Magic The Gathering

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shadowmoore is next

I've been keeping an eye on the new Shadowmoore cards; I haven't yet found the time to make a new T2 deck. I do like some of the new cards. The problem I have with T2 is that good deck ideas are rapidly arbitraged by the hyper-competitive environment; i.e. if it's good, it's already been done. I like the fact the number of expansions involved has increased so maybe this will change.

Been fooling around on mws with my pet extended deck as of late. . . Today I ran into a guy with UG Tron; he lost. I do a little search and it turns out UG Tron is an actual netdeck in vogue. I go into mws again and beat an angry guy with Zoo.
I get a chuckle out of all this. I don't think it's possible to do this well in T2 with a rogue* deck.

* as in: not-a-netdeck

heard of people that shadowmoore is the slowest set around that followup the two previous ones; loads of creatures with 5-6 mana vs the fast creatures in previous two sets; have to look at it myself. Shadowmoor prerelease was this weekend somewhere didnt go will tell more when i hear about it tomorrow in my club.real release day is 3 may

i play magic but have not played paper in almost 5 years. but i do play magic online.

I started playing around Odyssey block (when I was in 8th grade). I still own most of my magic cards and play with a couple of the high schoolers at the youth group I help out in, though I don't play in tourneys and never did...

My primary deck is this red creatureless deck that is fairly good in fast and medium-pace games. It packs mostly player and player-or-creature damage spells, backed up by an AEther Flash (to counter swarm decks, which are this deck's principal weakness) and two Goblin Charbelchers (artifact from mirrodin that I can use to repeatedly hit the opponent without going through my other spells)

I used to play that in high school. Had a very wicked artifact + swarm critter deck.

No one could beat it. Had lots of cards that generated a 1/1 creature every turn and an additional 1/1 for 1 mana of any color spent.

Had 1/3rd of the deck be artifacts, several of which were one that you tapped and EVERYTHING in the table would die..except artifacts and flying creatures.

so all my little 1/1 hordelings were flying critters, all my defense was artifacts and more than half my deck was lands.

Until i ripped Memnarch out and started possessing everything you had in play...

Yeah, saw a lot of expensive cards. There is, however, a 2/1 1st-turn-drop for aggro - I tried re-creating a bit the old Sleigh deck while playing with the warrior/elf themes.
I even had Groundbreaker for Ball Lightning.


// Lands
2 [10E] Treetop Village
8 [10E] Forest (2)
2 [10E] Mountain (2)
3 [SHM] Fire-Lit Thicket
2 [FUT] Grove of the Burnwillows
4 [10E] Karplusan Forest

// Creatures
3 [LRW] Garruk Wildspeaker
4 [10E] Llanowar Elves
3 [CS] Boreal Druid
1 [LRW] Wren's Run Packmaster
4 [LRW] Wren's Run Vanquisher
2 [MOR] Chameleon Colossus
4 [MOR] Bramblewood Paragon
4 [SHM] Boggart Ram-Gang
4 [SHM] Tattermunge Maniac
4 [MOR] Wolf-Skull Shaman

// Spells
1 [PLC] Gaea's Anthem
4 [10E] Incinerate
1 [MOR] Obsidian Battle-Axe

// Sideboard
SB: 3 [LRW] Eyes of the Wisent
SB: 4 [TSB] Tormod's Crypt
SB: 1 [10E] Pithing Needle
SB: 3 [PLC] Sulfur Elemental
SB: 4 [SHM] Guttural Response


I'm not much of a serious player.
My favourite deck, though, is my BR Control which is in fact more rogue-ish than this.



Yeah, same here.
I barely have time to jumble decks up on mws.

i bought several days ago the 5 construction theme decks , there are hybrid, saw a new symbol a untap symbol, it is used when attacking and you untap that creature with the untap symbol and you have a blocker for free next turn

I somehow inherited a bunch of leftover cards (mostly odyssey block) from a friend's brother who went to tournaments a lot. The rare and uncommon cards had already been taken, so it was a challenge to make a decent deck using only common cards. I did have a wide selection, however, and I think some of my decks were pretty good, though certainly not tournament worthy. I've never really spent money on the game.

I've made some killer decks with Apprentice, but I don't like to play online much because many of the people in the chat rooms were mean.

If enough people here who know the game are interested, we could probably set up a free chat room at www.chatzy.com and play with each other. Interested?

I have a similar problem with random players online so this sounds good; I'd have to learn Apprentice, though.

Apprentice is really very simple. It doesn't enforce the rules. It pretty much just makes a virtual deck and table, so you have to already know how to play.

If you want a more advanced free system, we could try Firemox instead. It's supposed to be able to enforce the rules, but I don't know how accurate its rulebook is. I've never used it before.

The problem with both of these though, is they're purely peer-to-peer. If you're behind a NAT you can't host. If neither player can host you might have to use Hamachi or port forwarding or something.

I don't think I'd have any problems.
Where can I download the latest version/patch? I saw one at Magic League but it was only up to Xth edition.

Sigh, Magic League is it. I thought they were usually up-to-date. Some more sets seem to have appeared when I wasn't looking.

The latest version of Apprentice (2.0) is on sourceforge, but hasn't been released. The latest released version of Apprentice is the one you found at Magic League. There is a later "unofficial" patch posted in the apprentice forum at magic-league.

If that's not good enough, we could use Scroll Rack instead ( http://scrollrack.sourceforge.net/index.html ). It automatically downloads the set information from wizards of the coast. The play capabilities are about as simple as apprentice, but it has naturally stronger anti-cheat mechanisms (and it's open-source.) Unlike apprentice, it doesn't come with a deck builder or advanced search features. You have to create the deck files manually. It's just a simple text file though (and I think it might be the same format apprentice uses anyway.) You could still use wizard's gatherer ( http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/ ) for you card search. It not quite as powerful a search as apprentice has, but it's still pretty good.

What do you think of Magic Workstation?
I know there are some complaints because mws sometimes crashes but it does have a search engine and a deck builder as well as a rather complete play interface (counters on permanentes, tokens, random actions, removed from game, sideboard wishing) Currently I have up to Shadowmoor (with images) but I'm not sure about it's anti-cheat features - I don't think it has any; other than listing a deck's format if it's legal and keeping a log of player actions. I don't recall thinking random players would be using hacks (like seeing my hand or getting suspicious draws); in mws there are mostly problems with hostile anonymous players that do whatever - other than that, I think the software itself is quite decent.

I know mws is better in some ways, but it has too many problems. As you've already mentioned, it crashes too easily. I'm not actually too concerned about cheating. It's not like we're holding tournaments with prizes.

The next problem is the added complexity over something simpler like Apprentice or Scroll Rack. We're probably not all in the same time zone, so I'd like as many people here at WP to be willing to try to play, and that means simpler is probably better.

And finally, mws is shareware! It has a nag box and 40-day evaluation period before you're legally supposed to buy it. Even if it actually keeps working after that, why bother with shareware when there are freeware and free software alternatives?

Scroll Rack is probably the simplest, followed by Apprentice, but building decks is easer with Apprentice. Firemox is probably the most advanced. I think it can do everything mws can and it can enforce rules. The added complexity might be offset by the rule engine, so more people may be willing to try.

That said, Apprentice is the only one I've actually used before.