I feel your pain when it comes to the Rangers. I lived in Boston until 2010 so I witnessed many a Red Sox collapse (1978, 1986, 2003) before they finally won the big prize in 2004 and 2007. When the Rangers do finally win, their victory will taste that much better.
And yes, I stopped watching your videos because of the dreaded mouse hovering between your opponents lands. I still read your articles to see how you do, so maybe some day I can come back to watching your videos as well.
as a st louis native i really do feel bad about the texas loss. the cardinals got so lucky in game 6. about the draft review, keep em coming. all i do is draft and multiplayer with friends. i lost my patience for constructed limited a long time ago. counter spell wars stress me out.
Orgg does not have a draw back as long as you clear path for him. Can you really blame him for not wanting to fight anything that might have a outside chance to win? Why should he when there are always tons of other gits to bully into such teamwork?
Its nice and all, but speak something during the draft videos, really u make 5-6 picks and then say nah this card is bad and then u are silent. What's the purpose of video if it's animated version of raredraft ?
Haha, well then, Evin Erwin hypes enough useless paper as it is, he doesn't need to branch out.
It wasn't an attack on you by the way, I just wouldn't want to see anyone buy stock in the misguided hopes that they would influence Hasbro.
I don't know the best way of effecting positive change for the player base, but I don't want to see anyone potentially lose money, unless it's drafting packs with me.
Sure... But I'm only reporting on the decks going 3-1 and better, and this was written using only the data from the first two events... and for the most part it's still accurate.
Please, educate yourself on how stock works before you come in to correct me.
I'm well aware he doesn't want people to buy stock to make money, which is his first mistake, because that is the ONLY reason to buy stock.
Minority shareholders have absolutely no impact on how Hasbro is run, much less its subsidiaries. Do the common stock shareholders of Hasbro even have voting rights? If they don't buying stock to bring about change is completely futile, all you have done is made an investment in Hasbro. I also doubt there are even enough shares available for sale to do what you are suggesting.
If you don't know the difference between common and preferred stock, how shareholder meetings and voting rights work, don't advise people to buy a stock to change how a company operates, because, as I said before, it is just bad financial advice.
I'm quite sure he meant well by his suggestion, and I doubt anyone seriously followed it, but it was a dangerously bad suggestion, especially if you believe Hasbro or WOTC is being poorly run.
Luckily for me my girlfriend is letting me stay in tonight just to watch college football.... but then I read this.
But when it comes to ISD Block Constructed, which I have played in almost every daily that is in my time zone and I play it exclusively right now, there are 50x the decks you are currently talking about.
Sure there is burning vengeance. But there are at least 4 separate variations on that. The U/G "Dredge" deck? The B/G "Dregde" deck, or I like to call it "Splinter-Mulch" is really good with Lilliana, so you don't need to bother with blue which isn't fast enough to deal with fast decks.
My deck (And if you win, you get to name it right?) I'm working on is doing really well testing against players that have an 1800-ish ranking. It's a U/W Token Control deck that is fast to deal with GW, but can also control BV. When I win a daily with it, I will call it "My Little Pony", bc you guys take this stuff wayyy too seriously.
Nevermore is being main-decked now.
Ghostly Possession + Geist of Tramp Stamp is working nice.
There is a really cool mono-blue deck.
Soon the Heartless Summoning decks will be hitting the market.
RG has more applications than just Werewolves, and they are badass. I'm going to run one of those soon and see how it works.
Burning Vengeance will slowly die out as players start to figure it out. I mean it is based entirely on lands, and if you have to start splashing other colors like white or green for Nevermind or Witchbane Orb means that it will be a 50/50 chance of winning. The only reason it does is that people haven't caught onto running Nevermind main deck yet.
And in the daily's, you will soon see different decks start to win at random intervals.
I can easily see a mono-black deck being played right now thanks to Heartless Summoning being like an enchantment elf.
