Magic: The Gathering

Wasn’t there a thread on MTG Arena? I watched my brother play a draft on discord (he won!) and it was pretty exhausting just trying to keep up with what the hell was goin on. His combo mostly involved his creatures dying and being replaced by token-creatures, sometimes doubled-tokens, sometimes angel-tokens, sometimes doubled-angel-tokens, and sacrificing his doubled tokens to get quadrupled +1/+1 counters.

Now I’m starting to play a bit myself, since I’m between games.

I dunno how much you’ve played draft, but that description sounds like the Tinkerer’s cube which has a lot of very powerful cards, more powerful than the usual draft format. It’s pretty sweet actually but pretty complicated if you’re newer to draft.

Yeah, that’s right. And yeah, I guess I’ll look for a tamer draft as my first. Mostly I’m shocked by how many cards are crammed with rules. The dungeons and dragons set seemed to be similarly intense.

They’re kinda all like that these days, but you’ll be on a more even playing field since the new format will be new cards for everyone

1 Like

Pre-release is next week, and I’ve been trolling some Reddit threads and seeing some of the card announcements. Frankly, I like the werewolf idea because it seems to open up avenues of strategy that are more than just “counter every spell until board wipe” or “make big stompy giant and stomp on opponents”. Plus I’ve always had a thing for wolves. And the artwork is really cool. I’ll probably buy a box when they’re available and see what comes out.

Also, there’s a card collector store near(ish) here that is selling sets of Ikora Commander decks (5) for $145. Went there a couple of days ago because my daughter was selling some yuGi-Oh cards and bought a set because we bought the Strixhaven commanders and enjoy playing with them.

Now, I see that on Amazon these are $190 for the 5-pack, so that got me wondering what makes these so much more valuable than other 4-deck or 5-deck Commander pre-cons. Turns out, there’s like one really good card (>$15) in most of these decks, and a fair number (probably 5 or 8 in each deck) that are worth more than $2.

I’m thinking of making an arbitrage play: I sort out the valuable cards and sell them back to that store as singles and getting credit enough to get the 5-pack again. I added up the single card values yesterday for everything that’s currently >$0.80 [Their guy says it’s $1.00, I went with $0.80 just to see if it’s doable], and the total is something north of $230. Using their 50% - 60% buy rate means I’ll get a little less than the price of the set in cash, but more than enough if I use store credit, which they offer an additional 10%.

So I could then use the credit to buy another set to replace the ones I just hacked up. Then I have the cards, plus a bunch of “free” chaff which we can use to buff up some other decks, probably around 400 cards that are all cheap on their own but might be good to supplement pre-made decks that are lacking some additional oomph.

What’s wrong with my plan?

That you traded your high paid job to make minimum wage as a comic book store librarian???

I mean, DO IT. If nothing else it could be an interesting lesson for your kids.

Also, a pre-release sounds really exciting. I’m almost tempted to go to a store for the first time in 10 years.

I’m surprised that store is both selling the decks cheaply and buying singles for enough to make this plan worth it. Doesn’t bode well for that store staying in business :laughing: But if the math works and it sounds like fun then go for it!

So anyway, I tried to make this work. I sorted out all the cards that are listed (on some aggregator site) for $0.95 and above (they say $1.00 is their singles minimum), and I thought I had about $220 worth of face value. At the stated upper limit of their trade-in range (which was 50% - 60%), that would have been about $130. Add on another 10% for store credit and it would have been right about $145, which was the deck price so it would have worked out.

However, my pricing source must have been off, or maybe they’ve seen this play before, because the front-desk guy offered me like $89 for cash, and $98 (round up to $100) for credit. At that price it wasn’t worth it to me to make up the $45 to get the deck and replace the cards, so I just said fuggedaboutit and went home. Still, it was worthwhile to think through the economics of the market.

1 Like

Also, me, and 13-yo went to the pre-release event last Friday night and had a lot of fun. I was 1-2, he was 1-1-1, and we both got some cards we’re definitely going to try and add to other decks or build a deck around. Plus one or two showcase / valuable ones that were brag-worthy.

I do like the night/day mechanism, though I don’t see it adding much play once the set rotates out of Standard. Against the limited card pool in Standard, it’s probably worthwhile to try and make the day/night transitions happen. Kind of like the unique-to-the-set mechanic of Dungeons for the D&D set pretty much limits it to Standard only.

Though when the next Innistrad set releases in a couple of months I hope they keep that going.

