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Jeb's magical school of Magic

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28 Jun 2013 03:30 #155329 by metalface13
This thread is dedicated for Sage Jeb to impart his mystical Magic knowledge to those of us who Gather at his feet. Or anybody else who knows how to play and build decks a lot better than myself.

Some tips already imparted by Grand Master Jeb and the Furious Five:

The trick to deck-building in a limited format (sealed/draft) is BREAD. Bombs, Removal, Evasion, Aggression/Advantage, Dregs.

Bombs are what you think, just crazy shit. Think Akroma.
Removal is anything that gets rid of a creature. Might be a bolt, a terror, a pacifism, some kind of tapping bullshit--you need to get creative in limited sometimes.
Evasion is abilities/spells that get your creatures through. Flying, fear, trample, &c.
Aggression/Advantage are cards that jolt up your critters. +2/+0 effects, haste, or get you card advantage like cantrips.
Dregs is everything else.

Always shoot for 2 colors with a splash if needed, often for the Bomb if its not in your main colors. If you really go to a balanced three colors, you need to make room for color fixers. You want to skew just a hint high on mana in limited because missing an early land drop or two can completely kill you.

Unless you are packing a lot of {1}{W}{W} and {B}{B} type stuff, i.e., low casting cost spells with double-color requirements, you probably don't need them. If you are BW/u and that u is three cards? Then you probably should have something to help out.

Yes, put Black Knight in, First Strike is awesome and Protection from White is evasion. Yes, Barney, those in order of priority. Removal > Evasion. You can have a ton of shitty guys without evasion if you are packing enough removal to get their blockers out of the way. Bombs over everything.

Those fetchlands are awesome. They thin your deck, pulling land out that you would otherwise draw later in the game AND fix your colors. Do they come into play tapped though? That's unfortunate if so. I hope they work like:

Blahdy Blah
Land
{T}: Add {1} to your mana pool.
{T}, sacrifice Blahdy Blah: Search your library for a basic land card and put in into play tapped.

That's solid as hell in limited play.

In limited, your choices are, well, limited. It's nice to have early drops, but they won't matter that much if you drop your bombs on turns 4 and 5 and clean up after that. Winning a game at 10 is the same as winning at 20. What you do want in limited is a lot of creatures. You want to be putting down creatures a lot, as that's the game in this format. Decks based on sorceries and instants need a lot of support that is normally not in the average cardpool.

You don't need to play every creature you have, and doing so can be risky if they have some kind of global removal like Wrath of God or whatever they call that now. Just play out enough to win and hold a grip of dudes that look like counterspells or burn.

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28 Jun 2013 04:26 #155332 by Michael Barnes
Oubliette + Royal Assassin

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28 Jun 2013 07:48 #155333 by jeb
Very nice. This'll probably need a name change at some point to become Dragonstout's School whenever he comes back. (He's with Ken).

You do want a curve of creatures, more at lower cost than higher cost, but it's a very tricky thing. Limited tends to turn into a race ot the big fellas, so the 1cc and 2cc slots should be accelerants, removal, and other tricky shit. You'll probably have a few creatures in here, but unless they have evasion or something cool going on, you're really looking to 3cc and 4cc guys as the meat of the deck. In a 40-card deck (ALWAYS KEEP YOUR DECK AT 40 CARDS) you'd have probably 17 lands or so, leaving 23 slots for spells. So, your "ramp" would look like:
1cc or 2cc3cc4cc5cc+
5783

Might be skewed a little low for limited, as the games can go long, and then you do need to cast some big CC stuff just to push through, but this is probably a good guideline.

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28 Jun 2013 10:22 #155336 by ThirstyMan

jeb wrote: Very nice. This'll probably need a name change at some point to become Dragonstout's School whenever he comes back. (He's with Ken).


No, not Dragonstout, I can never understand what he is talking about when it comes to Magic.

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28 Jun 2013 12:06 #155340 by Black Barney
Is Emma Watson enrolled in this school of Magic? If so, please point me to the closest rufie distributor.

Jeb, I really appreciate you explaining the BREAD thing because my booster draft game is AWFUL. Am I mistaken or does it basically mean that MOST Sorceries won't get picked or make it in the decks? Since most Sorceries don't pull off anything in the BREAD category (I'm not talking Wrath of God and stuff). For instance, Lava Axe would never make it, right? That's a Dreg, ya?

