Not sure if you understand my point. There is no virus. When I ran the kicker, it didn't work. Simple as that. I suppose I could try to call support to rectify it, but would there be any point in doing so? When I'm called irrational and myopic simply for stating my opinions? Why should I show up just to be insulted whenever I have a thought that runs contrary to what anybody else thinks. The fault isn't mine- and this feels like blaming the victim when you say that I need to find a way to have fun with it. Why tell me to develop elephant skin? Wouldn't it be better if everyone else learned to treat other people with respect? At the very least, people could leave their competitive decks out of the casual room. It's not my fault for getting frustrated over that- it's their fault for being bullies when other people just want to sit back and enjoy a match with random cards they threw together. While it's not Wizards fault that such behavior arises, I do wish they would do more- perhaps a database of netdecks that tells you if you have a tier 1, 2 or 3 deck when you put it together. Then if you try to make or join a match in the casual room with a tier 1 deck, it won't let you. This is the sort of thing they could do to ensure parity in the various rooms.

You can be logged on to an admin level account and still not be running a program as an administrator.

Right clicking and selecting "Run as an Administrator" is how windows lets you override its permissions system.

Again as I said. This sounds like a windows problem. You are getting messages (FROM WINDOWS) about permissions that have garbled characters in them? That sounds like a virus or two. Or perhaps your .net files are corrupt/missing. In any case this is solvable if you look for help from the appropriate angle.

As for the cards you hate:

Well MTG is a game in progress. There is no end boss. It will never have one. This means it will always been an imperfect game for some of us. Which ones may vary at any given time. If your expectation is based on the game being polished and complete then you are going to be disappointed time and again.

In my opinion Wotc does fair job of weeding out the worst offenders but they are humans and stuff does get by (I personally thought the big 3 of ROE were not just mistakes but horrible for the casual fun only players out there.) That makes the game outrageous at times for some players but it also makes it interesting for others.

As for the rest, well your rant seems a little myopic. (Not to mention lacking in paragraphs but that just made it harder to read.)

Not to say all of your complaints are invalid either (communication definitely is something they need to work on) but lumping them all together and virtually waving your hands in the air because of all that seems like you are missing the big picture.

Particularly when you blame wizards for the david v Goliath syndrome that happens with ANY strategy based game. There will always be people who will beat you down and disregard your pleasure/pain in the process. Or maybe even seek to provoke the negative response so they can feed THEIR fragile egos. This has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with humanity. Learn to avoid the people who do this or develop elephant skin.

I KNOW you enjoy the game. You've spent the time and energy to write articles about it. Heck you spent time and energy to write these impassioned if not precisely rational sounding posts. But it sounds like you have become so frustrated by your woes that you have lost track of what matters. Finding a way to have fun with the game.

Being unable to log in maybe causing this but that isn't imho the fault of wizards. Though I expect if you called them they would do their best to give you technical support. (One thing few have complained about is their customer support.)

Did you give any feedback to WOTC on the forums or by email or even to an ORC or anyone else aside from here?

==Edit==
Also how on earth could you have been playing this as long as you have and not even know about the kicker much less not have run it? I am really disturbed by that. Was someone else taking care of it for you?

I'm the only person on my computer and I've already set myself as an administrator. Usually, I get a box asking me if I want to let the program do its thing and I click on yes. Not so with the kicker- it wouldn't even let me get that far. Moreover, the text I saw was all jumbled: the result of bad programming.

Why do magic players put up with this? Why do they spend money on a faulty program to interact with other players who, let's face it, are really not that pleasant? Why do we sit through tournaments for three hours hoping to make a small gain when we could just easily take a job moonlighting somewhere and make a much larger profit? Why do magic players care more about the values of their cards than the experiences they give other players by using abusive, broken decks? Why does selfishness factor into everything around the game? Why do magic players always look at the next new thing, so excited about sets that haven't even come out yet when here there are plenty of cards yet to be tried? Are new cards more enjoyable than old cards simply because they're new? Why does Wizards design broken cards and then later say, "whoops, sorry?" Why is that even acceptable? Shouldn't we expect more when the card game has been around for as long as it has? If they people involved in the game haven't learned how to create healthy metagames by designing cards that everyone can play, when will they learn? When will Wizards finally make good on every single pre-release? When will Wizards learn how to communicate what's going on to as many people as possible, instead of putting an article on their site and automatically expecting everyone to find it? At long last, are we just going to admit that we are not valued customers, that we are only taken seriously when we complain and that the rest of the time, the only motivating factor for any action the company takes is to increase profits?

Not that there's anything wrong with profit, mind you. Just that in this case, it eclipses everything else.

Thanks for taking the time to make this. It was awesome from your part to share it.

Thanks man, I appreciate it. The replay thing was really ticking me off. I had several games where the replay just bugged out after turn 6 or so. I wouldn't have even minded showing a game where I lost if I was able to get a full game in. I figured 2 weeks of trying was enough, and at least showed you guys partial games. I think that first game would have recorded well if it weren't for the fact that the game itself was bugged, and not the replay. I really wish that the second game worked because it was a fun game where Ruhan came in to win in the end. Hopefully I'll have better luck for next week.

Your suggestions were great, and I appreciated them. Puresteel was great when I had metalcraft, but otherwise it was fairly vanilla. As for the deck, I think if you take out a land and add Rhystic Study, or maybe Stroke of Genius, it would help. The curve is so low that shaving a land shouldn't hurt and it will help (however slightly) avoid mana flood. Plus additional draw is never a bad thing.

