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 Welcome to the Sixteenth Edition of the Magic: The Gathering Megathread! A link to the previous thread. LifeLynx wrote most of the following stuff, which I've edited for the new thread. Thanks, LifeLynx! We have just had a new Set Rotation, with the release of Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, and four sets leaving Standard, so it's a good time to start a new thread! Magic: The Gathering is a collectible card game (CCG) where you build or draft a deck of cards and then battle one or more opponents. It's the original CCG, and has been played by millions of people around the world since 1993. According to the game lore, you play as a planeswalker, a powerful wizard capable of traveling between planes, summoning fantastic creatures, and casting powerful spells. Each game of Magic represents a duel between two or more planeswalkers. The sources of magical power in the game are divided into five colors: White, the color of order and balance; blue, the color of knowledge and illusion; black, the color of death and corruption; red, the color of chaos and power; and green, the color of nature and life. Each color is balanced against the others, with their various strengths and weaknesses. In addition to casual play, tournaments of varying levels are held regularly at almost every game store, and major events all around the world. There is an organization called the DCI that sanctions and maintains these events, using tournament officials known as judges to keep the game fair and fun. Like any other collectible game, the components can be quite pricey. Older, out-of-print cards can be hundreds of dollars, but those aren't needed to play in the game's most popular formats. You can buy individual cards from your game store or online, and there are viable decks in most formats that you can build for less than a hundred dollars (and some, such as "pauper", you can assemble for just a few bucks). A bewildering array of different packs and boxes and editions of cards are avaialble at retail and you can always pour money in that way if you like (especially if you would like to try drafting with the "Limited" format), but most people will agree that buying the single cards you need for a specific deck is a better bang for your buck... though that lacks the gambling-thrill of cracking open sealed packs. You can also play online! Magic: The Gathering Arena ('Arena' or MTGA) and Magic: The Gathering Online (MTGO) are two widely-used and well-supported platforms. Most people just getting into Magic go for Arena these days: it doesn't have cards from older sets, but if you want to play Standard formats, it's the best option. Arena is free-to-play, you can pour money into buying resources to accumulate cards quickly or you can just play casually and gradually accumulate what you need to build the decks you want to play without spending anything. MTGO is free to try but costs $4.99 a month for full features, lets you buy and sell digital cards in-game, and supports formats like Vintage that require older cards that don't exist in Arena. If you want the full-on total-card-set experience (in an older, clunkier UI with worse graphics and filled with hardcore magic nerds), check out MTGO. ============================================ THREAD RULES AND GUIDELINES All Trad Games and SA posting rules apply. In addition, please understand that after hundreds of thousands of posts, there are some specific arguments that most posters are really done with re-hashing: Industry News: You can post relevant news about Wizards of the Coast, game designers, social media personalities focused on Magic, etc. if you think there's something worthy of a short discussion. However, extended "industry chat" belongs in the TG as an Industry thread. Especially if there's gonna be a contentious fight about it. Cracking Packs Is Stupid: You will almost always pay more for a pack of cards, than the cards inside sell for individually. If you're playing a constructed format, you'll save money by buying singletons. That said, some people really like opening packs, and it is officially OK for them to post about it. It's a form of gambling, or just a fun surprise, whatever. Please do not poo poo all over people who choose to crack packs, and post about it. If someone claims they know this one weird trick to making money by cracking packs, they're probably getting ahold of packs at way below retail prices, or cracking packs that are from some very limited or out of print edition... or trying to get you to buy in to a scam. If you or someone you know may have a gambling problem, please check the resources in this thread over in the Poker forum, they're fantastic. "Playable" has a narrow meaning here: When a poster says a card is or isn't "playable" they probably mean: it does or does not serve in a constructed deck capable of winning matches at a competitive (e.g. tournament) level. They do not mean the card can't be included in your casual, kitchen-table, or even low-ranked online play formats. That said, people are notoriously bad at card evaluation, especially during pre-release spoilers, so please give each other some slack when it comes to posting opinions about what cards may or may not be good and/or "playable" during spoilers. They're Ruining Magic! It's Doomed!: Magic: The Gathering is the most profitable Trad Game around the world and it is not going away any time soon. If they're printing cards you hate, fair enough: you can say so, and you can say why. But please, nobody really wants to explain to yet another poster how this latest Secret Lair is not, in fact, dooming the game or the company to oblivion. Perhaps it's the last straw for you, and if so, that's your call to make... but don't expect many posters to follow. We are also completely done with re-hashing the problematic nature of the Walking Dead Secret Lair cards. Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro Sucks: Yes. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. This company has, and likely will in the future, make really lovely hiring and firing choices, abuse employees, ruin the environment, screw over customers, and sell a gambling product that exploits people's addictions and rips people off. Everyone who plays Magic or spends money on Magic must contend with their own moral compass. If you want to engage in this discussion, it belongs in the TG as an Industry thread, not here. ============================================ OTHER THREADS You can talk about anything to do with Magic in this thread, but there are some other threads focused on specific areas of Magic play that you may also enjoy: Magic: the Gathering Arena Thread (in the Games forum) This very popular high-traffic thread is for the online free-to-play game, Magic: The Gathering Arena. Talk about Magic microtransactions here! Arena uses some wacky formats, prioritizes Best of One tournament styles, and attracts players of all skill levels, so the metagame can be drastically different than paper. The Arena thread does a lot of deck and draft evaluation stuff, so if you're looking for advice on your latest Arena draft, that's the place to go. Commander Thread (Trad Games) This popular thread is focused on Magic's most popular, most casual format: Commander, also known as Elder Dragon Highlander or EDH. The thread has a casual feel that reflects the casual nature of the format. The Magic: the Gathering Buying and Selling/Trading Thread (SA Mart) Don't deal with eBay or some random third-party insecure site for your physical Magic card needs. This is a thread to post your haves/wants and see if any other Goon wants your poo poo or has the poo poo you really need for that big tournament coming up, you know the one. The Magic: the Gathering Limited Thread (Trad Games) This very low-traffic thread is dedicated to draft and sealed discussion. This is a really informative thread if you're looking for tips on draft especially, as it goes into the draft archetypes of the current format as well as a glossary of commonly used draft terms you might hear at the table. If there hasn't been a post in months, don't worry, post anyway! MtG Eternal Thread (Trad Games) This thread is also very low traffic, but if you want to have an extended discussion on Eternal formats Legacy, Vintage, and honorary "Eternal" format Modern, this is a good place for that focused conversation. M:tG Cube: The Most Expensive Free Magic Money Can Buy (Trad Games) Hey, another super-low-traffic thread! But go ahead and share your cubes with other people without the risk of strangers stealing your foil Russian Dark Confidant you've blinged out your cube with! ============================================ FORMATS Formats are fully explained on magic.wizards.com here I'll explain a handful of the most popular formats, but check that link for the rest: there's about 20 listed formats to try, plus... Casual: Anything goes. Despite being the least talked-about format and not even mentioned by Wizards on their page, mostly because it's not really a "format", casual play may be the most common form of Magic. We're talking kids buying precons and a couple of boosters and sitting around their kitchen tables here. There are other casual formats loved by players more into the game, such as Commander, Cube, Type 4, etc. but if you just want to play, you can just get your mitts on a pile of cards and play, no special format rules required. Constructed formats include... Standard: One of the easiest formats to get into, if someone doesn't mention the format they're playing, it's probably assumed to be Standard. Since it consists of nothing but the last two years worth of Standard-legal sets to be published, finding cards is relatively easy. Standard is the most popular sanctioned constructed format, played at most game stores every Friday