They are also missing the foil stamp at the bottom of the card- are all proofs like that now?
It's a really good idea, because you could easily trade for a sleeved card thinking it's a real card instead of a proof.
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Magic: the Gathering - Battle for Zendikar |OT| Lands matter (but nothing else does)
- Thread starter SigmasonicX
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They are also missing the foil stamp at the bottom of the card- are all proofs like that now?
It's a really good idea, because you could easily trade for a sleeved card thinking it's a real card instead of a proof.
I did a draft yesterday and it made me feel like a bad Magic player.
Started with WB Allies with a few great early picks like Drana's Emissary, then black dried up so I went into red. Grabbed a Veteran Warleader as well even though I ultimately decided not to splash green.
Ended up with a deck that wasn't all the way there and made some bad plays in my first two matches, think I lost them both 1-2.
Luckily I rolled over my 3rd opponent, game 2 I was beating on him early until he ramped out that 7/8 Eldrazi. Untapped and cast Turn Against and swung for the win, made me feel a bit better.
Started with WB Allies with a few great early picks like Drana's Emissary, then black dried up so I went into red. Grabbed a Veteran Warleader as well even though I ultimately decided not to splash green.
Ended up with a deck that wasn't all the way there and made some bad plays in my first two matches, think I lost them both 1-2.
Luckily I rolled over my 3rd opponent, game 2 I was beating on him early until he ramped out that 7/8 Eldrazi. Untapped and cast Turn Against and swung for the win, made me feel a bit better.
"God's Beard!"
Member
I had a draft like that recently, except I picked up three evolving wilds and a shambling vent and went full mardu with 10-7-6 mana even with two blighted lands
defiant bloodlord and angelic captain in a deck with like 6 double red cards lol
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
IIRC at the PT people were saying not to move into an archetype too early. Start with just great picks and if you get a key component late telling you it's open move in.
Yeah I was thinking the same. If I was gonna trade for the revised lands, I'll still be looking to trade way up as the price doesn't seem to be moving and expedition will probably continue to rise at a more exponential rate in a year or so.
That's usually how I do things, but I didn't see anything in other colors that was that great and kept getting things like Expedition Envoy and Stasis Snare. Then it just went to shit about halfway through pack 2. More disappointed with my play in the matches rather than my picks.
In good news, finally get to play my Modern WU Sun Titan control deck tonight against some competitive decks at my LGS! I've tested it against my brother's Tron deck and some rogue builds online and it seems pretty solid, should be a good end to kind of a bad day
I don't know about you guys, but less than a year ago you could have gotten Volcanics and Underground Seas for $100-150. Now they have doubled. But yeah, getting duals NOW might not be as sound an investment anymore.
SigmasonicX
Member
Oh wow, insight into Nissa's character besides her Zendikar crush!
Only posted this because of the Kreines citation.
I could verify this by posting my receipts. They've definitely gone up from when I bought them.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Krienes' work on UR is consistently the worst written tripe on the site, no joke.
Etrian Oddity
Member
The Armed & Dangerous clash pack is a really good deal for beginners.
You might want to hop onto the Duel Origins digital game first, mostly to get back in the groove and learning a couple things that might've changed rules-wise since you last played. I won't recommend any standard decks though, since I've been out of the loop for over two blocks now.
I was looking at trying one of the MTG PC games, is Duel Origins recommended over Planewalkers 2015?
EDIT: If I want to outright buy singles to make a deck to play at a LGS, what would you recommend that isn't a million dollars?
divisionbyzorro
Member
Funny story. A couple of nights ago I downloaded Magic Duels onto my Surface tablet, figuring I would give it a shot. The game is literally unplayable on a Surface. Annoyingly, I had to double-tap any of the buttons to make them work. Weird, but I can get past this, right? Not at all. Because it thinks you're on a regular PC, it expects you to have things like a mouse with a scroll wheel, and I could not pass the tutorial because I had to scroll the mouse wheel to zoom in on a card. I couldn't even quit the game. I had to swipe out of the game and close it via the taskbar, then immediately deleted it.
