There are about 10,000 players currently playing leagues across all leagues. That is surprisingly low. The events are a month or two long, and that means that at best, Wizards is selling 10,000 league entry fees a month. If they make $20 on average in entrance fees per player, then they're pulling in $200,000 per month from leagues. At best. That's really not that much. One thing I don't know though is if you can enter a league more than once, and if so, whether the listing of player is a listing of entries or a listing of unique players. For example, if I entered the same league three times (is that possible?) would I be counted as 3 in the listings or just 1?
The number of players displayed is the current number of players in the League, and when you finish you are removed from the total, so to get a good estimate you have to look at the rate at which the displayed number changes.
Cept its not spooky. Its a hug. I'm gunna have to figure out how to alter it to be spooky.
Plot twist: Pia has been dead the whole time! Any sightings of her are actually her ghost, and the hug itself is a vivid hallucination of Chandra, overwhelmed by the nostalgia of visiting her home and the memories of the only time in her life when she felt safe, before her parents died.
On the topic of running out of memory, do note that Magic Online requires more memory the larger your collection is. I had to use a different computer to empty my account of old cards after drafting the hell out of Zendikar (not that Zen did it alone, it was just the straw that broke the camel's back) and getting a scary Out of Memory error that closed the program every time I logged on. Now I see that the program takes up significantly less memory and I don't get the error anymore.
I'm #teamsealed myself, but I think it makes sense for them to hype draft more. I'm not convinced that draft is more skill intensive than sealed, but a lot of people do believe that, and the perception itself is valuable. If you're selling the experience of limited, you want your losing players to walk away thinking "I must have done something wrong. I can't wait to do this again to get another opportunity to not screw up." In sealed there's a perception that your pool greatly decides your fate. In draft, there are SO MANY decisions, along with an element of hidden information, and it's easy to imagine you screwed up somewhere, and imagine what would have happened if you took some other decision paths. So draft is the format they should push for people who want to believe that if only they did something different they could have won.
Of course this is all theoretical and ultimately the truth lies in mtgo's statistics on who are the bigger addicts, drafters or sealed players.
How does this card even work? The copy will also have the copy-causing ability. Can those turn other cards into copies of the mass? Or do the rules break down and cause copies of whatever the card is printed to be made? Judge plz halp.
I'm worried about the color balance of the set in regards to sealed. SOI was the worst balanced format I've seen in years with green and white dominating and blue being unplayable without something like Jace or Startled Awake to pull you into it.
I'm very glad that with our current expansion release model, formats rotate from 6x 1st expansion to 4x 2nd + 2x 1st, eg 6x SOI to 4x EMN + 2x SOI. I like that if the first expansion is unbalanced, because the next expansion will comprise the majority of your pool, the new format will be drastically different and have potential to not be unbalanced.
Unfortunately EMN carries some baggage from SOI. EMN's got two problems: red and black are still the only heavy Madness colors, and blue will not support Investigate any longer. Madness is an awkward mechanic for sealed because it requires synergy and is therefore high variance. For example, Twins of Maurer Estate may be quite good in draft where you pick from a large number of cards, but in sealed its power depends on how many Madness enablers you open. This leads to the overall power level of red and black in sealed being lower because some significant proportion of pools will lack a critical mass of Madness enablers.
Blue's problem is that there will be no more investigating. Blue was already bad enough in SOI. Now imagine opening an EMN-SOI pool and seeing an Erdwal Illuminator. How good do you expect that card to be when 2/3s of your packs have no investigate? How good do you expect Daring Sleuth to be? Fleeting Memories? So there's 3 uncommons that are likely going to be unplayable or at best mediocre. That hurts but it's not the end of the world for blue. What's worse is that there will be no cards like Graf Mole in other colors that make the blue Investigate cards more attractive to play. Blue's Investigate cards, eg Jace's Scrutiny and Drownyard Explorers, will have to pull their own weight in EMN, without synergy bonuses from cards that care about clues. But blue's card quality was already weak in SOI, so it's unlikely that blue investigate cards that couldn't hold their own weight in 6x SOI will be high value in 4xEMN 2xSOI.
