Josh, I love ya, but the reason this article is poop and CPhils isn't is because CP is CPeezy, and this is a 2nd appearance by a guy no one knows (for the most part). Cedric the entertaining one is brash, abrasive, humorous, and occasionally writes about MTG in his articles. He has a following! He built that following by writing SO HARD. He didn't rip off a Jamie Wakefield piece, make a shorter version about a 3on3 draft he ran with some locals, and submit it.
This article could have worked, but it needed either some more non-daily event occurences as you played through or before or after, or some strategic value. This was basically a forum-post in length and in content. I may have surpassed the total words with this last paragraph! (Not really).
I can appreciate what you were trying to do, but one of the reasons Cedric Philips' article worked was all the stuff around the tournament. Perhaps uniquely, this article could have been improved with a few terse rants about the shortcomings of the Client, in the same style as CP's complaints about his hotel or the music.
I don't think they will ever change the commander rule about legendary creatures.
If commanders annihilated each other, it would be an unfair advantage to other players. On paper, players can make sure their commanders do not overlap before the match starts but you cannot do so online.
The current rule is a necessity. Now if they will fix that damn commander zone for my norin and ghost council.
After yesterdays fun little article, I decided to give you guys a listen even though I know zip about classic. overall great show with some interesting information even if some of it went over my head. Keep up the good work.
It seemed like a lot of the time you guys were guessing at possibilities of why a card was in a deck's 75, what its uses were, etc. Maybe just hop on MODO and ask the pilots about their decks. If they don't want to talk, fine, but at least you guys can try to find out. At least that's an alternative to needing to organize guests and still maintain the value of the information. For example, it seems like none of you are Stax players and couldn't talk in depth from a pilot's point of view more than from an opposing player's perspective. Kind of like what you hinted at with Steel Sabotage and how those players mentioned fearing that card; those are the kinds of insights I think you can get from networking some of the deck pilots for a better understanding of their respective decks.
Pretty much, more "It looks odd, but the pilot says it's in there because the deck is weak to XYZ and although it looks strange as a singleton, it is part of various cards that help fill that need"
and less, "I wonder why XYZ is in there? Hmm, yeah not sure. Maybe..."
I mean, it's more work, but if you're serious about putting out the best podcast possible, I think it's a better way to go.
After playing Spine more, I still think that in most games it's a meh draw, never dead, but usually I'd rather have something else and often it's an expensive wasteland or a bad duplicant. However, it has turned out to be a total bomb against kataki and energy flux. It forces your opponents to take out their own flux effects or give you recurring permanent destruction that you can quickly take over the game with. So I would continue to advocate as a 1 or 2 of especially if you can tutor it up with forgemaster, still haven't decided if it belongs in main or side.
Explained stuff in the intro paragraph which was supposed to be before the video. But it got eaten up by the video or something. I am sorry for not reviewing to see if that section still existed but this was my first article and I looked for errors.
The cards divided the main ideas and following the video with extra comments not in the video annotated with bullet points.
The Mirrodin Besieged cards are not working for links or pictures. When I submitted it, I made a comment to the editor which had the article since Sunday night. There were parenthesis where either links or pictures should have gone:
picture: (pic=example)
link: (example)
They were not fixed before the release of the article by the editor as you have seen. Other articles have had the issue until the XML or SQL or whatever they use gets fixed for Besisged. Those are Databases that store the names and correlate them to the links/pictures.
I am sorry for the article not working because of the websites links/pictures but most of the content was explained in the video. I could have bolded main topics I guess such as reprints or infect but each card was different so.
Those are some things to improve upon for next time. This is my first article after all.
I'm pretty surprised it was this article that started a flame war. I mean the Pauper articles on this site are so traditionally bad that this half-decent one shouldn't be a problem. The guy even said the format he was writing in and explained why he wanted to do it . . . give him a break.
I'm not really one to flame an article but . . . you could have at least organized your thoughts into clear sections and hit the "preview" button before submitting the article. The lack of organization, brackets everywhere, and unorganized paragraph structure
I am currently playing this deck in real life as well. My only concern with your list is your land count. I know that the average mana cost of your deck is low, but only having 18 is asking for trouble. I am playing with 21 in my deck and lost a game against quest holding a mark of Mutiny and having only two land in play.
