Magic: the Gathering

[FireThunder]

The more I see of Modern Horizons, the more I like it. There's some real powerhouse cards (the new Urza, for instance) but there's two things that really appeal to me: a ton of flavor and a lot of cool returning cards (Genesis, Future Sight, Nether Spirit) and mechanics (ninjutsu, snow, slivers). It looks like it would be a ton of fun to draft.

[Craig H]

I love modern horizons. Cycling and slide decks y'all!!

[Death From Above]

The second event for the glass plainswakers starts tomorrow in Arena. Format will be Pauper so it should be significantly less of a time-sink.

[FireThunder]

When M20 goes live, it brings with it the London Mulligan for all formats.

I don't think I've seen a deck benefit from a rule change more than the ludicrous Neobrand deck in Modern, where you can potentially win on turn 1 by playing an Allosaurus Rider, turning it into a Griselbrand using Neoform and drawing your deck.

[Craig H]

I'm still not a fan of the London Mulligan. I think it gives too much of an advantage to combo decks. It is what it is though.

I still wish Horizons would be available on Arena. They could have their own version of modern on there and just call it Arena Modern or something.

I basically just want to play Slide decks wherever I can.

[Death From Above]

Next (last?) stained glass Arena event is Singleton format.

I assume this is a bug and not an actual rules workaround, but you can technically run "you can have more than 4 of this card in your deck" even in Singleton for some reason. I've seen it with both the ole' Rats deck as well as Persistent Petitioners. I reported it as a bug but the staff clearly didn't understand the rules problem based on the exchange that followed up, so I am going to assume it is still present.

I'll probably take a run at it with some kind of white/black/green deck. All kinds of deathtouch and token bullshit going on.

[FireThunder]

I put together a pretty straightforward Gruul deck that looks to apply pressure early and finish with things like Sarkhan the Masterless, Ravager Wurm and Skarrgan Hellkite. It's a pretty fun format.

[Death From Above]

7 hours ago, FireThunder said:

I put together a pretty straightforward Gruul deck that looks to apply pressure early and finish with things like Sarkhan the Masterless, Ravager Wurm and Skarrgan Hellkite. It's a pretty fun format.

I actually abandoned my initial plan because it was just too slow and switched to Boros, because there's just a comical number of good low-cost white and red cards.

[FireThunder]

So, non-mythic planeswalkers are here to stay. Link has the first three cards from M20 to be spoiled.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/get-to-know-magics-most-famous-fire-mage-in-these-brand-1835412320

Edited to add: WotC has posted that the planeswalker getting the "multiple cards printed in different rarities" treatment is the only character to get such an honor in M20. Interesting.

Edited June 11, 2019 by FireThunder

[Death From Above]

I have a lot more faith in them pulling that off post-WAR than I did before. It's a pretty wild set but it's been pretty fun to play in without feeling like any one card is dominating.

[southofheavy]

I'm having an absolute blast with MTG: Arena. Its exactly what I've been looking for, in that it takes care of a lot the small mechanics for me and the finances are pretty much optional, though I have kicked in some money. I've built Mono-Red and I'm working on Simic Mass Manipulation and Esper Planeswalkers for just over $100. In paper, we're looking at a whole lot more and those decks might not even be viable in six months. 

I played for a short while when I was a kid and it had first come out, but couldn't afford it and comics. Comics won. I've been looking for a way back in, but was always put off by the money involved. Arena is the answer for me. Buuuut, my coworker has a weekly Modern game going, so if I want to take the plunge and play face to face, I might give that a shot or start a Pauper or EDH game. 

TLDR, Magic fucking rules and I'm stoked to finally be playing.

[Craig H]

My friend shared an article with me from Goldfish that goes into quickly accumulating a collection of 4x of each rare.

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/collecting-mtg-arena-part-1-of-2

Tl;Dr - Only play draft, only draft rares (and maybe mythics too), don't open any packs until you reach critical mass, which he has a calculation for. It would basically take around 45 drafts or less to do this. You draft up to a certain point and then when you're close enough to getting 4x of each rare, you crack your packs. Due to duplicate protection, when you open your packs, you'll get the rest of the rares you need without using wildcards on them.

I'm going to give it a shot. Doesn't seem that hard to do, plus, I like drafting more than most formats anyway.

Edited June 12, 2019 by Craig H

[tbarrie]

So the new core set is looking pretty good. I laughed out loud when I saw Colossus Hammer.

[Craig H]

3 hours ago, tbarrie said:

So the new core set is looking pretty good. I laughed out loud when I saw Colossus Hammer.

I did the same thing! I kinda did a double take and then laughed. That's pretty good flavor.

BTW, check this shit out from over the weekend. SPOILERS, this is from the MC3 finals.

 

Edited June 24, 2019 by Craig H

[Death From Above]

Looking forward to seeing some fucked up red/green bullshit I can torture people with, as opposed to the greeen/black/blue bullshit I torture people with now. Command the Dreadhorde and Tamiyo, Collector of Tales took Sultai Midrange from merely "terrifying" to straight up "what the fuck".

