Yeah, there ARE some interesting things to be done that aren't being done in the Vintage meta but mostly because they are high risk low reward by comparison to what is tried and true. That's why I rarely play vintage.
I, unfortunately, cannot. May 3rd is my mom's birthday so I'll be at my parents' place all afternoon. So good luck, Joe, and anyone else who gets to participate.
The cheapest "real" deck is probably Dredge. If you skip out on Unmasks and Undiscovered Paradise/Bloodghast, it can be built completely from scratch for around 200 tix. You're bound to mize a few free wins with it, and I honestly can't remember the past time I saw Burn (assuming that's what you meant Blippy, since RDW as I remember it runs 4 Wastes and 4 Ports) Goblins or Elves played in Vintage. While there's always some benefits to giong rogue, I'm not convinced outweigh the disadvantages in this case.
What is the cheapest vintage deck? the chances of me winning in the format is none (unless my opponent gets mana scewed all the time) and it is such a shame. Still will play of course in support. still wish it was modern at the least.
What Algona said. However it is unlikely I will attend. I have a good collection by many standards but it isn't up to the task of putting together a competitive vintage deck. At best I can put a bad one together and I can tell you from experience that this won't cut it. Go big or go home, as they say. Glad you are still carrying on the tradition Blippy. At least it is something to keep alive some of the enthusiasm and joy Erik found for MTGO.
In regards to Dack and his third ability I'd play something a bit more different going along the lines of Gigadrowse, it's a case of keeping yourself and Dack alive long enough to steal all of your opponents cards in play.
Cheers Joe I always like my articles to look nice.
I always wanted to play in tournaments as well but found it too stressful to be honest and the amount of time required sat in front of a screen also was a big turn off.
Another thing I found is you always end up playing the same decks over and over again, after a while I get bored and look for the next interesting thing to build around.
Thanks for the comment Meyou, I was going to do a full article on the subject but it made me feel too sad and I like to share my decks to help spark someone's imagination.
Back in the day when I was writing weekly for Pure the casual population was amazing, you would always find a game online in any format, the players though have vanished over time like cards in the mist.
I currently have two main hobbies and only so much time in the week. A return to form isn't imposable, it just means I have to drag my behind out of MTGO retirement.
I did notice a comment on the State of the Program article a few weeks ago from Adam who has also noticed the decline.
I love the way everything looks in your articles. I think the deck lists look sweet, and the layout and everything are awesome.
I used to play in the just for fun room back when I had my first MTGO account, in 2007 approx. I won a lot, and always thought about playing in tournaments, because I had lots of experience in paper tournament from my first run in magic.
This time around, I stopped playing in the JUFF room as soon as I had Mono Black Devotion built, and I got delusions of grandeur - thinking that I might take my game to the next level.
Sometimes, though, I think that I had more fun when I didn't take the game so seriously.
I lost game three of a match last night because I kept clicking ok too fast, and realized suddenly after the last one that I needed to respond, and that response would have won me the game. It's entirely my fault. That is true.
I have a bad habit of making a play choice too fast, even when I'm not in danger of timing out, and it costs me dearly.
That is different from when you mean to pick one card and your finger slips. Or another one that happened to me, I clicked on a sol ring instead of a grafdigger's cage one time, and ended up choosing the sol ring to be destroyed with abrupt decay. In paper magic, I'd be saying the phrase that I was thinking at the time "I'll target your Grafdigger's Cage", and everyone would know what the choice really was. I call that a misclick. I thought cage, and clicked on the wrong card. Yes, it was sloppy, and a misplay, and it lost me the game.
All of those instances were my fault. And as upset as I may get, at the end of the day, I'm the one who did something wrong.
I've even done similar things in paper, where I for some reason said "Go" when I totally knew that I had more stuff to do. I was playing against a pro player in a ptq at the time, and I was just nervous. After the game, the player talked to me, and we agreed that that misplay cost me the match. Perhaps I'm subconsciously defeating myself, I don't know. It happens more than it should though. :)
Keep up the good work. Philosophy is an important part of understanding the game. :)
Flips as per usual great article! :) I am tempted build your version of the flayercore deck because I built mine and decided the JuFF room wasn't weak enough to handle my versions and lost track after the initial builds. I still think it is a fun deck. I'd probably toss in Torrent Elemental and a Tasigur or two + maybe Sidisis 1 & 2.
