@Would Wizards ever make Heirloom an official format?
If Heirloom keeps growing like Pauper did years ago they will take control in some way I think.
WoC would not have to interact with the secondary market officially. The banned list could be updated under "casual aspects" or something called like that. So cards that are heavy played in established formats like standard, extanded etc. (=expansive) would be banned. No mentioning of a secondary market price would be necessary I guess...
Thanks for checking it out again. Certainly there are pros and cons to all the approaches to the meta. I think all 4 of those are very good options for success though. Clearly many types of each have succeeded (including discard now =P).
RE Naproxen:
Great to hear about the casual room. Haven't been in there myself that much lately, though I did test my discard deck in there a few times before the last event. I had forgotten about Rule of Law myself until recently.
RE gaztaseven:
I don't think there is any law that says Wizards can't interact with the secondary market. They have certain internal guidelines that they tend to go by but they intervene all the time in the secondary market already in far more direct ways than sanctioning formats. For example as some have said including Hamtastic, when people started hoarding MED duals way back when they basically made it free toward the end of the release events to play sealed to get more cards in the online card pool. They also reprint singles, redefine formats (like extended) and ban offending cards for various reasons destroying their value.
As someone who used to run a card shop let me tell you that budget players/formats were for me often the most profitable on the sales side. I needed to have a lot of cards in stock in any case but the cards that were not expensive always allowed me the best profit margin. If I sold 20 basic lands for 10 cents each that was pretty much 2 dollars profit since I always had infinite more basics but not infinite more dollars. As far as other low end singles would go I would usually got rares for 5-10 cents each if they were bottom priced and sell them for $0.25-1.00. On high priced cards I might buy for 10% less than I was selling and any shift in the market would often cause me losses. I would have liked better margins on top end cards but a local wholesale/hobby center made that nearly impossible due to competition.
I think there are plenty of reasons WOTC would not support sanctioning the format but not for these reasons other than the value instability issue.
Of course I could be wrong, and it's great to hear your opinion,
Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely WOTC will ever sanction Heirloom. This is because the legal card list is based entirely on the secondary market, with which WOTC are legally allowed absolutely no interaction. I doubt the secondary market would welcome it either. If Heirloom took off on the scale of sanctioned formats, card prices would be highly unstable, as cards leave and join the Heirloom list. We would likely see an overall increase in card prices, as speculators and shops try and keep reasonable profit margins while still providing for the format. This dynamic is what makes Heirloom such an interesting, diverse format, but for card traders, it just means a lot of risk and work.
This is just my theory though, i'd like to see other viewpoints :)
Thanks for another nice article!
Good to see more and more people getting interested in Heirloom. Every day I see someone in the Casual room asking about it. :D
If won't be easy to have WotC make it an official format though :(
@Naga: not only Arcane Laboratory is legal, but Rule of Law is too ;)
Love the tribal lands pics heh, great use of images. I totally agree about gentleman's rules. It just rewards the least gentlemanly person to win and then doesn't even let them feel good about winning, silly. I keep meaning to take one of my tribal Heirloom decks to one of these events, since I think theyd probably do just fine and it would be a fun change of pace to play in a different PRE than mine. (Which I've never actually done, strange come to think of it lol)
I think this was one of the first article series I read about a year ago, I never did get very good at pauper but it made me give it a chance for awhile. I like the writing style as it's intelligent and flows nicely and having several deck lists to see the way you brainstorm is always really nice.
As someone who was around when they first banned Cranial Plating, it just seems stupid that that card is banned now. Pauper has evolved from a simple PRE format with a limited number of commons (Invasion block, Odyssey block, Onslaught Block, Mirrodin block and two Core sets). I think Cranial Plating got the axe either just before or after the release of Kamigawa block. Affinity was just the best mechanic out by far, at common. With so many sets in the mix now, newer broken mechanics, and older broken cards, the B&R List definitely needs to be updated.
I don't know how anyone can make a Pauper deck that someone could play against and not hate Magic. Sure a U/R Ponza style deck is bound to irk some people. But it's not like playing against Discard, Countermagic, Burn, or Storm is any more enjoyable.
I was having a great time with Pauper Prismatic Singleton until they decided to axe the Prismatic format for a format that no one plays.
The card pool for Pauper is insane. Sure people get to play some of the most powerful throwbacks. But as you already pointed out, only a very small subset of cards is being played, so trying to keep the format diverse by allowing all sets to be legal is actually having the opposite effect. A lot of really good commons are unplayable because the format is so fast. But I really doubt WOTC cares enough about the format to give it the overhaul it needs to be non-ultra Spikey again.
