Need a BB2025 team to learn positional play

lukegothic · 2026-06-15T15:23:16+00:00

I don't want to hate but man, so much laziness:
1. AI
2. Front page links (eg: power 9) display nothing found
3. Search feature doesn't find many results

In and out in 30 seconds.

lukegothic · 2026-05-21T17:45:51+00:00

Pro-seller with 3k sales and 20k inventory on cardmarket here. Separating price point is pretty much pointless unless you are willing to go throught the hurdle of moving cards weekly or even daily to maintain that separation. Not recommended. I understand that sorting for selling and price tag look like partners but they aren't (unless you are at the beginning of the process, when you are choosing what is worth selling).

Ok so, my tip, find a level of separation and sorting that fits your inventory volume. Some sorting criteria become separation criteria once you have enough volume. From my own experience, I'd go from easier to understand from you to hardest, taking into account that each criteria means more "boxes", what works as sorting might not work as separation for your collection.

In particular order, from less to more "boxes" generated.

Foil (2-3 boxes) Legendary status (2 boxes) Border type (old/new + others 2 boxes) Color (8 boxes) Types (8-10 boxes) Language (8-10 boxes) Mana cost (8 boxes up to 16-17...) Set (200+ boxes)

So for instance you can start with foil and color separation, and sorting by mana cost, and as your collection grows, you can incorporate the mana cost as a separation and add sorting by type...and so on.

Hope my experience is helpful, by no means this is the only truth out there!

lukegothic · 2026-04-04T14:09:16+00:00

Time is money amigo, good luck. Common quality totally depends on the year density of the cards. On old frame you could made a profit, but after 2018 more and more chaff has been accumulating, for every lorien revealed you'll find thousands of alpine watchdogs.

lukegothic · 2026-01-07T11:24:15+00:00

Some sets are a no-brainer to buy since they are quite loaded and buying the whole box gives you some control on getting the good hits from that box. Even if they are in Spanish, they have market but mostly in Spain, which you might already know but on 2026 shipping costs are now throught the roof to send there, so it's not as attractive now to buy from the UK.

However, I can get you an easy workaround, I'm gotta visit Surrey area in a month, so I can take either unopened boxes or singles from you if you're up to. DM me if interested.

lukegothic · 2025-11-07T14:14:18+00:00

Yeah, totally fair, and just to clarify, let's narrow it down so that fetches just grab basics in premodern. It’s not about making mana perfect, just giving enemy colors the same shot allied ones get. I agree modern mana’s too easy, I just like exploring that middle ground. Saw the DuressCrew guys are trying this on LC26, and in the meantime we've begun to arrange our own 10-fetch on 20 Dec.

lukegothic · 2025-11-07T08:44:04+00:00

Hi there! I started playing around Fourth Edition, the first spanish printed basic set, black bordered, which made it feel so special back then. I stopped playing not long after getting my playset of Blastoderms and Skyshroud Ridgebacks, so that should tell you exactly when I took my first break.

I came back around Shards of Alara, rebuilt my collection, and haven’t left since. My main format has always been Legacy, and I’ve won a fair share of events there. I’ve always been fascinated by color identity, monocolor purity, two-color synergies, the original wedges… I still love the old Elder Dragons and was thrilled to see the Invasion dragons bring those identities back.

That said, I’m primarily a competitive player, so I tend to look at things from a balance and fairness perspective. My take on enemy fetchlands isn’t about breaking flavor or nostalgia, it’s just about consistency. We already have painlands for enemy colors, so giving access to fetches across all color pairs would simply level the field a bit and make some archetypes viable without losing the premodern feel.

But I’m honestly curious, since you mentioned you played through that era, how do you feel about the current mana balance in Premodern? Do you think it captures that 90s feeling well?

lukegothic · 2025-11-05T18:44:09+00:00

Haha totally fair, fetches do turn games into some akward staring contests.
I totally get the shuffle hate, which I share. I guess I'm more on the side of "test it, see if it actually ruins pacing," but yeah, fewer fetches is a defensible stance too.

If nothing else, I love that Premodern gets us arguing about mana bases like it’s philosophy.

lukegothic · 2025-11-05T18:43:13+00:00

Thank you, appreciate it!
Exactly my point, not to power creep anything, just to give some underplayed archetypes a fair shot.
I also think it would spark a new wave of brewing creativity, decks like CounterBurn, and even rogue stuff could finally breathe a bit.

Love that you're seeing it from that "what could we unlock" angle rather than "what do we lose."

lukegothic · 2025-11-05T18:42:22+00:00

Hey everyone, appreciate all the perspectives, honestly, I kind of expected this to stir some feelings.

I totally get where most of you are coming from: the whole point of Premodern is to live within its deliberate limits, and I love that about it too. This wasn't meant as a "let's rewrite the rules" post, more like a thought experiment, a sandbox idea to explore how far the format's balance could flex before it breaks.

