I'm not entirely sure or familiar with all the variants you mention here, but I'm talking about using Mirror Entity to kill X times a Body Double copying a Reveillark, thus bringing back X times such Body Double and a creature with an ETB effect, typically a permanent bouncer (I believe the classical version used Riftwing Cloudskate, my choice was Venser, Shaper Savant). Then the last iteration would bring back Reveillark and Mirror Entity, to finish the permanentless opponent with just a couple attacks.
The deck was Standard during the Time Spiral/Lorwyn era so it had essentially not access to tutors, and it famously assembled the combo passively. All the creatures involved (Mulldrifter was another important player) were more than capable to cause a critical mass of efficient beaters for an aggro kill.
Loving the Kokusho unbanning, as an old school monoblack player from the fallen empires days. I have a monoblack control edh deck, featuring as the general Drana (in russian, as any good vampire should be, for the flavor), and will definitely be trying out Kokusho just for it's massive life swing with the sac outlets monoblack already plays, like High Market and Phyrexian Tower. And any decent monoblack edh deck has a few cutesy graveyard recursion tricks up its sleeve. Having never gotten to play with it before, I'm looking forward to it.
Of course, the problems with monoblack edh could warrant an entire article, and Kokusho hardly solves them. I am not an edh specialist, but I think like most of us we are slaves to the metagame of our local group. My play group is dominated by combo players, and if I manage to Sludge their hand or Mind Twist it or whatever, I just lose to the guy playing Doran beats. Kokusho might be a nice tool for anti aggro at least.
Wish i'd bought the foil before now, as there had been much speculation about Kokusho being unbanned previously and I could have snapped it up cheaper with only the foil dragon collectors as my competition.
I have built the Body Double combo variant for legacy tribal wars, but I'm playing it as combo-control, that has an endgame of Intuition into the combo pieces. I believe it was played with the control slant in TSP/LOR standard. However it could be played as an aggro variant, and if the combo pieces weren't there you might use the Lark as both a midrange curvetopper and a pseudo- Proclamation of Rebirth for reach.
If anybody has played Lark Body Double combo, I'd be curious what your 2 power recursion finisher was. I considered both the Rishadan Pirate guy, and the elemental who puts something on top when it leaves play, since i think leaves play works the same as enters play for the combo so long as you have the mirror entity triggers on stack.
It wasn't particularly the Humility idea what triggered my "Do your exercise properly" rant. (And Rex, by then you had already said that you weren't going to attend, so that wasn't directed at you). I know EVERY group of MTG players will always tend towards "that's the rule, let's find the loophole", like they were all lawyers. It's just the basic gamer's answer to a set of rules. But I want and somehow have the responsibility to limit this attitude as more as possibile, and show that there's a creative way to work "inside the box" too.
Bribery, for instance, as mentioned by Rex. Now, that's one of the solutions I was thinking of and I'd like to see. That's my "just outside the box" concept. It's a meta-call, but not one that tries to nullify the very fabric of the event. It plays into the weakness of the rules, not aiming to ignore or bypass them. It's a cheat-into-play card, only one that doesn't look at your deck.
It's how I said, "Problem: the candidates have fatties to drop. Find the solutions." And the solutions are really, really, REALLY a lot. They kept printing that kind of stuff since forever. It's a big part of the game, which appeals to Timmy. In fact, I don't even think the hard part will be choosing between ramp or cheating-into-play, and then choosing which kind of ramp or cheat effect to use. I think the hard part is choosing the right fatties, the ones that are worth the effort and the resources.
Re: fattie body 10 or 12. I had to set a number, a threshold that would necessarily feel arbitrary to a degree (if I had choses 10, then one could have argued that a creature with body 9 isn't that smaller, and so on). I chose the value that corresponds to the Titans. They're a great symbol, THE fatties of this age of Magic. The top-of-the-curve threats. It's not just about the size indeed, it's about creatures that pose a problem to the player, that cause your hand to feel heavy. In modern Magic, a 5/5 is a creature that might well cost 4 mana. It's something you hardcast without even thinking of it. If all creatures were like that, then the problem to solve would be more related to combat phase strategies than deckbuilding.
I've played against Zombie Bidding in the casual room (I'm there playing legacy tribal wars many nights a week, against people I never see in the event, why can't we recruit these people? I do tell them about the PRE, and some have never heard of it. BTW, I have a dozen or more rather good decks in my rotation of all different archetypes, always willing to test with anyone.) Anyhow, Zombie Bidding is rather formidable. I'm not sure if I've ever played against yours, Paul. I have a bidding deck with a rather poetic tribe attached to it that I'd love to try out sometime, but RTR is going to make it better and I'm biding my time, fiendishly grinning ;)
You're right, that's aggro-combo.
