magic: the gathering poll

I like the game so much more when it feels like a puzzle, where you have to make all the right choices in order to come out ahead, so blue is probably my favorite

That said the red "fuck you I'm going to spend every resource I have to kill you quick before your fancy deck can do anything" attitude is neat too.

caveat: ive been playing a friend of mine who played in tournaments and stuff in the early days of magic but who lost in interest in the game after the first few years, so the only cards ive really played with are the first say dozen or so sets and expansions.

but the thing i like most abt magic is the off-hand world building they do in the occassional card description and how distinct all the colors are, they way these piecemeal bits of history and legened accrue a kind of weight and importance through abscence and repetition

anyway i like mythology of the white cards the best, the faintly biblical bent of it

always loved the original Spirit Link artwork:

http://www.coolstuffinc.com/images/Products/mtg%20art/Legends/Spirit%20Link.jpg

Old school magic definitely had that flavor. Black had Unholy Strength and Demonic Tutor (both with pentagrams) and White had Jihad and Crusade. That all seems by the wayside now

1. blue
2. red
3. blue and red

gotta go black, but blue had counterspell and all kinds of other crazy shit.

i remember always trying to go big with this:

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx%3Fsize%3Dsmall%26type%3Dcard%26name%3DLeviathan%26options%3D

1. blue
2. white
3. green
4. red
5. black

actually maybe

1. blue and red
2. blue
3. red

there is really no better feeling than knowing you have both lightning bolts and counterspells in your deck

http://www.mtgmintcard.com/images/products/131/MAGIC-THE-GATHERING-BEATDOWN-LEVIATHAN-BTDW044.jpg

I don't think today's players will ever quite appreciate what Leviathan meant to us back in the day, when the thrill of attacking with anything bigger than a 4/4 was rare

i think white at least in the early sets has the best sense of place and expansive history or s.thing:

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=250&type=card http://www.mtgmintcard.com/images/products/125/MAGIC-THE-GATHERING-ALPHA-CASTLE-ALPU013.jpg

like its just the sun dappled idyll where angels and lions and knights are chillin all the time

also a big fan of:

http://www.coolstuffinc.com/images/Products/mtg%20art/Legends/The%20Tabernacle%20at%20Pendrell%20Vale.jpg

leviathan mostly just meant "dammit this is gonna be in my hand forever"

this guy otoh:

http://www.gaymerlife.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/shivan_dragon_art_by_melissa_benso.jpg

had a signed one iirc

I miss that style of art - this one was cool too

http://www.coolstuffinc.com/images/Products/mtg%20art/Beta/Stasis.jpg

today's cards seem to have a lot of generic fantasy art that is obviously computer-assissted, technically impressive but no personality

that Shivan is just the coolest thing ever

man i was about to make a new MTG thread

i've been sucked back into it recently, it's still really fun

voted green, though would have voted blue a few years ago before they juiced up green a bit and made it not terrible

and yeah the pre-style guide era art is still neat and p. unique sometimes

people seem to like that squirrel card huh

it was a key piece of the power squirrel deck

i definitely remember making infinite squirrels with http://magiccards.info/od/en/274.html back in the day

lol, i meant this one. just because nobody ever had a good explanation as to what it was supposed to be

http://client-cdn.crystalcommerce.com/photo/ccghouse/file/80908/large/scan0010.jpg

omg I was all about stasis decks, but I am a pretty annoying person tbh

'how do we make this game as unbearable as possible...'

i have a MTG 'encyclopedia' book that was published in like 1995 or so that 's just full color images of every card up through Ice Age

it's pretty sweet

lol I had that as a kid

Yeah, I have that book too, smh! Beautiful stuff.

Voted red. Explosions! Pillaging hoardes!

White is obv the best smh indeed

lol i forgot i had a statis/burn deck

just in terms of power white is pretty weak in early era magic. I remember reading about it getting strong later, but if you had to make a single color deck w/ revised cards, I think white would prob be the weakest deck. tho serra angel <3.

white was weak offensively yea but had so many total board altering/reset cards at that time (wrath of god, armageddon) & swords to plowshares/disenchant that it would prob be my second choice after blue in this poll

Mono white beta/alpha owns p hard lots of crazy stalls and total board control

ya but it just doesn't have the power to back it up. blue has the same control aspect but can also kick your ass.

tho when you do get to kill somebody w/ serra angels it's very majestic

black because sangir vampires are just so sexy

white had Balance, arguably the greatest card ever printed

http://www.chuck-a-con.net/MTG-balance3ED.jpg

also Sword to Plowshares was probably the best creature removal ever

crusade is p rad as well tbh

idk alpha/beta/unlmtd white is def abt a slower victory and im sure it is underpowered but there are just so many cool cards

also its the most fun to tell stories in my head abt as i play

yeah I don't think the fact that it's slightly weaker means it shouldn't be anyone's favorite

I mean who can deny this card and the art:

http://www.mtgvault.com/images/cards/medium/2ED/Wrath_of_God.jpg

i have to say im p glad i didnt love this shit when i was kid cuz i wouldve spent all my money on it. like i kinda wrote it off as stupid but there really is a tonne of strategy in deck building. i mean it kinda sux now cuz lol game theory but it seems like everyone just finds optimal decks really quickly and essentially plays variations on them but then i have no desire to buy new cards so its probably for the best

this was always the coolest creature (was quite good too):

http://www.toplessrobot.com/1%29%20Juzam%20Djinn%20lg.jpg

ya that was me. in retrospect I'm mostly just glad I didn't have that much money to spend to begin w/, that was sorta an advantage in some ways cause it required me to use what I had pretty efficiently, but otoh this was definitely my introduction to class consciousness. xp

tho when you do get to kill somebody w/ serra angels it's very majestic

― iatee, Wednesday, December 7, 2011 7:35 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

otmfm

I liked playing sealed/draft games better because the 'spend $500 = win' advantage didn't exist anymore and it really requires another level of critical thinking.