night, and is the primary game played on Arena and MTGO. Vintage: The most powerful decks that can be created reside here in "Type 1" where almost all Magic cards ever printed are legal, going back to the earliest days of 1993's wildly imbalanced release. The insanely high expense of rare cards that are in almost every good deck in the format - cards known as the Power 9 because of their reputation for being the nine most powerful cards ever printed - leads players to shy away from the format, although many games of Vintage allow proxies. There is restricted list for this format which controls it somewhat, but it's still an absurd format mostly for Magic's power-gamer set. Commander: Commander (previously known as EDH, or Elder Dragon Highlander) is one of the most popular casual formats. In Commander, you pick a legendary creature to serve as your "commander", and build a 100-card deck (99 plus your commander) using only one of each card, excluding basic lands. You can't use any cards which have mana symbols anywhere on them that don't match the ones on your commander's card, and the format uses the Vintage cardpool with some modifications. Your commander starts in the "command zone", and you can cast it any time you normally could cast them - but each time you cast it that way, it costs 2 more to cast. If a commander would be put into a graveyard or into exile, its owner can choose to put it back in the command zone instead, so it's hard to permanently get rid of a commander short of sending it into its owner's library. And lastly, if a player takes 21 or more damage over the course of the game from any one commander, they lose the game. The official rules can be found here. Pauper: While Pauper is most popular on Magic Online, it does see some interest in the real world as well. Using only commons and cards reprinted as commons on Magic Online, it is the cheapest constructed format available. Here's a good FAQ to get started. ...and many more. Drafted formats usually referred to as "Limited" include... Booster Draft: This format, popular on Arena and at game stores, has each player purchasing three sealed booster packs and sitting around a table. At the same time, each player opens up their first pack, takes a card out, and passes the rest of the cards in the pack to their left. This continues until all the cards in each pack are gone, then the second pack is opened and passed to the right. The third and last pack goes left again. Skilled players can sense which colors are "open" and pick cards that are strong in those colors. Then players build a minimum 40-card deck using their drafted cards plus as many extra basic land cards as they want. Some players consider booster drafting to be the best test of a Magic player's skill. Arena has a special "quick draft" option, in which you draft against a the computer AI, and then play against human players, that can be a nice option if you want to have no time pressure while you peruse every card in the pack, look up card rankings online, etc. Sealed Deck:In sealed deck, a player gets six packs. With those cards, plus as many extra basic lands as they wish, they have to build a deck that's at least 40 cards. Sealed is part luck (what you open), and part skill (how you build and play with your deck). High-level limited tournaments are often sealed deck, with booster drafts as their top 8 playoffs. Cube Drafting: Booster drafting is fun, but it can get expensive, and players lose interest in drafting a set when a new one's about to come out... and this is where cube drafting comes in. A cube contains 350-700 of curated cards, which can include high-powered vintage cards like the Power 9, or could be a thematic or pauper cube. The cube is shuffled, and random packs are dealt out to each player, which are then drafted like a normal booster draft. Cube draft owners often take great pride in their cube, and may try to collect foil versions of every card, making their cube cost more than the average Vintage deck. Once you have a good sized collection of your own Magic cards, you could try assembling your own Cube for you and your friends to try drafting from! ============================================ WHERE TO PLAY In 2020, Covid-19 swept the world, and in-person magic became a life-threatening option in most countries, including the US. Now, as of September 2021, in-person magic is becoming a thing again even in countries like the US where variants of the pandemic are still raging. Fully vaccinated and masked, you may feel the risks of public gatherings for Magic are acceptable; and hopefully in the near future, those risks will receed. Friday Night Magic (FNM): The most accessable tournaments for most players is FNM, which as its name suggests takes place on Friday nights at local hobby stores. FNM tournaments can range anywhere from eight to sixty-plus players, and usually pay out prizes in either packs or store credit. Competition is usually pretty lax at FNMs, with (hopefully) friendly players and a fun atmosphere. There's a special promo given out to some players at every FNM, and you can see the current month's here. Many stores also participate in FNM on Arena, where you can play and earn prizes awarded by your local store. Prereleases: The week before a new set comes out, players can experience it early in a Prerelease Event. Prizes are usually small, because the real prize is getting to see and play with the new cards for the first time. Magic Fests: Giant celebrations of Magic that happen in and around large cities. If you feel like travelling or there's one near you, they're insanely large events full of Magic players, side events, and Grand Prix type tournaments. Competitive Level Play: Wizards has radically curtailed its support for "professional level" tournament players, but there are still high-level tournaments from time to time, with varying prize support. Check https://www.magic.gg/ for officially-supported esport events like the World Championships. ============================================ USEFUL LINKS Articles & Info DailyMTG.com: The official page for Magic is updated every weekday with articles from some of the most well-known people related to the game, from rules managers to Pro players to the people who make the cards you play with. You can also find tournament locations near you and information about upcoming sets. MythicSpoiler: By far the best source for spoilers - the pre-release previews of cards in upcoming sets. Typically all of a given set's cards are spoilered by dozens of different media outlets, twitter accounts, youtubers, etc. for a couple of weeks before each release - you can get them all in one place, here. CranialInsertion.com: A weekly rules article with answers to questions submitted by players. This is the rules article that was previously on MTGSalvation. Magic-League.com: If you want to play in online leagues without paying for Magic Online, this is the place to look. Magic-League has thousands of players, so finding a game should never be a problem. TheManaDrain.com: One of the premier sources for Vintage information on the internet, TMD is a forum to discuss Vintage strategy and find events. MTG The Source: What The Mana Drain is to Vintage, this is to Legacy. Premodernmagic.com: A community-created constructed format consisting of the sets from 4th edition to Scourge, roughly 1995-2003, with just 32 banned cards. If you've got old cards from this era, check it out! Tolarian Community College is... uh... youtubes, they're funny and advice, I guess? I don't know. Silhouette said to link this. Tools Scryfall: The best and most comprehensive search engine for Magic cards. The official tool is Gatherer, but Gatherer sucks in comparison, just use Scryfall. 17Lands: An Arena companion tool that automatically tracks your drafts and your constructed decks, providing statistics, easy card lists, leaderboards, and replays. EDHREC: A great tool for Commander/EDH players. Get suggestions based on whatever you want to play in the format! MTG Goldfish: Another metagame analysis site. Very comprehensive! DeckStats.net: Type in your decklist and get details on your curve, draw sample hands, etc. Autocard anywhere is a vital browser plugin that recognizes card names on any site, and gives you a card preview popup on hoverover. MTGTop8.com: A listing of the top decks from various tournaments, broken down by format. A must-use if you want to follow the shifting metagame. Moxfield: A deck-building site with a very clean and friendly interface. It’ll also automatically generate commander deck recommendations based on https://edhrec.com Dawnglare Visualizer is an excellent tool for quickly evaluating your old cards to find the ones worth money. Just select the set or sets you're looking at and it'll show you pictures of the cards sorted in columns by approximate current street price. Dawnglare also has a Price change tracker so you can see how much less your borderless Teferi, Who Slows the Sunset is worth now than it was last week! Discord An unofficial Goon MTG Discord server is here: https://discord.gg/5tsv4tmBdE. This is not part of SA, please participate at your own risk. Contact mods or admins if goons are doing bad things to you on discord, don't post it in the thread. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 05:15 on Sep 11, 2023 |
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Sep 18, 2021 18:00
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Baller Ina posted:Just noticed the symbols on her laptop are wrong. Interesting touch or ridiculous blunder? Probably means the ad agency that received a small box of magic the gathering stickers to use as set dressing for this shoot didn't pay close attention, and the marketing staffer at wizards who approved the ad photos either didn't notice, or didn't care enough to get someone to photoshop the image to fix it.