I don't know why I thought they would just run the game in "iPad mode" on a Surface, but they don't. Kind of a shame too; I actually wanted to give it a real shot.
I don't know why I thought they would just run the game in "iPad mode" on a Surface, but they don't. Kind of a shame too; I actually wanted to give it a real shot.
You take a skullclamp deck in and T1 people.
Affinity with skullclamp? harhar
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
bummer since Hearthstone runs perfect on my surface but is awful
divisionbyzorro
Member
Someone on Reddit posted about this a couple of months ago. I believe Pyromancer/Mentor with Skullclamp handily won the event.
That was Caleb Durward's video series. His Hypergenesis decks were stupid, but they didn't have to face the other stupid decks.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Skullclamp in anything is completely busted beyond belief. Elves feat. Glimpse of Nature and Skullclamp. Faeries feat. Skullclamp and Bitterblossom.
Hypergenesis is good, but I have my doubts it would be the best deck in a format where Skullclamp is legal. Getting your Hypergenesis countered pretty much means you lose, hence why I'd lean towards Faeries being busted as fuck with Ponder/Preordain, JTMS, Clamp, etc. around.
Honestly, I'd say it's like 50-50 between Clamp-Elves and Clamp-Fae for my guess as to the legit best deck.
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
I like the box and I got some lightning bolts last time I bought one
Ok, cool! I'm just looking for a good place to start playing Magic, as I don't have any cards anymore.
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
There won't be any lightning bolts though for the record.
SigmasonicX
Member
They provide a lot of lands and a starting collection of cards. If you already have lands and just want to get straight to making a good deck with singles you buy online instead of forming a collection, then it's not worth it. EDIT: No cards at all? Then get the toolkit.
With Chrome Mox legal, you can play Chalice of the Void for one on t1 and Night of Souls Betrayal on t2.
Okay! If I want to start playing at a local shop, what format/tournaments should I look out for then as a new player?
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
I don't think that would be even vaguely enough to stop Elves or Fae. 4 Mental Misstep is decent against Elves too but its just not enough. There's too many broken things at once with Clamp, Glimpse and other cards.
The jump you're talking about was a year and a half ago and the prices have been on a modest but steady decline since. From my understanding that bump was largely from people trading out of Modern staples like Fetches, which were at an all time high, into Reserved List cards that were considered a safer long-term hold. Especially with the expectation of a fetch reprint coming.
Underground Sea
Volcanic Island
Since then Starcity no longer has Legacy coverage every Sunday which was helping to drive interest in the format. It's possible they'll see another bump driven by speculators when there are large arbitrage opportunities for trading out of Modern staples and into the perceived stability of Reserved List cards. That likely only happens after Khans has rotated out and WOTC fails to reprint Modern staples at a rate to keep prices from growing too excessively. The Zen fetches are starting to flirt with the possibility of reaching those ~April 2014 highs that people used as an opportunity to move into Reserved List cards so it's possible that we could see a similar, though likely smaller, bump as we close in on Modern season after the start of the year. We'll also see the typical Tax Rebate season bump so those two things could combine for a bump in the Jan-Apr window.
SigmasonicX
Member
The best format for you would be Standard, though the number of special lands that everyone is using in Standard right now makes decks unusually expensive. You could buy the Battle for Zendikar event deck, however, which provides a fairly close approximation of one of the more popular decks right now. Deck list.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Because your 3 card combo isn't fast enough. Playing a dedicated hate deck isn't actually a viable strategy.
You might also consider the Battle for Zendikar Event Deck: Ultimate Sacrifice. It's got a few cards that will almost certainly hold value over time (Hangarback Walker, Tasigur, Evolutionary Leap) and it is a basic shell that you can build on to make an Aristocrats deck that is seeing some competitive play.
EDIT: Beaten by Sigma.
Ok, thanks. So you recommend this over buying the toolkit to start building a deck of basic cards? I've heard that drafting is also a good format for new players.
