Has the 4 Misty/1 Forest plan ever backfired on you?

I'm just coming back to t1 so my experience is still a bit limited, but I've seen a fair number of Pithing Needles game 2, primarily from Stax and though I have a diversified fetchbase, the card named the most is Polluted Delta (even when my opponent has already seen 3+ unique fetches). Maybe I've just hit a string of odd flukes, but I'm still worried about opening myself to Needle.

I have a beta Sol Ring that's been plenty beat. Someone several years ago (before I owned it) tried to dress up the white spots on the border with crayon. Not sharpie - crayon!

Oh, and a fairly minty  Beta Sapphire. But I'm probably the only person that would rather have UL power.

Please just pay the  instead.

It's an activated ability, not a spell. It's also a mana ability, which can't be countered.

In GAT I tested Nix in the Drain slot because in my problem matches Drain was only relevant half the time I had it so I was really looking to replace what would have been MD REBs. Unfortunately, the card is about as narrow as MisD (the times you can use it outside of counter wars are strongly limited) and it just wasn't worth running 4 cards that needed another counter in hand to really become useful. Sure, coming out of nowhere on a Gush was cool when it happened - but it just didn't happen frequently enough that I felt Nix would be better than just sticking with Drain or revisiting the red splash.

I had to reread the sentence myself to make sure I understood what he was getting at.

He's saying that post board, if the Ichorid player is going to win, it's going to take him 6+ turns to do so.

So apparently my Penn State compatriots have never taken the full member test, leaving me to post in their stead. (Hint: take the test guys, lol)

We'll definitely be trying to make it down to this.

I think for anyone growing up with (and enjoying) the transformers you should at least go watch it. I was pleasantly surprised as I went into the movie expecting to be let down. I'm not sure I'd hail it as the crown jewel of one of my favorite cartoon franchises while growing up, but I wasn't overly disappointed.

The idea of badass chicks is pretty sexy, but they fumbled a bit here. At one point, when Sam tells here she's "more than meets the eye" I started laughing to myself at how they dropped the line in the way they did, which elicited some strange looks from my neighbors. I have to say getting dragged along to see it with people who just wanted to see an action movie was a bit detracting as I'd have to explain stuff to them and put up with "oh he's crippled but they're letting him fight!" This isn't fucking Autobot affirmative action - they're just that badass.

Oh, and before we went in to see the movie, the obnoxious girl (that apparently doesn't think very highly of Bumblebee, and spent the movie shouting in semi-climatic scenes and otherwise being generally disruptive) informed me that I was not to spoil the movie as there was someone in attendance who was oblivious to the "robots in disguise" plotline. M. Night Shyamalan isn't the fucking director here folks... The transforming robot premise isn't some sort of spoiler the way of 6th Sense. Though I did get a bit of a kick out of imagining what would happen if that were the case. I just couldn't get this image of some guy standing up in the last 5 minutes of the movie proclaiming "I GET IT! THEY'RE ROBOTS...IN DISGUISE. BRILLIANT!"

Sorry for the rant there, but my companions and the fact that they decided to see Transformers over Die Hard at the last moment left me feeling sort of razzled.

Unfortunately I missed this, due largely in part to the people I attended the movie with. Please enlighten me.

And Steve, I watch a lot of anime; but I can definitely relate to a dislike of mecha. The entire premise of man sized robots as vehicles of war just strikes me as nonsensical. However, this isn't really the same thing at all. I think if you enjoyed the series when you were young, it's worth plopping down a few bucks for nostalgia's sake at very least. I'd recommend seeing it in a theater though, as being in a theater automatically makes just about every movie better unless you have 1 or 2 friends over and drink heavily while watching a rented movie.

Man, that makes me sound like such a lush.

Edit: I'm sure most of you have seen this, but it's basically the expectations I had when going into the theater.

You still have to keep in mind that SW is not free. If the meta shapes to have a lot of bomberman and GAT mirror matches, the 2 life suddenly becomes relevant as your digging begins to radically shorten the opponent's clock. In a sea of combo and control the drawback really is minimal, but if you're expecting to see a fair amount of aggro SW becomes worse.

Also, to say that Opt is not comparable to SW is fallacious. People don't run Opt to dig for bombs - that's a job for cards that give a meaningful manipulation (Scrolls, Brainstorm, tutors). They justify the 1 mana cost because Opt will grow a Dryad and because it does give a modicum of card selection. Both of those are secondary bonuses to the real purpose to running Opt, not the main reasons.

