So after over a year of Jace decks, many topping out over $1000, I guess WotC has "purified" the playerbase of people like me who gave up on the game, and simply refused to pay those outrageous prices anymore. Now the remaining players see the new decklists topping out at about $530 and say "wow, that's so cheap!" Typical selection bias.
Similarly, painting people like me as "people who expect $60 decks" is utter fallacy. You made up that number, I didn't. I'd like to see prices more in line with Jund / Zendikar block season, with a strong Jund deck being around $250, competitive cheap RDW (only thing that still exists) and other cheap decks like Turbofog. Maybe your wallet doesn't notice a difference between $200 average decks and $350 average decks, but mine does. Especially when you want to, I don't know, play more than one deck...
There is no doubt that the secondary market is perverted in it's pricing. But why shouldn't it be, after all, We are the one's to blame for the cost of the cards, not WotC. If you don't like the price for a card, don't pay it.
False. Players didn't create pack prices, nor mythic rarity, nor did they skew so many of the tournament-worthy cards into rares and mythics. Deck prices (assembled from card prices) pretty closely reflect the amount of packs required by the magic playerbase to create the deck.
A patient seller will make his money, and a patient buyer will save his.
A patient buyer may avoid paying short-term inflated prices a few weeks after release, but that's only one aspect. In the long term the deck still costs what it costs. The deck prices above speak for themselves.
Hopefully this is the right place for this. Chiming in to state my outsider's opinion of the current standard:
It sucks.
My last post was in May. I had previously exited standard (and Magic) due to money issues and the endless dominance of Jace. The banning of Jace interested me, and although too little too late, I kept watch on the sets coming out.
Standard seems to have swung from Utter Control Dominance to Boring Creature Deck dominance (the prevalence of Mana Leak to backup the Boring Creature Decks is mostly beside the point.) Not sure how much of an improvement that is.
I'm sure I'll be in the minority with this one - I miss Jund. Mostly. At least it had a midgame, one that wasn't just locking out the opponent with counters. It was mindless, it was dominant, but it was beatable. RDW could beat it. Turbofog could beat it. Pre-broken Jace control could beat it.
Things were getting interesting for a while. There was a time when I could walk into FNM with any of the 4 above decks at my leisure, DECIDING which strong deck I would play and how I would adjust it to suit my meta and my own style, and have mostly enjoyable matches; not knowing for sure what I'd be facing down, but knowing if I played correctly I'd have a good shot. Would I make it a Jund week, would I opt for fast burn with RDW, or would I play one of the varieties of control?
For a time there was genuine VARIETY. And all 4 of the above decks were, dare I say, actually FUN, albeit not all of them necessarily requiring a genius IQ. Even if half the field was being boring and playing Jund, that was as much due to the relatively inexpensive and mindless piloting requirements as it was to Jund's supposed brokenness. Beating Jund was becoming a fun weekly ritual in fact. I didn't always succeed, but I did succeed quite a lot (especially with my own personal builds of Turbofog) and it was always satisfying to do so, especially with a dark-horse deck like that.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not seeing as much variety in the top decklists now. Maybe I'm biased against weenies, but seeing so many 1st-place finishes with a bunch of bears on crack just makes me cringe. Almost as much as the year of broken Jace control and the disturbing lack of any action on the part of WotC to stop it.
I don't see much point in returning to the game until the start of the next block (if ever.) Anyone want to tell me why I'm wrong?
Why are you running fetches with no way to use them (i.e. Grim Discovery)? With no Hexmage and only 3 Duress I think you will be in dire straits against Planeswalkers. I don't really understand why anyone would pull Hexmage. The list looked good at a cursory glance but after more examination I don't like it. Not enough beaters and also not enough control.
That's one of the worst steaming piles I've seen for months. No Sign in Blood, a bunch of 1 and 2-ofs, small handful of finishers. It looks like a precon.
Someone told me once that a lot of the pros post and verbally stand behind lists that they know are utter garbage, just to screw with the heads of other pros. This looks like more evidence of that to me.
Which is better: trading one dollar for one dollar, or trading one dollar for two dollars?
That's a good analogy once you extend it. What's better, trading one dollar for 2 dollars, then spending those on 2 bullets, or simply spending the one dollar on one bullet right now without spending the time trading. I guess it depends how soon you need to kill someone before they kill you.