The only one I'm really not clear on is Aggression/Advantage. What exactly falls into that? Can you name some commons?

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28 Jun 2013 12:09 #155341 by Ska_baron
I ain't been to no fancy school or nothing, but I'd say taking 1/4 of your opponents life could put it in the BOMB category for my sealed deck.

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28 Jun 2013 12:47 #155342 by stormseeker75
Aggression/Advantage would be cheap dudes that are undercosted for their size and can be played quickly. A splash of aggro in any deck that supports it (black or green usually) is a good thing and can give you an early life advantage. Of course, it sucks to draw them late in the game.

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28 Jun 2013 14:40 #155348 by metalface13

Ska_baron wrote: I ain't been to no fancy school or nothing, but I'd say taking 1/4 of your opponents life could put it in the BOMB category for my sealed deck.


I agree. Lava axe is dope and a total game winner. Especially if you have that red dude that doubles damage of your spells.

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28 Jun 2013 14:41 - 28 Jun 2013 14:43 #155350 by metalface13

Black Barney wrote: Is Emma Watson enrolled in this school of Magic? If so, please point me to the closest rufie distributor.


That would be brilliant if she was a secret F:ATtie. Keep dreaming Barney!

Last edit: 28 Jun 2013 14:43 by metalface13.
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28 Jun 2013 15:42 #155351 by Black Barney
By putting early pics of Hermione from Potter 1 or 2, you're making me look creepy!

I wasn't sexually attracted to her until the 3rd one.


back to Magic,

So Bombs are anything that take 5 or more life? Aggression/Advantage is still a total fog to me.

Speaking of Fog, where does Fog Bank come in? Is it basically like Removal or is it Advantage? It's Advantage, right?

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28 Jun 2013 15:59 #155354 by metalface13

Black Barney wrote: By putting early pics of Hermione from Potter 1 or 2, you're making me look creepy!

I wasn't sexually attracted to her until the 3rd one.




Better?

Black Barney wrote: back to Magic,

So Bombs are anything that take 5 or more life? Aggression/Advantage is still a total fog to me.

Speaking of Fog, where does Fog Bank come in? Is it basically like Removal or is it Advantage? It's Advantage, right?


I think Bombs are anything that are like Boom! Patterns! Big creatures or big spells or big damage stuff.
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28 Jun 2013 16:41 #155360 by Space Ghost
It basically comes down to card advantage, right. You either want a card advantage on the battlefield or you want a card advantage in terms of who sees the most of their deck fastest.

I usually don't like limited because I don't like creatures -- much preferring the more open possibilities of Legacy and Vintage.
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28 Jun 2013 16:54 #155362 by jeb
Bombs are board-changing effects. Things that say "Win target game." The all-time classic bomb in limited is Fireball. Arbitrary damage to arbitrary targets, (and at COMMON). Good times while it lasted. Anything that looks like that is a bomb. Akroma is a bomb. She's an unkillable, unstoppable badass. She puts the opponent on probably a one-turn clock by the time she's castable. She lands, hits for 6, and then what? Better hope you are packing a Pacifism or you are dead right there.

Board sweeping effects too. Anything that says "Destroy all creatures" or "destroy all lands" and so forth. You know they are coming and can plan for them--you want the opponent to overcommit and get killed in recovery.

----

Let's talk card advantage. This a basic concept that you need to get to advance your game beyond the novice level. You want to break the symmetry of card drawing. The basic game is I draw, you draw, and we go back and forth and the spell quality determines who wins. That's Pokemon. Magic allows for card advantage and this is where you start to win. How can you break this symmetry?
  • Play cards that draw more than one card.
  • Play cards that replace themselves (have a "Draw a card" effect--these are called cantrips.)
  • Play cards that eliminate more than one of the opponent's cards.
  • Play cards that improve the quality of your hand/library compared to your opponent.

The classic example of the third point is waiting for your opponent to put an Aura on their guy and killing the guy in response. You spent one card to "kill" two of hers. That's why you don't see a lot of Auras on the Pro scene.* It also shows the power of instant speed removal.