Reveillark.dek was too, wasn't it? You played a lot of creatures and just swung with them until all the combo pieces (all efficient creatures in and by themselves) showed up.
I might say that maybe people play Vorthos Zombies and just want to have fun with them. Not that more convoluted zombies aren't fun. They are very much indeed. Zombie really is a great and varied tribe (especially since they put under that name every kind of "material" undead but vampires, so they do a lot of different things. I mean, we have vegetal flying zombies! They always have a lot of fun designing wacky Zombies).
That's the reason I'd like to see them thrive a bit more in the current Tribal Apocalypse.
I don't understand why there are separate pages telling us different things on the same site. One news source with ALL of the pertinent information would be better imho.
I object to this characterization. I built a very nasty Zombies Bidding deck that worked well enough for several money finishes prior to the blippian era. It wasn't the best deck of the event but it was good enough imho. Pilot error kept one such version from being undefeated.
I do agree that many people eschew common sense with Zombies and don't bother to abuse them as they are intended.
I am sure glad I'm unable to attend this (I'm heading up to my Dad's at the time of the event) for multiple reasons. I'll try and be concise here as this could become lengthy.
1)While I love the occasional fat booty as much as the next Timmy I don't really get a kick out of seeing such creatures as the only option. Maybe Im only 25% Timmy?
2)I did not understand that TTB had been banned when I was testing with AJ and came up with a fairly brutal golems build using that and fling. I would hate to have found out last minute that it was wrong. In fact there would have been some virtual blood shed. I don't traverse the forums at all for tribal wars info. You need to include all the basic information in these articles if you want to attract the maximum amount of participants.
3)I think 10 power is where I draw the line at fatty. I don't agree with the 12+ rule. This eliminates many tribes with beefy members who don't quite make the cut. (In what world is Krosan Tusker not a fatty???)
4)I agree with you about the spirit vs the practice. I want to join events where everyone is in the same mind about the spirit of the event even when the approaches to that spirit greatly vary.
I expect however that the group of people who show up every week to play will be divided on this. Vantar, AJ and other noteworthy stalwarts will play according to the spirit and others perhaps unmentionable will not. (That said Humility is a funny response to the whole thing. I didn't take Rex's commentary as encouragement for people to do what he suggested but as a critique of the problem with these specialty formats.)
I don't particularly look forward to seeing a lot of mirror matches where everyone is playing cloudposts and other mana-efficient lands to accelerate into the nastiest fatties ever printed. I don't mean that those players who do this are some how not worthy players but that they don't honor the spirit of the event and many pretty much won't because of what is at stake. (Heck even with nothing on the line at all I suspect some contrarians would still seek to break the format in unkosher ways.)
That all said I hope everyone has lots of fun. I enjoyed practicing with AJ and built some funny variants including an all titan-giants deck.
The current iteration of standard zombie decks with Blood Artists and Geralf's Messengers and Falkenrath Aristocrat as a sac outlet is almost like the bizarre "aggro-combo" deck, so rarely seen that it is almost never discussed. Usually Ravager Affinity is given as the only example of that type of deck, but standard zombies has some similarities.
As you say, it gives you alot of cool options but the linear aggro version just doesn't seem to be very successful.
Whoa, hold up man, I wasn't trying to anger anybody there. First of all, I must have misread the power/toughness requirements, fine, that's my bad. From this point onwards, I will check the main forum thread for the special events rules.
Secondly, I wasn't trying to piss anybody off with the deck ideas for the format I was tossing around. The deck I had brewed and intended to play with didn't even use the stuff that I felt defeated the spirit of the format, like the Humility plan, and I get what we're trying to do with the event. The deck I built and had intended to run if I could have played had a primary gameplan of using Despise/Reanimate and Bribery to rip off the other player's fatties, which I thought would provide the most fun and varied gameplay for what I considered a less spikey event. That was my personal attitude towards this event, but I liked the idea of thinking about the parameters everyone else would be working within and trying to outlevel them. It's the same thing people did with the Goblins vs Elves event, where the best decks were odd control decks trying to prey upon the swarm aggro that everybody else naturally assumed would constitute that event.