You're acting like getting a Hexmage and a Tec Edge for 2 mana is a bad deal. You're paying 2 mana to draw 2 cards.
Yes, but SiB can happen on turn 2, and can help draw out of a bad hand or draw into a beater you can subsequently cast. By the time you cast GD it's mid-game or late-game. So if you get a hand full of GD early without any relevant targets, it's a dead hand. Later in the game, in a lot of situations, spending the 2 mana on the GD will delay casting your beater (which is what you really need to do ASAP to win.) Why not just have more beaters instead of the GD? The CA isn't worth it for us if it delays us, because we have to play as aggro to win against control. I know Tec Edge + Hexmage + GD is card advantage. I get it. What you don't get is that while you're busy finessing that combo, you're not doing the damage you need to be doing to win the game, and your UW opponent's CA is still marching onward toward inevitability.
And I don't think Mind Sculptor is overpowered. I think it's clunky and brittle.
Yeah. K. Play against more Jace decks wielded by strong players and get back to me. Feel free to post match reports, I'd love to see how your classic-control MBC beat down Jace.
Playing control is built upon the principle of winning by gaining a material advantage (also known as card advantage) and grinding the opponent out via attrition. This doesn't always have to be the way that games are won, but it's the definition of a control deck. In order to produce card advantage, you have to have card advantage spells in your deck, you have to draw them, and you have to resolve them.
Specifically about this build of MBC: I recommend you go up to 4 Sign in Bloods and 2-4 Grim Discovery. If you want to run Phyrexian Rager, I think that's great! It is card advantage, and it's good in a deck with a lot of other little creatures and some very strong new equipment. If you can find the space, then I'm all for running this man. Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to play a Sign in Blood to find some answers, then play a Rager to dig deeper and add something to the board, then get it and a Tec Edge/Fetchland back with Grim Discovery later so you can cast it again?
So what are we almost always bringing back with GD:
Tec Edge = 1-for-1's their huge manland threat
Hexmage = 1-for-2's their Planeswalker threat
This is the problem. All Grim Discovery is doing is decreasing our disadvantage against UW, or at best reaching parity. That's why this "classic control" method just fails for us. It's reactive card advantage only, not proactive. "You cast your ridiculously overpowered blue or white card to unbalance the game state and win? No! You can't win yet, I'll cast Grim Discovery and stall you for a few more turns." Look at the blue white lists. Almost everything in the deck, other than Plains and Island, is card advantage or card-quality advantage. It's ridiculous. There's just no way we can ever compete with it.
Traditional MBC in its strictest definition has no chance of being competitive against UW, given the black cards available and the cards available to the competition. If you want to call that thread hijacking or pollution or whatever, go ahead, but I simply cannot advocate "traditional" MBC. We have to go aggro or aggro-ish to beat UW control. Many of the successful lists have been midrange lists which have both aggro and control aspects.
Most of the time we will NEVER gain ultimate control of the game state against UW. Their topdeck is an endless CA engine. At the minimum we would need a broken planeswalker like Jace to even have a chance at that strategy. We don't even have a GOOD planeswalker, let alone a broken one. That's why we need the tools in the 75 to both disrupt (control aspect) and beat face early (aggro aspect.)
If you want to waste time messing around with GD, go for it. I've tried it. It's like I said -- GD = wasted turns spent countering some of the opponent's inevitable CA, instead of casting a beater to try to actually win before it's too late.
I have also for a long time wanted to make use of Phylactery Lich, and I think this is the perfect time to do it.
Why? Obliterator is far better. 1 more mana and you get an enormous threat, rather than a 5/5 with a liability who can be chumped all day. Persecutor, Obliterator, we don't need more beaters. The 1 less mana is not a good enough reason to pollute the deck with artifacts.
You shouldn't lose consistency by running Darksteel Axe since Inkmoth Nexus wields it very well as an obvious addition to making sure Lich stays on the field, adding to a secondary win-con.
Why would you ever want Nexus in the deck? Nexus has infect. Now you're not only polluting the deck with artifacts but also infect. Also, 1 Tec Edge on your phylactery-token nexus = 2 for 1 for the opponent, and also giving them a Tec Edge target where before they had none. ALSO, Nexus is colorless so can't cast Lich, gets in the way of your black mana sources / takes the place of the higher-utility Tec Edge in terms of colorless lands.
