Witchbane Orb is also a good choice and probably better as a budget option that can also be used in multiple builds. It doesn't have the synergy with Ethereal Armor that Ivory Mask has, but diversifying the card types has the advantage of making it harder to remove - if your opponent brings in Enchantment removal they may not be able to deal with the Witchbane Orb - especially so that they wouldn't necessarily be thinking of Artifacts in a Bogles deck. Thanks for the suggestion
As someone who has been playing Hexproof in the Modern PREs, both tonight and last week I 4-0ed Kumagoro's Modern Times event with my list that doesn't currently run Daybreak Coronet (they are expensive $$) I can say that the deck is fantastic and a lot of fun.
As an independent myself, I totally get the confusion too, but no. I was not assuming you were anything of a particular political nature. I was merely noting the incidence of Republicans spreading the word "Liberal" around like it's some kind of insult when for the most part it has been Liberal politics (on both sides of the aisle!!) that have affected change in the last century+. They've been fairly successful with their campaign if people estranged from politics use it that way.
Whereas the Democrats have been rather unsuccessful in using Conservative in the same manner (though in the 70s it was a dirty word for 5 minutes or so.)
Guilt is a useless emotion in adults. It is a tool espoused by certain child-rearing pedagogues to inculcate children with a sense of right and wrong.
I don't engage in it.
As for "*sigh*, Liberals..." that sounds like you still feel in opposition to myself: "Might as well use any dirty dozens insult I can come up with..." If you'd said "*sigh*, people" I'd probably agree. People indeed.
As I have already stated, I am proud to be a Liberal. Though I get the distinct impression we have different ideas of what that label means. Especially after your self-correction of "cultural Marxist". Which makes no sense to me so I will look it up as you suggest.
But just on the face of it, Marxism is an economics philosophy and one I disagree with based on empirical evidence of it not working for any major country ever in its form of communism.
I'd guess because of the strangeness of the juxtaposition of those terms that it is a kluge label used to obfuscate its meaning rather than clarify it. But I will have to read up on it. Having not had a chance to even brush it off yet. (Don't sigh at me mister! grrr *shakes cane*.)
Thanks for the links. This discussion may have had an entirely different tone if you'd just supplied those links in the first place. And Thanks for joining puremtgo for the content then, and I hope you stick around and get involved in what is important here.
As of now I do not have access to cataclysm but I would like to try and get 1 in the board before the GP. Also I have no plans to take out Mirran Crusader, I am sold on his power. :) Looks like I will try to do an article on the sideboard alone with options for various decks in the meta. Would love your input when I finish it.
Always great to see you providing budget options, especially for Modern!
For those that might have missed the Facebook comment, Troy Drinkard brought up how using Spirit Link instead of Life Link can be better because tossing Spirit Link on Eidolon of the Great Revel can make it start to produce life for you while neutering its damage! There are very few reasons why the "when" trigger on Spirit Link will be "worse" than actual Lifelink for the advantage that Spirit Link can be used as a defensive stall in a pinch.
If you opt out of using Oblivion Ring, don't use Suspension Field. Instead, use Journey to Nowhere. The ZEN version is only .08, cheaper than SF and less restrictive.
I'm always trying different options in the "flex creature" spot and right now I'm on Fiendslayer Paladin. Its pseudo-hexproof against Red and Black combined with Lifelink and First Strike makes it great in the Burn/Delver meta.
1.My name is a reference to a video game character
2.I mistyped, what I meant to say was cultural marxism, which I really hoped you would look up before brushing it off, but again *sigh* liberals.
3.I do agree however that progress is necessary for human evolution and I am all for it, however burning ourselves at the altar of white male cis guilt is not progress, but I digress from the politics of the post.
here are some fast facts for you about the other side of gamergate, the "high road"
1.http://blogjob.com/oneangrygamer/2014/09/wikipedia-editors-doxxed-for-updating-gamergate-wiki-page/
2.http://33.media.tumblr.com/b97c09cef137e95c891b447ab393ebbd/tumblr_ncbn7pHRzF1tkhroeo1_400.png
3.https://twitter.com/QueenyMartha (id reccomend skimming through this)
4.http://imgur.com/th6CBgl
5.better yet, just skip all this and read this http://mindlesszombiestudios.com/content/harassment-no-one-talking-about...
(also I made this account cause I wanted to, not just to "flame you")
Yeah, there's actually been more clone effects that target than don't lately (fated infatuation, stolen identity, artisan of forms, cackling counterpart) so it is a feature worth noting particularly for players who have only been around for more recent sets.
No, no, it wasn't meant to say you! Sorry if I let you think that (I'm not a native English speaker myself!)
