i love reading about what i call "hoser" decks. i tire of seeing the same decks constantly winning so seeing as you are finding ways to think outside the box to combat such decks is always a pleasure. keep up the good work
No worries on the double post, man. This ain't MTGSalvation (zing!)
And yeah, the story is unfortunately true. Sometimes, real life gets in the way. Things are better now.
I'm denying myself a fireball in the rating for this sentence: "I couldn't really figure out if I had really just hit a streak of good luck with a sub-par deck list or if I'd really stumbled on a new force in the metagame." That's three really's in one sentence. Really!?
Final note: Big thanks to JXClaytor or whoever did it for fixing my profile pic! Old one would just not stop being sideways, it was crooked as a politician (probably because I actually used it for my write-in campaign). This new one is much better, and I was actually holding a grip of cards when it was taken (Settlers of Catan resource cards, not Magic, but close enough).
Stay tuned...the next article will be submitted more timely, will feature less elementary editorial errors, and no inebriated altercations.
> halfway through it a drunken angry person decided to nearly smash my laptop, causing an embarrassing mid-game disconnect and a forced break from the game.
Drafted my first VI yesterday (after p1p1 Corrupted Conscience, p1p2 Go for the Throat, then a pack with nothing else), but the other VI I saw did not wheel from p1p2.
I got a couple things to use the VI with - Tumble Magnet, Trigon of Corruption, and a late Shriekhorn. But the rest of the deck was extremely solid UB control, like Grasp of Darkness, flyers, Trinket Mage, 2x Scudder, etc.
hello theregulargangster,firstly i want tell you that i like your articles on puremtgo.
i've drafted this (kind of) archetype last week as a test (1st picked corrupted conscience), and you pointed out in this article my leaks ie: trigon of rage was not that great.
i want to say that "titan forge was a pain cause long to cast" my opponent just waited that i use my mana each round to shatter it.
i think this archetype have tough matchup against good infects deck.
sorry for my bad english, it's not my primary language.
I don't know that I'm likely to be bold enough to draft this archetype (if they kill your infusers or you don't draw them, isn't the deck just sort of random weak cards?), but this was a great read.
I would like to say that IMO, you're putting out easily the best content on this site at the moment. Really good stuff.
Aside; Is golem foundry good enough? Even with an infuser (and say, casting an artifact ~every 2 turns), you're probably only making one 3/3 every couple of turns for a fairly significant investment of time and mana?
Hammer here - Thanks Paul I can understand why the unanswered questions are of interest but I feel we should respect the PR wishes of WOTC and only display and discuss the approved questions. I will say that we spent time to carefully construct relevant questions and I am sure you can take an educated guess what has been left unasked.
- I would like to put a big thank-you out to Tom and WOTC for allowing us such cool access and for taking the time to make this a very memorable experience. I feel very reassured about the future of being able to play Yawgmoth's Will et al in an online format and push the magical boundaries. Another special thank-you goes to Whiffy for having the vision and passion not only to initiate the Soap Opera but to approach Tom and do the necessary behind scenes work to help make it happen. I am glad we have whiffy championing Clasic on behalf of the community and look forward to the fun times ahead. Whilst on the thank-you crusade it would totally wrong not to mention the awesomness of Zach for his stellar hardwork in the editing of the podcast each week (I bet must listeners take for granted the hours that he has ploughed in to this over the weeks). Finally a thank you to Richie and Dunkle every format needs their troll and Donkle afterall!
Yeah, the GU list is highly tuned: I also frowned when I noticed the absence of fetchlands. During my match against the deck (12.03) the only game I won was the one when jeff could not find a blue source at all. It probably comes down to how well you know the deck and when to take your mulligans.
1st off thanks for writing in the arch types, just need beekerks to fully flesh her out. second of all i am really pleased with the way the interview went and flowed. before the recording we told tom we would edit anything he wassent comfortable with, that was zero things. so everything we talked about you heard, except for the super secret p9 distribution method. lol.
i know tom said classic was a joke, but it surely wassent a slam on the format, he feels the same way about vintage, the formats are jokes when looked at in the context of the game of magic, every deck in those two formats break the fundemental rules of the game at almost every play.
also we had to submit these questions to WotC PR for approval, not all of the questions made it to the interview, if you think we missed something, well we tried to ask it at any rate.
