Public Library is the best!

My wife and I have a Public Library deck about as big as yours, but instead of worrying about having a manabase, we just play with the two basic Type 4 rules: infinite basic lands, one spell per turn. It works really well that way, and is a lot of fun.

We run a lot of broken stuff, like Mind Twist, Mental Discipline, and Yawgmoth's Agenda(Great in T4, think about it in mass-graveyard!), but the sheer amount of "b0rken" practically assures an equal amount of it for both players.

Kinda sucks never to have more than one spell per turn, but it kinda sucks to be mana or color-screwed. Six of one, half-a-dozen of the other.

Any Madison, WI, USA folks here on TMD? I would love to play some Magic, but everybody in town seems to only be interested in 5-Color and Draft.

I don't have the time to build a good T1 deck and play for Moxes, but that doesn't mean Magic isn't any fun... so, anybody still have a deck with Shivans in it?  :lol:

Back when TMD had a Suicide Black forum for discussion of bad decks, it was
decided that Miracle Gro, Suicide Black, Sleigh, White Weenie, OSE, and EBA were
all well past their primes, and that discussing such a bad deck meant that one
was obviously not interested in _competitive_ Vintage. EBA in particular keeps
"bouncing back", as it were, and posting T8 berths every once in a while.

Is this an issue of the deck not really being that bad, just having bad
matchups, and so only being good in certain metas, or is it just that there's
a dearth of playskill in the T1 player pool, and so a good player will always
rise to the top, no matter what they play?

(Obviously this is a subjective question, and I'm not looking for an answer so
much as sound speculation, for the fun of it.)

You who think it's too slow to play a
deck that's based on draining into
a nevvy's--Do you think it would be
any better/more viable if you could
drain into winning the game instead? I'm
working on a landstill variant that would do that,
but right now, it's just something to think about when
I'm bored at work. It isn't anything like
competitive right now.

I'm thinking that if you're staring at a bunch of 5/xes, putting your
mana into the disk isn't the hottest idea ever, because you'll die
before you can untap it. Draining into a combo-kill seems like it
would be a lot better. Do you think so, too?
(Sorry about the formatting--I'm posting from lynx)

How's Tax/Rack working out for you? When I was playing a deck with a similar creature base, I was losing games before the Tax would come online. That's also the reason that Parfait stopped running Tax/Rack and turned into Enchantress. Also, lots and lots of testing back in Parfait days showed that 3Tax/4Rack was the Right Thing, because multiple Tax isn't much good, plus you already know they're going to be gunning directly for your scroll rack-without it you don't have a draw engine.

How often can you really cast Moat? Moat is some good, but most opponents don't let you get that much mana before they kill you.

How good is Balance when you've got so many creatures? It also shuts off your draw engine by making them sacrifice lands... just a thought.

Keep working on this. Meddling Mage is Teh Win.

For those of you who were playing landstill before and stopped, why have you stopped playing it?

Is it pressure from B2B/Crucible, or is it something else?

Posted in Newbie for being just a question, having no real content.

I thought I was going to SCG:Chicago in a week's time, but it turns out I'm not. Here's the thought I had, just in case it might prove to be valuable to someone else, since it certainly won't be valuable to me--I'm not going.

Smmenen brings up a good point-What are 5 proxy players going to do now that they can't win with Fish anymore? Play a hate deck! What decks do we need to hate? Workshop.dec (in all it's forms) and Oath. We also need an "acceptable" game against everybody else. If I were going to Chicago, I'd be trying to build a Welder Turboland deck. Welder helps you not lose, and it hates Artifact.dec. Glacial Chasam hates Oath.

How did I think of this silly-sounding idea? First--the turboland deck that won a few tournaments a while back sided out extra moxes in certain matchups, which makes me think a 5-proxy deck can be competitive. Second-everybody and their mother will be packing B2B or Blood Moon. Third-Turboland won't win if it can't keep it's crucible on the table.

So, let's cut Turboland down to just red (because Barbarian Ring needs it) and Green (because Turboland needs it), and use a manabase that looks something like this:

7SoLoMoxenCrypt (Play a real Diamond and Sol, Proxy lotus, on-color moxes, crypt, and an off-color mox)
4 Ancient Tomb
Forests
Mountains
Fetchlands
1-3 Undiscovered Paradise
4 strips

Ancent tombs aren't Workshops, but they're still fast mana.

