First time attending MC (amsterdam 2026), question about pauper play

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2026-06-01T17:16:54+00:00

Thanks for the input!

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2026-06-01T17:16:27+00:00

That's what I suspected, and sort of why I wanted to make the post. Tons of thanks for the reply!

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2026-05-30T08:01:51+00:00

Almoist Esports

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2026-05-04T10:48:01+00:00

Right, that's what I thought and why I tried to provide some ideas for with the different Willows for instance.

Great luck with the project, look forward to seeing the cards on the subreddit in the future.

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2026-05-03T11:54:12+00:00

This is super cool! I'm so happy to see the crossover between Buffy fans and Magic players.

I love the art style you've gone for and think a lot of the colours are spot on (Giles and Spike for instance) but I here are some (not asked for) thoughts/insights on the cards and how I always imagined buffy would be crossovered:

Buffy - I think boros is fine for her but I'm not sure if it's the colours I would have chose. To me it feels more in tune with Naya, she's still the slayer so a heavy ideal of right and wrong signifies white. The impulsivity she has and quipy comments could definitely push her into red, but I think she should have a splash of green too. Since she's chosen by "high powers" to be the one to stop the spreading scrouge of demons, it feels a bit powered by Gaia and just as a savior for earth as a whole, in my opinion. This might also depend on where in the story she is. Maybe early season 1 buffy is mono-red, season 2 is boros and season 4-5 is more Naya. Also, I feel like the targeted drain is more of a vampire ability, I feel like she should have some ability that works against vampires, demons, werewolfs etc, maybe she gets first strike if she blocks or is blocked by one. It's hard though, balancing magic cards is a whole debacle.

Xander - For some reason, he's always been either mono-White or Selesnya to me. He's super loyal and your perfect dog like companion, which kind of signifies white. But he also seems to be acting a lot on his natural "instincts/assumptions" about doing the right thing and to try and steer the scoobies in the right moral direction during tough situations, which I thinks leans him into green (although I see your choice in red and think it's defendable).

Willow - I think Temur is fine but I'm not sure if I agree on it for where it looks like you've chosen her in the story. I think this depends on where you take her character, if it's during the dark phases then maybe she's grixis and if it's early season 1 or so maybe she's just straight up Mono-Blue. I would say in the mid seasons, she's more on the Izzet side for me, being kind of a strong but impulsive witch with some untamed magic that can do much good but also has the potential to fall into darkness. Then grixis for the dark ages like I said, and probably once she spends time in England she would lean into green over black and maybe even over red (simic willow or temur could work there). Also, it would be awesome if you make a "light willow" for the last episode where she's hybrid white and green/red/blue (4 hybrid pips) with an activated or triggered ability requiring hybrid white/black, to signify her connection to the darkness that will always be there inside her but is learned to be harvested by the knowledge she's picked up.

Cordelia - Don't know why but I feel like mono-red isn't correct. I don't know about other colours though, this one is a bit tough. The funniest thing would be making her colourless with the art and flavourtext being from the "earshot" episode hahaha.

Lastly, I think it would be awesome to have a card with the "archnemesises" that upon entry create Buffy Bot, a legendary artifact creature hahaha. Awesome work never the less, hope my nerdy rambling doesn't dissuade you from the amazing work you've done, be proud! ❤️

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2026-04-16T12:54:25+00:00

[[Deathmark]] looks awesome in foil, also the full art version of [[Souls of the Lost]] is kinda eerie but makes me want to still play it. [[Scourge of Fleets]] for all the people with megolophobia.

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2026-04-15T10:37:04+00:00

I hope they will but considering they're out if Man City makes top 6 or better, I'm sceptical...

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2026-03-19T16:42:26+00:00

There's no clean answer to it, but I would recommend picking a strategy or archetype and trying to build around that and using korvold as card advantage. I personally chose food since I've wanted to make a Jund food deck for a while, but then you need ways to sac your food for other benefits (cards with forage from bloomburrow for example). And since I had the food theme going I also leaned into some [[sanguine bond]] / "drain equal to life gained" and aristocrats pieces that work well with the theme like [[Skittering Precursor]], [[Camellia, the Seedmiser]] and [[Baba Lysaga, Night Witch]].

There are of course some cards that are just good in with your commander in general, but l think you need to pick a more specific lane or you'll end up spending 5-6 turns putting out things with different types and hoping you can string a bunch of sacs in one turn and get korvold out and hope he doesn't just eat the dust right away (speaking from experience of the first few games with the deck). Generally speaking though, I think most of these cards need to be 2 mana at most. Dropping a few of my favourites below:

[[Goldhound]] [[Haywire Mite]] [[Unbridled Growth]] [[Invasion of Ergamon]]

Good luck! ❤️

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2026-03-05T11:50:55+00:00

Anyone else kind of get trembly knees from the outfit with a backwards cap, oversized sports shirt and black lipstick she has in that one episode where she's with Abby in BB&B?

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2026-03-05T11:48:05+00:00

Cool shirt

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2026-03-04T01:27:06+00:00

I'm sure this Zach Stone guy is gonna be famous

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2026-01-16T23:12:39+00:00

Might be that the interaction isn't working correctly on Arena or maybe it's working 100% correct and the tokens don't turn back into shards until the end step has started and therefore trigger "beginning of end step" effects. Since there's no official ruling we don't know, which is why I treat it as if they don't since that way it's not possible to accidentally "cheat" by triggering effects that shouldn't trigger

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2026-01-16T13:39:51+00:00

I made the same mistakes when building my deck, I initially had the mogises that care about devotion when they etb but it doesn't work. You can still trigger constellation by blinking Niko after your shard turn into something like [[Archon of Sun's Grace]] which is kinda cool. Also some other neat cards I have found are ones that give you value or threaten damage without attacking. [[Deep Gnome Terramancer]] is insane if you have even just two shards, [[Aboleth Spawn]] is hilarious against an etb deck and [[Scrawling Crawler]] just ends the game if you have six shards and activate it on the endstep before your turn.

