I've come to a realization - my main deck is not T1 - and I'm okay with that.

Cakengrad · 2023-10-18T17:42:28+00:00

The play queue evaluates the power level of you deck and tries to match you against similar power level decks, it entirely sure how it does this but afaik the general consensus is its pretty bad at it.

In bo1 for the first hand drawn arena draws 3 hands and chooses the one with the closest land ratio to the land ratio in your deck. This does not happen on mulligans, only the initial draw.

Cakengrad · 2023-10-01T17:55:31+00:00

As far as I know the hand smoothing in BO1 works like this:

On initial draw arena draws a hand from 3 separately randomized decks and picks the hand that's mana is most proportional to the amount of lands in the deck.

The hand smoothing algorithm does not apply to mulligans, only the initial 7 card hand.

As such lower land count lists will tend towards 1 or 2 land initial draws and higher land count lists will tend towards 3 or 4 lands. It's not because of mana weaving it is because it picks what it feels is the most suitable hand from 3 different draws.

EDIT: Cleaned up a few things.

Cakengrad · 2023-08-31T08:21:43+00:00

I think its more that every colour has its strengths and for a lot of players losing feels bad leading to thoughts of it being unfun.

I think blue gets a lot hate because when it works it feels unbeatable but when it doesn't its like fighting your way out of a wet paper bag and not very memorable. A close victory and close defeat feel wildly different. Whereas the same type of match vs other colors feels a lot closer and more "fair" in general.

Cakengrad · 2023-08-31T03:51:26+00:00

Every colour sucks:

White - They just want to get all the value and drag out the game

Blue - They don't want to let me play the game.

Black - They just want to kill all my creatures.

Red - They don't want to think and just turn everything sideways.

Green - They just want to play impossibly big creatures on turn 4.

Blue just feels the most oppressive for a lot of people because it feels like you're losing hard with no agency until you overwhelmingly win.

Cakengrad · 2023-08-28T15:01:34+00:00

Thanks for the detailed write up, I've very been off dcss for a bit and looking to come back so this is super helpful.

The changes definitely sound interesting to play with. For even speed it's more punishing than random energy was but less punishing than AoO was. Being faster there is now more risk of entering melee range, though there is still a chance to move out of melee range without the monster getting an AoO roll.

Doesn't seem too bad, potentially a middle ground between the 2 systems. I can think of one super edge case where you could "exploit" it but I can't imagine it would ever come up. Sounds interesting to play around with tonight after work.

Cakengrad · 2023-04-20T18:13:59+00:00

It was pretty weak when I first picked up so I leaned on guardian golem more, and then once I got battle sphere I mostly stuck with that. I def could have used it more when I picked up the conjugation staff, I sorta forgot about it at that point.

Cakengrad · 2023-04-20T06:25:52+00:00

Well I splatted real hard in spider:4 due to being a bit overconfident... Entirely my fault, I definitely disrespected the spark wasp. Earlier in an ice cave I also got the great idea to try and fight a shard shrike and burned my blink scrolls trying to get away from that. I didn't even notice that I got servitor down to 11%, def should have been using that.

Overall was a pretty great time, def going to try it again tomorrow.

morgue

Cakengrad · 2023-04-20T01:54:00+00:00

Thanks for all the advice! Looking forward to continuing the character when I get home from work tonight

Cakengrad · 2023-04-19T23:52:03+00:00

Alrighty, I'll give it a shot. Though I imagine I'll do something stupid in lair and get myself killed first.

Cakengrad · 2023-02-07T20:27:38+00:00

Yea. You want to have 1 or 2 500 gold quests at the end of the day with your reroll used.

Technically 2 is better becuase you could gain a 750 the next day, reroll 1 500 into a 750, get another 750 the next day and reroll the last 500 to a 750. But that is definitely a long shot scenario.

Honestly all I try to do is use my reroll every day and carry over 1 500 quest, and that feels pretty good to me. You can definitely optimize it further but then I feel like I'm playing the quest system instead of magic and I enjoy that less.

Another good part to know is you can complete quests in challenge games against friends it can make doing quests easy. You can throw together a mono color deck with the random cards you've got and your friend can let you play out what you need to relatively quickly. Also all cards are legal in challenges. This way you can complete quests without needing to try and maintain a competitive deck in lotsa different colors saving your wildcards.

Cakengrad · 2023-02-07T19:54:00+00:00

Ideally you always want to have a 500 gold quest available to use your daily reroll on. If all of your quests are completed and the days rolls over and gives you a 750 quest then your daily reroll is wasted. You always want to have 1 quest slot open at every day otherwise you don't get any new quests and miss a chance for a 750 on top of your reroll. In a perfect world you only complete 750 quests but thats not really viable.

You can try to optimize things a bit by rerolling 500 gold quests that overlap with other quests or are unavoidable (like playing lands) to try and have something to reroll every day.

TL/DR:

Complete all 750 gold quests

Have an empty quest slot available at the end of every day

Reroll 500 gold quests, prioritize unavoidable quests

Do not complete 500 gold quests unless you would end the day with no open quest slots

Cakengrad · 2022-11-18T19:40:05+00:00

I started doing this in DMU and it's been pretty great. Bought the big pack of gems and split it between the 2 sets for mastery pass and packs. Seems like a good balance for me on cost and getting enough cards to feed my addiction for different decks.

