Browbeat is a horrible card because it's a one-shot effect that gives your opponent a single choice to make correctly. Unless Painful Quandry instantly gets disenchanted, your opponent needs to make many choices, with the odds of them making optimal choices every time getting lower per choice. Painful Quandry isn't very good in a fast Standard like this one, but if black control became good (think along the lines of Odyssey/Onslaught MBC) I could see it as something like a 2- or 3-of.
I'm putting it into my MBC EDH. It breaks even on card advantage (or is a Lava Axe) even if their first spell is Disenchant. But EDH is a vastly different format than Standard, and 5 mana for that effect in Standard isn't going to be worth it, especially because of all the ramp meaning you'll just miss their big drop and they can just sit on cards for a turn or three and pitch lands for important spells.
By the logic you guys are exhibiting than all creatures in the history of ever are crap and not worth playing.
Pretty much yeah. There's no creature that can't be removed from play somehow. If you rely on creatures, you rely on either threat density (outnumber their answers) or threat quality (fewer things kill Emrakul than kill Kiln Fiend). Everything dies to some kind of removal. If you can't accept that, then you're going to lose games because of it and frankly you'll deserve it.
It's a cute trick to kill someone on turn 2 or 3 using only Standard cards. Not every Standard card pool has that capability. But in any metagame, consistency is the most important part of the deck, especially in aggro, where you want every card you draw to be either a threat or an answer to something your opponent's played. Memnite for example is great if it helps enable Mox Opal on turn 1. It's also a pretty horrible topdeck on turn 8.
I just want to point out that this thread reeks of every new and/or bad player on Magic Online who throws a fit whenever you play Cancel on them. Yes, Standard aggro is more autopilot than it should be. That doesn't mean it doesn't take skill to run it. While aggro might take fewer overall decisions over the course of the game, these decisions can matter much more compared to a single decision made by a control player.
To expand on what CorpT and Arzar said above, though, I really would recommend Legacy over Standard in every way. The costs these days are about the same, except that investment into Legacy will hold longer than investment into Standard, and the metagame is much more diverse and even the premier aggro decks (Goblins and Zoo, which is basically Naya on steroids) take a good deal of skill to play effectively. Anyone who says otherwise is either a bad player or has bad opponents. Alternatively, if you want extreme budget (cheaper than Standard decks even without Jace, Vengevine, etc), Dredge in games 2 and 3 is extremely skill-intensive because you have to fight some of the most powerful hate in the game.
Basically I'm saying if Standard is really that bad, there are other options, but complaining like this doesn't accomplish anything.
Yes, it can win turn 3. Yes, it's incredibly fragile and if your play gets disrupted you're basically SOL. No doubt it'll make for some spectacular wins, but confirmation bias will inevitably set in and you'd ignore all the times your combo gets disrupted because it's weak both to counters and creature removal.
I see it as being that fringe tier 1.5 deck that will randomly place but won't be consistent enough to be actually tier 1.
Also, exactly how are the cheaters getting these cards? Are they obtaining them from prior flights/friend's flights and using them in the next?
Sunday prerelease, so they're probably just bringing in cards from a Saturday prerelease at a different store.
My brother does a lot of drafts there and sees way more Baneslayers, Grave Titans, and Primeval Titans than you could ever imagine. Apparently nobody's ever opened, say, a Frost Titan.
This is basically the reason I'm moving all my Limited play to Magic Online. :T
Honestly, depends on the post office. Back when I worked at one the only "unsecure" thing that ever happened was I'd sometimes read someone's magazine before delivering it. But most of the box renters didn't have any subscriptions to anything interesting anyway.
And honestly, from experience, the post office guys don't care about peoples' mail. Nothing's going to happen on that end, and I'll grant the USPS might be different in this regard but as far as Canada Post went, the PO boxes were never out of an employee's sight except when the office itself was closed. I'd say they're more secure than residential post boxes.
tl;dr people telling you PO boxes aren't secure are either full of it, or it's a bad post office.
Red Deck Wins can outrace Valakut a lot of the time. It's losing Manabarbs (which basically makes it impossible for Valakut to win unless they get rid of it) and most of its fastest creatures in rotation, though, which means you'd have to take a more midrange approach to the matchup and focus on having as much of a lead as possible once they drop the Titan. You could probably make a fairly cheap Boros deck with Leonin Arbiter and Tunnel Ignus post-rotation and still try to race them (maybe throw in Goblin Ruinblaster and Tectonic Edge).
