You're wrong. Psyche does not kill Crawler nor does Time reversal. The draw happens in the same instance of the discard. Try it out in client. I just tested to be sure I was not misremembering.
Yeah, I know that. You have to keep at least one card in hand when you cast Time Reversal. This usually isn't a problem as you get EOT Think Twice or what have you.
Note time reversal and psychosis crawler do not work
When you reshuffle your cards into you library at that point you hav 0 hand and it dies.
Likewise Molten Psyche.
Obviously you need to playtest these decks before posting them as ideas - to verify they work etc - as you will go around teaching bad habits and creating disappointment for people - Lol for me as I watch people do such a silly thing to their own crawler - 1 less prob for me.
That is certainly an aspect to the argument against adding sideboards. It might in fact be the initial reason for excluding them. However given a format fully enforced in the client any rules to deal with that could still be handled. (ie: main deck still needs to have 33% of the deck be of the tribe.)
Blood Clock: makes your opponent return a permanent to their hand or pay 2 life while you with the Patron just return a land and shrug. It also works well with the Spine. You can combo this a bit more with Paradox Haze.
Snow-Covered Islands + Extraplanar Lens: Not many people play Snow-Covered lands in Commander because they're harder to come across. Mono-colored decks can take advantage of this by giving themselves extra mana while their opponents still don't get anything.
Eternity Vessel: Since landfall triggers are regular things for the deck, why not make sure you always have a good amount of life? Roil Elemental looks workable as well.
Overall, this deck looks really good. I might have to try something like this. :)
I always assumed that the reason for not having a sideboard was because people could just switch out the tribal aspects and have a much more finely tuned deck.
Do cards necessarily have to be banned? Could they be suspended? WOTC tries to only do bannings on the 21st of each quarter so they have to be very sure. Being that scheduling isn't that strict, could cards just be suspended instead of banned? Something like...
Due to the abuses of the last couple months and forcing its way into a huge number of decks, Card X has a 2 (or maybe 4, not sure on good length) week suspension from Tribal Apocalypse. When the 4 weeks is up, the deck can go back into the card pool, back onto the watch list, or onto the banned list depending on how the metagame reacts in it's absence.
-Also thanks for the words about the spirit of the format. Honestly, I'm sure I would of probably broken that if I was playing as often as I was in the fall, but with chasing down QP's this year I don't get to play as often, (I really don't think people want to play against someone triple queuing during Tribal Apoc.) I'd also credit AJ Impy and an old tribal league called World of Kedoria for a lot of my attitude about the format. I ended up winning the league with a really linear Elemental sligh deck, but was still a little jealous that AJ had a much more versatile build to do interesting things with while I was just turning guys sideways and sending burn to the face.
Blippy said what I was going to say: the Hall of Fame was sort of a private initiative (mine) to add statistics and juice to the event. When the Blippian run of this tournament started, for some reason the prizes were given based on DCI rankings, and that was deeply unfair. After changing that to what Wizards of the Coast itself does for Swiss events without Top 8 (Swiss drafts, for instance), that is giving prizes based only on the number of matches won, the tournament didn't need anything else to properly function.
Even now, the tournament could perfectly exist without the Hall of Fame. It relies more on the Creature Type List (for Endangered Prizes) and on vantar's Tribe Popularity (for Virgin Prizes). The only official use of the Hall of Fame to date has been the Invitational early this year.
When I first envisioned the Hall of Fame, the DCI rankings seemed the best way to do it: again, it's the official way. Top 8 are calculated this way in every Swiss tournament. A further showdown being not viable for time constraint reasons, that was it. And it makes sense anyway: it's not true that every undefeated player performed the same. A player who went 2-0, 2-0, 2-0 has definitely proven to do better than a player who went 2-1, 2-1, 2-1. Hell, this latter even lost more games than a player who went 2-0, 2-0, 1-2.
So there's that. And yet there's a case where your ranking is somehow decided on something you don't have control on: your pairings. Especially the pairing on Round 1: if your Round 1 opponent is one who's going to lose every other match, your ranking will be lower. It's still a true meter of performance: players who beated more worthy opponents did better than you. And yet, you can't choose your Round 1 opponent, or any other opponent (you might have the same bad luck by being paired down in a following round).
And that's why, yes, in these cases we will do exactly what grapplingfarang suggested, something I first tested last week when romellos and I both had the same percentage of games won. He was 1st place only in virtue of "better" (as in, stronger) pairings. So I challenged him for the first place, he accepted, we fought (and I lost). I'll recount and define this in the next article, but it's still something Blippy will not have to care about. Also something that will not happen so often, but when it does, I think it's right and interesting to settle it this way.
