actually i said i like playing decks that can do broken things not exactly broken decks But i suppose the point is more or less the same in either case we enjoy doing things that we more likely then not cannot pull off on a daily basis.
I've been bashed for playing combo in all forms, dual lands and the price of my decks in the end I got fed up and stopped playing in the events and went off and found another event to play in.
I like Ranth enjoy playing broken decks but if there are no defined restrictions/banned list for the event then you have to expect these decks as not everyone wants to play 20 creatures 20 removal and 20 lands. You cant bash a player for playing a deck if you have no rules in place to restrict the types of cards/interactions you dont want to see.
My reply was to Scartore's post rather than Kaladine's. However, preventing the boarding of a given type is even more unlikely than Wizards adding sideboards to the format. If we want to fix it, we cannot rely on the client, or on the honor system.
"Our research took another turn, however, when we investigated how Legacy is played in the real world. We discovered something rather interesting, and that is that Mystical Tutor decks were quite rare at Legacy tournaments that did not have tons of money on the line. At Grand Prix and other cash tournaments, people were happy to bust out their Mystical Tutors. However, in the comfort of their home stores they seemed to prefer doing other things that were more fun, if perhaps less powerful. This struck me as being a sort of gentleman's agreement; everyone knew what sick decks were out there, but they chose not to play them."
That's the situation here. We know you can break tribal wide open the way the doomsday shelldock deck does, or dredge does or any one of a dozen different ways. It's a flawed, broken format. My main argument against Wizards ever santioning it again is precisely because of the 'This is a sponsored tournament' attitude. The format cannot (and as a sanctioned format, didn't!) survive that.
If you're willing to accept that it's broken and not exploit the breaks, there's a hell of a lot of fun to be had. That's what the tournament aims for.
Tribe legality doesn't stop altering the nature of a tribe. With a few changelings or dual tribe members as a fulcrum, you could go from soldiers to angels or rats to ninja post-board.
Red decks arent a problem? Maybe u need to go back and look at the comments of your past few articles and refresh your memory of what people have got blasted for during the tournies.
"No one is trying to force you to play a particular way, but they might be asking that don’t play a particular way as well."
This is more or less the same thing as making a tourney that reads. No Elves,Goblins,Faries,counters,LD,Eldrazi,2 card combo's, infinate combos,Burn,Dredge,Reanimation...Dual lands(yes we've had people made to feel bad because they had a better mana base then another player)
Um not sure what else off the top of my head but that was just the things i've seen people get blasted by the other players and HOST for playing and get called a DB for it.
Soooo basically play an aggro deck with spot removal only or be a personal friend of this tight knit group or risk getting blasted for playing anything that might be more then a 20$ casual deck.
If you guys wanna have casual games with insane amounts of rules fine do that, but at least keep the rules of what's acceptable consistant.
Also sorry to say Shard you claim you and others play for fun and think that I dont? Maybe you and the others haven't noticed but some people happen to enjoy doing broken things in games and you've known me long enough to know that I happen to be one of thoes people.
only no one complained about the winter orb deck. It was not a consistent progenitus on turn 3 deck. He had a multitude on win coniditions and a deck that actually worked well around his tribe. ON the other hand the Shelldock Doomsday deck used vampires, but could have used faeire or wizards or surrakar. Basically any blue or black tribe and it wold not have mattered since they where chaff and unimportant to the deck as a whole.