Add in the turboland engine:
5 Fastbond Exploration
4 Horn of Greed
4 Crucible
2 Glacial Chasam
1 Barbarian Ring
1 Zuran Orb

Add some broken stuff:
Wheel of Fortune
Memory Jar
Crop Rotation
Living Wish
Gamble

and make room for some hate:

Goblin Welder
Mox Monkey in the SB
Naturalize


Goblin Welder helps you keep your artifacts on the table, and helps keep your opponents' artifacts (like Juggernauts et al) OFF. Recycling your draw-sevens is some good, too. If they go after your welder, you'll just have more time to combo out without him.

Gamble isn't ever used, but in a deck with 4 crucibles and 4 welders, it's good tutorage--no matter where the card you want ends up, you still get to use it. It's not "awesome" because it's "win more", but it's really "win more completely" because if you're missing a combo-piece, it gets you the one you're missing. If you're missing all of them, you're screwed, and Gamble won't help you.

Naturalize and helps with the fact that Chalice X=1 beats you because you can't win without Fastbond or Exploration.

Mox Monkey helps your Crucible-Strip be more effective when you Wish for him.

I hope somebody finds these notes useful--I just posted them here because it's what I'd be working on very hard right now, IF I'd get a chance to play the deck. Maybe it won't turn out to be any good in testing, but it is an idea, and ideas are what a budget player needs right now.

Forgive the typos I'm sure I made--I have to get back to work now. :-/

Tyler

The Good:

I don't care what everyone seems to say, Meddling Mage is Teh Awesome. Yes, a deck needs to be found for him to have a home in, but naming a card and not letting your opponent play it is great. This guy really needs a good sort of deck built around him. Maybe you'll be the one to do it? Keep working, and keep reading. Test a lot.

The Bad:

Land Tax/Scroll Rack isn't a draw engine anymore. It doesn't get working until the turn after you play the tax, and only if you've missed more land drops than your opponent. Ideal case, you Tax first turn, going second, and you get to pick out some lands on your second upkeep--but now you've got to play the scroll rack with your second turn mana... and your tempo falls onto it's face. Besides, after one tax/rack, you've traded four mana and two cards for three cards--the same as Inspiration.

When Parfait ran Tax/Rack as a draw engine (way back when), it ran 3 land tax and 4 scroll rack, plus probably about 3 Argivian Find, to get the rack back. This was because, assuming youv'e got the time to get the tax/rack engine working, every good player is going to gun for your rack with everything they've got.

Also, Moat won't come out until after you've lost vs. Workshop Aggro. :-/

The Indifferent:
Where do you plan on playing this thing to win? If everybody's playing such slow decks that this whole works can come online, you'd own them up with something like Slax or Ami's budget control-madness build.

Because it has been talked about to no end?

I need YOUR help with Suicide.

After much playtesting of my rogue deck, my wife suggested that with all the damage I'm doing to myself, and my deck's lack of answers to resolved Negators, I should test my deck against Suicide so as to not embarass myself.

Is this a common practice?

Where should I get a suicide list TO TEST MY DECK AGAINST from? "I just always use whatever I ran over at the last tourney" or "I want to win the mega-hate matchup" are the types of answers I'm looking for.

Should I build the Sui that I'd take to a "general meta" tournament myself (like, if someone had a gun to my head or something), the crazy metagamed Sui that gives the deck I'm testing maximum headaches, or the Sui list out of some locked Newbie forum post ?

I can post card choices, if anyone cares to see what I'm thinking, but I won't spam the board with them.

What do you think? A moment's reply is greatly appreciated.

Edit:Tried to make the post more clear, even if less scholastic

In tons of playtesting with my wife, I've found that the gencon build of Meandeck's Titan (read:Control Slaver) all but scoops to an early enough Chalice of the Void for 0. Were the Meandeckers just not expecting to see it, or are we not playing it right, or what?

Posted in Newbie because everybody probably already knows this.

Your decklist is 61 cards, because your search contains one more card than you totaled it to have. Why mention how good Merchant Scroll is and then not run it?

"We welcome the return of our squirrel overlords."

Perhaps I'm giving away my total lack of experience with Madness, but is there a reason not to run your allotted one copy of Frantic Search? It's just the same as Careful Study. Sure, it doesn't get cast until turn two instead of turn one, but it's the MAD TAMPO once it resolves.

Which is better, casting early without the TAMPO or casting a bit later with the TAMPO?

If they attack with a swarm, you respond by using Ring of Ma'Ruf/Brainstorm  to fetch the Necromancy you SBed for just this occasion. Then you animate their dragon and go off with it yourself, Stroking them for 1 million. Obviously.  

Everyone's right, though. This is a flashy play that's only worth the risk when you've just heard "There will be 5 more turns" and know you can't win in 3 turns. I bet those all coincide about once every hundred years. Thanks for talking about it anyway.

