The General Magic: The Gathering Thread

[Kapol]

Copter was ultra-efficient and ubiquitous, which made it a much more likely hit for a banning. Reflector Mage is more surprising. But others have talked about how it'd help push U/W to be the dominant archetype with Copter and Emrakul gone. So it does make sense.

The timing is the weird part for me. But WotC was kind of forced to do it before the new answers had a chance to play out. Otherwise you run into the situation where each new release has no bannings so they can allow answers to muddy the water. Bannings being with each new release was likely a poor idea to be honest. Though they've also fixed that by giving a new B&R list update halfway through the season.

[fantôme]

I don't follow Modern, so couldn't comment on Probe & Troll, but am very surprised at all three Standard bans.

Copter was busted, but there were plenty of ways to deal with it, and more excellent answers coming in AER. It being ubiquitous is the only problem I see with it, but with control & combo looking stronger in the new set - I don't believe that problem would have persisted.

Emrakul was not impossible to beat when she came out, just that she came out too quickly. Treat Aetherworks Marvel as a combo deck, and there were a reasonable number of sideboard options to deal with it - as with any other combo.

Reflector Mage makes the least sense. Copter was more important to u/w flash than Emrakul was to b/g delirium, and any shift in the meta would not last past AER release anyway. But more to the point, Mage was not at all the most guilty in making u/w flash so good.

I personally didn't run any of them, but banning three cards from Standard really hugely sucks for (especially newer) players who have invested in these cards.

[Booster]

I think the problem with Emrakul is that if she does come down, you need to have the answer exactly second from the top of your deck or you just lose. At last FNM she came down when I had a stasis snare in hand, and then on my stolen turn OP drew a second one, so they got used on my creatures, and there was just nothing I could do.

[fantôme]

Don't forget Stasis Snare has flash, you can exile Emrakul before the end of the turn on which she was cast. But having protection from instants, you make a very valid point for every other removal spell in the format.

[square1]

"When Stasis Snare enters the battlefield, exile target creature an opponent controls until Stasis Snare leaves the battlefield."

Opponent can't target your creatures with your Stasis Snare

[phlip]

So, I was watching the AER crack-a-case stream VOD, and realised there was something of an opportunity there...

Cause, obviously you can tell the distribution of the normal cards in boosters. And we know how often you get a foil (1 in 67 cards, it's in the fine print on the boosters). But I've never been able to find out the distribution within the foil cards... because there's no technical reason why it would have to be any particular arrangement... the ratio of rares to mythics would have to be the same as for non-foil cards, since they're on the same sheet, but other than that, it's just down to how many of each sheet they print. I've typically guessed it's the same ratio as the normal cards... 10 commons to 3 uncommons to 1 rare/mythic, but that's just a guess, with nothing to back it up.

But then LRR cracked open a case, and James helpfully gathered all the foils and showed them off to the chat, so I was able to get a count.

So, from a case, they open 6*36*15=3240 cards, from which you'd expect to get 3240/67≈48 foils... they actually opened 46, which is slightly below average but definitely well within the bounds of chance.

But then, those 46 foils are: 4 basic land, 22 commons, 13 uncommons, 7 rares. Which is definitely not even close to a 1:10:3:1 ratio. Closer to 1:5:3:2, but it's not really have enough data to nail it down. But definitly suggests that the foil distribution is noticably more rare-heavy than non-foils. Which matches up with what I'm seeing online... the 1:10:3:1 ratio would suggest a foil mythic on average once every ~2.4 cases, but I've seen shop-owners online saying they're closer to average 1 per case.

I'd love to have more data, though... I know there's a number of people who make crack-a-box videos on the youtubes... is there anyone here who follows that sort of thing that can make recommendations? Ideally ones that give a rundown of all the foils opened at the end, like James did, for ease of data-collection...

[Dredrik]

Does anyone have a decklist of Bens deck from the most recent TTC? (TTC 159)

[virre]

Does anyone have a decklist of Bens deck from the most recent TTC? (TTC 159)

Somebody linked it in the youtube comments
http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/aristocrats-wip/

[korvys]

Got interested in MTG card alters due to TTC talking about the Gravedigger with the coffee mug, and decided to give it a go:
https://twitter.com/korvys/status/827482073199882241

Already posted this in the Art thread, but thought it might be appreciated here as well.

[phlip]

So, they cracked an Unhinged pack to pad time on LRRMtG this week, and it reminded me of the lightly-curated Unhinged/Unglued set-cube I built a while back, and I figured people might be interested to see it, so I took the list and posted it online.

Cube List
Motivation and Choices

[Lycodrake]

Saw this earlier on a slide, but here's the actual "full art" of an Amonkhet creature. Sobek- or Ammut/Ammit-based dragon and/or god perhaps? Super hyped just because of this art.

