Get good at drafting. Only draft swiss or 8-4s. swiss = best guaranteed pay outs because the people who play in them are often really relaly bad. 8-4s are the same as 4-3-2-2s but the long term pack payout is worth the risk of a round 1 blowout.
Sell cards for tix along the way, slowly buy up a constructed deck. pauper is a good format, especially the 2-man queues. That's how people win 200+ packs per week.
then work up to constructed queues and do the dailies. then eventually invitationals. but the money is in the 2 man queues. and daily events.
I believe patrick chapin also commented on the issue of rearranging cards in the library before shuffling. Technically if you shuffle enough, the order of the cards before the library "shouldn't" matter. hence, you're not allowed to.
It's easier to prevent this manipulation than ensure a library is truly random after arranging cards in a certain order. hence the ruling.
Now it's almost like the 3 card formats, or 5 card, or 7 card, craft the perfect hand formats. who can craft the perfect turn 1-2 wins. So everyone is forced to play things like MM and FoW to stop the people who can win before you can.
Humans are capable of most things in life, the question has always been how to make them?
As any good teacher will tell you, it is the inspiration behind the will power. but they will also tell you that it is not easy to inspire. some people 'just change' by themselves or at the advice of others. So cause an epiphany, cause a change--it is only at the limits of the imagination that one can inspire and change the world one person at a time.
It should be the same ruling as any other creature in exile that changes zone. In other words, when the delayed trigger goes to find the creature 'in exile' it can't.
Despite arguing that GCO doesn't 'change' zones, finding it in 'exile' is a different story.
Surgical extraction says "any number of cards with the same name" so if Player A only pulls out 2 copies, and deems it satisfactory, then it is a legal play.
i believe that tip cards are supposed to achieve this purpose, and perhaps if you could collect all the relevant ones, that may work, but otherwise, i suggest printing something? or referring people to the comp rules. just too many rules to put them all succinctly in a cheat sheet.
Regenerate has become more powerful, but we are still in a format where dismemeber and into the roil are the choice removal spells followed by condemns and oust. If anything, River Boa would be a decent choice against U/B Control variants like Thrun, but falls short to the likes of caw-blade which gains a bajillion life anyway with icky Batterskull/SoWaP shenanigans.
White is easily the worst color in this draft format disregarding elesh norn. It is also underdrafted, so if it were a case where you'd be picking many 2/2 fliers or arrests late, then yes, white was worth it.
but out of any card you could open, Karn is the one you want. It is so hard to answer. Sure your opponent may have volition reins or beast within, but those easily answer elesh norn as well. at an effective 10 loyalty, Karn almost acts like a super gideon in limited but lets you play better colors than white.
summary, elesh norn is awesome, karn is better in a vacuum.
I believe each quest triggers separately so you would resolve them independently meaning; you would look at the top card, and then put a counter on (or not), and then do it again for the 2nd quest effectively looking at the same card twice.
It seems more and more like New Phyrexia to be honest. With 5 legendary phyrexians in each color and 5 chancellors that are phyrexian. It feels like there will be 80% phyrexia.
When we argue that things are in perfect competition we forget many factors, one of which is simply the idea of non perfect information. And as such, not ever player knows every store, players pay patronage, some players play for different purposes, etc. etc.
Taken that as a given, What drives up prices are truly the speculators and the card sharks and the consumers of the market who are high risk takers.
Take a simple fact, that if SCG or any other big site puts up a pre-order for a card at 30$ and people buy it, the price will go up because of demand.
Now ask yourself whether or not you were one of those people who would've bought 1x or 2x or 4x of that card. If so, perhaps you like taking risks. If not, then whether or not the card became the next jace or goyf or the last bombo like koth and abyssal (both hyped up incredibly much, not lambasting the cards themselves), it's purely an idea of risk. and doesn't really bother you since you want to buy cards at a stable price anyway. (ie not taking the said risk and losing money despite how much it cost)
Now consider if we knew the probabilities of good cards and bad cards, and had all the calculated expected values of their prices and quantities, then we'd be sitting in a nice perfect market where people wouldn't worry about prices and demand and supply would be in perfect sync.
But as a given, we do not sit there. There is adverse selection when we preorder, there is moral hazard when we buy a card after it 'wins' simply because we're banking on winning ourselves. so simply take the idea of whether or not you want to risk it, and buy the card, or try to be innovative. There will always be a number of risk takers and speculators out there, so unless someone invents some kind of magic insurance on card investments, it seems unlikely this is the fault of the big companies (who like some posts describe, do us a favor instead of making us crack box after box looking for a playset) even though they do make money selling to us.
So just really ask yourself, did you want to try and buy enough boxes to crack 4 Jace TMS which is probably at an absolute minimum of 3 boxes (realistically taking print runs into account) or up to 6-7 boxes rather than pay what you did for a playset.
Sell cards for tix along the way, slowly buy up a constructed deck. pauper is a good format, especially the 2-man queues. That's how people win 200+ packs per week.
then work up to constructed queues and do the dailies. then eventually invitationals. but the money is in the 2 man queues. and daily events.
It's easier to prevent this manipulation than ensure a library is truly random after arranging cards in a certain order. hence the ruling.
As any good teacher will tell you, it is the inspiration behind the will power. but they will also tell you that it is not easy to inspire. some people 'just change' by themselves or at the advice of others. So cause an epiphany, cause a change--it is only at the limits of the imagination that one can inspire and change the world one person at a time.
Despite arguing that GCO doesn't 'change' zones, finding it in 'exile' is a different story.
Good starting point is looking at the Ravnica Guilds, the Invasion/shards of alara 'wedges/shards' for themes within those color combinations.
but out of any card you could open, Karn is the one you want. It is so hard to answer. Sure your opponent may have volition reins or beast within, but those easily answer elesh norn as well. at an effective 10 loyalty, Karn almost acts like a super gideon in limited but lets you play better colors than white.
summary, elesh norn is awesome, karn is better in a vacuum.
Taken that as a given, What drives up prices are truly the speculators and the card sharks and the consumers of the market who are high risk takers.
Take a simple fact, that if SCG or any other big site puts up a pre-order for a card at 30$ and people buy it, the price will go up because of demand.
Now ask yourself whether or not you were one of those people who would've bought 1x or 2x or 4x of that card. If so, perhaps you like taking risks. If not, then whether or not the card became the next jace or goyf or the last bombo like koth and abyssal (both hyped up incredibly much, not lambasting the cards themselves), it's purely an idea of risk. and doesn't really bother you since you want to buy cards at a stable price anyway. (ie not taking the said risk and losing money despite how much it cost)
Now consider if we knew the probabilities of good cards and bad cards, and had all the calculated expected values of their prices and quantities, then we'd be sitting in a nice perfect market where people wouldn't worry about prices and demand and supply would be in perfect sync.
But as a given, we do not sit there. There is adverse selection when we preorder, there is moral hazard when we buy a card after it 'wins' simply because we're banking on winning ourselves. so simply take the idea of whether or not you want to risk it, and buy the card, or try to be innovative. There will always be a number of risk takers and speculators out there, so unless someone invents some kind of magic insurance on card investments, it seems unlikely this is the fault of the big companies (who like some posts describe, do us a favor instead of making us crack box after box looking for a playset) even though they do make money selling to us.
So just really ask yourself, did you want to try and buy enough boxes to crack 4 Jace TMS which is probably at an absolute minimum of 3 boxes (realistically taking print runs into account) or up to 6-7 boxes rather than pay what you did for a playset.