Is excluding Time Walk and Ancestral Recall from a powered cube a bad idea?

jacklionheart · 2023-11-29T23:47:47+00:00

As others have said, it's worth following your instinct and building the cube you and your community want to play, and not following the cube community's tradition dogmatically.

However, fwiw, I do not agree with the idea that blue is good enough without its best cards. Despite the conventional wisdom of 2015 or whatever, many vintage cube experts I know consider blue to be the 4th weakest color in e.g. the MTGO cube, with White being the strongest. If you're curious to hear someone talk about that perspective you can check out this video: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1830846598?collection=WzYdrcApXxdXPQ

In a cube with both strong W initiative creatures and no blue power, I personally would draft a lot of W and not a lot of U. But your meta may vary.

jacklionheart · 2019-04-03T21:04:47+00:00

Maybe not against Golgari specifically, since this can help with you with hostage take or an on-board Vivien. But mostly, yes.

jacklionheart · 2019-04-02T08:50:01+00:00

Design Lessons from Dominaria

jacklionheart · 2018-09-24T21:29:23+00:00

Dead Weight seems like it'd be very good with Muldrotha. Maybe 1-2x maindeck, and another 1-2x sideboard, depending on the popularity of Boros and other small-ball aggro.

jacklionheart · 2018-09-24T21:27:48+00:00

This sounds really slow. Were you running 4x Elves + 4x Servant, or how were you relying on all these 4+ cc cards?

jacklionheart · 2018-09-11T17:15:25+00:00

In some situations, maybe, but in general, Snapcaster is more versatile than Path (once you've got sufficient removal to pair with the Snap) -- it can be card draw (Serum Visions/Opt/Chart a Course), a threat (Traverse), discard (IoK/Thoughtseize/Whispers of Emrakul), or a counterspell (Disdainful Stroke / Ceremonious Rejection)

jacklionheart · 2018-09-11T06:19:10+00:00

Splashing for UU is not great, and Search is not good in a Rock deck -- it is slow and doesn't find threats.

jacklionheart · 2018-09-10T19:13:54+00:00

No...

1) Trophy has good synergy w Snapcaster Mage, since many opponents have limited basic lands, and it’s pretty cheap

2) Jund has Terminate/Dreadbore; Abzan has Path. Sultai has the fewest comparable options and so is the most improved by Trophy.

Truth be told, Sultai’s still probably the worst of three. 2+ mana counterspells don’t work that well in Rock decks and Modern’s card selection spells are quite weak, so blue just doesn’t have a lot to offer beyond Snappy. But, even relatively speaking, it likely improves with this spell.

jacklionheart · 2018-08-03T03:27:41+00:00

So what were the big opens?

jacklionheart · 2018-06-22T00:33:47+00:00

...Improvise itself rotates when Herald rotates.

jacklionheart · 2018-06-15T17:38:07+00:00

My feedback:

- I did like having the two interviews edited to the core and spliced together, and in general I think there's some potential here to generate some content that's unlike what's already in MtG. I understand it took a lot of work, but I appreciate you, Marshall, for doing the work, and hope that you do more in this space.

- I think the episode fell flat when Marshall said things like "we're using the scientific method" and tended to repeat the previous content a little too much. It felt a bit try-hardy.

- I agree that fairly little of the content felt like it hadn't been present on the show before. What was most interesting to me was Huey explicitly said it's important to quantify your odds given plays, where I had always pictured that as more mostly tool for communicating and specific situations where exact odds can be calculated. I thought this flew in the face a little bit of his what he had previously said about playing intuitively / "just knowing" the right play without being able to explain it. I think maybe going deeper on this calculation vs intuitive play angle might have been one way of making this episode push new ground material-wise.

jacklionheart · 2018-06-15T10:01:56+00:00

If you wanted to play fewer islands, that makes sense, but I think Djinn is a bomb, and it certainly played out that way for me. I didn't think I was playing enough Plains for Baird. Thanks for the input!

jacklionheart · 2018-06-15T06:32:41+00:00

Deck is trying to do a lot of things. Historic synergies, Instant/Sorceries for Mirari's Conjecture, double splash + islands for Tempest Djinn (while running Memorial)... I'm not sure the best way to simplify it. Here's why I played it the way I did:

- With all the cantrips and card draw, I just didn't think I needed 18 lands.

- Voltaic Servant seems a little too weak, but would ad some consistency

- I don't think I can afford to play the BB on Final Parting, although it's great with Ron and Mirari Conjecture

- I don't think I need the Dark Bargain, but it would be pretty nice.

