Nice little review of the format. I was browsing the PRE forum the other day and came across the thread for your event and got interested. Was meaning to come here and check out some decklists (because I know you published stuff on here before) and was greeted with this article today. Seems like a fun little format, hopefully I'll be able to join an event in the next few weeks.
LOL Yeah, that was me with Christmas Beatings. I mean, fair dues, I got thrashed and deserved it because I had never played 1 game with the deck before entering the tourney, and I was basically a join and drop. I jumped in the queue never expecting it to fire then all of a sudden there's a game popped up. I'm like, did I hit replay somewhere by mistake, wtf is this? Then it dawned on me. LOL =) Good times.
Re the PREague: Wow, you guys are too kind. =) Yeah, I will try to get the word out about Season 2, which I think will be after Danger's Open, so maybe mid-late August. I want to coordinate that so there's no conflict. I also don't want to get ahead of myself by planning and organizing Season 2 with 1 not even close to completion yet. I'm not displeased with the turnout so far. =D And I think it's good that Season 1 was populated primarily with old faces as a way to set the tone for future Seasons: high-level competitive Classic.
This lines up with the paper rules. I don't object to the fact that Clones can kill general now since it gives those cards a new worth and gives the players a new way to deal with stuff like Uril or to bypass shoud and hexproof. The only downside about the change is that games do suck if you and another person have the same commander. This is compounded by the fact that you can't choose your general in response to what someone else picks and people rarely, if ever, discuss what generals they have before the game starts, like they would IRL.
Banning Sol Ring and Mana Crypt is not going to happen, and for good reason. In multiplayer, they don't have as much of an effect on who wins as they do in 1v1 (which the format wasn't designed for). Mana is the sacred cow of online play, so decks which accelerate their mana via lands (Azusa, Riku, Wort) are very strong. This extends somewhat to mana artifacts. Even though people should be hitting those sol rings and mana crypts early in the game if they can, they don't or don't put the stuff in their decks to enable them to do so. Also, the only deck that will be degenerate with a turn 1 sol ring would be degenerate without it. Sol Ring doesn't turn a nice fun deck into something cut throat and vicious. It just enables a deck that already posses a degree of cut throated-ness to be more so.
I think the Rule Committee has done a very good job, and I would be very upset if there was an attempt to phase them out. The ban list should be as small as possible for EDH, since one of the appeals of the format is the fact that one can use nearly ever card printed. I think their philosophy is that the players have to police themselves for the most part, since there would be no way to shut down every brutal deck and combo. They try to only ban cards that are used only for unfun or degenerate things or that warp the game when they are played (e.g. Emarakul).
Hey Michael,
Excellent article, breakdown of the Classic PRE and the participants deck lists. The formatting is clean and easy to read.
I am also having a blast in the PRE, as I am one of those who would love to play in DE's, but am restricted due to my family responsibilites. The flexibility of the PRE gives me the ability to play competitive magic (strong pool of players)
Thanks to the PRE, it is evident that their are indeed a substantial amount of Classic enthusiasts out there that want to play, that haven’t been able to join events for one reason or another. This is encouraging forsure (32 participants is solid)
Thanks again for orchestrating this and hopefully this is the beginning of many Classic Leagues to come.
Also love seeing two Classic related articles/ Podcast in the same day (YSO / PRE). keep them coming!
The lining up with paper sucked. The paper rules managers are idiots have leave ridiculous cards unbanned. They grew the format extremely well, but it's ready to move past them. "Why would I ban Sol Ring? It's only a win in most openers!" among other highlights. I have had this discussion many times on MTGO and changed many minds (by playing Thada, Getting a Sol Ring first, then killing the table due to overwhelming them with 2-3 spells every turn for every spell they play).
Hey gang,
Nice to have a DE and PRE events to talk about this week. The deck analysis is my favorite facet of YSO!
Your PRE decks are also all pretty sexy.
Tough first round match up for you Andy having to face shop. (Sigh).
I have a new found respect for those extractions Zach. When you ripped my 4 Oath's out of my deck last week, I was left feeling hallow. My only out was Vault/ Key and JMS. You stole one of my Vault / Key peices with Thada and killed my 1 JMS with 1 of your 4. Was a humbling match :( Welldone!