FWIW, I think most of my observations about the dearth of early threats and what that would mean are pretty valid, and that something like getting off Tibalt's Storm Seeker ability plus some early damage from manlands and then maybe finishing with some unearthed monster or one of those old haste/echo guys that taps everything else when it comes into play is a pretty reasonable "within the box" gameplan in a format where everybody knows there will be no fast aggro. I also think tokens would be a fine strategy, since nobody will think to pack board sweepers against fatties (although a few people suspecting ones resistant to spot removal might, but edicts could be better.) When everybody every week knows there will be 20 creatures in everybody's deck and therefore plays a million wrath effects, that's not considered unsporting. So if I knew everyone would have no early rush and fewer board sweepers and I thought about ways to take advantage of that environment, I don't think that's unsporting either. Frankly, I thought that given the premise of the event, cheating fatties into play would be the most common approach anyhow, with ramping them into play a close second, and anything breaking that mold would strike me as the most original. I don't really think we have all that different views on this event's spirit, I just liked the thought experiment of what considering what one might do given a certain understanding of the expected field.
There was no real "last-minute switch". First of all, in the forum (which are still the official communication tool, as opposed to these articles) the announcement saying body = 12 is from early this week. But most importantly, the rule has NEVER been 5+. On the article published on August 31, when I first mentioned the rules from the event, it was clearly said "only creatures with both power and toughness greater than 5". If people read "greater" and their minds for unknown reasons think it means "greater or equal", that's hardly my fault. I'm pretty sure in English "greater" and "greater or equal" are very different concepts. :PPP
In the end, I chose the "body 12" expression because that includes MORE creatures, like Silvos, who's a veritable fattie and would have been excluded in the other way.
Plus, Blastoderm can't be really seen as a "fattie". Maybe ten years ago, definitely not in 2012. 5/5s for 4 are aggressive midrange beaters. The event is about creatures at the top of the curve, the ones you have to find ways to handle, not just by tapping 4 mana and hardcast them. That way, it wouldn't be as much Fattie Week as Non-Weenie Week.
Anyway, I'm a bit pissed off by the attitude "let's find a loophole to break the spirit of the event and make both the people who created it and the people who wanted to play it as face value feel scorned". It's like being someone who's invited to a costume party but doesn't want to wear a costume, so manages to find the one obscure movie character who's dressed exactly like him, and tells everyone that's his costume.
How about spending all that mental energy to break the event WITHIN its given set of rules instead? Take it as a military exercise, where you are supposed to clear the target, not find a loophole to avoid to do it, thinking you're cool and will be rewarded because you can think outside the box. You have to learn to think, brilliantly, inside the box too.
So, here's the deal: this is an exercise. The event has a wide scope and confronts the players with an issue: how do you handle gigantic, top-of-the-curve (or beyond) creatures? The game (the "box") is filled with answers to this problem. This is the event where people solve the problem with the tools in the box (or just outside, depending on how embedded in the game you consider certain strategies). As the person in charge of the Hall of Fame, I reserve myself the right to award more points to the Top 4 players who solved the problem in the way they were asked to, or less or no points to any other, or both. After all, a great player is also one who knows how to solve a MTG puzzle.
In this case, first there's the part where you have to put the fatties onto the battlefield. I took out the easiest solutions (Show and Tell, Eureka, Through the Breach, Sneak Attack, and Entomb), just because they would have been the go-to ideas for 90% of the decks which could afford them. But there's still a lot of very powerful cheaters. Seriously, a LOT. I expect (and will drop myself) fatties by turn 4, easily.
But you have to solve other problems too. If your fattie battleplan just entirely unfolds to Unsummon, you're doing it wrong. Think again. You have to choose your fatties properly (Hey, didn't I write two huge articles to help people do that? :)), that's a big part of the exercise.
Btw, I'm not 100% sure, but I believe your Gideon/Humility combo doesn't work. The timestamp rule deals with state-based effects negating each other. Humility says all creatures are 1/1, Opalescence says (essentially) that Humility is a 4/4. Who's right? The timestamp rules comes to help in this case. But activating Gideon isn't a state-based effect. In fact, it's an activated ability. Next time the game checks his state, Gideon will be turned into a 1/1 by Humility. At least, that's what I think. Might be wrong.
