Wow long time no see Flips. Yeah the Rebels deck suffers from my collection and all but the idea behind the 1 ofs is being able search for silver bullets not have consistent draws of silver bullets. One of is all the deck needs for many of the cards. The main problem the deck has is the early rebels die quickly to the vast amounts of removal in the game. The mana base could be better. On the other hand it is what it is...they could be dual lands and fetches if I had the right ones.
I am not a fan of passive card combos like Cho-manno+ anything that sucks up damage. At 5 mana to fetch or 4 to play from your hand its going to be too slow to matter vs anything that wins via direct damage.
What ally decks do you mean? I am currently working on some ally decks but I haven't written about them yet.
I think one of the problems from looking at the deck lists is inconstancy most of the major tricks and utility cards are only one off's
This will cause problems in the game as you are relying a lot more on luck than if you say ran 4 of one particular card over four different ones.
Using comes into play tapped lands also slows your deck down a lot as well. I prefer to use cards like Terramorphic Expanse as it gives you a choice. Vivid's are nice but I wouldn’t trust them or more to the case them and the uncommon land cycle from shards, both is a bit much as you will always be playing a turn behind.
On the Rebel side I'd go for the Cho-Manno, Revolutionary and Pariah combo to give you an edge. I think the ally decks could also do with some early spot removal maybe Lightning Helix
When you had Kor Cartographer and replaced it with Civic Wayfinder/Borderland Ranger, did you think about replacing it with Wood Elves?
You'd need to change the mana base around a bit so you could get some forest duals, but Wood Elves (a) Costs 3, and so can be fetched by the "(4), T: Fetch a rebel with 3 or less" guys, and (b) Puts the land into play untapped.
I enjoyed your rebel deck but I noticed it really doesn't have a solution for those stubborn tribes like gobos, elves and zombies. Have you thought about running hallowed burial instead of Wrath and bumping it up to 4? Since you are running a toolbox deck your toys will still be easy enough to grab.
And i was wondering all that time if someone would make a more aggressive TE deck.I play pauper magic and i have an aggro TE deck with some major differences i could say.No Gathan Raiders but Werebears because your hand rarely empties,so 4/4 i think is better than 3/3 especially for one less mana.No rancors because i believe it is not needed,your creatures will have the job done by themselves,and probably you see that too.I would suggest 2 Ravens' Crime MD to be able to avoid combo or control first game,or even aggro,discard is always appreciated,even though you are facing madness.Mulch does great work it feeds the graveyard with creatures,Tortured Existence :P,or it gives you land to discard to mongrel and Gathan or lets you reuse the Ravens' Crime.Also i would like to say that i completely agree with your last paragraph before the dead dog list.
Ah I keep forgetting to go there regularly. I am a creature of habit and if it isn't in my remembered sites in firefox I often forget about the site until someone reminds me.
im impressed by the actual online price of dredge...i always though it would be priced like the rest of the decks...i may be getting into legacy afterall
@Katastrophe - I understand your last comment, but thankfully, there strangulation for the eternal formats in paper world rests solely on a reserved list that is non-existant online. Hence, any "revolution" - where demand completely outstips supply - can be met with rereleases. If Legacy suddenly became so popular online that MED2 Underground Sea was $100 a pop, queue up MED5 Underground Seas. Problem solved.
That being said, that particular problem isn't what the article set out to prove. Not much in the way of long-term predictions here. Merely a status quo update - since it seems a great deal of people are mistaken about the status quo.
Lastly, if I was to consider Portal cards "not availalbe in paper" shouldn't we then also consider Exodus and MED1 cards "not available online" :)
Sadly, not the case. Interesting fact - City of Traitors was the only Exodus rare in the decklists.
@Paul - If the subject matter of the article had concerned how the format will split or had anything to do with classic at all (ave very tangentially), It would be on CQ. I just think this kind of article has a better target audience here than my own site.
You make a very good point about the overall format being cheaper. Although you should count Portal cards as "not available in paper" instead of at their exorbitant price. The Portal cards should be format warping, but practically they're not because they're physically unable to appear in concentrated numbers. Is this SCG event the first time that Portal sets have had two decks in the top-8? It's the first time I can think of.
