MTG Salvation

What was ROE sealed like? I started playing limited seriously in M11 so I never played ROE sealed.

In general I much prefer sealed over draft. I'm worried that sets where cards' values fluctuate wildly with context make for bad sealed environments, because you don't get to sculpt your pool around any one archetype like you do in draft. (For a Magic Origins example, think of how bad Sylvan Messenger is in sealed). Did ROE sealed suffer from this effect, or did it turn out okay?

This is without exaggeration the worst Origins sealed pool I've seen yet. You're not going to win fighting fair because your card quality is so low, so you probably want to go small and play all of the Bonded Constructs, which leads to playing Chief of the Foundry, and of course Runed Servitor is good enough to not need special justification to play. You will also want to play War Horn for this aggro plan. From there I'm not sure where to go. Every color is terrible. Red is probably correct because it supplies tokens with Gearcrafter and Dragon Fodder and more unplayable 1/1s with Bellows Lizards. You could pair red with either blue or green. Green has more "real" cards - though still not many - and gives potential for random Might of the Masses wins. Blue gives a more general plan of tempo: drop a bunch of normally unplayable garbage and tap/bounce your opponents' creatures so their real cards never get a chance to block your x/1s. Turn to Frog is probably not worth it in that UR deck because you will have so many X/1s.

Yeah, I'd go UR and drop after my first round loss.

A weak card like this would normally turn me off. I would complain, why not just print one of those 2/2s that sac to kill an enchantment? There's been plenty of precedent. But in this format, white is already so strong, and 2/2s for two are extra important in any color to block early Renown creatures, so I'm glad we have this garbage in place of another main deck worthy white card.

It's fun to try to draft the worst deck possible then see what it autobuilds.

Gotta be careful not to accidentally draft Healing Hands + Tainted Remedy combo.

Quote from Limited CCM Hydra »

This is one of those cards that really makes me wonder if WotC is run by monkeys. This card is so fundamentally bad that I don't see how it could have made it through any reasonable development process. It's the kind of card that sounds like someone came up with it in a brainstorming session, and everyone went "ooh, nice" and then they just never actually tested it or thought about it again. This is the closest they've come to printing a vanilla 1/1 for 1 that they've done in years, and they put it at rare, as a spiritual successor to one of the most successful cards of all time. That cannot possibly be what they intended.

Unplayable trash.

I get the opposite feeling. I see a card that started off as too good - maybe its first iteration had vigilance before it becomes renown. But it was too strong so they nerfed it into an awkward card that doesn't fit in any strategy.

I'd like to know if they published their internal testing comments on this card to see if my hunch is correct.

I'll seize this opportunity to take a melancholy turn.

Gifts Ungiven

How about Modern? Standard is not the best gauge. It's like Cube - plenty of people will play it no matter what. But if you look at Modern, card prices have fallen for the staples of the most popular decks and that could indicate a drop in interest.

Lots of conflating factors though. Back to Standard, there are preliminary ptqs and a ptq this weekend online. If you are a Standard player, there's hardly any reason to play a Daily instead of a PPTQ since the PPTQ has actual prizes.

Might be a good idea to run decks with all different basic lands so that if you ship one particular land to the bottom then immediately draw it you can confirm that it bugged out and file for comp.

I don't even want [limited] leagues. They will have a negative effect on pack prices because they will consume fewer packs than drafts or sealed events. If you don't see this, think of it this way: in every normal sealed event, each player opens 6 packs and plays up to 4 matches. In leagues, you will open 6 packs, play as many matches as you want, then instead of having to consume 6 more packs to play again, you only open 1, then play as many matches as you want again, repeat. The average number of packs annihilated per match will be much lower compared to a sealed or draft. The only way to get around this would be to have awful prizes compared to other limited options, and that's obviously not a satisfactory solution.

The nightmare would be limited leagues running mostly on Play Points, entering with pp and giving pp as prizes, cannibalizing demand for real packs while giving nothing of tradeable value to the participants, just like the Phantom Sealed queues largely stole the playerbase of the 4 pack sealed queues, which lead to that much less consumption of packs.

Yes you can share cards between decks. The only exception is that you cannot "double queue" with two different decks if they share cards and you don't own the sum of cards. If you are only playing one deck at a time, you'll be fine sharing one play set.

2-mans are not great value under the new scheme but they're still better value than before.

Not for me. And for exactly this reason:

You didn't have to play 2-mans then

Dragons of Tarkir boosters came close to 4 tix 2-3 weeks ago. I haven't played constructed in a long time (since Theros Block Constructed was a thing). I was excited that Dragons was worth something so I bought a deck and played 2-mans for a week. I earned 30 tickets that week. Not much in real world value, but if the new play point system were already in place, I would have made only about a third of that.

Oh wait, that's not right. I would have made $0. Because I would never have bought in. Because the incentive would not have been enough to motivate me. I had a certain threshold that I waited for, and the new system permanently locks in the value of the 2 man queue below my threshold. This is not a better value to me. Now instead of playing every blue moon when the economy is good (note that historically, core set boosters have done a better job holding closer to 4 tix than other expansions, even after the redemption change, so I was looking forward to not weeks but months of play while Origins was the prize), I'll never play 2 mans in the new system. And I won't play Dailies or 8 mans either.

I would rather have volatility with the option to not play when things are not worth it than permanent garbage.

I don't think Play Points are coming to nonphantom queues until all the changes take place on August 12th.

By wishful thinking alone, I hope traps return. Trapmaker's Snare will be strong enough for Modern play if the right trap is made.

Ever-recurring comment that I'd be playing in Limited PPTQs right now if packs were worth a reasonable amount (or if the events allowed entry with packs).