xkcd

by **Plasma Man** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 8:31 am UTC

Thank you to all the people that have been posting advice, it's good to get other people's perspective on this. It's interesting to see that I've made decks that have included acceleration or card advantage, but haven't put the two together.
I picked up a few 2010 booster packs the other day and got a couple of good things, namely a Bird Of Paradise and a Lifelink. I'm going back to the shop to get some more today.
So, new decks I will build when I've picked up some more new cards:
1) Blue & green combo deck: This is one I figured out for myself a couple of weeks ago. If I put Presence Of Gond on a creature while I have Intruder Alarm in play, I can create infinite elf warrior tokens. Otherwise, I can use blue tap and untap cards to slow down my opponent and create more of the counters. I can have Llanowar Elves and Fyndhorn Elves for mana acceleration, plus some land finding spells. Throw in some Elvish Paragons and even if the combo doesn't come up, I should still have a solid deck.
2) An improved version of my current black and white deck. It currently works well, I pay life and take damage from the black, then prevent damage and gain life back with the white. I'm hoping to get some more copies of Lifelink, as I want to put Lifelink on my Banshees to gain life as I do damage.

I may also try a blue & black control deck. I like to play with a decent number of creatures, but I'm aware that creatureless decks have done quite well in the past, so it would be interesting to try to play without many creatures.

Otherwise, I think it will be a case of going through my existing decks and trying to make them work better, with accelaration and card advantage. Or if anyone has any other cool ideas to try, I have plenty of cards, so can give them a go.

by **Numzane** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 11:02 am UTC

Fin Archangel wrote:
Numzane wrote:
Fin Archangel wrote:My #1 rule about deck building: SIXTY. CARDS
Yeah, this. If you want to play competitively, you should be playing 60 cards except for very rare cases (e.g. a Battle of Wits deck). This ensure the best possible chance of drawing the best cards in your deck.
I'm flattered, but this is a misquote. rrwoods wrote this, not me, although I did say the same thing.

Whoops, my bad. I'll edit the original.

Plasma Man wrote:1) Blue & green combo deck: This is one I figured out for myself a couple of weeks ago. If I put Presence Of Gond on a creature while I have Intruder Alarm in play, I can create infinite elf warrior tokens. Otherwise, I can use blue tap and untap cards to slow down my opponent and create more of the counters. I can have Llanowar Elves and Fyndhorn Elves for mana acceleration, plus some land finding spells. Throw in some Elvish Paragons and even if the combo doesn't come up, I should still have a solid deck.

Sounds good, and potentially very quick. You could get infinite tokens on 3rd turn if you get Birds or Llanowar Evles turn 1, and the right cards in hand. Though, if I were you, I would try to work in some kind of card drawing or deck-searching to help getting the combo pieces rather than, say, tap/untap. Condescend, if you have any, is great for this kind of deck, since it slows down your opponent and helps to dig for your combo. That is, if you want to take it the combo route, which I would, but that's because I love UG combo style decks.

On another note, can someone tell me what the deal is with mythic rares? Like, format legality and so on. Are they just trying to make it easier for people to get vintage level cards? (Because there's a lot of really, really broken cards in the list of mythic rares.)

by **d0nk3y_k0n9** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 11:10 am UTC

Numzane wrote:On another note, can someone tell me what the deal is with mythic rares? Like, format legality and so on. Are they just trying to make it easier for people to get vintage level cards? (Because there's a lot of really, really broken cards in the list of mythic rares.)

As far as I know, mythic rare just means "more rare than rare".

As far as format legality, rarity has no effect on legality, only what set (or sets) the card is printed in and whether or not it is on a banned or restricted list for a given format.

by **Azrael001** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 12:45 pm UTC

Plasma Man wrote:2) An improved version of my current black and white deck. It currently works well, I pay life and take damage from the black, then prevent damage and gain life back with the white. I'm hoping to get some more copies of Lifelink, as I want to put Lifelink on my Banshees to gain life as I do damage.