tho having massively polished and powerful decks is fun too.

i mean it kinda sux now cuz lol game theory but it seems like everyone just finds optimal decks really quickly and essentially plays variations on them but then i have no desire to buy new cards so its probably for the best

yeah this is where the internet kinda ruins things. last time I played one of my pals had this really cool utility control deck that I was really intruiged by, and he said "yeah, it took top 8 at Worlds in France" or something

its definitely frustrating going to a tournament and just running into the same decks over and over again, especially when those decks are full of $40-$50 cards that are stupidly overpowered. the whole "mythic rare" thing made me stop playing right away

haha he sounds like a mtg hipster

i just think deckbuilding is a lost art. i used to love those late night mountain dew sessions where you'd tweak a deck for two hours then get massacred when you actually played someone good. i don't think i could stand going to a tournament and have my opponent know every card in my deck within the first 2 turns

yeah i mostly play draft these days since it's more fun than constructed almost all the time. you get to actually play with all the cards sooner or later whereas in constructed you're playing with just the best 10-20%. plus there's a whole extra level of strategy in drafting and constructing a good deck and also figuring out interactions on the fly since you're playing a deck you've never played before against a deck you've never seen before.

i'm really bad at it tbqh

what I like w/ draft or sealed is that a lot of times a card that would have been totally out of consideration for a scientifically-made deck can often be very, very strong

yeah it seems like 60-80% of the commons and uncommons these days are designed to interact with each other, which is neat

one of my favorite moves in sealed/draft, is to just straight out bluff. like to just attack with a 2/2 even though your opponent clearly has an untapped 3/3 out there, prompting the opponent to think, "well, i'm probably gonna get fucked if I block, so I'll just take it". it especially works well in pre-releases because most players don't know what the hell type of cards are in the set.

haha how often do you balance yr range w/some kind of followthrough on the attack tho?

there is also a decent chance they will just think you are retarded

if there were a stronger culture of bluffing w/ magic it might work better

i never played nor even understood this game tbh!

yeah i'd only do that when i know i have very few outs against the blocker in my deck and i won't be able to win without getting the extra bit of damage through

in general it doesn't work on the same person twice if they actually "call your bluff". i don't do it often but it's a really fun move.

the point isn't just to deal them damage (though that helps), but to also them think you have some kind of "target creature gets +2/+2"-type card, which in turn makes them second-guess everything

if there was a culture of bluffing in magic it wouldn't work at all!

and even then it's always correct to block unless the blocker has a strong ability that you want to keep it around for, you're still trading 1 card for 1 if they have the combat trick

if there were a culture of bluffing they might think 'hmm is this a bluff or does he have a good card' instead it's like 'hmm this guy probably doesn't know the rules, but maybe he has a good card'

not really - a card in play is already "paid for", so to speak. you do it when your opponent has a creature out that he'd rather not lose. like if it's just some generic 3/3 he might just trade, but if it's like some bomb-ass creature that you can't deal with otherwise, it's worth a shot

if there were a culture of bluffing they might think 'hmm is this a bluff or does he have a good card' instead it's like 'hmm this guy probably doesn't know the rules, but maybe he has a good card'

ehhh, I would never think that. even people who just learned how to play don't just blindly send their creatures to death

yeah I mean it depends on the situation and creatures, I guess. ime even when someone is doing this and I think they prob have a card in their hand, I'm still gonna block it - that card in hand would prob be used eventually anyway.

kinda surprised no one is repping for artifacts either, feel like theyre p cool

ive been trying to work on a card pick up deck w/ivory tower and library of alexandria

what sets are you working w/?

cards from the first sets up to revised and then the early expansions like arabian nights, ice age, legends &c

are you playing w/ cards irl or online? I would so love to play w/ those old school cards irl even though I know that's just bizarre object fetishism and the game's the same regardless.

you guys ever try magic workstation? lets you play online with any card ever released, very cool program

ya like a year ago me, rev, gravel and sometimes a few others were playing fairly regularly online. I think we all got busy at the same time tho and my internet connection became too unreliable.

i'm just playing around with it now...so cool that you get to view the old world champion decks with cards like Llurgoyf and Man o' War

it's pretty dope, esp when you download the card art

are you playing w/ cards irl or online?

we play with my friends old cards. i think he stopped collecting in like 97 but he was p into it before that so has binders and binders of cards. i put my deck together online before we play tho

that's pretty cool, even his crappy cards are super rare at this point

http://www.cockatrice.de

Most folks I know have migrated from Magic Workstation to this very similar freeware program, since MWS hasn't been updated since 2005 and yet is still shareware w/ locked features etc.

that's good to know actually, since mws got fucked up on my computer and was always buggy as hell. does it do card art / sealed games?

are there a bunch of people online to play? usually no problem finding a game on mws

it does card art. does not do sealed pools yet to my knowledge, you'd have to find another tool to generate those and then import them into cockatrice

there's usually plenty of people on the server, though it's pretty much unmoderated so i dunno what type of people you'll run into on there. i only use it with people i know.

