Things like Crypt+Karakas+Walker and Necro+Sphinx seem to be bugs, it'd be absolutely disgusting if they had actually mapped the sorting machine to put 2 of the most expensive mythics and 2 of the least always together.
Foils really do make or break your value, other than what's already pointed out I opened foil Hydroblast, Mishra's Factory, Counterspell, Daze, Ashnod's Altar, Worn Powerstone and Faithless Looting. Add a couple Wasteland, SDTs, Agents, Mazes, assorted Tutors and a ridiculous ammount of valuable uncommons and this is the best value I've ever gotten out of a box's worth of cards.
Yup.
I'm a casual player, what that means is that I don't play competitive Standard or pretend to hit the PT/MWC and live off Magic, not that I don't spend money on this hobby.
I play Vintage, Legacy, Commander, pauper, used to play Modern until their meddling made me drop it. I have a small house worth of cards and attend any event that supports Vintage or Legacy near me.
Those events are very few and far spaced. I don't get support for the formats I like playing the most all because they made a stupid promise to stupid people who wronged the way to wall street. If I see a guy suddenly show up with a handfull of moxen, I'm not telling on them, they're giving me one more opponent to play my $20K paperweight with unlike WotC.
They're way too busy trying to get the tumblr sjw crowd with diversity pandering and other stupid ***** that already failed for the comic book industry, meanwhile China is actually giving people who want to play eternal formats the cards to play with.
EMA 2 needs to be much more aggressive in their commons and uncommons so that if they just won't print duals because they're greedy hand rubbers, they'll at least make the few legacy decks that don't require RL cards actually easy to build for newer players.
I guess I't easy for people who's interest in MtG is "investment" rather than playing, to ignore when eternal players say their problem with the game isn't that they don't have the cards, but that they don't have enough opponents who have the cards to play against.
I've already given up on people having easy access to the game, WotC doesn't want more players, it wants the captive gambling addicted enfranchised audience and the captive "I buy ever precon in my colors no matter the EV" casual crowd.
Liliana will never be below $100, Goyf will never be below $100, and let's not even talk about duals.
I would be content if they could at least print the ******* pauper staples that haven't had a Modern border print at least, I need a better way to easy people into formats other than standard and playing with near crumbling-to-dust Cuombajj Witches isn't a nice experience no matter how good the deck is.
Richard Garfield on the cost of Magic. He wanted the cards to be collectible "like stamps". To be fair, he talks about price points for cards in the 20 to 50 dollar range. Not 100 - 1000 like we have for so many cards. That being said, secondary market value is a PART OF THE GAME. Easy access? The game could hardly be easier to get into than it is now. Especially since they are planning on a new product and promotion for new players where decks are given away at stores.
Complaining about this seems ridiculous in the face of what was intended here by the very words of game's creator.
Afraid of losing a buck on your "investments"?
What they give away is a hook for standard and it's not very good since the people who get 30 card decks and a booster sit in front of a "money = skill" grognard and get blown off.
Pauper is a nice way to teach new players and players tired of wasting their money on standard that there is another way to play magic and that you can have a very high power deck that costs what a couple of standard rotations would, but that you can keep forever. But we need some of the oldest cards to be reprinted ASAP if we want to be able to build more decks, ******* Oubliette is impossible to find at a fair price and not having it is not playing the deck at it's best which defeats the point of fair competition.
The commander precons also used to help here but went way down in singles quality last year, hope they vindicate themselves this year.
As for paying a *****load being part of the "game", be real, you have to be a failed human beign who puts a lot of his self esteem on showing off what they can afford to feel any accomplishment from paying those prices. I play all formats, my favourites are vintage and legacy, I constantly meet and befriend other eternal players because we are so hard to find you can't afford to not get along. None of us would give away our cards for free, but most of us wouldn't give a ***** if the prices were cut to less than half by reprints or WotC released gold bordered versions of our decks for a pittance, just so we had more people to actually play these thousand dollar paperweights with. A lot of us are even drafting all the EMA we can find despite having playsets of FoW, Wasteland and Karakas, just so these cards won't end in some *****head "investor"s closet instead.
Just as a side note. I'd suggest that if anyone really wants a newer format like say NO RL Legacy. Form up a group and play or check with your LGS to see if they would run an event. Don't wait around for Wizards. And if it catches on they will figure it out eventually and possibly support it. I'm sure there are groups already out there. Organize and have some fun.
I don't know if it's the same for others, but that sounds like the most unwieldy format ever. It's just Legacy with the most enormous banlist ever. I don't have encyclopedic knowledge of the Reserve List, and this proposed format would be a nightmare for me to try and brew with. Just my two cents.