It's just that I really believe in what Paul said above, both when Magic and life are concerned: the past is the past, the future is where we'll live. And we should, we must make our future better.
Uh, Kumagoro42, not every copy effect dodges shroud/hexproof. A quick card search reveals several copy creature effects which indeed specify that it copies a "target creature." There are plenty of copy effects that target.
So, in this case, it actually is a loophole that allows this to work.
It might be a wrong assessment as my English is not good enough to get nuances well but I get the impression my posting annoys you; that my words belongs to the rant category soon be gone substituted by the better People to come? If so I am a bit unsure what raised it as no offence intended but anyway some answers to the raised points: I am not claiming any universal truth, just reported my individual experience/assessment: e.g following the switch I played two 100Singleton games and one prismatic simply because I found no games whereas I used to play several per day before. I was not referring to vintage but my personal assessment would be that we would have a vivid but small Community playing and enjoying it- but no proof available, sy. Playing experience is individual- not all people not liking it are not able to take changes, or is it completely off to not enjoying cracking a fetch in prismatic in V4. I fully stand by your view that limited is in great shape- i enjoy it myself but that's only One Part of game. To be honest I have no clue what is driving the secondary market, as I did not see the respective action in casual and constructed. Wouldn't you expect to see your Events grow with all the activity in in Limited?
Anyway, I enjoy your articles and wealth of Knowledge in the fantastic/historic/../context and hope you are correct and I am Off. I simply miss the joy of playing and deckbuilding, individally and without a Master thesis on the subject.
I absolutely love that Nahiri's ability creates a nonlegendary artifact. It makes it so Doubling Season affects it. Pop her in a token deck; Her first and last ability produces tokens!
All I'll say is that images do not imply more effort than walls of text. The content and style stand alone independent from the visuals. That said, it doesn't mean that my articles couldn't benefit from some visuals.
I'll think about everything that people have said and implement what I feel is relevant.
1) You can feel free to disagree about multiplayer, but there are MANY people that are very frustrated by the setup. Just compare the number of multiplayer games running at any time with what used to be going.
2) When I load the client, it uses between 600mb to 700mb of RAM. After three hours this morning it was up to 1.8gb. This is when it starts to lag and crash. I have 8gb of memory, so it hasn't used up all the memory on my system.
If I was to make a list of features I'd like to see, topping that list would be the ability to have several formats check boxed (rather than radio buttoned and getting rid of the required deck) and when you click on a game, it would bring up a list of your saved decks for that format, with the last one used being selected by default.
We'll talk at length about it in the next article. My monitor is possibly spoiling me, because I'm just fine looking at the cards, and I enjoy very very much tapping all lands together, attacking with all the creatures, stacking all the tokens. These are three things right there that are more important for Commander than for any other format, where you don't typically end with 20 lands and 300 tokens in play.
A different layout of the 4-man table is probably behind the corner (as the stupid "all opponents but 1 start minimized" is probably going away), and the chat issues are to be addressed everywhere.
But don't give up, Mike. You have a responsibility. If you give up, there's a voice less telling WotC what they're doing wrong. They're like clueless children! They are! I'm not saying they're not. As I noted, these are people who clearly never used MTGO much, or they wouldn't make such blatant bad calls.
But it's all in flux, and this is a crucial time. We're essentially all part of a giant open playtesting session. Instead of hiring playtesters, or having the program go dark for a few months, they're making us play with this incomplete version. We need serious, reasonable, responsible people playing the game now more than ever.
1) I vehemently disagree that multiplayer is "the same or better." Making it so that you cannot have each of the players share an equal amount of space is extremely frustrating. If you are playing against 3 players, those 3 are squished in the top half of the screen, which means a lot of minimizing/enlarging to see what is going on, which should be completely unnecessary. In Commander games battlefield space is at a premium since there can be numerous permanents. In v.3, this only became an issue when someone had numerous tokens out, and you had to scroll their windows up and down to make sure you didn't miss an important permanent in play. Now, anytime there are more than 4 permanents the cards are shrunk down so that I have difficulty reading them. This get exponentially worse when more players are involved.
I don't have a dual screen set up, so I have to dock the chat in order to see what is going on. Again, this cuts away from precious battlefield space. What I would really like to do is undock the chat, make the chat box as small as possible, then let it float in the battlefield where I want it. Unfortunately due to the windows based version of the chat, it would consistently be "put behind" and hidden every time I tried to do this. I would speculate that problems with the chat box have also decreased the social interactions in games, which is also extremely disappointing.
I still have great difficulty putting decks together (tried again the other night to update an old deck), but that is likely because I don't use it often enough.
