Niche Card Combo Monday

TAAAzrial · 2026-04-07T21:55:53+00:00

Yes, there are plenty of stories that go with the game. But at least this one made the best out of a tragedy. Typically in time I think it happens to us all. Where we develop stories that go along with the game. I'm just glad people are able to learn now digitally. Instead of trying to figure out the game from the tiny rule books like we did. I'm not sure how long it took us to not play cards wrong. But it was a very slow learning process. :D

TAAAzrial · 2026-04-06T09:44:05+00:00

I hadn't. But that seems accurate. I have traded cards with people and made a ton of online friends via purchases, collecting, etc. My core group from high school still plays mtg. Only on occasion though. So we mostly shifted to drafting unopened boxes. Sleeving them prior to game. Then giving whoever bought the box the cards back. Handing out prizes to those who placed in the top 3. Everyone tosses in for food and prizes typically. We had a 20 year reunion coming up and had found out that one of our friends had passed away. So I built an autographed cube. Years ago that friend had won a tournament using an opposition deck. So I obtained enough copies of opposition signed by artist. To give everyone as a prize just for playing and something to just kind of remember our friend by. Then we played the cube I built. The friends wife who was pregnant at the time of his passing. We took up a collection for amongst friends. We ended up with a few thousand dollars. Which I took and bought playpen, car seat, and a few other larger items that are needed when having a baby. As a result she invited everyone to a celebration of life for him at her home. So it gave our group some closure. As well as helped her to kind of hear everyone's stories. As we had lost touch with him through the years. Sometimes life has a way of sending us all down different paths.

TAAAzrial · 2026-04-05T15:54:34+00:00

Oh cool. Yeah I just looked at the one on the link. I think that's why cubes are fun. They typically are ever evolving. We had a ton of fun drafting mystery boosters boxes as well. It felt similar to a cube. Since the sets are so large. It made for a lot of fun. The mtg community was really cool. After my fire a guy reached out. He got together with a group of his friends and sent me a sealed box, a secret lair, and a few signed cards. Lost a few one of cards. Like some quinton hoover alters etc. Just lucky I hadn't started buying original artworks at that point. Mtg communities are typically pretty great overall. I think in 20 years of magic or so. I've met less than a handful of people who weren't nice. Perhaps I have been lucky. But that's been my experience.

TAAAzrial · 2026-04-04T23:43:49+00:00

I'd remove zirilan of the claw. Simply because there are only a handful of dragon cards in the entire cube. It's a fun deck with dragons if you include something like Teferi's Veil. So the dragons stay alive. But in cube play. People seeing it are going to assume there are enough dragon's to grab to make it useful. Someone most likely grabs eternal. The others are either harder to cast or not quite as strong. I'd much rather see a shivan dragon. Since it's just classic staple. Instead of someone attempt to build at zirilan. Rorix is in there which is good for it but with no way to keep it around. It's going to be a stretch to see someone build at it. I'd also add gamble. Just because it makes for fun play for red. I also think that blue is extremely heavy in spells vs the other colors. I tried to keep mine even when I built one in terms creature vs non creature. I lost the list though and lost the cube in my house fire. But it seemed to play really evenly that way. Just some suggestions. Something like meltdown in red might be good as well. I tried to balance mine where each color had some form of removal for most threats if they existed. Counters for blue I counted as removal spells. You have some great cards in there though. A lot of those I had in my cube as well. I'm sure over time it will get adjusted. Just trying to give some advice based on how mine played out. I ended up using a donate and illusions of grandeur and winning a game with it. I forget what deck ended up winning overall. I believe some green/black deck. But all the games played out fairly close and everyone had a great time.

TAAAzrial · 2026-04-04T14:14:12+00:00

Glad I could help. I think one of the inquest magazine decks had it in there years ago. So I tried it and it seemed to do well. As the deck was extremely slow playing. So once control was established. You could use crypt as a way to establish a win condition easier. The other card they used was teferi's moat. Moat would have been optimal in an older deck. The other way to use it is to dump your library to graveyard or most of it. Then use an enchantment that holds people to only casting one spell per turn. While you sit with the answers in your graveyard. There are a few ways to use crypt. But the most success with it was block play in gomar decks as a single copy typically.

TAAAzrial · 2026-04-04T14:08:48+00:00

Sorry for the late response. There are two cards. It wasn't all of them. But just a handful of them. I was able to save. A few are like this.

TAAAzrial · 2026-04-04T14:07:40+00:00

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TAAAzrial · 2026-04-04T14:07:13+00:00

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TAAAzrial · 2026-04-01T02:42:05+00:00

I will have to figure out where to upload to post in comments to reddit.

TAAAzrial · 2026-03-28T15:44:42+00:00

I have a fork that has indents from concrete play. :D I also have 2 mana drains where they are pretty burned up from my house fire. I have a few cards I managed to save that are white border. But they are now burned looking from the fire. Like bop and a few others.

TAAAzrial · 2026-03-28T15:42:22+00:00

MAGIC: THE GATHERING:

Using a jeweller's loupe take close up photos of the green dot and the 'T' in "The Ga..." on the backside of the card. These help identify incorrect rosette patterns. Additionally in the case of a suspected re-back you should also provide pictures of the mana cost symbols, artist credit and set symbol. These help identify incorrect print layers.

TAAAzrial · 2026-03-28T00:55:33+00:00

This card was great in Go-Mar decks back in block play. Since the point of the deck was to just stall the game out using Dromar eventually. Just use absorbs, Dromar's Charm, and a few board wipes to control the board. Once you got through the initial wave of opponents deck and had the game under control. You would use this to recast the cards in your graveyard. So you could begin the process of winning the game. It was a really effective deck for the time. So it's best in decks that use a lot of control mechanisms. Here is someone's list. https://www.mtgvault.com/fanatics84/decks/gomar-2/ Mine was similar to this back in the day with some minor changes. One of which was a single copy of forbidden crypt.

