Yeah, what kind of browser are you using, smack8001? The images should all be there. Maybe you have magiccards.info blocked or something? (I had to link to an outside website since these cards aren't on mtgotraders yet.)
If you want to count each specific case, then it makes the 1/10th number even more absurd, because you don't even know how many instances I'm referring to.
I'm not picking on you. I make grammar mistakes all the time. It was brought up in a previous post so I assumed it was a topic of interest.
I won't argue with you about when nouns should or should not be capitalized, when your rebuttal is well I "meant" for them to be proper names.
I don't see an issue with stealing, or cloning, someone elses incredibly broken card to kill them with it. My play group even has a house rule that if you steal something from someone, then they should be the ones to be attacked with it. Meaning if I take Kozilek out of your deck with bribery, then you best be ready to defend against it.
Just because you listed seven things does not mean that you only have seven things that you saw wrong. As per your list:
Run-on sentences
Sentences beginning with conjunctions (insert Finding Forester quote)
"Aquarium" capitalized incorrectly
Improper hyphen use
Missing commas (debatable I suppose)
Too many commas (again...)
"High School" capitalized incorrectly
With the exception of the aquarium and high school issues, every other issue you listed is (or can be assumed to be) pluralized, meaning (unless YOU made a mistake) that there are multiple occurences of each said mistake type. I realized that you must never make grammar mistakes (otherwise, why would you start picking on others for them?) so I took you at your word that you meant it as such.
As for High School and Aquarium, the reason why it was used as proper names is because I, as the author, meant it as such.
I would highly recommend getting off the grammatical high horse. Don't get me wrong, I am furious about the general decline of the English language, but there are far better targets than what you're choosing to aim at. Considering this is a casual environment with thousands of lines of text that may never have passed through an editor's hands, it doesn't really make much sense to try policing it - especially when newspapers routinely make far greater errors that the "mistakes" you claim I've made.
what are you talking about? i see the pictures and links
anyway veteran brawlers is one of my all time favorite cards, not ebcause of the strenght but because of he picture and flaovr text.other than that, i appreciate your effort to pormote these sets but sadly most of these cards are really bad
High school and aquarium were not used as proper nouns in your writing above.
Maybe you haven't seen the movie I referenced, but there is a scene that talks about starting a sentence with a conjunction. It also specifically talks about why doing it gives your writing a run-on feeling. (think independent clauses)
I'll even paste the dialogue below...
"Paragraph three starts...with a conjunction, "and." You should never start a sentence with a conjunction."
"Sure you can."
"No, it's a firm rule."
"No, it was a firm rule. Sometimes using a conjunction at the start of a sentence makes it stand out. And that may be what the writer's trying to do."
"And what is the risk?"
"Well the risk is doing it too much. It's a distraction. And it could give your piece a run-on feeling. But for the most part, the rule on using "and" or "but" at the start of a sentence is pretty shaky. Even though it's still taught by too many professors. Some of the best writers have ignored that rule for years, including you."
Also, how could a tenth of what I labeled wrong, be wrong, if I only listed 7 things?
No pictures of the cards? Not even the oracle text? That's lazy. You want each and every one of your readers to have to open a Gatherer window, type in the name, and load up the cards? That's offloading work on a lot of people rather than just doing a little bit yourself (hyperlinks ftw).
Infect is one of those mechanics that paint a huge target on your head (or should, if people really thought about it). In most of the games I've played, the person with poison was insta-targeted and killed pretty quickly. But I know what you mean, it's never a fun thing to come up against.
Then again, one of the funniest games I've played was where someone had Skittles and I cloned it with Sakashima and poisoned the owner out of the game. Poetic justice 101.
But I'd like an example of these "run-on sentences". Of all the things that the masses incorrectly label as correct, the "run-on sentence" is second only to the their-they're-there issue in my eyes. As for most of your other "errors", I would be surprised if even a tenth of what you considered "wrong" is, in fact, wrong.
Beyond the fact that almost every single word processing software in existence routinely "corrects" what is not wrong in any sense, a large part of English writing (especially with regards to hyphens, commas, and sentence length (fragments and the "run-on")) is more a matter of preference and style as compared to actually being incorrect. In particular, I tend to write longer sentences, specifically because I like how long well-written sentences trick people into thinking that they're incorrect, which I am 99% sure is the case here.
