Usually a 3-2 run will get you into the top16 of this tournament - regardless of which order the wins come in. With all the early drops for those that don't do well and drop to join other events, and with the couple of folks who join just to fire each week, it is actually conceivable to get into the top 16 on a 1-4 record, although it takes a bit of luck.
One week I top 16'd after a record of loss-loss-bye-bye-win for the 5 swiss rounds.
I had been working on a Bob metadeck all week, and it looked almost identical to Xkorpio's, except that it didn't have red and didn't run Lavamancer. That helped a lot, I think. I wasn't too impressed with my build so I incorporated the Yixlid Jailer hate into the existing merfolk shell that had worked the previous week. Xkorpio's build was a much better take on the same deck, my hat is off to him for it. It certainly owned my merfolk.
I skipped the match reporting because your UBr build looked so bad. I am glad that you realized the mistake and I think you would have done a lot better with the second list. A few things that I would change in that list.
-1 land I don't see any particular reason this deck needs an 18th land
+1 Harbor Serpent This guy is usually unblockable in sealed
I think that -2 plains -2 infantry veteran -1 excommunicate +2 mountain +2 lightning bolt +1 prodigal pyromancer is a decent option as well and could have been an effective sideboard plan against some decks.
It's great that Classic is alive again. People are innovating and the meta is opening up. And I believe we had a pro in our midst during this event. Lands was ridiculous... people were making fun of him for it, but I had no answers for a lot of his moves in our game and he made top 8 with it. And the Bob metadeck was great. I tried to come up with one all week and couldn't make it work. I'm looking forward to the next one - even though it's at 8am for me.
I'm ok with the prize support. In this event, only a few people walked away empty-handed. I sold two of my packs for 5 and kept the third to round out a draft set. Yeah, I understand that this sucks - if these had been M11 packs I could have gotten 8 tix for those two. But I came in 11th and still won packs. And it's the only Classic tournament all week. That to me is worth losing one ticket on. Soon ME4 will be out and this problem will be taken care of.
I put a note to the editor that he might want to wait to publish the article until the images are uploaded, but I guess he disagreed! I will defer to him on the matter.
Not to pimp another site or anything or anything but the latest round of draft videos on channelfireball are pretty good examples of the kind of thing you are looking for.
When does Pure usually add card images? If the cards aren't up yet then then your editor (or someone from the site) should tell you to drop the formatting. This is especially it they don't get the cards up until the set is released online.
I wish so many of the draft reports didn't report on drafts that went incredibly smoothly. It makes me depressed when I'm doing real drafts. People always seem to start out in their colors and stay here, and get passed huge piles of goodies. This draft wasn't by any means the most outrageous example I've seen, but pick 6 cudgel trolls? Three blinding mages? Only in my dreams. I'd like to see a few more drafts where someone starts in one color, and then realizes the color is being cut and has to switch.
On the positive side, the draft was very readable and there were some difficult picks between alternate good cards.
Yeah.... believe me it will look a LOT better once PureMTGO gets Scars into its database. All of the (tmb=xyz) tags will create images and the (cardname) tags will create links to the cards.
Hey I'm right here ya' know XD. Nah I'll admit I'm really just being bitter about the support for the format, because I'm a bitter person. It's for this reason my friends stopped talking to me about movies.
"Jeff have you seen the Dark Night? Man it was AWESOME! What'd you think?"
"Yeah.. I mean.. Well it was 'okay', I guess..."
If the prizes only went out to top 8, I'd agree. However, with prizes going down to the top 16, it kinda evens out the packs value being so low. If you're winning the event this kinda sucks, but if you're a more casual player getting in some events it's a great way to play a tourney, and still make a little bit of money. The classic community is fantastic other than one single player. So i'd encourage you to join up with a deck and have some fun.
For those that like to complain about the price. Take a look at the decklist from the last PE with u/w merfolk being about the same price as a top end standard deck. The difference being, that your tundra and force of will, won't be worth half as much next year when cards rotate.
It's not that I want an easy ride, but it'd sure be nice to have some better format support beyond mediocre prizes for an event that may not even fire with a $400 average buy in price. It's not even so much that the prizes are bad, but how much WotC doesn't seem to care about it.