If you are going to try out the Hero of Oxid Ridge, then you really should up the land count. You should also realy only count the War Zones as 1/2 a land as they do not produce red mana. Having a RR creature, a mountain, and a warzone is just not great.
Good job for a first article. Maybe you should highlight some two man matches in your next one.
OMFG, Claytor, This article is effing terrible. Way too short. How could you let people publish Some Pie charts and a couple dailies? You guys should stop hacking credits off Pure. I feel like I wasted 2 mins of my life reading this page. And what the heck is up with the deck list? I cant even see it@!!
Paul, Shard , GLIB go troll go
Took you guys long enough.
Edit: Asmod's Dredge list is good. It uses draw spells to have turn 2 blowouts with Bazaar+Dredger and Land+Study/Breakthrough. Also Coliseum on turn 3 or after hate is cleared.
8 Dredgers to 10, 6 Rainbow lands to 8 and 3 Ghast, 2 Ichorid to 4 Ghast and 3 Ichorid are the differences between his list and other Ichorid decks.
Turtle Dredge is a list with 4 Chains/Claims(Chains for Jailer from Jace G1), 4 Leyline Void/Snactity-Mirror or Oath,Strom- ), and post board 8 Claims/Chains. Absolutely reliant on Bazaar against everything.
LED Dredge is really good game 1 and combo/mirror match up is much improved. Turn 1 Dredge the whole deck or turn 2 win if you have to pass for lack of Dredgers.
Hey DW, I recognize you from messaging me on MTGO. I just wanted to pop in and say Good Job on your first article here. I'm currently brewing something rogue up in STD so maybe ill see you in the queues.
I could see your argument if we got paid for view count, but we don't. The links on "how to write" are still relevant, unlike past formats/sets/articles.
This was made to help other writers, you can tell by my frequency, I don't write for the credits.
Does that format work for the Cedric Phillips article? Most likely. The days and events surrounding a pro tour are long and some writers like to write 2-3 part tournament reports that give every detail about their weekend. Some readers like the little details. Some don't. But after writing 50 articles or more, Cedric decided to change it up and go for a minimalist/twitter type of approach and from the forums most people liked it. I think it worked for his article, as a one time format.
This author covered about 3 hours worth of time with the article and even as a homage, I still don't feel it's a great piece of writing. Besides the conclusion, it looks like it took five minutes to put together and that's what a lot of people are upset about, when they spend hours on their articles. Perhaps if this was a 10 round PTR qualifier it would've been enough even in the minimalist style. But for three rounds, it just seems...thrown together. That's my opinion and obviously you have your own opinion, being a friend of Cedric and the one who published the article.
Winning with Kobolds is quite easy actually. Just pair them with Cloudstone Curio and Glimpse of Nature (preferably both), and then fill the rest of the deck with those zero cost mana artifacts (Chrome Mox, Lotus Petal etc...), and then create a huge Storm count by playing your zero cost creatures and artifacts over and over. The finisher is either Tendrils of Agony or Brain Freeze.
Alternatively, if you want a more casual approach, you can pair them with Beastmaster Ascension too.
Of all of the articles for the "does anybody actually edit/content-manage this stuff" argument to finally appear on, I'm surprised it's this one. I found it quite entertaining.
That said, I do think that a huge quantity of articles that come out on this site should really be getting edited substantially or just dropped. This just wasn't one of them.
(On the subject of article-quality, has Godot stopped writing his draft articles on this site or have I just randomly missed them?)
Josh, I love ya, but the reason this article is poop and CPhils isn't is because CP is CPeezy, and this is a 2nd appearance by a guy no one knows (for the most part). Cedric the entertaining one is brash, abrasive, humorous, and occasionally writes about MTG in his articles. He has a following! He built that following by writing SO HARD. He didn't rip off a Jamie Wakefield piece, make a shorter version about a 3on3 draft he ran with some locals, and submit it.
