Rules question on the Angel. Would you get a creature back if you have one in your yard but your opponent doesn't?
Yes.
The wording doesn't require you to put an opponent's creature into play if they don't have one,
and not doing so doesn't prevent them from having to pick a creature which you can elect to return.
OK, thank you, that is what I figured, but the wording threw me off for a moment.
For example, run surge of righteousness main to answer mantis (plus anafenza, rhino and shambling vent in abzan) and wait to answer jace in turn 4 with utter end later on. Or you can answer jace efficiently (ultimate price is the only 2 mana removal for jace in esper colors) and wait to answer a rider later on. I'm not sure what the right answer is: on the one hand, i want to keep my life total high, but on the other, the card advantage from a flipped jace can be hard to overcome (and once he flips we don't have many answers to him).
I think that is what Reid is ultimately doing. Allowing them Jace is a lot more dangerous than allowing a hit in from a Rider. In the long run, you have ways to gain back life, but with the amout of 2-for-1 action in the Jeskai decks, the CA is going to be hard to grind out. It will probably cost you a couple games here or there, but that's what we have to work with.
The other option is to run Complete Disregard which sucks, but at least it does what you need it to do, even if it's very inefficient. I also just realized that I misread Horribly Awry and thought it was 4 or greater CMC, which made me wonder why anyone would ever run it. Makes more sense when you actually RTFC.
In his Deck Tech video, which I couldn't find a link to at the moment, he does say that Painful Trths was not ideal and he didn't like it much. Treasure Cruise taxes the yard too much with Jace and Dig (and Cut), so Truths was the next available option. I think the Silumgar's Command is great, flashing that back with Jace is really high-value. I also really like the second Shambling Vent, it's great to help you stabilize with the Lifelink.
I think going forward, on the "Pro level" you are going to keep seeing Reid do well with this, but not many others, the deck really fit his style, which I don't think many will want to try to emulate.
I've only ever experienced this enforced once, at Eternal Weekend 2013. It was Joel Lim versus Greg Fenton in the semifinals of the Vintage Champs. Joel had absolutely no intention of shuffling Greg's deck out of respect for the fact that there was Alpha and Beta power in the deck, plus FBB duals (also, Joel and Greg are friends). Greg also has never cut or shuffled any opponent's deck in all the years I've known him. Abe (I am pretty sure it was him) told both that they had to shuffle their opponent's decks or they'd both be DQed.
I watched the least interested, most dispassionate shuffling ever that day. I have a pretty good idea why this was done in this case, because earlier in that day there were accusations of shenanigans made and one person made to swap a card out. In the end, I think this rule is often viewed as a waste of time and so not often enforced. Why is it there then? Well, so that in the event it needs to be enforced, it's on the books.
To me it's like laws saying you need to drive with both hands on the steering wheel. Sure, it's a law, yet there is next to no chance you ever get pulled over for not following it, unless there is something else going on. At least that's how it seems to me.
If you watch Ried and Owen's Stand Super League Match I think that it is a good idea to be playing more Dispels, possibly even 4 at this point. Looking at Owen's list (which, mind you, tons of people will be copying) he only plays 2 Sorceries and a whopping 19 Instants. Frankly, the game nearly hinges on being able to shut down the opponent's Dig Through Times. Owen also plays 3 Distainful Stroke in the board, which is very good versus these Esper lists. In the end, you need to be able to win the Instant war, which is going to be rough when your opponent's counter-magic is more efficient than yours.
Also, I think that a couple Complete Disregard would be good for Ried's list. In that match, you can see that Mantis Rider is a pain, as I would imagine Hangerback is as well. I'm really interested in mashing up Jim Davis' list and Ried's.
Jim said today in his SCG article that he is very interested in adding Mage-Ring Network to his deck, which I think is a really good idea, because Secure the Wastes off only two lands can be huge.
