I've been maindecking Linvala to stop Deathrites Shaman, Splinter Twin and Kiki-Jiki. Additionally, I've been splashing red lately for Realm Razer (and later, Avalanche Riders). One of Pod's worst matchups (for me) was always red deck, so I put in Leyline of Sanctity. Additionally, I use Fallen Angel and Mikaeus, the Unhallhowed as additional combo conditions.
Now that Wizards has cut the teeth out of Jund and Storm, I tend to think Aven Mindcensor will be a bit more important. I'm not totally sold on Orzhov Pontiff or Withered Wretch. For me personally, I have always preferred Path to Exile, though we'll see if that's even needed anymore.
I think Profane Command can be really good in this deck. I thought about Immortal Servitude, but the Command serves as recursion AND removal. It's a two-for-one spell. If you'd like to go up to 7 cmc, you can try Elesh Norn or Angel of Serenity. There are just so many options. It's hard to go wrong here.
I start with a spreadsheet showing the prices for all the cards on MTGO, (thanks to Heath at MTOGTraders.com.) That spreadsheet has about 17,000 rows.
I then sort by price, and delete all the cards with no price (mainly the new player card sets and the promos in the cube, but not yet for sale.) That deletes 700 or so rows.
Next, I sort by collector number. This brings the booster packs, precons and so forth - the products with a collector number of zero - to the top. I delete them.
Next I sort by name, alphabetically, with a secondary sort by price, highest to lowest. I then write a formula (1-EXACT(A1,A2)) to zero out the prices of any duplicates. That just leaves the lowest price for any duplicates. Finally, summing the results of those numbers gives me the cost of one copy of every card, and multiplying by four, and rounding to the nearest dollar, gives me the big number.
I have never posted here before, although I have been reading your articles for a couple years. I guess...
I want you know that they are getting better and better.
Congrats for your great job! Hope you can go on with this for a long time!
About the prices for legacy staples.. I think most of the people who enjoy play legacy (I include vintage here) prefer to play outside modo, because this way they can play with their precious old cards. And more important, show them to others!
Eternal formats are all about nostalgia and proud. That's why IMHO these formats are getting troubles in become more played on MTGO.
I'm not saying these people are this ot that. It's just the nature of the human being.
One last thing..
I am really curious how do you get to the big number? I know what it means, but I'd like to know how do you get there, in deed.
I'd actually leave it pretty close to what it is. Most of the cards fulfill purposes outside of the main reasons they were put in, like Echoing Decay against Okiba-Gangs and not just Empty now, and just being good removal generally. Maybe I'd change it to a spell that only costs B instead of 1B, but the removal is needed. Standard Bearer does work against Stompy, Infect, Auras, and a whole range of others. So maybe the only change is making the removal less expensive.
Standard Bearer doesn't do anything for your storm match up. Not all of the copies have to target it. You could use belevent unicorn or prismic strands.
Oh I don't doubt he'll find other ways, as will some of the other players, I'm just looking forward to seeing other creative solutions to these challenges. Dream Halls and the Cephalid Breakfast shell were just too easy, by virtue of being versatile enough to pull off several of the combos, sometimes being built to do multiple in the same event. There were probably multiple reasonable methods for some of those that we never got to see, and if nothing else the achievements should be giving us interesting things to comment upon :-)
Dream Halls will essentially be banned in the second round of achievements (also, less of them will be of the kind that Dream Halls would help clearing). But I'm sure Chamale will find other ways, he didn't do ALL of them with Dream Halls after all.
I can see what you mean about angel being the go-to mythic, but without it the matchup against reanimator (Any variety) is really, really rough. It also helps a ton against wrath-heavy control decks, as you can safely overextend when you get to rebuy 3 creatures at the drop of a coin. And then there's the fact that you can just straight-up exile three threats, which is very powerful against any deck out there at the moment.
Nothing personal against Chamale, but I am looking forward to some interesting achievements that don't involve Dream Halls :-) Dream Halls and the "mill my whole deck and then DR something" strategy seemed to be responsible for a huge percentage of the flashy achievements. Perhaps some of them didn't have any other consistent ways to pull them off, but a bit higher variance should make for a more challenging achievement.
