MTG Salvation

Quote from Khaospawn

So I guess on the Daily they've done Kaalia's origin story. Check it out. Pretty interesting.

It's interesting that she figured out a way to command demons, because it was a demon who ruined her life utterly.

Well, I have no intention of putting Nefarox into a Kaalia deck after this story. That would feel wrong. The next rumble: Kaalia vs. Nefarox.

Are there any guidelines for determining how many lands to put into a Commander/EDH deck? I have trouble figuring out if I should put more or fewer lands in a deck.

I have a Kaalia of the Vast deck and the majority of my spells (creatures and non-creatures) fall around 4-6 CMC.

I just tried a 3-way game with my Knights deck with the Wrath of God x2 and Brave the Elements. One of my opponents was using a modified version of my Soldiers deck.

The Wrath of God worked beautifully after I established a 2x Knight Exemplar + 1 Phyrexian Metamorph lockdown. Knight of the Reliquary's ability was used to bring a Sejeri Steppe onto the battlefield to stop an Oblivion Ring. Brave the Elements stopped a Grab the Reigns against my Knight Exemplar. The deck worked perfectly in this case.

It means <> cards can be more powerful than cards that only require generic mana. Currently, colorless cards with generic-only mana costs can be played in any deck without any cost to the mana. This makes colorless cards tricky to design. If they're good, like Masticore and Hangarback Walker, they'll appear all over the place. Having colorless-only costs does more or less introduce a 6th color. You'll have to adjust your manabase to play <> cards, just like you would to splash black or any other color.

<> is colorless. Occam's Razor folks.

I'm very excited to see colorless become an actual "tribe" after all these years.

By casting and then choosing you're proposing a shortcut.
If your opponent says "In response, unsummon $thing." you are allowed to change your choices because he didn't accept the shortcut.

Just got into this game via some Magic friends.

I'm probably going to play a budget Vlad Darkness build with Bows and Arthurs.

Seems fun, intuitive, with a sweet mana system.

The art is... tasteless? Honestly, maybe I just don't get fanboy culture.

Anyway, the new set looks sweet with a lot of cool cards that I would definitely play.

For anything on the stack to resolve, every player must pass priority.
You have to repeat this for everything on the stack.

So your friend was right and you were wrong. Before the Stitcher resolved he has the chance to respond, as does everyone else at the table.

Quote from Magicman657 »

If they did 1 card a month like they do for FNM promos, do you have any idea how long it would take to reprint every card that deserves a reprinting? That's 12 cards a year. There are literally hundreds of cards they could be doing; this plan would easily last for a decade or more.

FNM promos don't create the price drop that we know players want, so it ultimately just invites complaints. On top of that, FNM cards are in a way, also "advertisements" for the formats they represents and Wizards prefers to promote Standard and Limited for obvious reasons - because that mass reprint isn't coming for sure, so promoting non-rotating formats only introduces more people to create and complain about scarcity. Yes, they do throw a couple of those at us, but was Path to Exile and Serum Visions's prices really affected? Player turnout wasn't even that much increased because when the competitive people show up, the less competitive players (which are usually the newer players Wizards are targeting) usually don't.

But that's not to say the idea isn't without merit though, Wizards should consider creating a different promo for different formats for FNM each month (at least a Standard Promo and a Modern Promo per month for starters), so that they can encourage different formats to fire for FNM each week instead of leaving it so open as "Choose your own format".

I wouldn't even say Pokemon is an inferior TCG when it does a lot of things people want magic to do. The thing holding back games like pokemon and yugioh is the age progression. Typically if you're playing a tcg at 8-12 years old it is pokemon, yugioh, or magic. At 12-18 years old it's most likely yugioh or magic. After 18 you're all but guaranteed to be playing magic at that point. We just age out of hobbies, going from 8-18 we probably go through 50 different hobbies, following what our friends do. Once adulthood starts to set we start to cement our interests and decide them for ourselves. I think a 21 year old can enjoy playing pokemon and have a desire to play it, but they don't want to play against a field of 10 year olds. And I think if magic wasn't around we would see yugioh or force of will as the adult tcg and pokemon as the teenage one. It has nothing to do with the quality of the game, just where the demographics settled because I guarantee there are plenty of people on these forums that still love the pokemon videogames, it's not a child thing it's an everyone thing, but the pokemon tcg is by environment a child's tcg though I believe the average world champion is in his late teens.

