Return to Ravnica Bloc sealed #1

So I made it until the release events. I "opened" the pool and here's whats looking at me:

click any image to embiggen

Sealed Pool #1

The rares have been moved to the bottom to allow full appreciation of their power. I am immediately drawn to Alms Beast and Sire of Insanity, so i pull together an attempt at RWB. It turns out 20 minutes is not a lot of time to build, especially in crazy 10 guild land, So with only a few minutes left, i add lands and submit. Maybe I'll work on another stab between rounds.

Main deck as submitted. Whoops on Carnage Gladiator.

Notes: Carnage Gladiator should be main instead of the Perilous Shade. I have an aggro package with Boros Charm, Firstblade and Traitorous Instinct, or I could bring in Maze Abomination for attrition matchups.

Round 1, FIGHT!
Game 1:
I took game one on the back of Rakdos Drake and Knight Tokens combines with Haazda Snare Squad, while his regenerator was busy with Alms Beast.
Game 2:
My Alms Beast was allowed to hit once, which put him to 14, setting up 8 untouchable damage from Holy Mantled Alms Beast the next turn, with Morgue Burst Backup in case he drew a spell to off my beast. He actually gained 4 life with the big Lightning Helix, but no answer to the undercosted fatty with pro-creature pants. Morgue Burst did the last two points to his dome just to be safe.

Round 2
Game 1:
I take damage from his Grim Roustabout and other smallish guys. I drop Alms Beast. Court Denizen and Arrester do tricks to let it through for some damage. I Knights Watch for some more attackers, then
Game 2:
I'm trying to stabilize against his turn 3 Rakdos Hellsomething 4/3 and turn four jailbroken Orge Jailbreaker against my Basilica Screecher and Radkos Drake. I'm all like "ruh-roh", but I peel Annihilating Fire plus extort to help me hold off until my awesome 6-drop removal can hold the day. He drops a dinky 2/1 that loots; I counter with Steeple Roc. He kills it with fire and swings me down to 7. I draw my sixth land, activating my Trostani's Judgment and Morgue Burst in hand. Judgment puts the ogre back in jail exile as I go to 5. This game ends spectacularly soon thereafter. He is at 5 lands, missing blue when he plays Izzet Cluestone. I finally have  the board in my favor so I lay down the Insanity Sire. Into his bin at end of turn goes Voidwielder and Explosive Impact. And I quote:

His name has been obscured to protect the innocent.

Round 3
Game 1:
He has an early army of naught/ones, with Centaur's Herald followed up by Cloudfin Raptor. By the time he pops the herald to swing for 1, I have a Cluestone and get our Steeple Roc on turn 4. He Mimic Slimes his Centaur token, then sits back. Hmmm... was that part of a plan? I drop Towering Thunderfist and block when he attacks. He taps SEVEN to bloodrush a Skaarg Goliath for +9/+9 and trample, blowing out my giant and taking me to 4. His follow-up is a 2/3 French vanilla flier. On my side, I play arrester and Knight's Watch on one turn to stabilize, take out one of his fliers with a burn spell, then end the game with a Spark Trooper . I think he could have played his giant a little slower and won this one.
Game 2:
I get blown out by trying to avoid dying to a bloodrushed goliath but he has Protect and Serve instead. My expensive removal doesn't quite come around in time, since I can only cast one spell per turn and he gets me while I still have two good spells in hand and the mana to play them over the next two turns. Perhaps if I play this one better I can survive to win. Particularly the time I blocked with Carnage Gladiator and two mana open, thinking its regen was two. It is three.
Game 3: He stumbles on 2 Islands for a couple of turns while I power out Alms Beast and get him with help from court street denizen and snare squad. He puts up a valiant fight, but loses on turn 8.

Round 4
Game 1: This game ended when his Progenitor Mimic stole my Alms Beast, then his trick killed my beast on the blocks when I was looking to trade then Morgue Burst the Mimic version.
Game 2: I mull, then he gets a quick Ghor-Clan Ravager start, which I ca't really match. It was too much to handle and I had almost stabilize before my face was explosively impacted.

3-1. I get 8 packs of Dragon's Maze, currently valued about 2.5 tix per, since the market is flooded, but that should rise to 3 or so in the next few weeks.

Other possible builds include trying to do populate nonsense with blue or black:

Not enough oomph

With better fixing, I splash top-end red into either GW deck.

Or speeding up the Boros deck and just splashing top end black or blue:

Zesty , but needs to win quickly

Daddy like

I think that with infinite time to build, I probably like that last version the best. It's a touch low on creatures, but there are two five-drops "non-creatures" that make multiple tokens.  Unfortunately I have no useful battalion shenanigans.

