I'm going to point out some of the "casual" elements of pk23's Shaman build (listed in the article above), to drive home some that point.
First, lack of legacy duals. It's not really fair, since no one can be blamed for their collection, but shocklands (with rare exceptions) are considered casual in Legacy.
Second, 33 Shamans! Those extra 13 shamans have to be of comparable quality to the 13 extra real Legacy-level spells to not be considered casual. I've not seen any of the 13 weakest here see Legacy play. Casual.
Third, lack of 4-ofs. If a card is worthy to be played in a deck for competitive reasons, much more often than not it needs to be played as a 4-of. Major exceptions include legends, top-of-curve, searchable bullets, or redundancy in the card's effect. Many cards in this list fail that criteria. Only 3 Deathrite is probably the most glaring "error" (assuming he was trying to be competitive, not my basic assumption). Masked Admirers over the second Thrun seems to fail for similar reasons, 1 Burning-Tree Emissary over 4 or 0 seems wrong. I think there are many others, but the reasons would be too subtle for a general discussion.
Fourth, Spikeshot Elder with virtually no support. No search, so only a weak combo with Pendelhaven, and an ok combo with Kessig in the late game. Zero copies is probably correct, but making room for 4 Rancor would have helped the entire deck, but especially expand the reach of a deck using the Elder.
I like pk23's build. It looks like fun. But it is casual. If, and this is a big if, he thought this was a perfect-Shaman build, then that might be grounds for considering him a bad deckbuilder. Much more likely, even given that foolish assumption for this argument's sake. considering his very powerful blue/white tribal builds, it just means he needs more practice or better cards with these colors. My personal assumption is that he knew the power level of the deck fully, and was content to play with it as it: casual.
Yet he did say that "What's more important is: for some undefeated decks, a ban won't even prove necessary, because the build will be fair enough as it is, despite its success."
I can see how you can say the last sentence is boorish. In real life, I would have said it with my saddest, soberest tone possible, not snidely. It is my honest opinion, and one I would have even so kept to myself, except that my previous arguments have been exhausted over the weeks. Thanks for the call out.
Coming from anyone else that last bit would put you in the category you declared yourself in before, boorishness. Condescension isn't how to argue this. You do know legacy/classic better than most tribal players because that is your metier however Kuma and many others who play THIS format understand how the power works here. It isn't at all the same as those environments even if you can shoe horn builds in.
I happen to agree with you that Rageforger is a fair card undeserving of banning but it isn't so much that any direct damage and removal can kill it. LOTS of cards fit that category and many are rather more unfair than Rageforger imho. Goyf on an empty board with no other cards in the yard dies to a shock. But I think many people will agree that Goyf is far more broken than Rageforger.
On the other hand in the right shamans build Rageforger should rack up more than a few points of damage assuming it remains on the table (like any creature has to pass that test.)
The real question is: Is that the "go to" card for the Shamans deck? I don't think so. I think PK had a good day with a decent deck and he's an amazing player. As I pointed out in my previous comment, Flamekin Harbinger is just as important as Rageforger (maybe more so in a toolbox variation of the deck.)
Kuma's point though was to remove a card from each undefeated deck regardless of whether there was anything driving the deck, thus making it harder to repeat the performance and that seems sound/fair.
Oh, dear. If an aggro deck cannot really compete 50-50 with a legal combo deck in the format, it is either casual or bad, by definition. This is a Legacy card pool. Tier one builds of just about any major tribe have nothing to fear from Rage Shaman. If they have that much board presence, they're likely winning anyways. Sometimes, Rage Shaman provides the extra oomph to get over the hump, sometimes it fizzles. It's nowhere near as broken as Dark Depths. Yes, 1-2 damage per game. Sometimes it is -1 to -2 damage per game, because the opponent has a Shock, whereas the Rage Shaman could have been a 3-toughness guy and would have done more damage. Sometimes it'll do more damage, and even way more damage than available substitutes, but 1-2 extra is not beyond the question.
You said you ban things because it is a "go-to" card. You go to something because it is powerful. You also said that "fair builds" don't even need bannings. That's power-related thinking. You also said the bans will affect the "power builds" - that's also power-related thinking. It is very evident you have misstated your intent, or I grasp it quite lucidly. But even if I did not, I made a catchall and that can sum up your "go-to card" comment as "stats" (a variety of reasons that add up). A reason for playing a card for other than power is for casual reasons.
