Just for reference, as a control player myself, old-school control decks didn't have to play "big bombs" to win the game like current control decks do, they simply won through attacking for small amounts of damage each turn with manlands or my personal favorite, millstone. The problem with modern Magic is that the creatures are getting more and more powerful while the noncreature spells (outside of a few outliers such as Jace, the Mind Sculptor, which happens to be one of my favorite cards of all time) are getting weaker than they used to be, and this trend makes aggressive decks much stronger and control decks weaker.
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Magic: The Gathering
- Thread starter Zystral
- Start date
I hope the 5-ability walker is Sorin )): Liliana is cool and all, but Sorin is supposedly the second-oldest walker other than Bolas, and no one else is supposed to come close. It'd be nice to see him kick some major ass, rather than making another of the babywalkers (yeah I know Liliana is still an oldwalker, but not like ancient old) supergood like Jace the Mind Sculptor.
thanks for the advice guys. aforementioned friend and i are going to go to a gaming hall in the city this week to play some of our friends who live in the area as well as whoever else shows up. apparently the place gives you a free 30-card pack with the purchase of a booster, so hopefully i'll get some good new cards to refine my deck with!
In addition, the design philosophy of R&D at the moment is to make creatures a more core part of the game, so creatures these days often play the roles that once were occupied by noncreature spells, thus blockers are often more relevant that removal and so on.
some people on the wizards forum are saying it could be that new izzet guy from duels of the planeswalkers 2012, which would be quite the introduction for a new planeswalker.
i'm really looking forward to previews next week.
This is a conscious decision, though. Old "Draw, Go" style decks that play their whole game in the opponent's end phase and have a single Rainbow Efreet in the whole deck as a kill condition? They are really, really boring, both to play and to face. R&D sat down and said, "Let's make Counterspell cost 1UU, let's make some 1-mana, 2-power guys that can let aggro consistently race control (a matchup it's supposed to win anyway), and let's stop making so many good Instants." They banned Sensei's Divining Top in Extended to stop games from taking a million years, took Wrath of God out of Standard, etc.
All of this comes down to a single philosophy shift: they used to think that not letting your opponent play with his cards was interactive. Now they think that interactivity comes when both decks get to actually do something most of the time. I am 100% on board with this. Stax, Forbidden Phoenix, Turbo Stasis, Pirates, etc. are all annoying as hell and destructive to the competitive scene.
It's very unlikely. Ral is depicted in Ravnica in the artwork, and does not fit into the 'horror' genre - it is therefore very unlikely that he is appearing in Innistrad block.
ITT butthurt aggro player is mad about losing to skillful control players (this line should be read with heavy sarcasm)
Seriously though, control is supposed to prey on aggro decks. Combo decks have an inherent advantage against control decks because they have inevitability, where as they are on a fast clock against an aggro deck and must race to assemble their combo before dieing. I'm not saying that things like Smokestack, Tangle Wire, Stasis, etc. are good for the game, I'm just saying that interactive decks are far more interesting to play and watch than simply watching two red mages see who can draw more goblin guides.
Nah, if he debuts I would bet they are waiting for Ravnica2, though I suppose Niv-Mizzet as a walker would be a mite cooler/more flavorful for a Ravnica redux. The Black walkers have been woefully underused thus far, so I'd like to see them totally underestimate the power of one like they did with Jace ]: Esp since Sorin is such a fucking boss character d:
As far as I know, it's been confirmed that there are only two planeswalkers in Innistrad, Garruk and Liliana. I don't remember where this was posted though.
Remember, MaRo likes to play games. His "five loyalty abilities" could mean an ability that does ±5 loyalty counters. This is from a guy who said "Worldwake will have a creature that is even bigger than Phyrexian Dreadnought for the same price!" and we got Death's Shadow...
