Sower #2, I think.

Great event. I had a blast and there was a dearth of douchiness. Even with all the kinks in the plan (judge no-showing, etc) everything worked out fine, so I imagine with some more people and none of those problems the next mox tourney will be plenty strong.

These events can be as big as you want, the difference being investment up front. If it gets any bigger, you need to get the 40k and Yugioh guys out of the way or have people play in the public areas, and that could be hard for a judge to cover. More advance notice is key.

I'm not of the school of thought where you just have someone scoop no matter what. I would have been the one scooping as I was DOB and I don't think it's all that fair to rob someone else just because the guy I sit across from could make it in. I had nothing against him, I can't recall his name, though evidently I could follow the link and figure it out, but there was no great reason to scoop him in. I also didn't want to propagate the notion that Selkie is in any way a real deck by allowing it into the top 8.

Most importantly, I didn't know how the previous round had turned out and I didn't want to jeopardize friend and teammate Mike Bomholt's seat in the top 8. Doing the math was not an option, not to mention a little too slick for a 19-person event where almost half the field makes it in.

It's with an "ie" dammit. I'm not a whale. Just ask your respective mothers about my figure.

Anyhow, yes, I'm trying but it's looking pretty bad. Haz-Matt is rolling out to the area tomorrow because that's where his fam is, but my fam is here in cbus, which is why I'm here. The last out seems to be convincing Steve he wants to do this. If I can just get him to do the Saturday event, then I'll be in a position to presume upon someone's hospitality for the following tourney. I might just Greyhound it.

Yeah, smoking def will not be allowed at all, but outside is completely legit. No one will enforce the 25 ft rule. It's only 15 in Chicago and I've smoked adjacent to doors directly in front of cops. It's not even a thing. If you can give me a ride from UChicago, I'll roll you infinite cigarettes.

What's the best way to get there from Chicago sans car? Anybody?

This is totally the same weekend as the Prerelease....

I don't know if that means I'm going to have a weekend chock full of magic, or some magic, or no magic. I further don't know which magic it will have if any.

LMAO! This has Bernie Mac! I wonder who's playing Jazz....

Is anyone from east of Cleveland going to be at this thing? It'd greatly streamline everything if I could get a ride to Chagrin Falls after it's over.

Great! Now we have a concise argument to destroy. Night's Whisper is never bad. You draw it, you play it, and it gives you cards. That's it. You maybe even get to play a land, or even some moxen followed by more spells. Here's how Mystical Tutor works: pass the turn. See how bad that is? Don't make your land drop, don't see more cards, just do the real sneaky EOT Mystical for whatever you want to have countered. Savage, you drew Yawg Will/Tinker, and now it's going to your graveyard because your opponent, who is not an idiot, has been playing lands and drawing cards and has the force and the drain. You see, the thing is that you seem to believe that Whisper is only good in a very narrow set of situations, when that's actually what Mystical is for. Mystical is for those times when you look at your hand and you say "man, if mystical were some other instant or sorcery, I could win or not lose right now", and then you use the ability conveniently printed on the card to change it into that other instant or sorcery, and you win or don't lose. That's the rare occurence, because it happens almost without exception no more than one time in any winnable game. Needing to draw cards is not a rare occasion. In fact, needing to draw cards is a situation that this format happens to exist inside of, not the other way around.

I'm not sure of the specifics of what you've been saying about playing Mystical for Ancestral in the early turns, but let me just say what others may have flinched from: that's a bad play. That's right. It's bad. Even with Merchant Scroll, a card advantage-neutral tutor, good players very rarely look for Ancestral except when all other possibilities have been exhausted.

Lets say you have a mox and a fetch. You could do either play (NW or MT). This is a good hand. Now, lets think for a minute. Do we want to play land, mox, go, or do we want to play land, mox, draw cards? Do you want to face your opponent's threats with 5 cards or 7? Ok, that's an obvious question. Lets assume you're onto something and press ahead assuming that drawing cards on the first turn is bad. At the end of the opponents turn, we do the super cool mystical for ancestral play. Then, on our turn, we play a land (how lucky!) and Ancestral. We have 4 pathetic little cards in hand to our opponents 6 or 7 (depending on who went first). Even if we have force for the opponents force, we only end up with exactly as many cards in hand as him (or exactly as many as he will after he draws if you're on the play). Keep in mind that if you do not have force, this play is completely unviable. Your opponent is liable to have Force or, even worse, Misdirection. You will lose. The Yawg Will THAT YOU WILL NEVER GET TO RESOLVE would probably have been amazing. Too bad you played Mystical for Ancestral.

The other two lists have already been posted, and Steve and Paul both played Grim Long. Same list. Same pwning.

Yeah, because your corpse would be relentlessly teabagged by OSU jocks and fratzis.

