Fair enough. The key function of every deck is to defeat the opposition, however: Any card can be justified in working towards that end. 'Bitterblossom is good in this deck' as a phrase is a bit off, as it's good in practically any deck that wins through damage. Innovating with cards that have been in the eyes of the players of the top tables is really, really hard: To take up the example of Punishing Fire, I included it in my Spellshaper deck as a 1-mana recursion engine to feed spellshaping in addition to its role as removal and a finisher. Despite that clever ruse, you'd have been absolutely right to dismiss it as a random good card, because as with Bitterblossom, I can win with Punishing fire/grove and nothing else.

Playing strong cards is absolutely fine, whatever they may be, but playing them and claiming to innovate with them, or building around them, doesn't really hold water: Revisiting extremely well-trodden ground can't be called trailblazing.

Quoting myself: "the thing didn't bother me per se (...) but it provided me with the chance to talk some more about my take on the Tribal Wars format." It was just the trigger for a "storytelling approach" piece I was planning to do anyway, with those two different Merfolk decks as the main example.

Anyway, the "trigger" was this (you can see it in our replay): as soon as I played Bitterblossom, you asked me (quoting verbatim): "Playing faeries or just random good cards? ;)". And no, my friend, that wasn't random at all. My point is that my approach is exactly NOT playing random good cards (that's why I never play Punishing Fire :P). I look at a card, as strong as it may be (I prefer to call them "exciting" :P), only as a function of the general structure and theme of the deck I want to build, or even build around them. That's what I wanted to talk about here. I even thought not to mention you or our game at all, but in the end that would have seemed strange.

BTW, I admit I totally misread your Thrun joke in Game 2 (I just rewatched it): when you said, "Use thrun: Seems better to be killed on-tribe than off. :)", in the heat of the moment I somehow didn't read the "to be killed" part, and thought you were being sarcastic, like an "ad" for Thrun being better off-tribe, or something. Hence my weird-sounding answer to that, about him not being off-tribe. :)

incase u need the spelling its,
Kolczynski
Its not like Wotc is going to come out and say, Hey were inviting back repeats this year.
To be honest Im of the mind, that in any givin year repeats could happen.

'I think he doth protest too much', as the bard once put it. I asked that Kuma use Thrun, the Last Troll to kill me rather than his faerie tokens, so as to be beaten by his tribe, Angels bested by Shamans. That's it, that's all. I have no beef with him squeezing Bitterblossom in his deck. It's a good card with a strong winning pedigree, Kuma has no more need to justify it than anyone needs to justify Goblin Charbelcher or Helm of Obedience. Good cards that win games are A-OK, and don't particularly need a half-dozen paragraphs trying to say why they fit into a deck or a theme. Bitterblossom was good enough to earn a pre-emptive ban in Modern due to its tournament successes, which is more than enough reason to stick it in a deck which can utilise it.

Seriously, no reason to go on about it nor to compose an apologia on its behalf. It's a perfectly reasonable card choice, you're defending against attacks which aren't being made.

Thanks for featuring my Goblin Welder deck this week. I spent a great deal more time tweaking that one than any deck recently, way more than my Esper Spirits deck that won a month back.

The main problem with the Artificers, I thought going in, was against linear aggro. The Batterskull plan and the Blade Splicers could buy time against fast aggro (Cat sligh, red elementals, etc), and my finisher was always going to be better than their board presence if they didn't kill me first. But linear aggro (Elves, Allies, Merfolk) was going to get their critical mass of synergistic guys out that my one or two fatties couldn't always trump. Undisrupted, those decks have a better endgame than me. The initial build had ZERO ways to interact with the opponent's board. Bosh and the Contagion Engine were added, and in my final test matches I swapped out a Paradise Mantle for the Blazing Torch just so I could kill a lord or troublesome utility creature in a pinch (and in magical Christmasland, recur it with Argivian Archaeologist.) And the torch randomly won me a couple games, including dominating game 3 of my last match against Vampires. A Germ riding a battering ram and carrying that torch, vampires cowering in fear, aw yeah!