I think the thing is that people want an easy ride. +3 tix for a top 16 doesn't cut it I guess. Not after you spent $$$ to build your top 16 deck anyway.
It's not as bad as it seems... I agree that the payout could be better, but you can sell UZ for 3.5 and UL for 2.8 to 3 tix, so even if you get 9-16th and only get 1 UZ and 2 UL, you still can bot them for about 9 tix easily, which more than covers the 6 tix entry fee - and you got the fun of playing and the MOPR points. Draft sets of UZUZUL sell for 10 tix, so you generally come out ahead. Not far ahead, but ahead.
Join us next week and you might just see some of these:
(pic=Urza's Saga)
(pic=Urza's Legacy)
Good article and all, but that's kinda why I quit playing Classic for now. Oh boy, I have a shot at winning some iffy packs that might cover about half of my entry fee... Another shining example of WotC giving the finger to the MTGO community... /rant
All of Lobo's girlfriends have borderline personality disorder, of course she'd be smiling. Of course he has "girlfriends", he has lots of them, at the same time, on the same "date", "No commitments babe but you can ride the big wolf down the avenue anytime." Yeah Lobo was sweet way back when, maybe I'll have to check to see if theres any new material or old stuff I missed. Always need random things to tell people to get me for holidays anyway, otherwise I never know how much acting I'll have to do while opening things.
As for the winning appearances, I did go by the amount of times a deck has finished with a winning record 3-1/4-0 in a daily event.
Yeah, I would really like to get an accurate picture of the metagame by studying the decks and matchups but it may be too great of an undertaking. We'll see how my school load goes during the next few weeks.
Usually a 3-2 run will get you into the top16 of this tournament - regardless of which order the wins come in. With all the early drops for those that don't do well and drop to join other events, and with the couple of folks who join just to fire each week, it is actually conceivable to get into the top 16 on a 1-4 record, although it takes a bit of luck.
One week I top 16'd after a record of loss-loss-bye-bye-win for the 5 swiss rounds.
I had been working on a Bob metadeck all week, and it looked almost identical to Xkorpio's, except that it didn't have red and didn't run Lavamancer. That helped a lot, I think. I wasn't too impressed with my build so I incorporated the Yixlid Jailer hate into the existing merfolk shell that had worked the previous week. Xkorpio's build was a much better take on the same deck, my hat is off to him for it. It certainly owned my merfolk.
I skipped the match reporting because your UBr build looked so bad. I am glad that you realized the mistake and I think you would have done a lot better with the second list. A few things that I would change in that list.
-1 land I don't see any particular reason this deck needs an 18th land
+1 Harbor Serpent This guy is usually unblockable in sealed
I think that -2 plains -2 infantry veteran -1 excommunicate +2 mountain +2 lightning bolt +1 prodigal pyromancer is a decent option as well and could have been an effective sideboard plan against some decks.
You know that sounds pretty good. How many wins did you have to get that payout?
It's great that Classic is alive again. People are innovating and the meta is opening up. And I believe we had a pro in our midst during this event. Lands was ridiculous... people were making fun of him for it, but I had no answers for a lot of his moves in our game and he made top 8 with it. And the Bob metadeck was great. I tried to come up with one all week and couldn't make it work. I'm looking forward to the next one - even though it's at 8am for me.
I'm ok with the prize support. In this event, only a few people walked away empty-handed. I sold two of my packs for 5 and kept the third to round out a draft set. Yeah, I understand that this sucks - if these had been M11 packs I could have gotten 8 tix for those two. But I came in 11th and still won packs. And it's the only Classic tournament all week. That to me is worth losing one ticket on. Soon ME4 will be out and this problem will be taken care of.
I suppose you could use Disciple of the Vault, but that's the EASY way to do it. Where's your sense of massive Johnny combo player?
overlooked DoP
You could have waited to submit it until he responded... :)
I put a note to the editor that he might want to wait to publish the article until the images are uploaded, but I guess he disagreed! I will defer to him on the matter.
