I'm fairly confident that your deck would lose 70+ of the time to each of the following decks: Valakut ramp, UB control, BR vampires, and would have a tough time against UW control and any well-constructed aggro deck. You'd run a ton of permission cards, but against the version of Vampires making the rounds they'd be worthless since almost everything in that deck that kills you costs 2 or less to cast anyway. Against UB control you'd have dueling counter-spells, but your aggro plan is weaker. Game two they sideboard in Memoricide for the win. Against UW control you get the joy of dueling counter-spells, but you lose because (again) not only do they have a better aggro plan, but they have white creatures to block with if you manage to get the Sword of Body and Mind into play.

Against Valakut Ramp the loss is a foregone conclusion since the most recent version of that deck has Summoning Trap in the main deck.

Essentially, your deck loses to a ridiculous percentage of the Standard field. It might be fun for casual play though.

 

Sorry to necro but I wanted to get everyone's advice on whether or not MTGO was worth it. Taure said it was, but he's only a single person and he may be more magic obsessed than a few others on the site. Do you think it is worth it, and if so, how much money do you think would give you a decent sized collection without dropping a ton of cash?

 

Behold, a relevant necro!

New Phyrexia is released today! Woo!

 

I haven't played much MTGO, it is more convenient than driving to large tournaments, but I've always found the game interface annoying -- plus, drafting with real people in the flesh is always a lot more fun.

New Phyrexia is an annoying set, mostly because of the printing of Mutagenic Growth. According to WOTC's research and development team, they wouldn't print anything with Phyrexian mana that they wouldn't do as an artifact. A one mana pump spell though? That's been green's area on the color wheel since Alpha.

As an aside, monoblack control might be a fun deck to build right about now. It won't be tier 1, but it will be humorous.

 

It's doable in block. The Black Exarch, Skinrender, Sheoldred, Despise, Geth's Verdict, Black Sun's Zenith, etc., etc. The lack of playable mass discard and the lack of good black draw spells hurt a bit, though.

It does fairly well against Glissa Rock, Big Red, and U/x Architect. U/b Control with the commandos and the Sphinxes eats it alive though.

 

My favourite card this block - Phyrexian Obliterator. 4 black for a 5/5 trample, with his reverse-annihilation ability. Fuck yeah.

 

Really? Huh. I've futzed around with him a bit, and I wasn't overly impressed with how he performed. He was a lot of fun against red decks though.

 

I'm without question a Magic dork, and yes, I definitely recommend Magic Online. If you're above average at the game, you can keep playing for a long time without having to invest more money. (Draft $$$ cards, win packs, sell money cards to draft again and repeat process.) Luck your way into drafting a Jace 2.0 and you've got your next 5+ drafts covered assuming you never get any more money cards and lose every time. More than likely though, you'll win more than a few packs and get other $$$ cards. I've probably spent a couple hundred bucks in the past 6+ months on magic online, which may seem like a lot, but a couple weeks ago I redeemed five sets. (For those unaware, if you have a complete digital set of cards you can 'redeem' them, that is trade in your digital cards and $5 + a flat $2.99 shipping and they'll send you a factory sealed set of the paper cards after taking those digital cards out of your account. It's where all the factory sealed sets on ebay come from.)

Sorry bout the text-block of ugly there. As for New Phyrexia? I'm liking it. Karn was even better than I thought it'd be. I'm with ASmallBundleOfToothpicks on being less enamored by the Obliterator. So much bounce, counters, removal, even maindeck tumble magnets in standard right now keep him from being the house he first appears to be.

Truthfully though, I think I was most excited to see that standard now has a legitimate turn two kill using only two basic lands and three commons. That's all kinds of awesome. (Forest, Glistener Elf, Mountain, Assault Strobe, Groundswell) Pauper magic ftw!