Duels of the Planeswalkers 2015 actually costs money, but on the other hand Origins is F2P with a limited card pool and weird deckbuilding restrictions (up to 4x commons, 3x uncommons, 2x rares, 1x mythics). But the again it's free.
Deckbuilding often comes down to what you enjoy about the game. Most people would prioritize winning and therefore spend money on some top-tier deck that gives them the highest chances for winning whatever, while I tend to enjoy building my own quirky decks over winning tourneys, so I'm okay with slowly trading my way to whatever off-beat deck I want to run.
Standard currently has feches in it, so you might consider picking them up while they're still "cheap" since they're used in all eternal formats. On the other hand, the Zendikar duals aren't nowhere near as powerful or as desireable as the fetches, so they're probably going to be cheaper to obtain in the colors you intend to play with a lower budget (however, they won't be nearly as useful as fetches post-rotation).
SigmasonicX
Member
The toolkit is good for getting lands and a large set of random (recently printed) cards, which is good for building your own decks and having a place to store cards. The event deck is for if you want a deck right away. It depends on what you want to do.
I'd wait a bit before you start drafting, since it requires drafting skills in addition to the normal deck construction and playing skills.
Can you explain this paragraph a little more clearly? Sorry, I don't think I understand some of the terminology.
lolwut
not even legacy elves win on t2
there's also trinisphere, cannonist, eidolon of the great revel, rule of law and a dozen other things that fuck elves over
SigmasonicX
Member
Dual lands are lands that can provide two colors of mana.
Fetches are lands nicknamed fetchlands, because you can sacrifice them to search your library for one of two basic land types (ex: Forest and Plains) and put it on the battlefield. This is important because some dual lands actually have basic land types.
For example, the following fetchland:
Can be used to get either of the following dual lands in Standard:
In addition to others.
For this reason, fetchlands are very expensive. Five of them were recently reprinted, so they're cheaper now than usual, but they're still very expensive. However, the above dual lands are considered weak compared to the dual lands available in other formats, so they are not expected to be very valuable once the fetchlands leave Standard in about half a year.
"God's Beard!"
Member
Man I wanna try drafting this deck lol
There's a cycle of rare lands in Khans that let you pay 1 life and sacrifice them to fetch a land from your deck and put it onto the battlefield, hence the "fetchlands" nickname. These lands are very powerful because they ask that the card has a basic land type even if it isn't a basic land, which means you can get some powerful dual-typed nonbasic lands to fix your mana extremely quickly.
Then there's a cycle of rare lands in Battle for Zendikar that have two basic land types so you can fetch them, but they're worse than other dual-typed lands that have been printed before (the original dual lands which had no downside, and the newer shocklands which enter the battlefield tapped unless you pay two life). Multicolored decks in Modern (a format) nearly always run fetchlands and shocklands, and the Legacy and Vintage formats also use fetchlands, but often replace the shocklands with the even stronger (and way more expensive) original dual lands. Compared to fetches, the Zendikar dual lands aren't as desirable, which makes them easier to acquire if you feel like playing them. Just remember that most cycles of rare lands tend to be only good in Standard, so they're only good cards to buy if you actually intend to play with them in that format, as opposed to buying them all for using them later like with shocklands and fetchlands.
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
the bane of aggro
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Skullclamp
Hmm maybe I'm wrong then and the trade will be worth it. Hard to predict how expedition vs Duals prices will rise in the future.
In limited, combat is super important. Most games either come down to racing or ground stalls with evasion closing the game. Dampening Pulse slows down your enemy on both fronts. Evasive creatures are usually small to begin with, so making them even smaller slows down the clock a lot.
More specifically, in this format, there are a lot of low-power, high-toughness creatures which leads to more ground stalls. Dampening pulse further skews the ratio increasing the chance of stalls. In blue, you're fine with stalls because you have plenty of fliers and tempo plays.
So it doesn't actually win on t3. I mean, with ponder, preordain and seething song unbanned, storm can at least win on t4 reliably.
Mind you, I don't actually advocate trading it for badlands. Badlands is one of the worst duals.
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