“anyone could make money by investing in cards online" What backs that up? The fact that prices fluctuate over time? That if you set your mind to it you can gain insider knowledge on those changes?
It is MUCH easier to make money with paper cards. Online everyone is already connected into the information (open classifieds or your favorite bot and observe the price.) In paper you can at least have better overall knowledge going into your trades & take advantage of variance on the spot (your trade partner may prefer to go with SCG prices while you have real market knowledge via eBay, for example.) Online seems like more of a guessing game.
I do agree with investing based on seasonality, but I still don't think it's as easy to make money as the original statement.
Any word on how the guys that went in on the hoard of duals are doing?
I'd like to see the stats for Gaddock Teeg if it were on the watch list: I'm not saying it should be banned, but I do think it has a very winning record.
Woot Cheapest deck in the top 4 :) as for the annoyance level of splinter twin I have played that deck 5 times using both noggles and humans instead of faeries. And yes I have seen plenty of ways around splinter twin from spot removal to random enchantment hate to Teeg.
As for the Tribal base cost :o I did not know Cloud of faeries jumped that much picked them up a while back for like 1 tix each.
I come from a Pauper background(yes I am dirty dirty Delver player). So any cards that I can use across the formats I will use.
That being said if I could afford those stupidly over priced faeries I would play them.
Lastly on the thought of banning Splinter Twin I can see a good argument on theme and flavor of the card but look at it from a format health perspective.
Splinter twin is 1.15 tix
pestermight is .08
Deciever Exarch is .07
all together 5.20 tix or cheaper
This is a cheap deck if you want it to be, Which also gives hope to casual players looking to have fun and not always getting roflstomped.
ok ending soap box
also thanks for writing these Diaries it does help put the format in perspective.
Cool to see you add some of the pauper cards I suggested to your portfolio. Now I wonder if you're playing by some kind of rules of the selling part? There's some bots out there that pay almost market price for pauper cards (which is personally think it dumb for a bot to do; because it fluctuates so often)... And there's others that pay about 50%.... So if the fireblast goes up to $2 eventually - you might get $1.10/$1.25 from certain mainstream bots.... But other bots will give as much as $1.60/$1.75....
Just wish you had held on to some money so you could buy up some Lotus Petals too. They just dropped down to $5 and now's your second chance to get in on them. They were selling for almost $11 before the annoucement! And the fact these drafts only lasted 1 week - makes me think the price should get back to where they were much faster than normal (Invasion was drafted for 2 weeks I believe and took about 3 months to get back to normal).
Either way... All of those are safe buys. In 3 months or so - they should be back to around what they were before the drafts. Fireblast - $2; Spinning Darkness - $2.25; Choking Sands - $1.80. Even if they're half of that - that's still profit.
---
I said: “the safe money is made in the eternal formats.”
You said: "I strongly disagree, unless you are simply timing the price drops when eternal format drafts are depressing prices (e.g. Fireblast after Mirage block drafts, or Wasteland after Tempest.)..."
And timing my buying around price drops (such as when cards are being drafted) is exactly what I'm talking about. I gave the example of buying Prohibits and Excludes for pennies when they were being drafted. The Prohibits paid off in a major way (The Excludes have not, because there's no current pauper deck that's running them; but I believe they eventually will go up in price.)... It's really safe money to me... Buying 100+ of each wasn't a lottery - I knew the history of the cards and knew the history of cards being drafted only hurts cards value in the short-term.
I'm also talking about buying in the off-season and selling in season (this mostly applies to Modern). But that's a different beast... And it looks like you did a little of that yourself.
Anyway, good to see you explain in a little more detail your thoughts on everything and what's going on. I only began reading your articles about a month ago. So I'm still catching up to what you're doing.
I agree with this. Because combo decks in tribal wars do not have enough slots to reliably protect their combo with countermagic and Duress/Thoughtseize, ones that are disrupted by creature removal (which 90%+ of the decks every week are playing) are pretty "fair" combo decks all things considered.
I think there are generally tiers of combo decks like this:
1. Creature-Based Combo: easily disrupted by 90% of the field.
2. Non-creature permanent Based Combo: 50% of the field can disrupt them, but not always at instant speed, and probably not before Turn 3.
3. Instant/Sorcery-Based Combo: maybe only 10% of the decks have some kind of countermagic to disrupt this, but it is way harder to build these decks for tribal wars in the first place so it's less of a problem that you'd think.