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Sep 18, 2021 18:27
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I know, right? I slapped this junk together last night. It has exactly one combo and if you don't draw it by turn five or six you're probably dead, but if you can get one (or two!) barbarian classes out, plus something with valuable ETB, push one Barb Class up to level 3 (for Haste) and then slap down Delina, mash the attack button, and roll a poo poo load of dice as your assault goes wide wider widerer wiiidderrerrr and so far I've done that three times and gotten a concession every time. Twice with Swarming Goblins, once with Ogre Battedriver (who replaces the need for level 3 on barbarian). Deck 4 Delina, Wild Mage (AFR) 138 24 Mountain (MID) 383 4 Barbarian Class (AFR) 131 4 Swarming Goblins (AFR) 162 2 Plundering Barbarian (AFR) 158 3 Basalt Ravager (KHM) 122 3 Goblin Gang Leader (ANB) 70 2 Ogre Battledriver (ANB) 80 2 Doomskar Titan (KHM) 130 2 Earth-Cult Elemental (AFR) 141 2 Red Dragon (AFR) 160 4 Fireblade Charger (ZNR) 139 2 Hobgoblin Captain (AFR) 148 2 Relic Robber (ZNR) 153 I spent three Rare wildcards for Delinas and the rest is just what I had already, YMMV.
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Sep 18, 2021 18:53
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kalvanoo posted:leperflesh is there a way to link your big nice prob/stats post from the previous thread in the op? i think a better more intuitive understanding of probabilities and statistics would be great for deckbuilding and issues like whether niche sideboard cards should be maindecked even in metas where they might see frequent relevant targets. would be a shame to lose the post. Oh yeah, I forgot about that thing. Maybe I'll go and find it, clean it up/shorten it a bit, and re-post it. I could link it but it was a bit long and meandery. Thanks for reminding me though! Also if you guys know of other old effortposts in any of the previous threads, link 'em.
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Sep 20, 2021 07:00
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Basic Odds and Probability Stuff for Magic the Gathering Players in About 5000 Words, by Leperflesh This is an update of a post I made in the previous thread, by request. Disclaimer: I am not a statistician, nor even especially good at math. I'm not really qualified to talk about statistics and probability, this post may contain significant errors. Also it's only just barely over 5000 words, sorry. Where I'm coming from is:
If you've played hundreds of games of Magic, and some of you have played thousands by now, you may understand a lot of this stuff intuitively even if you've forgotten all the math you got in high school, but this first bit is foundational so let's just review it quickly. Assumption of fairness: In all discussions and examples below, we will assume an ideal universe in which decks are always shuffled to total randomness, dice and coins are always fair and cannot land on their edges or skip off the table, etc. Errors in play, cheating, and defective playing pieces can't be accounted for so we'll ignore them when discussing how the math works. How to talk about odds: All odds of things happening are expressed as a value between 0 and 1. At 0, the event is completely impossible, and at 1, the event is absolutely certain. Between those numbers, we may express the odds as a fraction or a percentage, which are the same thing shown differently. Sometimes a fraction is more convenient, whereas a percentage (which is also expressable as a decimal) is sometimes easier to intuitively grasp, especially when rounded off. For example, "about 12%" or ~0.12 may be easier to intuitively grasp, than 7/59. Odds of drawing cards The odds that you draw any specific card from a shuffled deck on one draw is 1 divided by the number of cards in the deck. At the beginning of the game, playing with 60 cards, a particular card has a 1/60 chance of being on top. After you draw one card, you can see it, and either it's that one specific card or it isn't. If it isn't, the odds that one card will be the next card you draw are now 1/59, because there's 59 cards left. As the deck gets thinner, the odds of drawing that one card increase. When there's only 1 card left, if you haven't seen that one card yet, it must be the next card: the odds are 1/1. If there's multiple copies of a given card, and you want the odds of drawing any one of those copies, divide the number of copies by the number of cards remaining. For example, if you have six forests in your 60-card deck, it's 6/60 chance you'll draw a forest with your first card drawn. You can easily reduce that fraction: 6/60 is 1/10, or .10, or 10%. Remember though, that what you're calculating is the odds of an unseen card from among other unseen cards. If you've been playing a match for a while, what you care about is how many cards are left unseen (e.g., presumed to be in the deck). Extending the previous example, if you have 1 forest in your hand, 3 on the table in front of you, and 40 cards remaining in your deck, what are the odds you'll topdeck a forest? Well, you've seen 4, so you know there's only 2 left. 2/40 is 1/20 or .05 or 5%. The odds of drawing a forest have fallen from where they were at the beginning of the game, because through play you've pulled more than the average draw out of the deck already. OK, that's the foundational stuff. Now we're on to the functional part of the post. Tip 1: estimating the odds using quick mental math I find it much easier to intuitively understand what my odds are when I convert a fraction with a fairly large-ish denominator, or a denominator not divisible by 2, 4, 5, or 10, into a percentage. What's 3/47ths? If you're good at mental arithmetic, maybe you can find that exact number in two seconds, but I'm bad at it and I can't. However, having the exact odds are rarely important in a game. What you really want is useful information - a rough estimate of the odds is good enough for wizard poker - so you can make use of that estimate to inform your play. I taught myself how do to this for poker, so I'll use a poker example. Poker is normally played with a standard "bridge" deck with the jokers removed: 52 cards, which is approximately 50, and that means I can use some rounding-off techniques to make the mental arithmetic easier. Say I have around fifty cards left in my deck. If it's 47 or 53 or whatever, just call it 50. That means I can take the number of copies of a card within that deck that I'm looking for - 1, 2, 3, whatever - and double it, and that's an approximate percentage chance of drawing that card. So if there's 3/47... that's about 3 in 50, double the three and that's 6, so it's about 6%. The actual value of 3/47 is 6.38%. 6% is quite close enough to 6.38% for practical work. While a deck is around 50 cards left, the doubling trick works well. What about at other deck sizes? I like to round the number of cards to one of the numbers in the following list, find my pretty-close percentage, and then I can "fudge" that value up or down a bit at the end, depending on whether I rounded the deck up or down at the beginning. Memorize these values (or maybe make a cheat sheet you can quickly reference during play?) and practice a little, and you'll likely be able to come within two or three percent of the right answer with about five or ten seconds of thinking, every time:
OK. What do you do with this information? Tip 2: A simplified poker example of using drawing odds to make key decisions One thing that's important in poker is "outs." The idea is, OK, you're playing poker, and of the cards that are "yours" - either just your hand, or in some games like Texas Hold'Em, your cards plus community cards - you can either make a hand that is likely to win, or you can't. You use the betting and other information from the game to make guesses about whether you're probably "ahead" or "behind" the other players. When you're behind, you may need to make an estimate of your odds of improving with the next card. (Note: you're actually multiplying your uncertainty about being ahead/behind by your uncertainty of improving.) So, excluding all the cards you've seen (your own cards, cards other players have face up, face up community cards), you can count up how many cards you could be dealt from among those remaining in the deck which would probably improve your hand enough to win a showdown. (Note that even though other players have face-down cards, you don't treat them differently from the cards still in the dealer's deck. I can explain why that is if you care, but for now please just accept it as the case.) Here's a hand. I have 10  , 5 . Face up cards on the board (community cards, which I can use to try to make a 5-card poker hand) are 4, 10, Q , K. I've seen nobody else's cards, so the pool of cards from which the next draw is coming from is 52 - 6 = 46. I have a pair of tens, which is OK, but with two higher cards on the table, any opponent could easily have a better hand than mine. If someone makes a raise ahead of me, I have to either call, raise, or fold. Should I fold immediately?Well, I need to know the odds of improving my hand. Which cards improve my hand? A ten would give me three tens, and there's 2 left. A five would give me two pair, and there's 3 fives left. And, there's three clubs on the board plus the club in my hand, so any club gets me a flush! We can see four clubs, so that leaves 13-4=9 clubs left. 2 + 3 + 9 = 14 cards that improve my hand - 14 “outs.” What are the odds? 14 cards that improve me with about 50 cards left in the deck would be 14x2=28%. The odds are actually a bit better, because there's actually (52 - 6) 45 cards left, so I can fudge it upward to more like 30%, or a bit less than a third. Now I know how much money would be an "even" bet - if someone raises ahead of me, such that by calling that raise (to stay in the hand) I'd risk $X to try to win a pot of less than 3x$X, then I'd be paying “losing odds” to call. Ignoring the odds that my "improved" hand would still lose, or that my existing pair of tens could win, I know that I need to be offered 3-to-1 pot odds or better in order to be statistically worth calling. My decision isn't totally made for me (there's complicating factors: my reads, my option to bluff, etc.), but at least now I have a better feel for my situation, and that is information that I can use to make better decisions routinely. In the immediate case whatever the odds of improving might be, I might win or lose due to the luck of the draw: but if I repeat these situations over and over for thousands of hands, on average my results will improve if I call pots where my odds of winning are better, and fold where my odds of winning are worse, even (especially, actually) in edge situations where I'm only a little bit ahead or behind. Tip 3: Applying the principles of probability of drawing outs to Magic: The Gathering Perhaps you can see how the ability to calculate your odds of improving with the next card might apply in Magic. Rather than dealing with monetary bets (I assume), you may be dealing with choices. In a very simplified case: you have one mana left, and more than one card in your hand you could play. One of them is Opt. Should you play the Opt in hopes of drawing a card that takes you from losing next turn to winning next turn? Well, Opt lets you see 1 card, and then either take it, or reject it and draw an unknown card - so effectively, two chances at drawing a critical card. If you are in a binary situation - you may be losing the game now unless you draw one of a few specific cards left in your deck - you can calculate the odds that, of the next two cards in your deck, one of them is a card you need; and compare those odds against playing a different one-drop from your hand instead, perhaps one which you can also roughly estimate the odds of that other effect granting you survival. Tip 4: Understand and reject the gambler's fallacy Beware the gambler's fallacy. The gambler's fallacy boils down to a feeling or conviction that previous events influence the odds of a future event, when the future event is actually independant. Suppose you have drawn five lands in a row. The next card simply can't be a land, that'd be hosed up, right? The odds against drawing six lands in a row are astronomical! No, no, shut down that line of thinking. Those odds were extremely low, before you'd drawn any lands; but now, the five lands in a row are in the past, and those events do not influence your luck. The odds of drawing another land are equal to the number of lands remaining in the deck divided by the number of cards remaining in the deck. Period. If you have 8 lands left and 41 cards left then the odds are 8/41 (roughly 8/40. Using our estimating tricks, each 2 cards in 40 is exactly 5%, so that's about 4x5% = 20%. Actual odds of 8/41: 19.512%. 20% is close enough!). 20% chances happen all the time! There's an 80% chance you won't draw a land and a 20% chance you will and the fact you just drew five lands in a row is irrelevant to that. Statistically, we would say that the future event of drawing a card is independent of past events. There's more ways the gambler's fallacy can affect your thinking. If you know your deck beats their deck around 50% of the time, and you just lost a game to them in which you made no mistakes, you might think now, if you play correctly, you're due to win. You lost the last game, so by the rules of fairness, you're now owed a victory. Certainly you shouldn't lose three games in a row, that'd be horribly unlucky... or unfair, or proof of cheating, or proof that the site that says your deck is as good as theirs is wrong! Well no, the fact you just lost has no effect on the outcome of the next game (we're ignoring that both players have learned about each other's decks, sideboards, player skill, etc.). It's just another coinflip. The universe does not reach down its law of fairness hand and rearrange the cards in the shuffled decks to make sure balance is restored or some poo poo like that. You can flip a fair coin five times and get five heads in a row, and you can play five games and lose them all, and this does not prove that: your opponent is cheating, or you're cursed, or the online statistics that say that your deck is ~50% against their deck must be totally loving wrong, etc. etc. Tip 5: Understand sequential events In the moment of a game, the next draw, coin flip, dice roll, etc. is independent. But when we look at long-term trends, we are analyzing sequences of sequential events collectively, rather than each independent event by itself. Going back to poker for a second, we know that just because there may be only once chance in 45 (or whatever) of drawing the one card we need to win, doesn't mean that that card coming up is impossible, or that - once it happens - we can shake a fist at the universe for producing an "unfair" result. However, if we play dozens, hundreds, thousands of hands, we can expect the universe to produce results that are near to the statistically-calculatable outcomes. Expectation that results will trend towards the average is “reasonable.” It's not a proof, in a mathematical or scientific sense, but it's an approach that will tend to give most people the outcomes they expected. Let's do a quick thought experiment. I'm going to flip a fair coin four times and write down the results. What are the possible outcomes? HHHH HHHT HHTH HHTT HTHH HTTH HTHT HTTT THHH THHT TTHH TTHT THTH THTT TTTH TTTT That's sixteen possible sequences of events. So, we can say, prior to flipping any coins, that each sequence has a 1/16 chance of occurring. Note that only two sequences have four of the same result in a row: four heads, or four tails. So, there's only 2/16 or 1/8 or 12.5% chance, each time we go to flip a coin four times in a row, that we'll either get four heads in a row or four tails in a row. Here's another point worth noting. How many results have exactly the same number of heads and tails - e.g., how many would seem to conform to the expectations of “fair” outcomes our foolish gambler expects, and how many don't? Count them up and you'll find six that have some combination of two heads and two tails. That leaves ten that don't. So 6/16 or 37.5% of the time, the gambler is satisfied, and 62.5%, he starts leveling accusations at the coin-flipper, the coin, God, etc. I think it's interesting to see that in this example, the gambler's own expectations are wrong more often than they're right! An “uneven” result is significantly more likely than an “even” result. What if I ran this experiment sixteen times. Do you think I should expect to get each of the above results exactly once? No: each time I