Myr reservoir is certainly good in a deck with several myr, specially with cards like perilous myr, myr galvanizer and all those that can sacrifice artifacts for some effect. However I would never first pick it over removal, plague stinger/cystbear (unless I thought it was good to avoid poison), smiths, etc. It's specially good when you get it in the middle of pack1 or even in another pack if you already have what it takes to make it work.
Twisted Image on the other hand, while probably a bit underrated, it's not very exciting. Sure, when facing percursor golem it's very good, but that won't be very commo. Sometimes it will be a blowout as it is a 1 mana card advantage card but those cases aren't very common and usually it will be just a cycler that needs a target. Tel-Jilad Defiance also works with Percursor Golem and it's much easier to 2 for 1 them. Yes, it is more expected than twisted image but that's because it's revelant more times and it's also common. Anyway most green decks usually end up not playing it if they have 23 solid cards anyway.
I think in terms of likelihood we may have the odds stacked against us in some regards. It's absolutely true that formats like pauper succeed because of their simplicity. Of course I think that is also their weakness. They lack a certain something because of the strict cut they take. I don't see the issue of having a large banned/legal list as a barrier. In terms of coding this is really rudimentary. Unfortunately defining it differently would only lead to a corruption of it's principle of budget magic with a powerful and varied card pool. I think you sell players short in thinking that they couldn't understand a format like Heirloom. It's only the prompting they need, of official sanction.
Xaos, I love the format, but it WILL NOT be an official format in it's current structure. Comparing heirloom to pauper is a joke really, because pauper is very easy to define. It is simply every card that has been printed at common on MTGO, with 1 banning (I think cranial is the only banned card, sorry if I am wrong). How would wizards go about programming the format? The only way I could think it is possible is to have a 1000 card ban list (or however long it would be). How could wizards describe the format to players? All of the other formats have a pretty easy legality. You would need some way to define it differently, not by relative cost.
Yeah Paul, you were on the receiving end of this deck a lot. I appreciate that you played and stuck those games out though as I was testing it out. And you are right, there is a lot of thinking involved in this deck. That suits some players, but not me.
Hallowkat and Lythand, it was a fun game! Breaking triple digits in life is sometimes daunting to opponents, but this shows you can do it.
I originally had Relic of Progenitus in the deck, but I wanted to cut it, and figured I could get away with Bojuka Bog.
Also, a mistake in the article, at the end of the game, S was going to bounce my Darksteel Forge, and not the Disk. Like I noted, I should have attacked before popping the Disk. He would have bounced the Forge, but died anyway.
It's probably worth mentioning that you can only cycle twisted image when there's a creature in play, so it's not quite as easy as just being able to cycle it when it can't do anything. I still think it's a much better card than people give it credit for though.
I made some bad play mistakes in this game, and I think Leviathan let me off the hook. he could of easily of taken me out which is why I ended up conceding at the end of the game.
No need to worry about the land issues. Once the new rules are streamlined to mirror paper Commander, then you wont have a choice but to use colorless lands in a mono brown deck.
Oh, and you have Relic of Progenitus and Tormod's Crypt if you need GY hate.
I liked your article alot! Very thought provoking. I am very average drafter. But I like to draft during the opening week of a new set so I can learn the mechanics of the set. My best drafts were: Giddeon Jura and Maelstrom Pulse twice and I've been online since Alara. If I look at all the money I've spent on drafts (probably $600 over the past two years), I agree with your odds of hitting the money cards.
However, I still like drafting. I loose about as much as I win, I rarely pull awesome cards from my packs, but I still draft here and there. I'm not doing it to make money. Drafts are fun and make the playing field feel equal.
I still own my Giddeon and the Maelstrom Pulses (I could have sold Giddeon for $50, and the Maelstrom's for $20 if I sold them the day of my draft), and still use them in decks. For money cards, I think like this:
For this Christmas, I bought myself Null Rod for $30. I played it once thus far so I've spent thirty for those few moments of glory. However, the next game I play where Null Rod shows up, I will have only spent $15 for the privilege of a card that is over priced on MTGO. The next time after $7.50 and so forth.
I might have spent $14 for Giddeon Jura (or $600 over the past two years) but I can't count the times I've used the card. If I divide the card price for the amount of times I've played with the card, almost every card in my collection is worth pennies.
