MTG Salvation

Quote from movexig

Tell me, since I asked earlier: Do you believe Ancient Tomb gives you card advantage because it taps for 2? If not, why not?

They are if you build your deck taking this into account, playing fewer land and more spells, meaning that on average, you will have more spells in hand at every point in the game. The 2 lands + karoo vs 4 lands is an exact illustration of this: in one case, you got 4 spells in hand, in the other 3. When people were build decks in Ravnica limited, they'd play fewer lands when they had karoos. They counted karoos as 1.5 - 2 lands. When evaluating hands, karoos completely change what hands are keepable, because they act as an additional land.

Same for lightning bolt vs. volcanic hammer. If you build a burn deck, having bolts instead of hammers will let you run less land and more burn because each card cost less. For bolt vs. shocks, 2 bolts = 3 shocks. In the case of spells, I agree the definition is blurrier since if you bolt or shock a creature, the result is the same. For lands, the effect is clearly on the side of card advantage, as they almost always act as pure mana sources and almost never produce more than one mana.

Karoos count as two land drops. Except in narrow cases (boomerang, LD), karoos are virtually two cards. Stop counting cardboard.

If you don't think it's card advantage, then spells with flashback are not card advantage. Look! It's only one card!

Bonfire of the damned. When your opp has no blockers, you don't need no stinkin' wings.

Would you play this card?

OMG TimeWalk 0
You and target opponent draw a card.
Take an extra turn.

When your opponent does nothing because his mana base is badly built, you bascially get to play this spell. Do you want to give this card to your opponent? No? Then play the best manabase you can that will allow you to play your spells every turn. In standard and modern, the shocklands are OMG TW.

Quote from bji

I actually have to disagree here. In 8-4 queues I will almost always choose the cheap threat costing 3 or less over the bomb-ish card that costs 6 or more. That's the "metagame" of 8-4 queues: you have to be competitive at every part of the curve or you will lose to someone who got more early drops out and kept pressing their board position advantage. Since many games don't go beyond turn 6, you need to focus on battling in the 2 - 4 drop slots, mostly 2 - 3 drop.

But in 4-3-2-2 queues, I will often take the bigger bomb over the smaller efficient beater. This is because the "metagame" of 4-3-2-2 is to play more powerful creatures that win the mid and late game, and if you play too many cheap efficient early creatures, you run a greater risk of getting outclassed quickly in turns 4+.

Anyway, that's been my consistent experience ...

I may sound harsh, but from what I've read and especially this post, I think you approach drafting incorrectly. There is no metagame and you should not draft against it.

Drafting is about knowing the deck archetypes and their key components and be able to build up a deck and game plan on the fly. You need to be able to tell if you got a game plan, what are the key pieces you're still missing while evaluating what is going around, what you're passing, etc. From the sound of it, you seem locked into a few modes, and those mode are not even based on the draft content but on some general metagame based on which queue you join.

That doesn't make sense, otherwise you'd be able to join the 8-4 queue, draft a few early blockers and win the long game. That doesn't work. You need a game plan, what will happen in the first few turn, how you'll get reach or card advantage, what is your win-con.

How to pwn oneself.

In 4x AVR sealed. Got a weak pool with only demonic rising as a bomb. So I'm playing RB aggro / rising. My third match opponent is playing WU. The annoying variety, with a lot of life gain and card draw (via the soulbound tandem lookout and seraph of dawn, and flicker and peel from reality trickery). No way I can win on card advantage or life total. So, I sideboard into the milling strategy with UR: reforge the soul, otherworld Atlas and dreadwaters. He beats me down, drawing cards off the lookout and a griff nicely while I accumulate counters on the tome. In his last turn before killing me, I activate the tome in his end step. Then activate it on my turn and play dreadwater. See the mistake? Yeah, I should have played dreadwater and then activate the tome. On his upkeep, he plays Vanishment on his dude to have a card to draw. Doh! I tell him I realized too late I played my stuff in the wrong order. He attacks with everything and deal me exact lethal for the win. Fortunately, I had the fleeting distraction to survive and then actually win on my turn. He was kinda annoyed to lose like this.

So, hum, how to almost pwn oneself. (I won the final game by milling again, this time in the right order. Reforge the soul playable? I wouldn't have thought so.)

Patrol is mostly good in multiple. (Given that the magic P/T is 3.) A single one is not stellar. Bell ringer does not improve in multiple, but can be very good if you got other stuff out. They just don't quite play the same.

I'd cut slitherhead, tower drake and electrikery and add hellhole flailer, pyroconvergence and either grim roustabout, daggerdrome imp or traitorous instinct, probaly the instinct.

Nice report, so I'll just go ahead an nitpick the fact that you seems to have overloaded mizzium mortar thrice.