If you are going to be concentrating on life gain at all, I would suggest considering Sanguine Bond. If you can get a decent number of Tendrils of Corruption, Corrupt and Consume Spirit, along with powerful lifelinkers lots of fun can be had.

by **Armadillo Al** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 2:02 pm UTC

Numzane wrote:On another note, can someone tell me what the deal is with mythic rares? Like, format legality and so on. Are they just trying to make it easier for people to get vintage level cards? (Because there's a lot of really, really broken cards in the list of mythic rares.)

They wanted to reduce the number of cards in each set, but do it in a way that would not reduce the number of packs that would be sold. The way they accomplished this was to add another rarity that is, essentially, twice as rare as 'rare'. This way, you still have to open 121 packs to have, on average, one complete set of Shards of Alara*.

I should note that this new rarity is not without precedent. If you remember the old days, not all rarities were created equal. It was common for sets to have rarities of C2, C1, U2, and U1, where the number referenced how many times the card appeared on the appropriate print run. (Heck, Alliances, the last set to do this, had interspersed between R1's and R2's, three cards with a rarity of R6, making them more common than most of the set's uncommons.)

* Shards has 53 rares and 15 mythic rares. The 'rare' sheet of the Shards print run contains two copies of every rare and one copy of every mythic rare. 53 + 53 + 15 = 121. (Magic cards are printed on sheets that measure 11 cards by 11 cards, which is why 121 is such a magic number.)

by **rrwoods** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 2:03 pm UTC

So, while I'm in the middle of doling (dholing? :-P

) out advice, I'd like to ask for some:

("Open the Vaults", Post M10 Standard)
4 Open the Vaults
4 Traumatize
4 Diabolic Tutor

4 Sanguine Bond
4 Filigree Angel
4 Tainted Sigil
4 Ponder
4 Sign in Blood
4 Parasitic Strix

4 Mystic Gate
4 Sunken Ruins
4 Fetid Heath
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Swamp
2 Plains
2 Island

The combo is Traumatize yourself, cast Open the Vaults. Usually you win the turn you resolve the Open; Filigree gains you a bunch of life, Sanguine kills your opponent. Tainted Sigil helps too. The problem is that as reliable as the combo is, I can't live long enough to get there usually. I'm having trouble figuring out what cards I can add to defend myself while still keeping the combo viable.

by **Fin Archangel** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 2:32 pm UTC

rrwoods wrote:So, while I'm in the middle of doling (dholing? ) out advice, I'd like to ask for some:

("Open the Vaults", Post M10 Standard)
4 Open the Vaults
4 Traumatize
4 Diabolic Tutor

4 Sanguine Bond
4 Filigree Angel
4 Tainted Sigil
4 Ponder
4 Sign in Blood
4 Parasitic Strix

4 Mystic Gate
4 Sunken Ruins
4 Fetid Heath
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Swamp
2 Plains
2 Island

The combo is Traumatize yourself, cast Open the Vaults. Usually you win the turn you resolve the Open; Filigree gains you a bunch of life, Sanguine kills your opponent. Tainted Sigil helps too. The problem is that as reliable as the combo is, I can't live long enough to get there usually. I'm having trouble figuring out what cards I can add to defend myself while still keeping the combo viable.

The problem here is that you have absolutely 0 plays that help you survive. You have almost no creatures and no creature removal, which means you get overrun really, really fast.

Once Zendikar comes out, include Day of Judgement. Definitely. You can replace the filterlands with Borderposts, which really work better in a deck like this. Personally I think Tainted Sigil should become Soul Warden, just because of the insane lifegain that card can pump out. Sign in Blood is a bit counterintuitive if you're trying to survive - probably replace with Mulldrifter pre-rotation or other blue card draw (read: Jace) post.

You'll also want Tezzeret the Seeker in there. Tezz can accelerate your mana through untapping Borderposts, and can steal games easily with his last ability.

Replace Diabolic Tutor with Liliana Vess.

