Magic: The Gathering

[Xerlic]

Thirding on Madcap Skills being busted. My round 2 opponent in my first Prerelease played it on Boros Reckoner and it carried him the game. It was either take 6 damage a turn or block it and lose my entire board..

Deck seems pretty fun Bane.

[Chrius]

Picked up a Boros pack, no madcaps skills, nothing good in red. Real disappoint. Make an orzhov deck with my actually pretty sweet white cards, lots of flying and such. Go 3-0, split round 4 to take 6 packs each instead of 8-4. Woot
Wizard's didn't sent the store prize payout to support the number of prerelease packs they sent so I'll get those on Friday. In an earlier flight, unpacked Aurelia's Fury. Got greedy and let a blue player untap and X=7d it on upkeep to kill 2 dudes, tap his last and only let him play creature spells. Counter, mill 2 you nerd.
Foil Watery Grave was sweet as well.

[Olo401]

Awww yeah.. won Simic guild champion @ my store, got an extended art Breeding Pool playmat & matching sleeves/deckbox.

[Weltall]

New set is mad boring zzZzzzZZzZZ

[Franchise]

I ran Orzhov and got a lot of decent in color cards, but Guardian of The Gateless enchanted with Holy Mantle carried me to 2nd place, ran into another Orzhov player in the last round who had Alms Beast enchanted with Gift of Orzhova and i just couldn't break a wall like that down. Between my Guild pack and prize packs i pulled 2 Gideons, Domri, Prime Speaker and Ghost Council though so i was very happy. Dragon's Maze pre-release looks like it could be very interesting.

[Tomiko]

I did Dimir for the small PR I did since I wanted some of the cards from that guild for EDH. Had a good amount of removal, but not many creatures. Went 2-1 losing to a Simic deck which a friend and I both thought was rigged (we didn't use deck registrations though). If it wasn't, he got insanely lucky with pulls. Did another mini sealed with a friend later. I went Simic and pulled 2x Simic Manipulator. I ended up winning our Dual.

[BaneTheBrawler]

I got a chance to use my Dimir/JaceMA deck in a 2-headed giant game tonight. We lost, but mostly because my teammate got no creatures until the last few turns. I managed to swing for 18, with my teammate swinging for 4, all unblockable (not flying or intimidate or anything- just straight up unblockable) on the second-to-last turn, which brought our opponents down to 2 life, but it wasn't quite enough.

I think I'm going to remove some of the protection equipment and add some control instead, to save my earlier creatures so they can keep making people mill.

Anyway, I think my earlier assessment still stands: Dimir is shit... unless you set it up perfect and/or get lucky, at which point it becomes absolutely monstrous.

[Myrrh_Quetz]

90 minutes till Box opening time~

[Myrrh_Quetz]

Fanfuckingtastic. 140 dollar box. I made about 70 of that back.

[Nama]

$140 ouch where did you buy it from LGS? I've never spent over $100 on a box can usually snipe them for $80-90 if you keep an eye out online.

[zoobernut]

Fanfuckingtastic. 140 dollar box. I made about 70 of that back.

Well that is to be expected in a set that has no real value beyond the shock lands.

I still think Borborygmos Enraged can be broken somehow. Do you guys think a deck that is 4x Borborygmos and a bunch of mana acceleration, and mana dorks and then lots and lots of lands could work?

[Chrius]

In standard:
Tamiyo ultimate would get it done
Creeping Renaissance is the more likely option
Sorcery, 3GG
Choose a permanent type. Return all cards of the chosen type from your graveyard to your hand.
Flashback 5GG (You may cast this card from your graveyard for its flashback cost. Then exile it.)

[Myrrh_Quetz]

Well that is to be expected in a set that has no real value beyond the shock lands.

I still think Borborygmos Enraged can be broken somehow. Do you guys think a deck that is 4x Borborygmos and a bunch of mana acceleration, and mana dorks and then lots and lots of lands could work?

See, I'm mad because I opened my box beside several other people who opened epic shit. One guy got 13 shocks and 4 of which were foil.

$140 ouch where did you buy it from LGS? I've never spent over $100 on a box can usually snipe them for $80-90 if you keep an eye out online.

It's what the stores charge here. Was shocked because they just raised the price too

[BaneTheBrawler]

Should order online instead. You pay shipping,and have to wait a bit, but if you get enough at once it's not bad. Plus you can find older sets that stores don't really stock anymore.

I ordered a box from http://cardkingdom.com/ it should be here early next week.

[Myrrh_Quetz]

What do people think of a Cipher Mill deck for standard. I'm loving Cipher so much that I want to run a deck around it.

[Xerlic]

My LGS charges 100 flat for boxes. :/ I never buy boxes though cos I'm a drafting fiend. I hate opening packs just to open packs lol.

