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Sivin

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So I know you've all probably been absolutely devastated by my lack of board presence (that's a Magic pun) lately, but I've fallen in love with playing Magic and it's kept me from sitting in front of my computer for eight hours a day refreshing the Miscellaneous page of this site. It's even led to me meeting people and being sociable, so that's cool.



It seems to me that it's a downright crime that there's no Magic discussion on these threads, so I'll start it off.



I've cycled through a number of standard decks, my first being a Mono Green Devotion deck that I had moderate success with. From there I went to White-Green Manifest, which I fucked around with until it went from a Mid-Range Devotion deck to an Aggro form built around the cards Collected Company and Deathmist Raptor. I was finishing in the top-3 in my local game store for like 10 weeks, so I switched it up and now I'm running a Red-Green Aggro with emphasis on burn. I also built a UB Control and a Mono Blue Control but those weren't played competitively and were mostly for multiplayer.



Now that I'm kind of bored with Standard, I moved on to Modern. At first I was running a UB Mill deck, but it wasn't competitive at all so I tried to turn it into a UB Control/Mill. That wasn't flowing right either, so I've transitioned it to a Mono Black control deck centered around Liliana of the Veil and discard mechanics. I'm gonna roll with that for a bit, but I'm already considering splashing blue back in so that I can get bounce mechanics to get rid of Leylines or other early-play enchantments that Black struggles to remove. Plus blue gets Snapcaster Mage and while he looks fabulous in my binder, every deck is better with Snapcaster Mage.



Who else plays and what do you run?


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I play occasionally, not tournament-style, but just for fun with friends. Most of my decks are more fun than effective and are built around dicking with the opponents for the lolz.

I have a UB Madness deck that can be fairly effective once it gets rolling. Lots of recursion and self-milling and with a lot of Time Spiral cards. I'm sure if I played against actual, decent decks it would suck, but I really enjoy playing it.

I also have a RG weenie deck full of goblins and elves and built around a storm cauldron, ahnk of mishra, stormbind combo. It sucks but my friends hate it.

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I play EDH / Commander with friends, and have a LOT of decks for it. I'm kind of known for that among my local groups. Not all of them are good. I just have a lot of cards since I started when I was 11 (20 years ago) and even little investment tends to lead to lots of accumulation over time.



Outside of that, I'm all about drafting. My local store runs both Standard and Draft for FNM, so I've drafted nearly every Friday since Return to Ravnica came out. I'm decent at it, and with doing well at prereleases I usually can stay afloat during a format without buying a bunch more packs. It made me look into Magic Online, which I redownloaded (for the first time since Lorwyn block) about a month ago and I've been doing drafts and sealed and managing to keep my head above water without investing more than was already on my account, save for a Dragons prerelease pack. Drafting keeps my brain going, and it's made me come pretty far in terms of skill in the last three or so years. I'm starting to look at nearby limited Grand Prix and PTQ events (I'm in Indiana) and consider traveling to them.



I do have decks for other formats, including Modern (Kiln Fiend) and Legacy (Painted Stone, just without Imperial Recruiters). Before my local store started doing regular drafts, I played crazy standard decks with Birthing Pod or Genesis Wave usually. I'm working on a second Legacy deck, a silly Opalescence/Leyline/Serra's Sanctum deck, and I've got the most expensive pieces (the Sanctums and the Humilities), but it's nowhere near done yet.


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I've played since 1996, although I took a break from 2001 to 2006. In those days I didn't play any kind of tournament or anything competitive, just kitchen table with friends.

I got back in when someone at work brought up that they played, so I dug out my old cards and showed them what bad things we used to run in the olden days.

I slowly started playing actual tournaments, although I skipped most formats and played Vintage right off the bat (with proxies at the time). I had seen Legacy decks though, so right when I got back in, I bought up all the staples I didn't already have. Good thing too, because they were cheap back then.

Since I moved out of NY though, I play less Vintage and more Legacy now. I occasionally dabble in Modern, but all our FNMs are Standard/Legacy with a Modern one once a month.

I own Unlimited power now and I still love to play Vintage when I can. I don't touch Standard any more, it's too much of a cash sink. Our local joke is, "I can play zero-proxy Vintage, but I'm too poor to play Standard."