This was my decklist, feel free to make comments or constructive critism:
Lands: (16)
4 Seat of the Synod
4 Ancient Den
4 Darksteel Citadel (good against artifact destruction: gorilla shaman/ancient grudge/qasali pridemage)
2 Great Furnace
2 Vault of Whispers
Creatures: (17)
3 Trinket Mage (searches for that 1 CC artifact you need)
3 Leonin Squire (returns that 1 CC artifact you need)
3 Quicksilver Behemoth (note that he helps with reaping the graves to return even more)
4 Myr Enforcer (auto include)
4 Frogmite (auto include)
Spells: (27)
4 Springleaf Drum (need 4 with so much mana required)
4 Pyrite Spellbomb (much need spot removal or burn to the dome)
4 Chromatic Star
4 Thoughtcast
4 Prismatic Lens (need 4 with so much mana required)
3 Rush of Knowledge
2 Reaping the Graves (extremely good, ok against graveyard removal as long as you can just time it right)
1 Æther Spellbomb (searchable and if not needed just cycle, helps alot against certain matchups)
1 Sunbeam Spellbomb (searchable and if not needed just cycle, helps alot against certain matchups)
Sideboard
3 Krark-Clan Shaman (if you need a board sweeper on the ground)
3 Benevolent Unicorn (against storm or mono R burn)
1 Reaping the Graves (against MUC control or against board sweepers)
2 Ancient Grudge (mirror match or picks off spire golem)
4 Snow-Covered Islands (not sure about this one but I run into gorilla shaman way to often and this helps ALOT)
2 Ray of Revelation (against pestilence mostly but also good against annoying enchantments, rancor, armadillo etc)
The problem here is that everyone's line in the sand is different. The Natural Order / Progenitus combo has happened in at least two other decks before, and one deck was tuned as best possible to pull it off by turn 3. Without an exhaustive banned list or a treatise that no one wants to read concerning the acceptable/unacceptable constraints on deck building, the differences of opinions will continue.
I love Tribal Classic and I applaud what Shard is trying to do, but I have gotten frustrated in various weeks where I bring a knife to a gun fight and the week I do win, I get blasted for my deck choice.
I plan to keep participating as time allows, but every week I plan to either (a) bring a deck to win regardless of other players' feelings about that deck, or (b) bringing a deck I want to play and not worry about my win-loss record.
If they wanted to make it easy, for classic tribal the could set the program to prevent sideboarding of creatures. Not perfect, but it would solve any legality issues for post-sideboard decks.
Is the rumored to come "over-extended" a possible solution?
Also, has anybody bugged wotc about fixing the sideboard problem with tribal? As I see it the problem is keeping the deck tribal legal post sideboard, so why don't we get the program to doublecheck the tribal legality postsb? It already checks to make sure you have 60 cards, so how hard could that be?
That article makes some good points but... His solutions only work at the kitchen table, where the rules in play actually are flexible. As we at the mercy of the program, we have no real way to enforce any bannings, or mana limits, or spells per turn limits etc. All we can do is ask politely that the participants in Shard's tournement understand the nature of the decks we expect to face. As I've said before, it's Shards event, he has every right to chastise people for bringing guns to his knife fights.
One option to resolve the blue mana issue is Trinket Mage. While it does take a blue mana to cast him, that mana can come from a temporary source such as a Chromatic Sphere or Lotus Petal and then the little mage can power the Springleaf Drum and/or search for a Seat of Synod.
I ended up playing against both 'combo decks' this week: I took a game vs the shelldock emrakul shoehorn thanks to speeding out an expensive permanent capable of dealing with the isle, but lost 0-2 to the lockdown deck. I always felt I had much more outs to the lockdown deck, which was very much built around its constituent parts, and definitely had the 'hard but fair' feel about it. The shoehorned doomsday deck is another matter. It didn't bother with the tribe at all. It was chaff. He could easily have played with 20 basic lands in those slots and it would have made absolutely no difference to any of the games: He just exiled them all anyway after mystical tutoring up the desired component.
As I've mentioned before in articles touching upon the elephant in the room, the inherent brokenness of tribal Classic is due to the classic card pool and no sideboards. You can shoehorn in a classic- or legacy- viable combo deck, take out most of the disruption and protection to run 20 random creatures and just win. This style of play is what gets frowned upon, brutally exploiting the flaws. If everyone did that, the format would be an unplayable, trunctated version of classic where combo was king because no-one can sideboard in hate for any deck, let alone any of the myriad exploitative ideas people have in the eternal formats.
We don't want it to degenerate into that. 90% of the player pool doesn't run that kind of exploitative deck, because if they did, there really wouldn't be a format worthy of the name. So we all dance around the elephant in the room, deliberately not poking it with pointy sticks, and trying to dissuade people who do try to get it to trample or gore everyone in pachydermic rage.
