At U.S. Nationals, Conley Woods played a deck that featured 4 Serra Ascendants and went 6-2 in the Constructed Portion. A lot of MTGO players love them some Conley Woods' brews...
I can't afford any of the following expensive rares:
Baneslayer Angel
Fauna Shaman
Lotus Cobra
Knight of the Reliquary
Noble Hierarch
Maelstrom Pulse
Day of Judgment
So I decided I'll go rogue! Here are the cards I will choose to build around:
Primeval Titan
Vengevine
Jace the Mind Sculptor
Bloodbraid Elf
Lightning Bolt
Caveman's deck is the definition of rogue not this crap =/
Do you mean the banner of iconic card art behind your "A Caveman's Look" title? Cool selection of art for sure.
I thought perhaps you could use card art that resembles something more "cavemanish". I'm thinking of images like Stone Giant (Alpha, Beta, Revised art), Hill Giant (Alpha, Beta, Rev, and Portal art), Craven Giant (Stronghold), Cave People (duh) (Dark art), Cave Sense (!), Ronin Cavekeeper, you get the idea :)
I guess the irony of my suggestion lies in me using a hockey goalie avatar with a name like rpitcher :)
I gave up paper mtg when I realized I was driving hundreds of miles a year to pay large sums of money to play vintage against people I didn't like, and that I was drafting with assholes that would automatically assume that they lost to me because of luck, even though I had a 1906 limited rating when I quit (2nd/3rd/2nd/4th place, mostly by choice, in 4 limited PTQ's).
I sold my paper collection for just under 4 grand, got a new car, apartment, and a mtgo account full of cards. I have played some paper magic against my friends, but I dont do paper tourneys anymore.
I've also quit MtG only to return twice (so far) and played on and off a total of something like 15 years. I only played one other tcg/ccg much and tried several others. It was called ChronX "the original online ccg" - like MtG's lands and mana this futuristic post-apocalyptic game used bases to generate resources.
The similarities ... sometimes you lost from not having enough or the right type of resources (three kinds - Military, Covert, Cyber) ... basehunting or "land destruction" was a strategy
The difference ... unused resources accumulated from turn to turn so you could save up over a couple turns to play something ... most bases only produced resources for a few turns after 5 or 10 or however many turns the base stopped providing resources
so I guess no more emptying mana pools but every land has depletion counters is another "house rules" approach to add to the list
I gave Magic up for around 9 months (correponding to the large gap in my writing for this site) last time I got totally fed up with consistent bad luck. Another part of the annoyance is during these runs, it seems that the few times you draw a good opening seven, your opponent will be one of the types who quits every time they see anything less than a perfect opener. But that's a different article.
I'm in the same boat at the moment I get frustrated every time I try to play latley and feel like giving the game a rest for a bit, although my addiction always gets the better of me so we shall see how things turn out.
I'm really looking forward to the Coalition League but playing in the casual room is a big turn off at the moment.
I liked some of the Vs. System card game rules. I'm not completely sure of all of them since I played the game long ago but you were allowed one mulligan and you started out with the same amount of cards in hand. I don't believe you shuffled after a mulligan and I think you showed the cards to your opponent and put them on the bottom of the library. But the most important was that instead of land, you used resources to cast equipment, and superheroes. These cards were played face down and ANY card could be used as a resource but when it was used as a resource it had to stay there. The best cards to put in the resource row were locations since they were built for that space and couldn't be placed elsewhere and would provide bonuses and game changing states. But you basically couldn't be resource screwed because you could play one card in your resource row each turn. So if you were mana screwed it would be like converting a Grave Titan into a land and being able to add 1 Black mana to your pool but not being able to use the Grave Titan for any other purpose for the rest of the game.
I stopped playing Magic twice in my life but I never ever stopped playing trading card games. There were (and still are) always some other good card games around and I always found peace and calm and serenity playing those games with other gamers who never ever heard of "mana screw" and/or "mana flood" in their entire life.
Magic is the first trading card game but being the first one has also some problems. Which can't even be solved. Other game companies look at you and copy your best parts and avoid your worst ones. And the whole mana idea and lands as a card type, don't exist in other games. Yes, there are resources to play your cards but they work in a very different way. You never blame the shuffler, you never get mana screwed etc... You either have a good deck or a bad one. You either play good or bad. That simple.
