the blue decks i often see can run out thirst for knowledge, compulsive resreach, deep anal, comcentrate, or what have you into a full grip and if you can drop angel right after one of those as opposed to an inferior three drop it seems pretty awesome. And if you get if of a 1 drop that's awesome too. I feel it has enough applications to be quite awesome.
I am starting to see your point on brindle shoat, which makes me kinda sad, im definitely going to test him out still, but ill probably be a little more reserved now.
EDIT: i will also note that im definitely a piss poor aggro player and an even more piss poor aggro drafter, so my evaluations will often be skewed to the control side of things
I find it interesting that you chose to shorten Deep Analysis to save 4 keystrokes.
I played in 2 GTC pre-releases as Boros both times. I opened 2 Spark Troopers each time. In the first pre-release it was in a normal booster and my guild pack rare. In the second one, in the first pack I opened it was my rare, then two packs later another one. I'm not complaining as it was definitely a house all weekend long, but man. I wish it was worth a bit more.
At an FNM a while back I was playing against a Wolf Run Ramp deck, we started game 3 with about 5 minutes left before time in the round.
ME: Copperline Gorge, Birds
Him: Rootbound Crag
Me: Forest, Birthing Pod
Him: Forest, Sphere of the Suns
Me: Cavern, Blade Splicer, Avacyn's Pilgrim
Him: Forest, Solemn Simulacrum, get Mountain
Me: Forest, Conscripts - Take Solemn, Sac Solemn with Pod, Get Woflir Silverheart, bond to Conscripts, draw a card from Solemn. Attack for 11 (Splicer, Golem, Conscripts)
Him: Wolf Run, Primeval Titan
Me: Pod Splicer into Restoration Angel, Blink Conscripts, Take Primeval, Rebond Conscripts with Silverheart. Attack for 25 (Conscripts and Silverheart bonded, Primeval, Golem, Pilgrim).
That aside from Jace, the Mind Sculptor they've been brilliant.
The original 5 were really impressive with getting the feel of each color and their strategies across. Ramp and creatures for green, life gain and vigilance for white, card draw and mill for blue, tutoring, discard, and reanimation for black, damage, damagea, and uh..damage for red.
The only issue was Jace 2.0 and his effect on everything since. The more recent ones have been build around me type planeswalkers instead of auto-includes but because of Jace the pre-order prices and the hype of every planeswalker has been unreal. Nobody wants to miss out on the "next Jace" and the price jumps quickly and comes down slowly. If anything, that is what bothered me most about what they did with Jace.
I liked the show but I never trusted this guy and for a reason
I don't understand why people complain about Evan hyping cards up. He never claims to be a financial guy or that you should listen to him and buy up every copy of whatever card he's drooling over in the video.
The show is simply a fun way to get hyped up about new cards and tournaments. Its supposed to appeal to the feeling players used to get when they were new and busting a pack had 15 cards that were the coolest thing you had ever seen. Everyone playing the game for a while is a bit jaded these days and can evaluate a card and dismiss them off hand immediately. The show (or atleast the older versions) are more about that feeling of when you first started playing and cracked a Force of Nature and were like 8/8!!! ZOMG!?!?!?
If you expect anything else out of them then you're going to be dissapointed.
I liked magic when you could play any archtype you liked. Thats what made it unique.
.....
Sorry, us old school players count too. I dont care about profit margins. I care about fun for everyone who wants to play every archtype at the fullest potential. So, dont give me that "new player" garbage, because thats what it is........garbage.
You can still play any archetype you want. I previously linked to a few decks from the recent SCG open in Detroit where the 5th and 6th place deck were control. What other kinds of archetypes do people want?
If you want to play aggro you can play Green/Red like THIS one from SCG: Seattle.
If you want to play tempo you can play any version of Delver you can build.
If you want to play control you can play things like THIS or THIS or THIS.
Most of the Pod decks and a few Esper bills fit into the midrange category, if you want to play some kind of combo deck then Frites fits the bill.