You are not going to put in Sower off SnT if you can see they revealed Progenitus. This allows you to make better decisions pretaining to the board, Progenitus would most likely dictate a race one in which Sower is not helping more than say Jitte or Venge.
What other creature match ups would Sower be better than Drake?
Erik you are doing it wrong! You are supposed to follow up the programming section with a sentence that advertises how you can teach users how to script for an hourly cost. Where has your sense of exploitation from being a computer scientist gone?
p.s. Someone can hire me, I'll build the bot for you, I charge by the hour!
Thanks for the comments guys! Sorry for the delay, I have been away from the internet due to some issues IRL. To aetherdaemon - Excellent point. This is probably the biggest hitch I see in the format. I can imagine the same situation you described, where people just spend everything to get a money card, and tank the rest of the draft because they got a big money card. A couple ideas I had were -
1. To either have a large buyin for substantial prizes, to intice people to draft to win.
2. To have each person open their own 3 packs that they came with, and any cards that are worth over a certain dollar amount they get to keep in exchange for a portion of their auction spending cash.
Any feedback on these ideas would be great.
And to Paul - thanks for the ideas about running this on MTGO. My initial idea was to make it as simple as possible, to use some sort of chat client to handle the draft, and to simply post in the chat the remaining cards, (can be done by any sort of text macro program), and to have people simply bid in the chat client. You bring up some excellent points about security, and ideally I would like to implement a lot of the things you suggested (GUI/ secure pods, etc.) and hopefully we can go down that road in the future. For know, to build interest, I think a simple IRC room might be sufficient.
At first I was thinking, wtf, get to the sauce we want, i.e. the question you kind of sort of end up asking around 37 min in and the elephant in the room: P9 or not?! But as the interview developed, I really appreciated how the interview was about Classic, because that's what the podcast is about. Personally I don't care about P9 so much, but I do think P9 would bring in a lot of Vintage interest/players. Anyway, I appreciated Lapille's perspectives on Classic and thought it was interesting how he said, "this is kind of silly and a big joke, and if we wanted normal Magic, we'd go play normal Magic." Twice he referred to Classic as a joke, and I was kind of surprised by that. I know he didn't mean it in a derogatory way, so I do think that their perspective is healthy for a couple reasons. 1) Broken stuff like Shops and Bazaar are safe from being restricted. He made it clear he wants to keep pushing the boundaries. 2) Despite having a smallish following, Classic will continue to be a part of Magic for a long time (I dare not say forever).
I was most impressed with the thought and care Lapille, and presumably others, put into maintaining a format that isn't as popular or as much of a cash cow as Standard. In some respects, I can imagine that Classic takes more time to manage than Standard in that Standard rarely has a banned card and things pretty much take care of themselves, whereas in Classic, where things can get degenerate (like with Necropotence or Flash), a watchful eye has to be kept on the lookout. Yet, no one can deny the massive financial returns Standard brings as opposed to Classic.
I guess, what I'm really trying to say is that after this interview, I appreciate Classic more than I did before. Breaking down the format and placing it in the context of Magic overall really gives perspective that this is a format that deserves a niche even though it may never see broad appeal.
Thanks for the response. Right now I'm doing okay-ish and slowly grinding value out of MSS 4322s but I frequently get prize support to keep me playing but I'm worried that won't be a good plan once the value of some of the currently valuable regular rares (Inkmoth Nexus, Phrexian Crusader, Mirran Crusader, Phyrexian Vatmother, some of the Zenith's, ect) in MB start to drop in value. But my bankroll is pretty small to begin with so I haven't grown it to the point I feel comfortable risking a format where I'm not going to win packs back most of the time. Obviously opening Jace, Stoneforge Mystic, Avenger of Zendikar, fetch lands, Goblin Guide, man lands, ect would be ideal and not playing the same format 3 times a day would be nice but I don't like to be reliant on opening money to fund my next draft.
As of yesterday I'm having computer problems with my gaming laptop so I'm going to have to resolve that before anything else but once that's dealt with maybe I'll spend some time starring at The Gather's visual spoiler and reading all the commons and uncommons.
If I've got any questions after that maybe I'll message you. I still don't actually know how to message people that aren't in the same room as me though.
