Well they already have wrath of god in there and they already have a black card in there as well. I think for flavor reasons they didnt want 2 of the same exact card, regardless of color.
Though a reprint of damnation would be sick! But with it saying can't be regenerated on it, I sadly doubt it.
Overall I find the black list to be sub-optimal (I still really like the white list). I think Evincar's Justice would be a great addition even if it's just in the sideboard.
I thought about Read the Bones, but I like trying to keep my card draw on creatures to help put bodies on the field.
I also like the idea of using the 2 colorless cycling lands over the 1 on-color lands. You're right about having all of that colorless mana available.
Replica is great if you are trying to stick to mono-color or think you'll hit aggressive builds that you need bodies early, but I almost always wished it were a Mulldrifter. Of course in the build above Unearth can target a Replica and would not be able to hit a Mulldrifter.
Haven't really been doing Sealed, but I have been drafting a lot on my alt account. I basically force 5 colors every time. In the first pack I take a Guildgate if at all possible, unless there is a bomb to take over it. On the wheel picks I can usually get a few Gatekeepers. In the GTC and RTR packs, I again take a bomb if it's there, but otherwise I'll look for a Gate, removal, or cards that synergize with gates. Crackling Perimeter is often a win-con for me. Hold the Gates is very good as well. And obviously, these cards are not generally high priorities for anyone else.
Rebels should fit a little better into an urzatron list one would think.
having untapped lands to drop the initial rebels early and then once tron is active you should be fetching at least two cards a turn.
The black list is an idea I was toying with during the cloudpost days.
But found it to be suboptimal.
Some things I tried with the urzatron lands aside from cards already looked at:
Matt, I wasn't aware of the Cloudpost Rebels list, but I think it's worth looking into as an option. I think this deck suffers a bit because I need three land pieces to make big mana work vs. the locus lands.
I did not. However, I get my prices from MTGOTraders.com. (Great site, you should buy from them. I do.) Traders does not generally short term chase card fluctuations. They are in this for the long term, and they adjust prices based on longer term trends. They did not drop prices during that week. (Nor did other dealers, to the best of my information.) They've all been through this before. A few people will panic and sell out, but they will come back or be replaced. After a brief panic, the same decks and archetypes will be doing well, so the old and new prices will be about the same. (As they are.) Bumping prices down for that week would have just meant a loss that week, so dealers generally didn't cut prices.
This may have been missed at the bottom of the comments from last week, so reposting, in the hope of a response. :-)
Not sure if I've missed it, or whether you have (when you had a "week off"), but did you ever show the price changes for the week in which V3 was turned off?
I think data for that particular week would be the most interesting of all the weeks you've been including this feature.
The thing is, those are expensive staples in core decks of the format, true, but they are the kind of cards players kind of expect to be expensive. They are also cards that people can and do run various substitutions for to get started with a deck.
When the lands themselves are expensive, it means that you can't really play any non mono colored deck for the format without having a mess of a a manabase.
I don't think you can reasonably apply a moral argument ("should") to this economic phenomenon. It is what it is despite anyone's good intentions.
The fact that magic became exorbitant (the word you wanted, I believe) is not debatable but we can always debate the why. To no good effect imho. Greed, economics, collecting, formats changes, mythic rarities, etc are all factors.
Before the PT was developed, before draft and mostly before sealed (or any kind of limited tourney format really) people cracked packs all the time in the hopes for the lottery ticket that let them open more packs or netted them a small profit on their venture. Heck we used to go to the store, open the packs there and sell the Shivans and Royal Assassins back to the store for store credit. Turn around, open more packs, do it again.
Fun times that. But mainly I bring it up to point out that Limited has changed how we view opening packs. And how value from a pack has changed. You can still play the lottery (with a set like VMA or MMA there are always a few chase cards to sell back) but it isn't as smart or nearly as fun as just playing limited with them. And it is by far still cheaper to buy what you need on the Secondary market.
So the secondary market prices are inevitable. And when something like that is inevitable it gains value. There is no way to rewind that clock. Prices rise and they don't fall much usually unless wotc does something dramatic. (Aside from the occasional rogue deck making good and surprising everyone, or at least devaluing a previously hot card.)
I am not saying they did this to crash the modern card prices but I would not be surprised if it was a factor in their decision. Access is a big part of learning and playing a format. If many players can't afford the $400 a play set cards that are a part of the format and you can't even buy them in some places because they just aren't around, something has to give.
Maybe a cooling off period is something they felt modern needs. But I suspect this will not remain. The people have spoken out concerning this and they are decidedly unhappy.