I try to not ever bring the same deck or same tribe again. What the format is to me is a fun distraction between tournament rounds where I can try to brew something up for wierd ideas or fun interactions that I would not be willing to take into a Daily Event.
You, sir, are now the poster boy for the Spirit of Event Award.
And I'm really thinking of an award for this (I'll discuss it with Blippy). Like, if you bring 10 different tribes before repeating a previously played tribe, you get a (still-to-be-defined) prize. I know for people with big collection the meager tix we can offer wouldn't be so relevant, but glory and being recognized for excellence in a field is probably an incentive for everyone. We all like to be lauded for what we do, right?
Another thing I wnat to support: police/punish the temper tantrums. I usually ignore them, they're mostly caused by the stress of the competition, but if it becomes an issue that pushes players away and somehow discredits the event, that's bad and needs to be fixed. Gentleman's tournament should mean ACTING like a gentleman when you interact with your opponent during and after the games, NOT with the cards on the battlefield.
You make very good points about the proposed banning. Truth is: I'm not good in judging these kind of things. I support your suggestion about Nettle Sentinel (which is pretty useless outside the combo anyway), keeping Birchlore and Heritage.
Also, I had thought about Umbral being just a creature-based infinite mana combo like dozens of others, and I'm fine with keeping it. But all in all, the goal here is to break the same old, same old Elf decks and push Elf players towards other interactions, and Umbral Mantle is the type of no-brainer thing that it's been seen too much.
The same is true for Ezuri, like I wrote elsewhere.
I see the conflict about Punishing, and you're right in your final wondering. But there's a reason we're bringing this out AT THE SAME TIME we try to have Elves less of a constant presence (because, let's face it: players who only play Elves for those combos will more likely either stop playing, or switch to other tribes than finding a way to mend the wounded Elves). So the two bannings, made at the same time, should balance each other out.
I dread the moment Wizards will mess with the tribal format. You think it's cutthroat now? Wait until there were official tournaments, a sideboard system, and pro players (and we know what pro players do within an environment reflects on what wannabe pro players/competitive casual players/newbies/almost everyone will do).
To me the lack of sideboard is exactly like everything else: a feature of the format. It's a challenge. You have to be somehow more skillful to build around this limitation. With a sideboard, that's easier = less challenging (like, "let's play 100-card Singleton, but with 4 copies of each card! It'll be easier to find answers this way!"). In most Legacy games, it all boils down to a battle of sideboards, and that means the meta are more strictly defined, so you can study it, predict it, counter it. Without sideboard, the meta is less predictable, a deck wins in virtue of its own strengths, not the strengths of the hosers that come up in Game 2.
Also, it would just switch the focus from a kind of deck to another (for instance, graveyard strategies out, permission strategies in). And it will end up being more similar to regular Legacy. I don't want a Tribal where a playset of Force of Will becomes mandatory.
Yeah, I wouldn't stop repeating this: banning a card on this time and age isn't about "oh my God, that's SO BROKEN! It can't be beated!". It's about "oh please, all decks have the same card, let's stop this proliferation for the sake of not boring our players to death".
I also never understood the banning paranoia. All the formats have a restricted pool of cards. You build decks within that pool, and that's it. All the current pools are huge enough. Legacy is mega-huge. They took out one card you used to play? Well, guess what, you'll have to redefine the pool and start building within a new pool that is equal to old pool minus one. Nothing to go drama queen about (except if you just spent 400 tix for a playset of something that got banned two weeks after, but that just bad luck/bad acumen).
All of these arguments are why I wish Tribal had access to a sideboard! I didn't play either of these events, but being able to board in oxidize, relic of progenitus, spreading seas, some kind of pyroclasm effect etcetera seems like it would make so many other strategies more feasable!
As it is, you can't afford to stick multiple answers in your decks unless you have some sort of tutor package, and those are often too slow (and only available to certain tribes, really).
Obviously, I'm aware that y'all can't change the online tribal format, but I wish wizards would look into it!
My thoughts exactly. Also, Allies have a guy that does possibly more (protection from a color in your turn), and it's obviously always there in Ally decks, but there's not dozens of Ally decks per event because of it.
Go ahead!
I badly lost with a Cloudpost deck in the second tournament I talk about in this article. But that doesn't mean it's not powerful.
Also, there's A LOT of powerful things that TribAp players aren't playing. Ayanam1, for instance, is a player who often likes to remind us which broken stuff we're forgetting about.
I get it. It's weird how I always miss all this behind-the-scenes stuff playing out.
So, someone feels pushed away from something by aggressive remarks from a group of other participants. Friends or not friends, oversensitive or not, it looks like a case of mobbing to me.
I respect and like apaulogy and his decks. I just wish it was enough.
