I know I haven't ever participated in this tournament and definitely not the most knowledgable in this subject, but I have to ask, why not allow a sideboard?
From my understanding, combo-intensive decks will always have an inherent advantage over less combo-crazy decks. The faster you can pull off a winning combo the better. Isn't that what the sideboard is for though? Surely the majority of these "problem decks" could be avoided by a good selection of 15 cards.
yea it is very confusing reading 2 articles from you, published on the same day on different websites, one recommending dark depth thopter and the other recommending no dark depth thopter, both backed up by tournament results.
I'll be cutting Visionary for Mongrel, but it would be extremely difficult for me to cut Chittering. Generally Chittering > Rager in most situations, but I agree that here it's a bit different. Still, Chittering helps much more against Storm.
You know, people should just agree on alternate casting costs in their casual paper games. Make Irini Sengir cost BB instead of 2BB, and then she can go into a vampire deck without making it an awful deck. Wizards has printed tons of cards with costs that are blatantly too high. Maybe somebody should recost every bad card to make it semi-playable and publish a list for people to refer to for alternate rules. Seriously, there are some cards that would be really cool if they just had a reasonable casting cost. Like Golden Wish.
Thanks for the compliments! I love eternal formats, too, if you can't tell. Back in part Zero, I talk about how I would love to get every card online, but that it's not practical through the current Master's Edition releases. We would need 5 more Master's Edition sets to get it all, and that's a lot of bad, mostly unplayable cards for draft and sealed. But I know every card is someone's favorite - in a few articles you'll see my insane love for giant blue creatures. So this series, when I say "yes or no", it's mostly, would this card be better than other choices/desirable in a current-style Master's Edition release.
Frankly, what I would love is to have them do 1, _maybe_ 2 more Master's Edition sets. And then sell a 500-700 pack of "the bad cards" for $30, or something like that. One copy each of the cards not online. That would rock, and complete Legacy and Vintage fully for all players. But I haven't heard of any plans in that direction, so for right now I'm sticking to "next Master's Edition set" as the basis for "yes/no".
blau - In the one event I played in, I was blown out on turn 2 by a reanimated Sutched Ghoul with Dragon Fangs on it. When I made the comment about that being pretty nuts, I was told, "Well if you killed my Hermit Druid, I would not have been able to do that."
I put my hands up, yes that was me.
ok I'll bring a non combo deck this week. I just need some inspiration....name a tribe any tribe and I’ll see what I can do as long as I have the cards of course, I like a challenge.
Thanks for writing, I appreciate any article about eternal formats. I am concerned though because the meat of this article seems to cracking jokes at the expense of old cards. Yeah, Kasmir the Lone Wolf is outclassed today. What if some guy in CasCas wants to make a Wolf deck and use Kasmir as his general? Why not?
Nothing wrong with making fun of cards, but I want to be able to play ANY tourney legal Magic card Online. So Wizards should eventually print EVERYTHING. If I were writing the article there would be no "NO" cards.
Phyrexian Rager instead of Chittering Rats seems like it could be a great idea. That plus the Mongrel change could really help versus aggro, maybe enough (in combination) to free a card or two in the sideboard.
well first i will address the affinity comment...I do run Krosan Grips in the sideboard and I checked on skullclamp but it is banned in legacy:http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=judge/resources/sfrlegacy
As far as saying a standard elf deck is equal in brokeness to Helmline decks or Dredge decks is strange. Personally I dont think my deck is overpowered. Sure it's fast and has synergy being elves...but thats about all. It has no way to stop opponents from doing anything, no answers to removal or sweepers, no removal of its own. It is basically a dumb green aggro deck. im sorry if somehow this has entered the realm of overpowered but i dont really see it. I play elves to play more elves until i can play the warcaller or the overrun. Thats it no gamewinning ultra strategy, no hidden tricks that make my guy unblockable...
I wrote this long before Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block, and I totally forgot that Black finally got some Forestwalkers, and failed to update that. I did remember to update the plainswalker chart, though. Good catch!
Suffice to say, old Veldrane was the only black Forestwalker in Magic for exactly 12 years. So it was valid at the time!
