Thank you very much. The giant deck stands out to me because it is simple brutal and yet not goblins/elementals, and what not. Plus the name fit. :D Sure sure in your history Sphinges stand out. And I agree they are great but I was looking for format defining decks.
That's all hand edited css changes. If you right click on the document and click view source and look at the style tag near the top of the page you will see I added a bunch of custom classes that let me change the look & feel of the page. A few of those classes have styles from CSS2 & 3.
The deck lists use those classes too. What I did was start the deck in Jam's generator, only using the part of it from the <tbody> tag down. Then I have my own modified top part that contains the classes I use to make the gradients, rounded corners and the text decoration.
This article is just perfect. Absolutely pro-level journalism: concise, articulate, argumentative, the right amount of objectivity and personal involvement. Kudos.
Only nitpick: Planescape = Planechase, I assume.
Whoa, where did you find that Giant deck? I remember playing it, but just that one time, probably ending 2-1 or such. I wonder what caught your attention about it. :) (I would have thought my Sphinx build is more iconic, even just by being the rare deck I played consistently over the years, and with good results. Plus it's a passion we share, don't we?).
Now, to the important things: You HAVE to tell me all about those quote boxes! I want to use them badly! (Feel free to send me the code in email if you feel it's out of place here, but maybe other writers would like to know.) Your deck boxes are also cooler than mine, do you use a different editor?
Paul hit it pretty well; I just want to emphasis a few points.
If you want to write, write: If you have something to say, say it. Write it out. If you are passionate about it, put that passion on paper. If it is important to you, others may want to read it. So write, and submit. But don't be too upset if your first draft gets rejected. Writing is like Magic - it takes a lot of practice. Odds are pretty good you didn't win the tournament first time out. Same with writing - you may need to tune that article quite a bit to make it a winner.
Grammar is tech: When you have published a couple hundred articles, and proven that you have something important to say, then you can write in haiku, or l33t speak, or slang. If you are a new writer, then keep the language straightforward and get straight to the tech. Inside jokes, stories about your pets or the RPG you play on Weds. are all interesting to you and your friends, but keep them out of your articles. Avoid anything that makes it harder for your reader to get what you are saying is bad - and that includes bad grammar, misspellings, etc.
Keep the editor happy: Joshua is buried in work. If you want him to publish your work, don't make it any harder on him. If he has to fix grammar, correct the spelling of a bunch of cards, and edit all the links, the article will have to be incredible to justify all that work. Make it easy on him: run the spell check, run the grammar check, and test all the links before submitting.
Have someone else proofread it: Seriously. Have a Magic-playing friend read it - and maybe a non-player as well. You know what you are writing about, but that can lead to assuming you explained something when that happened in mentally drafting it, or the version that got scrapped and rewritten. A non-player will not get caught up in the excitement, and will pay more attention to the technical stuff.
A secret to my success - my wife proofread everything I wrote for the first couple years, and I still run a lot of stuff past her. That was particularly useful because she had an English degree and used to work as a professional proofreader. She is also a high-level Magic judge, former PTQ grinder and a rules guru. That's a useful combo.
Making money: Don't start out writing because you want to make money. Write because you want to write, and the money may follow. Even so, the money is small. Given the time I spend on each article, even after the generous compensation PureMTGO provides, I make a lot less than minimum wage on my writing. That said, it is a hobby, not a profession.
But if you have something to say, write an article.
Excellent summation. I'll have to revisit landless clerics at some point, that deck is several years old at this point, and predates Lotus Petal and Mox Opal.
Doh, I missed his update about the rules change until it was an hour too late to actually play in the event. I only had the one pure deck built, so once it was off the table I was going to have to sit the week out.
I also don't agree with the "lazy deckbuilding" argument. It's not trivially easy to make the Swords work. You need to understand what are you trying to accomplish, how they interact with your overall plan and how they fare against the general field. As have been said, the Swords aren't really good versus aggro decks (as opposed to Jitte, which is a very different card that has strong defensive applications and really screws up combat both on offense and defense), and they also aren't good versus combo. They have potential VS midrange and control builds, and I think that is why they are perceived as too good by lots of players - because they play underpowered slow decks that aren't really effective in controlling the board. If you play slow decks in Legacy you need to be able to deal with threats.
I have thought about Swords a lot over the years, and I think where they would realy shine is in aggressive decks that have 8+ mana dorks, like Noble Hierarch. In such decks you have excessive mana to spend, you can equip the Swords sooner, and you can make your otherwise irrelevant creatures into threats. I wouldn't want to play them in most other aggro builds, because for 5 mana I can generally better impact the board through other means. I also wouldn't want to play them in control decks, because 20 threats is too much as it is, and I want to use precious free spots on spells that control the board. I don't know, I just think they are hard to use optimally, and the players who make it work are probably far from lazy deckbuilders. It might seem otherwise, but decks that don't play marginal and fancy cards and interactions aren't necessarilly uncreative. They might have took longer time and more mental power to fine tune than it took a "creative guy" to make some Kraken deck.
But anyway, it's water under the bridge. My midrange Vampires certainly have one thing less to worry about.
Another point I have against this is banning Swords in regular events. If someone wants to try to play with Swords against full-powered Legacy Goblin, Elves, and Merfolk, let them. If so, it is not likely because of lazy deckbuilding, and even if so, they will most likely learn that Swords are not necessarily the best choice in that environment. And it would widen the gap between Pure and Regular, always a benefit.