Rage Shaman is clearly not powerful enough for the top tier of an Eternal format, as it provides no disruption, removal, card advantage, or engine, and it can easily lose mana as it trades with most 1-mana removal spells. It's potential over other three-drops is dependent on having a pre-existing army, an army that can attack, and an army that will continue to attack. That's a lot of ifs. Other three drops are often more consistent.
It's a casual card, which is fine, and I commend pk23 for playing it, and I don't call him a bad designer for including it - that's unfair and irresponsible for you to put those words in my mouth.
You say you don't ban fair builds - pk23's is the epitome of a fair build, and should have been left alone, in my opinion.
My honest impression is that you would do well to play more Classic/Legacy so that you could understand this basic card analysis better.
Well here's the HOW: I use an old AMD Phenom II X2 550 Processor, with 6 BG Ram and a 27 inches ASUS monitor... It's not the best in the market, but it gets the job done :D
2 Points against banning of swords:The swords help weak tribes, which have no chance without strong equipment. Top players just buy other 'killer' cards, so the banning damage casual players, like me, much more.
Batterskull RAm is a little different, as most of the time it is used as a creature and with the ability to be taken back on hand it is 'indestructible' in it's own way. The swords 'die' with any artifact destroying spell, get caught by any enchantment like Oblivion Ring, Faith's Fetters etc. could be taken over with any blue artifact or permanent stealing spell and so on. The swords are strong equipment,but as vulnerable as any other, while Batterskull Ram is extremly invulnerable. So for me, it is just not fair to pack both into the same poll. If the question would have been splitted A) Ban of swords B) Ban of Batterskull Ram , I'm sure the voting would have looked differently, at least it should. My vote would be A) No and B) Yes
You're comparing a combo deck with an aggro deck and concluding that your combo deck is able to end the game sooner when it goes off. I'm the one who doesn't understand your logic. (And your math is very wrong. 1-2 damage per game? You should watch past replays of that deck against tier-1 tribes before calling pk23 a bad deckbuilder.)
And you keep not understanding in the least my criteria for bans, and the purpose of them, but I'm not going to repeat myself for the billionth time, because if you still don't get it, there's nothing I can do. So let's just say we speak different languages entirely and leave it at that.
The deck I played last week won a couple of times on turn 3, before you could even cast the Forger. People should be able to design their decks without having to worry about me or anyone else bringing the combo.
At three mana, Rage Forger might deal 1-2 damage per game extra than the average replacement, though it might deal more. It dies to a Shock, for crying out loud, with no immediate board impact at all (even if the attack step is only one phase ahead). Bad value there with marginal upside conditioned upon having other creatures alive when cast and all of them sticking around, no great assumption in a format with tons of removal.
So, if the ban is one based on power, I don't follow your logic. If it's based on stats, then that just means we have a ton of either bad or casual deckbuilders on here, neither of which is good reason to ban a card.
I see you're re-oriented yourself towards the lower part of the curve. Good, because I'll have a 5-color midrange feast coming up tomorrow :) (5 colors as in 5 different monocolored decks).
And you didn't mention it, but Boggart Ram-Gang is relevant these days because of those GGG (or RRR) in its cost.
I find that Dungrove Elder in real game scenarios is rarely as amazing as one would think. Considering 1/4 of your lands in that builds aren't forests, how big would the Elder be when you drop it? Probably a 2/2, becoming a 3/3 or 4/4 in late game. To me it's only worth it in builds with all forests and some way to accelerate into more land drops.
As a rule of thumb, I want to ban ubiquitous lords of power tribes, as a solution to defang them without removing the tribes from the scenario altogether (which is what we were doing before). And in general, toolbox decks are creative, the tools to build them should never be removed.
"You forgot the How": Tell that to the Magic card I linked. :P
Rage Forger isn't a Gray Ogre at all. It's the go-to card for Shaman builds, always have been since it exists. You're actually the only one who ever played Dark Depths, I believe (if not, one of two or three). Pushing Shaman builds towards something else is important.