4. Graveyard-Based Combo: decks can usually only disrupt these with incidental GY hate (i.e. a zombies deck that happens to have Withered Wretch in it), because the cards that really fight graveyards effectively are utterly useless against everything else. Some of the strategies, such as reanimator, can be fought to some degree by countermagic and creature removal, and are probably therefore less degenerate.
It's obvious why I think #4 is the most dangerous in principle. Attacking along an axis your opponents aren't prepared for is clever. Attacking along an axis your opponents CAN'T prepare for is just ugly.
I wish you would have credited me with the comments that you extracted so that we could start a discussion. For those interested, I mentioned that I thought that Sorin was a bad speculation based upon the price that he had bought it at. I also said that the cards that had gone up recently were not cards that he had bought into.
This goes over my general theory of speculation. As for your specific comments--
1. Sorin--As I say in the article, the strategy of purchasing a card is more than just simply 'is it good/will it see play'. Plenty of cards are good and see play but that does not necessarily mean that they will increase in price -or- that they will increase in price enough for it to be worth your while. Sorin is a great spec now, or rather a week or so ago, but was not a good spec at the price that you bought him at--19.4 tickets. I agree that he is a great card and that he will probably see play this Standard season. But, again, and this is something that you did not touch on in your response to my comment, that price that you bought in at is too high. 19.4 tickets does not give you enough growth to have a decent return on your investment.
2. AVR/Zombies--While it is not entirely helpful for me to have said what cards you missed on, the point of my comment was to show you the kinds of cards that are good to speculate on and the timing. Right now is not the time to be buying cards from any Standard set unless you think that you have a read on the metagame. Now is a good time to buy cards for Modern. For instance, Scadling Tarn has dropped from 8.5-5.5. Once Modern season starts it will be a good time to buy Standard/RTR cards. When Standard season starts it will be a good time to buy Modern/Gatecrash cards, etc. etc.
Thanks for taking the time to do this article series, I check it every Friday and love all of the information contained within it. I also appreciate you taking the time to explore speculation as I find it to be a really interesting topic and love talking about it
But I like Venser! Poor Venser, who's dead and won't see any more card with his name. :/ And what he does with the big enchantments is really cool (which is why Academy Rector was there, which is way this was a Human deck, which is way it lost too many support slots to really work with Birds).
But yeah, I've Tezzeret 2.0 on my wish list since a while. I'll get it sooner or later. I don't know if I'll play it with Birds, though. Still need to research on that. Finding a tribal deck for each planeswalker (minus Nissa, because, heh) might be an interesting subject for an article/section/whatever.
I noticed the peculiarities of those Faerie and Eldrazi bases myself, then forgot to write them down. All-Mythic Eldrazi might even be higher than that, I used the price for promo Emrakul, but it's currently sold out, so the price might not be accurate (and it's one third of the regular one).
I agree with you on that. But I know other people are being less tolerant. I might be curious to find out how many times it has been played, it should be surely more than most of all the other watched cards, but still no more than a dozen times, I think.
Kuma, how about instead of Venser in your Strix deck, trying Tezzeret 2.0 with some more of the artifact birds? Now that Tezz 2.0 is out of standard and fits easier into the "just screwing around" budget, I think he'll be fun to try out. Gives you a nice planeswalker finisher for your control deck. And you're probably already in Esper at that point, so you could play neat one-sided sweepers like Scourglass and likely some others I haven't thought of.
Other random thought: Malum's entire tribal base would be under 1 dollar if it weren't for the playset of the pauper allstar Cloud of Faeries.
Last random thought: Eldrazi have to be the only tribe where the tribal base is WAY more expensive than the mana base, which is usually the other way around in our format.
I think I have played against Splinter Twin deck only once or twice in Tribal, but the combo doesn't seem too hard to disrupt if you pack enough instant removal.
In this regard it's different to some other combo decks - it doesn't need special answers that aren't good against most other decks.
I don't see a problem with the combo (though I might be wrong - it might be more resilient and annoying than I give it credit for)
So, I actually went ahead and made that post before even seeing the video you put up... where you mention returning to PTS. I apologize for being a premature douchebag
Yeah I didn't really consider it because the only time I tried it, it was pretty bad but I drew it when I was already in a bad spot. Maybe I should give that one another try if I do end up drafting a deck like this.
