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Magic: The Gathering |OT3| Enchantment Under the Siege
- Thread starter The Technomancer
- Start date
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Box was fairly dismal failure. Only things of note were;
- 1 Narset
- 1 Sarkhan
- 2 Thunderbreak Rengent
- 1 Atarka
Speaking on what some one else said earlier, I saw someone open two boxes, rage about how bad they were, so went back for a third. Luckily his third box was pretty amazing with a foil Narset and a bunch of other good stuff.
- 1 Narset
- 1 Sarkhan
- 2 Thunderbreak Rengent
- 1 Atarka
Speaking on what some one else said earlier, I saw someone open two boxes, rage about how bad they were, so went back for a third. Luckily his third box was pretty amazing with a foil Narset and a bunch of other good stuff.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Some dude tried to tell me how amazing Sunscorch Regent is. I told him "yeah, but what if the spell they cast is Hero's Downfall?" and he's like "you gain 1 life!"
It's too bad Hero's Downfall is like the most reprintable card ever. Honestly, they've gotten way too good at making Planeswalkers good for me to believe they'd stop printing that card.
It's too bad Hero's Downfall is like the most reprintable card ever. Honestly, they've gotten way too good at making Planeswalkers good for me to believe they'd stop printing that card.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Since nobody else posted it, here's the wallpaper sized art for the new Thalia:
http://i.imgur.com/TvZ9AOm.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/TvZ9AOm.jpg
manipulate
Member
Very clever
Nice.
manipulate
Member
This set seems really boring by the way. Oh well, guess I'll play it a bit and find out
Hey, Unearth is a Grixis mechanic (it's even on mono red creatures), and Sedraxis is a place in Grixis, so it's not the absolute worst design. Also, I won a PTQ once with a set of Sedraxis Specters, so the joke's on you!
I don't know why you guys are so vehemently opposed to Shards. It was a fun limited format until Alara Reborn came along, which was still fun in a messy sort of way. And in the end, isn't that all that matters? I mean, if the argument is that Shards restricted you to the five shards, then triple Khans restricted you to the five khans just the same. Multicoloured blocks have been mostly successful.
I'm curious what you guys think of Invasion block.
Unearth works well with Devour!
I honestly don't know how to feel about it. In one way it feels slower than Khans, which I'm told is already a slow set. On the other hand some of the combat tricks so far have been a lot of fun, rebound, dash and exploit combo in some interesting ways.
Can't imagine a much better box of dragons actually, what were you hoping for? You have 80 bux or so in cards right there and your pull was far better than others I've seen. The set sucks money wise, but other than double Narset you couldn't do a ton better.
LaserBuddha
Member
Please tell me what you were hoping for, because I don't understand what you're disappointed about.
Joe Molotov
Member
That sounds like a godbox of DTK.
That's about as good a box as one could hope for, what were you expecting?
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Some dude got all mad at me for using Ojutai's Breath on his dude at the begin combat step when I said "at the beginning of combat I Ojutai's Breath your dude" because he said he declared attacks.
I'm pretty sure that's a super common shorthand vs. actually orally declaring the beginning of combat step.
I'm pretty sure that's a super common shorthand vs. actually orally declaring the beginning of combat step.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
I mean, most people just say "attack with X and Y" and if the other guy is going to tap your guy down, they just say "at the beginning of combat do Z." I'm not sure why this dude thought that was unacceptable. Outside of saying "move to combat," there's no other way to do this other than doing it in their main phase and giving them the option of holding priority to cast something else.
I don't know, this dude was kind of rules lawyering me while playing pretty fucking loose with them, like dropping a land on my end step to get the red mana to kill my guy, then dropping another land and then claiming he went first (because he had 5 lands to my 4 and I clearly went first; I had a suspicion this was just blatant cheating but I'm not gonna accuse a dude of this without proof), but then refusing to let me Rebound my Ojutai's Summons because I drew a card and therefore passed the upkeep.
By the rules shortcuts like "combat?" or "declare attacks?" or anything of that manner from the active player means "I'm passing priority till you have it in the beginning of combat step". It actually skips over when the active player has priority in the beginning of combat step because most stuff they could do then could be done in the main phase. It makes it so the attacker can't try and bait out a tap effect or something else before deciding activate a manland or something similar by going "combat? Nothing? Okay, activate Mutavault."
But you obviously can't just rush to declaring attackers to try and skip people effects of course. And at FNM or similar you'll almost always get to cast your spells when you meant to despite shortcut confusion unless you're at a super competitive spike store.
But you obviously can't just rush to declaring attackers to try and skip people effects of course. And at FNM or similar you'll almost always get to cast your spells when you meant to despite shortcut confusion unless you're at a super competitive spike store.
That's exactly the kind of player that makes me shut up and play as technically as I can just to spite them, even though I like playing more relaxed while talking and whatnot normally.
Next time, tell him that he can't possibly get past anything until he gives you priority and you've passed it back to him, and that no amount of quick-playing by his part can get over the fact that he needs to do that to keep the game going.
