Conversely:

Creatures (14):
4 x Goblin Balloon Brigade
4 x Ironclaw Orcs
3 x Ball Lightning
3 x Orcish Artillery

Spells (12):
4 x Lightning Bolt
4 x Blood Lust
4 x Stone Rain

Artifacts (12):
4 x Winter Orb
4 x Ankh of Mishra
4 x Black Vise

Lands (22):
4 x Mishra's Factory
4 x Strip Mine
14 x Mountain

You are pretty much spot on with your analysis, as always.

A few of my ideas are posted in response to the SCG thread, so I won't echo them here.

As far as the Epic spells go, the Blue one and White one are definitely the only playables - in a two player game, I would give the edge to the Blue one, but the more players you add, the more significantly the power level of each drops, due to the increased counterwall they will face.

I give the edge to the white one overall, since it isn't nearly as offensive and might not always draw fire, while it still allows you to do some pretty broken things assuming your portion of the stack has some beefy enchantments and spells that have activated abilities in your hand (like Decree of Silence, etc.).

Consider the following, and I will let you draw your own conclusions from there:

1) It will always provide +1 card advantage.  With Thirst, you are required to play an inordinate amount of artifacts to get the same benefit.
2) It's a variant on Fact or Fiction, and as such you must consider that it's card advantage must be weighed tactically versus card quality, and that is hard to quantify concretely via pure conjecture.
3) Again, it fits with Chains of Mephistopheles, so can provide card advantage in Chains decks.

I've done my ad-hoc T4 set review for Saviors of Kamigawa - the new card ratings are located at the bottom of this thread.

Saviors offers up a few good cards, but the only real must-include of note is Overwhelming Intellect, a strictly superior version of Exclude.

edit:

The note regarding "Splice onto Arcane" is fixed in the linked thread, per Jacob's rules point.

Since this is casual, I thought I'd go ahead and suggest R&D's Secret Lair.

I did rate Goo a 10, due to its board sweeping and self-pumping capabilities.  I'd still rate him below Flowstone Overseer, due to the fact that the Overseer can be more political (selective pumping can be used to take out players), provided he sticks to the table.

Time Spiral is quite possibly the second-best draw seven in TPS (well, not counting Necro/Bargain).

Were it a faster deck, that wouldn't be the case.  You need to consider the fact that Storm is the win condition.

It is probably a moot point since that game was going horribly for you already, but you get priority again after your opponent after the storm trigger resolves.

Tendrils is played, storm trigger goes on the stack, both players pass, trigger resolves (0 copies), active player passes, you misdirect.

In any case, the storm trigger only counts spells played *before* the one that created the trigger.

To be fair, that thread is in the vintage forum, and as such has limited access.


Care to elaborate what issues?

Generally, Crucible/Strip is regarded as suboptimal due to the fact that it is antithetic to the deck's gameplan - it may support the ancilliary land destruction theme of Titan and provide recurring Welder fodder with Seat, but it lacks tempo.

The fact that it brings back Bazaar as well as discarded lands makes it quite potent, however, which is why it is probably best left a meta consideration - of which yours seems apt since it is heavy in control.

Razormane could be nice in a lone Titan spot for an aggro meta.

Duress really is more suitable, even disregarding the low blue count and suicidal amounts of damage this deck already does to itself.

One thing I am trying out is a Death Spark to replace a single Squee to deal with opposing Welders, and it is actually working reasonably well.

Those extra spaces could be relegated to some form of the Dragon combo, which is quite popular in CA.  I personally use Dragon+Eternal Witness.

16 non-ninja creatures seems fine to me (forgetting the factories?).

Like Machinus, I would prefer Cloud of Faeries in the Flying Men slot, as the Men seem extremely underwhelming.  I realize the problem is in keeping 1-drops and pitch fodder, though - but it might be worth trying, especially since you don't play Curiosity.

Re. the membership thing - one of TMD's downfalls is its exclusivity/cliqueiness, as is evinced by it's low activity.  Just remember your value to the Vintage community has nothing to do with your TMD membership status, and lack of ability in posting to the vintage forum has never stopped me from being heard when I've wanted to.

