ugh i hate how typed word never really translates well.
Anyhow why i ment by why should i care who won/lost in a close game was to mean that regardless of who won a good game is a good game who why does it matter of who extends a hand or says GG in such a case. Sadly alot of people just think its bad manners if the winner does even if the winner is being friendy or really did feel that it was hard fought.
And as I've learned from owning a laptop for 6 months or so, it is not always the easiest thing to type on these damned things when playing MTGO. I totally relate now to the macro users. In fact unless someone chats or responds to my hello and good luck macro I typically sit out the game without ever chatting at all beyond the formalities.
As for douchbaggery it comes in many forms. Blanking someone is just one. But I've never really thought that using the macros was a bad thing. Just seemed a little lame duck. On the other hand and I can't say this too carefully: It isn't really our place to punish people for being that way as we aren't the netiquette police.
I just think it is good to remind people that the Apocalypse mainly exists because of MTGOTraders (Heath's) generosity and it benefits us all if we treat each other with a little civility and kindness. If Heath felt the tourney was producing ill feelings it would be within his right to yank support for it and imho while that has never happened it could given enough douchbaggery. So that is a motivation to keep us at least nominally friendly.
If we are behaving like civilized folks outside of the game, others may come to enjoy the social aspect as well as the game aspect and then you get some real community. Which I think is what the PRE is about.
Part of the problem also comes in when some people get all sorts of sour about a GG when they didn't think the game was good. And then have a bad experience because of it. In-fact I hear people get fussy over handshakes in paper all the time. And honestly it baffles me.
To me why should I care who won and who lost in a close and hard fought game.
I so intensely dislike video watching that I go out of my way to avoid it typically but I think I will have to watch these despite not being a draft aficionado.
You guys did a great job but I think my idea of Control in tribal has to include multiple angles because the way decks go you are going to face counters as well as bolts. You will see elves and assassins and probably vedalkens too. Wizards/Humans are ubiquitous. Both aggro and otherwise. Armageddon Knights was a strong contender for a long time. So just sweepers doesn't cut it. You need consider the counter angle, the exile angle, the recursion angel and the Anticombo angle. That's a tall order for a deck that isn't fitted tightly to a specific meta game.
I think that AJ did win a match is more testament to his deckbuilding and playing than luck but again pairings are everything. Against the right field your efforts could have netted an undefeated record. Against the wrong ones it could have been a complete disaster.
Nice to see this sort of thing from you Kuma. I feel like Ive let the interview thing slide too long and you are taking up slack. Please don't stop. I do plan to do something with a certain podcaster on this site but first things first I need to get back home and settle into my routine again.
Thanks!
Yeah, I think it's useful, regardless of the format, to look into the deckbuilding process. Some of the choices you have to make, like choosing a manabase, are roughly the same everywhere.
Of course, "Hello and good luck" and "Good game" are the minimum inexcusable netiquette requirements, that goes without saying. But sometimes even just resorting to the stock phrases and nothing else, and not answering to in-game chat might be seen as doucheness, and it might well be it, but it might also be the effect of a language-impaired player. Or a player just not in the mood, which I relate with: sometimes I'm not in a social mood myself and might want to just lose myself in the game. Hard to get these things from the other side of a screen, though.
'hello and good luck' or hi etc isn't really slang. It might be a little difficult if someone has never heard of a translator to figure out what is being said but mtg players tend to be curious so I assume in general that most people understand and choose to not respond.
(There are the canned macros any user who has right clicked once knows about.)
That said I think it is important to be sensitive to those kinds of issues. Sure the client isn't terribly great but it also has improved a lot to the point where you can't really blame the client for not chatting but being unable to respond in good form might put someone off. At least past the greeting.
I also agree with what you said about Spikes being somewhat unable to flexibly build down their decks if they have better options. However I would consider TWL to be a format so far removed from the par for the course mtg experience that anyone playing it has some Timmy/Johnny proclivities and probably some vorthos/melvin interest as well.