[Craig H]

They did Omniscience Ranked draft with WotS over the weekend. Basically, you draft your deck, you play with no lands, you cast all of your spells for free. It was pretty funny. I think I went .500 in all of my drafts. Fun stuff. Wound up earning another 10 packs of WotS so I'm up to 40 packs. I don't want to crack them yet until I get up to 50 to 60 packs of WotS. Starting July 5, Ranked WotS draft returns so I should be able to hit 50 to 60 by the weekend. By that point, I'll crack all of those packs and wind up having every uncommon, rare, and almost every mythic in WotS.

Then it's on to doing the same for M20.

[Death From Above]

Good news: Core Set 2020 launched on Arena today.

Bad news: They replaced the weekly rewards with an Apex-style Mastery Rank battle pass that costs $20 if you want the actual good rewards, so if you pre-ordered for $50 go fuck yourself.

Honestly so tired of game companies pulling this kind of trash. My desire to play has hit an instant zero. I guess I should have known better than to expect anything but raw greed from Magic the Gathering, but still. I'm not even sure I'm going to play if that's the way they want to handle my business.

[FireThunder]

Double bad news: A huge group of players (which includes myself) can't even log in because of server issues. Somehow they managed to mess up a situation where they got people excited for a freaking core set.

[tbarrie]

Magic Online seems to be working fine.

[Craig H]

Not Magic Online. Magic Arena. Magic Arena is working just fine now. They had DNS issues after the patch where you had to be overseas or use a VPN to logon.

As for the Mastery pass thingy...I'm not a fan of it, but I don't think it's all bad. However, every year Giant Bomb does a "Please Stop" award for their year end awards and Battle Passes have to be this year's winner. Everything has a battle pass now. Magic Arena is already a game you have to pump money into and while you can play it for free, you do need to put some money into it. The developers said early on they didn't want this to be a game where you had to grind every day and if you could only play on weekends then you would still reap the same rewards as others. Everything had a cap.

This battle pass does away with that. The people with the time (ie streamers) will be the ones to hit level 100 because they'll be able to grind every single day.

[tbarrie]

1 hour ago, Craig H said:

Not Magic Online. Magic Arena.

Yeah, I know. Whenever somebody posts some gibberish I can't understand in this thread, I assume it must be some Arena thing.:) (I've been playing Magic for over twenty years, so it's unlikely to be a case of me not speaking Magic.) My point was: Magic Online seems to be working fine, so if you want to play the new set, you're good.

But since the topic came up - why do so many of you play Arena? I looked at it fairly early, and couldn't find anything that it did better than Online. I mean, it holds your hand a fair bit if you're new to the game, so it's probably pretty good as a gateway product - but I got the impression some of the Arena people here were fairly experienced. So what's the appeal? Have they improved it considerably? Is it just that it's easier to be successful, because that's where all the newbies play?

[Craig H]

Magic Arena is pretty damn good. While Magic Online has access to just about every card and multiplayer, you have to deal with a UI that is still reminiscent of what came out back when Apocalypse was released. That's like 19 years ago. They've made improvements here and there, but they haven't made any big leaps to really overhaul the entire system. When they did try to attempt that, they broke leagues for what seemed like an entire year.

Magic Arena plays incredibly well, drafting is fun, it's free to play, this is what WotC is eventually going to move towards like it or not, you don't have to bother with trading bots or whatever the hell, and so on. There's a lot of reasons why I fire up Magic Arena and barely touch Magic Online now. If you're experienced at using the Magic Online client, by using hotkeys and what not, it's not as much of a hassle, but it still sucks. You're still on a clock, which is annoying, you have to know each and every hotkey if you're playing a control deck so you don't use up that much time, etc. I just think Magic Arena is more fun and a better experience. The main things I really want to see from it at this point are cube drafts and at least 4 player multiplayer. If they add those, which I think they eventually will, then I can't ask for much more.

[Death From Above]

Online is actively bad, like, in almost every way. It's not even a contest.

[southofheavy]

I laid out my feelings on Arena a page ago. It's perfect for a guy like me, but I'll say this: I wasn't all that happy about not being able to crack my Core set packs today. It's 4:30 am and I just got home from work. I got a ton of shit I need to do tomorrow before work tomorrow, so I should probably just put it off until Thursday. 

Of course, I'll probably just do it tonight. I'm having a shitty brain day and it might cheer me up. Still, though. 

[Craig H]

It's not for everyone, but I'm not opening any packs anymore until I hit that critical mass moment after doing so many drafts where I'm guaranteed to get 4x of every rare and most mythics. You basically have to draft to the point where you've earned about 40 packs from drafting. That's actually not that hard to do. I tend to get 4 to 6 wins in ranked draft, which either offsets most of the gems I'd spend too draft or it let's me go infinite by earning me enough gems to draft again without taking a loss on gems.

So while I did preorder the M20 packs, I'm going to draft M20 to the point where I earn 40 more packs and then crack all 90 packs at once. For M20, that will give me 4x of every single rare and close to 4x of every mythic.

The way this works is by strictly rare drafting. Basically, any time you draft, if there's a rare or mythic, you take the rare or mythic unless you already have 4x of it. You wind up getting a lot of rares that way. And then duplicate protection does the rest of the work.