"And I agree the cost has gotten out of hand but I think its just demand out stripping supply due to growth."
Right - that's just basic economics at work. The player base was smaller then than it is now. There were less of these cards printed and more people want them, so prices are high. The point I was trying to make, though, is this condition is exacerbated by the rarity at which most of the constructed worthy cards were printed, further reducing supply compared to what we saw 10 years ago.
I just meant if there wasn't a pro circuit the cards would have less cash value. When you open a pack there is some expectation that what you open you could sell. If you decide to quit magic and sell your collection it is why cards have more value. The same cant be said if you buy a box of netrunner, you get the enjoyment and that is it your never going to sell those singles. I was talking pure dollars and cents.
And I agree the cost has gotten out of hand but I think its just demand out stripping supply due to growth. Legacy and Vintage will never be formats that are accessible, because the supply will never increase.
"It is what allows you to open a pack of magic cards and not simply have had your money evaporate"
I am sorry but this doesn't make much sense to me. The pro circuit should not dictate if your money was for nothing. You have fnm, collector's value and you have the kitchen table in the end with friends. It's a hobby and although yes, hobby;s cost money, the price of magic as a hobby has become... Well I am not sure of the right word, but you get my point.
I am not trying to say your wrong in any way, so please don't take what I said the wrong way.
The existence of the pro circuit, increases card value which is a good thing. It is what allows you to open a pack of magic cards and not simply have had your money evaporate. But commander has also spiked card prices.
Its more a factor of Magic as a game has grown a lot in the last few years. A lot less packs of Ravnica were opened as compared to RTR. So the Shocklands wont be spiking to 40 dollars anytime soon. The shocks are probably more or at least as important as the fetches really.
Part of the point of Modern is it is not beholden to the reserve list. They can reprint staples as much as they need to keep it from having singles that cost as much as standard decks. (Tabernacle for example in legacy.)
Think of it over the long term. If every two years there is a Modern Masters set and some reprints in the core it can stabilize prices over time rather then have them constantly increasing. This important since it prevents a bubble. Yes thoughtseize will most likely be a very pricey card again, but you can get them know and have them for later. The problem is when not just new players need staples but everyone needs staples.
Now I could easily be wrong here so please don't get angry at me. But isn't this a result of the game becoming more of a pro circuit type of game rather than a casual one? Which also drives up prices due to supply and demand and also there are 20 years worth of magic cards that have been printed and so the new cards are going to become more powerful because that's just what happens. Either they run out of idea's and so they say screw and print a card like Sphinx's Revelation or Geist of Saint Traft, or they look at it as a slight power creep makes the cards more fun to play. I could be either one of these reasons or maybe neither, but it looks like its both in some ways.
The game has gone far beyond being a friendly hobby card game where fnm is a large part of where games are played. Usually these days its gran prix's, scg events and the dream of making it to the pro tour that people care about and so cards will go up because the ones who really want to chase the pro dream are willing to pay 100 bucks a goyf if they have to.
Now again my entire post here could be wrong but this is just what it looks like is happening me to me. I also doubt that wotc didn't see the Fetchland spike coming at some points. We have seen spikes like this for years and I am sure Wotc is aware of what happened to Jace, the Mind Sculptor and what happened to Tarmogoyf. The problem is that there isn't much they can do about it, I doubt more reprints will make the prices go down to much and if they do, it will be for a very short period of time. Eventually more people will start playing, need the fetches and so little of them will be left in circulation, the prices will go back up.
I'm sure the more the game becomes popular due to twitch and the more the pro circuit takes off, the more money wotc will make and the more opportunities will come. This time next year we could see a pro tour on ESPN again, who knows? Either way I doubt the game is going to change anytime soon and I am sure wotc doesn't mind it.
I isn't just fetchlands. Tarmogoyf, Liliana, Dark Confidant... The list goes on. Modern is, as someone else mentioned, a victim of its own success. Cards from the earlier legal sets are becoming increasingly expensive and difficult to find.
It is also, IMO, a victim of what seems to be WotC's recent-ish philosophy on the rarity of constructed playable cards. These days, almost every card that makes the cut is Rare or Mythic. Some of the most powerful pre-modern era cards were Commons or Uncommons: Wild Mongrel, Fact of Fiction, Duress, Brainstorm, Terminate, Flametongue Kavu, Psychatog, and so on. These days we get Tarmogoyf, Sphinx's Revelation, Thoughtseize, Hero's Downfall, Restoration Angel, Vendilion Clique, etc. Basically, if you're playing a deck without 80% or more of the cards being Rare or Mythic you're either Tom Ross or you're doing it wrong. This, coupled with the format's popularity, is what makes it too expensive for many would-be players.