He seems to put the enchantments into a seperate category, if you read the last sentence of the article. I think it would make sense to add them together. Another non-enchantment black reanimate spell to add to the list would be Beacon of Unrest.
Cool idea for an article. It would be cool to have a compendium of cards for a whole bunch of criteria. Too bad we don't have wikis. If the "groups" on the official site weren't so dead, I'd suggest that somebody go over there to the 100CS group and create such a wiki.
I feel like I must have misread something for you to not include some of the more prominent reanimate effects. Animate Dead, Necromancy, Recurring Nightmare? Even Dance of the Dead is playable if you're more interested in the enters the battlefield effects or just think your opponent's creatures are better than your own.
"I think through playing more and more with a deck like this against my former pet decks, I'm really starting to see the major flaws in them, more so than I would by actually playing them."
This is SO true. I'm an aggressive player at heart, and I really hate playing control because it just doesn't suit my playing style. However sometimes I force myself to play control or at least controllish type decks and I usually learn more from those experiences than I do from playing decktypes that I'm comfortable with.
"...shows promise if the format ever slows down." That's some BIGTIME optimism! I don't see pauper as ever slowing down, only speeding up. Nor is it unhealthy, every week is a mash up of a dozen or so decks, that all take turns at winning via rock/paper/scisors etc..., Mathamatically, pauper is only going to get meaner/faster with each new expansions - it's magic at its purest imo.
Blue seas is a great start - but be warned, I've played similar decks in the decades past, and it makes people HATE magic :) The snapper is a nice touch, and to make a point...the snapper this time last year wasn't anything more than a file in the filecabinets of wizards.
I'm not pointing fingers at you Alex, your great for the game and everyone loves your stuff - - - I just don't like the opinions of "Chicken Little." Wizards, or should I say Wizard$ has rubbed a lot of players the wrong way, but lets not forget how INSANELY hard it is to have a balanced format like pauper with so many THOUSANDS of cards in existance. I think this format alone prooves how capable Wizards is. Had they known from the start pauper would exist it would still be impressive, but to have it created on the sidelines and it STILL holds up as well as it does...well it really proves they know what they're doing on the creative side of things. Now if they could only fix their software :)
Well the one thing I want to do is have the guts to play Devastating Summons with Koth. It is really tough to beat when it gets fired off for X=5. X=4 is managable, and less than that is pretty easy.
The thing about Mox Opal, the MTGO shuffler has been really, really, really land screwing me this past week. Every so often there will be a game where that Mox Opal digs me out of a tight spot, and thus making me inclined to leave it in just a tad bit longer. In the past 2 weeks, I've only had 1 dead draw from Mox, and that's when I got dealt both of them in the opening hand with 0 Rebirth the entire game. Other than that, it's always been pretty useful.
Hammy has been testing the Red Control deck a lot. Honestly, I just don't think it is suitable for this current metagame. All the other control decks can accelerate into their bombs waaaaaay easier and waaaaaay faster than Red can. And they have countermagic for your Turn 3-4 Koth =/
I have been wanting to cut Masticore from the deck. Maybe for another Koth?
I'm still not sure about the burn suite, but my feelings right now are that I don't really want to draw 2 of Burst Lighting/Staggershock, so having 1 of each is nice, although I occasionally get mana screwed with Staggershock sitting in my hand. Maybe a maindeck Arc Trail wouldn't hurt. Most B/R Vamps I've been running into this week have cut Mark of Mutiny for Arc Trail in the main.
I've been playing a fair amount of SOM over the least week. Mainly poison. I started with the stock mono black builds but have moved towards Bg. The mana can get awkward at times, but I find the Bg version to be much stronger vs. Mono-Red than the mono black version - to the extent where I feel like they are actually favored. Tumble magnets are killer vs. poison though.
TY for credits on my Kuldotha build and I enjoyed reading another week of improvements from you.
I really hoped you had given up on mox Opal by now, even replacing it with ornithoptrs should give you the occasional 1 extra bushwacker damage and a blocker against Caw-go
I've been toying with the staggershock into koth idea and found out that you play little of both maindeck 2:1.
This provides only the occasional lose/lose situation for control decks. I'd up the maindeck number of koth to at least three and add staggershock either to the maindeck or sideboard. You should play a healthy dose of 4 staggers.. (they also deal with jace).