Eitherway we are both merely juggling around numbers. The price of cards you own doesn't matter until the time comes to sell them. I don't plan to sell mine anytime soon because I love playing the game. I try to think of it like a service, I get $20 a month to spend on Magic. Be it a Duel Deck, a draft, or just tickets to save for a higher than $20 card for the next month. The nice part of MTGO is that I can use the stuff I bought a while ago over again. Unlike my cellphone, which doesn't allow me to put unused minutes towards a discount on my bill. With most services, if I sell, I don't get any of the monthly money back. Whereas with Magic, I'll get something! So wizards can have my $14 for making a great game, and not charging a monthly service fee (that's the day I'll cash out my collection because I really don't play every month). At least I'll make some of those $14 back in the end.
In my opinion the prizes for the challenges aren't really matching up with the added difficulty that is required to abide by the challenges. A $0.40 rare if I go 3-0 is hardly a reasonable reward for limiting my options. It makes sense as a door prize raffle for anyone abiding by the challenge, because then anyone has a chance of winning it, but for the players that are in it to "win it", it's hardly worth the gamble unless you've already got a deck that meets the challenge criteria and is ready to go.
On the other hand if you made the challenge prize something really expensive like a Jace 2.0, then everyone would abide by the challenge, and you'd be forced to give out at least one Jace 2.0 if not more for each challenge. So the other extreme is also not a great prize.
I would say that the right level of prize is around the $5-$10 range. Something like an Arid Mesa would be enough of an incentive to get me to take on the challenge, but not enough of an incentive for everybody to do so. Especially if it requires spending a lot of tickets on a deck in order to do so.
Of course the easy answer is to just make the challenges manditory, but that might alienate some of the players who didn't get the challenge message early enough to build a deck.
agreed with the mox opal and thopter. Thopter for the simple reasons that rayjinn pointed is better than opal here. I am also with him in cutting the spikeshot elders. They are not that good in that spot and is the place for your brave devastating summons.
Koth is a must as a 2-3 of maindeck. This deck should be able to play control style in game 2 with burn spells and 2 for 1 cards like Arc Trail, Searing Blaze. and also to recover from the initial rush and have a little more reach. And koth takes that place.
Right now the dailies are infested with monored which I really don't understand the reason. UW is still the best deck and I only lose to monored when I'm screw or when they get the nuts. And the reason some lists play the liquimetal coating plan in the board is because the match up is bad enough that monored needs to gamble on drawing liquimetal and some shatters plus scrapmelters (and hope they don't revoke liquimetal) to steal some wins.
Fair point in Myr Resevoir -- it's definitely interesting to read an article about a narrow archetype that I haven't had a chance to try!
I think you are overselling Twisted Image a bit though. I agree that it's underrated, but the problem I've had with this card is that it can be challenging to find the right deck to fit it into. If you are going for metalcraft or an otherwise artifacts matter theme it's really tough to find slots for utility cards like Image even if they are quite good. It's best home is in a non-artifact based blue deck which is definitely possible but not a super common archetype. I'd also like to note that it has a decent bit of synergy with another underrated card, Alpha Tyrranax, in that it protects the dinosaur from Turn to Slag.
Using a single vendor is not something that is in the Heirloom constitution. It is simply a fact of the current situation for the sake of convenience and impartiality. If wizards chose to support the format they could use a meta price list based on the prices of many vendors.
I really like the idea of customizable formats modifiable by players. You bring up the main drawbacks and I don't think I disagree with the weight you give each of them.
I do think there is something nice about Wizards officially sanctioning X number of formats and allowing the rest to be player run. It gives a universality to the format who's integrity and appeal is multiplied many times by that status.
In my ideal world I'd like to see Heirloom have official events (with reasonable entry and payout) and be an official format and also have the implementation of the player defined formats which for Heirloom would allow sub-categories of Heirloom like Heirloom Standard, Heirloom Block, Heirloom Commander ect and allow for a multitude of other player formats to succeed on a purely player run basis.
I think the biggest obstacle the format has to becoming sanctioned by WoTC is not so much that the prices are tied to value in the secondary market, but that they are linked to a single vendor's prices.