If someone asked me what part of Magic I dislike the most, then my answer would be (without even thinking) lands. Lands are horrible. Really. We always think that we build decks with 60 cards. In reality this isn't true. We build decks with only 34-38 cards and the rest are just cards that allow us to play our "real" cards. This whole idea is really dumb.
But of course there is a difference between mana screw and color screw. Your example with your Jund deck consists both for example. You say you got two lands after you mulliganed but they were both wrong colors. Well, that can be avoided. I don't know how many and which lands you play, but a three color deck should always play TONS of nonbasics to avoid such badluck and misfortune.
I once had an opener with zero lands while playing a deck with 27 lands. I mulliganed and again no lands. I mulliganed to five and again no lands. I mulliganed to four and again no lands. I mulliganed to three and guess what? All three cards were freakin' lands!!! And sadly this kind of nonsense only happens in Magic.
Anyway, thanks for reminding me of the one thing I dislike the most about Magic. Lands!
I don't know, I remember being a new player back when the Kamigawa block was released. I understood that as a new player I'd lose a lot, but the newbie room is a good place to face other newbies. After a while I built my first deck, taken straight from a Building on a Budget article from the mothership, took it into the casual room and won a few games.
That process made sense to me as a new player, and introduced me gradually and simply to the game. Losing because of bad luck has never taught me anything, except that Magic is a potentially hugely frustrating game. And that's far more likely to put players off, old or new I'd have thought.
Its very true that some of the aggro creatures have to get sided out against control since they aren't ideal by any stretch. But don't discount doing 4-6 quick damage if they don't have a turn 2 wall in game ones. Or being able to reload if they wrath the board.
As to your second point, I totally see that when you compare your final budget list to mine. My comment/list is really intended to contrast with the non-budget draft list you posted. The one that runs Abyssal Persecutor and Sarkhan the Mad.
The were meta calls really. If you look at most of the winning decks both cards hit just about everything. And yes, Viva la UB Control! When I first really started playing I thought Recoil was the most amazing card ever... Then Psychatog and Finkeltrator were printed...
these changes would be the end of the newer player.
Magic isn't about fair, it's about luck vs skill. Without luck there would only be skilled players. And believe me this would leave little players enthusiastic enough to play the game.
Thanks for the comment Odindusk. I usually go 17 or 18 lands with my draft decks. Do you not find you sometimes lose to flood though with 18 lands? Last week I was alternately flooding / being screwed with the same decks in different games.
It's mostly a luck issue, the problem comes when you encounter an unreasonable run of bad luck all at once. A way to minimise this without ruining the game is the holy grail.
I know that this article isn't entirely based on land screw, but I wanted to say something about that.
I predominantly play limited formats, and always have in my 10 years of slinging cards. At some point a while back, I made the decision to ALWAYS play 18 land. I used to subscribe to "almost always" playing 17 lands and once in a blue moon running 16 if my curve was super low. But the pain from loss after loss due to stalling out on 2 or 3 land sent me into an aggravated spiral that caused me to realize that I'd rather rip a land late in the game, than rip another spell early on that I don't have the mana to cast. All I wanted was a chance to cast my spells. That's paramount to my desire to try squeezing just one more spell into the deck.
Now granted... statistically, the difference between 17 and 18 land in a 40-card deck is almost trivial. But somehow it's helped to right my mental state and I've definitely been a better player since I've made that change.
ripitcher Im glad I was able to help inspire you. Hopefully you'll be able to tweak it enough to make it a stronger deck. When I finish getting all the cards I will be trying to get it as strong as possible as well.
Also thanks paul for the comment.
Five big red ones for you for going U/B, my favourite colour combo. Nice looking list two, I think I've got most of the cards (besides big Jace, I'll replace him with his little brother). I'm always reluctant to main deck Doom Blade though, too often a dead card for me. Bring back Rend Flesh!
It seems to me, any Hobby with any serious amount of work in it has the potential to be unfun. There are lots of things in life that create tension for us. Figuring out how to alleviate it without being upset is something even oldsters have trouble with. Congrats on your 2nd child's pending arrival and hope it is healthy and happy.
