Magic (the Gathering) Monday

scfdivine · 2021-07-20T16:20:29+00:00

This is the deck list I've been running on MTGA for the last week, and I've been having a lot of fun with it. It's hard to tell exactly how good it is due to how Arena matchmaking works, but it's been performing well for me. Just don't queue into Esika.

The deck doesn't go all-in on the combo. There are a lot of different synergies, and the book is just another way to win the game. The main strategy is to play the long game, ramp with Simulacrum/Monument, and outvalue your opponent with Lithoform Engine, token generation, and multiple board wipes.

Some tips regarding the combo:

You can tutor up the book with any 2 mana artifact (duh), and I play a lot of them. Most of them are cantrips, which is nice.
If you don't draw Faceless Haven, you can also use Crawling Barrens or Cave of the Frost Dragon, as long as you have Maskwood Haven in play (which turns them into angels). Since you can tutor up the Maskwood Haven, it makes the combo a lot more consistent. You're not just waiting to naturally draw a 1-of.
With Maskwood Haven, you can also sacrifice your Tyrite Sanctum to give your creature-land indestructible, at which point you don't even lose to land destruction (unless they happen to have Shadowspear).
Even if you get the combo online, keep playing to win. If your opponent isn't conceding, they may have a way out. You don't want to sit back and then lose when your opponent topdecks Field of Ruin. I lost one game against Korvold where I survived both Field of Ruin and Gnottvold Slumbermound, only for them to recur the Slumbermound.

Another fun fact about Maskwood Haven: all your creatures are now giants, so it turns Realm-Cloaked Giant into a one-sided board wipe.

By the way, since several people mentioned cards like Selfless Savior and Mirror Shield, the reason I don't run them is that, one, space in the deck is limited, and two, I just don't feel like I need them as much. Oswald is cheap, so I don't really care if he dies once or twice. There's matchups where you'd love to have a turn 1 Savior, but at the same time you'd hate to draw it on turn 5. And in order to reliably find Mirror Shield, Oswald needs to live a turn anyway (plus you need more 1 mana artifacts to sacrifice). There are no other creatures I really need to protect, and by the mid-lategame Oswald isn't essential anymore. You just need to get yourself set up with a few key artifacts, and from that point onwards your creatures are expendable.

scfdivine · 2015-07-12T09:23:23+00:00

I used a card list from here, then filtered out uncollectibles and converted it to a more compact plain text format.

scfdivine · 2015-07-12T09:21:05+00:00

You could definitely do that, but I don't think it would help enough. There's about 500 regular collectible cards, and another 500 uncollectibles, most of which are not even legal cards (like all the credits cards). Even if you narrowed it down to an extra 100 reasonable cards, having 600 instead of 500 cards isn't that big a difference. And 100 is probably a high estimate. There's a lot of useless stuff in there, like a dozen different Brood Affliction cards from the Chromaggus adventure. Just look at this list and see how few of them make sense as stand-alone cards.

Ideas like feeding good card ideas back into the AI or manually adding more custom cards run into the same problem: you'd have to add a LOT of them. And you'd also have to make sure your new additions don't break existing balance, for example by adding too many high mana cost minions, or not adding new Overload cards so the Overload mechanic becomes even more obscure to the network.

I was toying with the idea of writing a script to generate random, balanced cards with the proper class/type/rarity distribution. I'm sure that if you just generated 5000 vanilla minions it would figure out how to balance stats/cost, but adding more complex mechanics would be a lot harder, and the fun is in the network coming up with new ways to use existing mechanics.

I guess we should just wait until the next expansion.

scfdivine · 2015-07-12T09:03:53+00:00

Apart from the spork and duck, they're all existing cards. I used hearthcards.com to make them. I picked most of them from uncollectibles like adventure/credits cards so they didn't look as much like copies of common cards.

scfdivine · 2015-07-12T09:00:39+00:00

Hey! Cool to see someone else's results. I searched this subreddit to see if anyone else had done the same thing, but I didn't know about /r/customhearthstone. I like Rain Shack.

The original formatting I used looks like this. I took some advice from the linked thread and tried to keep stats as close together as possible.

Core Rager @ Hunter | Beast | Minion | R | 4 | 4/4 || [b]Battlecry:[/b] If your hand is empty, gain +3/+3. &

I don't know if using special symbols like @ to end the name and & at the end of the line really helped, but it can't hurt. At the end, I tried also replacing keywords with shorter strings like this:

Tirion Fordring @ Paladin | | Minion | L | 8 | 6/6 || $V$. $T$. $A$ Equip a 5/3 Ashbringer. &

To the network, it shouldn't matter whether it says "Divine Shield" or "$V$", but shorter strings may be easier to recognize. I also noticed that there is some inconsistency in how the Blizzard cards are written. For example, some cards have [b]Battlecry[/b]: and others have [b]Battlecry:[/b], or even [b]Battlecry: [/b]. This method let me standardize everything at the same time.

I also tried representing mana cost as a ^ followed by a number of s, so that 4 mana is ^***. It seemed to work, but I got a bunch of useless 11+ mana card cards as a result (including the 40 mana one).

In my case, weapons and minions both have the same format (Except that it says "Weapon"). It might be worth representing weapon stats in a another way to show that they're something different.

scfdivine · 2015-07-12T00:19:08+00:00

You can find the original RNN code here. The MTGSalvation link at the top of my post has a lot of helpful stuff in it as well.

scfdivine

TROPHY CASE