repeat the experiment, there's no more likelihood of getting any one of the above results than any of the others. Expecting to get one of each is just another application of the gambler's fallacy! If we've already repeated this experiment 9 times, and gotten 9 unique sequences, the odds the next sequence would be one of those 9 is higher (9/16) than the odds we'd get one of the remaining 7 (7/16). We're no longer treating each coin flip as a unique event, now we're treating each sequence of four coin flips as one event, and each time we repeat the trial, all sixteen possible outcomes are equally likely as each other, irrespective of what our previously recorded sequences turned out to be. Alright, so what if we run the experiment a bunch of times. We've already decided there's a chance we get the same sequence over and over - maybe all heads, say, or maybe the THTT sequence happens again and again; but since each time we repeat the experiment, there's actually just a 1/16 chance of getting a specific result, over time we can expect the results to trend towards a more or less even distribution from among the sixteen options. This is just as true if we call each dependent event a single coin flip, or ten in a row... or drawing one card from a deck, or drawing four from a deck, or arranging ten cards in a stack, or arranging sixty cards in a stack. To find the probability of two or more independent events occurring in a sequence, we multiply together the probabilities associated with individual events. This works only because the two events are independent: the result of the first event does not affect or influence the second event. So one coin flip coming up heads is 1/2. Two coin flips coming up heads, in a row, is 1/2 times 1/2 = 1/4. Three is 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 = 1/8. And four is 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 = 1/16. See? Sixteen possibilities, exactly one of which is four heads in a row. We can calculate the possibility of one specific sequence of n independent coin flips as (1/2)n. And we can calculate the number of possible unique sequences as 2n. The reason there's a 2 there, is because there's two sides of the coin. If we roll a d6, there's six options, so we'd use (1/6)n to find the odds of one specific sequence of results on a d6, and the number of possible sequences as 6n. What if we are looking for a specific, shorter sequence within a longer sequence of events? Say we want to know: what are the odds of flipping a coin 10 times and getting a sequence of 6 heads in a row (surrounded by other heads or tails results)? There is a handy tool for this, called the binomial distribution. I don't know how to do this. This wiki page is confusing. Whatever. The point I wanna make is that there's an exponent in the math, and that generally means "the more events there are, and the lower the odds of each event, the number gets really big really fast." Sometimes, it's tricky to calculate the odds of a complex sequence of events. But if you know the odds of each independent event in that sequence, you can program a computer application to use a random number generator to plug in random results of the correct odds for each event into a sequence, record the results, and then repeat the sequence, many many times. Doing this is called a Monte Carlo Simulation and it's a very useful tool if what you want is not "what's the specific outcome I'll get in the casino tomorrow" but rather "how much should we expect all the visitors to the casino for the next month to win and lose" kinds of questions. Tip 6: Sample sizes and variance The more times you test the odds of a thing, whether it's one event or a sequence of them, the more likely it is that your aggregate results closely represent the statistical odds of the events or sequences occurring. Of course, with a given trial run, you could get a wildly aberrant result: but each additional run of a simulation (each new sequence of coin flips, each new shuffle and draw from a deck, each new poker hand) represents another "shot" at the odds. You can brute force a chart of the expected results for a complex statistical event or sequence by just running more and more and more trials of a simulation, which is a thing computers are good at doing. This is hopefully drilled home by now: if you try something just a few times, you should expect your results to be different from the statistical average. Remember the four coin flips in a row. There's fewer options for a statistically average "each side turned up 50% of the time" than there are for an "unbalanced" result. With a small sample size, we expect the results to be unrepresentative. Results that exactly matched the stasticical expecation would actually be remarkable and unusual. Conversely, when you examine larger sample sizes, there's many more opportunities for the results to skew towards the average. I don't want to fill this page with sequences of Hs and Ts, but you can do it yourself if you want: write out all the possible combos of a sequence of, say, six coin flips in a row. (There's 64 of them.) How many have exactly 3 heads and exactly 3 tails? How many are "more average" with a 4/2 or 2/4 mix? How many are "unusual" with a 1/5 or 5/1 mix? There's still only one each of six Hs in a row or six Ts in a row. What you will find if you chart the possible results is that you get a probability distribution on a curve, like this:  What you are seeing is a middle point where results tend to cluster, and then legs on either side where outcomes are less and less likely, and then thin tails where there may be just a few or perhaps only one possible sequence among many to get that most extreme result on either side. In mathematics we call this a Normal Distribution. Don't try to read that page, it'll give you a headache. I'm cribbing from this random tutorial about statistics a bit, so let's go ahead and blatantly steal some graphs to better see what the result of # of trials in a monte carlo sim of coinflips look like. Here is one run consisting of 1000 trials:  And here is one run consisting of 10,000 trials:  Both graphs resemble, but are not identical to, the expected smooth curve of that first chart. But, you can see that the one with ten times as many trials has more "smooth" results than the one with just 1000 trials. They're still not exactly the "expected" outcome (as I said before, that'd be incredibly rare!) but they're pretty close. Close enough that even if we didn't know the odds of flipping a coin and getting heads vs. tails, we could flip a shitload of coints, squint at a chart of the results, and find the odds. Variance can be described as the expectation that our real-world results will deviate from the perfect curve. Variance says, if we flip a bunch of coins, we ought to expect to get results different from a “perfectly even” H-T-H-T-H-T-H-T-H-T... and if we total up the heads and tails of an even number of flips, we ought to “expect” the two totals to be different, not the same. Variance is important in poker because it says "even if you, on average, are playing well enough to have a positive expected value - that is, you'll net positive money in the long term - you must expect there to be long periods where you randomly underperform and others where you randomly overperform." Regardless of whether you're making good decisions, a sequence of independent trials (each card drawn, each hand played, each match or tournament played, etc.) can't be expected to perfectly conform to a particular long-term trend over any shorter period, and in fact is less and less likely to do so the shorter the period you examine. This is also true in wizard poker. The best player in the world should expect to lose several matches in a row to worse players frequently, and should not immediately attribute those losses to some unidentified flaw in their game, nor to the gods of chance having them on a shitlist, nor to someone cheating. Similarly, the worst player in the world may win several games in a row, and should not immediately attribute those wins to an improvement in their play, or the gods of luck looking favorably upon them, etc. Over the years I have seen many a trad games poster state that they have “terrible luck.” They are wrong. What is actually happening - assuming they're correctly reporting their results, which is a big assumption - is