Not that I'm complaining, but I miss the good ol' days of Pauper Test Session with your trusty friend Peter. Are we going to see any of that any time soon? Don't get me wrong, your videos are as always a blessing and some of the best produced there are, but I'm just a bigger fan of the official pauper format than by the player-run formats.
You missed out on this one. Stack its triggers properly and you're way ahead. Perfect for keeping tempo in this aggressive deck and buying time to clear their lands.
You didn't mention Grisly Salvage in your review. It's a better Mulch. Early game find a land, late game keep a creature. All while stocking your graveyard at instant speed.
Glad you're enjoying it! And yeah, Serendib Efreet is a great card in some decks. He was just a very bad choice for this deck, and I was punished for not sticking to my chosen deck style better. With a ton of card draw I suppose there's a little to be said for giving the deck options which way to play out, but then you have to recognize which line of play is best in each game, which I did not in my game 1. And even so, cube is so powerful overall that if 95% of your opponent's cards fit the same theme, and your deck's a bit of a jumble, you're going to have a hard time keeping up.
Regarding ramp, generally it's dead on to never use ramp in a splash color, and that's why the artifact ramp cards in cube are often high picks and go early. That applies to any 2+ color deck that's adding a splash though - we're a special case here because we know we're always going mono-colored. While a clasic splash with 1-4 lands of the splash color will be too unreliable for ramping, in a "blue splash green" deck you could easily run something like 11-12 islands and 5-7 forests, almost always have your blue mana, and still get the splash color early. While that's usually considered too many forests for a small splash, if you have 2-3 green cards that are only good early, you can often get away with setting up your manabase that way. (If you have heavy double-blue or triple blue spells though, be careful not to go too low.)
Crucible is one of those card that really does nothing in most decks. You really need something like Wasteland and/or Stripmine to have a reason to play it, along a few fetches. Otherwise it's a dead card most of the time. I would never play it in this deck.
Great seeing this go up. I haven't played a deck like this in the classic yet so it's interesting to see it from the player's perspective.I don't know if I'd have the discipline to play it without modifying it into something cute and inevitably ineffective (I can't stand having dead cards in common matchups, and like to draw lots of cards in my control decks). It's too bad some of your opponents took so long to make their plays, as those videos weren't as good as they could be.
I didn't see you make many mistakes, maybe leaving akroma in the sb for a nearly useless condemn. I was thrilled to see you win the event. I'll be glad to see you around the format in the future. Always good to have more champions we can root for testing the metagame.
I haven't tried Kyoki, Kuro or Seizan as Commanders. However, I have played with Kuro and, as Paul pointed out, put Seizan in several decks. Unfortunately while each of these creatures has positives, there are too many negatives to really make use of them as Commanders: Kyoki needs spirits and arcane spells (not easy in mono-colored) for an effect that does nothing on the table, Kuro costs a ton of mana, and Seizan benefits your opponents before he benefits you, which is always a bummer. However, Kuro was a great supporting player in a life gain deck I did a while back (Lady Evangela, I think) as he was able to machine gun the whole table at times. Seizan is great in those Rakdos "no pain, no gain" type of decks. Plus, a lot of those Kamigawa demons just look cool. So you just gotta find the right spots for them.
I did make a demon themed deck using Sol'Kanar (who I don't think you gave enough credit as swampwalk is pretty underrated):
Nice draft! I agree with your picks and you jumped into Azorius when it was open -- of course a Jace helps with the transition. Hope to watch more in the future.
Sure, but I'm talking about using him as a commander, not as one of the other 99 cards.
(That's probably something I should put with the other initial disclaimers: every Commander Evaluation uses the same premise: the card as a commander of a Commander deck; in the General Evaluations, instead, I talk about using the cards in all the constructed formats where they are legal, including, occasionally, Commander).
Forgot to add: Avatar will probably be the final article of the first cycle, representing the multicolor part of the spectrum (after Angel, Sphinx, Demon, Dragon, and Wurm as the monocolor bannermen).
After all, a certain movie (and Internet forums) made the word "avatar" really popular. Although, within MTG you should aim to use them in place of something more powerful than an annoying, paraplegic marine (or some forum user with too much time on their hands).
Inkmoth Nexus 2 $ 6.53
Is that correct? If so what a drop in a few days.
“anyone could make money by investing in cards online" What backs that up? The fact that prices fluctuate over time? That if you set your mind to it you can gain insider knowledge on those changes?
