wickeddarkman

A number of other sites have a "similarity %" where you can see how similar to other builds archived a deck is.
In terms of "competitive" some people trusts the similarity between designs more than they trust the tag.

Looks like the trolls are lazy, rather than spam, they downvote :)
Enough downvotes and a comment is exiled. It can occasionally be read by clicking the nearby [+], but sometimes the mods disable that feature. Recently it's been turned on and off a lot, which is why I know they monitor events in here, but doesn't step in.

The trolls presence is why any attempts to form a civilised community are bound to fail.

Well, there's one troll in here that has an exotic move to annoy others, with all his alternate accounts he starts by making his deck public, then slowly fills it with some cards (at close to a card per minute)

Back when I collected offenses I dubbed it deckslapping, then changed it into deckflashing.

At first I thought he might be a sort of flasher, just with magic, but then I discovered that a certain type of decks appeared shortly before the flash sessions, and I noticed that this particular troll had a viewer ship while flashing.

So while he flashed a card a minute, someone was watching his post, so when he'd finish a commander deck, it would have about 300+ views.

Most of that stuff is covered or will be covered in my paranoiazone.
https://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/paranoia-zone-frontpage/

We got all sorts of trolling in here, dating back to 2006, and they've made it very clear that they aren't going away.

Sometimes my war against them surfaces, but most of the time it's being played out hidden from the public.

I've always been publishing in here, so I use that as a way to warn against the stuff going on here, and a number of trolls think the solution is to spam, which is hopelessly outdated. A few has learned to sabotage my work by spamming the tags, but that's essentially not a solution either.

At the moment I believe that the there is a test of my vigilance, because I've been busy with many projects.

But the thing is, I saw that comming a long time ago.

I got a wast archive of usercounts, and everything I see someone new or old, they get added on a list, that I look through frequently to break the troll codes.

To identify each other, the trolls need signals, and they often slip up because of the amount of accounts they have.
I generally only identify them because they can't help staying with the same patterns.

A few times they've tried reverse psychology, but they sort of suck at it.

The times they've tried to befriend me, they've usually resolve to trolling me slightly after just a few days.
Trolling me is too big part of their nature, and since I've been friends with a very trollish person for about 15 years, I know just how to serve up stuff that triggers their troll behaviour.

Part of my side of the argument was that you were probably not playing competitive, and I was interested in making it better.

Stuff like playing 6 4-cost in a 20 land deck just isn't that, unless it's in a more relaxed environment.

I guess part of my curiosity back then came from the number of likes the deck had earned.
The 100 like days are basically over, because only trolls get that many points these days.

It's been a while since you were active, at first I thought someone had necroed your post, but then I saw you had put it in unloved mode, so I decided to rekindle "the fire" welcome back.

You will find a number of oldies still active, including me, but we also got trolls who've clung on for just as long.

At some point you migh wonder if there might be a correlation in that fact, but that's a road best not to be walked.

People have said stuff like that for as long as magic has existed.
Notably with force of will which was proven to be not as good as people thought it was.

It sort of depends what's being redundant in the deck.

I have had a change in procedures lately which did make me think it gained a little inconsistency, but I've had backup plans in place for a long time by reintroducing older cards to the genepook all the time. If there was a bleep in the measures, the card will simply return again the next generation.

But sometimes I've gotten results that consistently repeated themselves no matter how I felt for them.

Back when I was trying to evolve mill decks, the project always threw out the mill cards and became a control deck.
The only millcard left in that project is two mindshrieker.

Since all this is about math and statistics what would be your argument for 4 spellstutter sprite.
How are you certain that 3 isn't just as sufficient as 4 ?

I've got an old set of rules for it that I'm using.

4 if the deck can't survive without it.
3 if you want it early but want better stuff later.
2 if it's mainboard hatred.
1 if you are testing it.

The thing about spellstutter sprites is that it is dependant on the number of faeries your deck consists of, and since the number of faeries is dependent on which deck you couple your halfdeck with, that number swings wildly, making spellstutter sprite less efficient. I believe my system has "understood" that weakness. Sometimes you just draw a hand where spellstutter sprites is the only faerie you will see for a long time.

I hope this allows you to see that spellstutter sprite isn't always a 4 of, which also applies to force of will (which depends on having blue cards in hand) if a 4 of card has dependencies, it's not always the right thing to play 4 of it, but most people prefer to follow a band wagon mentality on some cards until they get thoroughly beaten by someone who uses 3.

One of my friends always swore at playing 4 force of will until I beat him by just having two.
Since then he's learned to play 0 counterspells in his designs where other people use several.
The ability to counter something isn't always good, not even with THE counterspell (counterspell)

I've even taught him that playing ancestral recall on the opponent during the early game can be a move in 93/94. (Not because you play black vise)

Magic is extremely complex.

Well, I use evolution to build it, and so far it's been producing odd but wondrous things.
Everything in my halfdecks compete for its existence, and one of the faeries simply didn't live up to its role in the deck.