"We used to have an MTGO online community. WotC went to great lengths over the years to disenfranchise said community. ... This MTG/Twitter community does not feel the same as the old MTGO community; it lacks a cohesiveness, a common bond."
WotC may have helped this transformation along, but their actions are not directly responsible for it IMO. My experience in online gaming has been that the larger a group gets, the less it feels like a community. Although I am loathe to bring it up, I believe the most prominent example of this is World of Warcraft. In the early days, nearly everyone on a server knew each other, even those on opposite factions. It was a tight-knit community. As the game grew, you would stop running into the same people over and over again and that community aspect started to fall apart. Some of the features Blizzard implemented, most notably cross-realm battlegrounds and the dungeon finder, helped to impersonalize the game even more, but they were in no way the cause of the community devolution.
I see the same pattern happening on MODO as well. I started very near the birth of the program - a week or 2 before Onslaught released IIRC. Back then, we were a small community. No matter your playstyle preferences, you were bound to run into the same people over and over and strike up a friendship with a few of them. (I even ended up shooting pool in a bar league with someone I met on MODO when i found out him and his wife had recently moved to Pittsburgh, where I was going to school at the time.) Fast forward to today; the player base has grown by orders of magnitude since then. Every format, aside from maybe Vintage and Legacy, has grown too large for that type of interaction to take place. Just like WoW and Blizzard's actions, WotC may have sped up the process, but it was an inevitable change and not the result of a malicious company.
Well they already have wrath of god in there and they already have a black card in there as well. I think for flavor reasons they didnt want 2 of the same exact card, regardless of color.
Though a reprint of damnation would be sick! But with it saying can't be regenerated on it, I sadly doubt it.
my only thought would be because it is due for a standard reprint?
"Question of the Week: Is there anything you would have wanted to see in FTV: Annihilation?"
Damnation. I didn't even dream they wouldn't put it in.
Overall I find the black list to be sub-optimal (I still really like the white list). I think Evincar's Justice would be a great addition even if it's just in the sideboard.
I thought about Read the Bones, but I like trying to keep my card draw on creatures to help put bodies on the field.
I also like the idea of using the 2 colorless cycling lands over the 1 on-color lands. You're right about having all of that colorless mana available.
Replica is great if you are trying to stick to mono-color or think you'll hit aggressive builds that you need bodies early, but I almost always wished it were a Mulldrifter. Of course in the build above Unearth can target a Replica and would not be able to hit a Mulldrifter.
Haven't really been doing Sealed, but I have been drafting a lot on my alt account. I basically force 5 colors every time. In the first pack I take a Guildgate if at all possible, unless there is a bomb to take over it. On the wheel picks I can usually get a few Gatekeepers. In the GTC and RTR packs, I again take a bomb if it's there, but otherwise I'll look for a Gate, removal, or cards that synergize with gates. Crackling Perimeter is often a win-con for me. Hold the Gates is very good as well. And obviously, these cards are not generally high priorities for anyone else.
Thanks for the article!
Rebels should fit a little better into an urzatron list one would think.
having untapped lands to drop the initial rebels early and then once tron is active you should be fetching at least two cards a turn.
The black list is an idea I was toying with during the cloudpost days.
But found it to be suboptimal.
Some things I tried with the urzatron lands aside from cards already looked at:
Grim Harvest
Perilous Myr
Fume Spitter
Predatory Nightstalker
Evincar's Justice
Read the Bones
Polluted Mire over Barren Moor.
Why?
You have much more available colorless mana than colored.
And the colored is at a premium.
I much like the replica's here though, will need to test them.
Matt, I wasn't aware of the Cloudpost Rebels list, but I think it's worth looking into as an option. I think this deck suffers a bit because I need three land pieces to make big mana work vs. the locus lands.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Well if they listen to us about this, maybe they will listen about mtgo? We hope?
But in all seriousness I'm very happy that for once they listened. They also added 2 more modern gps as well.
I did not. However, I get my prices from MTGOTraders.com. (Great site, you should buy from them. I do.) Traders does not generally short term chase card fluctuations. They are in this for the long term, and they adjust prices based on longer term trends. They did not drop prices during that week. (Nor did other dealers, to the best of my information.) They've all been through this before. A few people will panic and sell out, but they will come back or be replaced. After a brief panic, the same decks and archetypes will be doing well, so the old and new prices will be about the same. (As they are.) Bumping prices down for that week would have just meant a loss that week, so dealers generally didn't cut prices.
