MTG thread

Yeah, that's good.

Kuro_sl said:

I'm just selling my Eyes. $50-60 is a good markup from the $2-3 I got em at.

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This is wise.

Someone had commented how this Pro Tour was really just another conspiracy to sell Oath of the Gatewatch product. Of course they knew how broken these Eldrazi would be in modern and what better way to showcase it and sell more current product (maybe they even move more MM15 too because of Eye of Ugin and Eldrazi Temple).

Take it a step further that Ian Duke was the design lead and Reid Duke is a member of the team that broke the deck....

If it was that obvious why didn't every team get to the Eldrazi deck?

Oh wait, I forgot the internet has a hard on for conspiracies.

If you couldn't figure out Vile Aggregate, Eldrazi Skyspawner, Ruination Guide, Gemstone Caverns for Modern I don't know what to tell you. The deck builds itself.

Punko_sl said:

this isn't even 30% as broken as spiraltide was in standard

i remember saving my allowance and trading a lot of shit to get 4 tolarians / timespiral / stroke of genius, only to see the most expensive parts banned literally the day after i completed it

community has grown soft

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Seriously. Mtg is soft nowadays lol

I was actually trying to qualify in Columbus back during when Tide/Academy was full on dominating.

Then some unknown guy named Pat Chapin was hilariously destroying all of them running Jank with 8 main deck red elemental blasts (4 red elem blast + 4 pyroblast). Idk how many Tide players were screaming for judges to check his decklist then the judge would kinda smile and say "yep, its legit" as they would sulk. That region was hard as fuck to play in, had Randy Buehler and all the Carnegie Mellon guys too at everything in that region. I almost top 8'd that tourney with Poxrack since resolving Pox 1x pretty much was them scooping, if I did it twice they had no chance.

Was a shit ton of fun in those days smashing the meta. You could also wreck academy and tide with an aggressive red/blue merfolk deck running static orb with force spike/blast backup etc. Magic went to pure shit with the release of planeswalkers and killing off combo imo, at least compared to those days. Beating broken ass decks and playing them were both fun

Combo is still alive and well in the older formats. Even in modern, you can argue that there are viable combo decks. They're just not Academy.

Chickenpants_sl said:

Someone had commented how this Pro Tour was really just another conspiracy to sell Oath of the Gatewatch product. Of course they knew how broken these Eldrazi would be in modern and what better way to showcase it and sell more current product (maybe they even move more MM15 too because of Eye of Ugin and Eldrazi Temple).

Take it a step further that Ian Duke was the design lead and Reid Duke is a member of the team that broke the deck....

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I fucking cannot wait for Mirrodin 3 if this is the case

Hell. Affinity is *sometimes* a combo deck.

Chickenpants_sl said:

Someone had commented how this Pro Tour was really just another conspiracy to sell Oath of the Gatewatch product. Of course they knew how broken these Eldrazi would be in modern and what better way to showcase it and sell more current product (maybe they even move more MM15 too because of Eye of Ugin and Eldrazi Temple).

Take it a step further that Ian Duke was the design lead and Reid Duke is a member of the team that broke the deck....

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This is just more internet conspiracy stuff. Reid Duke was not a member of the team that broke the deck and he did not play the deck. Reid played Jund and is on Team Pantheon. The teams on Eldrazi were Team CFB/Face to Face and Team East West Bowl. Reid does write for CFB, which seems like the sort of kernel of truth thing you find underlying most conspiracies.

The other thing is conspiracies sort of need to be secret. Ian Duke talked on stream about how they knew that having good, smaller Eldrazi was going to be an issue in Modern, but they chose to prioritize designing for Standard.

The future future league doesn't really do all that much testing for eternal formats and that ain't anything new. What will be interesting is seeing how effective Eldrazi strategies are now that everyone has gotten a good look at them. You're going to have a ton of people experimenting with Eldrazi archtypes and the decks will probably get better and go in new directions but at the same time a ton of people are going to be working on exploiting their dominance.

Maybe in a couple months everyone ends up hating how goddamn stagnant Modern becomes but for now it's pretty cool.

I've just never understood why there isn't a Future Modern League. Fine, playtest for standard since it sells packs. But at least TRY to ensure that your non-rotating format doesn't shit the bed every few months.