For the bolded point, I'd most likely call the judge over to have the guy clarify what he thinks he was doing. Seriosuly, he couldn't have dropped a mountain during your turn, and that'd be way past any leniency towards take-backs anyway. Being a judge myself, I don't think reaching an arrangement between players is the right thing to do over something as sketchy as that. Best case scenario the guy is reminded to play more carefully and most likely won't mess up like that again, but worst case he gets what he deserves if there's enough proof that he was actually trying to cheat.
The Rebound thing is actually viable according to the Missed Trigger infraction, but if you were playing at a Regular REL (Rules Enforcement Level) event (such as a FNM or Prerelease event), then he shouldn't have been able to invoke the Missed Trigger rules because Regular events are handled with a different, more lenient set of IPGs.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Its sort of funny that I think the set is mostly just boring but Sarkhan 4 is a card I totally want to build around (partly because you have to make his wonky colors work but mostly because he poops dragons).
Yeh the only set of Mythic I can see is that megamorph Raptor, which I think has potential but I'm not sure it does after devotion strategies rotate out.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
I don't remember what Voice was but it was a 4-of in decks that wanted to play it.
charlequin
Banned
Yeah, the contrast between Khans with five factions that are all explicitly designed with overlap in mind and Shards with factions that live in completely different universes (except Jund and Grixis, which actually kind of makes it worse) is pretty huge.
Thanks to Khans Rosewater's finally been admitting that Shards is garbagio lately, so I don't know why he can't use Dragons as an excuse to admit that Avacyn is. :/
- Third multicolor block in four years so everyone was totally sick of gold stuff
- Five factions of which only one (Bant) has a decent theme for constructed
- Made a shitload of three-color cards but most of them are lame
- ALAx3 is (IMO) a low-side-of-mediocre draft format thanks to their first stab at NWO and bad manafixing; RCA is an awful format thanks to comedically bad inter-set balance
- Cascade is a bottom-five all-time mechanic, someone literally thought a mechanic that gives you a free card and a zero-cost spell for doing nothing was a good idea
- jund was one of the dumbest of the dumb-as-hell monster decks from that Lorwyn -> Innistrad window
That's just off the top of my head.
1. I don't think I'll ever get tired of multicoloured sets.
2. Predator Dragon was a big player in Modern Elves and Thopter Foundry even got banned!
3. All five shards were viable in limited. Grixis was perhaps the weakest, but Bant being the best shard is untrue.
4. Cascade gave birth to Hypergenesis and Living End, so yeah, I have to agree.
5. Jund wasn't nearly as dumb as CawBlade. At least Jund had bad or at the very least 50/50 matchups (mono red and u/w control). CawBlade had no bad matchups from my recollection. Not even mono red because of Timely Reinforcements and Kor Firewalker.
"God's Beard!"
Member
Bombed out of the cfb sealed pptq lol
Lost to 1/3 fliers and cloudforms all day. Skywise teachings and a crap ton of card draw and removal doesn't cut lol
Lost to 1/3 fliers and cloudforms all day. Skywise teachings and a crap ton of card draw and removal doesn't cut lol
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Avacyn sold really well, duh. I have opened one pack of Avacyn Restored in my entire life. It had Sigarda, Host of Herons and a foil Bruna, Light of Alabaster.
I remember Maro had Cascade as a 3 or something on his Storm Scale. Then he apparently rethought it and now its like a 7. The fact that a mechanic is well-liked (in this case because its kind of overpowered) obviously influences how he views stuff.
....
In all honestly, I'm not exactly sure what I was meant to expect. I've only opened three boxes ever and the other two I managed to get the value of the box in money cards. Maybe I've gotten really lucky so far.
I suppose $80 in cards would be exceptionally good if I were living in the US and the price of boxes was around $100 or so, but here in Australia we pay $150 pre-order price and $180 RRP for a box, and everyone uses SCG as a price guide.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
If boxes were on average worth more than they'd cost you couldn't buy boxes because retailers would open the box themselves.
Joe Molotov
Member
I overheard several conversations about how awesome X dragon was at the shop today. Is it wrong that I just wanna run a deck full of Thoughtsieze/Despise/Downfall and crush dreams?
divisionbyzorro
Member
I played in Perth for a year; I remember using SCG for comparing trade values, but never for buylist/sale prices. If you're just trying to make equitable trades, it doesn't matter what currency you use - so everybody just pulled up SCG on their phone. But your stores should buylist/sell in local currency.
charlequin
Banned
Usually he's pretty good about saying that popular, powerful mechanics that are actually broken and obnoxious are a bad idea (it is called the Storm Scale, after all.) I kind of think that what happened with Alara is that sales were in the toilet and everyone in R&D was working hard to put a positive face on everything. Now that everything's been a huge hit for the last six years they can admit how bad Shards actually was.
1) There is such a thing as having too much ice cream in one sitting and what not. Plus drafting multicolor sets can be annoying after a while, more so than other formats, if too much of it is done in too short a span of time.
