wickeddarkman

I've been searching for learn & lesson cards since the release of the set because I have an interest in wishboards in general.

I was just about to launch a research on wishboards and it's effects on sideboards when strixhaven spoilers revealed that a new type of wishes were available, so I decided to track the progress of these cards in particular.

I've been following a lot of content creators and looking carefully at what they build and what they face on arena, and there is a heavy exploitation of learn/lesson in arena and historic includes eldraine, which is why I've seen the strixhaven guilds wreak such havoc.

Maybe the speed at which paper embraces the new cards is slower, after all cards take a while to be collected/bought in real life.

To the best of your knowledge,
Do you know of any EDH players that have exploited that the eldrazi tribe is having 22 different ramp cards in total ?

What would you say to a colorless spell that could let you play Crypt ghast or liliana's shade at turn 3 ?
The same spell can ramp something else once, or may kill a creature or even counter a spell.

All that for 2 colorless mana...

The price of playing it is minor, you will have to exchange some swamps with cards like ghost quarters.

Warping wail.

Yeah, hapatra, obscure as it is, could be a prelude to an incoming deathtouch/infect hybrid.
If they are introducing it, there should be more clues to it among strixhaven.

Now I'll have to check :)

Back from checking.
There are 4 new cards involving deathtouch, and two of them seem like they might be designed with infect and fynn in mind.
So we will probably see an increasing introduction until someone cracks it and it becomes the new craze.

Wotc are getting better at leading the players by the nose
(This is an old phrase dating back to when animals were often trained and guided by painfull nose rings)

Strixhaven on arena hasn't exactly been a subtle thing.
They introduced 5 new deck themes that has all completely slaughtered the meta, and sprinkled it with some possible fixers to aid the designs already online.

They create an arms race and supply the weapons, that has always been a fact, but in arena it has really been like watching an alien invasion. Interestingly enough almost all magic related sites seem to withhold tournament data. I've been searching standard for decks that use lessons and learn, but it's like strixhaven isn't printed yet, and on arena the onslaught is fully visible.
It's like many sites first want to set up a price level and want to sell what's bad before they post results with new cards in them.

In a way, mtgvault extracts the same data. The site owner could make many good deals if mtgvault flags up the cards that pique our interest.

I'm not really sure that the world has seen its first window deck yet :)
A few of my own deck are scratching the surface of the concept, but I've never really got the courage to actually build it.

One of my better examples of the concept is usually jorubai murk lurker...
It only has one ability, but it's the reasons involved in picking it that is window-like.

Everytime phantasmal image is seeing play in modern through the builds of elemental, human, merfolk and others
Jorubai murklurker will be in my deck to close the window on those players trying to exploit it. By simply giving phantasmal image lifelink it is killed.

That is the level at which window decks will operate. Every card in the deck will have multiple uses.

Jorubai murk lurker has a single ability, and when discussing windows it must be made clear that the deck will have to be filled with cards that all have several abilities like command spells (like kolaghan's command) and planeswalkers and guildmages (like azorius guildmage)

I think the overall barrier for windows decks is that very few people will be capeable to build them, myself included.
I do study the past deckdesigns in order to catch cyclical recurrences like phantasmal image, but to build a windows deck is probably beyond my own scope of vision. I'm smart, bordering at genius level, but windows is simply outclassing me by how smart I would have to be to design it. It's why the concept got deemed crazy. It's too insane to try to build it.

If you ever take an interest in modern mill, I got that covered.
About 20% of my posts are about mill, about 70% of my posts are covering weird theories and on top of it alfred covers them at about 10%.

Yeah, me and alfred can be a show on a good day :)
And a bad circus on a bad day.

Sometimes we split up a conversation so you have to know exactly what two pages we talked on to understand what's going on.

We have some real funny talks going on some days.
Search for the decktag: vagabond
Search for the decktag: jolly roger
Reading both of these you will see us tear mtgvault appart in a voters war.
You might have to read a bit to cover it all :)

Most of the time, when pro's talk tempo, they will tell you that tempo is relative.
It can actually perform a rock, paper, scissors move with three decks.
Just like you can ask "which deck is the aggro" in a matchup, the same question can be asked with tempo.

The other term I can't remember is sort of like ramping, but only once like with dark ritual.

I got a deep past with theories, and have a high number of theories that I produced myself.

One of my more insane theories I called "windows" and the overall concept was that magic is a game of opening windows of opportunity for yourself, while shutting down any windows your opponent tries to open.
The concept expanded into the idea that the more abilities a card have, the more you manipulate the windows in the game. In theory it should be possible to brew up a windows deck, but I never tried hard at building it.

I got so many posts in mtgvault covering some truly bizarre ways to gain the upper hand.

I can see the tempo in this deck :)

Tempo isn't always the same as speed, it's more involved with the ability to do stuff every turn, so slow tempo is "a thing"

Tempo have had a long history of being misunderstood, but the term for casting stuff really fast is something else
(The term has slipped my mind, I know the damn word, but not right now))

Just published "ingest v4"
Which is my newest deck update.
I'm having a third breakthrough with the process that means I can reduce the time I spend on each generation by half.
Provided I can adjust some minor details.

It can be used at a great scale and at a small scale.
The core principle is to generate data on cards by putting paperstrips in front of the sleeves, enabling you to track the performance of individual cards.

The fastest thing to test is combo as the method can build it within a couple of days, provided you work from the assumption that the opponent cannot interrupt it. That way you just try to to kill turn 1 all of the time.

I can test up to 64 cards at the same time with my paperstrip method.
I'm trying to build the system so that it can turn a random noob deck into something competitive within a month.
The only problem is that the process is complicated enough to turn most people away from it.
I've written a bunch of posts on how I do it.
They all share the tag: wdm paperstrip

Well, I'm aspergers syndrome, and solution oriented, so when people pose problems I tend to give solutions :)
In my own decks I often crunch several problems at a time, and for years I've had evolution build my decks.
My main goal is therefore not to win in general, but to build up a system that creates good decks faster and faster.

When you focussed at keeping your creatures above bolt range I assumed you meet burn a lot, and then I went that direction with the problem solving.

From my time with evolution I've learned lots of stuff, but one lesson is that a meta is often vulnerable to a number of cards, and the key to winning is to key in on those cards.

The good thing is that those cards will be good for many years if used in a certain setup.
I usually build up an archive of solutions to free up my memory for other things.

Lumithread field, parapet, castle.

Searched for "free" +1/+1 effects with 3+ cc.
Didn't find any.

Maybe some castle like enc ?

Yeah, that's probably how faerie macabre got into living end designs in the first place :)

I don't think you should worry about the flyer being boltable. The decks that can stop your ground creatures probably isn't capeable of taking out the fliers too.

Yeah, forgot that :)
Got caught up in the search.
Windcaller aven ?

Dragon wings might be a simpler solution, and it will interact nicely with all the big cost creatures.

Bojuka bog is a classic :)
An alternative to throw macabre in main, would be to play with a relatively cheap flying cycle card.
Windcaller aven might work too.

Using exhume may backfire against some decktypes, so you should consider faerie macabre in the mainboard as a way to prevent that. (Especially considering it's your only flyer in the deck, so if your land forces cant get through for some reason your faeries will)