MTG thread

GR is bad, it'll either be jund or naya midrange. Friend has been doing a ton of analysis of the mana right now and the conclusion is: Wedge mana is great, shard mana sucks. So in the case of naya you'd be splashing red almost exclusively for Arlinn.

Wedges have creature lands and painlands. Don't see how much analysis you can do before we see all the fixing available.

There's the lands being spoiled today. Not sure how I feel about these right now, but I just woke up.

Yeah, so I was wrong I'll have more thoughts later.

Sin Prodder is nice.

Prerelease night. Retrieved my clue tokens from the boardgame shelf. Ready to durdle my way to infinite value.

And get completely run over by the red/black deck that opened 5 on-color rares.

Sounds about right. Speaking of clues I've been having fun testing this deck:Aethergrid Clue (Unknown MTG Deck)The big issue with it is the slightly awkward manabase and it can't beat Westvale Abbey game one. If you guys have ideas I am all ears. Otherwise if I can't fix those two problems I'll probably just play GW tokens/megamorph.

Xalara_sl said:

Sounds about right. Speaking of clues I've been having fun testing this deck:Aethergrid Clue (Unknown MTG Deck)The big issue with it is the slightly awkward manabase and it can't beat Westvale Abbey game one. If you guys have ideas I am all ears. Otherwise if I can't fix those two problems I'll probably just play GW tokens/megamorph.

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I would say you would want a bounce spell like Just the Wind. Gives you tempo against any deck and does the heavy lifting against Oremendahl. I would probably cut the Roasts and Sarkhan and turn red into a very light splash. I doubt you need all 4 Aethergrid since you should be drawing piles of cards to find one anyway (a second copy is always redundant), but where's Jace?? . You've obviously tested the deck more than me so you know why those cards are important. But maybe there's something in color that does what those cards do (obviously not Aethergrid since that's the theme of the deck).

I made some more changes to the deck, but to answer your questions. Baby Jace VP doesn't do too much, and big Jace is on the redundant side given all of the clues. I initially started with three Aether Grids but found I want one every single game, so I increased the count to four. Drawing multiples sucks, but not having it is worse. Plus there is lots of enchantment removal running around.

I moved Roast to the sideboard and cut Sarkhan completely. I also turned one of the Lumbering Falls into a fourth Yavimaya Coast. In place of Sarkhan I put Pia and Kiran Nalaar. I consider them a six to seven drop, rather than four drop but they provide another way to end games and interact favourably with Westvale Abbey because your thopters can chump block then be sacrificed before combat damage. For the bounce spell I went with Clutch of Currents since it lets you sequence a turn three against ramp/aggro where you play a two drop and bounce on of their creatures. As for Westvale Abbey, you can often chunp it once, bounce it, and by then you have Aether Grid to control the rest of the board.

I ended up not liking Clutch of Currents and instead replaced it with Containment Membrane

Takeaways from brewing new standard decks: Declaration In Stone amazing, creatures much less so.

B&R summary: Great news for modern, terrible for vintage.

This was a really fun prerelease weekend.

Rather surprised at the unbannings. Expected them to just nerf Eldrazi and "see how the Twin-less environment shakes out" since Eldrazi precluded doing so.

Guess the unbannings are an olive branch to the enraged Modern playerbase.

I don't see Lodestone Golem being restricted too bad a deal. You still have plenty of lock pieces, just only 1 that is a lock piece AND a beater for 5.

Drtyrm_sl said:

I don't see Lodestone Golem being restricted too bad a deal. You still have plenty of lock pieces, just only 1 that is a lock piece AND a beater for 5.

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I'm not a big shops player so I don't really have a stake in the fight, but I think it was much too soon after the Chalice restriction to be hitting another piece from the deck. Very likely, this just leads to blue stealing percentages of the metagame and Mental Misstep becoming that much more important. The common reaction right now is, "okay, but why not Dark Petition as well?" Generally speaking, if the immediate response to a restriction/banning is a call for another ban in response, they're both bad ideas.

Shop, Mox, Golem is also the same % chance as Orchard, Mox, Oath. And it was Oath that won the last two major paper events.

It always happens though. PVDDR was on twitter asking why Affinity didn't get touched nearly instantly.

Ok.

So, new release today and I got intrigued. I havn't bought a booster pack since 1999 I think? Decide not to stay for FNM because.. reasons, but grab two booster packs because I had convinced myself it was a good idea.

Two main questions though, a) is there a real option for someone who doesn't want to deal with FNM crowds and has no friends who plays magic anymore (thanks hearthstone and netrunner), but still wants to play casually. And b) I played from the tail end of revised until end of Urzas/beginning of MM. So many new rules, etc. Is it hard to get back in/learn all the new things?

Cheers

If you want to play magic but have no friends who play and don't want to deal with going to a LGS, the best option would be to play online. The client isn't the greatest, and the digital cards often have very different values than the paper ones, but overall it's not a bad experience. It's also a good way to learn the new abilities that you dont have much experience with as everything triggers automatically so you can't forget or miss anything.

If you really want to play with paper cards I don't really have a good suggestion for you.

kalissan_sl said:

Two main questions though, a) is there a real option for someone who doesn't want to deal with FNM crowds and has no friends who plays magic anymore (thanks hearthstone and netrunner), but still wants to play casually. And b) I played from the tail end of revised until end of Urzas/beginning of MM. So many new rules, etc. Is it hard to get back in/learn all the new things?

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Casual MTG is still the bread and butter that keeps the lights on at WotC. I'd wager you still know someone who plays at least a little bit, or would be interested in a draft at home. Snag a box and a case of beer, invite folks over, and have a good time. You might manage to recruit another friend back into the game.

As for the rules, they're radically different. You will recognize the broad strokes, but a lot of things have been streamlined and made more logical. The rules are very programmatic now. If you're familiar with problem solving in code, you'll notice it right away. There are still edge cases, but in general things tend to work in consistent and predictable ways. Certainly for casual Magic, you'll be fine. The biggest changes to the rules are interactions on the stack, no more mana burn or interrupts, damage happens as a turn based action rather than using the stack, and a consistent system of layers for the interaction of effects. The comp rules these days are a couple hundred pages, but even most judges don't read that cover to cover (I never did).

I'd also encourage you to find a local shop where people play and just meet the community. I got back into Magic in a pretty big way back in late 2013, and I've made some great friends that I see pretty consistently. My wife is fine with it because it's cheaper than a bar, and gives me a hobby that keeps me out of the house.