I don't see any reset inevitable at all. Pure will stay pure. It'll also take YEARS before all the Major League tribes will be actually defanged. And that a point, the scenario will still be more fertile and open than what we had.
I fail to understand how the past, unforgiving, destructive, doomed system that used to kill a tribe for everyone because one player did well with it could be preferable to this. Rationally, it's not. Irrationally, well, some people also like pain, I guess. :P
@Fliebana great to finally get some more details about you. :D I am not the eldest and I'm 4+ years older than you. (I think that title goes to BlippyTheElderSlug.) By the way you forgot the How. ('Who, What When, Where, Why and How' is the phrase as I remember it :d. But I know pedantry aside, how is a difficult one for this kind of thing. :p)
@Kuma, great article as always. As I have said before I am against banning cards but I am for you making and owning decisions. So I support your right and prerogative to do just that. I think Regular events should be just that. Regular. No fancy rules, no extra bannings. 3 weeks of the month you get to tinker, leave one week for the spikes. (They will do what they do anyway but hey at least if they get Regular events they might not feel the need to hog the limelight for the odd events.)
The purification idea has some merit but it makes me wonder what the end picture of the format will be like. The reason why some cards are more prevalent has to do with gravity and water. (Water always seeks the lowest point of gravity or some such. And as an analogy, spikes will always use the handiest tools to accomplish their mission: win at all costs.) And I don't think banning cards individually will be as effective at stymying that as you might think. We shall see. I hope I am wrong and everyone proves to have more creativity available to them than previously indicated.
@Bob, you are no more boorish than anyone else here. You speak your mind and stand by it and that is admirable. If you were to drone on and on about irrelevancies then you would be approaching boorishness. I agree about Rageforger, in that it is no combo piece. It has great synergy but so do most of the cards in that deck. Flamekin Harbinger is an awesome tutor for example, allowing pk to do something unusual in a toolbox approach (I applaud this btw.) Also good luck to your kids. I have played chess since an early age (about 42-3 years now) and it has served me well. Tell them to mind the clock.
I must raise my eyebrow at banning what is fundamentally a Grey Ogre. Not that I care, either. Banning Dark Depths (or even the threat of Dark Depths), on the other hand, is exactly what this sub-format needs. I'm glad I could help.
Plus I'm certainly no "leader of the opposition" - I speak for no one else but me (if I speak louder than others, just chalk it up to boorishness).
I also don't want to give anyone the impression that I bless this purification system, though I find it much better than the system outlined in last week's column. It at least seems to work until the inevitable reset far in the future.
Thanks for considering returning the Swords for regular events.
I won't be around this week, as I'm taking my kids to a chess tournament. I hope to see some good lists from the regulars. Cheers!
I wasn't even aware of the existence of article recaps. Do people actually do that? (I mean, MaRo does, I guess).
I'm surprised you didn't mention your Vanguard period, though. I read every single one of those articles, and I still don't even exactly know how Vanguard is (was) played!
I would have definitely written about Primeval Bounty if only Essence of the Wild was also in Standard. Or another idea: Lots of cheap mana creatures, a fast and early Primeval Bounty, Biovisionary, and then Mirrorweave FTW!!!
Sadly it's not in Standard and I want to keep Rogue Play limited to Standard for the time being.
Also I am challenged by someone else recently and currently working on it. If I do come up with something, you may read it in 2 weeks about that challenge.
You discussed it with me, Paul (and I told you, "Yes, this is not Druidic Satchel!" :P), but since then Trading Post was inducted in the Top 10 list of my all-time favorite cards.
I even went undefeated a couple times with Trading Post decks in PREs, the most recent was the Vedalken deck in Tribal where Trading Post + Vedalken Shackles = unleashed nightmare.
Erman, you and I totally share favorite cards.
Next, I challenge you to break Primeval Bounty.