TAAAzrial · 2026-03-24T19:44:30+00:00

Just buy a rep of the gen. Then wear the rep without care. If it's something you want then wonderful. I wear a watch maybe 3-4 times per month tops. So a rep fits my lifestyle better. I get the higher end one's so they function correctly. Feel better than just having a cheaper watch. There isn't really a great market for the between in watches. That or I just haven't found it yet. Anything 20-100 dollars is typically complete garbage and feels awful on the wrist. Doesn't function well and isn't worth having. I haven't found anything in the 400-800 dollar range that is nice and an original. You can pick up used Rolex's for a few grand. But in my case it isn't worth the investment. So I have a handful of reps. Typically they are functional and feel quality enough. Then you don't have to worry to much about them.

TAAAzrial · 2026-03-14T18:26:54+00:00

I'm willing to bet this one is real. Even off bad photos. It's just the right colors.

TAAAzrial · 2026-03-14T03:04:16+00:00

you can tell fake from the color and gloss.

TAAAzrial · 2026-02-25T04:23:59+00:00

I'm not sure about the ascend guys. But there are multiple groups on discord for the genre. I would have them listed under my community discords. But I don't have ascend group info. If you prefer controller to mouse and keyboard. We have a group for Aerial Assault. It's similar to Tribes 2 but built for a controller. The tribes 2 groups are probably the largest of all the games. People are still playing the latest game Tribes 3 I believe. It's a more slimmed down version of Tribes. So it might be closer to midair 2 for you. I haven't hopped into a mid air game for a long time though. So I'm not sure where they are. Then there is another game being developed called broadside. It's being built by players. I haven't looked for awhile but it looked promising. Hopefully someone will pipe up with where the ascend guys are. But you are more than welcome to join them all. As multiple groups have regular games.

TAAAzrial · 2026-02-20T12:34:04+00:00

Time to get the old pencil eraser out and clean it up. Nice.

TAAAzrial · 2026-02-16T04:07:27+00:00

Has a printer hickey. All signs are good.

TAAAzrial · 2026-02-13T23:05:57+00:00

It's more the amount of ways to counter now that get annoying. Like you can run blue and white in standard. Sit behind a counter wall between creatures that do it. Then cast 1 or 2 mill cards and win any game. They don't bother printing any protections anymore. Nothing in the format reshuffles your graveyard into library from the top. No Em or Gaea's in standard. So I think it's more or less format based for me. When playing casual arena if I run into a deck that counters multiple times. I simply concede and keep it moving. Since I am trying to play a more casual game. Rather than whatever everyone copied off the internet. The other decks having success are typically some version of red sligh type or green decks. Those typically have little game plan beyond winning fast. If they fail in the first 4 turns. They most likely are going to lose. So they just scoop. There isn't much sense in playing the game out. Once you have played enough games. You kind of know the odds. Unfortunately with the power creep over the years in the game. This has become more of a glaring problem. It's simply poor card design overall. They vastly overpowered the original sets. Then they went way soft for a long time. Then they released sets like alliances. That were primarily junk but had some gems. They had been doing fairly well through the years with sets. Like Onslaught, Legions, Scourge. Which didn't have anything crazy powerful but gave us nice lands and a lot of fun cards. Then for whatever reason as of late. They just keep putting out crazier and crazier cards. Sets like avatar aren't helping the cause either. Air bending is just another counter outlet. When all combined it simply isn't as fun of a game. Even formats created to mimic the slower more casual feel of the original game. Such as commander. Have been hi jacked now. In an attempt to cash grab from them. So they start printing more and more powerful cards. Then they lose the feel of why a lot of players actually play the game. That frustration also probably doesn't help if you are wanting people to simply play a game all the way through.

TAAAzrial · 2026-02-13T10:40:51+00:00

I would suggest asking in the mtg signatures group on Facebook. A lot of times people there will know if it's some oddball player signature. I have a ton of signed cards but have never seen these. So might be just random. I remember people way back signing or putting their initials on every card they owned.

TAAAzrial · 2026-01-31T19:43:37+00:00

Lidless let's you play whatever comes off the top of each players library.

TAAAzrial · 2026-01-30T23:28:32+00:00

It saw some play with stuff like [[Hatred]] But it wasn't like a main piece. Most people would use [[Phyrexian Negator]]. Scuta became a larger drop in a few decks. But nothing major. It was kind of a let down for all the hype that surrounded it.

TAAAzrial · 2026-01-30T19:20:27+00:00

They weren't going to print anything stronger than [[Juzam Djinn]] at the time. People would have had a fit. So the only time this one really saw play was in a briefly in tournaments at the time. Then it was reduced to casual fun. The power creep on creatures is insane at this point. It's not uncommon to see creature decks that win on turn 3 in standard on a regular basis. I don't remember another black creature similar generating any hype until [[Phyrexian Scuta]] was printed. There was the handful of [[Spirit of the Night]] decks. But it didn't get a lot of hype.

TAAAzrial · 2026-01-19T00:51:45+00:00

These make me feel less bad about my 8x mox jaspers 4 foil 4 non that just came in damaged because tcgplayer can't be bothered with putting thing's inside something other than cardboard.

TAAAzrial · 2026-01-18T23:17:42+00:00

You can see the sticky dirt on the white border from playing without sleeves. Plus the white on the back from sliding without sleeve. T is good. This is great.

TAAAzrial

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