The significantly more expensive digital cards are: Explosives, Magus of the Moon, Bridge From Below, Pact of Negation, Daze, and FoW. Layline of the Void and Progenitus are also a bit more online. Outside of that handful, digital is a huge discount. We might pay an extra $140 for a playset of FoW, but we save $160 on just the 8 cheapest duals used in a Zoo deck! Dual lands involving the color blue are about $30 cheaper each! Of course, Legacy players = old fogies. $60 isn't what people are paying for Underground Sea - it's what the card is 'worth' in a Juzam Djinn sort of way. That recent 14-year old finalist borrowed his cards. (Some of which were older than him!)
How about digital Vintage? Daze and FoW are still playable. But look at the paper prices of these cards: Oath of Druids (lol), Vampiric Tutor, Demonic Tutor, and Strip Mine. Ouch. Of course, the power 9 will be drastically cheaper and so it won't even matter. And how about our Mana Drains? People, buy Mana Drain!
Proving that paper Legacy is "more strangled" than digital Legacy doesn't prove that digital Legacy isn't also strangled. The paper cards might be worth more today, but surprisingly I suspect that there might be more of them. Since digital Legacy is more playable than paper Legacy I could imagine a revolution in the prices. I'll stop short of predicting it though. =)
Just curious but I would think with the amount of directed damage that Quest for Pure Flame would be a good add if space could be aloted. I know cracking one quest is always nice for those turns, but cracking 2 is just crazy.
Hey Mike wb to Pure, haven't seen anything from you for a while. More food for thought. I wonder if Legacy really will make a huge difference for me and my collection. Currently I am up in the air about it. I was already looking forward to Urza's Cycle and it's brokeness but to be honest I probably won't end up with the money cards for that series either just as I don't have a single Exodus card. (The ones I want priced out of my range too quickly for me and I have yet to get in a TSE draft.)
As a pauper fanatic for the last couple months I think this article sums up perfectly what a new pauper player needs to know and what I figured out through trial and error.
If you want to know if your deck is good, imagine you played goblins and Monoblack Control every other game and nothing else. Could you win over 50% of your games? If so it's probably a good pauper deck. Then test it out against WW and a Blink deck.
true but it is unfair to compare the decks while trying to establish a percentage of luck vs skill...it would be like using a pee-wee team and the indianapolis colts to correalate the percentage of luck and skill in football. Proper correalations could only be established through relatively equal decks. This is especially true in mirror matches. There it is sometimes luck but mostly skill from tweaking and playtesting that allow one to win.
There's a several-week gap between when a set is released on paper and released online. Online beta test starts the monday after paper prereleases, once all cards are already known. You download a separate version of the client and connect to a different server with the Worldwake cards mixed in, and play against other beta testers.
The point is to discover bugs (which have been better lately) before they get to the public.
To the anonymous poster above- I love connect four. I play it in english when the teacher isn't watching, and the dynamics of the game are interesting. Like tictactoe on crack.
Top tier players are getting an edge before the match ever starts. They get a big edge if they can draft well or have come prepared with a constructed deck. That is what people are underplaying. That is probably the best reason to try and claim magic requires more skill than poker. Magic is in a sense 2 separate games, and one of these games the players have a lot of control over.
If you want to use that poker analogy bringing a poorly drafted or crappy constructed deck is like going all in with crap. Yeah you are "all in" every match but you determine whether or not you have a good starting hand.
It was nice watching the evolution of your deck list through the games. Very intense games, well written, and the format was appealing and easy to read.
I'm not the original builder of those two decks but from my personal experience playing them both, I can clearly say that Siege-Gang Commander at the 5 mana slot is a better choice considering the Aggro meta. Against Control Chandra is better but normally one out of four games is against Control these days. So keeping her in the sideboard seems logical to me.
Also Siege-Gang Commander is a "pay one get four" creature and chump block four attackers if I need be and kill one or two in the meantime if there's some extra mana available, and thus gives time to set up Valakut.
Bogardan Hellkite is an excellent creature for this deck; I've tested it a few times after I wrote this article and witnessed firsthand its sheer power. Playing it at the end of opponent's turn (most of the time) means dealing 10 damage to the opponent and that (most of the time) ends games. Nevertheless I will at least try the new dragonmaster in the sideboard once he's out.
Wow long time no see Flips. Yeah the Rebels deck suffers from my collection and all but the idea behind the 1 ofs is being able search for silver bullets not have consistent draws of silver bullets. One of is all the deck needs for many of the cards. The main problem the deck has is the early rebels die quickly to the vast amounts of removal in the game. The mana base could be better. On the other hand it is what it is...they could be dual lands and fetches if I had the right ones.
I am not a fan of passive card combos like Cho-manno+ anything that sucks up damage. At 5 mana to fetch or 4 to play from your hand its going to be too slow to matter vs anything that wins via direct damage.