Spurred on by the Dragon thread in the regular forum, I've been thinking about beating Dragon. One way to beat Dragon is to Stifle a trigger at an opportune time. The following discussion assumes this situation:

The Dragon player is planning on going off right now. You have a Stifle, and whatever it takes to make it resolve.

The play most often advised is to wait until the "When WGD comes into play..." trigger resolves, and Stifle the "When WGD leaves play" trigger, leaving the Dragon player with all permanants removed from game.

Wouldn't it be better to wait until they're done going off and are floating about 1 million mana, let them animate their kill card of choice (be it Ambassador, Queen, what-have-you), and Stifle the animate card's "When ~this~ comes into play, if it is in play..." trigger? That would leave them with 1 million mana floating and nothing to do with it. This would hopefully cause them to mana burn for 1 million, and promptly lose.

Does this make sense?
(Posted in newbie just in case it doesn't.  )

Bah! 11.4 for $280K? Just turn the boost up a little higher on the Turbo Sundance. performance/price ratio is SO much higher. *grin* *grin* *grin*

/flameoff

Or you could write your program in such a way that it diddn't include or require a database of card images, but could easily have one added by the individual users.

Then "someone" could assemble such a database (and by database I mean directory full of jpeg files each named a cardname *grin*) and distribute it anonymously in a zipfile as an add-on to your program.

With such an arangement, Wizards can't file legal action to stop distribution of your Windows program, because you're not violating their intellectual property rights-the "person" passing the scans around is.

Note that there's several lawyers on this board, but I'm not one of them. I just know that this method has been used to great success in the past with many different sorts of projects.

Cheers!

My wife and I own a 1987 Plymouth Sundance 4-door hatchback. The paint is fading, the headliner is falling down, and as soon as I've got about 5000 bucks (and some spare time), it's going to be an amazing 12.0 second  turbocharged grocery-getting autocross sleeper.

Seriously, how could you not love a little turbocar with a simple modification that makes the engine computer flashable? Like, plug your laptop into the port in the glovebox and change your air/fuel ratio?

Question:


Answer:

And to stomp my opponents into rubble, obviously. If I'd been on the ball, I'd be BURNINATING them, instead.


World Championship decks give you 12 blank cards.

Whose Ancestral does mine look just like? Is it a legit card, or a proxy? There's a pimp Ancestral floating around on which Richard Garfield drew an exclamation point, and it was my inspiration for pathetic stick-figure goodness.

I just used a sharpie on some "world championship deck" white-fronted cards, but with an eye toward the (admittedly lame *grin*) humorous.




I also proxied Time Walk, but that was far too lame to even post here.
I'm actually really happy with how the Big Giant Man turned out.

Edit: I guess BBCode doesn't like image URLs that start with https://

I just got done making my proxies for SCG in Chicago and they are TEH AWESOME!!11one!

Here's my question: Does anybody else like to make "fun" proxies, or is it just quick-and-dirty scribble-on-the-land-with-a-sharpie?

I can scan/post, but won't if nobody's interested.

This is as much a tournament etiquette question as anything else. When searching your library, do you have to actually look at the card faces?

It is my second turn's upkeep. I have in play a Mox Sapphire and Island. In hand I have Brainstorm, Ancient Tomb, and Darksteel Colossus. I pour out my wine to Pallas Athene and topdeck Tinker. Can I Brainstorm, put the fat back as the top card of my library, Tinker my Mox away, and simply flip the top card of my library into play and then shuffle?

This is showing off, yes, but is it illegal?

I just thought the readers of the casual forum would get a kick out of this game story. I was playing against my fiancee's illegal Suicide deck (with pre-errata Lotus Vales and 4 Contract from Below) with U/w fish.

Josy, playing first: Swamp, Dark Rit, Dark Rit, Contract from Below, Phyrexian Negator, Vampiric Tutor

Tyler: Draw, Tundra, go

Josy: Swamp, Dark Rit, Nether Void. Tyler says "OK, Swords the Negator in response..."

Boy, that was a long game.

Any other really humorous game stories?

The use I had in mind for belcher was to put the proteus belcher combo into Landstill. With one Belcher and a couple Staff drawing a Staff means you can just stack your deck and win that turn--if you've got the mana. If you diddn't draw them, you just played out the regular Landstill gameplan.

What I found, however, was that it just cost way too much mana to be playable. It was amazingly cute in that Johnny sort of way, though.

Amazing how little $0.02 can buy these days...

He could Gush into something useful in response to the F/I, like into more blue cards to pitch to his pitch-an-island-and-a-blue-card card...

