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[Joe Molotov]

[QUOTE="God's Beard!";182353541]Man I wanna try drafting this deck lol[/QUOTE]

I tried to draft something like that last Thursday (even got a foil From Beyond!), but I couldn't quite pull it together.

 

[Hackworth]

[QUOTE="God's Beard!";182353541]Man I wanna try drafting this deck lol[/QUOTE]I ended up with something like that at my first draft by force-drafting Eldrazi. It went pretty well actually.

 

[Angry Grimace]

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.

...do you know what Skullclamp does

 

[Ashodin]

Skullclamp wins games. All games.

 

[Angry Grimace]

I'm just saying, Glimpse of Nature, Skullclamp and GSZ at the same time is gonna be ruthless, especially without FoW around. I just don't think it's fair to argue "well Legacy Elves isn't that good" because the most overpowered card in this theoretical deck is banned in Legacy to begin with.

 

[Ashodin]

I used to have a Glimpse of Nature I wanted to put into my Commander deck

 

[El Topo]

Anyone that's been around when Skullclamp was legal knows that it should never be unbanned.

Skullclamp wins games. All games.

It really does.

 

[Familienoberhauptvogel]

It's a pain in the ass even in kitchentable decks.

 

[divisionbyzorro]

I'm telling you though: Elves isn't the way to break it. Young Pyromancer and/or Monastery Mentor are your ticket to value town.

 

[JulianImp]

I'm telling you though: Elves isn't the way to break it. Young Pyromancer and/or Monastery Mentor are your ticket to value town.

I love Young Pyromancer, so I approve this idea. I don't know if it's fast enough for modern, though.

It more or less gives all your noncreature spells "Kicker (X): Draw twice X cards, where X is the number of Prodigal Pyromancers you control".

 

[Santiako]

I loved playing Affinity with Skullclamp back in the day on Standard. Extended too, every deck packed 4 Skullclamp until it got hit fast with the banhammer. Such a great card.

 

["God's Beard!"]

I play Obzedat's Aid in my Teysa EDH deck just in case someone kills my Skullclamp lol

 

[JulianImp]

I loved playing Affinity with Skullclamp back in the day on Standard. Extended too, every deck packed 4 Skullclamp until it got hit fast with the banhammer. Such a great card.

I'm still left wondering how broken it would've been if it gave +1/+0 and/or drew you a single card rather than two.

 

[Santiako]

Has there been a deck as broken as Affinity (with all artifact lands, skullclamps and disciple of the vault legal) in Standard since then?

 

[JulianImp]

Has there been a deck as broken as Affinity (with all artifact lands, skullclamps and disciple of the vault legal) in Standard since then?

Nope. Nothing has ever come close to being as polarizing and overpowered as Affinity. There was a similarly boring time when there were lost of Caw Blade decks, but they weren't nearly as explosive or as deadly as Affinity.

 

[Santiako]

Nope. Nothing has ever come close to being as polarizing and overpowered as Affinity. There was a similarly boring time when there were lost of Caw Blade decks, but they weren't nearly as explosive or as deadly as Affinity.

Good. That deck was way too insane.

 

[blindrocket]

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.

I posted something about it here. They had a cool poster advertising it like boxing match.
I think it was like BBE versus JtmS on the artwork.

 

[Angry Grimace]

I'm still left wondering how broken it would've been if it gave +1/+0 and/or drew you a single card rather than two.

The change from +1/+1 to +1/-1 was intended to be a nerf.

 

[blindrocket]

The change from +1/+1 to +1/-1 was intended to be a nerf.

lol

Oopsie.

 

[IrrelevantAlex]

How does Drown in Sorrow work with persist creatures? Does the -2/-2 count as a negative counter or is it like a static thing so say Kitchen Finks comes back like normal?

 

[SigmasonicX]

Story of Skullclamp

 

[Familienoberhauptvogel]

Just Blizzard R&D, wasn't JTMS originally 5CMC only to be lowered last second or something?

edit: what Kirblair said

 

[kirblar]

How does Drown in Sorrow work with persist creatures? Does the -2/-2 count as a negative counter or is it like a static thing so say Kitchen Finks comes back like normal?

It does not, no. The physical -1/-1 counter needs to be on it, not a temporary -1/-1 effect to stop the comeback.

 

[IrrelevantAlex]

It does not, no. The physical -1/-1 counter needs to be on it, not a temporary -1/-1 effect to stop the comeback.

Cool, thanks.

 

[Haines]

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.

