Oh no, Eldrazi should be banned everywhere, that was a mistake. Fixed. Ally, Artificer, Assassin, Eldrazi and Kor are banned for the Underdog Week as they were banned for the old Endangered Week.
But yep, the Unhallowed list will get thinner in time. Even by winning an Underdog Event a tribe isn't Unhallowed anymore. I'll come up with something when that list will start making less sense.
Btw, there's a chance Underdog will be more than 6 times per year (while Singleton still being 6 times next year). But it depends on something I can't talk about right now.
C'mon, you don't need to rationalize Mongoose too much in order to play them. Vantar cleared some Virgin tribes that were a lot less playable, it wasn't really a matter of deckbuilding space with those. :)
And I feel like a first turn (up to 3rd-4th turn) Sadistic Sacrament taking away 3 Lightning Bolts or 3 Swords to Plowshares isn't a good thing for an aggro deck too. It's also a way to make them draw more lands. The second Sacrament might prove devastating. It's kind of a proactive Chalice of the Void strategy. And of course, against most combo is lethal.
Sorry to hear that. Anyway, TribAp never went 5 rounds in the Blippy years (we wish! 41 players are needed for that), and last time it was 4 (21+ players) was on May. I hope we get 21+ again, though. I just did the math, the 52 events last year gave a grand total of 910 registered players. This year we are at 675 with 14 events to go. We need to average 17 players per event to beat the 2011 total.
Ive got several Kirin builds one of which might even steal a match given a soft enough opponent. My trouble is just not being available for the entire time the events take place. Particularly when they go 4-5 rounds.
I'll have to recheck the spreadsheet. I cut promo and things like Invasion tournament packs out of the database - maybe they got cut accidentally? I'll check.
First of all, as one of the biggest fans of the endangered week, and somebody who was very sad to see it go to every 3 (now 2) months, I am 100% in support of this change, no objections at all. It makes more rarely seen tribes playable in the event, and I am all for that. I think it will be much improved once somebody wins with Eldrazi, Slivers, and a couple of the other power tribes that are on the unhallowed list. I also thought Plant was disqualified after it became just another way to sneak wall-drazi into endangered events. But overall I'm very satisfied with the look of the Underdog Week, and by early next year hopefully the power tribes will be culled from it. I think disqualifying the more ubiquitous tribes on an ongoing basis is a good idea, as how assassins was taken out of the event earlier this year, and we should continue to do that every few events (so about every 6 months) take a look to see if anything reaching an assassins-level of ubiquity needs to be made ineligible.
I wish I could say I was surprised that Monguises are still waiting on the unplayed list. They're cute and vicious and awesome, all at the same time, but there's no deck design space there. The best I could ever do was some sort of U/G tempo deck which was still rather underpowered. Even worse, the shroud ones don't have the same potential impact in this event as they do in real legacy, because nobody in real legacy plays sweepers that would catch them, so they're usually only vulnerable to edicts there.
I have severe doubts that we will see any increase in Cap/Lobotomy effects, since those effects are a wasted card against aggro, and therefore dead against 70% of the field. You might run them in something that crushed aggro but folded miserably to combo and wanted to up its percentages in a tough matchup, such as a midrange creature deck in Doran/Junk colors. I continue to believe control decks should be fighting combo by splashing either blue for counterspells or black for thoughtseize and duress, as those are the most generally useful answers that aren't totally dead against the field. I also think that small enlightened tutor packages in the non-blue aggro decks, allowing them to fetch one of 2-3 silver bullets in the deck at need while also fetching swords when the bullets aren't needed, would improve their matchups against combo considerably as well. But by all means, Sadistic Sacrament is a nice card against combo, I don't discourage anybody from trying it, I just think you'll find it to be more dead against your other opponents than countermagic or hand disruption would be.
It was supposed to come out a few days earlier but some problems delayed it. I tried to cover some less hyped cards to mitigate the fact that everyone is talking about the new cards. But every new set this happens. There are always a lot of preview and review new cards articles.