The options are there but nobody cares to find a deck and stick with it. They want to be able to pick a deck and then pick another deck the next week and still a third the week after and have all of them be the most awesomest sauce since Psychatog was loose.
Also, to your last point...ignoring profit margins means you want them to ignore their viability. Without profits the company doesn't exist and the game in essence dies. People like to rail on Maro because he's one of the out front faces of the company but he has a point. This game is 20 years old and it is ridiculously daunting to get into. Monopoly and Chess for example haven't changed and there's nothing new that they can do at the core level. Magic gives people 5-10 new abilities every year and 1 or 2 gimmicks. Allowing newer players to transition into the game while still making things exciting for us old folks doesn't just happen, they have to figure it out. If they don't, they'll lose their jobs. Simple as that.
That's what I enjoyed about older Magic. You could play white weenie one week and then play LD or MUC the next. It wasn't the same thing over and over.
Well, that's what standard is now. It's the same decks week after week after week.
It wasn't always like this, even competitively. There have been times in Magic's history where you HAD 3 or 4 viable archetypes being played at PTQs, even if I didn't personally play at them. Because those same archetypes at least trickled over to FNM because people wanted to gear up for the competitive events.
In fact, our TO, about a year or so ago when a new group of kids walked into our LGS, asked them first thing, "Are you playing top tier decks?" He asked because we were trying to keep our LGS fairly casual to be able to attract new players to the game. New players aren't going to want to get stomped by a top tier deck. Well, every single one of these kids when asked said, "Of course we are. Gotta gear up for the big events."
And overnight, our FNM became a mini PTQ. You can't win if you don't bring the best deck possible. That's our competition. And because of it, as I feared, we've driven away all the new kids. We now have between 12 and 18 people a night.
That's why when people say I have no right to comment on this subject because I don't play competitively don't really understand. I do play competitively every single week. And the reason it's so frustrating is because in order for me to win, I have to give up the combo decks I've tried to make. I have to give up the control decks I've tried to make. I can't even consider trying to make a Liquemental Coating LD deck. Yes, I've been really thinking about it. I can also forget about a Burning Vengeance deck. Others, who are no longer with us, have tried and failed.
No, if I want to win, and I know I can because of done it, I have to bring one of the top tier decks.
And they're all creature based.
After a while, I'd just like to play something else. That's all.
But he did make one valid point. This game HAS been going back and forth between archetypes for as long as I can remember. Right now we're in an aggro dominated meta. Maybe in a year that'll change. Maybe we'll have more variety with RTR. As much as I don't want to get my hopes up, I also don't want to be a negative Nelly either.
I'll bide my time until October and see what we get.
But I want to make this clear above all else. I do NOT hate creatures. What I hate is lack of choices. I want multiple archetypes to be viable. Right now, they are not. That is why I am dissatisfied with Standard right now. My problems with Vintage, Legacy and Modern are availability in my area. I begged our LGS to run Modern tournaments on Saturday.
Again, if you had the desire to go to a PTQ this weekend you can in my opinion play any one of 4 or 5 decks and have a reasonable chance at winning. Delver, Naya or RUG Pod, BR Zombies, GR Aggro, and Esper Control. I've taken Naya Pod to two straight FNMs with fairly competitive people and won 2 weeks ago against Delver and split last week in the finals with RUG Pod. I played against Tokens to get to Delver, and Zombies to get to RUG Pod.
Also, cultivating new players isn't simply the job of WoTC. The people at your game store need to help out. If the casual crowd doesn't keep coming around then clearly they didn't like losing, but they might not have liked the way they were losing. We have a number of players who are on the more casual/budget minded side and can't play with 4 Huntmasters and 4 Cavern of Souls and 4 Razorverge Thickets, etc. but they keep coming back.