welp, MWS just crashed for the 3rd time in a row, guess i'm in

hmmm well if anyone itt is up for some games this weekend my gf is head over heels in schoolwork and I will be amazingly free

rip mws long live cockatrice

gah i hated blue decks. my first deck was a white one with serra angels, so really liked whoever said upthread that killing with them was very majestic ^^ second was a red/black one. i think i've had decks of every color but blue (that's how much i hate this fucking color... hate playing againsst it, hated playing with it too)

been trying it out - had no idea MWS was 'dead' so to speak but it would randomly crash like all the time so I hated it (plus the deckbuilding interface is really goofy)

so far, so good. I wish there was (and maybe there is?) a better way to filter cards when deckbuilding (like, show me all the type 2 legal cards that deal with the graveyard) but otherwise it's been great and doesn't crash, so that's awesome

programs like that are really good for me since it allows you to get bad decks out of your system and realize if something will or won't work before you actually go out and buy or trade for the cards

yeah the deckbuilder is the part that they haven't caught up to MWS on yet. i use http://www.magiccards.info advanced search for extreme card filtering options

FORK

dual lands

fork was so sick; was def in the statis/burn deck

if any of you have the original dual lands sitting around those are worth like $40-100 each now depending on which ones

I have exactly zero mtg cards left irl, but my cards were in such bad shape regardless. I just had piles of cards around my room, I was like scrooge mcduck w/ crappy fallen empires commons instead of gold pieces. but I mean, I was 9.

sold everything including a blue mox & lotsa duel lands for $400 iirc in 1999

i did briefly start buying some new stuff just to futz around w/ in 2008 or so..those are all...somewhere...

i had a deck with a bunch of banding creatures because no one really knew how banding worked so they couldn't play against it properly

most of the early sets were amazingly well designed in retrospect and I think that's why this game is still so playable 20 years later

but I think banding was the first-wave of shitty card abilities

banding was in alpha

some of the early sets are pretty suspect though. Legends only exists because some guys at WotC wanted to make magic cards for their D&D characters. Fallen Empires was so weak that it almost sunk the game commercially before it really got started.

haha yeah I mean alpha cards were super balanced, the first expansions were a real mixed bag in comparison, shit like this

http://images.magicmadhouse.co.uk/images/products/medium/1298911919-36779600.jpg

yeah the problem with banding is it's fucking impossible to figure out, and then when you do it's not that great.

I think if the game had started out w/ the early expansion set as the card base instead of the very solid and balanced alpha/beta/revised base, it prob wouldn't have caught on the way it did.

sets

yeah definitely the best thing about the recent sets, like the past 4 or 5 years maybe, is that they've really gotten rid of the terrible unplayable cards like that. when you crack a booster now you're gonna get at least 10 cards that you might consider playing in a sealed deck or a casual constructed deck, with the old sets you'd get maybe half that.

though it did make the good cards that much more exciting when you did open them

w/ rev and gravel we played some of the 'newer' sets, and by that I mean we played up to like invasion and masques

even those are suspicious imo and after that I just feel like an 90 y/o white dude listening to a rap album or something 'what is this, this isn't magic'

I mean the planeswalker cards? wtf

i gave up on the game (for like the 4th time) when planeswalkers came out.

invasion block was dope imo

i guess it's because i'm a bit younger than folks here and got to play w/ invasion, odyssey, etc when i was still a kid but i definitely like those sets just as much as the super-oldschool ones if not more

Way back in the day of NetDraft and Apprentice, we used to do Arabian Nights/Antiquities/Legends/The Dark drafts which were completely unplayable. You know all the overpowered stuff like Library of Alexandria, Mana Drain, Nether Void, etc. but you guys are right on with how incredibly bad the rest of those sets were. I remember the lands that just said things like "all your legends gain bands with other legends" and didn't even produce mana!

IMO set design only started to get "good" around Mirage. In fact Alliances is really the first expansion set that wasn't like, completely terrible. Even Ice Age had a ton of cards with these walls of text that ended up doing almost nothing. In fact I remember Necropotence going completely unnoticed because nobody could figure out what it actually did! (obviously it turned out to be the best card in the set and maybe one of the greatest cards ever)

yeah i think that's all pretty on-point.

yeah they were sorta designing sets on the fly until then, w/o really doing the leg-work to make sure things were balanced. even after they started doing it, people always found cards and combos to exploit that you wouldn't have thought of w/o a careful analysis.

Mirage was the first set they made with sealed/draft in mind iirc

mirage block was a blast to play

I actually liked the planeswalker idea a lot at first but they basically ruined it by A) making them all stupidly powerful, and B) making them "mythic rare", so there were much less to go around

Basically all my problems with the game now can be summarized with this card:

http://www.examiner.com/images/blog/EXID21272/images/Jace,_the_Mind_Sculptor.jpg

IIRC this thing went up to nearly $100 a pop before it got banned. I remember somebody showing me this on a spoiler list and thinking that it was one of the best cards they've ever printed, then actually seeing it and realizing that it actually costed four instead of five and was even better, needless to say every blue deck needed to play it

i just didn't get it--they were always so good at making powerful cards that were balanced and had some kind of drawback, and then they made planeswalkers which literally had no drawbacks.