Unfortunately about the cutthroat business, what I am trying to convey isn't that there are no alternatives to winning the whole thing (as you and clan Leys have been kind to provide us an alternatives achievements system) but that if you go in expecting a relaxed and laid back environment you will be unpleasantly surprised.
Not only are there money cards and powercombos but people tend to dig deep grooves into archetypes and stay there. (Thus our discussion and eventually ruling about changing deck lists in the top 8.)
You're one of my favorite MTG writers. Another amazing article with awesome interactions and deck lists.
One of my favorite decks is your budget glare deck. I added in Opposition and a few other cards like Puresight Merrow and Grimoire Thief to increase the fun.
Don't forget about Stranglehold for the Maralen and B. Heavyweights combos you have above! It's even in the same color as heavyweights :)
I really enjoyed this article. It really gives would-be builders the basic tools on how to approach deck building, rather than net-decking (although this term is highly over-used by sore losers - some card interactions are so obvious). It also highlights the how-to aspect of building a stable mana-base; something important for every deck.
I look forward to many more of these articles. And thanks to your guest AJ for assisting on this build.
I agree with most of what you say. But I have something to add (of course!)
I don't think your cutthroat player type is really ticket hungry. Let's face it, this event doesn't have a PTQ-level payout, not even a daily-level one. And the ditribution doesn't emphasize winning at all costs: last week, the two undefeated players took 2.2 tix exactly like the 3 players with 1 loss. I want for this to be stressed properly. Chamale doing achievements has made more tix, sometimes with a very bad ranking, than some of the guys who end 1st place every two weeks.
This is the thing: a true Spike can't help but try to optimize their deck to win. I really see where they come from. It's not about the prizes, it would be the same in a no-prize tournament. It's absurd for them to build in a way that actively hinders their chances to win. Like, why one shouldn't put Swords to Plowshares in a white deck? Or even splash for it when possible? There's not an answer to this that would convince them otherwise, since it's against what makes sense for them, it would be unnatural. You either prevent these players to join a tournament, or they will play that way, regardless (I'm positive we already proved that banning a single power card doesn't do much in this regard, it's the StP-or-equivalent-based Spike decks the ones that consistently win).
And this reminds me of another thing: I see Blippy jokingly writing in his Modern PREs' opening speeches, "This is not your parents' tournament." Now, should Tribal Apocalypse be? Isn't Tribal Wars already casual enough compared to Legacy? I really doubt people in a Classic PRE would complain about "cutthroat players" bringing Hermit Druid or whatnot while they wanted to play a Thicket Basilisk/Lure deck AND WIN. So, does Tribal Wars need to live up to its "casual by definition" status? That would mean it could never be a serious format, and I like for it to be. Yes, there's a precise distinction between "competitive" and "cutthroat", but when does competitive become "too much"? You wouldn't find two people agreeing on a threshold. Along the spectrum, you have people who think Path to Exile is broken versus people who think it's fun to play storm again and again.
And what you said about naive players needing to wise up is really true, but they don't need to become cutthroats. Some players just aren't Spikes. Most of us have some degree of Spike in our profile so we often measure our accomplishments in terms of matches won. But that's not the only way. Tribal Apocalypse is possibly the PRE (if not the MTG tournament) that awards other type of accomplishments the most. It gives players a rich set of other goals (hell, sometimes it gives prizes to players who didn't win a single game!). That's really the best we can do. I don't like the argument "you either go cutthroat or go home", because this is possibly the last place where this is true, provided you don't expect to achieve the same exact goal of a cutthroat player with a non-cutthroat approach. That's where some learning is needed. I like to think it's a useful lesson in real life too: choose your path, choose your goals, learn to be satisfied by them.