They see the cool things that well tuned decks can do. Play Blade Splicer, get the Golem, Pod the Splicer away for Huntmaster. Go. Answer questions politely instead of in a "you should just play Delver" or "If you're playing Blade Splicer you should definitely be playing Restoration Angel". Help them with ideas for their homebrew decks or sugggestions on ways to play what they have better. Be friendly and courteous even if you lose to some random Green Ramp Genesis Wave for 9 deck.
*Caveat - I'm not saying you or your LGS are like what I mentioned, I'm just saying that I've seen it. Better players pointing out how the newer players or players on a budget should just buy the better rares that they need. Or within earshot complain about how they lost to some random jank because of mana screw or what not. That kind of environment isn't conducive to growing the player base. And it's not only the attitude but the feeling that they are in a second tier of Magic players. Asking or weeding out competitive players to save the feelings of the more casual crowd might sound like a good idea but it might make those players feel like they need to be protected and not everybody likes that.
I have no problem with people playing top tier decks. Please learn to read.
My problem is that in order for me to compete against those top tier decks, I have to play the same deck week after week after week. There is no variety in Magic. You either play one of the top tier decks (which are all aggro based) or you get stomped.
I'd like to be able to play something OTHER than Delver or Zombies or RG Aggro or whatever "turn creatures sideways" deck I have to play in ORDER to be competitive.
That's all. I just want other archetypes other than what we're being given to play with.
Is that so hard to understand and so much to ask for?
I'm sure this forum has that feature.
Again, I've pointed out at least two control style decks. If "turning creatures sideways" isn't challenging for you or not your style there ARE other options. Look for them.
Why does a creatureless deck have to exist? It seems that you feel the game has gotten so creature based that it ignores spells, but then wouldn't the opposite be true as well? Why should a deck completely ignore one of the main parts of the game?
Also, THIS 5th place deck from the recent SCG open has 11 creatures and 23 spells, THIS 6th place deck has 2 creatures (3 if you count Mortarpod, 4 more if you count Lingering Souls) and 27 spells.
EDIT: Also, there are a few ways to try and grow a Legacy community where you are. Talk to whoever runs your LGS and see if they can get a Legacy night. At the outset, maybe start with proxies. A set number, say 20, and a schedule on when to roll it back. Down to 10 in 6 months, down to 5 in a year. Offer Legacy cards as prizes, offer a slight discount on a card that immediately replaces a proxy in your deck. Charge something ($.10-$0.25 or so) for every proxy beyond the limit and have the store mentally remember that as to off set the lost value on the discounted card. Offer an increased prize for a non-proxied deck.
Vintage - Is a dying format in the States. A number of people who play more regularly than I do trace it back to allowing proxies in tournaments. Devaluing the expected prizes in effect by making them extraneous and an easy couple hundred dollars in cash. The Europeans gladly bought them and the community thrives across the Atlantic.
Also, it hurts playability when some of the most essential cards, Power and Time Vault namely, are also some of the most collectible. I think a larger portion of playable cards for Vintage are out of circulation and in personal collections or graded slabs than other formats.
Legacy - Thriving. A relatively huge number of players for competitive tournaments. Play almost anything you'd like. Play your spells, attack with your creatures, combo off with spells or creatures. I don't think the reprint policy hurts as much as people like to say that it will. What essential staples of modern Legacy are off limits?
Going off the GP: Atl top 8 the cards that are on the reserved list are: Duals, Undiscovered Paradise, Gilded Drake, Lion's Eye Diamond, and Humility. A number of them had more recent additions like Delver, Blood Artist, Goyf, Scavenging Ooze, Thought Scour, Spell Pierce, Daze, Spell Snare, etc.
Clearly the Duals are the biggest issue. To which I counter...how big does Legacy need to be? It clearly has room to get bigger as the supply of duals has not been exhausted but if it stayed around this size for the life of Magic would that be so bad? Does it have to be so popular that it rivals Standard or can it get by with 300-400 person tournaments?
