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[Magic: The Gathering] Go Speed Racer, Go
cursedking
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Post your furry MTG ocs here, or just talk about playing the game I guess
Types: Boom + Robo | Food: Sweet | Habitat: Plains
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There is! Spelltable.Wizards.com will allow you to play your actual cards in a game of Magic over webcam, which is generally far easier than navigating through MTGO. You can also just proxy the cards, nobody will care unless you get whiny opponents! You can either find a server to find games in (various community figures discords work OK) or just set up/join a lobby with randos.
I've been playing commander so long my brain is a casual jelly, so I assume playing sealed will be disastrous. Exciting!
Edit:
Re: Spelltable, it works great, and you can just stream a window where you've got an Archidekt or Moxfield playtest open, if everyone else is cool with it.
I think Cockatrice also supports commander, as a digital client.
Makes sense since Plating already is.
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PSN: AbEntropy
Yeah even if the All That Glitters ban announcement didn't say there was an MH3 card already likely in the crosshairs (which it did), this would have been one of the least surprising announcements ever.
The timing is the main thing here, but I liked the justification of "why ruin two major events by waiting until the next scheduled announcement, when we know we'd have to do this anyway".
Like, the floor is an on-rate body with vigilance at instant speed and then for 5 mana you just guarantee you win the game if your opponent doesn't close things out in like, one more turn.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
The funniest thing about Play Boosters is that because of the chance for multiple rares, you might genuinely wind up in situations where you have to weigh like, Persistence of Loyalty against Gruff Triplets or something (it's Gruff Triplets, to be clear). There's a much higher density of making a pick that makes whoever you pass to wonder what the hell you're doing.
With how many of my drafts are paper I don't think I ever take Triplets P1P1 over Loyalty or Persistence though.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
Oh yeah pick up the $10 bomb over the bulk rare limited bomb for sure.
Hmm. Archons Glory should do work with the treasure and role production you have around. I'd probably not run the enchantments-matter stuff or Solitary Sanctuary... the Financier is... okay? Focus on the cards that create role tokens and you should be able to get some work done. Glory, Monstrous Rage, and Moment of Valor all let you mess up combat math nicely. Hopeful Vigil is nice, even if I dunno if I run any of the enchantments-matter stuff directly (It's a 2/2 vigilance for 2 and later you pay some mana to scry, or scry for free when you bargain it for Archon's Glory). A Tale for the Ages I'm on the fence on, as I dunno how often it will actually be meaningful with all the other ways you're growing stuff. Don't run the Intangible Virtues, not enough token making.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
Fortunately, Wilds doesn't use Play Boosters, so on Arena you never have that choice (in paper foils can screw up anything). But you still might have to choose between VoL and, say, Goblin Bombardment.
I don't have time to go through the whole draft since I'm at work, but I did want to mention that I really hate Intangible Virtue (your P1p2) in Wilds. It's not unplayable or anything but the most common token in the set can't block (making vigilance useless) and one of the common white tokens already has vigilance. A token Anthem is still fine but it feels like such a troll move to include it.
Will save me some grief.
Without going into too much detail about this draft in particular, the big issue is still that you're forcing colors way too hard and way too early. You got a great white card to start, and you immediately picked two completely, stone cold unplayable white enchantments to stay on color while passing two pieces of quality removal in Black, and then as soon as you P1P5'd a not particularly great red common you committed to it being your second color and never looked at the bounty you were seeing in black and, to a lesser extent, green. This led to you passing two quality black rares in your next pack, along with some more removal and some synergistic pieces for the BW enchantment-sacrifice deck.
E: Think about it this way. Right now, you've got 38 cards in your colors/colorless, many of which are pretty bad. You need 23 or 24 playables in a deck. If you spent the entirety of pack 1 just picking the best card regardless of color identity and wound up throwing out the entire pack, all 14 cards, you'd still have enough cards to make a deck here. The goal is to have the strongest deck at the end, it's way better to have 23 playables that are all at least pretty good than to have 38 cards where you're mostly picking between vanilla-test failing commons for your last 5 cards.
Sad to see Glitters banned, as I basically played Eldraine pauper with W/B buff/debuff enchantments, and a Lurrus.
But looks like artifact lands make it a beast in Pauper proper.
This is a great way to put it, and I was struggling to find a way to phrase it.
Sonelan: I also think you often commit to a color a bit too early. That's not entirely a bad thing, a lot of newbie drafters make the exact opposite mistake.
I definitely don't want to see you swing to an opposite extreme of committing too late.
The question of when to commit to a color is different for each set, and can even be different depending on what your first few picks are. But your first few picks should be generally oriented towards overall card quality. I'll refer to Draftsim because you mentioned it earlier, though there are other draft guides and I'm undecided on how much I like draftsim in particular.
