I think speculating is about projecting what metagames will look like based on card spoilers. A lot of token decks will like Elesh Norn. If there's a really strong equipment (something like Batterskull for 3 mana), it's probably a safe bet that Stoneforge Mystic will go up. People have a preference for new cards; this has nothing to do with the standard format. It's just human nature to like new things.
I also feel that there's a significant problem in online play as opposed to paper play: that of trading. When I speak with someone in person, I can make a fair deal. I even trade down if I want to. The few times I've been approached to trade online, it's usually been avaricious people who are apparently not aware that I have the price guide for every card every released online at my fingertips. This is not to say that trading is not viable online: merely that people don't seem willing to invest in the future by giving even value for something they believe will go up over time.
I'm not an authority on card speculation, but I somehow like to follow the trends, even just out of "scientific" curiosity (I'm always amazed at the micro-economy of MTGO). I'd say the current best mid-term investment cards are the Modern staples (once upon a time, they were the Extended ones), because Modern season is a huge influence on the prices. Like, when Modern season is on, you see the staples go up to 3x or 4x their prices. Look at Hallowed Fountain. It's nearly 40 tix. That's insane, that price is clearly inflated. You don't have to outsmart anynone to speculate on that, it's just a case where the players that want to build competitive decks for Modern tournaments are forced to spend that money. After the Modern season ends, you can bet everyone will sell their Hallowed Fountains to take their money back, and the prices will go down to probably 10 or so. At that point, you just buy them. No need to be greedy, just buy a playset or two (I actually just wish to do that for the sake of playing them in PREs; if I happen to make a profit out of that, fine, but I essentially just try to avoid losing money due to the inflated prices). Of cource, we're already late to experiment on that, since you will sell them when the price will go up again next season, and that's a lot of months from now. But there's that.
Since some time ago, I used to speculate in Lagrange's way. Just not by comparing prices all over the system. There was this ONE chain to which I would sell my rare cards (my own rare cards, from my own collection), and this ONE other chain I would buy them back, generating a profit in the process. I'll not write the names of the chains of course, but some people would probably know what I'm talking about: the former chain was selected because it was the highest payer in the system (that's not true anymore, unfortunately, or at least, it doesn't buy enough cards anymore); the latter because its prices fluctuate a lot, and there's a simple way to check them online outside the client. It was a painful process as I had to put all my rares on trade (only rares, that's important: no mythics. And no lands. Not enough differential with them. It was also required a collection large enough for the bots to always find something interesting), then the buying chain would make an offer for 75 of them chosen apparently at random, and I would have to exit, compare those buying prices with the selling prices of the other chain, and see if and where there was a margin. In a couple of hours, I could make maybe 2 tix worth of profit (and the remaining credits would be left in the same two chains anyway, so no dispersion there. I would actually not recommend to work with more than 2 bot chains in any case).
The satisfaction to be found in a similar system is entirely depending on your own goals. I was (as I am) trying to just buy some cards to play in a non-competitive way without spending real-world money, and 2 tix more every once and then (when I could put enough time and willpower in it, basically) was nothing to sneeze at. But I don't play competitive standard, so I don't really need a lot. And I got a good starting collection when I sold all my paper cards to MTGOTraders 3 years ago, and now I'm perfectly happy with what I earn with my articles every week. For someone else, that would be nothing.
Plus I get some occasional profit I don't even plan, but which just happens to me by following the market. Like, I had a playset of Natural Order since day 1. I like to have them in my collection. But at some point last year, they were being BOUGHT for 56 tix each. So I sold them, if sadly. With that boost, I bought dozens of great cards. Then recently, I slowly bought the NOs back using my article earnings, at 25 tix each. In the end, I made 124 tix out of nowhere. It just happened. (I also usually happen to buy the latest mythic creatures before they get huge, like Consecrated Sphinx and Elesh for 2-3 tix each). (But I rarely sell them afterwards, since I play with them a lot).