If you feel otherwise, please show me a few of these run-ons. I'd love to explain why they're not - especially since, as a general rule, most English speakers write like total crap, and I'd love the chance to at least fix one of them.
Starting sentences with a conjunction is also not an "error". Then there's the fact that High School and Aquarium are both capitalized because I used each of them as the proper name of a location.
I think Infect is actually fine as long as it's not abused. There are obviously some decks that just go for super quick poison kills with blazing shoals and other stupid pump spells, which is just annoying and unnecessary. I play a mimeoplasm 'New Phyrexia' themed deck, obviously containing a lot of infect cards and it's fine since I don't abuse the mechanic.
Oops! And I know! The problem was is that the infect as poison-counter rider on damage was designed to be problematic, and i think a bad design element. It is still solvable, but it makes it troublesome when the mechanic too well. At least annihilator got Tajuru Preserver. No such luck on infect.
On the subject of the fun versus unfun, I will describe what happened when I played It That Betrays with Ulamog in my Ghave, Guru of spores deck which, for the sake of this explanation, had Martyr's Bond and Grave Pact in it. This deck's design was such that while it would eventually amass a large army of saprolings, it would do so while wiping every other creature off the board without having to use asymmetrical sweepers.
During this time, one of my opponents, who played with a Kozilek in his deck (for the purposes of "shuffling the library" as we are often told), decided to Bribery twice (with a Riku deck) and got both of these Eldrazi. He then greaved up Ulamog and proceeded to take out every single one of my lands, then creatures, every turn.
If this is done early enough, as in Azusa, Lost but Seeking decks or typical monogreen or green-blue ramp decks, then it can happen so fast an Ulamog swinging on turn five or so is not a problematic position to make, and this makes the prospect of facing losing all, or most of your permanents a real problem. The other player does not have a mountain to climb back up out of, especially if they are using removal-light colors. In a casual environment, you wouldn't even use that much direct removal, barring Beast Within and such, and only a small handful of green kill exists. And none of it can take out Ulamog, with or without a Greaves on him.
I promptly removed all Eldrazi from my decks, and replaced them with cards more effective in doing what those cards did without Annihilator. I even removed Artisan of Kozilek. My decks do not suffer for this lack, so they were never in a position to require them. My monoblack deck will use Praetor's Grasp to take out a Kozilek or Ulamog, and then leave it in exile, even when I have the opportunity to cast it. I don't care.
The next and only other issue I have is with infect. Poison counters as a theme is fine, but the problem exists that in Commander, there is a solution to everything: even Emrakul, for being so unfun it got banned and not necessarily because it had Annihilator and in spite of his high cost, and it can be Shriekmaw'd, Faceless Butcher'd, etc. Infect has only one solution, Leeches, and it's not online. Moreover, unlike previous creatures with poison, there is a strong distinction in how they interact with cards:
Llanowar Elves compared to Glistener Elf, and a measure of pump. The same amount of pump results in extremely distinct forms of "damage." A Glistener Elf acts as a 4/1 for one and no drawback, and any sort of evasion (flying, for example) makes the damage output extremely problematic. The prevalence and availability of such cards is so rendered that having an infect version of a card is better, simply because the actual cost of the card does not really change. Infect is not a cost against a card, but a null bonus, a "evergreen" effect, and no adequate means of reducing its impact can be made when. If you have any amount of poison, a player can proliferate or simply peck at you, and the process of doing so is faster than just shooting you for two or so each turn. This doesn't mean Skithryx is that much better of a commander than, say, Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed, but it is a measure that players might be so aggressive to taking out the Skithryx player from the game they will ignore the blue or green (or red!) player who's win-con is Blightsteel Colossus with a Greaves on it.
My point: There is no hope and there is no fun to be had. To make this point, I don't run the cards because they are unfun for others. My skill is such that I can likely win regardless, and as such I do not need these cards to make my wins for me. There is such a thing as running cards that take no skill to play, and Blightsteel and Ulamog take NO SKILL to play. They serve only one function, and the game state they create makes it all about them, a feature that has preceded Kokusho and Emrakul being banned.
I found a few more grammar mistakes just glancing through...
Run-on sentences
Sentences beginning with conjunctions (insert Finding Forester quote)
"Aquarium" capitalized incorrectly
Improper hyphen use
Missing commas (debatable I suppose)
Too many commas (again...)
"High School" capitalized incorrectly
Your post isn't exactly a beacon of grammar light either, so it
comes as no surprise to me that you still don't know what casual means.
