Before I get into anything else, a quick correction. In my last article I reported that it took Doyt three months at 8 hours a day to achieve the Insane. Actually, it only took him three months at five hours a day. Plan your achievements accordingly.
This previous weekend Fountain of Youth games held a prerelease for Innistrad, the latest Magic the Gathering set. Like many good things, this story starts with waffles.
At the Friday Night Magic before, I made an agreement with one of the locals to make waffles. At the prerelease. At 10:00 am, when the doors open. So I bring the wafflemaker, I get there at 10:00 and he's nowhere to be seen. At 10:40 I'm sick of waiting, and I haven't had breakfast yet, so I make a run to the local grocery store and pick up what's necessary. As usual, I forget some important components, so I'm mixing with a plastic fork and I have to send another guy out to find me some syrup. Luckily the gas station down the road had some.
At noon the other guy shows up. With 32 double stackers from Burger King. Turns out it's free waffle free burger day at the game store. Which is awesome.
This is critical to the gaming narrative because providing waffles to the populace at large seems to have given me a karmic boost that I rode the rest of the day. In my sealed pool I pulled a new Garruk, and plenty of red and green stuff to play along side him. I ended up with a super aggressive deck and I handily dealt with most opponents. My favorite play of the day:
Turn three I drop a Kruin Outlaw. He doesn't have a play. On my upkeep he transforms into a 3/3 evasive double striker. I play an Inquisitor's flail, equip and swing in four twelve. I won that game the next turn.
I went 3-0, at which point I was able to intentionally draw with the other players into the top eight. Now, I can go either way on that sort of shenanigan. On the one hand it seems cheap for me to guarantee my way into the top eight draft without any risk. On the other hand, well, drafting is pretty awesome. A free draft is even better, and if you can get into the prize support (Fountain of Youth has a very vertical prize structure; only the top 4 got prizes), the prize support makes things better. After drawing with my opponents I did play out the matches "just to see", and I would have ended the day at 4-1, which would have gotten me into the top eight anyway, so my conscience is assuaged. Maybe I'll go into more detail on this subject later.
In the top eight, I wanted to draft red. My brother tells me that red is going to be one of the more powerful colors in the format, and I tend to believe him. However the consensus around the store is that red is a weak color in the format. So I intended to force red, prove my brother right and take all of them down. Based on the packs and the cards available I went blue black tribal zombies. It turned out much worse than I expected. The blue zombies are good, but they require you to lose creatures from your graveyard. The black removal is ok, but it also wanted me to lose creatures from my graveyard. And I had a couple powerful raise dead effects, but that resource was pretty darn low by the time I got around to those. Best card in the deck was, unsurprisingly, Evil Twin. Which, incidentally, is my favorite card in the set. At one point I copied a 5/5 regenerator, and was having to block something else every turn and try to shoot the regenerator, holding them both off. I won one round and lost the next, leaving me in 3rd or 4th overall, and with 4 packs of prize support. Huzzah!
The other high point in the day (and a day that has both waffles and a prerelease ranks pretty darn high already) there was a wizards representative at our store. Mark Gottleib, of the Innistrad development team (and much other experience at WOTC) had other business in town, so he showed up to gunsling at the prerelease. For reasons which I can't fathom his table wasn't incredibly busy all day, so I got to hang around, take on his sealed deck (I won, like I said, my deck was good), and so forth. I got him to sign my Living Wish. You see, Mr. Gottleib was rules manager when the M10 rules changes were enacted. One of the changes took "removed from game" and replaced it with "exile". Since the wishes got cards that were outside of the game, they could no longer retrieve cards that were exiled. Instead you get stuff out of your sideboard or collection. As Mr. Gottleib physically wrote on my card "Exiled cards aren't really out of the game". Though I have some lingering resentments over the M10 rules changes (and not very many; really they did an amazing job with that set in general), I was glad for an opportunity to meet one of the developers.
On Sunday I came back, but made no waffles. My sealed pool pushed me into Jund colors (Red Green and Black), with three shimmering grottos to fix mana. I got a first round bye, and then proceeded to go 1-3 the rest of the tournament. Sad.
Not that many people showed up on Sunday, so the store had extra product, so they were able to schedule an impromptu prerelease draft. Cost more than usual, with some prize support, but most interestingly it's a chance to draft the new set. Once again, I tried forcing red. This time I ended up in red green, very aggressive werewolf deck. I didn't draft any of the enablers (moonmist, for example), but I did have a solid wall of creatures to keep dropping. I narrowly won out the first match against another werewolf deck. I narrowly lost the second match against a mono black deck. It came down in game three to him having the second Bump in the Night to burn me out the turn before I would have killed him. Round three I lost against a guy who had the Sturmgeist I couldn't deal with. I probably would have had him anyhow if I could have dealt with his Crab Fortress
Net outlay $80 on games, for a total of 22 packs. I beat the Wal-Mart $4.00 a pack price, but only just. While I enjoyed myself immensely, I'm frustrated that I haven't yet mastered the format. Looking forward to more drafts.
Showing posts with label Magic the Gathering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Magic the Gathering. Show all posts
Friday, September 30, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
The Joys of Meaningless Rewards
Today we talk about filling bars. The meaningless rewards that games give you to make you keep playing the game. I'm even going to go one step further than that. Your standard fantasy RPG, you get experience points until you level up, and when you level up you gain new abilities and get more powerful and all that. That's your traditional leveling structure. The thing about that is that it actually lets you play the game more efficiently. I'm going one step less useful. The Cheevos.
World of Warcraft rolled out achievements late in the Burning Crusade expansion. When you get your first honorable (read PvP) kill, you get an achievement. Then for 25, and 100, and 500, and 1000, I forget all the increments but it goes up to at least 100,000. So if you keep playing the game you move up the achievement scale. The further up you get, the more achievement points you have, and you can compare these things to the other players. You look at that link? That's Zerg_Rush's primary WoW character, clocking in at 8165 achievement points. You know what those points do for him? Nothing. They might earn him the respect of other players, but they might also earn their pity. If you check his Feats of Strength (pretty long list, actually) he's got "Insane in the Membrane" (and, I hasten to add, the hard version from before that also required Shen'dralar rep before they removed it from the game), which took him approximately eight hours a day for three months to manage. Impressive yeah, but it doesn't let him kill things any faster.
That's not to say that WoW is the only one that does achievements. Far from it. Pretty much everybody is dipping their toes into the field as "gamification" becomes the new marketing buzzword. Three minutes into that presentation and you learn that looking at three lolcats gets you a badge, and that the icanhascheezburger group awards achievements now. Frightening stuff.
This tends to make me unhappy, because I've got two conflicting desires on this front. On the one hand, I like completing things; I like getting trophies or badges or whatnot, and if I know that there's one for doing X task, then you'd better believe I'm going to be doing X task. 5000 damage from a single Hadouken? I'm on it. But I really don't like getting caught in these things with everybody. Lolcats? I'll stay away. Even in games I enjoy playing (Half Life 2 springs to mind) the achievements make me want to go back and make sure I checked every nook and cranny for the solution, but I don't always want that pressure. I've got time constraints like everybody else, and not every game is worth a second or third or nth playthrough.
This was mostly brought to mind by Magic's new rating system. I'm a level 31 Invoker! Have yet to see how that has any real world consequence at all. Even so, I'll probably check back from time to time to see when I hit level 31
I can't deny the motivational effects. If you've got a game worth playing I usually end up trying to max out the cheevos. As careful as I am to avoid this sort of thing I can exploit it myself if I find a good enough reason. Enter Mindhack. In the game of life I apparently made Will my dump stat (and Charisma, and Strength... you know what? let's move on.) To fortify a low score, I'm trying one of these reward systems. I wrote a calculator program with a simple experience and level system, and I award myself experience for doing things that ought to be done. Yesterday, I hit level two. And I was happy.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to award myself 100 exp for completing a blogpost.
World of Warcraft rolled out achievements late in the Burning Crusade expansion. When you get your first honorable (read PvP) kill, you get an achievement. Then for 25, and 100, and 500, and 1000, I forget all the increments but it goes up to at least 100,000. So if you keep playing the game you move up the achievement scale. The further up you get, the more achievement points you have, and you can compare these things to the other players. You look at that link? That's Zerg_Rush's primary WoW character, clocking in at 8165 achievement points. You know what those points do for him? Nothing. They might earn him the respect of other players, but they might also earn their pity. If you check his Feats of Strength (pretty long list, actually) he's got "Insane in the Membrane" (and, I hasten to add, the hard version from before that also required Shen'dralar rep before they removed it from the game), which took him approximately eight hours a day for three months to manage. Impressive yeah, but it doesn't let him kill things any faster.
That's not to say that WoW is the only one that does achievements. Far from it. Pretty much everybody is dipping their toes into the field as "gamification" becomes the new marketing buzzword. Three minutes into that presentation and you learn that looking at three lolcats gets you a badge, and that the icanhascheezburger group awards achievements now. Frightening stuff.
This tends to make me unhappy, because I've got two conflicting desires on this front. On the one hand, I like completing things; I like getting trophies or badges or whatnot, and if I know that there's one for doing X task, then you'd better believe I'm going to be doing X task. 5000 damage from a single Hadouken? I'm on it. But I really don't like getting caught in these things with everybody. Lolcats? I'll stay away. Even in games I enjoy playing (Half Life 2 springs to mind) the achievements make me want to go back and make sure I checked every nook and cranny for the solution, but I don't always want that pressure. I've got time constraints like everybody else, and not every game is worth a second or third or nth playthrough.
This was mostly brought to mind by Magic's new rating system. I'm a level 31 Invoker! Have yet to see how that has any real world consequence at all. Even so, I'll probably check back from time to time to see when I hit level 31
I can't deny the motivational effects. If you've got a game worth playing I usually end up trying to max out the cheevos. As careful as I am to avoid this sort of thing I can exploit it myself if I find a good enough reason. Enter Mindhack. In the game of life I apparently made Will my dump stat (and Charisma, and Strength... you know what? let's move on.) To fortify a low score, I'm trying one of these reward systems. I wrote a calculator program with a simple experience and level system, and I award myself experience for doing things that ought to be done. Yesterday, I hit level two. And I was happy.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to award myself 100 exp for completing a blogpost.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Diablo II and the Penny Box
My local game store buys Magic collections fairly often. They have a special table in the back where they sort the cards. The good ones go into the case in front, they've got a shelf of binders, and most importantly they've got a penny box.
A given magic block has about 550 cards in it, 1/3rd of which are commons. Commons show up in a booster pack at a ratio of 11 commons to 3 uncommons to one rare or mythic rare. So let's say that the shop has about 3000 cards from Alara block sitting in the back there. Assuming an even distribution they'll get about 12 of each common. Now, they don't need twelve of every single common. they hold on to about ten, but excess cards are dumped into the penny box.
Enter the cheap magic player. I love this game, I love building decks, and of course I don't have the cash to acquire all the cards I want. Or most. Or even many. And honestly, cards like Gravedigger are perfectly fine, if they aren't going to make the tournament decks anytime soon. You can still build a good, fun casual decks. And I do. And thanks to that penny box I've got 47 copies of Terramorphic expanse, waiting for decks. I've spent about $20 buying penny cards.
A couple weekends ago, a friend of mine proposed a LAN party. We'd all bring our computers over and play Diablo II in a networked game until the wee hours of the morning. Ok, it's a good idea, Diablo II still remains one of the best games of all time. I spent significant portions of high school playing the game when I should have been studying, but I got over the game, and in times past I couldn't really work up enough interest to get past halfway through Act I.
I bet you know how this is going to turn out, right?
My necromancer is level 81 now, and doing Magic Find runs in Hell. (Hell is the highest difficulty level. One thing Diablo II did right, they got the style down.) In the game one of the many randomized modifiers you can find on items is "% better chance to find magic items". So you can get items which give you a better shot at getting even better items. It's a cycle, and it's rewarding, and pretty soon you find you can't stop. I got my Blade of Ali Baba and my Goldwrap, but I'm still waiting on my Chance Guards and War Travellers.
The real interesting point about this is the feeling; I can slay my way through the legions of hell with relative boredom, but the minute that Unique Grim Shield drops the adrenalin rushes and I get that cold gambler's thrill while I take my portal in to confirm that it is indeed a Lidless Wall.
I get a remarkably similar feeling when I'm looking through the penny box. Sure, those terramorphics are nice, but every so often I find a card that the store owner undervalued; last time I dug through that box I got a playset of Life and Death, which the internet values at about a quarter, but it's still a much better reanimation spell than they've printed since, well, since about Life and Death. In later times they prefer to print better creatures and worse ways to cheat them into play. I've also found other good stuff in that box, a Zuran Orb and a pair of Animate Dead for example.
And then I think about my brother, Zerg_Rush. He spent more time magic finding in the old days of Diablo II than anyone, and even though he doesn't play much Magic anymore he'd still like you to know he pulled a foil Elspeth Tirell out of the booster packs from Wal-mart.
I usually don't go for casino games; I see the rate of return and decide that I have better games to waste my money on. But apparently the motivation still works on me.
A given magic block has about 550 cards in it, 1/3rd of which are commons. Commons show up in a booster pack at a ratio of 11 commons to 3 uncommons to one rare or mythic rare. So let's say that the shop has about 3000 cards from Alara block sitting in the back there. Assuming an even distribution they'll get about 12 of each common. Now, they don't need twelve of every single common. they hold on to about ten, but excess cards are dumped into the penny box.
Enter the cheap magic player. I love this game, I love building decks, and of course I don't have the cash to acquire all the cards I want. Or most. Or even many. And honestly, cards like Gravedigger are perfectly fine, if they aren't going to make the tournament decks anytime soon. You can still build a good, fun casual decks. And I do. And thanks to that penny box I've got 47 copies of Terramorphic expanse, waiting for decks. I've spent about $20 buying penny cards.
A couple weekends ago, a friend of mine proposed a LAN party. We'd all bring our computers over and play Diablo II in a networked game until the wee hours of the morning. Ok, it's a good idea, Diablo II still remains one of the best games of all time. I spent significant portions of high school playing the game when I should have been studying, but I got over the game, and in times past I couldn't really work up enough interest to get past halfway through Act I.
I bet you know how this is going to turn out, right?
My necromancer is level 81 now, and doing Magic Find runs in Hell. (Hell is the highest difficulty level. One thing Diablo II did right, they got the style down.) In the game one of the many randomized modifiers you can find on items is "% better chance to find magic items". So you can get items which give you a better shot at getting even better items. It's a cycle, and it's rewarding, and pretty soon you find you can't stop. I got my Blade of Ali Baba and my Goldwrap, but I'm still waiting on my Chance Guards and War Travellers.
The real interesting point about this is the feeling; I can slay my way through the legions of hell with relative boredom, but the minute that Unique Grim Shield drops the adrenalin rushes and I get that cold gambler's thrill while I take my portal in to confirm that it is indeed a Lidless Wall.
I get a remarkably similar feeling when I'm looking through the penny box. Sure, those terramorphics are nice, but every so often I find a card that the store owner undervalued; last time I dug through that box I got a playset of Life and Death, which the internet values at about a quarter, but it's still a much better reanimation spell than they've printed since, well, since about Life and Death. In later times they prefer to print better creatures and worse ways to cheat them into play. I've also found other good stuff in that box, a Zuran Orb and a pair of Animate Dead for example.
And then I think about my brother, Zerg_Rush. He spent more time magic finding in the old days of Diablo II than anyone, and even though he doesn't play much Magic anymore he'd still like you to know he pulled a foil Elspeth Tirell out of the booster packs from Wal-mart.
I usually don't go for casino games; I see the rate of return and decide that I have better games to waste my money on. But apparently the motivation still works on me.
Monday, September 5, 2011
The Best deck in Modern
Ok, maybe it's not the best deck, but it's certainly the most awesome. From the pro tour this weekend:
To start with, the deck plays like your usual midrange deck; it grinds out incremental card advantage by trading up creatures with it's Birthing Pods. Start with a Wall of Roots, Take it's mana and sacrifice it with the pod to get a Kitchen Finks. Next turn, sacrifice the Finks to get a Murderous Redcap. For the investment of a wall and four mana (three if you don't count the one the wall produced) you get: 4 life, a 2/1 creature, a 2/2 creature and two damage to direct to any source you'd like. Next turn you can sacrifice the redcap to get a Reveillark or something. You're getting a lot of value for your cards. So even if the deck didn't engage in any other shenanigans you'd have a shot at taking your opponent down.
But does it engage in other shenanigans? It does. Oh yes it does. Take a look at Melira. Then read the fine print on Persist. Persist checks if the creature has a -1/-1 counter on it. If it doesn't, then when the creature dies it comes back, and persist puts one on. But if Melira is in play, then your creature can't have the counter put on it. So it comes back, but without the counter. So if it dies again, then persist will bring it back. Again. And again. So if you set up a Viscera Seer, for example, then you can keep sacrificing the creature and bringing it back over and over and over. To recap: Melira + Finks + Viscera Seer = Infinite life. Melira + Finks + Viscera Seer = Infinite direct damage. And if you've got the Finks combo, the Seer's scry ability even lets you find the Redcap.
