Spent about 200 tix on vintage masters drafts, have 6 packs left, did 10 events of various types. Never opened power. Only saw power played against me once (random mox). I've got 57 rares and 7 mythics, the best of which is a Dack Fayden. I'm seriously thinking I may sell off some of my modern and legacy staples just to buy power and forget about the drafting lottery.
You do know that as soon as drafting stops, the prices will skyrocket. I highly doubt waiting is a viable option. Look what happened to Modern Masters.
So... About $1200 for a set of P9... That might be nothing compared to paper prices, but yep, that's too expensive. Let's see if the prices fall in the next couple of weeks.
As an EDH player, one of the main things I was lacking that is legal were dual lands. I managed to draft a few. (I got them passed to me!)I also picked up a necropotence and a few other cards not EDH legal, so I sold them. If any of you all even remotely play EDH, now is as good a time as ever will be again to get a set of duals. Just FYI.
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There are some interesting cards from Conspiracy side. I wish they print other ones too, especially that Boros blacksmith is a great loss.
I think Council's Judgement will be the one that will impact most to the Tribal games as an ultimate O-Ring that can exile True-name, Emrakul or any other creatures with hexproof/shroud too.
But, my personal favorite card is actually Selvala. She is more than she seems even for 1v1 games. Mana acceleration & life gain & extra card can be crucial in some moments, even with its downside. And her CMC range is right to be splashed.
Just to touch on what you said in the first part of the article, tweaking is just as if not more important than brewing. As a part-time brewer myself, I'm not afraid to admit that my first pass at any deck is usually pretty bad, but most of them have potential. Take, for example, my latest creation: Dack Fayden/Goblin Welder control in Vintage. My initial draft was really clunky and had glaring issues with any resolved non-artifact creature. A few matches and iterations later, I've cut -1 Blightsteel Colossus, -2 Mindslaver, -1 Wheel of Fortune, -1 Dack, -1 Welder, -1 Jace TMS, -2 Thoughtseize and added +1 Time Vault, +1 Voltaic Key, +1 Sensei's Divining Top, +1 Myr Battlesphere, +1 Steel Hellkite, +1 Mana Drain, +1 Tezzeret the Seeker +1 Lightning Bolt, +1 Fire//Ice. I also made room for Toxic Deluge and Engineered Explosives in the board. I can say I'm much happier with the deck's performance now, though it's still a work in progress. I know I kind of went off on a tangent there (What can I say? Dack is my favorite new card in a long time, Welder has the best flavor text in all of Magic, and they've got a bromance in the making.), but I hope it illustrates my point that refining a deck is an integral part of brewing. Too many times I see writers, especially Drew Levin on the Premium side of SCG, come up with something sweet only to discard it and move on to something else next week, and I hate that it downplays all the work that goes into taking an idea and running with it until it's either tournament worthy or just something cool that didn't pan out.
Yes and no, with Ironworks. I mean, you would like it to win, however, you do have a few options in going off:
Board:
2 Island, Ghost Quarter, Lotus Bloom, Ichor Wellspring, Mox Opal, Chromatic Star (or sphere)
Hand - Reshape, Faith's Reward, Codex Shredder (which can be Faith's Rewards as well, and still be just fine, or the second Reshape)
In this scenario, you can "go off" in a pretty powerful way, even if you don't find Iron-Works right on top - keep in mind that the 10 mana loop is required to generate enough to go infinite/kill on the spot, however, you can start going off well before that.
We also might have a second Mox Opal, or Reshape. If that's the case, you're going to tap the first, floating either W or U (doesn't matter much once you've gotten to UUU WWW, which we will be doing, but it could be that you're holding 2 more Reshape or something). Then we'll play the second Opal (which will kill the first) or, if we have 2 Reshape, we'll do the below line, but saccing the Opal before we cast the second Reshape (when we'd sac the Wellspring), getting the third Lotus Bloom.