However, there is something that Wizards could do to make it easier for more casual, player-driven formats to succeed: they could add support to the client for custom formats. This is obviously not trivial to implement with the current client, but it might be something that they could include in the next version if they started thinking about it early enough.
As a programmer, I could see this being cleanly implemented by implementing a formal language for describing what a format is. This could start off as being a human-readable file, so that people could create and maintain their own formats using nothing more than a text editor, but it would probably be compiled down into another form for use with the client. Sort of like how other moddable games like Quake can use editing tools to add functionality to the original game. Adding custom formats to the mtgo client needn't be as complicated (or as powerful) as quake-like mods, though. You could get by with only a few primitive commands/directives like:
* formatname extends (name of some other format) (Object oriented-like inheritance from existing format)
* allow/do not allow/require Avatars
* allow/do not allow/require sideboard
* "card" is banned/unbanned
* apply singleton/stairwell/etc. rule
* apply/revoke (random other) rule
* download banned list (url)
It doesn't really matter what the language looks like so long as it's able to express what needs to be expressed about the format. For heirloom, the most important feature that'd have to be added is the use of custom banned lists, or the opposite "whitelist" of legal cards. If they could implement that, it wouldn't be difficult to also implement the idea of custom card pools, though if you wanted to implement the "parallel" league idea you'd have to make it so that you could give each player a different pool, based on their mtgo screen name.
Besides changes to the deck editing and deck filtering mechanisms to support custom deck construction rules, the major problem is making sure that when someone starts a game that they can specify a custom format and ensure that whoever joins the game must provide a deck which also satisfies those same deck construction rules. That's where it really gets tricky: there would probably have to be a way of uploading your format "mod" and having it downloaded it to the other person's client automatically so that they can play against you without having to manually download and install a mod. The alternative of players manually downloading mods would be a nightmare from the point of view of playability, security and plain old version control.
To be honest, even though I think it's probably technically possible to implement something like this (or even just custom banned lists/card pools), there's a lot of risk involved in the idea from Wizards' point of view. Even if they could make it secure, it could add a lot of confusion for players not being able to understand why they can't join a particular game. Plus, even if it was easy for players to create custom formats and the feature took off it could end up becoming a victim of its own success, with too many custom formats being created leading to fragmentation of existing formats like Heirloom, or it might end up drawing players away from Wizards' own events, preferring to play their own formats based only on very cheap cards or cards that a bunch of people already own.
So, sadly, I don't see much hope for either just Heirloom becoming sanctioned--because of its ties to a single vendor--or for the client being able to support generic, custom formats--because of the inherent risks to Wizards, without commensurate rewards.
LED is broken as has been shown in Classic. But in a 20 creature deck I am not sure it has the same oomph. I think it was banned as a piece in the dredge combo. Moat is clearly not broken and imho someone up in the white ivory tower that is WOTC HQ screwed up big time when they banned it. I don't know what kind of results must have led to that banning but it seems to me to be ill-informed and just wrong. Hopefully they will come to their senses soon. Great article LE yet again. :) I built and have been playing with a cruel control deck myself lately. It is not surprising to me you swept a tourney with a variant using elves. (Though that is a nice innovation over my not so in-obvious goblins.) It seems our thinking runs parallel in some ways during deck building. I am a huge fan of the ultimatums and cruel in particular. (The only one I dislike is Titanic though I've seen that put to good use as a surprise overrun in a windbrisk heights deck. Ouch!)
Yeah on horrors week my horrors were crushed by ...soldiers. Dragons? by Baneslayers (Though in retrospect that seems fitting and funny at the time it was severely disappointing.) Spirits on the other hand placed with 3-1 in an endangered species field so I agree that enforcing themes is the only way to make them work. This optional stuff is for the birds...literally.
I also think your point about MTGOtraders is well said. Many of our fellow writers/players seem to take this site for granted and treat it rather casually. It is nice to see someone taking the time to thank the source of our entertainment enhancement. Hope your holidays are grand. :)
I think if they just had a card filter in the game and let it be searched in gatherer and such and mentioned that the format was designed with budget in mind it wouldn't be that hard implement. Since they already support pauper I see that as precedent that they might be willing to support Heirloom officially at some point. Certainly as you suggest that if enough people were playing they would want to get their hands on the rules in some way.