As for UW builds, I've had my Furnace Celebration, Celestial Purge-d quite often lately. I hope this trend doesn't continue.
I'm glad we can learn from each other. In paper I already play koth because of you, while online i often stand in awe of furnace celebration. Maybe at some point i'll just forfeit the aggro plan and build a sick red control deck.. we'll see
I has a discussion like this with the fine people at Wizards during the 1st Community Cup in 2009. As it stands, Pauper is not populated enough to fragment the player base. As it stands, we are pulling between 30 and 50 for an event on average recently, and offering two "new" formats could kill the sanctioned events as we know them currently.
Additionally, Standard has far too small a card pool to develop a healthy metagame, and I am not sure if current Extended has enough either. I made that suggestion simply because I believe The "double-Standard" model does provide quite a few cards and the opportunity to try new ideas fairly regularly.
It's because of all the mirrors that I've changed my main to include a Wurmcoil Engine and two Arc Trails. This alone has helped immensely in the mirror, and actually makes sideboarding easier. I've also finally broke down and put the Liquimetal Coating (3) and Shatter (4) package in the sideboard, and I'm pleasantly surprised.
I admit that I am very new to the Pauper format. However, it seems to me that Frantic Storm decks can't work without the mana advantage that the Urza block untap spells create when combined with bouncelands and Familiars. Therefore, one would think that a permission control with Spreading Seas might be the answer here - cheap counters like Force Spike can prevent them from resolving an early Familary and buy you the time you need to establish a winning board position.
Have you tried Lotus Petals or other mana accelerators in the LD decks - perhaps even a UG build with Thermokarst and mana elves?
@Would Wizards ever make Heirloom an official format?
If Heirloom keeps growing like Pauper did years ago they will take control in some way I think.
WoC would not have to interact with the secondary market officially. The banned list could be updated under "casual aspects" or something called like that. So cards that are heavy played in established formats like standard, extanded etc. (=expansive) would be banned. No mentioning of a secondary market price would be necessary I guess...
Be careful not to mess up layers when altering power and toughness. I've seen you mention accorder's shield and trigon above.
RE Naga:
Thanks for checking it out again. Certainly there are pros and cons to all the approaches to the meta. I think all 4 of those are very good options for success though. Clearly many types of each have succeeded (including discard now =P).
RE Naproxen:
Great to hear about the casual room. Haven't been in there myself that much lately, though I did test my discard deck in there a few times before the last event. I had forgotten about Rule of Law myself until recently.
RE gaztaseven:
I don't think there is any law that says Wizards can't interact with the secondary market. They have certain internal guidelines that they tend to go by but they intervene all the time in the secondary market already in far more direct ways than sanctioning formats. For example as some have said including Hamtastic, when people started hoarding MED duals way back when they basically made it free toward the end of the release events to play sealed to get more cards in the online card pool. They also reprint singles, redefine formats (like extended) and ban offending cards for various reasons destroying their value.
As someone who used to run a card shop let me tell you that budget players/formats were for me often the most profitable on the sales side. I needed to have a lot of cards in stock in any case but the cards that were not expensive always allowed me the best profit margin. If I sold 20 basic lands for 10 cents each that was pretty much 2 dollars profit since I always had infinite more basics but not infinite more dollars. As far as other low end singles would go I would usually got rares for 5-10 cents each if they were bottom priced and sell them for $0.25-1.00. On high priced cards I might buy for 10% less than I was selling and any shift in the market would often cause me losses. I would have liked better margins on top end cards but a local wholesale/hobby center made that nearly impossible due to competition.
I think there are plenty of reasons WOTC would not support sanctioning the format but not for these reasons other than the value instability issue.
Of course I could be wrong, and it's great to hear your opinion,
X-
Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely WOTC will ever sanction Heirloom. This is because the legal card list is based entirely on the secondary market, with which WOTC are legally allowed absolutely no interaction. I doubt the secondary market would welcome it either. If Heirloom took off on the scale of sanctioned formats, card prices would be highly unstable, as cards leave and join the Heirloom list. We would likely see an overall increase in card prices, as speculators and shops try and keep reasonable profit margins while still providing for the format. This dynamic is what makes Heirloom such an interesting, diverse format, but for card traders, it just means a lot of risk and work.
This is just my theory though, i'd like to see other viewpoints :)
Thanks for another nice article!
Good to see more and more people getting interested in Heirloom. Every day I see someone in the Casual room asking about it. :D
If won't be easy to have WotC make it an official format though :(
@Naga: not only Arcane Laboratory is legal, but Rule of Law is too ;)
Great read again!