I just know that there are at minimum, 30 playable and winning decks out there. Some of those might be variations, but you might see Burning Vengeance become less of a win condition and more of an add on in R/U Decks or R/B.
You have it backwards for SCGs... SCGs aren't viable b/c people think if they do well enough at them they could go pro. They're viable because they're in huge cities, they sell product too all day(s), and because the prize payout is big enough to draw people from all surrounding states. Basically if you're semi-competitive at MTG and there is an SCG within 8 housr, you go! EU could do this I think, but I'm not sure how easy it would be to secure weekly or monthly convention centers. Is pricing comparable there?
But Thresh didn't really mill itself much, rather it discarded (sometimes for madness) and casts a ton of cheap spells. Milling yourself is a prime quality of dredge.
And I am not ignorant enough to actually believe that smaller countries have the same resources as we do here in the US. All that I am implying is that there are many large secondary market retailers (there have to be) in those countries that will try to protect their business. Or they will just fold.
As I said, I agree this has a larger impact outside the US. An impact that I can't accurately measure due to not having ever left the US to play MTG.
I also think this is why they push MTGO so much to the global market. It is easier to get digital product to people who are competitive world wide.
I am an old time player ( early 1994) with a little experience at the highest level. My last pro event was in 2003. the reason I made it to the PT was that with a group of local players, we could learn together, team together and get better. Work towards a reachable goal (winning a PTQ, or finish high in a GP.) GP's were also easier back then, for example I would always be disappointed if I didn't make top 64 and I am not and never was a top player) What really helped though was the involvement of local players who got on the PT train, some even ended up getting up to HoF status) It was a golden era of magic in my small country. Guess from which country I am. We got the top PT players and a steady entry of new talented youngsters who got included in the nation wide competitive community. (you could compare our nation with a large urban area at the west or east coast in the USA) A reason it was succesfull was that many talented people would look at the whole picture and think: "Okay, I am good at this game and it seems the rewards (play around the world, win back (some of) the huge investments, are worth it spending all this time on this game for a year or a couple of years. Take this hall of famer. He is quite brilliant, of course he is. Besides playing magic he studied. Something scientific. That study takes 4-5 years. It took him 8. Was he a bad student? No he wasn't, he might have been one of the top students. But the security of his pro magic career made it financially possible for him to delay his graduation. These days he is working for a PhD.
Most of us are not a HoFer. Me for example. Yet, the Pro Tour was a great reward for me. I could invest time and money. Make a pro tour. Go, finish 2-4 on day 1 and have a great time. PT San Diego, yeah baby! La Jolla here I come. How many european students have a chance to visit Yokohama or Tokyo?
This dream was within the reach of many average FNM players. It was an incentive to purchase the cards needed for extended or standard.. To keep drafting to increase your skill. To travel to the next city for another tournament, to play in GPs.
In the new system, most of that all will be gone. From 6-8 PTQ (*5 PTs!!! ) slots we will end up with 3 (*3 PTs) . No more Nationals. (two of our national champions became world champions) GPs lose value. PTQ's can still provide the San Diego vacation experience I talked about, but with less slots your chances are a lot smaller , so less people will decide it worthwile to grind them out until they make it. It's not the same... saying ok, if I play them all I give myself a good chance to qualify in a year.. compared to... oh, I play them all and now it will take 2-3 years.... Well, let's find some other hobby.
So who are unaffected? The commander players? the kitchen table players... the legacy players? Oh yeah those guys have a basement full of cards.. 10-18 years worth of cards.. Do they draft? not so much.. Do they buy boxes? some might do out of habit, or because they like to collect, but many of them are quite happy to pick up a handful of rares and mythics from the new set and leave it there.
Sets these days are more and more a recycling of older ideas (See many MaRo articles on this subject, preserving design space) Cards are variants of older cards, fitting in this years theme flavor. Grassroots players already have these cards in older forms. sure they want the next dragon or angel for their collection but that's not enough to drive sales.
