Magic: The Gathering

[Jaesun]

Holy shit.

 

[Ulminati]

Jaesun
On top of that card, many Jeskai creatures have prowess. (Whenever you play a non-creature spell, they gain +1/+1 until end of turn).

 

[Jaesun]

See THAT is the one thing I have always liked about MTG. All the different combinations of stuff a player could arrange in his/her deck.

Kind of like a GOOD cRPG that lets you experiment (and exploit) the setting/game. (See Deus Ex).

I already know I am going to give in and buy MTG Online soon. God Djinn help me.

 

[Ulminati]

When you give in, do what I do. Me and 2 bros play drafts. One bro does the actrual drafting, the other two spectate on skype with screen sharing and we hive mind what to do. It's pretty fun.

Once you've used up your n00b points (I recommend going for n00b tourneys rather than n00b drafts, since the tourney prize can give you more event tickets), if you're going to draft, don't buy boosters from the official store. (You need boosters or a ton of tickets to draft). There's a bunch of bots on th earket place who sell boosters for event tickets. You can buy tickets from the official store and sell them to bots for boosters cheaper than buying the actual boosters in the store.

I think I've sunk about $20 into MTGO. $10 for the initial registration and $10 for tickets. When we draft, we save any boosters we win to make entry into more drafts cheaper. And any expensive rares or mythics we mnage to draft go to trade bots for more boosters and tickets. :3

It all depends on what you want of course. I find draft more fun than constructed. The only time I play constructed is when I'm playing pauper (Format where you only use commons and basic lands to build your deck) with friends. So uncommons, rares and mythics are pretty much useless ot me in MTGO.

 

[Jaedar]

Lots of talk going around about how this thing is super broken. Seems most people expect it to be modern banned really soon, and maybe even standard banned(although this prediction is a lot less common). Apparantly it can win as early as turn 2, and is very likely to combo out at turn 3 or 4.

 

[Jaesun]

Holy shit, at that low a mana cost that is basically a I WIN card (if you can't get rid of enchantments).

 

[Caim]

Wow, just for that first ability alone it would be an awesome card.

Come to think of it, why do all Rares an Mythic Rares have that silvery oval at the base of the card? To stop dudes trying to make forgeries?

 

[Jaedar]

Wow, just for that first ability alone it would be an awesome card.

Come to think of it, why do all Rares an Mythic Rares have that silvery oval at the base of the card? To stop dudes trying to make forgeries?

yes

 

[Muty]

Personally I don't get all the whining about ascendancy. It sure is a very powerful card that created a new deck in modern all by itself, but so are many other cards there(pod, twin, Pyromancer Ascension etc...). Most of the decks in modern will kill you on turn 3 if they go unimpeded until then. Modern is an incerdibly removal heavy format, not to mention the disruption, at most I guess that the deck will force more people to play enchantment removal mainboard. Also so far we've seen only results from a few modern dailyies on mtgo, I guess we'll need results from at least several high profile tournaments before we can say that its completely broken. I may be completely wrong though and the card can really be broken enough to require banning, but I still think that its too early to tell.

 

[Ulminati]

All the ascendancy cards in general are stupid strong.
Take Abzan for instance. They start out with outlast creatures like these:

Now add in this:

And maybe even this to make it sillier:

Run a token/weenie deck with some outlast. Have a horde of weenies out. Ascendancy. BAM, they're now all +1/+1 (or +2/+2) and gain first strike, flying, death touch, lifelink...

Of course, you have to tap creatures to outlast, leaving you vulnerable to getting atta...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA NO YOU DONT!

 

[Muty]

Just a heads up for everyone that is interested(I missed pt m15 because I forgot about it...). The pro tour starts tomorrow. More info and live stream schedule can be found here: http://magic.wizards.com/en/content/event-information-pro-tour-khans-tarkir

 

[Ulminati]

Feck... I'm busy friday and sunday.

 

[Ranselknulf]

TCGplayer can be hit or miss on the quality of cards. So I decided to order a dollar or two worth of cards from 25 different sellers to see who has decent quality cards. So far I've found a couple that I think I can order from confidently. Big surprise that they are the sellers with 50,000+ sales.

 

[Ulminati]

So I played sealed KTK on MTGO yesterday. My first opponent played both planeswalkers by turn 6 in both games D:

Flunklesnarkin -- so which dealer(s) can you recommend following your experiment?

 

[Ranselknulf]

Columbia Games is the best seller on TCG imo. I ordered something like 130+ cards from them and every one looked like I had just opened the booster pack. Prices were close to the lowest also.

Happy Viking Games is pretty good also. There are many other people I'd buy from as well but I usually check those 2 first. Been so busy I haven't been able to play in a couple weeks, but I think I'll order a bunch of cards this week so I can make a khans style deck for next weeks standard tournament.

I'll probably throw together a random deck this week just to play for fun. I doubt it will win but I probably should at least play to see what people are doing.

 

[Grunker]

I'm drafting this ad infinitum on MTGO. If not my favourite set to draft ever, it's at least in the top 3.

 

[Ranselknulf]

I did a little better than I expected seeing as how none of the cards in my deck cost more than a dollar. Most were less than 10 cents. I ended up winning a few booster packs and an alt art rare foil promo card. It will be nice when I get the cards I ordered though, I really want to move into a new color set.

It's crazy how much some of these cards cost. I'm not gonna spend thousands on this but I'm ok spending a few bucks each week and just augmenting my decks with whatever I win.

