I have been playing W/B tokens lately only I have been running a more mid range/control type of build. It has no creatures and runs all token generators, anthems, o-rings, removal, and Day of Judgement. Having Day main is such a blowout sometimes because most people feel free to drop their whole hand against even a little pressure from tokens. It allows you to switch from aggro to control fairly easily. Also, vault of the archangel can make games that go long swing in your favor. Zombies can be a tough matchup but celestial purge in the sideboard does help a lot, and o-ringing the messangers.
Once the mana fixing is available come ravnica, I think G/W/b tokens will be a force since you will have access to both vault of the archangel and gavony township, not to mention any goodies from return to ravnica.
Excellent write-up Naoto. It was nice to see your thought process in choosing your deck for the tournament. Hopefully, you will be able to continue for each round!
This is an awesome article JustSin. Its exactly what a new player getting into pauper needs and its very useful for veterans to get a good look at the metagame. I'm definitely spreading the word about it. Keep it up!
The reveals for the land vault set are dismaying to me personally since I acquired some of these lands recently at a premium price. But I guess it is good news for the community in general so yay!
Currently my favorite format is up in the air. Meaning I have been vacillating between standard, modern, tribal and classic though commander is always in the back of my mind.
I guess I view it as just another legacy shoehorn. So to me instead of feeling impressed it seems sick. Good job for finding another way to break the format? *shrugs*
Do you want to elaborate on that? I'm talking within the realm of power combo decks, mind you. Not Aluren vs. a deck that just doesn't have a sudden "I win" scenario.
You have to admire the cleverness of the build, that involves the interaction of the strengths of half a dozen different cards. And you can even customize your build to a degree, and play and win when Aluren itself never even shows up, like every creature-heavy combo build (the old RecSur, Reveillark combo, the Pod) is often able to do. Where decks like Grindstone or Belcher are just, "Here, I activate this one card, I win".
Anyway, we're still talking about nothing here, since Aluren showed up 3 times in these two years, but it's like it showed up only once early last year, since the second time was a forced rerun in the Invitational, and the third time was in the 2HG event.
Good analysis, Rex. But I think there's a problem there I already warned you against. It's one of misleading perception, like I mentioned in my other comment, and that leads to overanalyzing some factors. You want to be roughly prepared against anything. That's fine. Then, you think of stuff like, "What if I'll meet Belcher?" But, looking closely, this sounds like if before leaving home, you wondered, "What if a meteorite will fall on my head? Should I wear a helmet?" 85 events, 1507 decks, 275 rounds. Belcher appeared 3 times, for a total of 10 rounds. The current odds to have Belcher in one round is (if I'm doing this math correctly) 3.63%. If you add Helm of Obedience, the figure becomes 4.72%. And this is the chance for a random player to meet them in an event, if you want to know a given player's odds, they become utterly insubstantial (something like an average 0.23% chance in Round 1 of a 20-player event, I think?). That's close to say that they are NOT in the metagame. 4 decks out of 1507, c'mon. It's probably easier to lose a match because you mana-screwed two times in a row than because you weren't prepared to face a fast combo deck like those.
Another thing: the annoyance factor is actually very different from a power archetype to another. For instance, Aluren is fun to play against. Of course everything loses its charm after a while, but I remember the few times Aluren showed up, people who never saw it were amused, not enraged. A deck that just does some "I won" play on turn 2 isn't fun. You can say at least it doesn't make you waste time, though. Which is why the most hated combo decks are the ones that cause you to watch the opponent play with himself for 10 minutes (unless you know them and concede, but here's a suggestion: never do that. Those players need to be forced to play out every step of their endgame, because 1. they waste clock time this way, and you might take advantage of it; 2. they might make some mistake along the way; 3. if they really want to play those endgames, they have to suffer through them, like an accountant in the last two work hours of a Friday).
