MTG Salvation

Good of you to bump this, FSM! My first post here in 3 years. Yeah, I'm in the same boat as you guys, I suppose, but I notice it's not just MTGS and forums that have become outdated, but I've also mostly kind of grown away from arguing with random people on the internet... I get some relapses now and then on Reddit, I suppose, but all-in-all I don't have the same need to discuss MTG (or other related things) as I did when I was a teen or in my early 20s. But I'll miss this site - I've been a member here for almost half my life! I joined when I was 15; now I'm 30.

Take care, y'all

Congratulations!

Yuuya Watanabe has been known to hit the 2000s regularly (I know this from screenshots posted to Twitter on occasion). My personal best is 1993, which I hit during the previous round of TPF flashback drafts:I was already around 1900, and when TPF drafts began, I won 33 matches in a row.

Quote from Sene »

I told the other mods a while back, but I figured it'd be a good idea to post about it here too: I've been gone for a few weeks, and I'll be gone a couple more. Work stuff. February-March are usually the busiest months for me, and I don't have much time for Magic or forums then. Additionally, the local game store I usually go to for prereleases temporarily closed down sometime last year, so I didn't play the OGW prerelease, and since I was fairly busy with work by the time it was released on Modo, I've pretty much missed out on the set altogether. However, by the time Shadows over Innistrad rolls around, I'm back to a normal work schedule, and my LGS, re-opened, will be hosting a prerelease I can attend, so expect me back in a few weeks!

In the meantime, you can direct all your hate mail at Hardened

Follow-up on this: No local prerelease after all, declining interest in the site, and I've shipped the other mods my resignation. This is far from the first time; I've been on-and-off as a Limited mod here for many years at this point, and I might be back when I have more to offer than I do right now (or have lately).

Good job, Hardened!

It is inelegant in draft, certainly. I played in several limited GPs/PTs during the previous Innistrad block, and the awkward thing was how it made certain seats better than others. Like, if you were sitting at the edge of a rectangular table (this has been the norm for these events for a while; back in the day we'd have round tables for drafts), passing to the player in front of you, you were in a much worse shape than the guy you pass to, since they could easily see the DFCs of the ones passing in their direction, while you couldn't. That said, it's what we have to work with at local level, and I assume at GPs and PPTQs/RPTQs too, so it's a definite part of the format, even if they've decided that they don't want it for the PT.

SOI draft #4 (third 3-0). Not my kind of deck, but it did crush, and winning is fun.
Building the deck was really hard; there were so many good cards I had access to. I wanted to play the tricks, I wanted to play all the 3-drops, I wanted to play the Hope Against Hope, but I had to try to have a semblance of a curve and a sufficient number of creatures. I only ran 13 guys, but I figured that the two Devil spells and Skin Invasion all kinda counted too. I boarded in the 5/4 in a couple of matches as another big dumb guy at the top of my curve.

P1P1: Avacynian Missionaries
MVP: The Fiery Tempers. Had them at clutch moments all draft. Had I drawn it more often, I suspect Slayer's Plate would have been the MVP; that thing was really brutal in the one game I had it.
Underperformers: Skin Invasion was pretty derpy most of the time I drew it. My dudes were not good enough as blockers to eat their attackers. In one of the games, I thought it was going to be great, but my opponent played Gone Missing on it to slow me down quite significantly.
Game record: 6-0. One game was close; I thought I was going to lose game 1 in the finals to a white-black deck (life total was 13-1 in my opponent's favor and I was behind on board), but my Pious Evangel won the game back for me.

I haven't quite decided if I can maindeck this card or not. I think it might be a maindeck card (and I have maindecked it once or twice), but I'm not sure - it's often really good against white, as they tend to have small fliers and cards such as the 3/1 dog, but in some matchups it really doesn't do a whole lot. It does depend on your deck too, of course; I think it's probably better in decks where you have a number of high toughness creatures; for example, Dual Shot lets you attack with your 2/4 into an opposing 2/3 and kill it. What are your experiences with this card?

Oh, and for value:

When I first saw this card, I was reminded of Coastline Chimera from Theros, which was a decidedly mediocre card. So although I have a propensity for cards like this, I didn't have super high hopes for Silent Observer. But after playing it a number of times so far, I've been quite impressed; it seems to match up really well against the threats in the format. Not only are the creatures generally not five power, the fliers tend to be X/1s like spirit tokens, Nibilis of Dusk, or Crow of Dark Tidings; additionally, having just 1 power is actually key against one of the format's abilities (skulk). So I've been jamming these in all my non-aggro decks (i.e. all of them; let's not kid ourselves here), and been very happy with it.

Thoughts on the card? How high does it rank among the blue commons?

SOI draft #3. This deck was so much fun. Lots of neat little synergies. I had hoped to get a Call the Bloodline, so I had to make due without it, but it went fine.
MVP: Tooth Collector. Nailed a card with it every time. Sometimes by sniping an X/1, sometimes by attacking my 2/4 or whatnot into their 2/3.
Underperformers: Stallion of Ashmouth. When I had delirium, I had better things to do with my mana than screwing around with this. It's probably decent usually, but in this deck, I had too much other stuff going on.
Game record: 6-2. Lost one to color screw, another to the six mana wrath (and he got an Angel).

Quote from Raver »

Here's my personal take on it, and obviously I could be wrong if the numbers state otherwise. MTGS is a little of everything but master of none.

This is pretty much exactly right. MTGS used to be the main hub for news and rumors, but this might very well be Reddit these days.

MTGS also used to have a sprawling "outside Magic"-community many years ago; this has all but disappeared. On the other hand, some areas of the forum (like Commander and Modern) are possibly healthier than ever, from what I've heard - I don't visit those areas myself.

Team D's deck:
I can't comment on the draft too much, as I was absent for the first half of it. But it looks okay..?

I 3-0'd my first SOI draft with UR Control.
The deck seemed alright. Not sure if this is an actual archetype, though. I first-picked the Angel and went from there; I got tempted into blue with some reasonable mid-pack pickups like the 3/3 flash flier and Just the Wind (after flirting with black). Had a very tough match against a red-green Werewolf deck that played turn 3 Tireless Tracker each game, but I managed to burn him out in game three in the face of a very menacing Wolf of Devil's Breach.

MVP: The Wild-Field Scarecrows
Underperformers: Broken Concentration. Cancel did not seem well positioned at all. Boarded it out in round 1 and 2.
Game record: 6-2

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.