Sooooo I came in 20th in my Nat's, and Top 8'd a GPT Milan. Running pretty good in daily events on modo, 3-1'ing for the most part. I think Innistrad will be a good set, I always like to give new mechanics a chance before judging them and this set is very different, the flavor looks awesome. It seems like cards like Snapcaster, Skaab Ruinator and the Geist are definitely a cut above the rest of the cards spoiled, theyre quite insane.

 

I think what you mean is that they were designed specifically to dodge Dismember, which sucks because I was really hoping to brew a GWU Durdle-pod list or some shade of GW-control. People laugh whenever I say the second, but white has O-Ring and Green has Beast Within. Add in Dismember and you've got twelve first tier removal options.

With the type of stuff they're chucking in UW though I may not actually have a choice in the matter since aggro-control looks poised to do disgusting things. Any thoughts on the red Yawgmoth's Will?

Also, Schrodinger -- if you're actually in Pittsburgh you should seek out Friday Night Magic events that do drafts. Try to find ones near Carnegie Mellon since that area generally has great players.

As an aside, my last FNM 5-0 match 10-0 games. I took five damage one game, but other than that no one even came close. Here was my list

16 Lands (8/8 -- there are arguments for why I should have run fewer Islands, but I wanted Aether Adept on turn 3 consistently.)

Creatures

2x Goblin Fireslinger
1x Phantasmal Bear
2x Gorehorn Minotaur
2x Blood Ogre
1x Goblin Piker
1x Coral Merfolk
1x Merfolk Looter
2x Aether Adept

Instants/Sorceries

3x Shock
1x Incinerate
1x Fireball
1x Unsummon
1x Mana Leak

Artifacts

1x Throne of Empires

And some other miscellaneous durdles that I can't remember.

 

I am, and thanks. I know a good TRPG store there that does Friday night Magic, I'll keep it in mind.

 

So yeah, Innistrad. I finished third at my prerelease of 50-something running an extremely bad Green/White deck that relied on the 'bomb' cards "Rally the Peasants" and "Chapel Geist." This format feels really terrible. It feels a lot like Scars/Besieged (no New Phyrexia), in that the following things are present 1) An absolutely insane tribal/set theme deck and 2) A ton of bombs to reward control players for existing. The only major difference is that there are dramatically fewer wrath effects.

The result was that, at my prerelease, every single round went to time with multiple matches going to turns each time -- we even had one game take up the entire 50 minute time allotment (they were sitting next to me.) Normally prerelease rounds go a bit slow since people are always reading the cards and uncertain about what line of play to take, but Innistrad seems particularly inclined toward unnecessarily complex board states.

How did everyone else do at their prerelease?

 

During the tourney, at least one game went to turns every round.

Although a massive number of bombs existed (and very little removal was present), only a few control decks made it to the top 8. Everyone else was running early game flip wolves.

I ended up going RG, with a splash blue for think twice and delver of secrets. werewolves and Burning Vengeance were my win cons.

What does everyone else see happening to standard as a format? I know that RDW was the big winner at the Star City tournament Saturday, but UW Illusions seemed to do reasonably well. I see GW Human tribal becoming pretty nasty with mentor of the Meek and Champion of the Parish soon enough.

 

Mentor of the Meek hasn't really been that impressive in my testing. It's not that he's terrible, it's that GW can't really spare the mana to use him properly if it curves out (although turn 5 Hero of Bladehold attack draw two off the tokens is pretty sick.) I'm not entirely sold on him yet, and I have no idea what I'm going to take to States in 12 days. I might just be desperate enough to run Solar Flare at States (assuming I can borrow the cards.)

 

One of the long-standing weaknesses of White-Weenie decks, and most agro decks in general, is running out of gas. Mentor neatly provides some long-term card advantage for an archetype that sorely needs it.

 

I play this too.
Currently, my deck looks like this:

Main Deck:

4 Glacial Fortress
4 Seachrome Coast
7 Plains
7 Island

4 Invisible Stalker
3 Mirran Crusader
3 Trinket Mage
2 Hero of Bladehold

3 Silver-Inlaid Dagger
2 Sword of War and Peace
1 Sword of Feast and Famine
1 Sword of Body and Mind

4 Ponder
2 Mana Leak
4 Stoic Rebuttal
3 Oblivion Ring
2 Day of Judgment

3 Gideon Jura
1 Venser, the Sojourner

Sideboard:

3 Flash Freeze
3 Divine Offering
3 Torpor Orb
1 Day of Judgment
3 Mental Misstep
2 Surgical Extraction

Basically, my strategy is to abuse Silver-Inlaid Dagger's +3/+0 to humans and all my creatures are humans.