I wrote the below to wizards regarding the health of the Pauper format:
_______________________________________________________________________
I’m writing in concerns to a format your company, understandably – doesn’t value that much: Pauper. More specifically, I’m concerned with the health of the format and am writing to persuade ‘the powers-that-be’ some recommended banning’s from a player that has played in, literally, THOUSANDS of tournaments. Considering my magic resume and history, I hope this isn’t brushed aside as a misguided opinion, and is instead viewed as a valuable insight from a player with countless hours of competing and observing this great format.
At first glance, the storm mechanic seems to be the greatest offender. Many suggest the banning of the ramp engine similar to what happened in Modern. This is very valid argument, given Pauper’s vast resources – and I’m sure if Pro Tour-level events included the Pauper format, it would have happened long ago. Additionally, before “Frantic Search” was banned, the format was inundated with “Temporal Fissure” decks…if you need proof of this, look at my matchups in the videos here:
The following cards should be put on a ‘watch list’ – I’m not suggesting this list be banned, just watched closely:
Rite of Flame, Flickerform, Glimmerpost, Gitaxian Probe, Fling, Snap, Cloud of Faeries, Temporal Fissure, Grapeshot, Ponder, Preordain, Lotus Petal, Flaring Pain and Invigorate.
Of all the above, I believe the three cards that are hurting the format most are:
Gitaxian Probe, Grapeshot and Snap.
Gitaxian Probe is used in everything from Empty the Warrens/Grapeshot Storm decks, to Mono-Blue Delver, Infect and various other off-color strategies. Limiting these to a ‘one-of’ would really help the format, allowing players a bit more fun as they have to gamble a bit more often with “all-in” styles of deck building. This ban would simply make the game more exciting and fun.
Grapeshot should be banned or limited to one for the very simple reason that the ONLY reliable way to negate this effect is the card Benevolent Unicorn. This isn’t that much of a problem for a savvy player, as the Transmute engine can search for a plethora of removal that cost two mana – even nastier is when a player has a prevention spell, that same search can stir up Flaring Pain after having drawn more than half his/her deck. If Pauper had 3-4 cards that had similar text to Benevolent Unicorn it wouldn’t be a problem – but as it sits now, this is really making the game less fun that it should be.
Snap is the last on my list. Mono-blue as well as the new breed of Temporal Fissure decks can already abuse Cloud of Faeries, but adding this to the list makes an offensive/defensive combination that is VERY hard to win against and creates a ‘hopeless feeling’ with many players I talk to. I’ve piloted this build plenty, and feel limiting the ‘free-mana’ spells to just the Cloud of Faeries would help immensely.
In closing, I hope this doesn’t fall on deaf ears. Instead, I hope it is viewed as a valuable insight and free think-tank analysis for a format your players love to play.
Thanks! Yeah, I saw a lot of folks on reddit were asking which guild pack was the best and I figured since no one else was talking about it, I may as well write up an analysis.
For actual sealed information I know no one better than LSV. I don't see a reason why I'd write up an article if he's covering the subject too, but way better. /fanboy
Fun to watch as always. Though you might feel a bit guilty at the topdecked Metamorph to win, finding Tinker was also a pretty gnarly deal for him first. Not to mention he got it going in all three games. Well played!
I've given you a hard time in the past, but it just wouldn't be right if I didn't also give you props when you did a great job. Not only was your 2nd round match against Aces_Wild the most enjoyable to watch match I've seen from you yet, but your whole attitude this time around seems to be improved. I don't know if things are just going better for you in your life or what, but your spirit and the energy you brought to these matches really made for a good show. I enjoyed watching this.
Nicely done! Naoto is a tough customer. Goes to show how broken Ravager is that it can wreck Blightsteel on the board though the Metamorph was very timely.
As a Macroeconomics teacher, experiencing the sheer awesomeness of this type of data-driven analysis will put me in a good mood for the rest of the day. Bravo, sir!
The last thing this sited needed was YET ANOTHER Ravinica breakdown article...but this ISN'T that, so thank you for doing it differently and surprising me :)
The worst thing about new sets,(if there is one!) - is the flood of articles that everyone insists on doing, despite 14 others having done so the day before...all saying roughly the same thing.
"This match seems pretty good for Rpitcher’s deck, but I feel that Tron can easily just pull far ahead in a few turns and lock him out of the game."
Exactly!