You know I almost never include swords outside of singleton and I am still against the ban on the grounds that who cares if so and so assumes SoF&I is good because there are 30+ goblin players?
Who cares if so & so draws their SoF&F instead of SoF&I because they got lucky when playing against Golgari? Sure that sucks for the Green Black guy but it should be part of the game.
Swords are by far not the most powerful cards played regularly. That said I respect your decision. It is on you what gets banned and when no matter what you may say about it being the voice of the people deciding this. You run the event and have ultimate veto.
If you want a format with only x tribes and y noncreatures I will ultimately support that despite not liking it. Hopefully, as I said we can revisit the issue in a while when we see how it works out.
In my book, bad deck builders are the ones who keep using the Swords because why not? The kind of build the Swords push is frankly the opposite of creative. I admire romellos' honesty about it.
There's a very solid theoretical reason for banning the Swords, and it's that we're dealing with a creature-based format, and they're Umezawa's Jitte #2-6. It's exactly what Aaron Forsythe called "metagaming": something that you play only to prey on what the other players are playing, as opposed to creative deckbuilding, which the Swords actively discourage. They also reward sheer luck, because without a cheap mean to silver-bullet them (= SFM), the Swords become, "Oh look at that, you're Golgari and I just happened to drew into my singleton Feast and Famine rather than my Singleton Fire and Ice or my singleton War and Peace!"
And it's the reasoning DCI uses too: removing the ubiquitous card that prevents variety. The slots automatically taken by the Swords because they don't compare to anything else will be now divided into a plethora of different cards that fulfill the same role. Repeat with me: Variety uber alles. Power level is not the measure of everything. In fact, power level doesn't affect a meta per se.
Aggro Rex: I kindly invite you to calm down as I'm pretty sure rayjinn comment was just a tongue-in-cheek, good-hearted barb.
And since you seem to like the word "wrong" this round, I'll use it, too: you're wrong in your evaluation of my bans. I might have said it one million times already (so let's make it one million and one): they're never about power level. Three things I need to evaluate in the meta: frequency of play of some cards, happiness of the player's base, variety of builds. Hence I ban what embodies a combination of ubiquity, annoyance and laziness. The Swords were too frequent, hated by many, and pushed lazy builds in the kind of aggro decks that are dominant by a long shot. Still, as I say above, for as much as I support the ban, you can't blame it on me alone. (You can blame the un-bans on me, rarely the bans.)
You often make the mistake to look at this meta from the perspective of a top player. That's the minority, the 1%ers. Those who come with $500 decks and can't really have the right to complain about what the majority feels about them, their decks, and their cards. I respect them, but my mandate isn't about them. In fact, my mandate might be the opposite of caring for them, since they scare away the other players, make them unhappy and frustrated and angry. They're the equivalent of the overly loud guys in the bar I run.
The little guy with a deck that's worth less than a single Sword? Now, he gets all my attention. His complaints are often silent, but they are there. I can sense them, I sometimes ask for them, I see them reflected in pool answers and in lists. That's the people I work for, Rex, like it or not. More often than not, their complaints are all over the place (the typical "This card I just lost against is bah-roken!"). Sometimes they're not. But the moment they matter is the moment they cease to be single displays of frustration, and become shard by two, ten, thirty players. Players who, with their presence, "pay" for this event. If only the top players showed up, Tribal Apocalypse would have been long out of business.
The idea that the Swords helped small tribes is mere theory and wishful thinking. The registered lists show that it doesn't apply to reality. The same way, but in reverse, as the idea that the super-scary power combo cards are bad for the meta: true in theory, false when applied to the reality of the tournament where nobody plays them. And since reality is my business, it guides my decisions.
Martyr's Cause is in the deck tech video indeed. But the numbers check out in the list so it was replaced with something that's not in the actual deck.
EDIT: Ah no, it says 21 Other Spells, but they're actually 20. :)
1) Allow me to say that this example is absurd. Serpent would NEVER be competitive, because for them to be, you need a scenario where 90% of the entire tribe system was out of Pure weeks. We would have never even remotely got to that point. And I believe you're making confusion here (QED), because you're mentioning Underdog. Underdog didn't have the "graduation system". That was Pure. Underdog would have always had all the tribes with less than 50 members in it, no matter how many times they would win. Even by never resetting the 50-member quota (which would have eventually moved back), it would have taken about 20 years for tribes like Sphinx or Leviathan or Ooze to end up out of Underdog. Similarly, Dwarf and Scarecrow would have never been out of Underdog in our lifetime. You got it all wrong.
2) Council is no more. But it wasn't arbitrary. I'll let AJ explain why to you, if he likes, as I don't care anymore. (Just this: I'd like for people to have more of a sense of humor about things. I know Magic players almost never have, and the sky is constantly falling, except it never does. But I'd like for MY Magic players to have it. I might even require it).
3) Did you play in the original Pure events? I'm not sure but I don't think so. Well, the original Pure event was the second Regular event of the month. And the day I said, "Hey, you know what? Let's turn the second Regular event into something a little bit different", people became angry because I was taking away their second Regular event, and there were already too many gimmicky events in a month. This was Legacy Tribal Wars, not "The Muppet Show Presents: Let's Play Magic!". Some longtime players even stopped playing Tribal Apocalypse because they only wanted to play Legacy Tribal Wars and not the Muppet version of it.