Everyone please post a story or two that you either witnessed or heard by word of mouth. For example, here are some stories from my area:

At the store called Egghead Games in Columbus, Ohio, there was a regular player who lived in his car in the parking lot of the neighboring grocery store, and these are his exploits. There was a little kid who woul get dropped off at the store by his parents (with an allowance) and picked up in the evening. One day he decided to take his money over to another store and buy a sword. His parents, understandably wouldn't let him keep it, so he gave it to Homeless Jerry to hold on to. Jerry promptly walked over to the store, infuriated that they had sold this weapon to his "little brother" and pocketed the refund.

In an unrelated incident, everyone was outside smoking on the porch and Homeless Jerry was asleep in his car with his dog Mutts. The little kid walked over to the car and knocked on the window, making sufficient noise to upset the abused dog, who promptly ran around the inside of the car and discharged solid waste all over Jerry, who in turn opened the door and jumped out after Mutts with intent to further abuse the dog, and Mutts ran away, leaving Jerry standing in plain view of the card store, covered in dog feces.

In another instance, we all managed to play a game of Type 4 while Steve Menendian thought about his Brainstorm at a small local tourney.

More things I want to know about:

Where did "ting" come from? As I understand it, it is simply an alternate pronunciation of "thing", but I've heard it used in the exclamatory way and perhaps as an affirmation too.

No one has yet addressed the origins of the word "savage" or the phrase "must be nice". Of course, I guess my team is a bit more known for the former because of Mr. Menendian's idiosynchratic speech, but I was under the impression that they were fairly widespread. I remember being in a draft where we declared "Savage Beating" the most aptly named card ever.

Does anyone besides Steve say "how good/lucky/etc." It was popular at one of the cardshops I frequented to say "what a beating" when one's opponent was doing something good or to use the phrase sarcastically to call attention to a bad play. Because of contemporary influence, one might occasionally instead say "what a skeeting".

If the people supervising the cameras could also take notes on what's happening/being said, they could be voiced over or subtitled later.

And yes, more videos.

I used to post more a couple years ago, and some of you may vaguely remember me from then. Anywho:

I'm doing a field research project for my folklore class and I decided that I should discuss the numerous legends and customs that circulate through my favorite community: the Magic community.

So what do I want from you guys? I want folklore, which is the lore (writings, stories, etc.) or anything that is practiced by the folk (people) of Magic. It'd be great if for the first time you post in this thread you could post the areas and formats in which you play or have played Magic, as well as your age and how long you have played.

Also, here are some discussion starters:

Where did the terms scrub, tech, savage, broken and any other popular terms come from? Who introduced them to you? Which ones, if any, do you use? What special slang do you use instead or also? Can you think of any stories about pros or just annonymous players that have circulated in your local Magic scene or the whole community?

There was even more hillarity than can be captured in that report.

After simultaneously entering the Type Four Bracket with Doug on the second day, we went to the aforementioned beer-providing establishment. We were thunderstruck at the bargain of the inclusion of a 14 oz beer with the combo. Upon ordering, we are presented with the opportunity to upgrade to a 32 OZ BEER. Lyle is convinced by the chef's appetizing review of it as "very good". Now here's the crucial part. Because I am not yet 21, I give my friends money and go to the bathroom after placing the order. I stand around the corner and observe via the reflection in the window of a closed store. That's the one play I made that I can be sure was correct. I later added some Jack from the "Honor Bar" in the concierge lounge to my pepsi. I didn't fill out a tab. Mise.

Steve got a very fancy imported beer that came with instructions on how to pour it. "Down my throat" was much more simple than what the label had advised.

Doug jammed up our toilet TWO NIGHTS IN A ROW. For such a little man, he certainly has a generous sphincter. On the morning of the second such night (Monday), I awoke and had to urinate. So I used my generous height and length to make peepee in the sink without making a mess.

Doing justice to a song means doing what the song was meant to do. There was an "I'm a Believer" (at least that's the chorus) cover that was a bit different, but the original artist liked it because it was fun and interesting, which was the purpose of the original. I suppose there are allowances to be made for an ironic twist, such as the versions of "Every Step You Take". Similarly, Rage and Johnny Cash all put their own stylistic stamp on their covers, and at the same time were completely faithful to the original in each case.

Sheryl Crow and Fred Durst can't cover anything because the music was meant to sound good and their singing it is therefore an unfaithful rendering.

First I have to make a card for teammate and non-poster and non-tournament attendee Joe Bushman:

Bushman, Eater of All 1UB

Start the game with Ancestral Recall or Time Walk in your hand. If you would draw a card, instead search your library for a card and put it into your hand.

Discard a card: Bushman, Eater of All gets +1/+1 until end of turn.
Remove two cards in your graveyard from the game: Bushman, Eater of All gets +1/+1 until end of turn.