You seem like a nice enough guy PatrykG, but you'd be better off banging your head into a brick wall a few times, rather than trying to tell the masses how they should or should not play EDH online. Overall, I thought the piece wasn't terrible. Lord knows there is worse stuff published here all the time.
So i wont say that i didnt make play mistakes, this is a new format and i would hardly say ive mastered it, otherwise i would have a ton of 4-0's. that said i appreciate knowing where i screwed up.
I am a fan of power over consistency in sealed, at least until i can figure out the synergies in the cards. was my build the best build that i could have made? no, otherwise i would have gone 4-0, also you have to realize that i am experementing with different cards as i see them for the first time, now i had played brink before and new it was bombbastic, so i really wanted to play with it again.
as for moorland haunt, you cant go for power over constincy and still be conservative, at least thats the way i think. I absolutely dissagree that it should have been a basic land. I am not entirely sure what game it was but im pretty possitive it won me a game in this event, where a basic land would have done nothing.
There is a little inconsistency in the synergies between brink, skabs, and moorland, but im milling my self randomly. I felt i needed as many ways to abuse my graveyard as possible, since i could eaisly mill away bring, haunt, or the skabs. By having all 3 in my deck i felt i upped the consistency with which i could abuse my grave yard.
I will say that of the 11x i have won 3 matches in isd sealed 10 have been 3 color decks. Maybe im not trying hard enough but when i play 2 color decks i lose 2 rds, (except once, with a sick bg deck.) Im sure that my stats are not going to be super relevant but i am consistently winning more rds with powerful spells, as opposed to consistent spells.
I started with 96 tix, that is enough to pay for 4 events up front. Throughout the 14 sealeds i won packs that i would sell to continue eventing, eventually i was down to 15 tix, ipso facto add 9 more tix from my main account to get to 24 for another event.
in order to split both parties must consent of course and then one player conceeds to the other. The total payout is 13 packs for 4-0 + 8 packs for 3-1. Thats 21 packs, 10 each 1 player gets an extra pack, one player gets 2 tix.
the tix in, rares/mythics/packs/ tix out is a total. the number you see is how many tix i have paid out of pocket, and then how many rares/mythics i have opened, and then finally how many tix and or packs i have after that event ends. I am selling ALL my prize packs so there will be odd numbers of tix or packs. For instance i had 9 tix after the 14th sealed deck, because i was selling packs, and the price of packs fluctuates as well as how many i will have left after i pay 24 tix to join another.
Leviathan, I read your articles religiously :) Between your articles, Hammie's State of the Program and Lord Erman's Rogue Play series, I've ended up getting at least a good 200+ new card ideas / deck ideas, and it's cool as hell to have you like my article :-D
So I'm shooting for an interesting idea for the next article, so in the words of Ahhnold, I'll be back...
I like the idea you propose about mentoring people in concept. Unfortunately creating those kind of relationships over the interwebs using the current version of the MTGO client is extremely freakin' challenging. Due to the nature of online play a lot of people just find it easier to point and click and avoid interaction. Of course, there are those people that enjoy chatting people up and meeting new players, but I have found that those people usually aren't problematic. So it's sort of a catch-22.
But what I like most about the article was the fact that you articulately made your point without saying "sharks suck" and "newbs learn to play better." And I liked that you did at least come up with a solution, no matter how difficult it may be to implement.
Also, just for future reference, if you want to show pics of cards without having to link to Gatherer, you can just put (pic=cardname) in the editor, with parenthesis. (tmb=cardname) will give you a thumbnail of the card as well.
Article wise not bad. I would of liked to see a little more. I feel it was a little short. Only one Typo I could find. so for the grammar, not bad.
I'm not against segregation, as I do it myself, but I do believe education is the best form of Commander education. More so in the sense though of educating someone on how the format is intended to be played. For the longest time I played commander like a shark. Not becuase I didn't care about casual players and I was a dick, simply becuase I had no idea what the intent of playing commander was all about. When I finally met Sheldon Menery for the first time and played a game with him, I was opened up to a whole new world of Commander. I realized my vision of the game was way off his, and adjusted accordingly, but who was to say I had to. The problem we face is that not everyones idea of an ideal format for commander is the same. We will always butt heads and disagree with each other on what is acceptable. It's the old question of "what is casual".
