Yeah, they were turned off due to competitive balance concerns. Some people were getting valuable information while others were not. I can't say I don't disagree with WotC in this case. I hope they don't return. It's not something that you can really do in the Paper world, unless you are part of a huge team and can pool information to exploit those that don't have such resources.
While it was your choice (assuming you knew that watching previous replays were possible) to watch replay's or not, it certainly was annoying to wait 2-3 minutes each round waiting for your opponent to finish watching your previous match.
Charbelcher is a very interesting card and I imagine there are a lot of things you could do with it. This deck works pretty well though, if not particularly consistently but that tends to be the way with Belcher decks.
The player-run events do a pretty good job of supporting niche formats.
The issue with the market is that, for sets currently being drafted, draft volume is absolutely insane compared to the volume of constructed play. To the point that I'm occasionally shocked there's a secondary market AT ALL. If it weren't for set redemptions taking some cards out of the system, a set might only have one or two mythics even exceeding the price of a single pack online.
As for the older sets, there are plenty of rares priced at $5+ in older sets that see no competitive Legacy or Modern play, or at best appear occasionally in Tier 2 strategies and below. Commander certainly impacts the secondary market online and so does casual Legacy/Classic play in the JFF room. Mycosynth Lattice is over $4 entirely on demand from that minor segment of the player base. Those old sets were drafted at a much lower volume, and some of the digital copies are sitting idle in accounts that haven't been touched for a long time. When they are drafted again, you do see big dips in those cards because the market demand is satisfied very quickly, but you can get value out of those cards.
Interesting to see another Advisor reanimator build. I ran one way back in Spring of 2012, you can see in Tribal Week 61's article. Which it won't let me link because it thinks it's spam. Okay....
It was not a tribe I ever imagined to play in Pure tribal, because it's a lot of work to go through just to cheat a mediocre creature into play. I figured I would see Teysa in such builds going forward, but I guess SDK either didn't like her or didn't want to add black to have the chance of hard-casting her. My build was 4 colors (5 if you count the front end of Unburial Rites, but I was usually binning that with Intuition or Faithless Looting). The 4 color build had some consistency problems with its mana which I tried to fix with 3 BoP.
SDK's is not really a dedicated reanimator deck, and honestly none of his targets would be worth going to all that trouble. The thing he's benefitting from is that the Tribal Nine's notorious white exile spells are banned in Pure Tribal, so Loyal Retainers can be used fairly.
Grats to Robin88, I think I could have had a chance to match him if I'd been able to play the whole year, he was a pretty good rival early in the year. Maybe I'll see you in the invitational :-)
Kierkegaard said something like "The joy of expectation is the greatest joy of them all". What Wizards has accomplish with the new forum UI is to prolong the "joy of expectation" by prolonging the time it takes you to find the forums and getting your expectations resolved.
The third is Avalon Hill. I get them large as well, but my opinion on the UI for the boards is 'It really is terrible', so this should not be seen as an advocation of the status quo.
I love and have supported the idea of "random" promo packs. I think one would need more of the old, offline cards to be able to have them in normal numbers. Maybe something like 3 "offline" cards, 2 completely random "already online" cards. Maybe a foil too. Maybe you could make them larger, 10 cards, and then divide them by rarity.
Just a note - there's way, way more cards not online than you list. Without knowing Vintage masters, there are currently 820 cards not online in any form, and another 19 you can't draft in any format. There's still a lot (of crap) out there. And I really hope someday we get all of it.
2. I love and support the idea of giving away some type of promos as prizes to take some of the economic pressure off of packs. I hadn't thought of random promo packs. It's an interesting idea.
3. One of the biggest problems in Magic Online is that the entire economy is very narrow. Newer set packs and playable mythics and some playable rares are the only things that hold much value. WotC seems very determined to keep the economy as narrow as possible by focusing on their core formats.
For example, let's eliminate all of the Daily events for pauper right before we have several weeks of flashback drafts. The flashback sets are fun and draftable in good part because the pauper tournaments are holding up the value of commons in those sets. Taking away the demand for a product right before you add a large supply of that product is not an economically sound idea.
If there were more well supported formats, there would be more valuable cards to draft. Thus, there would be more incentive to play everything. We should be supporting more formats like Pauper, SilverBlack, Choose your own block, Commander, 2-headed giant, Planechase, etc. I understand the argument that expanding the number of formats would mean that some players might be stolen away from Standard and Modern, but I don't really see that as a bad thing. Magic Online is much better suited to smaller tournaments anyway.