So you can see how it's always a lose-lose situation (which is just a win-win situation looked at from the wrong side).
And again, the current Pure was an aberration, because it wasn't created with the idea of banning tribes left and right. I blame myself for having allowed it to get so out of hands. I get that you liked "killing tribes" out of the meta, but if you think of it, that's an aberration, too. It's having a goal where the end result is less options for everyone. I have several fun builds with tribes that were out of Pure because they got lucky once, and were played 4 times. 4 times! That's insane, you'll agree. One of my goal is to push variety, how could take it out be a good thing?
I also have fun, Johnny builds for Major League tribes. I want two chances per month to play with them. And I'm sure this sentiment is shared by the kind of player I represent (I actually know it for a fact). Demonizing tribes because of how some players use them is very very wrong. How am I supposed to set a good example with them if I'm not allowed to? Pure was a trap, it was evident by now.
4) Singleton events aren't going anywhere. There's a chance for 4 of them out of the 10 in calendar to turn into Regular. I'd say it's a fair bet that only a couple of them will go.
5) Do you have another candidate?
6) I don't get your math. 30 games?
I'm not resetting anything. I'm fixing, mostly managing lists. There were too many different sub-categories, people were going mad tracking what was what. Your confusion about Underdog and Pure is proof enough. Some players were more confused than you. I know that because I'm the one who spends 45 minutes before each event explaining stuff in PM to confused players. Allow me to want a solution for that.
7) Again, Scout was N-O-T played! Wanna bet that Scout won't dominate the Underdog? And if it does, wanna bet what will happen then? Ask the Werewolves. They'll tell you. You all should think of me as wearing a t-shirt saying, "SAY NO TO PREEMPTIVE BANNING!" with a rear saying, "SAY NO TO DEMONIZATIONS BASED ON THEORETIC SCENARIOS!"
8) Didn't you just say it's wrong to put too much emphasis on winning? Let me get this: Scout and Giant should be left into the oblivion of never being PLAYED, yet Demon needs to be ensured an outlet for WINNING EVENTS? (And by the way, Demon did win events without much help, thank you very much.)
Also, do you realize that winning with Serpent in a meta where only tribes worse than Serpent exist don't actually amount to much?
I think I'll use one of the next special events to do "Crappy Tribes Week", selecting the very worst of the Unhallowed, so that one of them will finally get to live the dream of winning.
Oh crap, Martyr's Cause is supposed to be in the list. I just missed it I guess.
Yeah, the deck originally had Sol Ring, and I accidentally cut it. Like you said there's no accel, but I made sure that the curve was decently low. I wouldn't fit anything with a CMC over 7 in this list.
As for the Angels and Demons, I wanted them to fit thematically as well as being useful for the deck. While the Angels you mention are obviously good, Reya would likely be the best for the recursion aspect. But still, 9 mana or whatever is a lot.
See, that's the problem. We shouldn't be catering to players who are offended by something as innocuous as a Sword of X/Y. It's a relatively harmless midrange card that, if you designed your deck well, isn't going to beat you on its own. Banning it just enables bad deck builders to continue being bad deck builders.
If you poll the public at FNM, I bet you could get 50% to vote that mythic rares should be banned from Standard. This isn't the way to make decisions.
I have gone to great lengths to provide deck building challenges and prizes to reward people on limited budgets and people who want incentives to play cards that aren't just the strictly best option. I pay those prizes out of my own pocket for no reason other than I want to encourage something cool to get played at the event. That is my way of helping format diversity, and I put my own tickets on the line for it. I've given away more than I've won from Tribal Wars. The "achievement system" Kumagoro spear-headed was another great way to do that. Bans are a *crappy* way to mix things up. It's just the truth.
The decks most impacted by the Sword ban are G/W/x hate bears and other midrange strategies. Under no reasonable system would those interactive, fun, and rewarding decks be the target of bans while things like Reanimator, Living End, and Splinter Twin exist on the combo axis, and boring two dollar aggro decks continue to place week after week with the same predictable suite of creatures and removal spells.
1) Serpents will never be competitive now (current card pool). Under the old system, where decks were forced to one day graduate, Serpents were guaranteed to have their day under the sun. You killed Serpent-Day (and any analogous wimpy tribe)!!! Also, it would have been fun figuring out which tribe would be the next to graduate. Also, it was fun liberating certain decks from underdog status, like my winning Dwarf and Scarecrow decks (once other requirements were met). Now you voided those victories from meaning. "My idea is to call this the Underdog Week, a tribute to all those tribes that struggle to emerge among the top tribes..." - kumagoro42 @ http://puremtgo.com/articles/diaries-apocalypse-tribal-weeks-83-84 I don't like your above characterization of "the week where we play with the tribes we don't play in other weeks". I don't play Serpent in Underdog, because tribes with the power level of Scout still exist. Now thanks to this I'll never play Serpent. If I had wanted to play Scout, I still could have in other formats.
Yes, one day will require a reset, but that assumes we're still around in five years, and even if so, what's the big deal? Not a reason to kill a format.
2) Council is so arbitrary. Like I would totally vote for every single person on this current council, but how are they more qualified than the person who lost in the top 8? If you get a decent round of scumbags (me, if you want) in next year, what are you going to do but arbitrarily change the rules again? Even among the councilmen, how to split power was pretty arbitrary (you would accord power based on who might have had less mana screw?).