The interview with Tom was great and I'm so glad it wasn't a rehash of his articles. Excellent job getting him on the show. That's awesome that he watches our DE results. One question I would have liked is: will there be an ME5? Not only to hear his thoughts about the exciting constructed cards (P9) but also how they will make a limited set out of the dwindling supply of early cards. You guys did get into it some with the question about the future of classic though. And that might even be the type of thing he's not allowed to talk about anyway.
The game recaps at the end weren't that helpful. It was fun to listen to mine because it was mine and it was really short. But when it got into eight turns of back and forth, it's hard to follow what's going on without being able to see it. A similar thing you could do that I would really like would be videos of going through a game or two with commentary. More than just seeing what happened in the game, I want to know about the planning and decisions that go on in the player's head. If not you guys, someone should post some Classic videos on this site.
I love block! Thanks for the insights and viewpoints on Block... Its a great format that has a low cost to enter and could always benefit from more attention. I built your deck with no changes last night and tried it out in the practice room a few times before bed. (I know you cant use the tournament practice room to actually test a deck) I enjoyed the general feel of the deck but with the aggro decks i ran into i was thinking of mayebe SB or cutting a few reins and either adding wurmcoil or another black sun... Thanks again for the articles and hope to see you online!
I Started the draft with P1P1 Black sun, no infuser in pack. Grabbed black sun...
P1P2 I snap draft a tezz AOB... no infuser (the guy to my right crashed and missed his first 2 picks)
I never got a Infuser but still got to the finals with the same general strategy... IF I had an infuser in the deck it would have been retarded good...
Someone else at the table was drafting blue and I played them round 1... Shriekhorn won the match, and trinket mage for it is Awesome!
Really enjoyed the article and Had a great draft this afternoon!
On an aside I just wanted to thank the author for another great article. I am new to MTGO and these articles are well written and Helpful. I cant Thank you enough for taking the time out of your busy schedule to help build the community and help newbies like me find success
Fun article. I also have a grixis junk that doesn't win very often and has a lot of cards that are a blast to play.
I like the term "palette cleansing decks". Sometime you just have to go with a fun deck that doesn't win very often and just have a good time.
i love reading about what i call "hoser" decks. i tire of seeing the same decks constantly winning so seeing as you are finding ways to think outside the box to combat such decks is always a pleasure. keep up the good work
No worries on the double post, man. This ain't MTGSalvation (zing!)
And yeah, the story is unfortunately true. Sometimes, real life gets in the way. Things are better now.
I'm denying myself a fireball in the rating for this sentence: "I couldn't really figure out if I had really just hit a streak of good luck with a sub-par deck list or if I'd really stumbled on a new force in the metagame." That's three really's in one sentence. Really!?
Final note: Big thanks to JXClaytor or whoever did it for fixing my profile pic! Old one would just not stop being sideways, it was crooked as a politician (probably because I actually used it for my write-in campaign). This new one is much better, and I was actually holding a grip of cards when it was taken (Settlers of Catan resource cards, not Magic, but close enough).
Stay tuned...the next article will be submitted more timely, will feature less elementary editorial errors, and no inebriated altercations.
Double post, sorry :p
Great job, I was eagerly waiting for this! :)
> halfway through it a drunken angry person decided to nearly smash my laptop, causing an embarrassing mid-game disconnect and a forced break from the game.
:0
Thanks
Drafted my first VI yesterday (after p1p1 Corrupted Conscience, p1p2 Go for the Throat, then a pack with nothing else), but the other VI I saw did not wheel from p1p2.
I got a couple things to use the VI with - Tumble Magnet, Trigon of Corruption, and a late Shriekhorn. But the rest of the deck was extremely solid UB control, like Grasp of Darkness, flyers, Trinket Mage, 2x Scudder, etc.
And then infect stomped my face round 1.
hello theregulargangster,firstly i want tell you that i like your articles on puremtgo.
i've drafted this (kind of) archetype last week as a test (1st picked corrupted conscience), and you pointed out in this article my leaks ie: trigon of rage was not that great.
i want to say that "titan forge was a pain cause long to cast" my opponent just waited that i use my mana each round to shatter it.
i think this archetype have tough matchup against good infects deck.
sorry for my bad english, it's not my primary language.
thanks again
I don't know that I'm likely to be bold enough to draft this archetype (if they kill your infusers or you don't draw them, isn't the deck just sort of random weak cards?), but this was a great read.
I would like to say that IMO, you're putting out easily the best content on this site at the moment. Really good stuff.