that they have experienced an extended period of negative variance. Tip 7: Distribution of cards in a deck If you have a 52-card deck of playing cards, each card is a real physical object. That object can only be in one place at a time: one spot in the deck. If we start laying out a sequence, say: Q , 2, 5, 9 , 10, A... we've "used up" those six cards. The next card can't be one of them. So there's only 44 cards from which to choose for the next card in the sequence. Each time we draw one card, the pool of un-drawn cards goes down. For the first card there's 1/52 possibilities. For the second there's 1/51. The third is 1/50. And so on. Remember the math? Instead of independent coin flips, where we're flipping the same coin (or many identical coins), each card in turn reduces the possibilities for the next card, until eventually we get down to just two cards left... a 1/2 chance for a given card to be that one, and finally, a 1/1 chance, the last card can only be the last unpicked card. In mathematics, the term factorial means: the product of a positive integer and all the positive integers less than it. In math, you write a factorial by writing the largest integer with an exclamation point. Four factorial is written as 4! and is equal to 4x3x2x1=24. 5! =120, 6!=720, 7!=5,040, 8!=40,320, and so on. For a deck of cards, the factorial of its number of (unique) cards tells us how many different ways it can be arranged: each individual arrangement represents one of that number of possibilities. A deck with just ten cards is 10! = 10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1 = 3,628,800 What if you add just one more card? You're multiplying that result by 11. 11! = 39,916,800 Can you see, intuitively, how each additional card you add, increases the possible arrangements of those cards by a factor that is also increasing in size? You may not be able to mentally calculate, say, 24!, but without doing any calculations, you should intuitively sense that it's a biiig honkin' number. And 25! must be twenty five times even bigger-er! With magic: the gathering, in most formats we have several more-or-less identical cards in a deck, which if we treat as the "same card", reduce the possible outcomes. A particular deck arrangement with two forests on top is "the same" as the same deck arrangement with those two forests swapped. Tom Clancy has helped with this bit: Tom Clancy is Dead posted:IIRC you divide the overall factorial by the factorials of whatever duplicates you have, so the simplest mtg example would be 60!/(20!*4!^10) Tom Clancy's “simplest MTG example” is a deck of sixty cards, with four each of ten different cards, plus twenty lands. I think a more common arrangement would be four each of nine different cards plus 24 lands, which would be 60!/(20!*4!9). If I've understood this right. Maybe I didn't. I'm not actually good at math lol. The point is that a big ol deck of cards has so many unique arrangements, even with duplicates, that you should expect every time you thoroughly shuffle your deck, that it's in an arrangement that it's never been in before and will never be in again. The odds of a single arrangement occurring twice in one lifetime are fantastically low, like so low that it's similar to, say, the odds you trip over a grain of sand on a beach, and then return to that beach the next year and trip over the same grain of sand. e. see also: number one pta fan posted:Re: Practical Probability for Planeswalker Poker Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Sep 22, 2021 |
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Sep 21, 2021 23:09
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To me, "ETB" makes it clear we're not talking about when a spell is still on the stack (which a term like "comes into play" might still leave as ambiguous, but "arrives" I feel like would work). The Battlefield as a keyworded zone draws my attention to the fact that there's zones and they are distinct, in a way that "comes into play" wouldn't. I think these days they're at least somewhat aware that any keyword they come up with needs to be distinctive in all the different languages they print, too.
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Sep 22, 2021 00:38
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Drowning Rabbit posted:Printed to PDF for safe keeping and probably going to physically print this later to read in a more leisurely fashion. What I have read previously was very insightful. Thanks! Gosh. I hope it's helpful!
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Sep 22, 2021 18:18
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number one pta fan posted:Re: Practical Probability for Planeswalker Poker This is a really good article and I'm gonna link it from my effortpost. I do take issue with one thing he says in it, though: quote:So if you only care about drawing at least one copy of a certain card, then the first one you add to your list is the most valuable. If your metagame is equal parts Affinity, Dredge, and Storm and all hate cards are equally good, then the best 3-card sideboard is one Stony Silence, one Rest in Peace, and one Rule of Law—a sideboard with three copies of the same hate card would be worse. This is nonsensical. His premise (that the first copy of a card you add to your deck raises the probability of drawing it by turn three from 0% to 15%, while the second only raises that probability further to 28%) applies equally to the group of three different cards as it does to a group of three identical cards, if as he says right there "...all hate cards are equally good." Three cards added to your deck have the same probability of drawing one of them irrespective of whether they're the same card or different cards! I think he messed up in editing and wound up conflating two different things here, though. Three different cards and the three he uses here are quite different, are never "equally good." You're always choosing from among the cards in your board based on what your opponent is running, and artifact hate (stony silence) is not "equally good" as graveyard hate (Rest in Peace), unless somehow your opponent is using both artifact abilities and graveyard interaction, exactly equally! What is worth realizing is that adding a 15% chance of drawing artifact hate by t3 vs. an opponent's artifact-ability deck, plus having the versatility in your board to go after graveyard stuff at a 15% draw rate by t3, is better than the option of 28% chance of artifact hate by t3, and no option to go after graveyard stuff. Anyway, quote:You should also spend some time with a hypergeometric calculator if you're ever going to play with a spin-to-win card like Collected Company or Aetherworks Marvel or Delver of Secrets. Or getting a realistic expectation of exactly how good your flashbacked Memory Deluge is going to be with 35 cards left in the deck. You can also use hypergeometric probability to find out exactly how small the fraction of a percent the possibility of you getting to turn nine without drawing your third colour was if, like me, you enjoy mathematically rigorous self-flagellation. Yeah. It takes some fiddling to understand what the hypergeometric calculator is really showing you - try the samples given at the bottom of this version to get it. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Sep 22, 2021 |
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Sep 22, 2021 19:18
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What, historically, has been the strategic approach to counter or deal with or beat blue decks that just counter everything you do, draw shitloads of cards, and eventually win by not letting you play?
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Sep 24, 2021 20:36
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I really enjoy it when I get Delina in along with three Barbarian Classes and roll fuckloads of dice and make like seven copies of her (or perhaps swarming goblins or whatever else is lying around) and go wide with a ton of +2s and Menace on an opponent sitting there at 20 life who has been smugly countering and removing my piddly goblins all game and ignoring my barbarian class enchantments and drawing tons of cards and building a big mana base. It's only happening about once every four or five matches, at gold in best-of-one standard play, but that's enough for me. It's great.