Everyone who plays Legacy knows the RL cards that matter, they're not many:
Dual Lands
Lion's Eye Diamond
The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
Serra's Sanctum
Gaea's Cradle
Null Rod
Grim Monolith
Mox Diamond
Candelabra of Thawnos
Turnabout
Intuition
Metalworker
City of Traitors
Aluren
Phyrexian Dreadnought
Moat
"This land enters the battlefield tapped unless there is a card in your command zone" allows vintage and legacy to use them if they have an emblem, experience counter or poison counter, which would be fun.
It also can't happen because the Reserved List prevents functional reprints.
According to MaRo Types and Supertypes don't beat the resserved list, so no Snow or Legendary duals ever. But any rules text in the box does, and so we have Shocks and Battlelands.
"Land - Plains Island. This enters the battlefield tapped unless it it can produce mana that shares a color with your commander's color identity" and "Land. This has all basic land types that produce a color on your commander's color identity." are viable.
I've already given up on people having easy access to the game, WotC doesn't want more players, it wants the captive gambling addicted enfranchised audience and the captive "I buy ever precon in my colors no matter the EV" casual crowd.
Liliana will never be below $100, Goyf will never be below $100, and let's not even talk about duals.
I would be content if they could at least print the ******* pauper staples that haven't had a Modern border print at least, I need a better way to easy people into formats other than standard and playing with near crumbling-to-dust Cuombajj Witches isn't a nice experience no matter how good the deck is.
Sirius_B - this is not based on testing, but you want as many hands as possible to be "live" when you draw your opener. Shells help with that, but can see the value of the odd amalgam. Out of your 100 games, did the Amalgam win you any (if they return too late and you won, doesn't matter - if they return too late and you loose, its no different to having shell in the deck). If you have 7 hands that are worse, but 15 that turn out better, that's perhaps a reasonable rate. If you have 7 worse and only 7 better, I would question if it's really worth it, since we're already pretty glass-cannon-y.
My gut instinct is that a single amalgam in place of 1 shell might be ok. Because we dredge so agressively, that 1-of will come up more than you think. But, you haven't damaged your opening hands by 7% - it may just be 2%. A 2% decrease in opening hands for a 5% increased win rate would be pretty good. It's all theory, but that's my gut instinct on it. This deck really doesn't want to mulligan, so taking out a bunch of dredgers can't be great for it.
Yes I've won otherwise lost games vs Thalia and Eldrazi that Ichorid and Shadow alone would have never won.
Maybe we finally have an actual sideboard tech that doesn't dilute the strategy. Amalgams for when you want to go aggro, Shells for when you need to combo ASAP.
One request - can we please have a '3 packs' option to mimic what we would open for a draft?
Cheers,
- B
What I do is open my pack, pick, open another, pick the second best card, open one more and pick the third. Then repeat for the next two rounds.
It's not worth going any further but it gives you a bit of an idea where the power/value on your draft would be.
I suspect the print run will not be that small, it's in three languages and local stores at a 3WC are getting dozens. Just snatched three at MSRP to split with friends because a pal's LGS got cancellations on 5/12 boxes, and they've been around for 15-16 months.
People get rightfully annoyed when anyone makes something up for attention and then is found out to be wrong. Let alone if you actually used any rumor to make MTG finance decisions.
Grow a pair. I lost two buildings with the housing bubble burst of 07. Spending a couple dolars on shocklands because a dumbass in a forum said they were spiking soon is not a risky financial decision, it's an impulse buy on a childrens' card game.
Real life investments aren't safe. You don't have a right to your stuff appreciating every year just because, and nobody but you is responsible for buying too much, too little or underselling.
MtG "investors" need to get their little safe space ****ed up something fierce ASAP.
All boxes had 3 mythics and 2 rare/mythic foils:
Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Karakas, Mana Crypt, Foil Vampiric Tutor (mine), Foil Winter Orb.
Dack Fayden, Karakas, Mana Crypt, Foil Maelstrom Wanderer, Foil Imperious Perfect.
Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Karakas, Mana Crypt, Foil Sensei's Divining Top (mine), Foil Unexpectedly Absent (mine).
Maelstrom Wanderer (mine), Necropotence, Sphinx of the Steel Wind, Foil Gamble, Foil Sylvan Library.
Vampiric Tutor, Necropotence, Sphinx of the Steel Wind, Foil Toxic Deluge (mine), Foil Heritage Druid.
Balance, Necropotence, Sphinx of the Steel Wind, Foil Deathrite Shaman (mine), Foil Shardless Agent.
Force of Will, Necropotence, Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Foil Worldgorger Dragon, Foil Mother of Runes.
Natural Order, Worldgorger Dragon, Vampiric Tutor, Foil Wasteland (mine), Foil Control Magic.
Things like Crypt+Karakas+Walker and Necro+Sphinx seem to be bugs, it'd be absolutely disgusting if they had actually mapped the sorting machine to put 2 of the most expensive mythics and 2 of the least always together.