Keep up the good work.

It's better than Stroke and Braingeyser, so yes, I think people would care.  It'd make a pretty good T4 card 

Then again, it would be to Concentrate what Stroke is to Braingeyser, and no one plays either of the latter.

By virtue of having an entire Unlimited set, I have 1 set of P9.  My Ruby, Lotus, and Pearl are all mint, with the rest ranging from NM to EX and my Jet being the worst at VF.

All told, I have owned 3 Lotii, having sold one and the other having been played to literal tatters.

One could apply the exact same argument to people who oppose the restriction.

If you honestly feel this, then you should read Forsythe's explanation of the reasoning behind the current T1 restriction.  If you still have that opinion after reading it (which I can't believe you have yet), then he is either a bald liar or you are an incorrigible conspiracy theorist.

Just ask yourself this: which is more visceral to a card game business - actually losing players or player whining?

Players will always whine, which makes the answer obvious.



 

In a perfect world - and I guess that is the entire point of this thread.

@Dozer

Excellent post.  I sort of allude to your idea in my first post, when I state to the effect that some highly interactive decks obsoleted by 3Sphere "have a lot of cards that are purely reactive".

I still disagree with the idea that Stompy is non-interactive.  What about the mirror, or versus Madness, or WW, or Sligh, or Suicide Black?  A lot of people keep forgetting that a deck's level of interactivity is also dependent on the matchup, and when a deck relies on an inordinate amount of creature combat in order to win, it must interact with decks utilizing a commensurate premise.

You sound like you're saying Trinisphere's restriction originally opened the can of worms.

Are you forgetting about Burning Wish/LED?  Just because people can look back at these cards and go "derf, they're broken, OBV OBV" doesn't change the fact that Long wasn't distorting tournaments when they were restricted.

Actually, that was just a quick and dirty summary of a few of the decks that Trinsphere killed.

My definition is: "interactivity in Magic is responding to your opponent's actions, and both players having the ability to do so."

I tried defining interactivity multiple ways, and settled on this one as it as simple, flexible, and applicable, and thus far I have been comfortable with it.

Yet playing Mana Drain in and of itself will never prevent the player from having performed his original action or subsequent actions.

You need to find a definition of interactive that you identify with and make it clear, because your example is extraordinarily self-contradictory if viewed from the context of my definition.

I don't have premium, but I'll try to answer that question in its own context.

The goal of combo may be ultimately complete disregard of the opponent, but seeing as how combo decks are usually the most susceptible to hate, they are invariably unwillingly forced into an interactive role.

Otherwise, I agree wholeheartedly about the counters being inherently interactive statement.



All these questions have a very similar answer.  Wait for it...



You can't merely analyze the interactivity of a deck as a singular entity.  It has to be judged with respect to the metagame it is a part of, as well.

Just because a deck like Stompy can run on autopilot has nothing to do with it's interactivity - which deck I consider almost universally interactive.

Re: Trinisphere



Me just talking to myself, apparently.

In summary: you can't ignore the fact that WotC is a business.  The most vital key to any business is its customers.

Actually, the Yoda fight scene at the end of II strengthened the mythos, for me.

Obviously a squat troll like Yoda would not inherently possess such agility, thus he apparently draws it from the Force.  The fact that he is the only Jedi in the whole series thus far capable of such feats confirms that his strength in the Light side is unparalleled.

The Wishes are kind of a tricky matter in T4.  Generally, these are most of the feasible approaches:

1) Wishes can only be used on cards RFG'd during the course of a game.
2) A T4 stack comes with a preconstructed "Wishboard".
3) Any card you own in your general vicinity separate from the stack is tutorable (much like the 5-color Wish rule*).
4) Each player drafts a limited amount of cards, and everything left over becomes an ad-hoc Wishboard.

Also, the distinction has to be made beforehand whether legal Wish targets include all players' cards from the stack, or just ones you personally drafted.

Using a Wishboard is kind of silly, in my opinion, because why would you play cards that aren't in your stack to begin with?  Wishes then become, in essense, bad Demonic Tutors (excepting Cunning Wish, obv.).