@Naproxen:
I think they would have to make some mention of how the list was generated and have it listed all in one place but they could be pretty brief about it certainly. The work required to maintain the format is a main barrier but I think if they considered the potential for recruiting lifelong players by offering them a cheap alternative to the major formats they might see that enough value existed to have someone put in 8-16 hours a month to update the list.
@Our-Cruel-Lord-Erman:
Hey I think the Godfalker (that sounds kind of funny for some reason) cards are pretty cool. Be great having you again when the schedule allows for it =)
@Artlee:
That's awesome to hear. Heirloom is a great resource for that sort of use. WOTC could make cash off the format by printing premium versions of popular decks or by printing premade versions of the decks that one could buy for very cheap. Either way it's all profit for them and with all of us toiling away at making good decks that takes the deck design work out of their hands. Also as I mentioned before they already set a precedent with pauper and just having people enjoying magic in general gives them rewards in the long run. There are also plenty of people at WOTC who I'm sure would love to see cards they designed being great in a format like Heirloom even if they're trash on the major tournament scene. Don't underestimate the timmy nature of some of the players inside of WOTC headquarters. "I've always loved the fatties." is a lead designer quote lol.
I get the idea. And I completely agree with everything in the article. Bring what you want and be prepared for anything. I think the theme weeks should be obligatory though. But that is up to flippers.
I guess that was one of the games I didn't play with you. That deck is a true house though. Not really fun to play against and I imagine not all that fun to play unless you enjoy thinking A LOT about your interactions. Very intense deck. I see you managed to get in a game with Lythand and his Balthor deck. :) Of the games that we played together using this deck I don't think one actually completed.
Once again a great article. This is such a great source, even for the kitchen table casual gamer, for new deck ideas within a reasonable budget. My friends and I meet once in a while and play some mtg while having a beer. We are not going to spend high amounts of money on mythics etc, and Heirloom is now our primary source for deck ideas.
Merely due to the fact that Heirloom is based on card prices, I have a hard time imagining WotC would ever take part in this format.
Also, Heirloom is, in my opinion, not a format that is going to sell packs as it consists of the second or third best cards within it's genre.
As I said in the article quite many times: Unwritten rules don't mean anything. Make it obligatory to play a theme deck and then everybody HAS TO play it. Make it free-at-will, I play whatever that wins.
That's the lesson I learned in the past in THIS tournament and that's what I also wrote in the article. There's no such thing as "gentlemen's rules" or other unwritten rules. We tried it. It didn't work.
Theme weeks could be really awesome events IF ONLY everybody MUST play a theme deck. Otherwise, what's the point? What deck won the dragon's theme week? What deck won the Horror theme week? I think you get the idea.
I am starting to find the special events kind of pointless. Dont get me wrong I like the idea and think its fun. But there are only a few that actually join in the fun of building a deck for the occasion. Like this past weekend was the Christmas special event. Low and behold the top decks were your Elf Deck, the Wizard Breakfast deck and others playing Mono white. Come on now, you really cant come up with a deck for one weekend that steers away from the norm. I dont usually rant, and I dont have a problem with you Lord_Erman. But I wish people could just learn to relax a bit about the winning aspect and learn to have some fun.
Finally! Finally I have my planeswalker card! I did everything to get Xaos' attention to get one! I was so jealous of others who got theirs before I did. :)
Joking aside, thanks for the shout out and thanks for supporting the format. But a very special thanks to Naga for donating his prize the week before :)!!.
I will try to be with you guys the next time when the tournament is on Saturday again.
I agree with Naga on this. In fact, they could simply update the legal cards list every month or so without any need to specify how and why cards have been made legal/illegal.
The only problem I see is that this format requires a lot of "maintenance" with the constant changes, and I'm not sure if WoTC would be willing to do it.
On the other hand, Xaos is doing a great job almost all by himself, so why couldn't WoTC do the same?
Myr reservoir is certainly good in a deck with several myr, specially with cards like perilous myr, myr galvanizer and all those that can sacrifice artifacts for some effect. However I would never first pick it over removal, plague stinger/cystbear (unless I thought it was good to avoid poison), smiths, etc. It's specially good when you get it in the middle of pack1 or even in another pack if you already have what it takes to make it work.