Remember, MaRo likes to play games. His "five loyalty abilities" could mean an ability that does ±5 loyalty counters. This is from a guy who said "Worldwake will have a creature that is even bigger than Phyrexian Dreadnought for the same price!" and we got Death's Shadow...
Niv-Mizzet was confirmed not to be a Planeswalker by the then-Creative Director.
I don't know why people are so keen for him to be a Walker, though, since flavour-wise he fills the same sort of role that Bolas does.
Oh god, Death's Shadow...soooo bad.
I finally got around to downloading Cockatrice and making an EDH deck on it. I do like how every card is right there at your fingertips.
Looking forward to rotation. I'm so tired about hearing Caw-blade this and Caw-blade that and Caw-blade wins nobel peace prize, caw-blade, caw-blade, caw-blade. I have never hated a deck so much in my life. I'd rather get rolled three times in a row by NO RUG than face one caw-blade deck. Need more Innistrad spoilers though. I'm pretty set on playing Birthing Pod G/U/?. I'm just not sure what to slash for the third color. White is pretty far in the lead with Elesh Norn being a damn good reason to play W.
I finally got around to downloading Cockatrice and making an EDH deck on it. I do like how every card is right there at your fingertips.
Looking forward to rotation. I'm so tired about hearing Caw-blade this and Caw-blade that and Caw-blade wins nobel peace prize, caw-blade, caw-blade, caw-blade. I have never hated a deck so much in my life. I'd rather get rolled three times in a row by NO RUG than face one caw-blade deck. Need more Innistrad spoilers though. I'm pretty set on playing Birthing Pod G/U/?. I'm just not sure what to slash for the third color. White is pretty far in the lead with Elesh Norn being a damn good reason to play W.
Green seems like its losing its best ramp with zendikar rotating, that being said, ever since Alera there has always been good ramp in green, and we'll see if that continues in innistrad. (Wait for that 0/1 for 1G that taps and adds G to you pool for every card in your graveyard).
This is not the conventional wisdom at all. The traditional rock-paper-scissors rule is that aggro beats control, control beats combo, and combo beats aggro. This is because control can easily disrupt combo enough to make it fall apart, while aggro cannot. Meanwhile, countering or killing a few or even most creatures does not help when just one 4/4 of the 8 in their deck has to stick and then you are dead in 5 shots (often 4, since control likes to spend life points on things). Meanwhile, creatures kill too slowly to beat a combo deck (if a combo does not out-goldfish the fastest aggro deck, then the combo is not viable in that meta).
Certainly there are control decks that beat some aggro decks, in a metagame-specific way. For example, Glare beat Zoo in Ravnica/Kamigawa Standard. But Glare isn't really a "control" deck; it's a hybrid deck that is really "slightly slower aggro with special cards to beat faster aggro."
Just Google "aggro beats control," and you will find a lot of articles like this one about the standard rule. Google "control beats aggro" and you will find forum posts about specific metagames, like people complaining that "thanks to Jace, the new rock-paper-scissors is control beats aggro, control beats combo, and control beats control."
I proposed an MTG tourney in Circus Maximus if anybody's interested. It'd be preferably EDH or Legacy, but whatever everyone decides on when/if it comes together will be the format we use.
Well, we can take the majority opinion on what format when we confirm if this would be successful/something people'd want to do...
I wouldnt say that 1v1 EDH is less fun than 1v1 Legacy (And I compare it to legacy because the top competitive EDH decks are also built to combo out as fast as possible). Rather, I would say its much more luck based, and thus a less fair format to play than 1v1 Legacy.
For example, a turn one Sol Ring into Sensei's Divining Top in EDH often leads to the an automatic win in 1v1 EDH, and yet it is honestly strictly luck based (Mulliganing is extremely inefficient in a 99 card singleton format). Yet, in Legacy, if I turn 1 Dark Ritual into Hymn to Tourach after an aggressive Mulligan, thats hardly luck and simply good play.
