Magic: the Gathering - T: Add Three Mana Of Any One Colour To Your Mana Pool

[aldeayeah]

How are things going on the rare land front? I have only maximized the UR and BG lands (got nearly all of them in boosters, too)

Currently sitting on 15k gold, unsure what to spend it on. I think I'll wait for RNA best of one draft (however it's not in schedule yet? ONOREEEEE)

[I3uster]

the temptation of rainbow gate lich

its too strong

i cant splurge all my wildcards on meme cards

[aldeayeah]

Modern Deck Hall of Fame
(decks that got cards banned)

INFECT (Blazing Shoal, Gitaxian Probe)
12-POST (Cloudpost)
STORM (Ponder, Preordain, Rite of Flame, Seething Song)
ZOO (Wild Nacatl)
JUND (Punishing Fire, Bloodbraid Elf, Deathrite Shaman)
EGGS (Second Sunrise)
DELVER (Treasure Cruise, Dig Through Time)
POD (Birthing Pod)
TWIN (Splinter Twin)
AMULET BLOOM (Summer Bloom)
ELDRAZI (Eye of Ugin)
DREDGE (Golgari Grave-Troll)
KCI (Krark-Clan Ironworks)

o7

(one could argue Eggs and KCI were fundamentally the same deck, I guess)

[I3uster]

you ever wonder how half of these were met immediately with "why would you print this" the moment they were revealed (probe, treasure cruise, wild nacatl being the most obvious ones)

i mean hell golgari grave troll was a completely unproblematic card enabling a cool strategy for the entirety of ravnica until time spiral decided that narcomoeba/bridge from below were a good idea, two cards everyone thought shouldnt have been printed at the time of spoiler season

[aldeayeah]

Wasn't GGT played with Ichorid/Flashback/Threshold/Madness/discard-loot-wheel effects in Extended from, like, the very moment it saw print?

Dredge is a fundamentally broken engine by virtue of being a) mostly free, and b) mostly unstoppable.

[I3uster]

I wasn't a big Extended guy but I'm pretty sure that wasn't dominant until BFB really knocked that deck over the top.

This was when you still had a G/B manabase in Dredge because its significantly harder to hit 3 Ichorids than it is to hit one BFB.

The "free" payoff of getting Ichorid out is really not that great tbh, its only a problematic effect if it has enough redundancy to invalidate most GY hate, and it's much easier achieved with GY tutoring since you are looking for that one specific hit (the Dread Return Combo finish that became a staple is not really achievable without Bridge).

Dredge was a great mechanic that I think some Time Spiral Block cards deliberately pushed because it was popular, only that those saw too little playtesting to the point where some conspiracy theories were that wizards just deliberately tried to sink the dredge boat.

Bridge is to this day just a dumb ass design because it turns the engine of your deck into its own fodder, tempo/value generator and combo finish for free.

[mAc Chaos]

Nobody cared about Dredge until BFB, yeah.

[Deathhappens]

Wow, the man Brandon Sanderson himself replied to my silly Kelsier card design. Made my day.

Hah, nice! Though I do agree with the top comment guy, repeatable shocks for free with no other effort required is a bit too strong. I think I'd make it so he ETBs with, say, 2 treasure tokens but has to burn them for a shock (fits lorewise, since execssive effort requires burning your metal!).

Went for the pre-release event yesterday, and just my luck, they'd cancelled the whole thing because they didn't have enough sets left -_-
I got one of the last ones, but it was the experience I was going for. I don't even know what to do with the cards!

[aldeayeah]

Yeah, by default I always cost my custom cards to be Modern playable, which can make them overpowered in other contexts. That's clearly the case with this one. I have yet to master the art of MULTI-TRACK DRIFTING multi-format balancing.

(In particular, I'm pretty cavalier when it comes to giving fragile creatures strong abilities)

If it was sac to shock it would be basically Pia and Kiran Nalaar; I wanted it to play differently.

If I made it again I'd probably cost him UBR, and have the activated ability deal one damage. Then, on its own, he's basically a hasty pinger, which is pretty reasonable IMO. For balance reasons, the damage dealing ability should probably cost some mana, but I kind of like the combo element of slamming him onto a board full of Treasures for a kill.

Also, Brandon is very transparently a huge MTG fan, love that! He made a custom Mistborn cube with a "sleeves matter" mechanic.

