Wait, did I just hear you say you were thinking of banning the swords? Your experience is pretty much why them being around isn't a great idea. They are incredibly good, especially with any kind of tutor, particularly against mono decks but also just in general. Powerful equipment in a creature based format tends to warp it. I'm entirely in favour of the proposed ban, it should increase deck diversity.
I'll probably run the Archons with a few tweaks this week: I originally slated the deck for the weeks prior the invitational, but life got in the way.
I can't believe I failed to comment on AJ's Recurring Nightmare deck two weeks in a row (well, this time I didn't want to invade Rex's space, though). That Archon build is really tempting to me right now.
Rex, in the second video, your reaction to the pig token was awesome. Did you really never see it before? I essentially put Curse of the Swine in the deck only to see the piggy!
And yeah, one single Sword of Fire and Ice pretty much undid me. I started to put Disenchant/Naturalize in mono-colored builds. I'm counting so many crucial targets these days (and if the Gods will become really popular, make that Revoke Existence/Unravel the Aether).
I'm also this close to ban the Swords from Pure events. T9+Blades, how does that sound?
And you should have fetched basic Forest at the end of that game against slug, not Savannah. :)
Also, Locus is a type, Snow a super-type. That's probably why Cloudpost loses it after Spreading Seas.
And did it dawn on you like it did on me that Colossus of Akros is actually a great card in a Cloudpost deck? Faster and bigger than Darksteel Colossus for sure (poor Darksteel Colossus, it's entirely obsolete now).
It was indeed the trip to the Lofoten, the boat and the new penn rod and shimano reel - though my first priority is fly fishing down here in the black forest and can be comparable expensive. To be fair, fishing could be done much much cheaper - as of course would be restricting budget cards and missing Las Vegas GP and things..
Wow! How on earth did it cost you that much? Lol. I was thinking of fly fishing, not deep sea fishing though. I guess chartering/owning fishing boats would be expensive.
Very nice to have an article from you up - enjoyed it thoroughly. One remark - fishing do not need to but will be much more expensive and if you compare it - my last halibut costed me about 2500€ :-)
A good look at what Born of the Gods brings to Modern. Have to agree that there isn't too much exciting here. I'm most interested in Brimaz. I was thinking he could slot nicely into the Soul Sisters deck, as the deck already runs Honor of the Pure and you also gain additional bonuses from the tokens coming into play. Whether Brimaz actually adds enough to break into the Soul Sisters deck I don't know but that seems like something worth experimenting with.
I believe the immortal Tom Petty said:
It's time to move on. It's time to get going. What lies ahead I have no way of knowing. But under my feet, yeah, the grass is growing.
So you know forgive and forget or whatever variation therein. I got pretty harsh back there; I'm sorry for our public blowout. It's the one thing I've done on mtgo I am not proud of.
So new year, new year of mtgo.
Paul and I met in a random game and we were cordial enough and entertaining enough to each other to warrant a few game and then we were buddies. We both share creativity and creative pulls and, to tie this around to his article beyond apologies, because we were both very broke mtgo players with limited collections, but now we've collected a substantially better collection.
For my own part nowadays I am very cognizant of my roots and when I encounter a player like that and they confess it to me, I ask them to challenge me again and I play my ridiculous budget and super fun monoblack purraj of urborg deck.
Umm errrhhm I'm not sure how to end this comment. Has anyone else seen the 3D food printer that NASA is helping to fund through grant money? It's the first step in food replicators. C'mon star fleet academy.....
Because they're sweet! (I never liked the old art).
And by the way, speaking of the other side of the coin in matter of surprises: I just compiled the list of the non-super-high-profile cards I miss for the decks I want to rebuild (I ditched a lot of decks, just keeping the best... 161!). I'm pretty sure back in the time I bought Krark-Clan Ironworks for 20 cents or so. Now it's 3.5 tix.
On the other hand, most non-Standard-legal planeswalkers are very cheap these days.
This game is addictive. I remember a discussion you and me had years ago about how everyone quits at some point. But I can now also say that almost everyone comes back at some later point. Once you're in, there's no escape!