I passed SNM on to another host so I could have time to open up Where Angels Fear To Tread on Sundays. Also, I've found I really enjoy having Saturday afternoon/evening with nothing to do. Anything that impinges on that newly found freedom would be frowned upon by yours truly.
As far as "rankings" in Tribal Apocalypse go, they are there purely as a by-product. I do not have any plans to institute any kid of ranking system. The ONLY thing I care about is whether a player went x-0 or x-1, or if the tribe played qualifies for Virgin or Endangered. Anything like 1st, 2nd, etc, is meaningless as far as any "official" results go.
So any playoffs that want to occur after the event, players are welcome to do so, but those types of things would not be monitored by me.
Last bear I saw was in the Catskills in the 70s. Though a funny story: My dad who worked with kids from the South Bronx and sometimes ex-Offenders took a group of us out to Bear Mountain along with some colleagues and one of the adults came running back to our area screaming his head off that he saw a bear. Of course there haven't been any bears on Bear Mt years before that so it was very amusing for everyone else, though some of the kids got scared.
Nice analogy though :D we DO have some bears left, mostly in protected areas and rarely in very wild areas.
I agree somewhat about a mandatory final battle. Really the challenge system just came to mind as something that sounded quick, and I think quick is one of the main things that would be wanted. My fear with a mandatory final battle is if it basically extends the whole tournament by a round. That is exactly what I wouldn't want to Suggest. Blippy puts in a hell of a lot of work in one day hosting Eurodrive, Apocalypse, SNM, which averages about 12 round or so? I wouldn't want to have to tack on one more.
Maybe the final battle could be just a single game, since it would not affect prizes, and it would go much more quickly? Or maybe just going Undefeated and One loss would be better than worrying about rankings? I'm not sure, but I liked how it went with the final battle last week, so I am throwing things out there. I think that not having people out of first place and undefeated would be a good thing.
Agree that it would better to not differentiate between undefeated players (and players with 1 loss) based on the tie brakers, especially for the purpose of leaderboard. Different points for 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th place instead of for "undefeated" and "1-loss" create much unnecessary variance IMO.
Not sure about the challenging system, since it would result in more 1st places for zealous players over the ones who don't really care (assuming that the zealous player is less likely to challenge 2nd place player when he himself finishes first). I would be for it, but only if the final battle was mandatory.
That reasoning is flawed. Anything can be defeated by specific answers. However since the format prohibits sideboarding you have to to know to bring those answers. The narrower the answer (Crystaline Sliver for example) the harder it is to predict its usability.
Steely Resolve while certainly an answer to targeted creature removal in general is one answer. I am not saying Punishing/Groves is unabeatable either. I am saying it is ubiquitous and onerous.
I agree on modifying the current rank structure to undrefeated and one loss. The tiebreakers, whilst laudable, tend to add an artificial gloss to proceedings.
Now that I think about it, Punishing Fire really shouldn't be banned. There's Crystalline Sliver, Steely Resolve and a few other things that give all your creatures shroud. If the fire can't target a creature, you're spending two mana to deal one every turn. And anyway, people should be playing shroud effects more. :p
Wow, I was going to leave a comment last night, but was in a hurry so wanted to wait until today. The comments section sure blew up since then. I have a few things I wanted to talk about.
-About Wallbelcher itself: The main thing that I noticed while playing this was the same thing I noticed in Classic or Pauper or any other format with a heavy amount of combo decks. To many people are worried about the actual kill condition that they do not worry about the set up for the combo. The actual key card in the deck was Wall of Mulch. Wall of Mulch allowed me to set up and protect myself before drawing a huge amount of cards in the turn that I wanted to try for a kill. The deck did have a pretty high power level though. When I came in I was happy that I felt I was going to crush the silly elf decks, but figured a Wizards deck or something of that nature would make easy work of me.
-As for not bringing the deck again, I try to not ever bring the same deck or same tribe again. What the format is to me is a fun distraction between tournament rounds where I can try to brew something up for wierd ideas or fun interactions that I would not be willing to take into a Daily Event. Then the tournament itself is to see how the deck or the ideas actually worked out. I am not blaming anyone if they want to take the same deck to the tournament every week. Not everyone has access to a collection like mine, or maybe they just have a lot of fun playing that deck, or maybe they are trying to win and that is what makes them have fun. If so, great, do whatever makes you happy. I use the format for brewing mostly, some of those will be powerful, some will be horrible (like the Crab mill deck I played not long ago.)