A caveat to what I've said is that these problems do not bind any of the colors to being bad, or to the overall color balance of 4xEMN 2xSOI to be bad. It's possible for the developers to recognize these things and decide, for example, to make most red and black Madness cards perfectly fine without Madness and only marginally better with Madness. Bloodmad Vampire is a fine example. It's also within their power to make blue cards much stronger in this expansion to counter the weakness of blue in SOI. But since I am making a loose, highly in-the-dark prediction rather than stating what is possible, what matters is what's likely to happen, and what is likeliest is that blue will continue to underperform, red and black will continue to be high variance, and green and/or white will be top colors again.
Warning: this is coming from a sealed player. Drafting may expose some of these cards to synergies that make them playable.
Altar of the Brood
Avalanche Tusker
Dragon Throne of Tarkir
Hardened Scales
Jeskai Ascendancy
Kheru Lich Lord
Mindswipe
Retribution of the Ancients
Temur Ascendancy
Trap Essence
Empty the Pits
Narset, Enlightened Master
See the Unwritten
Ugin's Nexus
Somebody out there is going to love playing it with Doubling Season since it doubles both the number of +1/+1 counters and zombie tokens.
Also, I'm very glad that they didn't tack on the word "tapped" to the zombie tokens. They have this flavor meme of zombies entering tapped to signify their slowness. But it can make a big difference in power level. IMO the card Necromancer's Stockpile was ruined by making the tokens enter tapped. Diregraf Ghoul was fine because he comes down early and it's only tapped for one turn, but anything involving a repeated effect should let the zombies come in untapped. I mean, imagine how much worse Bitterblossom would have been if the faeries came into play tapped. For recurring triggers it's a huge difference.
Don't have any cards in mind, but I hope Gravestorm is a mechanic in Eldritch Moon. It would play well with Clues and Eldrazi Spawn, and caring about things dying is reminiscent of Morbid.
Here's a wild guess - new Format: Legacy + forced Ante
Everybody rushes to replace their duals with Shocks because those are cheaper to lose, and the 2 life isn't always relevant.
1) How much have you played with the format, roughly?
18 sealed leagues, 88 matches played, I 1-3'd twice
plus whatever I did before sealed leagues, but that's much less.
2) Which common was better than you expected?
Reality Hemorrhage. I still don't like the card much on principle, but I guess it takes a lot for burn spells to not be good.
3) Which common was worse than you expected?
Akoum Flameseeker. It isn't bad, but I thought the looting would be worth much more.
4) What's the most underappreciated card?
Maybe Stone Haven Outfitter. His ability is pretty irrelevant, but he's useful as an Ally bear, plus sometimes he attracts removal due to people expecting his ability to become relevant.
5) What's the worst common that people still play?
I'll interpret this question as "what's the worst common that YOU still play?" because people play all sorts of garbage. Eldrazi Aggressor. Not where I want to be, but I'll go there in desperate times.
6) What was your favorite archetype?
4 color good stuff enabled by a very lucky manabase with double Unknown Shores, double Crumbling Vestige, and an Evolving Wilds.
7) Which archetype wasn't as good as you'd expected?
UR surge
8) Which colors were the best and worst?
best = white worst = blue
9) Thoughts on the format as a whole?
A-/B+ Horrible color power imbalance, but we should expect that by now. From what I've read, limited is balanced around draft not sealed. What made this format great were decent fixing and powerful commons & uncommons. Good aggressive speed without being too fast. I've heard people say it's a draw first format but I don't think I like being on the wrong side of a turn four Lagac, or worse, Relief Captain. Conditional removal spells made games more interesting than they'd be if they weren't conditional - eg Tar Snare used in combat, Immolating Glare only working on defense, Sheer Drop requiring the creature to be tapped, Surge on Boulder Salvo influencing your sequencing. Also although the mana base lottery highly determined your ability to craft good mana, I liked the colorless mana cost for rewarding/punishing players who do/don't know how to build mana bases correctly.
