[Fedoras of Salvation] - White Knights ITT

[Alex]

15 Hodor sideboard

I went to a GPT back in 2011 playing U/W Mageblade with 15 Mountains in my sideboard, I shit you not.

I top 8'd.

[hamfactorial]

Of course you did, Mountain is the best basic land in Magic!

[Kazekirimaru]

Not to mention that dude's sideboard is a mess.

Real men shuffle their sideboard into their deck and then remove all 15 sideboard cards before game 2.

EYES OF THE TIGER.

I do that a lot just to fuck with people.

[Alex]

Not to mention that dude's sideboard is a mess.

Real men shuffle their sideboard into their deck and then remove all 15 sideboard cards before game 2.

EYES OF THE TIGER.

I do that a lot just to fuck with people.

It's how I always sideboard, regardless. It psychs people out.

[Solemn10]

Not to mention that dude's sideboard is a mess.

Real men shuffle their sideboard into their deck and then remove all 15 sideboard cards before game 2.

EYES OF THE TIGER.

Real men have a 60 card deck and 15 sleeved tokens

[Alex]

True, I could have used those mountains to cast Gut Shot.

[hamfactorial]

Going to stream RakHammer on MTGO tonight at 8 PM PST (3 hours from now)

[windstrider]

So, new Garruk revealed, but no new Chandra yet. Typical.

I hope that this means we get to see the new Chandra soon.

[Christen]

I hope the Chandra is 4cmc at most.

[Kazekirimaru]

I really, really hope that the new Garruk isn't an indicator for the kind of direction they're taking Chandra.

[Sasky]

It's probably an indication that Chandra's not going to suck! They are replacing the "good planeswalker" slot from Garruk PH to Chandra.

[Kazekirimaru]

I like that hopeful approach you're taking. Despite the fact that we're talking about Wizards of the Coast making a good Chandra.

[Calamity]

If the new Chandra isn't good it means wizards hates red

[Jack]

If the new Chandra isn't good it means wizards hates red

Nice. Just cut the subtlety and tell it like it is.

[photodyer]

Going to stream RakHammer on MTGO tonight at 8 PM PST (3 hours from now)

How goes the stream? Cannot access Twitch...

[hamfactorial]

Going to stream RakHammer on MTGO tonight at 8 PM PST (3 hours from now)

How goes the stream? Cannot access Twitch...

Good stream, dropped at 1-2. Casual variance.

[Christen]

DGM P1P1 - Exava vs Ascended Lawmage? - Lawmage is tempting due to flying-hexproof, though we have good reach-creatures. Anything that walls a 4/4 hasty first striker is in the late game so that's also good.

[Kazekirimaru]

Going to stream RakHammer on MTGO tonight at 8 PM PST (3 hours from now)

How goes the stream? Cannot access Twitch...

Bonfires and pianos.

That is all.

[hamfactorial]

I cast arpeggio for X=20. GG?

[Sasky]

DGM P1P1 - Exava vs Ascended Lawmage? - Lawmage is tempting due to flying-hexproof, though we have good reach-creatures. Anything that walls a 4/4 hasty first striker is in the late game so that's also good.

Easily Exava.

[zemanjaski]

Just had a good read on CFB.

http://www.channelfireball.com/articles ... ry-of-red/

I kind of dislike how they're shaping Gruul up to be today's RDW. The decks are two totally different deals, and RDW is still a thing today.

You're misunderstanding the author's premise, which is to group the decks thematically. To suggest RDW (which isn't actually an archetype, but instead the name of a specific deck; it's really called sligh but expecting any knowledge from the mtg crowd is an
exercise in futility) isn't a curve out aggro deck like Gruul is incorrect. The two decks do play the same way, even if there are significant technical differences in construction.

This separates sligh decks from other established (and even less well understood) red decks like big red (eg; Koth control, Demigod Red, Sledgehammer Red), Burn and Ponza (decks built around mana denial and disruption).

[LP, of the Fires]

Z's post is the reason I love this clan. People here have actual understanding of the subtle differences between archetypes. Ponza for whatever it's worth was one of my favorite decks of all time.

Also, listen to alex. Even if you have an actual sideboard, at actual events, it's very valuable to shuffle in your whole board and take whatever out to hide information. I switch it up just for mindgames. I'll go so far as to bring and take out the same seven cards in limited, because it can and will affect your opponents boarding. Also, in games you know your going to lose, if time isn't a factor, just don't play spells and let your opponents cast things for information. Did this at the GP and learned my opponent had Adarker valkerie for fucking free.

[Alex]

Also, in games you know your going to lose, if time isn't a factor, just don't play spells and let your opponents cast things for information. Did this at the GP and learned my opponent had Adarker valkerie for fucking free.