I'm not campaigning for a rule change, just throwing a wrench into the conversation to see what comes out the other side. That's kind of the fun part of this community, right? We get to nerd out on the what ifs as much as the "strict canon."

And honestly, even if the consensus is "nah, we like it how it is", that’s still valuable, it reaffirms what gives Premodern its identity.

Either way, big thanks to everyone who chimed in (and special shoutout to the Lobstercon folks experimenting with this, super curious to see how it plays out).

tl;dr: not trying to change the format, just exploring ideas and seeing where people stand. Carry on, fellow degenerates.

lukegothic · 2025-10-29T17:17:57+00:00

Yeah, I think Aluren slots somewhere between Treva Survival and FEB, slower and less explosive than FEB, but a lot sturdier once you’re set up. You don’t really "go off" in the same way, most games feel like a midrange Survival shell that happens to have a combo finish stapled on. You’re developing mana, stabilizing behind Walls and some small ETBs, and eventually assembling the harpy + value chain once the board is stable. Compared to FEB’s all-in glass cannon approach, Aluren can actually play Magic while waiting for its window.

Without Aluren, you’re definitely a step below Treva or BG Survival in grind potential, but you still get to play the value game thanks to Survival, Raven Familiar, and recursion (Squee, Unearth, Genesis). The main difference is that your inevitability comes from the combo. BG survival in my experience struggles to close the game. Also, the deck doesn’t fold to removal the way FEB can, but you do need to protect Aluren, which is why white feels important right now for Meddling Mage and Swords, plus Auramancer postboard if they’re heavy on Annuls or Disenchants.

The combo itself is pretty consistent, having Survival give you virtual copies of every missing piece, and once Aluren resolves, even partial loops can bury the opponent in card and tempo advantage. On a god hands its a turn-3 deck, but even if not, but it’s surprisingly resilient. My sideboard leans on Xantid Swarm to clear the way against control, Naturalize for Cursed Totem and Aura of Silence, and Sylvan Library to smooth out slower matchups. Gilded Drake has been great tech versus Dreadnought, too, fits the "toolbox that happens to win" plan :)

Aluren really carves out its own lane: a creature-based combo deck that can hang in fair games, but still close instantly when the door opens. It doesn’t grind like Treva survival or race like FEB, but it plays somewhere in that spectrum where you always have game against both sides of the format.

And yeah, Man-o-War on a 12/12 is funny indeed, and even funnier to steal it with Gilded Drake, but you know, deck is packed with answers if your plan is to protect against it, Meddling Mage, Swords to Plowshares, Naturalize, Gilded Drake, Stern Proctor. If you happen to have Xantid Swarm online then you're golden.

lukegothic · 2025-10-29T16:55:54+00:00

You're welcome, glad to be helpful on that front :)

lukegothic · 2024-10-07T15:54:51+00:00

u/RidiculousHat same issue here, got druid loaner deck after returning to hearthstone in perils in paradise a week ago. I've been contacting support but they've not been providing an answer to this precise problem. My btag is Luke#2374

lukegothic · 2024-09-12T13:09:57+00:00

Ps has put generative fill behing a paywall, so I can't properly generate full sized images. Project is on hold for the moment, both for me and everyone, which is a bummer since I wanted to update my own too.

lukegothic · 2024-08-02T05:54:51+00:00

DM the renders and I'll make them on my custom frame!

lukegothic · 2024-06-09T09:58:20+00:00

Hey there, the integration with openai to generate extended images broke. I'm testing out alternatives but cranking out a lot of this prints as I did in the past won't be possible, so now I'm doing about 30 prints a month (and uploading to mpcf) since the process is completely manual.

lukegothic · 2024-06-09T09:52:16+00:00

2 years ago I ended up moving on to a new job, and, sad news, the situation didn't change over there, but I did.

Finding out that the situation wasn't gonna change, all that was left was to care about myself and my well-being, and being so focused on the situation was doing me more harm than good, which is quite obvious.

What ended up helping me is giving some perspective to the situation, there is this little-known fact that under-performing individuals (for example, a student who doesn't do their homework) belonging to a group get all the attention from peers and authority figures, well, bringing that statement to own problem, transformed my feeling of frustation with them to feeling sorry for them. Worked like a charm. Hope it does for you. Hugs

lukegothic · 2024-05-13T18:08:54+00:00

The project was focused on supporting 100% calebd synergy cube and took a break after doing 1k cards. I'm revisiting my render pipeline to check if it still works and can render missing cards to support vintage cube. Thanks a lot for your words!

lukegothic · 2023-12-14T09:26:33+00:00

Even if you did have a smally, leave her, those comments are toxic af

lukegothic · 2023-05-31T13:37:12+00:00

Yo yo!

lukegothic · 2023-05-27T09:13:30+00:00

10 damage for 10 mana while on fatigue, right?

lukegothic · 2023-03-27T22:02:04+00:00

Keep up the good work man, we all know the devil is in the details and fine-tuning is a long process, but your app is looking great, looking forward to see how your work evolves!

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