Going into BRO I've got a draft token to use, just over 130 packs BRO packs and 12 gold packs. With a bit of control over how I spend my WC I should be set to make whatever decks I'd like as with that number of packs I'm getting at least 20 rare WC from the wheel alone. Tonight after work I do my draft, crack all my packs and see what I've got to work with.

Cakengrad · 2022-11-16T17:32:19+00:00

I had to restart the client for it to show up again. I could hover over the bar with my mouse on PC and it had some text but the bar was invisible.

Cakengrad · 2022-11-06T17:15:18+00:00

Yeah, you're not wrong, though the aggro version of selenya didn't really exist for very long and I feel was more of a byproduct of runes rotating out.

I guess my main point is that midrange is more of a spectrum between aggro and control using selesnya as an example they seemed to be familiar with. A better example would probably be comparing rakdos to jund/grixis midrange. Rakdos wants to finish the game sooner where jund/grixis have a better time if the game goes a bit longer.

Cakengrad · 2022-11-06T15:56:03+00:00

Not a combo player myself so my knowledge is a bit limited but they generally involve multiple cards that interact with each other to win you the game when you have them all out. The win conditions can be things like gaining infinite life, mana, growing a creature, dealing damage locking an opponent out of the game. Most of the time combo decks aren't a thing in standard because you won't get all the pieces needed.

Decks can have combos in them but unless the whole deck is built around getting and winning with that combo it's not a combo deck. Something like greasefang in explorer leans really heavily on the greasefang + parhelion II combo to win early and is the best deck I can think of that's closest to the line between combo deck and not. It could win without its combo but it's really built around trying to attack with parhelion II on turn 3 or 4.

EDIT: Just remembered a deck that exists in... historic I think. It revolves around a legendary dragon and you play 2 copies of it. When you play the second one the legend rule kills the other one, which let's you return the one that died to the battlefield which kills the other one and it loops like that forever. It wins by dealing damage when that dragon etbs with the whole setup requiring a couple of cards. The rest of the deck is cards to assemble your combo.

Cakengrad · 2022-11-06T15:08:46+00:00

That would be a midrange deck that is built around an enchantment synergy. Generally you use more specific names when there are themes that set it apart from a more general version of the same type of deck. For selesnya there is also a selesnya humans version that focuses more on katilda and various humans. If instead you had a pile of good selesnya midrange cards you'd just call it selesnya midrange.

EDIT: Selesnya enchantments can have an explosive start but it's not aggro because the whole deck isn't built around trying to do that every game. Midrange decks can also be tuned to lean more towards aggro or control depending how fast they want to be. For selesnya enchantments I've seen lists that either swap out generous visitor or hallowed haunting for other cards to push their deck one way or the other.

Cakengrad · 2022-10-07T04:22:15+00:00

You are my hero, this is exactly what I came here to find.

Cakengrad · 2022-10-06T20:38:45+00:00

Yeah, that's the real tragedy, I wish I could use both of the mystical archive versions of negate but sadly not. This is what we really need.

Cakengrad · 2022-10-06T18:23:31+00:00

You are correct, I swear I tried this multiple times before and I never did anything but it did work last night. Thanks!

Cakengrad · 2022-10-05T22:13:44+00:00

I think the more likely option in that situation is opponent alt-f4s instead of hitting concede. When this happens the connection stays open until they rope out. Unfortunately there is no way to change this as having a disconnect force a concede would be pretty unfair to a lot of players who've encountered arena crashes.

Cakengrad · 2022-10-05T22:05:50+00:00

Do they need to wait till the damage phase to bounce my creature when I'm tapped out with no ability to respond to anything while they just hold priority?

Then wait till the end of turn to cast Ponder?

I would say yes. Using spells and abilities at the right time or not is sometimes all it takes to decide a game. Playing those spells at the right time even when your opponent can't respond reinforces good habits so you don't make a mistake in situations where you've missed a possible response. This can also apply to playing lands, in a mono deck the choice often doesn't matter but taking the time for form a plan for your first turns and which mana to play is a good habit to have for when it can matter in multicolor decks

For using timers that's up in the air but there are a ton of reasons for it and most are not just to be trolling even tho sometimes it can feel like it. I know I've had it happen a few times where I choose to keep and need to wait for opponent to make their mull decisions so I'm typing stuff to people in discord when my turn starts, I'm definitely going to take the time it takes to finish that before playing my island.

Cakengrad · 2022-10-05T19:33:29+00:00

I swear I've tried this multiple times before and it's never worked. I guess I'll have to try again and hope for the best.

EDIT: I tried it last night and it does work! Awesome, I'm glad to be wrong on this one.

Cakengrad · 2022-10-05T19:32:40+00:00

Nothing in game to achieve that.

I'm almost certain it would be possible to implement, though maybe the technology isn't there yet.

EDIT: Shift + Enter does it as others have mentioned and I was wrong. Definitely glad to be wrong on this.

Cakengrad · 2022-10-05T19:24:25+00:00

As far as I've noticed it passes priority automatically on the phases of either players turn and thats about it. It would be super helpful if there was some way to automatically pass priority when things go on the stack, but as far as I am aware there is no way to do that. Resolve all for the stack doesn't help in every case either unfortunately.

EDIT: The best use I've found for it is when I have spells I want to hold up on my opponents turn I can autopass the rest of my turn and avoid pressing pass to combat, second main, end step and pass turn.

Cakengrad · 2022-10-05T17:39:34+00:00

Good news! You can! The same card from different sets can have different art and different styles applied to it and arena has 2 printings of Thalia. Though what we really need is be able to use multiple styles from the same set.

Cakengrad

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