Finished building a first draft of my Rocco, Street Chef deck. It's focused on the ABCs: Adventures, Battles, and Cascade. All three give you casts from exile, leaving you with a whole bunch of food and +1/+1 counters to throw around. I can't wait to try it out this weekend 🙂
What I'm currently excited about in the world of #MtGLordOfTheRings previews:
#MtGLTR - Stone of Erech. It won't win games on its own, but efficiently costed graveyard hate tends to retain value pretty well, and this little uncommon even replaces itself when you sacrifice it. I suspect Modern is going to at least tinker with this as an alternative to Relic of Progenitus.
#MtGLTC - Feasting Hobbit, because a block-evading 8/8 (or more) that can reliably hit the ground on turn 3 is just too fun. It's not efficient or resilient enough to be competitive, but I just can't say no to the possibility of winning with a kraken-sized hobbit.
Honorable mention to Eagles of the North for being just... kind of terrible, all the way around. (It isn't even that great a common pick in limited, which is obviously the only format where it'll see much play to begin with.) I knew these cards couldn't all be winners.
In case anyone else was wondering this with respect to the Ringbearer effect that makes your creatures legendary, the legend rule says that if you have two creatures with the same name that are both legendary, you can only keep one of them. If only one is legendary, the legend rule doesn't come into effect. So if you have two spirit tokens, you can make one of them the ringbearer without worrying that it will instantly go poof.
Topped off a long work day with a chaos draft at the pub for the weekly draft. We did SNC-MOM-DMU (in that order) and I rode a P1P1 Raffine to a very sold esper list:
Vs Abzan midrange: 2-1
Vs Bant control: 2-0
Vs Grixis control: 1-2
Final record: 2-1
Was a fun way to unwind, chat with friends, and play some games. Good stuff!
@tomscud@nikikole@ChaoticGood007 Okay, I will tell you guys what I want to do. And it's stupid. Not stupid good but just stupid. I want to go infinite with Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider and Jace, Cunning Castaway.
Assuming Vorinclex is in play first you can cast and ultimate Jace right away and keep making copies. So other than that combo the deck just needs to survive and have other synergies to keep Vorinclex/Jace from being dead cards on their own.
My favorite deck for the MTGA Historic Pauper event - mono-blue spells that aims to spam a million spells into the graveyard and then beat face with 1-mana tolarian terrors and 8/8 or larger tokens from Serpentine Curve. Mystic Sanctuary almost always wants to bring back Curve. There's just enough interaction to disrupt the other linear decks in the format.
My basic ass can't wait to start messing around with Hobbit/Food decks, and with how broad the appeal of #MagicLTR is likely to be, I doubt I'll be the only one. Better lock in those $0.50 MOC Gilded Goose cards (Gilded Geese?) now! #MtG#MagicTheGathering#MtGLTR
I'm now at the point where I actually can't remember the last time I went first in a game on MTGArena. I know it's been at least 3 days, which is likely 20+ games ago.
In the current Standard meta, you can (accurately) guess how low my winning percentage is over that time.
Drawing a card isn't enough to rebalance the game anymore, and it's becoming almost unplayable. WotC needs to start issuing some corrections for the overpowered 1-drops.
I think one of the best ways that the Magic: The Gathering Lord of the Rings set is paying homage to to the original stories is that by the time I get halfway through reading most of the cards, I've lost interest and moved on to something else.
It's been around three months since I started playing Magic. Since then, I've played mainly mono white. I invested all my wildcards into the deck, and I'm just slowly building up a collection for other strategies. Since I don't have a lot of experience with building Magic decks and I'm missing a lot of card knowledge, most of the decks I (want to) use are copied from the internet or adjusted with a little bit of personal flavor. They're a base for me to learn the game itself, but I'm missing out on a lot of building know-how. That's something I want to change!
Starting today, I'll post sort of a diary for my deck building process. I'll build a new deck every other day. But I don't want to invest in new cards I might not need for bigger projects. So, I'll build decks only using my limited card pool that I collected in the last couple of months as a F2P player.
Day 1: :white: :green: :blue: +1/+1 counter
This is my first attempt because a lot of strategies I enjoy are focused on counters. This deck is more or less a hybrid of two decks I'm currently building anyway (Heavily "stolen" from others). It's just missing the same key cards 😅😅
The most important card in the deck is Brokers Ascendancy, which creates very explosive growth together with Botanical Brawler and Kami of Whispered Hopes. Jugan defends the Tempel and the Planeswalkers are also doing a lot of work.
The biggest downside is the lack of early removal because the deck tends to be overwhelmed with opponents building an aggressive board state early on, but I'm considering getting rid of some other cards to make room for it. I'm just not sure about which removal would be the most useful with Ossification and Lay Down Arms dead to the lack of basic lands.
I played the deck in Standard without rank. Win rate was pretty even. The deck has a lot of potential and I'm excited to play a more refined version in the future.
Nothing really big for a couple of days. I mostly played the first deck I invested in when I started playing Arena. It's a mono white deck that doesn't play a lot of creatures and is more focused on Planeswalkers and Boardwipes. The deck is a high-risk, high reward build that can struggle a lot with most Aggro decks. It's still one of the decks I play and enjoy the most. I'm also most comfortable with it and its interactions. That results in more wins, which is also fun.
Today, I made a second version of the deck to change things up a little bit and to keep up with building more decks and increasing my skills. The second build is more focused on creatures and tries to utilize Serra Paragon with things like Ossification, Spirited Companion, and Ambitious Farmhand. Another key card to win games in this build is Steel Seraph. The deck is influenced by a lot of other mono white builds and performing quite well so far.
I enjoy playing both decks, but the original build is definitely more fun when the board goes crazy (with planeswalkers).
I made a deck based on one of my favorite mechanics - Life Gain. It's also the first thing I played on Arena before I invested any wildcards to play Standard format.
I decided to also build the current deck for Alchemy. The reason was the lack of cards. Especially Voice of the Blessed. It was impossible to make a playable deck in Standard, but Hallowed Priest and Impassioned Orator are helping a lot to make up for the missing cards.
I decided to go for white and green, which is different from the mono white version I played before. The reason is the inclusion of Kami and Ozolith. They're helping a lot with the growth rate of the priest. I'll definitely put more Ozolith in the deck in the future.
At the moment, it's more of a 50:50 win rate deck, but I'm enjoying it and want to work on it a bit more.
Also played a Standard event with the Mono White creature deck from the last post and went 3-3. I'm happy with the results. It's not a perfect deck, and it was the first time I played the event. 3-3 seems very reasonable. I also had some bad, very Aggro match-ups in the last battles, which also doesn't help with a slow mono white build popping off.
I'm starting to have second thoughts about the LotR set.
[EDIT: Let me be clear this feeling isn't about race-swapping in the card art, which is a choice I support. If you feel the need to discuss that, please do so elsewhere.]
I was extremely pumped for this set and intended to buy a ton of it, but so far the designs haven't really interested me as a player, and the cards haven't captured the story of LotR the way I anticipated. I don't think I've seen a single flavor text yet and we've seen a lot of cards [EDIT: on further viewing, there's a lot, even vanilla creatures!], and some choices seem antithetical to the LotR lore, like Sauron being a creature we can see.
I don't know, I'm not as into it as I thought I'd be. Maybe it's a better idea to spend the budget I planned for this set on Commander Masters instead?