This article could have worked, but it needed either some more non-daily event occurences as you played through or before or after, or some strategic value. This was basically a forum-post in length and in content. I may have surpassed the total words with this last paragraph! (Not really).
If Force of Will reaches 150 again, I swear I'm going to sell them!
:( good grief :(
I can appreciate what you were trying to do, but one of the reasons Cedric Philips' article worked was all the stuff around the tournament. Perhaps uniquely, this article could have been improved with a few terse rants about the shortcomings of the Client, in the same style as CP's complaints about his hotel or the music.
I don't think they will ever change the commander rule about legendary creatures.
If commanders annihilated each other, it would be an unfair advantage to other players. On paper, players can make sure their commanders do not overlap before the match starts but you cannot do so online.
The current rule is a necessity. Now if they will fix that damn commander zone for my norin and ghost council.
After yesterdays fun little article, I decided to give you guys a listen even though I know zip about classic. overall great show with some interesting information even if some of it went over my head. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for that article link. It will be a lot of help.
Thought the editor would have had the pictures fixed but now I realize I would have to link them myself if the auto link doesn't work.
It would be good to have a stax player as a guest on the show. If anyones interested contact Eternal_Hammer; Whiffy_Penguin and The_Hoff in client.
It seemed like a lot of the time you guys were guessing at possibilities of why a card was in a deck's 75, what its uses were, etc. Maybe just hop on MODO and ask the pilots about their decks. If they don't want to talk, fine, but at least you guys can try to find out. At least that's an alternative to needing to organize guests and still maintain the value of the information. For example, it seems like none of you are Stax players and couldn't talk in depth from a pilot's point of view more than from an opposing player's perspective. Kind of like what you hinted at with Steel Sabotage and how those players mentioned fearing that card; those are the kinds of insights I think you can get from networking some of the deck pilots for a better understanding of their respective decks.
Pretty much, more "It looks odd, but the pilot says it's in there because the deck is weak to XYZ and although it looks strange as a singleton, it is part of various cards that help fill that need"
and less, "I wonder why XYZ is in there? Hmm, yeah not sure. Maybe..."
I mean, it's more work, but if you're serious about putting out the best podcast possible, I think it's a better way to go.
After playing Spine more, I still think that in most games it's a meh draw, never dead, but usually I'd rather have something else and often it's an expensive wasteland or a bad duplicant. However, it has turned out to be a total bomb against kataki and energy flux. It forces your opponents to take out their own flux effects or give you recurring permanent destruction that you can quickly take over the game with. So I would continue to advocate as a 1 or 2 of especially if you can tutor it up with forgemaster, still haven't decided if it belongs in main or side.
Try using this as a guide for your next one:
http://puremtgo.com/articles/playwright
Good luck!
Explained stuff in the intro paragraph which was supposed to be before the video. But it got eaten up by the video or something. I am sorry for not reviewing to see if that section still existed but this was my first article and I looked for errors.
The cards divided the main ideas and following the video with extra comments not in the video annotated with bullet points.
The Mirrodin Besieged cards are not working for links or pictures. When I submitted it, I made a comment to the editor which had the article since Sunday night. There were parenthesis where either links or pictures should have gone:
picture: (pic=example)
link: (example)
They were not fixed before the release of the article by the editor as you have seen. Other articles have had the issue until the XML or SQL or whatever they use gets fixed for Besisged. Those are Databases that store the names and correlate them to the links/pictures.
I am sorry for the article not working because of the websites links/pictures but most of the content was explained in the video. I could have bolded main topics I guess such as reprints or infect but each card was different so.
Those are some things to improve upon for next time. This is my first article after all.
Here is a screen shot of where I only attacked with half my creatures. Player name withheld to protect the victims.
I'm pretty surprised it was this article that started a flame war. I mean the Pauper articles on this site are so traditionally bad that this half-decent one shouldn't be a problem. The guy even said the format he was writing in and explained why he wanted to do it . . . give him a break.
I'm not really one to flame an article but . . . you could have at least organized your thoughts into clear sections and hit the "preview" button before submitting the article. The lack of organization, brackets everywhere, and unorganized paragraph structure
- and random bullet points
make this extremely
- (difficult)
to read.