It is partially my fault that "no one" writes for casual play (anymore since I did used to write monthly articles on that very thing, here.) If I wasn't too enmeshed in my not-writing I would be churning out casual content. But I have read at least 2-3 articles a month on this site that seem very casual indeed.
You make me want an entire article on the subject. In brief, the negativity about MTGO from professional writers on other sites doesn't help. Whether you like it or not, MTGO has gotten a bad reputation. It doesn't help either that nobody writes about casual for MTGO. If you want casual to be a thing online, I implore you to be a champion for the casual format. If nobody promotes it, nobody will play it. Lastly, the mothership doesn't highlight online like they should on the front page. If Wizards is to blame for anything, it is their bad PR history. I can overlook many of MTGO's cons, but headquarters does a bad job of highlighting the great things about it. They "should" have a column in their regular rotation to highlight the pros of playing on MTGO. Just my thoughts in brief and good luck.
I agree with everyone calling a misplay a miss-click instead. Activating a planeswalker's wrong ability is not a miss-click. One time I was playing scapeshift and picking mountains but my library shifted and I picked a scalding tarn. That's a miss-click in my book, though it looks like wizards has fixed it now and your library stays fixed. A general rule of thumb is if what you did would never have happened in paper magic, then it's probably a miss-click. Making a token with elspeth, knight-errant instead of using her second ability and swinging for the win instead, is a misplay. Nice article, Derrick!
I'm hoping to play in the tournament. As long as I can get someone to watch my son, i'm going to play.
It's really amazing to see how all of you guys have honored Erik and his memory. I wasn't active in any form of magic from 2009-2013, so I am one of the youngin's you mentioned.
Anyway, thanks for the hard work you do for all of us Magic Online players.
Thanks for the comment, Joe! Back in '97 I didn't know of any "real" decks. My friend and I would just build something and try to play, and when I mean try, I mean play and if we didn't know a rule we'd make it up. But it is crazy how Magic has evolved since then. I wonder if we will be looking back in another 18 years and think about the decks we are playing now and how they wouldn't stand a chance against the ones we will be playing with. Boggles my mind to think about that.
I used to play a Merfolk deck, back in 1997ish (I'm a Dinosaur in the modern Magic world). I always liked the deck. Back then, you didn't have eight or more lords. We ran Sunken Sea for God's sake! The Crusade that eats up your mana, very underpowered by today's standards.
Phantasmal Terrain, I believe was the main way you gave someone an Island for Islandwalk. My little brother came up with a better way, which was to use Political Trickery to exchange control of one of your lands for theirs. That way, you could steal a utility land from them, and they'd get a useless island. Plus, you couldn't reverse the effect with a Disenchant.
Thanks for the feedback! Next article, I'll take a look at aggro. I ended up not playing this list this week because I got a sweet sweet aggro deck together, and I'm going to talk about how it played out at Game Day today :)
I'm just going to copy and paste a excerpt from a conversation I had last night about Dragons sealed.
"
I'm so done with dragons sealed.
I had a pretty decent pool, solid WB deck splashing blue for two rare dragons (3/7 hexproof silumgar and the 6/4 that gets protection)
Round 1 I curve out well in both games and win easily.
Round two I punish his stumble in game 1 and win.
In game two, he has the dragonlord dromoka 5/7 lifelink or whatever and I have no answers to it.
I board in another island and a reality shift to handle his bomb.
Game 3 goes long, he plays dromoka.
I have the 5 mana destroy an attacker/blocker bolster 1.
Then, he plays the 4/3 rare dragon that when your opponent plays a spell it grows and you gain a life.
I have the flatten for it.
Then he plays ANOTHER dromoka
This time it's the FRF version that bolsters two.
I rip reality shift, he's got WWGG open.