@ George. Love Beast from Within for it's versatility, but I have also been killed by those beast tokens far more then I like. Having killed Forbidden Orchard's and JMS to say in it, only to get licked by a 3/3 beater sucks. I am currently playing a build without the Beast's and think i like it better.
GL in your next round in the PRE and see you in the engine.
Cool deck this week. I have always thought Horobi would make and interesting commander. He obviously needs to be built around, and provides a unique challenge. I think you did a pretty good job of making it work.
You are right about your game. I think that is about as good as the deck can run. Minimal disrupotion versus a decent draw with a coffers and a lot of mana doubling usually makes things pretty one sided.
I was interested to see the various equipment. They would to me to be some what anti synergistic. In other games did they bog you down and all? Are they worth it to suit up stuff before you roll out your commander?
It is also nice to see someone else using Dauthi Embrace. I have run it in my blue black sabotage deck for ever, and have found it to almost always be useful. Nice political card too, becuse you can use it to help other player's fatties break through against someone with a lot of defenders.
I was really happy to see they fianlly fixed the rules line up with paper. Especialy the removal of super legendary commanders. It's timing kind of has a down side considering the popularity of some of the new commanders. I saw a game the other day where 3 people were running The Mimioplasm. Ironically it shouldn't have hurt that game at all considering he comes in as a copy of something else. But I have been in a few games with doubled up Kalias, Zedruus, and Rikus.
The one correction I dislike is the removal of the super clone. This greatly favors clone effects which there are many and greatly disfavors decks that rely on their commanders.
Your series of MPDC articles continues to impress me more than some of the so called "premium" articles at other sites.
Having a deck featured in one of your articles ranks right up there with store credits, trophies, and season points in the list of bonus reasons to play MPDC.
The opponent was a well versed classic pilot, he knows the tricks of the trade, and chances are he was running a list built by cat weasel which is very good. When iM not completly comfortable running a deck i tend to err on the side of control rather then agro. It is easier to deploy reserve cards then scramble after blitzing them into a brick wall. your point is valid, i just gave the reason i didnt go for the 11/11.
I can understand that reasoning, but he was tapped out the turn you could have done that, and you still have a FoW in hand. He also hadn't shown any indication of those cards (and it seemed like he wasn't very familiar with the format yet, so he might not know what to play to counter certain decks).
Admittedly, this is a bit of a moot point since you won next turn anyway, but you didn't know you could win that turn. He would had to have 2 ways to bounce the BSC since you had FoW, and you could have won the next turn. It's a low-risk, high reward play. Maybe I'm wrong though. I'm not really that into the format, so I could be.
Yeah, I want criticizing-was just trying to give you some tips for if you do try it again-i have played a lot of gush in vintage. Your sequence there should have been gush->gush->bstorm->hurkyl->mana vault-> minds desire.
That at the very least is 6 storm, and it's likely he would have tried to counter some of the draw spells too. After that...I've never seen minds desire fizzle on 6 storm after drawing 7 cards, but if it did, you would certainly have enough counter magic to protect vault/key. minds desire is in there for the blue decks with infi countermagic :)
Also, just in general, you have to respect how broken gush/brainstorm are, as a few games you were just sitting with them in your hand for several turns. It isn't the end of the world if a gush is countered, as it helps you whether it resolves or not.
The difference between the titans and stuff like Primordial Sage is that the titans have an effect as soon as they hit the battlefield. If I play Primeval Titan and he's met with a Go for the Throat, I'll be disapointed, sure. But I'll also say to myself "Hey, I just paid 4GG for two nonbasic lands onto the battlefield. That's pretty great!" Seriously, I would play a spell that had Primeval Titan's cost if all it did was give me two of any lands onto the battlefield. The other titans aren't quite as good, but they have an affect as soon as they hit the battlefield. Stuff like the Hydra are just big. If you don't get to attack with them, there's no point.
I will be playing it in my Animar EDH deck, however. Oh, and you should be playing that Hydra as soon as possible. Playing it on turn 3 for X=1 will leave you with a 4/4 hydra on turn 5. Unless your opponent is playing red, get it out as soon as possible.