So, in addition to the already solid midrange deck, you've got an infinite combo that doesn't even require bad cards to pull off. (Viscera seer is questionable on it's own, and Melira sans combo pieces really is only good against the combo poison decks that showed up, but finks and redcap are fine creatures even without support). Granted also that you've got effective tutoring methods (two different ways to search creatures into play) you can stuff your deck with all sorts of random creatures as answers to particular problems. It also gives you space to tune your deck for particular metagames. I can see how this deck went 8-2 in the highest level Magic tournament out there. (I presume Mr. Jaklovsky also had something to do with it).
Still, if I were to build the deck, (and you can darn well bet I will, soon as I get my hands on some more birthing pods) I think it'd be a little more... silly. To wit, there's another combo that you could easily shoehorn into the deck, but which Mr. Jaklovsky delclined so to do. Probably this was a deliberate choice tuning, which makes the deck more efficient, and therefore more likely to kill. But I'm too happy with the notion of the combo to dismiss it entirely. It uses Viscera Seer and Reveillark, which are in the deck already, to set up a stable loop with Saffi Eriksdotter.
Have Saffi, Reveillark and Seer in play. Sacrifice Saffi with her own ability, targeting Reveillark. Sacrifice lark to the Seer. Bring back two creatures with lark, one of which is Saffi and the other is up to you. Saffi's ability resolves, and brinks lark back from the graveyard to play. You're back where you started, but now you've got another creature in play. What that other creature is gives you a wealth of options.
Acidic Slime lets you destroy all their noncreature permanents.
Eternal Witness lets you return your graveyard to your hand
Tidehollow Sculler lets you force them to discard their hand (there's a trick to making sure the cards stay removed from game; it involves stacking the triggers properly and sacrificing Sculler again quickly. I'm not going to explain it here)
Wall of Roots lets you generate infinite green mana
And, of course, Murderous redcap can kill them and all their creatures in play.
Those are just the options that are already in the deck. Some more options:
Mulldrifter lets you draw out your deck
Elvish Pioneer lets you play all the basic lands you draw that way.
Nevermaker allows you to put all your opponent's permanents on top of their library
Merrow Witsniper lets you mill them all into their graveyard
Offalsnout lets you remove their graveyard from the game
Riftsweeper (along with Mulldrifter) gets you back anything that has been exiled
Siege-Gang Commander gives you an army of goblins
Essence Warden gets you infinite life
If you're keeping track, that allows us to draw all the cards in our deck, get back anything in the graveyard or that's been removed from the game, play out all our basic lands, play out anything in our deck that requires green mana, make infinite goblin tokes, kill anything your opponent has in play, or stack it on the top of his deck, mill his deck away, rip his hand, and exile everything in the graveyard. Leaving you with everything you could possibly have in play, a hand stocked with whatever you like, infinite life and mana, and leaving him with no permanents, no deck, no graveyard and only a couple land in his hand.
Furthermore, if you consider the Eternal Witness options, you can get back and replay any spell any number of times. For example, a Desperate Ritual played again and again gives you infinite red mana as well. Theoretically this lets you do even more things (rip those last lands from his hand, play out the nonbasic lands stuck in your hand, or possibly steal all his stuff) but I'm going to leave working out the details as an exercise for the student.
Or you could be boring, return a Murderous Redcap and just kill him. But if you do it that way, you'll never understand why Blofeld keeps investing in sharks and piranha traps.
To start with, the deck plays like your usual midrange deck; it grinds out incremental card advantage by trading up creatures with it's Birthing Pods. Start with a Wall of Roots, Take it's mana and sacrifice it with the pod to get a Kitchen Finks. Next turn, sacrifice the Finks to get a Murderous Redcap. For the investment of a wall and four mana (three if you don't count the one the wall produced) you get: 4 life, a 2/1 creature, a 2/2 creature and two damage to direct to any source you'd like. Next turn you can sacrifice the redcap to get a Reveillark or something. You're getting a lot of value for your cards. So even if the deck didn't engage in any other shenanigans you'd have a shot at taking your opponent down.
But does it engage in other shenanigans? It does. Oh yes it does. Take a look at Melira. Then read the fine print on Persist. Persist checks if the creature has a -1/-1 counter on it. If it doesn't, then when the creature dies it comes back, and persist puts one on. But if Melira is in play, then your creature can't have the counter put on it. So it comes back, but without the counter. So if it dies again, then persist will bring it back. Again. And again. So if you set up a Viscera Seer, for example, then you can keep sacrificing the creature and bringing it back over and over and over. To recap: Melira + Finks + Viscera Seer = Infinite life. Melira + Finks + Viscera Seer = Infinite direct damage. And if you've got the Finks combo, the Seer's scry ability even lets you find the Redcap.
So, in addition to the already solid midrange deck, you've got an infinite combo that doesn't even require bad cards to pull off. (Viscera seer is questionable on it's own, and Melira sans combo pieces really is only good against the combo poison decks that showed up, but finks and redcap are fine creatures even without support). Granted also that you've got effective tutoring methods (two different ways to search creatures into play) you can stuff your deck with all sorts of random creatures as answers to particular problems. It also gives you space to tune your deck for particular metagames. I can see how this deck went 8-2 in the highest level Magic tournament out there. (I presume Mr. Jaklovsky also had something to do with it).
Still, if I were to build the deck, (and you can darn well bet I will, soon as I get my hands on some more birthing pods) I think it'd be a little more... silly. To wit, there's another combo that you could easily shoehorn into the deck, but which Mr. Jaklovsky delclined so to do. Probably this was a deliberate choice tuning, which makes the deck more efficient, and therefore more likely to kill. But I'm too happy with the notion of the combo to dismiss it entirely. It uses Viscera Seer and Reveillark, which are in the deck already, to set up a stable loop with Saffi Eriksdotter.
Have Saffi, Reveillark and Seer in play. Sacrifice Saffi with her own ability, targeting Reveillark. Sacrifice lark to the Seer. Bring back two creatures with lark, one of which is Saffi and the other is up to you. Saffi's ability resolves, and brinks lark back from the graveyard to play. You're back where you started, but now you've got another creature in play. What that other creature is gives you a wealth of options.
Acidic Slime lets you destroy all their noncreature permanents.
Eternal Witness lets you return your graveyard to your hand
Tidehollow Sculler lets you force them to discard their hand (there's a trick to making sure the cards stay removed from game; it involves stacking the triggers properly and sacrificing Sculler again quickly. I'm not going to explain it here)
Wall of Roots lets you generate infinite green mana
And, of course, Murderous redcap can kill them and all their creatures in play.
Those are just the options that are already in the deck. Some more options:
Mulldrifter lets you draw out your deck
Elvish Pioneer lets you play all the basic lands you draw that way.
Nevermaker allows you to put all your opponent's permanents on top of their library
Merrow Witsniper lets you mill them all into their graveyard
Offalsnout lets you remove their graveyard from the game
Riftsweeper (along with Mulldrifter) gets you back anything that has been exiled
Siege-Gang Commander gives you an army of goblins
Essence Warden gets you infinite life
If you're keeping track, that allows us to draw all the cards in our deck, get back anything in the graveyard or that's been removed from the game, play out all our basic lands, play out anything in our deck that requires green mana, make infinite goblin tokes, kill anything your opponent has in play, or stack it on the top of his deck, mill his deck away, rip his hand, and exile everything in the graveyard. Leaving you with everything you could possibly have in play, a hand stocked with whatever you like, infinite life and mana, and leaving him with no permanents, no deck, no graveyard and only a couple land in his hand.
Furthermore, if you consider the Eternal Witness options, you can get back and replay any spell any number of times. For example, a Desperate Ritual played again and again gives you infinite red mana as well. Theoretically this lets you do even more things (rip those last lands from his hand, play out the nonbasic lands stuck in your hand, or possibly steal all his stuff) but I'm going to leave working out the details as an exercise for the student.
Or you could be boring, return a Murderous Redcap and just kill him. But if you do it that way, you'll never understand why Blofeld keeps investing in sharks and piranha traps.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
'sploitable mechanics
Continuing on my theme from last night, we're talking about exploitable mechanics. Tonight I'm going to cover the difference in power of exploits.
Here's your classic example. In Super Mario Bros. you could jump on koopas against a wall in such a way to generate as many extra lives as you please. (So long as it's less than 99, that is.) By Mario 3 they realized that that's a feature, not a bug, so they implemented more loops to allow you to get lives. Broadly, these fall into two categories.
Coin loops; if you run around the same terrain twice coins don't regenerate but bricks do. If there's a Pow block in the area you can jump on it, turn the blocks into coins, go down a tube and repeat.
Life cycles: In a couple levels (1-2, for example) you can jump on regenerating enemies, and so long as you don't touch the ground you can generate extra lives like in Mario 1.
So what's the difference? Magnitude. 100 coins buy you one extra life. Even though you're sweeping up twenty or thirty coins in a particular coin loop, it takes significantly more effort to gain the lives than if you're jumping on the goombas. (Assuming you've got the mad skillz to pull of the goomba jumps. It ain't easy to keep it up for any length of time.)
Broadly speaking, if I want to bolster my life total, which exploit do I use? A life cycle; it takes me a lot less time. In general an exploit is more or less worthwhile depending on how much effort it takes to use it versus how much reward you can get.
Let's go with a classic Kingdom of Loathing example; Boozerbear's Salty Dogs.
Boozerbear, or so the story goes, found a bug in the code that let him turn any item in the game into a Salty Dog. This is a low output exploit; while it's always good to have booze on hand, salty dogs aren't that special of a drink. The real bonanza came when Pimonkey suggested that you could turn store items into Salty Dogs
Buy any amount of chewing gum on a string, for 24 meat each.
Convert into Salty Dogs.
Autosell Salty Dogs for 65 meat each
Gives you 42 meat profit per unit. Meat being the currency in the game. Infinite money is a whole lot better to have. While some of their hordes of booze and meat were nuked by the game admin they were still left very wealthy. Boozerbear's stores of salty dogs haven't run out yet.
He used to put salty dogs up for sale at 66 meat each; for a while he tried selling them at 33 meat each, but a player named Qrrbrbbrl (you'll excuse me if I misspell that) pulled the same stunt on him; buying the salty dogs, autoselling them and buying more. He's still got about 500,000 for sale at 130 meat per.
I'll go one simpler. There's an item in the game called a meat vortex. If you use it on yourself you lose your item and some meat. So you quickly learn not to do that. But someone figured out that if you had no meat, instead of going into the negatives you would roll over to the high end of the scale; about four billion meat. The secret got out, and the economy went up in smoke. Delicious grill smoke. (There was also an item duplication bug running rampant at the time, and no recent server backups that could be rolled back to. I gotta say, it was pretty entertaining.)
On the flip side you can get exploits that are too unwieldy to use properly. Take Project X. Project X was a Magic deck, a tournament deck from the Ravnica/Time Spiral standard season. Let me walk you through the combo.
Start with Saffi Eriksdotter in play.
Play Crypt Champion, without paying the red mana.
Since you didn't use any red mana, crypt champion hits play with a "sacrifice this creature" trigger on the stack.
Sacrifice Saffi, targeting crypt champion. Saffi goes to the graveyard.
Crypt champion's trigger resolves, sending it to the graveyard.
Saffi's ability goes off, returning Crypt Champion to play.
Crypt Champion's second ability goes off, returning Saffi to play as well.
Since you didn't spend the red mana (0r any mana) this time either Crypt champion has another sacrifice trigger. Sacrifice Saffi to save it again...
It's a stable loop of two creatures entering and leaving play. There are ways you can convert this to other useful resources; if you also have an Essence Warden in play you can gain an arbitrary amount of life. (Thus the name "Project X", since it allows you to gain X life.)
Now, if you're playing the game with physical cards, you can demonstrate the loop to your opponent and say "Ok, run this loop a million billion times." The rules allow for it, even the finicky tournament rules. It's a different story in the digital game.
On MTGO (Magic: the Gathering Online) there's no way to specify that a loop is happening. So you have to run through each cycle individually. Furthermore, you have to go through each trigger and priority pass individually to make sure that you've got them all correctly. So while it's still technically possible to play the game online it involves oh so many clicks and it's really just not worth it.
This produced an interesting disparity; there's a certain class of tournament players who use MTGO tournaments to predict the metagame for real life tournaments. But with a strong disincentive to play Project X online the data is necessarily warped. Since Project X was never really a dominant deck it didn't make that much of a difference.
There's another factor that makes one infinite exploit better than another; versitility.
Take the potion exploit from Morrowind I mentioned earlier. It's not the only infinite money bug in the game. Shopkeeper prices depend on your reputation with the shopkeeper. At least in some cases, you can max out your reputation by bribing them, to the point where they buy things at a higher price from you than they ask when they sell that same thing to you. So you can keep buying and selling it and make your money that way. But the potion bug is more interesting, since in addition to arbitrarily large sources of wealth it allows you to raise your stats to stupid heights. (It also requires less starting capital than the bribery exploit.)
Again, Magic provides plenty of examples. In a highly competitive game that encourages innovation, in a game with a bazillion interlocking pieces it should come as no surprise that many different combos exist. Furthermore, they can be generally ranked in terms of power level.
Infinite mana is good, but won't win you the game unless you also happen to have some way to use that mana.
Infinite life can sometimes just win you the game, but your opponent might be able to deck you, or just go even more infinite with something else.
Infinite creatures is good, but they usually take a turn to kill your opponent.
Infinite card draw will usually win you the game right there, since if you have your entire deck in your hand you presumably planned out this scenario and have some combination of cards that you can use to kill your opponent.
Infinite direct damage usually does the trick.
And of course there are other infinities (Project X is essentially infinite creatures coming into play. You need more pieces to turn that into a useful sort of infinity.)
At this point we could go into another constraint; the resources required to get your exploit going. But by and large, this doesn't come up in most contexts. Magic is directly competitive, you only have so much time and so many cards with which to win the game before you lose it. In terms of an infinite gold bug on WoW, or item duplication or some such, you aren't so directly competing against people, so it doesn't much matter if it takes too many resources to start it off. You can gather the resources at your leisure. While I like talking about magic, I think I've spoken on this topic enough for now.
Here's your classic example. In Super Mario Bros. you could jump on koopas against a wall in such a way to generate as many extra lives as you please. (So long as it's less than 99, that is.) By Mario 3 they realized that that's a feature, not a bug, so they implemented more loops to allow you to get lives. Broadly, these fall into two categories.
Coin loops; if you run around the same terrain twice coins don't regenerate but bricks do. If there's a Pow block in the area you can jump on it, turn the blocks into coins, go down a tube and repeat.
Life cycles: In a couple levels (1-2, for example) you can jump on regenerating enemies, and so long as you don't touch the ground you can generate extra lives like in Mario 1.
So what's the difference? Magnitude. 100 coins buy you one extra life. Even though you're sweeping up twenty or thirty coins in a particular coin loop, it takes significantly more effort to gain the lives than if you're jumping on the goombas. (Assuming you've got the mad skillz to pull of the goomba jumps. It ain't easy to keep it up for any length of time.)
Broadly speaking, if I want to bolster my life total, which exploit do I use? A life cycle; it takes me a lot less time. In general an exploit is more or less worthwhile depending on how much effort it takes to use it versus how much reward you can get.
Let's go with a classic Kingdom of Loathing example; Boozerbear's Salty Dogs.
Boozerbear, or so the story goes, found a bug in the code that let him turn any item in the game into a Salty Dog. This is a low output exploit; while it's always good to have booze on hand, salty dogs aren't that special of a drink. The real bonanza came when Pimonkey suggested that you could turn store items into Salty Dogs
Buy any amount of chewing gum on a string, for 24 meat each.
Convert into Salty Dogs.
Autosell Salty Dogs for 65 meat each
Gives you 42 meat profit per unit. Meat being the currency in the game. Infinite money is a whole lot better to have. While some of their hordes of booze and meat were nuked by the game admin they were still left very wealthy. Boozerbear's stores of salty dogs haven't run out yet.
He used to put salty dogs up for sale at 66 meat each; for a while he tried selling them at 33 meat each, but a player named Qrrbrbbrl (you'll excuse me if I misspell that) pulled the same stunt on him; buying the salty dogs, autoselling them and buying more. He's still got about 500,000 for sale at 130 meat per.
I'll go one simpler. There's an item in the game called a meat vortex. If you use it on yourself you lose your item and some meat. So you quickly learn not to do that. But someone figured out that if you had no meat, instead of going into the negatives you would roll over to the high end of the scale; about four billion meat. The secret got out, and the economy went up in smoke. Delicious grill smoke. (There was also an item duplication bug running rampant at the time, and no recent server backups that could be rolled back to. I gotta say, it was pretty entertaining.)
On the flip side you can get exploits that are too unwieldy to use properly. Take Project X. Project X was a Magic deck, a tournament deck from the Ravnica/Time Spiral standard season. Let me walk you through the combo.
Start with Saffi Eriksdotter in play.
Play Crypt Champion, without paying the red mana.
Since you didn't use any red mana, crypt champion hits play with a "sacrifice this creature" trigger on the stack.
Sacrifice Saffi, targeting crypt champion. Saffi goes to the graveyard.
Crypt champion's trigger resolves, sending it to the graveyard.
Saffi's ability goes off, returning Crypt Champion to play.
Crypt Champion's second ability goes off, returning Saffi to play as well.
Since you didn't spend the red mana (0r any mana) this time either Crypt champion has another sacrifice trigger. Sacrifice Saffi to save it again...
