The Gaming Den

shadzar wrote:what edition are they on now anyway? any format still allow mana drain, timmy, ancestral recall, ante cards?

• Mana Drain is only legal in vintage
• Assuming by 'Timmy' you mean Prodigal Sorcerer, it's legal in Vintage, Legacy, and Modern (after being reprinted as a 'timeshifted' card in Time Spiral). It also has a red version, "Prodigal Pyromancer," which is legal in every format it is, and was printed as a 'colorshifted' card in Planar Chaos, and then reprinted in tenth edition, and the 2010 and 2011 core sets (m10 and m11)
• Ancestral Recall hasn't been reprinted since 'Unlimited', and Wizards promised collectors long ago that it would never reprint it in a tournament-legal version. It's restricted in Vintage and banned everywhere else. There's a (mostly weaker) variation called "Ancestral Visions" which is fully legal in Vintage and Legacy and might be reprinted at any time.
• Cards that change ownership of cards (such as ante cards) are banned in every format, as are manual dexterity cards (such as Chaos Orb), and Shahrazad (because it makes games take forever, which is actually a big problem in tournaments).

ok. well shaharazaad was replace by a two card combo long ago that works in effect the same way as the mini game does that it creates so i can still use it for fun at least.

it really isnt the same game anymore. it should have been given the DDM and Mage Knight treatment and call it MtG 2.0 since so much change the game isnt what it used to be in its first decade.

found my lion clan L5R deck, Heresy deck, original Illuminati Deck, and Vampire decks all with my Munchkin and Lunch Money decks, but not the missing and elusive MtG deck. too many boxes of these cards. i should wallpaper my bathroom with beta basic lands. got enough that were crimped into the package to probably do it with.

does the Gatherer on wizards.com still work after all that screwing around with their website or is there a new link to get to the card database they have?

shadzar wrote:it really isnt the same game anymore. it should have been given the DDM and Mage Knight treatment and call it MtG 2.0 since so much change the game isnt what it used to be in its first decade.

The change wasn't "sharp"; In some sense, it becomes a new game every three months when they release a new set. Standard and Extended are considered to, "rotate," every fall, when they each drop a 'core set' and a 'block'.

The backs, of course, remain constant so that you can mix cards from different sets without sleeves and not have the cards automatically marked like in Munchkin.

does the Gatherer on wizards.com still work after all that screwing around with their website or is there a new link to get to the card database they have?

Gatherer still works, but I prefer magiccards.info, because I can easily use operators to search for cards with specific parameters, e.g.: "restricted:vintage OR banned:legacy -c:u cmc>2 -t:land pow=tou -o:ante".

Lord Mistborn wrote:Seething song just got banned in modern.

What. The. Fuck. Wizards. It's not like Strom was even super powered in Modern but they decided to give everyone who played it a huge kick in the nuts.

The original vision for the format was "don't win before turn four" and Storm did that pretty consistently.

Ravengm wrote:The original vision for the format was "don't win before turn four" and Storm did that pretty consistently.

So does infect and they haven't banned any of it's cards. I think the fact that the deck cost less than 100 and was all over mtgo was the main reason that Wizards took it behind the woodshed a blew it's brains out.

They won't do anything to limit infect because infect is MaRo's baby, his favorite mechanic of all time.

Which is one major reason he can eat a dick.

Lord Mistborn wrote:

Ravengm wrote:The original vision for the format was "don't win before turn four" and Storm did that pretty consistently.

So does infect and they haven't banned any of it's cards. I think the fact that the deck cost less than 100 and was all over mtgo was the main reason that Wizards took it behind the woodshed a blew it's brains out.

I suspect that if asked, they would say that it's because infect is susceptible to more common forms of removal AFAICT. Counterspells are blue-only, but every color has answers to creatures.