yeah it's like someone just wanted to fuck up the game also it doesn't even make any sense, I thought you were a planeswalker, how can you have your own planeswalker pet

yeah jace tms was a mistake, they basically designed it to be an all-powerful card, and it was, and people started quitting the game over it so they had to ban it in t2.

the planeswalkers they've made since then are much more build-around cards and less general-utility have-to-play-it ones, which is a bit of an improvement. i don't really mind planeswalkers but they feel more like a marketing triumph than a game design triumph, since they finally managed to create cards that are techy enough to appeal to competetive players and splashy enough to appeal to casual players at the same time.

the drawback was that they can be attacked, but the best ones like the Jace above or the new Liliana could protect themselves.

also, this

http://magiccards.info/scans/en/m10/4.jpg

to me it seemed like some kind of ridiculous fantasy card that a 13-year old would design, but it was real and it sucked :(

its sad that they also printed Serra Angel in literally the same set

what's funny is how baneslayer angel was a $40 card that was in a ton of decks one year, and then a $5 card that saw almost no play the next year

i like the flavor of a lot of the early expansions but they are incredibly unbalanced. 'legends' in particular is a terrible set and all the legends are retarded, little attempt to think abt e.g. how casting costs should be balanced w/mana flow. according to the internet the early sets were developed half with the idea that they could be played as standalone so cards like camel or city or in a bottle make a lot more sense/are useful in that context.

banding can be really good but its sorta overused in the early expansions imo all those legends unique lands that granted banding &c

my least favorite thing abt the new sets is that they added 'equipment' instead of basic enchantments, i tried playing a sealed tournament early this summer with w/e expansion was coming out and i just didnt vibe it at all

oh also the newest set has double-sided cards, if you oldschool folks need more things to wtf at

yeah equipment is so not mtg

my least favorite thing abt the new sets is that they added 'equipment' instead of basic enchantments, i tried playing a sealed tournament early this summer with w/e expansion was coming out and i just didnt vibe it at all

I like the equipment. The problem with creature enchantment is that your opponent can just destroy the creature and kill two cards for the price of one. I loved the ones that were "living weapons", that was a super cool idea.

what's funny is how baneslayer angel was a $40 card that was in a ton of decks one year, and then a $5 card that saw almost no play the next year

here's why:
http://d28yjzray7dvaa.cloudfront.net/mtg-cards/new-phyrexia/dismember.jpg

Basically, as long as this card is legal, no creature w/ 5 toughness that doesn't protect itself will ever be truly "broken". This gives them the freedom to print stuff that seems really stupidly powerful (like the Phyrexian Obliterator, WTF) without having to worry about things running away from them. Now the big beaters of choice are the Titans which is almost certainly because they are 6/6s

I think the problem is there's this idea that you always have to give people something fresh and different and inevitable you're gonna run into diminshing returns w/ new ideas that can fit within what 'works' within the dynamics of mtg

equipment doesn't make sense, how can a pile of sludge have a battle axe or whatever and again, it's just not-mtg, artifacts already played that role

and it's inevitable*

i think my biggest issue with planeswalkers is that they're so big and obvious. a lot of the strongest cards in magic's history look completely innocuous the first time you see them. like, for example, this card:
http://magiccards.info/wwk/en/20.html
spent the first year or so of its existence as a bargain bin rare. then one day some pro players decided to try it in their blue-white control deck. 6 months later, it's in every deck in t2 and gets banned.

i really like the idea that there are these awesome cards lurking out there that no one's figured out yet, and planewalkers really play against that discovery process by coming with hype already attached

equipment doesn't make sense, how can a pile of sludge have a battle axe or whatever and again, it's just not-mtg, artifacts already played that role

― iatee, Thursday, December 8, 2011 12:03 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

isn't this like a classic fantasy-rpg trope/suspension of disbelief thing?

equipment doesn't make sense, how can a pile of sludge have a battle axe or whatever and again, it's just not-mtg, artifacts already played that role

ehhh, that kind of plausability went out the window from the very first set. when you had Merfolk that lived underwater yet could still block land creatures. or the infamous Whooperwill, the bird without flying

i think my biggest issue with planeswalkers is that they're so big and obvious. a lot of the strongest cards in magic's history look completely innocuous the first time you see them. like, for example, this card:
http://magiccards.info/wwk/en/20.html
spent the first year or so of its existence as a bargain bin rare. then one day some pro players decided to try it in their blue-white control deck. 6 months later, it's in every deck in t2 and gets banned.

i really like the idea that there are these awesome cards lurking out there that no one's figured out yet, and planewalkers really play against that discovery process by coming with hype already attached

I think the game can exist with both. Stoneforge is a weird case because it really was not good when it first game out as there really wasn't any good equipment. I think it was pretty evident that it was going to be amazing if playable equipment was printed - it never should have dipped to only a buck.