It's a stable loop of two creatures entering and leaving play. There are ways you can convert this to other useful resources; if you also have an Essence Warden in play you can gain an arbitrary amount of life. (Thus the name "Project X", since it allows you to gain X life.)
Now, if you're playing the game with physical cards, you can demonstrate the loop to your opponent and say "Ok, run this loop a million billion times." The rules allow for it, even the finicky tournament rules. It's a different story in the digital game.
On MTGO (Magic: the Gathering Online) there's no way to specify that a loop is happening. So you have to run through each cycle individually. Furthermore, you have to go through each trigger and priority pass individually to make sure that you've got them all correctly. So while it's still technically possible to play the game online it involves oh so many clicks and it's really just not worth it.
This produced an interesting disparity; there's a certain class of tournament players who use MTGO tournaments to predict the metagame for real life tournaments. But with a strong disincentive to play Project X online the data is necessarily warped. Since Project X was never really a dominant deck it didn't make that much of a difference.
There's another factor that makes one infinite exploit better than another; versitility.
Take the potion exploit from Morrowind I mentioned earlier. It's not the only infinite money bug in the game. Shopkeeper prices depend on your reputation with the shopkeeper. At least in some cases, you can max out your reputation by bribing them, to the point where they buy things at a higher price from you than they ask when they sell that same thing to you. So you can keep buying and selling it and make your money that way. But the potion bug is more interesting, since in addition to arbitrarily large sources of wealth it allows you to raise your stats to stupid heights. (It also requires less starting capital than the bribery exploit.)
Again, Magic provides plenty of examples. In a highly competitive game that encourages innovation, in a game with a bazillion interlocking pieces it should come as no surprise that many different combos exist. Furthermore, they can be generally ranked in terms of power level.
Infinite mana is good, but won't win you the game unless you also happen to have some way to use that mana.
Infinite life can sometimes just win you the game, but your opponent might be able to deck you, or just go even more infinite with something else.
Infinite creatures is good, but they usually take a turn to kill your opponent.
Infinite card draw will usually win you the game right there, since if you have your entire deck in your hand you presumably planned out this scenario and have some combination of cards that you can use to kill your opponent.
Infinite direct damage usually does the trick.
And of course there are other infinities (Project X is essentially infinite creatures coming into play. You need more pieces to turn that into a useful sort of infinity.)
At this point we could go into another constraint; the resources required to get your exploit going. But by and large, this doesn't come up in most contexts. Magic is directly competitive, you only have so much time and so many cards with which to win the game before you lose it. In terms of an infinite gold bug on WoW, or item duplication or some such, you aren't so directly competing against people, so it doesn't much matter if it takes too many resources to start it off. You can gather the resources at your leisure. While I like talking about magic, I think I've spoken on this topic enough for now.
Exploitable Mechanics
Today we're talking about infinite combos. In a game, you can sometimes find ways to shift your resources around so that you end up with more than you started with. At which point you can keep doing it, and keep doing it, and generate massive amounts of resources. In real life these examples are less common because almost inevitably you encounter negative feedback along the way. Here, let me give you an example.
In the game Morrowind you can practice alchemy. Take ingredients A and B, mix them together, and make a potion. Pretty much the standard fare for modern fantasy games. The trouble comes with the way stores work. If you sell your frost salts to an armorsmith you'll never see them again. If you sell them to an alchemist who already has one in stock, his stock will permanently go up by one. So buy both salts back from him; then close and reopen his window; he'll have two more salts for you to buy. As many times as you like. Or keep selling them back to build up a real proper inventory. It's a real easy way to get otherwise hard to acquire reagents.
If you take two foodstuffs and mix them together, you get a potion of restore fatigue. Not terribly useful, except that it sells for significantly more than the ingredients cost. But if you use the store exploit I mentioned above, you can keep buying reagents, keep selling potions, and get essentially infinite money and stockpiles of powerful potions and rare reagents.
Understandably this does bad things for game balance. On the other hand, Morrowind is a strictly single player game, so that's less important.
I'm going to define some terms quick.
Bug: A bug is anytime when a game does something it wasn't designed to do. This just indicates that the game isn't working properly. For example, in Diablo II if you stood in the bottom corner of Atma's tavern and dropped an item, it would land outside the wall even if you were inside. Usually bugs occur in a computer game, but not always. They've printed Magic cards that play havoc with the rules before. (You used to be able to give judges headaches with Opalescence and Humility. They've since worked it out.)
Exploit: An exploit is anytime you can use a convocation of mechanics or a bug for personal gain. That Atma's tavern bug? I remember it because people could use it to scam people in trades (we each drop an item, then we run around to pick up the other persons. Go stand in the corner so you'll be sure I can't get to yours before you get to mine.) When it's just an oddity in the game, it's a bug. When you can do something with it, like scam other players or make infinite potions, it's an exploit.
Hack: A hack is essentially a way of cheating at the game. Wallhack in counterstrike or loaded dice in back alley craps. What differentiates a hack from an exploit is that in an exploit you're using the rules of the game as they're laid out, with a hack you're changing those rules. To continue the craps example, on your basic come/don't come bet you've got about a 1.4% advantage betting on don't come. If you strictly bet that way you'll do slightly better than otherwise. That's an exploit, not a hack.
There are a couple different phenomena I'd like to discuss concerning exploits, but for now, I'll just talk about the effect on gameplay. For the first consideration, is this a multiplayer game? Ruining the Morrowind economy is one thing; scamming people in Diablo II is another. Generally speaking, if you're screwing over other players it's not a nice thing to do. If you're just making infinite gold that's less troublesome. But that sort of bug tends to get patched relatively quickly.
For example, early on in WoW you could easily script a fishing bot that would sit around in Stormwind and fish. Leave it running, you get stacks and stacks of fish, which you can sell to vendors. That was how the early gold farmers got their stock. They fixed the problem relatively quickly by making the fish you catch almost worthless. Not an ideal solution, but I don't know how you could better solve it. Err; how better it could have been solved.
If you're playing a single player game, do you use the exploit? The question you have to answer is how does that affect your enjoyment of the game? Take the potion example from above. Sure, you feel clever when you discover the exploit, but being able to make completely overpowered potions (yeah, that's another part of it. If you have a higher intelligence you make better potions. You can make potions of intelligence. With infinite potions you can make insanely powerful potions as well) obviates a lot of the exploring old ruins and discovering treasures that makes the game interesting. On the other hand, in Evil Genius there's a short time at the start of the game where you can steal from the world but the world can't fight back. So if you stop completing the objectives at that point and just loot you can get effectively infinite gold (just leave the game running overnight). But since the acquisition of money mechanic in the game is essentially another timesink I don't mind bypassing it. (I've already complained about the timesinks here.)
To think of it another way, if I'm playing through the Starcraft campaign there's not much point if I use the invulnerability cheat. (Power Overwhelming in the original. Don't know about Starcraft II). On the other hand, if I've already tried this stupid battle three times and I'm losing again and I don't like playing the zerg anyway and I just want to see how this story continues already and... and... yeah, then I don't mind using it to get to the next mission already.
In the game Morrowind you can practice alchemy. Take ingredients A and B, mix them together, and make a potion. Pretty much the standard fare for modern fantasy games. The trouble comes with the way stores work. If you sell your frost salts to an armorsmith you'll never see them again. If you sell them to an alchemist who already has one in stock, his stock will permanently go up by one. So buy both salts back from him; then close and reopen his window; he'll have two more salts for you to buy. As many times as you like. Or keep selling them back to build up a real proper inventory. It's a real easy way to get otherwise hard to acquire reagents.
If you take two foodstuffs and mix them together, you get a potion of restore fatigue. Not terribly useful, except that it sells for significantly more than the ingredients cost. But if you use the store exploit I mentioned above, you can keep buying reagents, keep selling potions, and get essentially infinite money and stockpiles of powerful potions and rare reagents.
Understandably this does bad things for game balance. On the other hand, Morrowind is a strictly single player game, so that's less important.
I'm going to define some terms quick.
Bug: A bug is anytime when a game does something it wasn't designed to do. This just indicates that the game isn't working properly. For example, in Diablo II if you stood in the bottom corner of Atma's tavern and dropped an item, it would land outside the wall even if you were inside. Usually bugs occur in a computer game, but not always. They've printed Magic cards that play havoc with the rules before. (You used to be able to give judges headaches with Opalescence and Humility. They've since worked it out.)
Exploit: An exploit is anytime you can use a convocation of mechanics or a bug for personal gain. That Atma's tavern bug? I remember it because people could use it to scam people in trades (we each drop an item, then we run around to pick up the other persons. Go stand in the corner so you'll be sure I can't get to yours before you get to mine.) When it's just an oddity in the game, it's a bug. When you can do something with it, like scam other players or make infinite potions, it's an exploit.
Hack: A hack is essentially a way of cheating at the game. Wallhack in counterstrike or loaded dice in back alley craps. What differentiates a hack from an exploit is that in an exploit you're using the rules of the game as they're laid out, with a hack you're changing those rules. To continue the craps example, on your basic come/don't come bet you've got about a 1.4% advantage betting on don't come. If you strictly bet that way you'll do slightly better than otherwise. That's an exploit, not a hack.
There are a couple different phenomena I'd like to discuss concerning exploits, but for now, I'll just talk about the effect on gameplay. For the first consideration, is this a multiplayer game? Ruining the Morrowind economy is one thing; scamming people in Diablo II is another. Generally speaking, if you're screwing over other players it's not a nice thing to do. If you're just making infinite gold that's less troublesome. But that sort of bug tends to get patched relatively quickly.
For example, early on in WoW you could easily script a fishing bot that would sit around in Stormwind and fish. Leave it running, you get stacks and stacks of fish, which you can sell to vendors. That was how the early gold farmers got their stock. They fixed the problem relatively quickly by making the fish you catch almost worthless. Not an ideal solution, but I don't know how you could better solve it. Err; how better it could have been solved.
If you're playing a single player game, do you use the exploit? The question you have to answer is how does that affect your enjoyment of the game? Take the potion example from above. Sure, you feel clever when you discover the exploit, but being able to make completely overpowered potions (yeah, that's another part of it. If you have a higher intelligence you make better potions. You can make potions of intelligence. With infinite potions you can make insanely powerful potions as well) obviates a lot of the exploring old ruins and discovering treasures that makes the game interesting. On the other hand, in Evil Genius there's a short time at the start of the game where you can steal from the world but the world can't fight back. So if you stop completing the objectives at that point and just loot you can get effectively infinite gold (just leave the game running overnight). But since the acquisition of money mechanic in the game is essentially another timesink I don't mind bypassing it. (I've already complained about the timesinks here.)
To think of it another way, if I'm playing through the Starcraft campaign there's not much point if I use the invulnerability cheat. (Power Overwhelming in the original. Don't know about Starcraft II). On the other hand, if I've already tried this stupid battle three times and I'm losing again and I don't like playing the zerg anyway and I just want to see how this story continues already and... and... yeah, then I don't mind using it to get to the next mission already.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Your Standard Ponza Scheme
For all of you readers who are going to be dissapointed, no, this isn't a discussion of Multi-level marketing strategies (although...), this is going to be a discussion of my experiences with a Magic deck this past Friday, which happened to be in the Ponza archetype, in the Standard Format.
"Ponza" is a Red Deck Wins or Sligh deck hybridized with a land destruction deck. The intention is to keep your opponent off their land and therefor their game plan long enough to kill them with your red deck. It trades speed in the form of cheaper spells for disruption. Here's the list that I played:
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Flame Slash
4 Arc Trail
4 Pyroclasm
4 Melt Terrain
4 Demolish
4 Roiling Terrain
3 Koth of the Hammertime
3 Molten Phoenix
2 Wurmcoil Engine
22 Mountain
2 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
No sideboard. I attempted to put one together between round one and two out of the commons box; some sort of dream of a transformational sideboard into a more standard Red Deck Wins. Didn't play with it.
Actually, the deck didn't have the full number of Phoenix; it was running two Auriok Replicas as proxies. Throughout the tournament I ran them as gray ogres rather than the phoenixen they're supposed to represent. And it wasn't my deck. My deck was sitting on my kitchen table an hour away. This was a rough draft deck kindly lent to me by the store owner. So here's how I did with it.
Round one: Elves
Ready... Fight!
I win the die roll. I play a mountain, pass. He plays a forest, into Llanowar Elves. I think for a moment and bolt the elves. At this point I assume he's playing a ramp deck, in which case I want to be able to slow his ramp down while I still have a chance. He plays turn two Fauna Shaman. I can't deal with Fauna Shaman despite the answers in my deck. He puts a couple vengevine in his graveyard, I melt a couple lands and he swarms me.
Game two he gets down a turn zero Leyline of Vitality, which doesn't help me at all. I mean, the half dozen life points didn't trump my game plan, but it certainly didn't help me possibly kill him while I was keeping him low on mana. Inasmuch as I can against an elf deck anyway. He gets out a Nissa Revane, I have trouble killing Nissa's Chosen at 4 toughness, and I move on to round two.
Round Two: Metalcraft Goblins
Ready... Fight!
Game one he gets Quest for the Goblin Lord, Quest for the Goblin lord, Memnite into Kuthoda rebirth. Three counters on the quests, and I burn out his goblins. He has more goblins and suddenly I'm facing an army that's all +4+0, which I can't handle. Game two he only gets down one quest, but it plays out much the same.
These games were over quickly, so we played roughly eight more waiting for the round to end. I won two. The game really revolves around managing the swarm of goblins. If he got down an early quest, he had a lot of inevitability. If I held my pyroclasms in reserve, getting as much card advantage out of them as possible I could get a Koth down and kill him with it. This didn't happen as often as I would like. Moving on to round 3
Round 3: Elves
Ready... Fight!
I did better in this round; more experience with the deck meant I was using my pyroclasms and arc trails more effectively, and his deck wasn't expensive enough to include the Vengevines. I took down one game; he got me down to 5, but I got out a Wurmcoil Engine, which got me up to about 27 before I finished him off.
Game three was fun. I was getting beaten down; he got out Nissa Revane, I bolt it right away. He gets out another one, and I can't kill it. So I'm sort of screwed. With no board presence, at six life facing down a lethal amount of creatures I start to scoop and he says "I'm not going to kill you just yet", so I carefully separate out my hand, graveyard and land, and keep playing. He gets Nissa up to seven counters, uses the ultimate. He then proceeds to attack me with his army. He's got 21 elves, four Elvish Archdruids tapping, and channelling the mana through an Ezuri, Renegade Leader, who can overrun with every five mana. After quite a bit of arithmetic, he hit me for 960 damage.
Yeah, it was pretty awesome. Even though, if you're counting, I'm 0-3 in matches and 1-6 in games.
Round Four: White Metalcraft
Ready... Fight!
In game one he gets down some quick creatures and I start to melt his lands. I deal with most of them, but one of his memnites gets in for nine damage, before I finally hit it with a pyroclasm. I get down one of my finishers, and win from there.
Game two goes much the same, except he gets a late game Kor Firewalker which I'm unable to deal with. He wins off of his two damage.
Game three he gets down a turn two and a turn three Kor Firewalker. I trade a Auriok Replica with one of them while the other goes to town on my lifetotal and buffers his. I get another Replica when I'm on seven life and he stops attacking. He's trying to build up lands and I'm trying to melt them. I get my singleton actual phoenix into play and start hitting back with that. Also, Valakut goes active and I start tossing mountain bolts around. A testament to my play skill, I forget that Valakut is actually a colorless source of damage and could have killed his firewalker.
He gets out two Tempered Steel, I'm slowly whittling him down from about 30, He's desperately trying to find land. He finally gets his fifth, a plains, slams it down and activates his Dread Statuary. He swings it in as an eight six, and I'm on the point of conceding before I realize I can chump with my replica. I get him on the next turn.
Whoo! I finally took a match.
Partly I won that round because he mis sideboarded; he brought in four celestial purge despite the fact that my deck had exactly four targets for them (3 Koth, 1 Phoenix.) And he didn't think to sideboard out his Wurmcoil Engines and Eldrazi Monuments despite his difficulties at hitting five and six mana. Another lesson at not sticking to a mechanical sideboarding plan.
So how did the deck play? Poorly. In a large part this was due to the matchups; elf decks are bad news for any land destruction plan, and goblins aren't much better. Even the white metalcraft deck would have had a pretty good matchup if he had sideboarded better. The deck doesn't have many things that'll bring it back from behind; a pyroclasm, a timely Phoenix death or a Wurmcoil engine. Koth is a great win condition, but there were times when I used him as a fog effect, the best I could get out of him.
Oh yeah, and then there's the mana curve. Didja notice it? Let me spell it out for you:
1: 8
2: 8
3: 0
4: 15
5: 3
6: 2
Could use more threes, less fours. Stone Rain, where are you?
In general, there are a lot of decks that can get a decent part of their plan off in turns one through three, and the land destruction doesn't start until four. To a decent extent you can counter this by just burning out their early creatures, but then you're running up against the cards in hand limit. Your classic ramp deck needs some ramp stuff and some stuff to ramp into, if you get too much of either you lose because you don't have the other. The system here is analogous; you get too much melt terrain or too much flame slash you'll lose, because you won't be able to stop their game plan with just one or the other.