Before I got far in making Wallbelcher, I was really curious if a card like Goblin Charbelcher had any place in the format with the tribal restriction. My first thought was that Spirits would be the way to use it, but then I checked out the Wall of Mulch engine and changed my mind. Brewing it up gave me something to do for the week in between rounds. Do what you enjoy though, this event is basically for fun. If you have fun trying to go for first place everytime, go for it. If you want to play something whacky, go for it. I'd think the draw of a tournament like this is that it costs nothing to enter so you can feel free to enjoy it how you like. I think one of the main things people need to remember is that how you enjoy the tournament is not necessarily the right way for everyone to enjoy it.
Another draw for the tournament for me is to fight against the meta. I feel like some of the levels of complaining about a few of the decks/archetypes gets way past a point of being based in reality. If I can make something that wrecks a deck that is heavily complained about, and show that it is not so bad, I feel great about that. It usually does not work how I think it will though. At the end of one of the rounds with Wallbelcher, my Elf opponent was having a bit of a temper tantrum in the game chat. As soon as the game closed, I saw the event chat, at the same time, had a different player having a temper tantrum about Elf decks?!
One last thing about how I view the general nature of this tournament. I don't make decks hoping specifically for a 4-0, I just want to see how much I can get certain ideas to work and have fun. This does not include "playing casually" though. If I have a wasteland out, and someone plays a Karoo land, I am always going to play it up and put them behind on lands. Despite viewing this tournament as something for fun, I can not bring myself to play badly to match opposing bad plays.
-All the stuff between Kuma and Apaulogy: I am kind of divided between you two on the different points. I think that discussing things that need to be banned has to happen. WOTC does not pay a whole lot of attention to this format, so the bannings need to be discussed sometimes to keep the format fresh and fun. On the other hand, a lot of times people want things be banned before they even put effort into beating them.
I do agree with Apaulogy that the main drawback of a tournament like this is the constant whining. I understand that is the nature of a PRE like this. Some people will use it to brew up whacky decks, some just want to game with friends, and some are here because they want to play tournaments but do not have the confidence to play WOTC sanctioned Tournaments. Sometimes a clash of these type of players is going to lead to a blowout. Someone does not need to be bragging about a blowout when this happens. Also, when someone says they do not care to much about winning, they should back that up by not getting really upset when someone that does wins a lopsided game. Some basic respect for how others play would go a long ways in increasing good attitudes during Apocalypse.
I know one of the cards I am looking forward for this format is Misthollow Griffin. Making a deck (which will probably not be very good) abusing interactions between Misthollow Griffin, Mtenda Griffin and various effect sounds like a lot of fun. Yet, I worry that I will hear a lot of whining about the deck regardless of how good it is simply due to using 4x Force of Will. I'd hope that people realize that cheesy or expensive does not necessarily mean not fun.
About the bannings themselves:
-Heritage Druid: This one seems a bit Pointless to me to be honest. Sure, it leads to explosive starts, but Elf players can get almost the same effect from Birchlore Rangers (and that can give them black mana if they want to go for Tendrils of Agony Kill.) If one card is to be banned from Elves, I think Nettle Sentinel is the card as it enables an engine with both of these.
-Umbral Mantle: I really do not support this banning. Sure it can be a powerful combo, but without it's combo pieces it can be fairly useless, and people can easily remove the creature they attempt to equip it to. This is also not a well known card and Tribal is basically the only format that it can be used competitively.
-Punishing Fire: I am really torn on this one. On one hand I feel like it is like Stoneforge Mystic. If I am using a deck with red that is not hyper aggressive, why would I not use the combo? It doesn't disrupt my decks synergies, and gets rid of many of the problem cards in the format. With those thoughts I think of course this card should go, having something that should always go into a color isn't a good thing. On the other hand I don't think banning it is a good idea right now. A huge amount of the event chat/comments in Diaries of the Apocalypse are complaining about Elves. Is banning the very best card against those decks the right thing to do?
-One more thing as my post was kind of whiny, and there was something very positive I saw. In the last Apoc Kuma and someone else played for first place. I thought this was great and a long time coming. Going Undefeated and not getting first place kind of sucks. I know that the problem with this is just how busy Blippy is, and this adds even more to his schedule. Hopefully something can be found to incorporate it more though? Maybe some sort of challenge system could be added? I would think something like if two people are undefeated, one of them has the option of immediately challenging the other undefeated player for first place as soon as they are done with round 4 (not when the actual round ends.) If the other player denies the challenge, then the challenger gets first. If it is accepted, they play for first place. Another option might be to just not keep track of first place, but only keep track of Undefeated and One Loss players. It is not a good feeling at all to go undefeated and see you did not get first on tie breakers.
You're wrong. Psyche does not kill Crawler nor does Time reversal. The draw happens in the same instance of the discard. Try it out in client. I just tested to be sure I was not misremembering.
