Best part of the last year: Red Sox.

Happy New Year

Saucemaster refers to this:

And following this logic to its inevitable conclusion, your opening hand is enabled most often by proper deck construction.  So the fundamental turn has nothing to do with actual turns in Type 1.  In other words, deck design is very important.  And I'll save Azhrei the post and say right now that this should have been obvious to everybody since forever.

That song is amazing, as is just about anything by Phish.  I just got A Live One and it has a thirty minute version of Tweezer that's just great.

I have a N64 for Smash Brothers and my little brother has a GameCube for Smash Brothers, and I kick his ass in both.  That's about all the gaming I have time for, although some friends of mine at school did try to get me into Far Cry (and I fell for it because it was reading period and I needed a distraction).

Eastman, I followed your link and IMed it to a friend from school, who also followed it.  

If people could help me out on the iPod referrals, please follow this link:
http://www.freeiPods.com/?r=13329548

Merry Christmas to everybody.  Anybody get anything particularly good?

Aside from a bunch of good music, I got a really nice chip set/case of 500 clay chips.  I'm going to ignore school work as soon as I go back to Chicago in favor of poker.

Since the smallest madness creature is Rootwalla, I'll use that for my example:

Scenario 1:
You discard the Rootwalla for 1 extra damage on your turn attacking with a Mongrel.  You do 1 extra damage.

Scenario 2:
You discarded the Rootwalla EOT and now attack with Rootwalla and Mongrel.  You do 1 extra damage, and have the option of doing 2 more.

There are only very specific scenarios where you would rather drop the madness creature on your own turn.  In general, EOT is the way to go.  You also possibly get into counter wars at the end of their turn, and, in general, stuff played during your opponent's turn is preferable to stuff played during your own turn.

Holy shit.  I can't believe I forgot this.  The Incredibles was incredible.


I don't think I've seen the trailer.  My friend loves the movie and has the soundtrack, so I heard part of it in his car once.  I don't know what the song was, though.

I liked that some of the skits were pretty clever, like the one where the two guys in it decided that quitting smoking made it so they could feel free to have a cigarette.  Also, both coffee and cigarettes are enormously popular on the University of Chicago campus (and I would presume on most college campuses), so the movie appealed to me as a college student as well.

I assume Maria Full of Miracles is the same thing as Maria Full of Grace?  I didn't like that movie because every scene just ended without resolution.  Also, the story was nothing particularly special.  It was basically an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

I need to see Garden State.  A bunch of people have said it was really good, and I heard part of the soundtrack which was good, too.

I loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Dodgeball was also good, but the movies are so different that they are hard to compare.  I also didn't see Anchorman, which people have told me was better than Dodgeball.

The Allman Brothers Band - Mountain Jam (specifically from the Fillmore East, the 33 minute version).  This song is over half of an hour of raw talent.  Duane Allman is insanely good.

Led Zeppelin - Black Dog.  I wanted to include something from How the West Was Won, because it's so good.  I happen to be listening to Black Dog right now, and it's great, just like the whole CD.

Ten Years After - I'd Love to Change the World.  This is probably my favorite song on the Essential Ten Years After CD.

I didn't mean that it's not tea.  I meant it doesn't taste like tea.  It tastes like sugar and really good spices.

Salman Rushdie lost to Islam, as did Christianity and Judaism.  However, Jews and Christians beat Muslims nearly 2:1, and Muslims beat Gentiles about 6:1.  

The US beat itself in a fight (about 17:1).
The US beat the Arab World (about 120:1).
The US beat God (more than 10:1).
The US beat Common Sense (nearly 70:1).
The US also beat Porn and Sex and others that I thought would beat it.  The US has about 1.2 billion hits, so I'm having trouble finding something to beat it.

Also, some fights of personal interest:
Origami destroys Kirigami by a ratio of 125:1.
Paper beats Rock (155,000,000 to 135,000,000) AND Scissors (3,830,000).

Chai isn't even really tea.  It's basically sugar and delicious mixed together.  That said, it gets my vote because I don't really like tea, so the tea that doesn't taste like tea is awesome.

Holy bad timing, Batman!  I'm returning to Chicago on the second in the evening.  So I get to miss this and the Waterbury on the 15th.  Damn.

As a sub-reason, Workshop has spawned numerous viable aggro decks.  I don't know about other people, but I think aggro decks are good for the format, and Wizards outspokenly loves aggro decks.

Holy jumping on the bandwagon, Batman!



EDIT: If this goes on long enough, we should try to get Kowal's quote box only big enough to hold the "<3".

I think I can make it to two of the Chicago ones, and, hypothetically, I'll have introduced my roommate to the game and tested like crazy with him and possibly his brother.  Then Team me and my roommate and possibly his brother will be unstoppable.

Possibly, I'll even buy some cards and make a deck.

I recommend you switch the 11 to a 1 in the thread title.

Not like it matters to me, because I'll be in Chicago for both of those dates.  Damn.