Myself:

Blundering Titan 8

When Blundering Titan comes into play, choose a win of each basic win type you control, then destroy those wins.
When Blundering Titan leaves play, choose a win of each basic win type you control, then destroy those wins.

6/8

The worth of a cover must always be weighed in terms of the justice it does to the original song. I'm therefore surprised that no one has mentioned Rage Against The Machine's cover of "Fuck tha Police" because of how extraordinarilly apropos it was.

Also, anything off American IV: The Man Comes Around by Johnny Cash is amazing. Johnny Cash covering a song distorts the timespace continuum such that his version becomes the definitive version and the version he was "covering" becomes the cover.

The Social Distortion cover of "Under My Thumb" is similarly awesome.

Oath is at once very powerful and terribly fragile. It's win condition involves having a specific enchantment, your opponent having creatures, and you swinging with creatures. That's a lot of criteria to fulfill. Of course it's fairly easy game 1 because orchard and oath with some counterspells takes care of it. Post board there are a slew of tactics that can be used against you because each of those criteria has a raft of cards that take care of it. You have to play very tight control to make sure Oath resolves and sticks long enough as well as making sure that your guy doesn't get removed. The match very quickly centers entirely upon the Oath deck.

So what is the actual means of winning? Does winning card advantage come from winning mana or vice versa? What is the hierarchy? Is there one?

Mana seems to be the initial calling station in that you need to make your first 3 land drops, but after turn two you need to either be sitting on a hand that is better than your opponents hand (Drain, FoW, Bomb, Blue cards, Land) or well on your way there. Similarly, as Bob and others have noted, Drains are a huge part of mana superiority, and card advantage is how you resolve Drain in the first place. The later it gets in the game, the harder it is to turn mana into card advantage and board position, while the opposite becomes much easier. Therefore, there's an overarching tempo aspect to this question. In other words, the level to which the game has progressed determines which factor leads to victory.

However, card advantage is the one aspect can win the game for you if you have enough. In other words, there's a number of cards you can draw at any point that will win the game for you. There's an amount of EARLY mana superiority that ought to win the game for you. Having 10 lands to your opponents five isn't so relevant when you're both in topdeck mode.

What's funny about this thread is that most people aren't listening to one another at all, which makes their arguments sound like pure bunk.

Hopefully this will help to clear the air:

Arguments for Solemn Simulacrum

• Stabilizes mana vs. disruption
• Combat utility vs. aggro and aggro-control
• 2 perms vs. Staks
• Combo with Welder
• Combo with TFK
• Almost always draws a card (otherwise you wouldn't have brought it in

Arguments Against Solemn Simulacrum

• Casting cost
• Doesn't do anything by itself (i.e., the cards it gets can do something and it's less good without Welder or TFK)
• Arguments For and Against Other Cards

• For Old Man of the Sea

• Greater Combat Utility
• Lower cc

[li]Against Old Man of the Sea[/li]

• Doesn't draw cards or get land
• Double Blue cc
• Not an artifact

[li]For Triskelion[/li]

• Greater than Greater Combat Utility
• Combo with Welder
• Combo with TFK
• Kills Many Dudes

[li]Against Triskelion[/li]

• High cc
• Utility negated by Null Rod

[/list]
[/list]

I apologize in advance if I missed a point, but hopefully this will be a useful springboard for colleaguial (respectful) rather than adversarial (asshole) discussion. The idea is not to "defeat" someone you're arguing with, but to use the difference in opinion to create a dichotomy that can drive innovation. You will not change anyone's mind, you can only hope to know their mind and your own mind better than you did previously.

Another question that needs to be asked is "If you are playing Solemn Simulacrum in the board, what's the rest of your sideboard plan?" and by logical extension "If you are playing <something else>, what's the rest of your sideboard plan?" Of course, I don't expect that to be revealed in detail by any of the rival schools, but some suggestion of how many slots are being allocated to each matchup would be helpful. For example, if people are just siding in one Trike instead of however many Jens, there is a strong argument for the versatility of that board. Conversely, if Jens is a catchall solution for a lot of matchups, there's a lot to be said for that too.

If we are calling a responsive control strategy Keeper, then yes, Keeper is possible. Most aggro-control decks are what I would call the new Keeper. The only difference is that they have acknowledged that their starting life totals are not 40, they are 20. This leads to spreading the win out across the whole deck in the form of utility creatures that over time swing for lethal damage. Aggro-control is Keeper in that it tries to manage comprehensive control of the game. However, where Keeper previously allowed the game to advance without interfering with the opponent too much, aggro-control lists shorten the length of the game with creatures and interfere with its progression through cards like Null Rod, Chalice and Wasteland.