3) Pure decks felt VERY different to me. Different meta, different card pool, different design constraints. Now you want to define what is a pure tribe by arbitrary decisions. Pure was the minor league - professional, but free of the major tribal players. Perfect. Now I can quite likely play the same power-level Goblin deck two weeks in a month, with regular (maybe Elves/Merfolk instead, depending on the votes).
4) I originally voted no to singleton - having two events under my belt, I have come to appreciate it more. If it goes, I won't cry, but it's definitely different enough, with enough variety among the top tribes for now. In general, I like it.
5) You think Cleric is the weakest non-Underdog????
6) Why desire to reset the meta? We have about 30 games in a given format a month! That's not stale, but it's definitely not solved.
7) I think you give too much emphasis to a "winning" deck. You seem to think that if I or another can't power Scout to a first-place finish it shouldn't be barred from the same card pool as the true underdogs. The deck can still seem unfair to deckbuilders building with other tribes even if it doesn't 4-0. Scouts and a few others clearly have more resources. I don't even particularly want to play Scouts, so I may not even try to prove the point. They have efficient beaters, color-hate, ramp spells that other decks would kill for as it effectively gives them 4 more Legacy-quality spells, and 2-3 cards involved in two-card oombos. And yet, if a deck doesn't win, it takes another month to prove the point, and yet everyone has to metagame against the stupid scout-or-whatever deck. After having typed all this, I will state that I might even agree with you, that Scouts MIGHT NOT be too overpowered. But, so what? There was a criteria for advancing them to the next stage, they passed it, and scouts could easily be played in Pure. You seem to interpret NOT PLAYED as NOT POWERFUL enough. There's only a few of us, and even if we didn't have pet decks, it's entirely reasonable that we would skip on scout or something for months. No reason to send it back to Underdog.
8) Now the Demons best chance of winning is to have to try to beat a full-Legacy-powered Goblin or Merfolk deck (or other Major League tribe)? You're a Demon-Hater too! Why couldn't the old Pure format stay where they (and tribes of similar power) were sure to gradually bubble to the top again!? Seriously, your old system was perfect, and you ruined it.
You and I agree on this but I see the emotional impact a sword has on some players and I see why it (the group of equips) got the axe so to speak. I wish it were not so but then again I think banning the swords is equivalent to banning other high tix/high power cards like force of will.
I hope this is more of a cycle than a permanent "the way of things".
Rex: I am for the first time ever happy to have banned a card (or group thereof) because I really hate the lazy, lazy, lazy deckbuilding represented by the Swords, and the bad feeling that they generate on the board and is, apparently, shared by many players (and please stop with that "they can be dealt with" argument; Umezawa's Jitte and Skullclamp can be dealt with, too. So why are they banned?)
This said, I take no responsibility for this turn of events! The poll was really surprising in how harsh the "Off with their heads!" outcry ended up being. High-profile Sword players like romellos essentially said, "Let's remove the temptation to play with these things for the 1000th time and let's see if we can do something else instead". At this point, you can say they banned themselves!
(I admit I'm a bit less convinced about Batterskull, which if you don't have an active Stoneforge Mystic, is kind of clumsy. But SFM and Batterskull would become a fixed support package in many decks, and that would be annoying. So Batterskull is kind of a victim here, sacrificed to make room for the other equipments). (This, if SFM won't end up being everywhere. In that case, I might do the switcheroo between her and Batterskull).
I don't need a pithy comment from somebody who knows nothing about this format. There are maybe 5 people at most who have been more involved with Tribal Wars than I've been in the past two years. I've recorded hours upon hours of coverage, commentary, and deck building theory about this format. I have a very solid understanding of both the practical and theoretical applications of equipment in the format. And I'm telling you, Swords of X/Y were and are perfectly safe in the format, and are a net positive for the potential of minor tribes to play competitively. I am firmly convinced that I am correct on this matter.
The idea that Swords just turned any old tribe into some "blah blah, cast a sword" tribe, was one that was floated when SFM was first quasi-restricted. I didn't agree with it then, but I lived with it. The way in which people have actually used swords since that time has proven that they are no danger, they do NOT homogenize the format into "equipment wars", and they have numerous answers that every deck plays.
This decision is just flat out wrong. It's not mine to make, and I totally respect Kumagoro, and I am sure he knows that. I don't always agree with him, but I am not the steward of this format, he is. I wish I could participate more right now, but I could never match the level of effort he puts into this, and I respect that 1 billion percent. But I know enough about the format that I don't need to qualify my opinion, it's just the wrong decision.
It seems to me that the theme is nicely fulfilled here. I would have included a few more big finishers like Avacyn or Akroma, or even Reya with all those sacrifices. Then again, it's a deck with not a single mana accelerator and 37 lands. I would never work the courage to play it, as I usually always have a good 50% of mana-related cards in my builds. :)
Martyr's Cause is not in the list, though. Did you take it out eventually?
I get it, and let me reiterate that you've done a great job shaping the events into something interesting and fun for most. So thanks for that. As much as I admire, Shard, Blippy and Flippers they didn't accomplish that to the same degree.
Is there a reason not to throw in (for instance) 4 Gemstone Mine or City of Brass? Other than the aesthetics of it of course.