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Sep 25, 2021 01:38
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A "proxy" that is intended to be indistinguishable from a real card, is not a proxy, it's a counterfeit card. The proliferation of counterfeits is why we're not allowed to link to proxy sites, even ones that are nominally not about making proxies that look like the originals. So that's kind of a pain. ahh, ya incorrigible scamp, I can't be mad
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Sep 30, 2021 00:01
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kalvanoo posted:what if they were so indistinguishable you couldn't tell them apart ever even by ripping them open what would the morality be then The morality is tied up with how people feel about intellectual property rights, corporations, the secondary market for cardboard, etc. and I'd invite anyone who really wants to dive deep into that, to go have the screaming fight in C-SPAM or something, rather than here, because I am 100% certain based on a year of moderating TG that we will not reach a happy consensus on that subject. The legality, however, is quite clear.
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Sep 30, 2021 01:20
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I want to hear about the card ripping. That sounds like a good story.
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Sep 30, 2021 01:33
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mandatory lesbian posted:Nah i want to hear people be a crybaby bitch and whine about how a multibillion dollar company needs to protect its copyright. That poo poo makes me hard  Aranan posted:"Proxy" talk This is good, I didn't know they had a term for the second thing - "playtest card" is I think the typical thing goons want to talk about and link to, and if it wasn't some kind of site exploration homework assignment for a mod every time someone linked to a new one, we'd probably allow it. But it would have to be in order to diligently protect Jeffrey from legal hazard, so, welp.
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Sep 30, 2021 01:51
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Lieutenant Centaur posted:Standard is basically back to being unplayable. Artifact hate is pretty easy to sideboard for Chariot, but I'm not sure what the good counters are for Goldspan (instant-speed creature removal is easy in B and available in R...) and particularly Alrund's (just counterspell effects?) But this does seem to me like the same issue you have in any given release where there's two or three really good cards you have to account for in your deck. Am I missing something that makes these three especially hard?
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Sep 30, 2021 20:24
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I was struggling the other night with someone who got teleportation circle out along with chariot, because I almost never maindeck enchantment removal, until I remembered that I had 4x copies of Plundering Barbarian and that I could actually chose his destroy target artifact ETB option that I use so infrequently I forgot it existed, since his job in the deck is to make treasure + be a 2/2.
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Sep 30, 2021 20:30
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TheKingofSprings posted:Goldspan Dragon very nearly refunds itself if killed with targetted removal. I'm obviously very bad at this game so forgive me if I'm being dense, but it seems to be a five-mana-cost card that refunds a one-mana treasure if you target it with a removal spell? Or is the idea that they've already definitely cast it with haste at the beginning of combat and attacked with it, so it's refund two... that's still not very nearly 5? e. oh I guess you tap and sac the treasures before the removal resolves too, so you get 4 mana, to spend in that phase. I get it. e2. I'm confused about timing now. If you cast him during your combat phase, do I not get a chance to target him with removal before you get to declare him as an attacker? Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 20:46
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I'm sympathetic, especially if "adapt" means "run this one or two very specific other decks", or severely compromise the deck you want to run by swapping in cards that are specifically to counter those three good cards and otherwise you never want to draw (I play Best of 1, so sideboarding them isn't an option for me), etc. "Standard is bad" as a shorthand for "once again there's one or two Tier 0 decks in Standard and I don't particularly want to run them" is a fair take. If it's actually a shorthand for "once again, the deck I decided to build, be it a tier 2 or my own janky creation, loses 65% of matches to those one or two Tier 0 decks" then yeah that's kind of a tired played out complaint because that's... just how the game of magic: the gathering works, in pretty much every format, right? I'm content to run my jank and lose 65% of matches because the ones I win are satisfying and fun and even when I lose, I often learn something or have a good time playing; but if you want to win consistently in Magic, you have to run one of the small number of Best Decks. Yeah?
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Sep 30, 2021 20:55
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Magic Underwear posted:You aren't confused, he was being hyperbolic. You always have an opportunity to kill it with instants before it can be declared an attacker, so nearly refund is just not true. It is a majorly pushed card though no doubt. It is fair enough that if you don't have both instant removal in hand, and the mana to cast it, goldspan's treasure gen and effect can put it ahead of you in mana advantage. It also being a hasty flyer is just very good, too. For my own part: I find I don't enjoy playing U much, I tend not to run much counterspell as a result, I play Bo1 to control my gametime commitment, and I've pretty much resigned ages ago to losing against premium decks a lot if I play ranked. So ho hum, another good card or three, doesn't worry me much. It's no Omnath. I'm not representative of this thread's population of Magic players though.
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Sep 30, 2021 21:44
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What if a take another turn card also untapped all your opponent's lands and creatures? Would that be too big of a downside to let it be playable? Let's assume it's fairly cheap to cast and has no other downside.
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Oct 1, 2021 19:37
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It occurs to me that written that way, your opponent could untap stuff locked down with "doesn't untap" effects etc., which might be too strong for them. Maybe word it instead like: "After target opponent performs their next upkeep phase, skip the rest of their turn" or "target opponent skips the first main, combat, and second main phases of their next turn" or similar; so they'd get an untap, upkeep, draw, and end phase, but wouldn't get special untaps they don't normally get. Probably this is too complicated to fly, the more I think about it.
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Oct 1, 2021 19:45
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Yeah you're probably right FF.
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Oct 1, 2021 19:50
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OK so, A, yes, do not throw around that accusation casually (although the first was phrased as a question and could have been a confusion for some other person I guess), and B, please export discussion of shitheads (or non-shitheads) in the industry to the industry thread and not here, thank you.
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Oct 13, 2021 17:21
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Leperflesh posted:THREAD RULES AND GUIDELINES This is probably too buried in the wall of text in the OP, huh? And I put it under the "magic is doomed" heading. Maybe it needs its own heading.
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Oct 14, 2021 23:42
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No, I genuinely think folks aren't seeing that, and that's on me. It's too easy to miss, especially since so much of this thread's OP is a reprint of the previous one. I'll try and pull it out more prominently.
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Oct 14, 2021 23:44
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Yeah, I know. Sigh. Did you guys know I write documentation? Like, as my real job. It's quite absurd, really.
