Just one TO's perspective.

Attendance is only one way of measuring success at a tournament.   I would get 30+ players when I ran proxy events but would sell few if any cards to the players.  Why should I expect to sell cards to players who don't need them?  In an earlier post Steve Menendian mentions that winners of power don't keep and use the card for future tournaments.  They go straight to eBay.  I now only run sanctioned events with additional prizes for best performing non-powered deck.  This has piqued the interest of quite a few players at my store and my sales of singles is pretty healthy because of it.  As time goes on some these players who are un-powered have eventually purchase P9 cards.  The bottom line to my jibberish is that I would rather have 20+ players at a sanctioned event than 30+ at a proxy event.  This gives me long term customers and a financial reason to even consider hosting events.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Carl

JuggernautGO: I was going to write lots of off-topic stuff about the nature of insurance, but I think Matt said it best.
Is there some kind of imaginable universe where there is not a direct relationship between these two things? (If we're bringing up health insurance because of AIG, only 4.2% of their domestic "gross premiums written" in 2007 were for Accident & Health products.)

This is not quite the case. The reason that financial companies have to sell the distressed loans at fire-sale prices is, while partly based on the actual portion of the loans that are delinquent, heavily based on an accounting rule known as "mark-to-market". While I'm not an accountant, my understanding is that the companies are required to report declines in the value of their assets exactly as if they were about to sell all of them immediately. So when there is almost no one willing to buy these securitized, toxic mortgages the company has to report them at the ultra-low prices that the few which are being sold have received.

These losses---which are largely hypothetical until/unless the company actually sells the asset---count against their "equity" which is their actual, available money. In order to keep things running, deal with investor redemption of deposits, etc., each company must maintain a certain equity relative to its liabilities, so these hypothetical losses lead to very real scrambles for cash in order to keep the gears turning. One of the reasons I've heard for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley declaring themselves to be "regular" banks instead of investment banks over the weekend is that they can label some of their assets as "for investment", allowing them to avoid mark-to-market requirements while they hold them until the market is less catastrophic.

I guess what I'm driving at is that, instead of spending $700x10⁹, they could have changed an accounting rule, for instance by allowing companies to use some kind of "discounted cash-flow" valuation, which would allow them to value it based on original loan value times the percent of loans that are not delinquent. (As in, how bad it actually is, instead of how bad the market fears it might be.) But I guess 700 billion isn't that big a deal to a Congressman, so we're doing that instead.

If all counterspells had split second, then you wouldn't be able to Burnout a Dismiss in mental magic; and honestly, who wants to not be able to do that?


My opinion is partially motivated by the casual group highlander games that I play with my friends. I go to play a card and have to say, "The text on this card is wrong. Its current wording is ~foo~. This is what it actually does."

Having a card's functionality match its print is very important. It creates far fewer awkward situations and less upset people.

I'm sorry for bumping such an old topic but I'm really interested in this deck and would like to continue the discussion.

I know he'd like to keep the deck mono green but perhaps he can replace some forests with Tropical Island or Breeding Pools and add in a few copies of Mana Leak/Stifle/Trickbind somewhere?  Since the Tropical Islands and Breeding Pools are forests you can search for them with Land Grant if you need to.

I was also wondering if Soultether Golem and Seedtime would somehow fit in the deck? A Seedtime could be fun after your opponent plays an EOT Brainstorm or something similar.

Edit: Would Groundbreaker be a decent choice for this deck?