Always nice to reflect on history for a bit. I hated the brown band of death.
A bit ironic that you are talking about playing as much MED4 as you can, given how much you disparaged it earlier. Of course, I'm guilty of pretty much the same thing. I finally opened a mishra's workshop, and now I don't hate MED4 anymore :) I am really puzzled that they didn't put any enchantment removal into the set, and am realizing that there are more and more significant enchantments. Maybe they did it to make Goblin Shrine more playable.
I don't think multiplayer will ever work very well in MTGO. You get to play much more in duels (since you don't have to wait for so many other players to take their actions), and the main appeal to multiplayer is the social interaction aspect, which MTGO can never recreate.
It seems that Kaleidoscope is its own worst enemy. There are too many internal problems with the format, let alone the possible cardpool. With such a restricted cardpool, the things that plague regular formats, namely slow and/or fragile mana bases and the possibility of flood/screw, and a narrow number of broken cards, are acutely heightened in Kaleidoscope.
Aggro decks are hurt by the limited number of good Turn 1 plays, so games appear to degenerate into midrange decks with unanswerable bombs + Vindicate that prove too much for Control decks. And I'm guessing it would be tough to find a consistent mana base + combo engine that relied solely on multi-color.
There probably needs to be sweeping bans of a lot of cards, and about 30 more sets released so that there is a wide enough cardpool to inject some diversity into the metagame.
Excellent article whiffy, reading your unique style about classic is ever nice. 6 fireballs for you
... but as I'm limited to 5, I then give you only 5 but the sixth should have been there if I could
What? I thought Kaleidoscope was already moved into classic. I too was one of those people who jumped on the format when it was first created, but (loudly) criticized it in public and in the forums over on the WotC webpage. It should have NEVER been an extended format. The card pool was way too small. The fact that WotC made it extended was a transparent ploy to get people to participate in Ravnica block sealed/draft tournaments they were running as a "lead up" to Kaleidoscope's release. It was pretty shameless of them, but then again, WotC and shameless are hard to separate. Once again, I would love to host a PRE for this, but much like everyone else, I simply don't have the time. I am currently only participating in one PRE and that's because it is on a Tuesday night, which works well for my time schedule. So, point being, let's just make a player movement to play Kaleidoscope in classic. If we have to go back to putting "KALEIDOSCOPE" in the game description, I guess that's what we have to do. Power to the players.
And by playing in pants I assume you mean underwear? Anyway nice letter (though you had a few typos). I hope someone at WOTC listens. Kaleidoscope was the format that dragged me here to pure in the first place in June of '09.
Well, the idea of a Classic Kaleidoscope PRE is definitely nice and I would love to play in it. But I personally cannot host it because of time issues.
I'm playing in PRE's since more than one year, and I do know that hosting a PRE is much more than just announcing pairings. You have to advertise your format everywhere possible, write articles about it everywhere possible, find sponsor(s) for it (who will give out the prizes?) etc...
I sadly don't have that much time. I'm playing Heirloom, Tribal Wars, BYOS as PREs (which consume a lot of time), and just started playing Legacy in which I am aiming to be competitive. So... (sad face here)
I'm sorry for my poor English, it really isn't my mother language. ^^;
I think my worst problem is that I think using Italian syntactic contructs and then I just translate. I'll keep reading some more books: training never stops and writing is just a part of it. :)
I'm not so sure that Boros Landfall isn't good anymore: I've just submitted an article on MPDC metagame and it still is on top. However, after yesterday's results, that may not be true anymore. :D
The mono-blue-and-artifacts build seems very, very interesting. I'll give it a try soon. Maybe adding some more metalcraft options...blue Myrs?
I was tooling around with this very idea today before I unexpectedly couldn't make the MPDC tournament. I was testing out a mono-blue version based on Jace's Erasure very similar to your first list.
Just to get commentary out of the way, I don't think this article "fails" at all, but I do see some room for improvement. Some of it just has to do with English mechanics, but I'm not about to get professorial on you :-) Some of it has to do with a lack of a few key metagame considerations. Specifically, you considered Boros Landfall a bit more than the Four Color Control/Esper Control decks that have currently edged the former out of the top spot. I think a little bit more about dealing with that archetype would have added more value to the article.
