that gatherling.com guy once and preferred to stay independant? What happened? I don't really have much faith in that guy to handle the stuff being put into his hands with our event. I suppose he'll have the chance to prove otherwise.
3. C'mon people, I'm practically paying you to play with ninjas and samurai, try the Kamigawa challenge already! I got plenty more ideas and solid 5-ticket prizes where that came from once you knock it off!
Doc - didn't you create Deep Dog? I know E.Hustle took the idea and made about 3 versions of it with some sucess (depending on meta)
Rug Delver - looks fun, but not competitive...but I'm pretty sure that wasn't the intent. Great deck to learn interactions as a tool for new players to sleeve up perhaps.
See what you miss by not coming to Tribal Apocalypse? :)
Sheesh! I wish I had known about that chart when I was researching this article.
Absolutely not. I actually hope your tribal traipsing will lead you to play in Tribal Apocalypse one of these days. :)
You even finally pushed me into adding Spawn to my creature types database. It's MTGO-based, but it mentions what's missing online. Spawn wasn't there because its online quantity is zero, but it feels right to put it in the list nonetheless.
Good spotlight. Deep Dog was one of my favorite archetypes back in the day. Although I can't help but wondering if you'd be much better off cutting red for traditional Deep Dog + Delver. Tricolor isn't the most consistent thing in Pauper.
Good info! I hope you don't mind my traipsing through your territory.
Most of this stuff is a residual of failed consolidations back in 2007 during The Grand Creature Type Update. Occasionally they fix something. For instance, they created Anemone back then (what's with this obsession for marine creatures?), because of Glowing Anemone. At some point, they realized it was just stupid, and now Glowing Anemone is a Jellyfish.
Great stuff. But since it's my territory, I need to correct you about one thing: 224 are the creature types currently existing in the game. 20 of them aren't featured on the type line of any actual card, they just exist as tokens: Blinkmoth, Camarid, Caribou, Citizen, Coward, Deserter, Germ, Graveborn, Orb, Pentavite, Pincher, Prism, Reflection, Sand, Saproling, Serf, Splinter, Survivor, Tetravite, Triskelavite. (I like that we can say "There are cowards in Magic" or "There are survivors".)
So the tribes are actually 204 (203 online). Plus Nameless Race, that defies any classification. In fact, it never appears in lists. It's nameless AND forgotten.
Great stuff, I love looking at forgotten classic cards.
I never realized Siren was introducing a new type to Magic...
I think that they could still do a little consolidation here.
-Hyena could become Hound, which is applied pretty widely.
-Anteater is a weird one, but it could just lose the Anteater and be a beast. I appreciate them adding to the Beasts of this era (Slug Beast, Frog Beast, etc) but creating a type just for this seems pointless.
-Brushwagg could be a Cat Elemental Beast or something else weird to keep its weird flavor.
-Nautilus could be Squid. They're related, and Squid could use some help.
-Sheep should probably be Goat, I agree.
-Spawn could just be Elemental. Spawn doesn't really mean anything and there's other cards with Spawn in the title that don't have it as you say.
Yes they are in the board - dunno how that happened.
Thanks Hoff.
As I have noticed, a lot of eternal power comes from the graveyard.
boracay package tour
Whilst not valid in Tribal Classic, all we need is a willing volunteer with a Tribal Classic deck to act as opponent and a straight classic game.
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Re the facebook comment (don't have FB sorry!) - the shocklands, ie. temple garden, steam vents etc., from the original Ravnica block have all been reprinted and so are legal in the current format whether you use the new or the old version. Block currently has both RTR and GTC sets in it, so all 10 shocklands are legal to play.
Hum this is good to know. Thank you!