Didn't know that Arcane Laboratory was legal, thx for the info :-)
Very good analysis of the meta game situation and great answers for it! The problem is to fit all into one deck...
tappedout.net is awsome for heirloom searches! I always used magiccards.info for advanced searches, but now i can only display heirloom legal cards!!!
Sorry, but i did not get the point of article.
A lot of cards with comment: i will not play this, there are better cards.
Our-Cruel-Lord-Erman,
Love the tribal lands pics heh, great use of images. I totally agree about gentleman's rules. It just rewards the least gentlemanly person to win and then doesn't even let them feel good about winning, silly. I keep meaning to take one of my tribal Heirloom decks to one of these events, since I think theyd probably do just fine and it would be a fun change of pace to play in a different PRE than mine. (Which I've never actually done, strange come to think of it lol)
X-
I think this was one of the first article series I read about a year ago, I never did get very good at pauper but it made me give it a chance for awhile. I like the writing style as it's intelligent and flows nicely and having several deck lists to see the way you brainstorm is always really nice.
X-
As someone who was around when they first banned Cranial Plating, it just seems stupid that that card is banned now. Pauper has evolved from a simple PRE format with a limited number of commons (Invasion block, Odyssey block, Onslaught Block, Mirrodin block and two Core sets). I think Cranial Plating got the axe either just before or after the release of Kamigawa block. Affinity was just the best mechanic out by far, at common. With so many sets in the mix now, newer broken mechanics, and older broken cards, the B&R List definitely needs to be updated.
I don't know how anyone can make a Pauper deck that someone could play against and not hate Magic. Sure a U/R Ponza style deck is bound to irk some people. But it's not like playing against Discard, Countermagic, Burn, or Storm is any more enjoyable.
I was having a great time with Pauper Prismatic Singleton until they decided to axe the Prismatic format for a format that no one plays.
The card pool for Pauper is insane. Sure people get to play some of the most powerful throwbacks. But as you already pointed out, only a very small subset of cards is being played, so trying to keep the format diverse by allowing all sets to be legal is actually having the opposite effect. A lot of really good commons are unplayable because the format is so fast. But I really doubt WOTC cares enough about the format to give it the overhaul it needs to be non-ultra Spikey again.
He seems to put the enchantments into a seperate category, if you read the last sentence of the article. I think it would make sense to add them together. Another non-enchantment black reanimate spell to add to the list would be Beacon of Unrest.
Cool idea for an article. It would be cool to have a compendium of cards for a whole bunch of criteria. Too bad we don't have wikis. If the "groups" on the official site weren't so dead, I'd suggest that somebody go over there to the 100CS group and create such a wiki.
I feel like I must have misread something for you to not include some of the more prominent reanimate effects. Animate Dead, Necromancy, Recurring Nightmare? Even Dance of the Dead is playable if you're more interested in the enters the battlefield effects or just think your opponent's creatures are better than your own.
Koth Red is the deck to beat right now. I think I will move the Wurmcoils to the mainboard for the battlesperes.
Strata Scythe is the bomb. I top decked one against the mirror and had a 15/15 iron myr swing for the come from behind win once.
This is my favorite quote from your article.
"I think through playing more and more with a deck like this against my former pet decks, I'm really starting to see the major flaws in them, more so than I would by actually playing them."
This is SO true. I'm an aggressive player at heart, and I really hate playing control because it just doesn't suit my playing style. However sometimes I force myself to play control or at least controllish type decks and I usually learn more from those experiences than I do from playing decktypes that I'm comfortable with.
"...shows promise if the format ever slows down." That's some BIGTIME optimism! I don't see pauper as ever slowing down, only speeding up. Nor is it unhealthy, every week is a mash up of a dozen or so decks, that all take turns at winning via rock/paper/scisors etc..., Mathamatically, pauper is only going to get meaner/faster with each new expansions - it's magic at its purest imo.
Blue seas is a great start - but be warned, I've played similar decks in the decades past, and it makes people HATE magic :) The snapper is a nice touch, and to make a point...the snapper this time last year wasn't anything more than a file in the filecabinets of wizards.
I'm not pointing fingers at you Alex, your great for the game and everyone loves your stuff - - - I just don't like the opinions of "Chicken Little." Wizards, or should I say Wizard$ has rubbed a lot of players the wrong way, but lets not forget how INSANELY hard it is to have a balanced format like pauper with so many THOUSANDS of cards in existance. I think this format alone prooves how capable Wizards is. Had they known from the start pauper would exist it would still be impressive, but to have it created on the sidelines and it STILL holds up as well as it does...well it really proves they know what they're doing on the creative side of things. Now if they could only fix their software :)
Oh and welcome back too!