And yes, I agree with a lot of what you're saying as well Paul, but the reason I feel that the mentor solution is the "only" solution (meaning, the only good one) is because I assume that even sharks don't have fun in an empty tank, and if the sharks continue on their chosen path, all that will eventually be left is... Well, sharks. Cannibalism notwithstanding, they'll eventually run out of food.
The crux to any solution in Commander is very much a problem of the different desires, as you mention, but if we continue on as we're going, we lose out - this-isn't-the-name-I-chose being yet another quitter - and I don't want that. I can't know if he was the typical guppy I've seen - but whether he was or not, the fact that he quit means I'll never know what his favorite cards are, what kinds of decks he liked, and that's a loss I mourn every time.
Ironically, your Chaos playing is the inverse of mine - Sunday school and church duties make it impossible for me to continue playing in Chaos, but I do share many fond rememberences of the games and themes. It also showed me many many different cards and ideas, which is why I miss it, too.
I just want enough people to read this and think. Shark or guppy, if I've made ya think a little, made ya improve your outlook or your game - then I feel I've done my job.
FNM promos never cease to amaze me. It is as if the "promo committee" sits around and dreams up the most irrelevant promo they can give. Like a running office joke or something.
Welcome to Puremtgo, Patryk. (I feel like I've seen your icon a lot here as a commenter.) I applaud your zeal but I don't agree with your solutions being THE answers. I think the main problem is there is no one answer. Every player gets different things out of commander. Also people can transition from one to another based on their own needs changing over time. I used to only play with people I knew in the group. I'd play in the wild (the wild = randomly selected unknown players in multiplayer or casual play) when I saw a buddy playing in a game that way I knew I could at least socialize with one player even if the game itself went south.
Then I built up a group of "friends" who played less "must win NOW!" decks in favor of the drawn out battle type decks we often hear about in Tarasco's (Leviathan, here) excellent commander articles on here. Then I started playing in the wild without a safety net. I've had some bad experiences with other players in the wild but I've also run into some very good and very smart players there.
Combos and win now strategies abound but they don't always succeed and if the other players are hip to them they may even have a hard time putting any kind of presence on the board to keep them alive. I've seen some vicious comments directed at Animar players by people wrecking them when questioned why they are the target.
Though Chaos EDH was interesting to me when I first heard about it (because of the varying build criteria) for a long time I just didn't bother. Too many other things were grabbing my attention on Sunday. Recently however,(since September) I've been attending these and have been fortunate enough to place well in many of them. The game play is typically of the long drawn out battle type and is quite political. Also quite tactical. Many of the players are Player Run Event Veterans. (See my article from last month for more.)
When someone starts to pull off a combo almost everyone jumps them without needing urging. (And one of the rules of that PRE is no talking in PMs about the game, under duress of a ban if found out.) And no collusion. So this instinct to kill combo is just smart playing and experience.
As far as casual commander goes, I'd say that the real solution is just to accept that there will be "sharks" as you say and build to withstand them without building the obvious deck every time. Or DO build the obvious deck and ignore the comments. Rite of Replication into Primeval Titan is funny as heck, even or especially prior to Wrath+Armageddon.
I have had great fun with a 5-color Zombies deck and a Xira Arien vermin theme deck recently even though they aren't as competitive as some other decks (Intet for example).
And one morning when I was feeling a little sharkish myself I broke out wrathgeddon Hazezon and was pleasantly rewarded by 3 excellent opponents who not only knew the score but were delighted by my deck. (Especially the Jokulhaups post Hazezon which doomed us to some very tedious turns of top decking land and did not give me the tokens I was hoping for, because Id forgotten the clause on my Commander that says "where X is the number of lands you control at that time." Duh? :p Wrath would have been better.) (And yes I generally agree, that mass ld is painful when you don't have a good kill on the table.)
I don't typically play Hazezon that way but I started the game with "play what you want, concede when you want." in the notes and this is the crux of it. Btw I got that phrase from AJ_Impy who is renowned on MTGO for being the guy to kill first (cf: Rule Zero) in commander.
Play what you want, enjoy yourself and expect others to do the same and if the game isn't fun concede if you want. No one is holding you hostage.
Yeah, what kind of browser are you using, smack8001? The images should all be there. Maybe you have magiccards.info blocked or something? (I had to link to an outside website since these cards aren't on mtgotraders yet.)
That is a fun and cool house rule.