I wrote that blog entry. Both Andrejs and sMann were banned for 30 days. There's still occasional conversations about this on twitter and you can follow updates by following me, @dieplstks. Thanks for linking, :)
Beasly I think you know more about my business than I even do. I had no idea all of that was going on so thanks for making me aware of things I must be doing in my sleep. Want to know how we do prices? It's very simple actually. We look at the total number of cards in stock, how many have sold recently and then adjust the prices. If you see a huge spike in a price it's probably because a speculator or redeemer bought them all. I know you must think we are crazy to base our prices are supply/demand and not some crazy evil way to manipulate prices and buy everyone else out, etc.
Also can you please tell your buddy that owns the shop to send me some money for my price list. Obviously he is getting that without my permission and I don't appreciate others getting a free ride off of my work.
Typically I am a proponent of adding images to articles on puremtgo.com to spruce things up and space out concepts but since this was really a one track op ed (even though it had a number of different sub topics) the text did not really need a lot of breaking up. It flowed well from one topic to the next.
Adding a header banner/image and some other pics can't hurt. Particularly in the middle for eye relief. Giving your readers some references in the form of links is also a kindness. For instance you could have linked to the pauper standings site you mentioned as well as some of ghweiss's Daily Event results, etc. I recommend you check out Gwynned's articles for an excellent current example of a pauper (albiet standard) article.
Another thing I think you should have included was at least one deck list and probably more to demonstrate the various pieces you were considering for the deck (before and after sideboarding, as well.) You can use Jamuura's deck list creator application to auto link cards to mtgotraders.com. You can get it here: http://jamuraa.com/pure/deck_new.php.
In addition you can autolink (most) cards in your article by surround the name with parentheses such as (Quirion Ranger). If you want to show the image of a magic card on mtgo you can add pic= inside the parentheses as in: (pic=Quirion Ranger). If for some reason you want to show a thumbnail substitute tmb= in place of pic=. As in: (tmb=Quirion Ranger).
"There are a lot of benignant by aronhally84112w at Thu, 03/15/2012 - 06:24
aronhally84112w's picture
3
There are a lot of benignant April Fools day pranks that you can do to truly fox someone. You're likely not sure which one you requirement to do this assemblage. So, what I'm deed to do is deal with you few innocuous Apr Fools day pranks that you can do april fool greetings."
Great stuff. Are you planning to do this kind of evaluation for all the blocks, sooner or later?
About Coat of Arms: I don't get why Hydra or Kor would get more help from it. If anything, a tribe like Hydra would get LESS help from Coat of Arms, since you're not going to have a lot of Hydras out, as opposed to, say, your opponent playing Elves. In Tribal nobody actually ever plays this card, because it makes no sense to spend your resources to make every creature on the table bigger. Even if your tribe is fast and got a lot of creatures on the table all at once, it's still too risky.
Great review. I see a lot of cards in your article that get played and a lot that should be played more.
I've become very fond of Oath of Lieges. I've gone as far as taking Land Tax out of some decks and replacing it with the Oath. Land Tax was getting destroyed before it could do much good while Oath stays around. Of course I usually play both in non-green decks.
Aaaah, forgot about Crovax. I haven't seen him in a while so that's probably why. He's good with Reverse the Sands and Soul Conduit too. On top of pumping all your dudes and shrinking those of your opponents.
Justsin, I actually thought about your Vhati deck when I wrote this. Never played against it, but remembered seeing it in action.
Random spammer, 3 fireballs? Really?? :P
The tip about Recon is pretty sweet, I had no idea about being able to do it at the end of combat. That's way better than Serra's Blessing. I'm going to have to try it out soon. Thanks for pointing out those other cards, I knew I had to have missed a couple.
1. Time Vault. I completely agree. Manually skipping turns can and will win situations where you would have lost. best example is giving your tinker target haste.
2.Library, I have a love hate with this card. It seems that it can only work with Gush and Jace, or my opponent just raw dogs it and wins in my face. It probably too powerful to be unrestricted.