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Played since mid-nineties but for some reason didn't have the foresight to pick up some power cards back then. I've always been a Standard player, although for the last 10 years it's been online only. I never do netdecking, and make sure at least put my own stamp on whatever I play in tournaments.


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I play EDH / Commander with friends, and have a LOT of decks for it. I'm kind of known for that among my local groups. Not all of them are good. I just have a lot of cards since I started when I was 11 (20 years ago) and even little investment tends to lead to lots of accumulation over time.

Outside of that, I'm all about drafting. My local store runs both Standard and Draft for FNM, so I've drafted nearly every Friday since Return to Ravnica came out. I'm decent at it, and with doing well at prereleases I usually can stay afloat during a format without buying a bunch more packs. It made me look into Magic Online, which I redownloaded (for the first time since Lorwyn block) about a month ago and I've been doing drafts and sealed and managing to keep my head above water without investing more than was already on my account, save for a Dragons prerelease pack. Drafting keeps my brain going, and it's made me come pretty far in terms of skill in the last three or so years. I'm starting to look at nearby limited Grand Prix and PTQ events (I'm in Indiana) and consider traveling to them.

I do have decks for other formats, including Modern (Kiln Fiend) and Legacy (Painted Stone, just without Imperial Recruiters). Before my local store started doing regular drafts, I played crazy standard decks with Birthing Pod or Genesis Wave usually. I'm working on a second Legacy deck, a silly Opalescence/Leyline/Serra's Sanctum deck, and I've got the most expensive pieces (the Sanctums and the Humilities), but it's nowhere near done yet.

I'm considering putting together a Blue/Black EDH deck so that I can do some wack shit, but I'm kind of hesitant about it. I don't like the 1 card limitation. Are there any good Blue/Black commanders available?

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Only one-of's isn't so bad when you get to play great cards like Demonic Tutor and Vampiric Tutor.

As for UB Commanders, there certainly are some pretty powerful ones, depending on what you want to do. Dralnu, Grimgrin, Lazav, Sygg, Wydwen, maybe even Dragonlord Silumgar.

I don't get to play EDH much any more, so my kind of pimped Rhys, the Redeemed deck just sits in a box...

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Yeah, and that's what made me wait so long to get back into it online at least. The real advantage to it is being able to play anytime, which is especially important for better limited play. It can be hard to put together enough people to draft, but MTGO solves that. Unless I go on a really, really hot streak, I can't see myself investing enough into it to play other formats on there though.



As for UB commander, I like Grimgrin, because zombies backed up by crazy blue spells can be ridiculous. The most notorious UB commander is probably Oona, Queen of the Fae, who most people immediately associate with insta-combos. I put all my insta-combos in those colors in my Dralnu deck so I that I have that deck available if someone is being dickish, but can play normal otherwise.



Overall, my commanders of choice are Rasputin Dreamweaver (U/W blinking effects and big mana), Balthor the Defiled (mono-B reanimation), and Karn, Silver Golem (colorless fun). I have a lot more, but these are the ones I keep updated the most, with actual good cards. The others are usually just silly themes.


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The biggest attraction to online for me, since I'm really not interested in Limited is getting to play more Vintage. I just can't spend another two-grand on a deck, when my twenty-grand deck is sitting on my desk, haha.

Yeah, my old playgroup was big in to casual EDH, so I have 7-10 decks built at a time.

Now I took them all apart, except Rhys. I used to run Zur, Numot, Damia, among others.

In Legacy I have mainly been jamming Team America (BUG Delver) since I love Hymn to Tourach. This weeks FNM I might run Deathblade or something else, I'm not sure yet.

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I mostly play Commander now with a few friends, until the drinks make it hard to remember the rules, then we switch to casual play. I am a Whiteweenie type of guy. Why walk when you can fly?

I have 8 commander decks currently, just started with them last year.

As for casual, I have around 25 decks built that do very well one on one. Groups of 3 or more and I have to rely on Whiteweenie or Green decks.

I have a UB infect deck that is killer for one on one play, usually lasts about 6 turns before it's over. Also built a blue control deck that I use just to piss people off. It has zero creatures in it and I can win pretty often. It stops their creatures and spells and steals them from them.