Hi Pete
This may have been missed at the bottom of the comments from last week, so reposting, in the hope of a response. :-)
Not sure if I've missed it, or whether you have (when you had a "week off"), but did you ever show the price changes for the week in which V3 was turned off?
I think data for that particular week would be the most interesting of all the weeks you've been including this feature.
Thanks as usual for the great articles. :-)
So for the record in case you missed it they added a modern pro tour to schedule.
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/modern-pro-tour-2015-2014-0...
The thing is, those are expensive staples in core decks of the format, true, but they are the kind of cards players kind of expect to be expensive. They are also cards that people can and do run various substitutions for to get started with a deck.
When the lands themselves are expensive, it means that you can't really play any non mono colored deck for the format without having a mess of a a manabase.
I don't think you can reasonably apply a moral argument ("should") to this economic phenomenon. It is what it is despite anyone's good intentions.
The fact that magic became exorbitant (the word you wanted, I believe) is not debatable but we can always debate the why. To no good effect imho. Greed, economics, collecting, formats changes, mythic rarities, etc are all factors.
Before the PT was developed, before draft and mostly before sealed (or any kind of limited tourney format really) people cracked packs all the time in the hopes for the lottery ticket that let them open more packs or netted them a small profit on their venture. Heck we used to go to the store, open the packs there and sell the Shivans and Royal Assassins back to the store for store credit. Turn around, open more packs, do it again.
Fun times that. But mainly I bring it up to point out that Limited has changed how we view opening packs. And how value from a pack has changed. You can still play the lottery (with a set like VMA or MMA there are always a few chase cards to sell back) but it isn't as smart or nearly as fun as just playing limited with them. And it is by far still cheaper to buy what you need on the Secondary market.
So the secondary market prices are inevitable. And when something like that is inevitable it gains value. There is no way to rewind that clock. Prices rise and they don't fall much usually unless wotc does something dramatic. (Aside from the occasional rogue deck making good and surprising everyone, or at least devaluing a previously hot card.)
I am not saying they did this to crash the modern card prices but I would not be surprised if it was a factor in their decision. Access is a big part of learning and playing a format. If many players can't afford the $400 a play set cards that are a part of the format and you can't even buy them in some places because they just aren't around, something has to give.
Maybe a cooling off period is something they felt modern needs. But I suspect this will not remain. The people have spoken out concerning this and they are decidedly unhappy.
"And I agree the cost has gotten out of hand but I think its just demand out stripping supply due to growth."
Right - that's just basic economics at work. The player base was smaller then than it is now. There were less of these cards printed and more people want them, so prices are high. The point I was trying to make, though, is this condition is exacerbated by the rarity at which most of the constructed worthy cards were printed, further reducing supply compared to what we saw 10 years ago.
I just meant if there wasn't a pro circuit the cards would have less cash value. When you open a pack there is some expectation that what you open you could sell. If you decide to quit magic and sell your collection it is why cards have more value. The same cant be said if you buy a box of netrunner, you get the enjoyment and that is it your never going to sell those singles. I was talking pure dollars and cents.
And I agree the cost has gotten out of hand but I think its just demand out stripping supply due to growth. Legacy and Vintage will never be formats that are accessible, because the supply will never increase.
"It is what allows you to open a pack of magic cards and not simply have had your money evaporate"
I am sorry but this doesn't make much sense to me. The pro circuit should not dictate if your money was for nothing. You have fnm, collector's value and you have the kitchen table in the end with friends. It's a hobby and although yes, hobby;s cost money, the price of magic as a hobby has become... Well I am not sure of the right word, but you get my point.
I am not trying to say your wrong in any way, so please don't take what I said the wrong way.
The existence of the pro circuit, increases card value which is a good thing. It is what allows you to open a pack of magic cards and not simply have had your money evaporate. But commander has also spiked card prices.
Its more a factor of Magic as a game has grown a lot in the last few years. A lot less packs of Ravnica were opened as compared to RTR. So the Shocklands wont be spiking to 40 dollars anytime soon. The shocks are probably more or at least as important as the fetches really.
Part of the point of Modern is it is not beholden to the reserve list. They can reprint staples as much as they need to keep it from having singles that cost as much as standard decks. (Tabernacle for example in legacy.)
Think of it over the long term. If every two years there is a Modern Masters set and some reprints in the core it can stabilize prices over time rather then have them constantly increasing. This important since it prevents a bubble. Yes thoughtseize will most likely be a very pricey card again, but you can get them know and have them for later. The problem is when not just new players need staples but everyone needs staples.