I would love to participate in these standard events, but unfortunately, I am a M-F 8-5 worker cat and then have children who want to see me when I get home. This means my MTGO time is mostly relegated to 9PM-whenever I decide to go to bed.
Anyway. I wanted to comment because you mentioned Maul Splicer. The whole splicer cycle is very interesting. I actually saw someone use the Maul Splicer in a standard Eldrazi Green deck. It was pretty good. Nice observation.
The spotlight deck's sideboard is missing 3 Porcelain Legionnaire, even though I mention them in the article. Probably just a typo while creating the deck's table.
In this particular case Norton is an old fogie with a huge reputation for wrecking systems and being very invasive. It is also completely incompatible with any other AVs so that eradication of it from the system is recommended before you even install others.
thanks for the advise. i was raised by the saying "you get what you pay for" and norton is high end so i thought it was the best. i'll try what you said bobbakake. hopefully it works and i'll be back online regularly again. i thought this was wizards fault. it just seems like when they fix a bug they create another.
@aaronm I do get a little one track minded with plays in classic. however, i liked the tutor for fastbond, as it allowed me to gauge its hand. Unless he has never played vs gush, he would counter fastbond if he had the ability too. I just really wanted to resolve vault and tinker for key. That was my line and thats where i went. I do feel like this deck was a little above my playskill as well, at least i didnt practise it enough. Maybe 2 dozen matches? should prolly be like at least 100 matches for me to say profeicent.
@forest fire- The reson i didnt go for blightsteel is it loses to something like steel sabotage, or chain of vapor, where as vault key is just delayed a tun by the same spells.
In this game i only had 1 fow and he had a full grip the whole game, i played conservativly to avoid just bricking all my spells into counters.
On turn 3 in R2G1, why didn't you make black with Undergroud Sea, cast Dark Ritual, play key, find an island with the fetchland, and play tinker into BSC? I mean, you did win on the next turn anyway, but you didn't know that on turn 3. You had FoW backup anyway, so it seems pretty unlikely he could have stopped it.
Nice little review of the format. I was browsing the PRE forum the other day and came across the thread for your event and got interested. Was meaning to come here and check out some decklists (because I know you published stuff on here before) and was greeted with this article today. Seems like a fun little format, hopefully I'll be able to join an event in the next few weeks.
LOL Yeah, that was me with Christmas Beatings. I mean, fair dues, I got thrashed and deserved it because I had never played 1 game with the deck before entering the tourney, and I was basically a join and drop. I jumped in the queue never expecting it to fire then all of a sudden there's a game popped up. I'm like, did I hit replay somewhere by mistake, wtf is this? Then it dawned on me. LOL =) Good times.
Re the PREague: Wow, you guys are too kind. =) Yeah, I will try to get the word out about Season 2, which I think will be after Danger's Open, so maybe mid-late August. I want to coordinate that so there's no conflict. I also don't want to get ahead of myself by planning and organizing Season 2 with 1 not even close to completion yet. I'm not displeased with the turnout so far. =D And I think it's good that Season 1 was populated primarily with old faces as a way to set the tone for future Seasons: high-level competitive Classic.
This lines up with the paper rules. I don't object to the fact that Clones can kill general now since it gives those cards a new worth and gives the players a new way to deal with stuff like Uril or to bypass shoud and hexproof. The only downside about the change is that games do suck if you and another person have the same commander. This is compounded by the fact that you can't choose your general in response to what someone else picks and people rarely, if ever, discuss what generals they have before the game starts, like they would IRL.
Banning Sol Ring and Mana Crypt is not going to happen, and for good reason. In multiplayer, they don't have as much of an effect on who wins as they do in 1v1 (which the format wasn't designed for). Mana is the sacred cow of online play, so decks which accelerate their mana via lands (Azusa, Riku, Wort) are very strong. This extends somewhat to mana artifacts. Even though people should be hitting those sol rings and mana crypts early in the game if they can, they don't or don't put the stuff in their decks to enable them to do so. Also, the only deck that will be degenerate with a turn 1 sol ring would be degenerate without it. Sol Ring doesn't turn a nice fun deck into something cut throat and vicious. It just enables a deck that already posses a degree of cut throated-ness to be more so.