It is MUCH easier to make money with paper cards. Online everyone is already connected into the information (open classifieds or your favorite bot and observe the price.) In paper you can at least have better overall knowledge going into your trades & take advantage of variance on the spot (your trade partner may prefer to go with SCG prices while you have real market knowledge via eBay, for example.) Online seems like more of a guessing game.
I do agree with investing based on seasonality, but I still don't think it's as easy to make money as the original statement.
Any word on how the guys that went in on the hoard of duals are doing?
I'd like to see the stats for Gaddock Teeg if it were on the watch list: I'm not saying it should be banned, but I do think it has a very winning record.
Woot Cheapest deck in the top 4 :) as for the annoyance level of splinter twin I have played that deck 5 times using both noggles and humans instead of faeries. And yes I have seen plenty of ways around splinter twin from spot removal to random enchantment hate to Teeg.
As for the Tribal base cost :o I did not know Cloud of faeries jumped that much picked them up a while back for like 1 tix each.
I come from a Pauper background(yes I am dirty dirty Delver player). So any cards that I can use across the formats I will use.
That being said if I could afford those stupidly over priced faeries I would play them.
Lastly on the thought of banning Splinter Twin I can see a good argument on theme and flavor of the card but look at it from a format health perspective.
Splinter twin is 1.15 tix
pestermight is .08
Deciever Exarch is .07
all together 5.20 tix or cheaper
This is a cheap deck if you want it to be, Which also gives hope to casual players looking to have fun and not always getting roflstomped.
ok ending soap box
also thanks for writing these Diaries it does help put the format in perspective.
Cool to see you add some of the pauper cards I suggested to your portfolio. Now I wonder if you're playing by some kind of rules of the selling part? There's some bots out there that pay almost market price for pauper cards (which is personally think it dumb for a bot to do; because it fluctuates so often)... And there's others that pay about 50%.... So if the fireblast goes up to $2 eventually - you might get $1.10/$1.25 from certain mainstream bots.... But other bots will give as much as $1.60/$1.75....
Just wish you had held on to some money so you could buy up some Lotus Petals too. They just dropped down to $5 and now's your second chance to get in on them. They were selling for almost $11 before the annoucement! And the fact these drafts only lasted 1 week - makes me think the price should get back to where they were much faster than normal (Invasion was drafted for 2 weeks I believe and took about 3 months to get back to normal).
Either way... All of those are safe buys. In 3 months or so - they should be back to around what they were before the drafts. Fireblast - $2; Spinning Darkness - $2.25; Choking Sands - $1.80. Even if they're half of that - that's still profit.
---
I said: “the safe money is made in the eternal formats.”
You said: "I strongly disagree, unless you are simply timing the price drops when eternal format drafts are depressing prices (e.g. Fireblast after Mirage block drafts, or Wasteland after Tempest.)..."
And timing my buying around price drops (such as when cards are being drafted) is exactly what I'm talking about. I gave the example of buying Prohibits and Excludes for pennies when they were being drafted. The Prohibits paid off in a major way (The Excludes have not, because there's no current pauper deck that's running them; but I believe they eventually will go up in price.)... It's really safe money to me... Buying 100+ of each wasn't a lottery - I knew the history of the cards and knew the history of cards being drafted only hurts cards value in the short-term.
I'm also talking about buying in the off-season and selling in season (this mostly applies to Modern). But that's a different beast... And it looks like you did a little of that yourself.
Anyway, good to see you explain in a little more detail your thoughts on everything and what's going on. I only began reading your articles about a month ago. So I'm still catching up to what you're doing.
I agree with this. Because combo decks in tribal wars do not have enough slots to reliably protect their combo with countermagic and Duress/Thoughtseize, ones that are disrupted by creature removal (which 90%+ of the decks every week are playing) are pretty "fair" combo decks all things considered.
I think there are generally tiers of combo decks like this:
1. Creature-Based Combo: easily disrupted by 90% of the field.
2. Non-creature permanent Based Combo: 50% of the field can disrupt them, but not always at instant speed, and probably not before Turn 3.
3. Instant/Sorcery-Based Combo: maybe only 10% of the decks have some kind of countermagic to disrupt this, but it is way harder to build these decks for tribal wars in the first place so it's less of a problem that you'd think.
