[Off-Topic] Community Chat Thread

[materpillar]

First of all @materpillar it was awesome hanging with you, thanks for makin the drive! I really enjoyed getting to see some decks I've followed for years in person.

It was great! I'll try to swing by again sometime but I rarely have Fridays free. I feel like my internet credibility might have taken at hit from the absolute shlocking I got. Maybe not. It was extremely funny to me that my explanation of Anzrag, the Quake-Mole got it slotted into your deck and thus I helped get myself killed. >.<

I had so much bad luck. For example, I didn't play Tivadar of Thorn against Slicer, Hired Muscle // Slicer, High-Speed Antagonist. Degenerate Mono-R is like what he's designed for so that matchup is probably stellar for me since Tivadar can just chump block him basically forever. Instead I rolled into Ephara, God of the Polis which is like the hard opposite side of the matchup.

I also felt like there was basically no removal flying around at all most games. I'd have definitely not tried to play Tivadar in that pod had I been aware of the speed. I thought most games would last until turn 7 but I felt like I was getting killed turn 5-6 pretty consistently throughout the evening.

That all being said the amount of times they had to read Tivadar of Thorn to emotionally come to grips with the fact that it didn't have 8 lines of text that result in drawing a new hand every turn while cheating on mana extremely funny to me. They just kept reading it trying to figure it out. The Zask, Skittering Swarmlord player read it almost every turn. He's still just a 2/2 with first strike. Just like the last time you read him.

The other guy I had less of a read on; he had some very good decks and was a decent player. I could not tell if he was intentionally sandbagging much of the time, but he certainly was with Oloro and his discard choices with Hinata made me very curious. Like he literally discarded answers to the board state. So I was left a little unsure. Very nice guy, my best guess is he doesn't like confrontation and didn't want to get yelled at for comboing us out -- me, I'm always good to go to the next game :D

My read is that he was pretty on page with the powerlevel we were hoping for and not with the glass cannon guy. His Mirri, Weatherlight Duelist looked to be pretty battlecrusiery. With Orolo he was slow rolling slightly but also I think he was stumbling on mana more than we realized. I'd be excited to play against him again. The glass cannon player less so. He was pleasant but his decks were pretty bleh to play against.

[pokken]

I feel like my internet credibility might have taken at hit from the absolute shlocking I got. Maybe not.

No way, commander is just too big of a random factor to make any assumptions like that.

[materpillar]

I feel like my internet credibility might have taken at hit from the absolute shlocking I got. Maybe not.

No way, commander is just too big of a random factor to make any assumptions like that.

I'm having a fun time going over the games in my head. I'm pretty sure The Ur-Dragon should statistically dump on that glass cannon player's decks. Elephant Graveyard would have been exceptionally good against Slicer, Hired Muscle // Slicer, High-Speed Antagonist me to chump him for a lot longer. I think I only needed one or two more blocks on him to win that game.

The last LGS I went to, I immediately bought Scavenger Grounds for all my decks. That cranked my winrate up dramatically. I think if I go to this LGS again I think them meta call will be to pack a bunch of Maze of Iths. Seems like it blanks the vast majority of the degenerate that I ran into.

I also have this funny section of my brain going "you need to crank the powerlevel of your decks some to match that meta" which I don't want to do because most of them are perfectly placed in my current meta.

[pokken]

I also have this funny section of my brain going "you need to crank the powerlevel of your decks some to match that meta" which I don't want to do because most of them are perfectly placed in my current meta.

Yeah games like those make me feel like I should crank it up honestly (except for Ephara, who tends to %$#% on the modern linear decks with Farewell type stuff), but the Thrasios, Triton Hero game in particular made me feel really good about the downtuning I've done. Like he had to work to beat me, and had I not had some jerk kill my Training Grounds on turn 3 I coulda gone off :D (and if I'd played better and not gotten greedy for the monarchy). Skipping some of the usual Maze of Ith and Glacial Chasm stuff costs me some games but it also makes them "better" I think?

[RxPhantom]

Brain dump time!
- Hearing about @pokken and @materpillar meeting up makes me extremely jealous. Also, I just picture a black cat and Master Transmuter hanging out.
- Eldrazi are overrated and even worse, boring. MH3 is barely on my radar.
- OTJ is a lot of fun, but I wish they had some better world building, like maybe mention or design a card around a clothier who's fashion ideas really caught on with Thunder Junction's rakish residents.
- Tinybones is a dead baby, right?
- Commander players need to stop conflating the concepts of playing to win with try hard competitiveness. I may not build cEDH tier decks, but when the game starts, I'm trying to win.
- Yellowjackets is an awesome show everyone should watch it.
- Voja and all other easy button value engine commanders can all burn in hell.

[materpillar]

Speaking of random meetups. Anyone going to GenCon this year? I'll probably be there some.

[pokken]

Speaking of random meetups. Anyone going to GenCon this year? I'll probably be there some.

We are planning to go next year when kiddos a little older and has had some time to learn dnd (she's starting a club for it at the library this summer :D).

[Dunadain]

Stickers are banned in legacy and vintage! 🎉🎉🎉

[pokken]

Stickers are banned in legacy and vintage! 🎉🎉🎉

Good lord what a stupid ass idea stickers were.