Building up a collection step by step is the best thing. When you're used to play decks that are worth a couple dollars (not that they can't win events, most common cards are pretty killers in their simplicity: burn was never an expensive archetype, for instance), the day you can afford, say, a Master of the Wild Hunt, you'll feel great. I'm enjoying my own rebuilding. You get to appreciate all the little milestones again. Now I have one Bayou! It's pretty awesome.
(And yes, people tend to disregard the mana base because lands are boring, but it's a crucial part of any playing collection, especially the fetch lands).
You know, I think you're right about Figure of Destiny. I hadn't personally seen it show up in any extremely winning lists in a while, but it has shown up recently in some daily winning lists in the last few weeks and it has done more work than a niche uncommon (even if that uncommon is helping smooth out a new deck).
I bump Figure up to Proven, giving Eventide 27 points instead. Still 3rd place though. :) (Debating the picks is fun.)
Also, when are we getting any new articles from you, hmmmmm?
Yeah I don't think complaining helps much (and that sort of sounds like the topic of a song) but when you see others struggling and you want to help, but you can't simply just throw cards at them the answer is to hook them up with the information you just mentioned. The vitual job aspect. Btw Miha is a really smart guy to come up with that RPG model. I guess I wanted to bring it up because it has become a common theme in my discussions with newer players in the last few years. Particularly as I have become accustomed to using the fancy smancy cards I own instead of the traditionally budget options I used to use.
As you said you broke the model by selling off (and I have considered that myself several times but haven't yet) but that also fits in a way. In many RPGs, particularly MMOs good characters can sell for real world money just as game currency turns around through metagame sites (D2/D3 for example) and some people "farm" just so they can have a better account, or as one Gamestop employee put it, so they can pay for the game itself.
In the end M:TG is a luxury in the same sense that Chocolate is. (And may be as or more addictive.) But it is in the same sense enjoyable to a lesser extent on a lower budget, particularly if rationed. But if you eat bad milk chocolate after eating something really good you will know how a M:TG budget player feels when he encounters amazing card interactions he can't afford to engage in. That used to bug me a lot more but I realize that at the baseline most people with access to the internet are already far wealthier than most of the world. That in and of itself perhaps should tell us that if anyone is a class warrior it isn't us.
I am honored by your "Winterproof" expression and will use that myself. I submitted THIS article after 12 hours and did not take the time to really proof it thoroughly (though I did thrice over it.) To my chagrin, I spotted a few typos on the reread just now. My excuse is sleep deprivation. (Boo Paul, boo!).
On that note; *runs off to buy 4x promo duplicants, because*.
Oh man, you're embarrassing me with such public apologies. :)
Know that, while I still don't appreciate the fact that you didn't just send me an email about that article, since that little incident I never submit anything without re-reading it one more time, which I call "the Winterproof" (the problem with that article was that it didn't get any re-read at all, of course. I can't wait for when it will be updated, so that I can do a massive rewriting).
On the argument of the Class Divide. It exists, and naturally so. There's a part of me that considers sort of preposterous complaining about not being able to fully cultivate a luxury hobby. It's like subscribing to a golf club, then complaining because you don't have the money to buy the best equipment.
Clearly we don't feel that a $10 account amounts to luxury. But it kinda does. To quote the closing line from the most recent State of the Program's price section: "The cost of owning a playset of every card on MTGO you can own is $26,550." I bet that's more than a nice set of golf clubs. Granted, you don't need all that. You're probably okay with a tiny fraction of that, depending on your favorite formats. In fact, another part of me thinks that when we start talking about budget issues between budget players, sometimes we lose perspective. Just think of how many good cards a simple movie night can buy. How much did you spend for your cell phone? And so on. It's obviously a matter of priorities, but sometimes we forget that.
Also a matter of priorities is what we want to get from the MTG experience. I strongly believe one can have "fun" without necessarily owning any of the really expensive cards, but it's already hard to define what "fun" is, because that's an entirely subjective concept. It's a mistake to believe that there's one universal definition of fun, as much as it's wrong to think that owning the super-inflated Standard chase cards makes having fun easier. It's usually what those who don't own them are prone to think, because so much of the Internet debate about Magic is based on what the pro players think and do, and that's just a minor part of the game as it is played AND designed. (The elitism inherent in the Magic debate is a concern to me. That's why someone like Cotton Rhetoric teaches you about the real nature of the game as much as your favorite pro.)