So, we tap UU from the Islands, and Ghost Quarter one away, finding another Island. We'll pay UU to cast Reshape = 0, saccing Wellspring (and getting a card), searching up the second Lotus Bloom. At that point, we can sac both blooms, making UUU WWW. We're floating at least 6 mana at this point.
At this point we'll run mana through the Chromatic effect in play, and we might have other chromatics in hand to run through. If we hit an Ironworks by now, we'd cast it, then sac our artifacts to make a bunch of mana, just saving at least 1 White mana for Reward.
Anyway, Ironworks or no, we'll cast Faith's Reward. We'll get back Wellspring, possibly an Opal, 2 Lotus, the Island, and the Ghost Quarter, at a minimum. That's going to let you draw a card from Wellspring, draw another by cycling with the Chromatic, and as long as you don't totally blank, you should be able to go off fairly easily now. Just make sure you tap the returned Island + Ghost Quarter with the Wellspring draw on the stack to thin the deck a touch, but you have a bunch of mana, so even if you just run through some Chromatics and have to pay the full 6 mana for Open the Vaults, you'll end up with more cards and at least 8 mana available on the next cycle.
You can certainly whiff here, but at this point, any Sunrise effect keeps you going for another run-through, as does Ironworks (which gets REALLY abusive once you have a couple of Wellspring going), as does Codex Shredder, as does Reshape IF you get a bit lucky and are able to net a bit of mana off of extra mox opals, etc.
Like, it's hard to go off on turn 3 without some fairly insane things going on, but it's also pretty easy to go off on turn 4 of most reasonable hands.
Interesting article. I never got around to playing Eggs back when Second Sunrise was legal but actually played a version of Eggs in the Heirloom PRE this weekend and feel like I have a better understanding of the deck now.
The list you present has some interesting card choices. Mox Opal seems like a solid inclusion to help generate mana. Codex Shredder over Conjurer's Bauble is another interesting one - but I can kind of see the merits of it, particularly as you always want to be casting Faith's Reward and not Open the Vaults.
My main concern with the deck as it stands is that it seems to be extremely mana hungry. As such it seems very KCI reliant. Do ever win without KCI? It seems possible but much more difficult. You present the loop of making 3W + 5 mana as if it's simple but 9 mana is a lot to make without KCI. Additionally, if you fail to draw Faith's Reward (which doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility) your loop needs to be 4WW + 5 mana. For me that's what really hurts the deck - you've replaced a 3 mana spell with a 6 mana spell and that makes life a lot more difficult.
I'd like to give this deck a try, though I don't have Mox Opals which is an issue.
Thank you for the feedback! I didn't realize I tend to gloss over things, and for the audience I want to help I definitely need to work on that. I knew formatting and repetition would be a problem also, but you giving me specific examples has helped immensely. Thanks again and I hope to continue writing :D
A nice first article! I'm always glad to see new writers giving it a try. I'd agree with the D.K.; the community here often provides constructive criticism and is supportive. This is a great site to dabble in writing to see if you actually like it or not.
Here are my suggestions for improvement:
Use the card tagging in your article text - it makes it easier to quickly pull up what a card does. It's especially useful for newer players, which is currently your target audience. (Also, the linkage to MTGOTraders.com is a nod of thanks to Heath for supporting the site and providing us a venue to scribble to the masses!) You don't have to do it every mention of a card, but usually at least once outside of the deck list is a good idea.
Slow it down for details - Since you are aiming at newer players, don't gloss over some of the explanations so quickly. Saying "You have your staple Slivers that are seen in almost any Sliver deck..." won't mean much to somebody if they don't know what a Sliver is. Same thing with Spirit/Arcane. Don't be afraid to write a concise sentence that explains what these mechanics/types/synergies are for people that might not know. For those that already know, at worst the sentence is "reminder text".
Proofread and trim before submitting - Read over the article to see if any sentences are being too repetitive. Check if any sentences are missing context that helps them make sense. (Sometimes when editing we cut things; crucial things...) Try to look for ways to trim excess or repetitive words out of your articles before submitting. (Take the last paragraph as an example - you say the word "hope" four times in two sentences.) Make the read as smooth as possible.