So I cast it, he manifests
I cast defeat targeting his manifest, he has 0 cards in hand at this point
He taps WWGG and flips that motherfucking 4/4 mythic that has super prowess
So my removal spell fizzles and he has this massive guy that I can't attack into
He untaps, draws a card.
It's the 6/6 dragon for 7 that when it dies you can put it on the top or bottom
I fucking FREAKED out and snap conceded.
He told me he opened 7 on-color bomb rares and played them all.
The rest of his deck was like almost unplayable.
Maindeck enchantment removal, bad filler commons, etc
But holy shit.
"
I am sort of an Abzaniac. I came from the opposite direction. I was playing a Temur Bees deck after M15 dropped (before Temur was Temur) and slowly made my way to the dark side. I've kept my eye on poor Temur as everyone else kept getting tools to win and Temur kept getting clucky non-bos and slow combos etc. No doubt DTK has added a lot to the Temur style decks.
Is it enough? Time will tell. But I have been playing Jacob Wilson's list (or more like my variant of his list) and have found that when both decks draw about even power, Abzan Control still is superior. I think Abzan Midrange and even Abzan Aggro are extremely weak to Temur decks like the one above. In fact I've played against a similar list twice and did pretty well. It was by no means a 'good' match up for my Abzan list and I can see how I could easily get crushed, but once I figured out what to expect, if I draw the right lands, removal and draw my correct threats on time, the decks play pretty even.
The main advantage of your Temur list is it will run folks off the road, particularly in game 1. I see a lot of decks getting slapped to ground by your list. I worry about Mono Red, though. Anger of the Gods is powerful, but at sorcery speed it has the same issue I'm having with Drown in Sorrow. DASH plus burn.
I love the Keranos. Was a 1 of in most of my Blue/Red decks. So hard to deal with for most decks. Makes me want to put one utter end back in my deck. If he starts popping up I just might.
Yeah, there ARE some interesting things to be done that aren't being done in the Vintage meta but mostly because they are high risk low reward by comparison to what is tried and true. That's why I rarely play vintage.
48th thats like 1/3 of the usual attendance right?
I, unfortunately, cannot. May 3rd is my mom's birthday so I'll be at my parents' place all afternoon. So good luck, Joe, and anyone else who gets to participate.
The cheapest "real" deck is probably Dredge. If you skip out on Unmasks and Undiscovered Paradise/Bloodghast, it can be built completely from scratch for around 200 tix. You're bound to mize a few free wins with it, and I honestly can't remember the past time I saw Burn (assuming that's what you meant Blippy, since RDW as I remember it runs 4 Wastes and 4 Ports) Goblins or Elves played in Vintage. While there's always some benefits to giong rogue, I'm not convinced outweigh the disadvantages in this case.
RDW, Goblins, & Elves are (reasonably) viable and (reasonably) cheap, and ya prolly have most of the pieces already.
What is the cheapest vintage deck? the chances of me winning in the format is none (unless my opponent gets mana scewed all the time) and it is such a shame. Still will play of course in support. still wish it was modern at the least.
But... but... we're paying all the way to 48th! (so far)
I foresee very few people (if any) walking away empty handed...
What Algona said. However it is unlikely I will attend. I have a good collection by many standards but it isn't up to the task of putting together a competitive vintage deck. At best I can put a bad one together and I can tell you from experience that this won't cut it. Go big or go home, as they say. Glad you are still carrying on the tradition Blippy. At least it is something to keep alive some of the enthusiasm and joy Erik found for MTGO.
I still miss hamtastic.
Great article Joe it was a really good read.
In regards to Dack and his third ability I'd play something a bit more different going along the lines of Gigadrowse, it's a case of keeping yourself and Dack alive long enough to steal all of your opponents cards in play.
Cheers Joe I always like my articles to look nice.
I always wanted to play in tournaments as well but found it too stressful to be honest and the amount of time required sat in front of a screen also was a big turn off.
Another thing I found is you always end up playing the same decks over and over again, after a while I get bored and look for the next interesting thing to build around.
Thanks for the comment Meyou, I was going to do a full article on the subject but it made me feel too sad and I like to share my decks to help spark someone's imagination.