Buying stock to profit is not what anyone is suggesting. As a stock holder, you have a say in how the company should act (to a certain extent). If you have enough stock, your voice can be heard with regards to changes in the game.
For the love of MTGO, please stop constantly moving the mouse back and forth between your opponent’s permanents (especially lands). It must be a nervous or boredom tick or something. It makes watching what are otherwise great videos a little annoying. I am not even sure you realize you are doing this. You do it in your classic tourney game videos too.
Buying Hasbro stock isn't going to have any effect on how M:TG is run. Even if you were to buy millions of shares of stock in a misguided effort to make it go up, that's not how stock works. The value of stock is based on the future earnings potential of the company (mostly and for our purposes). Stock changing hands between small shareholders is irrelevant to how Hasbro, and subsequently Magic, operate.
As long as magic is profitable, it will exist, with or without Hasbro. Please don't advise people buy Hasbro stock unless you reasonably believe the company will be more profitable than they are now in the future, because otherwise you are handing out dangerously bad financial advice. People who play magic buy enough useless paper as it is.
Thanks for the comments TwoHands. I think I have been overlooking Silent Departure, and I will actively keep an eye out for it in the coming drafts... I'm about to do #4 as I type this response :D
I think I agree after playing both that Geistflame is typically better... Which seems odd looking at them side by side...
What happened to doing this as complimentary articles? :/
I feel your pain when it comes to the Rangers. I lived in Boston until 2010 so I witnessed many a Red Sox collapse (1978, 1986, 2003) before they finally won the big prize in 2004 and 2007. When the Rangers do finally win, their victory will taste that much better.
And yes, I stopped watching your videos because of the dreaded mouse hovering between your opponents lands. I still read your articles to see how you do, so maybe some day I can come back to watching your videos as well.
Scott
as a st louis native i really do feel bad about the texas loss. the cardinals got so lucky in game 6. about the draft review, keep em coming. all i do is draft and multiplayer with friends. i lost my patience for constructed limited a long time ago. counter spell wars stress me out.
Orgg does not have a draw back as long as you clear path for him. Can you really blame him for not wanting to fight anything that might have a outside chance to win? Why should he when there are always tons of other gits to bully into such teamwork?
"Ghostly Possession + Geist of Tramp Stamp is working nice."
Sooo...spending 6 mana and 2 cards to get a 4/4 flier is good?
>considering an overcosted Air Elemental good
>2011
Also, what do you do when you actually draw ghostly possession alone?
I can't see that card being anything but a 14th pick in draft.
Its nice and all, but speak something during the draft videos, really u make 5-6 picks and then say nah this card is bad and then u are silent. What's the purpose of video if it's animated version of raredraft ?
yea im a drunk and the twitching made me dizzy... i like to watch drafting
Haha, well then, Evin Erwin hypes enough useless paper as it is, he doesn't need to branch out.
It wasn't an attack on you by the way, I just wouldn't want to see anyone buy stock in the misguided hopes that they would influence Hasbro.
I don't know the best way of effecting positive change for the player base, but I don't want to see anyone potentially lose money, unless it's drafting packs with me.
Evan Erwin suggested it, I was just saying what I saw on Twitter. Carry on.
Sure... But I'm only reporting on the decks going 3-1 and better, and this was written using only the data from the first two events... and for the most part it's still accurate.
Please, educate yourself on how stock works before you come in to correct me.
I'm well aware he doesn't want people to buy stock to make money, which is his first mistake, because that is the ONLY reason to buy stock.
Minority shareholders have absolutely no impact on how Hasbro is run, much less its subsidiaries. Do the common stock shareholders of Hasbro even have voting rights? If they don't buying stock to bring about change is completely futile, all you have done is made an investment in Hasbro. I also doubt there are even enough shares available for sale to do what you are suggesting.