3.I don't agree with your asertation of Misstep. I think that in the "current" metagame it is correct to jam a 4 of in your deck, especially if you are winning with creatures. For example, Is it better to run 2 misstep 2 pierce in a Gro deck? all you want is to bash them over and over again with dryad, pierce dosent always stop Swords, while misstep does. I believe that its count needs to be adjusted by the metagame and what your deck is doing.
4. Cage is not really a maindeck card, Ive tried it with tutors and trinket mages, but I prefer just jamming 4 in my board, in my testing the increased space by running 4 cage is wonderful, as well as cage doing a greeeat job vs dredge, storm and oath.
5. I agree with you about force of will, however in classic, unless im a controllish deck up against fish or dredge I tend to leave at least 3 in the md. The "desperation" of stopping a tinker is well worth the card disadvantage, sinse you live through the next few turn sequences. Plus its a two for 1 on them too, so there is parity.
all in all a great read, and I like how indepth you got with your turbo tezz games.
As always your deck is very cool. Personally in this color combo I like Tariel, but that is in no small part because of some of your advice in the comments of Leviathan's Tariel article.
Might I suggest finding a place for Blasphemous act? You are already running Repercussions (and you're right it is fun). Tutoring that little combo together would certainly give you at least one strong answer to white token decks.
I really disagree with you on Steelshaper's Gift. IMO if equipment really is integral to a deck's functioning then Steeshaper's Gift is awesome. One mana grab your best equip is just so strong. I think I would prefer it to a slower card disadvantage tutors like enlightened, or maybe Imperial Seal in this deck. Might just be me though.
Truly Tempest block is one of the greatest blocks ever made. So many classic cards and it's chock full of staples and gems of the commander format. When you lay them all out like this it really drives home just how awesome the block was. I did a count of what you have listed here and I have used or am currently using almost 50 of the cards in various commander decks. Plus you pointed out two or three more I now want to give a shot to.
One note on Reconnaissance. You can use it in the end of combat step after damage is dealt. It essentially gives your whole team vigilance in addition to being able to pull card that get blocked out of trouble. It allows you to be very aggressive and push though damage with your whole team at no risk, while still keeping up a solid defensive line. The card is the nuts, but I almost never see it played. If this were a more recently printed card, i am sure it would be much more popular.
Just a few other Rath cards I have found useful in certain decks include Broken Fall, Tortured Existence, Mogg Manic, and Cartographer.
Good info in this article, but it is basically a wall of text. If you could put some pictures of the cards you are talking about in the article, or a sample decklist it would make it a lot easier on the eyes.
Bant hit it's 20th 4-0 appearance, so it moved up to the "big boys" chart. I changed the criteria for the middle chart to 3-19, and the "small" chart to <3 (depsite "<3" also being an emoticon). Also, all 3 charts are now horizontal for easier archetype identification.
Yeah. I saw that as well, and the corrected PTQ results are already incorporated for the next article, and the meta has been updated accordingly. I was going to be featuring that deck as well. I Guess that cat's out of the bag....
In Budapest, the unknown deck was Gifts storm. You can see the decklists at http://mtgportal.hu/clanok.php?id=1095&SID=6424lakbfclnuv1se81fkvln26. Don't get confused by the few Hungarian words. It starts with the standings after the last swiss rounds, and the decklists are in the final order.
I wonder if they would do one of these Vault sets where the paper and online versions contained different cards? The rules that govern what they can print in paper don't apply, we could get better stuff online.
I have read about it and I also searched about it but I really did not understand that what you are trying to saying about "Freed From The real". I think you should write a more about it in simple language and I know you will take my advice. I hope you will accept my point of view and please don't mind.
Betting cannot be better in this site as well as the quick installing play pokies online software would have you using internet poker, blackjack or the pokies in no time.
I especially liked the reasoning and usage of the Kaldra equipment over the Sword of X/Y's. I'm going to have to give that a try. I am a bit worried about this "Star Wars the Old Republic though. We might have to knock out their servers to keep the flow of articles coming. :)
Little surprised this list isn't running Vault of the Archangel, if you've got Oros out you can probably fire off his ability and activate the vault, and it gives you a nice backup to the collar while being a little harder to remove. Otherwise I really like the deck, I'm definitely swiping the Kaldra setup for my own Oros list.
