Isamaru, Hound of Konda.

Woof.

I thought this was a rant towards Rage Against the Machine getting back together at Cochella, which I violently oppose. Ah well, time for that later.

Open it again, or download a new copy.

With exceptions to every circumstance, of course, I find that the caliber of player who is devoted to playing Vintage at a much higher level than those who slam down a few bucks on the new sets and build netdeck2007.dec. Most of us have been playing MTG since the early 90's, and have a lot more experience with the game than random_player_01 in a standard or extended match. Thus, many of us can take untested decks to success in said format; though the cards change, the principles and experience speaks for itself.

Now, on the other end of the spectrum, there are those who are on-par with this caliber of player who chooses to play professionally in standard or extended matches. If these people were to put their collective minds towards Vintage, then I'm sure they would shine as much as any top Vintage player - the pendulum swings both directions.

On average, though, I think the Vintage player is (likely) a much better player than the Standard player.

The decks that are going to benefit most from this card are already running 4x Duress. This will serve as both a great response to a Force or Drain, and a neutering scalpel to use against Ichorid, Dragon, Oath, and other graveyard intensive builds. All of this behind its own counterwall plus Duress (and sometimes a Hymn) in Fish, or all of the other nastiness in Stax could very well shoot this card into multiple-maindeck material.

I am quite impressed with this card.

The Departed | Blood Diamond  >  The Good Shepherd

I saw Children of Men last night, and I was speechless at the end. So very depressing, heart wrenching, and.... perfect. What an amazing movie.

Now: Comalies - Lacuna Coil

Next: I'm so sick - Flyleaf

I couldn't agree more, Vegeta. For any good that CG brings, unfortunately the downside is that it lets animation studios get lazy. Pastimes, when frames had to be individually hand-drawn, the movie had to be good or it wouldn't be getting made. Years of drawing and editing is not something they took lightly. But lately we have bad films popping up left and right because the big studios have gone into "Crank em out, Boys!" mode - at least we have Pixar and Dreamworks coupling good stories with (some) of their amazing animation.

I would love to convince someone to run a full proxy T1 tourney. Unfortunately, I can't convince anyone to run a single T1 tourney in every card shop I've visited in the Phoenix Metro area - and we have a huge MTG playerbase. Unfortunately, nobody here likes T1 - too expensive, might as well play T2, blah blah blah. The closest I can find is a Legacy tourney once every month or two. Vintage needs some love.

Because proxies are only tools for those who are interested in the format enough to purchase a large amount of high dollar cards to begin with. I've never seen a "full proxy" tourney; I've seen 5 or 10 proxy matches. An official release from WOTC that reprints the building blocks of every T1 deck would breathe new life into the format, as many, many people would buy them just to play with a Black Lotus that looks like a Black Lotus.

I've seen quite the opposite in my area - every store that hosted Vintage events in the past have completely discarded the format. I have a hard time finding 2 opponents at a 40 person draft who play Vintage with any regularity. Given, I don't live in the Northeastern US, but an expansive, growing T1 environment is not something I see.

Those who play will continue to play until they get bored. Those who quit probably won't get rid of their power, they will hang onto it in case they rejoin in the future. This shrinks the cardpool of an already limited stock in addition to normal wear and tear damage, and a perpetually shrinking pool leads to less and less players.

In a very limited cardpool, Elder Dragon Legends go for $50, but I think they would have quite a hard time breaking that barrier nowadays. I see your point with the depreciation of prices, but we are not talking about "neat" big creatures anymore - we are talking about the prerequisites to playing Vintage, at all.

Which older cards were these that tanked, which weren't very quickly reprinted in 5th edition, and kept the low value for any extended period of time? It was made up of bad Legends cards. I'm not saying that there will be no impact on the secondary market, quite the contrary. I think the secondary market needs some of the air let out of its sail - the prices are going nowhere but up, and in an already extremely cost-prohibitive format this isn't a healthy change.

Chronicles was far from a Power Set Reprint - Fear the Serra Angel.