I've been playing something like this in the Tournament Practice room, although it's UBw (for Elspeth). The mana is not the best, but it still can beat GR/GRW just fine, and Elsepth gives you game against UW Heroic since you can just chump for days while you look for a way to win the game. The problems I'm having with control is that it doesn't have a good wrath and it doesn't really have card advantage. I've been playing a miser's Thassa just for scry 1 to make sure I don't flood out in the lategame. Fated Retribution is too expensive as a wrath so you have to be on heavy spot removal to even stand a chance. Elspeth is kinda like a wrath with its +1 since the 1/1s just invalidate a lot of the creatures, acting like a psuedo wrath. If the mana was better I think UBW could be the top deck, but I don't think anybody wants that after RTR Block XD
I've only played with it once thus far, and it wasn't nearly as good as I thought it would be. It did essentially stop an attack and stabilize my board to let me win, so in hindsight I see it as more of a very good control stabilizer.
Good stuff! The only one I'm not sure about is Archetype of Finality. I know that deathtouch is a strong ability to give your whole team, but it's not quite as devastating as the other two that you list. And at 6 mana, a 2/3 sounds like a raw deal. That being said, I haven't been able to play with it much yet so I'm still not sure.
In Heirloom we've always had to do things mostly ourselves. Before Gatherling setting up its host tools, and before Mtgotraders was kind enough to provide us with the list based on our parameters I used to go through all 14k cards manually for every update. Its not simple now but its not that bad either with the great people we have contributing to the needs of the format. It's never been something that's held us back. We've never had more than the Classic filter on MTGO for our events so this doesn't change much for us other than the Heirloom Kaleidoscope event being more of a hassle now.
I would think this would be a bigger problem for other PRES that have been relying on MTGO filters that now may have to do more work to keep things working well enough for all the players of their respective PREs. Most of the ones I can think of off the top of my head are passionate enough to adjust through it though I think. Not that it isn't kind of crummy that they have to.
I dont see why they couldn't just segment the options, have a n option in interface to make all formats available that is by default off then only the most popular on. It solves both problems easily. New players dont get confused, more experienced players or more interested players can see all of them. I like having more tools on the interface personally.
I don't see how getting rid of them just because you dont happen to use them is anything but unfriendly toward other players that do like them. To me they did this just to reduce their workload even if it really shouldnt be that much work to maintain them.
You got lucky in that long game against Monty! Probably could have just done an Alpha Strike for the win that one turn.
I'm going to point out some of the "casual" elements of pk23's Shaman build (listed in the article above), to drive home some that point.
First, lack of legacy duals. It's not really fair, since no one can be blamed for their collection, but shocklands (with rare exceptions) are considered casual in Legacy.
Second, 33 Shamans! Those extra 13 shamans have to be of comparable quality to the 13 extra real Legacy-level spells to not be considered casual. I've not seen any of the 13 weakest here see Legacy play. Casual.
Third, lack of 4-ofs. If a card is worthy to be played in a deck for competitive reasons, much more often than not it needs to be played as a 4-of. Major exceptions include legends, top-of-curve, searchable bullets, or redundancy in the card's effect. Many cards in this list fail that criteria. Only 3 Deathrite is probably the most glaring "error" (assuming he was trying to be competitive, not my basic assumption). Masked Admirers over the second Thrun seems to fail for similar reasons, 1 Burning-Tree Emissary over 4 or 0 seems wrong. I think there are many others, but the reasons would be too subtle for a general discussion.
Fourth, Spikeshot Elder with virtually no support. No search, so only a weak combo with Pendelhaven, and an ok combo with Kessig in the late game. Zero copies is probably correct, but making room for 4 Rancor would have helped the entire deck, but especially expand the reach of a deck using the Elder.
I like pk23's build. It looks like fun. But it is casual. If, and this is a big if, he thought this was a perfect-Shaman build, then that might be grounds for considering him a bad deckbuilder. Much more likely, even given that foolish assumption for this argument's sake. considering his very powerful blue/white tribal builds, it just means he needs more practice or better cards with these colors. My personal assumption is that he knew the power level of the deck fully, and was content to play with it as it: casual.
Yet he did say that "What's more important is: for some undefeated decks, a ban won't even prove necessary, because the build will be fair enough as it is, despite its success."
I can see how you can say the last sentence is boorish. In real life, I would have said it with my saddest, soberest tone possible, not snidely. It is my honest opinion, and one I would have even so kept to myself, except that my previous arguments have been exhausted over the weeks. Thanks for the call out.
Coming from anyone else that last bit would put you in the category you declared yourself in before, boorishness. Condescension isn't how to argue this. You do know legacy/classic better than most tribal players because that is your metier however Kuma and many others who play THIS format understand how the power works here. It isn't at all the same as those environments even if you can shoe horn builds in.