I believe replays were turned off in events a few years ago to keep players more "honest." Remember when you used to spend the first 2 minutes of each match watching your opponent's replays? This was a particular advantage in limited, and became a necessity since everyone did it.
For your second screen shot up there, I've found that if you expand the width of the window (may depend on your screen resolution), the 3 tiny boxes at the bottom turn into 3 large images - D&D, Magic, something else - that are much more obvious portals into what you are looking for.
Not sure why those don't just show up all the time.
JMason, thanks for the comments. I dig your list and I think I will try a one of Shaper Parasite. The reason is because when someone plays a morph creature in pauper, of course it is Fathom Seer. I would like to see the face when some guys realize that it's a Shaper Parasite!
Tricks can run on 19 land because our curve stops at 3 and we only have 7 cards in the deck that cost more than 2 (if you count Fathom Seer as a 3-drop). Obviously if we bring in Mulldrifters and Geists from the SB that goes up, but since we bring those in against control decks we often have more time to get mana online anyway.
I tried a very strong Illusions tribal deck before I put Tricks together. I found that this performed a lot better than aggro tribal, though it's possible that's no longer the case. I could see a strong tribal flyers deck doing well; that's basically what White Weenie is and it gets results.
Matthew, the reason I don't love 4 bears is that we are rarely attacking on the ground. We love to clog the ground but our attacks often (necessarily) come in the air. Drawing a bear late game isn't super helpful, though getting one t1 (or t2 after we lay down a raptor) is great.
Also, while I love Fathom Seer, I think I might scale it back to a 2x. It's a horrible card to have in your opening hand. Feel free to check out MagicGatheringStrat on YouTube if you want to see some of my recent matches with the deck, or its performance in the recent Pauper Gauntlet that Dan ran and posted about here on Pure.
Cheers,
Bava
p.s. regarding bears - I also hate running 4x a creature that dies to Quirion Ranger. We don't see her a lot these days, but it still feels like too many eggs in one bear.
I totally get that but you can in theory sell off your prizes to stores (like Cape Fear games). Granted not all will give you a decent price for your stuff but it is definitely true that the prizes have value.
I've been tuning a casual pauper Illusion deck for as long as I remember.
Mine's more tribal than yours. There are few great one-drop illusions, and I also rejected Delver due to low instant density and settled on Cloudfin Raptor like yourself. I don't know how you manage on 19 land, it's a mana hungry deck and I need 22 and still struggle to keep mana open for counters. Fathom Seer can destroy mana development, and I wouldn't run Daze/Deprive too. I wanted another hard counter after counterspell and faerie trickery, and I have found that Intervene does everything I want (counter target spell that counters a creature), it's great against removal and great against aura decks (infect, hexproof). Spiketail Drakeling helps force the tempo while still being able to control the early game. Shaper Parasite often is a 2 for 0 in combat. With 20 illusions the Mists can get very large, and I have 16 flyers. Once Errant Epemeron and Krovikan Mist get going it's hard to lose.
"Why are these prizes not digital?"
"I have a dream."
I respect that dream. But I, for one, won't share it. I'm proud to not own any paper card anymore, will never do again. No tree will be killed in my name, no smelly kids will be sitting at the other side of my table (that I know of).
Plus, honestly, I think the integration should go the other way around: people playing paper events being given MTGO accounts and cards. Have the rich cousin help the poor one, not vice versa.
If I found modern in juff enjoyable the tokens deck would certainly be up my alley. I've fiddled with various Standard builds with the same idea. Though I have gone with blue instead of black there.
If you want to look at, say, only the blue cards, you don't need to unselect every other color, you just right-click on the blue mana symbol and the client will select only that one and unselect the others.
Same for type of cards: right-click on creature, you'll get only those.
Do you want to reset the filter? Right-click on an empty area of the toolbar, everything will go back to default (including the format filter).
What's the purpose of keeping all the cards in the card pool shown as images? You'll see them in the column at the right already, while browsing through them. That only makes browsing harder.
You want to select all versions, though, because otherwise the client will add a random version (including stupid DPA) rather than the one you actually own/plan to buy for the deck.
Another reason why you do NOT want to have the card pool shown as images (you can switch that back and forth with the text/eye icons that are right under the NEW button) is that in text mode you don't need to use the slow and clumsy "search" window – everything you need to know to jump to the card you want, provided you already know its name or at least what its name starts with – is select anything in the NAME column and leave the mouse hovering there. At that point, just start typing the name on your keyboard, the pool will instantly go there. For instance, if you want to add Clone to your deck, you don't *search* for Clone. You type C, L, O and you'll see the pool going to Cabal Archon (first card with C), then Clan Defiance (first card with CL), then Cloak and Dagger (first card with CLO), then Clone. If you're fast at typing, you'll be there in one second and without changing the filter (which would then need time to change back) or scrolling or anything.