I was siding Duress in after every g1, so I just moved them to the main.

Pacts are rather concrete in that they don't give you the opportunity to rip a bunch of consecutive bombs after a fizzle, that's very true. But the net result is very rarely different from expending all your resources with traditional combo. It's certainly a valid criticism, I just don't believe that it's nearly as pronounced as the people defending Flash would have us believe.

Either blue or Workshops of their own. I think your argument is misleading and "forcing" decks to play around 19 or 20 blue cards really isn't warping at all. How many decks really would have played without blue in Vintage?

I understand this quite well, that wasn't my point. So these decks mull into LotV and if they manage to get it, all subsequent draws (even if the first is removed - and including the first in the case of bounce) are unequivocally dead cards. Even worse, if they don't get it, it's still just as dead every time they draw it.

I'd say a deck that has people running a 4-of they can't cast is more format distorting than people running a card that is effective versus just about any threat your opponent can throw down, and not dead every time you draw it outside of your opening grip.

Further, all the flash players citing Pacts is something I don't understand. No one makes you play 8 Pacts, nor makes you cast them if you suspect your opponent is holding multiple counters. The version I'm testing with does just fine on only 5 pacts and the instances where I lose to Pact are no different than fizzling with any other combo deck.

I see a lot of gushes and dryads in those pics. 

Edit: I thought I typed this out, but apparently I'm just tired.

Any chance of a meta breakdown?

Oh, and pictures make these threads win, though for some reason after a certain number of pics my browser stops trying and just repeats the bottom edge of the last picture all the way down, making for difficult reading. 

So on question 8 you have

A X B C X X


Looks to me like you're standing next to a guy no matter what you pick. So...shouldn't A win out being next to a wall? Or perhaps I misunderstand coupling and it means having 2 pairs of guys at either end instead of simply being next to a guy?

Not to sound like I'm giving it a whole lot of thought, but most of these are common sense, and it seems to run counter to my initial reaction.


How is that possible unless a bunch of girls took the test and just said they were guys? Taking a piss isn't rocket science...

I've run into these at a lot of football stadiums, and it sucks to do your best to pick the least crowded one that's the most out of sight, stand at the very end, and still have a little kid walk in, sidle up next to you, and outright stare. ...yes, that's happened to me.

I think if you're that concerned with shaving an extra mana off your draw spells, you're probably playing the deck rather aggressively. If your build is cutting counters for guys, then by all means go ahead and run AKs. But just make sure you're not playing a control build too aggressively - control doesn't generally need to worry about an overloaded curve (assuming there are a fair number of instants at the "overloaded" spot) because it can generally cast draw spells at its leisure either off Drain, or at the opponent's end step when he's tapped down.

Another issue I think you may be glossing over is that you're looking at it in terms of simple card advantage. Yes, the second AK is the same card advantage as a Thirst (if you ignore the -1 from the first TfK vs. AK, which I think is a mistake as well) but it's also digging down an extra card. In a format packed with as many bombs as have been printed, it's easy to sometimes forget the power of card selection.

Even with games lasting more turns post-announcement, the fundamental turn is still around 1.5-2 (though I'm sure there's room for debate in there), and you have to really think hard about cards that don't really do anything until the second time you cast them and don't get particularly good until the third. I realize that this could be perceived as a strike against TfK as well since it weighs in at 3 mana. But it simply means you need a suitable number of cards to prevent you from entering scoop mode in the first few turns, and AK doesn't help in this situation - it just sits in the same boat with TfK while not being playable until after you've spent 2 mana to cycle one.

Another issue (the most readily identifiable one) is graveyard hate. Sure it sucks to pitch your Salvagers to TfK and have them Extirpated, but having AKs Extirpated doesn't seem like a real walk in the park either. You have to be particularly sensitive to this one because GY hate is so omnipresent, and because it coincidentally also manages to stop the combo aspect of your deck.

If the AKs work for you, then great. But I really think you need to keep in mind the myriad drawbacks associated with the card.

Stephen, I think the critiscisms stem from the fact that people are parting with their hard earned money to read these articles - and when money is involved people get really touchy.