 

I've been out of the loop for awhile now. I sold off the remnants my MTGO collection about 2 months ago, and now I just have my physical collection. I haven't been keeping up with prices until this week, but I was surprised to see that revised dual lands have shot up from $15 to $60, which is very nice (I have at least 4x of each, happy days). Also saw that my mint Karakas was in my <5$ binder, and is now worth ten times is much, and I don't know why. Perhaps its time to sell my collection off while the game is still hot.

 

Where/how would you go about selling them? I've got quite a collection myself, and it's time to sell them off.

 

ebay would be a good starting spot, but some of the dealer shops like mtgotraders, abugames, mtgfanatic, eudemonia, mtgarsenal and cardkingdom are good sites as well. Those are just some names off the top of my head. I think trollandtoad is the biggest site, but I don't know if they buy (for reasonable prices). Mtgotraders is a great site as well, but I may be biased because I've been playing xbox live with the owner for years

 

What with M12 out, Nationals around the corner (I hope to post a strong showing) and Innistrad looming, I thought it would be a good time to bump this thread.

Since the last post here our friendly neighborhood Jace 2.0 and his band of merry Stoneforge Mystics have been banned from standard, spelling the (temporary, if the decklists coming out from China/Japan Nationals and SCG Cincinnati are any indication) end of CawBlade, and the rerise of Valakut and Tempered Steel.

Standard is a bit stale right now, M12 basically brought some tech to the competitive decks (It's an ok format, plays really fast in draft from what I've experienced so far) so we'll see what happens come Innistrad and the rotation of Zendikar+M11.

 

I found it very amusing that Caw-Blade won the Standard Open at SCG Cincinnati. I was very surprised at the apparent lack of mono-Red decks in the Top 8 and 16 for both events; considering the hype that Grim Lavamancer received I assumed that there would be more mono-Red than there actually was.

Good luck at Nats; what deck are you planning on playing?

 

Valakut. Rampant Growth and Solemn Simulcrum gave us some decent additions, and I feel I have a favorable matchup with the metagame here, + its a fun deck

 

I've recently been building a deck IRL--I'm going for a variant of cawblade utilizing mill.

I don't have the more expensive cards yet, though. (SoBaM, and Jace, Memory Adept)

From what I can tell from playing on Cockatrice it works pretty well. I've beaten cawblade players 2-0, and have had great success against valakut, RDW and bant.

I'm also thinking of going for a white/blue control deck, utilizing the M12 Gideon cards (Lawkeeper/Avenger) along with Gideon Jura, along with the Crown of Empires. The Avengers turn into huge threats that have to be answered or it's a wincon--they gain +1/+1 for every enemy creature tapped.

Should definately get some MTG games going down on Cockatrice though--it's a free online MTG program that has all the cards. The interface is pretty good, too.

 

Necro, but relevant.

Cockatrice is a great program for testing against live opponents if you don't want to/can't afford to shell out for cards. The problem is that the range of skill you see on it is absolutely huge, and it can take a while to find talented testing partners (unless you set something up beforehand.)

With that said, Innistrad comes out soon and I do not like what I am seeing so far. The double-sided cards are going to create a total mess at the prerelease and release tournaments -- to say nothing of every single draft in the block.

 

Drafts are going to be the problem, but I get the feeling that people will get used to it. Maybe MODO drafts will see a rise in popularity over RL ones?

There is a silver lining to all this double-sided nonsense in double-sided foils.

 

So.. uh, I'm staring up again, (oh fuck) and, in the way of cards, my friend gave me a sixty card deck (Nicol Bolas) from a set called Nicol Bolas vs. Ajani. ANy suggestions on how to make it playable?

 

I laughed at this guy. Kinda bonkers.

 

Here is what you do. Go buy the new mono-black event deck from your local store. Then tweak it however you want. I recommend looking at the top-tier decks on TCGPlayer.com and tweaking your own based on what you like there.

You probably want to play standard, which that deck will not help with at all.

Another idea is to just draft at your local comic store. $15 for a days worth of play and helps build up your collection.