Quote from investor3 »

Pokemon is just a game. Magic is so much more than a game by now, in the same way that Lord of the Rings is more than a book and Star Wars is more than a movie. It is a culture, a franchise. The cards at the center of it have their value enhanced by the sheer scale of the whole phenomenon. I'm sure there is a technical, mathematical way of describing what I just described as well, but that's basically how it works.

I'll be honest (and no offense to you), I was mentally laughing when I read this, especially when you said Pokemon is just a game and went on to say Magic is a franchise, which implies Pokemon isn't one. I can say with confidence Pokemon is a greater franchise than Magic can ever be...

Firstly, the core game types of Magic and Pokemon are different - Magic's core is a trading card game, and it is because of the nature of the trading card games and the devotion of the players that the cards have value, not because of "phenomenon". Pokemon, on the other hand, has its core in the video games - the reason its TCG is still selling on shelves is because of the phenomenon brought upon by the video games (and arguably the anime). I know you admitted you didn't get the technical terms right, but you literally listed the opposite scenario in this case.

The strength of a franchise's culture is dependent on the non-core aspects of the franchise - to dismiss Pokemon as a just a game because it's TCG is weaker than MTG is like saying MTG is just a game because Duels of the Planeswalkers is weaker than the mainstream Pokemon games.

Just to hammer my point that Pokemon as a culture/franchise is stronger:

Magic has just started with the board game, the movie-in-the-works, FUNKO figures and the other action-figure series I already can't recall the name about, plus Magic Online and Duels of the Planeswalkers

Pokemon, on the other hand, has an anime, over sixteen movies, Nendoroid figures (the technical Japanese equivalent of FUNKO in my opinion), plenty of plushies sold in Official Pokemon Centers opened across the world. Digital-wise, there are side-games like Pokemon Colosseum, Pokken Tournament and even their online TCG services are probably better than MTGO. I haven't even got to the aspects that don't even relate to direct sales, like Pokemon-decorated airplanes and Pokemon themed-cafes.

Quote from investor3 »

Quote from SephX »

Quote from investor3 »

So... one Magic card bought a whole crap load of Pokemon cards?

That doesn't surprise me. Magic is a far superior game.

One U.S. dollar can buy a crap ton of stuff in some third world country. See what I'm saying?

I honestly can't tell if this is troll bait or not. I mean, if that's all you got from it, you either didn't read it all or didn't understand it.

But I'll bite. Superior in whose eyes? Yours? Mine? Because I can go outside and round up 10 people that think i'm an idiot for buying 60 dollar pieces of cardboard. I also can't convince my 7 year old how superior that Gideon was to the pile of packs I handed her. Plus, she busted a $20 EX card. So no, I don't see what you're saying at all.

Well those 60 dollar pieces of cardboard are 80 or 100 dollar pieces of cardboard when I sell them. So I think it's your 10 people who are really the idiots.

And why are the cards worth so much? The market. Wizards doesn't decide how much they're worth, the people do.

I mean...congrats? None of that has much of anything to do with what I was talking about in the OP. I was referring to the avenues other CCG's are opening up to attract their players and make them feel like they've gotten value from their dollar, as opposed to the litany of strange practices Wizard's has done to make the community feel a loss in value. Prize walls, watered-down Standard fodder, discontinued rewards programs, I mean just read the thread. This isn't a price discussion complaint, it's a value complaint.

And to be clear, I play the game. When I said '10 people' I meant people outside the game have a hard time wrapping their brains around it unless you equate it to sports cards, and even that's kind of an old-timey reference at this point. So while you're celebrating your $20 margin gain, to those people what we're doing is a silly/foreign concept. Like all collectible hobbies, I imagine.