I liked some of the deckbuilding achievements, and intended to go for the K-Scope one, but AJ did it the week before I was planning to. Maybe I'll find something to try for this season. I've already explored many (thought not all!) of the weird endangered tribes I've been interested in, so it'd be something else to spur a deck idea. They really have been a much bigger success than I thought they would be.
Empty the Warrens, Grapeshot, and Invigorate are banned.
I'm not saying it was me...but I did almost weekly write to WOC about what needs to be banned in pauper...They finally listened! What a great day ` (and yes, I often played the offenders, but this is great news for metagame..)
"I picked up my set of FoW last week after the downtime, by cashing in some Standard and Modern stuff. I never would have been able to get to 480 tix that way, but 210 was fairly easy. While I DID play a fair bit of legacy on MTGO before, FoW had always been a barrier preventing me from playing blue decks."
Almost exactly the same. I basically have a Mtgo budget, and add $50 a month to my account. If a card is $120 I'd have to save at least 3 months to get it. If I bought a bunch of $10 cards I'd start using them right away. So having a bunch of cards go from $20 to $25 is not as big a deal to me as having 1 card go from $100+ to $50. Besides I already have everything I need to throw together 5-6 different blue decks now that I have my FoW set.
Ive been tinkering with just such a deck minus a few key changes. I haven't used Garruk's Packmaster at all because it just seems so jank (as you point out.) But I can see where it would be a powerful enabler in this deck if it lives. That is the other thing about it, it doesn't really want to be blinked itself. You can to save it but that just feels like a lost card either way. Also didn't bother with Angel of Serenity because it was the go to Mythic while I was testing/tinkering with this deck so I avoided it. And the third thing I didn't use was Amass the Components. It is a reasonable draw card for sure but it just never quite made the cut.
Nice deck and welcome to the puremtgo fold! As a Timmy/Spike I look forward to seeing what you have to say in future articles.
I picked up my set of FoW last week after the downtime, by cashing in some Standard and Modern stuff. I never would have been able to get to 480 tix that way, but 210 was fairly easy. While I DID play a fair bit of legacy on MTGO before, FoW had always been a barrier preventing me from playing blue decks. I played Zoo, Jund, various GW aggro decks, and so on. Almost every big card in the format aside from FoW and LED has had a window of time where it was significantly more affordable and if you were patient you could slowly build a legacy collection by following those price trends (and these articles helped too!) Since I don't play combo nor care about LED, FoW was the last thing I needed in my collection to be in the sweet spot where I can build almost anything I want to build in legacy with only a little extra investment.
I wouldn't know where to begin for Classic, unfortunately. I know a little about Vintage, but I don't care to play 'Shops or Dredge. From what I know of Vintage these days, I would play some U/G/x Fish deck probably, with Bobs and Goyfs and FoW's and Trygon Predators (Delvers now too?), but the absence of Big Blue definitely hurts those decks. I guess the moxes' absence hurts 'Shops and Blue decks both. It just doesn't seem like the real format until Power comes online.
Don't underestimate the extent to which those Turn 1 kills alienate players. I've grown a thicker skin about it than I used to have, but I've sat there with my non-blue aggro deck and lost many games to Charbelchers and Storm decks that I had no way to interact with, and it's just a risk of playing without blue. You can also play a whole tournament and see only "fair" decks and play interactive magic all day, but if your first impression is losing before you cast a spell, and the one card that would stop that from happening costs 120 tix per copy, that's a bit rough. FoW accessibility should definitely help.
I've seen a few turn 1-2 wins but yeah they are fairly mythic (in the rarity sense). On the other hand I have lost turn 1 to a FOW on my lodestone golem followed by strip mine, wasteland, strip mine, taking out my only mana sources for the entire game. That was particularly unfun.
That said I agree with your assessment of competitive standard being fairly pricy too. It doesn't quite reach the same ridiculousness as LED or FOW or Wasteland (Usually) but it does add up really quickly. Especially when there are 9-10 of these high priced mythics stacked on top of each other to form "Good Stuff".dec.
As far as the perpetuators of the legend of Classic, I think that would be the players. Not the casual crowd, not the tourney crowd. Just the crowd. Everyone likes to brag when they get that insane game and so the legend grows. (IE: No one's fault in particular.)