Then there's the fun factor of piloting a deck. TribAp is a recurring event with some kind of a community. It's not a sanctioned event where you don't know your opponents and never see them again. Moreso, it's something you come back to in order to have fun, or at least I think it is for most of the players. So, we have to factor in the idea (which is what I did when I proposed the unbannings) that people might maybe want to play anything, but not necessarily for long. During his time here, Nemesis played Wall-Drazi a lot, because that deck is fun, it's brilliant to play, it's interactive. Dirty is playing Cephalid a lot because he has fun with it. It's not always about comboing out at the third turn. (There are other fast combos that aren't even considered because they rarely show up or they aren't that consistent. For instance, I won more than one game with Ooze by doing turn-1 Birds of Paradise into turn-2 Buried Alive, that only a counterspell can stop, into turn-3 Necrotic Ooze, that you need 3 instant removals to stop. But the deck wasn't just about that, I took those wins knowing that they aren't that common). Belcher, on the other hand, is all about the combo. You either do it or you don't, there aren't interactive cards in there. You do the same exact moves every single time, regardless of the opponent. After a while, it has to be annoying to pilot as much as it is to play against, if not even more. That's a self-regulating factor within a PRE like this.
I do bear this in mind: Ironically my games in round two and three this week just past illustrate the upside and downside to both arguments. I was running angel control, a tribe whose slots need to be devoted to removal and ramp in order to get through the early game consistently. My game 2 was against a solid Merfolk fish build packed with inexpensive counters. I won 2-0 on the back of Cavern of Souls, which serves as a way of turning this archetype matchup on its head on the one hand and still acting as excellent colour fixing in every other game, solving the problem without impacting other slots too much.
That Merfolk deck would have destroyed my round 3 opponent of dream halls/conflux, which beat me despite my best efforts (Including disrupting his worldfire combo by STPing his keldon marauders with the sorcery on the stack, followed by getting four lands in play with a hand of removal as we each rebuilt (sacland, sacland, cavern, cavern, unfortunately.).)
Metagaming against the decks you expect to face is one thing, but there is always an element of the unexpected. Aggro will always be there, the decks that run broad answers will usually be there, combo at worst a deck or two. If my round 2 opponent had faced my round 3 opponent and I had faced the winner of that in round 3, it would have been a different story.
Regarding Ranth and AJ's conversation about answer cards....
Ranth and I were having that little discussion during our round 3 match this past saturday. I was on a combo deck (doing another video for it, btw, if it doesn't get linked in the next article you can look on my youtube page later this week) and had barely survived against Kuma's revamped artificer list and then stomped a linear aggro deck. The linear aggro deck in question has actually been performing very well because the newcomer piloting it has realized quickly that just packing your deck with tons of removal can get you 2 wins a week feeding off other aggro decks. In round 3 though it was like I was Superman and Ranth was Kryptonite. He was playing stuff like Glen Alendra Archmage and Stifle (!!!) that are mediocre to outright useless against alot of players, but were ridiculously good against me. His position, which I think is correct, is that you can play some cards to answer things you are seeing in the metagame, such as an enchantment-based combo, and even if they are dead in round 1 against some straight-forward aggro or midrange deck, you can probably figure a way to beat those decks anyhow. Ranth at least is a good enough player that I believe he can get past the first couple rounds even with a few dead cards. If you start 2-0, Stifles and Counterspells and Relics of Progenitus and Krosan Grips have a good shot of being backbreaking cards in the final.
I think that if you are trying to play control, you have to control what you actually expect to see. And that's not just the Kithkin deck in round 1, it's the reanimator deck or Aluren deck you might see in round 3. Playing 6 sweepers instead of 4 might marginally improve your % against the Kithkin deck, but playing a couple counterspells or Thoughtseize could greatly improve your % against combo, indeed it could be the only way you have to interact with it at all. If you have to splash blue or black, then you do, because those are the control colors in legacy with the most versatile answers.
Watch mihilator's assassins deck tech video where he talks about having the Faerie Macabre in there. He knows darn well that his deck will slaughter the creature aggro decks, so he devotes a few slots to up his percentage against graveyard combo decks. Makes sense. Reanimation and other graveyard strategies have been the most popular combo decks this year, perhaps because we all have Innistrad on the brain and got some new tools these past months.
I think the players in this event could adjust to *nearly* anything. They can't adjust to a turn 0 deck like Belcher, because Force of Will is the only answer card. Everything else could be handled if the control players adjusted to the presence of combo, but because it waxes and wanes in popularity (while linear aggro is there every week in huge numbers), they never really feel the need to do it. But where I think Kuma has a point about "annoyance factor" is that new players getting crushed by Aluren are more likely to be turned off and weaken the community. For some reason, new players don't seem to have the same reaction to being ritualistically crushed by sweepers.dek once a week.
Most of them are MTG art or art from other wizards products. If you're interested to find the artists I'm sure a google image search will find it for you. I will try to post the artists names however I'm very busy today.
