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Explanation from Wizards that I'm sure I will be beaten to posting by the time I hit submit. So there was a secret group where judges got ahold of unreleased cards and shared them amongst each other, and stupidly, one or two of them shared it outside the group. I can't believe how horribly Wizards handled this. If this was their first statement, it would've been much more well received, at least amongst judges.
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Dec 23, 2015 03:29
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Ciprian Maricon posted:They are discussing leaked cards on social media. That they happen to be closer to the source of the leak than you or I doesn't somehow make it suddenly extra bad and evil, its not like discussing leaks is some sort of crime until X degrees of separation and suddenly its morally defensible. It not their responsibility or yours to go "hmmm oh boy, let me consider how far removed from the original leak these card images are so I can know whether I can ethically discuss their impact on my children's card game" WotC's reasoning (and I'm not saying whether or not I agree with it) must be that the 3-monthers knew exactly where the leaks were coming from (and I'm pretty sure I figured it out also) because they were talking to other people who they knew had inside information. It's like if I'm an employee (judges aren't employees) of a company, my friend is on some secret project, and shares the details of that project with me for months. Then one day one of the other people the NDA'd person shared details with goes and tells everything to some news organization. My boss is probably now pissed at me for knowing about the leak for a while and not saying anything. Angry Grimace posted:Aren't the random members of the group only banned like three months If you're dedicated enough to Magic to be a level 3 judge, three months is a long time.
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Dec 23, 2015 18:46
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Mikujin posted:It may not be en masse - and it might certainly be a bit drastic - but there's already a number of judges resigning (and/or intentionally lapsing since it's renewal season) in light of SeaGate [we need a snappier name]. This amidst other talk like strikes/denial of judging services in some groups. I know there's other judges here, so I implore you all to think long on what you want to do in the fallout of this incident, since it's always sad to see fellow judges go. I just renewed my L2, and got word that it went through before magicjudges.org got shuttered. I don't plan to quit or boycott. My biggest problem with this whole situation is the lack of transparency. A lot of the backlash could have been avoided if Helene's statement came out immediately prior to or even concurrent with the announcement of the suspensions. Toby Elliot's post that the judges were suspended as players and not as judges could have been more upfront also. A lot of the panic from judges was because they thought their judge level and position could be stripped away at a whim, but now we know that they expected Turner to come back as RC of the Southeast US in 90 days. We just started to learn about the Judge Code of Conduct, and there was a procedure, and this suspension didn't follow it. Now we know WotC's reasoning on it, but did they expect to just go "You fifteen judges are suspended and we can't talk about why, and you can't either because we're not going to tell you" and not have a near-mutiny on their hands? (Yes, apparently.) Of course, with Helene's announcement came the suspended judges saying "Well that's not what happened," but they won't comment because there's an appeals process that won't happen until January because everyone at WotC is on vacation until then. So it's just WotC's side of the story until then, and since they mishandled the announcement in the first place and tempers are hot, a lot of the judge community is hesitant to believe them. Here's notes on an MTG Focus podcast interview with Helene that sheds light on how the leak happened.
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Dec 24, 2015 08:05
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Niton posted:Happy Holidays from The Good Gamery! This is my new favorite thing. I want to put this in my cube.
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Dec 26, 2015 01:59
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Throwaway, "this could have been done without naming it" abilities aren't for us cynical, jaded types. They're for new and inexperienced players to understand that a subsection of cards in the set all do the same thing.
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Dec 30, 2015 00:43
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Rinkles posted:How many people are going to miss support only working on other creatures? How many people are going to ask if they can put all the support counters on the same creature?
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Dec 30, 2015 18:33
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Angry Grimace posted:And holy balls that flavor text is terrible. I'm starting to think this should be the new thread title.