I think if you work on those three things, your articles will improve greatly. Just my opinion though. :)
Pacing, formatting and such develops with practice. In the meantime, write about what you enjoy and go from there!
What I was thinking was, MBC results in longer games, so the card advantage from Chainer's Edict flashback makes it an attractive choice. On the other hand keeping 2 mana open is more threatening. I guess a mix of the two might be correct? In pauper of course.
You just gotta roll with them. Don't let negative comments get you down if you do receive them. Most "negative" comments here are just constructive criticism. I'm far from the perfect writer, believe you me. Just take your time, always give the article a proofread before you hit submit, and just enjoy the opportunity to have your voice be listened to by such a great community. Looking forward to part 2!
Hey man, thanks for the compliments. I honestly think the sliver decklist got messed up, and I know to stay away from the format next time lol. Again, appreciate the comment, terrified to get horrible ones all the time :O
71 cards in a competitive deck (Slivers)? That just doesn't seem right. Have I been that far out of the loop on Pauper?
I'm thinking about coming back to it though with Mono-Green Infect. I've been doing pretty well in Modern with a $5 MGI deck and don't see why it wouldn't transition perfectly to Pauper. It actually gains a few tools by opening up the Vintage and Legacy card pool to me. :)
Anywho, not a bad first article. Might want to hold off on that formatting feature next time, the text is somewhat on the smaller side and it kinda messes up the decklists. The actual meat of the article is nice though. I've been playing for over a decade now, so sometimes I need a reminder on how beginners view the game. I've tried to help every beginner I've ever come across though, so there's that. :P
I find it unlikely that Devour Flesh gets played over Diabolic Edict. Sure, there are some fringe uses for it, but in general, it is just better to run Diabolic Edict. I think anyone that's running Devour Flesh over it is probably just getting too cutesy.
Apparently nominations end on Friday, so if you haven't nominated you should do so sometime before then. Also, they are actually nominations, not votes (or at least Alison says so) https://twitter.com/MagicOnline/status/478961723139846144
It's not the value-aspect that makes diabolic good/not good, but the instant speed. The combination of Chainer's, Geth's Verdict, and Devour Flesh might, though.
All the dual lands are going to tank. They're only rares and you see them often. The mythics are probably going to tank hard too.
The only thing that I highly doubt will ever be "cheap" are the P9. They're exceedingly rare, and once the VMA drafting phase is over they're going to be on a steady increase.
I know nothing about Vintage, but if you need lots of P9 in your deck to play it then yes it's going to cost you quite a bit more than other formats still.
Well said, good points. Also, as far as PE's go, I can't remember the last time I had 6 hours to do anything that wasn't work (full time job, wife, 2 kids).
I'm not surprised to see everything crashing, and fully expect it to keep happening all weekend and into next week. During the first few pre/release days supply is extremely limited and there's a small set of players who will pay a premium to be among the first to have the cards. Once that market dries up, usually by day 2-3, we see the crash that's happening now. My best guess is that next weekend is going to be the time to buy in on the reprints/P9. I think we'll see Lotus hit about $50, Ancestral/Walk/Sapphire $40, Jet $35, Emerald/Ruby $30, and Twister $20. I also fully expect to see FoW rebound during the summer, but not back up to $100+. Going by number of copies per deck, it is the most played card in vintage and #2 in Legacy, barely below Brainstorm.
Spent about 200 tix on vintage masters drafts, have 6 packs left, did 10 events of various types. Never opened power. Only saw power played against me once (random mox). I've got 57 rares and 7 mythics, the best of which is a Dack Fayden. I'm seriously thinking I may sell off some of my modern and legacy staples just to buy power and forget about the drafting lottery.
You do know that as soon as drafting stops, the prices will skyrocket. I highly doubt waiting is a viable option. Look what happened to Modern Masters.