You can do the same trick in the other columns as well: click on the CREATURE TYPE column, for instance, and now everything is ordered by subtype. Type GOB and you can instantly start browsing through all the Goblins in existence. Want to see only the black ones? Double-click on the black mana symbol, and voilà.
When you build as much as I do, these tricks spare you HOURS of pointless scrolling, clicking and waiting for the client to respond. (I should actually do an article about that, because everyone needs to know what V3 can do, so that they'll end up giving the beta the same fucntionalities, which currently aren't there).
This sort of article doesn't usually excite me, but I enjoyed this very much. I hope you continue to bring unique content to the site in the new year much as you have in the past. Cheers.
I like that we all refer to the Doppelganger as a "she" (myself included) only because of the female figure that Quinton Hoover used for the art, when that's just the Elf Wizard (apparently holding the Icy Manipulator) that the doppelganger is copying. While a shapeshifter might have an original gender, the traditional lore considers them gender-neutral because they jump back and forth all the time.
My votes for this year were Reveillark (timeless beauty), Mulldrifter (for supporting the lark so well), Black was tough but I had to go with Gary because of his impactful entrance into all formats he is played in, Kiki Jiki (because) and deranged hermit as the best green midranged creature ever (squirrels!). Psychosis Crawler was a squeaker in an unimpressive field for colorless 5cmc creatures, and Blood Baron who seems like a broken multicolor creature if I ever saw one.
Yeah, they were turned off due to competitive balance concerns. Some people were getting valuable information while others were not. I can't say I don't disagree with WotC in this case. I hope they don't return. It's not something that you can really do in the Paper world, unless you are part of a huge team and can pool information to exploit those that don't have such resources.
While it was your choice (assuming you knew that watching previous replays were possible) to watch replay's or not, it certainly was annoying to wait 2-3 minutes each round waiting for your opponent to finish watching your previous match.
Hey, glad you like the deck.
Charbelcher is a very interesting card and I imagine there are a lot of things you could do with it. This deck works pretty well though, if not particularly consistently but that tends to be the way with Belcher decks.
The player-run events do a pretty good job of supporting niche formats.
The issue with the market is that, for sets currently being drafted, draft volume is absolutely insane compared to the volume of constructed play. To the point that I'm occasionally shocked there's a secondary market AT ALL. If it weren't for set redemptions taking some cards out of the system, a set might only have one or two mythics even exceeding the price of a single pack online.
As for the older sets, there are plenty of rares priced at $5+ in older sets that see no competitive Legacy or Modern play, or at best appear occasionally in Tier 2 strategies and below. Commander certainly impacts the secondary market online and so does casual Legacy/Classic play in the JFF room. Mycosynth Lattice is over $4 entirely on demand from that minor segment of the player base. Those old sets were drafted at a much lower volume, and some of the digital copies are sitting idle in accounts that haven't been touched for a long time. When they are drafted again, you do see big dips in those cards because the market demand is satisfied very quickly, but you can get value out of those cards.
Interesting to see another Advisor reanimator build. I ran one way back in Spring of 2012, you can see in Tribal Week 61's article. Which it won't let me link because it thinks it's spam. Okay....
It was not a tribe I ever imagined to play in Pure tribal, because it's a lot of work to go through just to cheat a mediocre creature into play. I figured I would see Teysa in such builds going forward, but I guess SDK either didn't like her or didn't want to add black to have the chance of hard-casting her. My build was 4 colors (5 if you count the front end of Unburial Rites, but I was usually binning that with Intuition or Faithless Looting). The 4 color build had some consistency problems with its mana which I tried to fix with 3 BoP.
SDK's is not really a dedicated reanimator deck, and honestly none of his targets would be worth going to all that trouble. The thing he's benefitting from is that the Tribal Nine's notorious white exile spells are banned in Pure Tribal, so Loyal Retainers can be used fairly.
Grats to Robin88, I think I could have had a chance to match him if I'd been able to play the whole year, he was a pretty good rival early in the year. Maybe I'll see you in the invitational :-)
Kierkegaard said something like "The joy of expectation is the greatest joy of them all". What Wizards has accomplish with the new forum UI is to prolong the "joy of expectation" by prolonging the time it takes you to find the forums and getting your expectations resolved.
The third is Avalon Hill. I get them large as well, but my opinion on the UI for the boards is 'It really is terrible', so this should not be seen as an advocation of the status quo.