Not to pimp another site or anything or anything but the latest round of draft videos on channelfireball are pretty good examples of the kind of thing you are looking for.
When does Pure usually add card images? If the cards aren't up yet then then your editor (or someone from the site) should tell you to drop the formatting. This is especially it they don't get the cards up until the set is released online.
I wish so many of the draft reports didn't report on drafts that went incredibly smoothly. It makes me depressed when I'm doing real drafts. People always seem to start out in their colors and stay here, and get passed huge piles of goodies. This draft wasn't by any means the most outrageous example I've seen, but pick 6 cudgel trolls? Three blinding mages? Only in my dreams. I'd like to see a few more drafts where someone starts in one color, and then realizes the color is being cut and has to switch.
On the positive side, the draft was very readable and there were some difficult picks between alternate good cards.
Yeah.... believe me it will look a LOT better once PureMTGO gets Scars into its database. All of the (tmb=xyz) tags will create images and the (cardname) tags will create links to the cards.
"other than one single player"
Hey I'm right here ya' know XD. Nah I'll admit I'm really just being bitter about the support for the format, because I'm a bitter person. It's for this reason my friends stopped talking to me about movies.
"Jeff have you seen the Dark Night? Man it was AWESOME! What'd you think?"
"Yeah.. I mean.. Well it was 'okay', I guess..."
If the prizes only went out to top 8, I'd agree. However, with prizes going down to the top 16, it kinda evens out the packs value being so low. If you're winning the event this kinda sucks, but if you're a more casual player getting in some events it's a great way to play a tourney, and still make a little bit of money. The classic community is fantastic other than one single player. So i'd encourage you to join up with a deck and have some fun.
For those that like to complain about the price. Take a look at the decklist from the last PE with u/w merfolk being about the same price as a top end standard deck. The difference being, that your tundra and force of will, won't be worth half as much next year when cards rotate.
It's not that I want an easy ride, but it'd sure be nice to have some better format support beyond mediocre prizes for an event that may not even fire with a $400 average buy in price. It's not even so much that the prizes are bad, but how much WotC doesn't seem to care about it.
I think the thing is that people want an easy ride. +3 tix for a top 16 doesn't cut it I guess. Not after you spent $$$ to build your top 16 deck anyway.
It's not as bad as it seems... I agree that the payout could be better, but you can sell UZ for 3.5 and UL for 2.8 to 3 tix, so even if you get 9-16th and only get 1 UZ and 2 UL, you still can bot them for about 9 tix easily, which more than covers the 6 tix entry fee - and you got the fun of playing and the MOPR points. Draft sets of UZUZUL sell for 10 tix, so you generally come out ahead. Not far ahead, but ahead.
Join us next week and you might just see some of these:
(pic=Urza's Saga)
(pic=Urza's Legacy)
Good article and all, but that's kinda why I quit playing Classic for now. Oh boy, I have a shot at winning some iffy packs that might cover about half of my entry fee... Another shining example of WotC giving the finger to the MTGO community... /rant
Nice Analysis mate - the formatting of the page makes we want to poke my eyes out though. Ouch.
Well mostly from my wife lol, when my parents give me stuff it's generally baby stuff heh.
Rofl, you still get presents? Nice.
MMogg,
All of Lobo's girlfriends have borderline personality disorder, of course she'd be smiling. Of course he has "girlfriends", he has lots of them, at the same time, on the same "date", "No commitments babe but you can ride the big wolf down the avenue anytime." Yeah Lobo was sweet way back when, maybe I'll have to check to see if theres any new material or old stuff I missed. Always need random things to tell people to get me for holidays anyway, otherwise I never know how much acting I'll have to do while opening things.
Xaoslegend-
Would a girlfriend of Lobo be smiling? Perhaps if she were maiming. Would Lobo have a girlfriend? LOL Oh, how I miss Lobo. I wish he were a weekly. =(
As for the winning appearances, I did go by the amount of times a deck has finished with a winning record 3-1/4-0 in a daily event.
Yeah, I would really like to get an accurate picture of the metagame by studying the decks and matchups but it may be too great of an undertaking. We'll see how my school load goes during the next few weeks.