Twisted Image on the other hand, while probably a bit underrated, it's not very exciting. Sure, when facing percursor golem it's very good, but that won't be very commo. Sometimes it will be a blowout as it is a 1 mana card advantage card but those cases aren't very common and usually it will be just a cycler that needs a target. Tel-Jilad Defiance also works with Percursor Golem and it's much easier to 2 for 1 them. Yes, it is more expected than twisted image but that's because it's revelant more times and it's also common. Anyway most green decks usually end up not playing it if they have 23 solid cards anyway.
Hey Bliv,
I think in terms of likelihood we may have the odds stacked against us in some regards. It's absolutely true that formats like pauper succeed because of their simplicity. Of course I think that is also their weakness. They lack a certain something because of the strict cut they take. I don't see the issue of having a large banned/legal list as a barrier. In terms of coding this is really rudimentary. Unfortunately defining it differently would only lead to a corruption of it's principle of budget magic with a powerful and varied card pool. I think you sell players short in thinking that they couldn't understand a format like Heirloom. It's only the prompting they need, of official sanction.
X-
Xaos, I love the format, but it WILL NOT be an official format in it's current structure. Comparing heirloom to pauper is a joke really, because pauper is very easy to define. It is simply every card that has been printed at common on MTGO, with 1 banning (I think cranial is the only banned card, sorry if I am wrong). How would wizards go about programming the format? The only way I could think it is possible is to have a 1000 card ban list (or however long it would be). How could wizards describe the format to players? All of the other formats have a pretty easy legality. You would need some way to define it differently, not by relative cost.
Yeah Paul, you were on the receiving end of this deck a lot. I appreciate that you played and stuck those games out though as I was testing it out. And you are right, there is a lot of thinking involved in this deck. That suits some players, but not me.
Hallowkat and Lythand, it was a fun game! Breaking triple digits in life is sometimes daunting to opponents, but this shows you can do it.
I originally had Relic of Progenitus in the deck, but I wanted to cut it, and figured I could get away with Bojuka Bog.
Also, a mistake in the article, at the end of the game, S was going to bounce my Darksteel Forge, and not the Disk. Like I noted, I should have attacked before popping the Disk. He would have bounced the Forge, but died anyway.
It's probably worth mentioning that you can only cycle twisted image when there's a creature in play, so it's not quite as easy as just being able to cycle it when it can't do anything. I still think it's a much better card than people give it credit for though.
There is one thing that I disagree with in the article that I missed somehow. The banning of Moat is a good thing and needs to stay banned.
I forgot about this game. lol
I made some bad play mistakes in this game, and I think Leviathan let me off the hook. he could of easily of taken me out which is why I ended up conceding at the end of the game.
No need to worry about the land issues. Once the new rules are streamlined to mirror paper Commander, then you wont have a choice but to use colorless lands in a mono brown deck.
Oh, and you have Relic of Progenitus and Tormod's Crypt if you need GY hate.
I liked your article alot! Very thought provoking. I am very average drafter. But I like to draft during the opening week of a new set so I can learn the mechanics of the set. My best drafts were: Giddeon Jura and Maelstrom Pulse twice and I've been online since Alara. If I look at all the money I've spent on drafts (probably $600 over the past two years), I agree with your odds of hitting the money cards.
However, I still like drafting. I loose about as much as I win, I rarely pull awesome cards from my packs, but I still draft here and there. I'm not doing it to make money. Drafts are fun and make the playing field feel equal.
I still own my Giddeon and the Maelstrom Pulses (I could have sold Giddeon for $50, and the Maelstrom's for $20 if I sold them the day of my draft), and still use them in decks. For money cards, I think like this:
For this Christmas, I bought myself Null Rod for $30. I played it once thus far so I've spent thirty for those few moments of glory. However, the next game I play where Null Rod shows up, I will have only spent $15 for the privilege of a card that is over priced on MTGO. The next time after $7.50 and so forth.
I might have spent $14 for Giddeon Jura (or $600 over the past two years) but I can't count the times I've used the card. If I divide the card price for the amount of times I've played with the card, almost every card in my collection is worth pennies.