The fixing in this pool was all for black, blue, and red. The cluestones weren't nearly as bad for me as I want them to be, but I still love it when my opponent taps out on turn three to play a mana stone.

I never cast Explosive Impact and only had Sire of Insanity (which was in fact, insane) once, but Alms Beast did a lot of work.

So you want to play online?

Ok here's the deal. Head over to: http://www.octgn.info/ and click on the download button

Now that you've got the download file just run it and take the defaults. Then it should auto launch and you can sign in (you have to make an account if you don't have one). My username is "lpa2a". Thanks UVa, for that. Now click on "Games Manager" (orange arrow) and enter this URL: http://www.myget.org/f/octgngamedirectory

Once that is done the nickname (I chose "OCTGN game directory") you entered for the URL will appear on the list (blue arrow). Click on it, scroll down and install Magic the Gathering. And that's it, you're off to the races. Use the deck editor to build decks and then launch a game and play.

Ok but you want actual pictures of the cards. Head over to: http://octgn.gamersjudgement.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=762. The first post has all the links. Once you download the sets you want you have to install the .o8c file. You just click on "Add o8c" on the same tab where you entered the game directory url. Unfortunately you have to upload them one at a time.

special thanks to Jmu for alerting me to this thing about a year ago.

Death & Taxes 1.1

Alright, now it's time for the results of the first round of playtesting with Death & Taxes. It held its own against Pete's new control deck and his aggro deck, though I worry it's the type of deck that will juuuuust barely lose to either of the extremes without consistently killing them. Learned one big lesson: I do not need a lot of land with this deck. The initial layout of 22 was definitely too rich. Cutting two lands and adding two critters.

One Drop

4 Thrull Parasite
4 Faerie Imposter
3 Shadow Alley Denizen

Two Drop

4 Tithe Drinker
4 Basilica Screecher
3 Azorius Arrester
4 Hidden Strings
4 Hands of Binding
3 Blood Scrivener (+1)
2 Deputy of Acquittals (+1)

Four Drop

3 Duskmantle Seer

Land

4 Watery Grave

4 Drowned Catacomb

2 Glacial Fortresss

4 Hallowed Fountain (-2)

4 Isolated Chapel

4 Godless Shrine

What was kind of interesting was how inconsistent my deck was. Only one game did I get a cipher card out (though it was totally awesome to have Hidden Strings pay for its own extorts). I had a fun game boomeranging Faeries and Deputies, whittling down with extorts. Another one was fueled by the Blood Scrivener which poured additional spells into the hand to extort. Also, Pete's a total jerk for not letting my Duskmantle Seer stick around. Total buzzkill.

Goals

1) Get more practice with the nuts and bolts of playing the cards. It actually gets a little complicated timing spells, extorts, and ciphers.
2) Figure out what my sideboard looks like and what I would swap around. The Sin Collector looks ideal against control decks. What else do I move around?

3) How fast does the deck really need to be? The healing of extort greatly cushions the pain of shock lands but I don't have much of a cushion against aggro decks. Maybe ditch the Fountains entirely for Glacial Fortresses.

Thoughts?

Aetherling Deck - Standard

There are two kinds of decks. "Way faster than you" and "a touch slower than you". I always play the former and it hurts me in matchups against the latter because i don't know how to think like my enemy. My doublestrike deck is donezo once standard rotates in a few months. So I'm gonna try the other flavor of deck. And i know the card i want to be playing is

I just hope it's good enough for standard. I'm going to start with Sam Black's build from the mothership. Which sounds like a riot. It plays stuff like

 

So you know it's gonna be a blast to play. Once I get a feel and figure out what I like and don't I'll make some tweaks and we'll see what happens. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Public Service Announcement

Do NOT play online pre-release events.*

Let't do a little arithmetic.

"Pre-release" sealed for 20 MTGO event tickets (tix) plus one guild mark. Tix cost $1 from the store or you can acquire them by liquidating your old cards to other players or bots. The guild mark is only available from the store for $5 US (no bitcoins). Since you can buy and sell tix on eBay for roughly $0.98, I'll assume you are they cost $1.

The good news here is that you're paying $25 for 6 packs of cards, plus a four-round sealed tournament. That's $24 MSRP value.

The bad news is that because of the online economy, the cards are worth very little after the event and you should never pay retail price for packs. So the second thing we need to look at is the Expected Value (EV) of the event. Prizes are 10 packs for wining, 4 packs for the four people who go 3-1 and one pack for each of the six people at 2-2. The total prize support for the event is 22 packs, plus 8 pre-release cards, plus 1 "foil" pre-release card. So what I am saying is 22 packs.