Replays for multipalyer games don't work at all. This really hurts my ability to make the articles I want. The other bugs are annoying, but I trust that they will eventually get those fixed. You do a good job of pointing out various issues and flaws, as well as improvements in the system. It's pretty thorough. Good on you for making this article.
On a more personal note, I just don't enjoy playing Commander on MTGO anymore. I've pretty much stopped playing (a few of my regular playing buddies have as well), and therefore stopped writing/making vids. I was playing on MTGO during v.2, survived that and the subsequent transitions to v.3. I tried to give v.4 a chance. It just makes me sad.
On what you base this statement, exactly? Look, I'm a pragmatist (when I need to), so I want data. I know how easy it is to mistake one's personal experience with some universal truth.
Do you have access to data pertaining the number of people who quit MTGO after V4, and the number of people who quit BECAUSE of V4? (People used to routinely quit — and sometimes routinely come back — during the V3 era, too. I could probably list a hundred names of players I personally saw quit during V3).
I don't have those data, so I can just look around and deduce some data by observation. I see drafts firing at uncanny speed and in massive quantity for the latest sets. I see my own PREs hitting the same attendance level they used to do in V3, in some cases more. I see several new players showing up at those PREs. I see card prices changing more and more rapidly, which is a symptom of a growing economy. I see the number of hits on articles about MTGO, like those on this very site, not going down a bit. I see popular bots being still very hard to access.
How are these clues of a dying environment?
"flagging formats are virtually dead or dying"
Which ones? You mean Vintage?
Honest question: would Vintage's destiny have been any different under V3?
"the whole setup in all their tiny fractions render the playing experience much less fun than it's used to be"
Well, not for me, no.
Certainly not for all the new players that never even experienced V3 (I would like to make them — and everyone else — try V3 after they played for one or two years with V4. That would be a very interesting experiment indeed).
I actually welcome the new generation of players, if only because when they will be the majority, I will finally stop hearing rants about the good days of yore. Until the release of V5, that is.
Witchbane Orb is also a good choice and probably better as a budget option that can also be used in multiple builds. It doesn't have the synergy with Ethereal Armor that Ivory Mask has, but diversifying the card types has the advantage of making it harder to remove - if your opponent brings in Enchantment removal they may not be able to deal with the Witchbane Orb - especially so that they wouldn't necessarily be thinking of Artifacts in a Bogles deck. Thanks for the suggestion
Witchbane Orb is far superior alternative over Ivory Mask as a replacement for Leyline of Sanctity. And it is universal SB card for any colored decks.
Thanx - that is good to know as I feared to somehow missed my intention.
As someone who has been playing Hexproof in the Modern PREs, both tonight and last week I 4-0ed Kumagoro's Modern Times event with my list that doesn't currently run Daybreak Coronet (they are expensive $$) I can say that the deck is fantastic and a lot of fun.
Thanks for the tips, they are great and would go a long way to improving the deck
As an independent myself, I totally get the confusion too, but no. I was not assuming you were anything of a particular political nature. I was merely noting the incidence of Republicans spreading the word "Liberal" around like it's some kind of insult when for the most part it has been Liberal politics (on both sides of the aisle!!) that have affected change in the last century+. They've been fairly successful with their campaign if people estranged from politics use it that way.
Whereas the Democrats have been rather unsuccessful in using Conservative in the same manner (though in the 70s it was a dirty word for 5 minutes or so.)
Guilt is a useless emotion in adults. It is a tool espoused by certain child-rearing pedagogues to inculcate children with a sense of right and wrong.
I don't engage in it.
As for "*sigh*, Liberals..." that sounds like you still feel in opposition to myself: "Might as well use any dirty dozens insult I can come up with..." If you'd said "*sigh*, people" I'd probably agree. People indeed.
As I have already stated, I am proud to be a Liberal. Though I get the distinct impression we have different ideas of what that label means. Especially after your self-correction of "cultural Marxist". Which makes no sense to me so I will look it up as you suggest.
But just on the face of it, Marxism is an economics philosophy and one I disagree with based on empirical evidence of it not working for any major country ever in its form of communism.
I'd guess because of the strangeness of the juxtaposition of those terms that it is a kluge label used to obfuscate its meaning rather than clarify it. But I will have to read up on it. Having not had a chance to even brush it off yet. (Don't sigh at me mister! grrr *shakes cane*.)
Thanks for the links. This discussion may have had an entirely different tone if you'd just supplied those links in the first place. And Thanks for joining puremtgo for the content then, and I hope you stick around and get involved in what is important here.
