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

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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