wickeddarkman

Such wonder

Summoners trap to fight counterspells

Habla inglese ?
Oh, this is nostalgic, and you forgot to answer me :p

Mekkacat, mekkacat, what have they been feeding you?
It must have been something drug like, since you are at such an enormous amount of decks.

And you are still active since the dawn of time where I put you on follow.
But your number of comments are still low, and your reputation is just as low.

I guess you just ain't the talker you used to be.

I on the other hand is still the stalker I used to be, and I'm cleaning up in my follow files to see who's gone and who is still in here.

I've also started to mess around with my own structure and one of the areas I'm focusing on is my use of tags.

You seem to have a simple system, but do you have any tricks none else knows about that you haven't told about ?

Go take a short peek at my current tag-guide at my page and comment if you got anything.

I find it unlikely that you of all people haven't got a few ideas on the area :)

One of my own suggestions were to also tag years so you could quickly revisit a specific era.

I'm super competitive, I might give you some advice, but it will take some effort:)

Your first challenge is to identify what it is about her play style and deck choices that makes her good.

True masters in competitive environments identify the most problematic cards and build up a response behavior to them, that way they don't need to learn all cards in the format and can focus better on a wide scale

This format is also known as premodern and is often tagged that way to avoid being called vintage/oldschool.

You should try to find some competitive players, nothing makes you learn faster than a bunch of competitors:)

Heh! The name Turkish simic is either because you are a turk, or because you misspelled turquoise;)
Which izzet ?

There's only one registered bronie deck in mtgvault.
We know you are out there, step up and tag yourself as bronies, you don't need to build a deck to use a tag.

True, we don't want to wear him out :)

Redo the calculations, you should be able to kill at the same number of turns as a 3 mana setup with only 2 lands, because you gain a bolt. It takes 7 bolts to kill (21 damage) with but a single card that also act as a 2 damage bolt is the optimal number of 2 damage bolts.

Scenario 1, 4 turns equals 10 cards drawn. 3 are lands, 7 are bolts.
Scenario 2, 4 turns equals 10 cards drawn. 2 are lands 8 are bolts at turn 1 and 2 you play lands. At turn 2 you will have used 3 bolts at turn 3 you don't get a land so you cast 2 bolts same at turn 4. Total is 7 bolts wether you get 3 or 2 lands.

I never used anything in the simulation but mountains and lightning bolts, and it was built before fetch lands existed.

Creatures with haste could add to the equation but would give some other vulnerabilities.

I was just curious if there was enough bolts now :)

There could be multiple of ways to build it.
2 shard volley could also be added considering that they can be cast as the last bolts where you don't need your lands anyways because they are dead.

There are several ways to include more cards but it will also become a puzzle at what will be optimal :)

I've been thinking of another area that might need fixing.
Views...
When I post a deck or an article I've noticed that it gets 6-7 views while I create the deck alone. These views cannot be from real viewers because I only make my stuff public after the deck has been made.

When I've finished with the descriptions as well I've usually got around 20 views

I assume it's because the page somehow register ones own views, and knowing myself I usually errata my own posts after they are public.

I also assume that when I view other peoples pages several times waiting for responses I probably add to their number of views.

A lot of other people probably share some of my behaviour, so a lot of views registered are not really views.

Since many of us are currently disheartened by the lack of upvotes compared to the number of views. It should be pointed out that there is such a distortion and gary might want to set some it ghoul on it.

Now you know...

When I was at my best at milling I favoured two strategies, one was walls draw and Phoenix, the other was to mill faster than any other mill to deal with aggro.

In my speed mill I ran 3 chancellor of the spires with 4 extirpate because at that time there was a lot of aggro with counterspell, so extirpate was my main pick to disrupt aggro via chancellor's.

I used 3 main board leyline of the void to deal both with control and graveyards.

I used 3 traps and only 2 hedron because most decks are too apt at getting it killed, so it was mostly a dead card.

I played augur of bolas more than snappy. Because I'd discovered that decks with snappy only won at local tournaments while bolas were in decks that won in journeys with hundreds of people.

Crypt incursion I had two in main and took it out against aggro.

Your goal will be to mill large enough chunks that everything falls apart but aggro, and aggro must be stalled with creatures that somehow avoids removal and also adds to the mill.

That sort of thinking brought me to build a wall deck with phenax, god of deception.

Then I discovered that I wanted to play old school to test some theories on how to get evolution to build decks for me.

Symmetry is a forced search, and so far only three cards do that in magic, which makes symmetry and traps very powerful.

I'd try out 4 symmetry 4 archive, 4 glimpse and 4 mind funeral out with 4 noxious revival to see how they will interact.
Extirpate and surgical will go into it as well, but focus on the traps and how symmetry and noxious revival will work.

One of my favourite mill cards have always been shriekhorn. You could use symmetry to put a trap on top, then mill yourself and then draw the trap with a noxious and cast it for free.

In my eyes symmetry is too good to pass by

The second card to force a search is a recently printed land that seems like a bad wasteland, replace shelldock with that. Most decks have it to fight torn. But it's sweet with the traps too.

You might be surprised how little that can do.
Optimally you fire off the symmetry at turn 1 to kickstart any traps in the opening hand, this means you only have 2 surgical available at that opening and since 4 copies of a card are drawn less than 41 percent of the time the odds of having 1 out of 2 cards will be extremely small.

I've faced decks with more than 15 graveyard cards and gotten beaten because the hatred was not able to be cast at an early start. (Turn 1-2)

I suggest you test against instant reanimator with goryo to test out your defences.

My own best results have been with surgical, leyline of the Void and faery macabre with at least 6 of these in main deck.

I can also tell you that as long as eldrazi is played there will be hatred against eldrazi lands, which will disrupt your shell docks and fraying sanity is a card that doesn't work against aggro and is best when facing slow decks. During tournaments the meta mainly consists of aggro.

I'm wondering, how many lightning bolt like spells are out there in modern now ?

I once had a computer calculate that 16 lands and 44 lightnings would be the fastest non-combo kill.

Is there enough 1cc lightning like spells to cover 44 cards ?

Symmetry will work against you when facing decks that wants to fill the grave, as they get to put exactly what they need into it. You will need cards to deal with that

I saw the headline and thought it might be an obscure reference to "frog in a blender" which is a famed deck from when darksteel was released.

Then I saw your commander and knew I was wrong.

I'm not into the commander format but I really liked your guidelines.
Much structure, so details.

You start out with a blank paper, and in the middle you write the topic you want to mind map, like a magic card or something you want to work on like family relations or the civil war. Around it you write out the most related topics or best cards to combo with and use lines to connect all new things with the main topic. Then you draw lines between any of the new topics that share something with each other. After that treat all new topics as if they were the main topic. Soon you will have made a tree like structure of connected stuff, and that's a mind map. With practice it will learn you how to think out of the box by doing it mentally without the paper. All out takes is that you mindmap a lot of things for a while.

I tend to think in card networks.
Once I see a card I can usually place it in a web and reference to the edges.

It's a skill I learned from mind mapping. It's a simple mental tool that starts out on paper but later in life you do it automatically.

Heh, are you competitive or budget :p
If you have some good friends and some proxy decks you could find the minimum before buying into the cards.
I usually test my manabase against a turn 0 blood moon. For the sake of the test blood moon is irremovable and valakut ignores the moon.