I say play Bant control splash black for your drownyards if you're feeling super wirey, sure your thrag's get worse because of the lack of cavern, but who really cares when you kill everything over and over mill them to death (I've tested it works).
I've seen a few things, sadly can't remember where, that talk about profit margins at restaurants before and after you include tips: The short message is that a high percentage of a restaurant's profits go to wait staff in the form of tips, while profits on food are often smaller. Of course there are exceptions to this, but still a pretty cool business design nonetheless!
More or less what everyone has said here is correct. The positives are really good too. She has confided in you, which means she trusts you. She recognizes it as a problem as well, which is good.
The best thing you can do is support her and tell her you care. I had a similar experience with my fiance earlier in our relationship (not cutting but mental illness). The best thing you can do, if you really care about her is to tell her you do and offer to listen, go with her to appointments, which will encourage her to get help, and really make sure she knows that she has worth, you care about her, and that you're there.
Just be certain you are prepared for that sort of heaviness.
Here's the deck I've been mashing, having played a good amount of games with it last night. I think I could scale back the creatures even further for more spells but, I haven't decided just what to do yet. It has performed relatively well though. It stalls just fine and then finally gets there. I honestly want a version that gets 4 more cantrips in there, but I'm not sure how to accomplish that. The rewind in there has been pretty fun, since if you get to link archaeomancer with deadeye it turns into ultimate frustration for your opponent. It's been mentioned in here, but some number of apostle's blessing may be a good idea, although for a while you'll win games off opponents that have no clue what is going on. If you play delver matchups, be sure to put caverns into the deck, they make that matchup not too bad in my experience.
I like this deck a whole lot. You more or less win once the combo sticks, and you have the initiative to stop them from disrupting the combo if you take it. Once the combo is in place, it doesn't matter how you win in my opinion. I think we should be focusing on the best deck to facilate that gameplan.
I should also mention there's a less good version of this deck in esper colors with village bellringer and tezz as part of the combo, just for laughs
Glad to hear about your testing. I'll be quite interested in seeing your list when you get it up.
Yeah, more or less every time a new set comes out, I become interested in making a UR combo deck. I'll get the list up as soon as I can.
I do agree with you on augur somewhat. Visionary is much better in this deck. I do think thragtusk should be in here possibly over huntmaster. One other card that may be interesting is Solemn Simulacrum as it would likely help the deck with its mana hunger. Depending on how much Delver takes a hit with 2013 or if a blue based control deck (other then this) gets a big chunk of the meta, cavern of souls definitely works here too.
Augur of Bolas - If you are playing a version with more dig/cantrips, this allows you to get to them and also soulbond to deadeye on your last iteration to find the spell to kill your opponent.
Archaeomancer Similar if you are using a version with more dig spells however, elvish visionary does this job better. If you play this lots of things become win conditions and opens the possibility of lots of loops if you get the combo. (burn, d-tide shenanigans, thought scour loop, anything you want). Just be sure to announce the mana you are making (8000000000000000 blue first then whatever other colors you want).
Thragtusk has to be in this deck if you are RUG, although I guess huntmaster is very similar.
I've been testing this some as well and it seems very well positioned just in terms of artifact destruction and black removal being the only real way to interact with the combo. Remember too that you don't really need anything to kill them once you've got the combo in place since you can lock them out on upkeep each turn/steal all their permenants for the turn. I'll post my list later when I'm not at work, but it definitely is very fun, very big and at least tier 2 (insomuch as URx control is fringe)!
they win more, then get caught cheating. you then retroactively explain their wins as due to cheating.
its easy to pick out anomalies in a data set if you already know what you're looking for. the hard part is producing a predictive model that can find things you don't know about yet.
Why I said we shouldn't hijack this thread about this topic yet, is the model is yet to be finished. I'm hashing out a multi-stage probit model that will handle this. My whole purpose is to inquire whether there are statistically significant differences between different people's probability of winning given a specific tournament. There's lots of ways to model this and build the panel, so I'm still working it all out. There's big problems with the dataset caused by problems in the game from a tournament design view (intentional drawing is the best example) that I'm figuring out how they need to be specifically addressed as well.
If you have any ideas or stats background that you'd like to contribute, feel free to PM me Metamorph. It's a big project that I do on my limited spare time that feels like the work I do (financial analyst) so it has been slow moving but it will be coming.