And "expensive" is again a rather subjective field. There's a lot of different budget-related levels in this game: for someone the upper barrier might be 20 tix, for someone else 5 tix is already too much, and so on.
I, for one, fully subscribe to mihahitlor's RPG approach. You have to consider MTGO like a MMORPG where your account is your character.
Real money doesn't apply here, you don't use anything from outside the game. Tix is the currency: you earn tix, and with tix you buy cards, thus improving your collection, which makes your character "stronger", i.e. more able to win fights. Which in turn generates other tix.
And what can you do to earn tix? You can find a virtual job, for instance. I have two jobs, I write articles about the game and I host tournaments. Both require work on my part, both earn me tix, not real money (I broke this construct when I sold my collection a few months ago, but that was like resetting my character, in a way). Other people manage bots. That's being a merchant, which also requires work (more than you think) and earn you tix. Someone else is essentially a stock trader. And then there's people who are good enough to play and win prizes in the tournament scene. That requires an "advanced character" to generate a serious income, but every little tix you earn is a step forward. And the game and its crazy economy always find ways to surprise you, sometimes even in a good way: just today I found out that Duplicant promo is 5 cents, when I was expecting to pay several tix apiece and was taken aback at the prospect because I would rarely need a playset of Duplicant, if not for this one specific deck I built.
One thing that surely doesn't earn you tix is complaining about not having tix. Just like it's pretty much impossible to have fun while you're complaining about not having fun. :)
I think Searing Blood VS Blaze conundrum can be solved based on each person's own experience. During pre-RTR Modern times, I have played with various of RDW decks with fetchlands. Those decks were with 18 to 20 lands, max. And I can clearly say that land drop ratio can be really low most of the times. So for me; Searing Blood is a better choice with its consistency factor. This can be interpreted contrary based on different experiences...
Regarding to your evaluation at Eventide: Figure of Destiny was a hot card (proven) during the first two years of the Modern in various of decks (and at Extended, before that). I don't think that Figure of Destiny needs to prove itself more than Wistful Selkie.
There was an early release error, I was online at the time it happened.
It had to do with the card FAQ getting posted a few days early, along with most of the previously unspoiled cards.
On reddit, someone noticed the page was up early by mistake, it stayed available for about 10 minutes, then was replaced with an access denied page. A little while later, the original page was put back with a note saying that it was posted early by mistake, but since people saw it and were talking about it, they decided to just go ahead and put it back up to try and limit confusion.
I think the earlier release of card info was not an error, so much as to be able to test them on closed beta sooner to decrease the gap between paper and online. We got notification of them being up for testing last Friday.
Also, thank you all for the kind words and support. Feedback is always appreciated, and hearing positive feedback is great motivation to keep the articles coming!
Land hate can still be useful. There a couple of Tron lists out there that try to do the same thing that Post did. The RUG Tron deck in particular is a really strong deck in my opinion.
Also, the Hexproof deck uses a lot of land enchantments as I mentioned in the article. Wiping out a land can be really helpful, especially since they rely on the enchantments at times as their only source of white mana.
Brilliant analysis!
It almost makes me want to play Pauper again. It's been a long time, and it seems that the meta has changed drastically in the last couple of years. So, Storm has been entirely wiped out of existence by the bans? Affinity and Post aren't a threat anymore? At least, a threat worth putting several Ancient Grudges and Razes in the sideboard: I just looked at my old Gruul list (which incidentally played the "advantage through recasting" trick you do here, thanks to Horned Kavu) and the sideboard was heavily anti-artifact and anti-land. Should I put Sandstorm back? (Or well, Electrickery). Is there something Gruul can do against Bogle? If only Back to Nature was common.
Wait, did I just hear you say you were thinking of banning the swords? Your experience is pretty much why them being around isn't a great idea. They are incredibly good, especially with any kind of tutor, particularly against mono decks but also just in general. Powerful equipment in a creature based format tends to warp it. I'm entirely in favour of the proposed ban, it should increase deck diversity.
I'll probably run the Archons with a few tweaks this week: I originally slated the deck for the weeks prior the invitational, but life got in the way.
