What about the inclusion of Cathar's Crusade?

The reason for Mikaeus, the Lunarch is the ability to tutor it with Ranger of Eos.

I think I would prefer Emeria, the Sky Ruin over Windbrisk Heights, as the average mana cost of the deck is ~1.9 CMC; so you net less than 1 on the activation. Altough it does allow for a scry 4 and possible combat trick.

Loving this series! Cheers for the efforts. Easily one of the best cube draft articles out there. My G'd, if I see another UG 2-1 cube deck I'm going to do something silly...
Major props for the dream halls by the way. Go big or go home - only way to cube.

On the deck/draft, mono-blue is easily the hardest deck to play in any environment. I used to have a 100-card singleton mono-U deck that I tried a couple times in the weekend tournies (before they stopped grrrr.....). I could often win match 1 but my head hurt so much after I'd have to go lie down. Always got steam rollered in the later matches.

I'm not sure whether you agree but it seems that mono-blue wasn't quite there for you. I always find early defense is the biggest problem in mono-blue and you didn't really get passed any of the normal role-players (vedalken shackles for example). I think I might have taken tectonic edge rather than delver. I also might have considered masticore, daze or breeding pool over the STE. It's ramp seems a little slow, only jumping you one, and it's in your splash. I'm sure I read somewhere (possibly even in your column?) never to use ramp in a splash colour because you don't get it early enough, but maybe I'm wrong?

Anyway, definite kudos for trying though. Bring on Black and White!

The players you talk about are a subset of the players I talk about. Nothing prevents you to try and do some speculation game if you feel like that. And everyone has the same chances to be right of anyone else. So, to me, while Pete's project might have his value to him in putting him in touch with all of this, it's not going to say anything meaningful in reference of "are those players right or wrong in saying they can predict prices"? I can tell you the answer right now: some of them are right sometimes, some of them are wrong other times.

And they are just random people showing up here and giving opinions. They are not representative of anything other than themselves, singularly. You can't put them all together in a diagram and draw conclusions. We don't even know if there's people out there with a serious knack and tools for doing this prediction thing well, a la pro-level stockbrokers, and they just don't come here to tell us what to buy (because that, told to 1500+ readers within such a micro-economy, would just cause for the predictions to fall apart anyway).

Shame to see you go from the site Blippy. I have really enjoyed these articles and the updates on Modern. Thanks for all your time and contributions.

It's possible with 61 or 62 cards. But I didn't even realize that deck was SEVENTY CARDS! bdgp, you're insane! :)

It's impossible to have a changeling-free Kirin deck over 60 cards in any case. I wouldn't have minded losing to Kirin, it's just unfortunate that he managed to get three of his singleton planeswalkers on the field at once.

And hopefully complete a match in your favor with 0 mulligans for a novelty. :D

By complete accident as i had changed what computer i was using from the previous time i had played imps and had no updated the list on the desktop so i regged with the "old" list that didn't have that change and was stuck using it.

Pete, I want to answer here to something you said in last week's comments about your card speculation project. You said that people always remember that card they bought at 5 and then went to 15, and don't remember the cards they bought for 5 and then bombed and became worthless.

That's very true, but in a nutshell, that's where the approach of all this thing resides. It seems to me you're doing this experiment in a vacuum, and this being more of a social experiement than an economics one (and economics is still social-related anyway), that's not going to produce meaningful data to me.

My point being: why people buy/sell/trade cards? If you assume, "to become rich" (or whatever you might call "rich" within the MTGO micro-economy), that's not the right approach. If someone wants to make serious money (or tix) out of MTGO, they just become pro retailers with a serious business plan and mindset. Otherwise it's like if someone aimed to make money by grabbing stuff they have in their houses, going to the street, and selling/trading it to passersby.

Now, if you assume that people, especially your readers, are just MTGO players that want to end up with more and more good cards for their decks, things change entirely. Buying cards for 5 that then become 0 is just part of the business of being such a player. (Of course, intuition, acumen, and carefulness may vary; after all, some people do make money with the stock market, and not just through hundreds of endless micro-transactions, which is something you can do here too, but it's an entirely different beast.)

Let's say I'm such a player. I have 15 tix. I want cards A, B, and C. They are all 5 tix each. I want them because I want to play them, because I like them, and so. Not necessarily because I want to make money out of them. As a player, they are my NECESSITY. Then I go and buy them all. I enjoy them in my collection and decks. 3 months later, card A's price is up to 15 tix. Cards B and C bombed and they now are worth 0 tix. So I look at card A and say, "I like it, but I don't play it that much after all. Moreso, it's a waste to keep it stuck in my collection since its value is so high now".

The latter point is critical. A player like the one I described (whose profile of course won't include, "Doesn't care about spending a limitless amount of money for MTGO"), always look at the prices of the cards in their collection, because you can always get to a point where you can turn 1 good card into 10 good cards.

So, I sell card A, get 15 tix. Now 3 months have passed, I've my 15 tix back and 2 cards I didn't have in the beginning. But there's more: in 6 months, card A will rotate out of standard or something, and be down to 5. I decide I want it back, because remember how I liked it in the start? I still like it. (Modern has had a lot of influence to this kind of mindset: Modern cards never go out of business and Modern pool is willing to accept new cards, while other, more demanding eternal formats like Legacy don't move their pool around a lot).

Bottom line: I made tix/cards out of thin air, if in the course of 9 months. This is not anecdotal. This is not something you do once in a lifetime. This is something you keep doing, again and again, every month and every week. Just by being aware of what you have in your ever-growing, ever-improving collection, and their current prices. (State of the Program is one of your favore tools for that!) You do this with your entire collection, constantly. That's why, to me, it's not about speculation. It's about survival (of the fittest? Possibly)

The only thing I have to say about your latest video is that, to me, midrange isn't an archetype, it's a playing style. You can do midrange versions of other archetypes. Like, you can do a midrange reanimator (I know I always do), rather than a fast combo reanimator like the ones in this article. If I were you, I would have just called this entry Rock, and focused on the way that particular deck became an archetype adding different colors and techs.

On the length, I don't mind longer podcasts, but that may be just me: when I decide to listen to something, and need to put myself in the right mindset for that, I want for it to be worth the experience, and 30 minutes is a short enough chunk of my time for that. TV producers have known that for a long time, that's why sitcoms are 30 minutes. Of course that might not apply to Internet (whose multimedia content are usually shorter) and most people that aren't me. (Or MaRo, since his podcasts do last 30 minutes indeed).

I don't rememember that, what was it?
I was referring to some debates in the Tribal room, and people I know planning to do an Enduring Ideal Kirin deck. :)

I would have been pretty good in that statistic until this past month. Either I'm just having poor luck, making a few poor game decisions out of fear, or doing these deck techs is making me veer away from my usual deckbuilding styles too much.

BTW, if anybody has an opinion on the shorter length of my video this week, let me know. I thought based on view counts that people preferred it to be kept around the 11-13 minute mark. I don't think I could really get it under 10 minutes and still talk enough about both the theory of the decks and the decklists themselves.