So... About $1200 for a set of P9... That might be nothing compared to paper prices, but yep, that's too expensive. Let's see if the prices fall in the next couple of weeks.
As an EDH player, one of the main things I was lacking that is legal were dual lands. I managed to draft a few. (I got them passed to me!)I also picked up a necropotence and a few other cards not EDH legal, so I sold them. If any of you all even remotely play EDH, now is as good a time as ever will be again to get a set of duals. Just FYI.
I offer a smarter, more affordable way to recruit a Virtual Personal Assistant. Virtual Assistant Business Administration I am an experienced, business savvy UK Virtual Assistant with a Satisfaction Guarantee offering complete peace of mind hiring your Personal Assistant or your money back. Banish the chaos with professional PA wizardry to clear through and clean up!
There are some interesting cards from Conspiracy side. I wish they print other ones too, especially that Boros blacksmith is a great loss.
I think Council's Judgement will be the one that will impact most to the Tribal games as an ultimate O-Ring that can exile True-name, Emrakul or any other creatures with hexproof/shroud too.
But, my personal favorite card is actually Selvala. She is more than she seems even for 1v1 games. Mana acceleration & life gain & extra card can be crucial in some moments, even with its downside. And her CMC range is right to be splashed.
Just to touch on what you said in the first part of the article, tweaking is just as if not more important than brewing. As a part-time brewer myself, I'm not afraid to admit that my first pass at any deck is usually pretty bad, but most of them have potential. Take, for example, my latest creation: Dack Fayden/Goblin Welder control in Vintage. My initial draft was really clunky and had glaring issues with any resolved non-artifact creature. A few matches and iterations later, I've cut -1 Blightsteel Colossus, -2 Mindslaver, -1 Wheel of Fortune, -1 Dack, -1 Welder, -1 Jace TMS, -2 Thoughtseize and added +1 Time Vault, +1 Voltaic Key, +1 Sensei's Divining Top, +1 Myr Battlesphere, +1 Steel Hellkite, +1 Mana Drain, +1 Tezzeret the Seeker +1 Lightning Bolt, +1 Fire//Ice. I also made room for Toxic Deluge and Engineered Explosives in the board. I can say I'm much happier with the deck's performance now, though it's still a work in progress. I know I kind of went off on a tangent there (What can I say? Dack is my favorite new card in a long time, Welder has the best flavor text in all of Magic, and they've got a bromance in the making.), but I hope it illustrates my point that refining a deck is an integral part of brewing. Too many times I see writers, especially Drew Levin on the Premium side of SCG, come up with something sweet only to discard it and move on to something else next week, and I hate that it downplays all the work that goes into taking an idea and running with it until it's either tournament worthy or just something cool that didn't pan out.
Oona, Queen of the Fae is another good addition to this deck
Yes and no, with Ironworks. I mean, you would like it to win, however, you do have a few options in going off:
Board:
2 Island, Ghost Quarter, Lotus Bloom, Ichor Wellspring, Mox Opal, Chromatic Star (or sphere)
Hand - Reshape, Faith's Reward, Codex Shredder (which can be Faith's Rewards as well, and still be just fine, or the second Reshape)
In this scenario, you can "go off" in a pretty powerful way, even if you don't find Iron-Works right on top - keep in mind that the 10 mana loop is required to generate enough to go infinite/kill on the spot, however, you can start going off well before that.
We also might have a second Mox Opal, or Reshape. If that's the case, you're going to tap the first, floating either W or U (doesn't matter much once you've gotten to UUU WWW, which we will be doing, but it could be that you're holding 2 more Reshape or something). Then we'll play the second Opal (which will kill the first) or, if we have 2 Reshape, we'll do the below line, but saccing the Opal before we cast the second Reshape (when we'd sac the Wellspring), getting the third Lotus Bloom.
So, we tap UU from the Islands, and Ghost Quarter one away, finding another Island. We'll pay UU to cast Reshape = 0, saccing Wellspring (and getting a card), searching up the second Lotus Bloom. At that point, we can sac both blooms, making UUU WWW. We're floating at least 6 mana at this point.