I noticed your inclusion of prophetic prism, while it is ok. I do prefer to play prismatic lens as be able to play rush of knowledge on turn 3 is just disgusting. Prismatic lens is unique in that it accelerates and gives mana fixing which is exactly what the deck needs. I also played in the premier event but I got unlucky and played 2 of the storm decks that made top 8 in my first 2 matches and trust me its not an easy match up. I lost both my first and second and round then got a bye the 3rd round, so i decided to drop :/. My decklist is very similar but I find having leonin squire and trinket mage with the 3 good spells bombs helps ALOT against almost all the matchups. I also run reaping the graves in the main which is a 2nd rush of knowledge that is often better and impossible to counter. Good article and I'm glad to see someone else playing affinity and writing about it.
The difference is that my deck wasn't built around that combo working. Infact, with my deck going 6-1 I only resolved natural order twice. Of those two times only once did it go the distance for me. The deck was built as an absolutely brutal lockdown deck. The origional version was too good at that. Almost every game I played either ended up in someone decking themselves on turn 60, or running out of time. Natural order was added as a method to end the game before turn 60, or to get rid of moats or other troublesome pieces with terastodon. If my deck was a combo deck, don't you think I would have played a full set of natural order?
thanks for article, though I was expecting some match reports.
one nitpick - i would refrain from suggesting Meddling Mage as 2/2 bears tend to die rather quickly in this format, you can substitute it with Declaration of Naught, which should last a bit longer
ssshh.. we don't like to publicise our growing membership, thank you very much. It would be better if you didn't draw attention to us while we're still in the planning stages of taking over the world :)
As to the war cry, you are quite right, I am happier with the war cry. But firstly I have both in the deck and secondly my ashling deck isn't aggressive in that way. I tend to use the hydra as a second Magma Mine.
Anyway, if you really wanted to, how hard is it to give a critter vigilance these days?
actually i said i like playing decks that can do broken things not exactly broken decks But i suppose the point is more or less the same in either case we enjoy doing things that we more likely then not cannot pull off on a daily basis.
on the Declaration of Naught; I play blue so infrequently I didn't really know of its existence
I agree with Ranth
I've been bashed for playing combo in all forms, dual lands and the price of my decks in the end I got fed up and stopped playing in the events and went off and found another event to play in.
I like Ranth enjoy playing broken decks but if there are no defined restrictions/banned list for the event then you have to expect these decks as not everyone wants to play 20 creatures 20 removal and 20 lands. You cant bash a player for playing a deck if you have no rules in place to restrict the types of cards/interactions you dont want to see.
My reply was to Scartore's post rather than Kaladine's. However, preventing the boarding of a given type is even more unlikely than Wizards adding sideboards to the format. If we want to fix it, we cannot rely on the client, or on the honor system.
If your having fun with your deck and no one else is maybe you should look at an reconsider your deck.
'Sponsored Tournament' isn't a valid argument, Ranth. To quote from the article about the legacy ban changes,
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/ld/96
"Our research took another turn, however, when we investigated how Legacy is played in the real world. We discovered something rather interesting, and that is that Mystical Tutor decks were quite rare at Legacy tournaments that did not have tons of money on the line. At Grand Prix and other cash tournaments, people were happy to bust out their Mystical Tutors. However, in the comfort of their home stores they seemed to prefer doing other things that were more fun, if perhaps less powerful. This struck me as being a sort of gentleman's agreement; everyone knew what sick decks were out there, but they chose not to play them."
That's the situation here. We know you can break tribal wide open the way the doomsday shelldock deck does, or dredge does or any one of a dozen different ways. It's a flawed, broken format. My main argument against Wizards ever santioning it again is precisely because of the 'This is a sponsored tournament' attitude. The format cannot (and as a sanctioned format, didn't!) survive that.
If you're willing to accept that it's broken and not exploit the breaks, there's a hell of a lot of fun to be had. That's what the tournament aims for.
Yah, I just thought I'd pass on some kind of counterpoint to the link in the article.
I'm always on the side of bannings! Ban, bannety-ban-ban.
Actually AJ If you prevent boarding creatures at all then it does prevent exactly that.
Tribe legality doesn't stop altering the nature of a tribe. With a few changelings or dual tribe members as a fulcrum, you could go from soldiers to angels or rats to ninja post-board.
Red decks arent a problem? Maybe u need to go back and look at the comments of your past few articles and refresh your memory of what people have got blasted for during the tournies.