If you want to count each specific case, then it makes the 1/10th number even more absurd, because you don't even know how many instances I'm referring to.
I'm not picking on you. I make grammar mistakes all the time. It was brought up in a previous post so I assumed it was a topic of interest.
I won't argue with you about when nouns should or should not be capitalized, when your rebuttal is well I "meant" for them to be proper names.
I don't see an issue with stealing, or cloning, someone elses incredibly broken card to kill them with it. My play group even has a house rule that if you steal something from someone, then they should be the ones to be attacked with it. Meaning if I take Kozilek out of your deck with bribery, then you best be ready to defend against it.
Just because you listed seven things does not mean that you only have seven things that you saw wrong. As per your list:
Run-on sentences
Sentences beginning with conjunctions (insert Finding Forester quote)
"Aquarium" capitalized incorrectly
Improper hyphen use
Missing commas (debatable I suppose)
Too many commas (again...)
"High School" capitalized incorrectly
With the exception of the aquarium and high school issues, every other issue you listed is (or can be assumed to be) pluralized, meaning (unless YOU made a mistake) that there are multiple occurences of each said mistake type. I realized that you must never make grammar mistakes (otherwise, why would you start picking on others for them?) so I took you at your word that you meant it as such.
As for High School and Aquarium, the reason why it was used as proper names is because I, as the author, meant it as such.
I would highly recommend getting off the grammatical high horse. Don't get me wrong, I am furious about the general decline of the English language, but there are far better targets than what you're choosing to aim at. Considering this is a casual environment with thousands of lines of text that may never have passed through an editor's hands, it doesn't really make much sense to try policing it - especially when newspapers routinely make far greater errors that the "mistakes" you claim I've made.
what are you talking about? i see the pictures and links
anyway veteran brawlers is one of my all time favorite cards, not ebcause of the strenght but because of he picture and flaovr text.other than that, i appreciate your effort to pormote these sets but sadly most of these cards are really bad
High school and aquarium were not used as proper nouns in your writing above.
Maybe you haven't seen the movie I referenced, but there is a scene that talks about starting a sentence with a conjunction. It also specifically talks about why doing it gives your writing a run-on feeling. (think independent clauses)
I'll even paste the dialogue below...
"Paragraph three starts...with a conjunction, "and." You should never start a sentence with a conjunction."
"Sure you can."
"No, it's a firm rule."
"No, it was a firm rule. Sometimes using a conjunction at the start of a sentence makes it stand out. And that may be what the writer's trying to do."
"And what is the risk?"
"Well the risk is doing it too much. It's a distraction. And it could give your piece a run-on feeling. But for the most part, the rule on using "and" or "but" at the start of a sentence is pretty shaky. Even though it's still taught by too many professors. Some of the best writers have ignored that rule for years, including you."
Also, how could a tenth of what I labeled wrong, be wrong, if I only listed 7 things?
No pictures of the cards? Not even the oracle text? That's lazy. You want each and every one of your readers to have to open a Gatherer window, type in the name, and load up the cards? That's offloading work on a lot of people rather than just doing a little bit yourself (hyperlinks ftw).
Infect is one of those mechanics that paint a huge target on your head (or should, if people really thought about it). In most of the games I've played, the person with poison was insta-targeted and killed pretty quickly. But I know what you mean, it's never a fun thing to come up against.
Then again, one of the funniest games I've played was where someone had Skittles and I cloned it with Sakashima and poisoned the owner out of the game. Poetic justice 101.
But I'd like an example of these "run-on sentences". Of all the things that the masses incorrectly label as correct, the "run-on sentence" is second only to the their-they're-there issue in my eyes. As for most of your other "errors", I would be surprised if even a tenth of what you considered "wrong" is, in fact, wrong.
Beyond the fact that almost every single word processing software in existence routinely "corrects" what is not wrong in any sense, a large part of English writing (especially with regards to hyphens, commas, and sentence length (fragments and the "run-on")) is more a matter of preference and style as compared to actually being incorrect. In particular, I tend to write longer sentences, specifically because I like how long well-written sentences trick people into thinking that they're incorrect, which I am 99% sure is the case here.
If you feel otherwise, please show me a few of these run-ons. I'd love to explain why they're not - especially since, as a general rule, most English speakers write like total crap, and I'd love the chance to at least fix one of them.
Oh, and that reminds me -
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/conjunctions.htm
Starting sentences with a conjunction is also not an "error". Then there's the fact that High School and Aquarium are both capitalized because I used each of them as the proper name of a location.
