If I remember correctly from reading some of the extended universe books, the ability is somewhat limited. I recall a point at which Obi-Wan had to say goodbye to Luke for real because his being was going to fully merge with the Force or something like that.

It'd be ' irc://irc.efnet.net/themanadrain '

This is probably a blasphemous thing to say around here, but lately, I've found the non-Eternal formats a lot more fun. Certainly at least part of that is simply a result of having vastly more people with whom to play those formats regularly, but I think those formats are also much more varied and dynamic. Playing Vintage today doesn't really feel much different than playing Vintage did several years ago (which I suppose can be considered part of the appeal, depending on how you look at it).

I'd write a report, but Jamison already said pretty much everything meaningful I would have to say. If I could do the tournament again, I'd run something like 4 Threads, 4 Spectral Lynx over the Kataki, Kami, and Unicorns. As others have said, all things considered, it was a pretty good tournament.

I would advise you to stay far, far away from any HP laptop. The model I bought (a dv9000 series laptop) is generally of shoddy construction and a defect that renders your machine unusable may arise in around a year's time, which HP will charge you >$300 to fix. It's roughly a year and a half old, and honestly I'm surprised it still manages to boot (and getting it to do even that is often an adventure). I refuse to send it in and pay such a ridiculous repair fee, and luckily I haven't been the victim of one of the widely-reported hinge breaks yet. The other models reportedly have similar issues.

I've heard good things about Toshiba laptops, but I don't have any personal experience with them.

You have to start clean, but that isn't nearly as bad as it sounds because leveling up, finding sets/uniques, and creating powerful items is MUCH faster. I started a sorceress and have played maybe a grand total of twelve hours. She's over level sixty with zero twinking or rushing and is fully equipped with sets/uniques. They weren't kidding about item drops being better. On the other hand, the difficulty has been significantly increased; I'm having a hard time getting through the last two acts of nightmare in a single-player game, where a character with similar stats in LoD would have absolutely steamrolled the same locations.

It does modify your D2 directory, so if you install it, I highly advise backing up your directory first.

Apollyon: How aren't mono-elemental sorcs boned by immunities? From my experience you're still forced to double-tree unless your merc is good enough to deal with immunes.

To those of you wanting to play D2 but not wanting to play quite the exact same thing again: I recommend this.

I consider Sealed to be incredibly luck-based, just because of the number of things you have no control over. I generally consider draft the least luck-based, because you have a large level of control over everything: card pool, deck construction, and in-game play. While constructed formats do generally give you a greater level of deck consistency, especially in respect to mana bases, constructed tournaments have an additional luck-based element through pairings. You could be playing the best deck with a perfect mana base, but if you get paired with too many bad matchups (which is not improbable even if not too many players are playing such decks), you're still probably not going to do very well in that particular tournament. This generally doesn't happen in booster drafts, provided that there isn't a card in the draft on the level of Umezawa's Jitte or something else hideously broken.

So, as far as the level of control a player has over his own winning and losing, I say draft > constructed > sealed.

Those cards also all go in different decks. Past $20 cards like Ravager tended only to go in one; Bitterblossom and Cryptic Command go in different places than Garruk and Chameleon Colossus.

I don't know whether or not this deck can actually take advantage of this, but in other decks, Venser is amazing against Ideal because it can bounce Solitary Confinement through Dovescape with at least five birds on the table post-Form of the Dragon.

Short answer: yes.

Long answer:

Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir {2UUU} |Legendary Creature -- Human Wizard| 3/4. Flash / Creature cards you own that aren't in play have flash. / Each opponent can play spells only any time he or she could play a sorcery.

502.59a. Suspend is a keyword that represents three abilities. The first is a static ability that functions while the card with suspend is in a player's hand. The second and third are triggered abilities that function in the removed-from-the-game zone. "Suspend N-[cost]" means "If you could play this card from your hand, you may pay [cost] and remove it from the game with N time counters on it. This action doesn't use the stack," and "At the beginning of your upkeep, if this card is suspended, remove a time counter from it," and "When the last time counter is removed from this card, if it's removed from the game, play it without paying its mana cost if able. If you can't, it remains removed from the game. If you play a creature spell this way, it gains haste until you lose control of the spell or the permanent it becomes.

Since you can suspend cards whenever you are able to play those cards, and Teferi allows you to play creatures whenever you may play an instant, you may suspend creatures any time you may play an instant.

For those of you who are interested, here's Owen's list that made top8 on day 2. It's totally amazing.