*Ring of Ma'Ruf and Judgment Wishes
In addition to the limitations on the cards themselves, Ring of Ma'Ruf and the fives Wishes from Judgment™ may search only for a) a card you own, b) a card within your immediate range of motion, and c) a card that does not make your deck illegal.

How does Planar Void stop the combo?

Short answer, it doesn't.

If you Oath up Salvagers and have Lotus/LED in the yard and {W} open, then there's your infinite mana.

I just wanted to say congratulations.  You've convinced me to watch this deck much more closely (at least over the Spirit/Angel version).

Scrabbling Claws seems like an excellent idea.

The glass is half empty/half full.

I'd be inclined to believe that lagging attendance is scarier to WotC than lagging sales of an expansion.

Note that in its best case scenario, Mana Drain is still simply a counterspell that makes your next spell or two cost less.  It also still requires {U} up and for someone to cast a spell into it.

Best case for Trinisphere is, well, it's a 1 mana Time Stretch that happens to also include the ability "you win the game".

And I agree with Chains completely - but probably differ in that I feel that the restriction of Trinisphere was a Good Thing, even though it is the cornerstone of many of my favorite decks.

Actually, Trinisphere produces an axis of upper-tier decks that exclude archetypes such as Psychatog and variants of Aggro/Control/Combo that auto-lose to Workshop->3Sphere.

The current best decks aren't necessarily strictly better than their pre-3Sphere incarnations, they have just been tweaked to the axis imposed by it.

Now that 3Sphere decks are being booted out of the axis, other archetypes can (re)emerge, which will result in a new axis of best decks that play on each others' weaknesses.

Taking the long view (i.e., regarding player turnover as the driving force behind restrictions), anything that takes the fun out of the game hurts the game.  Whether Trinisphere was actually dominating or produced a widespread lack of interactivity is sort of besides the point, since past restrictions have also been obviously based on the long-term view rather than just short term results (i.e., tournament data).  Long didn't dominate or produce a widespread dearth of interactivity, yet the fact that it patently soured more players than it drew was reason enough to restrict 2 cards.

The business case for the current restriction probably looked something like this (and this applies to any card):

Restriction of 3Sphere will result in the loss of X customers/players.
Leaving 3Sphere unrestricted will result in the loss of Y customers/players.

The answer obviously shows that the DCI regarded the former number to be substantially less than the latter.  The success of the DCI and Wizards is dependent on making sure turnover never results in the net loss of players, hence making a move that results in fewer players is nonsensical.

I consider the health of Vintage (in terms of growth and popularity) as a sort of watermark for the overrall popularity of the game.  Sure, Standard/Block/Limited are the cash cow, and have the greatest impact on Wizard's bottom line in the short term, but it's Vintage that defines the game due to the depth of the card pool, requisite rules knowledge, and the fact that T1 has a certain mythos and appeal due to it being the stomping ground of Magic "design atrocities", where cards not only have huge/swingy effects, but huge pricetags due to their collectability.  T1 also encompasses the history of the game, since every deck that has ever existed can still be reconstructed from the available card pool in a closely approximate form, which isn't true of any other sanctioned format.  Is it merely coincidence that Magic as a whole is doing as well as it is, and Vintage has been exploding?

If you lose a Vintage player, you lose a recruiting tool as well as a customer.  Vintage players are also more likely to play multiple formats, since they are huge fans, by definition.

The fact that T1 exists is probably a bigger proselytizing force than any other current aspect of Magic.

I don't see how this restriction is different from any other - when it boils down to it, all restrictions appear to have been made for the sake of improving the vintage gaming experience by increasing interactivity.

Just because people were getting used to being raped by Trinisphere - expecting it, in fact - doesn't mean that the card wasn't an abomination.

I am continually amazed by how the DCI has had a finger directly on the pulse of T1 for some years now, and must applaud their deft handling of this most volatile of formats.

Now I have to go see if 3 SoR and 1 Trini is even remotely as playable as 4 x 3Sphere.