At this point we'll run mana through the Chromatic effect in play, and we might have other chromatics in hand to run through. If we hit an Ironworks by now, we'd cast it, then sac our artifacts to make a bunch of mana, just saving at least 1 White mana for Reward.
Anyway, Ironworks or no, we'll cast Faith's Reward. We'll get back Wellspring, possibly an Opal, 2 Lotus, the Island, and the Ghost Quarter, at a minimum. That's going to let you draw a card from Wellspring, draw another by cycling with the Chromatic, and as long as you don't totally blank, you should be able to go off fairly easily now. Just make sure you tap the returned Island + Ghost Quarter with the Wellspring draw on the stack to thin the deck a touch, but you have a bunch of mana, so even if you just run through some Chromatics and have to pay the full 6 mana for Open the Vaults, you'll end up with more cards and at least 8 mana available on the next cycle.
You can certainly whiff here, but at this point, any Sunrise effect keeps you going for another run-through, as does Ironworks (which gets REALLY abusive once you have a couple of Wellspring going), as does Codex Shredder, as does Reshape IF you get a bit lucky and are able to net a bit of mana off of extra mox opals, etc.
Like, it's hard to go off on turn 3 without some fairly insane things going on, but it's also pretty easy to go off on turn 4 of most reasonable hands.
Interesting article. I never got around to playing Eggs back when Second Sunrise was legal but actually played a version of Eggs in the Heirloom PRE this weekend and feel like I have a better understanding of the deck now.
The list you present has some interesting card choices. Mox Opal seems like a solid inclusion to help generate mana. Codex Shredder over Conjurer's Bauble is another interesting one - but I can kind of see the merits of it, particularly as you always want to be casting Faith's Reward and not Open the Vaults.
My main concern with the deck as it stands is that it seems to be extremely mana hungry. As such it seems very KCI reliant. Do ever win without KCI? It seems possible but much more difficult. You present the loop of making 3W + 5 mana as if it's simple but 9 mana is a lot to make without KCI. Additionally, if you fail to draw Faith's Reward (which doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility) your loop needs to be 4WW + 5 mana. For me that's what really hurts the deck - you've replaced a 3 mana spell with a 6 mana spell and that makes life a lot more difficult.
I'd like to give this deck a try, though I don't have Mox Opals which is an issue.
Don't know when you recorded this show - but obviously you posted it up to your website Tuesday, 6/18.
The prices of the Power 9 are on the rise!
Black Lotus up to selling for $200!
Moxes at $100 and up!
Hang on to your power!
John
Thank you for the feedback! I didn't realize I tend to gloss over things, and for the audience I want to help I definitely need to work on that. I knew formatting and repetition would be a problem also, but you giving me specific examples has helped immensely. Thanks again and I hope to continue writing :D
A nice first article! I'm always glad to see new writers giving it a try. I'd agree with the D.K.; the community here often provides constructive criticism and is supportive. This is a great site to dabble in writing to see if you actually like it or not.
Here are my suggestions for improvement:
Use the card tagging in your article text - it makes it easier to quickly pull up what a card does. It's especially useful for newer players, which is currently your target audience. (Also, the linkage to MTGOTraders.com is a nod of thanks to Heath for supporting the site and providing us a venue to scribble to the masses!) You don't have to do it every mention of a card, but usually at least once outside of the deck list is a good idea.
Slow it down for details - Since you are aiming at newer players, don't gloss over some of the explanations so quickly. Saying "You have your staple Slivers that are seen in almost any Sliver deck..." won't mean much to somebody if they don't know what a Sliver is. Same thing with Spirit/Arcane. Don't be afraid to write a concise sentence that explains what these mechanics/types/synergies are for people that might not know. For those that already know, at worst the sentence is "reminder text".