5 Island
4 Polluted Delta
2 Flooded Strand
1 Academy Ruins
1 Library of Alexandria
1 Tolaria West
1 Tolarian Academy
5 Moxen
1 Black Lotus
1 Sol Ring
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault

4 Mana Drain
4 Force of Will
4 Pact of Negation
1 Misdirection

3 Platinum Angel

4 Thirst for Knowledge
4 Brainstorm
4 Merchant Scroll
2 Ponder
1 Echoing Truth

1 Fact or Fiction
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Tinker

SB:
4 Leyline of the Void
4 Threads of Disloyalty
2 Trickbind
2 Hurkyl's Recall
2 Pithing Needle
1 Meloku, the Clouded Mirror

Word says that Steve won 2-0, making him the 2007 Vintage Champion!

The finals are about to begin, featuring Rich vs. Steve.

Possibly. He didn't specify, but I do remember that the main events were usually on Saturday and not Friday.

[00:40] <_13NoVa_> TK top8ed with "D's Noughts", A dreadnought Deck.
[00:41] <_13NoVa_> STeve top 8ed but had an issue (I'll get to that later)
[00:41] <_13NoVa_> Seroogy with Flash
[00:41] <_13NoVa_> Trogden with Shop stax/aggro?
[00:41] <_13NoVa_> Lam Fan with UR landstill
[00:41] <_13NoVa_> A canadian with bomberman
[00:43] <_13NoVa_> Ray Robilard with what he usually plays
[00:43] <_13NoVa_> and one unknown
[00:43] <_13NoVa_> Rich Shay was there, but played legacy and not vintage.
[00:43] <_13NoVa_> Paul Mistriano showed up today, and didn't play.
[00:43] <_13NoVa_> Roland 2-2 dropped
[00:43] <_13NoVa_> and Trogden beat Vroman to top8.
[00:44] <_13NoVa_> there was a situation with I@n DeGraff, TK, and steve...
[00:44] <_13NoVa_> where STeve at X-0 scooped to tommy.. and then later they found out that one person was x-0-2
[00:44] <_13NoVa_> I@n and Steve got paired
[00:44] <_13NoVa_> but I@n scooped to steve since steve scooped to tommy

EDIT: I realize that posting on behalf of a banned member is against the rules, but I think this kind of thing is appropriate to post... I hope.

Kowal called me and asked me to post that anyone taking 91 south to the venue should add at least a half hour to their calculated trip time to account for some construction going on.

Excellent performance and excellent report. Winning two different tournaments with wildly different metagames on two consecutive days is not a laughable feat.

I'm pretty sure you would get two poison counters. Both Virulent Slivers are still in play when the damage is dealt, so both "when ~this~ deals combat damage to a player, that player gets a poison counter" triggers go off before the blocked Virulent Sliver gets put in the graveyard as a result of lethal damage.

Depending on what you want out of the slot, either Tormod's Crypt or Red Elemental Blast will almost always be better than Stifle for trying to survive early on. REB is just as good against Flash if you build your mana base properly, and unlike Stifle it isn't nearly worthless against other decks in the format. REB can help you stop the opponent's draw engine, win counter wars, or destroy annoying permanents like Dimir Cutpurse and Meddling Mage. Stifle usually sits in your hand until you find some mediocre use for it like pitch to Force or counter a fetchland.

Tormod's Crypt is an even better than REB though. It's infinitely better than Stifle because you can get it onto the table for free, where it isn't going to just be taken away by a Duress or countered by Pact of Negation. It's also an artifact, and it should be pretty obvious that a cheap artifact with practical applications against almost every deck in the format is a better use of deck slots than a situational instant.

Go ahead and play Stifle. I'll cast Yawgmoth's Will.

Sixty people in attendance.

Brassman is 2-0, about to be 3-0 it seems. He's playing Gifts.
Elias, piloting Bomberman, is 2-0
Demars is 2-0, playing Grim Long.
Kowal is playing Hulk-Sliver-Flash, and is 1-2.

In case any of you have yet to pick a deck for Regionals and don't feel like wading through all the hate with Bridge-dredge or Dragonstorm, here's a deck I've been working on quite a bit lately and is testing incredibly well, mostly stolen from the top8 of some Japanese event.