I think the Rule Committee has done a very good job, and I would be very upset if there was an attempt to phase them out. The ban list should be as small as possible for EDH, since one of the appeals of the format is the fact that one can use nearly ever card printed. I think their philosophy is that the players have to police themselves for the most part, since there would be no way to shut down every brutal deck and combo. They try to only ban cards that are used only for unfun or degenerate things or that warp the game when they are played (e.g. Emarakul).
Hey Michael,
Excellent article, breakdown of the Classic PRE and the participants deck lists. The formatting is clean and easy to read.
I am also having a blast in the PRE, as I am one of those who would love to play in DE's, but am restricted due to my family responsibilites. The flexibility of the PRE gives me the ability to play competitive magic (strong pool of players)
Thanks to the PRE, it is evident that their are indeed a substantial amount of Classic enthusiasts out there that want to play, that haven’t been able to join events for one reason or another. This is encouraging forsure (32 participants is solid)
Thanks again for orchestrating this and hopefully this is the beginning of many Classic Leagues to come.
Also love seeing two Classic related articles/ Podcast in the same day (YSO / PRE). keep them coming!
Nice article. I'm so bummed I wasn't able to jump in and play, work has been brutal lately. I will def try my hardest to join the next league.
Thanks for doing this and helping the classic community.
The lining up with paper sucked. The paper rules managers are idiots have leave ridiculous cards unbanned. They grew the format extremely well, but it's ready to move past them. "Why would I ban Sol Ring? It's only a win in most openers!" among other highlights. I have had this discussion many times on MTGO and changed many minds (by playing Thada, Getting a Sol Ring first, then killing the table due to overwhelming them with 2-3 spells every turn for every spell they play).
Hey gang,
Nice to have a DE and PRE events to talk about this week. The deck analysis is my favorite facet of YSO!
Your PRE decks are also all pretty sexy.
Tough first round match up for you Andy having to face shop. (Sigh).
I have a new found respect for those extractions Zach. When you ripped my 4 Oath's out of my deck last week, I was left feeling hallow. My only out was Vault/ Key and JMS. You stole one of my Vault / Key peices with Thada and killed my 1 JMS with 1 of your 4. Was a humbling match :( Welldone!
@ George. Love Beast from Within for it's versatility, but I have also been killed by those beast tokens far more then I like. Having killed Forbidden Orchard's and JMS to say in it, only to get licked by a 3/3 beater sucks. I am currently playing a build without the Beast's and think i like it better.
GL in your next round in the PRE and see you in the engine.
Cool deck this week. I have always thought Horobi would make and interesting commander. He obviously needs to be built around, and provides a unique challenge. I think you did a pretty good job of making it work.
You are right about your game. I think that is about as good as the deck can run. Minimal disrupotion versus a decent draw with a coffers and a lot of mana doubling usually makes things pretty one sided.
I was interested to see the various equipment. They would to me to be some what anti synergistic. In other games did they bog you down and all? Are they worth it to suit up stuff before you roll out your commander?
It is also nice to see someone else using Dauthi Embrace. I have run it in my blue black sabotage deck for ever, and have found it to almost always be useful. Nice political card too, becuse you can use it to help other player's fatties break through against someone with a lot of defenders.
I was really happy to see they fianlly fixed the rules line up with paper. Especialy the removal of super legendary commanders. It's timing kind of has a down side considering the popularity of some of the new commanders. I saw a game the other day where 3 people were running The Mimioplasm. Ironically it shouldn't have hurt that game at all considering he comes in as a copy of something else. But I have been in a few games with doubled up Kalias, Zedruus, and Rikus.
Welcome to the exciting world of Overextended!
The one correction I dislike is the removal of the super clone. This greatly favors clone effects which there are many and greatly disfavors decks that rely on their commanders.
Thank you. :-)
Your series of MPDC articles continues to impress me more than some of the so called "premium" articles at other sites.
Having a deck featured in one of your articles ranks right up there with store credits, trophies, and season points in the list of bonus reasons to play MPDC.
Keep up the good work!
The opponent was a well versed classic pilot, he knows the tricks of the trade, and chances are he was running a list built by cat weasel which is very good. When iM not completly comfortable running a deck i tend to err on the side of control rather then agro. It is easier to deploy reserve cards then scramble after blitzing them into a brick wall. your point is valid, i just gave the reason i didnt go for the 11/11.