Oh yeah, about Flame slash. You notice something about the burn? Flame Slash and Pryoclasm, while being excellent cards for what they do, don't go to the face. Eight of the land destruction spells also deal incidental damage to the player, but it doesn't add up to much. Imagine you hit them with two melt terrain and two Roiling terrain. You get them down to nine, which isn't really within range bolt and arc trail as your burn. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it sets you up in the role of pure control rather than an aggro-control damage + disruption scheme like your classic Ponza deck. You're also pushed that way since you've got very few creatures that respond to traditional removal spells, sticking more cards in their hand. Again, being a control deck isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it sets you in a bad metagame position with respect to aggro decks, like elves or goblins.
So how would I fix it? With lots and lots of rambling, apparently.
Well, let's take a look at that mana curve. We need stuff in the three slot, or at least to bypass it. The first card that comes to my mind is Staggershock. It helps you fight off elf and goblin swarms, can be directed at the face if necessary, and fits nicely in at three mana. There aren't any land destruction spells at that cost, so our options are mostly to shore up the burn.
If we're looking to ramp, we've got a couple possibilities. Everflowing Chalice usually kicked at 1, Iron Myr or even Spawning breath, which would be a great card if the number of 1/1s I saw is consistent with the metagame. Iron Myr would make pyroclasm a much worse card; Spawning breath much less; you can either sac the spawn token or use it to chump block with very few regrets.
You could also ramp with Pilgrim's eye, which isn't a dead draw if you're running Valakut, or alternately scrap the valakut plan and run some Tectonic Edge as backup land destruction.
And while I'm talking land destruction, what land destruction spells to run? Out of the options given, Demolish seems the weakest since it doesn't deal any damage, but on the other hand sometimes you really need to hit an artifact, especially considering Mirrodin is back. At one point the White Metalcraft deck pulled a Sword of Body and Mind on me. I felt lucky to be able to demolish it. Goblin Ruinblaster is probably better than any of the listed options, assuming you've got some, which wasn't the case with this deck.
Talking about the ramp targets, well, I was underwhelmed by the Phoenix. It doesn't get me back from behind, seeing as I don't have a real good way to wipe the board with it, short of taking an alpha strike to the face. The Wurmcoil engine, on the other hand, provides a significant board presence, and I wouldn't mind keeping it in if it was easier to cast. It's hard to get to six mana if the only way you're doing it is drawing blind. Ramping is fine, drawing cards enough to get the mana is fine, but just waiting for your deck to produce means you're waiting a long time.
Hmm... Crystal Ball? I'm inclined to say no. If you hit it on turn three you don't get to use it on turn four because you'd rather be blowing up someone's land. And then it never actually draws you cards, it just filters them. I've never been a fan of the card that others have, so maybe I'm biased.
So let's get down to the metaphorical brass tacks. How would I rebuild the deck? Well, let's say I'm sticking with mono red. I can either move more to the traditional Ponza route or the control route. If I go Ponza I want to take out the higher mana cost things and put in more ways to damage the opponent:
4 Goblin Guide
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Arc Trail
4 Ember Hauler
4 Staggershock
1 Cunning Sparkmage
4 Goblin Ruinblaster
4 Melt Terrain
4 Roiling Terrain
3 Koth of the Hammertime
2 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
22 Mountain
Hmm... Maybe putting Goblin Guide in a deck with 12 land destruction spells is a bit greedy. On the other hand, I do love goblin guide. Ember hauler works as a 2/2 for 2 that also can occasionally add a little damage to the face or take care of a problem creature. Cunning Sparkmage likewise, in the three drop slot. Maybe some Lust for War would be good there too.
Now if I were to make it more of a control deck...
4 Flame Slash
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Everflowing Chalice
4 Iron Myr
4 Pilgrim's Eye
4 Staggershock
3 Koth of the Hammer
4 Demolish
4 Chain Reaction
1 Comet Storm
2 Valakut
22 Mountain
This one preserves the creatureless deck advantage, to an extend. Oh noes! He doom bladed my pilgrim's eye. You've still got the excellent creature kill, but now you can ramp more easily into your more awesome stuff. I especially like Iron Myr into Chain Reaction; it lets you make sure the kill all creatures effect is larger, so you're not wasting your card investment. The one of comet storm also gives you an out for killing everything or using it to toss at people's faces. Pilgrim's eye makes sure you're drawing your land cards for your Valakut kill while also providing a chump blocker. This deck uses demolish as an answer to problem cards rather than as a strategy.
I'm not saying either deck would be perfect, but they'd make a decent second draft. That's what I'd put in and why.
"Ponza" is a Red Deck Wins or Sligh deck hybridized with a land destruction deck. The intention is to keep your opponent off their land and therefor their game plan long enough to kill them with your red deck. It trades speed in the form of cheaper spells for disruption. Here's the list that I played:
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Flame Slash
4 Arc Trail
4 Pyroclasm
4 Melt Terrain
4 Demolish
4 Roiling Terrain
3 Koth of the Hammertime
3 Molten Phoenix
2 Wurmcoil Engine
22 Mountain
2 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
No sideboard. I attempted to put one together between round one and two out of the commons box; some sort of dream of a transformational sideboard into a more standard Red Deck Wins. Didn't play with it.
Actually, the deck didn't have the full number of Phoenix; it was running two Auriok Replicas as proxies. Throughout the tournament I ran them as gray ogres rather than the phoenixen they're supposed to represent. And it wasn't my deck. My deck was sitting on my kitchen table an hour away. This was a rough draft deck kindly lent to me by the store owner. So here's how I did with it.
Round one: Elves
Ready... Fight!
I win the die roll. I play a mountain, pass. He plays a forest, into Llanowar Elves. I think for a moment and bolt the elves. At this point I assume he's playing a ramp deck, in which case I want to be able to slow his ramp down while I still have a chance. He plays turn two Fauna Shaman. I can't deal with Fauna Shaman despite the answers in my deck. He puts a couple vengevine in his graveyard, I melt a couple lands and he swarms me.
Game two he gets down a turn zero Leyline of Vitality, which doesn't help me at all. I mean, the half dozen life points didn't trump my game plan, but it certainly didn't help me possibly kill him while I was keeping him low on mana. Inasmuch as I can against an elf deck anyway. He gets out a Nissa Revane, I have trouble killing Nissa's Chosen at 4 toughness, and I move on to round two.
Round Two: Metalcraft Goblins
Ready... Fight!
Game one he gets Quest for the Goblin Lord, Quest for the Goblin lord, Memnite into Kuthoda rebirth. Three counters on the quests, and I burn out his goblins. He has more goblins and suddenly I'm facing an army that's all +4+0, which I can't handle. Game two he only gets down one quest, but it plays out much the same.
These games were over quickly, so we played roughly eight more waiting for the round to end. I won two. The game really revolves around managing the swarm of goblins. If he got down an early quest, he had a lot of inevitability. If I held my pyroclasms in reserve, getting as much card advantage out of them as possible I could get a Koth down and kill him with it. This didn't happen as often as I would like. Moving on to round 3
Round 3: Elves
Ready... Fight!
I did better in this round; more experience with the deck meant I was using my pyroclasms and arc trails more effectively, and his deck wasn't expensive enough to include the Vengevines. I took down one game; he got me down to 5, but I got out a Wurmcoil Engine, which got me up to about 27 before I finished him off.
Game three was fun. I was getting beaten down; he got out Nissa Revane, I bolt it right away. He gets out another one, and I can't kill it. So I'm sort of screwed. With no board presence, at six life facing down a lethal amount of creatures I start to scoop and he says "I'm not going to kill you just yet", so I carefully separate out my hand, graveyard and land, and keep playing. He gets Nissa up to seven counters, uses the ultimate. He then proceeds to attack me with his army. He's got 21 elves, four Elvish Archdruids tapping, and channelling the mana through an Ezuri, Renegade Leader, who can overrun with every five mana. After quite a bit of arithmetic, he hit me for 960 damage.
Yeah, it was pretty awesome. Even though, if you're counting, I'm 0-3 in matches and 1-6 in games.
Round Four: White Metalcraft
Ready... Fight!
In game one he gets down some quick creatures and I start to melt his lands. I deal with most of them, but one of his memnites gets in for nine damage, before I finally hit it with a pyroclasm. I get down one of my finishers, and win from there.
Game two goes much the same, except he gets a late game Kor Firewalker which I'm unable to deal with. He wins off of his two damage.
Game three he gets down a turn two and a turn three Kor Firewalker. I trade a Auriok Replica with one of them while the other goes to town on my lifetotal and buffers his. I get another Replica when I'm on seven life and he stops attacking. He's trying to build up lands and I'm trying to melt them. I get my singleton actual phoenix into play and start hitting back with that. Also, Valakut goes active and I start tossing mountain bolts around. A testament to my play skill, I forget that Valakut is actually a colorless source of damage and could have killed his firewalker.
He gets out two Tempered Steel, I'm slowly whittling him down from about 30, He's desperately trying to find land. He finally gets his fifth, a plains, slams it down and activates his Dread Statuary. He swings it in as an eight six, and I'm on the point of conceding before I realize I can chump with my replica. I get him on the next turn.
Whoo! I finally took a match.
Partly I won that round because he mis sideboarded; he brought in four celestial purge despite the fact that my deck had exactly four targets for them (3 Koth, 1 Phoenix.) And he didn't think to sideboard out his Wurmcoil Engines and Eldrazi Monuments despite his difficulties at hitting five and six mana. Another lesson at not sticking to a mechanical sideboarding plan.
So how did the deck play? Poorly. In a large part this was due to the matchups; elf decks are bad news for any land destruction plan, and goblins aren't much better. Even the white metalcraft deck would have had a pretty good matchup if he had sideboarded better. The deck doesn't have many things that'll bring it back from behind; a pyroclasm, a timely Phoenix death or a Wurmcoil engine. Koth is a great win condition, but there were times when I used him as a fog effect, the best I could get out of him.
Oh yeah, and then there's the mana curve. Didja notice it? Let me spell it out for you:
1: 8
2: 8
3: 0
4: 15
5: 3
6: 2
Could use more threes, less fours. Stone Rain, where are you?
In general, there are a lot of decks that can get a decent part of their plan off in turns one through three, and the land destruction doesn't start until four. To a decent extent you can counter this by just burning out their early creatures, but then you're running up against the cards in hand limit. Your classic ramp deck needs some ramp stuff and some stuff to ramp into, if you get too much of either you lose because you don't have the other. The system here is analogous; you get too much melt terrain or too much flame slash you'll lose, because you won't be able to stop their game plan with just one or the other.
Oh yeah, about Flame slash. You notice something about the burn? Flame Slash and Pryoclasm, while being excellent cards for what they do, don't go to the face. Eight of the land destruction spells also deal incidental damage to the player, but it doesn't add up to much. Imagine you hit them with two melt terrain and two Roiling terrain. You get them down to nine, which isn't really within range bolt and arc trail as your burn. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it sets you up in the role of pure control rather than an aggro-control damage + disruption scheme like your classic Ponza deck. You're also pushed that way since you've got very few creatures that respond to traditional removal spells, sticking more cards in their hand. Again, being a control deck isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it sets you in a bad metagame position with respect to aggro decks, like elves or goblins.
So how would I fix it? With lots and lots of rambling, apparently.
Well, let's take a look at that mana curve. We need stuff in the three slot, or at least to bypass it. The first card that comes to my mind is Staggershock. It helps you fight off elf and goblin swarms, can be directed at the face if necessary, and fits nicely in at three mana. There aren't any land destruction spells at that cost, so our options are mostly to shore up the burn.
If we're looking to ramp, we've got a couple possibilities. Everflowing Chalice usually kicked at 1, Iron Myr or even Spawning breath, which would be a great card if the number of 1/1s I saw is consistent with the metagame. Iron Myr would make pyroclasm a much worse card; Spawning breath much less; you can either sac the spawn token or use it to chump block with very few regrets.
You could also ramp with Pilgrim's eye, which isn't a dead draw if you're running Valakut, or alternately scrap the valakut plan and run some Tectonic Edge as backup land destruction.
And while I'm talking land destruction, what land destruction spells to run? Out of the options given, Demolish seems the weakest since it doesn't deal any damage, but on the other hand sometimes you really need to hit an artifact, especially considering Mirrodin is back. At one point the White Metalcraft deck pulled a Sword of Body and Mind on me. I felt lucky to be able to demolish it. Goblin Ruinblaster is probably better than any of the listed options, assuming you've got some, which wasn't the case with this deck.
Talking about the ramp targets, well, I was underwhelmed by the Phoenix. It doesn't get me back from behind, seeing as I don't have a real good way to wipe the board with it, short of taking an alpha strike to the face. The Wurmcoil engine, on the other hand, provides a significant board presence, and I wouldn't mind keeping it in if it was easier to cast. It's hard to get to six mana if the only way you're doing it is drawing blind. Ramping is fine, drawing cards enough to get the mana is fine, but just waiting for your deck to produce means you're waiting a long time.
Hmm... Crystal Ball? I'm inclined to say no. If you hit it on turn three you don't get to use it on turn four because you'd rather be blowing up someone's land. And then it never actually draws you cards, it just filters them. I've never been a fan of the card that others have, so maybe I'm biased.
So let's get down to the metaphorical brass tacks. How would I rebuild the deck? Well, let's say I'm sticking with mono red. I can either move more to the traditional Ponza route or the control route. If I go Ponza I want to take out the higher mana cost things and put in more ways to damage the opponent:
4 Goblin Guide
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Arc Trail
4 Ember Hauler
4 Staggershock
1 Cunning Sparkmage
4 Goblin Ruinblaster
4 Melt Terrain
4 Roiling Terrain
3 Koth of the Hammertime
2 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
22 Mountain
Hmm... Maybe putting Goblin Guide in a deck with 12 land destruction spells is a bit greedy. On the other hand, I do love goblin guide. Ember hauler works as a 2/2 for 2 that also can occasionally add a little damage to the face or take care of a problem creature. Cunning Sparkmage likewise, in the three drop slot. Maybe some Lust for War would be good there too.
Now if I were to make it more of a control deck...
4 Flame Slash
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Everflowing Chalice
4 Iron Myr
4 Pilgrim's Eye
4 Staggershock
3 Koth of the Hammer
4 Demolish
4 Chain Reaction
1 Comet Storm
2 Valakut
22 Mountain
This one preserves the creatureless deck advantage, to an extend. Oh noes! He doom bladed my pilgrim's eye. You've still got the excellent creature kill, but now you can ramp more easily into your more awesome stuff. I especially like Iron Myr into Chain Reaction; it lets you make sure the kill all creatures effect is larger, so you're not wasting your card investment. The one of comet storm also gives you an out for killing everything or using it to toss at people's faces. Pilgrim's eye makes sure you're drawing your land cards for your Valakut kill while also providing a chump blocker. This deck uses demolish as an answer to problem cards rather than as a strategy.
I'm not saying either deck would be perfect, but they'd make a decent second draft. That's what I'd put in and why.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Legacy Goblins Tournament Report
Today Fountain of Youth games gave away a Timetwister and a Badlands in a legacy tournament. This is the tournament for which I've been preparing my goblins. Here's the final decklist:
Creatures:
4 Goblin Guide
3 Tattermunge Maniac
4 Mogg War Marshal
3 Stingscourger
4 Warren Instigator
4 Goblin Chieftan
2 Siege-Gang Commander
Spells:
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Goblin Grenade
4 Goblin Incinerator
2 Warren Weirding
Lands:
4 Wasteland
4 Auntie's Hovel
2 Wooded Foothills
2 Blood Crypt
2 Teetering Peaks
2 Smoldering Spires
1 Bojuka Bog
5 Mountain
Sideboard:
2 Leyline of the Void
2 Relic of Progenitus
4 Cabal Therapy
2 Umezawa's Jitte
4 Earwig Squad
1 Fodder Launch
Ok, so the Incinerators are creatures and not kill spells, but it's very rare that they act like actual creatures.
If you're looking at that list closely, you'll notice some odd numbers. 2 teetering peaks, 2 smoldering spires, 1 bojuka bog? I never got any actual playtesting games in. When I went into the store the wednesday previous I found out it was actually D&D night (which is also cool), and FNM was much more about EDH games. What I ended up running was actually my playtest list. Partly because I didn't know what was worth cutting and partly because I thought the tournament was starting an hour later than it did so I only got to sign up at the last minute. But anyway, let's get on with the tournament.
Round one: Cheyenna with Squirrel Nest combo
In the first game I get a goblin guide to her wind zendikon. She makes a couple squirrel tokens, forgets a number of guide triggers, and generally gets run over by goblins. In a last ditch effort she drops an intruder alarm to hopefully keep me tapped down, but my deck is providing me with plenty of goblins. Game two goes much the same. No sideboarding, I figured I was at enough of an advantage already.
I feel sort of bad about this match, because plainly she's here with a boyfriend, not really that great at the game (Goblin Guide is much worse when it's faced with brainstorm, unless you horribly misplay brainstorm. Which she did.) and just looking to have fun. Not bad enough to intentionally drop a game or anything, but I do try to make things pleasent for her. Reminding her of guide triggers and so forth.
1-0
Round two: Katie with Affinity
Katie, on the other hand, makes a fearsome opponent. She wins the die roll, lays a first turn Great Furnace, memnite and mox opal, into frogmite and springleaf drum, if I remember correctly. Yeah, Scars of Mirroden printed some stuff that powers up Affinity; who would have thought? I start with a goblin guide to stay in the race, and finish off her creatures. She doesn't have enough gas to say in the race, and I win the first game.