This is a relic of information that I think a lot of Cawblade players are all too familiar with. "Well I'm on five cards and my opponent is on seven and there's no Ponder in this opener, so I'm not even going to play lands." It was a pretty common tactic. Going into game 2 with the extra information in a deck like that gave you a 80%+ chance of winning game 2.

For what it's worth, I think a lot of the "younger" players here (and by that I mean not having played as long) simply don't know as much
about older archetypes and how they influence the decks of today. For instance, Scars/Innistrad RDW was often referenced as being a burn deck or an aggro deck when in actuality it was about as sligh as it got. Explosive starts could sometimes happen as could Shrine of Burning Rages for X=millions, but more often than not it was "Chandra's Phoenix pecks at your life total and I Galv Blast dudes out of the way." These same types of people often referred to decks like Township Tokens as an aggro deck, when it was basically as midrange as they got.

[Alex]

DGM P1P1 - Exava vs Ascended Lawmage? - Lawmage is tempting due to flying-hexproof, though we have good reach-creatures. Anything that walls a 4/4 hasty first striker is in the late game so that's also good.

I disagree with Sasky. I happen to think that Exava is worse strictly because of the Rakdos card quality in P2. You MIGHT get lucky and get really good Rakdos pulls in P3 but if you don't you're playing a strictly worse deck than you otherwise would have. Azorius has extremely playable cards in every set.

[Christen]

DGM P1P1 - Exava vs Ascended Lawmage? - Lawmage is tempting due to flying-hexproof, though we have good reach-creatures. Anything that walls a 4/4 hasty first striker is in the late game so that's also good.

I disagree with Sasky. I happen to think that Exava is worse strictly because of the Rakdos card quality in P2. You MIGHT get lucky and get really good Rakdos pulls in P3 but if you don't you're playing a strictly worse deck than you otherwise would have. Azorius has extremely playable cards in every set.

This is what I was considering as well. Exava is a good card, but Jund
colors are popular (at least in my LGS), and therefore might be a bad choice if you get cut out of cards. The lawmage's only weakness IMO are reach and flying creatures that can block him. Going UW also opens you up to Bant, and Esper which are good colors to draft and have a considerable amount of good cards P2.

[Alex]

DGM P1P1 - Exava vs Ascended Lawmage? - Lawmage is tempting due to flying-hexproof, though we have good reach-creatures. Anything that walls a 4/4 hasty first striker is in the late game so that's also good.

I disagree with Sasky. I happen to think that Exava is worse strictly because of the Rakdos card quality in P2. You MIGHT get lucky and get really good Rakdos pulls in P3 but if you don't you're playing a strictly worse deck than you
otherwise would have. Azorius has extremely playable cards in every set.

This is what I was considering as well. Exava is a good card, but Jund colors are popular (at least in my LGS), and therefore might be a bad choice if you get cut out of cards. The lawmage's only weakness IMO are reach and flying creatures that can block him. Going UW also opens you up to Bant, and Esper which are good colors to draft and have a considerable amount of good cards P2.

Beyond that, Ascended Lawmage is so good that you can splash it as a fourth-color splash card. Exava marries you to creatures with counters on them, and what creatures are you going to get in pack one that have counters on them? That's right, it's basically only Simic cards. There are almost no Rakdos, and only a select few Jund playables.

Is there enough merit in a 3/3 First Striking Haste beater for 4? Probably, but in a format so chock full of 4CMC removal, does Hexproof matter that much on your 4CMC beater?
Absolutely.

[photodyer]

So to encapsulate based on your points Alex:

Exava, while a decent beater, is primarily a build-around card. She has the potential to be a good constructed card, and in block sealed she is fantastic if you can build around her and likely worth a reasonable splash regardless. In draft, however, her benefits are going to be restricted by difficulty in drafting a pool that can take advantage of her abilities.

Lawmage on the other hand is strong in any limited format because she's evasive, hexproof and splashable. In constructed, however, she is too costly to be at all relevant.

Right ballpark?

[photodyer]

Buy-A-Box promo Ratchet Bomb is pretty badass--

[Alex]

Exactly.

Build-around cards in general are a trap in draft, especially as your first picks. They commit you hardcore and often with very little merit. It does depend quite a bit on the draft format, though.

As an example, let's look at the Spider Spawning deck from Innistrad limited. The deck was good (and arguably the best deck) when the format was INN/INN/INN, but in INN/DKA/AVR, it was barely a playable deck unless you got really fortunate picks in pack 1. Why is this? Partially because the support wasn't there for it in the rest of the set, but primarily because as the format grows, cohesion in deckbuilding is less important that the individual quality of every card you play in your deck. Where in a triple-pack draft you can pick a certain gameplan and generally stick to it because of how many of the same cards you're likely to see throughout the draft, with more sets in the mix, the likelihood of seeing cards
that you can pigeon hole into your gameplan decreases. The consistency of the cards you see decreases, and as such so does your chance of drafting the "perfect" cards for your archetype.