For an aggro deck to tackle a Tron deck like Mikey's, it needs to be fast, and to have some redundancy in its speed. Survival Cache, for instance, doesn't fit the aggro plan, as it is just too slow. More suited for a mid-range deck that can grind things out. Even its red rebound cousin, Staggershock, would fit the aggro theme better, while still (sometimes) providing a 2-for-1 exchange.
Griffin Guide is an old favourite of mine, but it's not very well suited to this format. Guide's bonus happens when the enchanted creature dies. Not when Guide itself goes to the graveyard from play. This means exile effects like Path, Journey, Pillar, and Ob-ring, don't help me out. Sure, I might get lucky and stick a Guide to pound face now and then, but not often enough to justify the frequent 2-for-1 losses.
I wanted mine to be a Tarmagoyf deck, with Pridemate subbing as Goyf, but I fell into my old habits and included too many mid-range cards. Never was much of a Sligh Guy.
The Tron deck can become overwhelmingly powerful in a hurry, but even when it staggers, it has the tools to get back into the game.
That slug came about because a designer likes to play a "game" where you roll two d6 and name a vanilla creature with the stats combo that comes up. There were a couple of holes in the list as a result of some early walls being errata-ed to have the "defender" keyword, so he added a few vanilla creatures with weird stats in RtR (I think there's a 5/2 as well?).
Also, I tried some other colors for the line in that graph. White was just too jarring, and it made it too hard to really see anything, because the contrast was just too high. The best solution would have been to just pair down the other lines, but I really wanted people to see how RTR compared to the other sets. The problem is that too many of the high contrast lines just completely destroyed the readability of the other lines. I probably could have fiddled around with it for another half hour to figure out something better, but I decided to just let good enough be good enough.
Oh no, Eldrazi should be banned everywhere, that was a mistake. Fixed. Ally, Artificer, Assassin, Eldrazi and Kor are banned for the Underdog Week as they were banned for the old Endangered Week.
But yep, the Unhallowed list will get thinner in time. Even by winning an Underdog Event a tribe isn't Unhallowed anymore. I'll come up with something when that list will start making less sense.
Btw, there's a chance Underdog will be more than 6 times per year (while Singleton still being 6 times next year). But it depends on something I can't talk about right now.
C'mon, you don't need to rationalize Mongoose too much in order to play them. Vantar cleared some Virgin tribes that were a lot less playable, it wasn't really a matter of deckbuilding space with those. :)
And I feel like a first turn (up to 3rd-4th turn) Sadistic Sacrament taking away 3 Lightning Bolts or 3 Swords to Plowshares isn't a good thing for an aggro deck too. It's also a way to make them draw more lands. The second Sacrament might prove devastating. It's kind of a proactive Chalice of the Void strategy. And of course, against most combo is lethal.
Sorry to hear that. Anyway, TribAp never went 5 rounds in the Blippy years (we wish! 41 players are needed for that), and last time it was 4 (21+ players) was on May. I hope we get 21+ again, though. I just did the math, the 52 events last year gave a grand total of 910 registered players. This year we are at 675 with 14 events to go. We need to average 17 players per event to beat the 2011 total.
Ive got several Kirin builds one of which might even steal a match given a soft enough opponent. My trouble is just not being available for the entire time the events take place. Particularly when they go 4-5 rounds.
I'll have to recheck the spreadsheet. I cut promo and things like Invasion tournament packs out of the database - maybe they got cut accidentally? I'll check.
It should actually be 4th... Tarmogoyf...
Why isn't Rishadan port in the most expensive card list? It should be 3rd
First of all, as one of the biggest fans of the endangered week, and somebody who was very sad to see it go to every 3 (now 2) months, I am 100% in support of this change, no objections at all. It makes more rarely seen tribes playable in the event, and I am all for that. I think it will be much improved once somebody wins with Eldrazi, Slivers, and a couple of the other power tribes that are on the unhallowed list. I also thought Plant was disqualified after it became just another way to sneak wall-drazi into endangered events. But overall I'm very satisfied with the look of the Underdog Week, and by early next year hopefully the power tribes will be culled from it. I think disqualifying the more ubiquitous tribes on an ongoing basis is a good idea, as how assassins was taken out of the event earlier this year, and we should continue to do that every few events (so about every 6 months) take a look to see if anything reaching an assassins-level of ubiquity needs to be made ineligible.