Good stuff as always Paul.
I can't believe I failed to comment on AJ's Recurring Nightmare deck two weeks in a row (well, this time I didn't want to invade Rex's space, though). That Archon build is really tempting to me right now.
Rex, in the second video, your reaction to the pig token was awesome. Did you really never see it before? I essentially put Curse of the Swine in the deck only to see the piggy!
And yeah, one single Sword of Fire and Ice pretty much undid me. I started to put Disenchant/Naturalize in mono-colored builds. I'm counting so many crucial targets these days (and if the Gods will become really popular, make that Revoke Existence/Unravel the Aether).
I'm also this close to ban the Swords from Pure events. T9+Blades, how does that sound?
And you should have fetched basic Forest at the end of that game against slug, not Savannah. :)
Also, Locus is a type, Snow a super-type. That's probably why Cloudpost loses it after Spreading Seas.
And did it dawn on you like it did on me that Colossus of Akros is actually a great card in a Cloudpost deck? Faster and bigger than Darksteel Colossus for sure (poor Darksteel Colossus, it's entirely obsolete now).
true- but at least the beast was heavier than me which is something :-)
Yeah point taken. :) Though I expect the trip was an extravagance by any standard. No need for moxen at a standard tourney :p
It was indeed the trip to the Lofoten, the boat and the new penn rod and shimano reel - though my first priority is fly fishing down here in the black forest and can be comparable expensive. To be fair, fishing could be done much much cheaper - as of course would be restricting budget cards and missing Las Vegas GP and things..
Wow! How on earth did it cost you that much? Lol. I was thinking of fly fishing, not deep sea fishing though. I guess chartering/owning fishing boats would be expensive.
Very nice to have an article from you up - enjoyed it thoroughly. One remark - fishing do not need to but will be much more expensive and if you compare it - my last halibut costed me about 2500€ :-)
A good look at what Born of the Gods brings to Modern. Have to agree that there isn't too much exciting here. I'm most interested in Brimaz. I was thinking he could slot nicely into the Soul Sisters deck, as the deck already runs Honor of the Pure and you also gain additional bonuses from the tokens coming into play. Whether Brimaz actually adds enough to break into the Soul Sisters deck I don't know but that seems like something worth experimenting with.
I believe the immortal Tom Petty said:
It's time to move on. It's time to get going. What lies ahead I have no way of knowing. But under my feet, yeah, the grass is growing.
So you know forgive and forget or whatever variation therein. I got pretty harsh back there; I'm sorry for our public blowout. It's the one thing I've done on mtgo I am not proud of.
So new year, new year of mtgo.
Paul and I met in a random game and we were cordial enough and entertaining enough to each other to warrant a few game and then we were buddies. We both share creativity and creative pulls and, to tie this around to his article beyond apologies, because we were both very broke mtgo players with limited collections, but now we've collected a substantially better collection.
For my own part nowadays I am very cognizant of my roots and when I encounter a player like that and they confess it to me, I ask them to challenge me again and I play my ridiculous budget and super fun monoblack purraj of urborg deck.
Umm errrhhm I'm not sure how to end this comment. Has anyone else seen the 3D food printer that NASA is helping to fund through grant money? It's the first step in food replicators. C'mon star fleet academy.....
Because they're sweet! (I never liked the old art).
And by the way, speaking of the other side of the coin in matter of surprises: I just compiled the list of the non-super-high-profile cards I miss for the decks I want to rebuild (I ditched a lot of decks, just keeping the best... 161!). I'm pretty sure back in the time I bought Krark-Clan Ironworks for 20 cents or so. Now it's 3.5 tix.
On the other hand, most non-Standard-legal planeswalkers are very cheap these days.
This game is addictive. I remember a discussion you and me had years ago about how everyone quits at some point. But I can now also say that almost everyone comes back at some later point. Once you're in, there's no escape!
Building up a collection step by step is the best thing. When you're used to play decks that are worth a couple dollars (not that they can't win events, most common cards are pretty killers in their simplicity: burn was never an expensive archetype, for instance), the day you can afford, say, a Master of the Wild Hunt, you'll feel great. I'm enjoying my own rebuilding. You get to appreciate all the little milestones again. Now I have one Bayou! It's pretty awesome.
