Quote from megatog201 »Yeah. Sorry man. I don't know your knowledge of the game but shocks are far better than pain lands.
I'm not a pro player by any means... but Chris Vanmeter had this to say in an article after the first week of M15 standard.
http://www.starcitygames.com/article/28984_Rats.html
I had initially planned on just swapping the Overgrown Tombs for Llanowar Wastes and callimg it a day, but after playing the deck a bunch (albeit it without any M15 cards) online over the last two weeks while streaming , I realized that was wrong.
I thought that with how often we want to use all of our mana every turn, Llanowar Wastes would do less damage to us in the long run than Overgrown Tomb. Incorrect. Between Scavenging Ooze using a lot of green mana, and our sideboard having a lot of black spells, it appeared that the painland would do more to us than the shock land would.
I did swap a Forest for a Llanowar Wastes because I wanted another black source in the deck to help support all of the black removal spells in the sideboard.
Now, ultimately he tested it and found out you would rather have the Overgrown Tombs, but the general point is that there is actually a question in 3 color decks of which lands to play between Shocks and Pain lands. And CVM actually went into testing assuming Llanowar Wastes would be better.
Exhibits B and C are the Jund Monsters decks from the top 8 of the Pro Tour. 4 Llanowar Wastes, only 2 Overgrown Tombs in both of the decks. One of those Jund Monsters decks plays Nissa, so playing a Pain-land over a shockland that is also a Forest is meaningful.
^Basically this.
I don't think Extended died because they switched to 4 year rotations. They would only make such a change as a means to try and revive the format.
The thing people keep forgetting is that there were far less people playing 7-8 years ago. And more specifically, the change in number of people playing from 20-10 years ago is much smaller compared to 10-0 years ago. And the result is... a lot of the new players didn't have the cardpool to play Extended and so the playerbase just doesn't grow as fast as Standard did.
And then Modern comes along. People liked that the format didn't rotate, but it also wasn't as expensive an investment as Legacy.
There actually aren't THAT many ways that you can just flatout scam a game loss away from people. But I've heard of stories where someone will have a game in the bag and his opponent will try to claim he drew an extra card, or that his life total is lower than it really is. And because the opponent kept good notes and the other guy didn't, a judge will usually side with the opponent. That's why they say you shouldn't rely on your opponent to keep track of life totals.
In the case of claiming they are cheating via shuffling a weird way. You just aren't going to get punished for it unless there is a lot of evidence you are doing it. They aren't going to just DQ someone just because their opponent said so. And therefore... I don't think people have anything to worry about because no one is actually calling cheater on opponents. I think what most people would do if they suspected an opponent of cheating is they would get a judge to watch the game.
I would argue that what you are talking about is already happening. Rules lawyering is a thing. And that leads people to be extra careful about accidently drawing extra cards or somehow having an illegal deck... or all the little things they could get a game loss over. Something that the majority of people probably wouldn't make a big deal over if they knew it was completely innocent. But occasionally you run into guys that like to use any means necessary to win and because of those guys you have to be on guard.
I think in the case of the shuffling thing, you have even less to worry about because it's really hard to catch that kind of cheating. It's only been caught on camera IIRC. And I don't think people are going to just openly accuse their opponents of cheating to their face.
Well, it certainly lowers the odds of getting the 7 land hand. If someone is able to do this trick seven times, and because of this new rule change the result is you are working with slightly less lands than average... that's pretty good considering what you would've gotten before.
And I feel the need to point out.... I'm just throwing my idea out there. If there is a better idea that's easy to implement, then that should be what gets used.
Honestly this goes for uncommons and a lot of rares. You would think that EDH would have raised the price dramatically on some of these rares that get a lot of play in these EDH decks, but if you go look at the value of the cards in those decks and a lot of the rares are maybe a few bucks tops. It's stuff like Sylvan Library or Vampiric Tutor that cost a lot of money.
I don't feel like this could work within a single tournament because of variance. But across multiple tournaments if you have one player forcing mulligans twice as often as is the average... then that should tell you something.
Honestly though, I think the correct way to handle something like this is to either "enforce" a specific type of shuffling. Maybe at the end of all the shuffling, your opponent MUST cut the deck into two roughly even stacks and then you get the option of which stack you want on top. That should make it virtually impossible for either player to stack either deck.