I like the deck, but maybe a brief sum up from the videos would be a nice addition, I tend to often browse articles at work and can't be playing through the videos so it'd be nice to have maybe a quick bit of text on em, but really running 26 lands? I understand the edges have to be there, but the land count seems a bit high.. now I haven't had a chance to try the deck so maybe it fits, but I'd think that there'd be a lot of draws into lands when I needed a spell
Excellent article sir. I have a thought on Visionary. Phyrexian Rager could replace Chitters and Mongrel/Leech Visionary. You would lose some disruption but keep the card draw and gain a better body against aggro and be nicer to your mana early. Just a thought. Great article.
Excellent article sir. I have a thought on Visionary. Phyrexian Rager could replace Chitters and Mongrel/Leech Visionary. You would lose some disruption but keep the card draw and gain a better body against aggro and be nicer to your mana early. Just a thought. Great article.
Well I played in only one PRE with you all, but I have to agree with Paul on his comments and with kalandine. I get really sick of people who say "You would have had an out if you played X." Or, "my deck was pauper. I didn't even include X card." Shall I help you up onto your cross? That is the worst excuse ever. In the one event I played in, I was blown out on turn 2 by a reanimated Sutched Ghoul with Dragon Fangs on it. When I made the comment about that being pretty nuts, I was told, "Well if you killed my Hermit Druid, I would not have been able to do that." The logic there is, it's okay for you to kill me on Turn 2 in a casual tournament (and let's be real here, this PRE IS being advertised in THIS COLUMN as being casual) because you're running a creature that can be killed. Now granted he should have added, that it would have had to be a kill spell that cost a single black mana, since I was playing swamps and he was on the play. That really puts way too many conditions on your opponent. If you need to make unjustified rationals about how your opponent MIGHT beat your unjustified deck.... Well, enough said.
It really hurts the people who show up looking for a fun format where they can show off something creative. Paul knows kind of what I'm talking about. I talked to him right before the start of the tourney. I have Goblins, Elves, and Vial Fish built. I didn't bring them because, as I told him, I felt it would be wrong to bring a deck like that to a casual format. Then, the tourney starts, and I get a glimpse of what the regulars are running and I feel shocked. These decks aren't casual. For about a month now this article has routinely stated how the regulars feel upset by the broken Tier 1 classic decks that new players are showing up with, yet they themselves are running things on par with those broken decks. The implied message from this article is, "Regular players running broken decks is ok, but we don't like competition. We expect to win and if we lose then you new people are jerks for playing decks that can beat ours." If you think that's just sour grapes on my part because I got blown out every round and went 0-3, it's not. I brought a weak deck that was poorly constructed. I deserved to lose. I'm angry because I did as I thought was intended and brought a casual deck. And not all the decks I faced were broken. Round 1 I faced Paul and his protection from red creatures. Nothing broken there. If I had been running a better deck, I probably would have beat him. Round 3 I faced off against a fairly weak Ally build. I enjoyed racing against that player. We both had fun. But that Round 2 lost to Turn 2 combo left a really bitter taste in my mouth. It seemed outside the "fun" atmosphere that had been advertised. And I thought "Why am I sitting here losing to this, and playing this terrible deck, when I could have brought Goblins."
Solutions: I'll just repeat what I said last time this discussion came up. Stop calling it a casual tournament. Accept that it is a classic format and should use classic rules. Get rid of your banned list. It's meaningless anyway. You can't ban everything. Every time you ban something new, something else will rise up to take its place. Either that, or follow Paul's advice and drastically alter the format or take Archgenius's advice and run theme weeks. The issue with both of those is that what do you do for players like me? I don't regularly follow the message boards and I can only make a tourney once in a great while. If I don't clearly know the rules, I may show up with something I'm not supposed to.
I can honestly say, after my experience in that PRE, I have no interest or desire in participating in another one. That makes me sad because, before, I read this article each week and really wanted to play in this event. I love playing tribal classic, but this tournament is no fun at all.
P.S. as for your ravager build for legacy. I like it a lot. But I would also point out, isn't skullclamp legal in legacy? Seems like it should be in there. You're also going to want to put something to kill pithing needle, chalace, etc for once people side against you.