* * *

You can play Winston Draft with the prerelease kit and a friend. It's a bit unfair if you already know the cards in the pool, but still fun.

[Cruor]

So I found a rather interesting decklist, its rather 'cheap' on mythics (has a ton of rares though). And it turned out to be rather fun and interesting to play and has some real good success against Burn and most decks on current ladder in MTGA- Mono White Prison. It turns out its rather hard for Burn to deal with all your healing and all your removal is rather difficult to deal with for most decks, I haven't faced much Gruul for some reason but I expect that to be a cancerous matchup for you as you can't do anything, White Weenie and G/W can't seem to do anything to you, I think Dimir Discard was the scariest but they simply couldn't kill me as I had too much healing.

Its mainly good in BO1 I can't imagine it being too great in BO3 but I'm slowly building this for that.

[Deathhappens]

Yeah, by default I always cost my custom cards to be Modern playable, which can make them overpowered in other contexts. That's clearly the case with this one. I have yet to master the art of MULTI-TRACK DRIFTING multi-format balancing.

(In particular, I'm pretty cavalier when it comes to giving fragile creatures strong abilities)

If it was sac to shock it would be basically Pia and Kiran Nalaar; I wanted it to play differently.

If I made it again I'd probably cost him UBR, and have the activated ability deal one damage. Then, on its own, he's basically a hasty pinger, which is pretty reasonable IMO. For balance reasons, the damage dealing ability should probably cost some mana, but I kind of like the combo element of slamming him onto a board full of Treasures for a kill.

Also, Brandon is very transparently a huge MTG fan, love that! He made a custom Mistborn cube with a "sleeves matter" mechanic.

* * *

You can play Winston Draft with the prerelease kit and a friend. It's a bit unfair if you already know the cards in the pool, but still fun.

Thing is... I don't have any basic lands. :P

[aldeayeah]

Your store should give you basic lands for free, if you ask.

[Deathhappens]

I've heard of that being the case in other Local Game Stores, but I reserve a bit of doubt concerning that particular chain (they're known as fairly money-grubbing in the community). No harm in asking next time I go there I guess.

[aldeayeah]

If you are an actual paying customer and buy literally anything else (if you don't know what to buy, I suggest some sleeves/deck boxes), they'd have to be REALLY stingy not to give them for free.

Any card shop that opens sealed material to sell singles tends to have zillions of those things lying around.

You should also be able to ask the store (again, being a paying customer will help a lot) for some free Core Set 2019 Welcome Decks. Those are monocolor 30-card decks, each has 13 basics, and WotC distributes them to stores with the idea of giving them to new players for free. Maybe they won't give you the whole set, but they should give you at least a pair (if they let you choose, I'd pick the red one with Shock/Lightning Strike and the green one with a couple Llanowar Elves).

Otherwise, just ask other players. Pretty much anyone with a paper collection will have a bunch of extra basic lands to give.

If everything else fails, you could grab a Deck Builder's Toolkit, they are like twenty bucks and they include a bunch of basics + 4 boosters + a bunch of Standard cards (some even playable!). These are also often available in toy stores too.

https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Core_Set_2...er%27s_Toolkit (with XLN, RIX, DOM, M19 boosters)

https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Ravnica_Al...er%27s_Toolkit (with DOM, M19, GRN, RNA boosters, releases this Friday)

[Deathhappens]

How do you do Orzhov right? I've been trying to build around Teysa and Afterlife, but possibly because I'm missing cards I'm just not seeing enough payoff. Should I switch to lifegain-loss shenanigans with Kaya, Vampires and Pridemate?

[aldeayeah]

Best of 3 challenges in Arena, yay!

[Deathhappens]

Black has so much boardwipe and cheap removal it's perfectly feasible to remove everything and just keep plinking away with a Reassembled Skeleton or something.
t. it just happened.

[aldeayeah]

PewDiePie has reached Mythic in Constructed. I'm afraid of the implications.

[Deathhappens]

I haven't bothered with ranked ever since they gave us Quickplay, as is my typical MO with most online games with ladder systems, but according to others' discussion on the topic getting Mythic in Arena is just a function of time over a barely passable winrate (50% or so). And streamers tend to play a LOT.

[aldeayeah]

And now, for something completely different,

Who'd be up for a Vintage showdown on Cockatrice?