If you don't know the difference between common and preferred stock, how shareholder meetings and voting rights work, don't advise people to buy a stock to change how a company operates, because, as I said before, it is just bad financial advice.
I'm quite sure he meant well by his suggestion, and I doubt anyone seriously followed it, but it was a dangerously bad suggestion, especially if you believe Hasbro or WOTC is being poorly run.
Luckily for me my girlfriend is letting me stay in tonight just to watch college football.... but then I read this.
But when it comes to ISD Block Constructed, which I have played in almost every daily that is in my time zone and I play it exclusively right now, there are 50x the decks you are currently talking about.
Sure there is burning vengeance. But there are at least 4 separate variations on that. The U/G "Dredge" deck? The B/G "Dregde" deck, or I like to call it "Splinter-Mulch" is really good with Lilliana, so you don't need to bother with blue which isn't fast enough to deal with fast decks.
My deck (And if you win, you get to name it right?) I'm working on is doing really well testing against players that have an 1800-ish ranking. It's a U/W Token Control deck that is fast to deal with GW, but can also control BV. When I win a daily with it, I will call it "My Little Pony", bc you guys take this stuff wayyy too seriously.
Nevermore is being main-decked now.
Ghostly Possession + Geist of Tramp Stamp is working nice.
There is a really cool mono-blue deck.
Soon the Heartless Summoning decks will be hitting the market.
RG has more applications than just Werewolves, and they are badass. I'm going to run one of those soon and see how it works.
Burning Vengeance will slowly die out as players start to figure it out. I mean it is based entirely on lands, and if you have to start splashing other colors like white or green for Nevermind or Witchbane Orb means that it will be a 50/50 chance of winning. The only reason it does is that people haven't caught onto running Nevermind main deck yet.
And in the daily's, you will soon see different decks start to win at random intervals.
I can easily see a mono-black deck being played right now thanks to Heartless Summoning being like an enchantment elf.
I just know that there are at minimum, 30 playable and winning decks out there. Some of those might be variations, but you might see Burning Vengeance become less of a win condition and more of an add on in R/U Decks or R/B.
You have it backwards for SCGs... SCGs aren't viable b/c people think if they do well enough at them they could go pro. They're viable because they're in huge cities, they sell product too all day(s), and because the prize payout is big enough to draw people from all surrounding states. Basically if you're semi-competitive at MTG and there is an SCG within 8 housr, you go! EU could do this I think, but I'm not sure how easy it would be to secure weekly or monthly convention centers. Is pricing comparable there?
But Thresh didn't really mill itself much, rather it discarded (sometimes for madness) and casts a ton of cheap spells. Milling yourself is a prime quality of dredge.
UG Threshold, since it mills itself and benefits from big graveyards
pretty much what enderfall said here. Stockholders have a large say in what the Board of Directors at Hasbro mandate to their employees.
Again, I am not with this solution for the simple fact that I am broke and there is no guarantee.
And I am not ignorant enough to actually believe that smaller countries have the same resources as we do here in the US. All that I am implying is that there are many large secondary market retailers (there have to be) in those countries that will try to protect their business. Or they will just fold.
As I said, I agree this has a larger impact outside the US. An impact that I can't accurately measure due to not having ever left the US to play MTG.
I also think this is why they push MTGO so much to the global market. It is easier to get digital product to people who are competitive world wide.
I am an old time player ( early 1994) with a little experience at the highest level. My last pro event was in 2003. the reason I made it to the PT was that with a group of local players, we could learn together, team together and get better. Work towards a reachable goal (winning a PTQ, or finish high in a GP.) GP's were also easier back then, for example I would always be disappointed if I didn't make top 64 and I am not and never was a top player) What really helped though was the involvement of local players who got on the PT train, some even ended up getting up to HoF status) It was a golden era of magic in my small country. Guess from which country I am. We got the top PT players and a steady entry of new talented youngsters who got included in the nation wide competitive community. (you could compare our nation with a large urban area at the west or east coast in the USA) A reason it was succesfull was that many talented people would look at the whole picture and think: "Okay, I am good at this game and it seems the rewards (play around the world, win back (some of) the huge investments, are worth it spending all this time on this game for a year or a couple of years. Take this hall of famer. He is quite brilliant, of course he is. Besides playing magic he studied. Something scientific. That study takes 4-5 years. It took him 8. Was he a bad student? No he wasn't, he might have been one of the top students. But the security of his pro magic career made it financially possible for him to delay his graduation. These days he is working for a PhD.