Return to Ravnica block introduced yet another factor: Guilds. The guilds make your choices even more critical than ever, because not only does it make it harder to switch to a new gameplan mid-draft due to the fact that there are so many gold cards, but the way they split the guilds up in R2R/GTC means that you need to consider your picks even more carefully. Generally speaking it is "safer" to pick gold cards in your first pack only if that guild was in Gatecrash because you will build the cohesion in your deck earlier on and will simply be picking at mono-colored playables in pack 3. If you went through all of pack 2 drafting for a guild that's primarily based in pack 3, chances are your card quality is going to just generally be lower than the guy who took the strong picks early and is now
just rounding out his deck with playables in pack 3.

That's not to say that buildarounds are always a trap, but a good rule of thumb when drafting at the end of a block is this: If the card isn't good on its own, it isn't good enough to go in your deck. So why draft it at all?

[PirateKingAtomsk]

Buy-A-Box promo Ratchet Bomb is pretty badass--

Ok who let the goblins get that close to a ratchet bomb, this will only end in tragedy (hilarious exploding goblin tragedy).

[photodyer]

Total craziness...San Diego Comicon...Wizards will be GIVING AWAY special black-on-black versions of ALL M14 PLANESWALKERS. They are already listing on ebay for $$$. Here's Garruk:



SOURCE: Direct tweet from WotC.

[Sasky]

Looks like an unfinished foil.

[redthirst]

So who's picking me up 4 Chandra at Comicon?

[zemanjaski]

Also, in games you know your going to lose, if time isn't a factor, just don't play spells and let your opponents cast things for information. Did this at the GP and learned my opponent had Adarker valkerie for fucking free.

This is a relic of information that I think a lot of Cawblade players are all too familiar with. "Well I'm on five cards and my opponent is on seven and there's no Ponder in this opener, so I'm not even going to play lands." It was a pretty common tactic. Going into game 2 with the extra information in a deck like that gave you a 80%+ chance of
winning game 2.

For what it's worth, I think a lot of the "younger" players here (and by that I mean not having played as long) simply don't know as much about older archetypes and how they influence the decks of today. For instance, Scars/Innistrad RDW was often referenced as being a burn deck or an aggro deck when in actuality it was about as sligh as it got. Explosive starts could sometimes happen as could Shrine of Burning Rages for X=millions, but more often than not it was "Chandra's Phoenix pecks at your life total and I Galv Blast dudes out of the way." These same types of people often referred to decks like Township Tokens as an aggro deck, when it was basically as midrange as they got.

Pretty much. Understanding history helps make a lot of short cuts. Sledgehammer Red was birthed out of the similarities between the current card pool to the Demigod Red era card pool for example.

[rcwraspy]

Sorry for leaving the stream early, Ham. Enjoyed it while I could.

[Alex]

Also, in games you know your going to lose, if time isn't a factor, just don't play spells and let your opponents cast things for information. Did this at the GP and learned my opponent had Adarker valkerie for fucking free.

This is a relic of information that I think a lot of Cawblade players are all too familiar with. "Well I'm on five cards and my opponent is on seven and there's no Ponder in this opener, so I'm
not even going to play lands." It was a pretty common tactic. Going into game 2 with the extra information in a deck like that gave you a 80%+ chance of winning game 2.

For what it's worth, I think a lot of the "younger" players here (and by that I mean not having played as long) simply don't know as much about older archetypes and how they influence the decks of today. For instance, Scars/Innistrad RDW was often referenced as being a burn deck or an aggro deck when in actuality it was about as sligh as it got. Explosive starts could sometimes happen as could Shrine of Burning Rages for X=millions, but more often than not it was "Chandra's Phoenix pecks at your life total and I Galv Blast dudes out of the way." These same types of people often referred to decks like Township Tokens as an aggro deck, when it was basically as midrange as they got.

Pretty much. Understanding history helps make a lot of short cuts. Sledgehammer Red was birthed out of the
similarities between the current card pool to the Demigod Red era card pool for example.

We should really do a podcast where we do nothing but talk about Magic nostalgia. That shit would be highly educational, and probably pretty funny as long as I drink enough.

[Calamity]

I'd listen to it.

[hamfactorial]

I would listen, drink and host this podcast. Next level FoS podcast team, activate?

[Self Medicated]

I would listen, as long as ham can provide that sweet "opening a bottle of hooch" sound effect.

[LP, of the Fires]

I would listen so long as Alex trolls Z. I don't know if it's because he's Australian, but angry Z is funny.