I bet a lot of the struggles you guys are dealing with are timing related. Knowing when to cast your removal to be most effective. If you have a bolt, wait until the end of the opponent's turn to cast it if you can. Having cards in hand and mana up could front all kinds of nasty instant speed effects and make the opponent cautious. Playing this way means you are ready to deal with big hasty stuff too.

As for the specific cards mentioned, Lava Axe is worth splashing for. 5 to the dome is solid. If you hit creatures it would be close to a bomb. But you don't want to draw it early, yeesh, so not more than 1 or maybe 2.

Fog Bank gets you some advantage in that it draws fire--your opponent must spend some removal to kill it or always have her best offensive threat neutralized. This is a quality exchange, and not as strong a play as others mentioned above. What's nice about Fog Bank is that it ties up the board until you get your 4cc and 5cc blue flyers online.**

*Equipment fixed this issue for the most part. Auras you -do- see on the Pro scene tended to have built in card advantage, like Rancor (returns to hand) and Elephant Guide (turns into another card). I am sure there are more recent examples, but I am working with what I know.

**If you are playing blue and don't have 4 or 5 4cc+ flyers you have fucked up and should start over.

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28 Jun 2013 17:10 - 28 Jun 2013 17:15 #155364 by ThirstyMan
I wasn't sexually attracted to her until the 3rd one.


Phewee!! That's lucky....
Last edit: 28 Jun 2013 17:15 by ThirstyMan.
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28 Jun 2013 17:20 - 28 Jun 2013 19:12 #155365 by dragonstout
Jeb knows the score.

One of the great things about draft environments over the past most-of-a-decade, and particularly the last 5 years or so, is just how far they've moved away from BREAD, to a more synergy-dependent pick order. Even in core sets like M13!

But sealed is always very BREAD-oriented, and despite the awesome M13 format, core sets are still pretty BREAD-y too. And I'd agree that it is still the very first thing anyone just starting limited needs to learn.

I haven't read the whole thread, but a couple minor points on Jeb's last post:
- Lava Axe: Lava Axe is not an auto-include or anything, but can definitely be very solid. However, HOW YOU PLAY IT is absolutely key, and I see it misplayed by n00bs all the damn time. Your default mode for playing it should be to only play it when the opponent has 5 or fewer life. The only reason to play it earlier is if you have done some damn good calculations about the next few turns and determined that it's essential to play now. INFORMATION is so key in Magic: while you hold Lava Axe in your hand, you know that your opponent has effectively 5 fewer life, and your opponent does not know that. That is THE BEST THING about Lava Axe, no exaggeration.

- With regards to auras: I dunno what auras are in DotP 2014. Jeb is correct that you should always be wary of auras for card disadvantage reasons, and that it used to be that the only good auras were ones with built-in card advantage. They've pushed the power level of auras recently, though, so that that's not quite the case anymore. First of all: be very aware that every time you cast an aura you could open yourself up for a blowout, and don't DO it if you think you're going to get blown out. Cast it when the opponent is tapped out, so you can at least get one attack in with the enchanted creature; cast it so that it increases the toughness of the creature higher than whatever the most common direct-damage-type spell your opponent might be using would kill. A relatively innocuous-seeming aura like Spectral Flight is actually quite good, simply because you can a) use it as a sorcery, basically, to make your creature unblockable and +2 damage for a turn even if the opponent kills it, but b) put it on a Saproling or other shit-ass 1/1 token creature, and then you're not really opening yourself up to card disadvantage, since a Saproling is barely barely relevant...but a 3/3 flier is a killer clock.

- Fog Bank is fairly similar to a "tapper" like Master Decoy that Jeb referenced in the first comment, except that it 1) doesn't require a mana investment like most tappers but 2) does not help at all on the offense. So it depends on your deck. Tappers in general are awesome because they're removal that, unlike most removal where it is incredibly important to carefully wait and choose what to remove, can just always be removing your opponent's best creature at all times; their attendant drawback is that they're themselves very easy to remove.

But yeah, think a lot more about when you play your cards, how much information you're giving your opponent (Magic is just as much about asymmetric hidden information as Netrunner), and your opportunity costs. To me this all seems like basic gamer-skills, but I'm always surprised by how those skills melt away when a new gamer plays Magic. Magic teaches you everything you need to know about how to play all games better except for social/interpersonal skills.
Last edit: 28 Jun 2013 19:12 by dragonstout.
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