Energy is never lost, only transformed.
[card]Theft of Dreams[/card]

I have no time to test, but I have also stopped going to tournaments, which I also have no time for.  Over the summer I went to a few tournaments, but I didn't do much testing beyond lots of goldfishing, and as a result, I did poorly.  The deck I tested with most, I top 8ed with.  The other tournaments I was trying some experimental stuff, and I hadn't tested enough, and my showings were painfully mediocre.

Pernickety
Pernickety and persnickety are synonymous.

I think it would would take quite a while to fishbowl the entire tournament venue.  Much longer than your 50 minute limit, anyway.

I hate Tendrils.  I love combo, and you need to use Tendrils in most combo decks, and it's so fucking ugly.  They need to make a Tendrils promo with alternate art so I can look at the damn thing without gagging.

The penny idea makes more sense than the paper idea.  If you use a scrap of paper, you run the risk of leaving it lying around, and then thinking you have Mana Drain mana coming when you really don't.  The other thing I saw some guy do at a game next to me once was he put his Mana Drain sideways in his graveyard, and then put it back normally after he used the mana.

@Nibble and Alfred:  Actually, these decks would be faster since you don't need to use all the Death Wishes at once.  You can gain 3 life, Death Wish + Mirari it, get 1 Leviathan, then gain 3 life and do it again.  It means you only need about 600 life instead of the 2^2000 that somebody had in the previous BoW/Leviathan/Death Wish deck.  The difference is the Library of Leng.  You need to force yourself to play all the Leviathans and a huge Scattershot all at once, so that the life needed for Death Wish becomes huge.  The problem is, the way to force Library of Leng into play was with the specific mana engine used before.  So it looks like you can't have the Upwelling/Naked Singularity/Reality Twist mana engine and the Death Wish/Leviathan/Library of Leng/Scattershot/BoW win.

Yeah, I hadn't calculated in the Death Wish mana yet.  That's a huge bitch of a calculation now.  I'll do it later (perhaps in a few days when I have some more free time).

If you exchange Mortal Combat for Battle of Wits and 20 Leviathan with 200 Leviathan, your deck slows way the hell down.  I think it would easily beat the previous one.  But then you need some way to force the Leviathans to stay in your hand so you can Scattershot to kill all of them.

fadeblue, Morality Shift will be slower than Piper's Melody, if only a little.

FYI, 2^2000 is approximately 10^602.  That's not the number of turns it would take.  That's just the amount of life.  Then you need mana to cast 2000 Death Wishes (the copies cost the same, so I'll just lump them together and call that 6000 mana), 200 Leviathans (1800), and Scattershot (3) for a total of 7803 turns.  That doesn't really seem like enough, but don't forget the need to cast the Stream of Life all at once.  You need 2^2000 life, so Stream costs 2^2000 + 1 mana, and therefore takes 2^2000 + 1 turns.  

I'm sure we can think of a slower mana engine, though, as you're building up mana at a rate of 1 per turn.  Also, you're primary land is blue, so you'll lose at least a few turns on the end by being able to directly help in casting a Leviathan.

Unfortunately, wonkey_donkey, 10^125 is not enough anymore.  Fortunately, I tried to start calculating the turn count, and I think you're way off.  Specifically, 80U just covers the Leviathans.  You said you needed 2^189 life, so you need 2^190 white mana, plus a relatively insignificant amount of mana for the earlier Death Wishes.  So where you said: 3(2^189)(2^188)/2, I think you actually need 3(2^189)(1+2^190).  Like you said, 2 thirds of that will be U, so 2(2^189)(1+2^190)U mana that you need to get from Naked Singularity.  I'll be back in a little while with more calculations.  Huge numbers are getting to my head, and I need to organize my scratch paper.

EDIT: Yay calculations!  Caveat: I assumed you were right about needing 2^189 life, so I didn't check it.  A slight deviation in the amount of life you need would drastically change the calculations.  Also, I'm not calculating the total turn cost.  I'm ignoring a lot of smaller things like the little life gaining you need for the independent Death Wishes.  Also, the random +80 in the calculations is for the 80 blue at the end to cast the Leviathans.  Unfortunately, this makes the calculations horribly messy.  Here goes nothing:

A. (2^379 + 2^189)  <-- Building Upwelling for colorless cost of RT
B. [3(2^379 + 2^189) + 80] + 3(2^379)[(2^190)+1]^2 + 80(2^379 + 2^189) + 240(2^380 + 2^190) + 6400    <--- Building Upwelling for the cost of Naked Singularity
C. (2^380+2^190)  <--- Building up blue mana for RT with NS in play
D. (2^190)  <--- Building up white mana for CR with RT in play

A+B+C+D = Turns for building up mana, independent of casting things and the turns it actually takes to gain the life (which, at 1 life per turn, is another 2^190).

fadeblue, since you need the Library of Leng for Urn mana you can't discard your Final Fortunes.  So you need to cast all of them in order to get them into your graveyard and then Reclamate them into the deck for Battle of Wits to win.  Since you cast the Final Fortunes, you need to cast them all at once so you can win the next turn, otherwise you lose.  So you really do need to cast all the Death Wishes at once, and you can't just rebuild after each one.  (Don't forget your life gaining mechanism taps to gain life, and you have no way to untap it.)