2) I think he meant that there was no "Unearth", "5 Power", "Artifact" or "Devour" deck in standard in the time whereas Mythic Conscription (Rafiq, Finest Hour, Sovereigns of Lost Alara) were HUGE players in standard for a while. Actually I think there was an Unearth "dredge" deck around for a bit too. Compare this to now where Delve, Prowess and Ferocious are all big players in Standard not just as individually powerful cards but with decks that maximize those mechanics with the occasional Raid/Dash card thrown in (LOL at Outlast/Bolster though).
3) Shard balance was much worse than the Clans ever were especially in 3x the first large set. They also didn't play together as well as the Clans did - even if there is a flavor justification it made limited worse.
5) Jund was less powerful than Caw-Blade in its environment but it had a lot less play to it. Caw-Blade was a very decision intensive deck - at its core it promotes good Magic play. The issue is that if you were worse than your opponent at all, due to all the variance reduction aspects of the deck, you could never win. Since it was by far the best deck and the better player pretty much always won, lots of people stopped playing (that and of course not any one kind of deck will appeal to everybody).
With Jund, at least with respect to gameplay, it was one of the most mindless good decks to play in Magic history. You just tapped all your lands every turn and played the highest CMC card you could. In part because of Cascade (will I get a 5 for 1 or will I completely whiff?) and in part because the deck had bad mana, games were all over the place. Unlike the flak Red decks unfairly get, Jund was "herp derp" Magic. Admittedly, deckbuilding with regards to Jund had some interesting back and forth to it, much more than actually playing the deck.
Well, we have a couple of dodgy operators here in Adealide. One of them is pretty good, just buys and sells at SCG values in local currency (I.e $10 on SCG = $10 AUD which works out pretty well for us actually) and buys at 60% of SCG value). The others sell at SCG+25% for the conversion, and buys at 50% of SCG. Our market is kind of small so we usually don't have much of a choice for some of the rarer cards.
Was it Otujai? Because he's legit.
"God's Beard!"
Member
divisionbyzorro
Member
To be fair, given how much the AUD has crashed relative to USD (and how quickly), it's got to be hard to properly price your singles.
charlequin
Banned
Yes, this is exactly it: Jund is the deck that plays the way that people always unfairly accuse aggro decks of playing.
(Everything else you say basically saved me the effort of saying the same thing, but this one especially, spot on.)
I suppose. Do you mind me asking where you're from? If you drafted in Perth for a year, I'd hazard to guess you're from the States. I'd love to know what the MTG scene in Australia is like compared to the United States (in broad strokes), given that I'm probably going to be moving there sometime in the near future.
I understand that some mechanics are rules nightmares and such but I'm glad storm existed. It gave a unique and totally fair (fair as in balanced within the format) archetype for legacy that I'd miss if it suddenly was gone.
Joe Molotov
Member
No, Sunscorch Regent. I was like, bro that ain't even the best Regent.
Then there was the people that just wanted to run full-on Dragon decks.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Hopefully you don't direct a Downfall at a Thunderbreak while your opponent has more Thinderbreaks out.
Joe Molotov
Member
That's when you'd want a Crux of Fate.
Etrian Oddity
Member
Ran into my first truly well-run Jeskai tokens deck online. Went 2-1 but a lack of Doomwake Giant really hurt me. Fixed that up, we'll see how this goes.
divisionbyzorro
Member
Perth had a healthy, vibrant Magic scene. I live in the suburbs of Houston, Texas now, and there aren't that many stores near me. I've visited a couple of them and was not impressed; I've heard good things about the one in the middle of town, but that's a huge drive.
Different cities have different scenes. I hear good things about Seattle, NY, LA, Denver, etc, but Houston isn't exactly a hotbed of Magic. :/
I played in a Sealed PPTQ yesterday. There were no bombs in my pool and my best rares were in otherwise unplayable colors, so I played R/W aggro with Zurgo as my only rare. I started out 1-2, but I ended up in 10th place at 4-2. Atarka Efreet was great for me all day and I don't think I ever pointed its Unmorph ability at a creature, flipping it up into a Temur Battle Rage felt really good. Granted that it probably isn't at its best in this deck, Channel Harm was always completely underwhelming. Dragon Hunter's abilities were actually surprisingly relevant at times. Glaring Aegis was mediocre in a lot of places, but it won me two games that no other card would've. Collateral Damage also seems significantly more playable now that Pacifism and Dragon Fodder are in the format.
Makes me remember the time we thought a good deck consisted of 4 Serra Angels, 4 Sengir Vampires and 4 Mahamotti Djinns. It was also the time that a Shivan Dragon was worth at least 4 dual lands...
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Looking through the three color cards from Khans there are still a decent amount of generic three color cards (see:
I mean you can't even say the size justified the three colors, 5 mana for 6 PT is not crazy for green)
but it feels less egregious than shards because there weren't the fuckton of two color cards alongside them
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Hopefully they don't have something else that's not a dragon out.
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