MTGO is online? Is it free, or do you still have to pay for it? I'm so confused.

 

MTGO stands for Magic The Gathering Online.

It costs $10 to get the program and an account with about 300 commons/uncommons plus 2 M11 boosters and 2 event tickets.

Further cards cost money. A booster pack online is about the same price as a booster pack IRL. However, booster packs are a bad way to go about it. You can use event tickets ($1 each from the store) as a trade item in the online trade community and get literally hundreds of commons for a single event ticket. Uncommons are slightly more expensive, rares a bit more so. Mythics jump in price quite a bit.

But you can build up a good collection of cards with 10 event tickets. That'll get you all the commons and uncommons you need, plus some good rares (e.g. Mitotic slime is 0.2 tickets. Serra ascendant is 1.3).

The benefit of MTGO is that whatever time of day you go on, there will be over a thousand people playing. I've never had to wait more than 20 seconds for a game of standard constructed.

 

Will be playing in a FNM tournament for the first time next week. Will be playing something like the following deck:

4x Bloodthrone Vamp
3x Mitotic slime
3x Acidic Slime
4x Llanowar Elves
3x Reassembling Skeleton
1x Royal Assassin

3x Doom Blade
3x Diabolic Tutor
3x Cultivate
3x Giant Growth
2x Nature's Spiral

3x Whispersilk Cloak
1x Brittle Effigy
1x Sword of Body and Mind

4x Terramorphic Expanse
10x Forest
9x Swamp

Sideboard:

1x Black Knight
3x Viscera Seer
3x Naturalize
2x Rise from the Grave
1x Dead Reckoning
1x Giant Growth
1x Nature's Spiral
3x Hornet Sting

The main win-condition is getting the Bloodthrone Vampire out and then Mitotic Slime out the turn after. Bloodthrone Vamp sacrifices the slime and all of its spawn to become a 15/15 for that go. Whispersilk cloak on the Vamp is a bonus.

The rest is oriented towards getting those cards out (either by tutoring or fetching them from the graveyard), dealing small damage while I'm waiting (small creatures with Giant Growth, or the Giant Growth can be used in conjunction with the win condition), mana generation (Cultivate and Llanowar Elves), and removal (Doom Blade, Royal Assassin, Brittle Effigy for creatures, Acid Slime for artefacts - with Naturalize sideboarded in case they have an artefact-heavy deck).

I'm considering switching out the Sword of Body and Mind and one of the Cultivates for 2 of the Viscera Seers. That would give me more creatures to sacrifice to the Bloodthone, or cheap early damage, or scrying to get to my win condition quicker.

The real problem with this deck is not getting to the win condition fast enough. If they get creatures out then the 15/15 is going to be wasted on a chump blocker unless I can get a Whispersilk Cloak out.

For mana curve and other stats: http://www.mtgvault.com/ViewDeck.aspx?DeckID=110587

 

[SIZE=+0]My friends got me into Magic a couple weeks ago, so i'm probably not the most qualified person to give advice, but I would suggest throwing in Blade of the Bloodchief. Makes that 15 attack a 29 attack. Then if they block that, BtV would stay at 15/15 so you can just attack with it again. As for early damage I would suggest a pulse tracker, I consider it to be one of the best one drops in the game. I run with 4 of them in my speed vamp deck and they just pwn early game and are great for sacrificing late game.[/SIZE]

 

I play a straight-black zombie/skeleton deck. You can't keep a good zombie down, after all.

 

So, on a different note, remember all of my bitching earlier in this thread about the power creep?

Well, this video pretty much displays the problems with the power creep and the speed of the metagame right now.

Yeah...

 

Loadingreadyrun is always fantastic, but in this case, I'm going to say that's probably not a problem with power creep.

A decent control deck- even and old one- could probably destroy them, that is, if Alex wasn't cheating the entire time, as was part of the point. On top of that, half the time the characters lost, they lost because they were shit unlucky while their opponent was getting pretty awesome draws.

Of COURSE you're going to lose when you have no defense whatsoever and you get attacked several turns in a row. Power creep may be a factor, but it's not the only factor.

 

So this is a bit of a bump, but I finally gave in and started playing elves so I thought that I'd announce it. I lacked four of Eldrazi Monument and Nissa Revane though so I had to improvise. I ended up putting in a playset of Khalni Hydra and Genesis Wave to make up for the shortfall.

They don't quite get the job done the way I'd like, but there's something absurdly gratifying about being able to cast an 8/8 trample on turn three.

 

I hate to be a douchebag and double-post, but is anyone going to the Grand Prix event in Denver in February?

Also, my record in tournaments for the weekend:

1st at a Scars of Mirrodin sealed event on Saturday.

2nd at Friday Night Magic running the shitty Elf deck described in the post above.

??? at random a random draft scheduled for today.

 

I have a few decks of MTG myself, but nothing really serious here. Mostly Legends of Arana series based decks (I also happened to grab Sarkhan Vol in one of the "tournament decks" I bought from the store, but don't really use him in a deck.)