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Dec 31, 2015 17:13
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AlternateNu posted:I actually agree with limiting off-color fetches. It always seemed like the worst flavor-fail. Who cares though? The only argument for it I can form is to point and laugh at people who run off-color fetches so they can "thin" their 99-card deck. There's also no way to write that rule in Magic terms in a way that doesn't exclude someone from playing, say, Farseek with a commander whose color identity isn't all five colors. They can say you specifically can't play lands that mention the name of a basic land that doesn't produce mana that isn't in your color identity, but look how dumb that reads. Cool fact though: Aside from Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth*, there's no land that mentions a basic land type and doesn't either tap for the color of mana that basic land would produce or fetch for a land of that type (fetches, Mirage fetches, and Panoramas). But again, there's no reason to limit fetches unless you want to stick it to the deck-thinning idiots or just limit shuffle effects. *When I built my Emrakul deck a long time ago, I had Urborg in there to make some of the old lands without mana abiltiies be able to tap for mana, but that's a corner case.
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Jan 1, 2016 19:04
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Standard is so dead. We used to get 20-30 people for Monday nights, but recently we've struggled to get even eight. Last night when the judge called out for Standard signups, someone yelled, "Why not Modern?" and with that, we had eleven people sign up for an impromptu Modern tournament.
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Jan 6, 2016 00:42
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Angry Grimace posted:"So, uh, Jace, I heard you're heading to Innistrad." Added to the OP.
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Jan 6, 2016 06:16
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What's the list for this WB Eldrazi deck? I'm only really finding mono-black versions. I have a foil Eye of Ugin and a Japanese foil Eye of Ugin, and I never want to buy Scalding Tarns, so I want to try it.
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Jan 6, 2016 22:01
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Frozen_flame posted:GottaGoFast Experienced players: "Hey, it's a Surge enabler! But not really playable anyway, and it sucks that it can't give your next Surged-out creature haste." New players: "Holy poo poo, take this higher than literally anything else. By the way, what does Surge do?"
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Jan 7, 2016 15:29
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The full card gallery should be up tomorrow. BFZ's full list was up on 9/18, and the prerelease was on 9/26.
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Jan 7, 2016 16:28
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mcmagic posted:Oh look, another stupid modern buyout... Am I the only one so turned off by #mtgfinance that I want to sell my collection and exclusively draft, or even just cube?
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Jan 8, 2016 02:59
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mcmagic posted:It doesn't really happen in standard... Just quit modern. I wanted to start playing Modern. Standard is dead, but it's not like I ever played the format anyway. I show up with a pet deck around Game Day once in a rotation, go 4-0, and never touch it again because everyone's playing the same deck after the first PT/Open. Modern looked fun and varied, but that's not going to happen for me now. Oddly enough, 15-proxy Vintage is cheaper for me because I own all the duals and the price of most of the staples in the format (Zendikar fetches aside) never change because not enough people care about the format to stage silly buyouts. All my Shops stuff is about the same price as it was a year ago, and probably a year from now, also.
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Jan 8, 2016 04:58
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Sickening posted:This is the relevant text from the follow-up email they sent me: They're worried about counterfeits printed to look like real Magic cards. This is because they're cracking down on Chinese counterfeiters selling "proxies" (wink wink, no seriously, don't use these as anything but proxies, wink wink). I don't think writing "Black Lotus" with permanent marker on a Darksteel Relic is really what they're worried about. It wouldn't surprise me if this store was allowing players to use Chinese "proxies" in tournaments and someone went 0-2-drop, got pissed off, and reported the store out of spite. It happens a lot. I always warn store owners not to do stupid poo poo, because all it takes is one disgruntled player to report you and you'll lose your next prerelease.
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Jan 12, 2016 06:03
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I understand WotC's position on this, I am just enraged that it's the world we live in where common sense takes a backseat to hard corporate policy and "slippery slope" arguments that lead to this. Like they literally can't say "Just don't use cards specifically printed to look so identical to official Magic cards that they pass almost any test you can throw at them," because WotC thinks that gives counterfeiters leeway. There are stores in my area that get ~20-30 people for weekly Vintage events. Our RC is currently asking Wizards what our responsibility is as judges. No one wants to get suspended for judging a tournament that allows proxies, but, you know, recent precedent about judges needing to protect WotC's IP.
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Jan 13, 2016 03:19
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Cernunnos posted:Neither would a WotC employee. I love Force of Will's use of "trigger" and "continuous" to designate between triggered and static abilities. This would solve, like, 1/5th of my judge calls if Magic used that.