I sideboard in two Umezawa's Jitte for two Siege-gang commanders. I figure Jitte will take over the game only it won't have to wait for five mana to do it. I want to keep in all my removal, since affinity very definetly works with a critical mass of artifact creatures. This was never relevant in the match.
The second game goes similarly, except she's got double myr enforcer. I'm handling it just fine, getting damage in, using smoldering spires to make sure I can still race past. I go for an alpha strike, knowing she doesn't have enough creatures to kill me off and that I'll be able to finish her next turn. The goblin guide flip reveals Shrapnel blast. I go to -1.
Game three ends after she gets Engineered plague on turn three and Engineered plague on turn four. I suggested she name elves, but despite a mutual disdain for them she persisted in locking me out of the game.
1-1
Looking around after the game, I see Enchantress playing Doomsday combo. Enchantress is sitting behind two sterling groves and an enchantress's presence and doomsday combo is resolving it's namesake card. I flit back and forth between this game and Aluren combo facing Merfolk across the way. Doomsday makes his stack. Enchantress spends a turn cantripping wild growths. Doomsday combo plays out Shelldock Isle, looks through the remaining four cards of it's stack and puts Emrakul underneath it. Enchantress sacs a sterling grove to get Runed Halo, naming Emrakul. Ermakul comes out, Aeons are torn, an extra turn is taken, and the swing comes in. Enchantress sacs six permanents, but doesn't take any damage. Doomsday can't make enchantress sac runed halo before running out of cards in library, and concedes. Doomsday indeed.
Across the way Merfolk succumbs to cavern harpy bouncing Parasitic Strix. That card did real good things for the Aluren deck.
Round three: Jonathan with Lightning Rift
Jonathan is going for the mad control route, with all sorts of fun things like humilty and engineered explosives and eventually cycling lands into burning out whatever goblins I get. Unfortunately, my goblins are fast enough to keep him off that eventuality. Again, I get goblin guides on turn one both games (my deck loves me almost as much as I love it.) While he had answers, they didn't come down quick enough, and weren't enough to fight past my burn. I finish him with Goblin Grenade and say "Goblin Grenade! Nobody even remembers that card exists!", at which point the store owner walks by and says "Goblin Grenade? I love that card!"
I sideboarded in the cabal therapies, figuring that I might be able to stop a moat or a humility if I see it early with a Goblin Guide flip. I do get the option to use therapy out the second game, and I have a useful target, but for the life of me I can't remember the target's name. I could describe it, but the last time I wasn't precisely accurate in naming the card there was a judge call and an appeal to the head judge and a whole mess and so forth. So I took the other line of play, which still won me the game. Not the best reason, I really need to practice my therapy.
2-1
I look over and get to see Katie's Affinity sacrifice seven permanents with double Disciple of the Vault in play, finishing off her opponent. Half an hour for lunch. You know what else is good about Fountain of Youth? Convenient access to cheap tacos. Taco Johns it is!
Round four: Other Jonathan with Eva Green.
Eva Green is a green black deck with lots of discard, land destruction and tarmogoyfs and such. Game one he wins the die roll and makes a decent hand into a pretty bad one by getting both my turn two plays with a Hymn to Tourach. We spend some time trading resources back and forth, with me trying to bolt his Hypnotic Specters before they get my last cards in hand and him sinkholing me and so forth. He eventually drops a Tombstalker, I fail to draw any of my outs, and we go on into game two. Game two I keep a sketchy hand which he turns into a nigh unplayable one when his turn one thoughtseize takes my mogg war marshal. I end the game with three goblin grenades in hand, never getting enough board presence to use them.
2-2
After round four I wander towards the back of the store where I find Cheyenna matched up with her boyfriend. Apparently they misunderstood the time allotted for lunch, arriving back about six or seven minutes late. Oh, and they had a couple shots under their belt,which didn't make for tight play. They weren't going to make the finals, but on the other hand they were having a great time.
In the back I spotted a new section of the commons box. Very exciting. You see, they sell the commons for a penny apiece, whcih means that a lot of marginal cards are still worth that coin. And they aren't terribly discriminate about which cards go into it, so you can frequently find good uncommons and jank rares in there. Over the past month or so I think I've spent about $7.00 on penny cards. And I've pulled some decent stuff; A Zuran Orb, two Engineered Plagues, A double playset of Kird Ape, a set of Fyndhorn Elves, A couple Goblin Matrons, and stacks and stacks of decent, interesting, and maybe playable cards. On Wednesday, when everybody else was playing D&D (and not being associated with either of the groups myself), I dug through the penny box, sorting through roughly eight thousand commons, dumping it all back in and making sure it was well mixed.
Sarge, who owns the store, has a philosophy about his penny commons. He'll keep the box, but if you're going to look through it you're going to have to work for it. So he doesn't let anyone sort his box for him. I wanted to get through this new box before he digs it deep into the other one, just to spite me. (He says "I would, too."). The first card I pull out is an Ascendant Evnicar. The second one I pull is a Lin Sivvi. I say "Are you sure this is a penny box?", and point out that these cards are very playable in casual decks. After he checks the price online (about a buck fifty each) he says he'll have to take them out, and he'll sell them to me for .50 each since I found them in the penny box. I accept; they're worth it. I get another .82 cents worth of cards out of that box, finishing it before round 5 starts.
Round 5: ??? with Eva Green
This guy, whos name I can't remember, came from Michigan. Apparently they had no plans for the weekend and a friend in town, so they drove down from the UP for the event. Game one I steamroll him with goblins, he doesn't get much of a chance to do anything. I figure I'm out of contention anyways, so I sideboard in everything that might be useful; two Relics, four Cabal Therapy and that one Fodder Launch.
Game two he kills me with a Tarmogoyf and a Putrid leech that I'm unable to deal with. I spend some time holding up the bolt and trying to force him to pump so I can kill it in response, but I don't manage it. In this game he forced me to discard a cabal therapy. I play a mogg war marshal and flash it back, not knowing what is in his hand. I'm not sure what to guess, so I eventually guess tarmogoyf, even though he would have cast it that turn if he had it. I was considering naming Tombstalker, even though I hadn't yet seen it in his deck. I figured he might have it, and it'd be a problem for me if he did. But no, I play like an idiot, and I get to see the tombstalker in his hand. And the double Sinkhole. Did I mention how I didn't have the mana to play much this game?
Game three is a knock down, drag out affair. We trade resources until neither of us has anything, and I'm leading on board advantage with a relic of progenitus in play. I play a goblin guide, he smothers it. He topdecks a Hypnotic Specter and I topdeck a bolt for it. We both land flood, and I'm removing his graveyard one card at a time, which has little more effect than annoying him. Eventually, I topdeck a goblin and he doesn't have an answer, and I take him down. It didn't take that long; all his free smothers and fetch lands and such had him down to eight life.
3-2
At this point there was a cut to the finals, with Goblins, Goblins, Katie with Affinity, and I believe another green black deck getting in. Katie and her boyfriend (playing goblins) split in the finals, for a badlands and a timetwister between them.
You know what I love about legacy? How you can't at all properly predict the metagame. Remember that neat chart I stole from Starcitygames? Yeah; I didn't face a single deck on it all day. There was a large presence of goblins, and a large presence of green black, which means that my metagame call of more aggressive goblins didn't play out that well. Also a lot of combo, but largely creature based combo so less threatening. The guy playing Ad Nauseum went 0-2 drop. I think, for the next tournament in January, I should bring some other deck, better positioned against the actual metagame and not a supposed metagame.
As for the deck itself, well, it needs more goblins. Most decks do. And possibly some Ninja. No; I think more goblins will do it. Specifically, I think I should kick Warren Weirding to the board. While it's good to have options against Natural Order Progenitus, I think i'd do better leaving it in the side (in place of Fodder launch and... I don't know.) This sort of deck really runs off of a critical mass of goblins; I'm not sure what I want to put in it's place but two more goblins might make the difference between running out of gas and having enough carriers for Goblin Grenades.
As for mana, I could use another black source or two; I need more support for early Cabal Therapy after boarding. The singleton Bojuka bog never kicked me in the teeth, but on the other hand I never got a surprise win out of it either. The taplands didn't give me much trouble, but I still don't know if they're justified. I'm thinking of cutting out wasteland too, actually. On the one hand, you can steal wins with it. On the other hand, I don't have the ports, Aether vials or lackeys to back it up, so those wins aren't that common. I'm already being greedy on land only running 22, and legacy tends to have a lot of wastelands and sinkholes to punish low lands. Still, I never ran up against a Maze of Ith or a Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale.
All in all, it was all kinds of fun, and I'd do it again tomorrow if they were holding it. I'm definetly excited for the next one.
Creatures:
4 Goblin Guide
3 Tattermunge Maniac
4 Mogg War Marshal
3 Stingscourger
4 Warren Instigator
4 Goblin Chieftan
2 Siege-Gang Commander
Spells:
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Goblin Grenade
4 Goblin Incinerator
2 Warren Weirding
Lands:
4 Wasteland
4 Auntie's Hovel
2 Wooded Foothills
2 Blood Crypt
2 Teetering Peaks
2 Smoldering Spires
1 Bojuka Bog
5 Mountain
Sideboard:
2 Leyline of the Void
2 Relic of Progenitus
4 Cabal Therapy
2 Umezawa's Jitte
4 Earwig Squad
1 Fodder Launch
Ok, so the Incinerators are creatures and not kill spells, but it's very rare that they act like actual creatures.
If you're looking at that list closely, you'll notice some odd numbers. 2 teetering peaks, 2 smoldering spires, 1 bojuka bog? I never got any actual playtesting games in. When I went into the store the wednesday previous I found out it was actually D&D night (which is also cool), and FNM was much more about EDH games. What I ended up running was actually my playtest list. Partly because I didn't know what was worth cutting and partly because I thought the tournament was starting an hour later than it did so I only got to sign up at the last minute. But anyway, let's get on with the tournament.
Round one: Cheyenna with Squirrel Nest combo
In the first game I get a goblin guide to her wind zendikon. She makes a couple squirrel tokens, forgets a number of guide triggers, and generally gets run over by goblins. In a last ditch effort she drops an intruder alarm to hopefully keep me tapped down, but my deck is providing me with plenty of goblins. Game two goes much the same. No sideboarding, I figured I was at enough of an advantage already.
I feel sort of bad about this match, because plainly she's here with a boyfriend, not really that great at the game (Goblin Guide is much worse when it's faced with brainstorm, unless you horribly misplay brainstorm. Which she did.) and just looking to have fun. Not bad enough to intentionally drop a game or anything, but I do try to make things pleasent for her. Reminding her of guide triggers and so forth.
1-0
Round two: Katie with Affinity
Katie, on the other hand, makes a fearsome opponent. She wins the die roll, lays a first turn Great Furnace, memnite and mox opal, into frogmite and springleaf drum, if I remember correctly. Yeah, Scars of Mirroden printed some stuff that powers up Affinity; who would have thought? I start with a goblin guide to stay in the race, and finish off her creatures. She doesn't have enough gas to say in the race, and I win the first game.
I sideboard in two Umezawa's Jitte for two Siege-gang commanders. I figure Jitte will take over the game only it won't have to wait for five mana to do it. I want to keep in all my removal, since affinity very definetly works with a critical mass of artifact creatures. This was never relevant in the match.
The second game goes similarly, except she's got double myr enforcer. I'm handling it just fine, getting damage in, using smoldering spires to make sure I can still race past. I go for an alpha strike, knowing she doesn't have enough creatures to kill me off and that I'll be able to finish her next turn. The goblin guide flip reveals Shrapnel blast. I go to -1.
Game three ends after she gets Engineered plague on turn three and Engineered plague on turn four. I suggested she name elves, but despite a mutual disdain for them she persisted in locking me out of the game.
1-1
Looking around after the game, I see Enchantress playing Doomsday combo. Enchantress is sitting behind two sterling groves and an enchantress's presence and doomsday combo is resolving it's namesake card. I flit back and forth between this game and Aluren combo facing Merfolk across the way. Doomsday makes his stack. Enchantress spends a turn cantripping wild growths. Doomsday combo plays out Shelldock Isle, looks through the remaining four cards of it's stack and puts Emrakul underneath it. Enchantress sacs a sterling grove to get Runed Halo, naming Emrakul. Ermakul comes out, Aeons are torn, an extra turn is taken, and the swing comes in. Enchantress sacs six permanents, but doesn't take any damage. Doomsday can't make enchantress sac runed halo before running out of cards in library, and concedes. Doomsday indeed.
Across the way Merfolk succumbs to cavern harpy bouncing Parasitic Strix. That card did real good things for the Aluren deck.
Round three: Jonathan with Lightning Rift
Jonathan is going for the mad control route, with all sorts of fun things like humilty and engineered explosives and eventually cycling lands into burning out whatever goblins I get. Unfortunately, my goblins are fast enough to keep him off that eventuality. Again, I get goblin guides on turn one both games (my deck loves me almost as much as I love it.) While he had answers, they didn't come down quick enough, and weren't enough to fight past my burn. I finish him with Goblin Grenade and say "Goblin Grenade! Nobody even remembers that card exists!", at which point the store owner walks by and says "Goblin Grenade? I love that card!"
I sideboarded in the cabal therapies, figuring that I might be able to stop a moat or a humility if I see it early with a Goblin Guide flip. I do get the option to use therapy out the second game, and I have a useful target, but for the life of me I can't remember the target's name. I could describe it, but the last time I wasn't precisely accurate in naming the card there was a judge call and an appeal to the head judge and a whole mess and so forth. So I took the other line of play, which still won me the game. Not the best reason, I really need to practice my therapy.
2-1
I look over and get to see Katie's Affinity sacrifice seven permanents with double Disciple of the Vault in play, finishing off her opponent. Half an hour for lunch. You know what else is good about Fountain of Youth? Convenient access to cheap tacos. Taco Johns it is!
Round four: Other Jonathan with Eva Green.
Eva Green is a green black deck with lots of discard, land destruction and tarmogoyfs and such. Game one he wins the die roll and makes a decent hand into a pretty bad one by getting both my turn two plays with a Hymn to Tourach. We spend some time trading resources back and forth, with me trying to bolt his Hypnotic Specters before they get my last cards in hand and him sinkholing me and so forth. He eventually drops a Tombstalker, I fail to draw any of my outs, and we go on into game two. Game two I keep a sketchy hand which he turns into a nigh unplayable one when his turn one thoughtseize takes my mogg war marshal. I end the game with three goblin grenades in hand, never getting enough board presence to use them.
2-2
After round four I wander towards the back of the store where I find Cheyenna matched up with her boyfriend. Apparently they misunderstood the time allotted for lunch, arriving back about six or seven minutes late. Oh, and they had a couple shots under their belt,which didn't make for tight play. They weren't going to make the finals, but on the other hand they were having a great time.
In the back I spotted a new section of the commons box. Very exciting. You see, they sell the commons for a penny apiece, whcih means that a lot of marginal cards are still worth that coin. And they aren't terribly discriminate about which cards go into it, so you can frequently find good uncommons and jank rares in there. Over the past month or so I think I've spent about $7.00 on penny cards. And I've pulled some decent stuff; A Zuran Orb, two Engineered Plagues, A double playset of Kird Ape, a set of Fyndhorn Elves, A couple Goblin Matrons, and stacks and stacks of decent, interesting, and maybe playable cards. On Wednesday, when everybody else was playing D&D (and not being associated with either of the groups myself), I dug through the penny box, sorting through roughly eight thousand commons, dumping it all back in and making sure it was well mixed.
Sarge, who owns the store, has a philosophy about his penny commons. He'll keep the box, but if you're going to look through it you're going to have to work for it. So he doesn't let anyone sort his box for him. I wanted to get through this new box before he digs it deep into the other one, just to spite me. (He says "I would, too."). The first card I pull out is an Ascendant Evnicar. The second one I pull is a Lin Sivvi. I say "Are you sure this is a penny box?", and point out that these cards are very playable in casual decks. After he checks the price online (about a buck fifty each) he says he'll have to take them out, and he'll sell them to me for .50 each since I found them in the penny box. I accept; they're worth it. I get another .82 cents worth of cards out of that box, finishing it before round 5 starts.
Round 5: ??? with Eva Green
This guy, whos name I can't remember, came from Michigan. Apparently they had no plans for the weekend and a friend in town, so they drove down from the UP for the event. Game one I steamroll him with goblins, he doesn't get much of a chance to do anything. I figure I'm out of contention anyways, so I sideboard in everything that might be useful; two Relics, four Cabal Therapy and that one Fodder Launch.
Game two he kills me with a Tarmogoyf and a Putrid leech that I'm unable to deal with. I spend some time holding up the bolt and trying to force him to pump so I can kill it in response, but I don't manage it. In this game he forced me to discard a cabal therapy. I play a mogg war marshal and flash it back, not knowing what is in his hand. I'm not sure what to guess, so I eventually guess tarmogoyf, even though he would have cast it that turn if he had it. I was considering naming Tombstalker, even though I hadn't yet seen it in his deck. I figured he might have it, and it'd be a problem for me if he did. But no, I play like an idiot, and I get to see the tombstalker in his hand. And the double Sinkhole. Did I mention how I didn't have the mana to play much this game?