Let's take the specific case of somebody who pays a lot for a card, and then it gets reprinted, causing the value to plummet. Specifically, let's say you bought Force of Will two years ago for $100. Now it gets spoiled as a rare in an upcoming set that's coming out in a couple of months. The value of FoW drops to $50 overnight, and eventually it drops as low as $20 while the set is being drafted moderately heavily for a while.
Some thoughts on this scenario:
1) During the two years after you bought Force of Will, you had the opportunity to use it in decks. Nobody else was able to use it unless they paid $100 for it, so you got value out of the card. That's really all you are guaranteed to get out of a card, you know - the ability to put it in decks. Even then there's an outside chance of it getting banned.
2) If you wanted to, you could cut your "losses" (not sure if you lost anything, given that you played the card for two years) and sell at $50 after the initial announcement. Maybe later you'll reconsider and buy it back when it's down to $20. Guess what - you're up $30! And you still have the card in your collection to play with!
3) The announcement of a reprint is likely to come well in advance of the actual online release. During that interim period, it's likely that a contingent of players will want to continue playing with their copies of the still-scarce FoW. That will keep the price from dropping to $1 overnight. Even if Force of Will gets reprinted, it's probably going to be in an online classic set of sorts, and it'll be at rare. Those sets get drafted moderately, but not heavily like standard sets. Therefore, it's pretty unlikely that FoW ever drops to a really low price, ever.
Finally, I'm going to point this out, even though it should be obvious. But it seems like you didn't notice. Nobody has advocated that Wizards should reprint Force of Will at common or anything like that. From what I can tell, people are in favor of reprints in sets that will get drafted. If you paid attention in MED4, you will have noticed that this doesn't cause the price of highly sought after cards like dual lands to completely lose their value.
Ok, one more thing. "But if the cards in my collection dropped in value by a significant amount, I would quit playing Magic completely." You know that Magic cards, nearly uniformly, lose value over time, right? Are you talking specifically about certain Classic and Modern staples? Because even those are constantly at risk of being reprinted or knocked off their perch by a better deck coming along. It's life. You already took that risk. If you aren't happy with that risk, then you should sell the valuables in your collection for tickets except the cards you're playing with right now to mitigate that risk.
The issue with Kirin is that they kinda play against each other (let's face it, they weren't ever designed as a tribe. That's where my challenge came from actually). Like, once you play the white one, which is arguably the most powerful, you can't play the red and black anymore because they would just kill him and die, something that doesn't look like a battleplan that leads to a win.
Plus, for some reason, they made them all legendary, so you can't even mass-reanimate them with a great chance of success.
One of the builds Leys concocted was actually a combo deck (an interesting one that I believe was never played in the last two years), with the Kirins thrown in the mix just for the challenge. I criticized it for that, but since even the most committed experimental players like Vantar aren't trying it, I'm more in the mood of, "Let's get this damn Kirin single win by any mean necessary and be over with". I mean, the Elder challenge lasted about 3 weeks, the Kirin one is like 4-month-old or something. They're really one of the less appreciated tribes in the game (despite looking so cute in their art, as opposed to those terrible, terrible Elders). :)
I tried a couple of discard wincon strategies with it and also 5 color genesis wave. the Gen Wave deck was almost interesting as it included the legends aren't legendary artifact. But it never really got off the ground in testing as my usual test partners have been conspicuously absent 90% of the time I am on.
Dirty duck always seems to tick me off when I am just watching him play people. But I think that's a personality thing not a magic thing. I'd only think of him as an annoyance in terms of the fact that his decks are extremely spiky. (They mostly have great ways of messing up concurrent strategies.)
As for the Kirin deck the easiest idea i thought up of at this point was to make sweepers.dek + non creature kill con, and pretty much just fall apart vs any kind of endgame that was non creature based O.o.
okay AJ was right i just a series of individual things out of context which in turn ended up looking way worse then what is was. :( sorry about that! (infact catch me in-game and i'll explain better how/why it looked that way me)
Aaaaanyhow If all parties agree to have our comments regarding this matter removed by the admins I'm all game for that and in-fact encourage it.
It's very possible I messed something up. I pointed at the "Unhallowed Tribes" in the bottom right. Those are the ones eligible for the Up-and-Coming Prize ("the ones that never won", so yeah, it's the complementary list of "the ones that won", you can see the latter as a "banned list" for the prize). Is there something wrong in that list?