Facing sleight of hand in Magic? Ouch, that's just not cricket (a phrase which I'm sure doesn't translate across the pond. It's just not baseball?).
You're right Paul, building your deck and manabase correctly certainly helps. I know some of my decks function better than others in terms of actually allowing me to play. The last straw recently though was when I turned to my best built, most consistent deck, and still had exactly the same problem. I have a limited amount of gaming time (and with a second child due any day now, that time is set to reduce further), and having just had an entire week's gaming time effectively lost to mana screw, I felt like something needed to change. Or I need to stop playing altogether, one of the two.
In reality it was just an exceptionally bad run of luck. This week my decks have been delivering pretty much what I need. But the knowledge that luck is temporary and is bound to change didn't help last week when I could barely play a spell. When your hobby is capable of being consistently unfun, something's wrong.
My most consistent deck at present isn't actually my Jund deck, it's my Dark Tutelage / Phylactery Lich deck from last week. Probably has something to do with building a decent curve for once, and the fact that the only two cards in the entire deck cost more than 3cc, and that's Consuming Vapors at 4cc. Means I can almost always cast what I want, even when I don't get much land. I can still flood, but not often, and that just makes Consume Spirit more potent. And Tutelage / Crystal Ball help too.
Anyway, 70% deck building, 30% luck sounds about right.
Sorry, but that wouldn't work, in older formats you could run combo decks with 1 land (belcher would certainly benefit) and just mulligan until you get a turn 1 win with protection. Perhaps if there was a limit of 1 free mulligan it would be okay, but i think this would just delay the problem slightly as people would expect a higher quality hand due to the potential increased card selection.
"I wish they'd make a "free draft" room, where you can draft sets for free, and just not keep anything you open, or win anything for playing." Try http://ccgdecks.com/draft_gen.php just remember to invite friends if you want the full experience. The AI will pick somewhat coherently but not always in a sensible fashion.
At U.S. Nationals, Conley Woods played a deck that featured 4 Serra Ascendants and went 6-2 in the Constructed Portion. A lot of MTGO players love them some Conley Woods' brews...
I have a great idea for an article:
I can't afford any of the following expensive rares:
Baneslayer Angel
Fauna Shaman
Lotus Cobra
Knight of the Reliquary
Noble Hierarch
Maelstrom Pulse
Day of Judgment
So I decided I'll go rogue! Here are the cards I will choose to build around:
Primeval Titan
Vengevine
Jace the Mind Sculptor
Bloodbraid Elf
Lightning Bolt
Caveman's deck is the definition of rogue not this crap =/
Do you mean the banner of iconic card art behind your "A Caveman's Look" title? Cool selection of art for sure.
I thought perhaps you could use card art that resembles something more "cavemanish". I'm thinking of images like Stone Giant (Alpha, Beta, Revised art), Hill Giant (Alpha, Beta, Rev, and Portal art), Craven Giant (Stronghold), Cave People (duh) (Dark art), Cave Sense (!), Ronin Cavekeeper, you get the idea :)
I guess the irony of my suggestion lies in me using a hockey goalie avatar with a name like rpitcher :)
I gave up paper mtg when I realized I was driving hundreds of miles a year to pay large sums of money to play vintage against people I didn't like, and that I was drafting with assholes that would automatically assume that they lost to me because of luck, even though I had a 1906 limited rating when I quit (2nd/3rd/2nd/4th place, mostly by choice, in 4 limited PTQ's).
I sold my paper collection for just under 4 grand, got a new car, apartment, and a mtgo account full of cards. I have played some paper magic against my friends, but I dont do paper tourneys anymore.
I've also quit MtG only to return twice (so far) and played on and off a total of something like 15 years. I only played one other tcg/ccg much and tried several others. It was called ChronX "the original online ccg" - like MtG's lands and mana this futuristic post-apocalyptic game used bases to generate resources.
