The Gaming Den

Thoughts?

maybe Emrakul will grant them eyes on the inside.

It would've been better to have a new colorless horror faction show up in Innistrad so players have one set to debate whether it's Phyrexia or Eldrazi or what, and then it's revealed with the next set that completes the block "hey Eldrazi!"

The investigators that generate clue tokens inadvertently summoning a cosmic horror with them is flavorful.

I'm just tired of Eldrazi. Maybe it's the fact that I've lost to them so much. In fact, that's probably it, but still. WotC just seems to have a raging hard on for Eldrazi, and I'm sitting here completely uninterested in their supposed Dominia Cthulhu.

OgreBattle wrote:It would've been better to have a new colorless horror faction show up in Innistrad so players have one set to debate whether it's Phyrexia or Eldrazi or what

"Colorless non-artifact" applies, as per factions, to the Eldrazi and essentially nobody else. This wouldn't have inspired any debate at all beyond the ones people were already having about the tepid telegraphing they did write.

Any advice on building anything out of green/black for Standard format? There's a tournament going on Saturday; and I want to see what one of those is like for the first time.

I've currently got a smattering of Dominaria, Kaladesh, Amokhet, Magic 2019, Battlebond, cards. As well as enough Ixalan to likely build decks out of uncommons.

I guess I can't use any Masters 25 or Iconic Masters cards; unless I check on Gatherer or something.

My current rares are "Green/Black starter deck trash" (some spirit vulture & aggressive mammoth), maybe I'll get lucky if I hit the draft night on Friday.

I'm going to assume that card draw and direct damage is as good now as it's always been? How valuable is Scry (look at top of library, put on bottom if you wish)?

Maybe I'll look for some Zombie "leaders" that can buff the zombies in the deck and buy them at the shop before/after FNM. I might change them for pirates or vampires though from Ixalan.

Alternately. I might sub in black vampires/pirates; and green dinosaurs/whatever that show up a lot in Ixalan.

Are the newer mana-generating artifacts that have come out recently any good?

That's pretty vague so I'll keep my advice simple and unsexy: fret over your mana base. Magic players are a greedy lot and it's easy to fall into the trap of cutting lands for situational cards and cool stuff because that always feels oh so clever compared to keeping that 8th forest or whatever. You'll probably spend your first tourney getting ran over by net decks but you could still easily end up picking up a few Ws just by making sure your trains run on time as your opponent trips over their own dick.

Scry is pretty sweet since it allows you to move away cards you do not need at the moment and know what you can count for the next draws. Really makes your deck run smoother. And also helps that most scry cards are costed quite competitively.

I’ll second the advice to run 24 lands, no matter how much it stings.

Scry is great, as is its black cousin Surveil (like scry, except you mill the cards instead of putting them at the bottom of your library). Card draw is as powerful as ever, but expect to pay for it. Being a cantrip is about +1 mana cost, and cards that draw more than one rarely do anything else.

You don’t want to splash vampires or pirates. Both want to be tribal, with all sorts of effects triggering by playing or attacking with their brethren.

If you don’t want to go tribal, simply running green stompy with some black utility spells is pretty brutal. Toss down something fat, sweep their board with Finality, and reanimate it when they kill it.

Mostly play on Arena and decided to give Historic a shot. I remember having fun in a draft with Rowdy Crew so I decided to build a deck around it.

4x Rowdy Crew
4x Quasiduplicate
4x Teferi, Time Reveler

This is about as far as I've gotten. The idea here is that Rowdy Crew is card advantage, even though its random card advantage, making it work particularly well with Quasiduplicate since you can cast the spell through jump start even if it gets discarded. Another reluctant inclusion here is Teferi. I wanted to minimize the amount of different card types in the deck to make sure that Rowdy Crew trigger resolves favorably as often as possible but Teferi just does so much for the deck that its impossible to ignore.

Most likely I will need to lean heavily into creatures but could also maybe go the sorcery route. Any card suggestions for this kind of deck?