You look at Virgin+Endangered+Unhallowed and that's all the ways you can get access to an Underdog event through. (You don't need for your tribe to belong to all three categories at once, maybe I should point that out better).
Thanks again for the right interpretation: you put it exactly like it was in my mind (and it really wasn't a big deal to me, just a conclusive thought). I was included in the whiners/jackasses reprimand myself, of course, since I have a history of being both at times.
Re: Kirin, Leys7 has several builds ready for when he'll come back in September (he tried one of them with no success some time ago, then just went on to complete the 10-tribe sequence for the Hamtastic Prize). I'm actually trying to have someone else beat him to the contest, because I don't want to give the tix to my own clan founder. He will use it for evil! :)
Err... what? No, seriously, what did this come from? I'm sorry, I'm totally baffled, honestly.
Did I call you a jackass? When did this happen? Believe me, I would never even DREAM of doing such a thing!
Hope you can trust me when I say you weren't in my mind AT ALL when I was writing that whiners/jackasses line. Nobody was, actually. It's exactly like AJ put it in his last comment. What I was saying is just that we can have all the power cards we want if we just play them moderately (because if they show up too much, people will complain enough that Blippy will have to ban them; it's happened in the past). No need to be "whiners" and be scared by cards that actually almost never show up (you wanna know the real reason I bothered doing that Watch List? To prove that those cards aren't problematic at all, and perception often plays tricks on us). And no need to be "jackasses", meaning with that careless in dealing with the issue. That was just a throwaway, humorous line, anyway. And I don't even really understand why you of all people should identify yourself with the "jackass" (hope someone who identifies with the "whiner" doesn't show up now to shout at me some more). You only appear once in the Watch List. I was actually going to commend the fact that you never played the Helm deck again so far. That's an example of what a responsible player does, actually. I didn't write that in order not to sound too pandering. But maybe that would have made the point clearer: you, Mr. Ranth, can't be seen otherwise than a "good guy". (Also worth noting: I was the one that made possible for Helm and co. to be playable again. I was the one who wanted for them to be played. Now I just don't want for them to be banned again!)
Re: DirtyDuck. A personal agenda against him? :) He's one of the greatest guys in this scene! I always have a blast talking with him and playing him. He's a fellow Horseman of the Apocalypse! We always joke that he's going to have people organize an angry mob with torches and pitchforks over his Cephalid deck. :) (His words) He actually did a good job of keeping it on the low side so far. And he knows I like the deck a lot (Dirty, you know, right?) Again, I want for the deck to stay, so I see the Watch List as a tool for Dirty to tune the deck's apparition accordingly in order to never get to Level 3: no angry mob, no pitchforks, everybody wins.
Re: the Imp deck. Man, I hope you were just having a bad day here. Did you really take offense at me saying that it was "a bit too much single-mindedly committed to its strategy"? The deck was featured because it deserved to be featured, it shows the strenght of a tribe that we rarely see and there's the oddity of two top players using essentially the same list in the same event (you still didn't tell me if you did brew it together, or it was just a coincidence). And the Liliana line is a kind of recurring joke of mine, I often mention that I want to put Liliana everywhere. In a reanimator deck (an archetype which I believe I'm the one who annoyed everyone else with the most around these parts), it goes without saying.
And you apparently didn't get the premise of the Watch List. If it was about "annoyance" (*) per se, it would feature Punishing Fire and such. I started saying that it's only about "particular, archetype-defining cards". It started as a way to monitor the freshly unbanned cards only. It's not a survey on popular opinions. People get annoyed at the latest thing their opponents successfully threw at them. Someone once told me Recurring Nightmare is broken because "it can't be stopped" (meaning that he couldn't stop it at that time).
(*) I used the word "annoyance" to downplay the concept and not make it too serious-sounding, actually. Not sure if I was successful at that. I might change the name to "Misbehaving Levels". I would like for the cards to be "grounded", rather than "banned". :)
Bottom line: I write a humorous, generic throwaway line and got insulted by a perfectably respectable player. Man, you gotta love all the drama of being a Magic player. :)
I have been playing W/B tokens lately only I have been running a more mid range/control type of build. It has no creatures and runs all token generators, anthems, o-rings, removal, and Day of Judgement. Having Day main is such a blowout sometimes because most people feel free to drop their whole hand against even a little pressure from tokens. It allows you to switch from aggro to control fairly easily. Also, vault of the archangel can make games that go long swing in your favor. Zombies can be a tough matchup but celestial purge in the sideboard does help a lot, and o-ringing the messangers.