Competitive worst: M11 prerelease, for a number of reasons. First, it's incredibly obvious that people at my LGS cheat hard at any kind of Limited event (I know it's my fault for still playing there, though I won prizes at ROE playing honestly, but anyway), so that made it stop being fun about the time I was facing a guy with two Titans and some other mythic I can't remember... in the 0-3 bracket—and you better believe the 3-0 bracket was even more obvious (I think one guy just "happened" to open like 6 mythics). The only match all day I came close to winning was against an opponent who tapped a Prodigal Pyromancer to ping me instead of my Royal Assassin (which killed it in response). Later, the Assassin goes to kill a Duskdale Wurm, and I have to explain at length that, no, my Assassin isn't "blocking" anything and thus wouldn't die even if it was blocking, and that I'm sorry you made that mistake but I'm not going to let you take it back. I had to call a judge to explain that I wasn't making rules up. The judge not only overruled me and said, "no, seriously, your opponent gets a takeback," but also seemed not to care about a three-mana Chandra's Outrage. All I got for both judge calls was to be told, "stop being such a rules lawyer."
Non-competitive worst: Being the player in EDH who has 2 lands on turn 7 and still getting attacked by everyone except my brother. While one guy cackles and blows up the few lands I do draw.
Competitive best: Toss-up between the Fifth Dawn and Betrayers of Kamigawa prereleases. The former saw me managing turn 4-5 kills in Sealed due to a hilariously broken deck (Grafted Wargear on a Blind Creeper swinging on turn 2 thanks to a Chrome Mox, then Spikeshot Goblin the next turn—twice), while in the latter I made a pretty great ogre+demon tribal deck (Yukora, the Prisoner dying and me not sacrificing the 4-5 other creatures I controlled, for instance). Or in the Time Spiral prerelease, having about 30 Citizen tokens and winning on turn 5 of extra turns with double Fortify and Reiterate. Basically my best Spike, Johnny, and Timmy experiences respectively.
Non-competitive best: Independently making the Japanese-style Standard RDW right after Zendikar comes out, before I'd ever read about the archetype actually being viable (I thought it was just cute virtual card advantage to run all those sac creatures). I only really used it for casual games, so I count it as non-competitive even though the deck itself isn't really "casual."
The thing about the "turn 3" win is that even if Affinity can't always actually reduce you to 0 life on turns 3 or 4, the sheer tempo and card advantage it generates means that by turn 3 or 4, Affinity winning is all but inevitable.
The other thing to remember is that back in the days of Affinity, other decks would maindeck 8-12 pieces of artifact hate and Affinity could just plow through it. Metalcraft isn't going to pull that off. Either you pack your deck full of low-cost artifacts that aren't any good as topdecks (diluting your threat density at the same time), or you face the fact that you're going to be slower. Compare this to an Arcbound Worker that could, at a best-case scenario, basically read, "2, sorcery, draw 2 cards, target opponent loses 1 life, and put a +1/+1 counter on target artifact creature."
tl;dr Metalcraft looks good on paper, and it might be good in practice, but it doesn't hold a candle to Affinity.
Standard prices these days makes me miss the price of when Tarmogoyf was around $30 and everyone complained. I miss $30 goyfs now...:(
It makes me consider back in the day when U/G Madness was viable with a shell consisting mostly of commons and uncommons. It's a double-edged sword to have cheap tier 1 decks because while it means anyone can play tier 1, it's going to make up a larger percentage of the field and thus be more susceptible to being hated out. I played in that Standard environment and it wasn't all sunshine, roses, and happiness. Just like people got sick of Jund, they got sick of Wild Mongrel and Psychatog.
Budget options like Standard RDW are definitely healthy for the metagame, but so is having cards that are on the upper end of the cost spectrum. The game needs both cheaper decks that can still compete (to make sure everyone can win) and more expensive decks that are generally better (to make sure cards keep getting sold thus Wizards stays in business). The part that I disagree with, as many people have stated (even Richard Garfield himself in one video) is that the current upper price bound in Standard is too high. It's to the point where it's a more sound investment to play Legacy because Standard cards can only go down in value in the long term. Case in point, why buy Jaces when you can buy duals?
You can if it involves spending a lot of cards to boost one creature with no defenses of its own.
Pretty much yeah. There's no creature that can't be removed from play somehow. If you rely on creatures, you rely on either threat density (outnumber their answers) or threat quality (fewer things kill Emrakul than kill Kiln Fiend). Everything dies to some kind of removal. If you can't accept that, then you're going to lose games because of it and frankly you'll deserve it.