I have only been playing about 5 years now, played in 10-15 prerelease parties, fat pack challenges and drafts. I usually do pretty well, top 5-10%.

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I used to play Magic back when I was in grade school, but fell out of it for various reasons after. I've always loved the mechanics, but the time (and money) required to stay competitive in one of the constructed formats is just too much for me. One of our friends did put together a pretty sweet pauper cube, though, and one of my favorite things to do is run a cube draft and play a mini, swiss-style tournament.


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  • 4 months later...
Figured it would make sense to move this conversation here.

Somewhere there's a thread about me (as a 40-something mom who has never played any sort of fantasy game in her life) learning to play Magic for my kid. He quickly outpaced me and regularly places (even wins) in local tournaments. I'm just happy he doesn't ask me to play with him any more.


That's great though. I have taught our two oldest to play for the most part, only very simple cards, just creatures, sorceries and lands. They have a decent grasp, but their attention spans are not up to playing for long yet. Perhaps soon though.

Edit: Since this is now some kind of Magic thread, I'll throw in my two cents. I think this is the last time I'll be playing in a Standard FNM for a few years unless we get some decent fucking counter spells. I'm extremely disappointed in not only the way the game panders to Mono Red and the tri-color stupid dumb shit, but also in what's been revealed in Battle for Zendikar. I'm all about Grixis, and by extension U/B control. But now I have no blue cards and no black removal. Why even play? I'll stick to Modern and Legacy. Where the most bullshit things I have to deal with from people who don't know how to play is Amulet Bloom and Show and Tell.


I ditched Standard a long time ago, because it's just too damn expensive for what I feel is very little fun. I think a real sea change will hit Standard when the block after Zendikar hits. For right now, it's just minor shifts. Don't aticipate any real counterspells to be printed though, the new mind is that 2 CMC is too low for decent countermagic, which is a whole different reason to give up Standard itself.

I recently went to Eternal Weekend in Philly for Legacy and Vintage. I scrubbed out of Legacy (0-2) and went 4-3 Drop in Vintage (and 3-2 in the Traial after an 0-2 start). I had a blast though, since I don't get to Vintage much around here any more. Eternal formats are just so much more fun to me, so many decks to play that still are powerful and different.
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I'm mostly an interested observer.  Some of my clients play, so I will play with them and have two or three simple decks.  I find, for whatever reason, this game triggers a negative aspect in my personality when I play, so I either need the social construct of "being on the clock" or just stick to watching.

 

Anywho, I liked this match as it ticked both my love of football and games,

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwUDLv52nrc

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I was considering heading over to EW to watch, I ended up watching most of the stream, instead.

 

I play a fair bit of limited, either on Modo or occasionally in person. I brew a lot for Standard and a little bit for Modern, but haven't really put the $$ down to actually build a deck yet. I have been accumulating some staples from draft, so once Theros rotates out, I will probably throw together a Standard deck of some sort.  I consume an absolute ton of MtG content, though - watch a lot of tournament coverage as well as the bulk of videos and articles that ChannelFireball put out (the articles are frequently not worth the time, but the videos tend to be worthwhile). I started playing back during Ice Age (~'95 or '96), stopped in the early 2000s, and picked it up again during Born of the Gods.

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It's unfortunate you didn't get back in sooner, prices were astronomically lower around 2006-7. I'm lucky I got what I could when I did.

I also consume tons of information, it's a reason I can play at the level I do. I'm not very smart, or a strong technical player, but I do my homework, so the mix of knowledge and intuition (built of study and theory) I can bring is often reasonable versus most of the field.

My current quest is to keep 40 Revised duals and still get 40 FBB duals as well. Right now, I have 9, but 4 of those are Underground Seas, so the biggest hurdle is past. Still a way to go though, as the rest of the Blue duals aren't too much lower.

Right now in Legacy I am still on Team America, but with the meta shift toward so many Dig decks, I really suffer for the lack of a great answer to it.
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Why is BUG Delver called Team America in legacy? (It is one of the decks I would consider building if I were to get into Legacy, alongside Miracles, but I always assumed Team America would be UWR.)

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