Yeah, there are a lot of 2 attack minions, and i can understand the point of the clock. Def felt that more than once. I guess i needed to wrap my mind around the fact that blue/draft is more apt to get into very creature heavy game states with so many swarm builds being very strong.

Cool. Thanks.

 

[Etrian Oddity]

I tried to draft something like that last Thursday (even got a foil From Beyond!), but I couldn't quite pull it together.

Man, screw you! That card's the engine to my deck.

 

[pelicansurf]

I got a foil from beyond in my first prerelease. It's real nice looking.

 

[Haines]

Wheres a cheat sheet for color codes for decks. Like Blue green is called UG

I dunno what you guys call this so having a hard time googling an answer/list but im finding i need to learn it for when im reading stuff

 

[kirblar]

WUBRG = White Blue Black Red Green

U is Blue because there are two Bs and it was the easier one to switch.

 

[OnPoint]

WUBRG = White Blue Black Red Green

U is Blue because there are two Bs and it was the easier one to switch.

Two "BL"s specifically, and U is the next letter they don't share. I also like that thematically, U is closer to the teardrop shape than any other letter. I wouldn't be surprised if that factored in.

 

[SigmasonicX]

Also, when Wizards established this convention, they weren't aware of the existing convention to represent black as 'K'. It's for the better, since BBB cards would have been awkward.

 

[OnPoint]

Awesome fanmade Star Wars Magic cards

 

[charlequin]

Okay, so I thought about this during the spoiler season too, but seeing the larger art pop up on WotC's twitter today just brought to mind again:

This has got to be hinting at some kind of connection between the slivers and the eldrazi, right?

Boros: NYPD but less racist

boros' first mechanic is literally that you and everyone who's the same color as you gets a bonus

 

[Familienoberhauptvogel]

but mana transcends race.

Angels are racist though.

 

[The Technomancer]

Speaking of created cards

Cassandra Meg
@RoboRosewater this is so close to not being complete gibberish

 

[Haines]

WUBRG = White Blue Black Red Green

U is Blue because there are two Bs and it was the easier one to switch.

Well shit, thats easy. cool.

Ok, another question!

Ive only seen drafts done in a pod of 8. This place that drafts, does 2 pods of 10 for its fmn.does that make sense to you guys or does that mess with the way packs are played out in draft. Should i be looking for a place that does 8 instead

 

[OnPoint]

This has got to be hinting at some kind of connection between the slivers and the eldrazi, right?

How so?

 

[The Technomancer]

Well shit, thats easy. cool.

Ok, another question!

Ive only seen drafts done in a pod of 8. This place that drafts, does 2 pods of 10 for its fmn.does that make sense to you guys or does that mess with the way packs are played out in draft. Should i be looking for a place that does 8 instead

It does screw with it, but I wouldn't say dramatically. A small pool is a larger problem than a large pool. It should, I believe, make pursuing any particular archtype a bit harder

An important part of drafting is predicting what's going to "wheel", or come back around the table before the pack is finished. With eight players the first seven (?) packs you see you know you'll see between 1 and 7 cards from again, since there are 15 cards in a pack. So if you're sure that no-one else at the table wants some uncommon that your deck could really use, you can take something more important and plan on the other card coming back around.

The more players you add to the pool, the less cards you'll see again. For example, in a 15 player pod you wouldn't see any returning cards

 

[Yeef]

Well shit, thats easy. cool.

Ok, another question!

Ive only seen drafts done in a pod of 8. This place that drafts, does 2 pods of 10 for its fmn.does that make sense to you guys or does that mess with the way packs are played out in draft. Should i be looking for a place that does 8 instead

8 is ideal for draft, but you'll typically see between 6 to 10 per pod at most places. The reason being, not every event is going to get people joining in exactly multiples of 8. The software used to report events to Wizards will also set up the pods based on the number of players. It'll always try to set up as many pods with even numbers of players as to avoid byes. It will also never make a pod smaller than 6 or larger than 11.

In terms of how the actual draft is affected; larger pods make it harder to "wheel cards" (let a card come back around to you) and smaller pods leave you seeing fewer cards overall, which typically makes your deck a lot worse, but it works out because that holds for everyone in the pod, so the deck cohesion will be lower all around. Typically, when there are multiple pods, you only play other people in your pod.