Has no one considered a Duress + Despise split, ignoring IoK entirely now (or relegating it to the SB)? The way I see it, IoK is needed most against fast decks, fast decks are playing lots of creatures and a good portion of the time you'll want to pull a creature from them. While half (or say less than half) of your 1cc discard will then be unable to pull things like Sword and Rebirth, you'll gain the ability to pull planeswalkers all of the time, and also creature bombs like Titans.
Of course, maybe sword is so important, the above still isn't enough to run Despise. I dunno, I haven't really played in months.
** Oh, and I forgot the other reasoning for Duress + Despise -- for people who are switching out Hexmage for Spellskite, it might make sense to add more Planeswalker elim to the discard.
I feel that, even with Obliterator, it's folly not to run Tectonic Edge. The card is very useful against a wide variety of decks.
Naturalize is also very useful, but most of us don't mess up our mana base splashing for it, even when it would only be 1 actual forest. I consistently ran 3 Tec Edge but with the inclusion of Obliterator I don't think it's very easily done now.
Tec Edge really is going to conflict with Obliterator. BBBB on T4 is way too much of a strain when you throw in colorless lands. I think the only way to successfully run both would be to run a 26+ land build with 6cc finishers and other ways to use the extra land.
With all of this new fun stuff coming out for MBC, are the 6cmc guys required anymore? Is obliterator and percy sufficient without the titan and wurmcoil?
Maybe, but I suspect that if one were to use both Obliterator and Percy, avoiding 6cc finishers, one might consider just changing the whole list to a MBA aggro list. Not sure yet though.
You are a longtime MBC thread contributor, unlike all these others who have only recently added their two cents. Do you really think Obliterator is that final piece we have been waiting for?
As another long-time thread contributor, I'll answer this as well. I don't see that Obliterator is giving us much that we don't already have. 4 mana for a big beatstick? Persecutor says hi.
There's been a constant disagreement in the thread between 6cc finisher builds and 4cc Persecutor builds with 6cc supplements. We were handed GftT which seriously reduced the liability of Persecutor. Still, arguments were made for not running Persecutor, and some people who did run it even played with less than 4 Persecutor. Not me, I always played 4 once I ran it. I never had problems with its drawback, nor did I feel the drawback was that much of a strain on the deck, especially since GftT.
So, am I seeing any new lists eschewing 6cc finishers and focusing on pairing up Persecutor and Obliterator? At least that would have given us a new option we didn't have before, whether or not it showed itself to be the optimal choice. No, people just jumped on the new-card bandwagon, swapping one for the other.
In these lists we haven't gained NEW amounts of 4cc beaters, they've just been swapped out. What has been gained then? We'd have to analyze Persecutor vs. Obliterator in various situations to see who wins. I don't have time to make a big list of game-states right now, but the short version is that while each has certain advantages, in the end I only see Obliterator having significant advantage as a really nasty blocker. Otherwise, both cards are 4cc beatsticks which generate no immediate CA to mitigate removal, and put the opponent on a very fast clock.
I actually find Lashwrithe more interesting, especially paired with Nighthawk (which may have justification to be run, now.)
Similarly, painting people like me as "people who expect $60 decks" is utter fallacy. You made up that number, I didn't. I'd like to see prices more in line with Jund / Zendikar block season, with a strong Jund deck being around $250, competitive cheap RDW (only thing that still exists) and other cheap decks like Turbofog. Maybe your wallet doesn't notice a difference between $200 average decks and $350 average decks, but mine does. Especially when you want to, I don't know, play more than one deck...
As for standard prices, the 1st place lists in price order for November and onward:
RDW - $82-158
Delver - $200-302
Monoblack Infect $246
UW Control $257
Hawkward - $293-310
Haunted Humans - $312-388
Mage-Blade - $329-513
Wolf Run - $369-534
UB Control $377
Solar Flare - $390-419
Township Tokens - $463-483
Monoblack Midrange $480
GW Overrun $490
You have a strange definition of cheap when only RDW goes below $200.
False. Players didn't create pack prices, nor mythic rarity, nor did they skew so many of the tournament-worthy cards into rares and mythics. Deck prices (assembled from card prices) pretty closely reflect the amount of packs required by the magic playerbase to create the deck.