Modern - Still evolving, we'll see where it goes. I think one problem with Modern is that people expect WoTC to just simply reprint anything that gets expensive whenever they need it. Not realizing the immense planning that would need to happen and the lag time between when a card is super expensive and when it would actually be available as a reprint. I think this might cause more people to get frustrated as they will still have moments of inaccessibility.
Standard - I have no issue with the push in creature power level. Obviously some mistakes were made (Titans, Mystic with access to Batterskull) but to claim its all about creatures is a bit of an overstatement. People were recently talking about banning Ponder and Vapor Snag. Think about that for a second. Yes, Snapcaster makes them both absurd but again, that's because they are spells. The only strategies that have been eliminated completely are easy land destruction and control control where you answer everything and durdle around until your win condition shows up on turn 17. I'm fine with that. They have to account for tournaments in some fashion and the time constraints are a real consideration for what strategies they can allow. A tournament full of slow grindy control decks and a ton of 1-0-1 matches is going to be exhaustively long as each round goes to time, and turns, and instead of 50 minutes becomes an hour and 10 minutes.
Magic is ridiculously popular and continues to be so. I restarted playing with Lorwyn and of the people at my LGS from then until now, there are about 5 or 6 that I don't see anymore. Everyone else still plays in some fashion. Cubes, drafts, Standard, whatever. At the time, there was on store to play in. Now, that store has a second location, thinking about a third. Two new stores have opened up and are doing well as well.
Does anyone know if there's a way to format my list of cards to include the set the card is from instead of having to manually implement it after the fact.
For instance, I want to take my list of cards, go to the Add Cards section, and then the text box list area and just put in:
4 Ajani Goldmane
4 Mulldrifter
4 Bitterblossom
etc but then the set hasn't been entered so I have to manually click on each card, click each drop down box and change the set to what I want it to. Can I format the list in a way so that it does that automatically?
I've tried a few ways but it says that I've misspelled the card so I don't think it recognizes anything but the exact card name.
Today I finished my 6th complete signed set!!! It was the smallest with 140 cards but due to the negative rep it has it was VERY difficult to get it done.
Thanks everyone for helping me!
Be warned...Looking at the cards at your own risk...It's from the dark ages. When good cards (by today's standard) were very, very rare and very costly (mana wise)... You probably know now which set I am talking about
Oh man, I loved Autumn Willow. Congratulations on another set.
Part of the absurdity of it was that it was an uncounterable counterspell. Since it wasn't a spell you couldn't in turn counter the ability from Denying Channel (with the exception of Stifle and Trickbind maybe?).
I find it interesting that you chose to shorten Deep Analysis to save 4 keystrokes.
ME: Copperline Gorge, Birds
Him: Rootbound Crag
Me: Forest, Birthing Pod
Him: Forest, Sphere of the Suns
Me: Cavern, Blade Splicer, Avacyn's Pilgrim
Him: Forest, Solemn Simulacrum, get Mountain
Me: Forest, Conscripts - Take Solemn, Sac Solemn with Pod, Get Woflir Silverheart, bond to Conscripts, draw a card from Solemn. Attack for 11 (Splicer, Golem, Conscripts)
Him: Wolf Run, Primeval Titan
Me: Pod Splicer into Restoration Angel, Blink Conscripts, Take Primeval, Rebond Conscripts with Silverheart. Attack for 25 (Conscripts and Silverheart bonded, Primeval, Golem, Pilgrim).
The most fun I've had playing Pod ever.
The original 5 were really impressive with getting the feel of each color and their strategies across. Ramp and creatures for green, life gain and vigilance for white, card draw and mill for blue, tutoring, discard, and reanimation for black, damage, damagea, and uh..damage for red.
The only issue was Jace 2.0 and his effect on everything since. The more recent ones have been build around me type planeswalkers instead of auto-includes but because of Jace the pre-order prices and the hype of every planeswalker has been unreal. Nobody wants to miss out on the "next Jace" and the price jumps quickly and comes down slowly. If anything, that is what bothered me most about what they did with Jace.