Melira *cough*
I think Infect is actually fine as long as it's not abused. There are obviously some decks that just go for super quick poison kills with blazing shoals and other stupid pump spells, which is just annoying and unnecessary. I play a mimeoplasm 'New Phyrexia' themed deck, obviously containing a lot of infect cards and it's fine since I don't abuse the mechanic.
Oops! And I know! The problem was is that the infect as poison-counter rider on damage was designed to be problematic, and i think a bad design element. It is still solvable, but it makes it troublesome when the mechanic too well. At least annihilator got Tajuru Preserver. No such luck on infect.
http://www.mtgotraders.com/store/ME4_Leeches.html <---is online as of January (Masters Edition 4) but that doesn't mean it is a good card. :)
Great work.
Edit: You so do sound like an announcer for Manchester United games.
Excellent article.
On the subject of the fun versus unfun, I will describe what happened when I played It That Betrays with Ulamog in my Ghave, Guru of spores deck which, for the sake of this explanation, had Martyr's Bond and Grave Pact in it. This deck's design was such that while it would eventually amass a large army of saprolings, it would do so while wiping every other creature off the board without having to use asymmetrical sweepers.
During this time, one of my opponents, who played with a Kozilek in his deck (for the purposes of "shuffling the library" as we are often told), decided to Bribery twice (with a Riku deck) and got both of these Eldrazi. He then greaved up Ulamog and proceeded to take out every single one of my lands, then creatures, every turn.
If this is done early enough, as in Azusa, Lost but Seeking decks or typical monogreen or green-blue ramp decks, then it can happen so fast an Ulamog swinging on turn five or so is not a problematic position to make, and this makes the prospect of facing losing all, or most of your permanents a real problem. The other player does not have a mountain to climb back up out of, especially if they are using removal-light colors. In a casual environment, you wouldn't even use that much direct removal, barring Beast Within and such, and only a small handful of green kill exists. And none of it can take out Ulamog, with or without a Greaves on him.
I promptly removed all Eldrazi from my decks, and replaced them with cards more effective in doing what those cards did without Annihilator. I even removed Artisan of Kozilek. My decks do not suffer for this lack, so they were never in a position to require them. My monoblack deck will use Praetor's Grasp to take out a Kozilek or Ulamog, and then leave it in exile, even when I have the opportunity to cast it. I don't care.
The next and only other issue I have is with infect. Poison counters as a theme is fine, but the problem exists that in Commander, there is a solution to everything: even Emrakul, for being so unfun it got banned and not necessarily because it had Annihilator and in spite of his high cost, and it can be Shriekmaw'd, Faceless Butcher'd, etc. Infect has only one solution, Leeches, and it's not online. Moreover, unlike previous creatures with poison, there is a strong distinction in how they interact with cards:
Llanowar Elves compared to Glistener Elf, and a measure of pump. The same amount of pump results in extremely distinct forms of "damage." A Glistener Elf acts as a 4/1 for one and no drawback, and any sort of evasion (flying, for example) makes the damage output extremely problematic. The prevalence and availability of such cards is so rendered that having an infect version of a card is better, simply because the actual cost of the card does not really change. Infect is not a cost against a card, but a null bonus, a "evergreen" effect, and no adequate means of reducing its impact can be made when. If you have any amount of poison, a player can proliferate or simply peck at you, and the process of doing so is faster than just shooting you for two or so each turn. This doesn't mean Skithryx is that much better of a commander than, say, Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed, but it is a measure that players might be so aggressive to taking out the Skithryx player from the game they will ignore the blue or green (or red!) player who's win-con is Blightsteel Colossus with a Greaves on it.
My point: There is no hope and there is no fun to be had. To make this point, I don't run the cards because they are unfun for others. My skill is such that I can likely win regardless, and as such I do not need these cards to make my wins for me. There is such a thing as running cards that take no skill to play, and Blightsteel and Ulamog take NO SKILL to play. They serve only one function, and the game state they create makes it all about them, a feature that has preceded Kokusho and Emrakul being banned.
I found a few more grammar mistakes just glancing through...
Run-on sentences
Sentences beginning with conjunctions (insert Finding Forester quote)
"Aquarium" capitalized incorrectly
Improper hyphen use
Missing commas (debatable I suppose)
Too many commas (again...)