@foodchain people perform in an expected manner at least so far. Id expect cheaters to perform substatially better than expected. Once I'm done with everything I'll at least be putting up the results somewhere. Anyone interested in getting it when its done feel free to pm me. Don't want to hijack this thread for this.
But long story short, if you want to play something only in your geographic region competitively that has low variance, magic may not be the game for you. I agree with Steve on his points immensely. Perhaps ptqs are better (I'd doubt this honestly), but the statistical analysis required can't happen as easily there.
Coming from someone who has found themselves in the top 8 of a couple ptq's and also attempts to play some level of competitive chess, I'm going to say that Steve is mostly right. Speaking generally, good players may have some advantage that after lots of games it comes to light since they have more games played which will like lower variation around their expected value (law of large numbers). Sadly, the analysis I've been doing on scg events for normal people isn't as pretty, speaking to Steve's point that the game is highly variable.
On a side note, people that are known cheaters should be able to be spotted very easily in the data. I'm working backwards on coding all the scg open data as a nice little hobby, but it takes forever and I haven't got to bertoncini and Flores just yet.
I personally think green based aggro, delver permutations, rites based control are the big 3. After that Wolf run, Zombies and all the variants, miraculous control to a lesser extent.
The delver bird sun titan meta sums things up really well right now imo.
Just because I told someone their argument is invalid, wrong, badly worded, incorrect or has no logic doesn't imply I am being rude, mean, harsh, or nasty.
It implies that I don't live in magical ****ing rainbow pony land. What did your math teacher tell you when you got your answer wrong? He told you it was wrong.
How the hell am I doing anything differently?
People have this perception, that I am this mean guy, who always hates people for no reason. The reality is that I'm not like that whatsoever, and if something is being done inefficiently and incorrectly, I point it out. For some reason, that makes me a bad guy.
All I have to say in reply to that, is you need to start growing pubic hair, and realize that because someone is wrong, and its being pointed out to them, is not offensive in the slightest.
See not directed at me either, and off topic, but none the less. Pointing out someone is wrong is different than characterizing them as "uneducated." Look at what you said in the last paragraph there. Implying someone need additional hair on their body in order to take insults or your form of "criticism" has nothing to do with your argument that it should be ok to tell people you think they are wrong. It actually just reinforces the fact that you don't know how to provide criticism without devolving into flames and inappropriate comments.
My math profs said I was wrong plenty of times. They never said, "you need to grow some hair where the sun doesn't shine so that you can know how to long divide."
Mono-G ramp is just stronger than Mono-G aggro. Ordinary aggro cannot do much to Dungrove and Thrun other than racing, especially after you fetch a lot of forests using Primeval Titan. Then the Combination of Sword, Garruk PH and Hexproof creatures gives a lot headache to control.
I guess a better question is: Why not more Dungrove in the meta? As for Blade splicer, crushing vines is a real card that I've been testing in the main deck for metas infested with delver. It really is that good against them. That and phyrexian metamorph in your 75 really help the two biggest problems in my opinion (mirran crusader and blade splicer). I like that it mirrors "Avenger mana" as well and hits angel/delver.
I've played a little of the Flores deck as well and think that all of them have similar strengths against delver. Landing a Primetime against them with an elder in play is a difficult race for them to win especially when you are wolfrunning the dungrove. Trample on that guy is definitely living the dream.
Everyone, why is it we're not playing monog right now?
I wouldn't mind being enlightened, as the deck seems to have loads of power, and does seem to have a pretty good matchup against the blue elephant in the room.
Perhaps I don't understand how to play Delver properly or something, but I did get a good thrashing from a monog list in testing. Enlighten me.
But back to the main point. Yes, Delver gets played a lot. It gets played a lot because that's what people want. They want a BEST deck. They want as little variance, in a variance saturated game, as possible. If all the decks are TRULY equal, then nobody REALLY has an advantage. Don't kid yourselves. The pros don't want that, though they can still figure out the next best deck pretty quickly. But until they do, their win percentages go down if their pet deck is blown out of the water via a ban.
I think this may be a slight reply to me. I agree with everything you're saying Steve, I was just pointing out bannings are more beneficial to pros than the general magic player, because they have the time/knowledge/whatever, that makes them able to solve formats more quickly. Creating more instances where a format needs to be solved, creates more opportunities for pros to exploit the advantage they have in doing such a thing to get victories.