Yeah, I know that. You have to keep at least one card in hand when you cast Time Reversal. This usually isn't a problem as you get EOT Think Twice or what have you.
Note time reversal and psychosis crawler do not work
When you reshuffle your cards into you library at that point you hav 0 hand and it dies.
Likewise Molten Psyche.
Obviously you need to playtest these decks before posting them as ideas - to verify they work etc - as you will go around teaching bad habits and creating disappointment for people - Lol for me as I watch people do such a silly thing to their own crawler - 1 less prob for me.
That is certainly an aspect to the argument against adding sideboards. It might in fact be the initial reason for excluding them. However given a format fully enforced in the client any rules to deal with that could still be handled. (ie: main deck still needs to have 33% of the deck be of the tribe.)
So that only forestalls doing it unofficially.
I have a few suggestions:
Blood Clock: makes your opponent return a permanent to their hand or pay 2 life while you with the Patron just return a land and shrug. It also works well with the Spine. You can combo this a bit more with Paradox Haze.
Snow-Covered Islands + Extraplanar Lens: Not many people play Snow-Covered lands in Commander because they're harder to come across. Mono-colored decks can take advantage of this by giving themselves extra mana while their opponents still don't get anything.
Eternity Vessel: Since landfall triggers are regular things for the deck, why not make sure you always have a good amount of life? Roil Elemental looks workable as well.
Overall, this deck looks really good. I might have to try something like this. :)
I always assumed that the reason for not having a sideboard was because people could just switch out the tribal aspects and have a much more finely tuned deck.
Do cards necessarily have to be banned? Could they be suspended? WOTC tries to only do bannings on the 21st of each quarter so they have to be very sure. Being that scheduling isn't that strict, could cards just be suspended instead of banned? Something like...
Due to the abuses of the last couple months and forcing its way into a huge number of decks, Card X has a 2 (or maybe 4, not sure on good length) week suspension from Tribal Apocalypse. When the 4 weeks is up, the deck can go back into the card pool, back onto the watch list, or onto the banned list depending on how the metagame reacts in it's absence.
-Also thanks for the words about the spirit of the format. Honestly, I'm sure I would of probably broken that if I was playing as often as I was in the fall, but with chasing down QP's this year I don't get to play as often, (I really don't think people want to play against someone triple queuing during Tribal Apoc.) I'd also credit AJ Impy and an old tribal league called World of Kedoria for a lot of my attitude about the format. I ended up winning the league with a really linear Elemental sligh deck, but was still a little jealous that AJ had a much more versatile build to do interesting things with while I was just turning guys sideways and sending burn to the face.
Blippy said what I was going to say: the Hall of Fame was sort of a private initiative (mine) to add statistics and juice to the event. When the Blippian run of this tournament started, for some reason the prizes were given based on DCI rankings, and that was deeply unfair. After changing that to what Wizards of the Coast itself does for Swiss events without Top 8 (Swiss drafts, for instance), that is giving prizes based only on the number of matches won, the tournament didn't need anything else to properly function.
Even now, the tournament could perfectly exist without the Hall of Fame. It relies more on the Creature Type List (for Endangered Prizes) and on vantar's Tribe Popularity (for Virgin Prizes). The only official use of the Hall of Fame to date has been the Invitational early this year.
When I first envisioned the Hall of Fame, the DCI rankings seemed the best way to do it: again, it's the official way. Top 8 are calculated this way in every Swiss tournament. A further showdown being not viable for time constraint reasons, that was it. And it makes sense anyway: it's not true that every undefeated player performed the same. A player who went 2-0, 2-0, 2-0 has definitely proven to do better than a player who went 2-1, 2-1, 2-1. Hell, this latter even lost more games than a player who went 2-0, 2-0, 1-2.
So there's that. And yet there's a case where your ranking is somehow decided on something you don't have control on: your pairings. Especially the pairing on Round 1: if your Round 1 opponent is one who's going to lose every other match, your ranking will be lower. It's still a true meter of performance: players who beated more worthy opponents did better than you. And yet, you can't choose your Round 1 opponent, or any other opponent (you might have the same bad luck by being paired down in a following round).
And that's why, yes, in these cases we will do exactly what grapplingfarang suggested, something I first tested last week when romellos and I both had the same percentage of games won. He was 1st place only in virtue of "better" (as in, stronger) pairings. So I challenged him for the first place, he accepted, we fought (and I lost). I'll recount and define this in the next article, but it's still something Blippy will not have to care about. Also something that will not happen so often, but when it does, I think it's right and interesting to settle it this way.
Great post, grappling.