Aside; Is golem foundry good enough? Even with an infuser (and say, casting an artifact ~every 2 turns), you're probably only making one 3/3 every couple of turns for a fairly significant investment of time and mana?
Hammer here - Thanks Paul I can understand why the unanswered questions are of interest but I feel we should respect the PR wishes of WOTC and only display and discuss the approved questions. I will say that we spent time to carefully construct relevant questions and I am sure you can take an educated guess what has been left unasked.
- I would like to put a big thank-you out to Tom and WOTC for allowing us such cool access and for taking the time to make this a very memorable experience. I feel very reassured about the future of being able to play Yawgmoth's Will et al in an online format and push the magical boundaries. Another special thank-you goes to Whiffy for having the vision and passion not only to initiate the Soap Opera but to approach Tom and do the necessary behind scenes work to help make it happen. I am glad we have whiffy championing Clasic on behalf of the community and look forward to the fun times ahead. Whilst on the thank-you crusade it would totally wrong not to mention the awesomness of Zach for his stellar hardwork in the editing of the podcast each week (I bet must listeners take for granted the hours that he has ploughed in to this over the weeks). Finally a thank you to Richie and Dunkle every format needs their troll and Donkle afterall!
See you next week - Hammer
Being that I am slightly subversive in nature I would have listed the unanswered questions anyway.
With so many interesting formats around it's difficult to stick with just Pauper.
Great article, I really enjoyed it!
Thanks for your feedback as usual. :)
Yeah, the GU list is highly tuned: I also frowned when I noticed the absence of fetchlands. During my match against the deck (12.03) the only game I won was the one when jeff could not find a blue source at all. It probably comes down to how well you know the deck and when to take your mulligans.
1st off thanks for writing in the arch types, just need beekerks to fully flesh her out. second of all i am really pleased with the way the interview went and flowed. before the recording we told tom we would edit anything he wassent comfortable with, that was zero things. so everything we talked about you heard, except for the super secret p9 distribution method. lol.
i know tom said classic was a joke, but it surely wassent a slam on the format, he feels the same way about vintage, the formats are jokes when looked at in the context of the game of magic, every deck in those two formats break the fundemental rules of the game at almost every play.
also we had to submit these questions to WotC PR for approval, not all of the questions made it to the interview, if you think we missed something, well we tried to ask it at any rate.
This was awesome.
You are not going to put in Sower off SnT if you can see they revealed Progenitus. This allows you to make better decisions pretaining to the board, Progenitus would most likely dictate a race one in which Sower is not helping more than say Jitte or Venge.
What other creature match ups would Sower be better than Drake?
Erik you are doing it wrong! You are supposed to follow up the programming section with a sentence that advertises how you can teach users how to script for an hourly cost. Where has your sense of exploitation from being a computer scientist gone?
p.s. Someone can hire me, I'll build the bot for you, I charge by the hour!
Thanks for the comments guys! Sorry for the delay, I have been away from the internet due to some issues IRL. To aetherdaemon - Excellent point. This is probably the biggest hitch I see in the format. I can imagine the same situation you described, where people just spend everything to get a money card, and tank the rest of the draft because they got a big money card. A couple ideas I had were -
1. To either have a large buyin for substantial prizes, to intice people to draft to win.
2. To have each person open their own 3 packs that they came with, and any cards that are worth over a certain dollar amount they get to keep in exchange for a portion of their auction spending cash.
Any feedback on these ideas would be great.
And to Paul - thanks for the ideas about running this on MTGO. My initial idea was to make it as simple as possible, to use some sort of chat client to handle the draft, and to simply post in the chat the remaining cards, (can be done by any sort of text macro program), and to have people simply bid in the chat client. You bring up some excellent points about security, and ideally I would like to implement a lot of the things you suggested (GUI/ secure pods, etc.) and hopefully we can go down that road in the future. For know, to build interest, I think a simple IRC room might be sufficient.
