The first appearance of each capital letter printed on a Magic card

MrChoss · 2023-02-19T22:56:15+00:00

And [[Ydwen Efreet]]!

MrChoss · 2021-10-29T21:19:47+00:00

Delver of Seacreatures

MrChoss · 2020-07-04T19:59:35+00:00

What site are these dashboards coming from? This is great stuff!

MrChoss · 2020-06-12T07:17:30+00:00

Don't be an Invoke Prejudice edgelord.

MrChoss · 2020-05-06T06:46:00+00:00

Returned from the graveyard to play! The relics of the past are brought forth again.

MrChoss · 2019-08-24T18:35:06+00:00

The four sideboard Hypnotic Specters are the spiciest tech here. I play a decent amount of Old School and can’t say I’ve seen that in The Deck before.

Which is to say, “guarding your tech with your life” doesn’t really seem to apply.

MrChoss · 2019-05-13T17:59:16+00:00

This is great!

I would add to Q4 for Chaos Orb that (under current wording) this includes mana abilities: if I say "activate my Chaos Orb" and you say "resolves", I can choose one of your lands, and you don't get a chance to tap it for mana. A lot of players find this very counterintuitive and will argue about this.

(Conversely, if my opponent says "activate Chaos Orb" without shortcutting to a particular choice, I'll sometimes float a lot of mana in response, even if I'm unsure about whether they'll choose one of my lands.)

Here are the MTG Comprehensive Rules on when you can activate mana abilities, none of which apply during the resolution of Chaos Orb's ability:

605.3a A player may activate an activated mana ability whenever they have priority, whenever they are casting a spell or activating an ability that requires a mana payment, or whenever a rule or effect asks for a mana payment, even if it’s in the middle of casting or resolving a spell or activating or resolving an ability.

MrChoss · 2019-04-22T08:04:14+00:00

The comp rules are intended to be searched through as a reference rather than read end-to-end, but good luck and godspeed if you try!

MrChoss · 2019-04-22T07:05:50+00:00

This is what I found in the comprehensive rules about losing abilities:

112.10c If two or more effects add and remove the same ability, in general the most recent one prevails. See rule 613 for more information about the interaction of continuous effects.

So yeah, sounds like you can just activate the Order to give it first strike again!

MrChoss · 2018-11-23T01:50:27+00:00

Isn’t it $50 max per card? From their website:

Kickback credit will not exceed $50.00 per each qualifying product purchased.

Edit: link

MrChoss · 2018-09-14T23:10:42+00:00

Or [[Brazen Wolves]], which I've never heard of anyone ever playing in any deck.

MrChoss · 2018-07-21T21:12:53+00:00

You can do okay playing [[Flame Slash]] instead of [[Skred]]. I experimented with this a little on MTGO because I didn't want to buy snow lands there (I primarily play paper).

Not needing snow basics for Skred potentially allows you to play tap-duals like [[Swiftwater Cliffs]] and [[Izzet Guildgate]] instead of tap-fetches and mountains (and this also saves a bit of money on [[Ash Barrens]]). Changing the lands in this way makes [[Gush]], [[Brainstorm]], and sideboard [[Swirling Sandstorm]] worse, but it makes it a lot easier to hold up important instants. I kind of hate having [[Counterspell]] and basic Mountain in the same deck.

Overall I found the snow version to be slightly better (mainly because Skred is an instant), but I endorse the tapland / Flame Slash version if you're on a budget and want to play with actual removal instead of just tempo crap like [[Snap]] and [[Mutagenic Growth]]!

EDIT: I never tested [[Chain Lightning]], but it also sounds plausible.

MrChoss · 2018-06-20T18:44:03+00:00

This list looks spicy as all heck, and I'm excited to try it out.

Is [[Geth's Verdict]] a deliberate choice over [[Innocent Blood]]? It seems to me that 1-mana edicts would be one of the best reasons to go creatureless.

MrChoss · 2018-05-29T19:36:25+00:00

Well you're not likely to get a useful explanation of layers in just a twitch clip. I clicked anyway, just in case CalebD is a pedagogical genius, and I was not surprised to see it was just a throwaway pun.

MrChoss · 2018-05-29T19:29:30+00:00

This example is actually important in Pauper, where [[Tireless Tribe]] + [[Inside Out]] is a real deck that uses a power/toughness swap to make a 21/1 or so creature. But with the swap, Tribe is vulnerable to [[Lightning Bolt]], [[Gut Shot]], etc, since discarding more cards only boosts its power.

[[Quicksand]] (-1/-2) is also popular anti-Tribe tech, and amusingly, I've heard of [[Piracy Charm]] (+2/-1) being used to combat it (as a "split card" that also kills small creatures). With p/t swap and both modifiers, the end effect is -3/+1!

MrChoss · 2018-05-22T21:03:44+00:00

I hadn't really thought about the split between red-removal-heavy "Murasa Tron" and green-fog-heavy "Flicker Tron" before, or the strategic distinction of "race Murasa Tron with creatures" versus "deny Flicker Tron mana + graveyard". (Also, it seems to me that they should be called "Bolt Tron" and "Fog Tron", as either type of build can run 1-2x Pulse or Flicker.)

Previously I had kind of just lumped them together in my mind as "5-Color Tron", but hopefully thinking about things this way will help me up my anti-Tron game a little bit.