Parasitic Strix doesn't seem to do enough here. I would replace it with card draw or more copies of planeswalkers, probably Elspeth, as she can hold back attackers for ages. Your main combo is Filigree Angel/Sanguine Bond, which is already good enough anyway.

And, hell, it's not an artifact, but Baneslayer Angel wins games once it hits the board, and unless they deal with it their creatures are completely neutralized. Mostly.

by **Numzane** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 3:41 pm UTC

I don't know the sets (so I'm not going to go into specific cards), but I'll give what general advice I can.

The most obvious thing that you seem to be missing is artifact mana acceleration. At the moment, you have 4 1cc cards and 4 2cc cards, which probably means you're going to be doing very little in the early game. Artifact mana will let you do something productive in your early turns, and accelerate you to get the mana you need to combo, and has synergy with the angels, so there isn't much reason not to play any, as far as I can see.

You probably also want some kind of mass removal or counters, which should help you survive till you combo. Drop the parasitic strixes and replace them with counters or some mass kill (I would expect there to be something available between black and white, but WoG wasn't reprinted so I'm not sure what they've done with the colour wheel since last I played). Otherwise, you could look at some kind of point removal, since you're have black mana. Removal and/or counters + acceleration should go a long way towards getting to the point where you can combo.

Also, it looks like you have too many cards that help you win after you've combo'd, but I haven't play tested this deck and you have, so I'm not sure. If you can spare some of the post-combo game winning cards, you could free up space to put in cards to defend yourself before the combo goes off. You could probably trade out the sigils for other-purpose artifacts (e.g. acceleration), since you only need 2 angels and 1 bond and 1 other artifact (+18 life, -18 life, 2x 4/4 flying), or 1 angel and 2 bonds and 2 other artifacts (+9 life, -18 life, 4/4 flying) to pretty much guarantee victory, but I don't know how often you get that or better from the Open the Vaults on half your deck.

You might also consider playing 1 or 2 copies of some other massive artifact win-the-game kind of creature if you can find space, possibly instead of an angel or bond, so that you don't need a bond to get a game-winning pile from Open the Vaults, and it gives you some more flexibility. You will probably also end up with a fair bit of mana on the board after OtV if you play artifact mana, which could let you hard-cast one of your artifact creatures if it's stuck in your hand.

Edit: Re: Mythic rares: Thanks for the explanations, what got me confused in the first place was The Vault: Exiled cards, which are obviously way too powerful for standard, but were still reprinted. I just didn't know that it was a collector thing.

by **Klapaucius** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 3:42 pm UTC

Fin Archangel wrote:
Klapaucius wrote:Hey, I'm really new to MTG. I actually just started playing this week, so this might be a preposterous question. Anyway:

I found an blue/artifact infinite mana loop somewhere (Guilded Lotus, Aphetto Alchemist and Pemmin's Aura). Can I use it in combination with Memnarch (and Mycosynth Lattice if I want) to take every opponent creature and control them, then use Darksteel Forge to make them indestructable?

Also, my friend has a bewilderingly cheap artifact card that he found in a booster pack somewhere called Door to Nothingness. For two of every kind of mana, you win. The opponent is banished to oblivion, and you win. Can I use said loop along with Memnarch, Power Artifact (and Voltaic Guardian, if I need to) to seize and activate Door to Nothingness?

EDIT: Oh, and a Power Artifact/Grim Monolith infinite loop would be a good deal easier. If I can't use the first loop, can I use this one?

1) If you can make infinite mana (I haven't looked at the cards you mentioned...if I remember correctly, Gilded Lotus produces 3 mana of any color and costs 5 to play, Aphetto Alchemist...I'm gonna guess that it untaps an artifact, and Pemmin's Aura turns enchanted creature into a Morphling, if I remember correctly.) If indeed this produces infinite mana, then of course you can take control of every permanent (not just creatures) on the field with Memnarch. And yes, you can use the Forge to make them indestructible.