I think speculating is about projecting what metagames will look like based on card spoilers. A lot of token decks will like Elesh Norn. If there's a really strong equipment (something like Batterskull for 3 mana), it's probably a safe bet that Stoneforge Mystic will go up. People have a preference for new cards; this has nothing to do with the standard format. It's just human nature to like new things.
I also feel that there's a significant problem in online play as opposed to paper play: that of trading. When I speak with someone in person, I can make a fair deal. I even trade down if I want to. The few times I've been approached to trade online, it's usually been avaricious people who are apparently not aware that I have the price guide for every card every released online at my fingertips. This is not to say that trading is not viable online: merely that people don't seem willing to invest in the future by giving even value for something they believe will go up over time.
I'm not an authority on card speculation, but I somehow like to follow the trends, even just out of "scientific" curiosity (I'm always amazed at the micro-economy of MTGO). I'd say the current best mid-term investment cards are the Modern staples (once upon a time, they were the Extended ones), because Modern season is a huge influence on the prices. Like, when Modern season is on, you see the staples go up to 3x or 4x their prices. Look at Hallowed Fountain. It's nearly 40 tix. That's insane, that price is clearly inflated. You don't have to outsmart anynone to speculate on that, it's just a case where the players that want to build competitive decks for Modern tournaments are forced to spend that money. After the Modern season ends, you can bet everyone will sell their Hallowed Fountains to take their money back, and the prices will go down to probably 10 or so. At that point, you just buy them. No need to be greedy, just buy a playset or two (I actually just wish to do that for the sake of playing them in PREs; if I happen to make a profit out of that, fine, but I essentially just try to avoid losing money due to the inflated prices). Of cource, we're already late to experiment on that, since you will sell them when the price will go up again next season, and that's a lot of months from now. But there's that.
Since some time ago, I used to speculate in Lagrange's way. Just not by comparing prices all over the system. There was this ONE chain to which I would sell my rare cards (my own rare cards, from my own collection), and this ONE other chain I would buy them back, generating a profit in the process. I'll not write the names of the chains of course, but some people would probably know what I'm talking about: the former chain was selected because it was the highest payer in the system (that's not true anymore, unfortunately, or at least, it doesn't buy enough cards anymore); the latter because its prices fluctuate a lot, and there's a simple way to check them online outside the client. It was a painful process as I had to put all my rares on trade (only rares, that's important: no mythics. And no lands. Not enough differential with them. It was also required a collection large enough for the bots to always find something interesting), then the buying chain would make an offer for 75 of them chosen apparently at random, and I would have to exit, compare those buying prices with the selling prices of the other chain, and see if and where there was a margin. In a couple of hours, I could make maybe 2 tix worth of profit (and the remaining credits would be left in the same two chains anyway, so no dispersion there. I would actually not recommend to work with more than 2 bot chains in any case).
The satisfaction to be found in a similar system is entirely depending on your own goals. I was (as I am) trying to just buy some cards to play in a non-competitive way without spending real-world money, and 2 tix more every once and then (when I could put enough time and willpower in it, basically) was nothing to sneeze at. But I don't play competitive standard, so I don't really need a lot. And I got a good starting collection when I sold all my paper cards to MTGOTraders 3 years ago, and now I'm perfectly happy with what I earn with my articles every week. For someone else, that would be nothing.
Plus I get some occasional profit I don't even plan, but which just happens to me by following the market. Like, I had a playset of Natural Order since day 1. I like to have them in my collection. But at some point last year, they were being BOUGHT for 56 tix each. So I sold them, if sadly. With that boost, I bought dozens of great cards. Then recently, I slowly bought the NOs back using my article earnings, at 25 tix each. In the end, I made 124 tix out of nowhere. It just happened. (I also usually happen to buy the latest mythic creatures before they get huge, like Consecrated Sphinx and Elesh for 2-3 tix each). (But I rarely sell them afterwards, since I play with them a lot).