In general I think it's not too tough to figure out what these cards are. I stocked up on Entombs because it was very efficient (one mana instant) and did something no other card did even though it didn't have a use in Type 2 - now it's $40. There were a bunch of Future Sight cards like that too, which were so unique and interacted with other cards in such strange ways that it's no surprise that some of them jumped so high. Tarmogoyf was the ultimate example, that thing went from $3 to about $80 in less than a year!

damn looking at prices right a good portfolio of magic cards was a better investment than the stock market

its insane how much Alpha/Beta duals go for, especially the Underground Sea, which is now worth more than any card sans Black Lotus

no but even like tempest rares or whatever are going for pretty good money

http://www.amazon.com/Force-Will-Magic-Gathering-Alliances/dp/B0030IW4GM/ref=pd_sim_sbs_t_3

I had like 6 of these ffs. someone who bought boxes of cards and sat on them could have made a killing.

i don't understand how most of these new cards being posted work, like not even close (especially whatever mechanics are supposed to be involved with that planeswalker).

iirc i started right when antiquities came out, and stopped right before fallen empires. a friend of mine and i managed to get all of 'the dark' cards together, no idea what happened to those.

quick google search shows that if i had kept it, i could turn it into a cool hundred bucks now

i still have 3 or 4 force of wills--probably my most valuable card and also the card that rules the most.

xxp Basically that one starts with 3 counters (the number in the lower right corner), then each turn you can use one ability by adding or subtracting the "cost" on the left. It can also be attacked and directly damaged as though it was a player. Kinda weird but overall pretty neat

yeah the ultimate ace in the hole xp

o apparently my bazaar of baghdad may be worth more?

damn these prices seem like theyve blown up since i last checked.

so it gains counters by looking at the other player's cards? and can it take damage equivalent to the number of counters or something?

yeah Bazaar of Baghdad is definitely worth a bunch now since you can do so much with your graveyard now.

Wasteland was a surprising one, that was a $1/$1.50 uncommon back in the days of Tempest (quite expensive for an uncommon I might add!), now it's over $30

so it gains counters by looking at the other player's cards? and can it take damage equivalent to the number of counters or something?

right - if you do the first ability, you add two. if you do the third, you subtract one. when a player attacks you, they can now "attack" Jace, and for each damage it takes it loses a counter

so absurd

the funniest price spike was definitely Necropotence, a card that nobody wanted because A) it had way too many words on it and was really confusing, and B) players hated paying life and didn't really care about card advantage, then some guys started winning tournaments with it and everyone realized "wait, this card basically says you can draw as many cards as you want, that's really good" as it jumped from $5 to like $25

yeah that was really the first era of higher-level analysis w/r/t playing dynamics. after that the mirage era prosperous bloom deck really took the game somewhere else - before that you couldn't imagine a deck that sophisticated that actually functioned and wasn't just for fun.

my friend has most of the mox gems and every og dual land in both alpha/beta and unlimited and when we first playing i couldnt believe how much they were worth. his arent in perfect condition or anything cuz he played with most of them but the prices for old rare magic cards are o_O

also going back but i object to equipment more on game flavor than mechanics, some of the actual cards are p rad, i just dont like how rpg-ish it is, i guess? tbh my real problem is just the too slick and heavy card art and the stupid sci fi dystopia concept

the sci-fi dystopia stuff was just the setting for one block though (last year's)

the new one they just started is a sort of colonial/gothic horror theme, v. different

I think the problem is there's this idea that you always have to give people something fresh and different and inevitable you're gonna run into diminshing returns w/ new ideas that can fit within what 'works' within the dynamics of mtg

I dunno, the Time Spiral block seemed to indicate that they aren't even close. Basically the "theme" of the set was the game itself, so a bunch of cards would reference older cards, and old mechanics like flanking and shadow came back, plus each pack had a random card out of a set of old cards throughout the game's history, with the old art and card face and everything, and were all legal to play even if they were horribly out of flavor. Then Planar Chaos came along as was like this "alternate reality" of magic, where white had burn and green had card draw. And Future Sight blew the doors off everything, adding another new card face, like a dozen new keyword mechanics, a bunch of cards that did things no other card had done before, cards that made no sense under current rules, and a card that referenced Planeswalkers even though they hadn't been printed yet. The whole block seemed like it was a clear "jump the shark" moment for the game but they handled it really well and demonstrated that there was a lot of design space left.

if you have a moment just revel in the bizarreness of this set, where like half the cards seem like outliers:

http://mtgsalvation.com/future-sight-spoiler.html

I'd like to try out cockatrice if someone is free and bored sometime in the next few hours

this is pretty entertaining

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_QYXXhXthM

haha I feel 30% draw to that 70% repulsed

"an unstoppable army of infinite fairies"

And I was wondering why Kraftwerk's 'Autobahn' was being used for background music, but I guess that Ralf is a serious Magic player. Or maybe Florian is.

I thought it was just classic geek rock

oh wow sad i missed all the good discush in this thread

at the height of my powers i was playing a p aggressive green/white deck that did well for me at middle school but was consistently getting my ass kicked when i went to HEAD GAMES or the other comic shop in my town, the name of which i cant remember, but which had like a super extensive hentai collection

thing is i mostly played some combination of red/green/white aggro/beatdown decks but i always really wanted to a blue control kind of guy. story of my life i guess.

btw i had a pretty big though not distinguished collection of magic cards when i stopped playing, and i gave them to my brother to sell to the shop in town, promising him a 50/50 split or something, and then for some unfathomable reason he buried them in our backyard? wish i still had those cards, or at least some money.

wait are they still there? you should go find them

also you should play w/ me online

theyre in a cardboard box at the foot of the apple tree, no joke. but i am 90% sure theyre like completely demolished

I guess if a magic card tree was gonna grow it woulda happened by now

how do i play online

http://www.cockatrice.de

dl this program, it's pretty easy to install

download it! also other people itt should. I really want to play tonight :(

not tonight, maybe tomorrow, i got a hot date w/ john le carre

boo okay

I accept non-max opponents btw

so i play this game. less since we've moved, but i've got a few decks -- fat packs from all the latest sets...

um. iatee, if this program works for the mac, i will play you

it appears that there is a mac version!

i'm loading it right now.

do i need to download decks to get this to work?

no, we make decks, tho there might be some somewhere if we want to use those?

let's bring this to gchat = my real first name w/ an extra e in front

lol i know i didn't play at all last time we did this but i just dl'd cockatrice...this is really easy to use for deckbuilding!