There have been multiple people to come forward and say they subscribe to premium based solely on your articles. While I can understand the way you feel to be greeted with a lot of negative comments, I think you should just take it with a grain of salt. People are disappointed by simple mistakes not simply because they want to nitpick with you, but because they've come to expect a lot of great content from your articles. At this point, I think a lot of people simply take for granted the work you put in and so it's easy to forget a "thank you" when your articles are a smash, because they're so used to your high quality writing, while in contrast they don't really have a problem with "hey that's below your normal caliber" particularly if your articles get published out of order (like these 2 weeks have been).

The longer you continue to write, the more the maxim "no news is good news" will start to apply to your articles as people start to expect your articles to continually raise the bar, but will be harsh when articles fail to live up to their expectations. It may seem daunting, but if you look at it from the perspective that people are so negative at times because you've shown them just how much high quality content you're capable of producing, it really puts a different spin on it imho.

I spoke with one person who felt the format was too fast to support wishing for zerk, but his build was a lot more aggressive than mine was. The problem with your situation is that it's not a speed concern, it's a concern of increasing the utility of wish.

If you really want to be able to wish for an answer and have the ability to zerk ftw afterwards, you're going to be forced to run either 1 wish/ 1 zerk main or 2 wish. In about half the times I wish for zerk, the wish itself is critical to having lethal damage on zerk, which would leave me 1-2 points shy if I had simply eschewed the wish for maindeck zerk (and consequently a turn slower).

The singleton wish is something I'm not thrilled about, as in the past I've loved being able to either pitch a wish for FoW early, grab a relevent SB card, still have the option of grabbing the zerk, and do neat things like wishing for cards that have been RFG'd to FoW, tog, or even Extirpate. It took me a lot of convincing to cut my second wish, and while it's 1 mana more than 5/7 of my other tutors (which is exacerbated if you have to use one of those tutors to grab the wish), I really think running 2 wishes adds a lot of flexibility.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like you can afford to run the extra flexibility. (I.E. devote 2 slots to zerk/wishes in this format.) But if you do, it seems like simply running a second wish would be stronger than the 1/1 split in the maindeck.

The main issue I have with the deck at this point in time is the Regrowth. At this point in time, it is sometimes absolutely key in winning a game (either by letting me cast a 1-of twice or get back a bomb like Fastbond or Will that has been sent rather unfairly into my bin), but spends a lot of time wishing for the situation to present itself to be useful.

First place in 2 different events with both different metas and lists is pretty solid, big congratulations for that.

It's a very interesting idea actually. While I still ran the red splash I had been thinking long and hard about trying a single Storm Entity, as there were a SIGNIFICANT number of YawgWills in which I would untap and turn my dryad sideways for 2 or 3 damage on my Walk turn.

It merits some testing, though it takes a rather high storm count to hit lethal.

I only talked to 3 of the Flash players (the two in the finals of the side event and one other whose name I didn't catch) and they seemed to agree that the deck was just flat out ridiculous.

The sheer amount of disruption the deck packs makes it relatively easy to both play around hate and work on stopping the opposing deck's strategy simultaneously, which I think is what really pushes the deck over the top.

As for the actual tournament, it was well run even if the room did get a little stuffy and exceedingly loud from the vintage event in addition to the type 2, 5 color, and yugioh tournaments that all happened at the same time. It was definitely worth it and really leaves me excited to be back to the game after a 2 year break, so a big thank you to CCGames, the Gone to Plaid guys, and just about everyone that showed up to play some type one.

Slops to the one yugioh dealer for picking that one tournament to not bring playmats to. Though I sort of feel bad for him, when I asked if he had any for sale you could tell he really wish he'd have brought some, and that I was definitely not the first to have asked him. Type one players apparently love their playmats. 

Boo to the main event, grats on the side though.

I'd like to know - How did your mana base work out for you?

Up until the night before the tourney down in Blue Bell, I was running the same mana base (sans the Pearl and Petal) and my friends pointed out how many times I was losing games to sitting on red sources and being cut off from either black or green. I ended up cutting the Volcs for a Trop and Sea and the Ruby for another basic Island (I was a bit scared of wastes/blood moon/stifle) and while I managed to never be color screwed for the tournament, the loss of REB and Fire/Ice cost me some games, as REB was all star vs. Flash. Afterwards I decided to try out Nix as a pseudo blue REB, but haven't really gotten around to testing it just yet, nor have I really revisited the manabase to see if the Petal is enough to stave off color screw.