The similarities ... sometimes you lost from not having enough or the right type of resources (three kinds - Military, Covert, Cyber) ... basehunting or "land destruction" was a strategy
The difference ... unused resources accumulated from turn to turn so you could save up over a couple turns to play something ... most bases only produced resources for a few turns after 5 or 10 or however many turns the base stopped providing resources
so I guess no more emptying mana pools but every land has depletion counters is another "house rules" approach to add to the list
I gave Magic up for around 9 months (correponding to the large gap in my writing for this site) last time I got totally fed up with consistent bad luck. Another part of the annoyance is during these runs, it seems that the few times you draw a good opening seven, your opponent will be one of the types who quits every time they see anything less than a perfect opener. But that's a different article.
I'm in the same boat at the moment I get frustrated every time I try to play latley and feel like giving the game a rest for a bit, although my addiction always gets the better of me so we shall see how things turn out.
I'm really looking forward to the Coalition League but playing in the casual room is a big turn off at the moment.
Could play some Momir basic! Never had mana problems in that format.
I liked some of the Vs. System card game rules. I'm not completely sure of all of them since I played the game long ago but you were allowed one mulligan and you started out with the same amount of cards in hand. I don't believe you shuffled after a mulligan and I think you showed the cards to your opponent and put them on the bottom of the library. But the most important was that instead of land, you used resources to cast equipment, and superheroes. These cards were played face down and ANY card could be used as a resource but when it was used as a resource it had to stay there. The best cards to put in the resource row were locations since they were built for that space and couldn't be placed elsewhere and would provide bonuses and game changing states. But you basically couldn't be resource screwed because you could play one card in your resource row each turn. So if you were mana screwed it would be like converting a Grave Titan into a land and being able to add 1 Black mana to your pool but not being able to use the Grave Titan for any other purpose for the rest of the game.
I stopped playing Magic twice in my life but I never ever stopped playing trading card games. There were (and still are) always some other good card games around and I always found peace and calm and serenity playing those games with other gamers who never ever heard of "mana screw" and/or "mana flood" in their entire life.
Magic is the first trading card game but being the first one has also some problems. Which can't even be solved. Other game companies look at you and copy your best parts and avoid your worst ones. And the whole mana idea and lands as a card type, don't exist in other games. Yes, there are resources to play your cards but they work in a very different way. You never blame the shuffler, you never get mana screwed etc... You either have a good deck or a bad one. You either play good or bad. That simple.
If someone asked me what part of Magic I dislike the most, then my answer would be (without even thinking) lands. Lands are horrible. Really. We always think that we build decks with 60 cards. In reality this isn't true. We build decks with only 34-38 cards and the rest are just cards that allow us to play our "real" cards. This whole idea is really dumb.
But of course there is a difference between mana screw and color screw. Your example with your Jund deck consists both for example. You say you got two lands after you mulliganed but they were both wrong colors. Well, that can be avoided. I don't know how many and which lands you play, but a three color deck should always play TONS of nonbasics to avoid such badluck and misfortune.
I once had an opener with zero lands while playing a deck with 27 lands. I mulliganed and again no lands. I mulliganed to five and again no lands. I mulliganed to four and again no lands. I mulliganed to three and guess what? All three cards were freakin' lands!!! And sadly this kind of nonsense only happens in Magic.
Anyway, thanks for reminding me of the one thing I dislike the most about Magic. Lands!
LE
I don't know, I remember being a new player back when the Kamigawa block was released. I understood that as a new player I'd lose a lot, but the newbie room is a good place to face other newbies. After a while I built my first deck, taken straight from a Building on a Budget article from the mothership, took it into the casual room and won a few games.
That process made sense to me as a new player, and introduced me gradually and simply to the game. Losing because of bad luck has never taught me anything, except that Magic is a potentially hugely frustrating game. And that's far more likely to put players off, old or new I'd have thought.
Its very true that some of the aggro creatures have to get sided out against control since they aren't ideal by any stretch. But don't discount doing 4-6 quick damage if they don't have a turn 2 wall in game ones. Or being able to reload if they wrath the board.
As to your second point, I totally see that when you compare your final budget list to mine. My comment/list is really intended to contrast with the non-budget draft list you posted. The one that runs Abyssal Persecutor and Sarkhan the Mad.
Thank you much! Now I have yet another new and exciting way to waste time at work :D
The were meta calls really. If you look at most of the winning decks both cards hit just about everything. And yes, Viva la UB Control! When I first really started playing I thought Recoil was the most amazing card ever... Then Psychatog and Finkeltrator were printed...