Once the mana fixing is available come ravnica, I think G/W/b tokens will be a force since you will have access to both vault of the archangel and gavony township, not to mention any goodies from return to ravnica.
Excellent write-up Naoto. It was nice to see your thought process in choosing your deck for the tournament. Hopefully, you will be able to continue for each round!
Same stuff pretty much applies, except MED4 came and went with no P9
http://www.classicquarter.com/articles/052_100703.asp
This is an awesome article JustSin. Its exactly what a new player getting into pauper needs and its very useful for veterans to get a good look at the metagame. I'm definitely spreading the word about it. Keep it up!
The reveals for the land vault set are dismaying to me personally since I acquired some of these lands recently at a premium price. But I guess it is good news for the community in general so yay!
Currently my favorite format is up in the air. Meaning I have been vacillating between standard, modern, tribal and classic though commander is always in the back of my mind.
I guess I view it as just another legacy shoehorn. So to me instead of feeling impressed it seems sick. Good job for finding another way to break the format? *shrugs*
Do you want to elaborate on that? I'm talking within the realm of power combo decks, mind you. Not Aluren vs. a deck that just doesn't have a sudden "I win" scenario.
You have to admire the cleverness of the build, that involves the interaction of the strengths of half a dozen different cards. And you can even customize your build to a degree, and play and win when Aluren itself never even shows up, like every creature-heavy combo build (the old RecSur, Reveillark combo, the Pod) is often able to do. Where decks like Grindstone or Belcher are just, "Here, I activate this one card, I win".
Anyway, we're still talking about nothing here, since Aluren showed up 3 times in these two years, but it's like it showed up only once early last year, since the second time was a forced rerun in the Invitational, and the third time was in the 2HG event.
My initial reaction to alluren combo is "ick!" but I guess I am an oddball?
Good analysis, Rex. But I think there's a problem there I already warned you against. It's one of misleading perception, like I mentioned in my other comment, and that leads to overanalyzing some factors. You want to be roughly prepared against anything. That's fine. Then, you think of stuff like, "What if I'll meet Belcher?" But, looking closely, this sounds like if before leaving home, you wondered, "What if a meteorite will fall on my head? Should I wear a helmet?" 85 events, 1507 decks, 275 rounds. Belcher appeared 3 times, for a total of 10 rounds. The current odds to have Belcher in one round is (if I'm doing this math correctly) 3.63%. If you add Helm of Obedience, the figure becomes 4.72%. And this is the chance for a random player to meet them in an event, if you want to know a given player's odds, they become utterly insubstantial (something like an average 0.23% chance in Round 1 of a 20-player event, I think?). That's close to say that they are NOT in the metagame. 4 decks out of 1507, c'mon. It's probably easier to lose a match because you mana-screwed two times in a row than because you weren't prepared to face a fast combo deck like those.
Another thing: the annoyance factor is actually very different from a power archetype to another. For instance, Aluren is fun to play against. Of course everything loses its charm after a while, but I remember the few times Aluren showed up, people who never saw it were amused, not enraged. A deck that just does some "I won" play on turn 2 isn't fun. You can say at least it doesn't make you waste time, though. Which is why the most hated combo decks are the ones that cause you to watch the opponent play with himself for 10 minutes (unless you know them and concede, but here's a suggestion: never do that. Those players need to be forced to play out every step of their endgame, because 1. they waste clock time this way, and you might take advantage of it; 2. they might make some mistake along the way; 3. if they really want to play those endgames, they have to suffer through them, like an accountant in the last two work hours of a Friday).
Then there's the fun factor of piloting a deck. TribAp is a recurring event with some kind of a community. It's not a sanctioned event where you don't know your opponents and never see them again. Moreso, it's something you come back to in order to have fun, or at least I think it is for most of the players. So, we have to factor in the idea (which is what I did when I proposed the unbannings) that people might maybe want to play anything, but not necessarily for long. During his time here, Nemesis played Wall-Drazi a lot, because that deck is fun, it's brilliant to play, it's interactive. Dirty is playing Cephalid a lot because he has fun with it. It's not always about comboing out at the third turn. (There are other fast combos that aren't even considered because they rarely show up or they aren't that consistent. For instance, I won more than one game with Ooze by doing turn-1 Birds of Paradise into turn-2 Buried Alive, that only a counterspell can stop, into turn-3 Necrotic Ooze, that you need 3 instant removals to stop. But the deck wasn't just about that, I took those wins knowing that they aren't that common). Belcher, on the other hand, is all about the combo. You either do it or you don't, there aren't interactive cards in there. You do the same exact moves every single time, regardless of the opponent. After a while, it has to be annoying to pilot as much as it is to play against, if not even more. That's a self-regulating factor within a PRE like this.