Point is, I do enjoy 1v1 EDH play at the top level, but for a serious 1v1 type tournament, I would also heed against it.
The rock-paper-scissors argument has NEVER been true, regardless of the way it's structured; it entirely depends on the available cards in the format, and what specific brand of control people mean. People who refer to it do so in a very clumsy and inaccurate way.
When people say "Combo is bad against Control", what they mean is "Combo has difficulty with counterspells or discard". But by no means is permission-or-discard the only way of building Control. For example, the GW Astral Slide combo deck that won Worlds in the hands of Julien Nujiten back in 200X. A splinter-twin type combo in that format would have destroyed Nujiten's deck because it's interaction was entirely based on what's on the board. Since Splinter Twin style combo decks are not based on the board (since they only put cards on the board when they win), the GW Slide has no game against it.
On the other hand, some Combo decks do not have a problem with permission, or Control. Take Owling Mine, the combo deck that was popularised in Kami-Rav Standard at Honolulu. It had an almost unlosable Control matchup, upwards of 85-15. But it couldn't beat the Aggro decks of the time, especially Zoo.
Sometimes, Aggro decks are bad against Combo. The Heartbeat of Spring combo decks were a good example - with no way to interact with your opponent's hand or spells, an Aggro deck (besides BW Hand) has only one option - kill the Heartbeat player before Turn 4-5 (i.e. get a godhand). Short of that, you will often not do enough damage in time and they will combo off in front of you, taking you from a 20-4 life total lead to a 0-4 loss.
There are plenty more examples, but you should never refer to a Rock-Paper-Scissors trichotomy in this form. There is far too much variance in the card pool and the archetypes of decks within the Aggro/Control/Combo umbrella terms to say that Control-is-generally-good-against-Aggro or vice-versa without specifically tying it to the particular metagame, e.g. "Combo, like Splinter Twin, in this format generally has a bad matchup with the dominant Control deck, because the Control deck plays 5 discard spells and 10 counters."
I vote for a Legacy Tournament. Lots of diversity plus a fast fun format. Bo3 games. Sideboards. As for how to set up the tournaments, I think a 5 Round Swiss would be fun and easy. Then we could do Top 8 or Top 4 depending on how many people come out. Atleast this way we would have a lot more games and you aren't so depend on bad matchups. Just my 2 cents
Modern is ok. I think its still a fairly young metagame that needs a little more time for development and to early for tournaments, but I'd be ok with this tournament as well.
Also, lets face it, Standard sucks dick like Fig said. Caw Blade is basically what you have to run in order to keep up or otherwise you need to get some lucky draws with Valakut or other decks. Sure there are exceptions, especially if you look at the last StarCityGames tournament. But otherwise, Caw Blade is the way to go.
EDH 1v1 is really all about whether you want to auto-win with mono-blue control or Jur enchant decks. Sure there are a lot of decks, but I wouldn't enter this kind of tournament. Would just bore me, especially if people ran unfair decks.
Modern is ok. I think its still a fairly young metagame that needs a little more time for development and to early for tournaments, but I'd be ok with this tournament as well.
Also, lets face it, Standard sucks dick like Fig said. Caw Blade is basically what you have to run in order to keep up or otherwise you need to get some lucky draws with Valakut or other decks. Sure there are exceptions, especially if you look at the last StarCityGames tournament. But otherwise, Caw Blade is the way to go.
EDH 1v1 is really all about whether you want to auto-win with mono-blue control or Jur enchant decks. Sure there are a lot of decks, but I wouldn't enter this kind of tournament. Would just bore me, especially if people ran unfair decks.
I like the fact they banned JTMS and SFM from Standard but all that did was take Caw-Blade from being completely broken beyond recognition to still horribly broken but leaves you the illusion of having a chance to win by playing another deck. I've been playing Mono-Green Eldrazi ever since last year's rotation (played RDW prior) and I love the deck but I just get my ass handed to me whenever I face that deck.