The thing with Zombies is: they seem great in a linear aggro build (in the classic Merfolk/Goblin/Elves sense: play lord, swing with team). And yet they actually suck at it. It's almost unbelievable, but it's true. Zombie is one of the most played tribes in Tribal Apocalypse, and yet they have an abysmal rate of success. They have only got one 3rd place and two 4th places over 61 appearances. They have been played more than Vampires. Vampires are at 6th place in the all-time Hall of Fame. Zombies are 50th, after tribes like Scout, Kavu, Archon, and Gargoyle.
I've not checked directly, but I think most of those decks were built as linear aggro rather than combo-control (which is especially great after ISD block, but was already a sweet option with cards like Haakon or Glissa), or control-reanimator (Putrid Imp is a Zombie). Among the most powerful zombies ever printed there's Fleshbag Marauder and Undead Gladiator, and they don't even stay on the battlefield.
I think I might write something about the Mistery of the Wrong Zombie Build.
I did do elves, it's the last TribApoc decklist in the video. I actually debated whether to include it, as it can be formulated as linear-aggro (the ezuri versions imho) or linear combo, and the version I actually selected is more the second type. I just wanted to get elves out of the way early, I suppose.
I didn't include zombies just because I thought I had enough content for this vid already. I do think zombies can be built as linear aggro, and the tribe highlights alot of potential in the use of support cards for graveyard recursion and other things like Cabal Therapy (which is also a card I meant to mention in relation to the use of Bloodghasts in vampire lists). Zombies can be played as a "rock" deck in some ways too, aggro-control with heavy hand disruption and threats that are resistant to removal, which grinds the opponent out in the long game. I am working up a more "sligh"-style zombie list right now that I may run in the next few months. Zombies can go alot of ways and is a very cool tribe.
Rishadan Port appears to be heading for LED/FOW territory, and fast. By the end of the year, I wouldn't be surprised to see it hit triple figures. Not predicting, just saying I wouldn't be surprised. There is obviously a huge demand for it from people playing Goblins. Any scarce card that is a 4-of in a non-blue deck gets a huge price bump on mtgo from people trying to assemble a deck without buying FOW. But we're getting to the point where Port is going to be as much a barrier to entry to playing Vial Aggro decks as FOW is for control and aggro-control, and as LED is for combo and dredge.
Hope everyone likes the video this week. It's a little theory-heavy in the first part, most videos won't be that way, so if you prefer seeing me get straight to the decklists with just a little prologue, that's what most videos will be in the future.
Kind of surprised at the last-minute switch in the fatties event rules. It turns out I won't be able to play tomorrow after all, but if I had been able to play I'd be scrambling for a deck right now, as the one I spent the week developing relied on the cycling Beasts, of which 3 met the 5+/5+ requirement but only 1 would meet the 12-Total requirement.
Since I'm not playing, I'll go ahead and point out what I thought was interesting to be exploited about the fatties-only environment. For one thing, cheap cmc planeswalkers seem like a total house since there would be expected to be very little early pressure -- I was expecting at least the 'Derms to be legal, and with them now excluded, walkers could be even more dominant. Tibalt could just totally wreck face in the right deck, perhaps paired with Lily 2.0 in a reanimation shell. Also you could try a deck relying mostly on the cheapest manlands, Mutavault and Mishra's Factory and maybe Treetop Village, which would be the most reliable early turn creatures (which aren't cheated into play, naturally), and playing cheap spot removal or edicts or even just unsummon effects which would likely wreck anything planning to "fairly" cast out fatties. Some combination of cheap token producing instants and sorceries, artifact mana, and Armageddon would probably also wreck the "fair fatties" deck. And if you wanted to completely thumb your nose at the entire fatties format, you could rock 4 copies of Humility and just win with planeswalkers or anthem effects. In fact, under timestamp rules, you could lay down a Humility, activate Gideon, he still becomes 6/6, and you could toss him over your opponent's board of vanilla 1/1's with Elspeth 1.0 for 9 to the face per shot. The whole idea of the fatties format is just begging to be broken in more devilish ways than merely cheating your fatties into play early.
Congrats to Heath, and to Walter for getting the first REPEAT invite! Have fun and dont forget to enjoy yourself while beating Wotc again.
I'm not entirely sure or familiar with all the variants you mention here, but I'm talking about using Mirror Entity to kill X times a Body Double copying a Reveillark, thus bringing back X times such Body Double and a creature with an ETB effect, typically a permanent bouncer (I believe the classical version used Riftwing Cloudskate, my choice was Venser, Shaper Savant). Then the last iteration would bring back Reveillark and Mirror Entity, to finish the permanentless opponent with just a couple attacks.