That's really nice on post..
Bank PO Coaching In Mohali | UGC NET Coaching
I do bear this in mind: Ironically my games in round two and three this week just past illustrate the upside and downside to both arguments. I was running angel control, a tribe whose slots need to be devoted to removal and ramp in order to get through the early game consistently. My game 2 was against a solid Merfolk fish build packed with inexpensive counters. I won 2-0 on the back of Cavern of Souls, which serves as a way of turning this archetype matchup on its head on the one hand and still acting as excellent colour fixing in every other game, solving the problem without impacting other slots too much.
That Merfolk deck would have destroyed my round 3 opponent of dream halls/conflux, which beat me despite my best efforts (Including disrupting his worldfire combo by STPing his keldon marauders with the sorcery on the stack, followed by getting four lands in play with a hand of removal as we each rebuilt (sacland, sacland, cavern, cavern, unfortunately.).)
Metagaming against the decks you expect to face is one thing, but there is always an element of the unexpected. Aggro will always be there, the decks that run broad answers will usually be there, combo at worst a deck or two. If my round 2 opponent had faced my round 3 opponent and I had faced the winner of that in round 3, it would have been a different story.
Regarding Ranth and AJ's conversation about answer cards....
Ranth and I were having that little discussion during our round 3 match this past saturday. I was on a combo deck (doing another video for it, btw, if it doesn't get linked in the next article you can look on my youtube page later this week) and had barely survived against Kuma's revamped artificer list and then stomped a linear aggro deck. The linear aggro deck in question has actually been performing very well because the newcomer piloting it has realized quickly that just packing your deck with tons of removal can get you 2 wins a week feeding off other aggro decks. In round 3 though it was like I was Superman and Ranth was Kryptonite. He was playing stuff like Glen Alendra Archmage and Stifle (!!!) that are mediocre to outright useless against alot of players, but were ridiculously good against me. His position, which I think is correct, is that you can play some cards to answer things you are seeing in the metagame, such as an enchantment-based combo, and even if they are dead in round 1 against some straight-forward aggro or midrange deck, you can probably figure a way to beat those decks anyhow. Ranth at least is a good enough player that I believe he can get past the first couple rounds even with a few dead cards. If you start 2-0, Stifles and Counterspells and Relics of Progenitus and Krosan Grips have a good shot of being backbreaking cards in the final.
I think that if you are trying to play control, you have to control what you actually expect to see. And that's not just the Kithkin deck in round 1, it's the reanimator deck or Aluren deck you might see in round 3. Playing 6 sweepers instead of 4 might marginally improve your % against the Kithkin deck, but playing a couple counterspells or Thoughtseize could greatly improve your % against combo, indeed it could be the only way you have to interact with it at all. If you have to splash blue or black, then you do, because those are the control colors in legacy with the most versatile answers.
Watch mihilator's assassins deck tech video where he talks about having the Faerie Macabre in there. He knows darn well that his deck will slaughter the creature aggro decks, so he devotes a few slots to up his percentage against graveyard combo decks. Makes sense. Reanimation and other graveyard strategies have been the most popular combo decks this year, perhaps because we all have Innistrad on the brain and got some new tools these past months.
I think the players in this event could adjust to *nearly* anything. They can't adjust to a turn 0 deck like Belcher, because Force of Will is the only answer card. Everything else could be handled if the control players adjusted to the presence of combo, but because it waxes and wanes in popularity (while linear aggro is there every week in huge numbers), they never really feel the need to do it. But where I think Kuma has a point about "annoyance factor" is that new players getting crushed by Aluren are more likely to be turned off and weaken the community. For some reason, new players don't seem to have the same reaction to being ritualistically crushed by sweepers.dek once a week.
oh btw yeah I came up with the deck idea and Dirty Duck tweaked his list with some critters that i didn't own.
Most of them are MTG art or art from other wizards products. If you're interested to find the artists I'm sure a google image search will find it for you. I will try to post the artists names however I'm very busy today.