It's a cute trick to kill someone on turn 2 or 3 using only Standard cards. Not every Standard card pool has that capability. But in any metagame, consistency is the most important part of the deck, especially in aggro, where you want every card you draw to be either a threat or an answer to something your opponent's played. Memnite for example is great if it helps enable Mox Opal on turn 1. It's also a pretty horrible topdeck on turn 8.
To expand on what CorpT and Arzar said above, though, I really would recommend Legacy over Standard in every way. The costs these days are about the same, except that investment into Legacy will hold longer than investment into Standard, and the metagame is much more diverse and even the premier aggro decks (Goblins and Zoo, which is basically Naya on steroids) take a good deal of skill to play effectively. Anyone who says otherwise is either a bad player or has bad opponents. Alternatively, if you want extreme budget (cheaper than Standard decks even without Jace, Vengevine, etc), Dredge in games 2 and 3 is extremely skill-intensive because you have to fight some of the most powerful hate in the game.
Basically I'm saying if Standard is really that bad, there are other options, but complaining like this doesn't accomplish anything.
It does. You sac it at the beginning of the end step, since it's a copy of the Putrefax until the end of the turn.
I see it as being that fringe tier 1.5 deck that will randomly place but won't be consistent enough to be actually tier 1.
Sunday prerelease, so they're probably just bringing in cards from a Saturday prerelease at a different store.
My brother does a lot of drafts there and sees way more Baneslayers, Grave Titans, and Primeval Titans than you could ever imagine. Apparently nobody's ever opened, say, a Frost Titan.
This is basically the reason I'm moving all my Limited play to Magic Online. :T
And honestly, from experience, the post office guys don't care about peoples' mail. Nothing's going to happen on that end, and I'll grant the USPS might be different in this regard but as far as Canada Post went, the PO boxes were never out of an employee's sight except when the office itself was closed. I'd say they're more secure than residential post boxes.
tl;dr people telling you PO boxes aren't secure are either full of it, or it's a bad post office.
Non-competitive worst: Being the player in EDH who has 2 lands on turn 7 and still getting attacked by everyone except my brother. While one guy cackles and blows up the few lands I do draw.
Competitive best: Toss-up between the Fifth Dawn and Betrayers of Kamigawa prereleases. The former saw me managing turn 4-5 kills in Sealed due to a hilariously broken deck (Grafted Wargear on a Blind Creeper swinging on turn 2 thanks to a Chrome Mox, then Spikeshot Goblin the next turn—twice), while in the latter I made a pretty great ogre+demon tribal deck (Yukora, the Prisoner dying and me not sacrificing the 4-5 other creatures I controlled, for instance). Or in the Time Spiral prerelease, having about 30 Citizen tokens and winning on turn 5 of extra turns with double Fortify and Reiterate. Basically my best Spike, Johnny, and Timmy experiences respectively.
Non-competitive best: Independently making the Japanese-style Standard RDW right after Zendikar comes out, before I'd ever read about the archetype actually being viable (I thought it was just cute virtual card advantage to run all those sac creatures). I only really used it for casual games, so I count it as non-competitive even though the deck itself isn't really "casual."
The other thing to remember is that back in the days of Affinity, other decks would maindeck 8-12 pieces of artifact hate and Affinity could just plow through it. Metalcraft isn't going to pull that off. Either you pack your deck full of low-cost artifacts that aren't any good as topdecks (diluting your threat density at the same time), or you face the fact that you're going to be slower. Compare this to an Arcbound Worker that could, at a best-case scenario, basically read, "2, sorcery, draw 2 cards, target opponent loses 1 life, and put a +1/+1 counter on target artifact creature."
tl;dr Metalcraft looks good on paper, and it might be good in practice, but it doesn't hold a candle to Affinity.
It makes me consider back in the day when U/G Madness was viable with a shell consisting mostly of commons and uncommons. It's a double-edged sword to have cheap tier 1 decks because while it means anyone can play tier 1, it's going to make up a larger percentage of the field and thus be more susceptible to being hated out. I played in that Standard environment and it wasn't all sunshine, roses, and happiness. Just like people got sick of Jund, they got sick of Wild Mongrel and Psychatog.
Budget options like Standard RDW are definitely healthy for the metagame, but so is having cards that are on the upper end of the cost spectrum. The game needs both cheaper decks that can still compete (to make sure everyone can win) and more expensive decks that are generally better (to make sure cards keep getting sold thus Wizards stays in business). The part that I disagree with, as many people have stated (even Richard Garfield himself in one video) is that the current upper price bound in Standard is too high. It's to the point where it's a more sound investment to play Legacy because Standard cards can only go down in value in the long term. Case in point, why buy Jaces when you can buy duals?