I use Fraps and Windows Media Encoder.
these changes would be the end of the newer player.
Magic isn't about fair, it's about luck vs skill. Without luck there would only be skilled players. And believe me this would leave little players enthusiastic enough to play the game.
What do you use to record those matches?
Thanks for the comment Odindusk. I usually go 17 or 18 lands with my draft decks. Do you not find you sometimes lose to flood though with 18 lands? Last week I was alternately flooding / being screwed with the same decks in different games.
It's mostly a luck issue, the problem comes when you encounter an unreasonable run of bad luck all at once. A way to minimise this without ruining the game is the holy grail.
I know that this article isn't entirely based on land screw, but I wanted to say something about that.
I predominantly play limited formats, and always have in my 10 years of slinging cards. At some point a while back, I made the decision to ALWAYS play 18 land. I used to subscribe to "almost always" playing 17 lands and once in a blue moon running 16 if my curve was super low. But the pain from loss after loss due to stalling out on 2 or 3 land sent me into an aggravated spiral that caused me to realize that I'd rather rip a land late in the game, than rip another spell early on that I don't have the mana to cast. All I wanted was a chance to cast my spells. That's paramount to my desire to try squeezing just one more spell into the deck.
Now granted... statistically, the difference between 17 and 18 land in a 40-card deck is almost trivial. But somehow it's helped to right my mental state and I've definitely been a better player since I've made that change.
ripitcher Im glad I was able to help inspire you. Hopefully you'll be able to tweak it enough to make it a stronger deck. When I finish getting all the cards I will be trying to get it as strong as possible as well.
Also thanks paul for the comment.
Also how do you guys like the banner by the way?
Five big red ones for you for going U/B, my favourite colour combo. Nice looking list two, I think I've got most of the cards (besides big Jace, I'll replace him with his little brother). I'm always reluctant to main deck Doom Blade though, too often a dead card for me. Bring back Rend Flesh!
And on that note, Flashfreeze maindecked too!
It seems to me, any Hobby with any serious amount of work in it has the potential to be unfun. There are lots of things in life that create tension for us. Figuring out how to alleviate it without being upset is something even oldsters have trouble with. Congrats on your 2nd child's pending arrival and hope it is healthy and happy.
Facing sleight of hand in Magic? Ouch, that's just not cricket (a phrase which I'm sure doesn't translate across the pond. It's just not baseball?).
You're right Paul, building your deck and manabase correctly certainly helps. I know some of my decks function better than others in terms of actually allowing me to play. The last straw recently though was when I turned to my best built, most consistent deck, and still had exactly the same problem. I have a limited amount of gaming time (and with a second child due any day now, that time is set to reduce further), and having just had an entire week's gaming time effectively lost to mana screw, I felt like something needed to change. Or I need to stop playing altogether, one of the two.
In reality it was just an exceptionally bad run of luck. This week my decks have been delivering pretty much what I need. But the knowledge that luck is temporary and is bound to change didn't help last week when I could barely play a spell. When your hobby is capable of being consistently unfun, something's wrong.
My most consistent deck at present isn't actually my Jund deck, it's my Dark Tutelage / Phylactery Lich deck from last week. Probably has something to do with building a decent curve for once, and the fact that the only two cards in the entire deck cost more than 3cc, and that's Consuming Vapors at 4cc. Means I can almost always cast what I want, even when I don't get much land. I can still flood, but not often, and that just makes Consume Spirit more potent. And Tutelage / Crystal Ball help too.
Anyway, 70% deck building, 30% luck sounds about right.
Sorry, but that wouldn't work, in older formats you could run combo decks with 1 land (belcher would certainly benefit) and just mulligan until you get a turn 1 win with protection. Perhaps if there was a limit of 1 free mulligan it would be okay, but i think this would just delay the problem slightly as people would expect a higher quality hand due to the potential increased card selection.
"I wish they'd make a "free draft" room, where you can draft sets for free, and just not keep anything you open, or win anything for playing." Try http://ccgdecks.com/draft_gen.php just remember to invite friends if you want the full experience. The AI will pick somewhat coherently but not always in a sensible fashion.