You may be right about the speculators. I hope you aren't because that means bad things for Classic in general.
I am willing to live with the fact that people have a bad impression of Classic. I said that much in my post earlier. It's not for everyone, I get it.
That being said, I'd be willing to bet a majority of the people buying FOW now have no intention of ever using it in a game. Speculators are probably 75% of the people that are buying them right now, and keep in mind, most bots aren't touching them yet.
I should have clarified that while Eternal is expensive, it's not FOW's fault. People always seemed to complain about FOW, but never paid much mind to all the other cards. This is more or less my complaint, and is in turn the real problem. Anyone that thought FOW's price was the barrier to entry and went out and purchased them at the new discounted rate is probably a little upset to see how the other prices of cards have shot up.
I also have no sympathy for people complaining about Eternal prices when Standard decks cost so much. I fully understand that these are two different things, but neither cater to the "casual" crowd... most of whom are the perpetrators of the price stereotype.
And all these Turn 1 or 2 wins? I'd like to see them, because most Classic and Legacy decks these days are fair aggro-control decks or Workshops. Really, one only need FOW for a Lodestone Golem. Maybe FOW for Show and Tell or a reanimator spell, too. Hardly anyone is playing Storm in Classic and few are playing it in Legacy.
People focus on Force of Will because Force is warping Legacy. If a list can win with Red Elemental Blast and Jaya Ballard maindeck, you know a format is warped towards blue. People might complain about the price, but I think they're really upset at how prevalent it is.
Melira, Sylvok Outcast entered the arena in May 2011.
The *VERY FIRST* recorded T8 result of Melira Pod can be found here, near the middle of the page. A first place finish during Worldwide Overextended Day in July 2011:
http://mtgoverextended.com/worldwide-overextended-day-results/
Project Melira - which is essentially the same thing without the Pod - first showed up a few days earlier:
http://mtgoverextended.com/0705-tuesday-night-overextended-results/
Indeed, Melira Pod is one of the "oldest" decks in Modern, and remains a house to this day.
I've been maindecking Linvala to stop Deathrites Shaman, Splinter Twin and Kiki-Jiki. Additionally, I've been splashing red lately for Realm Razer (and later, Avalanche Riders). One of Pod's worst matchups (for me) was always red deck, so I put in Leyline of Sanctity. Additionally, I use Fallen Angel and Mikaeus, the Unhallhowed as additional combo conditions.
Now that Wizards has cut the teeth out of Jund and Storm, I tend to think Aven Mindcensor will be a bit more important. I'm not totally sold on Orzhov Pontiff or Withered Wretch. For me personally, I have always preferred Path to Exile, though we'll see if that's even needed anymore.
I think Profane Command can be really good in this deck. I thought about Immortal Servitude, but the Command serves as recursion AND removal. It's a two-for-one spell. If you'd like to go up to 7 cmc, you can try Elesh Norn or Angel of Serenity. There are just so many options. It's hard to go wrong here.
That's funny, because most German players prefer English cards because they do not like the translation, which is at times quite goofy and literal.
I start with a spreadsheet showing the prices for all the cards on MTGO, (thanks to Heath at MTOGTraders.com.) That spreadsheet has about 17,000 rows.
I then sort by price, and delete all the cards with no price (mainly the new player card sets and the promos in the cube, but not yet for sale.) That deletes 700 or so rows.
Next, I sort by collector number. This brings the booster packs, precons and so forth - the products with a collector number of zero - to the top. I delete them.
Next I sort by name, alphabetically, with a secondary sort by price, highest to lowest. I then write a formula (1-EXACT(A1,A2)) to zero out the prices of any duplicates. That just leaves the lowest price for any duplicates. Finally, summing the results of those numbers gives me the cost of one copy of every card, and multiplying by four, and rounding to the nearest dollar, gives me the big number.
I'm extremely jealous of the german cards you all got to open. That is my favorite magic card language!
Hello Pete.
I have never posted here before, although I have been reading your articles for a couple years. I guess...
I want you know that they are getting better and better.
Congrats for your great job! Hope you can go on with this for a long time!