Foils really do make or break your value, other than what's already pointed out I opened foil Hydroblast, Mishra's Factory, Counterspell, Daze, Ashnod's Altar, Worn Powerstone and Faithless Looting. Add a couple Wasteland, SDTs, Agents, Mazes, assorted Tutors and a ridiculous ammount of valuable uncommons and this is the best value I've ever gotten out of a box's worth of cards.
Wear // Tear makes Plateau the better option since it beats the only truly insurmountable enchantment: Chill.
I'm a casual player, what that means is that I don't play competitive Standard or pretend to hit the PT/MWC and live off Magic, not that I don't spend money on this hobby.
I play Vintage, Legacy, Commander, pauper, used to play Modern until their meddling made me drop it. I have a small house worth of cards and attend any event that supports Vintage or Legacy near me.
Those events are very few and far spaced. I don't get support for the formats I like playing the most all because they made a stupid promise to stupid people who wronged the way to wall street. If I see a guy suddenly show up with a handfull of moxen, I'm not telling on them, they're giving me one more opponent to play my $20K paperweight with unlike WotC.
They're way too busy trying to get the tumblr sjw crowd with diversity pandering and other stupid ***** that already failed for the comic book industry, meanwhile China is actually giving people who want to play eternal formats the cards to play with.
EMA 2 needs to be much more aggressive in their commons and uncommons so that if they just won't print duals because they're greedy hand rubbers, they'll at least make the few legacy decks that don't require RL cards actually easy to build for newer players.
Afraid of losing a buck on your "investments"?
What they give away is a hook for standard and it's not very good since the people who get 30 card decks and a booster sit in front of a "money = skill" grognard and get blown off.
Pauper is a nice way to teach new players and players tired of wasting their money on standard that there is another way to play magic and that you can have a very high power deck that costs what a couple of standard rotations would, but that you can keep forever. But we need some of the oldest cards to be reprinted ASAP if we want to be able to build more decks, ******* Oubliette is impossible to find at a fair price and not having it is not playing the deck at it's best which defeats the point of fair competition.
The commander precons also used to help here but went way down in singles quality last year, hope they vindicate themselves this year.
As for paying a *****load being part of the "game", be real, you have to be a failed human beign who puts a lot of his self esteem on showing off what they can afford to feel any accomplishment from paying those prices. I play all formats, my favourites are vintage and legacy, I constantly meet and befriend other eternal players because we are so hard to find you can't afford to not get along. None of us would give away our cards for free, but most of us wouldn't give a ***** if the prices were cut to less than half by reprints or WotC released gold bordered versions of our decks for a pittance, just so we had more people to actually play these thousand dollar paperweights with. A lot of us are even drafting all the EMA we can find despite having playsets of FoW, Wasteland and Karakas, just so these cards won't end in some *****head "investor"s closet instead.
Everyone who plays Legacy knows the RL cards that matter, they're not many:
Dual Lands
Lion's Eye Diamond
The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
Serra's Sanctum
Gaea's Cradle
Null Rod
Grim Monolith
Mox Diamond
Candelabra of Thawnos
Turnabout
Intuition
Metalworker
City of Traitors
Aluren
Phyrexian Dreadnought
Moat
That's it.
According to MaRo Types and Supertypes don't beat the resserved list, so no Snow or Legendary duals ever. But any rules text in the box does, and so we have Shocks and Battlelands.
"Land - Plains Island. This enters the battlefield tapped unless it it can produce mana that shares a color with your commander's color identity" and "Land. This has all basic land types that produce a color on your commander's color identity." are viable.
Liliana will never be below $100, Goyf will never be below $100, and let's not even talk about duals.
I would be content if they could at least print the ******* pauper staples that haven't had a Modern border print at least, I need a better way to easy people into formats other than standard and playing with near crumbling-to-dust Cuombajj Witches isn't a nice experience no matter how good the deck is.
Yes I've won otherwise lost games vs Thalia and Eldrazi that Ichorid and Shadow alone would have never won.
Maybe we finally have an actual sideboard tech that doesn't dilute the strategy. Amalgams for when you want to go aggro, Shells for when you need to combo ASAP.
What I do is open my pack, pick, open another, pick the second best card, open one more and pick the third. Then repeat for the next two rounds.
It's not worth going any further but it gives you a bit of an idea where the power/value on your draft would be.
Grow a pair. I lost two buildings with the housing bubble burst of 07. Spending a couple dolars on shocklands because a dumbass in a forum said they were spiking soon is not a risky financial decision, it's an impulse buy on a childrens' card game.
Real life investments aren't safe. You don't have a right to your stuff appreciating every year just because, and nobody but you is responsible for buying too much, too little or underselling.
MtG "investors" need to get their little safe space ****ed up something fierce ASAP.