• 4 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I definitely agree with your reasoning about commander. It can become so tedious. The problem with Cube is that the draft portion can take ages, as well, and players who don’t know all the cards can feel exhausted after the draft and have low motivation for building a deck and playing.

    I guess I really appreciate 60-card magic for its simplicity, in a way. Your deck has a game plan that you can fairly consistently pull off, the number of different cards is lower and it’s all in all a tighter gameplay loop that still offers plenty of complexity. The huge disadvantage is that it is extremely hard to have a balanced and fair metagame on a budget in nearly any 60-card format. The second someone starts buying singles or netdecking the arms race begins and many casual players will be left in the dust.






  • And, people don’t need to redraft every single session, you can keepmthe decks around for a few nights at a time if that’s what people want.

    That’s actually a neat idea, I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks for the tip!

    I think I want to make a cube and ideally support draft, fat stack and sealed. That way we can change it up as we see fit.

    Do you think cubes work best when they replicate a realistic draft experience (e.g. just sleeve up a bunch of packs or maintain a certain card rarity ratio), or when they contain a broad mix of hand picked unique one-of cards? I find myself drawn to the notion of making a more “true to real life” card pool where you can get multiples of the same card and you mostly get commons and uncommons.

    I have tried to build a one-of-each-card cube with powerful and interesting cards in the past but I think it came across as quite overwhelming. Every single card in every single pack you draft is unique and all the cards your opponent plays are unique. Kinda exhausting to read and understand to many different cards and mechanics for people who don’t have a lot of card knowledge. I think those types of cubes are mostly good to keep veteran players intrigued and engaged.

    I think Cube + Constructed commander is all we really need as a playgroup, maybe. Cube for fairness and variety, Commander for fun deck building and using your cards in pet decks (I suspect that some will enjoy that). I can lend out EDH decks to those that don’t have their own and help them with proxies to build their own if they wish.









  • I didn’t see any aggro, but my card pool contained a few cards that gave an indication that it could be possible to play aggro. Watch out for combat tricks, though! There’s quite a few of them in every colour. At least blue and black also pack a few flash creatures.

    My sealed pool had some decent low cost white creatures which I ran in my Esper deck (3 mana Eowyn and the 2 mana 3/1 that can sac itself to destroy artifact/enchantment were super nice).

    I think Boros is equipment/token focused with some Human tribal and Rakdos is amass focused with some goblin/orc tribal. Black has the best hard removal, it seems, but white and red still pack some alright removal.

    White has a neat 2/2 vigilance for 2 that can O-ring a creature if you sac a token (Food and 1/1s are pretty easy to find), so I feel like white is a really solid choice for aggro compared to black’s slower sacrifice synergy cards (the best sac engine is a 5 mana 4/5). You should take my analysis with a pinch of salt though, since I never saw any red decks or aggro decks at the prerelease.

    If you can get your hands on a Denethor you should definitely consider splashing a color for him (especially if you get the land that fixes colours for legendaries). He’s an excellent finisher and value engine. Not a bad body (2/4) for 3 mana, either.

    The +1/+1 sword for 1 mana that takes away abilities when blocking/being blocked is very convenient against the various cards that give indestructible/first strike/etc. I think it’s a good card to have.





  • I only recently got kinda back into magic after a few years off (I played some Arena, though), and I haven’t really looked at spoilers for this set. I am considering going to a prerelease, but I’m not a huge fan of bringing in other universes into magic, so it’s not really my first choice for acquiring new cards. I suppose it also goes against my tentative interest in leaving Modern as a competetive format and trying out Pioneer. We’ll see.

    Right now I’m thinking more of casual stuff like EDH and Wizard’s Tower that I can play with my girlfriend and other people who have a more casual appreciation for the game or who don’t have their own decks. I guess I could do a LOTR Wizard’s Tower, now that I think of it. Is it a good set for that?


  • It could be nice to have an easier way to enter game wins and ties with the mouse. I appreciate that it’s quick to do with the keyboard using the tab key, but there’s a lot of clicking around when you want to do it with the mouse, and the “tickers” that let you add or subtract 1 are quite small (I know it’s the default browser look, but maybe some custom styling is warranted here).

    The official Wizards app they use at LGS’ has buttons you can click to enter results like 2-1 and 2-0, I think, which could be nice if they look nice and feel intuitive.