Yeah, I just read the StarCity article. It's like they're written by two different people. One promotes removing Dark Depths from the deck, and says that is what you plan to run for the rest of the season, and this article says that Marit Lage is too powerful to sideline. LOL
This deck was designed by Cassius V. Weathersby III and it placed myself at 13 and John Balla at 3-4th at the TCGPlayer 5k in Los Angeles. I went 7-2 and only lost to Jund. Balla went 7-0-2 in the swiss. Another player playing an older list (with Hexmages and no LD sideboard plan) went 6-3. We were the only three people playing the deck that day as far as I know.
First and foremost the deck is FAR better than mono black vampires. Blightning is simply the best card in standard right now and being able to take advantage of it gives you a lot more reach than mono black vampires. Losing tendrils is tough but a relatively small price to pay for blightning and a sideboard that can actually beat Jund.
Aaron's sideboard plan against Jund is fairly similar to how we ended up towards the end of the tournament. Although we always brought in the slave of bolas because A) it's cute against thrinax and B) its a fun card. It's definitely reasonable to consider every card in your sideboard against Jund depending on their build. If they're stuck in the dark ages with Garruk and Bit Blast even the duress's can be halfway decent.
Personally, I would take out the Lightning Bolts before I took out the terminates but Aaron had some nice opportunities to use the bolts in these games so I'm willing to concede that that's potentially wrong. Of course, if you're as lucky as John Balla your opponent will pump Leech 3 times in one match when you have bolt in your hand.
The deck is extremely fun to play which is really why I played it at the 5k. It's Jund matchup is better than it looks on paper if you're well rehearsed. Hope people have fun with it and enough credit cannot be given to it's designer, Cassius V. Weathersby III. The sideboard plan and Basilisk Collars are courtesy of Tuffy from Magic League.
I know I haven't ever participated in this tournament and definitely not the most knowledgable in this subject, but I have to ask, why not allow a sideboard?
From my understanding, combo-intensive decks will always have an inherent advantage over less combo-crazy decks. The faster you can pull off a winning combo the better. Isn't that what the sideboard is for though? Surely the majority of these "problem decks" could be avoided by a good selection of 15 cards.
"like he's killed an entire tribe of Peach Jelly-Bean warriors and made armor out them"
Thanks for that.
yea it is very confusing reading 2 articles from you, published on the same day on different websites, one recommending dark depth thopter and the other recommending no dark depth thopter, both backed up by tournament results.
I'll be cutting Visionary for Mongrel, but it would be extremely difficult for me to cut Chittering. Generally Chittering > Rager in most situations, but I agree that here it's a bit different. Still, Chittering helps much more against Storm.
You know, people should just agree on alternate casting costs in their casual paper games. Make Irini Sengir cost BB instead of 2BB, and then she can go into a vampire deck without making it an awful deck. Wizards has printed tons of cards with costs that are blatantly too high. Maybe somebody should recost every bad card to make it semi-playable and publish a list for people to refer to for alternate rules. Seriously, there are some cards that would be really cool if they just had a reasonable casting cost. Like Golden Wish.
I agree about elves, and they're only going to get better with Priest of Titania. I feel the same about Goblins.
For the Legacy deck, you probably don't need Vial AND Drum.
Thanks for the compliments! I love eternal formats, too, if you can't tell. Back in part Zero, I talk about how I would love to get every card online, but that it's not practical through the current Master's Edition releases. We would need 5 more Master's Edition sets to get it all, and that's a lot of bad, mostly unplayable cards for draft and sealed. But I know every card is someone's favorite - in a few articles you'll see my insane love for giant blue creatures. So this series, when I say "yes or no", it's mostly, would this card be better than other choices/desirable in a current-style Master's Edition release.
Frankly, what I would love is to have them do 1, _maybe_ 2 more Master's Edition sets. And then sell a 500-700 pack of "the bad cards" for $30, or something like that. One copy each of the cards not online. That would rock, and complete Legacy and Vintage fully for all players. But I haven't heard of any plans in that direction, so for right now I'm sticking to "next Master's Edition set" as the basis for "yes/no".
blau - In the one event I played in, I was blown out on turn 2 by a reanimated Sutched Ghoul with Dragon Fangs on it. When I made the comment about that being pretty nuts, I was told, "Well if you killed my Hermit Druid, I would not have been able to do that."