Cipher is a cool mechanic, but a deck I don't think it has much standard application. A lot of the cipher cards aren't very mana efficient due to their nature, so they're kind of like auras in that you easily get 2 for 1'd. IMO.

So my draft tonight was an easy 3-0 running Orzhov. 5/8 of the drafters at my pod were trying to force Boros after it dominated at most of the prerelease flights lol. They ended up fighting over cards and most of them had to end up splashing Green for some weird Naya builds. I ended up getting like 3 of the Go for the Throat/mill instants, plus got passed Alms Beast and High Priest of Penance. Cracking Obzedat in Pack 1 didn't hurt, but I only got to cast him one time the entire night.

I'm going to a case tournament tomorrow and probably just going to run Esper. It did pretty well in testing, and Sphinx's Revelation still reads "I win" even with Skullcrack in the format.

[BaneTheBrawler]

I don't know about Standard, but the Dimir mill deck I built around JaceMA works okay, with luck. Like I said, it sucks.... unless you pull it off perfectly/get lucky. As Xerlic said, the cipher cards aren't very good. They function as if they were indestructible enchantments, which is fine, if you can protect the creature they're attached to. But, since you often can't they get taken out of the game pretty easily, and since they're pretty expensive for what they do, they end up not being very good. The best ciphers I've seen are the super cheap ones that would be decent sorceries even without cipher. Paranoid Delusions is the only one I've found that fits those criteria, but I haven't gotten any more Gatecrash since the prerelease yet. I built the deck with a lot of unblockable creatures (Latch Seekers GOOOOOOOOOOOOO) and a fair amount of hexproof/shroud equipment, to protect them, but I think I need to tweak it so that I have better blockers. It's hard to hide how powerful your creatures are going to get through milling once the opponent sees them, so they're going to go out of their way to prevent that by any means necessary. In the case of my friends, they did this by attacking all out, not bothering to hold any creatures in reserve to block, since they couldn't block anyway. Or maybe I need to add some Hydro Surges and take away some of the unblockables. I dunno. It's gonna be difficult to get it right, I think.

[Myrrh_Quetz]

Here's some framework so far. It's just part of it, mind you. Still alot of work to go to get it playable against Aggro.
3 Invisible Stalkers
2 Jace's Phantasm
3 Paranoid Delusions
2~3 Mind Grinds
3 Mind Scuplt
2 Lazav
2 Consuming Abberation
2~3 Nightviel Spectors
Maybe Tormented Souls or Wright of percinct 6

It needs some control aswell. Maybe even delve into esper colours.

[BaneTheBrawler]

some First Strike would certainly help protect your creatures, and white has a lot of spells/enchantments that do that. Safe Passage is always a nice oh-fuck card, too. I've found that triple colored decks are difficult to pull off, though. You end up devoting a decent amount of the deck to land-acquisition, which leaves less room for what you want to do.

Your list looks good so far. I hope I pull some of those when my cards arrive, as that will improve my deck significantly. I'm in the process of moving, and my cards are at my new apartment, otherwise I'd pull my deck out and list them for you. Again, though, we don't play Standard, so some of the cards I use may not be acceptable. Jace Memory Adept fit pretty well with the milling theme, as his +1 lets you draw and mills an opponent for 1, and his 0 mills an opponent for 10. If you're in poor shape, he can change things around pretty quickly even if he gets killed right away, because you can just use his 0 and give consuming aberrations +10/+10.

Some cards I put in mine that I think you might want to take a look at are Crosstown Courier (Particularly if you do splash some white, this could be a good one. Power him up enough and you can mill some crazy cards.) and Wight of Precinct Six (Expensive at first, he gets powered up pretty well, particularly if you successfully mill a deck heavy on creatures.) Plus equipment like Swiftfoot Boots, Lightning Greaves, and Bonehoard.

I'll have more ideas once I get the cards I ordered in the mail and take a look at them. Hopefully I find some better ciphers, because it really is a fun mechanic.

[Myrrh_Quetz]

What do people think of this?

MAIN DECK

Creatures

4 Augur of Bolas
4 Invisible Stalker
4 Nightveil Specter
12


Spells

2 Detention Sphere
3 Dissipate
3 Paranoid Delusions
2 Syncopate
2 Hands of Binding
3 Mind Grind
3 Devour Flesh
2 Psychic Strike
20

Lands

4 Drowned Catacomb
4 Glacial Fortress
4 Godless Shrine
4 Hallowed Fountain
4 Isolated Chapel
4 Watery Grave
24


SIDEBOARD


2 Lazav, Dimir Mastermind
3 Blind Obedience
1 Detention Sphere
3 Dimir Charm
3 Glaring Spotlight
2 Consuming Abberation



I'm thinking of putting in 2 or 3 Jace's Phantasm and 1-2 Runechanter's Pike.