The deck was Standard during the Time Spiral/Lorwyn era so it had essentially not access to tutors, and it famously assembled the combo passively. All the creatures involved (Mulldrifter was another important player) were more than capable to cause a critical mass of efficient beaters for an aggro kill.
:)
In modern I am using Blood Artist.
Loving the Kokusho unbanning, as an old school monoblack player from the fallen empires days. I have a monoblack control edh deck, featuring as the general Drana (in russian, as any good vampire should be, for the flavor), and will definitely be trying out Kokusho just for it's massive life swing with the sac outlets monoblack already plays, like High Market and Phyrexian Tower. And any decent monoblack edh deck has a few cutesy graveyard recursion tricks up its sleeve. Having never gotten to play with it before, I'm looking forward to it.
Of course, the problems with monoblack edh could warrant an entire article, and Kokusho hardly solves them. I am not an edh specialist, but I think like most of us we are slaves to the metagame of our local group. My play group is dominated by combo players, and if I manage to Sludge their hand or Mind Twist it or whatever, I just lose to the guy playing Doran beats. Kokusho might be a nice tool for anti aggro at least.
Wish i'd bought the foil before now, as there had been much speculation about Kokusho being unbanned previously and I could have snapped it up cheaper with only the foil dragon collectors as my competition.
I have built the Body Double combo variant for legacy tribal wars, but I'm playing it as combo-control, that has an endgame of Intuition into the combo pieces. I believe it was played with the control slant in TSP/LOR standard. However it could be played as an aggro variant, and if the combo pieces weren't there you might use the Lark as both a midrange curvetopper and a pseudo- Proclamation of Rebirth for reach.
If anybody has played Lark Body Double combo, I'd be curious what your 2 power recursion finisher was. I considered both the Rishadan Pirate guy, and the elemental who puts something on top when it leaves play, since i think leaves play works the same as enters play for the combo so long as you have the mirror entity triggers on stack.
I answer Rex too.
It wasn't particularly the Humility idea what triggered my "Do your exercise properly" rant. (And Rex, by then you had already said that you weren't going to attend, so that wasn't directed at you). I know EVERY group of MTG players will always tend towards "that's the rule, let's find the loophole", like they were all lawyers. It's just the basic gamer's answer to a set of rules. But I want and somehow have the responsibility to limit this attitude as more as possibile, and show that there's a creative way to work "inside the box" too.
Bribery, for instance, as mentioned by Rex. Now, that's one of the solutions I was thinking of and I'd like to see. That's my "just outside the box" concept. It's a meta-call, but not one that tries to nullify the very fabric of the event. It plays into the weakness of the rules, not aiming to ignore or bypass them. It's a cheat-into-play card, only one that doesn't look at your deck.
It's how I said, "Problem: the candidates have fatties to drop. Find the solutions." And the solutions are really, really, REALLY a lot. They kept printing that kind of stuff since forever. It's a big part of the game, which appeals to Timmy. In fact, I don't even think the hard part will be choosing between ramp or cheating-into-play, and then choosing which kind of ramp or cheat effect to use. I think the hard part is choosing the right fatties, the ones that are worth the effort and the resources.
Re: fattie body 10 or 12. I had to set a number, a threshold that would necessarily feel arbitrary to a degree (if I had choses 10, then one could have argued that a creature with body 9 isn't that smaller, and so on). I chose the value that corresponds to the Titans. They're a great symbol, THE fatties of this age of Magic. The top-of-the-curve threats. It's not just about the size indeed, it's about creatures that pose a problem to the player, that cause your hand to feel heavy. In modern Magic, a 5/5 is a creature that might well cost 4 mana. It's something you hardcast without even thinking of it. If all creatures were like that, then the problem to solve would be more related to combat phase strategies than deckbuilding.
I've played against Zombie Bidding in the casual room (I'm there playing legacy tribal wars many nights a week, against people I never see in the event, why can't we recruit these people? I do tell them about the PRE, and some have never heard of it. BTW, I have a dozen or more rather good decks in my rotation of all different archetypes, always willing to test with anyone.) Anyhow, Zombie Bidding is rather formidable. I'm not sure if I've ever played against yours, Paul. I have a bidding deck with a rather poetic tribe attached to it that I'd love to try out sometime, but RTR is going to make it better and I'm biding my time, fiendishly grinning ;)
You're right, that's aggro-combo.
Reveillark.dek was too, wasn't it? You played a lot of creatures and just swung with them until all the combo pieces (all efficient creatures in and by themselves) showed up.