I can understand that reasoning, but he was tapped out the turn you could have done that, and you still have a FoW in hand. He also hadn't shown any indication of those cards (and it seemed like he wasn't very familiar with the format yet, so he might not know what to play to counter certain decks).
Admittedly, this is a bit of a moot point since you won next turn anyway, but you didn't know you could win that turn. He would had to have 2 ways to bounce the BSC since you had FoW, and you could have won the next turn. It's a low-risk, high reward play. Maybe I'm wrong though. I'm not really that into the format, so I could be.
Yeah, I want criticizing-was just trying to give you some tips for if you do try it again-i have played a lot of gush in vintage. Your sequence there should have been gush->gush->bstorm->hurkyl->mana vault-> minds desire.
That at the very least is 6 storm, and it's likely he would have tried to counter some of the draw spells too. After that...I've never seen minds desire fizzle on 6 storm after drawing 7 cards, but if it did, you would certainly have enough counter magic to protect vault/key. minds desire is in there for the blue decks with infi countermagic :)
Also, just in general, you have to respect how broken gush/brainstorm are, as a few games you were just sitting with them in your hand for several turns. It isn't the end of the world if a gush is countered, as it helps you whether it resolves or not.
The difference between the titans and stuff like Primordial Sage is that the titans have an effect as soon as they hit the battlefield. If I play Primeval Titan and he's met with a Go for the Throat, I'll be disapointed, sure. But I'll also say to myself "Hey, I just paid 4GG for two nonbasic lands onto the battlefield. That's pretty great!" Seriously, I would play a spell that had Primeval Titan's cost if all it did was give me two of any lands onto the battlefield. The other titans aren't quite as good, but they have an affect as soon as they hit the battlefield. Stuff like the Hydra are just big. If you don't get to attack with them, there's no point.
I will be playing it in my Animar EDH deck, however. Oh, and you should be playing that Hydra as soon as possible. Playing it on turn 3 for X=1 will leave you with a 4/4 hydra on turn 5. Unless your opponent is playing red, get it out as soon as possible.
I would love to participate in these standard events, but unfortunately, I am a M-F 8-5 worker cat and then have children who want to see me when I get home. This means my MTGO time is mostly relegated to 9PM-whenever I decide to go to bed.
Anyway. I wanted to comment because you mentioned Maul Splicer. The whole splicer cycle is very interesting. I actually saw someone use the Maul Splicer in a standard Eldrazi Green deck. It was pretty good. Nice observation.
The spotlight deck's sideboard is missing 3 Porcelain Legionnaire, even though I mention them in the article. Probably just a typo while creating the deck's table.
I've been writing more lately because I'm done with class for a bit.
In this particular case Norton is an old fogie with a huge reputation for wrecking systems and being very invasive. It is also completely incompatible with any other AVs so that eradication of it from the system is recommended before you even install others.
thanks for the advise. i was raised by the saying "you get what you pay for" and norton is high end so i thought it was the best. i'll try what you said bobbakake. hopefully it works and i'll be back online regularly again. i thought this was wizards fault. it just seems like when they fix a bug they create another.
@aaronm I do get a little one track minded with plays in classic. however, i liked the tutor for fastbond, as it allowed me to gauge its hand. Unless he has never played vs gush, he would counter fastbond if he had the ability too. I just really wanted to resolve vault and tinker for key. That was my line and thats where i went. I do feel like this deck was a little above my playskill as well, at least i didnt practise it enough. Maybe 2 dozen matches? should prolly be like at least 100 matches for me to say profeicent.
@forest fire- The reson i didnt go for blightsteel is it loses to something like steel sabotage, or chain of vapor, where as vault key is just delayed a tun by the same spells.
In this game i only had 1 fow and he had a full grip the whole game, i played conservativly to avoid just bricking all my spells into counters.
.
On turn 3 in R2G1, why didn't you make black with Undergroud Sea, cast Dark Ritual, play key, find an island with the fetchland, and play tinker into BSC? I mean, you did win on the next turn anyway, but you didn't know that on turn 3. You had FoW backup anyway, so it seems pretty unlikely he could have stopped it.