2) Door to Nothingness is nowhere as cheap as you might think. First of all, it costs 10 mana, and of all 5 colors, to activate, plus 5 to play. So unless you have 15 mana in one turn, you'll have to play it out first, making it quite susceptible to artifact removal/other removal. Second, without some kind of combo, building up to 10 mana against a good deck is very, very difficult. In a duel (2-man game) most games are either over in 7-10 turns (especially in Extended) unless they're total control attrition decks. This is of course assuming a serious game - a casual game has much more room for playing with your card choices, and many decks have been built around cards like the Door.
As for the Memnarch combo, if you can get an infinite Memnarch out, you'll probably have won the game already, nevermind the Door. I'm not sure why you would need to use Power Artifact, since the Door should never be tapped unless, like, Icy Manipulator is on the board, because sacrificing it is part of the cost to play its ability. And I think you mean Voltaic Key? There is no card called Voltaic Guardian.
(Just as a reminder, as it seems you may be a bit confused about this: permanents include creatures, artifacts, lands, enchantments, and planeswalkers. Basically, anything that stays on the battlefield, or, to put it another way, not an instant or sorcery.)

3) Yes, Power Artifact + Grim Monolith does make infinite mana. However. Grim Monolith is banned from the Legacy format, which is one of the two "eternal" tournament formats along with vintage. Eternal formats allow cards from throughout M:tG's history with a few exceptions, fewer of which are in Vintage than Legacy (much fewer.) However, you seem like a casual player, so this may not affect you.

Now, a bit of advice: statistically speaking, a 3+ card combo is extremely unreliable, especially one that requires so much mana. You're very unlikely to draw all three cards of your infinite mana combo + a Memnarch to blast away and take over all permanents. In multiplayer, where countermagic often runs rampant, high-mana combo decks are seldom played because of the high chance of getting owned by disruption. Again, this is assuming a competitive play group, so it may or may not affect you.

Yeah, I know that unless I build a well-engineered deck-searching deck, even if I have numerous card combinations, it's very unlikely that I'll be able to make anything work. Mainly I'm only playing Magic because all my friends are playing Magic, so competitive rules are only moderately important to me.

I meant Voltaic Construct, sorry about that.

As for the Door to Nothingness thing, that's where Mycosynth Lattice comes in. It allows you to play mana as mana of any color, which makes it a good deal simpler. The Power Artifact thing came in because I was considering somehow looping it to greatly decrease DtN's cost, but that's probably not possible.

And I suppose that if I really wanted a cheap infinite-loop strategy, I could just use Braingeyser.

by **rrwoods** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 6:52 pm UTC

Hadn't even thought about the Borderposts, I'll definitely try those!

Day of Judgment will definitely be good. I don't lose much post-rotation since the filter lands are coming out for Borderposts. Reflecting Pool can get replaced with fetchlands/M10lands/both.

Diabolic Tutor -> Vess = awesome. I will try Elspeth as well.

I think I'll wait on Baneslayer at the moment, a lot of other changes are happening and I want to keep the spirit of the deck.

My artifact mana will be all Borderposts... so no mana from those post Open since they ETB tapped. But some other massive artifact win-the-game guy would be good... Darksteel Colossus would be great if it weren't for that nasty replacement effect :-P

We'll see what Zendikar brings and I'll do a search after the set comes out.

by **Fin Archangel** » Thu Sep 17, 2009 12:23 am UTC

Glad to be of help :]

My turn to ask for deck advice!
So, Zendikar is coming in a few. It's got me EXTREMELY excited (I'm considering making the 5.5-mile walk to my nearest prerelease) and it just looks incredible.

(known Zendikar spoiler list)

One specific card has got me very excited: Luminarch Ascension. So one day, while bored in Psych class, I decided to fiddle with an decklist:

Spoiler:

So the basic idea is to play out the Luminarch Ascension, and then, for four turns, not take damage. Kitchen Finks does this very nicely, blocking twice and also gaining life while he's at it. Ghostly Prison can get insanely good in most scenarios, forcing your opponent to choose between hitting you or playing a spell (with the Ascension, they should probably hit you.) Singleton Elspeth is there to make an endless stream of blockers for you, even though it has limited synergy with the deck. Ajani keeps the Finks alive forever (provided it doesn't get exiled) and can gain life in a pinch.