Game three is a knock down, drag out affair. We trade resources until neither of us has anything, and I'm leading on board advantage with a relic of progenitus in play. I play a goblin guide, he smothers it. He topdecks a Hypnotic Specter and I topdeck a bolt for it. We both land flood, and I'm removing his graveyard one card at a time, which has little more effect than annoying him. Eventually, I topdeck a goblin and he doesn't have an answer, and I take him down. It didn't take that long; all his free smothers and fetch lands and such had him down to eight life.
3-2
At this point there was a cut to the finals, with Goblins, Goblins, Katie with Affinity, and I believe another green black deck getting in. Katie and her boyfriend (playing goblins) split in the finals, for a badlands and a timetwister between them.
You know what I love about legacy? How you can't at all properly predict the metagame. Remember that neat chart I stole from Starcitygames? Yeah; I didn't face a single deck on it all day. There was a large presence of goblins, and a large presence of green black, which means that my metagame call of more aggressive goblins didn't play out that well. Also a lot of combo, but largely creature based combo so less threatening. The guy playing Ad Nauseum went 0-2 drop. I think, for the next tournament in January, I should bring some other deck, better positioned against the actual metagame and not a supposed metagame.
As for the deck itself, well, it needs more goblins. Most decks do. And possibly some Ninja. No; I think more goblins will do it. Specifically, I think I should kick Warren Weirding to the board. While it's good to have options against Natural Order Progenitus, I think i'd do better leaving it in the side (in place of Fodder launch and... I don't know.) This sort of deck really runs off of a critical mass of goblins; I'm not sure what I want to put in it's place but two more goblins might make the difference between running out of gas and having enough carriers for Goblin Grenades.
As for mana, I could use another black source or two; I need more support for early Cabal Therapy after boarding. The singleton Bojuka bog never kicked me in the teeth, but on the other hand I never got a surprise win out of it either. The taplands didn't give me much trouble, but I still don't know if they're justified. I'm thinking of cutting out wasteland too, actually. On the one hand, you can steal wins with it. On the other hand, I don't have the ports, Aether vials or lackeys to back it up, so those wins aren't that common. I'm already being greedy on land only running 22, and legacy tends to have a lot of wastelands and sinkholes to punish low lands. Still, I never ran up against a Maze of Ith or a Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale.
All in all, it was all kinds of fun, and I'd do it again tomorrow if they were holding it. I'm definetly excited for the next one.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Further Talk on Goblins
As I write this, it's Tuesday, November 30th. The tournament begins Saturday, Dec 4th. I've got to nail down a decklist.
Last time we wrote, I figured I'd end up playing Goblins, because 1) they're reasonably well positioned in the metagame and 2) I always play Goblins anyway. Let's take a look at a current Legacy Goblins list:
It's a fairly standard list, looking at the goblins. Unfortunately, I don't have access to all the legacy goblins that I would like, so my options are a bit narrower:
-4 Goblin Lackey
-4 Goblin Piledriver
-4 Aether Vial
(Not looking at manabase or sideboard right now.)
This, as they say, constitutes a problem. Without the lackeys and the vials the deck becomes much less tenable, as you can't drop the occasional free siege gang commander. While I certainly wouldn't be adverse to picking up a few extra goblins my budget would be. I'm going to look into lackeys though.
Without the free goblins a lot of your plays become much less powerful. Dropping a Matron on turn three gets you an extra goblin, sure, but to your hand. Meanwhile you're just spent your entire turn for a 1/1. If you drop a ringleader next turn you could fill your hand, but what hope do you have of getting those goblins to play in time to actually hurt someone with them?
My chances of winning with that sort of deck get better if I can substitute in some Warren Instigators, which aren't as good as Lackey by a darn site, but there's a lot of room to be not as good as Lackey and still be pretty good. It might be worthwhile to set up one of these decks to work with both lackey and instigator. A quick rundown of relevant goblins:
4 Goblin Lackey
4 Warren Instigator
4 Gempalm Incinerator
4 Goblin Warchief
2 Goblin Chieftan
4 Goblin Matron
4 Goblin Ringleader
2 Siege-Gang Commander
3 Stingscourger
3 Warren Weirding
4 Mogg War Marshal
(22 lands)
I'm adding in some more war marshals and an extra stingscourger for the piledrivers. If you can get a lackey or a instigator down on turn one or two and connect you're golden. Which is an if or two too many. Let's say you get it down on turn two. How are you going to swing past that tarmogoyf? Unless you've got a turn three warren weirding and he's got nothing else you'll be waiting while you scramble for enough goblins in play to take it out with an incinerator. At which point you really have to be asking, "what's the point of that instigator?"
Goblin Lackey is better than Aether Vial (in this deck) precisely because it starts it's action on turn two. You can often steal games merely by them not having an immediate Force of Will or Swords to Plowshares to answer it. Giving them until turn three to come up with an answer gives them entirely too much time and too many options. Not that Instigator is entirely a loss; it's still an "answer this or lose" card, it's just that you don't gain anything against a common category of answers; (Tarmogoyfs).
The alternative is to focus less on the midrange and more on the beatdown. Naturally, that'd work a lot better if I had the piledrivers, but I could make do. This side of the strategy is aided by the recent printing of some powerful goblins (the chieftans, and of course Goblin Guide) Goblin Guide in particular is much better in a burn or aggro type of deck as he tends to work against you if the game goes long. Another Sample List:
4 Goblin Guide
4 Goblin Lackey
4 Warren Instigator
4 Gempalm Incinerator
4 Goblin Bushwhacker
4 Stingscourger
4 Mogg War Marshal
4 Goblin Chieftan
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Goblin Grenade
(20 lands)
Still with the Lackeys and Instigators. Again, I'm assuming I can get my hands on some Lackeys. Instigator, while being less of an autokill if it connects, is still an decent offensive creature, thanks to double strike. Turn two instigator into turn three bushwhacker with kicker means swinging in for six assuming nothing else has happened this game. And even if a lackey trigger isn't as much of a mana advantage as it is in a deck with Siege-Gang Commanders in it, it can still be a crushing advantage. And when they use a first turn Force of Will on it they don't necessarily know that all you're gonna be able to drop with it is a Mogg War Marshal
On the other hand, instigator works uniquely well with Goblin Matron, allowing you to search something up with first strike damage, then drop it into play with normal damage. That turn two instigator might make for a turn three siege gang commander, with mana up to fling a goblin or cycle an incinerator or... or... Ok, putting away that line of thought. There's no way I could fit everything I wanted to in a 60 card deck, and it still has all the vulnerabilities that I previously mentioned.
Moving on, let's take a quick look at the manabase:
4 Wasteland
8 Mountains
4 Rishidan Port
3 Bloodstained Mire
3 Badlands
I don't have the fetches or the duals; I can manage two onslaught fetches and two ravnica duals.
2 Blood Crypt
2 Wooded Foothills.
That leaves me with much less ability to play any Warren Weirdings that make it into the maindeck, or black sideboard cards, or other things. (Cabal Therapy?) Luckily, I've got a playset of Auntie's Hovel I can substitute in. Also, I can manage the wastelands, but not the Rishidan ports, which is just as well, as I'll be needing more of my mana for casting things if I can't lay hands on lackeys. Revised Mana base:
4 Wasteland
4 Auntie's Hovel
2 Blood Crypt
2 Wooded Foothills
8 Mountains
Note that I also cut it down to 20 cards; the aggro list has 40 nonlands. i'm not very happy cutting down to this level, but with a max casting cost of 3 it might be viable. On the other hand, 20 with 4 wastelands.
Possible other lands:
Ghost Quarter. Depending on how heavily the metagame favors nonbasics it might act like strip mine. Would be a lot better if I went full on Rishidan Ports and Aether Vials. Not gonna happen.
Teetering Peaks: A tap land that also gives me two free damage. Good with Instigator, and getting someone from ten to eight life if so critical. On the other hand... tapland
Smoldering Spires. Really good if someone's relying on a Tarmogoyf to hold off attacks. Also a tapland.
Bojuka Bog: Also a tap land, in the wrong color even. On the other hand, a lot of cards and decks are screwed over by graveyard hate (Tarmogoyf, Life from the Loam, dredge, reanimator). I do like the idea of randomly winning games.
Which brings me naturally to a quick look at the sideboard. There are a couple things I'm looking to reposition myself against:
Bigger creatures
Combo Decks
Graveyards
Counterbalance/top
Essentially, I'm running a red deck wins, so really I only need to get them down to about eight life before the board state becomes much less relevant; a bolt plus a grenade, a hasty creature or two, a couple bolts, forget card advantage as long as I can get those last couple points in. The trouble is if they get a turn two tarmogoyf and sit behind him. I have to set up a massive alpha strike while they smile and slowly take the game away from me. Bolt, incinerator, don't solve goyf that much. Potential other solutions: Warren Weirding, Fodder Launch, temporary solutions such as Stingscourger and Smoldering Spires.
Combo Decks: These work out to storm decks and graveyard decks, for the most part. Storm decks (Ad Nauseum Tendrils, Goblin Charbelcher) don't interact very much with the board, which is where I'm hoping to dominate. Additionally they're very hard to race, as in impossible if I don't get a perfect draw and they don't get an abysmal one. I've got two options; to disrupt their hand with discard effects (Cabal Therapy, Duress, Thoughtseize) or their deck with Cranial Extraction Effects (Earwig Squad, Extirpate if I had any). Still not the greatest matchup
Graveyard decks; largely dredge, but also anything running life from the Loam, or other graveyard based threats. Aside from the Bog already mentioned, there are all sorts of graveyard hate cards being printed in increasing power levels over the recent years, some I can get my hands on (Relic of Progenitus), some I can't (Tormod's Crypt.)
And finally, Counterbalance/top. if I'm running a deck full of one drops, then I've got a hard time beating out someone with the combo. There are two ways of beating it though; either run some good disenchant effects (Krosan Grip, Indrik Stomphowler), or run odd casting cost cards (Earwig Squad, Fodder Launch). Since the disenchant effects don't actually advance my goals (dealing damage), and require a more difficult mana base, I'm leaning towards the other ones.
Bang out a quick sideboard:
4 Earwig Squad
2 Relic of Progenitus
2 Bojuka Bog
4 Cabal Therapy
3 Fodder Launch
Final Thoughts: If I shoehorn the bogs into the maindeck, I'll have another pair of sideboard slots to deal with. Also, I sort of need to get some Warren Weirdings in my deck somewhere.
The next step is to build the deck and test it out against someone. Anyone up for a game?
Last time we wrote, I figured I'd end up playing Goblins, because 1) they're reasonably well positioned in the metagame and 2) I always play Goblins anyway. Let's take a look at a current Legacy Goblins list:
| 4 | Wasteland | 20 of 20 (100.00)% | 4.0000 | 8.8000 |
| 8 | Mountain | 19 of 20 (95.00)% | 7.9474 | 9.0526 |
| 4 | Rishadan Port | 13 of 20 (65.00)% | 3.5385 | 8.6154 |
| 3 | Badlands | 13 of 20 (65.00)% | 2.9231 | 9.2308 |
| 3 | Bloodstained Mire | 13 of 20 (65.00)% | 2.9231 | 9.4615 |
| Spells | ||||
| 4 | Goblin Lackey | 20 of 20 (100.00)% | 4.0000 | 8.8000 |
| 2 | Siege-Gang Commander | 20 of 20 (100.00)% | 1.9500 | 8.8000 |
| 4 | Aether Vial | 20 of 20 (100.00)% | 4.0000 | 8.8000 |
| 4 | Goblin Ringleader | 20 of 20 (100.00)% | 4.0000 | 8.8000 |
| 4 | Goblin Warchief | 20 of 20 (100.00)% | 3.9500 | 8.8000 |
| 4 | Goblin Piledriver | 20 of 20 (100.00)% | 3.9500 | 8.8000 |
| 4 | Goblin Matron | 20 of 20 (100.00)% | 3.9000 | 8.8000 |
| 4 | Gempalm Incinerator | 19 of 20 (95.00)% | 3.6316 | 8.8947 |
| 2 | Stingscourger | 16 of 20 (80.00)% | 1.5625 | 8.6250 |
| 2 | Goblin Chieftain | 15 of 20 (75.00)% | 2.3333 | 9.5333 |
| 3 | Warren Weirding | 12 of 20 (60.00)% | 2.5833 | 9.4167 |
| 1 | Mogg War Marshal | 10 of 20 (50.00)% | 3.2000 | 8.9000 |
| Sideboard | ||||
| 4 | Pyrokinesis | 14 of 20 (70.00)% | 3.0714 | 9.0000 |
| 3 | Relic of Progenitus | 8 of 20 (40.00)% | 2.7500 | 10.5000 |
| 3 | Perish | 8 of 20 (40.00)% | 2.5000 | 10.3750 |
| 3 | Blood Moon | 7 of 20 (35.00)% | 3.0000 | 9.4286 |
| 2 | Tormod's Crypt | |||
It's a fairly standard list, looking at the goblins. Unfortunately, I don't have access to all the legacy goblins that I would like, so my options are a bit narrower:
-4 Goblin Lackey
-4 Goblin Piledriver
-4 Aether Vial
(Not looking at manabase or sideboard right now.)
This, as they say, constitutes a problem. Without the lackeys and the vials the deck becomes much less tenable, as you can't drop the occasional free siege gang commander. While I certainly wouldn't be adverse to picking up a few extra goblins my budget would be. I'm going to look into lackeys though.
Without the free goblins a lot of your plays become much less powerful. Dropping a Matron on turn three gets you an extra goblin, sure, but to your hand. Meanwhile you're just spent your entire turn for a 1/1. If you drop a ringleader next turn you could fill your hand, but what hope do you have of getting those goblins to play in time to actually hurt someone with them?
My chances of winning with that sort of deck get better if I can substitute in some Warren Instigators, which aren't as good as Lackey by a darn site, but there's a lot of room to be not as good as Lackey and still be pretty good. It might be worthwhile to set up one of these decks to work with both lackey and instigator. A quick rundown of relevant goblins:
4 Goblin Lackey
4 Warren Instigator
4 Gempalm Incinerator
4 Goblin Warchief
2 Goblin Chieftan
4 Goblin Matron
4 Goblin Ringleader
2 Siege-Gang Commander
3 Stingscourger
3 Warren Weirding
4 Mogg War Marshal
(22 lands)
I'm adding in some more war marshals and an extra stingscourger for the piledrivers. If you can get a lackey or a instigator down on turn one or two and connect you're golden. Which is an if or two too many. Let's say you get it down on turn two. How are you going to swing past that tarmogoyf? Unless you've got a turn three warren weirding and he's got nothing else you'll be waiting while you scramble for enough goblins in play to take it out with an incinerator. At which point you really have to be asking, "what's the point of that instigator?"
Goblin Lackey is better than Aether Vial (in this deck) precisely because it starts it's action on turn two. You can often steal games merely by them not having an immediate Force of Will or Swords to Plowshares to answer it. Giving them until turn three to come up with an answer gives them entirely too much time and too many options. Not that Instigator is entirely a loss; it's still an "answer this or lose" card, it's just that you don't gain anything against a common category of answers; (Tarmogoyfs).
The alternative is to focus less on the midrange and more on the beatdown. Naturally, that'd work a lot better if I had the piledrivers, but I could make do. This side of the strategy is aided by the recent printing of some powerful goblins (the chieftans, and of course Goblin Guide) Goblin Guide in particular is much better in a burn or aggro type of deck as he tends to work against you if the game goes long. Another Sample List:
4 Goblin Guide
4 Goblin Lackey
4 Warren Instigator
4 Gempalm Incinerator
4 Goblin Bushwhacker
4 Stingscourger
4 Mogg War Marshal
4 Goblin Chieftan
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Goblin Grenade
(20 lands)
Still with the Lackeys and Instigators. Again, I'm assuming I can get my hands on some Lackeys. Instigator, while being less of an autokill if it connects, is still an decent offensive creature, thanks to double strike. Turn two instigator into turn three bushwhacker with kicker means swinging in for six assuming nothing else has happened this game. And even if a lackey trigger isn't as much of a mana advantage as it is in a deck with Siege-Gang Commanders in it, it can still be a crushing advantage. And when they use a first turn Force of Will on it they don't necessarily know that all you're gonna be able to drop with it is a Mogg War Marshal
On the other hand, instigator works uniquely well with Goblin Matron, allowing you to search something up with first strike damage, then drop it into play with normal damage. That turn two instigator might make for a turn three siege gang commander, with mana up to fling a goblin or cycle an incinerator or... or... Ok, putting away that line of thought. There's no way I could fit everything I wanted to in a 60 card deck, and it still has all the vulnerabilities that I previously mentioned.
Moving on, let's take a quick look at the manabase:
4 Wasteland
8 Mountains
4 Rishidan Port
3 Bloodstained Mire
3 Badlands
I don't have the fetches or the duals; I can manage two onslaught fetches and two ravnica duals.
2 Blood Crypt
2 Wooded Foothills.
That leaves me with much less ability to play any Warren Weirdings that make it into the maindeck, or black sideboard cards, or other things. (Cabal Therapy?) Luckily, I've got a playset of Auntie's Hovel I can substitute in. Also, I can manage the wastelands, but not the Rishidan ports, which is just as well, as I'll be needing more of my mana for casting things if I can't lay hands on lackeys. Revised Mana base:
4 Wasteland
4 Auntie's Hovel
2 Blood Crypt
2 Wooded Foothills
8 Mountains
Note that I also cut it down to 20 cards; the aggro list has 40 nonlands. i'm not very happy cutting down to this level, but with a max casting cost of 3 it might be viable. On the other hand, 20 with 4 wastelands.