Answers to infect:
Green: Fog, removal
White: Path to Exile et al., Pacifism-like effects, tapdown, etc
Blue: Bounce, counter, tapdown
Black: Removal
Red: Removal (used when the creature can't attack so they have to use up their pumps if they want to save it)

Also, the turn two win can generally be chump blocked.

NineInchNall wrote:They won't do anything to limit infect because infect is MaRo's baby, his favorite mechanic of all time.

Which is one major reason he can eat a dick.

Actually, the entire deck could probably be considered his 'baby', with infect replacing Berserk: https://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/ ... aily/mr204 (ctrl+f 'berserk')

Lord Mistborn wrote:

Ravengm wrote:The original vision for the format was "don't win before turn four" and Storm did that pretty consistently.

So does infect and they haven't banned any of it's cards. I think the fact that the deck cost less than 100 and was all over mtgo was the main reason that Wizards took it behind the woodshed a blew it's brains out.

They absolutely did. Blazing Shoal is on the banlist.

Ravengm wrote: They absolutely did. Blazing Shoal is on the banlist.

They killed infect shoal not BUG infect. BUG infect can win on fucking turn 2 but noone is complaing because just like storm the deak bricks itself as soon as anyone interacts with it.

Lord Mistborn wrote: They killed infect shoal not BUG infect. BUG infect can win on fucking turn 2 but noone is complaing because just like storm the deak bricks itself as soon as anyone interacts with it.

Storm is a lot harder to interact with because it only tends to use one permanent, and interacting with spells is pretty much impossible for all but blue (and sometimes red). In a lot of matchups it becomes "mull until you find your Leyline".

Besides, infect hasn't been putting up that impressive of tournament results recently, anyway. We haven't had much since the most recent ban rounds, so that might change, but I doubt by much. It's an all-in deck that uses creatures as the cornerstone, so pretty much every deck can deal with it.

Figured I drag this thread up again, because, well, there are much better deck builders than me on the Den. I'm pretty terrible.

I love Slivers. I want to play Slivers. What suggestions can the better deck builders make for a decent Sliver deck? It doesn't need to be ultra competitive, because as far as tournaments go, I draft, or I look into Pauper, and that's about it. Decent casual Slivers is perfectly fine, and in fact, basically what I want to do.

Prak wrote:Figured I drag this thread up again, because, well, there are much better deck builders than me on the Den. I'm pretty terrible.

I love Slivers. I want to play Slivers. What suggestions can the better deck builders make for a decent Sliver deck? It doesn't need to be ultra competitive, because as far as tournaments go, I draft, or I look into Pauper, and that's about it. Decent casual Slivers is perfectly fine, and in fact, basically what I want to do.

Slivers is a Pauper deck. There aren't enough Slivers to do a decent Sliver Commander thingy, the tribe is too old for Standard, and it's nowhere near good enough for Modern or Legacy.

As a Pauper deck, Slivers is a Green/White linear agro deck with Muscle Sliver and Predatory Sliver as your premier cards (a Grizzly Bear that acts as an anthem that you're allowed to have 8 copies of). Other than that, you just have some auras or spells that help you with your beatdown. Journey to Nowhere, and then like Rancor, Armadillo Cloak, or Vines of Vastwood.

-Username17

I mean... there are 100 slivers? Not counting changeling/mistform bullshit? And there's a lot of "hey, three different cards do this good thing" (at varying levels of decentness of cost...) so... that's not enough for commander?

Also, yeah, I'm putting a GW Pauper Sliver deck together from the Professor's video, but... I don't like playing White.

Key word is "Decent." It's a kitchen table format so YMMV but the reasonably dangerous "sliver" edh decks I've seen had maybe ~20 slivers and then what you were actually doing is fucking around with a shit ton of mana fixing and tutors until you could get some combo or another to go off.

5 Color Commander decks are very expensive. If you can't afford a competitive Standard deck, you can't afford a 5 color Manabase for Commander. If you aren't going to do 5 color Sliver Queen or 5 color Sliver Overlord, there aren't enough Slivers to make a 100 card deck that has decent synergies.