(A side note: I despise the "evil persona" attitude, and although I don't see too much of this within TribAP, I'm thinking of creating harsh measures against it, to the point of issuing an auto-loss to players not respecting netiquette. Still, keep in mind that this is a Euro-friendly tournament, due to the timeframe, so there are some players who just aren't so good with English, and that's why they never chat. I recently discovered myself that a player who I thought was being unfriendly just didn't speak English almost at all. It may also be good netiquette not to assume everyone is ready to understand and answer English slang).
A really fun article that looks like it took a lot of time and effort.
Just a note to make, I'm afraid your Landfall combo deck isn't Modern legal as Tree of Tales (along with all the other Artifact lands) is banned in Modern. The Dryad Arbor + Soul Foundry part is fine though.
Tournament is synonymous with competitive. However not all competitions are cut-throat which is where people get confused. For our purposes we have to consider mtgo a cut-throat only environment (NYC is a great example of a real world version of this) despite there being plenty of casual players trying odd things.
The PRE scene is especially filled with ticket hungry type a no nonsense spikes who for some reason or another can't (or won't) quite make the big times (and thus have no time for penny ante stuff if they did.) Newer players won't quite understand this and may bring stuff like Rex's Barbarians before they get the true cut of the tourney's jib.
This imho isn't your responsibility to change. Learning experiences are for learning even when they seem harsh at the time. I think the quality of the Apocalypse has varied a lot in terms of experiences but it certainly consistent in terms of competition. There are always going to be a certain amount of murderous, nasty decks and the players that bring them aren't always the nicest of people. In fact Id say some are as unfun to face as the decks they bring.
But that's the price of doing business online. This isn't kitchen table magic and this isn't a local FNM. These people may share your sense of enjoyment of the format but the likelihood is they are here for the 3 tickets and screw anyone who gets in the way of that.
That isn't to say there aren't some very nice players in the PRE but some you really need to get to know first before you can make that judgment. In fact I'd say some actively cultivate an evil persona to give themselves an edge. Going so far as to not greet ops when greeted etc.
Point is: The tourney is fine as long as people know what they are getting into. I feel really bad for the guy who brings an untried or untuned deck expecting kitchen table level of stuff and then facing this crowd.
They can't play the undefeated deck they had used themselves. And not 4 weeks, 4 events. If they don't show up for 5 events after they are undefeated, they'll still have a 4-event count.
It's something. Don't say it's nothing because it's something: we're lucky our top players aren't "playing dirty" as of right now, but they might. Besides, we did have cases of undefeated decks repeated within a short period. Now we won't anymore.
And once again, casual competition = contradiction in terms, divide by 0. It's impossible to make a "casual tournament" (I also think it's pointless, for that matter). But we can make a good competitive tournament where players experience different things, not every time the same. I think we are more or less already there, but there's no reason not to keep improving.
The number one reason why I sold my online collection and uninstalled the program was the communication. If the program breaks, okay, it breaks. It happens. But when people have to keep asking the same questions of "when will this happen?" and "when is the next set coming out?" then you know you have a problem. Wizards has done very little to address it, despite the various social media outlets they have. Can you subscribe to a weekly email like StarCityGames has? If you go onto their website and decide to play Modern at two in morning, will you know in advance whether the thing will even fire or not?
Magic online is just riddled with management problems from start to finish, and while I do enjoy being able to pick up a game whenever I want and test decks very quickly and very easily, I have found local store owners better at communicating what's going on. They are the ones on the hook for your five dollars every Friday. They want you to come back. I never got this impression from magic online, and it really detracted from the experience (in addition to the whole unresponsive ban list, which is another thorn to pick at later).
I found out how to turn mine off and did so as quickly as I could manage it. :) That makes it a little better (but not much.)
oh and yes touchpads can be the bane of my existence when typing on a laptop.
ugh i hate how typed word never really translates well.
Anyhow why i ment by why should i care who won/lost in a close game was to mean that regardless of who won a good game is a good game who why does it matter of who extends a hand or says GG in such a case. Sadly alot of people just think its bad manners if the winner does even if the winner is being friendy or really did feel that it was hard fought.