Possible other lands:
Ghost Quarter. Depending on how heavily the metagame favors nonbasics it might act like strip mine. Would be a lot better if I went full on Rishidan Ports and Aether Vials. Not gonna happen.
Teetering Peaks: A tap land that also gives me two free damage. Good with Instigator, and getting someone from ten to eight life if so critical. On the other hand... tapland
Smoldering Spires. Really good if someone's relying on a Tarmogoyf to hold off attacks. Also a tapland.
Bojuka Bog: Also a tap land, in the wrong color even. On the other hand, a lot of cards and decks are screwed over by graveyard hate (Tarmogoyf, Life from the Loam, dredge, reanimator). I do like the idea of randomly winning games.
Which brings me naturally to a quick look at the sideboard. There are a couple things I'm looking to reposition myself against:
Bigger creatures
Combo Decks
Graveyards
Counterbalance/top
Essentially, I'm running a red deck wins, so really I only need to get them down to about eight life before the board state becomes much less relevant; a bolt plus a grenade, a hasty creature or two, a couple bolts, forget card advantage as long as I can get those last couple points in. The trouble is if they get a turn two tarmogoyf and sit behind him. I have to set up a massive alpha strike while they smile and slowly take the game away from me. Bolt, incinerator, don't solve goyf that much. Potential other solutions: Warren Weirding, Fodder Launch, temporary solutions such as Stingscourger and Smoldering Spires.
Combo Decks: These work out to storm decks and graveyard decks, for the most part. Storm decks (Ad Nauseum Tendrils, Goblin Charbelcher) don't interact very much with the board, which is where I'm hoping to dominate. Additionally they're very hard to race, as in impossible if I don't get a perfect draw and they don't get an abysmal one. I've got two options; to disrupt their hand with discard effects (Cabal Therapy, Duress, Thoughtseize) or their deck with Cranial Extraction Effects (Earwig Squad, Extirpate if I had any). Still not the greatest matchup
Graveyard decks; largely dredge, but also anything running life from the Loam, or other graveyard based threats. Aside from the Bog already mentioned, there are all sorts of graveyard hate cards being printed in increasing power levels over the recent years, some I can get my hands on (Relic of Progenitus), some I can't (Tormod's Crypt.)
And finally, Counterbalance/top. if I'm running a deck full of one drops, then I've got a hard time beating out someone with the combo. There are two ways of beating it though; either run some good disenchant effects (Krosan Grip, Indrik Stomphowler), or run odd casting cost cards (Earwig Squad, Fodder Launch). Since the disenchant effects don't actually advance my goals (dealing damage), and require a more difficult mana base, I'm leaning towards the other ones.
Bang out a quick sideboard:
4 Earwig Squad
2 Relic of Progenitus
2 Bojuka Bog
4 Cabal Therapy
3 Fodder Launch
Final Thoughts: If I shoehorn the bogs into the maindeck, I'll have another pair of sideboard slots to deal with. Also, I sort of need to get some Warren Weirdings in my deck somewhere.
The next step is to build the deck and test it out against someone. Anyone up for a game?
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
The Great Designer Search II: Search and Destroy
Hey everybody! Excitement! Over at Magicthegathering.com they're running a contest to determine who's going to be the next design intern! All kinds of fun, and I'm definitely going to participate. Don't get me wrong, I love designing games on my own but a chance to get paid to do it? These blog posts aren't making me the sweet sweet monies yet. So onward! Full steam ahead! Let's rock this like a series of mid level venues... wait, what's that?
The deadline for submission was on Monday, not Wednesday like I had assumed? Well, crap.
Crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap. Crap!
Err... ahh.... Good news! We get to play along here. It'll be like I'm doing all the work without actually getting a job at the end of it. Whoo!
Crap crap crap.
Let's take a look at those original essay questions and my answers which I was planning on writing up on Tuesday. As I'm not entered into the contest, I'm not confining myself to the 350 word limit per question.
1) Introduce yourself and explain why you are a good fit for this internship.
Pass. Read the freaking first post if you want to know about me.
2) You are instructed to move an ability from one color to another. This ability must be something used in every set (i.e. discard, direct damage, card drawing etc.). You may not choose an ability that has already been color shifted by R&D. What ability do you shift and to what color do you shift it? Explain why you would make that shift.
I'd move flash from blue to green. "Flash" is the ability that allows you to play spells at instant speed, especially creatures. It does powerful things for blue where it is right now, largely because it allows the blue mage the ability to play his deck even moreso in response to whatever his opponent can do. Forget about stalking stones as a win condition, you can hold up your mana and counter whatever he's doing, or if he doesn't do anything you can drop in your threat at the last second and untap with basically haste and your mana up. If the blue mage can counter spells, draw cards and lay threats at instant speed when everybody else uses sorceries then they've got an advantage.
And then there's green. Most of the things green does in constructed are painfully obvious. They lay some undercosted two drop and swing in with him. They get wrathed and lay some more creatures. And then they overrun and kill you. Or they don't. The closest thing they get to clever are giant growth effects, which work like bad removal or bad burn spells. They do see play from time to time in constructed, but not that often these days.
Mono green decks aren't very popular on the tournament scene. Playing one entails beating your opponent into submission, with very little room for subtlety. If we took flash from blue (which would still have counterspells and card drawing at instant speed), we could give it to green, which allows them a chance to set up more clever interactions, especially if the flash creatures get enters the battlefield triggers. Briarhorn is my all star example here. While it can be played like any other pump spell for it's evoke cost, if you play it for it's regular cost it becomes a natural two for one (eating an attacking creature and leaving a 3/3 for you). This helps the green mage grind out card advantage, and gain position by being more clever than his opponents. If you allow green mages to be more clever, you'll get more tournament players playing primarily green decks.
3) What block do you feel did the best job of integrating design with creative? What is one more thing that could have been done to make it even better?
My initial impulse was to go with Shadowmoor, because the whole "world of light plunged into darkness" thing is pretty cool, and you get to do the whole death and decay thing with wither. Persist works pretty well too; Murderous Redcap is so evil that you have to kill him more than once, in good horror story tradition. On the other hand, the best justification I can get for the untap symbol is the whole mirror universe thing, and hybrid mana and retrace don't really fit in that well.
As my brother points out, on the other hand, Shards of Alara does really well. Five different mini worlds each with their own mechanics. Let's go around the circle, shall we?
Bant: Exalted fits in very well with the whole idea of armies settling their difference in duels between champions, which in turn makes very much flavor sense in a world where chaos and death magic (red and black) are absent.
Esper: Everything's robots! While the whole "be an artifact" mechanical connection isn't very deep, I love the whole "remake the world with permanent metal" bit, especially since, absent red and green magic, there's very little that can destroy artifacts. The occasional Dispeller's capsule can, but the present black magic has a harder time.
Grixis. You take a world of darkness, with no light or life magic, and what do you get? Ever growing armies of the undead. Necromancers and demons fighting it out to get at the ever dwindling supply of life to feed off of. The best part is the noble king who wised to the situation first and slaughtered his entire family to become a lich. Sedris, the traitor king. Mechanically, this is represented by Unearth, which means that pretty much anything that Grixis used comes back for one last huzzah as a zombie. Awesome.
Jund. Jund is a world without any forces of order to slow down the chaos. Dragons eat the ogre, who eat the viashino, who eat the goblins. Or something like that. Jund is all about devouring your neighbor before your neighbor devours you. Which makes Devour, a mechanic that literally does that, pretty darn cool.
Naya: Naya's main theme is behemoths, huge freaking creatures. Naya is in Green, White and Red, which allows it to make huge creatures, and it excludes blue or black magic, which have the easy ways of dealing with them. Also works really well.
Granted that some of the things from later sets didn't fit in very well (Domain is fun, yeah, but sort of out of place, for example), Shards of Alara as a block did better at this than the others.
4) R&D has recently been looking at rules in the game that aren't pulling their weight. If you had to remove an existing rule from the game for not being worth its inclusion, what would it be?
The untap step. Why should we untap our permanents when we can just play more? Seriously though, you could make "untap all your permanents" a game action that happens at the beginning of your upkeep and you could skip an entire step. Moreso, skip a unique step where nobody gets a chance to do anything. Drawing your card already works that way, so there's precedent.
5) Name a card currently in Standard that, from a design standpoint, should not have been printed. What is the card and why shouldn't we have printed it?
My first impulse is Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Never mind the price tag, Jace has the problem of being too good. When a particular card is good enough that any deck running that color has to ask itself "why am I not running a full set of this?", then maybe you should wonder if it's too powerful. Jace fits the bill, and it isn't even a role filler like Lightning Bolt or Memory Leak. It adds card advantage and board control and hey, maybe even a win condition to your deck.
The other thing is, brainstorm, while a very fun ability to a large number of players, probably shouldn't have been reprinted next to the fetchlands. It's already a significant amount of card advantage, it'd lead to a lot less fiddling and shuffling if your blue mage had to work a bit to get his shuffle effects. As it is, it produces an effect like Sensei's divining top, if a little less pronounced.
Also, Jace was printed to make blue a little stronger than it had been. Blue was feeling the hurt between the rotation of cryptic command and the printing of Jace. Given that it's been dominant for the entire rest of the freaking game, you'd think they could have waited a little longer.
That's one option. My friend Stephen suggests Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. Emrakul, by being the biggest, baddest creature they've printed yet becomes the goto character for pretty much any combo deck. In vintage, for example, you can tinker out Darksteel Colossus or Inkwell Leviathan depending on what you expect to face. It's a legitimate choice. If they hadn't printed Emrakul, you could still argue choices between Progenitus or Kozilek or Ulamog or even something else, like Magister Sphinx. But when you're getting a free creature, Emrakul is just better than the competition, which makes for less interesting deckbuilding decisions.
The other thing is the "shuffle your graveyard into your library" thing is a cool idea, but it really screws over anybody trying to make a milling deck. And there's always somebody.
That, and when Emrakul hits the ground it's about as close to game over as anything in Magic is. Without the extra turn or the annihilator 6 it might reasonable to deal with. Without the extra turn you get sorcery speed options to deal with it (Journey to Nowhere, Aether Adept, Day of Judgment), with the turn you'd better have something on the board, or you're pretty much dead. (Not complaining about his protection ability, that's pretty cool.) Alternately, with a lower Annihilator value he would only kill a couple permanents of yours, you wouldn't sacrifice half your mana base just to stay alive. And that runs head first into the lesson of Zuran Orb; anything that makes you sacrifice your lands to survive just prolongs your inevitable demise.
6) What do you think design can do to best make the game accessible to newer players?
Now that's a tough one. The main barriers to entry for the game are price and knowledge. You could print sets less frequently, and with more reprints, but that cuts into the more experience players, with respect to point seven. And there are other things that they can't do, because it would hurt sales (make the best manafixing lands uncommon). If I was R&D, I'd try to make each set so it had a strong linear deck available that could be built mostly with commons and uncommons. For example, kithkin from Lorwyn. 4 Wizened Cenn, 4 Knight of Meadowgrain, 4 Goldmeadow Stalwart and 4 Goldmeadow harrier are plenty to produce a solid core for the deck. You can toss in four oblivion rings for creature kill, and whatever appropriate rares you get your hands on. It makes a strong casual deck, and Kithkin decks were tournament viable, if perhaps more expensive because of the Windbrisk Heights and Figures of Destiny.
7) What do you think design can do to best make the game attractive to experienced players?
Pretty much the opposite of last one. Although less focused on price issues, to become an experienced magic player you have to come to terms with that barrier to entry. To keep people playing the game you need to give them new experiences. The good news is that Magic has this built in, what with new cards coming in and sets rotating fairly often. Your more experienced players are less willing to stick with a relatively simple deck, or alternately are more willing to play more difficult decks or explore the murkier areas of deck design. So to keep your more experience players playing R&D needs to design interesting, synergistic cards that don't necessarily confine themselves to one kind of deck.
8) Of all the mechanics currently in Extended, which one is the best designed? Explain why.
Persist. Let me say that again, only with a -1/-1 counter. Persis. For starters, Magic is a game of two for ones. If your card isn't generating some sort of advantage, then why are you playing it? Especially in midrange decks you want your cards to be worth more than one unit of cardboard. Blightning not only makes them discard two cards, but it also damages them for three. Oracle of Mul Daya lets you play another land as soon as it hits play, hopefully off the top of your deck. Aether Adept gives you a 2/2 as well as an unsummon. Two for ones give you naturally powerful cards, which draws the spikes to them, and they make for naturally fun decks. Giving a creature an "enters the battlefield" trigger makes it a natural two for one. If then you allow them to come back and do it again, it's a great feeling. Even if the effect is pretty small, you still feel like you're getting something for free.
Furthermore, it's inherently a creature mechanic. As Mr. Rosewater has said before and as I heartily agree with him, Magic is most fun when it's a battle between creatures. A good, fun creature based mechanic helps promote that.
The "play it exactly twice" mechanic allows you to make reasonably powerful but not overpowered creatures with it. Since it's not infinitely repeatable you get power without having so many worries about balance issues. And it does give your opponents ways to interact with it, via wither effects or graveyard hate or even better two for ones of their own. Alternately, it appeals to the Johnny segment of the playerbase because it allows so many ways to get around playing only twice. Either by infinities (the morningtide lords, the ranger from coldsnap), or bit by bit. (Kitchen Finks next to Oren-Rief, the Vastwood is pretty cool, or Murderous Redcap next to Reveillark)
Lastly, it's a "protect my creature" mechanic, and we all hate losing our creatures. So Timmy who gets his giant Woodfall Primus out can blow something up with confidence that, even if his treefolk burns he'll get to blow something else up.
9) Of all the mechanics currently in Extended, which one is the worst designed? Explain why.
A couple candidates come to mind for this one. Chronologically:
Clash. Clash is an inherently random mechanic, which to some people is very fun but to others not so fun at all. I mean, I get that the difference between clashing and winning and clashing and losing is made not so huge that it won't break me if I keep losing clashes, but by that same token it makes me less excited to win them. The chance of winning a clash is less than 50% on it's own, and the value in manipulating your deck to change that is usually pretty small. Furthermore, Rosewater has asserted that when someone looks at the next card in their deck for the clash it feels like a mini game, where you're excited to see what happens next. Usually it feels to me like a mini game where I'm annoyed that the main game paused.
Next up is Retrace. Retrace allows you to replay a spell by discarding a land and paying the spell's original casting cost. Unfortunately, the spell potentially can be recast many, many times so they can't put anything too powerful on your average retrace spell. (I think we've all learned our lesson from capsize.) The cards are also designed under the assumption that you'll be playing them when you've already got all your mana, so something simple like Monstrify ends up being a giant growth variant for four. Or Oona's Grace- all your lands now have Cycling 2U. Exciting, isn't it? The other problem is, it's not just play this from your graveyard, it's also play it by discarding lands. People like to play out their lands; it's part of what made Zendikar great. Unless you're engaging in Life from the Loam shenanigans (which I wouldn't recommend) retrace is usually a waste of your time.
Lastly, Stephen suggested poison. Now I haven't had much chance to play with Scars yet, so I don't know how this is going to play out by and large. He does make some good points though. Historically poison has been pretty unimpressive; swamp mosquito is the only playable card, and that one not really because there's nothing to play around it. Virulent sliver made for an interesting trick draft deck (And one heck of a pro tour story), but that was it. Now, well, maybe. Part of the problem is that poison is a win condition that you get by attacking people in the combat step. Sound like, oh, regular combat damage to you too? Only it also requires a massive commitment; it does you no good to have them at ten life and five poison counters. And then there's the fact that it breaks EDH. If giving your creatures double strike is good, quadruple strike must be even better (since 1 poison counter =4 life in that format.) And to top it off, if you make the blight dragon your general you can never kill them on general damage; the poison counters will get them first. On the other hand, I'm still not willing to judge it without playing it some more.
All in all though, I'm going with "Retrace" as the worst mechanic in current extended.
10) Choose a plane to revisit other than Dominaria or Mirrodin. What is a mechanical twist we could add if we revisit this plane?
Thematically? I'd love to visit Lorwyn/Shadowmoor again. With the day/night cycle constrained by powerful magic for the past I don't know how long, then there are probably some drastic repercussions for letting that go now. Suppose that the natural order can't reassert itself immediately, that the plane shifts unstably between week long days and nights. These mini auras would reshape the land, occasionally also reshaping the minds of the inhabitants. Natually this would end badly. A curious Lorwyn Boggart stumbles into a Shadowmoor Kithkin Clachan, a Shadowmoor Elf is banned from Lorwyn Elf society because of his scars. That sort of thing. And there would be other effects as well.
Now how we express that mechanically is another matter. Since we're essentially fusing two blocks, it's going to be combining elements from the two, and naturally adding a twist of our own. Of the two major elements, I think color matters will do better for a repeat than tribe matters. And I'll continue to think that until Wizards stops downplaying Zombies as a tribe. As the tribes are spread over three colors between the two blocks, this also allows for more options, especially with hybrid mana. You can run your R/G hybrid goblins alongside your B/R hybrid goblins, but you might want to splash black anyways for a straight black goblin, or the other way around. Additionally, since R&D have been looking to repeat old and good mechanics, it'll be easy to rip one off of either block. You might have noticed me being a fan of persist a bit earlier, but there are other good options.