Oh man, better let go of drinks...sy, for that unqulified note.
VC is CMC 3.
Tx- I Love these thing, especially because it offen reinvent
forgotten treasures :-) still I miss a not forgotten one: vendilion clique?
Now I could easily be wrong here so please don't get angry at me. But isn't this a result of the game becoming more of a pro circuit type of game rather than a casual one? Which also drives up prices due to supply and demand and also there are 20 years worth of magic cards that have been printed and so the new cards are going to become more powerful because that's just what happens. Either they run out of idea's and so they say screw and print a card like Sphinx's Revelation or Geist of Saint Traft, or they look at it as a slight power creep makes the cards more fun to play. I could be either one of these reasons or maybe neither, but it looks like its both in some ways.
The game has gone far beyond being a friendly hobby card game where fnm is a large part of where games are played. Usually these days its gran prix's, scg events and the dream of making it to the pro tour that people care about and so cards will go up because the ones who really want to chase the pro dream are willing to pay 100 bucks a goyf if they have to.
Now again my entire post here could be wrong but this is just what it looks like is happening me to me. I also doubt that wotc didn't see the Fetchland spike coming at some points. We have seen spikes like this for years and I am sure Wotc is aware of what happened to Jace, the Mind Sculptor and what happened to Tarmogoyf. The problem is that there isn't much they can do about it, I doubt more reprints will make the prices go down to much and if they do, it will be for a very short period of time. Eventually more people will start playing, need the fetches and so little of them will be left in circulation, the prices will go back up.
I'm sure the more the game becomes popular due to twitch and the more the pro circuit takes off, the more money wotc will make and the more opportunities will come. This time next year we could see a pro tour on ESPN again, who knows? Either way I doubt the game is going to change anytime soon and I am sure wotc doesn't mind it.
What do we do with left over hunt packs?
I isn't just fetchlands. Tarmogoyf, Liliana, Dark Confidant... The list goes on. Modern is, as someone else mentioned, a victim of its own success. Cards from the earlier legal sets are becoming increasingly expensive and difficult to find.
It is also, IMO, a victim of what seems to be WotC's recent-ish philosophy on the rarity of constructed playable cards. These days, almost every card that makes the cut is Rare or Mythic. Some of the most powerful pre-modern era cards were Commons or Uncommons: Wild Mongrel, Fact of Fiction, Duress, Brainstorm, Terminate, Flametongue Kavu, Psychatog, and so on. These days we get Tarmogoyf, Sphinx's Revelation, Thoughtseize, Hero's Downfall, Restoration Angel, Vendilion Clique, etc. Basically, if you're playing a deck without 80% or more of the cards being Rare or Mythic you're either Tom Ross or you're doing it wrong. This, coupled with the format's popularity, is what makes it too expensive for many would-be players.
Does anyone else wonder if this might have something to do with the fetchland mess of skyrocketing prices?
WoTC has pretty much said that they had not predicted the huge jump, and could not respond with a reprint any time soon due to the lead time on sets.
How likely is it that they decided to deal with the problem by just cutting Modern from the schedule, be it for now or for good?
"We used to have an MTGO online community. WotC went to great lengths over the years to disenfranchise said community. ... This MTG/Twitter community does not feel the same as the old MTGO community; it lacks a cohesiveness, a common bond."
WotC may have helped this transformation along, but their actions are not directly responsible for it IMO. My experience in online gaming has been that the larger a group gets, the less it feels like a community. Although I am loathe to bring it up, I believe the most prominent example of this is World of Warcraft. In the early days, nearly everyone on a server knew each other, even those on opposite factions. It was a tight-knit community. As the game grew, you would stop running into the same people over and over again and that community aspect started to fall apart. Some of the features Blizzard implemented, most notably cross-realm battlegrounds and the dungeon finder, helped to impersonalize the game even more, but they were in no way the cause of the community devolution.
I see the same pattern happening on MODO as well. I started very near the birth of the program - a week or 2 before Onslaught released IIRC. Back then, we were a small community. No matter your playstyle preferences, you were bound to run into the same people over and over and strike up a friendship with a few of them. (I even ended up shooting pool in a bar league with someone I met on MODO when i found out him and his wife had recently moved to Pittsburgh, where I was going to school at the time.) Fast forward to today; the player base has grown by orders of magnitude since then. Every format, aside from maybe Vintage and Legacy, has grown too large for that type of interaction to take place. Just like WoW and Blizzard's actions, WotC may have sped up the process, but it was an inevitable change and not the result of a malicious company.