I might say that maybe people play Vorthos Zombies and just want to have fun with them. Not that more convoluted zombies aren't fun. They are very much indeed. Zombie really is a great and varied tribe (especially since they put under that name every kind of "material" undead but vampires, so they do a lot of different things. I mean, we have vegetal flying zombies! They always have a lot of fun designing wacky Zombies).
That's the reason I'd like to see them thrive a bit more in the current Tribal Apocalypse.
Ah well that's rather sneaky since those bannings were not in the original version of that announcement and are not on the official banned list page.
Oh and wow Kokusho will be quite a popular staple.
==Edit==
Rather the bannings aren't mentioned here: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/other/092...
which is the source of my confusion.
I don't understand why there are separate pages telling us different things on the same site. One news source with ALL of the pertinent information would be better imho.
I happen to love those in particular since they commemorate my birthday.
I object to this characterization. I built a very nasty Zombies Bidding deck that worked well enough for several money finishes prior to the blippian era. It wasn't the best deck of the event but it was good enough imho. Pilot error kept one such version from being undefeated.
I do agree that many people eschew common sense with Zombies and don't bother to abuse them as they are intended.
I am sure glad I'm unable to attend this (I'm heading up to my Dad's at the time of the event) for multiple reasons. I'll try and be concise here as this could become lengthy.
1)While I love the occasional fat booty as much as the next Timmy I don't really get a kick out of seeing such creatures as the only option. Maybe Im only 25% Timmy?
2)I did not understand that TTB had been banned when I was testing with AJ and came up with a fairly brutal golems build using that and fling. I would hate to have found out last minute that it was wrong. In fact there would have been some virtual blood shed. I don't traverse the forums at all for tribal wars info. You need to include all the basic information in these articles if you want to attract the maximum amount of participants.
3)I think 10 power is where I draw the line at fatty. I don't agree with the 12+ rule. This eliminates many tribes with beefy members who don't quite make the cut. (In what world is Krosan Tusker not a fatty???)
4)I agree with you about the spirit vs the practice. I want to join events where everyone is in the same mind about the spirit of the event even when the approaches to that spirit greatly vary.
I expect however that the group of people who show up every week to play will be divided on this. Vantar, AJ and other noteworthy stalwarts will play according to the spirit and others perhaps unmentionable will not. (That said Humility is a funny response to the whole thing. I didn't take Rex's commentary as encouragement for people to do what he suggested but as a critique of the problem with these specialty formats.)
I don't particularly look forward to seeing a lot of mirror matches where everyone is playing cloudposts and other mana-efficient lands to accelerate into the nastiest fatties ever printed. I don't mean that those players who do this are some how not worthy players but that they don't honor the spirit of the event and many pretty much won't because of what is at stake. (Heck even with nothing on the line at all I suspect some contrarians would still seek to break the format in unkosher ways.)
That all said I hope everyone has lots of fun. I enjoyed practicing with AJ and built some funny variants including an all titan-giants deck.
Do you mean Primeval Titan, Worldfire and Kokusho? They are announced for Commander. Here's the MTGO forum announcement: http://community.wizards.com/magiconline/blog/2012/09/20/september_2012_... (effective as of Sep 26 downtime). There's a link to Sheldon Menery's explanations for the bannings.
"Zombie is one of the most played tribes in Tribal Apocalypse, and yet they have an abysmal rate of success."
It's because most people don't know how to build a proper removal suite or support package.
Also zombies as a tribe have some of the best recursive abilities of ANY tribe and i dont mean in cheat-my-big-fatty-in-to-play kind of way either.
The current iteration of standard zombie decks with Blood Artists and Geralf's Messengers and Falkenrath Aristocrat as a sac outlet is almost like the bizarre "aggro-combo" deck, so rarely seen that it is almost never discussed. Usually Ravager Affinity is given as the only example of that type of deck, but standard zombies has some similarities.
As you say, it gives you alot of cool options but the linear aggro version just doesn't seem to be very successful.
My mind probably auto-excluded the timestamped promos. :)
Whoa, hold up man, I wasn't trying to anger anybody there. First of all, I must have misread the power/toughness requirements, fine, that's my bad. From this point onwards, I will check the main forum thread for the special events rules.