Boros Deck Wins ~Flying-Midrange Ver.~

// Lands
    4  Sacred Foundry
    2  Mountain
    7  Plains
    4  Battlefield Forge
    3  Flagstones of Trokair
    2  Boros Garrison

// Creatures
    3  Calciderm
    4  Savannah Lions
    4  Keldon Marauders
    3  Stonecloaker
    2  Giant Solifuge
    2  Gathan Raiders
    4  Leonin Skyhunter (alternatively, 4 Soltari Priest)
    4  Serra Avenger

// Spells
    3  Rift Bolt
    4  Lightning Helix
    3  Seal of Fire (or Scorched Rusalka)
    2  Demonfire

// Sideboard
SB: 4  Cryoclasm (or 2 Cryoclasm 2 Giant Solifuge)
SB: 4  Paladin en-Vec
SB: 3  Cloudchaser Kestrel
SB: 4  Honorable Passage


I realize that it is quite unusual-looking, but I assure you that this deck is quite solid. It doesn't quite have the speed of your average Boros list, but that hasn't been doing very well lately and thus clearly is not the optimal way to go. This deck sacrifices a little speed for some *insane* reach. I'm talking "does not care about the opponent playing three Loxodon Hierarchs with two Essence Wardens on the table" reach. I'll go ahead and explain card-by-card.

3 Calciderm: These are a pretty big part of the deck's reach. In the right metagame, I'd just run all four spiders, but this guy is almost as big a house dropped post-Wrath/Damnation against control decks while being a monster in combat against other aggressive decks and midrange decks with Hierarchs and stuff. Since aggro and random.dec are likely to be found in droves at Regionals, three of these ought to be a valuable asset.

4 Savannah Lions: Believe it or not, this is among the least valuable cards in the deck. In many matchups, it's rare for these to do more than two or four damage since they're so easy to block or deal with; it's also the only creature in the deck that dies to Sulfur Elemental rather than benefits from it. However, it's essential enough for putting a clock on control decks and trying to race Dragonstorm to warrant running it despite its weaknesses. I've also been in situations in which I win because I topdeck one of these to chump a guy while I smash face with flying creatures.

4 Keldon Marauders: I've been loving these. If it resolves, the worst you can possibly get is two damage for 1R; not great, but not the worst thing in the world either. Besides the obvious potential five damage, he can also act as a beefy blocker against Gruul to help you race (and you can often actually force a trade), remove Bridge from Below upon his death, be a good Stonecloaker target (especially during combat), and numerous other subtle uses.

3 Stonecloaker: He's a three-power flier that lets you recycle Keldon Marauders or Calciderm, do some amazing combat tricks, beat the living daylights out of dredge, and so forth. The biggest problem with these is drawing multiples; cutting one for a Jotun Grunt or something is perfectly reasonable.

2 Giant Solifuge: They're good at, well, dealing damage. Only two because of the benefits of Calciderm as described above, but having two around to occasionally draw against control or Dragonstorm game one works very well.

2 Gathan Raiders: Huge guy that doesn't care about your color mixture. Not quite as impressive as either Solifuge or Calciderm most of the time, though, and might become additional copies of each; however, in some matchups, a (mostly) vanilla 5/5 is much preferable to Calciderm's limited duration and Solifuge's fragile body. The surprise value actually matters quite a bit here--many people don't expect him and try to throw a burn spell or attack into it while you're tapped out, only to suddenly be rumbling with a massive guy.

4 Leonin Skyhunter: Two-power evasive guy for WW. If you don't fear running into Sulfur Elemental, Plagued Rusalka, or Darkblast, feel free to run Soltari Priests instead. I prefer the two toughness, but I can definitely see being able to swing past flying red dragons being relevant. Up to you.

4 Serra Avenger: A flying vigilant beater. The drawback does suck a fair amount of the time, but being able to play multiple solid threats post-Wrath/Damnation has proven to outweigh this drawback on many occasions, as has her simply being a three-power flying creature. I *guess* you can just run four each of Skyhunter and Priest instead of running these, but I've been liking these a lot and am most likely not turning back.

0 Knight of the Holy Nimbus: Yes, you are reading that correctly. His second ability is rarely relevant enough to matter since it doesn't allow him to survive Wrath, Damnation, or Last Gasp anyway. Flanking can be nice against Gruul, but it doesn't let him swing over a Rumbling Slum, Loxodon Hierarch, Wall of Roots, Korlash, etc. No thanks.

3 Rift Bolt: I'd actually kind of like the fourth, but I can't figure out where to put it. I definitely don't want to cut into the creature density, because most of the time, creatures are preferable to burn spells.

4 Lightning Helix: Do I really need to explain this? Amazing against other creature decks, three to the dome at instant speed against anything else.

3 Seal of Fire or Scorched Rusalka: I've been liking the Seals recently just because you can just play them and have them stick around, but Rusalka definitely has the benefit of being much better against cards like Fetters, Helix, and Tendrils; I simply have lately preferred Seal due to its ability to pick off an early dredge enabler and stall the Project X combo.