Hey,
I love and have supported the idea of "random" promo packs. I think one would need more of the old, offline cards to be able to have them in normal numbers. Maybe something like 3 "offline" cards, 2 completely random "already online" cards. Maybe a foil too. Maybe you could make them larger, 10 cards, and then divide them by rarity.
Just a note - there's way, way more cards not online than you list. Without knowing Vintage masters, there are currently 820 cards not online in any form, and another 19 you can't draft in any format. There's still a lot (of crap) out there. And I really hope someday we get all of it.
1. Thank you for quoting my thread on the forums.
2. I love and support the idea of giving away some type of promos as prizes to take some of the economic pressure off of packs. I hadn't thought of random promo packs. It's an interesting idea.
3. One of the biggest problems in Magic Online is that the entire economy is very narrow. Newer set packs and playable mythics and some playable rares are the only things that hold much value. WotC seems very determined to keep the economy as narrow as possible by focusing on their core formats.
For example, let's eliminate all of the Daily events for pauper right before we have several weeks of flashback drafts. The flashback sets are fun and draftable in good part because the pauper tournaments are holding up the value of commons in those sets. Taking away the demand for a product right before you add a large supply of that product is not an economically sound idea.
If there were more well supported formats, there would be more valuable cards to draft. Thus, there would be more incentive to play everything. We should be supporting more formats like Pauper, SilverBlack, Choose your own block, Commander, 2-headed giant, Planechase, etc. I understand the argument that expanding the number of formats would mean that some players might be stolen away from Standard and Modern, but I don't really see that as a bad thing. Magic Online is much better suited to smaller tournaments anyway.
I believe replays were turned off in events a few years ago to keep players more "honest." Remember when you used to spend the first 2 minutes of each match watching your opponent's replays? This was a particular advantage in limited, and became a necessity since everyone did it.
For your second screen shot up there, I've found that if you expand the width of the window (may depend on your screen resolution), the 3 tiny boxes at the bottom turn into 3 large images - D&D, Magic, something else - that are much more obvious portals into what you are looking for.
Not sure why those don't just show up all the time.
JMason, thanks for the comments. I dig your list and I think I will try a one of Shaper Parasite. The reason is because when someone plays a morph creature in pauper, of course it is Fathom Seer. I would like to see the face when some guys realize that it's a Shaper Parasite!
I definitely like this deck. I tried doing stuff with Charbelcher in modern but I guess the way I was doing it isn't the way to go.
Bava here.
JMason - cool list, thanks for sharing.
Tricks can run on 19 land because our curve stops at 3 and we only have 7 cards in the deck that cost more than 2 (if you count Fathom Seer as a 3-drop). Obviously if we bring in Mulldrifters and Geists from the SB that goes up, but since we bring those in against control decks we often have more time to get mana online anyway.
I tried a very strong Illusions tribal deck before I put Tricks together. I found that this performed a lot better than aggro tribal, though it's possible that's no longer the case. I could see a strong tribal flyers deck doing well; that's basically what White Weenie is and it gets results.
Matthew, the reason I don't love 4 bears is that we are rarely attacking on the ground. We love to clog the ground but our attacks often (necessarily) come in the air. Drawing a bear late game isn't super helpful, though getting one t1 (or t2 after we lay down a raptor) is great.
Also, while I love Fathom Seer, I think I might scale it back to a 2x. It's a horrible card to have in your opening hand. Feel free to check out MagicGatheringStrat on YouTube if you want to see some of my recent matches with the deck, or its performance in the recent Pauper Gauntlet that Dan ran and posted about here on Pure.
Cheers,
Bava
p.s. regarding bears - I also hate running 4x a creature that dies to Quirion Ranger. We don't see her a lot these days, but it still feels like too many eggs in one bear.
I totally get that but you can in theory sell off your prizes to stores (like Cape Fear games). Granted not all will give you a decent price for your stuff but it is definitely true that the prizes have value.
I've been tuning a casual pauper Illusion deck for as long as I remember.
Mine's more tribal than yours. There are few great one-drop illusions, and I also rejected Delver due to low instant density and settled on Cloudfin Raptor like yourself. I don't know how you manage on 19 land, it's a mana hungry deck and I need 22 and still struggle to keep mana open for counters. Fathom Seer can destroy mana development, and I wouldn't run Daze/Deprive too. I wanted another hard counter after counterspell and faerie trickery, and I have found that Intervene does everything I want (counter target spell that counters a creature), it's great against removal and great against aura decks (infect, hexproof). Spiketail Drakeling helps force the tempo while still being able to control the early game. Shaper Parasite often is a 2 for 0 in combat. With 20 illusions the Mists can get very large, and I have 16 flyers. Once Errant Epemeron and Krovikan Mist get going it's hard to lose.