Cool strategy
At first I was thinking, wtf, get to the sauce we want, i.e. the question you kind of sort of end up asking around 37 min in and the elephant in the room: P9 or not?! But as the interview developed, I really appreciated how the interview was about Classic, because that's what the podcast is about. Personally I don't care about P9 so much, but I do think P9 would bring in a lot of Vintage interest/players. Anyway, I appreciated Lapille's perspectives on Classic and thought it was interesting how he said, "this is kind of silly and a big joke, and if we wanted normal Magic, we'd go play normal Magic." Twice he referred to Classic as a joke, and I was kind of surprised by that. I know he didn't mean it in a derogatory way, so I do think that their perspective is healthy for a couple reasons. 1) Broken stuff like Shops and Bazaar are safe from being restricted. He made it clear he wants to keep pushing the boundaries. 2) Despite having a smallish following, Classic will continue to be a part of Magic for a long time (I dare not say forever).
I was most impressed with the thought and care Lapille, and presumably others, put into maintaining a format that isn't as popular or as much of a cash cow as Standard. In some respects, I can imagine that Classic takes more time to manage than Standard in that Standard rarely has a banned card and things pretty much take care of themselves, whereas in Classic, where things can get degenerate (like with Necropotence or Flash), a watchful eye has to be kept on the lookout. Yet, no one can deny the massive financial returns Standard brings as opposed to Classic.
I guess, what I'm really trying to say is that after this interview, I appreciate Classic more than I did before. Breaking down the format and placing it in the context of Magic overall really gives perspective that this is a format that deserves a niche even though it may never see broad appeal.
Thanks for the response. Right now I'm doing okay-ish and slowly grinding value out of MSS 4322s but I frequently get prize support to keep me playing but I'm worried that won't be a good plan once the value of some of the currently valuable regular rares (Inkmoth Nexus, Phrexian Crusader, Mirran Crusader, Phyrexian Vatmother, some of the Zenith's, ect) in MB start to drop in value. But my bankroll is pretty small to begin with so I haven't grown it to the point I feel comfortable risking a format where I'm not going to win packs back most of the time. Obviously opening Jace, Stoneforge Mystic, Avenger of Zendikar, fetch lands, Goblin Guide, man lands, ect would be ideal and not playing the same format 3 times a day would be nice but I don't like to be reliant on opening money to fund my next draft.
As of yesterday I'm having computer problems with my gaming laptop so I'm going to have to resolve that before anything else but once that's dealt with maybe I'll spend some time starring at The Gather's visual spoiler and reading all the commons and uncommons.
If I've got any questions after that maybe I'll message you. I still don't actually know how to message people that aren't in the same room as me though.
The interview with Tom was great and I'm so glad it wasn't a rehash of his articles. Excellent job getting him on the show. That's awesome that he watches our DE results. One question I would have liked is: will there be an ME5? Not only to hear his thoughts about the exciting constructed cards (P9) but also how they will make a limited set out of the dwindling supply of early cards. You guys did get into it some with the question about the future of classic though. And that might even be the type of thing he's not allowed to talk about anyway.
The game recaps at the end weren't that helpful. It was fun to listen to mine because it was mine and it was really short. But when it got into eight turns of back and forth, it's hard to follow what's going on without being able to see it. A similar thing you could do that I would really like would be videos of going through a game or two with commentary. More than just seeing what happened in the game, I want to know about the planning and decisions that go on in the player's head. If not you guys, someone should post some Classic videos on this site.
I love block! Thanks for the insights and viewpoints on Block... Its a great format that has a low cost to enter and could always benefit from more attention. I built your deck with no changes last night and tried it out in the practice room a few times before bed. (I know you cant use the tournament practice room to actually test a deck) I enjoyed the general feel of the deck but with the aggro decks i ran into i was thinking of mayebe SB or cutting a few reins and either adding wurmcoil or another black sun... Thanks again for the articles and hope to see you online!
I Started the draft with P1P1 Black sun, no infuser in pack. Grabbed black sun...
P1P2 I snap draft a tezz AOB... no infuser (the guy to my right crashed and missed his first 2 picks)
I never got a Infuser but still got to the finals with the same general strategy... IF I had an infuser in the deck it would have been retarded good...
Someone else at the table was drafting blue and I played them round 1... Shriekhorn won the match, and trinket mage for it is Awesome!
Really enjoyed the article and Had a great draft this afternoon!
On an aside I just wanted to thank the author for another great article. I am new to MTGO and these articles are well written and Helpful. I cant Thank you enough for taking the time out of your busy schedule to help build the community and help newbies like me find success
"Ummmm . . . How Do I Put 8 or 9 Red Dots on This Jpeg?" I would download and use g.i.m.p. to do that fairly easily.