As of now I do not have access to cataclysm but I would like to try and get 1 in the board before the GP. Also I have no plans to take out Mirran Crusader, I am sold on his power. :) Looks like I will try to do an article on the sideboard alone with options for various decks in the meta. Would love your input when I finish it.
Always great to see you providing budget options, especially for Modern!
For those that might have missed the Facebook comment, Troy Drinkard brought up how using Spirit Link instead of Life Link can be better because tossing Spirit Link on Eidolon of the Great Revel can make it start to produce life for you while neutering its damage! There are very few reasons why the "when" trigger on Spirit Link will be "worse" than actual Lifelink for the advantage that Spirit Link can be used as a defensive stall in a pinch.
If you opt out of using Oblivion Ring, don't use Suspension Field. Instead, use Journey to Nowhere. The ZEN version is only .08, cheaper than SF and less restrictive.
I'm always trying different options in the "flex creature" spot and right now I'm on Fiendslayer Paladin. Its pseudo-hexproof against Red and Black combined with Lifelink and First Strike makes it great in the Burn/Delver meta.
- Gio
It appears you were suggesting that I was republican, I'm not, I'm a reactionary. I don't vote
Sorry for the various mistakes, I was typing this while drafting
1.My name is a reference to a video game character
2.I mistyped, what I meant to say was cultural marxism, which I really hoped you would look up before brushing it off, but again *sigh* liberals.
3.I do agree however that progress is necessary for human evolution and I am all for it, however burning ourselves at the altar of white male cis guilt is not progress, but I digress from the politics of the post.
here are some fast facts for you about the other side of gamergate, the "high road"
1.http://blogjob.com/oneangrygamer/2014/09/wikipedia-editors-doxxed-for-updating-gamergate-wiki-page/
2.http://33.media.tumblr.com/b97c09cef137e95c891b447ab393ebbd/tumblr_ncbn7pHRzF1tkhroeo1_400.png
3.https://twitter.com/QueenyMartha (id reccomend skimming through this)
4.http://imgur.com/th6CBgl
5.better yet, just skip all this and read this http://mindlesszombiestudios.com/content/harassment-no-one-talking-about...
(also I made this account cause I wanted to, not just to "flame you")
Yeah, there's actually been more clone effects that target than don't lately (fated infatuation, stolen identity, artisan of forms, cackling counterpart) so it is a feature worth noting particularly for players who have only been around for more recent sets.
No, no, it wasn't meant to say you! Sorry if I let you think that (I'm not a native English speaker myself!)
It's just that I really believe in what Paul said above, both when Magic and life are concerned: the past is the past, the future is where we'll live. And we should, we must make our future better.
and crusader is your only hope against elves. don't take it out
I suggest 1 or 2 cataclysm in the sideboard. It is good against both control deks as well as pesky elves
Uh, Kumagoro42, not every copy effect dodges shroud/hexproof. A quick card search reveals several copy creature effects which indeed specify that it copies a "target creature." There are plenty of copy effects that target.
So, in this case, it actually is a loophole that allows this to work.
It might be a wrong assessment as my English is not good enough to get nuances well but I get the impression my posting annoys you; that my words belongs to the rant category soon be gone substituted by the better People to come? If so I am a bit unsure what raised it as no offence intended but anyway some answers to the raised points: I am not claiming any universal truth, just reported my individual experience/assessment: e.g following the switch I played two 100Singleton games and one prismatic simply because I found no games whereas I used to play several per day before. I was not referring to vintage but my personal assessment would be that we would have a vivid but small Community playing and enjoying it- but no proof available, sy. Playing experience is individual- not all people not liking it are not able to take changes, or is it completely off to not enjoying cracking a fetch in prismatic in V4. I fully stand by your view that limited is in great shape- i enjoy it myself but that's only One Part of game. To be honest I have no clue what is driving the secondary market, as I did not see the respective action in casual and constructed. Wouldn't you expect to see your Events grow with all the activity in in Limited?
Anyway, I enjoy your articles and wealth of Knowledge in the fantastic/historic/../context and hope you are correct and I am Off. I simply miss the joy of playing and deckbuilding, individally and without a Master thesis on the subject.
I absolutely love that Nahiri's ability creates a nonlegendary artifact. It makes it so Doubling Season affects it. Pop her in a token deck; Her first and last ability produces tokens!
Thanks! I really do appreciate the feedback.
All I'll say is that images do not imply more effort than walls of text. The content and style stand alone independent from the visuals. That said, it doesn't mean that my articles couldn't benefit from some visuals.
I'll think about everything that people have said and implement what I feel is relevant.
1) You can feel free to disagree about multiplayer, but there are MANY people that are very frustrated by the setup. Just compare the number of multiplayer games running at any time with what used to be going.