That said, there's a certain charm to the deck-in-progress style this has, and that makes for an enjoyable read. And there's ideas here that I find worth exploring even though I've thought a lot about this stuff. I was surprised to find you experimenting with Wall of Tanglecord as a way to defend yourself, but you forgot to include green mana. I included the Wall and Prophetic Prism to get green mana so that I could block the ever-present Kor Skyfisher all day long; the Prism's ETB cantrip gets you a card mill when you've got a Jace's Erasure out. I then figured that since I'm running 8 artifacts that I could successfully include Screeching Silclaw as a secondary milling agent. I was also trying out Tumble Magnet and Vedalken Certarch to keep my opponent's creatures tapped down because, let's face it, the hardest part about milling your opponent to death is stopping yourself from being dealt 20 damage from creatures!
Also, that bolded quote "most good decks have the victory seal in their opening hand" was deep, man! I'm bringing it up from two to three stars for that reason alone.
I completely agree. I like all the crazy MTGO only formats and that is one of the reasons I originally decided to download and try MTGO. I was a little disappointed to find out so many formats, like this, are moribund.
To you, Nafiz: you know personally the success of Heirloom, so why not start a grassroots movement to make your OWN Classic based Kaleidoscope format, including a PRE?
I must of laughed for 5 minutes on the Blade poster. My wife asked me what was so funny and I tried explaining it to her but it was lost. She never saw balde or would ever want to see blade. She does like twilight tho....uck
Alt-Prt Scr(Print Screen) are the two buttons you hold down at the same time to capture the currently focused window. Then open an art/image program (g.i.m.p. for example, or even ms paint.) Then paste (control-v) into that program. It should create an image you can save. Note that .bmp (paint's default format is not internet friendly. You need to save it as a .jpg, .gif or .png (though this last is unusual these days.)
Not sure mandatory voip connections are advisable or even enforceable. (Consider some people's connectivity issues for starters and then the difficulties in overcoming technical issues such as firewalls, proxies etc.)
Wow, Consecrated Sphinx is going to be amazing in commander. That's a crazy card draw affect on a big flying body!
Always nice to reflect on history for a bit. I hated the brown band of death.
A bit ironic that you are talking about playing as much MED4 as you can, given how much you disparaged it earlier. Of course, I'm guilty of pretty much the same thing. I finally opened a mishra's workshop, and now I don't hate MED4 anymore :) I am really puzzled that they didn't put any enchantment removal into the set, and am realizing that there are more and more significant enchantments. Maybe they did it to make Goblin Shrine more playable.
I don't think multiplayer will ever work very well in MTGO. You get to play much more in duels (since you don't have to wait for so many other players to take their actions), and the main appeal to multiplayer is the social interaction aspect, which MTGO can never recreate.
It seems that Kaleidoscope is its own worst enemy. There are too many internal problems with the format, let alone the possible cardpool. With such a restricted cardpool, the things that plague regular formats, namely slow and/or fragile mana bases and the possibility of flood/screw, and a narrow number of broken cards, are acutely heightened in Kaleidoscope.
Aggro decks are hurt by the limited number of good Turn 1 plays, so games appear to degenerate into midrange decks with unanswerable bombs + Vindicate that prove too much for Control decks. And I'm guessing it would be tough to find a consistent mana base + combo engine that relied solely on multi-color.
There probably needs to be sweeping bans of a lot of cards, and about 30 more sets released so that there is a wide enough cardpool to inject some diversity into the metagame.
Excellent article whiffy, reading your unique style about classic is ever nice. 6 fireballs for you
... but as I'm limited to 5, I then give you only 5 but the sixth should have been there if I could
For a guy who can't remember to tap his scroll rack!
Just busting' chops - good read!
Finally! Some good material on puremtgo.
What? I thought Kaleidoscope was already moved into classic. I too was one of those people who jumped on the format when it was first created, but (loudly) criticized it in public and in the forums over on the WotC webpage. It should have NEVER been an extended format. The card pool was way too small. The fact that WotC made it extended was a transparent ploy to get people to participate in Ravnica block sealed/draft tournaments they were running as a "lead up" to Kaleidoscope's release. It was pretty shameless of them, but then again, WotC and shameless are hard to separate. Once again, I would love to host a PRE for this, but much like everyone else, I simply don't have the time. I am currently only participating in one PRE and that's because it is on a Tuesday night, which works well for my time schedule. So, point being, let's just make a player movement to play Kaleidoscope in classic. If we have to go back to putting "KALEIDOSCOPE" in the game description, I guess that's what we have to do. Power to the players.
And by playing in pants I assume you mean underwear? Anyway nice letter (though you had a few typos). I hope someone at WOTC listens. Kaleidoscope was the format that dragged me here to pure in the first place in June of '09.
Keep it up Whiffy. I like reading about classic and legacy.
bearing in mind some of the things I get in the text box after casting something like mind rot, I'd say voice connections are far from advisable!
