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Magic: The Gathering |OT|
- Thread starter The Technomancer
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WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
Don't you mean overpriced IRL? Online is ridiculously cheap.
...What's cheap about online, exactly?
Cards are extremely cheap online compared to their paper counterparts with some certain exceptions. But for the most part the cards online are pennies in comparison.
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
The cards are vastly cheaper, in my experience.
I play constructed pretty much exclusively, so the exceptions weighthuge for me. (The market def gets flooded w/ rares tho because of set redemptions leaving half behind.)
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
I don't draft either. Singles are silly cheap on MTGO. Like, with the exception of money rares (which are competitively priced) the other cards are usually pennies on the dollar. 15 tix last you foreverrrrrr
Tough break man. That deck looked pretty awesome.
I should rephrase that. I am a Spike. I play exclusively tournament play.
If you sit across from me, I want you to be trying as hard as you possibly can to kill me. Because I'll be doing the same.
Shelling out $30 for Mythics twice = ughhh.
Best sealed deck I've ever had was at the MBS pre-release. Mono-Red, had 13-15 removal spells and the haste Dragon. Didn't drop a game. (Mirran Packs = stuuuupid good, and got you the better pre-release card!)
Minimum 20 bucks. You get product for it.
Wait isn't there a primer we put up here for MTGO? The_Technomancer don't we have one in the op? Oops I was supposed to write it. I guess I could do that tonight.
Essentially you can have endless fun for less than 20 bucks. There's no subscription.
But yeah after I eat dinner I'll write up something for people interested in MODO. The costs and where you can get free cards and the perks for playing.
Zaraki_Kenpachi
Member
Pretty much. It's why I can't bring myself to go online, I still enjoy the paper version too much and to rebuy mythics is bs. I'm still tempted to try drafting on it though...
Wasn't there a subscription at some point?
No there never was a subscription. That's what makes it so awesome.
Before Mythics it was definitely more expensive.
Buy in has always been 3 packs and 2 tickets for drafts.
Also there was only one way to join a draft which was to have the product and the tickets. Now you can do a combination of tickets or products or just tickets. There's also nix ticket drafts if you hold on to your packs for old sets. Basically you draft without tickets and just use your boosters you've hoarded.
There's also a new draft queue being experimented with where the payouts are 12 packs for first and 6 for second. I don't know what the buy in is but I would guess its probably at least 4 more tickets than regular draft.
When Mythics came out the bottom dropped out on Rares. So on one hand it was easier back then go to "infinite" by selling rares for packs to keep drafting. It's harder to do that now.
What a lot of people don't know about is that there's a LOT of well respected player run tournaments where you can join for free and get prizes out of them, of course given by other players.
Card prices are pretty stable too because of bots that meticulously track the prices of cards and the only way the bots make a profit is by selling in bulk, so the overhead on cards isn't so high. Thats bad if you want to sell a whole lot but for buying you can have rares for pennies.
divisionbyzorro
Member
Drafting is actually a lot less cost-effective on MTGO because of how cheap singles are.
That being said, you can draft anywhere, anytime, as much as you want...
That being said, you can draft anywhere, anytime, as much as you want...
Then again sometimes its a crapshoot to sell cards to people in real life. Hell even buying. Most people just want to trade cards for cards in real life and shops can screw you.
But yeah like I said, don't go into a draft thinking the draft itself will pay for the next draft. Unless you crack open a money Mythic, its not happening.
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
Good fucking lord. I put together a deck out of cards I got IRL, then priced it out online. 300 bucks. I have a deck of freaking cardboard worth 300 bucks.
That's a chunk of change....shit. Not bragging, really. Just in shock at these prices. I'm definitely ass backwards though. I play almost only online, and all my decks there were built for 15 bucks or so.
That's a chunk of change....shit. Not bragging, really. Just in shock at these prices. I'm definitely ass backwards though. I play almost only online, and all my decks there were built for 15 bucks or so.
It really is amazing how fast it can stack up. I had a metalworker deck put together that was worth about 600. Realizing you are playing magic with $600 in front of you is disconcerting.
Similarly, I have been pulling out the money cards, sleeving them, and putting them in a small box for safe keeping and realizing I have well over $2000 dollars in a box sitting there trips me out.