Yay, SOTP, it's the one reason I look forward to getting to my work computer every Friday...
I wrote that blog entry. Both Andrejs and sMann were banned for 30 days. There's still occasional conversations about this on twitter and you can follow updates by following me, @dieplstks. Thanks for linking, :)
-Chris Mascioli
lulz
Got it!
Typically I am a proponent of adding images to articles on puremtgo.com to spruce things up and space out concepts but since this was really a one track op ed (even though it had a number of different sub topics) the text did not really need a lot of breaking up. It flowed well from one topic to the next.
Adding a header banner/image and some other pics can't hurt. Particularly in the middle for eye relief. Giving your readers some references in the form of links is also a kindness. For instance you could have linked to the pauper standings site you mentioned as well as some of ghweiss's Daily Event results, etc. I recommend you check out Gwynned's articles for an excellent current example of a pauper (albiet standard) article.
Another thing I think you should have included was at least one deck list and probably more to demonstrate the various pieces you were considering for the deck (before and after sideboarding, as well.) You can use Jamuura's deck list creator application to auto link cards to mtgotraders.com. You can get it here: http://jamuraa.com/pure/deck_new.php.
In addition you can autolink (most) cards in your article by surround the name with parentheses such as (Quirion Ranger). If you want to show the image of a magic card on mtgo you can add pic= inside the parentheses as in: (pic=Quirion Ranger). If for some reason you want to show a thumbnail substitute tmb= in place of pic=. As in: (tmb=Quirion Ranger).
Hope this helps. Keep on writing.
Stupid spammer is stupid. Josh please delete?
"There are a lot of benignant by aronhally84112w at Thu, 03/15/2012 - 06:24
aronhally84112w's picture
3
There are a lot of benignant April Fools day pranks that you can do to truly fox someone. You're likely not sure which one you requirement to do this assemblage. So, what I'm deed to do is deal with you few innocuous Apr Fools day pranks that you can do april fool greetings."
I refer to that. Benignant? Really?
Great stuff. Are you planning to do this kind of evaluation for all the blocks, sooner or later?
About Coat of Arms: I don't get why Hydra or Kor would get more help from it. If anything, a tribe like Hydra would get LESS help from Coat of Arms, since you're not going to have a lot of Hydras out, as opposed to, say, your opponent playing Elves. In Tribal nobody actually ever plays this card, because it makes no sense to spend your resources to make every creature on the table bigger. Even if your tribe is fast and got a lot of creatures on the table all at once, it's still too risky.
Great review. I see a lot of cards in your article that get played and a lot that should be played more.
I've become very fond of Oath of Lieges. I've gone as far as taking Land Tax out of some decks and replacing it with the Oath. Land Tax was getting destroyed before it could do much good while Oath stays around. Of course I usually play both in non-green decks.
Aaaah, forgot about Crovax. I haven't seen him in a while so that's probably why. He's good with Reverse the Sands and Soul Conduit too. On top of pumping all your dudes and shrinking those of your opponents.
Justsin, I actually thought about your Vhati deck when I wrote this. Never played against it, but remembered seeing it in action.
Random spammer, 3 fireballs? Really?? :P
The tip about Recon is pretty sweet, I had no idea about being able to do it at the end of combat. That's way better than Serra's Blessing. I'm going to have to try it out soon. Thanks for pointing out those other cards, I knew I had to have missed a couple.
1. Time Vault. I completely agree. Manually skipping turns can and will win situations where you would have lost. best example is giving your tinker target haste.
2.Library, I have a love hate with this card. It seems that it can only work with Gush and Jace, or my opponent just raw dogs it and wins in my face. It probably too powerful to be unrestricted.
3.I don't agree with your asertation of Misstep. I think that in the "current" metagame it is correct to jam a 4 of in your deck, especially if you are winning with creatures. For example, Is it better to run 2 misstep 2 pierce in a Gro deck? all you want is to bash them over and over again with dryad, pierce dosent always stop Swords, while misstep does. I believe that its count needs to be adjusted by the metagame and what your deck is doing.