 

[Grunker]

So I'm watching the Pro Tour KoT coverage and who shows up... Julien Pirou

Infinitron

 

[Ranselknulf]

I've been working six days a week lately so I didn't have much time to put together a tournament deck this week. I went to the card shop with my terrible deck anyways and found out they were doing a sealed tournament instead. Somehow I ended up winning the entire tournament and won a bunch of free booster packs. People always try to play so fast but I don't know what half the new cards are so I was always having to stop and read them as they were played. I think it threw off the veterans because they like to rush through games. I also played a bunch of shitty situational cards that always seemed to show up right as I needed them. I made come backs from 1 health and my opponent being close to full health a few times. Playing lots and lots of instants and "nope" cards was fun too.

I didn't think morph would be as good as it ended up. Being able to toss down a creature even though you don't have the color land to cast it is really powerful in sealed. It kinda makes your opponent stress out a bit too because they don't know if it's a terrible creature or a monster underneath the morph token.

 

[Ulminati]

Winning in KTK Draft/Seal made easy:

0) You're Abzan
1) Outlast
2) Murderous Cut
3) More Outlast
4) Maybe 1-2 delve cards (sultai scavenger, shambling attendants)
5) Bit more outlast
6) Dual/triple lands, abzan charm/ascendancy is in too.

Pretty much every draft I've played has been won either by Abzan or 5-color dream that went aggressively for morphs and dual lands.
Outlast cards are simply too mana efficient. Out of the box, you'd still find them (situationally) good without their outlast ability by virtue ob being stuff like 0/4 for 1 or 3/4 for 3. On top of that you can grow them, and they grant additional abilities to all cards you've grown. Most abzan players tend to have at least 2 of firststrike/deathtouch/lifelink/flying on all their outlast cards by turn 5.

Hard removal (murderous cut, levitation feld, dead drop, utter end, crackling doom) definitely needs to be prioritized when drafting KTK to deal with the mega doombeasts Abzan players tend to have if you don't rush them down. Failing that, Dune blast/end hostilities, but they're both rares.

 

[Ranselknulf]

I doubt I would have won if I went straight abzan because I only got 2 creatures with outlast in my entire sealed box. Nonetheless I did play those two creatures but I used a lot of delve as well. Digging through my deck to get to those creatures and playing lots of instants to put counters on other creatures helped a lot. Mix in removal and nope cards like feat of resistance (I got three of those, lucky me) and it was a pretty good win most games. My deck was kinda a sultai/abzan mix and it was solid.

Don't let delve scare you even though it's only a 40 card deck. I went a couple games where I intentionally discarded 15 cards from my deck just to search for what I wanted. Scout the borders is awesome btw ;p

 

[Grunker]

Winning in KTK Draft/Seal made easy:

0) You're Abzan
1) Outlast
2) Murderous Cut
3) More Outlast
4) Maybe 1-2 delve cards (sultai scavenger, shambling attendants)
5) Bit more outlast
6) Dual/triple lands, abzan charm/ascendancy is in too.

Pretty much every draft I've played has been won either by Abzan or 5-color dream that went aggressively for morphs and dual lands.
Outlast cards are simply too mana efficient. Out of the box, you'd still find them (situationally) good without their outlast ability by virtue ob being stuff like 0/4 for 1 or 3/4 for 3. On top of that you can grow them, and they grant additional abilities to all cards you've grown. Most abzan players tend to have at least 2 of firststrike/deathtouch/lifelink/flying on all their outlast cards by turn 5.

Hard removal (murderous cut, levitation feld, dead drop, utter end, crackling doom) definitely needs to be prioritized when drafting KTK to deal with the mega doombeasts Abzan players tend to have if you don't rush them down. Failing that, Dune blast/end hostilities, but they're both rares.

I agree that Abzan is strong, and until people figure out that lands should be high-as-fuck-picks, 5-color dream decks will probably be the strongest. However most drafts I'm in are won by either two-color splash decks (Mardu and Abzan are toppers, Sultai following) or the 5-color decks. I don't think Abzan is as dominating as you put it.

I'm still of the opinion that this draft environment is close to being up there with RotE, Innistrad and Invasion.

 

[Ranselknulf]

It's crazy how some of these uncommon cards are $4 each. Maybe I should buy a bunch of boosters from those sets and sell the uncommons on tcg.

 

[Grunker]

Pretty satisfied with this bunch:

Is it just me, or is the Warrior deck so sickly overdrafted that you can never get it even if you force it? I've drafted Khans maybe 40 times now, and not a single time have I played the deck or played against a credible, strong version of it.

 

[Dr Skeleton]

How did that deck play? The cards are great (Claws, Twins, Arc Lightning, Roughrider, Instigator), but splashing 2 colours with just basics? Ouch.

And yeah, people seem to pick aggressive W+B/R very highly, it's a good archetype in a format where you play taplands and 2/2 on turn 3, but you can't even get commons like Hordechief on later picks most of the time. I usually tend towards UG/UB and then splash for Sultai or Temur, you can get cards like Sultai Soothsayer or Bear's Companion very late, fixing with U seems easier to pick too.

Overall this is easily one of my favorite limited formats of all time, there's enough fixing for crazy 3+ colour control decks, but aggro is still viable, there's decent removal, morph is back, you get weird build-around cards like Trail of Mystery or Goblinslide, there's no bullshit like Invisible Stalker, Pack Rat or white heroic in Theros. The most broken card is probably Duneblast, but it's 7 mana in 3 colors and a rare.