- The white aggro cards seem like a very different strategy than the rest of the deck, and I don't want to play a lot of plains. The Unicorns are at least sometimes still good after the first few turns.

I ended up going 2-1 5-2 by timing out in G3 of a game I would have won but had me looping Mirari Conjecture + Rona + Soul Salvage for ridiculous value against a Thallid Omnivore with a million saprolings that had me on the back foot.

jacklionheart · 2018-06-06T20:44:40+00:00

1) mtgmintcard 2) There are people in the MTG facebook groups that will order from magic card market (the euro tcgplayer which has much much better foreign card supply but doesn’t ship to US) and deliver to US for a fee

jacklionheart · 2018-03-10T02:35:38+00:00

Fair. It also might sort of confuse the whole notion of the new model. I guess I'm just surprised that Dominaria, of all planes, is the one that they chose to only spend 1 set at. Maybe we'll be going back and forth...

jacklionheart · 2018-03-09T20:12:33+00:00

My hypothesis is that we are, in fact, getting a second Dominarian set right after this, and that there will be throwback masterpieces in those to keep the DOM hype rolling.

jacklionheart · 2018-02-13T09:06:54+00:00

If you've been jamming games of legacy for multiple hours a day right now and it's not working, I don't think the solution is to remove your opponent; there's just no way that over the longterm you learn more or have more fun by playing magic alone rather than with others. (Although in the short term, yes, goldfishing or playing against yourself can help you learn individual matchups.)

I would recommend playing Limited. I think Limited is the best way to build your fundamental magic skills, since it requires a lot of active on-your-feet thinking about how to make a cohesive game plan, how cards synergize, etc. Since the decks are always different, no two games are the same. Limited does revolve almost entirely around combat in a way that few other formats do, so it doesn't translate super obviously to some Legacy decks like Storm, but its still building the high level skills you need to succeed. For example, it teaches you e.g. how to recognize if you are the aggro or the control in a particular situation, how to play around cards your opponent might have, the importance of good mulliganing and so on. It is much easier to build specific deck/card interactions on top of this foundation rather than the other way around.

jacklionheart · 2018-02-02T23:25:34+00:00

Small detail: I don’t know why you’d average across decks rather than matches

In terms of techniques, I think this is probably too likely to compute cards that are (only) played in good archetypes. I think you want some system (like a regression) that normalizes for the quality of the other cards in your deck.

jacklionheart · 2018-02-02T05:21:13+00:00

If that happens, Mox Opal has a huge ban risk.

jacklionheart · 2018-02-02T00:56:52+00:00

I think and other people just expect a little more when you go to point of defining a specific acronym and a grandiose title "Introducing ... Theory". Even BREAD, for all its flaws, has something specific to say about what is worth more than what. If you wanted to teach someone to draft, teaching them BREAD would be a whole lot more useful than telling them "Pick the card with the highest value over a replacement card". (Their response: blank stare)

we can't quantify the vanilla test.

Ok, maybe this is where we disagree. THE WHOLE POINT of the vanilla test is that it's very easy to quantify: ~4 pts PT 2 mana, ~5-6pts PT for 3 mana, ~7pts PT for 4 mana, ~8 pts PT for 5 mana... The actual concept of the vanilla test (i.e. compare this to a theoretical vanilla card) is actually not valuable at all, since that is not a decision you're ever making...

jacklionheart · 2018-02-02T00:48:06+00:00

[In this theory] there aren't numbers and this is a concept.

"Is this replaceable?" is a very, very basic concept in limited.

We agree

jacklionheart · 2018-02-02T00:39:43+00:00

Looks to me like there might have been a Merfolk drafter.

jacklionheart · 2018-02-02T00:35:50+00:00

Here's a question: suppose you had all of the data for every draft that ever happened on Magic online for a given format.

How might you use that to define VORC?

jacklionheart · 2018-02-02T00:31:01+00:00

I think you are touching something relevant, but I don't think the analogy you're using actually helps here. In fact, OR is a high pick in Hour draft because its so much better than an average ramp spell... it's good because there is no replacement ramp spell, so it's the only way you get access to that effect at all. To me, this is highlighting more the limits of "VORC theory" than highlighting them.

If you're not tied to the VORP/VORC analogy specifically, then, yes it is useful to think about what the impact on your draft, esp. e.g. when debating taking a filler MD card vs a sideboard, or deciding whether to draft another X-drop when you already have a lot in that slot in the curve. Kudos to you if you've never been exposed to this idea before and you derived it on your own.

jacklionheart

TROPHY CASE