I don't understand why people complain about Evan hyping cards up. He never claims to be a financial guy or that you should listen to him and buy up every copy of whatever card he's drooling over in the video.
The show is simply a fun way to get hyped up about new cards and tournaments. Its supposed to appeal to the feeling players used to get when they were new and busting a pack had 15 cards that were the coolest thing you had ever seen. Everyone playing the game for a while is a bit jaded these days and can evaluate a card and dismiss them off hand immediately. The show (or atleast the older versions) are more about that feeling of when you first started playing and cracked a Force of Nature and were like 8/8!!! ZOMG!?!?!?
If you expect anything else out of them then you're going to be dissapointed.
You can still play any archetype you want. I previously linked to a few decks from the recent SCG open in Detroit where the 5th and 6th place deck were control. What other kinds of archetypes do people want?
If you want to play aggro you can play Green/Red like THIS one from SCG: Seattle.
If you want to play tempo you can play any version of Delver you can build.
If you want to play control you can play things like THIS or THIS or THIS.
Most of the Pod decks and a few Esper bills fit into the midrange category, if you want to play some kind of combo deck then Frites fits the bill.
The options are there but nobody cares to find a deck and stick with it. They want to be able to pick a deck and then pick another deck the next week and still a third the week after and have all of them be the most awesomest sauce since Psychatog was loose.
Also, to your last point...ignoring profit margins means you want them to ignore their viability. Without profits the company doesn't exist and the game in essence dies. People like to rail on Maro because he's one of the out front faces of the company but he has a point. This game is 20 years old and it is ridiculously daunting to get into. Monopoly and Chess for example haven't changed and there's nothing new that they can do at the core level. Magic gives people 5-10 new abilities every year and 1 or 2 gimmicks. Allowing newer players to transition into the game while still making things exciting for us old folks doesn't just happen, they have to figure it out. If they don't, they'll lose their jobs. Simple as that.
Again, if you had the desire to go to a PTQ this weekend you can in my opinion play any one of 4 or 5 decks and have a reasonable chance at winning. Delver, Naya or RUG Pod, BR Zombies, GR Aggro, and Esper Control. I've taken Naya Pod to two straight FNMs with fairly competitive people and won 2 weeks ago against Delver and split last week in the finals with RUG Pod. I played against Tokens to get to Delver, and Zombies to get to RUG Pod.
Also, cultivating new players isn't simply the job of WoTC. The people at your game store need to help out. If the casual crowd doesn't keep coming around then clearly they didn't like losing, but they might not have liked the way they were losing. We have a number of players who are on the more casual/budget minded side and can't play with 4 Huntmasters and 4 Cavern of Souls and 4 Razorverge Thickets, etc. but they keep coming back.
They see the cool things that well tuned decks can do. Play Blade Splicer, get the Golem, Pod the Splicer away for Huntmaster. Go. Answer questions politely instead of in a "you should just play Delver" or "If you're playing Blade Splicer you should definitely be playing Restoration Angel". Help them with ideas for their homebrew decks or sugggestions on ways to play what they have better. Be friendly and courteous even if you lose to some random Green Ramp Genesis Wave for 9 deck.
*Caveat - I'm not saying you or your LGS are like what I mentioned, I'm just saying that I've seen it. Better players pointing out how the newer players or players on a budget should just buy the better rares that they need. Or within earshot complain about how they lost to some random jank because of mana screw or what not. That kind of environment isn't conducive to growing the player base. And it's not only the attitude but the feeling that they are in a second tier of Magic players. Asking or weeding out competitive players to save the feelings of the more casual crowd might sound like a good idea but it might make those players feel like they need to be protected and not everybody likes that.
Again, I've pointed out at least two control style decks. If "turning creatures sideways" isn't challenging for you or not your style there ARE other options. Look for them.
Why does a creatureless deck have to exist? It seems that you feel the game has gotten so creature based that it ignores spells, but then wouldn't the opposite be true as well? Why should a deck completely ignore one of the main parts of the game?