I know! I got really excited for the Phyrexian article!!
Well the one thing I want to do is have the guts to play Devastating Summons with Koth. It is really tough to beat when it gets fired off for X=5. X=4 is managable, and less than that is pretty easy.
The thing about Mox Opal, the MTGO shuffler has been really, really, really land screwing me this past week. Every so often there will be a game where that Mox Opal digs me out of a tight spot, and thus making me inclined to leave it in just a tad bit longer. In the past 2 weeks, I've only had 1 dead draw from Mox, and that's when I got dealt both of them in the opening hand with 0 Rebirth the entire game. Other than that, it's always been pretty useful.
Hammy has been testing the Red Control deck a lot. Honestly, I just don't think it is suitable for this current metagame. All the other control decks can accelerate into their bombs waaaaaay easier and waaaaaay faster than Red can. And they have countermagic for your Turn 3-4 Koth =/
I have been wanting to cut Masticore from the deck. Maybe for another Koth?
I'm still not sure about the burn suite, but my feelings right now are that I don't really want to draw 2 of Burst Lighting/Staggershock, so having 1 of each is nice, although I occasionally get mana screwed with Staggershock sitting in my hand. Maybe a maindeck Arc Trail wouldn't hurt. Most B/R Vamps I've been running into this week have cut Mark of Mutiny for Arc Trail in the main.
It's coming, promise :) Expect it in a couple weeks. I'm deliberately pacing the lore articles.
Red is one of my favorite colors to play. Koth is one of my favorite Planeswalkers, just for flavor alone.
What happened to the continuation of the Dominarian History?
I've been playing a fair amount of SOM over the least week. Mainly poison. I started with the stock mono black builds but have moved towards Bg. The mana can get awkward at times, but I find the Bg version to be much stronger vs. Mono-Red than the mono black version - to the extent where I feel like they are actually favored. Tumble magnets are killer vs. poison though.
the liquimetal/shatter can be potent.....game winning if you get a liquimetal down and they dont revoke or shatter it
TY for credits on my Kuldotha build and I enjoyed reading another week of improvements from you.
I really hoped you had given up on mox Opal by now, even replacing it with ornithoptrs should give you the occasional 1 extra bushwacker damage and a blocker against Caw-go
I've been toying with the staggershock into koth idea and found out that you play little of both maindeck 2:1.
This provides only the occasional lose/lose situation for control decks. I'd up the maindeck number of koth to at least three and add staggershock either to the maindeck or sideboard. You should play a healthy dose of 4 staggers.. (they also deal with jace).
As for UW builds, I've had my Furnace Celebration, Celestial Purge-d quite often lately. I hope this trend doesn't continue.
I'm glad we can learn from each other. In paper I already play koth because of you, while online i often stand in awe of furnace celebration. Maybe at some point i'll just forfeit the aggro plan and build a sick red control deck.. we'll see
I has a discussion like this with the fine people at Wizards during the 1st Community Cup in 2009. As it stands, Pauper is not populated enough to fragment the player base. As it stands, we are pulling between 30 and 50 for an event on average recently, and offering two "new" formats could kill the sanctioned events as we know them currently.
Additionally, Standard has far too small a card pool to develop a healthy metagame, and I am not sure if current Extended has enough either. I made that suggestion simply because I believe The "double-Standard" model does provide quite a few cards and the opportunity to try new ideas fairly regularly.
-Alex
Well you read my mind on the article order :D
It's because of all the mirrors that I've changed my main to include a Wurmcoil Engine and two Arc Trails. This alone has helped immensely in the mirror, and actually makes sideboarding easier. I've also finally broke down and put the Liquimetal Coating (3) and Shatter (4) package in the sideboard, and I'm pleasantly surprised.
I admit that I am very new to the Pauper format. However, it seems to me that Frantic Storm decks can't work without the mana advantage that the Urza block untap spells create when combined with bouncelands and Familiars. Therefore, one would think that a permission control with Spreading Seas might be the answer here - cheap counters like Force Spike can prevent them from resolving an early Familary and buy you the time you need to establish a winning board position.
Have you tried Lotus Petals or other mana accelerators in the LD decks - perhaps even a UG build with Thermokarst and mana elves?