I happen to agree with you that Rageforger is a fair card undeserving of banning but it isn't so much that any direct damage and removal can kill it. LOTS of cards fit that category and many are rather more unfair than Rageforger imho. Goyf on an empty board with no other cards in the yard dies to a shock. But I think many people will agree that Goyf is far more broken than Rageforger.
On the other hand in the right shamans build Rageforger should rack up more than a few points of damage assuming it remains on the table (like any creature has to pass that test.)
The real question is: Is that the "go to" card for the Shamans deck? I don't think so. I think PK had a good day with a decent deck and he's an amazing player. As I pointed out in my previous comment, Flamekin Harbinger is just as important as Rageforger (maybe more so in a toolbox variation of the deck.)
Kuma's point though was to remove a card from each undefeated deck regardless of whether there was anything driving the deck, thus making it harder to repeat the performance and that seems sound/fair.
Oh, dear. If an aggro deck cannot really compete 50-50 with a legal combo deck in the format, it is either casual or bad, by definition. This is a Legacy card pool. Tier one builds of just about any major tribe have nothing to fear from Rage Shaman. If they have that much board presence, they're likely winning anyways. Sometimes, Rage Shaman provides the extra oomph to get over the hump, sometimes it fizzles. It's nowhere near as broken as Dark Depths. Yes, 1-2 damage per game. Sometimes it is -1 to -2 damage per game, because the opponent has a Shock, whereas the Rage Shaman could have been a 3-toughness guy and would have done more damage. Sometimes it'll do more damage, and even way more damage than available substitutes, but 1-2 extra is not beyond the question.
You said you ban things because it is a "go-to" card. You go to something because it is powerful. You also said that "fair builds" don't even need bannings. That's power-related thinking. You also said the bans will affect the "power builds" - that's also power-related thinking. It is very evident you have misstated your intent, or I grasp it quite lucidly. But even if I did not, I made a catchall and that can sum up your "go-to card" comment as "stats" (a variety of reasons that add up). A reason for playing a card for other than power is for casual reasons.
Rage Shaman is clearly not powerful enough for the top tier of an Eternal format, as it provides no disruption, removal, card advantage, or engine, and it can easily lose mana as it trades with most 1-mana removal spells. It's potential over other three-drops is dependent on having a pre-existing army, an army that can attack, and an army that will continue to attack. That's a lot of ifs. Other three drops are often more consistent.
It's a casual card, which is fine, and I commend pk23 for playing it, and I don't call him a bad designer for including it - that's unfair and irresponsible for you to put those words in my mouth.
You say you don't ban fair builds - pk23's is the epitome of a fair build, and should have been left alone, in my opinion.
My honest impression is that you would do well to play more Classic/Legacy so that you could understand this basic card analysis better.
Too bad you have to go to work. But no worries, you haven't missed a lot. - Lindsay Rosenwald
Thx Winter :).
Well here's the HOW: I use an old AMD Phenom II X2 550 Processor, with 6 BG Ram and a 27 inches ASUS monitor... It's not the best in the market, but it gets the job done :D
2 Points against banning of swords:The swords help weak tribes, which have no chance without strong equipment. Top players just buy other 'killer' cards, so the banning damage casual players, like me, much more.
Batterskull RAm is a little different, as most of the time it is used as a creature and with the ability to be taken back on hand it is 'indestructible' in it's own way. The swords 'die' with any artifact destroying spell, get caught by any enchantment like Oblivion Ring, Faith's Fetters etc. could be taken over with any blue artifact or permanent stealing spell and so on. The swords are strong equipment,but as vulnerable as any other, while Batterskull Ram is extremly invulnerable. So for me, it is just not fair to pack both into the same poll. If the question would have been splitted A) Ban of swords B) Ban of Batterskull Ram , I'm sure the voting would have looked differently, at least it should. My vote would be A) No and B) Yes
You're comparing a combo deck with an aggro deck and concluding that your combo deck is able to end the game sooner when it goes off. I'm the one who doesn't understand your logic. (And your math is very wrong. 1-2 damage per game? You should watch past replays of that deck against tier-1 tribes before calling pk23 a bad deckbuilder.)