Superpower: Hitting every note perfectly
Retarded Superpower: Fuck notes (Andrew W.K.)
Retardeder Superpower: Lip Synching/singing the wrong song when trying to lip synch (Ashlee Simpson)

Superpower: Eloquence (Ability to speak artfully and convincingly)
Retarded Superpower: SCG Posting (Ability to confuse one's opponent in a debate with glaring non-sequiturs and flagrant inaccuracies)

Superpower: Pyrokinesis (Ability to control flames, like that kid in X2)
Retarded Superpower: Putting cigarettes out on your arm

Superpower: Flopping the nuts
Retarded Superpower: Flopping someone else's nuts

Superpower: Shooting energy out of your eyes
Retarded Superpower: Shooting milk out of your eyes

Superpower: Screaming Really loudly (Landlady from Kung Fu Hustle)
Retarded Superpower: Inability to use one's inside voice

Superpower: Ability to control the weather (Storm)
Better Superpower: Ability to copy a spell once for each spell played this turn (Storm)

Superpower: Ability to sac Troy
Retarded Superpower: Ability to loot New Orleans

Superpower: The People's Republic of China
Retarded Superpower: The United States of America

Crash has a lot of appeal and apparent depth at first glance. Then you realize it's just a more patronizing kind of racism. All of the character are stock demographics and they interact in ways that are palatable to stereotypes in modern society.

Themes in Crash: Cops hate Black people, rich people and Arabs hate Mexicans, Mexicans have tattoos and live in bad neighborhoods but aren't as bad as black people, Arabs buy guns to solve their problems and are completely backwards people, black people carjack other people, some black people are whiter than others, white people are racist and that's bad, black people are racist but it's ok. The movie can easily be summed up as OMG he just said the N word.

Watch Do the Right Thing and you will see how completely irrelevant Crash is. Or, if you absolutely gots to have some Don Cheadle, watch Hotel Rwanda.

Godzilla just makes a semi-practical speculation that careless nuclear proliferation could have nasty consequences. Hopefully, we already know that. Having a giant lizard fight a bunch of other giant things is just excessive.

Kong makes several meaningful assertions about Western culture as compared with nature.

King Kong is essentially a story about carelessness too: Skull Island is known to be a terrible place, they decide to take Kong out of the jungle where a massive wall had kept him from fucking up the world. Godzilla also doesn't raise any questions other than general concern for the environment in the context of nuclear proliferation.

Gotcha covered Jacob. I tried to preserve the random run-on lines and irregular enjambment pattern while sounding like the most ignorant inbred piece of shit I could, in keeping with the original song. Here's two verses, enjoy!

The children of Israel don't even take the day off.
They keep their Delis open and sell bagels and lox.
The rest of the year they make up holidays like Rosh Hoshannah
And so a week before New Year's I go to Brooklyn and tell them all...

Hey there Mr. Judaist, Merry Fucking Christmas!
The Messiah has come and you killed him off so pay your damn respects.
Open that huge nose and smell the pine trees too,
Or it's back in the ovens with you.

The only problem with Batman Begins is that Katie Holmes is terrible. She has such an important part and she blows it horribly. Any non-Katie scene is good. Sin City also rocked (first DVD I purchased), as did King Kong, so get out of your basements and see it already.

Jarhead gets biggest disappointment marks. I so badly wanted that movie to be good.

The only means of evaluating a deck is in comparison with other decks; that's why I cited other storm combo decks and Gifts, as they are the closest parallels I know of.


I understand that casting Doomsday against an unknown hand is a bad play. In fact, that's the central point of my argument. If you get the hand that's 2 Rituals, a Swamp, Chromatic Sphere and a Doomsday, you have a bad hand that requires you to make said terrible play. Even if this hand happens to include Duress, Unmask or FoW, it's still terrible because it loses to double FoW and Ancestral Recall. There is no way to play this hand that does not lose against a decent hand. If you wait, your hand deteriorates relative to your opponent's because their good spells come online and lock parts start to come down.


My point is that this degree of interaction still comes down to blind guessing and that your opponent doesn't have any arbitrary deadline. Duressing or Unmasking a player and then passing is terrible because our format has Brainstorm+Fetch. Congratulations, you now have no idea what's in that hand. The planning with this deck can only involve a few turns, and that's the real problem. There is no plan that works after a certain turn because too many answers will have been found on the other side of the table. I understand that the idea is to put as little of the planning into the Dday as possible, because putting in utility cards that only work in Dday is terrible because of the fragility that we have discussed.

LDVault looks good, in fact I'd advocate more of them because this deck has a tendency to draw things that don't help the hand it has. Also, if just attacking your opponents hand and playing Dday turn one isn't an option, why play Unmask? You mentioned that it does terrible things to your hand and puts a shorter clock on you to go off, so it seems like it's terrible if you see a hand that you don't beat.

EDIT: Props on working with such a challenging deck. Slops to me for not saying that earlier and for posting on Xmas day.