About the prices for legacy staples.. I think most of the people who enjoy play legacy (I include vintage here) prefer to play outside modo, because this way they can play with their precious old cards. And more important, show them to others!
Eternal formats are all about nostalgia and proud. That's why IMHO these formats are getting troubles in become more played on MTGO.
I'm not saying these people are this ot that. It's just the nature of the human being.
One last thing..
I am really curious how do you get to the big number? I know what it means, but I'd like to know how do you get there, in deed.
I'd actually leave it pretty close to what it is. Most of the cards fulfill purposes outside of the main reasons they were put in, like Echoing Decay against Okiba-Gangs and not just Empty now, and just being good removal generally. Maybe I'd change it to a spell that only costs B instead of 1B, but the removal is needed. Standard Bearer does work against Stompy, Infect, Auras, and a whole range of others. So maybe the only change is making the removal less expensive.
Love the deck, wondering what changes you'd make in light of the bannings?
My bad then. However, Grapeshot just got banned, so the point is really moot now. He's still amazing vs. Infect, Stompy, and Auras though.
Standard Bearer doesn't do anything for your storm match up. Not all of the copies have to target it. You could use belevent unicorn or prismic strands.
Oh I don't doubt he'll find other ways, as will some of the other players, I'm just looking forward to seeing other creative solutions to these challenges. Dream Halls and the Cephalid Breakfast shell were just too easy, by virtue of being versatile enough to pull off several of the combos, sometimes being built to do multiple in the same event. There were probably multiple reasonable methods for some of those that we never got to see, and if nothing else the achievements should be giving us interesting things to comment upon :-)
Dream Halls will essentially be banned in the second round of achievements (also, less of them will be of the kind that Dream Halls would help clearing). But I'm sure Chamale will find other ways, he didn't do ALL of them with Dream Halls after all.
I can see what you mean about angel being the go-to mythic, but without it the matchup against reanimator (Any variety) is really, really rough. It also helps a ton against wrath-heavy control decks, as you can safely overextend when you get to rebuy 3 creatures at the drop of a coin. And then there's the fact that you can just straight-up exile three threats, which is very powerful against any deck out there at the moment.
Nothing personal against Chamale, but I am looking forward to some interesting achievements that don't involve Dream Halls :-) Dream Halls and the "mill my whole deck and then DR something" strategy seemed to be responsible for a huge percentage of the flashy achievements. Perhaps some of them didn't have any other consistent ways to pull them off, but a bit higher variance should make for a more challenging achievement.
I liked some of the deckbuilding achievements, and intended to go for the K-Scope one, but AJ did it the week before I was planning to. Maybe I'll find something to try for this season. I've already explored many (thought not all!) of the weird endangered tribes I've been interested in, so it'd be something else to spur a deck idea. They really have been a much bigger success than I thought they would be.
Chittering Rats and Cavern Harpy are really strong together. You can lock down your opponent from ever drawing a unique card for the rest of the game.
Invigorate - banned
Grapeshot - banned
EMPTY THE WARRENS - banned
Empty the Warrens, Grapeshot, and Invigorate are banned.
I'm not saying it was me...but I did almost weekly write to WOC about what needs to be banned in pauper...They finally listened! What a great day ` (and yes, I often played the offenders, but this is great news for metagame..)
YIPPIE!
"I picked up my set of FoW last week after the downtime, by cashing in some Standard and Modern stuff. I never would have been able to get to 480 tix that way, but 210 was fairly easy. While I DID play a fair bit of legacy on MTGO before, FoW had always been a barrier preventing me from playing blue decks."
Almost exactly the same. I basically have a Mtgo budget, and add $50 a month to my account. If a card is $120 I'd have to save at least 3 months to get it. If I bought a bunch of $10 cards I'd start using them right away. So having a bunch of cards go from $20 to $25 is not as big a deal to me as having 1 card go from $100+ to $50. Besides I already have everything I need to throw together 5-6 different blue decks now that I have my FoW set.
Ive been tinkering with just such a deck minus a few key changes. I haven't used Garruk's Packmaster at all because it just seems so jank (as you point out.) But I can see where it would be a powerful enabler in this deck if it lives. That is the other thing about it, it doesn't really want to be blinked itself. You can to save it but that just feels like a lost card either way. Also didn't bother with Angel of Serenity because it was the go to Mythic while I was testing/tinkering with this deck so I avoided it. And the third thing I didn't use was Amass the Components. It is a reasonable draw card for sure but it just never quite made the cut.