Eitherway we are both merely juggling around numbers. The price of cards you own doesn't matter until the time comes to sell them. I don't plan to sell mine anytime soon because I love playing the game. I try to think of it like a service, I get $20 a month to spend on Magic. Be it a Duel Deck, a draft, or just tickets to save for a higher than $20 card for the next month. The nice part of MTGO is that I can use the stuff I bought a while ago over again. Unlike my cellphone, which doesn't allow me to put unused minutes towards a discount on my bill. With most services, if I sell, I don't get any of the monthly money back. Whereas with Magic, I'll get something! So wizards can have my $14 for making a great game, and not charging a monthly service fee (that's the day I'll cash out my collection because I really don't play every month). At least I'll make some of those $14 back in the end.
In my opinion the prizes for the challenges aren't really matching up with the added difficulty that is required to abide by the challenges. A $0.40 rare if I go 3-0 is hardly a reasonable reward for limiting my options. It makes sense as a door prize raffle for anyone abiding by the challenge, because then anyone has a chance of winning it, but for the players that are in it to "win it", it's hardly worth the gamble unless you've already got a deck that meets the challenge criteria and is ready to go.
On the other hand if you made the challenge prize something really expensive like a Jace 2.0, then everyone would abide by the challenge, and you'd be forced to give out at least one Jace 2.0 if not more for each challenge. So the other extreme is also not a great prize.
I would say that the right level of prize is around the $5-$10 range. Something like an Arid Mesa would be enough of an incentive to get me to take on the challenge, but not enough of an incentive for everybody to do so. Especially if it requires spending a lot of tickets on a deck in order to do so.
Of course the easy answer is to just make the challenges manditory, but that might alienate some of the players who didn't get the challenge message early enough to build a deck.
agreed with the mox opal and thopter. Thopter for the simple reasons that rayjinn pointed is better than opal here. I am also with him in cutting the spikeshot elders. They are not that good in that spot and is the place for your brave devastating summons.
Koth is a must as a 2-3 of maindeck. This deck should be able to play control style in game 2 with burn spells and 2 for 1 cards like Arc Trail, Searing Blaze. and also to recover from the initial rush and have a little more reach. And koth takes that place.
Right now the dailies are infested with monored which I really don't understand the reason. UW is still the best deck and I only lose to monored when I'm screw or when they get the nuts. And the reason some lists play the liquimetal coating plan in the board is because the match up is bad enough that monored needs to gamble on drawing liquimetal and some shatters plus scrapmelters (and hope they don't revoke liquimetal) to steal some wins.
That was a great game! I had thought I was solidly in control for a while, but then things just got out of hand :) Thanks for the write up!
Fair point in Myr Resevoir -- it's definitely interesting to read an article about a narrow archetype that I haven't had a chance to try!
I think you are overselling Twisted Image a bit though. I agree that it's underrated, but the problem I've had with this card is that it can be challenging to find the right deck to fit it into. If you are going for metalcraft or an otherwise artifacts matter theme it's really tough to find slots for utility cards like Image even if they are quite good. It's best home is in a non-artifact based blue deck which is definitely possible but not a super common archetype. I'd also like to note that it has a decent bit of synergy with another underrated card, Alpha Tyrranax, in that it protects the dinosaur from Turn to Slag.
A lot of good thoughts here,
Using a single vendor is not something that is in the Heirloom constitution. It is simply a fact of the current situation for the sake of convenience and impartiality. If wizards chose to support the format they could use a meta price list based on the prices of many vendors.
I really like the idea of customizable formats modifiable by players. You bring up the main drawbacks and I don't think I disagree with the weight you give each of them.
I do think there is something nice about Wizards officially sanctioning X number of formats and allowing the rest to be player run. It gives a universality to the format who's integrity and appeal is multiplied many times by that status.
In my ideal world I'd like to see Heirloom have official events (with reasonable entry and payout) and be an official format and also have the implementation of the player defined formats which for Heirloom would allow sub-categories of Heirloom like Heirloom Standard, Heirloom Block, Heirloom Commander ect and allow for a multitude of other player formats to succeed on a purely player run basis.
X-
I think the biggest obstacle the format has to becoming sanctioned by WoTC is not so much that the prices are tied to value in the secondary market, but that they are linked to a single vendor's prices.