Also, THIS 5th place deck from the recent SCG open has 11 creatures and 23 spells, THIS 6th place deck has 2 creatures (3 if you count Mortarpod, 4 more if you count Lingering Souls) and 27 spells.
EDIT: Also, there are a few ways to try and grow a Legacy community where you are. Talk to whoever runs your LGS and see if they can get a Legacy night. At the outset, maybe start with proxies. A set number, say 20, and a schedule on when to roll it back. Down to 10 in 6 months, down to 5 in a year. Offer Legacy cards as prizes, offer a slight discount on a card that immediately replaces a proxy in your deck. Charge something ($.10-$0.25 or so) for every proxy beyond the limit and have the store mentally remember that as to off set the lost value on the discounted card. Offer an increased prize for a non-proxied deck.
Also, it hurts playability when some of the most essential cards, Power and Time Vault namely, are also some of the most collectible. I think a larger portion of playable cards for Vintage are out of circulation and in personal collections or graded slabs than other formats.
Legacy - Thriving. A relatively huge number of players for competitive tournaments. Play almost anything you'd like. Play your spells, attack with your creatures, combo off with spells or creatures. I don't think the reprint policy hurts as much as people like to say that it will. What essential staples of modern Legacy are off limits?
Going off the GP: Atl top 8 the cards that are on the reserved list are: Duals, Undiscovered Paradise, Gilded Drake, Lion's Eye Diamond, and Humility. A number of them had more recent additions like Delver, Blood Artist, Goyf, Scavenging Ooze, Thought Scour, Spell Pierce, Daze, Spell Snare, etc.
Clearly the Duals are the biggest issue. To which I counter...how big does Legacy need to be? It clearly has room to get bigger as the supply of duals has not been exhausted but if it stayed around this size for the life of Magic would that be so bad? Does it have to be so popular that it rivals Standard or can it get by with 300-400 person tournaments?
Modern - Still evolving, we'll see where it goes. I think one problem with Modern is that people expect WoTC to just simply reprint anything that gets expensive whenever they need it. Not realizing the immense planning that would need to happen and the lag time between when a card is super expensive and when it would actually be available as a reprint. I think this might cause more people to get frustrated as they will still have moments of inaccessibility.
Standard - I have no issue with the push in creature power level. Obviously some mistakes were made (Titans, Mystic with access to Batterskull) but to claim its all about creatures is a bit of an overstatement. People were recently talking about banning Ponder and Vapor Snag. Think about that for a second. Yes, Snapcaster makes them both absurd but again, that's because they are spells. The only strategies that have been eliminated completely are easy land destruction and control control where you answer everything and durdle around until your win condition shows up on turn 17. I'm fine with that. They have to account for tournaments in some fashion and the time constraints are a real consideration for what strategies they can allow. A tournament full of slow grindy control decks and a ton of 1-0-1 matches is going to be exhaustively long as each round goes to time, and turns, and instead of 50 minutes becomes an hour and 10 minutes.
Magic is ridiculously popular and continues to be so. I restarted playing with Lorwyn and of the people at my LGS from then until now, there are about 5 or 6 that I don't see anymore. Everyone else still plays in some fashion. Cubes, drafts, Standard, whatever. At the time, there was on store to play in. Now, that store has a second location, thinking about a third. Two new stores have opened up and are doing well as well.
They're doing something right.
For instance, I want to take my list of cards, go to the Add Cards section, and then the text box list area and just put in:
4 Ajani Goldmane
4 Mulldrifter
4 Bitterblossom
etc but then the set hasn't been entered so I have to manually click on each card, click each drop down box and change the set to what I want it to. Can I format the list in a way so that it does that automatically?
I've tried a few ways but it says that I've misspelled the card so I don't think it recognizes anything but the exact card name.
Oh man, I loved Autumn Willow. Congratulations on another set.
Nice, was it the one on the bay? Sell me one of your extras.