Of course what I ended up losing to wasn't aggro at all, but AJ's demons. As Mike Flores would say, he had "moresies" on me. For every fatty I had, he had 3 of them. He chained them with Rune-Scarred Demons, which is uber-powerful. And I couldn't set up much early, because my shenanigans are creature-based and he had 6-8 sweepers in there.

Per Kuma's remark about noncreature permanents, I did consider Spine of Ish-Sah, but it kind of stinks that it goes back to your hand instead of yard when you sac it, so I thought it would be too much work to include it. I would rather have found some way to run Chrome Mox instead of Diamond, since Chrome Mox runs in land slots not spell slots like the Diamond does, and fit in 3-4 utility removal spells or countermagic. But I had too many artifacts to feel like Chrome Mox would be reliable, and the Diamonds were nice color-fixing against people who, for instance, blew up all my dual lands with Sundering Titan :-)

Regarding the "spirit of the format", I mostly view it like Kuma. That is to say, at the fundamental level it's just a legacy format made more interesting by combining the vast legacy card pool with a novel deckbuilding restriction. Trying to fit interesting cards, combos, and ideas into that restriction is challenging and fun. I certainly have my "Vorthos" moments where I run some card just because I love the art, but most of the time it's me sitting at the bar, idly browsing the Decked Builder app, and suddenly wondering "what can I do with THIS?" And I love it when all the pieces fall together into something that resembles a reasonable deck.

In retrospect, I'm not sure I would even call that odious Wall-Belcher deck outside the "spirit of the format". It's noxious and disgusting and an affront to the game in ANY format, but at least the person who originally designed it a few months ago can claim that he did the work and found a way to fit that ridiculous joke of a deck into the format's restrictions. Anybody copying it now lacks that justification.

I havent seen it posted anywhere that past invitees cant be invited again.
Repeats will happen, its just a matter of when it does.

Good work as usual.
Edited as you beat me to it!

Cheers

As mentioned by El Pato, above, I messed up the calculations for the pack EVs. Here are the updated numbers:

ISD: $1.16
DKA: $1.47
AVR: $1.15
M12: $0.81

My apologies. The reflected changes are that Mythics are 1 in 8 (not 1 in 7) and that Double Faced Mythics and Rares in ISD and DKA have different distribution rates.

Oh I should also point out that while what you said about the name origin is true it was also intended as a reference to the R/P/S meta game model that was popular in discussion at the time. As the R in that model it was designed to beat the top tier which accounted for its success and the toolbox nature of its design meant that changing out creatures when the meta changed kept the archetype alive and competitive.

Don't lose hope that you can't win 2/3 of your matches! Sometimes you are just not very good at a format. I was above 70% for Scars block but I failed out of ISD-DKA at around 58% and I'm not doing too hot in AVR. It's a little depressing thinking that there are some sets your are just going to fail, and you're never going to know why, because Magic keeps changing and you have to move on, but the fact that it moves on gives you hope for better days.

Stuff I'd like to point out:

After the 8/1 downtime, there are no longer M12 queues ;_; too bad so sad

Is that 6/7 + 1/7 calculation correct? I thought mythic odds are 1/8 not 1/7.

Make sure to do the ISD-DKA math right - flip cards don't take the rarity slot so they make the EV a bit more difficult to crunch. If you haven't done this yourself, or for anyone reading who would do this, here are some numbers for flip cards:
Innistrad has 121 cards on the DFC sheet. There's 1 mythic with only 1 copy, so 1/121, and 6 rares with 2 copies each, 2/121 each.
DKA has 80 cards on the DFC sheet. There are 2 mythics at 1 copy each and 3 rares at 2 copies each.

Yeah, that's when Magic really was the game I love. I think we've lost something along the way and even though the game is still great, it just doesn't grab me the way it did back then. These days, I have a whole lot more "what the hell were they thinking?" moments than I did back then. I don't like the way formats deteriorate so quickly now. Back then, it felt like the possibilities were endless. Now, it seems predetermined that there will only be two or three tournament-worthy decks at any one time with a few decks lurking at the fringes.
I also miss the days when you'd go to the card shop and you'd see homebrew all over the place. Now, it's more a case of "which decklist do you prefer: the one from Star City or the one from some other website?"
Hey, you kids! Get off my lawn!