Let's take the specific case of somebody who pays a lot for a card, and then it gets reprinted, causing the value to plummet. Specifically, let's say you bought Force of Will two years ago for $100. Now it gets spoiled as a rare in an upcoming set that's coming out in a couple of months. The value of FoW drops to $50 overnight, and eventually it drops as low as $20 while the set is being drafted moderately heavily for a while.
Some thoughts on this scenario:
1) During the two years after you bought Force of Will, you had the opportunity to use it in decks. Nobody else was able to use it unless they paid $100 for it, so you got value out of the card. That's really all you are guaranteed to get out of a card, you know - the ability to put it in decks. Even then there's an outside chance of it getting banned.
2) If you wanted to, you could cut your "losses" (not sure if you lost anything, given that you played the card for two years) and sell at $50 after the initial announcement. Maybe later you'll reconsider and buy it back when it's down to $20. Guess what - you're up $30! And you still have the card in your collection to play with!
3) The announcement of a reprint is likely to come well in advance of the actual online release. During that interim period, it's likely that a contingent of players will want to continue playing with their copies of the still-scarce FoW. That will keep the price from dropping to $1 overnight. Even if Force of Will gets reprinted, it's probably going to be in an online classic set of sorts, and it'll be at rare. Those sets get drafted moderately, but not heavily like standard sets. Therefore, it's pretty unlikely that FoW ever drops to a really low price, ever.
Finally, I'm going to point this out, even though it should be obvious. But it seems like you didn't notice. Nobody has advocated that Wizards should reprint Force of Will at common or anything like that. From what I can tell, people are in favor of reprints in sets that will get drafted. If you paid attention in MED4, you will have noticed that this doesn't cause the price of highly sought after cards like dual lands to completely lose their value.
Ok, one more thing. "But if the cards in my collection dropped in value by a significant amount, I would quit playing Magic completely." You know that Magic cards, nearly uniformly, lose value over time, right? Are you talking specifically about certain Classic and Modern staples? Because even those are constantly at risk of being reprinted or knocked off their perch by a better deck coming along. It's life. You already took that risk. If you aren't happy with that risk, then you should sell the valuables in your collection for tickets except the cards you're playing with right now to mitigate that risk.
The issue with Kirin is that they kinda play against each other (let's face it, they weren't ever designed as a tribe. That's where my challenge came from actually). Like, once you play the white one, which is arguably the most powerful, you can't play the red and black anymore because they would just kill him and die, something that doesn't look like a battleplan that leads to a win.
Plus, for some reason, they made them all legendary, so you can't even mass-reanimate them with a great chance of success.
One of the builds Leys concocted was actually a combo deck (an interesting one that I believe was never played in the last two years), with the Kirins thrown in the mix just for the challenge. I criticized it for that, but since even the most committed experimental players like Vantar aren't trying it, I'm more in the mood of, "Let's get this damn Kirin single win by any mean necessary and be over with". I mean, the Elder challenge lasted about 3 weeks, the Kirin one is like 4-month-old or something. They're really one of the less appreciated tribes in the game (despite looking so cute in their art, as opposed to those terrible, terrible Elders). :)
I tried a couple of discard wincon strategies with it and also 5 color genesis wave. the Gen Wave deck was almost interesting as it included the legends aren't legendary artifact. But it never really got off the ground in testing as my usual test partners have been conspicuously absent 90% of the time I am on.
Dirty duck always seems to tick me off when I am just watching him play people. But I think that's a personality thing not a magic thing. I'd only think of him as an annoyance in terms of the fact that his decks are extremely spiky. (They mostly have great ways of messing up concurrent strategies.)
Nah, it's all right for me, it shows how we all get(maybe sometimes a bit too much) involved in our beloved little game. :)
And you have to allow me to use the "personal agenda against Dirty" as a running joke. It's too fun. :)
As for the Kirin deck the easiest idea i thought up of at this point was to make sweepers.dek + non creature kill con, and pretty much just fall apart vs any kind of endgame that was non creature based O.o.
okay AJ was right i just a series of individual things out of context which in turn ended up looking way worse then what is was. :( sorry about that! (infact catch me in-game and i'll explain better how/why it looked that way me)
Aaaaanyhow If all parties agree to have our comments regarding this matter removed by the admins I'm all game for that and in-fact encourage it.