What makes Clash of Wills better than Calculated Dismissal or Spell Shrivel, unless it is meant purely as a late game counter? I've been out of standard for a few years so I'm getting back into the swing of card evaluation and U/B/x control is my favorite deck to play.
Because you can counter something on turn 2.
Jim Davis:
Our counterspell suite is rather robust, as the deck sports the full playset of Clash of Wills. Clash of Wills was not a major player in the previous format because of how manabases were constructed. With so many Temples and other enter-the-battlefield-tapped lands, it was simply too difficult to keep the proper mana open for Clash of Wills for what your opponent may play while also developing your own mana.
This has completely changed, as this deck has only a scant four lands in it that enter the battlefield tapped.
Because you can so reliably cast it up the curve, Clash of Wills is a fantastic answer to most of the format's threats. Clash of Wills is the card that will bridge the gap for you to the midgame. Turn-two counterspells are so important that we even have a fifth in Horribly Awry.
Lastly, our Dissolve replacement also does a nice job as one of our win conditions as well. Scatter to the Winds is going to be a Cancel 95% of the time, and that's just fine. I've cast many Cancels in my day, and it really isn't that bad. The fact that it has extra utility is just gravy.
I usually don't play Standard, but we've been struggling to fire Legacy and I happen to have most of the deck already (bought Jaces when they were low). I think I want to try to make an amalgam of Reid Duke's list (mostly his mana base) and Jim Davis' above list. Then again, I really like the simplicity of Jim's mana as well. I think that at least one Mage-Ring Network would probably be good with Secure the Wastes though, because it can let you get a "second" land drop, or substitute for a missed one.
I'll see what I can scrape some cards together to make in case our Legacy event doesn't fire.
Still better than Basandra, Battle Seraph, so I guess we can at least say they are making progress. It's like a Skullbriar, the Walking Grave only beefier. It isn't as if Red is low on ways to give Haste anyway.
Wait, actually Kalemne, Disciple of Iroas is sort of good with Basandra...and, of course, by good I mean less horrible.
EDIT(2): A new implementation of the art generator can be found here. Uses a different underlying model (I think the one the authors used?), rather than deep dream, which has to be specially calibrated to work. This one can run either on the CPU or GPU, so for those of you who don't have a good GPU, you can still generate artwork on your machine. Not sure whether this implementation scales better than the previous one I showed you, I'll have to try it out and see.
I have a desktop at home that is an I7 with 16 gigs of RAM and a Radeon 7870 (2 GB) which I used (in my former life) for gaming. I'm really interested in these art mergers, or whatever they are being called. Problem is, I know essentially nothing of programming (we used to write dumb C++ programs in highschool) and certainly nothing about Deep Neural Networks. I would need someone to explain how to set it up to me, as if I was an idiot (because I essentially am).
I'd love to be able to set up that machine to possibly work on some of these, possibly that hardware could yield high resolution results? The computer sits day in and day out with nothing to do really, if I could master scripts I could set it to run nearly forever (I have another desktop we use as the house computer).
This probably is not worth anyone's time, so I'll keep an eye on this thread if maybe something comes up that I could implement with my zero knowledge though.
Naw, it's definitely worth everyone's time! I appreciate you being willing to come forward and offer your computational resources.
One limitation would be that Radeon 7870 is an AMD product and the frameworks that we're working with prefer to use Nvidia GPUs. That means that the computation would have to be done CPU-side. You do have a lot of RAM, which definitely helps, but I tried the image generation code that can supposedly run in a CPU-only mode and I'm running into some issues with it. To be fair, the code came out just 11 hours ago, so it's probably a simple bug that will get resolved in the days ahead. If and when that happens, I'd be happy to give you some instructions on how to set things up on your end. I'm sure you'd find the experience of churning out new works by Picasso and Leonardo da Vinci as thrilling as I have.
As for me, I hope to get my new machine set up on Wednesday. Hopefully I'll be able to get better images out of that one.