I actually liked mws better for deckbuilding but this is wayyyy less buggy / 100x easier to setup

I'm gonna download the hell out of this Cockatrice

hey iatee, i msg'd you my gmail name if you mind adding me. i'm trying to get cockatrice working but it's a little confusing

if you don't mind

ya I added you, I can prob help you if you're stuck

ok i got this going and made a deck in 5 mins. anyone want to play tomorrow night, 8 or 9 ish?

ya most likely can! this is pretty easy to play and setup the only drawback is the deck builder

cool i'll check in on this thread tomorrow. what don't u like about the deckbuilder?

it's hard to filter cards by sets...or really at all and there's no sealed generator. we just put in some old world championship decks.

yeah you would have to do the filtering in gatherer and then just pull the cards you wanted in cockatrice i guess. a sealed generator would be nice

everything else is better than mws tho. anyway I'm glad people are up for games again.

you can generate sealed decks using this thing: http://ccgdecks.com/sealed_gen.php

tho i'm not sure they have all sets

lol I tried that already it kinda sucks

are you on a mac? I think there are some you can dl

yeah i am on a mac

hmmm I'm sure we'll figure it out

can also just pick cool premade decks

yeah i whipped up a deck based on one of my old irl decks

i want 2 fuc w/this but this week is crazy busy for me

i'll get in on this at some point. what format/sets do you guys want to use? you gotta limit me or i'm gonna be coming at you with Knight of the Reliquary

well my comfort zone consists of everything through weatherlight but i'm adaptable

i would love to play some innistrad w/ whoever -- maybe draft?

yeah id like to try innistrad as well if only to prevent from allocating sparse dollars to this junk irl

haha yeah as much as I like magic there is no way I would invest any real life money on these pieces of paper, that's why playing online is cool. I look forward to owning u all as I did w/ mordy tonight. (4-0)

ayo

hey dude, I am up for playing but I actually have to go to a more stable internet connection which means I can do it in like 10 mins? msg me your gmail

k i sent it

cockatrice is awesome! ppl need to get on this shit

i wish ppl had posted more cool old cards itt or debated which colors are cool. wanted someone to go to bat for an artifact deck

haha sorry for taking it over

artifact decks, at least in classic era magic, just can't put up a fight

later in the game you could build decks around them tho...I think there was an artifact-y set?

http://static.starcitygames.com/sales/cardscans/MAGREV/nevinyrrals_disk.jpg

such a rad card

http://www.coolstuffinc.com/images/Products/mtg%20art/Antiquities/Mishra

cool card iirc

do you know about the title of that card lamp?

antiquties is basically an artifact set and its really really early ~~ i think any of the subsequent sets built around the urza/mishra mythos are artifact based?? idk tho

nah I meant one of the mid-period sets, let me look it up

which card? i have imgs off and the link for yours wont work. the other one is larry nevin spelt backwards - i guess the idea for the card came from one of his books

haha yeah that's what I meant

mine was mishra's factory

what's w/ these sites and the squirrels

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirrodin_(Magic:_The_Gathering)

this is the one I was thinking of

overall I think w/ the early sets there are a handful of great artifacts but they don't add up to anything killer on their own

later in the game you get stuff like this and suddenly artifacts can fuck people up

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=8883
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=194980
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=206332

haha academy and tinker are banned in every format pretty much

the urza block really fucked up the game, there were like 20 different cards that led to turn 1-2 kill combos

man i just got sucked into looking through the cards in the urza's saga set there are some p amazing cards geez

the thing abt early artifacts is that shit like the mox gems and sol ring and obv black lotus are sorta rad w/o needing to combo w/other shit, theyre just inherently rad

i mean i guess this is really obv but as the game progresses cards are so much more impt in context of other cards whereas early on cards are just facevalue powerful

basically every time they make an artifact themed block the game breaks and they have to ban stuff, its kind of funny at this point

iirc w/ early sets artifact creatures are all a tad overpriced mana-wise, just a bit too expensive to be competitive w/ colored creatures

except juggernaut...that dude made it into a lot of my decks

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/feature/253

artifact porn

for some reason at one point I was really obsessed with maze of ith for one of my decks and I went and bought a pack from that expansion which was at that point like 3 years old and it cost me $8 which was obviously a lot of money to me and anyway it actually had a maze of ith in it even though maze of ith was pretty rare

that's my artifact story

huh looking it up maze of ith was pretty common. I was still psyched on it tho

my most expensive card was a revised shivan dragon

maze of ith was actually a land not an artifact for some reason. because of this it still gets played sometimes thanks to Knight of the Reliquary

the thing abt early artifacts is that shit like the mox gems and sol ring and obv black lotus are sorta rad w/o needing to combo w/other shit, theyre just inherently rad

the funny thing about these cards is that the designers knew they were overpowered but that there wouldn't be enough of these cards to go around because they were rare

in the long-term that proved to be true

still trying to figure out why i wanted maze of ith so bad

it's a dope card, you don't need any excuses

no but i had like a COMBO going on. this is going to kill me.

