Magic: The Gathering,GO TEAM MS!

[xyzzy]

I'm playing in a sealed PPTQ in 12 minutes; wish me luck, I'm probably gonna suck, whatever, nbd

[xyzzy]

Open avacyn.

I blew all my "open Avacyn" luck at a prerelease where I constantly forgot what her actual abilities are since I was using a checklist card (the checklist cards really need to come with a giant "remember, Avacyn has flash, it's a complete mistake to not take advantage of that" reminder on them for people who are bad at remembering basic facts...)

[xyzzy]

tonight the person to the right of me had a first pack with Nahiri and Arlinn Kord and so now I'm in possession of a wolf mom. love that wolf mom

[xyzzy]

what a cute adorable harmless kitten~

[xyzzy]

I'm going to a midnight prerelease tonight, which will be preceded by an 8 PM chaos draft, and then I'm going to another one tomorrow evening at 6 PM, and then on Sunday my girlfriend and I are driving to Roanoke to play in a 2HG prerelease at SCG (and also get sweet playmats)!

good luck, everyone! I hope everyone here activates Tamiyo's ultimate, drawing copies of Emrakul, your second Tamiyo, and another Emrakul

just in case

[xyzzy]

in the 2HG, my girlfriend and I got Hanweir Battlements and Hanweir Garrison as our promos, and then we got an Arlinn Kord in one of our packs; she piloted that deck while I played a controlling blue/black deck; game 1 we got to use Arlinn's front face +1 on Hanweir, the Writhing Township, and won handily. unfortunately, we never got either Arlinn or the Township in either of our other games; our second game, we got completely blown out by Emrakul, and game 3 was basically a mirror match with slightly different bombs that we ended up losing.

I didn't do too great in any of my prereleases, but I still had a great time; also, I ended up with two copies of Thalia, one of them foil, and a Gisela, so I got plenty of valuable things, and one really great story.

the only thing that sucks: in my second prerelease, I had both Thalia and Thalia's Lancers, but I never got the ultimate flavor win of searching my library for Thalia, because both games that I cast the Lancers, I already had Thalia either in my hand or on the battlefield. bummer.

[xyzzy]

Emissary's Ploy is a fun card. I drafted 5-color 3-drops. I live in a world where 5-color 3-drops is a real archetype y'all

[xyzzy]

so it seems like green/black has a +1/+1 counter limited deck, and I'm curious how well that'll pan out; they both get a lot of fabricate and a lot of things that just incidentally add counters, and they collectively have a few uncommons that get a lot better if you're putting a lot of +1/+1 counters on things. anyone who manages to do Verdurous Gearhulk --> Armorcraft Judge will have a really good time. (I mean, you're already having a really good time if you have any of the Gearhulks in limited, but drawing an extra 4 cards off of it is nice.)

[xyzzy]

I did so bad all weekend but I did a 2HG at Star City Game Center and opened a Chandra. sadly we never got as far as Chandra actually leaving the library, much less getting onto the battlefield. but, like, that's one more Chandra than I had yesterday. Brad Nelson personally murdered me with a flying boat though

[xyzzy]

hey, can anyone offer any useful thoughts on this?

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/08-12-16-white-soldiers/

one big thing that I'm gonna do that I just haven't gotten the chance to do is replace several more of the Plains with utility lands, since other than Emeria and Emeria Shepherd there's very little reason to have that many Plains, so if you have any suggestions about specific lands I should be including, then that would definitely be helpful.

[xyzzy]

tbh I really, really doubt the Saheeli Rai/Felidar Guardian combo will actually take off; it might do well occasionally in some metas, but it's way too easy to just hold up mana for Shock if you're in red and hold up mana (as well an Evolving Wilds or something else that can leave the battlefield for free) for Fatal Push if you're in black. it's a really good combo if your opponent can't play around it; if your opponent

can

play around it, it's just... nothing.

I feel similarly about the Wandering Fumarole/Crackdown Construct interaction; it, again, dies really easily (though not quite as easily), and an arbitrarily large blocker has some allure (just in case you run into an Electrostatic Pummeler???) but it's absolutely useless against Emrakul, which is the biggest reason you'd potentially want a huge blocker. it'll be

okay

. but even if it's a cool combo, it's not a game-winning combo most of the time.

[xyzzy]

I wasn't aware of that deck's existence until now, and now I really want to play it. now I just need several hundred dollars and then I can do that!

[xyzzy]

well, yeah, I looked up the price before I said that.

[xyzzy]

you can't play a rare card in a pauper format, and even if you could, everyone knows it's not real Kamigawa block pauper tiny leaders unless it's also Iron Man, which means your opponent concedes the moment they realize they'd have to rip up their expensive card because of your inexpensive artifact removal.

[xyzzy]

what Swamp art is that? I googled "promo swamp" but it didn't appear to be in the first half dozen or so results.

[xyzzy]

ah, I've seen way more old border promo cards than old border non-promo foils, so in my mind, I see the little shooting star logo in the corner and I just think "oh that's a promo"

[xyzzy]

is anyone else here attempting GDS 3? I'm working on the essays for it right now.

[xyzzy]

I just had a really successful pauper league in Arena with this list:



there's probably tweaks that could be made to this, but in general this was able to shut down nearly everything I went up against pretty easily -- the only deck that beat it was a blue/black deck where my opponent had 2 of the 0/3 "tap, 2: gain 1 life, target opponent loses 1 life" creatures, which meant we stayed at pretty much the same life totals for roughly 10 turns, and I drew almost exclusively lands during those turns. turns out a hand of 7 Plains can't actually win the game???

[xyzzy]

I have extremely little experience with constructed so I was just going with a number I felt was safe but it could probably drop down to like 18 easily based on my experiences playing with it

[xyzzy]

I won two drafts at SCG Baltimore yesterday. the first one was a completely disgusting Izzet deck that won literally every game I played -- I countered dozens and dozens of spells and repeatedly looped my removal with Devious Cover-Up. the second one wasn't nearly as exciting -- just a Selesnya deck splashing black for Charnel Troll that won via a series of efficient combat tricks (it turns out if you bait your opponent into blocking your 1/1 lifegain creatures in such a way that all their 5-drops die, you win? who knew). I've only won three drafts in paper before (I've had a handful of drafts I won on Arena, but that's not really totally comparable since you're not drafting with humans, it's a league, and it's single games rather than full matches), so having two of them in one day felt really good.

[xyzzy]

so you won the modern tournament by default! congrats