The issue is how do you even attack the deck? A land that generates 2 mana and a land that discounts most of your cards by 2 mana. Well, you can't play colored spells with that mana base but all these eldrazi don't need colored mana. And you still get to run interaction with 4 Chalice, 4 Dismember and 2 Ratchet Bombs. Oh and don't forget Thought Knot Seer exiling any answer you found on turn 2 or turn 3.

Hoogland was streaming the RW land destruction deck and he still got manhandled by Eldrazi. The cutest idea he talked about was adding Painter's Servant into his Kiki Chord.

Heylel_sl said:

I've just never understood why there isn't a Future Modern League. Fine, playtest for standard since it sells packs. But at least TRY to ensure that your non-rotating format doesn't shit the bed every few months.

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I'm sure it's a resource issue. How many were trying to break it for the Pro Tour? And that was with people generally thinking Eldrazi could be a thing because of the BW deck. But only 8% of Day 1 was Eldrazi. If you're WoTc and you look at something like that, where tens, if not hundreds of people, spend weeks trying to find the deck, and only a few do, then it's got to be pretty hard justifying putting your employees on it.

Add to that that any broken cards or interactions that slip through will excite people, and drive conversation, etc. No press is bad press and all that. Anything degenerate that slips through can be banned per the normal schedule and anything utterly broken can always be emergency banned. Looking at it like that, little to no testing for modern is rational.

I think control decks are going to end up being pretty good against the deck, outside of nut mimic draws. Remand, mana leak, and cryptic punish stumbles pretty hard and the deck does stumble. Ashiok is annoying. Not sure how those decks stack up against the rest of the format tho.

A viable turn 1 counterspell would go a long way for the tempo decks. Hell, just straight up Force Spike would put a halt to the mimic into thought knot openers that tap out each turn.

Maybe some kind of Ensnaring Bridge nonsense is the way to go. Ghoulcaller's Bell can become a 10 dollar common!

It's not like WotC tests standard anyway. I occasionally talk to employees, being that I live in Seattle, and one of the things that always strikes me is how little they actually test constructed. The latest example is how Reflector Mage wasn't tested in standard, but I know through the grapevine that Monoblack Devotion and Monoblue Devotion came about because WotC didn't bother to test Theros standard. Oh yeah and they didn't catch Rally the Ancestors either, but they're lucky that the deck is hard to pilot, so it isn't a problem outside of competitive tournaments where you'll run into people who don't suck.

They're just lucky that they have reasonably good game developers and a strong framework to design cards in.

I mean.. that goes against all the stories I've heard from past employees. They test every set and it's effect on standard, but there is only about a dozen or less people doing it. So, it's not that they 'don't' test, it's that they can only test the basic outline of deck ideas. Luckily, over the years they have gotten more and more pro level players into R&D, so their testing has gotten better. Small things sneak through, but they have gotten pretty good at realizing what is busted and creating enough tools to fight any given strategy as a failsafe, even if they don't think it'll be good.

I personally don't think devotion was a mistake. Yes we had a pretty dominant deck, but the only times we don't is when there's too strong of a rock-paper-scissors effect, but with 2-3 extra options. Meaning, one deck (rock) just almost always beats another (scissors), irrelevant of skill level, but also auto-loses to another deck out there, etc.. I hate those formats, cause it's generally less skill intensive and just picking the right deck each week.
During mono-black devotion's dominance, you could outplay people in the mirror, or play an anti-devotion deck. I won lots of local tournaments/IQs with B/w midrange, basically black devotion with blood baron/obzedat, during that time. It was effectively the same % as mono black was against the other decks, little better against control, but it crushed the pseudo mirror.

I also don't see how they 'missed' rally, it was purposefully designed in such a way that it's pretty hard to go infinite with it, but you can't really play it as a normal value spell either. It's very clearly designed to be used exactly as it is, but they probably didn't have the optimal version of the deck.

My point is, magic players bitch and complain, no matter what Wizards does. We complain about fetchland prices, they reprint fetches, then we bitch that they've made standard too expensive.. We complain about modern not being a pro tour format, despite Wizards knowing that if the Pros focus on it, they will break the format cause they don't print cards with Modern in mind. We also complain about cards spiking in price. So, we get a modern pro tour, and what happens? Eldrazi breaks the format and spikes a bunch of cards, and we bitch about that too.