A patient buyer may avoid paying short-term inflated prices a few weeks after release, but that's only one aspect. In the long term the deck still costs what it costs. The deck prices above speak for themselves.
It sucks.
My last post was in May. I had previously exited standard (and Magic) due to money issues and the endless dominance of Jace. The banning of Jace interested me, and although too little too late, I kept watch on the sets coming out.
Standard seems to have swung from Utter Control Dominance to Boring Creature Deck dominance (the prevalence of Mana Leak to backup the Boring Creature Decks is mostly beside the point.) Not sure how much of an improvement that is.
I'm sure I'll be in the minority with this one - I miss Jund. Mostly. At least it had a midgame, one that wasn't just locking out the opponent with counters. It was mindless, it was dominant, but it was beatable. RDW could beat it. Turbofog could beat it. Pre-broken Jace control could beat it.
Things were getting interesting for a while. There was a time when I could walk into FNM with any of the 4 above decks at my leisure, DECIDING which strong deck I would play and how I would adjust it to suit my meta and my own style, and have mostly enjoyable matches; not knowing for sure what I'd be facing down, but knowing if I played correctly I'd have a good shot. Would I make it a Jund week, would I opt for fast burn with RDW, or would I play one of the varieties of control?
For a time there was genuine VARIETY. And all 4 of the above decks were, dare I say, actually FUN, albeit not all of them necessarily requiring a genius IQ. Even if half the field was being boring and playing Jund, that was as much due to the relatively inexpensive and mindless piloting requirements as it was to Jund's supposed brokenness. Beating Jund was becoming a fun weekly ritual in fact. I didn't always succeed, but I did succeed quite a lot (especially with my own personal builds of Turbofog) and it was always satisfying to do so, especially with a dark-horse deck like that.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not seeing as much variety in the top decklists now. Maybe I'm biased against weenies, but seeing so many 1st-place finishes with a bunch of bears on crack just makes me cringe. Almost as much as the year of broken Jace control and the disturbing lack of any action on the part of WotC to stop it.
I don't see much point in returning to the game until the start of the next block (if ever.) Anyone want to tell me why I'm wrong?
Why are you running fetches with no way to use them (i.e. Grim Discovery)? With no Hexmage and only 3 Duress I think you will be in dire straits against Planeswalkers. I don't really understand why anyone would pull Hexmage. The list looked good at a cursory glance but after more examination I don't like it. Not enough beaters and also not enough control.
Someone told me once that a lot of the pros post and verbally stand behind lists that they know are utter garbage, just to screw with the heads of other pros. This looks like more evidence of that to me.
Leyline.
Oops, back to the drawing board.
That's a good analogy once you extend it. What's better, trading one dollar for 2 dollars, then spending those on 2 bullets, or simply spending the one dollar on one bullet right now without spending the time trading. I guess it depends how soon you need to kill someone before they kill you.
Nope, all you have to do is post your classic-control MBC list with a positive win record against UW along with a match report.
Yes, but SiB can happen on turn 2, and can help draw out of a bad hand or draw into a beater you can subsequently cast. By the time you cast GD it's mid-game or late-game. So if you get a hand full of GD early without any relevant targets, it's a dead hand. Later in the game, in a lot of situations, spending the 2 mana on the GD will delay casting your beater (which is what you really need to do ASAP to win.) Why not just have more beaters instead of the GD? The CA isn't worth it for us if it delays us, because we have to play as aggro to win against control. I know Tec Edge + Hexmage + GD is card advantage. I get it. What you don't get is that while you're busy finessing that combo, you're not doing the damage you need to be doing to win the game, and your UW opponent's CA is still marching onward toward inevitability.
I never said it was hopeless. I said we had to go aggro+disruption to beat it.
Yeah. K. Play against more Jace decks wielded by strong players and get back to me. Feel free to post match reports, I'd love to see how your classic-control MBC beat down Jace.
So what are we almost always bringing back with GD:
Tec Edge = 1-for-1's their huge manland threat
Hexmage = 1-for-2's their Planeswalker threat
This is the problem. All Grim Discovery is doing is decreasing our disadvantage against UW, or at best reaching parity. That's why this "classic control" method just fails for us. It's reactive card advantage only, not proactive. "You cast your ridiculously overpowered blue or white card to unbalance the game state and win? No! You can't win yet, I'll cast Grim Discovery and stall you for a few more turns." Look at the blue white lists. Almost everything in the deck, other than Plains and Island, is card advantage or card-quality advantage. It's ridiculous. There's just no way we can ever compete with it.