I wish I could say I was surprised that Monguises are still waiting on the unplayed list. They're cute and vicious and awesome, all at the same time, but there's no deck design space there. The best I could ever do was some sort of U/G tempo deck which was still rather underpowered. Even worse, the shroud ones don't have the same potential impact in this event as they do in real legacy, because nobody in real legacy plays sweepers that would catch them, so they're usually only vulnerable to edicts there.
I have severe doubts that we will see any increase in Cap/Lobotomy effects, since those effects are a wasted card against aggro, and therefore dead against 70% of the field. You might run them in something that crushed aggro but folded miserably to combo and wanted to up its percentages in a tough matchup, such as a midrange creature deck in Doran/Junk colors. I continue to believe control decks should be fighting combo by splashing either blue for counterspells or black for thoughtseize and duress, as those are the most generally useful answers that aren't totally dead against the field. I also think that small enlightened tutor packages in the non-blue aggro decks, allowing them to fetch one of 2-3 silver bullets in the deck at need while also fetching swords when the bullets aren't needed, would improve their matchups against combo considerably as well. But by all means, Sadistic Sacrament is a nice card against combo, I don't discourage anybody from trying it, I just think you'll find it to be more dead against your other opponents than countermagic or hand disruption would be.
It was supposed to come out a few days earlier but some problems delayed it. I tried to cover some less hyped cards to mitigate the fact that everyone is talking about the new cards. But every new set this happens. There are always a lot of preview and review new cards articles.
No offence to you, but can we PLEASE STOP writing these? There are literally 23 articles about New Ravinica, all saying the same thing.
AN OPEN LETTER TO WIZARDS:
I wrote the below to wizards regarding the health of the Pauper format:
_______________________________________________________________________
I’m writing in concerns to a format your company, understandably – doesn’t value that much: Pauper. More specifically, I’m concerned with the health of the format and am writing to persuade ‘the powers-that-be’ some recommended banning’s from a player that has played in, literally, THOUSANDS of tournaments. Considering my magic resume and history, I hope this isn’t brushed aside as a misguided opinion, and is instead viewed as a valuable insight from a player with countless hours of competing and observing this great format.
At first glance, the storm mechanic seems to be the greatest offender. Many suggest the banning of the ramp engine similar to what happened in Modern. This is very valid argument, given Pauper’s vast resources – and I’m sure if Pro Tour-level events included the Pauper format, it would have happened long ago. Additionally, before “Frantic Search” was banned, the format was inundated with “Temporal Fissure” decks…if you need proof of this, look at my matchups in the videos here:
http://puremtgo.com/articles/pauper-stompy
Where I faced it 5 out of 8 rounds!
The following cards should be put on a ‘watch list’ – I’m not suggesting this list be banned, just watched closely:
Rite of Flame, Flickerform, Glimmerpost, Gitaxian Probe, Fling, Snap, Cloud of Faeries, Temporal Fissure, Grapeshot, Ponder, Preordain, Lotus Petal, Flaring Pain and Invigorate.
Of all the above, I believe the three cards that are hurting the format most are:
Gitaxian Probe, Grapeshot and Snap.
Gitaxian Probe is used in everything from Empty the Warrens/Grapeshot Storm decks, to Mono-Blue Delver, Infect and various other off-color strategies. Limiting these to a ‘one-of’ would really help the format, allowing players a bit more fun as they have to gamble a bit more often with “all-in” styles of deck building. This ban would simply make the game more exciting and fun.
Grapeshot should be banned or limited to one for the very simple reason that the ONLY reliable way to negate this effect is the card Benevolent Unicorn. This isn’t that much of a problem for a savvy player, as the Transmute engine can search for a plethora of removal that cost two mana – even nastier is when a player has a prevention spell, that same search can stir up Flaring Pain after having drawn more than half his/her deck. If Pauper had 3-4 cards that had similar text to Benevolent Unicorn it wouldn’t be a problem – but as it sits now, this is really making the game less fun that it should be.
Snap is the last on my list. Mono-blue as well as the new breed of Temporal Fissure decks can already abuse Cloud of Faeries, but adding this to the list makes an offensive/defensive combination that is VERY hard to win against and creates a ‘hopeless feeling’ with many players I talk to. I’ve piloted this build plenty, and feel limiting the ‘free-mana’ spells to just the Cloud of Faeries would help immensely.