So, a couple of weeks ago I got into my head that I could make a Commander deck around sphinxes, because there’s not that many of them (something like 60 or so) and it would be cool to get my feet wet on deck building in something other than Standard. For the last few weeks, then, I’ve been on EDHRec, Scryfall, and others trying to get pointers and options.

I made a spreadsheet :smiley:

Here are some of my constraints:

  1. Wanted to have only Sphinxes as creatures (summoned creatures - some cards create tokens that aren’t actual sphinxes).
  2. Wanted other cards (instants or sorcery) that had “sphinx” in the title if possible.
  3. Stay under $100 budget for the deck, even for cards I already have and am not going to buy.

Just pushed [ORDER] from Card Kingdom on 81 cards! Total 86 excluding basic lands, I own a few of the cards already and maybe I forgot to order one or something. This order is $89.99, so I’m right on budget! Pretty close to my estimate of prices gleaned from Scryfall ($82.60).

The only high-powered sphinx I didn’t include is Consecrated Sphinx ($34.99), which draws a player 2 cards every time an opponent draws one. I just couldn’t see dumping that much into one card if I’m staying under the $100 limit. When I decide to level-up this deck to the $200 limit I’ll certainly include that one.

Some stats:
Commander: Yennett, Cryptic Sovereign

Other creatures: 27
Instants: 12
Sorceries: 6
Enchantments: 7
Artifacts: 12
Planeswalkers: 0
Lands: 35 (14 basic, 21 non-basic)

I’ve got it on MTGGoldfish if you’re interested: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/4374165#paper

Since all of my creatures are Sphinxes, I have 10 artifacts or enchantments that either affect “all creatures of a selected type” or “all creatures with flying” so they get a bonus. Plus a handful of ways to give my commander indestructible so she can keep attacking and giving me card draws and free spells.

This was a lot of work! I think it was good to go through the process of: setting out a plan, doing some research, learning about a bunch of cards, being surprised along the way, and finally just making some cuts to meet constraints or target balances between mana curve, various sources, and abilities that come from the cards and creatures.

I’m pretty happy to see the plan come together, and I’m looking forward to a few days from now when everything arrives and I can actually play a game or two! Curious to see how this does in a real game.

1 Like

That Commander is ridiculous for $1.25. 50/50 of a free card play on a flying attack that needs 2 defenders? Damn. Only criticism I have at a glance is maybe you could stack it with more odd cards, but you probably already looked at that. There are surely some substitutes out there a touch better than a 2-cost for 3-cost that aren’t too pricey.

I’m sure there are substitutions I could make to optimize against what I’ve already got, yet I’m happy with where it is and I’m interested to see how it plays. Yes, there are other odd-MV cards that could replicate some of the even-MV cards, and now that I look at it I see I missed one I could have put in but didn’t, but that’s all OK.

I’m also interested in making a “mythical creatures” deck with one of several mythical bests like a pegasus, medusa, golem, sphinx, phoenix, god, yeti, werewolf, etc. I’m gonna give myself at least 6 months before I take on that challenge.

Took the deck to my local game store last night. Had fun. 4-player match, against 2 guys who obviously play together at lot (because they basically knew each others’ decks) and another guy who seemed kind of new to the whole thing.

Managed to get Yennett’s attack trigger to go off about 6 times, with only about 2-3 of those resolving as free spells and the rest just being a land card or something with even mana value. I did like that I used a tutor eaerly to put Unesh, Criosphinx sovereign in play which led to a few of the “show 4 cards from top of your library, opponent separates into 2 piles, you put one pile in your hand and other in your graveyard” actions. Which meant that throughout I never missed a land drop and in fact may have had too much land draw, as I ended the game with 3 in hand but nothing else available.

Guy to my left was playing green-black, so was able to create and regenerate many nasty creatures. I had a couple of board wipes against him, so those got me a fair bit more life to keep me going and prolong for a while, but none of us could get rid of his enchantments and by the time he cast his Craterhoof Behemoth for the second time, it was lethal on all 3 of us.

Good times. I’m definitely going to go back again. Very happy that I didn’t stink up the place with general noobishness, the deck was competitive for a friendly game but not overpowering, and I felt like there were some actual decisions (like sphinx-themed riddles) that forced table politicking. Sure, that made the game go longer, about 2 hours in the end, but it was fun throughout.