The sideboard is basically, anti-birthing pod since most people run different variations of it. What do you guys think?

 

I guess my issue i that you want to be dropping your little dudes after you drop this guy, which is the last thing you want to be doing in the sort of aggro deck he fits in. Throwing him in tokens (either UW or GW) is hardly the worst thing in the world, but in all of the testing I've been running on Cockatrice he has failed to get there.

Wetnurse

You're going to need to reconsider your sideboard unless your local meta skews heavily away from the competitive one.

As for me, the list I was going to take to states (having the flu and a 101 degree fever kept me from making the trip) was a pretty standard Wolf-Run list but with 3x Ghost Quarter and 1x Inkmoth Nexus. This was largely because I was expecting lots of greedy mana bases, and also because Ghost Quarter is absolutely savage in the mirror. Almost every single time I tested the mirror my first two fetches with Primeval Titan were Ghost Quarter and Ghost Quarter. It blanks their plan A since most lists only run 1 or 2 Kessig Wolf Runs and only one or two Inkmoth Nexus, delays your plan A by one turn, and leaves you in a reasonable position to do unfair things.

 

I've been playing MTG on and off since 4th edition and I absolutely love it. I have to admit I don't have too much tournament experience, I have mostly played casual anything goes type 1 with my friends over the years. Lately though, I have branched out and been playing type 2 quite a bit at the local card shop. I had a pretty good standard mono black vampire deck last year revolving around Vampire Nocturnus and Bloodghast but sadly they have rotated out and I don't have enough of the new vamps to make a good standard vamp deck anymore. My vamp deck still couldn't really compete with Jund at the time but it was quite fun to have lots of powerful vamps out really early.

As a bit of an older magic player, I have quite a bit of nostalgia for the old sets particularly Invasion, which is still my favorite set. They really designed Invasion block well. There was lots of good multi colored cards and many different deck archetypes to play. My favorite colors to play are white and green, I love the mana ramping and solid beefy creatures of green and I love the various awesome enchantments and flying creatures of white. To me nothing is more satisfying then hitting the opponent out of nowhere with a former puny creature that has been heavily buffed.

One of the best decks I ever built was a WG variation of the infinite squirrel deck combo revolving around the banned card

Earthcraft

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=4756

and Squirrel's Nest

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=31836

Yes, Earthcraft was banned but I was just playing with my friends at the time and they didn't really care. They would get annoyed of course when I consistently overran them with a million and ten squirrels. I also ran

Altar of Dementia

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=4596

in my deck so I could win on the turn I played the combo, decking them out by sacrificing my squirrels instead of waiting a turn for my squirrels to untap and lose summoning sickness. Good times indeed!

Now that I try to play more competitively now, I mostly do booster draft at the local card shop and online. Booster draft is surprisingly fun and I like the random element of it. However, I badly need a new standard deck so I'll have to figure something out. WG doesn't seem that good in the current format so I'll need to try something else, maybe another vamp deck or a cheap red deck. I want to build a really good tournament deck but it seems most of those decks cost 100+ dollars. Does anyone have any suggestions for a relatively inexpensive standard deck?

 

Newbie question here. On MTG online, do you have to buy the cards as well? And if so, are they the same prices as real cards?

 

Yes you have to buy cards, but the prices vary because it's a completely different economy. I think you win up about the same, cost wise, though.

 

So if I were to start today, would I be getting any free starter packs? Or I'd have nothing and have to buy cards right away to play? Just curious, how much do basic land cards cost?

 

Necro, but kinda relevant. Picked Magic back up after not playing for ages, started building a normal physical deck and started an MTGO account.

Who else is still playing MTGO? Account name is malfurien2 (because all my usual names were taken)

 

My user name is polaris66 on MGTO. Feel free to friend me. I don't bite. Mostly play draft these days online but I can probably put together some kind of standard deck to play against people.