In closing, I hope this doesn’t fall on deaf ears. Instead, I hope it is viewed as a valuable insight and free think-tank analysis for a format your players love to play.
-Adrian Grey Marsden
‘deluxeicoff’ on mtgo
Good listen as usual.
It would be really cool if Thursdays turned into "Classic Thursdays" on Pure. Four articles on Classic at once!
Thanks! Yeah, I saw a lot of folks on reddit were asking which guild pack was the best and I figured since no one else was talking about it, I may as well write up an analysis.
For actual sealed information I know no one better than LSV. I don't see a reason why I'd write up an article if he's covering the subject too, but way better. /fanboy
Thanks guys!
Postgame: So I ended up coming in 10th. Too bad so sad. Have to wait around for the next QT. Hopefully y'all could join in the fun!
Fun to watch as always. Though you might feel a bit guilty at the topdecked Metamorph to win, finding Tinker was also a pretty gnarly deal for him first. Not to mention he got it going in all three games. Well played!
The title to this one should read: 9-22-15. Whoops!
I've given you a hard time in the past, but it just wouldn't be right if I didn't also give you props when you did a great job. Not only was your 2nd round match against Aces_Wild the most enjoyable to watch match I've seen from you yet, but your whole attitude this time around seems to be improved. I don't know if things are just going better for you in your life or what, but your spirit and the energy you brought to these matches really made for a good show. I enjoyed watching this.
Thanks for posting.
Nicely done! Naoto is a tough customer. Goes to show how broken Ravager is that it can wreck Blightsteel on the board though the Metamorph was very timely.
Agreed on all counts.
As a Macroeconomics teacher, experiencing the sheer awesomeness of this type of data-driven analysis will put me in a good mood for the rest of the day. Bravo, sir!
The last thing this sited needed was YET ANOTHER Ravinica breakdown article...but this ISN'T that, so thank you for doing it differently and surprising me :)
The worst thing about new sets,(if there is one!) - is the flood of articles that everyone insists on doing, despite 14 others having done so the day before...all saying roughly the same thing.
Like the new pic too!
I believe is called Tron because the lands come together like Voltron.
Thank you for the comment. I also think that your deck was pretty cool, hope to see an updated version of it in the future.
"This match seems pretty good for Rpitcher’s deck, but I feel that Tron can easily just pull far ahead in a few turns and lock him out of the game."
Exactly!
For an aggro deck to tackle a Tron deck like Mikey's, it needs to be fast, and to have some redundancy in its speed. Survival Cache, for instance, doesn't fit the aggro plan, as it is just too slow. More suited for a mid-range deck that can grind things out. Even its red rebound cousin, Staggershock, would fit the aggro theme better, while still (sometimes) providing a 2-for-1 exchange.
Griffin Guide is an old favourite of mine, but it's not very well suited to this format. Guide's bonus happens when the enchanted creature dies. Not when Guide itself goes to the graveyard from play. This means exile effects like Path, Journey, Pillar, and Ob-ring, don't help me out. Sure, I might get lucky and stick a Guide to pound face now and then, but not often enough to justify the frequent 2-for-1 losses.
I wanted mine to be a Tarmagoyf deck, with Pridemate subbing as Goyf, but I fell into my old habits and included too many mid-range cards. Never was much of a Sligh Guy.
The Tron deck can become overwhelmingly powerful in a hurry, but even when it staggers, it has the tools to get back into the game.
Good job on the video series Mikey!
That slug came about because a designer likes to play a "game" where you roll two d6 and name a vanilla creature with the stats combo that comes up. There were a couple of holes in the list as a result of some early walls being errata-ed to have the "defender" keyword, so he added a few vanilla creatures with weird stats in RtR (I think there's a 5/2 as well?).
Also, I tried some other colors for the line in that graph. White was just too jarring, and it made it too hard to really see anything, because the contrast was just too high. The best solution would have been to just pair down the other lines, but I really wanted people to see how RTR compared to the other sets. The problem is that too many of the high contrast lines just completely destroyed the readability of the other lines. I probably could have fiddled around with it for another half hour to figure out something better, but I decided to just let good enough be good enough.