I try to not ever bring the same deck or same tribe again. What the format is to me is a fun distraction between tournament rounds where I can try to brew something up for wierd ideas or fun interactions that I would not be willing to take into a Daily Event.
You, sir, are now the poster boy for the Spirit of Event Award.
And I'm really thinking of an award for this (I'll discuss it with Blippy). Like, if you bring 10 different tribes before repeating a previously played tribe, you get a (still-to-be-defined) prize. I know for people with big collection the meager tix we can offer wouldn't be so relevant, but glory and being recognized for excellence in a field is probably an incentive for everyone. We all like to be lauded for what we do, right?
Another thing I wnat to support: police/punish the temper tantrums. I usually ignore them, they're mostly caused by the stress of the competition, but if it becomes an issue that pushes players away and somehow discredits the event, that's bad and needs to be fixed. Gentleman's tournament should mean ACTING like a gentleman when you interact with your opponent during and after the games, NOT with the cards on the battlefield.
You make very good points about the proposed banning. Truth is: I'm not good in judging these kind of things. I support your suggestion about Nettle Sentinel (which is pretty useless outside the combo anyway), keeping Birchlore and Heritage.
Also, I had thought about Umbral being just a creature-based infinite mana combo like dozens of others, and I'm fine with keeping it. But all in all, the goal here is to break the same old, same old Elf decks and push Elf players towards other interactions, and Umbral Mantle is the type of no-brainer thing that it's been seen too much.
The same is true for Ezuri, like I wrote elsewhere.
I see the conflict about Punishing, and you're right in your final wondering. But there's a reason we're bringing this out AT THE SAME TIME we try to have Elves less of a constant presence (because, let's face it: players who only play Elves for those combos will more likely either stop playing, or switch to other tribes than finding a way to mend the wounded Elves). So the two bannings, made at the same time, should balance each other out.
I answer about the undefeated/1 loss thing below.
I dread the moment Wizards will mess with the tribal format. You think it's cutthroat now? Wait until there were official tournaments, a sideboard system, and pro players (and we know what pro players do within an environment reflects on what wannabe pro players/competitive casual players/newbies/almost everyone will do).
To me the lack of sideboard is exactly like everything else: a feature of the format. It's a challenge. You have to be somehow more skillful to build around this limitation. With a sideboard, that's easier = less challenging (like, "let's play 100-card Singleton, but with 4 copies of each card! It'll be easier to find answers this way!"). In most Legacy games, it all boils down to a battle of sideboards, and that means the meta are more strictly defined, so you can study it, predict it, counter it. Without sideboard, the meta is less predictable, a deck wins in virtue of its own strengths, not the strengths of the hosers that come up in Game 2.
Also, it would just switch the focus from a kind of deck to another (for instance, graveyard strategies out, permission strategies in). And it will end up being more similar to regular Legacy. I don't want a Tribal where a playset of Force of Will becomes mandatory.
Yeah, I wouldn't stop repeating this: banning a card on this time and age isn't about "oh my God, that's SO BROKEN! It can't be beated!". It's about "oh please, all decks have the same card, let's stop this proliferation for the sake of not boring our players to death".
I also never understood the banning paranoia. All the formats have a restricted pool of cards. You build decks within that pool, and that's it. All the current pools are huge enough. Legacy is mega-huge. They took out one card you used to play? Well, guess what, you'll have to redefine the pool and start building within a new pool that is equal to old pool minus one. Nothing to go drama queen about (except if you just spent 400 tix for a playset of something that got banned two weeks after, but that just bad luck/bad acumen).
All of these arguments are why I wish Tribal had access to a sideboard! I didn't play either of these events, but being able to board in oxidize, relic of progenitus, spreading seas, some kind of pyroclasm effect etcetera seems like it would make so many other strategies more feasable!
As it is, you can't afford to stick multiple answers in your decks unless you have some sort of tutor package, and those are often too slow (and only available to certain tribes, really).
Obviously, I'm aware that y'all can't change the online tribal format, but I wish wizards would look into it!
My thoughts exactly. Also, Allies have a guy that does possibly more (protection from a color in your turn), and it's obviously always there in Ally decks, but there's not dozens of Ally decks per event because of it.
Go ahead!
I badly lost with a Cloudpost deck in the second tournament I talk about in this article. But that doesn't mean it's not powerful.
Also, there's A LOT of powerful things that TribAp players aren't playing. Ayanam1, for instance, is a player who often likes to remind us which broken stuff we're forgetting about.
Oh my God, guys! Now I have to fight to bring YOU back because of the opposite issue? You guys want me dead! :)
I get it. It's weird how I always miss all this behind-the-scenes stuff playing out.
So, someone feels pushed away from something by aggressive remarks from a group of other participants. Friends or not friends, oversensitive or not, it looks like a case of mobbing to me.