Secondly, I wasn't trying to piss anybody off with the deck ideas for the format I was tossing around. The deck I had brewed and intended to play with didn't even use the stuff that I felt defeated the spirit of the format, like the Humility plan, and I get what we're trying to do with the event. The deck I built and had intended to run if I could have played had a primary gameplan of using Despise/Reanimate and Bribery to rip off the other player's fatties, which I thought would provide the most fun and varied gameplay for what I considered a less spikey event. That was my personal attitude towards this event, but I liked the idea of thinking about the parameters everyone else would be working within and trying to outlevel them. It's the same thing people did with the Goblins vs Elves event, where the best decks were odd control decks trying to prey upon the swarm aggro that everybody else naturally assumed would constitute that event.
FWIW, I think most of my observations about the dearth of early threats and what that would mean are pretty valid, and that something like getting off Tibalt's Storm Seeker ability plus some early damage from manlands and then maybe finishing with some unearthed monster or one of those old haste/echo guys that taps everything else when it comes into play is a pretty reasonable "within the box" gameplan in a format where everybody knows there will be no fast aggro. I also think tokens would be a fine strategy, since nobody will think to pack board sweepers against fatties (although a few people suspecting ones resistant to spot removal might, but edicts could be better.) When everybody every week knows there will be 20 creatures in everybody's deck and therefore plays a million wrath effects, that's not considered unsporting. So if I knew everyone would have no early rush and fewer board sweepers and I thought about ways to take advantage of that environment, I don't think that's unsporting either. Frankly, I thought that given the premise of the event, cheating fatties into play would be the most common approach anyhow, with ramping them into play a close second, and anything breaking that mold would strike me as the most original. I don't really think we have all that different views on this event's spirit, I just liked the thought experiment of what considering what one might do given a certain understanding of the expected field.
There was no real "last-minute switch". First of all, in the forum (which are still the official communication tool, as opposed to these articles) the announcement saying body = 12 is from early this week. But most importantly, the rule has NEVER been 5+. On the article published on August 31, when I first mentioned the rules from the event, it was clearly said "only creatures with both power and toughness greater than 5". If people read "greater" and their minds for unknown reasons think it means "greater or equal", that's hardly my fault. I'm pretty sure in English "greater" and "greater or equal" are very different concepts. :PPP
In the end, I chose the "body 12" expression because that includes MORE creatures, like Silvos, who's a veritable fattie and would have been excluded in the other way.
Plus, Blastoderm can't be really seen as a "fattie". Maybe ten years ago, definitely not in 2012. 5/5s for 4 are aggressive midrange beaters. The event is about creatures at the top of the curve, the ones you have to find ways to handle, not just by tapping 4 mana and hardcast them. That way, it wouldn't be as much Fattie Week as Non-Weenie Week.
Anyway, I'm a bit pissed off by the attitude "let's find a loophole to break the spirit of the event and make both the people who created it and the people who wanted to play it as face value feel scorned". It's like being someone who's invited to a costume party but doesn't want to wear a costume, so manages to find the one obscure movie character who's dressed exactly like him, and tells everyone that's his costume.
How about spending all that mental energy to break the event WITHIN its given set of rules instead? Take it as a military exercise, where you are supposed to clear the target, not find a loophole to avoid to do it, thinking you're cool and will be rewarded because you can think outside the box. You have to learn to think, brilliantly, inside the box too.
So, here's the deal: this is an exercise. The event has a wide scope and confronts the players with an issue: how do you handle gigantic, top-of-the-curve (or beyond) creatures? The game (the "box") is filled with answers to this problem. This is the event where people solve the problem with the tools in the box (or just outside, depending on how embedded in the game you consider certain strategies). As the person in charge of the Hall of Fame, I reserve myself the right to award more points to the Top 4 players who solved the problem in the way they were asked to, or less or no points to any other, or both. After all, a great player is also one who knows how to solve a MTG puzzle.
In this case, first there's the part where you have to put the fatties onto the battlefield. I took out the easiest solutions (Show and Tell, Eureka, Through the Breach, Sneak Attack, and Entomb), just because they would have been the go-to ideas for 90% of the decks which could afford them. But there's still a lot of very powerful cheaters. Seriously, a LOT. I expect (and will drop myself) fatties by turn 4, easily.
But you have to solve other problems too. If your fattie battleplan just entirely unfolds to Unsummon, you're doing it wrong. Think again. You have to choose your fatties properly (Hey, didn't I write two huge articles to help people do that? :)), that's a big part of the exercise.