1 Like

Okay, so basically immediately after that last game with the Sphinx deck I decided to upgrade one of the Strixhaven pre-cons with Adrix and Nev:

I’ve seen a couple of other “budget” upgrades, but decided to go a little different. Insted of going all in on creature tokens, I’m looking for other types of tokens to exploit: food, clue, and treasures. So I’ve got enchantments and creatures that give me things like a food or treasure each turn or landfall or opponent’s casting a spell, and there’s an artifact (Tamiyo’s Journal) that gives a clue each upkeep. If I tap that artifact I can sacrifice 3 clues to search for a card, which, if I’ve got Adrix and Nev on the battlefield, could happen 2 of every 3 turns.

A couple of constraints:

  1. Keep the total deck price post-upgrade about $100
  2. Don’t replace too many of the cards, at most 30.
  3. have fun!

And I think I’m there. I had done most of the work that first weekend, and this week made a couple of other changes to buy a few cards that haven’t arrived yet. But I took most of this deck to the LGS last night and had a good match!

Forgotten Ancient did me a bunch of work getting loads of 1/1 counters that helped keep Adrix and Nev strong. At one point I was able to get Body of Research to resolve and put 2x 80/80 Elementals on the board. Awesome! If I have a way to give them flying or trample. So they chumped around a bit until I cast Second Harvest, which doubled the number of tokens on the battlefield. Because A&N see that, now I get 2 of each thing that I just made, which meant I had 6x 80/80 elementals. Again, which could be chumped by 1/1s.

Eventually took out one dude, but the guy beside me had something that was able to destroy everything with CMC<4, which took out all my tokens and all my Clues and Treasures and Foods I’d been storing up. He had some dudes with flying and infect, so eventually took me out for the win.

It was a good match, though. I feel pretty good about the deck, and have multiple ways to get blockers with reach or flying (Arasta, Hornet Queen, Hornet Nest, Vivien, Combine Chrysalis, Fable of Wolf and Owl) that just didn’t get out that game.

I think the thing I really want to do is get Progenitor Mimic onto the battlefield as a copy of Academy Manufactor and just go ridiculous with exponential creation of Foods, Clues, and Treasures. Or kick Rite of Replication to immediately make 5 (10 with A&N!) token copies of Academy Manufactor and get the same effect.

I think this is my new favorite.

Adrix and Nev Upgrade Deck (mtggoldfish.com)

I’ve been upgrading some of the precons I have. So far I’ve done:

Osgir the Reconstructor
Veyran, Voice of Duality
Shadrix Silverquill

I’ve played all of these at least once and while they can do the thing they want to do, none are going to take over my Adrix and Nev as most enjoyable.

Speaking of which, last night I played a pretty epic game.

Opponents and I all had upgraded precons from the last few years, and we did pretty good for a while. My food/clue/treasure value chain got set up, where I had Tamiyo’s Journal, Adrix and Nev, and Academy Manufactor on the table. So at each upkeep, I got 2 Foods, 2 Clues, 2 Treasures. When an opponent was looking pretty dangerous with his Ghired populate deck that kept making 4/4 Rhinos on each turn or his attack, and another opponent was quite formidable with a Wilhelt zombie deck, I was feeling quite behind.

So I used clues to get an Ezuri’s Predation, created a bunch of beasts that took out several opponents’ creatures, and then, with Combine Chrysalis, all my tokens had flying. After that I ended up with at least 45 Beast creature tokens (4/4), plus a handful of other creatures I’d made. I was feeling like a serious threat.

Next turn from Ghired, he ends up playing an instant to tap all my creatures. And then is going to swing at me for 45 damage from a bunch of his 5/5 Rhinos, when I had 41 life. But… I have Confirm Suspicions in hand! Which is not only going to counter that, it’s going to give me 6 more clues, 6 more treasures, and 6 more foods! Yes!

Except… DAMN IT! This thing costs 5 mana, and I’ve only got 4 left. I had to use a jank-load to get the Beasts on the table, and I just couldn’t sequence it correctly, nor did I have the time to wait another turn to let him hit me without all those Beasts as blockers.

After I went out, the Gired and Wilhelt players went out quickly too, as the dude playing Breena the Demagogue had a bunch of flyers (something like 40) that he created by playing Inkshield for the second time, having returned it to his hand with Conqueror’s Foothold. He did say that this is the second time he’s returned a card to his hand with that Foothold and it eventually won him the game.

Overall really fun experience, took 2 hours and was good to hang out with some people who were happy to get their decks to do what they wanted to do, and see them in action.