Sources of life gain in this deck is important because burn decks are popular strategies and keeping your life total healthy is the best way to survive long enough to get your Ascension up.

Anyway, when I saw Day of Judgement I was like "oh no. Now we can play EIGHT wraths in Extended..." which I'm more than happy to do here. Finks survives Wrath, but hopefully your opponent's critters don't Gameslayer Angel dies to WoG, but when you have a Baneslayer Imbalance active and in play (ie not Pacifism'd or some other madness) yuo'll probably never, ever die ever (it can block, it can outrace, it can make you breakfast...) Jittes and the Sword of Fire and Ice are there to 1) kill 2) gain life 3) draw cards.

Sigil of the Empty Throne is a late-game card that turns every enchantment into another angel. More of a backup than anything else.

So, upon analysis (since I can't play with this yet) I have a feeling that this deck is weakest to full control decks or aggro-control decks. This deck relies on a few important spells to win, especially Luminarch Ascension, so counterspells can really screw you over, since there are so few other win conditions. However, once a Luminarch Ascension sticks, control deck usually can't deal with it. Luck of the draw, I s'pose.

I though about Mesa Enchantress as well, but this isn't a full enchantment deck so I bypassed the idea.

So, suggestions?

by **Azrael001** » Thu Sep 17, 2009 1:36 am UTC

This new set is exceedingly powerful.

A vampire deck would win.

Spoiler:

As long as you have one Vampire and Sanguine Bond, Blood Tribute is an instant win. And that's just a quickly thrown together standard deck.

by **Armadillo Al** » Thu Sep 17, 2009 6:24 pm UTC

Numzane wrote:(I would expect there to be something available between black and white, but WoG wasn't reprinted so I'm not sure what they've done with the colour wheel since last I played).

Nothing. They renamed WoG, took off the 'can't be regenerated' clause, and put it in Zendikar to force everyone that's been using the same beat-up Wraths since 1995 to actually buy some new packs.

by **Jessica** » Thu Sep 17, 2009 6:38 pm UTC

That's one view of it.
Another would be to make a zendikar flavoured version they can put to make block interesting, instead of having to rely on a gimmicky more expensive wrath for block.

Or, they wanted to remove the "can't be regenerated" from M10.

They did it a lot in M10. And really, it's not that big of a deal. I'd say the people who are most affected by this are those who play in tournaments online. Casual doesn't care. Professionals can get playsets no problem. And, really, the people who are likely to play standard in top line tournaments probably grumble about having to get a new playset of "the same card", but they won't stop playing over it.

Sure, money comes into it. They are a corporation, and profits are important. But, they make profits. I'm sure that "milking their audience" doesn't really come into it, because they really don't need to do it more.

by **Azrael001** » Thu Sep 17, 2009 7:08 pm UTC

I was actually more upset about the copy of Oblivion Ring, Path to Nowhere (or something). An identical card which costs one less, standard at the same time.

by **d0nk3y_k0n9** » Thu Sep 17, 2009 8:23 pm UTC

Azrael001 wrote:I was actually more upset about the copy of Oblivion Ring, Path to Nowhere (or something). An identical card which costs one less, standard at the same time.

It's not identical. Oblivion Ring can target any nonland permenant, while the Zendikar version can only target creatures. Oblivion Ring is good utility and creature removal, while the new one is just creature removal. What I love about Oblivion Ring is that I can use it and have creature removal, but also have an option for removing artifacts and enchantments before sideboarding. The new version doesn't give this option and thus isn't as generally useful.

by **Fin Archangel** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 2:54 am UTC

Yes. Oblivion Ring was so, so flexible beyond belief, especially in limited, where it was generally a first/second pick. Journey to Nowhere looks all right too, (it's like a better Pacifism) but I'd rather play my oRing any day.

by **Klapaucius** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 10:43 pm UTC

So, after considering all the options, I decided to screw the powergaming and pick up the most convenient deck I could (Planechase, Elemental Thunder) and use it as is. I played two games today against one of the guys who got me to start playing, and won in a few turns.