I respect Chapin, but his attitude over this ban season was very disappointing. M13 is seeded with cards specifically designed to fight Delver. Thragtusk is one of the most obviously designed hate cards in a long time, made specifically to punish Vapor Snag. People need a chance to play with new cards and see what happens. For someone called "The Innovator," he was far quicker to advocate heavy-handed outside correction instead of working from within the format. It's also ironic that he lost to non-Delver decks when he played it, which shows that it's not some auto-pilot broken deck or so good that it just can't lose.
In general, there emerged this summer a tendency for many of the game's top pros to just assume that bans should be the default position, rather than the other way around. That trend scared the heck out of me, and had me far more worried about the health of the game than Delver itself.
Kudos on this. This is what frightens me as well. This sort of "chiming in" only results in more complaints coming from the general play groups. Heck, my local store from home had one delver player that no one really cared about and once SCG really started picking up the "ban all things" attitude, most of the people at the store started echoing it.
But if you think about it, pros who are particularly good at brewing the "best" deck with a given card pool would definitely push for more bannings. Pros have more time and energy (not to mention knowledge) to apply to solving a format. When everyone is on the same level of knowledge about a format, pros can't as easily abuse their comparative advantage for wins.
I completely agree that this is right for standard. The PTQ and WMCQ I went to this weekend obviously had oodles of delver, but just walking around top tables, it was actually remarkably diverse. On top of that, there's lots of cool permutations floating around. I find that exciting.
I, for one, hate playing a format dominated by whoever has the biggest creature. While each creature deck may have different cards, different P/T, different colors even, what remains the same is that the aggro mirrors are quite boring. At least delver mirrors are highly interactive, have massive decision trees and make for some fun games.
Good job wizards, thank you for showing why Chapin doesn't work for R&D anymore. With all of this the only thing I'm sick of is SCG's recent whine fest on banning discussion. Hopefully the rest of this week won't be the same.
The best thing you can do is support her and tell her you care. I had a similar experience with my fiance earlier in our relationship (not cutting but mental illness). The best thing you can do, if you really care about her is to tell her you do and offer to listen, go with her to appointments, which will encourage her to get help, and really make sure she knows that she has worth, you care about her, and that you're there.
Just be certain you are prepared for that sort of heaviness.
2 Archaeomancer
4 Deadeye Navigator
4 Deceiver Exarch
1 Elvish Visionary
2 Huntmaster of the fells
3 Zealous Conscripts
3 Bonfire of the Damned
3 Galvanic Blast
4 Gilded Lotus
3 Mana Leak
4 Ponder
1 Rewind
2 Desolate Lighthouse
3 Forest
4 Hinterland Harbor
8 Island
3 Mountain
3 Rootbound Crag
4 Sulfur Falls
Here's the deck I've been mashing, having played a good amount of games with it last night. I think I could scale back the creatures even further for more spells but, I haven't decided just what to do yet. It has performed relatively well though. It stalls just fine and then finally gets there. I honestly want a version that gets 4 more cantrips in there, but I'm not sure how to accomplish that. The rewind in there has been pretty fun, since if you get to link archaeomancer with deadeye it turns into ultimate frustration for your opponent. It's been mentioned in here, but some number of apostle's blessing may be a good idea, although for a while you'll win games off opponents that have no clue what is going on. If you play delver matchups, be sure to put caverns into the deck, they make that matchup not too bad in my experience.
I like this deck a whole lot. You more or less win once the combo sticks, and you have the initiative to stop them from disrupting the combo if you take it. Once the combo is in place, it doesn't matter how you win in my opinion. I think we should be focusing on the best deck to facilate that gameplan.
I should also mention there's a less good version of this deck in esper colors with village bellringer and tezz as part of the combo, just for laughs
Yeah, more or less every time a new set comes out, I become interested in making a UR combo deck. I'll get the list up as soon as I can.
I do agree with you on augur somewhat. Visionary is much better in this deck. I do think thragtusk should be in here possibly over huntmaster. One other card that may be interesting is Solemn Simulacrum as it would likely help the deck with its mana hunger. Depending on how much Delver takes a hit with 2013 or if a blue based control deck (other then this) gets a big chunk of the meta, cavern of souls definitely works here too.
Augur of Bolas - If you are playing a version with more dig/cantrips, this allows you to get to them and also soulbond to deadeye on your last iteration to find the spell to kill your opponent.
Archaeomancer Similar if you are using a version with more dig spells however, elvish visionary does this job better. If you play this lots of things become win conditions and opens the possibility of lots of loops if you get the combo. (burn, d-tide shenanigans, thought scour loop, anything you want). Just be sure to announce the mana you are making (8000000000000000 blue first then whatever other colors you want).