I built a kaleidoscope (60 cards, all gold) tribal deck this week, which I may not get to play anytime soon since it could be 8/18 before there's another "normal" event I will be home for. I think that might be a fun one-off event. There are probably a dozen viable tribes, and maybe a few more legal ones that arent competitive, but that's enough for a one-off event. It's not exactly budget-friendly if you want the optimal manabase and 4-5 colors, but there are always vivid lands and other options, and I don't think it prices anybody out of the event. We likely have plenty of alternative events already as it is, may not need anymore for awhile, but it was fun to build that kind of deck and something maybe to consider for the future, just wanted to throw it out there.

Another commander that I have a deck for. Funny how now that you are doing some of the less popular "bad" commanders, you are hitting the commanders I use. My Ruhan deck is very different though. It is basically my asshole deck, and I really don't run it very often. Mine tries to get Ruhan out as fast as possible then blow up all the lands and try to ride to victory with counter back up. Not at all nice.

I have a few other things though that I like with Ruhan. O-naginata is super cheap, pumps big and adds trample. Flickering Ward is a great reusable and cheap form of evasion. Not of this world is awesome with Ruhan, it is totally free and people never expect it. Last I think I prefer Sieze the day to something like waves of aggression. It is is cheaper, and can be used twice, but i guess it really just depends on just "all in" you are on Ruhan.

I am a bit surprised you have never used bauble before. It is a total staple for me in non green decks.

You are right about the Puresteel, he really only has a place in certain decks and tends to be lousy otherwise. I really only run him in mono white equip voltrons, and even then there are times when he is just meh.

Slayers Strong hold is sooooo good. The effect is very strong, and the activation is so cheap. Having to be boros is really its only down side.

You have sold me on Malignus. He sure looks like fun, and I will have to give him a try now.

I am glad to see a couple more of my suggestions work out for you.

Bummer about the replays. It would have been fun too see a few more full games, but still good job.

I do like this project and I appreciate you undertaking it. Some thoughts:

Setting a standard value for the packs doesn't make it conservative or aggressive, it's the EV of every opened pack. A pack could (unlikely) be more than 4 tix also. Packs are generally priced to be a bit worse than the EV of opening it.

If you standardize pack price, then you'd also need to standardize card price. If you do one and not the other, then you could have a "LOOK AT MY RIDICULOUS EV" on a week where the cards you opened happened to be in a sweet spot in the market.

MTGO is a market that has constant fluctuation. No matter what you do, you can't account for all of the fluctuations in the market. What you CAN do is to just be as accurate as possible. I think it's fine to have an article where you say "LOOK AT MY RIDICULOUS EV" -- some weeks are like that and you can write about noticing when it's good value to draft a certain set over another (bc ratio EV of card price to pack price is good). Alternatively, you can have one where you say the market was really bad. You can talk about stockpiling packs during good market times in anticipation of bad ones to help your profit margin. You can talk about when to stockpile your cards during a good run and when to sell them, which point you should attempt to go for the set to redeem, etc.

The beautiful thing is, over time, with enough data, it will even itself out and biases should be somewhat eliminated. That is, of course, you have a built-in bias like standardizing price of one commodity and not another.

I know this takes more work, but it's not THAT much more work and it will lead to a much better product. Besides, if you're using analytic programs to find trends, isn't that best done with the most accurate data possible?

I was an econ/business major in undergrad, and the main problem was that the theory didn't often match reality, mainly because the theorists made too many assumptions. The real experience won't be so cut and dry; a robust, accurate data set also makes for more intricate and interesting analysis that is much more practical.

Again, I think this is a great idea, but these are some suggestions to make it the most worthwhile to both yourself and your readers. Hope this helps.

If I forgot to say it in the last article, welcome back Adam! :)

I appreciate that you went a little bit deeper into the EV calculation. I didn't go quite as deep into it in my first article because I wanted it to at least be an interesting and easy read for the layperson.

As for the assumption of 4 tix, I find that I like to do financial projections (in the real world as well) quite conservatively. Since I expect to use more packs as entry, than receive as prizes, the assumption of a 4 tix price will provide me with a conservative, unchanging baseline while giving myself the freedom to shop for the absolute best price on packs. It would be harder to evaluate my playing performance based on EV if the cost of each tourney was not a constant.

As for step number 4, I hope that I can convey that my goal is to play magic for fun without paying... not to squeeze every drop of value.

Hey everyone, thanks for the feedback! I managed to take my ISD block decks into the tournament practice room and it produced a reasonable amount of success, but I have no illusions that it'll be anywhere near as easy for Standard.

Starting next week I'm intending to have a look at a variety of casual standard decks that can be built for under $5, then choose one and take this forward, adding to my collection and improving the deck with an aim of perhaps sliding in the tournament practice room by the release of Return to Ravnica.

With rotation looming I intend to touch on standard for a couple of weeks, interspersed with other formats, instead of focusing on a futile attempt to break into a format with two years worth of cards and a minuscule foothold. I'd be remiss if I advocated spending too much of a weekly budget on Standard cards that are necessary to compete for the next few months, but become dead cards post-rotation.

I hope I manage to cater to people who do have delusions of competitiveness on a limited budget, as well as those people who feel no need to leave the casual room, although by necessity it will be the latter I will be focusing on until my budget Standard collection is sufficiently deep. :)