Perfectly put and well said.
This is a sponsored tournement
"No one is trying to force you to play a particular way, but they might be asking that don’t play a particular way as well."
This is more or less the same thing as making a tourney that reads. No Elves,Goblins,Faries,counters,LD,Eldrazi,2 card combo's, infinate combos,Burn,Dredge,Reanimation...Dual lands(yes we've had people made to feel bad because they had a better mana base then another player)
Um not sure what else off the top of my head but that was just the things i've seen people get blasted by the other players and HOST for playing and get called a DB for it.
Soooo basically play an aggro deck with spot removal only or be a personal friend of this tight knit group or risk getting blasted for playing anything that might be more then a 20$ casual deck.
If you guys wanna have casual games with insane amounts of rules fine do that, but at least keep the rules of what's acceptable consistant.
Also sorry to say Shard you claim you and others play for fun and think that I dont? Maybe you and the others haven't noticed but some people happen to enjoy doing broken things in games and you've known me long enough to know that I happen to be one of thoes people.
only no one complained about the winter orb deck. It was not a consistent progenitus on turn 3 deck. He had a multitude on win coniditions and a deck that actually worked well around his tribe. ON the other hand the Shelldock Doomsday deck used vampires, but could have used faeire or wizards or surrakar. Basically any blue or black tribe and it wold not have mattered since they where chaff and unimportant to the deck as a whole.
red decks arent a problem...that was an individuals immaturity. I dont think anyone has ever had any problems with your decks.
This was my decklist, feel free to make comments or constructive critism:
Lands: (16)
4 Seat of the Synod
4 Ancient Den
4 Darksteel Citadel (good against artifact destruction: gorilla shaman/ancient grudge/qasali pridemage)
2 Great Furnace
2 Vault of Whispers
Creatures: (17)
3 Trinket Mage (searches for that 1 CC artifact you need)
3 Leonin Squire (returns that 1 CC artifact you need)
3 Quicksilver Behemoth (note that he helps with reaping the graves to return even more)
4 Myr Enforcer (auto include)
4 Frogmite (auto include)
Spells: (27)
4 Springleaf Drum (need 4 with so much mana required)
4 Pyrite Spellbomb (much need spot removal or burn to the dome)
4 Chromatic Star
4 Thoughtcast
4 Prismatic Lens (need 4 with so much mana required)
3 Rush of Knowledge
2 Reaping the Graves (extremely good, ok against graveyard removal as long as you can just time it right)
1 Æther Spellbomb (searchable and if not needed just cycle, helps alot against certain matchups)
1 Sunbeam Spellbomb (searchable and if not needed just cycle, helps alot against certain matchups)
Sideboard
3 Krark-Clan Shaman (if you need a board sweeper on the ground)
3 Benevolent Unicorn (against storm or mono R burn)
1 Reaping the Graves (against MUC control or against board sweepers)
2 Ancient Grudge (mirror match or picks off spire golem)
4 Snow-Covered Islands (not sure about this one but I run into gorilla shaman way to often and this helps ALOT)
2 Ray of Revelation (against pestilence mostly but also good against annoying enchantments, rancor, armadillo etc)
The problem here is that everyone's line in the sand is different. The Natural Order / Progenitus combo has happened in at least two other decks before, and one deck was tuned as best possible to pull it off by turn 3. Without an exhaustive banned list or a treatise that no one wants to read concerning the acceptable/unacceptable constraints on deck building, the differences of opinions will continue.
I love Tribal Classic and I applaud what Shard is trying to do, but I have gotten frustrated in various weeks where I bring a knife to a gun fight and the week I do win, I get blasted for my deck choice.
I plan to keep participating as time allows, but every week I plan to either (a) bring a deck to win regardless of other players' feelings about that deck, or (b) bringing a deck I want to play and not worry about my win-loss record.
If they wanted to make it easy, for classic tribal the could set the program to prevent sideboarding of creatures. Not perfect, but it would solve any legality issues for post-sideboard decks.
Is the rumored to come "over-extended" a possible solution?
Also, has anybody bugged wotc about fixing the sideboard problem with tribal? As I see it the problem is keeping the deck tribal legal post sideboard, so why don't we get the program to doublecheck the tribal legality postsb? It already checks to make sure you have 60 cards, so how hard could that be?