However, there is something that Wizards could do to make it easier for more casual, player-driven formats to succeed: they could add support to the client for custom formats. This is obviously not trivial to implement with the current client, but it might be something that they could include in the next version if they started thinking about it early enough.
As a programmer, I could see this being cleanly implemented by implementing a formal language for describing what a format is. This could start off as being a human-readable file, so that people could create and maintain their own formats using nothing more than a text editor, but it would probably be compiled down into another form for use with the client. Sort of like how other moddable games like Quake can use editing tools to add functionality to the original game. Adding custom formats to the mtgo client needn't be as complicated (or as powerful) as quake-like mods, though. You could get by with only a few primitive commands/directives like:
* formatname extends (name of some other format) (Object oriented-like inheritance from existing format)
* allow/do not allow/require Avatars
* allow/do not allow/require sideboard
* "card" is banned/unbanned
* apply singleton/stairwell/etc. rule
* apply/revoke (random other) rule
* download banned list (url)
It doesn't really matter what the language looks like so long as it's able to express what needs to be expressed about the format. For heirloom, the most important feature that'd have to be added is the use of custom banned lists, or the opposite "whitelist" of legal cards. If they could implement that, it wouldn't be difficult to also implement the idea of custom card pools, though if you wanted to implement the "parallel" league idea you'd have to make it so that you could give each player a different pool, based on their mtgo screen name.
Besides changes to the deck editing and deck filtering mechanisms to support custom deck construction rules, the major problem is making sure that when someone starts a game that they can specify a custom format and ensure that whoever joins the game must provide a deck which also satisfies those same deck construction rules. That's where it really gets tricky: there would probably have to be a way of uploading your format "mod" and having it downloaded it to the other person's client automatically so that they can play against you without having to manually download and install a mod. The alternative of players manually downloading mods would be a nightmare from the point of view of playability, security and plain old version control.
To be honest, even though I think it's probably technically possible to implement something like this (or even just custom banned lists/card pools), there's a lot of risk involved in the idea from Wizards' point of view. Even if they could make it secure, it could add a lot of confusion for players not being able to understand why they can't join a particular game. Plus, even if it was easy for players to create custom formats and the feature took off it could end up becoming a victim of its own success, with too many custom formats being created leading to fragmentation of existing formats like Heirloom, or it might end up drawing players away from Wizards' own events, preferring to play their own formats based only on very cheap cards or cards that a bunch of people already own.
So, sadly, I don't see much hope for either just Heirloom becoming sanctioned--because of its ties to a single vendor--or for the client being able to support generic, custom formats--because of the inherent risks to Wizards, without commensurate rewards.
LED is broken as has been shown in Classic. But in a 20 creature deck I am not sure it has the same oomph. I think it was banned as a piece in the dredge combo. Moat is clearly not broken and imho someone up in the white ivory tower that is WOTC HQ screwed up big time when they banned it. I don't know what kind of results must have led to that banning but it seems to me to be ill-informed and just wrong. Hopefully they will come to their senses soon. Great article LE yet again. :) I built and have been playing with a cruel control deck myself lately. It is not surprising to me you swept a tourney with a variant using elves. (Though that is a nice innovation over my not so in-obvious goblins.) It seems our thinking runs parallel in some ways during deck building. I am a huge fan of the ultimatums and cruel in particular. (The only one I dislike is Titanic though I've seen that put to good use as a surprise overrun in a windbrisk heights deck. Ouch!)
Yeah on horrors week my horrors were crushed by ...soldiers. Dragons? by Baneslayers (Though in retrospect that seems fitting and funny at the time it was severely disappointing.) Spirits on the other hand placed with 3-1 in an endangered species field so I agree that enforcing themes is the only way to make them work. This optional stuff is for the birds...literally.
I also think your point about MTGOtraders is well said. Many of our fellow writers/players seem to take this site for granted and treat it rather casually. It is nice to see someone taking the time to thank the source of our entertainment enhancement. Hope your holidays are grand. :)
@Naga:
I think if they just had a card filter in the game and let it be searched in gatherer and such and mentioned that the format was designed with budget in mind it wouldn't be that hard implement. Since they already support pauper I see that as precedent that they might be willing to support Heirloom officially at some point. Certainly as you suggest that if enough people were playing they would want to get their hands on the rules in some way.