In theory, we should be able to break this task down in a way that it can run on a modest GPU, such as by chunking up the image, doing transformations on each piece, and then intelligently stitching the results together, rather than trying to force a massive image through all at once, but the code to do that isn't in place. However, I'm sure people will release more efficient ways of doing this sort of thing down the road.
I had feared that would be the case. Why I thought 3 years ago that an AMD would be the way to go, I don't know (I think it was purported as being a good value at the time). How could I not have forseen this!
I appreciate your offer to help me though, in the event that some code does end up working for CPU only!
EDIT(2): A new implementation of the art generator can be found here. Uses a different underlying model (I think the one the authors used?), rather than deep dream, which has to be specially calibrated to work. This one can run either on the CPU or GPU, so for those of you who don't have a good GPU, you can still generate artwork on your machine. Not sure whether this implementation scales better than the previous one I showed you, I'll have to try it out and see.
I have a desktop at home that is an I7 with 16 gigs of RAM and a Radeon 7870 (2 GB) which I used (in my former life) for gaming. I'm really interested in these art mergers, or whatever they are being called. Problem is, I know essentially nothing of programming (we used to write dumb C++ programs in highschool) and certainly nothing about Deep Neural Networks. I would need someone to explain how to set it up to me, as if I was an idiot (because I essentially am).
I'd love to be able to set up that machine to possibly work on some of these, possibly that hardware could yield high resolution results? The computer sits day in and day out with nothing to do really, if I could master scripts I could set it to run nearly forever (I have another desktop we use as the house computer).
This probably is not worth anyone's time, so I'll keep an eye on this thread if maybe something comes up that I could implement with my zero knowledge though.
Because if it wasn't you could cast him for 10 off a charged up Mage-Ring Network. As it is with the Diamonds there, you couldn't.
I am partial to EpiCycle1's idea, because it gives a good reason why certain cards were made with Devoid.
OK, thank you, that is what I figured, but the wording threw me off for a moment.
I think that is what Reid is ultimately doing. Allowing them Jace is a lot more dangerous than allowing a hit in from a Rider. In the long run, you have ways to gain back life, but with the amout of 2-for-1 action in the Jeskai decks, the CA is going to be hard to grind out. It will probably cost you a couple games here or there, but that's what we have to work with.
The other option is to run Complete Disregard which sucks, but at least it does what you need it to do, even if it's very inefficient. I also just realized that I misread Horribly Awry and thought it was 4 or greater CMC, which made me wonder why anyone would ever run it. Makes more sense when you actually RTFC.
2 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
Creature (5)
4 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
1 Arashin Cleric
Sorcery (3)
1 Painful Truths
2 Planar Outburst
Instant (23)
2 Ultimate Price
2 Anticipate
4 Clash of Wills
1 Negate
1 Scatter to the Winds
4 Ojutai's Command
2 Utter End
1 Silumgar's Command
2 Murderous Cut
4 Dig Through Time
1 Haven of the Spirit Dragon
2 Mage-Ring Network
2 Shambling Vent
1 Plains
1 Swamp
4 Island
1 Windswept Heath
1 Bloodstained Mire
4 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
3 Prairie Stream
3 Sunken Hollow
3 Arashin Cleric
1 Negate
3 Surge of Righteousness
2 Duress
2 Dispel
2 Dragonlord Silumgar
1 Dragonlord Ojutai
1 Foul-Tongue Invocation
Reid Duke made Top 8 at the GP with a few changes from his PT/SSL list. You can read what he says about the list here.
The main changes he made for the GP seem to be:
+1 Island
+1 Shambling Vent
-1 Mage-Ring Network
-1 Windswept Heath
-1 Scatter to the Winds
-1 Arashin Cleric
-1 Treasure Cruise
-1 Ultimate Price
+1 Murderous Cut
+1 Silumgar's Command
+1 Negate
+1 Painful Truths
In his Deck Tech video, which I couldn't find a link to at the moment, he does say that Painful Trths was not ideal and he didn't like it much. Treasure Cruise taxes the yard too much with Jace and Dig (and Cut), so Truths was the next available option. I think the Silumgar's Command is great, flashing that back with Jace is really high-value. I also really like the second Shambling Vent, it's great to help you stabilize with the Lifelink.