I respect and like apaulogy and his decks. I just wish it was enough.
I passed SNM on to another host so I could have time to open up Where Angels Fear To Tread on Sundays. Also, I've found I really enjoy having Saturday afternoon/evening with nothing to do. Anything that impinges on that newly found freedom would be frowned upon by yours truly.
As far as "rankings" in Tribal Apocalypse go, they are there purely as a by-product. I do not have any plans to institute any kid of ranking system. The ONLY thing I care about is whether a player went x-0 or x-1, or if the tribe played qualifies for Virgin or Endangered. Anything like 1st, 2nd, etc, is meaningless as far as any "official" results go.
So any playoffs that want to occur after the event, players are welcome to do so, but those types of things would not be monitored by me.
Last bear I saw was in the Catskills in the 70s. Though a funny story: My dad who worked with kids from the South Bronx and sometimes ex-Offenders took a group of us out to Bear Mountain along with some colleagues and one of the adults came running back to our area screaming his head off that he saw a bear. Of course there haven't been any bears on Bear Mt years before that so it was very amusing for everyone else, though some of the kids got scared.
Nice analogy though :D we DO have some bears left, mostly in protected areas and rarely in very wild areas.
He did drop SNM from his roster of PRES to run so there is that.
I agree somewhat about a mandatory final battle. Really the challenge system just came to mind as something that sounded quick, and I think quick is one of the main things that would be wanted. My fear with a mandatory final battle is if it basically extends the whole tournament by a round. That is exactly what I wouldn't want to Suggest. Blippy puts in a hell of a lot of work in one day hosting Eurodrive, Apocalypse, SNM, which averages about 12 round or so? I wouldn't want to have to tack on one more.
Maybe the final battle could be just a single game, since it would not affect prizes, and it would go much more quickly? Or maybe just going Undefeated and One loss would be better than worrying about rankings? I'm not sure, but I liked how it went with the final battle last week, so I am throwing things out there. I think that not having people out of first place and undefeated would be a good thing.
Agree that it would better to not differentiate between undefeated players (and players with 1 loss) based on the tie brakers, especially for the purpose of leaderboard. Different points for 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th place instead of for "undefeated" and "1-loss" create much unnecessary variance IMO.
Not sure about the challenging system, since it would result in more 1st places for zealous players over the ones who don't really care (assuming that the zealous player is less likely to challenge 2nd place player when he himself finishes first). I would be for it, but only if the final battle was mandatory.
That reasoning is flawed. Anything can be defeated by specific answers. However since the format prohibits sideboarding you have to to know to bring those answers. The narrower the answer (Crystaline Sliver for example) the harder it is to predict its usability.
Steely Resolve while certainly an answer to targeted creature removal in general is one answer. I am not saying Punishing/Groves is unabeatable either. I am saying it is ubiquitous and onerous.
I agree on modifying the current rank structure to undrefeated and one loss. The tiebreakers, whilst laudable, tend to add an artificial gloss to proceedings.
Now that I think about it, Punishing Fire really shouldn't be banned. There's Crystalline Sliver, Steely Resolve and a few other things that give all your creatures shroud. If the fire can't target a creature, you're spending two mana to deal one every turn. And anyway, people should be playing shroud effects more. :p
Wow, I was going to leave a comment last night, but was in a hurry so wanted to wait until today. The comments section sure blew up since then. I have a few things I wanted to talk about.
-About Wallbelcher itself: The main thing that I noticed while playing this was the same thing I noticed in Classic or Pauper or any other format with a heavy amount of combo decks. To many people are worried about the actual kill condition that they do not worry about the set up for the combo. The actual key card in the deck was Wall of Mulch. Wall of Mulch allowed me to set up and protect myself before drawing a huge amount of cards in the turn that I wanted to try for a kill. The deck did have a pretty high power level though. When I came in I was happy that I felt I was going to crush the silly elf decks, but figured a Wizards deck or something of that nature would make easy work of me.
-As for not bringing the deck again, I try to not ever bring the same deck or same tribe again. What the format is to me is a fun distraction between tournament rounds where I can try to brew something up for wierd ideas or fun interactions that I would not be willing to take into a Daily Event. Then the tournament itself is to see how the deck or the ideas actually worked out. I am not blaming anyone if they want to take the same deck to the tournament every week. Not everyone has access to a collection like mine, or maybe they just have a lot of fun playing that deck, or maybe they are trying to win and that is what makes them have fun. If so, great, do whatever makes you happy. I use the format for brewing mostly, some of those will be powerful, some will be horrible (like the Crab mill deck I played not long ago.)