"High School" capitalized incorrectly
Your post isn't exactly a beacon of grammar light either, so it
comes as no surprise to me that you still don't know what casual means.
You seem like a nice enough guy PatrykG, but you'd be better off banging your head into a brick wall a few times, rather than trying to tell the masses how they should or should not play EDH online. Overall, I thought the piece wasn't terrible. Lord knows there is worse stuff published here all the time.
So i wont say that i didnt make play mistakes, this is a new format and i would hardly say ive mastered it, otherwise i would have a ton of 4-0's. that said i appreciate knowing where i screwed up.
I am a fan of power over consistency in sealed, at least until i can figure out the synergies in the cards. was my build the best build that i could have made? no, otherwise i would have gone 4-0, also you have to realize that i am experementing with different cards as i see them for the first time, now i had played brink before and new it was bombbastic, so i really wanted to play with it again.
as for moorland haunt, you cant go for power over constincy and still be conservative, at least thats the way i think. I absolutely dissagree that it should have been a basic land. I am not entirely sure what game it was but im pretty possitive it won me a game in this event, where a basic land would have done nothing.
There is a little inconsistency in the synergies between brink, skabs, and moorland, but im milling my self randomly. I felt i needed as many ways to abuse my graveyard as possible, since i could eaisly mill away bring, haunt, or the skabs. By having all 3 in my deck i felt i upped the consistency with which i could abuse my grave yard.
I will say that of the 11x i have won 3 matches in isd sealed 10 have been 3 color decks. Maybe im not trying hard enough but when i play 2 color decks i lose 2 rds, (except once, with a sick bg deck.) Im sure that my stats are not going to be super relevant but i am consistently winning more rds with powerful spells, as opposed to consistent spells.
I started with 96 tix, that is enough to pay for 4 events up front. Throughout the 14 sealeds i won packs that i would sell to continue eventing, eventually i was down to 15 tix, ipso facto add 9 more tix from my main account to get to 24 for another event.
in order to split both parties must consent of course and then one player conceeds to the other. The total payout is 13 packs for 4-0 + 8 packs for 3-1. Thats 21 packs, 10 each 1 player gets an extra pack, one player gets 2 tix.
the tix in, rares/mythics/packs/ tix out is a total. the number you see is how many tix i have paid out of pocket, and then how many rares/mythics i have opened, and then finally how many tix and or packs i have after that event ends. I am selling ALL my prize packs so there will be odd numbers of tix or packs. For instance i had 9 tix after the 14th sealed deck, because i was selling packs, and the price of packs fluctuates as well as how many i will have left after i pay 24 tix to join another.
make sense?
Leviathan, I read your articles religiously :) Between your articles, Hammie's State of the Program and Lord Erman's Rogue Play series, I've ended up getting at least a good 200+ new card ideas / deck ideas, and it's cool as hell to have you like my article :-D
So I'm shooting for an interesting idea for the next article, so in the words of Ahhnold, I'll be back...
I like the idea you propose about mentoring people in concept. Unfortunately creating those kind of relationships over the interwebs using the current version of the MTGO client is extremely freakin' challenging. Due to the nature of online play a lot of people just find it easier to point and click and avoid interaction. Of course, there are those people that enjoy chatting people up and meeting new players, but I have found that those people usually aren't problematic. So it's sort of a catch-22.
But what I like most about the article was the fact that you articulately made your point without saying "sharks suck" and "newbs learn to play better." And I liked that you did at least come up with a solution, no matter how difficult it may be to implement.
Also, just for future reference, if you want to show pics of cards without having to link to Gatherer, you can just put (pic=cardname) in the editor, with parenthesis. (tmb=cardname) will give you a thumbnail of the card as well.
Good stuff.
Welcome to the fun of Commander articles.
Article wise not bad. I would of liked to see a little more. I feel it was a little short. Only one Typo I could find. so for the grammar, not bad.
I'm not against segregation, as I do it myself, but I do believe education is the best form of Commander education. More so in the sense though of educating someone on how the format is intended to be played. For the longest time I played commander like a shark. Not becuase I didn't care about casual players and I was a dick, simply becuase I had no idea what the intent of playing commander was all about. When I finally met Sheldon Menery for the first time and played a game with him, I was opened up to a whole new world of Commander. I realized my vision of the game was way off his, and adjusted accordingly, but who was to say I had to. The problem we face is that not everyones idea of an ideal format for commander is the same. We will always butt heads and disagree with each other on what is acceptable. It's the old question of "what is casual".