(And yes, people tend to disregard the mana base because lands are boring, but it's a crucial part of any playing collection, especially the fetch lands).
You know, I think you're right about Figure of Destiny. I hadn't personally seen it show up in any extremely winning lists in a while, but it has shown up recently in some daily winning lists in the last few weeks and it has done more work than a niche uncommon (even if that uncommon is helping smooth out a new deck).
I bump Figure up to Proven, giving Eventide 27 points instead. Still 3rd place though. :) (Debating the picks is fun.)
Also, when are we getting any new articles from you, hmmmmm?
The draft is really good. It is something they need to be working if I were them. - Roger Stanton
Being decked out is really fun. That is one of the nicest thing they can do for you. - Roger Stanton
Yeah I don't think complaining helps much (and that sort of sounds like the topic of a song) but when you see others struggling and you want to help, but you can't simply just throw cards at them the answer is to hook them up with the information you just mentioned. The vitual job aspect. Btw Miha is a really smart guy to come up with that RPG model. I guess I wanted to bring it up because it has become a common theme in my discussions with newer players in the last few years. Particularly as I have become accustomed to using the fancy smancy cards I own instead of the traditionally budget options I used to use.
As you said you broke the model by selling off (and I have considered that myself several times but haven't yet) but that also fits in a way. In many RPGs, particularly MMOs good characters can sell for real world money just as game currency turns around through metagame sites (D2/D3 for example) and some people "farm" just so they can have a better account, or as one Gamestop employee put it, so they can pay for the game itself.
In the end M:TG is a luxury in the same sense that Chocolate is. (And may be as or more addictive.) But it is in the same sense enjoyable to a lesser extent on a lower budget, particularly if rationed. But if you eat bad milk chocolate after eating something really good you will know how a M:TG budget player feels when he encounters amazing card interactions he can't afford to engage in. That used to bug me a lot more but I realize that at the baseline most people with access to the internet are already far wealthier than most of the world. That in and of itself perhaps should tell us that if anyone is a class warrior it isn't us.
I am honored by your "Winterproof" expression and will use that myself. I submitted THIS article after 12 hours and did not take the time to really proof it thoroughly (though I did thrice over it.) To my chagrin, I spotted a few typos on the reread just now. My excuse is sleep deprivation. (Boo Paul, boo!).
On that note; *runs off to buy 4x promo duplicants, because*.
Oh man, you're embarrassing me with such public apologies. :)
Know that, while I still don't appreciate the fact that you didn't just send me an email about that article, since that little incident I never submit anything without re-reading it one more time, which I call "the Winterproof" (the problem with that article was that it didn't get any re-read at all, of course. I can't wait for when it will be updated, so that I can do a massive rewriting).
On the argument of the Class Divide. It exists, and naturally so. There's a part of me that considers sort of preposterous complaining about not being able to fully cultivate a luxury hobby. It's like subscribing to a golf club, then complaining because you don't have the money to buy the best equipment.
Clearly we don't feel that a $10 account amounts to luxury. But it kinda does. To quote the closing line from the most recent State of the Program's price section: "The cost of owning a playset of every card on MTGO you can own is $26,550." I bet that's more than a nice set of golf clubs. Granted, you don't need all that. You're probably okay with a tiny fraction of that, depending on your favorite formats. In fact, another part of me thinks that when we start talking about budget issues between budget players, sometimes we lose perspective. Just think of how many good cards a simple movie night can buy. How much did you spend for your cell phone? And so on. It's obviously a matter of priorities, but sometimes we forget that.
Also a matter of priorities is what we want to get from the MTG experience. I strongly believe one can have "fun" without necessarily owning any of the really expensive cards, but it's already hard to define what "fun" is, because that's an entirely subjective concept. It's a mistake to believe that there's one universal definition of fun, as much as it's wrong to think that owning the super-inflated Standard chase cards makes having fun easier. It's usually what those who don't own them are prone to think, because so much of the Internet debate about Magic is based on what the pro players think and do, and that's just a minor part of the game as it is played AND designed. (The elitism inherent in the Magic debate is a concern to me. That's why someone like Cotton Rhetoric teaches you about the real nature of the game as much as your favorite pro.)