I think going forward, on the "Pro level" you are going to keep seeing Reid do well with this, but not many others, the deck really fit his style, which I don't think many will want to try to emulate.
I watched the least interested, most dispassionate shuffling ever that day. I have a pretty good idea why this was done in this case, because earlier in that day there were accusations of shenanigans made and one person made to swap a card out. In the end, I think this rule is often viewed as a waste of time and so not often enforced. Why is it there then? Well, so that in the event it needs to be enforced, it's on the books.
To me it's like laws saying you need to drive with both hands on the steering wheel. Sure, it's a law, yet there is next to no chance you ever get pulled over for not following it, unless there is something else going on. At least that's how it seems to me.
Also, I think that a couple Complete Disregard would be good for Ried's list. In that match, you can see that Mantis Rider is a pain, as I would imagine Hangerback is as well. I'm really interested in mashing up Jim Davis' list and Ried's.
Jim said today in his SCG article that he is very interested in adding Mage-Ring Network to his deck, which I think is a really good idea, because Secure the Wastes off only two lands can be huge.
Because you can counter something on turn 2.
Jim Davis:
5 Island
1 Plains
1 Swamp
1 Blighted Fen
4 Evolving Wilds
4 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
4 Prairie Stream
3 Sunken Hollow
4 Clash of Wills
3 Complete Disregard
4 Dig Through Time
1 Disdainful Stroke
1 Horribly Awry
1 Murderous Cut
4 Ojutai's Command
4 Scatter to the Winds
2 Secure the Wastes
1 Ultimate Price
2 Utter End
2 Planar Outburst
3 Arashin Cleric
2 Monastery Mentor
2 Dispel
2 Surge of Righteousness
2 Ultimate Price
1 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
3 Duress
I usually don't play Standard, but we've been struggling to fire Legacy and I happen to have most of the deck already (bought Jaces when they were low). I think I want to try to make an amalgam of Reid Duke's list (mostly his mana base) and Jim Davis' above list. Then again, I really like the simplicity of Jim's mana as well. I think that at least one Mage-Ring Network would probably be good with Secure the Wastes though, because it can let you get a "second" land drop, or substitute for a missed one.
I'll see what I can scrape some cards together to make in case our Legacy event doesn't fire.
Wait, actually Kalemne, Disciple of Iroas is sort of good with Basandra...and, of course, by good I mean less horrible.
I had feared that would be the case. Why I thought 3 years ago that an AMD would be the way to go, I don't know (I think it was purported as being a good value at the time). How could I not have forseen this!
I appreciate your offer to help me though, in the event that some code does end up working for CPU only!
I have a desktop at home that is an I7 with 16 gigs of RAM and a Radeon 7870 (2 GB) which I used (in my former life) for gaming. I'm really interested in these art mergers, or whatever they are being called. Problem is, I know essentially nothing of programming (we used to write dumb C++ programs in highschool) and certainly nothing about Deep Neural Networks. I would need someone to explain how to set it up to me, as if I was an idiot (because I essentially am).
I'd love to be able to set up that machine to possibly work on some of these, possibly that hardware could yield high resolution results? The computer sits day in and day out with nothing to do really, if I could master scripts I could set it to run nearly forever (I have another desktop we use as the house computer).
This probably is not worth anyone's time, so I'll keep an eye on this thread if maybe something comes up that I could implement with my zero knowledge though.
OK, just me getting old then. Carry on, carry on.
I will try to pick up a pack of hyper-mattes when I go back to the shop and then compare. It will probably be 2 weeks though.