4. Graveyard-Based Combo: decks can usually only disrupt these with incidental GY hate (i.e. a zombies deck that happens to have Withered Wretch in it), because the cards that really fight graveyards effectively are utterly useless against everything else. Some of the strategies, such as reanimator, can be fought to some degree by countermagic and creature removal, and are probably therefore less degenerate.
It's obvious why I think #4 is the most dangerous in principle. Attacking along an axis your opponents aren't prepared for is clever. Attacking along an axis your opponents CAN'T prepare for is just ugly.
I wish you would have credited me with the comments that you extracted so that we could start a discussion. For those interested, I mentioned that I thought that Sorin was a bad speculation based upon the price that he had bought it at. I also said that the cards that had gone up recently were not cards that he had bought into.
I wrote an article about basic MTGO Speculation: http://60cards.com/feature/60cards-financial-report-with-colin-mcdonald-...
This goes over my general theory of speculation. As for your specific comments--
1. Sorin--As I say in the article, the strategy of purchasing a card is more than just simply 'is it good/will it see play'. Plenty of cards are good and see play but that does not necessarily mean that they will increase in price -or- that they will increase in price enough for it to be worth your while. Sorin is a great spec now, or rather a week or so ago, but was not a good spec at the price that you bought him at--19.4 tickets. I agree that he is a great card and that he will probably see play this Standard season. But, again, and this is something that you did not touch on in your response to my comment, that price that you bought in at is too high. 19.4 tickets does not give you enough growth to have a decent return on your investment.
2. AVR/Zombies--While it is not entirely helpful for me to have said what cards you missed on, the point of my comment was to show you the kinds of cards that are good to speculate on and the timing. Right now is not the time to be buying cards from any Standard set unless you think that you have a read on the metagame. Now is a good time to buy cards for Modern. For instance, Scadling Tarn has dropped from 8.5-5.5. Once Modern season starts it will be a good time to buy Standard/RTR cards. When Standard season starts it will be a good time to buy Modern/Gatecrash cards, etc. etc.
Thanks for taking the time to do this article series, I check it every Friday and love all of the information contained within it. I also appreciate you taking the time to explore speculation as I find it to be a really interesting topic and love talking about it
But I like Venser! Poor Venser, who's dead and won't see any more card with his name. :/ And what he does with the big enchantments is really cool (which is why Academy Rector was there, which is way this was a Human deck, which is way it lost too many support slots to really work with Birds).
But yeah, I've Tezzeret 2.0 on my wish list since a while. I'll get it sooner or later. I don't know if I'll play it with Birds, though. Still need to research on that. Finding a tribal deck for each planeswalker (minus Nissa, because, heh) might be an interesting subject for an article/section/whatever.
I noticed the peculiarities of those Faerie and Eldrazi bases myself, then forgot to write them down. All-Mythic Eldrazi might even be higher than that, I used the price for promo Emrakul, but it's currently sold out, so the price might not be accurate (and it's one third of the regular one).
I agree with you on that. But I know other people are being less tolerant. I might be curious to find out how many times it has been played, it should be surely more than most of all the other watched cards, but still no more than a dozen times, I think.
Kuma, how about instead of Venser in your Strix deck, trying Tezzeret 2.0 with some more of the artifact birds? Now that Tezz 2.0 is out of standard and fits easier into the "just screwing around" budget, I think he'll be fun to try out. Gives you a nice planeswalker finisher for your control deck. And you're probably already in Esper at that point, so you could play neat one-sided sweepers like Scourglass and likely some others I haven't thought of.
Other random thought: Malum's entire tribal base would be under 1 dollar if it weren't for the playset of the pauper allstar Cloud of Faeries.
Last random thought: Eldrazi have to be the only tribe where the tribal base is WAY more expensive than the mana base, which is usually the other way around in our format.
I think I have played against Splinter Twin deck only once or twice in Tribal, but the combo doesn't seem too hard to disrupt if you pack enough instant removal.
In this regard it's different to some other combo decks - it doesn't need special answers that aren't good against most other decks.
I don't see a problem with the combo (though I might be wrong - it might be more resilient and annoying than I give it credit for)
Well, I won't be doing them with Peter anymore, but yes, I will be returning to some classic pauper, hopefully sooner than later.
Well, when it's RPG, it's always been Blue to me.
So, I actually went ahead and made that post before even seeing the video you put up... where you mention returning to PTS. I apologize for being a premature douchebag
Yeah I didn't really consider it because the only time I tried it, it was pretty bad but I drew it when I was already in a bad spot. Maybe I should give that one another try if I do end up drafting a deck like this.