Assuming each player is of equal skill and likelihood to win each match, that is EV of 1.375 packs.

Since we can use online prize packs to draft or play sealed again, the prize payout is very important to online players. The higher the payout, the more we can churn through events without putting out more cash.

Let's compare the EV of the sealed deck Release Events, which start on Monday and run for two weeks.

Entry for this event is $1 less per player, but the prize support is huge in comparison. 1x12 + 4x8 + 6x3 = 62 packs for the same number of players, for an EV of 3.875. Note, we don't get our pre-release promo or our 1 in 8 shot at the "foil" version, but the cost to enter is cheaper and the promos are worth bupkis.

Drafting is no better.

The pre-releases offer you a chance to draft triple Dragon's Maze, but why would you want to? With a small set, there are only 70 unique commons, 10 of which are cluestones and 10 of which are guildgates, which will make for an awkward and repetitive drafting experience.

Prize support for the draft isn't terrible, with one extra pack than a standard draft, but it does cost an extra ticket to enter. EV for drafts is 1.625. EV for "normal" drafts is 1.5, unless you play 4-3-2-2 drafts (which i don't recommend), where your EV is 1.375. But don't forget they are charging you an extra $1 to enter, plus you can enter "normal" drafts with packs you won as prizes from previous events.

The lesson: don't play online "pre-release" events.

* The author of this post is currently battling to convince himself not to play pre-release events. The good news is that he is currently winning.

5/12/13 EDIT: Wizards added in full block 4-2-1 payout drafts as of this morning. The cost top enter is still the full 15 tix, but at least this is a real format with slightly better than usual prize support. Starting tomorrow, you can bring your own packs to draft, which is a good thing, since Gatecrash and Dragon's Maze packs are holding around 3.33 tix each on the secondary market currently. The RTR pack is currently 3.95, bringing your cost to draft  to a little more than 12.5 tix.

Fat Stack

I have a friend, let's call him Michael. He hates magic. Well, to be more specific he hates limited because the games are too awkward. For instance he claimed that 1.5 of the games he played at the Dragon's Maze release sealed deck tourney were fun. That's a whole lot of time spent shuffling and being all awkward on mana just to get a good game of magic. He also hates standard, because it sucks.

So what were we to do. I scoured the interwebs and found a solution on the mothership (side bar: my spell checker does not recognize "mothership", what kind of bullshit is that?). Fat Stack. The idea is simple. What if you had two decks and could draw from whichever one you wanted to? One deck is full of lands, the other non-lands. Outside of that (and some awkward kluges) you just play a regular game of magic. It didn't sound amazing but we figured we should give it a whirl.

We did have to figure out how to populate (heh) the deck. We just tried every common and uncommon in Return to Ravnica. We shuffled it all together and ... it was amazing. It had the feel of sealed deck where you have to make due with whatever you get. But even more so, for example our poster child was

Seriously you need to give is a go. I've even gotten some of my Spikier friends to try it and they think it is a blast. The tension around each draw is immense. Imagine you have a bomb in your hand but need that second green source. Do you take a hit from the land deck? You're probably not going to get a forest. But if you hit the spell deck what if you draw a

Probably shoulda gone for that land. Now you just drew the Trait Doctoring your opponent would have drawn. See it is amazing. So give Fat Stack a change and let us know how it went. I promise you'll love it.

Ranking Return to Ravnica Bloc Tokens

Who knew there would be so many tokens in just one block? I've ranked all 20 tokens in the Return to Ravnica bloc in ascending order:

Zzzz... 

Nothing new here

Boring creature type, nice badonk

I've seen altogether too many of these drafting online

Ditto

Crash of Rhinos?

Too typical


Ditto. And weak art on both.

For some reason these vigilance bears speak to me.

Getting better. Note, this is not a Pack Rat. The token doesn't have deathtouch. The Ogre grants it to all rats.

Red-white soldier tokens are infinitely better than white soldier tokens, but is there some rules reason why the soldier token isn't printed with haste? Other keywords made the cut.

Are the humans trying to Gulliver's Travels the Wurm in this picture 1/1s? If so, it should only take 5.

Trying too hard to be special. Useless without an Angel in your yard.

Full marks for originality, but something is missing here.

The guildmark adds a nice touch. I like the simplicity here and the unusual stats for a token.

Love the Orzhovian stained glass and the guildmark, but that's about it

The blue-black hybrid background offers nice contrast with the red demon horror-wings. Again, the guildmark is fantastic behind the one-word text box.

Heart Oozes

This assassin has badass rules text.

FROG. LIZARD.