I’ve been playing Magic off and on since the mid-'90s, though some of the “off” periods have been pretty long.

I used to help run Pauper events on MTGO, before Pauper became an officially sanctioned format.

Check out this Magic-related web site I made: https://housedraft.games/

  • 137 Posts
  • 411 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • EvutoMTGAetherdrift Mechanics
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    3 days ago

    I was rolling my eyes about how Speed is yet another effect that isn’t represented by a permanent and can’t be interacted with, and then as I read on I discovered it’s even more confusing than that. Gaining the first speed level happens instantaneously, but if I’m reading right, gaining levels 2 through 4 is a triggered ability (albeit one with no source, not even an emblem?) and could be Stifled.



  • I’m not just being cynical when I say that the point is that Wizards won’t make enough money if your collection fills up too efficiently. I guess they might say something like “we want the experience of opening digital packs to closely mirror paper”. But if you pursue this line of questioning you pretty quickly end up at “why doesn’t everybody just get four free copies of every card so personal wealth isn’t a factor in deckbuilding?” And the answer is that that’s not WotC’s business model. They have to make money – even if we set aside the matter of profit, they have to fund maintenance & development somehow – and selling you packs that aren’t guaranteed to contain anything you need is part of how they stay afloat.

    Maybe the more pertinent question is “how do they justify selling you things they know you don’t need?” If we’re asking about Arena, duplicate commons and uncommons contribute to your Vault progress, and periodically you’ll get to open your Vault and get six extra wildcards. It’s not much, but it’s not nothing. If we’re asking about MTGO, theoretically you can trade your excess cards or sell them to bots, though typically for less than a penny apiece.








  • A lot of what he’s saying here matches my own experience playing ranked games on Arena. I made it to Mythic (playing Standard) a few days before the end of December. When I finally broke in, my rank was 92%. That’s a pretty high number, and it’s actually even better than it sounds: I’m not just in the 92nd percentile of all Magic players worldwide, I’m in the 92nd percentile among people who take Magic seriously enough to play ranked matches on Arena.

    Surely an accomplishment one could be proud of, right? But the whole time I was getting there, I felt mediocre, because I kept losing about as much as I was winning. I also wasn’t experimenting. I wanted to get to Mythic, so I stuck to decks that I knew were good and that I was experienced with.

    As soon as I reached my competitive goal, I switched to playing more offbeat or experimental decks. And honestly, I started having more fun, if only from the change of pace, even though my rating dropped into the 80s. And then something interesting happened: I got more comfortable with those decks, and/or started facing lower-ranked opponents, and my rating climbed back into the 90s.

    So I think Richard is right about ladders’ capacity to suppress one’s enjoyment of the game. However – I’m still not sure I would want to play without one. From time to time I play unranked games with decks that I think are fun, but pretty far (even intentionally far) from Tier 1. But I can never put up with it for very long: the caliber of the decks that I face varies too widely. I’ll stomp someone’s precon in one game and then get stomped in turn by a tournament deck in the next. I keep coming back to the ladder because, as unfair as the cards and decks I see there may be, at least both players agree at the start on what power level we’re aiming for. (Having separate lobbies for “unranked play with tournament decks” and “unranked play with casual decks” might sound like a solution, but some players would still join the wrong ones.)

    As for tournaments: I’ve been on Arena for two or three years now and I’ve never joined a constructed tournament. The prize structure makes them effectively single-elimination, and I’m not sure I’ve ever won five matches in a row on the ladder, so what would make me think I could do it when there was even more on the line? My gold and gems are much more wisely spent doing drafts so I can build my collection.

    But that may not be a refutation of Richard’s point so much as a criticism of Arena’s tournament structure. If Arena had Swiss-style tournaments, with flatter prize structures, I would be more likely to join them.








  • EvutoMTGI solved today's Spellify in 0 guesses!
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    2 months ago

    Yeah, I found this pretty unintuitive in a few ways. To name the card, you have to click “Guess card”, then type out the name (even though it looks like the fields are disabled), then click the button again. If that isn’t working for you then I don’t know.


  • Are we talking about cookie tins, or what? The article doesn’t have pictures of the actual product, and doesn’t describe them as anything other than “promotional tins”. We know they’ll contain five booster packs plus two cards, so I guess that puts a floor on how small they could be.

    I’d expect you could fit about four cookies, depending on their size and shape, in the space taken up by five booster packs.




  • EvutoMTGThe End of EDH | Commander's Herald
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    2 months ago

    Commander players have a thing called “Rule 0” that basically says you can change whatever rules you want as long as your whole playgroup agrees to it. But if you want to get your changes accepted on a broader scale, so that you could go to a store event or a big tournament and expect other players to be familiar with them, that’s a much taller hurdle. Can you convince the community that your banlist is better than the official one and also better than any other fan-made ones? Can you get stores to support it – keeping in mind that they have to curry favor with Wizards in order to maintain WPN certification, be allowed to pre-order the amount of product they want, etc.? If you could do it successfully, you’d basically be building a grassroots competitor to the Commander Format Panel. Not impossible, but it would be an uphill battle for sure.