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Jan 13, 2016 04:23
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I can assure you that smugly bringing up Collector's Edition cards doesn't contribute anything to the argument. Bringing up that there's a two year old article on the official Magic site suggesting you ask your LGS to run proxy tournaments, however, is a big deal. A user on Reddit had this to say: quote:Your problem lies in that you are asking too many questions. I'm being serious. Hear me out. Some of that makes sense. Anyone from Wizards with the ability to comment on this at all is a robot who has to repeat the company line and nothing but that. I don't think there's a "wink" involved here at all though. Since no one's been suspended over this, had their WPN privileges taken away, or been explicitly threatened with either of those penalties, it's hard to say whether this Reddit person is right or if this "first warning" marks the start of Wizards actually enforcing their policy.
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Jan 13, 2016 16:31
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Sickening posted:A basic land would imply you could have more than 4, this isn't the case with wastes right? It is.
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Jan 13, 2016 16:58
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whydirt posted:Is this a real card? 
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Jan 14, 2016 00:47
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Booklegger posted:Elaine also carefully elided discussion of non-sanctioned tournaments. Yeah it's disappointing because when Elaine comments on something, it always feels like she's allowed to be blatant about things. And this time, she specifically avoided clearing up the thing that caused people to be upset about this in the first place. Dr. Clockwork posted:How many of Trick's stupid announcements does Elaine have to packpedal this week? Elaine Chase should take over his duties, with the caveat that she has to write up and publish her articles before or simultaneously with whatever announcement. Especially because I know people who work there, I can't believe that WotC is that out of touch with the playerbase that they can't predict how they will react to major shakeups such as (and these are what was being yelled the loudest): people being banned for looking at spoilers and the nuking of unsanctioned Legacy and Vintage. For what it's worth (broad definition of "worth"), Patrick Jarret's official Magic Twitter account retweeted this: quote:Jim Thevenot @jimthev 56m56 minutes ago ...which I imagine he'd be in hot water for retweeting if it wasn't a fact.
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Jan 14, 2016 20:44
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Entropic posted:The thread still seems live for me. It is, but the initial post that said something like, "do with that what you will" is gone. The thread title and poster's name are still there, but at least they covered their rear end by removing that line! Whew, MTGO account saved.
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Jan 16, 2016 05:39
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I never played Twin, but I started building Tron because UG Tron was one of my favorite Standard decks ever and I still had the lands. I wish there were different bans, maybe Exarch and Pestermite, so that Twin's manabase was shaken up having to play the 1GU or 2W guy instead. Would that have made the deck more fair?
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Jan 16, 2016 17:59
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Mana symbols as "flair" on the Reddit sub-reddit have been removed. Patrick Jarrett explains here: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/410la1/why_mana_flair_disappeared/
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Jan 17, 2016 05:04
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Sickening posted:People said that about battle and it didn't happen. Multiformat mythics are usually an expensive thing. 25 bucks is about as good as that gets. But it will. Gideon was $40 at one point. Ulamog was $25, then dropped to $12, then only spiked recently. Prerelease prices never hold, and I almost felt sorry for the binder grinders trading for foil Kozilek's Returns at $100 yesterday.
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Jan 18, 2016 15:29
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Sickening posted:If you ignore two cards, everything was cheaper than 10 bucks. Got it. Oh, the under $10 didn't click in for me. Kozilek's Returns will definitely be cheaper than $25 though.
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Jan 18, 2016 16:02
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Commander changes: The Commander-specific mulligan is gone! We now use regular mulligans like regular goddamn people. The first mulligan is free in multiplayer, which is also part of Magic's normal rules. You can now generate mana outside of your general's color identity. No more Urborg letting you generate colorless, which wasn't the reason it was changed, because balance-wise who cared, there weren't enough playable colorless-only-costing things to matter. But now it's simpler for players. Like mana burn, it was a rule that was mostly hidden until it mattered in one game, so it's good to get rid of it. Prophet of Kruphix is banned! This alone might get me to bring out my Commander decks to my LGS again. What an oppressive card. Once the UG player cast it, the game was over, because suddenly every turn was their turn. I've been calling for its ban since it came out.