it's good...but it's not COMBO good

im not sure what this combo would be

the combo of finding maze of ith and putting it in your deck

if i had been into magic as a kid i wouldve spent so much money on worthless decks cuz i still only really like cards cuz of how they look

in some ways that's more justifiable, if you're spending $10 on a small piece of paper, it should at least be aesthetically appealing

http://www.mtgmintcard.com/images/products/150/MAGIC-THE-GATHERING-MERCADIAN-MASQUES-RISHADAN-PORT-MDMR082.jpg

nonbasic lands are like catnip to me

heh its very possible i just liked maze of ith for its art:

http://magiccards.info/scans/en/dk/114.jpg

xp innistrad has some fun ones

http://magiccards.info/scans/en/isd/239.jpg

god, every time i click a link on this thread i lose about two hours

and i never even played this beyond, like, starter deck level

i've always loved the land art in this game, both pre- and post- style-guide

http://magiccards.info/scans/en/shm/288.jpg

i gotta say drafting this new set is the most fun i've had drafting in a while

i feel like it handles the whole 'graveyard' thing much better than Odyssey did, instead of saying "as soon as you get 7 cards in the graveyard, this stuff happens", it's much more creative with a bunch of cards that have death effects or can be more valuable when they're dead

god, every time i click a link on this thread i lose about two hours

lol: http://mtg.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Nonbasic_Lands

an all land deck would be interesting

lol: http://mtg.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Nonbasic_Lands

― є(٥_ ٥)э

go to hell

there's a legacy deck called Lands that runs upwards of 40 lands, i've never played with or against it though so i don't know much about it

and yeah innistrad is very good in limited. it's def the best example yet of their new design strategy to make simple cards that interact in complex ways rather than just make the cards themselves complex

I think it's hilarious that they printed the card Mental Misstep pretty much just for Legacy and Vintage and it wound up getting banned in everything

lol that card is ridiculous

'Counter target spell with converted mana cost 1.'

wait I'm confused, what does 'converted mana cost 1' mean

converted mana cost (cmc) is just the number of mana the card costs, disregarding color etc

serra angel has cmc 5 for example, shivan dragon is 6, etc

that's what I figured but I don't see why it's amazing in that case

because the card costs either one blue or 2 life to play. so any deck can play it, regardless of color, and don't even need to have a land out to cast it.

in legacy/vintage, like a good 30-40% of the cards played cost 1 mana. I thought the card was printed to bring some balance to the format, but it just wound up making combo more powerful

from what i gather it killed the viability of a lot of legacy/vintage decks such as goblins. and it gave decks of every color a counterspell.

ah that makes more sense

its more contextually bad for the game than outright broken itself

yup

"the metagame" aka the phrase that makes reading mtg message boards too horrible to actually do

basically, control decks are traditionally weak to fast starts, especially good 1-cost spells, since they don't have counterspell mana up yet on the first turn, which means they have to let the 1-drop resolve or use force of will on it which puts them behind on cards. mental misstep gave control decks a way to fill this hole in their defense, which made them too good in older formats.

and yeah innistrad is very good in limited. it's def the best example yet of their new design strategy to make simple cards that interact in complex ways rather than just make the cards themselves complex

there have been a lot of cool draft formats lately. they've really gotten good with making cool interactions, sometimes in very subtle ways. for example a card like Altar's Reap (1B, sac a creature: draw two cards) can be useful in many different ways b/c a lot of creatures have death triggers and a lot of cards get more powerful when you have creatures in your graveyard, plus there are the "Morbid" triggers. in other sets the card would be kinda generic. I prefer that style of design to the whole "metalcraft" or "threshold" things where you just tried to get 3 artifacts out which forced you to play subpar cards in order to trigger other effects.

Illusions Of Grandeur + Donate = LOL

just starting reading the Mark Rosewater columns on the official site again thanks to this thread, it's incredible how much goes into the design of these cards now. you see a card like Think Twice (1U Instant - Draw a Card - Flashback 2U) and you think "well, that was popular the first time, so that's why they brought it back", when the real reason was "blue is supposed to be good against red and green, so we wanted a lot of cheap instants so you could "un-transform" the red and green Werewolves, and Think Twice can be played twice in the same turn"

yeah -- like a lot of u guys (i assume) i have tons of nostalgia for the game i played in 4th-6th grade (pretty much 'the dark' up to 'ice age') but the new stuff is really meticulously tested and designed and a lot of fun...

there's something to be said for the innocence of that era tho, back when they were still just trying to make cards cause they thought they were cool and really weren't thinking about what the effect on the game would be. as frogbs pointed out upthread necropotence was probably the turning point.