 

[Haines]

Hmm, ok. 10 doesnt sound too bad but it does sound like 8 is ideal. Guess ill just try the 10 and see how i like it. Having cards wheel back to me does sound more appealing and i like the idea of better decks being played for sure.

the other fmn draft that does 8 is way more aggressive/skilled so just kind of avoiding it til i get better

 

[Crocodile]

So it didn't really seem much "exploded" from the Pro Tour except maybe Ojutai's Command? It seems everything many people thought could be good was good. The new Aristocrats seems to be the only thing "out of the blue" and everything else that was new was mostly the addition of colors to deck with the new Battle Lands and maybe some Landfall and Token decks?

Which is exactly why shitty people use it to steal from less skilled players.

This is a pretty aggressive mischaracterization of what is going on. Do you specifically know assholes who prefer drafting this way and thus having your impression shaped by them? I already discussed the circumstances in which it doesn't make sense to draft this way and nobody sure as hell can or should force somebody to do a draft in a style they don't like - that is douchbaggery. However that's not what I have or ever will suggest. I was a new player just like everybody else. Not everybody who starts as a new player is some defenseless cub and nobody who starts as new stays new forever - people do improve and its a nice feeling when you can translate that to something tangible.

 

[SigmasonicX]

Awesome fanmade Star Wars Magic cards

I was going through it, saw some interesting individual cards, but noticed some mechanics aren't supported very well, especially bounty. There were some badly worded effects, but it was otherwise fine. I thought it was odd that a lot of things weren't represented, but whatever.

Then I realized I was just looking at the commons. MaRo often says you create your commons first and just by doing that you'll get a bunch of uncommons and even rares, and this demonstrates that pretty well. I personally found the commons here to generally be more interesting than the overly complicated higher rarity cards.

Still, pretty neat.

 

[traveler]

I like this cycle.

 

[A Serious Man]

Awesome fanmade Star Wars Magic cards

Wicket has a mythic card but Ahsoka doesn't have one at all? No sale.

 

[A Serious Man]

Gideon into Drowner of Hope into kicked Ulamog's Despoiler into Bane of Bala Ged is one way to lose a round of BfZ draft. I mean, I knew the game was over as soon as Gideon hit but he was topdecking bombs like you read about. I was getting lightheaded near the end there.

 

[charlequin]

Speaking of created cards

RoboRosewater is easily a top-10 twitter for me. I guess it's conceivable that you could find a more precise intersection of my interests than a natural-language neural network that generates Magic cards, but I certainly can't think of how.

How so?

Same exact design. Extended head crest, bifurcated limb coming out of the chest area, mess of tentacles instead of feet. It looks more like a sliver than basically any sliver in M14.

This is a pretty aggressive mischaracterization of what is going on.

It's the consistent and inevitable result of this type of activity in a store setting. New players are always going to be worse players, and they'll generally not have access to much of a collection or comprehensive knowledge of card values. If they play in a draft like this they're paying their money for the opportunity to learn by getting beat, because they won't get to leave with any good cards. If one opens an expedition Misty Rainforest or something the result is going to be taking literally hundreds of dollars from them.

 

[ElyrionX]

So my LGS is getting a second wave of fat packs and apparently the price is now nearly double that of the first wave. And people are still buying it! And claiming that it's still good value! Sometimes, I don't understand what the hell is going on with this game.

The cost price of those things have not moved one bit, I presume? So LGSes are earning massive margins on what is supposed to be a low-margins high-volume product?

 

[Wichu]

There are three places here that do drafts.

1. £10 drafts, keep what you draft, some additional prize support.
2. £9 drafts, rare redraft. Not sure on their Expeditions policy.
3. £5 drafts, rare redraft in a random order (rather than by standings), keep any Expeditions you open.

3 is easily my favourite. I can draft fun stuff instead of just the money cards, but there's also no pressure to win. Sure, you might not get to keep the cool rare you open, but you're just as likely to get to pick something better regardless of your results (I opened absolute crap, but still walked away with a mythic and a foil rare despite being second last in pick order).

Also being roughly half the price of anywhere else really helps

 

[Etrian Oddity]

So my LGS is getting a second wave of fat packs and apparently the price is now nearly double that of the first wave. And people are still buying it! And claiming that it's still good value! Sometimes, I don't understand what the hell is going on with this game.

The cost price of those things have not moved one bit, I presume? So LGSes are earning massive margins on what is supposed to be a low-margins high-volume product?

Those dumb lands truly will be the only memorable/significant event from this set. :\

 

[A Serious Man]

Sultai Eldrazi is pretty damn fun. Really any deck that lets you play a good-sized Villainous Wealth fairly often is a good time. My version definitely needs a lot of work but if I can survive until turn 5 or so things turn around very quickly. The card advantage from Kiora and an early Sire of Stagnation is fantastic, especially with all the fetches flying around.