And you keep not understanding in the least my criteria for bans, and the purpose of them, but I'm not going to repeat myself for the billionth time, because if you still don't get it, there's nothing I can do. So let's just say we speak different languages entirely and leave it at that.
The deck I played last week won a couple of times on turn 3, before you could even cast the Forger. People should be able to design their decks without having to worry about me or anyone else bringing the combo.
At three mana, Rage Forger might deal 1-2 damage per game extra than the average replacement, though it might deal more. It dies to a Shock, for crying out loud, with no immediate board impact at all (even if the attack step is only one phase ahead). Bad value there with marginal upside conditioned upon having other creatures alive when cast and all of them sticking around, no great assumption in a format with tons of removal.
So, if the ban is one based on power, I don't follow your logic. If it's based on stats, then that just means we have a ton of either bad or casual deckbuilders on here, neither of which is good reason to ban a card.
I see you're re-oriented yourself towards the lower part of the curve. Good, because I'll have a 5-color midrange feast coming up tomorrow :) (5 colors as in 5 different monocolored decks).
And you didn't mention it, but Boggart Ram-Gang is relevant these days because of those GGG (or RRR) in its cost.
I find that Dungrove Elder in real game scenarios is rarely as amazing as one would think. Considering 1/4 of your lands in that builds aren't forests, how big would the Elder be when you drop it? Probably a 2/2, becoming a 3/3 or 4/4 in late game. To me it's only worth it in builds with all forests and some way to accelerate into more land drops.
As a rule of thumb, I want to ban ubiquitous lords of power tribes, as a solution to defang them without removing the tribes from the scenario altogether (which is what we were doing before). And in general, toolbox decks are creative, the tools to build them should never be removed.
"You forgot the How": Tell that to the Magic card I linked. :P
Rage Forger isn't a Gray Ogre at all. It's the go-to card for Shaman builds, always have been since it exists. You're actually the only one who ever played Dark Depths, I believe (if not, one of two or three). Pushing Shaman builds towards something else is important.
I don't see any reset inevitable at all. Pure will stay pure. It'll also take YEARS before all the Major League tribes will be actually defanged. And that a point, the scenario will still be more fertile and open than what we had.
I fail to understand how the past, unforgiving, destructive, doomed system that used to kill a tribe for everyone because one player did well with it could be preferable to this. Rationally, it's not. Irrationally, well, some people also like pain, I guess. :P
@Fliebana great to finally get some more details about you. :D I am not the eldest and I'm 4+ years older than you. (I think that title goes to BlippyTheElderSlug.) By the way you forgot the How. ('Who, What When, Where, Why and How' is the phrase as I remember it :d. But I know pedantry aside, how is a difficult one for this kind of thing. :p)
@Kuma, great article as always. As I have said before I am against banning cards but I am for you making and owning decisions. So I support your right and prerogative to do just that. I think Regular events should be just that. Regular. No fancy rules, no extra bannings. 3 weeks of the month you get to tinker, leave one week for the spikes. (They will do what they do anyway but hey at least if they get Regular events they might not feel the need to hog the limelight for the odd events.)
The purification idea has some merit but it makes me wonder what the end picture of the format will be like. The reason why some cards are more prevalent has to do with gravity and water. (Water always seeks the lowest point of gravity or some such. And as an analogy, spikes will always use the handiest tools to accomplish their mission: win at all costs.) And I don't think banning cards individually will be as effective at stymying that as you might think. We shall see. I hope I am wrong and everyone proves to have more creativity available to them than previously indicated.
@Bob, you are no more boorish than anyone else here. You speak your mind and stand by it and that is admirable. If you were to drone on and on about irrelevancies then you would be approaching boorishness. I agree about Rageforger, in that it is no combo piece. It has great synergy but so do most of the cards in that deck. Flamekin Harbinger is an awesome tutor for example, allowing pk to do something unusual in a toolbox approach (I applaud this btw.) Also good luck to your kids. I have played chess since an early age (about 42-3 years now) and it has served me well. Tell them to mind the clock.
I must raise my eyebrow at banning what is fundamentally a Grey Ogre. Not that I care, either. Banning Dark Depths (or even the threat of Dark Depths), on the other hand, is exactly what this sub-format needs. I'm glad I could help.