I'm not complaining myself because I never played pre-res or release events anyway, but this seems like a mix of bad and good. Weren't Release sealed queues very good EV? IIRC only the prerelease offerings were terrible, and you could mitigate that somewhat by selling off cards at generous high-scarcity prices, or just *gasp* wait a few days for the release events. So to me this looks like the neutralization of a single weekend of bad events at the cost of removing a week or two of good events. Thanks Obama.
Again although I see this as a net loss as opposed to how it's being sold by Lee, I'm not at all angry because mtgo is in such a great state, with pack prices actually retaining value and the normal sealed leagues being about as good EV (probably better!) than the original 4 pack sealed queues. So I applaud Lee for making these changes that are likely good for WotC's bottom line and acceptable to the players.
I wonder how big the prerelease league will be. Prerelease is a special time when the casualest of casuals come out to play. I thought breaking over 5,000 players was huge for the inaugural sealed league. Are there more?
As a limited player I would have appreciated it if they bumped the Madness burn spell up to Mythic. It is going to single-handedly decide so many games. Fall of the Titans was powerful enough with the Surge restriction. Unless free discard outlets are scarce this thing will often be an instant speed Rolling Thunder.
I DO appreciate that it's in expansion 1 of 2 which means come Eldritch Moon there will only be 2 SOI packs per sealed pool and 1 pack per draft so we'll see it less in the full block format like we see Rolling Thunder less in BFZ+OGW.
Also, this is coming from someone who doesn't like to see all removal pushed to rare. I think that's dumb. But strong, flexible removal with built in card advantage spoils limited games.
The number of players displayed is the current number of players in the League, and when you finish you are removed from the total, so to get a good estimate you have to look at the rate at which the displayed number changes.
Plot twist: Pia has been dead the whole time! Any sightings of her are actually her ghost, and the hug itself is a vivid hallucination of Chandra, overwhelmed by the nostalgia of visiting her home and the memories of the only time in her life when she felt safe, before her parents died.
Of course this is all theoretical and ultimately the truth lies in mtgo's statistics on who are the bigger addicts, drafters or sealed players.
I'm worried about the color balance of the set in regards to sealed. SOI was the worst balanced format I've seen in years with green and white dominating and blue being unplayable without something like Jace or Startled Awake to pull you into it.
I'm very glad that with our current expansion release model, formats rotate from 6x 1st expansion to 4x 2nd + 2x 1st, eg 6x SOI to 4x EMN + 2x SOI. I like that if the first expansion is unbalanced, because the next expansion will comprise the majority of your pool, the new format will be drastically different and have potential to not be unbalanced.
Unfortunately EMN carries some baggage from SOI. EMN's got two problems: red and black are still the only heavy Madness colors, and blue will not support Investigate any longer. Madness is an awkward mechanic for sealed because it requires synergy and is therefore high variance. For example, Twins of Maurer Estate may be quite good in draft where you pick from a large number of cards, but in sealed its power depends on how many Madness enablers you open. This leads to the overall power level of red and black in sealed being lower because some significant proportion of pools will lack a critical mass of Madness enablers.
Blue's problem is that there will be no more investigating. Blue was already bad enough in SOI. Now imagine opening an EMN-SOI pool and seeing an Erdwal Illuminator. How good do you expect that card to be when 2/3s of your packs have no investigate? How good do you expect Daring Sleuth to be? Fleeting Memories? So there's 3 uncommons that are likely going to be unplayable or at best mediocre. That hurts but it's not the end of the world for blue. What's worse is that there will be no cards like Graf Mole in other colors that make the blue Investigate cards more attractive to play. Blue's Investigate cards, eg Jace's Scrutiny and Drownyard Explorers, will have to pull their own weight in EMN, without synergy bonuses from cards that care about clues. But blue's card quality was already weak in SOI, so it's unlikely that blue investigate cards that couldn't hold their own weight in 6x SOI will be high value in 4xEMN 2xSOI.