The Trials are connected to "Solidarity, Knowledge, Strength, Ambition and Zeal". Oddly not in WUBRG order, if we take them as "W, U, G, B, and R". Perhaps we really will see another shard-colored block/plane?

Oh and the next PW decks will be Chad and Lili.

[scarbble]

I am mildly excite about amonkhet, but for me it will be really hard to beat kaladesh block. The whole inventor theme really was my jam in so many ways.

[chetoos]

I think someone should compile a list of all of the 13s on cards in Shadows over innistrad block, from the direct 13s (triskaidekaphobia, emerakul) to the implicit ones (goldnight castigator, hanweir, the writhing township)

[Lycodrake]

I need Prowling Serpopard so much it hurts.

[AdmiralMemo]

Anyone else kind of hate the look of the Invocations? I have mixed opinions on them. Here are my opinions based on the categories I hear from most people.

Overall look: "This ain't a Magic card."
Monochrome mana costs: I'm actually fine with them.
Top border/middle divider art: Pretty awesome and on-style.
Font choice for card name/type: God-awful! Can't read it!
Adding extra symbols to those lines: Terrible and made it worse.
Centering all text on the card: I'm fine with it.
Expansion symbol: It's cool.
Text box font: Great. Wish they'd used it for the other stuff.
Bottom border: Seems dece.
Horns of Bolas around the Holofoil: Excellent!
Vertical Power/Toughness: Not a fan, but still a fine 6/10. It's certainly distinguishable as to what's what.
Color on vertical columns to indicate card color: Good move.
Vertical columns themselves: Tacky and bland.
Lack of a black border itself: Bad move.
Lack of machine-readable bottom text: They didn't really DO anything with that idea to begin with, so meh.
Smaller art frame: Bad idea.
Art itself: Superb!

All in all, half the innovations they came up with card design were fine-to-great, but the other half just bombed.

[phlip]

My thoughts on the Invocations look can be summed up as basically... it looks like they had a big brainstorming session to think of ideas, and then they used all of them.

[GlorySeer]

I agree with Phlip's summery. Personally, I think if they had made the frame to the sides of the art gold rather than stone colored, then have the 'paint' over that, it would have helped. I also would have not had the black sections to the sides of the text box and had that be gold as well. As it is, those sections feel like they segment the design in a really bad way to me. It makes it feel more cluttered and busy when a frame is meant to 'hold' the card instead of taking the focus from it.

I actually like the Hieroglyph font itself. Adding in the random pointless glyphs to the sides is an idea I don't understand how they went with.

One other big problem I have is with the art box. I don't like how the art is 'set' into the frame so much. But that I could live with. Who thought that adding in those two torch things was a good idea though!? To me, they really distract from the art, which is already small as it is. Like... having something like that sticking out, covering some of the art, just makes no sense. I understand wanting to have the border be a specific style, but that's the point where I feel they put too much emphasis on the card frame/border than the card itself.

Personally, this is more along the lines of what I would have wanted. Tthere are some changes I would have done, but that's more akin to what I would have wanted. It just looks cleaner to me.

[AdmiralMemo]

Most of the Heiroglyph font is OK, but it's difficult to read at a glance. Of note to me:

Ds read as Bs
Ns read as Rs
As don't work at first glance, can't say why
Ms don't work at first glance, can't say why
Ts just look bad to me, can't say why
The second cross-bar on the Hs looks bad to me

So really, I have a problem with 6 of the 26 letters, but they are all common letters, used frequently.

[bv310]

Which leads to some fun when the Red God looks like "The Pervert"

[theycallmejokke]

Dang it bv310! Now I can't unsee it.

[phlip]

So, I was watching the AER crack-a-case stream VOD, and realised there was something of an opportunity there...

Cause, obviously you can tell the distribution of the normal cards in boosters. And we know how often you get a foil (1 in 67 cards, it's in the fine print on the boosters). But I've never been able to find out the distribution within the foil cards... because there's no technical reason why it would have to be any particular arrangement... the ratio of rares to mythics would have to be the same as for non-foil cards, since they're on the same sheet, but other than that, it's just down to how many of each sheet they print. I've typically guessed it's the same ratio as the normal cards... 10 commons to 3 uncommons to 1 rare/mythic, but that's just a guess, with nothing to back it up.

But then LRR cracked open a case, and James helpfully gathered all the foils and showed them off to the chat, so I was able to get a count.

So, from a case, they open 6*36*15=3240 cards, from which you'd expect to get 3240/67≈48 foils... they actually opened 46, which is slightly below average but definitely well within the bounds of chance.

