It runs for me just fine under wine (what version are you using?), but is even more annoying to use than natively. So I use vmware instead, which works great. There's tutorials floating around about how to make a disk image you can use with the free VMWare Player.

I believe he meant Counterbalance.

Anyone around who has experience with this?

I basically have a couple of specific concerns:

- How is VAT handled? Is there any way where I don't have to pay it? (I heard somewhere that it only applies above a given price value, but not what it is, or where to find out...). And if I do have to pay it, how? According to Google, VAT is levied at the border... but since I'm not actually, you know, physically present at the border, how do I get the money where it needs to go, without delaying the cards getting to me if at all possible?

- How fast do the cards usually arrive? There's a tournament on the 13th of October, so, well, I'd need them by then. I notice there's a multitude of shipping options, but all besides the basic one can be rather expensive.

And is there anything else I should know? Like customs issues, or anything else...

No Sprite Noble?

Here was mine:

1 Ascendant Evincar
1 Genesis
1 Juzam Djinn
4 Korlash, Heir to Blackblade
1 Trench Wurm
3 Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed
1 Yavimaya Granger
1 Zombie Master

1 Drain Life
1 Enslave
2 Rise // Fall
4 Intuition
1 Haunting Echoes
1 Life from the Loam
1 Nightmare Void
4 Pernicious Deed
4 Sensei's Divining Top

4 Bloodstained Mire
2 Cabal Coffers
4 Maze of Ith
3 Overgrown Tomb
1 Quicksand
4 Rocky Tar Pit
3 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
2 Watery Grave
1 Volrath's Stronghold
2 Swamp
1 Snow-Covered Swamp
1 Mountain

I built this, I think, a bit over two years ago(?) for around $500:

Athlon 64 3000+
Chaintech VNF4 Ultra
1GB Hynix
GeForce 6600 128MB
Seagate 120GB
NEC 3520A DVD+-RW
Chieftec 360W
some crappy beige case I had lying around

Obviously on the lower end of the price scale, but it worked great up until I sold it for funds toward a laptop not quite a year ago. I agree with everything jro said, and I'd give you specific advice, but it would mostly be from those two sites I mentioned, so might as well go straight to the source. (It feels so good no longer having to recommend against ATI/AMD graphics if you ever possibly might maybe want to try using Linux with it). Also, yeah. seriously consider getting a laptop. They're very convenient, even if only for things like lounging around on a couch (as I am now) rather than sitting at a desk. They also have a built-in UPS, which is a feature frequently overlooked.

I recommend looking at the system guides at The Tech Report and Ars Technica. They know their stuff, really well.

Thawing Glaciers is banned.

Metamorphosis was required reading here (albeit in Hungarian), and it's the only book so far in my life which I actually hated, and regretted having read. I know others haven't had the same visceral reaction, so I'm just sharing my experience. From my somewhat limited knowledge of literature, it's like Beckett crossed with E.T.A. Hoffmann and a twisted sadistic streak.

Dream Halls is considered broken by some, so this really doesn't stand much of a chance at all.

Not being able to Torch your opponent for a billion actually makes it a slight bit more difficult to break, but just build a deck with the Leyline and Powders, and some of these cards:

Wit's End
Head Games
Hypnox
Myojin of Night's Reach
Myojin of Life's Web
Nullstone Gargoyle
Dovescape
Enduring Ideal
Time Stretch
Decree of Silence
Biorhythm (plus, like, Arbor/Factory/Nexus)

...and so on.

It seems their actual website is here, though it's pretty sparse.

edit -- and the download page is here. and it's open source, but uses Microsoft/Windows libraries, so it's not available for other platforms. feh.

I'd go with the Legacy banned list as-is, and then maybe ban a couple of Affinity cards, but I think that should be enough. It's your tournament, of course, just saying.

I'm pretty sure you don't want Lotus Petals here. Being a slow deck, you want as much mana as you can muster each turn, not only the first. The Moxen could probably stay with the amount of card drawing and Scepters you have. I can't imagine Stifles being very amazing in casual; I'd cut them.

Not many of those cards besides Arcanis "aren't good enough to be competitive", actually. Here's some ideas (in the order they occur to me), most of which were either once good, or are just plain awesome:

Ghost Ship
Mist Dragon (my favorite)
Palinchron
Rainbow Efreet
Future Sight!
Legacy's Allure
Control Magic
Treachery
Dismiss
Opportunity
Seal of Removal
Snap
Propaganda
Flood
Fog Bank
Wall of Tears
Genju of the Falls
Draining Whelk
Whispers of the Muse
Thwart
Foil
Ertai, Wizard Adept
Stuffy Doll
Capsize
Forbid
Forcefield
Meishin, the Mind Cage
Ring of GIx
Icy Manipulator
Ivory Tower
Fade Away
Soothsaying
Kaho, Minamo HIstorian
Jokulmorder

I hope that's enough for now =)

An interesting idea, and I'd be up for the chance to play with Dromar's Charm, Grim Monolith, Survival of the Fittest, or Oath of Druids again. I might prefer a Build Your Own Block tournament, where you get to mix and match any first, second, and third sets from among blocks -- this is much more exciting from a deck building perspective, because you can't just look up winning lists from past Block Constructed tournaments. (It would probably need a different banned list, though, likely Legacy's, which would exclude me from playing with Oath or Monolith again. Frown.)

If you're serious about this, I recommend posting it in Community (if they let you) and at other sites like the Source, Starcity, and/or Salvation, because I see you're not getting much interest in this out-of-the-way niche of TMD.

The Beatles - I Me Mine

Previously: Sublime - Doin' Time

I also read it as soon as it was leaked, to get in before the spoilers. (In a single sitting, which I wasn't expecting. Took 11 hours). Twas pretty good, much better than the 6th, at least. I really hated the epilogue.