Keep the articles comming.
And yes, I agree with a lot of what you're saying as well Paul, but the reason I feel that the mentor solution is the "only" solution (meaning, the only good one) is because I assume that even sharks don't have fun in an empty tank, and if the sharks continue on their chosen path, all that will eventually be left is... Well, sharks. Cannibalism notwithstanding, they'll eventually run out of food.
The crux to any solution in Commander is very much a problem of the different desires, as you mention, but if we continue on as we're going, we lose out - this-isn't-the-name-I-chose being yet another quitter - and I don't want that. I can't know if he was the typical guppy I've seen - but whether he was or not, the fact that he quit means I'll never know what his favorite cards are, what kinds of decks he liked, and that's a loss I mourn every time.
Ironically, your Chaos playing is the inverse of mine - Sunday school and church duties make it impossible for me to continue playing in Chaos, but I do share many fond rememberences of the games and themes. It also showed me many many different cards and ideas, which is why I miss it, too.
I just want enough people to read this and think. Shark or guppy, if I've made ya think a little, made ya improve your outlook or your game - then I feel I've done my job.
FNM promos never cease to amaze me. It is as if the "promo committee" sits around and dreams up the most irrelevant promo they can give. Like a running office joke or something.
Good cast this week, gentlemen.
Welcome to Puremtgo, Patryk. (I feel like I've seen your icon a lot here as a commenter.) I applaud your zeal but I don't agree with your solutions being THE answers. I think the main problem is there is no one answer. Every player gets different things out of commander. Also people can transition from one to another based on their own needs changing over time. I used to only play with people I knew in the group. I'd play in the wild (the wild = randomly selected unknown players in multiplayer or casual play) when I saw a buddy playing in a game that way I knew I could at least socialize with one player even if the game itself went south.
Then I built up a group of "friends" who played less "must win NOW!" decks in favor of the drawn out battle type decks we often hear about in Tarasco's (Leviathan, here) excellent commander articles on here. Then I started playing in the wild without a safety net. I've had some bad experiences with other players in the wild but I've also run into some very good and very smart players there.
Combos and win now strategies abound but they don't always succeed and if the other players are hip to them they may even have a hard time putting any kind of presence on the board to keep them alive. I've seen some vicious comments directed at Animar players by people wrecking them when questioned why they are the target.
Though Chaos EDH was interesting to me when I first heard about it (because of the varying build criteria) for a long time I just didn't bother. Too many other things were grabbing my attention on Sunday. Recently however,(since September) I've been attending these and have been fortunate enough to place well in many of them. The game play is typically of the long drawn out battle type and is quite political. Also quite tactical. Many of the players are Player Run Event Veterans. (See my article from last month for more.)
When someone starts to pull off a combo almost everyone jumps them without needing urging. (And one of the rules of that PRE is no talking in PMs about the game, under duress of a ban if found out.) And no collusion. So this instinct to kill combo is just smart playing and experience.
As far as casual commander goes, I'd say that the real solution is just to accept that there will be "sharks" as you say and build to withstand them without building the obvious deck every time. Or DO build the obvious deck and ignore the comments. Rite of Replication into Primeval Titan is funny as heck, even or especially prior to Wrath+Armageddon.
I have had great fun with a 5-color Zombies deck and a Xira Arien vermin theme deck recently even though they aren't as competitive as some other decks (Intet for example).
And one morning when I was feeling a little sharkish myself I broke out wrathgeddon Hazezon and was pleasantly rewarded by 3 excellent opponents who not only knew the score but were delighted by my deck. (Especially the Jokulhaups post Hazezon which doomed us to some very tedious turns of top decking land and did not give me the tokens I was hoping for, because Id forgotten the clause on my Commander that says "where X is the number of lands you control at that time." Duh? :p Wrath would have been better.) (And yes I generally agree, that mass ld is painful when you don't have a good kill on the table.)
I don't typically play Hazezon that way but I started the game with "play what you want, concede when you want." in the notes and this is the crux of it. Btw I got that phrase from AJ_Impy who is renowned on MTGO for being the guy to kill first (cf: Rule Zero) in commander.
Play what you want, enjoy yourself and expect others to do the same and if the game isn't fun concede if you want. No one is holding you hostage.
There just needs to be a way to be like Fonzie, and jump the shark.