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Oct 14, 2021 23:54
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Ultima66 posted:The Mind Flayer is actually really funnily bad to me. Like the cards are not made to be particularly pushed or anything, Dustin has cheaper analogues, and Lucas's ability is kind of weak. but those can be excused to some extent since they're paired commanders that have 2 colors and you can build around. The Mind Flayer wants to be a 7 mana "draw 1 extra card per turn for each opponent" effect. At a baseline draw an extra card per turn effects that scale up tend to cost 5 (Curse of Surveillance, Honden of Seeing Winds), with black of course having the really popular Phyrexian Arena and Underworld Connections at 3 for non-scaling ones (Connections does need 1 extra mana each turn). I'm obviously not experienced much with Magic but this is the first card I've seen that pulls from the bottom of opponents' decks. Aside from the thematic quality (the upside-down place), doesn't this alter the deal a bit, e.g., when someone mulligans they put their discard on the bottom, and certain other card effects also have you stick stuff at the bottom of your deck? Obviously as soon as you have even one deck shuffle effect that goes out the window, and you can't exactly get the flayer card out quickly, so maybe it's irrelevant. Mostly though I think it's the theme. The monster draws from the upside-down place, first you get attacked by corruptions of your own people, and then eventually it breaks through into the world and attacks you directly. Compared to the weaker themes in the mechanics of the various Friends, this seems more connected to the monster's flavor.
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Oct 15, 2021 20:30
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People can point out "that deck you are building isn't very competitive, but of course that's OK if you want to play it" rather than presuming the poster is an idiot or lying about the cost of building a tribal deck because of presumptions about what has to be in that deck etc. It is, as usual, the stark difference between being friendly, supportive, and nice to posters new and old, vs. being hostile, negative, and flippant. Virtually every other thread in TG manages to do the former.
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Oct 19, 2021 21:37
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Not to re-open that discussion, but if Chalice is both necessary and expensive, perhaps you can ask the locals if they are OK with proxied cards. Not counterfeit, of course: clear, unambiguously proxied. Reportedly, many folks are fine with it!
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Oct 20, 2021 17:38
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Has anything ever targeted the sideboard, or is that just generically part of the "not in the game" zone or whatever
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Oct 25, 2021 19:15
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I hadn't heard, gosh. Here is an announcement, in the QCS thread. Yawgmoth was a good poster in trad games who had a lot of friends around here. My condolences to those of you who are grieving. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Nov 2, 2021 |
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Nov 2, 2021 20:46
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I'd hesitate to enforce a "no spoiler tweet embeds" rule without a more clear mandate for one, since the site's gone to a fair bit of trouble to make tweet embedding easy: but regardless, I encourage folks to install an Imgur plugin (I use "imgur Uploader") which lets you right-click on any image, choose upload to imgur in the context menu, and you get a URL (which you can set to BBCoded!) in your clipboard so you can immediately paste it; and for cases where an image isn't clickable or you want more than just the image, there's also a "capture region" tool that uploads whatever cropped area of the browser window you want, too.
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Nov 3, 2021 18:21
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I can understand the logic of thinking that, if the aftermarket for a set of modern/vintage/etc. staples is absurdly expensive, you could erode the value and therefore lower the market price for cards generally by making no card have long-lasting value in any format. However, that is a case of killing the patient in order to cure the disease. If you want to lower the aftermarket price of a card that is highly in-demand, it's easy to just print more of that card. However, making a habit of attacking high aftermarket prices by reprinting is loudly and directly assaulting the "investor class" of your customers: the ones who speculate on card value. And probably Wizards regards that set of customers to be far too valuable to piss off. As an economic decision, it is probably correct for Wizards to continue to allow various formats to cost absurd amounts of money and therefore be prohibitive for the majority of its players to participate in, as a tradeoff for its game continuing to be regarded as a "collectors" game where if you just buy lots of cards and keep them for years you'll possibly make a huge profit on them. Exploitative, sure. So are lottery tickets and casinos, but those are profitable ventures as well. As much as it may irk folks to see a format they can't afford to play, and to see the source of those unaffordable cards being the people who actually won that lottery and wound up with profitable investments taking their profits directly from gamers who just want to play a game: that situation is, at least presently, intrinsic to the CCG business model.
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Nov 5, 2021 23:53
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If you exile a printed 0/0 creature with at least one +1/+1 counter on it and the counters go away, does the creature die in exile? Or does it just hang out in exile at 0/0?
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Nov 12, 2021 22:16
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got it, thank you e. when a */0 creature returns to the battlefield from exile and then dies, is this really a "dies" effect that you could use to trigger a "when x dies" on another card? I think the answer is yes, but I am not 100% sure
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Nov 12, 2021 22:28
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Pig Hands? That's a person?
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Nov 13, 2021 03:32
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I've got like a hundred thousand gold and lots of unused wildcards and fifty or so unopened packs sitting around and I've been playing Arena (not daily, but often) for about a year without spending a dime. IMO this is part of why the calculation of "how much does a rare cost" that just assumes you're always using gems is misleading. You do not ever have to actually spend gems, in order to play on Arena (but you'll get a few for free and you might as well).
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Nov 17, 2021 02:36
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Leperflesh posted:THREAD RULES AND GUIDELINES It's been pointed out to me today by a poster that maybe we haven't been enforcing these new thread rules. I haven't been keeping up with this thread on a daily basis lately, potatocubed doesn't either, so perhaps we've been negligent. However, based on skimming a few pages about the current Alchemy thing, I'm not sure if I could directly apply these as-written anyway. Altering the base assumptions of how Historic works isn't exactly comparable to the secret lair stuff, and the complains don't seem to be "Wizards is doomed/Magic is doomed" so much as "I hate this", which is explicitly permitted by these rules as a topic. This also isn't about Wizards' malfeasance as an employer, like, abusing employees or moral compass decisions. So on reflection, no, I don't think this thread has been flagrantly violating either of these rules, at least not in the last couple of days. That said, it sure seems to be grim up in here lately, there's a lot less chat about specific play or whatever and a lot more angst and anger etc. I don't think it's reasonable for mods to insist a thread always be cheerful, but I also don't think a permanent "death thread" is what any of you really want for the magic thread. I do want to emphasize that regardless of the state of the game currently, when people ask questions - newbies or regulars - they can be answered without derision or scorn. We've let a few reports that were marginal slide in recent weeks, because it's been tough to look at one specific post that was borderline and say "OK that clearly deserves a sixer" or, in a few cases, neither of us saw the report until like 18 hours later and the posters involved had already moved on. That's always going to be the case for moderation in Trad Games because we don't have round-the-clock mod coverage the way some of the more busy forums like GBS or the politics forums have. But when a poster goes on a tear with several lovely posts, we're going to hit that. And we're going to continue to ask folks in the thread to try to cut each other some slack, assume good faith instead of presuming bad faith, and generally try to get along.
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Dec 9, 2021 21:04
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Framboise posted:the only thing that will kill magic is people not playing it anymore, and from what I understand it's pulling in more money now than ever. This is a factually correct statement. Here's an excerpt from the latest Hasbro earnings report: 
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Dec 10, 2021 07:18
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 13:39 |
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potatocubed posted:Trad Games in a Time of Plague: A Covid Policy This is part of our stickied subforum rules. Stop attacking each other in this thread over exactly where people are drawing lines. Not because it's an invalid conversation, not because we don't think there are lines, but because this conversation will derail every thread in TG if it's allowed, and there are other places on SA to have it instead, please.
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Dec 29, 2021 00:50
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