Back when mirage first came out I was collecting Lion's Eye Diamonds cause it was such a shitty card and I loved having shitty cards. My friends and people at the card shop would just give them to me. I had about 20 or so.
Then in 1998 I graduated high school and quit playing magic just before Urza's block came out. I never had any really good cards at the time then. Some (now) notable standouts were 5 Phyrexian Dreadnoughts, 6 enlightened tutors is what I remember. There were a ton of ancient tombs in there as well. That summer I sold all my paper cards for about 20 bucks so for a carton of cigarettes.
Sigh...
I think we all have horrible regretful stories like that. I started around ice age and bought a ton of portal and alliances packs, and then a bunch of tempest as well. At the time I knew the cards had a money value but it didn't really click that they could be worth something to hold on to, I just looked at it as a way to tell which cards were better than others. I didn't understand anything about the secondary market, trading, selling and buying etc....
I remember looking at all the Force of Wills and thinking "this is a stupid card, way too complicated" and tossing it in the useless will never use pile. And then looking at all the wastelands and thinking "what a dumb land, you can't even add colored mana with it" and doing the same, and then giving them all away to a friend when I moved. If I had to guess I probably gave about 25 away between the two.
If I only knew then what I know now.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Ooh, I didn't notice Serra Avenger was back:
I have a weird spot of love for this card.
I have a weird spot of love for this card.
Ooh, I didn't notice Serra Avenger was back:
I have a weird spot of love for this card.
She's cute, has a great body and is 2 CMC. Whats not to like? ;p Aside from the obvious non-agression.
DEM HIPS.
Seriously, it can be a disconcerting at times. A friend texted my yesterday asking to borrow cards for GP Atlanta this weekend. 4 Force of Wills and 4 Tropical Islands. I didn't think anything of it until later when I was curious, and it priced up to around $700 casually loaned out. Hell, when the SCG train comes near or for GP Providence last year, it has been known to be in the few thousand range. Shit adds up quickly.
I get twitchy loaning out 100 bucks worth of cards, I can't even imagine 700. I have a friend who lent a foiled out $2000 deck to a friend for a legacy tournament and at one point he looked over to see the friend bridge shuffling his deck. He damn near had a heart attack.
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
Yeah. It's a bit...uncomfortable. I'm not used to having money at all, and to have some of it "invested" in pieces of cardboard is fucked up. The me of 10-12 years ago would have killed, literally killed, for that kind of money sitting in one deck. Shit. I need to go volunteer at a soup kitchen.
So say we all. Old timers, that is.
FieryBalrog
Member
non competitive cards can be ludicrously cheap in paper too, if you buy bad cards in bulk.
Like, I probably have a good 2000 paper cards that are worth nothing whatsoever to me that I would give away for free.
Online is good though because there's no inefficiency. Sometimes in paper if you want a specific bad/mediocre rare it still costs something because you gotta find a guy who has it and there's shipping involved, and obviously stores are overpriced as hell.
divisionbyzorro
Member
Tappedout.net and Mtgvault.com are two popular deck building sites.
And I need to start adding you guys on MTGO; I believe pretty much everyone here who plays online goes by the same name?
And I need to start adding you guys on MTGO; I believe pretty much everyone here who plays online goes by the same name?
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
Tizoc
Member
Thanks Tappedout seems to be the one I was looking for.
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
Okay, so a bunch of people were hitting me up about updating my tradelist. Just did...but got bored after adding about 2 pages worth of new stuff. If you don't see it, ask. I am currently out of Cavern of Souls, though.
http://deckbox.org/sets/148910
http://deckbox.org/sets/148910
divisionbyzorro
Member
My first crack at a reanimator deck:
Mana base is a bit dicey but it's fun as hell to actually play with all these super expensive ridiculous dudes.
Faithless looting is your only graveyard enabler? I would definitely find room for 4x Mulch, which also really helps fix your mana.
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
Considering all the green you have, I'd swap out the suns for Abundant Growth. You're not going to be hard casting anything higher than Unburial (and even that's only if things aren't going your way.) And I'm guessing you only have 2 Birds?
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Yeah, the Birds and the Pilgrim have you covered on color fixing, I'd say the Suns need to go. At the very least don't run four of them.
Zaraki_Kenpachi
Member
Ditch suns for more dig. And any reanimator without lingering souls/craterhoof is madness unless you aren't using green.