Nice deck and welcome to the puremtgo fold! As a Timmy/Spike I look forward to seeing what you have to say in future articles.
I picked up my set of FoW last week after the downtime, by cashing in some Standard and Modern stuff. I never would have been able to get to 480 tix that way, but 210 was fairly easy. While I DID play a fair bit of legacy on MTGO before, FoW had always been a barrier preventing me from playing blue decks. I played Zoo, Jund, various GW aggro decks, and so on. Almost every big card in the format aside from FoW and LED has had a window of time where it was significantly more affordable and if you were patient you could slowly build a legacy collection by following those price trends (and these articles helped too!) Since I don't play combo nor care about LED, FoW was the last thing I needed in my collection to be in the sweet spot where I can build almost anything I want to build in legacy with only a little extra investment.
I wouldn't know where to begin for Classic, unfortunately. I know a little about Vintage, but I don't care to play 'Shops or Dredge. From what I know of Vintage these days, I would play some U/G/x Fish deck probably, with Bobs and Goyfs and FoW's and Trygon Predators (Delvers now too?), but the absence of Big Blue definitely hurts those decks. I guess the moxes' absence hurts 'Shops and Blue decks both. It just doesn't seem like the real format until Power comes online.
Don't underestimate the extent to which those Turn 1 kills alienate players. I've grown a thicker skin about it than I used to have, but I've sat there with my non-blue aggro deck and lost many games to Charbelchers and Storm decks that I had no way to interact with, and it's just a risk of playing without blue. You can also play a whole tournament and see only "fair" decks and play interactive magic all day, but if your first impression is losing before you cast a spell, and the one card that would stop that from happening costs 120 tix per copy, that's a bit rough. FoW accessibility should definitely help.
I've seen a few turn 1-2 wins but yeah they are fairly mythic (in the rarity sense). On the other hand I have lost turn 1 to a FOW on my lodestone golem followed by strip mine, wasteland, strip mine, taking out my only mana sources for the entire game. That was particularly unfun.
That said I agree with your assessment of competitive standard being fairly pricy too. It doesn't quite reach the same ridiculousness as LED or FOW or Wasteland (Usually) but it does add up really quickly. Especially when there are 9-10 of these high priced mythics stacked on top of each other to form "Good Stuff".dec.
As far as the perpetuators of the legend of Classic, I think that would be the players. Not the casual crowd, not the tourney crowd. Just the crowd. Everyone likes to brag when they get that insane game and so the legend grows. (IE: No one's fault in particular.)
You may be right about the speculators. I hope you aren't because that means bad things for Classic in general.
I am willing to live with the fact that people have a bad impression of Classic. I said that much in my post earlier. It's not for everyone, I get it.
That being said, I'd be willing to bet a majority of the people buying FOW now have no intention of ever using it in a game. Speculators are probably 75% of the people that are buying them right now, and keep in mind, most bots aren't touching them yet.
I should have clarified that while Eternal is expensive, it's not FOW's fault. People always seemed to complain about FOW, but never paid much mind to all the other cards. This is more or less my complaint, and is in turn the real problem. Anyone that thought FOW's price was the barrier to entry and went out and purchased them at the new discounted rate is probably a little upset to see how the other prices of cards have shot up.
I also have no sympathy for people complaining about Eternal prices when Standard decks cost so much. I fully understand that these are two different things, but neither cater to the "casual" crowd... most of whom are the perpetrators of the price stereotype.
And all these Turn 1 or 2 wins? I'd like to see them, because most Classic and Legacy decks these days are fair aggro-control decks or Workshops. Really, one only need FOW for a Lodestone Golem. Maybe FOW for Show and Tell or a reanimator spell, too. Hardly anyone is playing Storm in Classic and few are playing it in Legacy.
People focus on Force of Will because Force is warping Legacy. If a list can win with Red Elemental Blast and Jaya Ballard maindeck, you know a format is warped towards blue. People might complain about the price, but I think they're really upset at how prevalent it is.