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Jan 18, 2016 17:09
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I don't know if everyone's been around to remember the Legacy or Commander boom, but those didn't exactly pop like bubbles. Cards for those formats are still crazy expensive. Modern is more volatile because things can be reprinted. Like it'll only take a surprise duel deck reprinting to tank the price of Inquisition of Kozilek. Wizards has also shown they're not shy about banning cards in Modern. The threat of reprints and bannings along with constantly shifting metagames is going to make players jumpy. Right now though, everyone just wants in on the next big thing. People love the idea that they can shock other people by telling them how pricey a card suddenly is. Hundreds of times during the prerelease I had to hear "Did you see what *insert card here* jumped up to?". It's fun for people, somehow. This isn't Legacy or Commander where the priciest cards can't be reprinted. WotC has direct control over the price of Modern, but they're not going to just reprint everything expensive all at once, because that's blowing their load when they've got Modern Masters 4 and Modern Masters 5 and 6 (etc.) to sell. One thing's for sure though: Modern cards are an incredibly risky investment. Reprints can and will happen in the near future, and card prices are going to fluctuate wildly.
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Jan 21, 2016 02:33
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JerryLee posted:Yeah, something like this seems more likely to me. It's such an obvious Lovecraftian reference that I'll be upset if it's not Emrakul. The Shadows Over Innistrad = Shadow Over Innsmouth similarity and the fact that Emrakul is the Cthulthu of Magic in appearance and actions make it so obvious. I'd be thrilled if they had Innistrad be freaking out in the first set while the planeswalkers try to figure out what's going on, followed by Emrakul's invasion in the next set. More Eldrazi, Wizards gets to push colorless mana more, more Wastes (this time Innistrad flavored!), etc.
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Jan 21, 2016 17:03
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Wurzag posted:I really hope it isn't Emrakul for the sole reason I'll be really burned out on eldrazi by the time SOI comes out and two entire blocks about the same thing in a row seems really dull. An employee at my LGS and I were talking to some people about Emrakul's likely relation to Shadows Over Innistrad, and one of them said, "Wow, they're really running out of ideas, huh?". I didn't know what that was supposed to mean. A continuing story across blocks sounds like the opposite of "running out of ideas". Oraculum Animi posted:I don't think they'll push colorless mana in Innistrad, I think that was a Kozilek-specific thing. Yeah, you're all probably right about Wastes and colorless mana. I don't think they'd have Shadows Over Innistrad not care about colorless mana and then Innistrad Small Set have a bunch of colorless-mana-matters cards and Wastes. Yes, Battle for Zendikar to Oath of the Gatewatch was kind of like that, with colorless-mana-matters only in the small set, but BFZ also had some things to ease into it such as most of the Eldrazi only costing a single colored mana to make them easier to cast when you're splashing the third color (for game purposes) of colorless mana. whydirt posted:I highly doubt Emrakul will be in SoI itself. If anything we might get a reveal hinting at her behind the scenes in the following small set. We don't know how the Eldrazi operate, do we? They came to Zendikar, hosed up everything, and were trapped away by Sorin, Nahiri, and Ugin, but who knows what their MO for invading a plane is, because that much wasn't talked about (I don't really read the lore). Maybe they poke around and corrupt the inhabitants a bit to prepare for their arrival.
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Jan 21, 2016 18:46
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I saw this interaction tonight: Binder Grinder goes over to one of the Commander players and tells him, "You're still looking for a promo Thought-Knot Seer, right? I found one for you!". Commander player is super happy with this, and asks Binder Grinder how much it is. Binder Grinder says they're $30. I go across the store to see what matches are still playing, just so happening to see one guy (Rob) with his trade binder open and a Thought-Knot Seer promo sitting on top of it. The Binder Grinder rushes over to Rob and says, "Yeah, I'm interested in the Thought-Knot Seer." to which Rob replies, "Okay, you said it's $26, right?". Binder Grinder nods, tosses him a regular Thought-Knot Seer and an Oath Chandra (there were maybe some other cards involved) and runs across the store, promo in hand, super excited to make $4. Earlier in the night, another Binder Grinder went up to a friend and asked if he had a set of some card. His friend said he'd trade them to him at a little under what they were worth, and the Grinder scoffed and said he wouldn't trade for them that high. So his friend called him out on never wanting to trade fairly, and he just said "I don't ever need to!". So the friend told him to never ask him for cards again.