What ally decks do you mean? I am currently working on some ally decks but I haven't written about them yet.
I think one of the problems from looking at the deck lists is inconstancy most of the major tricks and utility cards are only one off's
This will cause problems in the game as you are relying a lot more on luck than if you say ran 4 of one particular card over four different ones.
Using comes into play tapped lands also slows your deck down a lot as well. I prefer to use cards like Terramorphic Expanse as it gives you a choice. Vivid's are nice but I wouldn’t trust them or more to the case them and the uncommon land cycle from shards, both is a bit much as you will always be playing a turn behind.
On the Rebel side I'd go for the Cho-Manno, Revolutionary and Pariah combo to give you an edge. I think the ally decks could also do with some early spot removal maybe Lightning Helix
When you had Kor Cartographer and replaced it with Civic Wayfinder/Borderland Ranger, did you think about replacing it with Wood Elves?
You'd need to change the mana base around a bit so you could get some forest duals, but Wood Elves (a) Costs 3, and so can be fetched by the "(4), T: Fetch a rebel with 3 or less" guys, and (b) Puts the land into play untapped.
I enjoyed your rebel deck but I noticed it really doesn't have a solution for those stubborn tribes like gobos, elves and zombies. Have you thought about running hallowed burial instead of Wrath and bumping it up to 4? Since you are running a toolbox deck your toys will still be easy enough to grab.
Also what timezone is that tribal event time?
And i was wondering all that time if someone would make a more aggressive TE deck.I play pauper magic and i have an aggro TE deck with some major differences i could say.No Gathan Raiders but Werebears because your hand rarely empties,so 4/4 i think is better than 3/3 especially for one less mana.No rancors because i believe it is not needed,your creatures will have the job done by themselves,and probably you see that too.I would suggest 2 Ravens' Crime MD to be able to avoid combo or control first game,or even aggro,discard is always appreciated,even though you are facing madness.Mulch does great work it feeds the graveyard with creatures,Tortured Existence :P,or it gives you land to discard to mongrel and Gathan or lets you reuse the Ravens' Crime.Also i would like to say that i completely agree with your last paragraph before the dead dog list.
The Bazaar of Baghdads aren't that much more.
Example Decklist: http://www.classicquarter.com/decks/deckview.asp?DecklistID=1740
Ah I keep forgetting to go there regularly. I am a creature of habit and if it isn't in my remembered sites in firefox I often forget about the site until someone reminds me.
im impressed by the actual online price of dredge...i always though it would be priced like the rest of the decks...i may be getting into legacy afterall
1. Discard TE to Raiders
2. Discard Mongrel to Hounds
3. Discard Scrambler to Hounds - pay Madness - fetch Mongrel
4. Discard Mongrel to Hounds
5. Pump Rootwalla.
Swing for
5+4+8 = 17
@Katastrophe - I understand your last comment, but thankfully, there strangulation for the eternal formats in paper world rests solely on a reserved list that is non-existant online. Hence, any "revolution" - where demand completely outstips supply - can be met with rereleases. If Legacy suddenly became so popular online that MED2 Underground Sea was $100 a pop, queue up MED5 Underground Seas. Problem solved.
That being said, that particular problem isn't what the article set out to prove. Not much in the way of long-term predictions here. Merely a status quo update - since it seems a great deal of people are mistaken about the status quo.
Lastly, if I was to consider Portal cards "not availalbe in paper" shouldn't we then also consider Exodus and MED1 cards "not available online" :)
Sadly, not the case. Interesting fact - City of Traitors was the only Exodus rare in the decklists.
@Paul - If the subject matter of the article had concerned how the format will split or had anything to do with classic at all (ave very tangentially), It would be on CQ. I just think this kind of article has a better target audience here than my own site.
You make a very good point about the overall format being cheaper. Although you should count Portal cards as "not available in paper" instead of at their exorbitant price. The Portal cards should be format warping, but practically they're not because they're physically unable to appear in concentrated numbers. Is this SCG event the first time that Portal sets have had two decks in the top-8? It's the first time I can think of.
The significantly more expensive digital cards are: Explosives, Magus of the Moon, Bridge From Below, Pact of Negation, Daze, and FoW. Layline of the Void and Progenitus are also a bit more online. Outside of that handful, digital is a huge discount. We might pay an extra $140 for a playset of FoW, but we save $160 on just the 8 cheapest duals used in a Zoo deck! Dual lands involving the color blue are about $30 cheaper each! Of course, Legacy players = old fogies. $60 isn't what people are paying for Underground Sea - it's what the card is 'worth' in a Juzam Djinn sort of way. That recent 14-year old finalist borrowed his cards. (Some of which were older than him!)