Before I got far in making Wallbelcher, I was really curious if a card like Goblin Charbelcher had any place in the format with the tribal restriction. My first thought was that Spirits would be the way to use it, but then I checked out the Wall of Mulch engine and changed my mind. Brewing it up gave me something to do for the week in between rounds. Do what you enjoy though, this event is basically for fun. If you have fun trying to go for first place everytime, go for it. If you want to play something whacky, go for it. I'd think the draw of a tournament like this is that it costs nothing to enter so you can feel free to enjoy it how you like. I think one of the main things people need to remember is that how you enjoy the tournament is not necessarily the right way for everyone to enjoy it.
Another draw for the tournament for me is to fight against the meta. I feel like some of the levels of complaining about a few of the decks/archetypes gets way past a point of being based in reality. If I can make something that wrecks a deck that is heavily complained about, and show that it is not so bad, I feel great about that. It usually does not work how I think it will though. At the end of one of the rounds with Wallbelcher, my Elf opponent was having a bit of a temper tantrum in the game chat. As soon as the game closed, I saw the event chat, at the same time, had a different player having a temper tantrum about Elf decks?!
One last thing about how I view the general nature of this tournament. I don't make decks hoping specifically for a 4-0, I just want to see how much I can get certain ideas to work and have fun. This does not include "playing casually" though. If I have a wasteland out, and someone plays a Karoo land, I am always going to play it up and put them behind on lands. Despite viewing this tournament as something for fun, I can not bring myself to play badly to match opposing bad plays.
-All the stuff between Kuma and Apaulogy: I am kind of divided between you two on the different points. I think that discussing things that need to be banned has to happen. WOTC does not pay a whole lot of attention to this format, so the bannings need to be discussed sometimes to keep the format fresh and fun. On the other hand, a lot of times people want things be banned before they even put effort into beating them.
I do agree with Apaulogy that the main drawback of a tournament like this is the constant whining. I understand that is the nature of a PRE like this. Some people will use it to brew up whacky decks, some just want to game with friends, and some are here because they want to play tournaments but do not have the confidence to play WOTC sanctioned Tournaments. Sometimes a clash of these type of players is going to lead to a blowout. Someone does not need to be bragging about a blowout when this happens. Also, when someone says they do not care to much about winning, they should back that up by not getting really upset when someone that does wins a lopsided game. Some basic respect for how others play would go a long ways in increasing good attitudes during Apocalypse.
I know one of the cards I am looking forward for this format is Misthollow Griffin. Making a deck (which will probably not be very good) abusing interactions between Misthollow Griffin, Mtenda Griffin and various effect sounds like a lot of fun. Yet, I worry that I will hear a lot of whining about the deck regardless of how good it is simply due to using 4x Force of Will. I'd hope that people realize that cheesy or expensive does not necessarily mean not fun.
About the bannings themselves:
-Heritage Druid: This one seems a bit Pointless to me to be honest. Sure, it leads to explosive starts, but Elf players can get almost the same effect from Birchlore Rangers (and that can give them black mana if they want to go for Tendrils of Agony Kill.) If one card is to be banned from Elves, I think Nettle Sentinel is the card as it enables an engine with both of these.
-Umbral Mantle: I really do not support this banning. Sure it can be a powerful combo, but without it's combo pieces it can be fairly useless, and people can easily remove the creature they attempt to equip it to. This is also not a well known card and Tribal is basically the only format that it can be used competitively.
-Punishing Fire: I am really torn on this one. On one hand I feel like it is like Stoneforge Mystic. If I am using a deck with red that is not hyper aggressive, why would I not use the combo? It doesn't disrupt my decks synergies, and gets rid of many of the problem cards in the format. With those thoughts I think of course this card should go, having something that should always go into a color isn't a good thing. On the other hand I don't think banning it is a good idea right now. A huge amount of the event chat/comments in Diaries of the Apocalypse are complaining about Elves. Is banning the very best card against those decks the right thing to do?
-One more thing as my post was kind of whiny, and there was something very positive I saw. In the last Apoc Kuma and someone else played for first place. I thought this was great and a long time coming. Going Undefeated and not getting first place kind of sucks. I know that the problem with this is just how busy Blippy is, and this adds even more to his schedule. Hopefully something can be found to incorporate it more though? Maybe some sort of challenge system could be added? I would think something like if two people are undefeated, one of them has the option of immediately challenging the other undefeated player for first place as soon as they are done with round 4 (not when the actual round ends.) If the other player denies the challenge, then the challenger gets first. If it is accepted, they play for first place. Another option might be to just not keep track of first place, but only keep track of Undefeated and One Loss players. It is not a good feeling at all to go undefeated and see you did not get first on tie breakers.