Like, there's enough Green and White Slivers to make a Green/White Sliver beatdown deck that's competitive in Pauper. But there's not really enough Green and White Slivers to make a coherent Green/White commander deck, because you need to fill 33 more deck slots and you can only have 1 copy of each sliver. You're allowed uncommons and rares, but that doesn't actually help much - essentially you have 3 times as many card options but have one quarter as many copies of each chosen card and 5/3rds as many deck slots to fill.

Where going to Commander land can make your Sliver deck easier to make is the access to all five colors when you have the insane mana bases and a guaranteed fatty to play once you get all five colors online. But that requires actually having all those expensive ass lands. And yeah, I don't think that's an option if you're thinking about this as a budget option.

No 5 color commander is a budget option. And no non-5 color commander is a real option for Slivers.

-Username17

Ah, gotcha. That makes sense now.

Pay-to-win games are not my bag since I don't have the amounts of money you need to blow on them in order to be (and stay) competitive, but if you do, magic is pretty much THE game to do it. It's well-structured, enjoyable, has great art, and it's played pretty much everywhere there are geeks. It's pretty much the hobby's gold standard.

Granted, there are some horrible elements in the tournament community (and otherwise), but that's inevitable anywhere with more than a couple dozen people.

Prak wrote:Ah, gotcha. That makes sense now.

To give you a slight idea about how expensive 5-color mana bases can be here is a link to my 5-color Ur-dragon Commander deck. Also note that my mana base isn't really optimized.

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/798384

You would also need mana fixing as well.

Did anyone else hear that Martha Wells is doing the story direction for the next expansion?

If you don't recognize the name, she's the author of some absolutely fantastic SFF books like The Cloud Roads.

Leress wrote:

Prak wrote:Ah, gotcha. That makes sense now.

To give you a slight idea about how expensive 5-color mana bases can be here is a link to my 5-color Ur-dragon Commander deck. Also note that my mana base isn't really optimized.

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/798384

You would also need mana fixing as well.

Next set has some choice stuff for Ur Dragon Commander.

FrankTrollman wrote:
Next set has some choice stuff for Ur Dragon Commander.

Well the Ur-dragon pre-con did come with Infinity Gauntlet Fist of Suns and that became more of a hindrance than anything, and that was when I running more filterer lands like Cascading Cataracts

You can build slivers for like... a hundred dollars? Not sure if you consider that budget or not. I'm pretty choosy, so I wouldn't spend for it, but I also don't like slivers.

I just want a deck I can have fun at the kitchen table with, I don't go to Duel Commander tournaments or anything.

YMMV of course, and the Infinity Gauntlet is more of a mandatory thing for Dragon Engine commanders (for whom it allows you to pay five colors of mana for everything including things that are cheaper than that), but it's pretty hard to actually play the Ur Dragon if you don't have some sort of Fist of Suns cheat on the casting cost. Motherfucker costs 9 mana.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:YMMV of course, and the Infinity Gauntlet is more of a mandatory thing for Dragon Engine commanders (for whom it allows you to pay five colors of mana for everything including things that are cheaper than that), but it's pretty hard to actually play the Ur Dragon if you don't have some sort of Fist of Suns cheat on the casting cost. Motherfucker costs 9 mana.

-Username17

Ah, see that's the thing I don't cast the Ur-dragon. It's Eminence ability is good enough for my deck. I agree if I was still making it a cheat out commander-type deck it would be fine. An earlier version of this deck had it that I could get infinity combat steps. I would cheat out Ur with the Gauntlet, have Savage Ventmaw, a fires of Yavimaya, and an Aggravated Assault to go infinite. I could use Atarka, World Render to speed it up.

Prak wrote:I just want a deck I can have fun at the kitchen table with, I don't go to Duel Commander tournaments or anything.

What is your budget for this deck and what do you want it to do?