@Naproxen:
I think they would have to make some mention of how the list was generated and have it listed all in one place but they could be pretty brief about it certainly. The work required to maintain the format is a main barrier but I think if they considered the potential for recruiting lifelong players by offering them a cheap alternative to the major formats they might see that enough value existed to have someone put in 8-16 hours a month to update the list.
@Our-Cruel-Lord-Erman:
Hey I think the Godfalker (that sounds kind of funny for some reason) cards are pretty cool. Be great having you again when the schedule allows for it =)
@Artlee:
That's awesome to hear. Heirloom is a great resource for that sort of use. WOTC could make cash off the format by printing premium versions of popular decks or by printing premade versions of the decks that one could buy for very cheap. Either way it's all profit for them and with all of us toiling away at making good decks that takes the deck design work out of their hands. Also as I mentioned before they already set a precedent with pauper and just having people enjoying magic in general gives them rewards in the long run. There are also plenty of people at WOTC who I'm sure would love to see cards they designed being great in a format like Heirloom even if they're trash on the major tournament scene. Don't underestimate the timmy nature of some of the players inside of WOTC headquarters. "I've always loved the fatties." is a lead designer quote lol.
X-
I get the idea. And I completely agree with everything in the article. Bring what you want and be prepared for anything. I think the theme weeks should be obligatory though. But that is up to flippers.
I guess that was one of the games I didn't play with you. That deck is a true house though. Not really fun to play against and I imagine not all that fun to play unless you enjoy thinking A LOT about your interactions. Very intense deck. I see you managed to get in a game with Lythand and his Balthor deck. :) Of the games that we played together using this deck I don't think one actually completed.
Once again a great article. This is such a great source, even for the kitchen table casual gamer, for new deck ideas within a reasonable budget. My friends and I meet once in a while and play some mtg while having a beer. We are not going to spend high amounts of money on mythics etc, and Heirloom is now our primary source for deck ideas.
Merely due to the fact that Heirloom is based on card prices, I have a hard time imagining WotC would ever take part in this format.
Also, Heirloom is, in my opinion, not a format that is going to sell packs as it consists of the second or third best cards within it's genre.
Thanks for the comment and a quick response:
As I said in the article quite many times: Unwritten rules don't mean anything. Make it obligatory to play a theme deck and then everybody HAS TO play it. Make it free-at-will, I play whatever that wins.
That's the lesson I learned in the past in THIS tournament and that's what I also wrote in the article. There's no such thing as "gentlemen's rules" or other unwritten rules. We tried it. It didn't work.
Theme weeks could be really awesome events IF ONLY everybody MUST play a theme deck. Otherwise, what's the point? What deck won the dragon's theme week? What deck won the Horror theme week? I think you get the idea.
LE
I am starting to find the special events kind of pointless. Dont get me wrong I like the idea and think its fun. But there are only a few that actually join in the fun of building a deck for the occasion. Like this past weekend was the Christmas special event. Low and behold the top decks were your Elf Deck, the Wizard Breakfast deck and others playing Mono white. Come on now, you really cant come up with a deck for one weekend that steers away from the norm. I dont usually rant, and I dont have a problem with you Lord_Erman. But I wish people could just learn to relax a bit about the winning aspect and learn to have some fun.
Finally! Finally I have my planeswalker card! I did everything to get Xaos' attention to get one! I was so jealous of others who got theirs before I did. :)
Joking aside, thanks for the shout out and thanks for supporting the format. But a very special thanks to Naga for donating his prize the week before :)!!.
I will try to be with you guys the next time when the tournament is on Saturday again.
LE
I agree with Naga on this. In fact, they could simply update the legal cards list every month or so without any need to specify how and why cards have been made legal/illegal.
The only problem I see is that this format requires a lot of "maintenance" with the constant changes, and I'm not sure if WoTC would be willing to do it.
On the other hand, Xaos is doing a great job almost all by himself, so why couldn't WoTC do the same?
Lion's Eye Diamond: Ban it all you will, I don't own it anyway.
Beside that, are there resons for that banning you share?
Great to have so many decks to beat in one article ;-)