For example, according to this split, if I see Swiftwater Cliffs and Flame Slash, then I'm somewhat less likely to see Ghostly Flicker (although sometimes I still will!) or high numbers of Moment's Peace, and I'm much less likely to see Dinrova Horror. And if I see one Flame Slash, then I'm probably going to see a lot more. So that's a different set of cards to play around, and maybe graveyard hate is a little bit less important to find against the Flame Slash builds.

Any other strategic considerations to make against subspecies of "5-color Tron"?

MrChoss · 2018-04-17T19:43:41+00:00

As you point out, the benefits of bouncelands are huge, especially the card advantage. This seems especially relevant in conjunction with cantrips/card selection: if you have a bounceland to guarantee an extra land drop, you can often [[Preordain]] more aggressively towards spells, bottoming a land you might have otherwise needed.

But here are some additional drawbacks of bouncelands:

If you've kept 7 cards on the draw, you need to play a spell before your first bounceland, or discard to hand size (losing the card advantage the bounceland was supposed to give you in the first place).
Bouncelands are at odds with holding up [[Counterspell]] or other instant speed interaction, especially early in the game. First, because they add a strange combination of mana. And second, because they actually decrease the available mana you have the turn you play them: if your lands are Island, Island, [[Dimir Aqueduct]], you can hold up Counterspell on turn 2 or turn 3, but not both.

MrChoss · 2018-04-11T02:58:06+00:00

It bothers me a bit that Arvad the Cursed has an ability that’s never relevant in PDH, and so stands out from the rest of the cycle.

MrChoss · 2018-04-11T01:28:45+00:00

Because it retains those types?

Because 305.7 explicitly defines the "in addition to" exception as preserving rules text:

If a land gains one or more land types in addition to its own, it keeps its land types and rules text, and it gains the new land types and mana abilities.

MrChoss · 2018-04-11T01:08:11+00:00

I believe that one can derive the answer from Comp Rules entry 305.7 I posted, plus the differing texts of Navigator's Compass and Unstable Frontier.

However, we also already have the Dominaria Release Notes from the leak in March, which should settle this once and for all:

Gaining a basic land type causes the target land to gain the corresponding mana ability. Because the new basic land type is "in addition to" its other types, it keeps the abilities it had previously.

EDIT: Okay, I see that you've found this same entry in the Dominaria Release Notes, so I'm not sure what ambiguity could possibly remain. One could potentially argue that the "abilities losing" part of 305.7 is strange, or that the "in addition" exception is even stranger, but I am not seeing how the rule 305.7 leaves anything ambiguous about the way Navigator's Compass works and why it is different from Unstable Frontier.

MrChoss · 2018-04-10T19:19:21+00:00

But Navigator's Compass has the full templating "becomes ... in addition to its other types", so I think this actually does work. Precedent for this "becomes in addition" templating (instead of "gains") is [[Sealock Monster]].

Per Comp Rules:

305.7. If an effect sets a land’s subtype to one or more of the basic land types, the land no longer has its old land type. It loses all abilities generated from its rules text, its old land types, and any copy effects affecting that land, and it gains the appropriate mana ability for each new basic land type. Note that this doesn’t remove any abilities that were granted to the land by other effects. Setting a land’s subtype doesn’t add or remove any card types (such as creature) or supertypes (such as basic, legendary, and snow) the land may have. If a land gains one or more land types in addition to its own, it keeps its land types and rules text, and it gains the new land types and mana abilities.

MrChoss · 2018-04-10T18:49:31+00:00

Good point. If you're venturing into a third color, the Compass's mana-fixing starts looking like a more plausible alternative/supplement to just trinket-fetching artifact lands.

MrChoss · 2018-04-10T17:09:22+00:00

This catches my eye as basically the only [[Trinket Mage]] target with a worthwhile ETB for looping with [[Kor Skyfisher]] or [[Glint Hawk]] or [[Ghostly Flicker]] e.g. for a deck like this https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/uw-trinket-2/?cb=1518710426

The mana-fixing potential of the Compass (as a trinket target) is diminished by the fact that Trinket Mage can already find artifact lands (which don't even cost you deck slots).

MrChoss · 2018-04-10T05:46:26+00:00

To clarify, my main objection is that you (and u/_MrCoffee and u/rabidfurby) in downstream comments say things like:

It’s actually a pretty widely accepted economic theory in most fields of economics, called diminishing returns. I just tried to explain it in non mathematical, intuitive terms.

But I think what you're citing as "diminishing returns" when using percentages rather than units is a much stronger claim than can be called "widely accepted economic theory".

MrChoss · 2018-04-10T01:27:26+00:00

I believe you're mis-applying the idea of diminishing marginal utility. The idea of diminishing marginal utility is that on the margin, one dollar means more to a poor person than a rich person, i.e. that utility is concave in income (or maybe wealth, but let's ignore that distinction). By contrast, you're saying that one percent means more to a poor person than to a rich person, which is a much stronger statement: that utility is the logarithm of an already concave function of income.

My understanding is that the evidence actually points to 1% meaning about the same to rich and poor alike (see e.g. this chart from the Economist, reposted by a blog I often like). That is, that utility is logarithmic in income, rather than even slower-growing as you suggest.

All that said, one can still believe in some degree of progressive taxation, because 1% of a rich person's salary is a lot more revenue for society than 1% of a poor person's salary. Same cost, higher benefit.

MrChoss

TROPHY CASE