2 Demonfire: Since the deck runs twenty-two lands including two Boros Garrisons, you will often find yourself with more mana than you know what to do with. This is a good remedy for that. However, these could also easily be the fourth Seal of Fire and Rift Bolt; this is another close call and up to personal preference, I guess.

0 Char: This card is why Hierarch often crushes aggro decks. The Japanese list I based this off ran a single copy, but I'm not really a fan of doing something like that.

Matchups:

Dragonstorm: This is actually one of the rougher matchups for you, but it's not really any less favorable than any other deck in the format. Basically, your plan for the entire match is to race. Game one you just hope for a faster goldfish than theirs; post-board, you get Cryoclasm as a way to both deal damage and slow them down, and Honorable Passage to attempt to deal those last points of damage if you're close to killing them before they go off. Most Dragonstorm players will side out their Gigadrowses against you in favor of Repeals in anticipation of COP: Red and Worship, so this plan has a pretty solid chance of working. Do your best to mull into a "speed" hand instead of a "reach" one here. This is one matchup in which extra Solifuges would be a valuable asset, so if you're really concerned about consistently winning this match specifically, run the Solifuges over the Gathan Raiders main.

Dralnu and other counterspell-based control: These are generally pretty good matchups due to the density of recurring damage sources found in the deck. Just make sure you win or get them into burn range before they drop a Skeletal Vampire and you'll be fine. Most of your creatures don't care about Bottle Gnomes much, but Last Gasp and Tendrils can still be pretty annoying. You bring in Cryoclasms here for the Gathan Raiders, an Avenger, and a Stonecloaker or something.

Tron-based control: I expect most of these people to lose to the Dragonstorm, dredge, and Gruul players, but if you run into one you should still be in fairly good shape. The U/R versions, which are more popular, usually don't run any sweepers other than Hellkite. This allows you to just swarm them with guys through the counters and crush them in the face. Sometimes, Tron decks just win, but when they don't do that the match will generally be in your favor. Not caring too much about Sulfur Elemental is huge here.

Gruul: You have Lightning Helix, fliers, and a few really huge guys, and thus have an upper hand here. It's still not quite a bye though, so be careful and don't keep any exccessively slow hands (though you really shouldn't anyway). Burn spells almost always target creatures here. Don't be afraid to chump with Savannah Lions and stuff in order to punch through and race with fliers. Bring in Paladin en-Vec and Honorable Passage here.

Dredge: If you burn their first enabler, they will be incredibly hard-pressed to race you (even if they get one activation off it). Losing after opening with a Seal of Fire is quite improbable. I've played the match a large number of times against a great variety of builds and piloted by some decent players, and have lost very, very few games. Obviously, Stonecloaker is remarkable here. The scariest thing dredge can do is stall with multiple Stinkweed Imps, so try to save your burn spells for those rather than throwing them to the dome at first opportunity.

Project X: Sometimes, they're just going to have multiple ways to go off quickly and there won't be anything you can do about it. Most of the time, though, you can use burn and Stonecloaker to keep their combo under control and fly past all of their blockers with your flying creatures. I've found this to generally be a pretty favorable match. If they don't combo you off, winning past them gaining lots of life is really not difficult at all; they don't run any board sweepers, so you can just play every guy you draw and deal damage much more quickly than they can gain life. I'm not sure whether or not you bring in Paladin en-Vec here. I've tried it a number of times and sometimes he's an amazing threat they are hard-pressed to remove, but other times I just wish he had some sort of evasion.

Angelfire: Bad. You're an aggro deck, they're Angelfire. Calciderm is a champion here, but don't expect to win this match very often. Bring in the Cryoclasms and pray. Thankfully, I think that Dragonstorm and dredge are going to largely keep this deck away... I hope.

Random/Rogue/Other: You tend to do pretty well here because of the combination of speed and the variety and density of your threats. This is basically the only reason the Cloudchaser Kestrels are in the sideboard, so you don't randomly lose an entire match because you have no outs to a Worship or Glare or something. If you don't want to run the Kestrel contingency plan, I guess you can stock up on the Solifuges if you aren't running the extra ones in the maindeck, or some Boom/Busts or Stone Rains or Blood Moons for some extra weapons against DStorm and control decks.

Hope someone out there found this worth a read and considers playing the deck, as I consider it a serious contender for Regionals. Comments and feedback are quite welcome.