Thanks for name drop guys. I'm a big fan of this series.
I thought about Fecundity. I didn't want to use it because it gives everyone an advantage.
I am currently playing this deck in real life as well. My only concern with your list is your land count. I know that the average mana cost of your deck is low, but only having 18 is asking for trouble. I am playing with 21 in my deck and lost a game against quest holding a mark of Mutiny and having only two land in play.
If you are going to try out the Hero of Oxid Ridge, then you really should up the land count. You should also realy only count the War Zones as 1/2 a land as they do not produce red mana. Having a RR creature, a mountain, and a warzone is just not great.
Good job for a first article. Maybe you should highlight some two man matches in your next one.
OMFG, Claytor, This article is effing terrible. Way too short. How could you let people publish Some Pie charts and a couple dailies? You guys should stop hacking credits off Pure. I feel like I wasted 2 mins of my life reading this page. And what the heck is up with the deck list? I cant even see it@!!
Paul, Shard , GLIB go troll go
Took you guys long enough.
Edit: Asmod's Dredge list is good. It uses draw spells to have turn 2 blowouts with Bazaar+Dredger and Land+Study/Breakthrough. Also Coliseum on turn 3 or after hate is cleared.
8 Dredgers to 10, 6 Rainbow lands to 8 and 3 Ghast, 2 Ichorid to 4 Ghast and 3 Ichorid are the differences between his list and other Ichorid decks.
Turtle Dredge is a list with 4 Chains/Claims(Chains for Jailer from Jace G1), 4 Leyline Void/Snactity-Mirror or Oath,Strom- ), and post board 8 Claims/Chains. Absolutely reliant on Bazaar against everything.
LED Dredge is really good game 1 and combo/mirror match up is much improved. Turn 1 Dredge the whole deck or turn 2 win if you have to pass for lack of Dredgers.
Hey DW, I recognize you from messaging me on MTGO. I just wanted to pop in and say Good Job on your first article here. I'm currently brewing something rogue up in STD so maybe ill see you in the queues.
I could see your argument if we got paid for view count, but we don't. The links on "how to write" are still relevant, unlike past formats/sets/articles.
This was made to help other writers, you can tell by my frequency, I don't write for the credits.
Does that format work for the Cedric Phillips article? Most likely. The days and events surrounding a pro tour are long and some writers like to write 2-3 part tournament reports that give every detail about their weekend. Some readers like the little details. Some don't. But after writing 50 articles or more, Cedric decided to change it up and go for a minimalist/twitter type of approach and from the forums most people liked it. I think it worked for his article, as a one time format.
This author covered about 3 hours worth of time with the article and even as a homage, I still don't feel it's a great piece of writing. Besides the conclusion, it looks like it took five minutes to put together and that's what a lot of people are upset about, when they spend hours on their articles. Perhaps if this was a 10 round PTR qualifier it would've been enough even in the minimalist style. But for three rounds, it just seems...thrown together. That's my opinion and obviously you have your own opinion, being a friend of Cedric and the one who published the article.
Winning with Kobolds is quite easy actually. Just pair them with Cloudstone Curio and Glimpse of Nature (preferably both), and then fill the rest of the deck with those zero cost mana artifacts (Chrome Mox, Lotus Petal etc...), and then create a huge Storm count by playing your zero cost creatures and artifacts over and over. The finisher is either Tendrils of Agony or Brain Freeze.
Alternatively, if you want a more casual approach, you can pair them with Beastmaster Ascension too.
LE
Of all of the articles for the "does anybody actually edit/content-manage this stuff" argument to finally appear on, I'm surprised it's this one. I found it quite entertaining.
That said, I do think that a huge quantity of articles that come out on this site should really be getting edited substantially or just dropped. This just wasn't one of them.
(On the subject of article-quality, has Godot stopped writing his draft articles on this site or have I just randomly missed them?)
the difference is that cedie p's article covers 10 rds of personal play while also railbirding and describing the event in a great way.
this was 3 rds and although paid a nice homage, it feels like a cheap knock off because of the length.