Proofread and trim before submitting - Read over the article to see if any sentences are being too repetitive. Check if any sentences are missing context that helps them make sense. (Sometimes when editing we cut things; crucial things...) Try to look for ways to trim excess or repetitive words out of your articles before submitting. (Take the last paragraph as an example - you say the word "hope" four times in two sentences.) Make the read as smooth as possible.
I think if you work on those three things, your articles will improve greatly. Just my opinion though. :)
Pacing, formatting and such develops with practice. In the meantime, write about what you enjoy and go from there!
Good luck,
- Gio
What I was thinking was, MBC results in longer games, so the card advantage from Chainer's Edict flashback makes it an attractive choice. On the other hand keeping 2 mana open is more threatening. I guess a mix of the two might be correct? In pauper of course.
You just gotta roll with them. Don't let negative comments get you down if you do receive them. Most "negative" comments here are just constructive criticism. I'm far from the perfect writer, believe you me. Just take your time, always give the article a proofread before you hit submit, and just enjoy the opportunity to have your voice be listened to by such a great community. Looking forward to part 2!
Hey man, thanks for the compliments. I honestly think the sliver decklist got messed up, and I know to stay away from the format next time lol. Again, appreciate the comment, terrified to get horrible ones all the time :O
71 cards in a competitive deck (Slivers)? That just doesn't seem right. Have I been that far out of the loop on Pauper?
I'm thinking about coming back to it though with Mono-Green Infect. I've been doing pretty well in Modern with a $5 MGI deck and don't see why it wouldn't transition perfectly to Pauper. It actually gains a few tools by opening up the Vintage and Legacy card pool to me. :)
Anywho, not a bad first article. Might want to hold off on that formatting feature next time, the text is somewhat on the smaller side and it kinda messes up the decklists. The actual meat of the article is nice though. I've been playing for over a decade now, so sometimes I need a reminder on how beginners view the game. I've tried to help every beginner I've ever come across though, so there's that. :P
It may be a budget thing, but people already run it at least occasionally as their 2nd set of instant-speed-edicts in the board.
http://www.mtggoldfish.com/archetype/9013
I find it unlikely that Devour Flesh gets played over Diabolic Edict. Sure, there are some fringe uses for it, but in general, it is just better to run Diabolic Edict. I think anyone that's running Devour Flesh over it is probably just getting too cutesy.
Apparently nominations end on Friday, so if you haven't nominated you should do so sometime before then. Also, they are actually nominations, not votes (or at least Alison says so) https://twitter.com/MagicOnline/status/478961723139846144
It's not the value-aspect that makes diabolic good/not good, but the instant speed. The combination of Chainer's, Geth's Verdict, and Devour Flesh might, though.
I dunno, do you think Chainer's Edict might supplant Diabolic Edict despite it being a sorcery?
Here's a graph of how the VMA cards are crashing:
http://www.mtggoldfish.com/index/VMA#online
All the dual lands are going to tank. They're only rares and you see them often. The mythics are probably going to tank hard too.
The only thing that I highly doubt will ever be "cheap" are the P9. They're exceedingly rare, and once the VMA drafting phase is over they're going to be on a steady increase.
I know nothing about Vintage, but if you need lots of P9 in your deck to play it then yes it's going to cost you quite a bit more than other formats still.
Well said, good points. Also, as far as PE's go, I can't remember the last time I had 6 hours to do anything that wasn't work (full time job, wife, 2 kids).
I'm not surprised to see everything crashing, and fully expect it to keep happening all weekend and into next week. During the first few pre/release days supply is extremely limited and there's a small set of players who will pay a premium to be among the first to have the cards. Once that market dries up, usually by day 2-3, we see the crash that's happening now. My best guess is that next weekend is going to be the time to buy in on the reprints/P9. I think we'll see Lotus hit about $50, Ancestral/Walk/Sapphire $40, Jet $35, Emerald/Ruby $30, and Twister $20. I also fully expect to see FoW rebound during the summer, but not back up to $100+. Going by number of copies per deck, it is the most played card in vintage and #2 in Legacy, barely below Brainstorm.