I put my hands up, yes that was me.
ok I'll bring a non combo deck this week. I just need some inspiration....name a tribe any tribe and I’ll see what I can do as long as I have the cards of course, I like a challenge.
I will never look at Joven and Chandler the same way again...thanks for ruining my childhood! =)
I like "Keep 'em honest" decks like this. And like everyone else I love the vids. This is a noob question, but what program do you use to record them?
'Not even in an alternate universe where the Nazis won.'
Like Phillip K Dick's 'Man in the High Castle"?
Great articles. It's too bad that you will run out of cards one day.
I think he meant up to that point, maybe?
I double posted. Liked the article that much. ;-)
Thanks for writing, I appreciate any article about eternal formats. I am concerned though because the meat of this article seems to cracking jokes at the expense of old cards. Yeah, Kasmir the Lone Wolf is outclassed today. What if some guy in CasCas wants to make a Wolf deck and use Kasmir as his general? Why not?
Nothing wrong with making fun of cards, but I want to be able to play ANY tourney legal Magic card Online. So Wizards should eventually print EVERYTHING. If I were writing the article there would be no "NO" cards.
Phyrexian Rager instead of Chittering Rats seems like it could be a great idea. That plus the Mongrel change could really help versus aggro, maybe enough (in combination) to free a card or two in the sideboard.
well first i will address the affinity comment...I do run Krosan Grips in the sideboard and I checked on skullclamp but it is banned in legacy:http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=judge/resources/sfrlegacy
As far as saying a standard elf deck is equal in brokeness to Helmline decks or Dredge decks is strange. Personally I dont think my deck is overpowered. Sure it's fast and has synergy being elves...but thats about all. It has no way to stop opponents from doing anything, no answers to removal or sweepers, no removal of its own. It is basically a dumb green aggro deck. im sorry if somehow this has entered the realm of overpowered but i dont really see it. I play elves to play more elves until i can play the warcaller or the overrun. Thats it no gamewinning ultra strategy, no hidden tricks that make my guy unblockable...
I wrote this long before Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block, and I totally forgot that Black finally got some Forestwalkers, and failed to update that. I did remember to update the plainswalker chart, though. Good catch!
Suffice to say, old Veldrane was the only black Forestwalker in Magic for exactly 12 years. So it was valid at the time!
Your magic flavored humor is incredibly funny. I always respect the players that have a sense of humor about the game.
I like the deck, but maybe a brief sum up from the videos would be a nice addition, I tend to often browse articles at work and can't be playing through the videos so it'd be nice to have maybe a quick bit of text on em, but really running 26 lands? I understand the edges have to be there, but the land count seems a bit high.. now I haven't had a chance to try the deck so maybe it fits, but I'd think that there'd be a lot of draws into lands when I needed a spell
Excellent article sir. I have a thought on Visionary. Phyrexian Rager could replace Chitters and Mongrel/Leech Visionary. You would lose some disruption but keep the card draw and gain a better body against aggro and be nicer to your mana early. Just a thought. Great article.
Excellent article sir. I have a thought on Visionary. Phyrexian Rager could replace Chitters and Mongrel/Leech Visionary. You would lose some disruption but keep the card draw and gain a better body against aggro and be nicer to your mana early. Just a thought. Great article.
Not sure it's fair to generalize "regulars" because even those people to which you're referring are on both sides of the arguement
Well I played in only one PRE with you all, but I have to agree with Paul on his comments and with kalandine. I get really sick of people who say "You would have had an out if you played X." Or, "my deck was pauper. I didn't even include X card." Shall I help you up onto your cross? That is the worst excuse ever. In the one event I played in, I was blown out on turn 2 by a reanimated Sutched Ghoul with Dragon Fangs on it. When I made the comment about that being pretty nuts, I was told, "Well if you killed my Hermit Druid, I would not have been able to do that." The logic there is, it's okay for you to kill me on Turn 2 in a casual tournament (and let's be real here, this PRE IS being advertised in THIS COLUMN as being casual) because you're running a creature that can be killed. Now granted he should have added, that it would have had to be a kill spell that cost a single black mana, since I was playing swamps and he was on the play. That really puts way too many conditions on your opponent. If you need to make unjustified rationals about how your opponent MIGHT beat your unjustified deck.... Well, enough said.