Not that I'm complaining, but I miss the good ol' days of Pauper Test Session with your trusty friend Peter. Are we going to see any of that any time soon? Don't get me wrong, your videos are as always a blessing and some of the best produced there are, but I'm just a bigger fan of the official pauper format than by the player-run formats.
You missed out on this one. Stack its triggers properly and you're way ahead. Perfect for keeping tempo in this aggressive deck and buying time to clear their lands.
Always a great review.
You didn't mention Grisly Salvage in your review. It's a better Mulch. Early game find a land, late game keep a creature. All while stocking your graveyard at instant speed.
Glad you're enjoying it! And yeah, Serendib Efreet is a great card in some decks. He was just a very bad choice for this deck, and I was punished for not sticking to my chosen deck style better. With a ton of card draw I suppose there's a little to be said for giving the deck options which way to play out, but then you have to recognize which line of play is best in each game, which I did not in my game 1. And even so, cube is so powerful overall that if 95% of your opponent's cards fit the same theme, and your deck's a bit of a jumble, you're going to have a hard time keeping up.
Regarding ramp, generally it's dead on to never use ramp in a splash color, and that's why the artifact ramp cards in cube are often high picks and go early. That applies to any 2+ color deck that's adding a splash though - we're a special case here because we know we're always going mono-colored. While a clasic splash with 1-4 lands of the splash color will be too unreliable for ramping, in a "blue splash green" deck you could easily run something like 11-12 islands and 5-7 forests, almost always have your blue mana, and still get the splash color early. While that's usually considered too many forests for a small splash, if you have 2-3 green cards that are only good early, you can often get away with setting up your manabase that way. (If you have heavy double-blue or triple blue spells though, be careful not to go too low.)
Crucible is one of those card that really does nothing in most decks. You really need something like Wasteland and/or Stripmine to have a reason to play it, along a few fetches. Otherwise it's a dead card most of the time. I would never play it in this deck.
Great seeing this go up. I haven't played a deck like this in the classic yet so it's interesting to see it from the player's perspective.I don't know if I'd have the discipline to play it without modifying it into something cute and inevitably ineffective (I can't stand having dead cards in common matchups, and like to draw lots of cards in my control decks). It's too bad some of your opponents took so long to make their plays, as those videos weren't as good as they could be.
I didn't see you make many mistakes, maybe leaving akroma in the sb for a nearly useless condemn. I was thrilled to see you win the event. I'll be glad to see you around the format in the future. Always good to have more champions we can root for testing the metagame.
I haven't tried Kyoki, Kuro or Seizan as Commanders. However, I have played with Kuro and, as Paul pointed out, put Seizan in several decks. Unfortunately while each of these creatures has positives, there are too many negatives to really make use of them as Commanders: Kyoki needs spirits and arcane spells (not easy in mono-colored) for an effect that does nothing on the table, Kuro costs a ton of mana, and Seizan benefits your opponents before he benefits you, which is always a bummer. However, Kuro was a great supporting player in a life gain deck I did a while back (Lady Evangela, I think) as he was able to machine gun the whole table at times. Seizan is great in those Rakdos "no pain, no gain" type of decks. Plus, a lot of those Kamigawa demons just look cool. So you just gotta find the right spots for them.
I did make a demon themed deck using Sol'Kanar (who I don't think you gave enough credit as swampwalk is pretty underrated):
http://puremtgo.com/articles/conqueror-commander-vol-lxxii-solkanar-swam...
Nice draft! I agree with your picks and you jumped into Azorius when it was open -- of course a Jace helps with the transition. Hope to watch more in the future.
Also, sweet ringtone!
Sure, but I'm talking about using him as a commander, not as one of the other 99 cards.
(That's probably something I should put with the other initial disclaimers: every Commander Evaluation uses the same premise: the card as a commander of a Commander deck; in the General Evaluations, instead, I talk about using the cards in all the constructed formats where they are legal, including, occasionally, Commander).
Forgot to add: Avatar will probably be the final article of the first cycle, representing the multicolor part of the spectrum (after Angel, Sphinx, Demon, Dragon, and Wurm as the monocolor bannermen).
After all, a certain movie (and Internet forums) made the word "avatar" really popular. Although, within MTG you should aim to use them in place of something more powerful than an annoying, paraplegic marine (or some forum user with too much time on their hands).