Thank you very much. The giant deck stands out to me because it is simple brutal and yet not goblins/elementals, and what not. Plus the name fit. :D Sure sure in your history Sphinges stand out. And I agree they are great but I was looking for format defining decks.
That's all hand edited css changes. If you right click on the document and click view source and look at the style tag near the top of the page you will see I added a bunch of custom classes that let me change the look & feel of the page. A few of those classes have styles from CSS2 & 3.
The deck lists use those classes too. What I did was start the deck in Jam's generator, only using the part of it from the <tbody> tag down. Then I have my own modified top part that contains the classes I use to make the gradients, rounded corners and the text decoration.
This article is just perfect. Absolutely pro-level journalism: concise, articulate, argumentative, the right amount of objectivity and personal involvement. Kudos.
Only nitpick: Planescape = Planechase, I assume.
Whoa, where did you find that Giant deck? I remember playing it, but just that one time, probably ending 2-1 or such. I wonder what caught your attention about it. :) (I would have thought my Sphinx build is more iconic, even just by being the rare deck I played consistently over the years, and with good results. Plus it's a passion we share, don't we?).
Now, to the important things: You HAVE to tell me all about those quote boxes! I want to use them badly! (Feel free to send me the code in email if you feel it's out of place here, but maybe other writers would like to know.) Your deck boxes are also cooler than mine, do you use a different editor?
Paul hit it pretty well; I just want to emphasis a few points.
If you want to write, write: If you have something to say, say it. Write it out. If you are passionate about it, put that passion on paper. If it is important to you, others may want to read it. So write, and submit. But don't be too upset if your first draft gets rejected. Writing is like Magic - it takes a lot of practice. Odds are pretty good you didn't win the tournament first time out. Same with writing - you may need to tune that article quite a bit to make it a winner.
Grammar is tech: When you have published a couple hundred articles, and proven that you have something important to say, then you can write in haiku, or l33t speak, or slang. If you are a new writer, then keep the language straightforward and get straight to the tech. Inside jokes, stories about your pets or the RPG you play on Weds. are all interesting to you and your friends, but keep them out of your articles. Avoid anything that makes it harder for your reader to get what you are saying is bad - and that includes bad grammar, misspellings, etc.
Keep the editor happy: Joshua is buried in work. If you want him to publish your work, don't make it any harder on him. If he has to fix grammar, correct the spelling of a bunch of cards, and edit all the links, the article will have to be incredible to justify all that work. Make it easy on him: run the spell check, run the grammar check, and test all the links before submitting.
Have someone else proofread it: Seriously. Have a Magic-playing friend read it - and maybe a non-player as well. You know what you are writing about, but that can lead to assuming you explained something when that happened in mentally drafting it, or the version that got scrapped and rewritten. A non-player will not get caught up in the excitement, and will pay more attention to the technical stuff.
A secret to my success - my wife proofread everything I wrote for the first couple years, and I still run a lot of stuff past her. That was particularly useful because she had an English degree and used to work as a professional proofreader. She is also a high-level Magic judge, former PTQ grinder and a rules guru. That's a useful combo.
Making money: Don't start out writing because you want to make money. Write because you want to write, and the money may follow. Even so, the money is small. Given the time I spend on each article, even after the generous compensation PureMTGO provides, I make a lot less than minimum wage on my writing. That said, it is a hobby, not a profession.
But if you have something to say, write an article.
Excellent summation. I'll have to revisit landless clerics at some point, that deck is several years old at this point, and predates Lotus Petal and Mox Opal.
Doh, I missed his update about the rules change until it was an hour too late to actually play in the event. I only had the one pure deck built, so once it was off the table I was going to have to sit the week out.
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I also don't agree with the "lazy deckbuilding" argument. It's not trivially easy to make the Swords work. You need to understand what are you trying to accomplish, how they interact with your overall plan and how they fare against the general field. As have been said, the Swords aren't really good versus aggro decks (as opposed to Jitte, which is a very different card that has strong defensive applications and really screws up combat both on offense and defense), and they also aren't good versus combo. They have potential VS midrange and control builds, and I think that is why they are perceived as too good by lots of players - because they play underpowered slow decks that aren't really effective in controlling the board. If you play slow decks in Legacy you need to be able to deal with threats.
I have thought about Swords a lot over the years, and I think where they would realy shine is in aggressive decks that have 8+ mana dorks, like Noble Hierarch. In such decks you have excessive mana to spend, you can equip the Swords sooner, and you can make your otherwise irrelevant creatures into threats. I wouldn't want to play them in most other aggro builds, because for 5 mana I can generally better impact the board through other means. I also wouldn't want to play them in control decks, because 20 threats is too much as it is, and I want to use precious free spots on spells that control the board. I don't know, I just think they are hard to use optimally, and the players who make it work are probably far from lazy deckbuilders. It might seem otherwise, but decks that don't play marginal and fancy cards and interactions aren't necessarilly uncreative. They might have took longer time and more mental power to fine tune than it took a "creative guy" to make some Kraken deck.
But anyway, it's water under the bridge. My midrange Vampires certainly have one thing less to worry about.
Another point I have against this is banning Swords in regular events. If someone wants to try to play with Swords against full-powered Legacy Goblin, Elves, and Merfolk, let them. If so, it is not likely because of lazy deckbuilding, and even if so, they will most likely learn that Swords are not necessarily the best choice in that environment. And it would widen the gap between Pure and Regular, always a benefit.