A caveat to what I've said is that these problems do not bind any of the colors to being bad, or to the overall color balance of 4xEMN 2xSOI to be bad. It's possible for the developers to recognize these things and decide, for example, to make most red and black Madness cards perfectly fine without Madness and only marginally better with Madness. Bloodmad Vampire is a fine example. It's also within their power to make blue cards much stronger in this expansion to counter the weakness of blue in SOI. But since I am making a loose, highly in-the-dark prediction rather than stating what is possible, what matters is what's likely to happen, and what is likeliest is that blue will continue to underperform, red and black will continue to be high variance, and green and/or white will be top colors again.
Altar of the Brood
Avalanche Tusker
Dragon Throne of Tarkir
Hardened Scales
Jeskai Ascendancy
Kheru Lich Lord
Mindswipe
Retribution of the Ancients
Temur Ascendancy
Trap Essence
Empty the Pits
Narset, Enlightened Master
See the Unwritten
Ugin's Nexus
Also, I'm very glad that they didn't tack on the word "tapped" to the zombie tokens. They have this flavor meme of zombies entering tapped to signify their slowness. But it can make a big difference in power level. IMO the card Necromancer's Stockpile was ruined by making the tokens enter tapped. Diregraf Ghoul was fine because he comes down early and it's only tapped for one turn, but anything involving a repeated effect should let the zombies come in untapped. I mean, imagine how much worse Bitterblossom would have been if the faeries came into play tapped. For recurring triggers it's a huge difference.
Everybody rushes to replace their duals with Shocks because those are cheaper to lose, and the 2 life isn't always relevant.
18 sealed leagues, 88 matches played, I 1-3'd twice
plus whatever I did before sealed leagues, but that's much less.
2) Which common was better than you expected?
Reality Hemorrhage. I still don't like the card much on principle, but I guess it takes a lot for burn spells to not be good.
3) Which common was worse than you expected?
Akoum Flameseeker. It isn't bad, but I thought the looting would be worth much more.
4) What's the most underappreciated card?
Maybe Stone Haven Outfitter. His ability is pretty irrelevant, but he's useful as an Ally bear, plus sometimes he attracts removal due to people expecting his ability to become relevant.
5) What's the worst common that people still play?
I'll interpret this question as "what's the worst common that YOU still play?" because people play all sorts of garbage. Eldrazi Aggressor. Not where I want to be, but I'll go there in desperate times.
6) What was your favorite archetype?
4 color good stuff enabled by a very lucky manabase with double Unknown Shores, double Crumbling Vestige, and an Evolving Wilds.
7) Which archetype wasn't as good as you'd expected?
UR surge
8) Which colors were the best and worst?
best = white worst = blue
9) Thoughts on the format as a whole?
A-/B+ Horrible color power imbalance, but we should expect that by now. From what I've read, limited is balanced around draft not sealed. What made this format great were decent fixing and powerful commons & uncommons. Good aggressive speed without being too fast. I've heard people say it's a draw first format but I don't think I like being on the wrong side of a turn four Lagac, or worse, Relief Captain. Conditional removal spells made games more interesting than they'd be if they weren't conditional - eg Tar Snare used in combat, Immolating Glare only working on defense, Sheer Drop requiring the creature to be tapped, Surge on Boulder Salvo influencing your sequencing. Also although the mana base lottery highly determined your ability to craft good mana, I liked the colorless mana cost for rewarding/punishing players who do/don't know how to build mana bases correctly.
Again although I see this as a net loss as opposed to how it's being sold by Lee, I'm not at all angry because mtgo is in such a great state, with pack prices actually retaining value and the normal sealed leagues being about as good EV (probably better!) than the original 4 pack sealed queues. So I applaud Lee for making these changes that are likely good for WotC's bottom line and acceptable to the players.
I wonder how big the prerelease league will be. Prerelease is a special time when the casualest of casuals come out to play. I thought breaking over 5,000 players was huge for the inaugural sealed league. Are there more?
I DO appreciate that it's in expansion 1 of 2 which means come Eldritch Moon there will only be 2 SOI packs per sealed pool and 1 pack per draft so we'll see it less in the full block format like we see Rolling Thunder less in BFZ+OGW.
Also, this is coming from someone who doesn't like to see all removal pushed to rare. I think that's dumb. But strong, flexible removal with built in card advantage spoils limited games.