Would Honor the Fallen be worth trying as a Wish target here, if you're using white?

You could adapt quite a lot of standard Legacy decks to this format, because you can just fill out the alphabet with nonbasic lands -- there are good ones for nearly every letter. Not being able to play two cards of the same letter is actually a much bigger restriction than having to play one of each. And this would be easy enough to try and break -- the trouble is they're not looking for power, but the ever enigmatic "creativity, entertainment, and play value". Designing a deck is much more straightforward when you have a clear goal to aim for, which this one isn't. I thought of crafting a deck around the Greatest Combo Ever Conceived -- Graceful Antelope plus Quarum Trench Gnomes -- but would that then be considered too weak? Feh. Anyone know what exactly they're looking for?

If you don't also have to draw a card, you can still activate Belcher in response to the Pact trigger.

Does the pink noise move, or stay in place?

I would check if the color depth in desktop settings hadn't gone back to 32bit, if you haven't done this already. Don't see why it would reset spontaneously, but computers are eminently strange creatures.

I'd also check your RAM and video card for hardware defects. There's software for the former (memtest86+); I'm not sure what you can do for the latter besides swapping in a different one and seeing if that fixes it.

SuperIllissius strikes again!

I'm not sure what to do for #100. Assuming we don't want to change the fundamental format (round robin tournament with three cards), there's four things I can see which we can experiment with:

- The banned list: What it sounds like, modulating which cards are legal, trading points for banned cards, and the like. Done recently.
- The card pool: We could restrict it to Extended or Standard, but that doesn't sound very fun. More interesting could be a Duplicate Sealed type format, where we select 100 cards, and you can only build your decks using those cards; but this would be a lot of effort. Hell, we could even draft them, but that would be difficult logistically.
- Special restrictions: Just as a wild example, the sum of the your creatures' power and toughness must be 100 (which is impossible in three cards). Or you choose a color, can only play cards of that color, and get a special bonus depending on the color. Dunno.
- Global effects: Like the Upwelling/Trinisphere format, except with different effects. We could also use Vanguard, either the paper or MODO version (excluding the ones with random effects), but this has a high probability of being extremely broken. What other interesting global effects could we use? Here's some off the top of my head:

Stasis
Necrogen Mists
Sphere of Resistance, Helm of Awakening
Mana Flare
Aluren
Vedalken Orrery
Dream Halls
Forbidden Crypt
Lich
Eladamri's Vineyard
Nature's Revolt, Opalescence, March of the Machines
Braids, Conjurer Adept
Jhoira of the Ghitu
Restore Balance
Ice Cave
Sneak Attack

And on and on. There's a ton of possibilities.

The difficulty of reliably detecting sarcasm in written text has long plagued the internet community. It's a common suggestion to somehow visually distinguish the sarcastic text, but this seems condescending, and takes away some of the allure of writing quality sarcasm. I think I have an idea, though, for how [sarcasm] tags could work. Visually, it would look just the same as normal text. When you hover over it with a mouse, it would show a little tooltip saying, "Yes, this is sarcasm.". If you suspect sarcasm, you can check. If you don't even suspect it, either you can rightly be looked down on with disdain for having your sarcasm detectors out of order, or the poster, for being incapable of writing sarcasm.

What think ye? Could this be implemented in these here forums? (In other words, is this a good idea; is the forums software capable of it; does anyone reading this post have access to the software; and does said person think it's worth doing).

And When He Falleth by Theatre of Tragedy

Next: All You Need Is Love by The Beatles

Win more. If you have four mana left after playing multiple spells, you have Fastbond, and have won the game. Tendrils is useless in any other situation.

EDIT -- I also support the Wraith idea, and wanted to include it as soon as I heard the deck would be legal again. You always have trouble filling the last 3-5 slots, which often end up being chaff like extra cantrips or vanilla Counterspells, so Wraith fits perfectly here. The interaction with Tutors is gravy.

I have two versions I'm tinkering with at the moment; one of them is a mostly traditional GAT build with Wraiths and five restricted tutors (including Consult), which is not far off from ELD's (let's see: -1 Scroll -1 Regrowth -1 Wish -1 Library (SB) -1 Strip -3 Duals +1 Tog +1 Wraith +1 Misdirection +1 Consult +4 Fetches), though many of these choices are obviously pretty malleable. The other isn't really GAT; it's straight UB possibly splashing for Fastbond, with a slower, more disruption oriented approach, and Confidants in place of Dryads. (Obviously, Wraith and Misdirection are omitted here).

Tinker. But you don't have many artifacts, and would have to run DSC. Doubt it's worth it.

That's rather freaky. Haven't seen it before.

This one is also very perplexing. (Watch the video). A bit unbelievable. I'll have to construct one myself.

Oh my god. You have no idea how happy this makes me. Just the other day I was despondent that the most copies of Gush I can play in any format is one... so they go and unrestrict it for me. Thanks, Wizards! Needless to say, this increases my interest in Vintage roughly a hundredfold.

Restricting Gifts but not Flash, Bazaar, Grim, and/or Ritual does seem rather silly.

So is Gifts Rock actually superior to Vampiric Rock? I'd be surprised...

Leyline Deck does not Win. I was actually worried about other people running Leylines and Karakas, but didn't expect two of them to :/. Frowns.

You're amazingly fast. You posted what, half an hour after the deadline?

I haven't counted anyone else's, but if Blasts are interchangeable and the BW deck isn't Deadguy, I think I have 32.

EDIT -- And now I count 31 for LSD and 33 for themajickguy. Maybe i can't count. *shrug*