So I'm addicted.

by **Fin Archangel** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 10:56 pm UTC

Klapaucius wrote:So, after considering all the options, I decided to screw the powergaming and pick up the most convenient deck I could (Planechase, Elemental Thunder) and use it as is. I played two games today against one of the guys who got me to start playing, and won in a few turns.

So I'm addicted.

Did you use the plane cards?

by **Amnesiasoft** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 11:20 pm UTC

As for online play, OCTGN is pretty good. Particularly if you can find version 1 (since version 1 is finished and actually has a full database of cards for it). The real trick is actually finding the database, otherwise you can't play any games.

by **Fin Archangel** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 3:28 am UTC

I perfer Magic Workstation m'self. It's...kind...of easy to use, flexible, easy to find a game, and most of all, EASY to update.

by **Amnesiasoft** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 4:54 am UTC

Yeah, but it's not free and free!

by **Fin Archangel** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 5:34 am UTC

Well, it's free enough to work, which is all I care about :]

by **Von Haus** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 8:00 am UTC

Fin Archangel wrote:and most of all, EASY to update.

Talking of that, I found that after updating it for the third time, it would always start to crash all the time, and i'd need to remove it all and reinstall everything to get it working.It'd do that after every third update. Have you experienced that at all, and/or know how to prevent it happening?
Other than that though, I agree, workstation was a pretty good system.

by **Fin Archangel** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 2:23 pm UTC

Von Haus wrote:
Fin Archangel wrote:and most of all, EASY to update.

Talking of that, I found that after updating it for the third time, it would always start to crash all the time, and i'd need to remove it all and reinstall everything to get it working.It'd do that after every third update. Have you experienced that at all, and/or know how to prevent it happening?
Other than that though, I agree, workstation was a pretty good system.

It's not really the update. It's just the program itself cutting itself. As far as I know there really is no way to prevent crashes - it happens to everyone. Reinstallation helps, but reinstalling text spoilers is always a pain in the butt.

by **Klapaucius** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 4:33 pm UTC

Fin Archangel wrote:
Klapaucius wrote:So, after considering all the options, I decided to screw the powergaming and pick up the most convenient deck I could (Planechase, Elemental Thunder) and use it as is. I played two games today against one of the guys who got me to start playing, and won in a few turns.

So I'm addicted.
Did you use the plane cards?

Iwanted to, but neither of us brought them with us.

by **gereffi** » Sat Sep 26, 2009 9:29 pm UTC

Has anybody seen the stuff you can get in the new set coming out? Lotus Cobra is insane, and there are new Fetchlands.

Oh, and you can pull a power nine if you're lucky.

by **Fin Archangel** » Sat Sep 26, 2009 11:40 pm UTC

gereffi wrote:Has anybody seen the stuff you can get in the new set coming out? Lotus Cobra is insane, and there are new Fetchlands.

Oh, and you can pull a power nine if you're lucky.

Going to the PR tomorrow. Wish me luck.

by **Von Haus** » Sun Sep 27, 2009 1:18 pm UTC

Wait, what do you mean you can pull the power 9???

by **Bulvox** » Sun Sep 27, 2009 7:54 pm UTC

Von Haus wrote:Wait, what do you mean you can pull the power 9???

he means that you have about a 1 in 750 chance to pull one of these cards instead of one of the awesome basic lands.

by **Von Haus** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 1:16 pm UTC

What?? That's awesome, how have I only just heard of that?
I NEW I should have gone to the Prerelease.

by **Fin Archangel** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 2:33 pm UTC

I opened two fetches and a Lotus Cobra

but my pool was build on a solid mound of shit, so I failed at the games. It's k, though.

by **Armadillo Al** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 4:40 pm UTC

Yeah, with that kind of pull, I'm pretty sure you came out further ahead than if you'd actually won the damn tournament.