 

I still play Magic online at least a few times a week under the unsurprising username of nonjon. But I also play a ton of head to head Magic offline (a.k.a. paper magic) limited with a friend. 4 pack sealeds, 4 pack winstons, 4 pack winchesters mainly. I gotta admit, I've learned to love 30-card decks even more than 40-card ones these days. Rarely do I mess with constructed but when I do, I prefer casual and/or EDH much more than competitive tournament level Standard/Modern/Legacy.

For those missing out on 30-card decks, you probably know limited as only draft where you pass around three packs each or sealed where you just open and get 6 packs of cards and from your pool you build a 40-card deck. These are sealed pools of only 4 packs instead of 6, but your deck can be as few as 30 cards instead of 40.

Continuing my oh so subtle bragging, I'll say I did an Innistrad 4 pack sealed last night and got a really good pool. Two mythics, two dual lands, and a bonus transform rare. Built my deck around my big money card, Geist of Saint Traft. For those curious you can see the deck I built and the rest of my pool in this screenshot. It wasn't easy not playing my red, but just blue-white I figured would be better. And after losing my first game to a near perfect draw, I then went all stompy and beatdown on everyone. Double Juggs bashing, Geisty control with a little tempo and a Cleaver giving me obscene amounts of life led to relatively easy victories in every other game I played. So 2-1, 2-0, 2-0 and the win for the event.

Sadly, you can't always expect to get two mythics, plus money rares, plus a nice pool, plus draw and run great, plus get some unlucky opponents, plus win the tournament... but when you do it sure is a lot of fun.

Oh and one last thing? Warning Dark Ascension spoiler: I'm in love with a black and white planeswalker.

 

So, I used to play magic WAAAY back in the day, before the turn of the millenia, and shortly after, till about 2003, 2004.

But from everything I've seen, the game has become viciously, mindbogglingly complex.. so every time I think about getting back into it.. I lose the drive to learn the ten-bazillion new effects and abilities and terms that dominate any sort of competitive play right now.

Anyone know of a resource or method (Besides just learning as you go, I hate being blindsided by mechanics that everyone else is aware of) one could use to assist in trying to familiarize with everything?

Also, holy shit, it's a nonjon post! It's like finding Moxen! .

 

A couple of years ago I was in the same boat. I hadn't looked at magic cards since probably Tempest and was still excited that they color coded rarity into the expansion symbol. Foil cards were a rare exotic beauty (for about a month).

I never located a special resource or method that helped but I do know what things helped the most. Far and away, the best resource out there is if you get on Magic online and just dive into watching all the events replays. Seeing actual game play, seeing what cards other players choose to play with and how they use them, that's where I figured most of the things out. The replays can be paused easily and you can scroll through the text to re-read things you didn't follow. You can watch Legacy and Modern events, see all sorts of the best constructed combo type decks and through that often end up learning all the new keywords, and most specifically, how those abilities are best utilized.

Sidenote, if you don't know what dredge is, then don't try to figure it out from write-ups or even youtube videos (that's one that didn't really click til I could pause and step forward through a replay)

Anywho, beyond MTGO replays there are some good sites for Limited discussion that I still frequent. These generally just are the newest and latest sets, with examples of what cards are good and how/why to use them. draftbetter.com has some good writeups, explanations, and videos of gameplay. Some less useful posts there lately it seems. If you just like mock drafting, I'm a real big fan of draft.bestiaire.org.

One of the fun things on bestiaire is that you can draft their cube, which is a predetermined pool of like 300 of magic's best cards, mixed up at random. There you can see what sorts of cards are some of the best ones in magic, which can sometimes lead you to stories/decks from when that card was most useful or imposing on the magic scene.

I'm curious who else has some advice or resource that'd help catch you up on 10+ years of new expansion blocks, keywords, and abilities.

 

I placed a glorious 31/32 in the Dark Ascension pre-release, courtesy of a completely unviable card pool. Couldn't do UB zombies, UW spirit/humans, RB vampires, RG wolves, or anything else.
On the BRIGHT side, I pulled a Sorin in the one pack I recieved for 31st place.... so I win, even though I lose.
Also, Archangel's Light has GOT to be the shittiest mythic... ever.

 

Schrodinger, show me what your card pool was if you still remember it. I have to say, I've seen some pretty unplayable pools in limited before. My most recent was one that required a quadruple splash of a third color in order to get to 20 playable cards in any color combination, I was a pretty sad panda that day.

On the plus side, I've been having a pretty easy time converting my standard staples from Scars Bloc to eternal staples. It's pretty awesome.