2) When I load the client, it uses between 600mb to 700mb of RAM. After three hours this morning it was up to 1.8gb. This is when it starts to lag and crash. I have 8gb of memory, so it hasn't used up all the memory on my system.
3) It does not work.
If I was to make a list of features I'd like to see, topping that list would be the ability to have several formats check boxed (rather than radio buttoned and getting rid of the required deck) and when you click on a game, it would bring up a list of your saved decks for that format, with the last one used being selected by default.
We'll talk at length about it in the next article. My monitor is possibly spoiling me, because I'm just fine looking at the cards, and I enjoy very very much tapping all lands together, attacking with all the creatures, stacking all the tokens. These are three things right there that are more important for Commander than for any other format, where you don't typically end with 20 lands and 300 tokens in play.
A different layout of the 4-man table is probably behind the corner (as the stupid "all opponents but 1 start minimized" is probably going away), and the chat issues are to be addressed everywhere.
But don't give up, Mike. You have a responsibility. If you give up, there's a voice less telling WotC what they're doing wrong. They're like clueless children! They are! I'm not saying they're not. As I noted, these are people who clearly never used MTGO much, or they wouldn't make such blatant bad calls.
But it's all in flux, and this is a crucial time. We're essentially all part of a giant open playtesting session. Instead of hiring playtesters, or having the program go dark for a few months, they're making us play with this incomplete version. We need serious, reasonable, responsible people playing the game now more than ever.
1) I vehemently disagree that multiplayer is "the same or better." Making it so that you cannot have each of the players share an equal amount of space is extremely frustrating. If you are playing against 3 players, those 3 are squished in the top half of the screen, which means a lot of minimizing/enlarging to see what is going on, which should be completely unnecessary. In Commander games battlefield space is at a premium since there can be numerous permanents. In v.3, this only became an issue when someone had numerous tokens out, and you had to scroll their windows up and down to make sure you didn't miss an important permanent in play. Now, anytime there are more than 4 permanents the cards are shrunk down so that I have difficulty reading them. This get exponentially worse when more players are involved.
I don't have a dual screen set up, so I have to dock the chat in order to see what is going on. Again, this cuts away from precious battlefield space. What I would really like to do is undock the chat, make the chat box as small as possible, then let it float in the battlefield where I want it. Unfortunately due to the windows based version of the chat, it would consistently be "put behind" and hidden every time I tried to do this. I would speculate that problems with the chat box have also decreased the social interactions in games, which is also extremely disappointing.
I still have great difficulty putting decks together (tried again the other night to update an old deck), but that is likely because I don't use it often enough.
Replays for multipalyer games don't work at all. This really hurts my ability to make the articles I want. The other bugs are annoying, but I trust that they will eventually get those fixed. You do a good job of pointing out various issues and flaws, as well as improvements in the system. It's pretty thorough. Good on you for making this article.
On a more personal note, I just don't enjoy playing Commander on MTGO anymore. I've pretty much stopped playing (a few of my regular playing buddies have as well), and therefore stopped writing/making vids. I was playing on MTGO during v.2, survived that and the subsequent transitions to v.3. I tried to give v.4 a chance. It just makes me sad.
"parts of the community are gone"
On what you base this statement, exactly? Look, I'm a pragmatist (when I need to), so I want data. I know how easy it is to mistake one's personal experience with some universal truth.
Do you have access to data pertaining the number of people who quit MTGO after V4, and the number of people who quit BECAUSE of V4? (People used to routinely quit — and sometimes routinely come back — during the V3 era, too. I could probably list a hundred names of players I personally saw quit during V3).
I don't have those data, so I can just look around and deduce some data by observation. I see drafts firing at uncanny speed and in massive quantity for the latest sets. I see my own PREs hitting the same attendance level they used to do in V3, in some cases more. I see several new players showing up at those PREs. I see card prices changing more and more rapidly, which is a symptom of a growing economy. I see the number of hits on articles about MTGO, like those on this very site, not going down a bit. I see popular bots being still very hard to access.
How are these clues of a dying environment?
"flagging formats are virtually dead or dying"
Which ones? You mean Vintage?
Honest question: would Vintage's destiny have been any different under V3?
"the whole setup in all their tiny fractions render the playing experience much less fun than it's used to be"
Well, not for me, no.
Certainly not for all the new players that never even experienced V3 (I would like to make them — and everyone else — try V3 after they played for one or two years with V4. That would be a very interesting experiment indeed).
I actually welcome the new generation of players, if only because when they will be the majority, I will finally stop hearing rants about the good days of yore. Until the release of V5, that is.