Traditional MBC in its strictest definition has no chance of being competitive against UW, given the black cards available and the cards available to the competition. If you want to call that thread hijacking or pollution or whatever, go ahead, but I simply cannot advocate "traditional" MBC. We have to go aggro or aggro-ish to beat UW control. Many of the successful lists have been midrange lists which have both aggro and control aspects.
Most of the time we will NEVER gain ultimate control of the game state against UW. Their topdeck is an endless CA engine. At the minimum we would need a broken planeswalker like Jace to even have a chance at that strategy. We don't even have a GOOD planeswalker, let alone a broken one. That's why we need the tools in the 75 to both disrupt (control aspect) and beat face early (aggro aspect.)
If you want to waste time messing around with GD, go for it. I've tried it. It's like I said -- GD = wasted turns spent countering some of the opponent's inevitable CA, instead of casting a beater to try to actually win before it's too late.
Why? Obliterator is far better. 1 more mana and you get an enormous threat, rather than a 5/5 with a liability who can be chumped all day. Persecutor, Obliterator, we don't need more beaters. The 1 less mana is not a good enough reason to pollute the deck with artifacts.
Why would you ever want Nexus in the deck? Nexus has infect. Now you're not only polluting the deck with artifacts but also infect. Also, 1 Tec Edge on your phylactery-token nexus = 2 for 1 for the opponent, and also giving them a Tec Edge target where before they had none. ALSO, Nexus is colorless so can't cast Lich, gets in the way of your black mana sources / takes the place of the higher-utility Tec Edge in terms of colorless lands.
Of course, maybe sword is so important, the above still isn't enough to run Despise. I dunno, I haven't really played in months.
** Oh, and I forgot the other reasoning for Duress + Despise -- for people who are switching out Hexmage for Spellskite, it might make sense to add more Planeswalker elim to the discard.
Naturalize is also very useful, but most of us don't mess up our mana base splashing for it, even when it would only be 1 actual forest. I consistently ran 3 Tec Edge but with the inclusion of Obliterator I don't think it's very easily done now.
Tec Edge really is going to conflict with Obliterator. BBBB on T4 is way too much of a strain when you throw in colorless lands. I think the only way to successfully run both would be to run a 26+ land build with 6cc finishers and other ways to use the extra land.
Maybe, but I suspect that if one were to use both Obliterator and Percy, avoiding 6cc finishers, one might consider just changing the whole list to a MBA aggro list. Not sure yet though.
Day of Judgment says hi.
Unless they cast DoJ...
Wurmcoil counters titans now? Sigh.
As another long-time thread contributor, I'll answer this as well. I don't see that Obliterator is giving us much that we don't already have. 4 mana for a big beatstick? Persecutor says hi.
There's been a constant disagreement in the thread between 6cc finisher builds and 4cc Persecutor builds with 6cc supplements. We were handed GftT which seriously reduced the liability of Persecutor. Still, arguments were made for not running Persecutor, and some people who did run it even played with less than 4 Persecutor. Not me, I always played 4 once I ran it. I never had problems with its drawback, nor did I feel the drawback was that much of a strain on the deck, especially since GftT.
So, am I seeing any new lists eschewing 6cc finishers and focusing on pairing up Persecutor and Obliterator? At least that would have given us a new option we didn't have before, whether or not it showed itself to be the optimal choice. No, people just jumped on the new-card bandwagon, swapping one for the other.
In these lists we haven't gained NEW amounts of 4cc beaters, they've just been swapped out. What has been gained then? We'd have to analyze Persecutor vs. Obliterator in various situations to see who wins. I don't have time to make a big list of game-states right now, but the short version is that while each has certain advantages, in the end I only see Obliterator having significant advantage as a really nasty blocker. Otherwise, both cards are 4cc beatsticks which generate no immediate CA to mitigate removal, and put the opponent on a very fast clock.
I actually find Lashwrithe more interesting, especially paired with Nighthawk (which may have justification to be run, now.)