And as I've learned from owning a laptop for 6 months or so, it is not always the easiest thing to type on these damned things when playing MTGO. I totally relate now to the macro users. In fact unless someone chats or responds to my hello and good luck macro I typically sit out the game without ever chatting at all beyond the formalities.
As for douchbaggery it comes in many forms. Blanking someone is just one. But I've never really thought that using the macros was a bad thing. Just seemed a little lame duck. On the other hand and I can't say this too carefully: It isn't really our place to punish people for being that way as we aren't the netiquette police.
I just think it is good to remind people that the Apocalypse mainly exists because of MTGOTraders (Heath's) generosity and it benefits us all if we treat each other with a little civility and kindness. If Heath felt the tourney was producing ill feelings it would be within his right to yank support for it and imho while that has never happened it could given enough douchbaggery. So that is a motivation to keep us at least nominally friendly.
If we are behaving like civilized folks outside of the game, others may come to enjoy the social aspect as well as the game aspect and then you get some real community. Which I think is what the PRE is about.
yeah its funny that I typed that, saw nothing wrong with it, posted and still didn't quite get it until after I reread your post. lol.
But Yeah, the recursion angle with the recurring angels could be a cool deck.
Damn it, now I want to build a deck consisting solely of recursion angels...
It will switch between formats, tonight we're gonna do an izzet week modern stream!
Yeah Andy made that attack, and because of the clock panicked a bit and just went way too fast in declaring attacks.
Part of the problem also comes in when some people get all sorts of sour about a GG when they didn't think the game was good. And then have a bad experience because of it. In-fact I hear people get fussy over handshakes in paper all the time. And honestly it baffles me.
To me why should I care who won and who lost in a close and hard fought game.
Kinda threw away game 1. You could have swung for lethal while still playing around the second Fog.
I so intensely dislike video watching that I go out of my way to avoid it typically but I think I will have to watch these despite not being a draft aficionado.
You guys did a great job but I think my idea of Control in tribal has to include multiple angles because the way decks go you are going to face counters as well as bolts. You will see elves and assassins and probably vedalkens too. Wizards/Humans are ubiquitous. Both aggro and otherwise. Armageddon Knights was a strong contender for a long time. So just sweepers doesn't cut it. You need consider the counter angle, the exile angle, the recursion angel and the Anticombo angle. That's a tall order for a deck that isn't fitted tightly to a specific meta game.
I think that AJ did win a match is more testament to his deckbuilding and playing than luck but again pairings are everything. Against the right field your efforts could have netted an undefeated record. Against the wrong ones it could have been a complete disaster.
Nice to see this sort of thing from you Kuma. I feel like Ive let the interview thing slide too long and you are taking up slack. Please don't stop. I do plan to do something with a certain podcaster on this site but first things first I need to get back home and settle into my routine again.
Thanks!
Yeah, I think it's useful, regardless of the format, to look into the deckbuilding process. Some of the choices you have to make, like choosing a manabase, are roughly the same everywhere.
Of course, "Hello and good luck" and "Good game" are the minimum inexcusable netiquette requirements, that goes without saying. But sometimes even just resorting to the stock phrases and nothing else, and not answering to in-game chat might be seen as doucheness, and it might well be it, but it might also be the effect of a language-impaired player. Or a player just not in the mood, which I relate with: sometimes I'm not in a social mood myself and might want to just lose myself in the game. Hard to get these things from the other side of a screen, though.
'hello and good luck' or hi etc isn't really slang. It might be a little difficult if someone has never heard of a translator to figure out what is being said but mtg players tend to be curious so I assume in general that most people understand and choose to not respond.
(There are the canned macros any user who has right clicked once knows about.)
That said I think it is important to be sensitive to those kinds of issues. Sure the client isn't terribly great but it also has improved a lot to the point where you can't really blame the client for not chatting but being unable to respond in good form might put someone off. At least past the greeting.