They would not need to reprint them in any sort of Standard setting, a new Collector's Edition would be fine. Or, premium cards released in a very limited setting - something like the FNM prize cards - they aren't legal for standard, but they are fully functional, nice looking reprints.

You think that the secondary market would be so negatively impacted by a new CE set that your values would drop exponentially? The real thing is 99.9% preferred to anything "fake". Essentially, all this would be is a printing of official proxy cards, perhaps with some alternate art or in premium versions.

Dear Mark Rosewater,

I am an avid Magic: The Gathering player. I participate in FNM events, go to Prereleases, and I try my hand at States, Regionals, and PTQ's from time to time. This is all good, and I appreciate the time, energy, and creativity that everyone at Wizards of the Coast puts into their product development and events. I am quite impressed with many of the changes that have taken place in the game over the past decade, while being wary of a few of your policies.

As you can probably imagine, having played Magic since Unlimited, I possess quite a card collection. I have had various "power cards" from days of yore: a partial set of Moxen, Drains, Workshops, and playsets of most of the other halfway decent cards that are useful in Vintage. Vintage, my first and greatest love. Vintage, the format that has so much potential, yet is passed over and ignored time after time. Vintage, the format that I would love to see more of, but has such a limited playerbase that it is nearly impossible to find another player, and completely devoid of events unless I want to fly 3000 miles to an event hosted by Star City Games or The Mana Drain.

How did this come about? Why has WOTC utterly abandoned its most venerable format? Why, with all of the support and the huge playerbase that Magic has, does WOTC choose to leave support of Vintage to a fansite or two, and a handful of remote card shops that most players have no access to?

One step in the right direction would be reprinting certain key cards for the Vintage environment. It could range anywhere from a few cards to a whole set:

Dual Lands
Moxen/Lotus
Ancestral Recall
Mana Drain
Time Walk/Twister
Balance
Necropotence
Swords to Plowshares
Strip Mine
Force of Will
Demonic Tutor
Mind Twist

All examples of the backbone of Vintage. Cards that, without having a playset, you are completely unable to compete in Vintage. Cards that are stated "never to be reprinted" according to a company that, even with all its creativity and good intentions, is first and foremost concerned with the bottom line. Not reprinting these cards does nothing except encourage increasing prices on integral pieces of a format, with such wide options that only the cream rises to the top. Why, when you have broken your own Reserve List policy more than once, do you encourage the secondary market so? As cards get damaged, wear out, or are forgotten about, the Vintage playerbase shrinks. As Vintage fades away, card collections grow and gather dust, and our favorite format becomes a twinkle in someone's eye.

Why let it happen? Obviously you have reprinted reserved cards with our newest sets, and are more than willing to revisit the nostalgia we feel from the early days, so why not make another release of these cards somehow? Your company will make money, counterfeits will all but disappear, and a format that has such potential for growth as Vintage will have new life breathed into it. Currently, I feel like I am wasting my time playing Vintage - every card shop or event location that hosted Type 1 games here in the past has either closed, or moved on to Extended or Standard, and I am left with remnants of a format that I feel like Wizards has thrown in the towel on. Many quote power level concerns - the format is far from broken, as I'm sure any of your employees that frequent a certain Vintage fansite know; it is healthy and thriving in many places. For every broken deck there is a metagame shift, and every new set changes the format. It has enough options to entertain anyone. Don't abandon us in our hour of need.

Vintage players are the most nostalgic of all - and we won't let our secondary market collapse. Most of us will trade any amount of new cards or flat-out purchase old Alpha/Beta/Legends copies, and with a brand new set floating around to drum up some more players, I have no doubt that the market will continue to grow. More players mean a higher demand, and a higher demand means a healthier secondary market. Don't base your reprint policy off faulty economics - rather, look at the demand increase in cards like Psionic Blast, now that it has been reprinted.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I appreciate all the work that you put into the game - keep it up!