I think Cadaverous Bloom was when the game "officially" lost its innocence

haha i just noticed the closing date for this poll

mayan end times, sorcery WW3

hey anyone up for playing some innistrad-only decks on cockatrice? try to get decks together for the beginning of next week?

haha mordy msgd me about wanting to play that earlier, so I'm guessing he is. I guess I'd be up for it, but are there planeswalkers? I don't want to play w/ any god damn planeswalkers.

any limits on the decks? or drafting options?

planeswalkers are just enchantments w/ three abilities

ya three abilities like 'basically win the game'

yeah i'd say no planeswalkers cause i'm not dealing with that shit--no deck restrictions other than being innistrad-only. here's a visual spoiler: http://www.planeswalkerslibrary.com/innistrad_visual_spoiler to get a feel for the cards if u haven't looked yet.

as an addendum i'd be up for some kind of draft tho as we discussed previously i don't know how to easily do one

I think sealed deck is more feasible than draft, draft is fun but getting a bunch of people online at the same time would be a lot of trouble

also I would play someone later tonight if anyone's up

oh yeah i think i meant sealed deck (i was typing draft and thinking "this is not...the word....i want")--i would be up for that but don't know how to do it easily.

cant play tonite btw

I am at a show but will be home later really want to play

rad I can stay up pretty late tonight, msg me

tip for innistrad decks: Snapcaster Mage is literally the best creature ever printed

I'm reading the text and it's like I'm reading a foreign language

what is flash and what is flashback

flash = can be played as an instant

flashback is an ability on instants and sorceries that lets you re-cast them once from the graveyard and then they're removed from game. it's been around for like 10+ years i guess you never made it that far your first time around

its not a broken card in theory because it's only as good as the other cards in your deck, but being able to double up on all your counterspells and removal is just insane in practice

wau @ $31 for that card

31 is overpriced it's actually like $20-25 but thats the most expensive a regular rare's gotten to since they started mythic rares. the card has been out for only a couple months and its already a staple card in legacy and vintage

its especially crazy to think about it in vintage where you can use it to get a second ancestral recall or time walk

yeah it would be tremendous in those formats

haha I sorta want to be a vintage player (when did they stop calling it type 1?) w/ a $5000 deck

i think they named vintage and legacy when they split them off from each other a while back but the names took a while to stick

i would def be up for some innistrad on cockatrice btw, either block constructed or sealed (i'll look for a good sealed generator)

this one time I was playing in a local tournament (I was ~9) and actually doing really well and then the guy who I was playing against, who would talk to me about how did he heroin and was and sorta off the hinge, claimed that the thawing glaciers in my deck wasn't allowed in type 2 and for some reason we looked it up and it looked like it was banned? so I was disqualified. but then when I got home I looked it up again and it was only banned in type 1.5 for some reason. anyway...tragic childhood memory.

it was fairly difficult for me to be a competitive player on a $5 a week allowance

^^^real talk from youth

did you guys read the duelist or inquest or scrye?

oh yeah the duelist was great, the other ones I looked at once in a while

I loved the puzzles

Ok let's play tonight should be home by 12

great!

yeah i never played in tournaments when i was a kid, we just played during recess at school

I loved the puzzles

― iatee, Thursday, December 15, 2011 10:02 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Permalink

yes! this was the coolest feature!

i got a spirit of the night in my first mirage booster and i was like completely overjoyed, and then someone stole it at school a few days later. i never did figure out who

man it is eerie how many specific booster backs I can remember opening, I should write an 'a la recherche du temps perdu' type book about my childhood and mtg

here's the mechanics info for anyone who wants to venture into innistrad:
http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/157a

i'm reading about recent vintage tournament decks now. these things are wacky.

it seems like it's badass power blue deck w/ every good card ever vs badass power blue deck w/ every good card ever vs. badass power blue deck w/ every good card ever

i'm down for some type 2 if anyones got it. i have a good deck built that's almost block but it has some m12 in it. otherwise i can just sub the cards out

there's also badass artifact deck with Mishra's Workshop but i think even those play the good blue cards

oh i guess not, no ancestral in here
http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/deck/773

seeing Slash Panther, a card which was ignored in every other format except draft, in a vintage deck is funny but i guess it's the most aggressive creature that's easy to cast off a workshop

hah i like that deck a lot

ok http://www.magicdraftsim.com/ has a sealed deck simulator, just set to 6 Innistrad packs and it should give you a cardpool and a little interface to deckbuild, and there's an export button that puts it in a text format that you can paste into cockatrice's deck editor

cooooool

thanks dude!

(i feel really dumb asking but who are you on reg ilx?)

ciderpress

oh! hey man. i don't remember you posting on the magic thread there but otherwise i was like "who is this guy who is posting on a lot of the threads i'm posting on?"

yeah i just got back into magic this past year mostly and the reg ilx version of this thread's been dead a while

yeah last time thread was active ppl were using mws which was a complete pain in the ass to get working (on mac at least). i'm loving cockatrice tho

cockatrice is pretty perfect outside the terrible deck construction options

ya mws had great deck construction options and a sealed deck generator but would crash all the time and would have the weirdest impossible to fix bugs

it's disappointing that they couldn't build a better deck construction side of this, you wouldn't even think that would be so difficult? it's mostly just organizing already-organized data....

yeah i agree it's just sorting a database

yeah hopefully it's in the works, cockatrice is fairly new still

iatee just got home if youre still around im up for a game or two

haha yeah I'm still around pm me

^^ had a fun time despite getting my ass handed to me :D

haha yeah it was def fun

I'm prob gonna be out of the game for a while cause my gf's on vacation and I have to spend time w/ her instead of playing a card game online w/ strangers. but luckily - her vacation isn't that long.

haha 'have to'... cant wait till im off for winter break tho ugh

(cough)

anyone want to play tonight

i have recently tried playing more mtg, after finding a stash of old cards in my game cabinet. they are all from 1997 or before; i played with a bunch of dudes who had all these new cards and i couldn't quite understand what any of them did.

that being said i remember being able to really fuck people up really quickly with black decks.

it and red seemed to be the ones most primarily decidated to damaging opponents.

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