22 Island
4 Cloudfin Raptor
4 Phantasmal Bear
4 Krovikan Mist
4 Errant Ephemeron
4 Fathom Seer
4 Shaper Parasite
4 Spiketail Drakeling
4 Intervene
4 Counterspell
2 Faerie Trickery
Sideboard
2 Faerie Trickery
3 Disperse
2 Gossamer Phantasm
4 Piracy Charm
4 Dream Stalker
To each their own. Some people like Mozart, others like Motörhead, others still like Motown. Some people even like Justin Bieber.
On the integration direction, I agree. But I need to get my foot in the rich cousin's door, first! :)
"Why are these prizes not digital?"
"I have a dream."
I respect that dream. But I, for one, won't share it. I'm proud to not own any paper card anymore, will never do again. No tree will be killed in my name, no smelly kids will be sitting at the other side of my table (that I know of).
Plus, honestly, I think the integration should go the other way around: people playing paper events being given MTGO accounts and cards. Have the rich cousin help the poor one, not vice versa.
If I found modern in juff enjoyable the tokens deck would certainly be up my alley. I've fiddled with various Standard builds with the same idea. Though I have gone with blue instead of black there.
Ive won games with Gideon but not like that. Nice one AJ!
I don't make resolutions but if I did I suppose Id make this: "Attempt to play more often and with better or at least more fun decks."
As for Shandalar, even if they made it bassackwards and in typical WOTC fashion, buggy as all get out, a new version would still rock.
Not really feeling the UG planeswalker but I guess I need to see more of the set. (24th before we see anything more!)
Tricks with the V3:
If you want to look at, say, only the blue cards, you don't need to unselect every other color, you just right-click on the blue mana symbol and the client will select only that one and unselect the others.
Same for type of cards: right-click on creature, you'll get only those.
Do you want to reset the filter? Right-click on an empty area of the toolbar, everything will go back to default (including the format filter).
What's the purpose of keeping all the cards in the card pool shown as images? You'll see them in the column at the right already, while browsing through them. That only makes browsing harder.
You want to select all versions, though, because otherwise the client will add a random version (including stupid DPA) rather than the one you actually own/plan to buy for the deck.
Another reason why you do NOT want to have the card pool shown as images (you can switch that back and forth with the text/eye icons that are right under the NEW button) is that in text mode you don't need to use the slow and clumsy "search" window – everything you need to know to jump to the card you want, provided you already know its name or at least what its name starts with – is select anything in the NAME column and leave the mouse hovering there. At that point, just start typing the name on your keyboard, the pool will instantly go there. For instance, if you want to add Clone to your deck, you don't *search* for Clone. You type C, L, O and you'll see the pool going to Cabal Archon (first card with C), then Clan Defiance (first card with CL), then Cloak and Dagger (first card with CLO), then Clone. If you're fast at typing, you'll be there in one second and without changing the filter (which would then need time to change back) or scrolling or anything.
You can do the same trick in the other columns as well: click on the CREATURE TYPE column, for instance, and now everything is ordered by subtype. Type GOB and you can instantly start browsing through all the Goblins in existence. Want to see only the black ones? Double-click on the black mana symbol, and voilà.
When you build as much as I do, these tricks spare you HOURS of pointless scrolling, clicking and waiting for the client to respond. (I should actually do an article about that, because everyone needs to know what V3 can do, so that they'll end up giving the beta the same fucntionalities, which currently aren't there).
Thanks for putting this together, Gwyned, great work with very useful information. I declare this the most important Standard Pauper article of 2014!
This sort of article doesn't usually excite me, but I enjoyed this very much. I hope you continue to bring unique content to the site in the new year much as you have in the past. Cheers.
I like that we all refer to the Doppelganger as a "she" (myself included) only because of the female figure that Quinton Hoover used for the art, when that's just the Elf Wizard (apparently holding the Icy Manipulator) that the doppelganger is copying. While a shapeshifter might have an original gender, the traditional lore considers them gender-neutral because they jump back and forth all the time.
My votes for this year were Reveillark (timeless beauty), Mulldrifter (for supporting the lark so well), Black was tough but I had to go with Gary because of his impactful entrance into all formats he is played in, Kiki Jiki (because) and deranged hermit as the best green midranged creature ever (squirrels!). Psychosis Crawler was a squeaker in an unimpressive field for colorless 5cmc creatures, and Blood Baron who seems like a broken multicolor creature if I ever saw one.
I wish she was in cube, she would wreck. Still enjoying her morph cousin though.