Brennon Adams
Phoenix, AZ

-  The "reprint policy", as is named, is the only thing standing between Wizards fully supporting every format that your game    provides, and letting the most open environment stagnate and fade away with time.




With Wizards' recent willingness to break their own rules, I have to wonder why the Reserved List is still being regarded at all. Reprints would solve many problems with format accessibility. I know that this has been suggested many times in the past, but it seems that, more and more, Wizards is loosening up on the refusals to reprint older cards. Perhaps one day, if we voice enough of a concern, they will listen. I urge you all to send a new round of emails/letters to Mark.

First, you need to come to the realization that you will not get 3-4k for a collection worth 3-4k. When you figure that out, you can start trying.

Selling your singles on Ebay will yield the greatest return, most likely, but it is extremely time consuming, and the fees add up. With only 100 feedback, and only a few of those as a seller, you aren't going to have many bites - very few indeed on the power. You need thousands of refs to auction power off, if you expect any sort of real return since any realistic buyer shops around first, and there are hundreds of each card listed at any given time.

A faster way, and perhaps safer, is to frequent some large event such as a Regionals or PTQ tourney (stay out of the Prereleases - everyone wants to buy the new set, not old ones) and spread the word around that you are looking to unload a collection, find a spot, and park it there most of the day.

Stay away from card shops - you will net less than 40% of the worth of your set (if even that much) and most shops steer clear of big collections anyway.

MOTL has some higher success rates with sets (I used MOTL when I unloaded my Vintage a few years back, decent return) but you need to befriend some mods and find one of them to act as an Escrow, and build that feedback pretty high with real transactions first.

I saw "The Good Shepherd" this evening - very well done. I knew in the back of my mind that I was watching a slow movie, but somehow it didn't feel slow at all. It was very hard to follow in the beginning, and parts of it made your mind do a couple flips before you realized what was going on, but again, very well done.

We will see what Planar Chaos brings, but yes, white is better than it has been in a while. But, I'm still waiting for it to regain its former glory.

Reprinting lions didn't spontaneously trigger good white cards seeing the light. It opened a powerful weenie slot for an underutilized color, which prompted a few shifts to include whatever people could scrounge up to support that color. You just don't see many mono-white decks running around, and you haven't in a very, very long time. Masques Block was the last time I saw real, competitive, open-fielded white decks running around. Everything lately is a dual-color or splash. Or, looking at it another way, you see plenty of Mono-R, Mono-B, or Mono-G (probably not too many Mono-U... not a big thing lately either), but white can't stand on its own legs - it needs help.

Now, don't read into it too hard and think that I am saying "White is Bad, Bad, Bad", because I'm not. It has perfectly decent cards in print at a very high power level. There just aren't very many, leading to very limited options and few variances. I firmly believe that white is powerful in its own right - it has all the tools. But, R&D needs to expand its tool box a bit to some of its other options.

From what I'm told, Children of Men has taken the "Movie of the Year" place in the minds of everyone I've talked to that were lucky enough to have seen it - it opened last Friday in a limited release, so it will be part of the '06 consideration, too, I think. I look forward to seeing that.

The Libertine was an '05 movie.

Rachel Bilson is rather attractive, in my opinion.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1377375/

It was mostly just for the smoking hot girl that I enjoyed the show. I don't remember the plot or story at all.

Good white cards (Land Tax, Swords, etc) are too powerful for most constructed formats.

Useful white cards will still be around in some form (I just don't see Wrath going away, sorry... not going to jump on that bandwagon until something official comes down) so its splashability should remain there.

It will always have White Weenie to fall back on... there aren't many 2/2 first striking pro color knights around these days, but there are alternatives.

The rest of white is total horseshit. I think R&D tosses all the bad spells in a hat, and whatever they pull out they assign to white.

What was that movie Zach Braff was in this year? I saw it also, it was fairly decent... forget the name.

Fearless is Jet Li's last martial arts movie - he is trying to become a "serious actor" now.

I watch entirely too many movies, as my fiancee manages a theatre, but let me pick through the choices here...