It's very possible I messed something up. I pointed at the "Unhallowed Tribes" in the bottom right. Those are the ones eligible for the Up-and-Coming Prize ("the ones that never won", so yeah, it's the complementary list of "the ones that won", you can see the latter as a "banned list" for the prize). Is there something wrong in that list?
You look at Virgin+Endangered+Unhallowed and that's all the ways you can get access to an Underdog event through. (You don't need for your tribe to belong to all three categories at once, maybe I should point that out better).
Thanks again for the right interpretation: you put it exactly like it was in my mind (and it really wasn't a big deal to me, just a conclusive thought). I was included in the whiners/jackasses reprimand myself, of course, since I have a history of being both at times.
Re: Kirin, Leys7 has several builds ready for when he'll come back in September (he tried one of them with no success some time ago, then just went on to complete the 10-tribe sequence for the Hamtastic Prize). I'm actually trying to have someone else beat him to the contest, because I don't want to give the tix to my own clan founder. He will use it for evil! :)
Err... what? No, seriously, what did this come from? I'm sorry, I'm totally baffled, honestly.
Did I call you a jackass? When did this happen? Believe me, I would never even DREAM of doing such a thing!
Hope you can trust me when I say you weren't in my mind AT ALL when I was writing that whiners/jackasses line. Nobody was, actually. It's exactly like AJ put it in his last comment. What I was saying is just that we can have all the power cards we want if we just play them moderately (because if they show up too much, people will complain enough that Blippy will have to ban them; it's happened in the past). No need to be "whiners" and be scared by cards that actually almost never show up (you wanna know the real reason I bothered doing that Watch List? To prove that those cards aren't problematic at all, and perception often plays tricks on us). And no need to be "jackasses", meaning with that careless in dealing with the issue. That was just a throwaway, humorous line, anyway. And I don't even really understand why you of all people should identify yourself with the "jackass" (hope someone who identifies with the "whiner" doesn't show up now to shout at me some more). You only appear once in the Watch List. I was actually going to commend the fact that you never played the Helm deck again so far. That's an example of what a responsible player does, actually. I didn't write that in order not to sound too pandering. But maybe that would have made the point clearer: you, Mr. Ranth, can't be seen otherwise than a "good guy". (Also worth noting: I was the one that made possible for Helm and co. to be playable again. I was the one who wanted for them to be played. Now I just don't want for them to be banned again!)
Re: DirtyDuck. A personal agenda against him? :) He's one of the greatest guys in this scene! I always have a blast talking with him and playing him. He's a fellow Horseman of the Apocalypse! We always joke that he's going to have people organize an angry mob with torches and pitchforks over his Cephalid deck. :) (His words) He actually did a good job of keeping it on the low side so far. And he knows I like the deck a lot (Dirty, you know, right?) Again, I want for the deck to stay, so I see the Watch List as a tool for Dirty to tune the deck's apparition accordingly in order to never get to Level 3: no angry mob, no pitchforks, everybody wins.
Re: the Imp deck. Man, I hope you were just having a bad day here. Did you really take offense at me saying that it was "a bit too much single-mindedly committed to its strategy"? The deck was featured because it deserved to be featured, it shows the strenght of a tribe that we rarely see and there's the oddity of two top players using essentially the same list in the same event (you still didn't tell me if you did brew it together, or it was just a coincidence). And the Liliana line is a kind of recurring joke of mine, I often mention that I want to put Liliana everywhere. In a reanimator deck (an archetype which I believe I'm the one who annoyed everyone else with the most around these parts), it goes without saying.
And you apparently didn't get the premise of the Watch List. If it was about "annoyance" (*) per se, it would feature Punishing Fire and such. I started saying that it's only about "particular, archetype-defining cards". It started as a way to monitor the freshly unbanned cards only. It's not a survey on popular opinions. People get annoyed at the latest thing their opponents successfully threw at them. Someone once told me Recurring Nightmare is broken because "it can't be stopped" (meaning that he couldn't stop it at that time).
(*) I used the word "annoyance" to downplay the concept and not make it too serious-sounding, actually. Not sure if I was successful at that. I might change the name to "Misbehaving Levels". I would like for the cards to be "grounded", rather than "banned". :)
Bottom line: I write a humorous, generic throwaway line and got insulted by a perfectably respectable player. Man, you gotta love all the drama of being a Magic player. :)
AJ, the difference is that I was actually mad at you at that point! :P
(Seriously, thanks for pointing out the "no malice intended" part.)