You know I almost never include swords outside of singleton and I am still against the ban on the grounds that who cares if so and so assumes SoF&I is good because there are 30+ goblin players?
Who cares if so & so draws their SoF&F instead of SoF&I because they got lucky when playing against Golgari? Sure that sucks for the Green Black guy but it should be part of the game.
Swords are by far not the most powerful cards played regularly. That said I respect your decision. It is on you what gets banned and when no matter what you may say about it being the voice of the people deciding this. You run the event and have ultimate veto.
If you want a format with only x tribes and y noncreatures I will ultimately support that despite not liking it. Hopefully, as I said we can revisit the issue in a while when we see how it works out.
In my book, bad deck builders are the ones who keep using the Swords because why not? The kind of build the Swords push is frankly the opposite of creative. I admire romellos' honesty about it.
There's a very solid theoretical reason for banning the Swords, and it's that we're dealing with a creature-based format, and they're Umezawa's Jitte #2-6. It's exactly what Aaron Forsythe called "metagaming": something that you play only to prey on what the other players are playing, as opposed to creative deckbuilding, which the Swords actively discourage. They also reward sheer luck, because without a cheap mean to silver-bullet them (= SFM), the Swords become, "Oh look at that, you're Golgari and I just happened to drew into my singleton Feast and Famine rather than my Singleton Fire and Ice or my singleton War and Peace!"
And it's the reasoning DCI uses too: removing the ubiquitous card that prevents variety. The slots automatically taken by the Swords because they don't compare to anything else will be now divided into a plethora of different cards that fulfill the same role. Repeat with me: Variety uber alles. Power level is not the measure of everything. In fact, power level doesn't affect a meta per se.
Aggro Rex: I kindly invite you to calm down as I'm pretty sure rayjinn comment was just a tongue-in-cheek, good-hearted barb.
And since you seem to like the word "wrong" this round, I'll use it, too: you're wrong in your evaluation of my bans. I might have said it one million times already (so let's make it one million and one): they're never about power level. Three things I need to evaluate in the meta: frequency of play of some cards, happiness of the player's base, variety of builds. Hence I ban what embodies a combination of ubiquity, annoyance and laziness. The Swords were too frequent, hated by many, and pushed lazy builds in the kind of aggro decks that are dominant by a long shot. Still, as I say above, for as much as I support the ban, you can't blame it on me alone. (You can blame the un-bans on me, rarely the bans.)
You often make the mistake to look at this meta from the perspective of a top player. That's the minority, the 1%ers. Those who come with $500 decks and can't really have the right to complain about what the majority feels about them, their decks, and their cards. I respect them, but my mandate isn't about them. In fact, my mandate might be the opposite of caring for them, since they scare away the other players, make them unhappy and frustrated and angry. They're the equivalent of the overly loud guys in the bar I run.
The little guy with a deck that's worth less than a single Sword? Now, he gets all my attention. His complaints are often silent, but they are there. I can sense them, I sometimes ask for them, I see them reflected in pool answers and in lists. That's the people I work for, Rex, like it or not. More often than not, their complaints are all over the place (the typical "This card I just lost against is bah-roken!"). Sometimes they're not. But the moment they matter is the moment they cease to be single displays of frustration, and become shard by two, ten, thirty players. Players who, with their presence, "pay" for this event. If only the top players showed up, Tribal Apocalypse would have been long out of business.
The idea that the Swords helped small tribes is mere theory and wishful thinking. The registered lists show that it doesn't apply to reality. The same way, but in reverse, as the idea that the super-scary power combo cards are bad for the meta: true in theory, false when applied to the reality of the tournament where nobody plays them. And since reality is my business, it guides my decisions.
Martyr's Cause is in the deck tech video indeed. But the numbers check out in the list so it was replaced with something that's not in the actual deck.
EDIT: Ah no, it says 21 Other Spells, but they're actually 20. :)
The Loxodon clan is doing a happy dance indeed.
BoB:
1) Allow me to say that this example is absurd. Serpent would NEVER be competitive, because for them to be, you need a scenario where 90% of the entire tribe system was out of Pure weeks. We would have never even remotely got to that point. And I believe you're making confusion here (QED), because you're mentioning Underdog. Underdog didn't have the "graduation system". That was Pure. Underdog would have always had all the tribes with less than 50 members in it, no matter how many times they would win. Even by never resetting the 50-member quota (which would have eventually moved back), it would have taken about 20 years for tribes like Sphinx or Leviathan or Ooze to end up out of Underdog. Similarly, Dwarf and Scarecrow would have never been out of Underdog in our lifetime. You got it all wrong.
2) Council is no more. But it wasn't arbitrary. I'll let AJ explain why to you, if he likes, as I don't care anymore. (Just this: I'd like for people to have more of a sense of humor about things. I know Magic players almost never have, and the sky is constantly falling, except it never does. But I'd like for MY Magic players to have it. I might even require it).
3) Did you play in the original Pure events? I'm not sure but I don't think so. Well, the original Pure event was the second Regular event of the month. And the day I said, "Hey, you know what? Let's turn the second Regular event into something a little bit different", people became angry because I was taking away their second Regular event, and there were already too many gimmicky events in a month. This was Legacy Tribal Wars, not "The Muppet Show Presents: Let's Play Magic!". Some longtime players even stopped playing Tribal Apocalypse because they only wanted to play Legacy Tribal Wars and not the Muppet version of it.