Back in the day when I was writing weekly for Pure the casual population was amazing, you would always find a game online in any format, the players though have vanished over time like cards in the mist.
I currently have two main hobbies and only so much time in the week. A return to form isn't imposable, it just means I have to drag my behind out of MTGO retirement.
I did notice a comment on the State of the Program article a few weeks ago from Adam who has also noticed the decline.
Some good ideas there Paul, actually you have just given me a cool new deck idea involving Torrent Elemental, watch this space.
It's good to see you're still around even if you only pop in for a read every now and then.
I love the way everything looks in your articles. I think the deck lists look sweet, and the layout and everything are awesome.
I used to play in the just for fun room back when I had my first MTGO account, in 2007 approx. I won a lot, and always thought about playing in tournaments, because I had lots of experience in paper tournament from my first run in magic.
This time around, I stopped playing in the JUFF room as soon as I had Mono Black Devotion built, and I got delusions of grandeur - thinking that I might take my game to the next level.
Sometimes, though, I think that I had more fun when I didn't take the game so seriously.
I lost game three of a match last night because I kept clicking ok too fast, and realized suddenly after the last one that I needed to respond, and that response would have won me the game. It's entirely my fault. That is true.
I have a bad habit of making a play choice too fast, even when I'm not in danger of timing out, and it costs me dearly.
That is different from when you mean to pick one card and your finger slips. Or another one that happened to me, I clicked on a sol ring instead of a grafdigger's cage one time, and ended up choosing the sol ring to be destroyed with abrupt decay. In paper magic, I'd be saying the phrase that I was thinking at the time "I'll target your Grafdigger's Cage", and everyone would know what the choice really was. I call that a misclick. I thought cage, and clicked on the wrong card. Yes, it was sloppy, and a misplay, and it lost me the game.
All of those instances were my fault. And as upset as I may get, at the end of the day, I'm the one who did something wrong.
I've even done similar things in paper, where I for some reason said "Go" when I totally knew that I had more stuff to do. I was playing against a pro player in a ptq at the time, and I was just nervous. After the game, the player talked to me, and we agreed that that misplay cost me the match. Perhaps I'm subconsciously defeating myself, I don't know. It happens more than it should though. :)
Keep up the good work. Philosophy is an important part of understanding the game. :)
Flips as per usual great article! :) I am tempted build your version of the flayercore deck because I built mine and decided the JuFF room wasn't weak enough to handle my versions and lost track after the initial builds. I still think it is a fun deck. I'd probably toss in Torrent Elemental and a Tasigur or two + maybe Sidisis 1 & 2.
It is partially my fault that "no one" writes for casual play (anymore since I did used to write monthly articles on that very thing, here.) If I wasn't too enmeshed in my not-writing I would be churning out casual content. But I have read at least 2-3 articles a month on this site that seem very casual indeed.
You make me want an entire article on the subject. In brief, the negativity about MTGO from professional writers on other sites doesn't help. Whether you like it or not, MTGO has gotten a bad reputation. It doesn't help either that nobody writes about casual for MTGO. If you want casual to be a thing online, I implore you to be a champion for the casual format. If nobody promotes it, nobody will play it. Lastly, the mothership doesn't highlight online like they should on the front page. If Wizards is to blame for anything, it is their bad PR history. I can overlook many of MTGO's cons, but headquarters does a bad job of highlighting the great things about it. They "should" have a column in their regular rotation to highlight the pros of playing on MTGO. Just my thoughts in brief and good luck.
I agree with everyone calling a misplay a miss-click instead. Activating a planeswalker's wrong ability is not a miss-click. One time I was playing scapeshift and picking mountains but my library shifted and I picked a scalding tarn. That's a miss-click in my book, though it looks like wizards has fixed it now and your library stays fixed. A general rule of thumb is if what you did would never have happened in paper magic, then it's probably a miss-click. Making a token with elspeth, knight-errant instead of using her second ability and swinging for the win instead, is a misplay. Nice article, Derrick!
I'm hoping to play in the tournament. As long as I can get someone to watch my son, i'm going to play.