Thragtusk has to be in this deck if you are RUG, although I guess huntmaster is very similar.
I've been testing this some as well and it seems very well positioned just in terms of artifact destruction and black removal being the only real way to interact with the combo. Remember too that you don't really need anything to kill them once you've got the combo in place since you can lock them out on upkeep each turn/steal all their permenants for the turn. I'll post my list later when I'm not at work, but it definitely is very fun, very big and at least tier 2 (insomuch as URx control is fringe)!
Why I said we shouldn't hijack this thread about this topic yet, is the model is yet to be finished. I'm hashing out a multi-stage probit model that will handle this. My whole purpose is to inquire whether there are statistically significant differences between different people's probability of winning given a specific tournament. There's lots of ways to model this and build the panel, so I'm still working it all out. There's big problems with the dataset caused by problems in the game from a tournament design view (intentional drawing is the best example) that I'm figuring out how they need to be specifically addressed as well.
If you have any ideas or stats background that you'd like to contribute, feel free to PM me Metamorph. It's a big project that I do on my limited spare time that feels like the work I do (financial analyst) so it has been slow moving but it will be coming.
But long story short, if you want to play something only in your geographic region competitively that has low variance, magic may not be the game for you. I agree with Steve on his points immensely. Perhaps ptqs are better (I'd doubt this honestly), but the statistical analysis required can't happen as easily there.
On a side note, people that are known cheaters should be able to be spotted very easily in the data. I'm working backwards on coding all the scg open data as a nice little hobby, but it takes forever and I haven't got to bertoncini and Flores just yet.
The delver bird sun titan meta sums things up really well right now imo.
See not directed at me either, and off topic, but none the less. Pointing out someone is wrong is different than characterizing them as "uneducated." Look at what you said in the last paragraph there. Implying someone need additional hair on their body in order to take insults or your form of "criticism" has nothing to do with your argument that it should be ok to tell people you think they are wrong. It actually just reinforces the fact that you don't know how to provide criticism without devolving into flames and inappropriate comments.
My math profs said I was wrong plenty of times. They never said, "you need to grow some hair where the sun doesn't shine so that you can know how to long divide."
I guess a better question is: Why not more Dungrove in the meta? As for Blade splicer, crushing vines is a real card that I've been testing in the main deck for metas infested with delver. It really is that good against them. That and phyrexian metamorph in your 75 really help the two biggest problems in my opinion (mirran crusader and blade splicer). I like that it mirrors "Avenger mana" as well and hits angel/delver.
I've played a little of the Flores deck as well and think that all of them have similar strengths against delver. Landing a Primetime against them with an elder in play is a difficult race for them to win especially when you are wolfrunning the dungrove. Trample on that guy is definitely living the dream.
I wouldn't mind being enlightened, as the deck seems to have loads of power, and does seem to have a pretty good matchup against the blue elephant in the room.
Perhaps I don't understand how to play Delver properly or something, but I did get a good thrashing from a monog list in testing. Enlighten me.
I think this may be a slight reply to me. I agree with everything you're saying Steve, I was just pointing out bannings are more beneficial to pros than the general magic player, because they have the time/knowledge/whatever, that makes them able to solve formats more quickly. Creating more instances where a format needs to be solved, creates more opportunities for pros to exploit the advantage they have in doing such a thing to get victories.
Kudos on this. This is what frightens me as well. This sort of "chiming in" only results in more complaints coming from the general play groups. Heck, my local store from home had one delver player that no one really cared about and once SCG really started picking up the "ban all things" attitude, most of the people at the store started echoing it.
But if you think about it, pros who are particularly good at brewing the "best" deck with a given card pool would definitely push for more bannings. Pros have more time and energy (not to mention knowledge) to apply to solving a format. When everyone is on the same level of knowledge about a format, pros can't as easily abuse their comparative advantage for wins.
I, for one, hate playing a format dominated by whoever has the biggest creature. While each creature deck may have different cards, different P/T, different colors even, what remains the same is that the aggro mirrors are quite boring. At least delver mirrors are highly interactive, have massive decision trees and make for some fun games.
Good job wizards, thank you for showing why Chapin doesn't work for R&D anymore. With all of this the only thing I'm sick of is SCG's recent whine fest on banning discussion. Hopefully the rest of this week won't be the same.