I echo the sentiment on wanting more buybots from MTGOtraders. I often will look to the lone bot only to see it occupied, and then having to go elsewhere. Maybe they prefer lower volume and get most of their stock through buying collections?

Again, great article. See you in the q's!

...point. To be fair, it's been a long while since I could check the list in the client.

I think it's going to sell poorly online, though. Think of the difference between a paper $130 Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed and his online counterpart at 12 cents. Progenitus would be sweet since he's over 10 tickets. I'm not sure how many high ticket Commanders are online, actually. =/ Compounding matters is that the online supply is virtually limitless, making already cheap and easy-to-find cards more so.

Pheldagriff
Kiki-Jiki
Progenitus
Zur, the Enchanter

Just a few.

I am not saying they should be, but I wouldn't be surprised to them.

I think this set will be expensive as it will really apeal to Commander players.

"Well yes, Preator's Counsel is my favorite Green card of the set. If only I knew why..."

It's because you can tell how good Preator's Counsel is going to be for Commander. You get all the cards in your graveyard back in you hand (including all those fetch lands and mana acceleration spells) then to top it off, you don't have a maximum hand size for the rest of the game! There isn't even a blue card (that I know of) that has the second effect. I just about fell off my chair, even Consecrated Sphinx will eventually force you to "use it or lose it" when it comes to your hand.

I cannot believe I read that entire thing and did not pick that up, foolish me.

The 3rd most placing Legacy deck is Storm with LEDs, 2nd is Countertop and Zoo at 1st.

i think green sun's zenith is overrated (by everyone). I prefer summoning trap any day. First it is a sorcery, second it is discarded to inquision of kozilek, third it is expensive for the cards you really want to tutor for.

Sorry, this article is about Standard Pauper. No Brainstorms around. ;)

All we can do is play Foresees and Preordains while exploiting Skyfishers and Oracles.

It's all good. With luck and a fair wind, it shouldn't be too long...

Your response to me is probably better than the original article ;) I'm guessing that English isn't your native tongue, and in some cases I'm not sure I understand what you're saying and in some cases I don't think you understood me.

At any rate, so your theme is supposed to be "overlooked" cards for classic pauper? Ok, that's fine. But there's literally thousands of such cards, and it's still not clear why you picked these three. Guardian of the Guildpact isn't even overlooked, everybody knows about him, and he has been used successfully in competitive decks.

Your assertion that these cards are viable cards for "Tier 1" decks is at this point an unsupported assertion. Trying to encourage people to play cards that have been overlooked is a laudable goal, but cards are not played in a vacuum. You have to give people some context, meaning the combos or interactions or decks where the card might be useful. If you hope for these cards to be used more competitively then you should be telling us a new use for these cards, but you barely covered the known uses, much less reveal anything we didn't already know.

Let's look again at Sprout Swarm. It's an interesting card. But in your article you said nothing interesting about it, and in your comment, you said, "Sprout Swarm is definitely not the best out for infinite combos." And then you didn't explain any further. Well I don't know if it is or if it isn't, but there's only a handful of infinite combos in pauper, and I'm not sure any of them are any good. In my own opinion, the Sprout Swarm combo is closer to being useful than the other infinite combos. But you still haven't explained to your dear readers how to go infinite with the card in the first place.

But more importantly, why should anybody care? It generates 1/1 tokens, people get that. But generally, there are better ways to make tokens. What makes Sprout Swarm more interesting than other token generators? So it has buyback, but so does Lab Rats. Those are really expensive tokens, what good are they? Mogg War Marshal, Dragon Fodder, Kuldotha Rebirth, Raise the Alarm, the Eldrazi Spawn cards, and others are all better cards generally. There's two aspects to Sprout Swarm that bear closer scrutiny: Sprout Swarm generates Saprolings, and it has Convoke. Saprolings have some interesting properties, and might combine well with Proliferate. Convoke is what allows you to pump out a massive army of guys and is the reason you don't have to wait until turn 5.

So what are you going to do with your tokens? Play an RG Raid Bombardment deck? The other more efficient token generators will leave little room for Sprout Swarm, and besides attacking and convoking don't go well together. Where Sprout Swarm gets interesting is in a BG Sacrifice deck, with Carrion Feeder and Deathspore Thallid. There's really no point in talking about Sprout Swarm unless you mention Nettle Sentinel, Carrion Feeder/Nantuko Husk/Bloodthrone Vampire/etc, Thallids in general, and Deathspore Thallid in particular. These are the cards that really have a chance to take advantage of Sprout Swarm.

On to Guardian of the Guildpact. At 4cc, you have to work hard to make Guardian relevant. There are a few ways to make Guardian relevant: 1) ramp, 2) Armadillo Cloak, 3) Pestilence, 4) exalted. Your original article said, "Also, Armadillo Cloak." That was all the insight you gave on these important topics. One of the problems with Guardian, aside from being 4cc, is the prevalence of Agony Warp and artifact creatures, with Affinity being one of the top 3 decks right now. He is a good way to stop Atog, however. A WG Guardian/Cloak/Pridemage deck with a little mana ramping should have good game against affinity and have a reasonable game against goblins.

The Pestilence deck must use Dark Ritual to mana ramp, and uses Wall of Hope to keep ahead in life when using Pestilence. The en-Kor creatures in combination with Order of Leitbur also work well with Pestilence in a WB setting. In addition, there are lots of good WB cards that a Guardian/Pestilence deck can leverage.

As for Train of Thought, it's competing with all the blue draw spells, including Oona's Grace. And there are lots of draw spells. Train of Thought is very mana intensive. You have to have a LOT of mana for it to be any better than the other draw cards. This is why people don't use it much; generally there's just better ways to draw cards. True, the Replicate makes it harder to counter the card draw, but if you're playing this card, you're playing blue already, and you are probably doing the countering, not the other way around. If it only required colorless mana to replicate, then it would be more like a common Braingeyser, and it would see play, but Post decks don't have enough blue mana to take advantage of it. Foresee, Think Twice, Oona's Grace, Deep Analysis, and others set a pretty high bar, so the application for Train of Thought is very narrow. The best use I ever came up with was for the killing blow with Jace's Erasure. But even so, the draw/discard cards tend to work better with Jace's Erasure. The problem is that it's a sorcery. So even when you have the mana to make it worthwhile, it's hard to spend the mana, and early in the game, it sucks compared to the other draw cards. Comparing it to draw spells that nobody uses doesn't make a very compelling case.

Anyway, I just expect that if somebody gets paid to write an article, they should do better than I can in five minutes off the top of my head. I didn't get paid to write this comment. I don't want people to think that pauper has a lower standard.

If you want to write an article like this, here's my suggestion. Plan on writing a series of articles: 1 for each color, one for artifacts, one for lands, and one for multi-colored cards. Then for each article pick 10 overlooked cards, including at least 1 creature, 1 instant, 1 sorcery, and 1 enchantment, including some low CMC and some high CMC cards. For each card, explain what makes it interesting, what makes it unique, deserving of our attention. Discuss how you might use it, what cards it will combine with in interesting ways. Without a deck listing, describe a deck that might use it. That would be an article.

I'm currently stuck on a 2003-vintage laptop which is unable to run the client. We can either wait 'til my main machine gets fixed, or I could nominate someone to hold the prize on my behalf until then.