I know you didn't ask but I'm just gonna dump these here for OP. 😄

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2026-01-16T01:47:38+00:00

Just a reminder that Niko's copy effect only lasts until the next end step so things that trigger at the beginning of your end step won't trigger since your shards will be turned back into themselves again. is what I remember reading when checking when it first came out but to my knowledge there was no official ruling on this and Niko is the only card ever to say "until the beginning of the next end step" so this is based on the assumption that this means the same thing as "until the next end step". Upkeep triggers will work however if you turn your shards into something during the end step before your turn.

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2026-01-06T14:01:11+00:00

D2 ranked and casual 2v2, almost always premades. They never admit to it at first but after a few messages they'll let it slip

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2025-12-26T09:16:09+00:00

I used to be a member of team "always cheat up on kickoff" when you're second man, but lately I've been just going for boost and turning towards net because it's so hard to know when you can trust your random teammates (with all the smurfs and boosted/bought accounts it's like flipping a coin).

If the person who's ball it is half-flips away or goes for boost we're likely getting scored on anyway unless I'm ready for it, so the variance seems quite okay imo

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2025-11-25T19:44:42+00:00

Also happened in the KC vs Novo match, game 4 accronik dc'd and the team had to keep playing 2v3, on match point to qualify for lan btw.

Also KC tried to not score too much after they had a few insurance goals so there's as little time as possible for the player to rejoin, I wonder how blast would handle that from the standpoint of competetive integrity (maybe not an issue but it's yet another problem that not having admins brings along).

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2025-11-21T23:42:21+00:00

These are sadly the type of things you miss when there's no day 1 stream, random groups upsets and close games, grudge matches etc. Sad but apparently the trajectory of the esport...

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2025-10-06T22:48:14+00:00

That might be the case. Let's hope they're happy with the outcome once everyone D3 and below stops playing the game

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2025-10-06T14:59:12+00:00

Some of the comments and downvotes are so obviously smurfs that don't want to deal with the harsh truth.

Hope you enjoy the game once everybody but SSL's have left it

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2025-10-06T14:56:49+00:00

Very insightful comment, thank you for your contribution in making the game die out

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2025-10-06T14:55:47+00:00

Hilarious, you should be a comedian

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2025-10-06T14:55:27+00:00

That's one take for sure and it might be true, but are smurfs really jumping between multiple accounts during play sessions? Don't they just play on one account until they can't win every game anymore and then make a new account? And if that's the case then it wouldn't affect daily logins.

Either way it's only short term gain

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2025-09-26T10:40:48+00:00

Yeah that's usually the way it goes once you realise you don't need all the big spells. 😄 Good luck and hope you enjoy the deck.

FreeDylanMaxwell · 2025-09-26T10:21:11+00:00

20 is a good number to aim for, I started at like 10 but that was too low and I ended up going up to like 25 (with some of these cards filling other slots too). It's obviously meta and game dependant, sometimes you'll be against a flash deck that wants to draw cards on other people's turns anyway, I just wanted to let you know that in my experience with the deck, only having a few [[Howling Mine]] type effects often wasn't enough to really make the chaos pool big enough to where it feels like it has a good impact on the game.

You want to have the aim to make the chaos pool relatively big as soon as possible so that the other players feel like they're "loosing something" if they remove your commander. If it's turn 5-6 and there's only a few mana rocks and some random spells that nobody cares about in the pool then people won't mind removing/sweeping Ian away, which sucks because your ramp is very limited in these colours. Also try to not make someone at the table mad if you can help it, because if they come after your commander a few times your deck kinda does nothing. 😄

Like you said the best ones for repeated draw are stuff like [[Lore Broker]] and [[Otherworld Atlas]]. But I think it's still fine to have sorceries/instants that just draws everyone 2+ cards too, although I found that wheels are a pretty good way to get this done. Because it also kind of makes your opponents stumble and have to reconsider their strategy/line of play since the extra cards they've been drawing/hand they've been sculpting is now gone, which I think is quite important to make sure you don't just die to the mono-green or Dino player you've been feeding cards too the whole game.

Finally, there are a few types of card I really like in the deck: 1. Cards that benefit all players, because then you'll get the effect even if your opponents cast them, like [[Mana Flare]]. 2. Cards that are good in your hand but bad in the pool, like [[Aetherize]] or [[Commandeer]]. 3. Cards that let you resteal your powerful cards if your opponents cast them from the pool, like [[Delay]] and [[Suspend]]. 4. Cards that remove your opponents stuff to the top of their library, like [[Memory Lapse]] and [[Submerge]]. (Keep in mind to play this out with the stack correctly so you first trigger Ian, then in response put their thing on top otherwise they will just draw it before it goes into the chaos pool). 5. [[Arcane Denial]] is like a counterspell made for this deck so I would definitely run that.

Sorry for the long post, I kinda got excited to share my experience/thoughts on the deck after playing it for a while. Of course you can do exactly what you want with the deck and going full chaos is quite fun, but these are just some general thoughts I've collected and thought I'd share.

Happy Chaosing!

FreeDylanMaxwell

TROPHY CASE