Which, somehow, seems depressingly wrong to me.

by **rrwoods** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 6:40 pm UTC

At the Bethesda prerelease there was supposedly a Scrubland (Plains/Swamp dual) and a Mox Ruby pulled.

by **Jessica** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 7:08 pm UTC

That's impossible...
Wizard's official reprint policy means they can't reprint power 9. Pretty much everything on that site is something from the reserve list.

Unless they're just completely ignoring the secondary market which they created that list to preserve. Which would be insane...

Or maybe they have officially gone insane. But, I can't see there being actual duals, and black lotuses being reprinting...

edit: Or maybe they are insane... it seems to be confirmed...

So, theoretically, someone can open a $1000 pack of cards.

This is stupid.

by **mchainmail** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 10:41 pm UTC

Jessica wrote:That's impossible...
Wizard's official reprint policy means they can't reprint power 9. Pretty much everything on that site is something from the reserve list.

Unless they're just completely ignoring the secondary market which they created that list to preserve. Which would be insane...

Or maybe they have officially gone insane. But, I can't see there being actual duals, and black lotuses being reprinting...

edit: Or maybe they are insane... it seems to be confirmed...

So, theoretically, someone can open a $1000 pack of cards.

This is stupid.

They're not reprints; they're the original printing of the cards repackaged into the new packs.

They aren't legal in standard or extended, only formats where the card would normally be legal in.

by **Fin Archangel** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 10:58 pm UTC

It's recirculation, Jessica, not reprinting. And they only replace the lands, and the highest level cards reprinted are the Moxen, I believe, which are really only like 300-700 or so.

by **Bulvox** » Tue Sep 29, 2009 1:19 am UTC

Fin Archangel wrote:It's recirculation, Jessica, not reprinting. And they only replace the lands, and the highest level cards reprinted are the Moxen, I believe, which are really only like 300-700 or so.

wrong. There have been reports of Black Lotus pulled. but you're right about it being recirculation. What WotC did was buy up the cards and then they hand inserted them in, so yeah.

I did the prerelease and pulled a fetchland, but my deck was uber-consistent, with a bunch of 2 and 3 of, so I ended up getting 2 packs as prize and pulled a second fetch land, Arid Mesa, one of the ones that I wanted, so I sold my first fetch and a few other cards to buy my way into the draft that was happening afterwards in which I went Mono-black Vamps with three other people in my pod also drafting black. I managed to go 2-1 for another 2 packs. It's results like this that make me wonder why I even bother to play constructed.

by **RetSpline** » Tue Sep 29, 2009 2:16 am UTC

To all who posted deck advice: thanks a lot! I'm still working on it (and picking up some new cards, which is really a terrible idea when I'm trying to thin it down...)

This Friday, or the Friday after that, I will be participating in my first draft, looks like it'll be M10. The shop my friends and I go to is really casual, up to semi-competitive, but I'm just wondering on some good draft strategy. Should I go in with a set idea of a deck to build? Should I just wing it based off of what's available? I'm also looking for a specific card or two (my shop doesn't have M10 singles) and I guess this is more of a judgment call on my part, but how screwed over would I be if I picked one or two cards that don't fit my overall strategy as my draft picks? I really want me another Cemetery Reaper.

On that note, I'm a bit frustrated with how hard it is to find a few specific cards I'm looking for. I found Lim-Dûl the Necromancer online and thought he was totally awesome, but at two different shops, the only within reasonable driving distance, and even met up with a guy who had, "pretty much every card ever," who pulled out 4 holo Ink-Eyes for a friend of mine. Same story with Skirk Ridge Exhumer. Frustrating. Has anyone had any experience with buying online?

by **Fin Archangel** » Tue Sep 29, 2009 2:25 am UTC

www.cardkingdom.com

I've ordered hundreds of dollars worth of cards from there. =\ shoulda saved my money, honestly. Lul.

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