I also agree with what you said about Spikes being somewhat unable to flexibly build down their decks if they have better options. However I would consider TWL to be a format so far removed from the par for the course mtg experience that anyone playing it has some Timmy/Johnny proclivities and probably some vorthos/melvin interest as well.
Unfortunately about the cutthroat business, what I am trying to convey isn't that there are no alternatives to winning the whole thing (as you and clan Leys have been kind to provide us an alternatives achievements system) but that if you go in expecting a relaxed and laid back environment you will be unpleasantly surprised.
Not only are there money cards and powercombos but people tend to dig deep grooves into archetypes and stay there. (Thus our discussion and eventually ruling about changing deck lists in the top 8.)
You're one of my favorite MTG writers. Another amazing article with awesome interactions and deck lists.
One of my favorite decks is your budget glare deck. I added in Opposition and a few other cards like Puresight Merrow and Grimoire Thief to increase the fun.
Don't forget about Stranglehold for the Maralen and B. Heavyweights combos you have above! It's even in the same color as heavyweights :)
I really enjoyed this article. It really gives would-be builders the basic tools on how to approach deck building, rather than net-decking (although this term is highly over-used by sore losers - some card interactions are so obvious). It also highlights the how-to aspect of building a stable mana-base; something important for every deck.
I look forward to many more of these articles. And thanks to your guest AJ for assisting on this build.
I agree with most of what you say. But I have something to add (of course!)
I don't think your cutthroat player type is really ticket hungry. Let's face it, this event doesn't have a PTQ-level payout, not even a daily-level one. And the ditribution doesn't emphasize winning at all costs: last week, the two undefeated players took 2.2 tix exactly like the 3 players with 1 loss. I want for this to be stressed properly. Chamale doing achievements has made more tix, sometimes with a very bad ranking, than some of the guys who end 1st place every two weeks.
This is the thing: a true Spike can't help but try to optimize their deck to win. I really see where they come from. It's not about the prizes, it would be the same in a no-prize tournament. It's absurd for them to build in a way that actively hinders their chances to win. Like, why one shouldn't put Swords to Plowshares in a white deck? Or even splash for it when possible? There's not an answer to this that would convince them otherwise, since it's against what makes sense for them, it would be unnatural. You either prevent these players to join a tournament, or they will play that way, regardless (I'm positive we already proved that banning a single power card doesn't do much in this regard, it's the StP-or-equivalent-based Spike decks the ones that consistently win).
And this reminds me of another thing: I see Blippy jokingly writing in his Modern PREs' opening speeches, "This is not your parents' tournament." Now, should Tribal Apocalypse be? Isn't Tribal Wars already casual enough compared to Legacy? I really doubt people in a Classic PRE would complain about "cutthroat players" bringing Hermit Druid or whatnot while they wanted to play a Thicket Basilisk/Lure deck AND WIN. So, does Tribal Wars need to live up to its "casual by definition" status? That would mean it could never be a serious format, and I like for it to be. Yes, there's a precise distinction between "competitive" and "cutthroat", but when does competitive become "too much"? You wouldn't find two people agreeing on a threshold. Along the spectrum, you have people who think Path to Exile is broken versus people who think it's fun to play storm again and again.
And what you said about naive players needing to wise up is really true, but they don't need to become cutthroats. Some players just aren't Spikes. Most of us have some degree of Spike in our profile so we often measure our accomplishments in terms of matches won. But that's not the only way. Tribal Apocalypse is possibly the PRE (if not the MTG tournament) that awards other type of accomplishments the most. It gives players a rich set of other goals (hell, sometimes it gives prizes to players who didn't win a single game!). That's really the best we can do. I don't like the argument "you either go cutthroat or go home", because this is possibly the last place where this is true, provided you don't expect to achieve the same exact goal of a cutthroat player with a non-cutthroat approach. That's where some learning is needed. I like to think it's a useful lesson in real life too: choose your path, choose your goals, learn to be satisfied by them.