That article makes some good points but... His solutions only work at the kitchen table, where the rules in play actually are flexible. As we at the mercy of the program, we have no real way to enforce any bannings, or mana limits, or spells per turn limits etc. All we can do is ask politely that the participants in Shard's tournement understand the nature of the decks we expect to face. As I've said before, it's Shards event, he has every right to chastise people for bringing guns to his knife fights.
One option to resolve the blue mana issue is Trinket Mage. While it does take a blue mana to cast him, that mana can come from a temporary source such as a Chromatic Sphere or Lotus Petal and then the little mage can power the Springleaf Drum and/or search for a Seat of Synod.
Good walk through of the tournament.
I ended up playing against both 'combo decks' this week: I took a game vs the shelldock emrakul shoehorn thanks to speeding out an expensive permanent capable of dealing with the isle, but lost 0-2 to the lockdown deck. I always felt I had much more outs to the lockdown deck, which was very much built around its constituent parts, and definitely had the 'hard but fair' feel about it. The shoehorned doomsday deck is another matter. It didn't bother with the tribe at all. It was chaff. He could easily have played with 20 basic lands in those slots and it would have made absolutely no difference to any of the games: He just exiled them all anyway after mystical tutoring up the desired component.
As I've mentioned before in articles touching upon the elephant in the room, the inherent brokenness of tribal Classic is due to the classic card pool and no sideboards. You can shoehorn in a classic- or legacy- viable combo deck, take out most of the disruption and protection to run 20 random creatures and just win. This style of play is what gets frowned upon, brutally exploiting the flaws. If everyone did that, the format would be an unplayable, trunctated version of classic where combo was king because no-one can sideboard in hate for any deck, let alone any of the myriad exploitative ideas people have in the eternal formats.
We don't want it to degenerate into that. 90% of the player pool doesn't run that kind of exploitative deck, because if they did, there really wouldn't be a format worthy of the name. So we all dance around the elephant in the room, deliberately not poking it with pointy sticks, and trying to dissuade people who do try to get it to trample or gore everyone in pachydermic rage.
I noticed your inclusion of prophetic prism, while it is ok. I do prefer to play prismatic lens as be able to play rush of knowledge on turn 3 is just disgusting. Prismatic lens is unique in that it accelerates and gives mana fixing which is exactly what the deck needs. I also played in the premier event but I got unlucky and played 2 of the storm decks that made top 8 in my first 2 matches and trust me its not an easy match up. I lost both my first and second and round then got a bye the 3rd round, so i decided to drop :/. My decklist is very similar but I find having leonin squire and trinket mage with the 3 good spells bombs helps ALOT against almost all the matchups. I also run reaping the graves in the main which is a 2nd rush of knowledge that is often better and impossible to counter. Good article and I'm glad to see someone else playing affinity and writing about it.
The difference is that my deck wasn't built around that combo working. Infact, with my deck going 6-1 I only resolved natural order twice. Of those two times only once did it go the distance for me. The deck was built as an absolutely brutal lockdown deck. The origional version was too good at that. Almost every game I played either ended up in someone decking themselves on turn 60, or running out of time. Natural order was added as a method to end the game before turn 60, or to get rid of moats or other troublesome pieces with terastodon. If my deck was a combo deck, don't you think I would have played a full set of natural order?
I kind of agree.
Also, this might be relevent as a sort of counterpoint to mr menery's stuff;
http://strategy.channelfireball.com/featured-articles/rule-of-law-the-la...
thanks for article, though I was expecting some match reports.
one nitpick - i would refrain from suggesting Meddling Mage as 2/2 bears tend to die rather quickly in this format, you can substitute it with Declaration of Naught, which should last a bit longer
ssshh.. we don't like to publicise our growing membership, thank you very much. It would be better if you didn't draw attention to us while we're still in the planning stages of taking over the world :)
As to the war cry, you are quite right, I am happier with the war cry. But firstly I have both in the deck and secondly my ashling deck isn't aggressive in that way. I tend to use the hydra as a second Magma Mine.
Anyway, if you really wanted to, how hard is it to give a critter vigilance these days?