So you can see how it's always a lose-lose situation (which is just a win-win situation looked at from the wrong side).
And again, the current Pure was an aberration, because it wasn't created with the idea of banning tribes left and right. I blame myself for having allowed it to get so out of hands. I get that you liked "killing tribes" out of the meta, but if you think of it, that's an aberration, too. It's having a goal where the end result is less options for everyone. I have several fun builds with tribes that were out of Pure because they got lucky once, and were played 4 times. 4 times! That's insane, you'll agree. One of my goal is to push variety, how could take it out be a good thing?
I also have fun, Johnny builds for Major League tribes. I want two chances per month to play with them. And I'm sure this sentiment is shared by the kind of player I represent (I actually know it for a fact). Demonizing tribes because of how some players use them is very very wrong. How am I supposed to set a good example with them if I'm not allowed to? Pure was a trap, it was evident by now.
4) Singleton events aren't going anywhere. There's a chance for 4 of them out of the 10 in calendar to turn into Regular. I'd say it's a fair bet that only a couple of them will go.
5) Do you have another candidate?
6) I don't get your math. 30 games?
I'm not resetting anything. I'm fixing, mostly managing lists. There were too many different sub-categories, people were going mad tracking what was what. Your confusion about Underdog and Pure is proof enough. Some players were more confused than you. I know that because I'm the one who spends 45 minutes before each event explaining stuff in PM to confused players. Allow me to want a solution for that.
7) Again, Scout was N-O-T played! Wanna bet that Scout won't dominate the Underdog? And if it does, wanna bet what will happen then? Ask the Werewolves. They'll tell you. You all should think of me as wearing a t-shirt saying, "SAY NO TO PREEMPTIVE BANNING!" with a rear saying, "SAY NO TO DEMONIZATIONS BASED ON THEORETIC SCENARIOS!"
8) Didn't you just say it's wrong to put too much emphasis on winning? Let me get this: Scout and Giant should be left into the oblivion of never being PLAYED, yet Demon needs to be ensured an outlet for WINNING EVENTS? (And by the way, Demon did win events without much help, thank you very much.)
Also, do you realize that winning with Serpent in a meta where only tribes worse than Serpent exist don't actually amount to much?
I think I'll use one of the next special events to do "Crappy Tribes Week", selecting the very worst of the Unhallowed, so that one of them will finally get to live the dream of winning.
Oh crap, Martyr's Cause is supposed to be in the list. I just missed it I guess.
Yeah, the deck originally had Sol Ring, and I accidentally cut it. Like you said there's no accel, but I made sure that the curve was decently low. I wouldn't fit anything with a CMC over 7 in this list.
As for the Angels and Demons, I wanted them to fit thematically as well as being useful for the deck. While the Angels you mention are obviously good, Reya would likely be the best for the recursion aspect. But still, 9 mana or whatever is a lot.
See, that's the problem. We shouldn't be catering to players who are offended by something as innocuous as a Sword of X/Y. It's a relatively harmless midrange card that, if you designed your deck well, isn't going to beat you on its own. Banning it just enables bad deck builders to continue being bad deck builders.
If you poll the public at FNM, I bet you could get 50% to vote that mythic rares should be banned from Standard. This isn't the way to make decisions.
I have gone to great lengths to provide deck building challenges and prizes to reward people on limited budgets and people who want incentives to play cards that aren't just the strictly best option. I pay those prizes out of my own pocket for no reason other than I want to encourage something cool to get played at the event. That is my way of helping format diversity, and I put my own tickets on the line for it. I've given away more than I've won from Tribal Wars. The "achievement system" Kumagoro spear-headed was another great way to do that. Bans are a *crappy* way to mix things up. It's just the truth.
The decks most impacted by the Sword ban are G/W/x hate bears and other midrange strategies. Under no reasonable system would those interactive, fun, and rewarding decks be the target of bans while things like Reanimator, Living End, and Splinter Twin exist on the combo axis, and boring two dollar aggro decks continue to place week after week with the same predictable suite of creatures and removal spells.
1) Serpents will never be competitive now (current card pool). Under the old system, where decks were forced to one day graduate, Serpents were guaranteed to have their day under the sun. You killed Serpent-Day (and any analogous wimpy tribe)!!! Also, it would have been fun figuring out which tribe would be the next to graduate. Also, it was fun liberating certain decks from underdog status, like my winning Dwarf and Scarecrow decks (once other requirements were met). Now you voided those victories from meaning. "My idea is to call this the Underdog Week, a tribute to all those tribes that struggle to emerge among the top tribes..." - kumagoro42 @ http://puremtgo.com/articles/diaries-apocalypse-tribal-weeks-83-84 I don't like your above characterization of "the week where we play with the tribes we don't play in other weeks". I don't play Serpent in Underdog, because tribes with the power level of Scout still exist. Now thanks to this I'll never play Serpent. If I had wanted to play Scout, I still could have in other formats.
Yes, one day will require a reset, but that assumes we're still around in five years, and even if so, what's the big deal? Not a reason to kill a format.
2) Council is so arbitrary. Like I would totally vote for every single person on this current council, but how are they more qualified than the person who lost in the top 8? If you get a decent round of scumbags (me, if you want) in next year, what are you going to do but arbitrarily change the rules again? Even among the councilmen, how to split power was pretty arbitrary (you would accord power based on who might have had less mana screw?).