(A side note: I despise the "evil persona" attitude, and although I don't see too much of this within TribAP, I'm thinking of creating harsh measures against it, to the point of issuing an auto-loss to players not respecting netiquette. Still, keep in mind that this is a Euro-friendly tournament, due to the timeframe, so there are some players who just aren't so good with English, and that's why they never chat. I recently discovered myself that a player who I thought was being unfriendly just didn't speak English almost at all. It may also be good netiquette not to assume everyone is ready to understand and answer English slang).
Thanks for pointing that out! totally forgot about that!
A really fun article that looks like it took a lot of time and effort.
Just a note to make, I'm afraid your Landfall combo deck isn't Modern legal as Tree of Tales (along with all the other Artifact lands) is banned in Modern. The Dryad Arbor + Soul Foundry part is fine though.
PTQ Season for PT “Friends” (codename for the first set of the block after Return To Ravnica) will be Modern, and begins December 22, 2012.
Tournament is synonymous with competitive. However not all competitions are cut-throat which is where people get confused. For our purposes we have to consider mtgo a cut-throat only environment (NYC is a great example of a real world version of this) despite there being plenty of casual players trying odd things.
The PRE scene is especially filled with ticket hungry type a no nonsense spikes who for some reason or another can't (or won't) quite make the big times (and thus have no time for penny ante stuff if they did.) Newer players won't quite understand this and may bring stuff like Rex's Barbarians before they get the true cut of the tourney's jib.
This imho isn't your responsibility to change. Learning experiences are for learning even when they seem harsh at the time. I think the quality of the Apocalypse has varied a lot in terms of experiences but it certainly consistent in terms of competition. There are always going to be a certain amount of murderous, nasty decks and the players that bring them aren't always the nicest of people. In fact Id say some are as unfun to face as the decks they bring.
But that's the price of doing business online. This isn't kitchen table magic and this isn't a local FNM. These people may share your sense of enjoyment of the format but the likelihood is they are here for the 3 tickets and screw anyone who gets in the way of that.
That isn't to say there aren't some very nice players in the PRE but some you really need to get to know first before you can make that judgment. In fact I'd say some actively cultivate an evil persona to give themselves an edge. Going so far as to not greet ops when greeted etc.
Point is: The tourney is fine as long as people know what they are getting into. I feel really bad for the guy who brings an untried or untuned deck expecting kitchen table level of stuff and then facing this crowd.
They can't play the undefeated deck they had used themselves. And not 4 weeks, 4 events. If they don't show up for 5 events after they are undefeated, they'll still have a 4-event count.
It's something. Don't say it's nothing because it's something: we're lucky our top players aren't "playing dirty" as of right now, but they might. Besides, we did have cases of undefeated decks repeated within a short period. Now we won't anymore.
And once again, casual competition = contradiction in terms, divide by 0. It's impossible to make a "casual tournament" (I also think it's pointless, for that matter). But we can make a good competitive tournament where players experience different things, not every time the same. I think we are more or less already there, but there's no reason not to keep improving.
The number one reason why I sold my online collection and uninstalled the program was the communication. If the program breaks, okay, it breaks. It happens. But when people have to keep asking the same questions of "when will this happen?" and "when is the next set coming out?" then you know you have a problem. Wizards has done very little to address it, despite the various social media outlets they have. Can you subscribe to a weekly email like StarCityGames has? If you go onto their website and decide to play Modern at two in morning, will you know in advance whether the thing will even fire or not?
Magic online is just riddled with management problems from start to finish, and while I do enjoy being able to pick up a game whenever I want and test decks very quickly and very easily, I have found local store owners better at communicating what's going on. They are the ones on the hook for your five dollars every Friday. They want you to come back. I never got this impression from magic online, and it really detracted from the experience (in addition to the whole unresponsive ban list, which is another thorn to pick at later).
When does modern PTQ season start?