Well, the idea of a Classic Kaleidoscope PRE is definitely nice and I would love to play in it. But I personally cannot host it because of time issues.
I'm playing in PRE's since more than one year, and I do know that hosting a PRE is much more than just announcing pairings. You have to advertise your format everywhere possible, write articles about it everywhere possible, find sponsor(s) for it (who will give out the prizes?) etc...
I sadly don't have that much time. I'm playing Heirloom, Tribal Wars, BYOS as PREs (which consume a lot of time), and just started playing Legacy in which I am aiming to be competitive. So... (sad face here)
LE
How about this list:
4 Halimar Excavator
4 Screeching Silcaw
4 Silver Myr
4 Wall of Tanglecord
3 Sea Gate Oracle
3 Dispel
3 Mana Leak
3 Stoic Rebuttal
3 Prophetic Prism
3 Tome Scour
3 Foresee
3 Jace's Erasure
4 Halimar Depths
16 Island
I knew it. Now I'm craving a game with it. XD
Thanks! :)
I'm sorry for my poor English, it really isn't my mother language. ^^;
I think my worst problem is that I think using Italian syntactic contructs and then I just translate. I'll keep reading some more books: training never stops and writing is just a part of it. :)
I'm not so sure that Boros Landfall isn't good anymore: I've just submitted an article on MPDC metagame and it still is on top. However, after yesterday's results, that may not be true anymore. :D
The mono-blue-and-artifacts build seems very, very interesting. I'll give it a try soon. Maybe adding some more metalcraft options...blue Myrs?
I was tooling around with this very idea today before I unexpectedly couldn't make the MPDC tournament. I was testing out a mono-blue version based on Jace's Erasure very similar to your first list.
Just to get commentary out of the way, I don't think this article "fails" at all, but I do see some room for improvement. Some of it just has to do with English mechanics, but I'm not about to get professorial on you :-) Some of it has to do with a lack of a few key metagame considerations. Specifically, you considered Boros Landfall a bit more than the Four Color Control/Esper Control decks that have currently edged the former out of the top spot. I think a little bit more about dealing with that archetype would have added more value to the article.
That said, there's a certain charm to the deck-in-progress style this has, and that makes for an enjoyable read. And there's ideas here that I find worth exploring even though I've thought a lot about this stuff. I was surprised to find you experimenting with Wall of Tanglecord as a way to defend yourself, but you forgot to include green mana. I included the Wall and Prophetic Prism to get green mana so that I could block the ever-present Kor Skyfisher all day long; the Prism's ETB cantrip gets you a card mill when you've got a Jace's Erasure out. I then figured that since I'm running 8 artifacts that I could successfully include Screeching Silclaw as a secondary milling agent. I was also trying out Tumble Magnet and Vedalken Certarch to keep my opponent's creatures tapped down because, let's face it, the hardest part about milling your opponent to death is stopping yourself from being dealt 20 damage from creatures!
Also, that bolded quote "most good decks have the victory seal in their opening hand" was deep, man! I'm bringing it up from two to three stars for that reason alone.
I completely agree. I like all the crazy MTGO only formats and that is one of the reasons I originally decided to download and try MTGO. I was a little disappointed to find out so many formats, like this, are moribund.
To you, Nafiz: you know personally the success of Heirloom, so why not start a grassroots movement to make your OWN Classic based Kaleidoscope format, including a PRE?
Yea the Blade one had me craking up.
This was defenitly a fun article. Thanks for lightening the mood.
http://www.jinx.com/women/shirts/geek/buffy_staked_edward_womens.html?cs...
that is awesome! I must have that shirt
I liked it :D t-shirt spotted at FNM a little while ago, "...and then Buffy staked Edward. The End."
Honestly I didn't get either reference. Sad me I guess.
I must of laughed for 5 minutes on the Blade poster. My wife asked me what was so funny and I tried explaining it to her but it was lost. She never saw balde or would ever want to see blade. She does like twilight tho....uck
for my lap top I have to press fn+print screen. Then open paint and ctrl+v will paste it.
for the images, I use the image placer button (yeah I dont have a lot of technical know how).
Congrats.
Go for 601st!
Alt-Prt Scr(Print Screen) are the two buttons you hold down at the same time to capture the currently focused window. Then open an art/image program (g.i.m.p. for example, or even ms paint.) Then paste (control-v) into that program. It should create an image you can save. Note that .bmp (paint's default format is not internet friendly. You need to save it as a .jpg, .gif or .png (though this last is unusual these days.)
Not sure mandatory voip connections are advisable or even enforceable. (Consider some people's connectivity issues for starters and then the difficulties in overcoming technical issues such as firewalls, proxies etc.)