[Lorn Asbord Schutta]

Hi, as you probably know, Custom Cards forum has a monthly Card Creation League (CCL) tournament. The final poll for April edition is currently running. You don't need to know anything about the previous rounds and voting takes just a moment of consideration, while contributing to more nuanced and fair results. Of course, if you want to say something about the designs, feel free to do that!

[Lifeless]

Stickers are banned in legacy and vintage! 🎉🎉🎉

I haven't followed this at all but I assume it was a well deserved death. I can't believe they were ever legal in the first place.

[duducrash]

I haven't followed this at all but I assume it was a well deserved death. I can't believe they were ever legal in the first place.

To be 100% fair I play pauper a lot, I know stickers have had some online success, and people would often talk about palying it, but I never actually saw anyone playing, never saw a single sticker

[DirkGently]

When we released Unfinity, we knew that its partial legality in Magic's broader formats was an experiment with risks. The concept of widening a set's appeal to more players is at its core a good one. Moving forward, we won't be revisiting this kind of experiment any time soon.

Rot in hell, unfinity. Easily my least favorite set with magic IP.

[Dunadain]

I'm just blown away by the fact that they admit they knew it would be %$#% to actually play with, but they were banking on the cards being bad so people wouldn't have to bother playing with them.

Like, they point out that they don't have a way to print something that's legal in commander, but not legacy/vintage and instead of fixing that, or deciding that's not a card pool we should be exploring, they just ignored the problem and hoped nothing bad would happen.

It's also really weird how they talk like they just assume nothing in the set would see competitive play, but the sticker and attraction cards don't seem particularly underpowered, if anything, I think the mechanics have ended up being less powerful than a lot of the early card evaluations were predicting. Which isn't really a surprise, early preview predictions are rarely accurate, but I certainly never got the sense that the set was powered down in any way at all.

[Lifeless]

The entire premise was insane. Fiddly, combersome, and completely unnecessary. It was like they deliberately decided to ruin Un-Sets for the only people who actually enjoyed them. As the owner of an Un-cube I didn't consider a single card. That's when you know your %$#% up.

[RxPhantom]

I could go for an Unset with silver borders and meta jokes. Unglued 2, basically.

[folding_music]

i'd take Unfinity over any of the ideas or card names in New Capenna x3 unfinity would've been lovely if it had really acted as a corrective force to divide competitive and casual more completely - adding them to strict competitive formats was a mistake. the cards are for people delighted by all the new mechanics and facets of customization, not for people who'd go into a draft and say, agh, all these distractions make the cards harder to evaluate

[Lifeless]

The issue is Wizards constant attempts to have their cake and eat it too with the supplemental products (if you can even call them that anymore with the clip they are released). God forbid they release a draft set or casual set that doesn't also appeal to every other vertical. So we get sets like Baldur's Gate that fall on their face because they're trying to be everything to everyone.

[duducrash]

I really wish that in a eventual return to Ikoria we get really cool legendary godzilla cards.

[folding_music]

is uhhh
does anyone play Block Constructed? at all? I know there's no longer enough high-profile tournaments to really have block be a competitive mainstay... I've seen Dirk mention making some single-set edh decks which is really cool but I was thinking like... sixty card casual, max four of any card, one vs. one with sideboards or chaos-style/emperor/2HG with wishboards? I used to think Bring Your Own Block was the coolest principle to build a casual deck by and have it stay pleasantly underpowered. strongly thinking about buying heavily into the upcoming cute fuzzy set and building some decks out of it for family & friends. feel like the sets go by so quickly that they stop being coherent formats by themselves real quick.

ps: if you did this, would you expand the idea of the block to include:
- original cards from the Bloomburrow commander decks
- the reprints from those decks
- any supplemental cards released alongside it, eg, Mystical Archive-type situations
- cards from the current List?

[Hermes_]

[DirkGently]

@Hermes_ I'd say boo, but honestly I've never seen anyone play either of those things in commander (except me, playing Ambassador Blorpityblorpbloop lmao) so whatever.

[materpillar]

I have a friend who has an attractions deck. It's finicky because he's basically the only one who knows the rules behind it but it's otherwise extremely fine.

They made all these cards the opposite of pushed. If they'd just said "acorns are only legal in commander and no other format" I'd not have cared.

[Dunadain]

You know, I've been thinking more about that "there's no existing way to make a bunch of cards legal in Commander and not Legacy" comment, and while it's technically true, wasn't that the whole point of UN sets in the first place? Not tournament-legal cards, explicitly designed to be played in the casual setting?

I know some play groups are a bit of a stickler for official EDH rules, but rule 0 is a thing for a reason.

I have a planeswalker commander deck, and an un-set deck and I can count on 1 hand the number of times people have refused to let me play them, and usually they weren't flat out refusing, but wanted to push it back to next game so they could bring out there own not-technically-legal deck.

[Lifeless]

Yeah silver border already hit the sweet spot for casual formats IMO. I don't think they needed to mess with the formula at all, other than to try and double dip to get sanctioned format players to buy the product.