In this case, you got an excellent card in P1P1 (Virtue of Loyalty). But your P1P2 (Intangible Virtue) was a card listed as "Basically Unplayable" on draftsim. I can kinda see the logic here though, there's a small synergy between these two cards (though it's not a strong enough synergy to justify picking it, IMO).
P1P3 was kind of a weird choice. Assuming you wanted to stick to white, you picked Karmic Justice which Draftsim has listed as one of the 10 worst cards in the set over two white "Solid Playables" Gallant Pie-Wielder and Kellan's Lightblades. One of those (Pie-Wielder) even synergizes with your best card (Virtue of Loyalty).
Then in P1P4 you pick a "Basically Unplayable" card again (Knight of Doves) over a higher-rated one (Archon's Glory). I can see the logic here, too - you want creatures and tokens more than you want combat tricks. It's good thinking, but not when it leads you to picking a 'basically unplayable' card on pick 4.
P1P5 was puzzling to me for a similar reason. You picked a lower-rated red card (Merry Bards) over a higher-rated white card (Stockpiling Celebrant).
My takeway here: for the first few picks of the first pack, just focus on the mostly highly-rated card in your draft guide. I'm talking picks 1 through 5, though this is flexible. Then when you're around pick 5 through 7, start thinking more about color consistency and synergies.
It's okay to pick a slightly lower-rated card early in the draft if it happens to have some synergies. Lets say your P1P3 you have a choice between Cheeky House Mouse vs Belligerent of the Ball. These are both uncommon creatures, though Draftsim ranks Belligerent slightly higher. It's okay to pick Cheeky House-Mouse here because it shares its color with the bomb mythic you got. The synergy is worth taking a slightly lower-ranked card. But if the choice were between Cheeky House Mouse vs High Fae Negotiator, the right choice would be Negotiator. It's just a much better card and that early in the draft you have plenty of time to change colors or add a color.
For most drafts, your first 5-ish picks (sometimes 4, or 6 picks) should fairly closely conform to a draft guide. That is, until you start getting more experience at card evaluation.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Anyway, looking at this one:
Deck:
Cut Utopia Sprawl, Up the Beanstalk (you have no way to trigger it), Minstrosity, Prophetic Prism, 2X Sweettooth Witch, Return from the Wilds, Ashiok's Reaper, Lord Skitter's Butcher, Totentanz, 1x Unruly Catapult, 2x Skybridge Tracker (you have no way to trigger it), Night of Sweet's Revenge, and run 16 lands. Your entire gameplan is just to run low to the ground aggro, use Titanic Growth to push through damage, and in the end to hope that Raid Bombardment, Unruly Catapult, and Impact Tremors can finish the job.
E: I'd also note that if I were running this, I probably would have been looking for more top end or cards that let me punch above my weight class. I think the GR aggro deck here actually looks OK, but with how absurdly heavy I was getting at 2 and 3, even more than the data suggests I would have picked like, the red 5-drop that adventures to stop stuff from blocking, or the green giant that's cheaper when bargained. Your biggest risk is that you don't get enough damage in early for your direct damage reach to kill them, and while you're going to be very consistent at having early drops you aren't going to consistently have powerful ones.
If you're looking at a tier list, SB means "sideboard"; it's referring to cards you would only play if really needed for a matchup in Bo3, after you add and remove cards from your deck. So like, a card that was G: Destroy target white enchantment, draw two cards, would be completely useless most of the time, but insane against your Virtue of Loyalty deck, so it'd be a SB card.
E: Also to be clear I had a lot of comments on the above draft, but in the end you wound up with a pretty interesting looking aggro deck without quite hard committing to colors; hopefully the games are kind to you. One specific note is that you are going to want to Belligerent -> Merry Bards as a typical line, as it will let you get the Young Hero token on bards and attack with the Belligerent as a 4/3; every bit of damage is going to count for your deck.
Pauper is already a super fucked up format. Like the irl meta is completely different than online due to play timers and loops. And then the people managing the banlist just absolutely refuse to actually ban problem cards/decks. Pauper is a great idea with terrible stewardship
by all parties. It's like wtf print some good commons that aren't red and or artifacts for a change...
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Had a look, and I thought Pauper was no rares, not commons only.
My deck was commons, uncommons and one Lurrus for a long time.
I'm not sure how you'd play commons only in a single block
(I meant to post this earlier but I guess I forgot. It was in my drafts. Pun intended.)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Pauper by default is an eternal format, so it's every common ever printed. I've played Standard Pauper in the past and it is a deeply strange format.
Commons/Uncommons is called Artisan and really only exists on Arena.