magic: the gathering poll

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 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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