It really hurts the people who show up looking for a fun format where they can show off something creative. Paul knows kind of what I'm talking about. I talked to him right before the start of the tourney. I have Goblins, Elves, and Vial Fish built. I didn't bring them because, as I told him, I felt it would be wrong to bring a deck like that to a casual format. Then, the tourney starts, and I get a glimpse of what the regulars are running and I feel shocked. These decks aren't casual. For about a month now this article has routinely stated how the regulars feel upset by the broken Tier 1 classic decks that new players are showing up with, yet they themselves are running things on par with those broken decks. The implied message from this article is, "Regular players running broken decks is ok, but we don't like competition. We expect to win and if we lose then you new people are jerks for playing decks that can beat ours." If you think that's just sour grapes on my part because I got blown out every round and went 0-3, it's not. I brought a weak deck that was poorly constructed. I deserved to lose. I'm angry because I did as I thought was intended and brought a casual deck. And not all the decks I faced were broken. Round 1 I faced Paul and his protection from red creatures. Nothing broken there. If I had been running a better deck, I probably would have beat him. Round 3 I faced off against a fairly weak Ally build. I enjoyed racing against that player. We both had fun. But that Round 2 lost to Turn 2 combo left a really bitter taste in my mouth. It seemed outside the "fun" atmosphere that had been advertised. And I thought "Why am I sitting here losing to this, and playing this terrible deck, when I could have brought Goblins."
Solutions: I'll just repeat what I said last time this discussion came up. Stop calling it a casual tournament. Accept that it is a classic format and should use classic rules. Get rid of your banned list. It's meaningless anyway. You can't ban everything. Every time you ban something new, something else will rise up to take its place. Either that, or follow Paul's advice and drastically alter the format or take Archgenius's advice and run theme weeks. The issue with both of those is that what do you do for players like me? I don't regularly follow the message boards and I can only make a tourney once in a great while. If I don't clearly know the rules, I may show up with something I'm not supposed to.
I can honestly say, after my experience in that PRE, I have no interest or desire in participating in another one. That makes me sad because, before, I read this article each week and really wanted to play in this event. I love playing tribal classic, but this tournament is no fun at all.
P.S. as for your ravager build for legacy. I like it a lot. But I would also point out, isn't skullclamp legal in legacy? Seems like it should be in there. You're also going to want to put something to kill pithing needle, chalace, etc for once people side against you.
Yeah, I just read the StarCity article. It's like they're written by two different people. One promotes removing Dark Depths from the deck, and says that is what you plan to run for the rest of the season, and this article says that Marit Lage is too powerful to sideline. LOL
This deck was designed by Cassius V. Weathersby III and it placed myself at 13 and John Balla at 3-4th at the TCGPlayer 5k in Los Angeles. I went 7-2 and only lost to Jund. Balla went 7-0-2 in the swiss. Another player playing an older list (with Hexmages and no LD sideboard plan) went 6-3. We were the only three people playing the deck that day as far as I know.
First and foremost the deck is FAR better than mono black vampires. Blightning is simply the best card in standard right now and being able to take advantage of it gives you a lot more reach than mono black vampires. Losing tendrils is tough but a relatively small price to pay for blightning and a sideboard that can actually beat Jund.
Aaron's sideboard plan against Jund is fairly similar to how we ended up towards the end of the tournament. Although we always brought in the slave of bolas because A) it's cute against thrinax and B) its a fun card. It's definitely reasonable to consider every card in your sideboard against Jund depending on their build. If they're stuck in the dark ages with Garruk and Bit Blast even the duress's can be halfway decent.
Personally, I would take out the Lightning Bolts before I took out the terminates but Aaron had some nice opportunities to use the bolts in these games so I'm willing to concede that that's potentially wrong. Of course, if you're as lucky as John Balla your opponent will pump Leech 3 times in one match when you have bolt in your hand.
The deck is extremely fun to play which is really why I played it at the 5k. It's Jund matchup is better than it looks on paper if you're well rehearsed. Hope people have fun with it and enough credit cannot be given to it's designer, Cassius V. Weathersby III. The sideboard plan and Basilisk Collars are courtesy of Tuffy from Magic League.