Edit: You also without a doubt need at least one Elesh norn. She just wins way too many games. And lingering souls is a must if nothing more than for chump blocking and gets even better if you can get an elesh or craterhoof out.
Edit: You also without a doubt need at least one Elesh norn. She just wins way too many games. And lingering souls is a must if nothing more than for chump blocking and gets even better if you can get an elesh or craterhoof out.
dr3upmushroom
Banned
I lurk in this thread a lot, and love the idea of MtG, but the cost really, really puts me off. The last time I got into it was when Eventide came out. I spent close to $80 putting a Goblin deck together, and it was really fun, but I ended up only playing for like a month before life got in the way.
I do really enjoy the game, so I'm thinking about getting into online. How much money does it take to start? Someone said that 15 tickets will last a long time, is that what you start out with for free? How much do replacement tickets cost? How much on average does a competitive deck cost? Can you make decent decks and still have fun, or do most players have hyper-competitive decks?
The lack of face-to-face interaction turns me off, but I figure if it's cheap enough and I enjoy it enough if I stick with it for a couple months or so I'll try to figure out a way to work FNM or some drafts into my schedule. It's sort of hard for me because none of my friends play, and the crowds at my local game shops always seem to be the stereotypical unbathed teens.
I've been content to just look through card lists whenever an expansion comes out and brainstorm deck ideas for a few days until I get tired of it, but '13 does look really interesting.
I do really enjoy the game, so I'm thinking about getting into online. How much money does it take to start? Someone said that 15 tickets will last a long time, is that what you start out with for free? How much do replacement tickets cost? How much on average does a competitive deck cost? Can you make decent decks and still have fun, or do most players have hyper-competitive decks?
The lack of face-to-face interaction turns me off, but I figure if it's cheap enough and I enjoy it enough if I stick with it for a couple months or so I'll try to figure out a way to work FNM or some drafts into my schedule. It's sort of hard for me because none of my friends play, and the crowds at my local game shops always seem to be the stereotypical unbathed teens.
I've been content to just look through card lists whenever an expansion comes out and brainstorm deck ideas for a few days until I get tired of it, but '13 does look really interesting.
divisionbyzorro
Member
From LSVs twitter.
It's $10 to make an account, that nets you some starter product that you can sell on the marketplace for tickets.
With what they give you you could probably start with about 15 tickets yea. 1 ticket is = to $1.
Depends on your definition of competitive and what deck you're trying to make. If you're trying to recreate tournament decks with like 4 snapcaster mages and 4 geists of st. traft you're going to be spending a lot of money but you can make very solid fun decks for a buck or two if you avoid the money rares.
There are different rooms in MTGO, in the "just for fun" room you run into people playing everything under the sun. Sometimes you'll run into super competitive "net decks" that copy tourney winners, but mostly you run into folks just goofing around with fun brews. If you're looking be super competitive there are tournament and tournament practice rooms were the real ass kickers go.
Hi guys, long time lurker first time poster. Just getting into MTG now.
Just wondering how Cloudshift works?
"Exile target creature you control, then return that card to the battlefield under your control."
The way I read it, I select a creature I control on the battlefield, exile it and then return it back to the battlefield.
Surely that is completely pointless? Or am I completely reading it wrong?
Just wondering how Cloudshift works?
"Exile target creature you control, then return that card to the battlefield under your control."
The way I read it, I select a creature I control on the battlefield, exile it and then return it back to the battlefield.
Surely that is completely pointless? Or am I completely reading it wrong?
You've read the card right but misread the potential.
For example if you cloudshift any card with an "enter the battlefield" effect you retrigger it. If someone targets a creature of yours with a removal spell (say Doom Blade) then you can cloudshift it to save it. Since the creature returns as essential a new copy of itself you can use it clear negative effects. Someone pacifies a creature, cloudshift to remove the pacify. If you have an undying creature with a +1/+1 counter on it you can cloudshift to clear the counter alloying it to undie again.
There is even a bizarre quirk in the magic rules that states that in combat, once a creature is declared as being blocked, it remains blocked even if the blocking creature is removed. So you could take some weak little guy like a Llanowar elf and block a big 5/5 monster, then cloudshift him to save him while still preventing the damage from the 5/5.
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