And there actually is precedent for them to "enforce" procedure like that. They made the rule about no electronics, or the rules about note taking... or the rule where once you get to the top 8 you have access to everyone's decklist so that people can't gain an advantage by having sat next to a guy by chance one round that you ended up playing in the top 8.
The deckname thing IMO is a non-issue. Wizards (and SCG for that matter) have had the policy on deck names for a long time. Usually it's just to make decks easier to talk about. Although... even if the political aspect were true, they have every right to change the name in an effort to not make an entire country mad.
But there is a point to be made about the lack of a good 3rd party news that covers stuff like this. A story like this would've been a cool thing to see during Pro-Tour coverage. They do these kinds of things for major poker tournaments that are televised as well. It's just another way to connect the fans with the players.
This is faulty logic though. Because no matter how big the card pool gets, there's always going to be the best cards in the format being played. You look over at Modern, a format in which you have like 10 years of blocks legal in... but at the end of the day the best cards for that format are going to get played. Sphinx's Rev, Pack Rat, Elspeth, Domri, Xenagos, Mutavault aren't even really played in Modern because there are cards that are far better.
I echo what a lot of people are on the board are saying about the lands and the price of standard in general. This was an issue before this change even. And that's just that it's hard to play at a semi-competitive level without being really committed to playing this game money-wise. I got to the point where I was comfortable spending probably 500 dollars a year between FNMs and singles playing Standard and would mostly play the same types of decks and it allowed me to get away with buying fewer staples to build some of these different decks. And it always bothered me that most of the cards I bought would be worth 10% of their current value in a year or two. So it feels like unless you are really into the competitive scene, this is always going to be an issue.
It's a legit complaint IMO. And the solution is to either invest in Modern (probably costs more money up front, but far less over 3-4 years) or play a format like EDH where you can get away with spending far less money and get potentially as much enjoyment out of it.
But at the same time, I understand from the profesional play point of view, it kind of sucks when the same 3 decks are basically a big part of the meta for a good 12 months. The format gets figured out after a couple of months, and a new set in April doesn't do enough to fix that.
So yeah, this move is likely going to be awesome for the people that really like the competitive aspect of the format, probably not so stellar for players that just want to casually play tournaments.
First of all, I can't think of any deck in current standard that you would remember 3-4 years down the road. The issue with giving an interesting name to Jund Midrange or UW control or GW aggro is there really isn't anything unique about it that sets it apart from other decks with the same name in previous standard formats.
The only standard lists that would be worth remembering a few years from now would be named after a card or mechanic. Mono Blue Devotion for example. A unique enough deck compared to other blue aggro decks. But with those decks, once again, the name is a big clue as to what the deck is about. If 3-4 years from now someone is talking about Mono blue devotion, it's highly unlikely that there was another devotion deck from a different standard format. So people aren't going to confuse it with a different standard deck.
Ok that's fair that those names aren't creative, but can't you see the issue that is created if we go back making deck names that don't give you any clue of what is in the deck? "Check out this new deck, it's called 'The Hangover 2 staring Bradley Cooper'" "What? What does that do?" "It's a Jund deck with Planewalkers".
The game has gotten really big over the past few years. You can't have Starcitygames writing articles with the headline "The Hangover took 2 of the top 8 at pro tour Portland" and confuse everyone the first time they hear about the deck.
It kind of sucks the creativity is lacking, but again... no reason you can't come up with your own names for the decks that you joke about with your LGS, or names for individual cards even.
But the biggest reason is why the majority of people prefer this convention has nothing to do with new players and familiarity. It's simply to avoid confusion. We saw at Pro Tour a deck that was called Jund Planeswalkers get popularized with two decks in the top 8. I didn't see any of the Pro Tour coverage, but if I hear people talk about Jund Planeswalkers... I don't have to ask what kind of deck it is, because the description is in the name. If instead they called it "The Illuminati" or something like that... the first question people are going to ask is "what kind of deck is that?" "it's a Jund deck that plays a bunch of Planeswalkers" "well, let's just call it Jund Planeswalkers and stop wasting peoples time explaining what the name means."
I think there is something of value in being able to be creative with names. I'm not saying we shouldn't be allowed to have fun. But why can't you let the official name be "Jund Planeswalkers" and then between your friends come up with cool nicknames for the deck to joke about? In professional sports this sort of thing happens all the time. Players have "regular" names, but then in some cases can garner other nicknames over their careers.