I don't have the chance to play very often. I have maybe 300 cards at the most, and have 5 or 6 decks all together.

 

I wish there were people around me that played, i built a dragon deck a back in 04 that still is insane.

 

I made a dragon deck a while back that my friends still refuse to play. If i pull that thing out, they will concede the match.

Ive been playing since Alpha myself but I fell out a while ago. Im pretty casual now; just me and a few friends.

 

I recently got back into this game (which I haven't played in forever). Picked up a few boosters, had pretty good luck with Rares. Picked up one of those deck builder things, since I had a gift card that had been collecting dust for about two years and I was tired of taking it on walks in my wallet. Had pretty good luck there, too; picked up a Platinum Angel.

Since I had another gift card that had been standing around for a year, I got on amazon and bought a box of a thousand cards for a total of eleven dollars, of which I paid none of.

Afer it gets here, I'll see what I've got. Should be interesting.

 

I play. Mostly white, though recently, i've been looking at green wistfully.

Right now, I run three decks, with a fourth coming in the mail. They need some work, but they're fun, and at a casual level, very competitive.

White Solders: Pretty simple, a white weenie deck with lots of +1/+1 to Solders/White Creatures/Creatures I control. A few exiles, plus mobilization (soldiers have vigilence, and token pump) and an Elspeth make it so I don't get to play this deck any more. >>

White Archers: Started as purely white, with a near exclusive focus on creatures who have the ability of "Tap: Deal X damage to target attacking or blocking creature" where X is probably 1,2 or, in the case of archery training, how ever many turns it's been enchanted. Some greens cards were thrown in for their magnificent combos, like double-tapping them with vitalize, giving them shroud or making them unable to be targeted by spells.

Goblin: It's fail. Focused around goblin warrens (sac 2 goblins, enter 3 goblin tokens) combine with raid bombardment (whenever a creature with power 2 or less attacks, deal one damage to target player) and Furnace of Wrath (whenever a source would deal damage, it deals double that damage instead). Which makes for fun insta-gibs when I have ten goblins out, but it's a slow starting deck that I don't know how to improve.

Then in the mail, i have a number of slivers coming for an all color aggression deck.

ninja: I should have deck lists available on request if you so desire.

 

Yah people got pissed when i summoned a Dragon tyrant on my 5 turn back in high school lol.

 

I really want to play a Sliver deck; my favorite creatures by far.

Thing is, in multiplayer, as soon as everyone realises that you're playing a sliver deck, their reactions are generally a lot like "Oh, my God; kill it, kill it now!"

Destroy effects generally follow shortly afterwards, along with everyone suddenly teaming up against you.

 

I'm considering building a blue/colourless mill deck revolving around Keening stone.

Keening stone: Pay 5: opponent puts X cards from his library into his graveyard, where X is the number of cards in the graveyard

Combine it with Sword of Body and Mind, Traumatise and Hedron Crab and it'd be milltastic. Mix in some blue permission (mana leak, cancel) and card draw (Preordain, foresee, jace's ingenuity), use really cheap creatures for the Sword (Memnite, ornithopter, both cost 0 to cast).

Would be nuts. Only problem is getting all the cards! Would cost a pretty penny.

 

Seems like it would work pretty well. You'd be fairly vulnerable in the early game, but as soon as traumatise and keening stone are available to work, you'd be well on the way to victory. Fair awesome.

I built my first magic deck a couple of weeks ago, and then found this thread. Awesome!

I have played magic before, with friends, but never been to FNM or other magic events, so forgive me if my deck sucks. Its a Machine Red, lots of burn on the red side, and a few awesome cards on the artifact side eg Molten-Tail Masticore, Etched Champion.

The optimum way it plays is usually a goblin guide, chalice, masticore, GG. Masticore is just brutal. Metalcraft is pretty good. get out some equipment (darksteel axe is indestructible)and myrs, have metal craft. Kuldotha Pheonix (metalcraft: 4 to play from graveyard) as masticore fodder, Etched Champion (2/2, metalcraft: protection from all colour), and galvanic blasts for burn. Have a chandra ablaze and a koth for late game, and one or two other big guys. Biggest problem is blue/white control stopping masticore or planeswalkers.

In general, I like it a lot, but I dont think it draws mana fast enough, and it can get bogged down if it doesn't get out the main guys. Also, it can't destroy enchantments (out of my 5 magic playing friends, 3 play leylines of sanctity. FUUU-)

I think this deck is kinda expensive, but my friend has a whole lot of cards, and he is always getting more, and doesnt play red or artifact. So a lot of the expensive cards I am borrowing for free.

Good? Bad? Improvements?

 

Get Nemesis of Reason, too. It makes the opponent discard ten cards everytime it attacks. It's a good monster, too; 3/7 for five.

http://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/details.aspx?name=Nemesis of Reason

 

Another of my favorite decks is a green/white saproling deck I made during the Ravnica block. By around 5th turn I can have 20 or so saprolings ready to swarm you with. Doubling Season, Saproling Symbiosis and occasionally Verdeloth the Ancient make for nastiness. Fun times.