So many rules changed, you'd be better off reading some introductory material. Just a short list:

1. Mana burn gone.
2. Spells stack in/out. No batches.
3. Lifelink changed.
4. Damage on stack is gone.
5. Attacker / blocker changed and last-time-to-respond before damage changed.
6. Deathtouch vs. trample interactions.
7. Exile zone.
8. Wording changed: Battlefield instead of in play, dies instead of going to graveyard, cast instead of play, ...
9. A lot more abilities have keyword.
10. Ability settings layers changed a couple of time. I give up on anything more complicated that the basic stuff.
11. Planeswalker, equipments, auras.
12. Walls vs. defender.
13. Reach vs. flyers vs. can only be blocker by... I don't even remember what the current ruling is.
14. Fight keyword. Especially fight vs. deathtouch vs. first strike vs. wither vs. poison.
15. New style damage prevention spell.
16. Damage redirection on planeswalker.
17. How damage is assigned is no longer totally under your control (must assign full damage to first blocker, you can't divide damage as you wish anymore... 'cause you know, you can't hurt another guy before you completly kill the first... :/ ).

I'm sure there is plenty more I'm not thinking about now...

Wait, people are still responding to the guy who:

1. Will, mouahahaha!, get his copy for less than MSRP.

2. Use long winded paragraph to hide that all he's saying is that the product is intended for people who will buy the product.

3. Is down on anyone who doesn't annoint the floor of his store?

4. Consider that the only successful limited run product is one that will sell out *and* he can overcharge for.

Jeebsus.

Quote from Phyrre56

I doubt they provided many instructions at all. It's not like those packs were assembled by hand. A bunch of RTR packs went into a machine and guild packs came out the other end. Much like with online shuffler conspiracies, the much more reasonable answer is random chance vs. human meddling.

Packs aren't just placed into boxes according to the rare print run. It's more random than that. The cards are generated that way (in multiple batches) but then they're stacked, sealed, etc. Multiple print runs are getting mixed at some point. It's unpredictable.

For some reasons I envisioned that the same printer that makes the boosters would do the guild packs, feeding the result of one line into the other, thus the requirement to shuffle the packs before putting them in the next machine.

All done by hand. Using humonculus. Supervised by Izzet guild mages and run by the orzhov syndicate. Obv.

I wouldn't be so categorical. Maybe Wizards instructed those building the guild packs to shuffle the boosters around to create more variety.

Guild pack: C-. It increases the disparity between the have and have-not. If your boosters don't match your guild pack, you basically start with one dead pack and one less bomb than everyone else or a stick with a weak deck. It stretches the natural sealed disparity even further. I liked the box, but didn't care much for the achivements nor the dice.

Store: C-. Five stores joined to do a big pre-release, which meant long delays to start the tournament (1h late), people elbows to elbows. I also didn't like playing at midnight while being tired at the other side of town ('cause the five stores got together and thus there was a single location instead of five.)

Games: A. Even with my weak deck, and the fact that I went 1-2, 0-2, drop, I still felt I had a shot in each game. I got bad luck of double-mulligaing twice. The games were still fun and I lost to nice plays, especially by my second-round opponent.

Overall: B-.

For Gatecrash I wish they'd keep the guild concept but found a way to get less variance. I think only having a guild-promo plus guild land and 6 full boosters would have been better. That way, if you ditch your guild during deck building, you only leave one bomb and one land on the side, not a full booster.

Quote from tempesteye

Players don't get banned for no reason. Players get banned as a last resort.
You're only getting half the story here, at most. And WotC's policy is never to comment on disciplinary issues.

I'm not going to speculate as to the OP's particular issue but I can speak to the fact that if you don't do anything wrong you should be fine. And even if you unknowingly buy stolen tickets you are generally ok. They usually just advise you to be more careful.
However, if you are seen to be repeatedly buying stolen tix, or to be continuously trading with accounts that do, you are going to be in for a rough time.
The only time an account gets insta-banned is if a stolen card is used.

Isn't the first paragraph in contrdiction with the second? Wizards never comment on disciplinary action, yet you are sure their action are always justified?

I think this is part of the larger problem with every online services: if you ever run afoul, you get banned and can't ever come back and you lose evrything. Add that with exclusive content distribution and you got a monopoly that can totally exclude you.

On day, the only option will be to buy groceries online and once you get banned, I guess you starve... :/

One card that really suprised me was swift justice. In an azorius build, the extra one power and first strike means your 2/2 and 2/3 flyers suddenly kill their X/3, gain life and live to tell the tale. For a single white mana open, it's a good deal. People were not expecting it.

Precint's Captain got played twice against me and was always good. Obviously, he's much better against Azorius than other guilds. Fortunately, he makes dinky 1/1, so he not too good, just a nice two drop.

voidwielder and dramatic rescue were always giving me warm fuzzy feelings.

One thing that I only realized after incorrectly sideboarding in mizzium coating (sp?) is that overload doesn't just make the spell infinitely better, it converts a targeting spell into and untargeting spell. That alone is busted. Suddenly, those 3/4 hexproof boars are not so hexproof after all. I suppose they volontarily made it so, as the keyword could easily have used "each target" instead of just "each". I guess it was to be expected: overload is (partially) blue and it hose hexproof, which is green. We know which color gets the love.