16 Blocks (3/3/06)
Akeelah and the Bee (4/28/06)
All the King's Men (9/22/06)
Annapolis (1/27/06)
Apocalypto (12/8/06)
Beerfest (8/25/06)
The Benchwarmers (4/7/06)
The Black Dahlia (9/15/06)
Blood Diamond (12/8/06)
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (11/3/06)
The Break-Up (6/2/06)
Brick (3/31/06)
Cars (6/9/06)
Casino Royale (11/17/06)
Charlotte's Web (12/15/06)
Click (6/23/06)
Crank (9/1/06)
Curious George (2/10/06)
The Da Vinci Code (5/19/06)
Date Movie (2/17/06)
The Departed (10/6/06)
The Descent (8/4/06)
Doogal (2/24/06)
Failure to Launch (3/10/06)
The Fountain (11/22/06)
Freedomland (2/17/06)
Happy Feet (11/17/06)
The Hills Have Eyes (3/10/06)
The Holiday (12/8/06)
Hostel (1/6/06)
Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
Inside Man (3/24/06)
Jackass: Number Two (9/22/06)
Lady in the Water (7/21/06)
The Lake House (6/16/06)
Lucky Number Slevin (4/7/06)
Miami Vice (7/28/06)
Mission: Impossible III (5/5/06)
My Super Ex-Girlfriend (7/21/06)
Nacho Libre (6/16/06)
Nanny McPhee (1/27/06)
The Omen (2006) (6/6/06)
Open Season (9/29/06)
Over the Hedge (5/19/06)
The Pink Panther (2006) (2/10/06)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (7/7/06)
The Prestige (10/20/06)
The Pursuit of Happyness (12/15/06)
Scary Movie 4 (4/14/06)
Silent Hill (4/21/06)
Step Up (8/11/06)
Stranger Than Fiction (11/10/06)
Superman Returns (6/28/06)
Take the Lead (4/7/06)
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (8/4/06)
Thank You for Smoking (3/17/06)
Tristan & Isolde (1/13/06)
Underworld: Evolution (1/20/06)
V for Vendetta (3/17/06)
The Wild (4/14/06)
World Trade Center (8/9/06)
X-Men: The Last Stand (5/26/06)
You, Me and Dupree (7/14/06)

And quite a few more titles from Netflix that I won't list.

I thought 2006 had some extremely good things and some extreeeemely bad ones.

And, I have a top 5.

1. United 93 - I've only ever teared up in two movies ever... John Q, and United 93. If you aren't American, perhaps this movie won't move you in the same way, but I couldn't speak for 20 minutes after leaving the theatre.

2. Blood Diamond - If you haven't seen it yet, go see it tonight. A very powerful movie that hasn't pushed my mind in this direction since last year's The Constant Gardener. Excellence.

3. The Fountain - Aronofsky has done it again. In his best showing yet, he overcomes strife and multiple cancellations to bring us one of the best movies of the year.

4. Stranger than Fiction - I've always had a problem with Will Farrell. He bugged me on SNL, he made me cringe in movies, and he stunned me in Stranger than Fiction. Who knew that such an amazing actor hid underneath such bad comedy roles? The screenwriter deserves academy recognition for this lovely piece of art.

5. The Departed - Very well written story with just the tiniest little ticks wrong with it. Could have scored higher if Nicholson had been held back a bit in the end.

Others that were very good, but not quite tip-top material included:

The Holiday
The Prestige
V for Vendetta
Happy Feet
The Decent
Casino Royale
Beerfest
Thank You for Smoking
Borat


And my nomination for worst movie of the year:

The Black Dahlia

15 minutes of story pertaining to the actual event, and 2.5 hours of total shit. I almost walked out three times. There was 30 seconds of goodness with a black-and-white lesbian scene with that chick from The L Word (though, you get plenty of those in L Word anyway) but the rest of it was a joke. Never see this movie unless you are contemplating suicide-by-film.