Most of us are not a HoFer. Me for example. Yet, the Pro Tour was a great reward for me. I could invest time and money. Make a pro tour. Go, finish 2-4 on day 1 and have a great time. PT San Diego, yeah baby! La Jolla here I come. How many european students have a chance to visit Yokohama or Tokyo?
This dream was within the reach of many average FNM players. It was an incentive to purchase the cards needed for extended or standard.. To keep drafting to increase your skill. To travel to the next city for another tournament, to play in GPs.
In the new system, most of that all will be gone. From 6-8 PTQ (*5 PTs!!! ) slots we will end up with 3 (*3 PTs) . No more Nationals. (two of our national champions became world champions) GPs lose value. PTQ's can still provide the San Diego vacation experience I talked about, but with less slots your chances are a lot smaller , so less people will decide it worthwile to grind them out until they make it. It's not the same... saying ok, if I play them all I give myself a good chance to qualify in a year.. compared to... oh, I play them all and now it will take 2-3 years.... Well, let's find some other hobby.
So who are unaffected? The commander players? the kitchen table players... the legacy players? Oh yeah those guys have a basement full of cards.. 10-18 years worth of cards.. Do they draft? not so much.. Do they buy boxes? some might do out of habit, or because they like to collect, but many of them are quite happy to pick up a handful of rares and mythics from the new set and leave it there.
Sets these days are more and more a recycling of older ideas (See many MaRo articles on this subject, preserving design space) Cards are variants of older cards, fitting in this years theme flavor. Grassroots players already have these cards in older forms. sure they want the next dragon or angel for their collection but that's not enough to drive sales.
Sales will go down.
Buying stock to profit is not what anyone is suggesting. As a stock holder, you have a say in how the company should act (to a certain extent). If you have enough stock, your voice can be heard with regards to changes in the game.
Do I always sell my swords of X & Y just before the two weeks that they jump up $5-$10 in price?????
Sorry for this crap sandwich, but I have to.
Thanks for the quality articles and podcasts.
For the love of MTGO, please stop constantly moving the mouse back and forth between your opponent’s permanents (especially lands). It must be a nervous or boredom tick or something. It makes watching what are otherwise great videos a little annoying. I am not even sure you realize you are doing this. You do it in your classic tourney game videos too.
Again, I enjoy your work.
Does this bother anyone else?
- Jacobs
Buying Hasbro stock isn't going to have any effect on how M:TG is run. Even if you were to buy millions of shares of stock in a misguided effort to make it go up, that's not how stock works. The value of stock is based on the future earnings potential of the company (mostly and for our purposes). Stock changing hands between small shareholders is irrelevant to how Hasbro, and subsequently Magic, operate.
As long as magic is profitable, it will exist, with or without Hasbro. Please don't advise people buy Hasbro stock unless you reasonably believe the company will be more profitable than they are now in the future, because otherwise you are handing out dangerously bad financial advice. People who play magic buy enough useless paper as it is.
Thanks
Thwart is out already and sees 0 play. Misdirection would see marginal Legacy/Classic use.
Thanks for the comments TwoHands. I think I have been overlooking Silent Departure, and I will actively keep an eye out for it in the coming drafts... I'm about to do #4 as I type this response :D
I think I agree after playing both that Geistflame is typically better... Which seems odd looking at them side by side...
Thanks again for stopping in dude!
Zach