4. Cage is not really a maindeck card, Ive tried it with tutors and trinket mages, but I prefer just jamming 4 in my board, in my testing the increased space by running 4 cage is wonderful, as well as cage doing a greeeat job vs dredge, storm and oath.
5. I agree with you about force of will, however in classic, unless im a controllish deck up against fish or dredge I tend to leave at least 3 in the md. The "desperation" of stopping a tinker is well worth the card disadvantage, sinse you live through the next few turn sequences. Plus its a two for 1 on them too, so there is parity.
all in all a great read, and I like how indepth you got with your turbo tezz games.
Hooray
As always your deck is very cool. Personally in this color combo I like Tariel, but that is in no small part because of some of your advice in the comments of Leviathan's Tariel article.
Might I suggest finding a place for Blasphemous act? You are already running Repercussions (and you're right it is fun). Tutoring that little combo together would certainly give you at least one strong answer to white token decks.
I really disagree with you on Steelshaper's Gift. IMO if equipment really is integral to a deck's functioning then Steeshaper's Gift is awesome. One mana grab your best equip is just so strong. I think I would prefer it to a slower card disadvantage tutors like enlightened, or maybe Imperial Seal in this deck. Might just be me though.
Truly Tempest block is one of the greatest blocks ever made. So many classic cards and it's chock full of staples and gems of the commander format. When you lay them all out like this it really drives home just how awesome the block was. I did a count of what you have listed here and I have used or am currently using almost 50 of the cards in various commander decks. Plus you pointed out two or three more I now want to give a shot to.
One note on Reconnaissance. You can use it in the end of combat step after damage is dealt. It essentially gives your whole team vigilance in addition to being able to pull card that get blocked out of trouble. It allows you to be very aggressive and push though damage with your whole team at no risk, while still keeping up a solid defensive line. The card is the nuts, but I almost never see it played. If this were a more recently printed card, i am sure it would be much more popular.
Just a few other Rath cards I have found useful in certain decks include Broken Fall, Tortured Existence, Mogg Manic, and Cartographer.
Good info in this article, but it is basically a wall of text. If you could put some pictures of the cards you are talking about in the article, or a sample decklist it would make it a lot easier on the eyes.
Bant hit it's 20th 4-0 appearance, so it moved up to the "big boys" chart. I changed the criteria for the middle chart to 3-19, and the "small" chart to <3 (depsite "<3" also being an emoticon). Also, all 3 charts are now horizontal for easier archetype identification.
Yeah. I saw that as well, and the corrected PTQ results are already incorporated for the next article, and the meta has been updated accordingly. I was going to be featuring that deck as well. I Guess that cat's out of the bag....
In Budapest, the unknown deck was Gifts storm. You can see the decklists at http://mtgportal.hu/clanok.php?id=1095&SID=6424lakbfclnuv1se81fkvln26. Don't get confused by the few Hungarian words. It starts with the standings after the last swiss rounds, and the decklists are in the final order.
used to have a Vhati deck that I loved because it allowed you to be kind of power neutral, while making power plays at the same time
lot of great control in black and adding green gets you get additions like tarmo and mael pulse
I wonder if they would do one of these Vault sets where the paper and online versions contained different cards? The rules that govern what they can print in paper don't apply, we could get better stuff online.
I have read about it and I also searched about it but I really did not understand that what you are trying to saying about "Freed From The real". I think you should write a more about it in simple language and I know you will take my advice. I hope you will accept my point of view and please don't mind.
Crovax, Ascendant Hero can too.
I love your articles. But then, i think EDH is the best format for having fun.
I especially liked the reasoning and usage of the Kaldra equipment over the Sword of X/Y's. I'm going to have to give that a try. I am a bit worried about this "Star Wars the Old Republic though. We might have to knock out their servers to keep the flow of articles coming. :)
Little surprised this list isn't running Vault of the Archangel, if you've got Oros out you can probably fire off his ability and activate the vault, and it gives you a nice backup to the collar while being a little harder to remove. Otherwise I really like the deck, I'm definitely swiping the Kaldra setup for my own Oros list.