The vast majority of my non-Magic gaming time recently has been spent playing Touhou curtain fire shooters, particularly Perfect Cherry Blossom. I'm also being increasingly dragged into StarCraft again by old friends.

After Regionals I'm probably going to pick up Odin Sphere and import a copy of Guilty Gear Accent Core.

It happens to me regularly too, so I'm willing to bet it's just some MWS problem.

Wow, that thing is going to be pretty handy. Thanks for linking it

If there are going to be that many people, I think it'd be better for me to bring cupcakes instead of a cake for various logistical reasons.

This event really looks like it's going to be huge and awesome, fitting for Eric's last tournament.

There are various constraints around the avatars that can be stored on TMD itself. The easiest way to get around this would be to upload your avatar to http://www.imageshack.us/ and then put the link in the appropriate box in your profile.

Please make sure to post the card's Oracle text when asking rules questions in the future.

Circle of Affliction {1B} |Enchantment| As Circle of Affliction comes into play, choose a color. / Whenever a source of the chosen color deals damage to you, you may pay 1. If you do, target player loses 1 life and you gain 1 life. PLC-U [Vin Leg Ext Std legal.]

No, it cannot be used more than once each time you are damaged. You can use it twice if, say, you chose white when you played it, are attacked by a white creature with double strike, and the damage is dealt both times. Otherwise, it only triggers once every time a source of the chosen color deals damage to you, and so you are only given the option to pay 1 once.

Goblin Sharpshooter {2R} |Creature -- Goblin| 1/1. Goblin Sharpshooter doesn't untap during your untap step. / Whenever a creature is put into a graveyard from play, untap Goblin Sharpshooter. / T: Goblin Sharpshooter deals 1 damage to target creature or player. ONS-R [Vin Leg Ext legal.]

"Deaths" don't go on the stack; it's a bunch of "untap Goblin Sharpshooter" triggers that do. As Khahan said, in the case of Wrath of God, those triggers are still all there, but there is no longer a Goblin Sharpshooter to untap so you can't really do anything.

Now, let's say a player casts Perish rather than Wrath of God.

Perish {2B} |Sorcery| Destroy all green creatures. They can't be regenerated. 6E,TE-U [Vin Leg legal.]

After Perish resolves and all of the squirrel tokens hit the yard, the stack will look like this:

untap Goblin Sharpshooter (triggered by the death of token #100)
untap Goblin Sharpshooter (triggered by the death of token #99)
untap Goblin Sharpshooter (triggered by the death of token #98)
...
untap Goblin Sharpshooter (triggered by the death of token #1)

So what you would do is let "untap Goblin Sharpshooter (triggered by the death of token #100)" resolve and untap Goblin Sharpshooter; after it does, each player will again gain priority, giving you an opportunity to tap Goblin Sharpshooter to deal one damage to your opponent. After that resolves, you can repeat this process for each "untap Goblin Sharpshooter" trigger until your opponent loses the game or all of the triggers have resolved.

See Section 409 410 of the Comprehensive Rules (too long to copy/paste here in its entirety). In summary, when you play a spell or ability (in this case, an ability), you do the following in order:

410.4. When a triggered ability goes on the stack, the controller of the ability makes any choices that would be required while playing an activated ability, following the same procedure (see rule 409, “Playing Spells and Activated Abilities”). If no legal choice can be made (or if a rule or a continuous effect otherwise makes the ability illegal), the ability is simply removed from the stack.

The pertinent parts of 409:
1) Choose a mode, if applicable.
2) Choose the number of targets, then the targets themselves, if applicable.
3) If the spell or ability affects several targets in different ways, the player announces how it will affect each target. If the spell or ability requires the player to divide or distribute an effect (such as damage or counters) among one or more targets, or any number of untargeted objects or players, the player announces the division. Each of these targets, objects, or players must receive at least one of whatever is being divided.

EDIT: My mistake, Rule 409 only applies to spells and activated abilities. You want rule 410. The end effect is the same, but all the stuff about paying costs is extraneous.

Once all of this is complete, then the spell or ability is considered played and put onto the stack. In this particular case, you must already have chosen the targets for and distributed the damage for the triggered ability by the time the ability is on the stack, and your opponent can respond to save his 1/1 with Brute Force.


Yes. At the end of the declare attackers step, starting with the active player, each player gains priority to play spells or abilities. This is the point at which your opponent will most likely activate Mishra's Factory. Once that ability resolves, each player will again receive priority to play spells or abilities starting with the active player; at this point, you can cast Swords to Plowshares on the animated Mishra's Factory before the declare blockers step.