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Jan 23, 2016 06:26
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I haven't listened to it, but it's pretty brave of these judges to speak out, even after their suspensions got lifted. I'd be paranoid of hidden consequences such as getting turned down for GPs, not getting exemplar recognitions (so no foils), etc. I'm sure their judging could be made both inconvenient and uncomfortable without much effort and with nothing to point back to anyone in charge.
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Jan 28, 2016 07:20
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Sickening posted:There is just so much wrong with the judge system that its hilarious. The process to become one is too convoluted and rising through the ranks is too clique oriented. Slap the "too much work for too little pay" bow on that poo poo sandwich and there you have it. 1 to 2 isn't so bad. People do it fast these days. It's just like going from 0 to 1, except you need like six months experience and a level 3 has to do it instead of a level 2. Basically as long as you're friendly with a level 3 and you've shown you want to judge more than an FNM, it is no problem. Getting to level 3 is really hard. You have to dedicate a lot of time to judging and the judge program, and then pass a hard test and an interview with high level judges. Level 2 is the sweet spot for me. I don't think I could handle head judging a GP, and the benefits over level 1 are that I can judge GPs if I want, I can head judge PPTQs, team lead at large events, and basically players respect the rulings of non-level-1s a LOT more.
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Jan 28, 2016 18:31
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Maybe I was spoiled, because I got my L1 in a time when an L3 had to certify you, not an L2. The first time I judged was under an L3. I guess I should have checked my privilege. 
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Jan 28, 2016 19:19
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Lightning Lord posted:I think the real reason is they don't want to piss off Star City and have memories of the store revolts that happened when Chronicles was printed rather than any fear of legal reprisal. It's corporate policy, not a binding contract. But it's stupid, even without the List it's not like they're going to print sheets of Moxen and Duals and throw them out of a helicopter, and the RL means they can't ever reprint harmless but fun cards like Thunder Spirit or Ritual of the Machine. They can't pare the List down to just the obvious never print again cards either because that's clearly a slippery slope to the Mox Helicopter scenario, right!?! If you believe the stories, SCG is a major proponent of abolishing the reserve list because it means more Legacy players for them. I never knew of that was true or if they ma and more money controlling the price of everything on the list, but now that they're moving away from Legacy, who knows.
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Jan 29, 2016 02:14
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Entropic posted:Who is it that's actually in favour of the reserve list at this point? Is it the east coast Vintage community (all eight of them)? Everyone around here wants the reserve list abolished so there are more people playing their format. Getting new players until the format is getting harder and harder.
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Jan 29, 2016 05:48
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Sickening posted:So because the modern FNM I attended had a big standard crowd and the tables weren't numbered, I was a 2 rounds in before I realized that 3 out of the 8 people that was needed to fire the event were falsely entered into WER and the standings was a big pile of poo poo and gently caress up as a result. He only had five players, but entered three phonies in just still his event would fire, essentially having three byes? He could get in serious trouble for that if you reported him.
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Jan 30, 2016 06:05
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JerryLee posted:I can't tell from Sickening's account which one it is, but my feeling is generally that if he was doing it to inflate the points of his friends/customers, then gently caress him; but if he was just trying to run a tournament for people who wanted to play and there was literally no other way to do it, then that's something WOTC should fix. This of course still doesn't make it a good idea to bullshit the system but I'm a little bit more sympathetic in the latter case. I'm a little sympathetic. I've been to stores where they got seven players, so an employee had to enter and drop in the first round, giving their opponent the win. It's a gray area, but it lets people play. No one runs fake tournaments anymore since the old DCI ratings were done away with.
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Jan 30, 2016 07:32
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Sickening posted:If you want to do that you talk to your players first. It seems like common sense. Oh, yeah. I can see a TO doing this and not thinking about anything other than, "Well these five guys will just leave the store and not spend any money if I don't force a tournament to start." At my LGS, if we get five or six people sign up and no tournament starts, there's a good chance they'll all leave out of frustration. Our WPN status is too important to risk pulling any bullshit though. It sounded like he was blaming you for not knowing he does this often, which is lovely. I hope Wizards scares him into doing things the right way.
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Jan 30, 2016 07:43
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