3) Pure decks felt VERY different to me. Different meta, different card pool, different design constraints. Now you want to define what is a pure tribe by arbitrary decisions. Pure was the minor league - professional, but free of the major tribal players. Perfect. Now I can quite likely play the same power-level Goblin deck two weeks in a month, with regular (maybe Elves/Merfolk instead, depending on the votes).
4) I originally voted no to singleton - having two events under my belt, I have come to appreciate it more. If it goes, I won't cry, but it's definitely different enough, with enough variety among the top tribes for now. In general, I like it.
5) You think Cleric is the weakest non-Underdog????
6) Why desire to reset the meta? We have about 30 games in a given format a month! That's not stale, but it's definitely not solved.
7) I think you give too much emphasis to a "winning" deck. You seem to think that if I or another can't power Scout to a first-place finish it shouldn't be barred from the same card pool as the true underdogs. The deck can still seem unfair to deckbuilders building with other tribes even if it doesn't 4-0. Scouts and a few others clearly have more resources. I don't even particularly want to play Scouts, so I may not even try to prove the point. They have efficient beaters, color-hate, ramp spells that other decks would kill for as it effectively gives them 4 more Legacy-quality spells, and 2-3 cards involved in two-card oombos. And yet, if a deck doesn't win, it takes another month to prove the point, and yet everyone has to metagame against the stupid scout-or-whatever deck. After having typed all this, I will state that I might even agree with you, that Scouts MIGHT NOT be too overpowered. But, so what? There was a criteria for advancing them to the next stage, they passed it, and scouts could easily be played in Pure. You seem to interpret NOT PLAYED as NOT POWERFUL enough. There's only a few of us, and even if we didn't have pet decks, it's entirely reasonable that we would skip on scout or something for months. No reason to send it back to Underdog.
8) Now the Demons best chance of winning is to have to try to beat a full-Legacy-powered Goblin or Merfolk deck (or other Major League tribe)? You're a Demon-Hater too! Why couldn't the old Pure format stay where they (and tribes of similar power) were sure to gradually bubble to the top again!? Seriously, your old system was perfect, and you ruined it.
You and I agree on this but I see the emotional impact a sword has on some players and I see why it (the group of equips) got the axe so to speak. I wish it were not so but then again I think banning the swords is equivalent to banning other high tix/high power cards like force of will.
I hope this is more of a cycle than a permanent "the way of things".
Rex: I am for the first time ever happy to have banned a card (or group thereof) because I really hate the lazy, lazy, lazy deckbuilding represented by the Swords, and the bad feeling that they generate on the board and is, apparently, shared by many players (and please stop with that "they can be dealt with" argument; Umezawa's Jitte and Skullclamp can be dealt with, too. So why are they banned?)
This said, I take no responsibility for this turn of events! The poll was really surprising in how harsh the "Off with their heads!" outcry ended up being. High-profile Sword players like romellos essentially said, "Let's remove the temptation to play with these things for the 1000th time and let's see if we can do something else instead". At this point, you can say they banned themselves!
(I admit I'm a bit less convinced about Batterskull, which if you don't have an active Stoneforge Mystic, is kind of clumsy. But SFM and Batterskull would become a fixed support package in many decks, and that would be annoying. So Batterskull is kind of a victim here, sacrificed to make room for the other equipments). (This, if SFM won't end up being everywhere. In that case, I might do the switcheroo between her and Batterskull).
I don't need a pithy comment from somebody who knows nothing about this format. There are maybe 5 people at most who have been more involved with Tribal Wars than I've been in the past two years. I've recorded hours upon hours of coverage, commentary, and deck building theory about this format. I have a very solid understanding of both the practical and theoretical applications of equipment in the format. And I'm telling you, Swords of X/Y were and are perfectly safe in the format, and are a net positive for the potential of minor tribes to play competitively. I am firmly convinced that I am correct on this matter.
The idea that Swords just turned any old tribe into some "blah blah, cast a sword" tribe, was one that was floated when SFM was first quasi-restricted. I didn't agree with it then, but I lived with it. The way in which people have actually used swords since that time has proven that they are no danger, they do NOT homogenize the format into "equipment wars", and they have numerous answers that every deck plays.
This decision is just flat out wrong. It's not mine to make, and I totally respect Kumagoro, and I am sure he knows that. I don't always agree with him, but I am not the steward of this format, he is. I wish I could participate more right now, but I could never match the level of effort he puts into this, and I respect that 1 billion percent. But I know enough about the format that I don't need to qualify my opinion, it's just the wrong decision.
It seems to me that the theme is nicely fulfilled here. I would have included a few more big finishers like Avacyn or Akroma, or even Reya with all those sacrifices. Then again, it's a deck with not a single mana accelerator and 37 lands. I would never work the courage to play it, as I usually always have a good 50% of mana-related cards in my builds. :)
Martyr's Cause is not in the list, though. Did you take it out eventually?
My votes for non-angel best friends = humans(pick four good ones), plow, wrath, living death, entomb, animate dead, exhume.
Warhammer, possibly the 3rd-best "sword," is still legal.
but maybe the start of your very own format then, "Equipment wars".
I get it, and let me reiterate that you've done a great job shaping the events into something interesting and fun for most. So thanks for that. As much as I admire, Shard, Blippy and Flippers they didn't accomplish that to the same degree.