Magic: The Gathering

Best photo essay on MtG I have ever seen.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mrloganrhoades/man-goes-to-magic-the-gathering-tournament-poses-next-to-but

 

That shit pisses me off. The fucking people don't take care of themselves. I've been to some tournaments where people clearly haven't showered. It's fucking disgusting and it's one of the reasons I don't go to tournaments anymore.

 

I was looking over the value of the current top decks in standard and modern and it's just getting more and more absurd. Card prices do nothing but go up.

 

Play pauper

 

Well, you don't have to play Jund, do you? Modern is pretty diverse. Except for Liliana of the Veil, 8-rack is very cheap and it can beat every deck in the format with some luck. Not everyone's cup of tea, but I love the deck. There's other nice decks that don't cost a million as well.

Hell, land-less storm in fucking legacy is like $100.

I played it for a while, and I discovered a format more degenerate than fucking vintage. No thanks.

 

I can't comment because Ive never played any other format, but it seems many high profile nerds would disagree.

In any case I personally prefer to play a degenerate format that costs a couple dollars over any monocle format that would force me to sell my ass.

 

Degenerate isn't necessarily bad. Some people like ultra-fast Vintage-type BOOM OR BUST play. In my experience, that's what Pauper was. Ultra-fast and all-in Infect versus Solitaire-Storm.

I like Modern because besides bullshit like Splinter Twin, the games aren't just two players playing their respective games of Solitaire, hoping their own will be solved before their opponent's. Modern actually mostly relies on fairly low impact cards so you get fairly grindy games where you're struggling for the upper hand.

And like I said:

You can get Modern decks that cost less than hyper-competitive Pauper decks. I play 8-RACK, which costs almost nothing, except for Liliana of the Veil, but you could just run a version without her. She's not ultra-essential. White Weenie pauper costs on the wrong side of $100 if you want to win against Storm, for example.

 

MTG Salvation is pretty good in terms of feedback but have the ultimate faggotry in terms of moderation. I don't know shit about shit when it comes to standard, sorry.

 

fat neckbeard making fun of other fat neckbeards.

 

Might be, but it's still the largest concentration on constructive-feedback willing magic players around

Well... actually, that might be Twitter, but I'm don't care much for that.

 

Wait, pauper is degenerate? I thought the entire point of commons only was to avoid stuff like that.

I could try to give feedback, but I don't actually play standard that much. The current environment just isn't very interesting to me.

Seems most of the magic I play these days is with my friends and chaos cube(ie totally random mostly commons from the last 10 years of magic bought by the kilo online).

 

Not really. The point was to decrease cost (which has also partly failed). There basically three "top tier" decks in Pauper. Infect, which tries to all-in alpha-strike you with one mega-pumped creature. Affinity, which cheats out big creatures insanely fast. And Storm, which plays Solitaire and crosses it fingers.

There are some other, more "fun"/less degenerate decks, like Kiln Fiend aggro or White Weenie (which plays sort of like grindy control actually), but they don't win as much as the others. And Kiln Fiend basically plays like a "fair" version of Infect.

 

You really need to update your journal. Infect turned into tier-2 (at best) after the banning of Invigorate, non-bounce Storm disappeared with the banning of grapeshot and empty the warrens (and, with the loss of frantic search even earlier than that, bounce storm is more like perpetual tier 1.5), and affinity was always, like, tier 1.5, due to the extremely high variance of its starting hands.

I don't follow pauper nowadays, but even when I've left it, the meta was wildly different.

 

Gotta admit it's been some time since I played, so it might have changed like you say. Didn't know they banned Invigorate. I doubt the format became much slower though. Kiln Fiend will pick up where Infected left off, no doubt.

 

Uhm, in the latest pauper video at channelfireball the dude plays against a mono-black control, 2x mono-blue control and a white weenie. I also remember seeing many mono-blue decks in the previous videos. I wouldn't call that a fast format

 

I stand corrected then

Maybe I should pick up the format again. Sounds a lot more playable now.

 

Oh.. They changed all that shit though. No more infect decks or temporal fissure or storm/warrens shit. All banned. There is always going to be some shit that pisses you off, but in general the format seems fairly fine right now

Yeah but for the same price i can have all top archetypes in pauper
Playing a single deck over and over would really piss me off.

Having said that, if i had the money i would def try the other formats

 

You havent played for a long time ^^

edit:

http://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/pauper/full

Only affinity still exists, and even that has been nerfed. Not only are there loads of competitive deck archetypes, but rogue decks supposedly do better in the format as well (which I am just parroting, i wouldnt know).

Again I can't compare, but you obviously played pauper way back when it was (probably) more horrible than now.

edit:

The Pauper banned list is:

• Cloudpost
• Cranial Plating
• Empty the Warrens
• Frantic Search
• Grapeshot
• Invigorate
• Temporal Fissure

As it stands there are a bunch of different types of decks as well. Some are very fast combo decks (delver fiend, which prob comes closest to that infect shit), control aggro (delver blue which is my preferred deck), long ass grindy control decks like the black/blue control shit, aggro decks like white weenie and affinity etc etc.

There is even a domain deck up and coming

 

That does look pretty solid. Here's my attempt to say something useful.

Have you considered pilfered plans instead of divination? It is more color heavy, but also has the chance to fuck up the opponents scry a bit. Bile blight might be good sideboard against aggro(and packrat), but it too is rather color heavy. I'm also not sure about scavenging ooze, seems a bit of an anticombo with elixir and whip since you don't want to play in your own graveyard.

 

Despite saying that playing one deck gays me, i have been focusing on 1 archetype for now (Delver Blue) simply to get good at something and also because I find the archetype to be strong and very very fun. One deck that consistently causes me problems is mono black devotion though.

If anybody plays are starts to play pauper, any tips to deal with that shit would be welcome. Im trying to find some sideboard hate. Sadly it seems like countering is my best bet :-/

edit: well i added some gitaxian probes. Cant really think of anything else that would help. At least ill know what kind of removal he has (among his other shit)