Btw, I'm not 100% sure, but I believe your Gideon/Humility combo doesn't work. The timestamp rule deals with state-based effects negating each other. Humility says all creatures are 1/1, Opalescence says (essentially) that Humility is a 4/4. Who's right? The timestamp rules comes to help in this case. But activating Gideon isn't a state-based effect. In fact, it's an activated ability. Next time the game checks his state, Gideon will be turned into a 1/1 by Humility. At least, that's what I think. Might be wrong.
The thing with Zombies is: they seem great in a linear aggro build (in the classic Merfolk/Goblin/Elves sense: play lord, swing with team). And yet they actually suck at it. It's almost unbelievable, but it's true. Zombie is one of the most played tribes in Tribal Apocalypse, and yet they have an abysmal rate of success. They have only got one 3rd place and two 4th places over 61 appearances. They have been played more than Vampires. Vampires are at 6th place in the all-time Hall of Fame. Zombies are 50th, after tribes like Scout, Kavu, Archon, and Gargoyle.
I've not checked directly, but I think most of those decks were built as linear aggro rather than combo-control (which is especially great after ISD block, but was already a sweet option with cards like Haakon or Glissa), or control-reanimator (Putrid Imp is a Zombie). Among the most powerful zombies ever printed there's Fleshbag Marauder and Undead Gladiator, and they don't even stay on the battlefield.
I think I might write something about the Mistery of the Wrong Zombie Build.
I did do elves, it's the last TribApoc decklist in the video. I actually debated whether to include it, as it can be formulated as linear-aggro (the ezuri versions imho) or linear combo, and the version I actually selected is more the second type. I just wanted to get elves out of the way early, I suppose.
I didn't include zombies just because I thought I had enough content for this vid already. I do think zombies can be built as linear aggro, and the tribe highlights alot of potential in the use of support cards for graveyard recursion and other things like Cabal Therapy (which is also a card I meant to mention in relation to the use of Bloodghasts in vampire lists). Zombies can be played as a "rock" deck in some ways too, aggro-control with heavy hand disruption and threats that are resistant to removal, which grinds the opponent out in the long game. I am working up a more "sligh"-style zombie list right now that I may run in the next few months. Zombies can go alot of ways and is a very cool tribe.
Im actually Rather surprised you didnt mention decks like elves or zombies as linear
Rishadan Port appears to be heading for LED/FOW territory, and fast. By the end of the year, I wouldn't be surprised to see it hit triple figures. Not predicting, just saying I wouldn't be surprised. There is obviously a huge demand for it from people playing Goblins. Any scarce card that is a 4-of in a non-blue deck gets a huge price bump on mtgo from people trying to assemble a deck without buying FOW. But we're getting to the point where Port is going to be as much a barrier to entry to playing Vial Aggro decks as FOW is for control and aggro-control, and as LED is for combo and dredge.
Hope everyone likes the video this week. It's a little theory-heavy in the first part, most videos won't be that way, so if you prefer seeing me get straight to the decklists with just a little prologue, that's what most videos will be in the future.
Kind of surprised at the last-minute switch in the fatties event rules. It turns out I won't be able to play tomorrow after all, but if I had been able to play I'd be scrambling for a deck right now, as the one I spent the week developing relied on the cycling Beasts, of which 3 met the 5+/5+ requirement but only 1 would meet the 12-Total requirement.
Since I'm not playing, I'll go ahead and point out what I thought was interesting to be exploited about the fatties-only environment. For one thing, cheap cmc planeswalkers seem like a total house since there would be expected to be very little early pressure -- I was expecting at least the 'Derms to be legal, and with them now excluded, walkers could be even more dominant. Tibalt could just totally wreck face in the right deck, perhaps paired with Lily 2.0 in a reanimation shell. Also you could try a deck relying mostly on the cheapest manlands, Mutavault and Mishra's Factory and maybe Treetop Village, which would be the most reliable early turn creatures (which aren't cheated into play, naturally), and playing cheap spot removal or edicts or even just unsummon effects which would likely wreck anything planning to "fairly" cast out fatties. Some combination of cheap token producing instants and sorceries, artifact mana, and Armageddon would probably also wreck the "fair fatties" deck. And if you wanted to completely thumb your nose at the entire fatties format, you could rock 4 copies of Humility and just win with planeswalkers or anthem effects. In fact, under timestamp rules, you could lay down a Humility, activate Gideon, he still becomes 6/6, and you could toss him over your opponent's board of vanilla 1/1's with Elspeth 1.0 for 9 to the face per shot. The whole idea of the fatties format is just begging to be broken in more devilish ways than merely cheating your fatties into play early.