Plus I'm certainly no "leader of the opposition" - I speak for no one else but me (if I speak louder than others, just chalk it up to boorishness).
I also don't want to give anyone the impression that I bless this purification system, though I find it much better than the system outlined in last week's column. It at least seems to work until the inevitable reset far in the future.
Thanks for considering returning the Swords for regular events.
I won't be around this week, as I'm taking my kids to a chess tournament. I hope to see some good lists from the regulars. Cheers!
I see 'em every now and then.
As for my vanguard period, here's the last recap I did, covering all the way back to my first ever article! http://puremtgo.com/articles/76-ideas
I wasn't even aware of the existence of article recaps. Do people actually do that? (I mean, MaRo does, I guess).
I'm surprised you didn't mention your Vanguard period, though. I read every single one of those articles, and I still don't even exactly know how Vanguard is (was) played!
There's almost 300 Shamans, it would kill me. :)
I would have definitely written about Primeval Bounty if only Essence of the Wild was also in Standard. Or another idea: Lots of cheap mana creatures, a fast and early Primeval Bounty, Biovisionary, and then Mirrorweave FTW!!!
Sadly it's not in Standard and I want to keep Rogue Play limited to Standard for the time being.
Also I am challenged by someone else recently and currently working on it. If I do come up with something, you may read it in 2 weeks about that challenge.
You discussed it with me, Paul (and I told you, "Yes, this is not Druidic Satchel!" :P), but since then Trading Post was inducted in the Top 10 list of my all-time favorite cards.
I even went undefeated a couple times with Trading Post decks in PREs, the most recent was the Vedalken deck in Tribal where Trading Post + Vedalken Shackles = unleashed nightmare.
Erman, you and I totally share favorite cards.
Next, I challenge you to break Primeval Bounty.
I've been playing something like this in the Tournament Practice room, although it's UBw (for Elspeth). The mana is not the best, but it still can beat GR/GRW just fine, and Elsepth gives you game against UW Heroic since you can just chump for days while you look for a way to win the game. The problems I'm having with control is that it doesn't have a good wrath and it doesn't really have card advantage. I've been playing a miser's Thassa just for scry 1 to make sure I don't flood out in the lategame. Fated Retribution is too expensive as a wrath so you have to be on heavy spot removal to even stand a chance. Elspeth is kinda like a wrath with its +1 since the 1/1s just invalidate a lot of the creatures, acting like a psuedo wrath. If the mana was better I think UBW could be the top deck, but I don't think anybody wants that after RTR Block XD
I've only played with it once thus far, and it wasn't nearly as good as I thought it would be. It did essentially stop an attack and stabilize my board to let me win, so in hindsight I see it as more of a very good control stabilizer.
Good stuff! The only one I'm not sure about is Archetype of Finality. I know that deathtouch is a strong ability to give your whole team, but it's not quite as devastating as the other two that you list. And at 6 mana, a 2/3 sounds like a raw deal. That being said, I haven't been able to play with it much yet so I'm still not sure.
Great job with this!!
In Heirloom we've always had to do things mostly ourselves. Before Gatherling setting up its host tools, and before Mtgotraders was kind enough to provide us with the list based on our parameters I used to go through all 14k cards manually for every update. Its not simple now but its not that bad either with the great people we have contributing to the needs of the format. It's never been something that's held us back. We've never had more than the Classic filter on MTGO for our events so this doesn't change much for us other than the Heirloom Kaleidoscope event being more of a hassle now.
I would think this would be a bigger problem for other PRES that have been relying on MTGO filters that now may have to do more work to keep things working well enough for all the players of their respective PREs. Most of the ones I can think of off the top of my head are passionate enough to adjust through it though I think. Not that it isn't kind of crummy that they have to.
I dont see why they couldn't just segment the options, have a n option in interface to make all formats available that is by default off then only the most popular on. It solves both problems easily. New players dont get confused, more experienced players or more interested players can see all of them. I like having more tools on the interface personally.
I don't see how getting rid of them just because you dont happen to use them is anything but unfriendly toward other players that do like them. To me they did this just to reduce their workload even if it really shouldnt be that much work to maintain them.