How about digital Vintage? Daze and FoW are still playable. But look at the paper prices of these cards: Oath of Druids (lol), Vampiric Tutor, Demonic Tutor, and Strip Mine. Ouch. Of course, the power 9 will be drastically cheaper and so it won't even matter. And how about our Mana Drains? People, buy Mana Drain!
Proving that paper Legacy is "more strangled" than digital Legacy doesn't prove that digital Legacy isn't also strangled. The paper cards might be worth more today, but surprisingly I suspect that there might be more of them. Since digital Legacy is more playable than paper Legacy I could imagine a revolution in the prices. I'll stop short of predicting it though. =)
Just curious but I would think with the amount of directed damage that Quest for Pure Flame would be a good add if space could be aloted. I know cracking one quest is always nice for those turns, but cracking 2 is just crazy.
Hey Mike wb to Pure, haven't seen anything from you for a while. More food for thought. I wonder if Legacy really will make a huge difference for me and my collection. Currently I am up in the air about it. I was already looking forward to Urza's Cycle and it's brokeness but to be honest I probably won't end up with the money cards for that series either just as I don't have a single Exodus card. (The ones I want priced out of my range too quickly for me and I have yet to get in a TSE draft.)
5x fireball @ you.
Yes, I found it pretty hard as well. New laptop, new sound setup: I'll be making sure the microphone gain is a lot higher next week.
As a pauper fanatic for the last couple months I think this article sums up perfectly what a new pauper player needs to know and what I figured out through trial and error.
If you want to know if your deck is good, imagine you played goblins and Monoblack Control every other game and nothing else. Could you win over 50% of your games? If so it's probably a good pauper deck. Then test it out against WW and a Blink deck.
true but it is unfair to compare the decks while trying to establish a percentage of luck vs skill...it would be like using a pee-wee team and the indianapolis colts to correalate the percentage of luck and skill in football. Proper correalations could only be established through relatively equal decks. This is especially true in mirror matches. There it is sometimes luck but mostly skill from tweaking and playtesting that allow one to win.
@Boogie, just so you're clear:
There's a several-week gap between when a set is released on paper and released online. Online beta test starts the monday after paper prereleases, once all cards are already known. You download a separate version of the client and connect to a different server with the Worldwake cards mixed in, and play against other beta testers.
The point is to discover bugs (which have been better lately) before they get to the public.
To the anonymous poster above- I love connect four. I play it in english when the teacher isn't watching, and the dynamics of the game are interesting. Like tictactoe on crack.
Top tier players are getting an edge before the match ever starts. They get a big edge if they can draft well or have come prepared with a constructed deck. That is what people are underplaying. That is probably the best reason to try and claim magic requires more skill than poker. Magic is in a sense 2 separate games, and one of these games the players have a lot of control over.
If you want to use that poker analogy bringing a poorly drafted or crappy constructed deck is like going all in with crap. Yeah you are "all in" every match but you determine whether or not you have a good starting hand.
It was nice watching the evolution of your deck list through the games. Very intense games, well written, and the format was appealing and easy to read.
Sounds great that you're opening a shop of your own. Grats, and thanks for spreading the nerd love!
My article went down for an update, it will be back up tonight.
mas ca ganda paneleiro !
I'm not the original builder of those two decks but from my personal experience playing them both, I can clearly say that Siege-Gang Commander at the 5 mana slot is a better choice considering the Aggro meta. Against Control Chandra is better but normally one out of four games is against Control these days. So keeping her in the sideboard seems logical to me.
Also Siege-Gang Commander is a "pay one get four" creature and chump block four attackers if I need be and kill one or two in the meantime if there's some extra mana available, and thus gives time to set up Valakut.
Bogardan Hellkite is an excellent creature for this deck; I've tested it a few times after I wrote this article and witnessed firsthand its sheer power. Playing it at the end of opponent's turn (most of the time) means dealing 10 damage to the opponent and that (most of the time) ends games. Nevertheless I will at least try the new dragonmaster in the sideboard once he's out.
LE
Good luck with the shop Eric, I'm sure you'll do just fine. And for the record, this time I too had difficulties hearing AJ.
LE
He always seems to be harder to hear then Eric.