Most of the times when that happens it's often because the other versions of the card earn more points, stealing the thunder. It gets removed when it doesn't perform which is a pretty simple thing to measure.

1: it's scry ability allows you to use it as a mana-fixer. I've been using the card long enough to learn that you can often take the risk of keeping a 1 land hand if you have this in it, as you can simply scry 2 cards away if they aren't lands, and that's usually what it takes to get that critical 2nd land.

2: playing the card, it's mill effect allows you to recognize what the opponent is playing much faster than you usually would. The scry then allows you to dig after solutions, at the same turn as you learn what they play.

3: it's an early defence, a little less protective than the crab, but it basically does the same job, except that in some cases it can strike back, which the crab can't.

4: it's aggro in a pinch. If your deck is control enough, a small clock can make all the difference.

5: if your opponent plays with cards that rearrange their top (like scry), overwhelming apprentice disrupts it by milling it away.

6: in a small number of cases I've used it in combo to protect my own pieces, by scrying them to the bottom of the deck, where it's less likely to be hit by mill, and I can retrieve it with cards that fetches the combo piece.

Since you are behind 50% of the decks using [[hard evidence]]
What's your fascination with it?
I'm pretty sure I've told you about how many tricks overwhelmed apprentice has compared to it...

Someone recently build around day's undoing/narset.
Perhaps they have some other tech.

Probably search for days undoing to find it.

There's also the problem that users with 1000+ decks want to be able to search for them rather than dig through 30+ pages to find something.

But you can only use the search engine to find decks that are public.
That pushes a lot of the heavyweights to publish despite most of them want to just use this place as an archive.

That's why I launched the good players list.
That got absolutely hated away because if I gained a regular audience as a result, things would become very difficult for the thieves.

Remember it ?
https://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/other-cool-users/

They went absolutely bonkers about this...

The spam to cover this conversation will be hasty :)

Look for half done decklists by people sharing similarities in their usernames :)

I've been looking for input since I joined the place.
I've also tried to improve the community in at least a 100 ways, but when I got here, someone else followed, who I've probably humiliated at the playing tables.

Recently I've been thinking that it was basically a setup.
I used to provide the Danish meta with tons of theories, but then trolls hacked my account and started altering my old posts. I only discovered it because I'm old fashioned and kept papercopies of my posts, so I could see the changes.
Then I started to look for a new place to post, when out of the blue someone in Denmark suggested this place.

Took me some years to puzzle out the events, but it was tied to a theft of one of my tournament decks.

I've been posting warnings about theft ever since I realised it.

When I named one of my halfdecks: sacrifice
All combinations I've posted with it contained the warning.

If you search for decks tagged with: sacrifice
You can look back at the older pages and see who liked sacrifice decks in the past, it was a tag used more than I thought it would, but since I started to use the tag in my decks it's usage have simply exploded.
Sacrifice decks are an increasing hit these days.
(Not counting my own ofcourse)

If you compare the date of the oldest use of sacrifice as a tag, you will see that the current rate that the tag is used at is abnormal. I've been having a laugh about that. My personal hate team really makes their own sacrifices :D

This is another type of input, but I can use it as a drive nonetheless.

The trolls been inactive for a while because I made a new trick, fooling them into thinking I've stopped warning about theft.
A small hour ago I posted about how to break halo fountain.

During the next hours I'll monitor who posts a lot, especially several decks, and then within 24 hours my post is usually burried.

Then I post something else :)

The same pattern is seen with the tag: mill
If you look at most of the mill decks they are old designs. The trolls reuse old decks to "cover" my warning.

It's yet another detail that has confirmed my belief that they are thieves.

You guys are so easy :)

https://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/paranoia-zone-frontpage/

I'd gladly add modern to my tags, but then I'd be swamping all modern players with my halfdeck project.
So I write it in the intro of each deck instead.

As much as I've pressured other people to use tags, it has to be admitted that it's not always a good thing.
There are exceptions.

The trolling runs a lot deeper, and there's plenty of stuff still going on behind the scenes.
https://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/paranoia-zone-frontpage/

Topic number 6 in that link is the real cause of the wdm is a fraud post.

I've always been a big fan of cross over, and have a small dream that one day the "block war" format will be a thing.
Your deck must be built from one block, but any block can be chosen. It would be cool. Then the ice age block could be played as "intended".

Some might choose unlimited because of the power available, others might go for the eldrazi. I might go with zendikar for the mill :)

Easy, there :)

You seem a little desperate to question a newcomer that fast :)

No need to rush it :)

So, 28 likes in 5 years :)
I still stand by the land discussion...

I think the second releases hint at the order of the events, but we are missing two more clues at the order.

I remember the iceage meta fondly.
So many different things were happening in magic at that time, and though most thought of it as a "combo winter" it was a lot more than that. Sligh was a thing that I was trying to examine with computer simulations back then.

I got 2 echoing truth and 3 spellstutter sprite in my own stuff.