And "expensive" is again a rather subjective field. There's a lot of different budget-related levels in this game: for someone the upper barrier might be 20 tix, for someone else 5 tix is already too much, and so on.
I, for one, fully subscribe to mihahitlor's RPG approach. You have to consider MTGO like a MMORPG where your account is your character.
Real money doesn't apply here, you don't use anything from outside the game. Tix is the currency: you earn tix, and with tix you buy cards, thus improving your collection, which makes your character "stronger", i.e. more able to win fights. Which in turn generates other tix.
And what can you do to earn tix? You can find a virtual job, for instance. I have two jobs, I write articles about the game and I host tournaments. Both require work on my part, both earn me tix, not real money (I broke this construct when I sold my collection a few months ago, but that was like resetting my character, in a way). Other people manage bots. That's being a merchant, which also requires work (more than you think) and earn you tix. Someone else is essentially a stock trader. And then there's people who are good enough to play and win prizes in the tournament scene. That requires an "advanced character" to generate a serious income, but every little tix you earn is a step forward. And the game and its crazy economy always find ways to surprise you, sometimes even in a good way: just today I found out that Duplicant promo is 5 cents, when I was expecting to pay several tix apiece and was taken aback at the prospect because I would rarely need a playset of Duplicant, if not for this one specific deck I built.
One thing that surely doesn't earn you tix is complaining about not having tix. Just like it's pretty much impossible to have fun while you're complaining about not having fun. :)
I think Searing Blood VS Blaze conundrum can be solved based on each person's own experience. During pre-RTR Modern times, I have played with various of RDW decks with fetchlands. Those decks were with 18 to 20 lands, max. And I can clearly say that land drop ratio can be really low most of the times. So for me; Searing Blood is a better choice with its consistency factor. This can be interpreted contrary based on different experiences...
Regarding to your evaluation at Eventide: Figure of Destiny was a hot card (proven) during the first two years of the Modern in various of decks (and at Extended, before that). I don't think that Figure of Destiny needs to prove itself more than Wistful Selkie.
There was an early release error, I was online at the time it happened.
It had to do with the card FAQ getting posted a few days early, along with most of the previously unspoiled cards.
On reddit, someone noticed the page was up early by mistake, it stayed available for about 10 minutes, then was replaced with an access denied page. A little while later, the original page was put back with a note saying that it was posted early by mistake, but since people saw it and were talking about it, they decided to just go ahead and put it back up to try and limit confusion.
I agree. In fact if I remember correctly it was announced that the spoilers would be available Monday.
I think the earlier release of card info was not an error, so much as to be able to test them on closed beta sooner to decrease the gap between paper and online. We got notification of them being up for testing last Friday.
Also, thank you all for the kind words and support. Feedback is always appreciated, and hearing positive feedback is great motivation to keep the articles coming!
Land hate can still be useful. There a couple of Tron lists out there that try to do the same thing that Post did. The RUG Tron deck in particular is a really strong deck in my opinion.
Also, the Hexproof deck uses a lot of land enchantments as I mentioned in the article. Wiping out a land can be really helpful, especially since they rely on the enchantments at times as their only source of white mana.
Oh right, I forgot Cloudpost was gone too. So no reason to pack land hate at all?
Serene Heart is perfect indeed. Who would have thought it would become playable?
Cloudpost was banned along with the last storm card that saw play, but Affinity is still around and doing well enough I think.
I dealt with bogle in green using Serene Heart, against that deck, it more or less *is* back to nature.
Brilliant analysis!
It almost makes me want to play Pauper again. It's been a long time, and it seems that the meta has changed drastically in the last couple of years. So, Storm has been entirely wiped out of existence by the bans? Affinity and Post aren't a threat anymore? At least, a threat worth putting several Ancient Grudges and Razes in the sideboard: I just looked at my old Gruul list (which incidentally played the "advantage through recasting" trick you do here, thanks to Horned Kavu) and the sideboard was heavily anti-artifact and anti-land. Should I put Sandstorm back? (Or well, Electrickery). Is there something Gruul can do against Bogle? If only Back to Nature was common.