That's if you're on the play. If we continue Toad's math of 40% chance of 3Sphere and 60% of the opponent not having FoW, that's what, 24% chance of dropping a turn 1 3Sphere?

Further, if we throw out 50% for a percentage of how often you'll be playing first, that means that you have a 12% chance of the 3Sphere coming down in time to prevent the opponent from having the resources to remove it. If that wins 9 times out of 10, then you end up with a final percantage of ~10.8%. Which means that first turn Trinisphere wins you about 1 out of 10 games. If you want to assert that your statement took into account being on the draw, then it's still only 1 in 5 games.

Now I realize I just threw out a lot of "if" statements, but I hope I've done something to illustrate how often this should theoretically happen against any deck with Forces. And I ask you, is that really a large number when compared to the majority of combo decks that exist in the format?

Edit: I apologize if this post seems redundant. I started typing it a few posts back and got distracted with something else.

I'm in Razvan's boat, except I got hooked during open beta.

Um. Level 18 (?) Night Elf Warrior on server Dalaran is my main character. I'm currently not playing until I can buy a new computer though.  

Or simply slow it down as people replace it with Cabal Ritual.

When my manabase can support an early Library, everything's all well and good. But quite frankly, that doesn't happen very often when Drain accounts for a bit more than 1/3 of my counterbase.

When I get Library midgame, I generally need to have other draw up and running to be able to activate it. I don't know if my experiences are universal, but a card that only helps me after resolving at least one draw spell factors pretty low on my list. That said, it's still in my maindeck, but I'm strongly debating its merits.

You need to have a legal target to announce any spell or ability. You choose targets when you pay costs, so you can't use the Claws as a target.

Unless you decide to play spells after Azusa's resolution, you will have priority and can play both lands.

*looks forlornly at his PS2*

I sometimes play at a friend's, but he's still living in the dorms, where they aren't allowed to use XBox live for some dumb reason.

I used to tear it up at Renegades Tribes with the sniper rifle until I stopped playing it for a few years.

I missed the Brainstorms. There are approximately 0 sanctioned tournaments within anywhere of both school and home. (Home used to have sanctioned weekly tournaments, but not FNM.)

I do sort of like the FoF though. It'll go well with my terribly unpimp FNM AK's at the very least, if I ever play 'Tog again.

Well that's a bit of a setback.

I'd really like to run some form of sanctioned T1 tournament (as there is interest), but the prize support is a bit lacking, which is why I wanted to do FNMs. No one really wants to play for a few bucks cash, let alone packs. Does Wizards have any solution they recommend, or do we just sort of try to figure out something on our own?

Edit: I just tried the online application, and apparently failed. The first question asked if matches could be determined by a coin flip, to which I answered no.

The second question was "I can have as many DCI(TM) numbers as I want." I selected false. I was then redirected to a page that only said "Please try again tomorrow."

I dug through the UTR and found this:

Can TOs have more than 2 DCI numbers?

I totally agree with Matt. While I'm registered at The Source, I don't really enjoy posting there (or even lurking for that matter), and spend about half of my time on TMD sifting through the 1.5 forum.

Yeah. I've only read through those a few times, and I've been talking with a level 1 in the area about helping me brush up. The main reason I'd like my certification is so I can run T1 FNMs since there really isn't anything sanctioned in any close proximity. Vintage or otherwise.

Are there any suggestions you have on getting TO status?

82% and 74%

A few of the questions made me take a bit of extra time to think, since I knew they operated under now obsolete rules.

To those that are current judges: Assuming all I need to do is brush up on unique but esoteric interactions and the floor rules, would I have a decent shot at passing the level 1 test?

I feel bad dropping such a short post in here, but I think I'll see how the discussion develops before making further comments.

I take it you've never played with Vial? It powers out on-color 2 drops at instant speed for FREE.

And Grim Lavamancer is a 1/1 for R.

As always, relying on your opponent to fuck up qualifies as Best. Strategy. Evar.

And every combo deck in Vintage can win on turn 1. Huzzah. You can't make a case for something being a hard matchup by comparing its nutz draw to another deck's average draw.

Of course. Playing bad decks generally has that effect. But then you can't really make the argument that he knew what he was doing.

Maybe I haven't been keeping up, but I haven't seen too many Sligh, TurboLand, WW, Kobold, or Stompy decks in any notable t8's.

If all those decks are so good, then maybe I should sleeve up ICT or Countersliver and absolutely destroy everyone.