It's really amazing to see how all of you guys have honored Erik and his memory. I wasn't active in any form of magic from 2009-2013, so I am one of the youngin's you mentioned.
Anyway, thanks for the hard work you do for all of us Magic Online players.
Thanks for the comment, Joe! Back in '97 I didn't know of any "real" decks. My friend and I would just build something and try to play, and when I mean try, I mean play and if we didn't know a rule we'd make it up. But it is crazy how Magic has evolved since then. I wonder if we will be looking back in another 18 years and think about the decks we are playing now and how they wouldn't stand a chance against the ones we will be playing with. Boggles my mind to think about that.
I used to play a Merfolk deck, back in 1997ish (I'm a Dinosaur in the modern Magic world). I always liked the deck. Back then, you didn't have eight or more lords. We ran Sunken Sea for God's sake! The Crusade that eats up your mana, very underpowered by today's standards.
Phantasmal Terrain, I believe was the main way you gave someone an Island for Islandwalk. My little brother came up with a better way, which was to use Political Trickery to exchange control of one of your lands for theirs. That way, you could steal a utility land from them, and they'd get a useless island. Plus, you couldn't reverse the effect with a Disenchant.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the feedback! Next article, I'll take a look at aggro. I ended up not playing this list this week because I got a sweet sweet aggro deck together, and I'm going to talk about how it played out at Game Day today :)
I'm just going to copy and paste a excerpt from a conversation I had last night about Dragons sealed.
"
I'm so done with dragons sealed.
I had a pretty decent pool, solid WB deck splashing blue for two rare dragons (3/7 hexproof silumgar and the 6/4 that gets protection)
Round 1 I curve out well in both games and win easily.
Round two I punish his stumble in game 1 and win.
In game two, he has the dragonlord dromoka 5/7 lifelink or whatever and I have no answers to it.
I board in another island and a reality shift to handle his bomb.
Game 3 goes long, he plays dromoka.
I have the 5 mana destroy an attacker/blocker bolster 1.
Then, he plays the 4/3 rare dragon that when your opponent plays a spell it grows and you gain a life.
I have the flatten for it.
Then he plays ANOTHER dromoka
This time it's the FRF version that bolsters two.
I rip reality shift, he's got WWGG open.
So I cast it, he manifests
I cast defeat targeting his manifest, he has 0 cards in hand at this point
He taps WWGG and flips that motherfucking 4/4 mythic that has super prowess
So my removal spell fizzles and he has this massive guy that I can't attack into
He untaps, draws a card.
It's the 6/6 dragon for 7 that when it dies you can put it on the top or bottom
I fucking FREAKED out and snap conceded.
He told me he opened 7 on-color bomb rares and played them all.
The rest of his deck was like almost unplayable.
Maindeck enchantment removal, bad filler commons, etc
But holy shit.
"
I am sort of an Abzaniac. I came from the opposite direction. I was playing a Temur Bees deck after M15 dropped (before Temur was Temur) and slowly made my way to the dark side. I've kept my eye on poor Temur as everyone else kept getting tools to win and Temur kept getting clucky non-bos and slow combos etc. No doubt DTK has added a lot to the Temur style decks.
Is it enough? Time will tell. But I have been playing Jacob Wilson's list (or more like my variant of his list) and have found that when both decks draw about even power, Abzan Control still is superior. I think Abzan Midrange and even Abzan Aggro are extremely weak to Temur decks like the one above. In fact I've played against a similar list twice and did pretty well. It was by no means a 'good' match up for my Abzan list and I can see how I could easily get crushed, but once I figured out what to expect, if I draw the right lands, removal and draw my correct threats on time, the decks play pretty even.
The main advantage of your Temur list is it will run folks off the road, particularly in game 1. I see a lot of decks getting slapped to ground by your list. I worry about Mono Red, though. Anger of the Gods is powerful, but at sorcery speed it has the same issue I'm having with Drown in Sorrow. DASH plus burn.
I love the Keranos. Was a 1 of in most of my Blue/Red decks. So hard to deal with for most decks. Makes me want to put one utter end back in my deck. If he starts popping up I just might.
Great stuff. Looking forward to more!