But I need to describe some mechanical themes of my own. Howabout transformation? You've already got changelings and mimics which play into the theme, other things can be made. Blue's cloning abilities could be hyped up. You could even go so far as to make new flip cards, like from Kamigawa, but that would probably be pushing it.
Specifically, Blue/Black could have a mind wiping theme; imagine rogue auroramancers who have learned to manipulate those magical energies to reshape the minds of others. Although maybe that should be shifted to Red/Black. Blue already gets the clone portion of the mechanics. And red presents a fun twist on it: mages who are using the aurora but have no idea of the results they'll achieve. Blue can come in as the occasional mind control. Black gets it's usual discard effects and so forth reconcepted as using the aurora to rip minds, red gets threaten effects and anything else that fits the bill. I keep imagining a goblin somewhere repeatedly mindwiping himself and never noticing.
As for green, Green gets off too lightly in the villain department. What if Green's main motivation (and the elves in general) is to force the tumultuous terrain into a new natural order? Only green is deciding what is natural, and it's perfectly fine with completely wrecking other people's stuff as long as it's getting closer to it's ultimate vision of nature. SO green gets effects like Muonvuli Acid moss, destroying opposing permanents and replacing them with forests, or at least basic lands. Unfortunately you can't push green into creature kill without seriously distorting the color pie, so it'll have to get it from white. Because it's only been a week since Path to Exile rotated and already I want it back.
Can you tell I didn't really have much of an idea how to answer that last question? I certainly went on and on about it. And yeah, if I wanted to turn this stuff in I'd have to confine myself to the 350 word limit per question. That would have been hard. In any case, I'll be continuing this as the great designer search goes.
The deadline for submission was on Monday, not Wednesday like I had assumed? Well, crap.
Crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap. Crap!
Err... ahh.... Good news! We get to play along here. It'll be like I'm doing all the work without actually getting a job at the end of it. Whoo!
Crap crap crap.
Let's take a look at those original essay questions and my answers which I was planning on writing up on Tuesday. As I'm not entered into the contest, I'm not confining myself to the 350 word limit per question.
1) Introduce yourself and explain why you are a good fit for this internship.
Pass. Read the freaking first post if you want to know about me.
2) You are instructed to move an ability from one color to another. This ability must be something used in every set (i.e. discard, direct damage, card drawing etc.). You may not choose an ability that has already been color shifted by R&D. What ability do you shift and to what color do you shift it? Explain why you would make that shift.
I'd move flash from blue to green. "Flash" is the ability that allows you to play spells at instant speed, especially creatures. It does powerful things for blue where it is right now, largely because it allows the blue mage the ability to play his deck even moreso in response to whatever his opponent can do. Forget about stalking stones as a win condition, you can hold up your mana and counter whatever he's doing, or if he doesn't do anything you can drop in your threat at the last second and untap with basically haste and your mana up. If the blue mage can counter spells, draw cards and lay threats at instant speed when everybody else uses sorceries then they've got an advantage.
And then there's green. Most of the things green does in constructed are painfully obvious. They lay some undercosted two drop and swing in with him. They get wrathed and lay some more creatures. And then they overrun and kill you. Or they don't. The closest thing they get to clever are giant growth effects, which work like bad removal or bad burn spells. They do see play from time to time in constructed, but not that often these days.
Mono green decks aren't very popular on the tournament scene. Playing one entails beating your opponent into submission, with very little room for subtlety. If we took flash from blue (which would still have counterspells and card drawing at instant speed), we could give it to green, which allows them a chance to set up more clever interactions, especially if the flash creatures get enters the battlefield triggers. Briarhorn is my all star example here. While it can be played like any other pump spell for it's evoke cost, if you play it for it's regular cost it becomes a natural two for one (eating an attacking creature and leaving a 3/3 for you). This helps the green mage grind out card advantage, and gain position by being more clever than his opponents. If you allow green mages to be more clever, you'll get more tournament players playing primarily green decks.
3) What block do you feel did the best job of integrating design with creative? What is one more thing that could have been done to make it even better?
My initial impulse was to go with Shadowmoor, because the whole "world of light plunged into darkness" thing is pretty cool, and you get to do the whole death and decay thing with wither. Persist works pretty well too; Murderous Redcap is so evil that you have to kill him more than once, in good horror story tradition. On the other hand, the best justification I can get for the untap symbol is the whole mirror universe thing, and hybrid mana and retrace don't really fit in that well.
As my brother points out, on the other hand, Shards of Alara does really well. Five different mini worlds each with their own mechanics. Let's go around the circle, shall we?
Bant: Exalted fits in very well with the whole idea of armies settling their difference in duels between champions, which in turn makes very much flavor sense in a world where chaos and death magic (red and black) are absent.
Esper: Everything's robots! While the whole "be an artifact" mechanical connection isn't very deep, I love the whole "remake the world with permanent metal" bit, especially since, absent red and green magic, there's very little that can destroy artifacts. The occasional Dispeller's capsule can, but the present black magic has a harder time.
Grixis. You take a world of darkness, with no light or life magic, and what do you get? Ever growing armies of the undead. Necromancers and demons fighting it out to get at the ever dwindling supply of life to feed off of. The best part is the noble king who wised to the situation first and slaughtered his entire family to become a lich. Sedris, the traitor king. Mechanically, this is represented by Unearth, which means that pretty much anything that Grixis used comes back for one last huzzah as a zombie. Awesome.
Jund. Jund is a world without any forces of order to slow down the chaos. Dragons eat the ogre, who eat the viashino, who eat the goblins. Or something like that. Jund is all about devouring your neighbor before your neighbor devours you. Which makes Devour, a mechanic that literally does that, pretty darn cool.
Naya: Naya's main theme is behemoths, huge freaking creatures. Naya is in Green, White and Red, which allows it to make huge creatures, and it excludes blue or black magic, which have the easy ways of dealing with them. Also works really well.
Granted that some of the things from later sets didn't fit in very well (Domain is fun, yeah, but sort of out of place, for example), Shards of Alara as a block did better at this than the others.
4) R&D has recently been looking at rules in the game that aren't pulling their weight. If you had to remove an existing rule from the game for not being worth its inclusion, what would it be?
The untap step. Why should we untap our permanents when we can just play more? Seriously though, you could make "untap all your permanents" a game action that happens at the beginning of your upkeep and you could skip an entire step. Moreso, skip a unique step where nobody gets a chance to do anything. Drawing your card already works that way, so there's precedent.
5) Name a card currently in Standard that, from a design standpoint, should not have been printed. What is the card and why shouldn't we have printed it?
My first impulse is Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Never mind the price tag, Jace has the problem of being too good. When a particular card is good enough that any deck running that color has to ask itself "why am I not running a full set of this?", then maybe you should wonder if it's too powerful. Jace fits the bill, and it isn't even a role filler like Lightning Bolt or Memory Leak. It adds card advantage and board control and hey, maybe even a win condition to your deck.
The other thing is, brainstorm, while a very fun ability to a large number of players, probably shouldn't have been reprinted next to the fetchlands. It's already a significant amount of card advantage, it'd lead to a lot less fiddling and shuffling if your blue mage had to work a bit to get his shuffle effects. As it is, it produces an effect like Sensei's divining top, if a little less pronounced.
Also, Jace was printed to make blue a little stronger than it had been. Blue was feeling the hurt between the rotation of cryptic command and the printing of Jace. Given that it's been dominant for the entire rest of the freaking game, you'd think they could have waited a little longer.
That's one option. My friend Stephen suggests Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. Emrakul, by being the biggest, baddest creature they've printed yet becomes the goto character for pretty much any combo deck. In vintage, for example, you can tinker out Darksteel Colossus or Inkwell Leviathan depending on what you expect to face. It's a legitimate choice. If they hadn't printed Emrakul, you could still argue choices between Progenitus or Kozilek or Ulamog or even something else, like Magister Sphinx. But when you're getting a free creature, Emrakul is just better than the competition, which makes for less interesting deckbuilding decisions.
The other thing is the "shuffle your graveyard into your library" thing is a cool idea, but it really screws over anybody trying to make a milling deck. And there's always somebody.
That, and when Emrakul hits the ground it's about as close to game over as anything in Magic is. Without the extra turn or the annihilator 6 it might reasonable to deal with. Without the extra turn you get sorcery speed options to deal with it (Journey to Nowhere, Aether Adept, Day of Judgment), with the turn you'd better have something on the board, or you're pretty much dead. (Not complaining about his protection ability, that's pretty cool.) Alternately, with a lower Annihilator value he would only kill a couple permanents of yours, you wouldn't sacrifice half your mana base just to stay alive. And that runs head first into the lesson of Zuran Orb; anything that makes you sacrifice your lands to survive just prolongs your inevitable demise.
6) What do you think design can do to best make the game accessible to newer players?
Now that's a tough one. The main barriers to entry for the game are price and knowledge. You could print sets less frequently, and with more reprints, but that cuts into the more experience players, with respect to point seven. And there are other things that they can't do, because it would hurt sales (make the best manafixing lands uncommon). If I was R&D, I'd try to make each set so it had a strong linear deck available that could be built mostly with commons and uncommons. For example, kithkin from Lorwyn. 4 Wizened Cenn, 4 Knight of Meadowgrain, 4 Goldmeadow Stalwart and 4 Goldmeadow harrier are plenty to produce a solid core for the deck. You can toss in four oblivion rings for creature kill, and whatever appropriate rares you get your hands on. It makes a strong casual deck, and Kithkin decks were tournament viable, if perhaps more expensive because of the Windbrisk Heights and Figures of Destiny.
7) What do you think design can do to best make the game attractive to experienced players?
Pretty much the opposite of last one. Although less focused on price issues, to become an experienced magic player you have to come to terms with that barrier to entry. To keep people playing the game you need to give them new experiences. The good news is that Magic has this built in, what with new cards coming in and sets rotating fairly often. Your more experienced players are less willing to stick with a relatively simple deck, or alternately are more willing to play more difficult decks or explore the murkier areas of deck design. So to keep your more experience players playing R&D needs to design interesting, synergistic cards that don't necessarily confine themselves to one kind of deck.
8) Of all the mechanics currently in Extended, which one is the best designed? Explain why.
Persist. Let me say that again, only with a -1/-1 counter. Persis. For starters, Magic is a game of two for ones. If your card isn't generating some sort of advantage, then why are you playing it? Especially in midrange decks you want your cards to be worth more than one unit of cardboard. Blightning not only makes them discard two cards, but it also damages them for three. Oracle of Mul Daya lets you play another land as soon as it hits play, hopefully off the top of your deck. Aether Adept gives you a 2/2 as well as an unsummon. Two for ones give you naturally powerful cards, which draws the spikes to them, and they make for naturally fun decks. Giving a creature an "enters the battlefield" trigger makes it a natural two for one. If then you allow them to come back and do it again, it's a great feeling. Even if the effect is pretty small, you still feel like you're getting something for free.
Furthermore, it's inherently a creature mechanic. As Mr. Rosewater has said before and as I heartily agree with him, Magic is most fun when it's a battle between creatures. A good, fun creature based mechanic helps promote that.
The "play it exactly twice" mechanic allows you to make reasonably powerful but not overpowered creatures with it. Since it's not infinitely repeatable you get power without having so many worries about balance issues. And it does give your opponents ways to interact with it, via wither effects or graveyard hate or even better two for ones of their own. Alternately, it appeals to the Johnny segment of the playerbase because it allows so many ways to get around playing only twice. Either by infinities (the morningtide lords, the ranger from coldsnap), or bit by bit. (Kitchen Finks next to Oren-Rief, the Vastwood is pretty cool, or Murderous Redcap next to Reveillark)
Lastly, it's a "protect my creature" mechanic, and we all hate losing our creatures. So Timmy who gets his giant Woodfall Primus out can blow something up with confidence that, even if his treefolk burns he'll get to blow something else up.
9) Of all the mechanics currently in Extended, which one is the worst designed? Explain why.
A couple candidates come to mind for this one. Chronologically:
Clash. Clash is an inherently random mechanic, which to some people is very fun but to others not so fun at all. I mean, I get that the difference between clashing and winning and clashing and losing is made not so huge that it won't break me if I keep losing clashes, but by that same token it makes me less excited to win them. The chance of winning a clash is less than 50% on it's own, and the value in manipulating your deck to change that is usually pretty small. Furthermore, Rosewater has asserted that when someone looks at the next card in their deck for the clash it feels like a mini game, where you're excited to see what happens next. Usually it feels to me like a mini game where I'm annoyed that the main game paused.
Next up is Retrace. Retrace allows you to replay a spell by discarding a land and paying the spell's original casting cost. Unfortunately, the spell potentially can be recast many, many times so they can't put anything too powerful on your average retrace spell. (I think we've all learned our lesson from capsize.) The cards are also designed under the assumption that you'll be playing them when you've already got all your mana, so something simple like Monstrify ends up being a giant growth variant for four. Or Oona's Grace- all your lands now have Cycling 2U. Exciting, isn't it? The other problem is, it's not just play this from your graveyard, it's also play it by discarding lands. People like to play out their lands; it's part of what made Zendikar great. Unless you're engaging in Life from the Loam shenanigans (which I wouldn't recommend) retrace is usually a waste of your time.
Lastly, Stephen suggested poison. Now I haven't had much chance to play with Scars yet, so I don't know how this is going to play out by and large. He does make some good points though. Historically poison has been pretty unimpressive; swamp mosquito is the only playable card, and that one not really because there's nothing to play around it. Virulent sliver made for an interesting trick draft deck (And one heck of a pro tour story), but that was it. Now, well, maybe. Part of the problem is that poison is a win condition that you get by attacking people in the combat step. Sound like, oh, regular combat damage to you too? Only it also requires a massive commitment; it does you no good to have them at ten life and five poison counters. And then there's the fact that it breaks EDH. If giving your creatures double strike is good, quadruple strike must be even better (since 1 poison counter =4 life in that format.) And to top it off, if you make the blight dragon your general you can never kill them on general damage; the poison counters will get them first. On the other hand, I'm still not willing to judge it without playing it some more.
All in all though, I'm going with "Retrace" as the worst mechanic in current extended.
10) Choose a plane to revisit other than Dominaria or Mirrodin. What is a mechanical twist we could add if we revisit this plane?
Thematically? I'd love to visit Lorwyn/Shadowmoor again. With the day/night cycle constrained by powerful magic for the past I don't know how long, then there are probably some drastic repercussions for letting that go now. Suppose that the natural order can't reassert itself immediately, that the plane shifts unstably between week long days and nights. These mini auras would reshape the land, occasionally also reshaping the minds of the inhabitants. Natually this would end badly. A curious Lorwyn Boggart stumbles into a Shadowmoor Kithkin Clachan, a Shadowmoor Elf is banned from Lorwyn Elf society because of his scars. That sort of thing. And there would be other effects as well.
Now how we express that mechanically is another matter. Since we're essentially fusing two blocks, it's going to be combining elements from the two, and naturally adding a twist of our own. Of the two major elements, I think color matters will do better for a repeat than tribe matters. And I'll continue to think that until Wizards stops downplaying Zombies as a tribe. As the tribes are spread over three colors between the two blocks, this also allows for more options, especially with hybrid mana. You can run your R/G hybrid goblins alongside your B/R hybrid goblins, but you might want to splash black anyways for a straight black goblin, or the other way around. Additionally, since R&D have been looking to repeat old and good mechanics, it'll be easy to rip one off of either block. You might have noticed me being a fan of persist a bit earlier, but there are other good options.
But I need to describe some mechanical themes of my own. Howabout transformation? You've already got changelings and mimics which play into the theme, other things can be made. Blue's cloning abilities could be hyped up. You could even go so far as to make new flip cards, like from Kamigawa, but that would probably be pushing it.
Specifically, Blue/Black could have a mind wiping theme; imagine rogue auroramancers who have learned to manipulate those magical energies to reshape the minds of others. Although maybe that should be shifted to Red/Black. Blue already gets the clone portion of the mechanics. And red presents a fun twist on it: mages who are using the aurora but have no idea of the results they'll achieve. Blue can come in as the occasional mind control. Black gets it's usual discard effects and so forth reconcepted as using the aurora to rip minds, red gets threaten effects and anything else that fits the bill. I keep imagining a goblin somewhere repeatedly mindwiping himself and never noticing.
As for green, Green gets off too lightly in the villain department. What if Green's main motivation (and the elves in general) is to force the tumultuous terrain into a new natural order? Only green is deciding what is natural, and it's perfectly fine with completely wrecking other people's stuff as long as it's getting closer to it's ultimate vision of nature. SO green gets effects like Muonvuli Acid moss, destroying opposing permanents and replacing them with forests, or at least basic lands. Unfortunately you can't push green into creature kill without seriously distorting the color pie, so it'll have to get it from white. Because it's only been a week since Path to Exile rotated and already I want it back.
Can you tell I didn't really have much of an idea how to answer that last question? I certainly went on and on about it. And yeah, if I wanted to turn this stuff in I'd have to confine myself to the 350 word limit per question. That would have been hard. In any case, I'll be continuing this as the great designer search goes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)