But then, those 46 foils are: 4 basic land, 22 commons, 13 uncommons, 7 rares. Which is definitely not even close to a 1:10:3:1 ratio. Closer to 1:5:3:2, but it's not really have enough data to nail it down. But definitly suggests that the foil distribution is noticably more rare-heavy than non-foils. Which matches up with what I'm seeing online... the 1:10:3:1 ratio would suggest a foil mythic on average once every ~2.4 cases, but I've seen shop-owners online saying they're closer to average 1 per case.

I'd love to have more data, though... I know there's a number of people who make crack-a-box videos on the youtubes... is there anyone here who follows that sort of thing that can make recommendations? Ideally ones that give a rundown of all the foils opened at the end, like James did, for ease of data-collection...

So adding in the numbers from the AKH crack-a-case... James only ran through the foils at the end for the first three boxes, and I'm not going to watch the other half just to try to catch all the foils (and I don't think I could scrub through looking for them without potentially missing some) so I'll just work with that.

From those 3 boxes, they open 23 foils... again slightly less than the expected 24ish... interestingly, exactly the same proportions as from AER.

Those 23 foils are 2 basics, 11 commons, 6 uncommons, 3 rares, and a mythic. Very similar ratios to the AER haul. Total counts of 6:33:19:11 (counting rares and mythics together, because we already know their respective ratio), which still looks like the ratio might be somewhere around 1:5:3:2... but just adding 3 more boxes to the stats isn't a massive chunk of data.

[phlip]

Since it came up on LRRMtG today, I wanted to crunch the numbers for how likely it is for a specific common to not be opened in a draft. Specifically: the chance that zero Garys are opened in a triple-Theros draft.

Click to Expand

So first off, let's consider the chance of opening Gary in a pack that doesn't contain a foil. The commons are arranged such that there's no duplicates in a pack, and we assume that the 101 commons in the set are all equally likely (actually not quite true, but it's close enough). And so the chance is simply:
N = 10/101 ≈ 9.9%
Note that we don't need to care about the print runs... yes, the way the collation works means that if we open some commons, it'll increase or decrease the odds of seeing Gary in that pack, depending on where they are on the sheets... but we don't actually care, because it all balances out either way.

Next up, we need to consider foil packs. These have 9 commons that work the same way as above, and one foil card. The foil card, as noted above, has an estimated 2/11 chance of being a common, and if it is, it's got a 1/101 chance of being Gary, independent of the nonfoil commons. Note that the possibility of having 2 Garys in a pack also means the chance of there being 0 Garys is higher, even among packs with where the foil is a common, because the EV is the same but the variance is higher. Since the foils and the nonfoils are independent, the chance we have at least one Gary in a foil pack is:
F = 1 - (1 - 9/101)(1 - 2/11 * 1/101) ≈ 9.1%

To combine these, there are 15 cards in each pack including the basic, and the legal text on the pack says there's a foil card in every 67 cards, which means there's a foil in every 15/67 packs. So the chance of getting Gary in a pack is:
P = (15/67)F + (1 - 15/67)N ≈ 9.7%

Finally, there's 24 packs opened in a draft, which in theory are supposed to be independent. IRL they probably aren't, if they all came from the same booster box, but online they probably are, or are close enough as makes no odds. So the chance that zero Garys are opened anywhere at the table is:
(1 - P)^24 ≈ 8.6% ≈ 1/11.6

tl;dr: the chance no-one at a table for a triple-Theros draft would open no Garys is a shade better than 1 in 12. Pretty unlucky, but not unreasonably so.

[Utilitarian]

Alright I just had this happen and I need somewhere to rant about:

Did you know that Lich's Mastery only prevents you from Losing the Game, but that your opponent can still Win the Game? This is, as far as I can see, the only card in MTG history that has a blanket "Can't Lose the Game" statement on it without a matching "Can't Win the Game" pair, thus opening it up to an opponent to still win via a card like Approach of the Second Sun. (or else the other cards specify limited conditions for losing like from having less than 0 life).

it's especially frustrating as in virtually every other instance of magic, "Can't" trumps "Can". But thanks, design team, for leaving this random door open on this card for no discernible reason, and not bothering to include the reminder text and hiding it on gatherer.

Because it's sure fun to have a card that says I can't lose in play, and then be confronted with a big old "YOU LOSE" screen.

this has been a rant about the templating of Lich's Mastery. Thank you for your time.

[SixFootTurkey]

While this does reside in between cards like Platinum Angel and those like Lich from a mechanical standpoint, it would make sense from flavor (it's the same as other lich cards) and mechanics/color (black doesn't appear to get opponent can't win). It wouldn't surprise me to see this templating going forward for future lich cards, as it takes up less space for minimal impact. Sure it makes them better against infect decks, but that seems a small price.

100% super frustrating to figure that out in game though.

[GlorySeer]

My opponent basically just lost the Phlottery on turn 4 in Momir. They used Momir on 4 and got Inverter of Truths. A card I had forgotten even existed.