You win this turn by realizing you can't beat your opponent's optimal hand (2xDaze, Force, Mis'd) and if you don't win this turn, you're unlikely to win at all (you could pass the turn and try to give Kai the pink slip during your opponent's declare attackers, but then your opponent has yet another card and is untapped, both of which reduce you chances of success even further). Since you know you can't beat the optimal hand, you have to just test the waters and hope your opponent has a suboptimal hand. Remember that Misdirection can end the game right now, but don't get too fatalistic. Fire Kai and your opponent with a mountain and a Waste. Using multiple targets makes any Misdirections in his hand useless.

If your opponent counters it with Daze (or that pitch-a-blue-card-and-an-island monstrosity), respond by putting your whole second Fire into his dome. At this point if he's holding a Misdirection (and diddn't pitch down to only one) or another Daze, you're sunk, but if you don't put the whole thing into his dome, you'll almost certainly lose anyway.

If your opponent does not counter and Kai dies, or if they used another Force to counter your first Fire, your opponent is at one life. At this point only Daze can save them. Target your second Fire at yourself and your opponent, so as to not expose yourself to a Mis'd they might (or might not) be holding. When Fire resolves, you'll be at one and won't have an opponent.

If you don't live through this turn and Kai does, well, good game, partner. Sometimes you just have to lose in a given situation, but it doesn't (usually) do any good to assume you're in that situation.

Not having played negator and hatred in the same deck before....

I'm pretty sure the negators will in fact win you games, because you just go for broke with them. The problem with hatred is that you've got to be able to go unblocked. The problem with negator is that they end up dead before they've dealt 20 damage. Negator and Hatred solve each other's problems.

Turn 1:

Swamp, ritual, negator

Turn 2:
Swamp, take 5, sinkhole

Turn 3:
Lake, attack, (suppose they block with a serendib efreet) Hatred for 14. GG. *shakes hands with opponent*

Sure you don't have any cards in play, but you win, too.

Seriously, though, I'd just play with cooler people instead of teaching someone a lesson. Also, don't worry about whether they'll lose you games... get out and try them.

That depends upon how much free time Team Mean Deck has between now and the next B/R announcement.  

I've been playing with running only one Mind's Eye and adding Gamble, with the thought that this a combo deck, and thus tutoring for combo pieces is good.

Goblin Welder lets you smile about the fact that Gamble is half Demonic Tutor and half Entomb, the casting cost is great, and I'd very often rather Gamble->Memory Jar, recur Memory Jar than draw a Mind's Eye.

If you pick up your Gamble when you're looking for a particular combo piece (Myr, Orb, Wire) then you just Gamble it up. If you really need to draw cards, Memory Jar now draws like a 5-of. If you're ready to combo out and win, Gamble up your one copy of Time Vault (or Voltaic Construct, which isn't just an infinite mana combo with Metalworker, but also an infinite Lodestone Myr combo, since it can untap itself) and go for the infinite smackdown. I feel like every time I draw Gamble, there's some use that helps wrap the game up.

Just thought I'd mention that now because being able to run an unrestricted one-mana tutor might help answer the "Sphere of Resistance or Trinisphere" question, too.

Have you tested this card in the MD and found it to be ass, or might this go somewhere?

If you planning on playing strictly against "aggro", shall I assume you mean "Wait until I topdeck my Verdant Force" aggro? If that's the guy you're gunning for I'd say the discard won't be doing too much to win you games. Swamp-Ritual-Duress-Hymn is a great opening and all, but now your hand is empty, too, and unless you play 4xContract from Below like my wife, it's going to stay that way. Also, you're only running 5 effective copies of Hatred, and two of them give you a "I'll kill you with Hatred... next turn" kind of feeling (Demonic Tutor + Hatred==lots of mana).

Hatred lost a lot of power with the restriction of Demonic Consultation, because you could hold it back until you saw the opportunity to Hate them for the kill, and if it never showed you could Consult up something else more useful. To try to keep with that theme, maybe you'd want a deck with more mana acceleration (Hatred is expensive, you know), tutoring power, and some creature removal. Try building around 4 Hatred and six tutors (DT, Consult, 4xTainted Pact), with Lotus Petal and maybe even crap like Cabal Ritual.

Once when I was bored I built up a Hatred deck that _always_ goldfished Turn 2 with good mulliganing (it was rainbow colored and unpowered and dropped a 1cc creature first turn and hatred for 19 second), but of course all it beat were little wet pets--anybody who played basically any cards at all on their turn made it impossible to win. Hatred is fragile--lean on it too much and it'll break underneath you. It's so much fun to win by throwing that spell at them, but maybe something else would be more appropriate for putting some lamer in their place....like playing against people who act cool, instead. I'd go with that latter route.