Pretty sure the event is dead, and that Team G killed it. I can't imagine any scenario in which they don't pass a pack in 5 days unless they don't want the event to continue. Even given the confusion about the mispassed pack (how hard is it to pass packs correctly??!? Pretty hard apparently!) the delay should not have been nearly this long.
What is so controversial about having a right to play the damn game? I don't care if you currently have a 1/1000, 1/1000000, or a 99/100 chance of winning. And a 4 card hand is nowhere close to either one of these numbers. In fact, if we are to believe Olivier Ruel, the chance of winning on 4 cards against 7 on the play is 10%. (also notice the omission of 3 card hands because, as I've discussed, they automatically violate the mulliganing rule)
Your position, if I understand it correctly, is that mulling to four should be disallowed under your proposed change to mulligan rules because it delays the game (by what, a grand 20 seconds per mulligan or so?) unneccessarily because as we all know, a 10% chance is just so abysmal that one should never play with it, which is why they strictly enforce that a person with a 10% chance of winning must quit at all competitive events.
I'm with you on the second point though, so no argument there.
I just don't get the vehemence of your argument here. Once the rules are that you can't mull to 4, then everyone is playing by the same rules, everyone knows the rules ahead of time, and everyone can strategize according to these rules and exercise their skill within those rules.
This is exactly equivalent to Wizards taking away the damage stacks rule, which is why I brought it up. The rules changed, people had to adapt. If they changed the mulligan rule, the same would apply. Whether or not you could have done something differently had the rules stayed the same isn't particularly important at that point.
Anyway, I already stated that my proposed rule would be 7-6-5-5-0. You are welcome to mulligan from 5 to 0 if you think it will improve your odds of winning, similarly to how you are welcome to mulligan from 5 to 4 if you feel the same. But then again by the time you got to the last 5 in the 7-6-6-5-5 you already had a better chance at a playable opening hand than you would have had in the 7-6-5-4-3-2-1-0 rules.
Also the notion that I'm proposing that players are not allowed to play if they mulligan to 5 is useless hyperbole so please stop saying it.
After playing with it, I totally agree about Executioner's Swing. I have found it quite underwhelming for the reason you posted.
It's in Orzhov colors and Orzhov is often happy to take damage once in order to cheaply kill the creature and then use extort to recover much of the lost life. Not always, but often.
I have to chime in here to say I find this thread disgusting. I cannot understand why you guys are positing ways to change the way the game is played. This is not the hallmark of a great player; a great player
figures out how to win by playing within the rules rather than complaining about them.
Other players like a game but think it can be better, where "better" = more interesting and more fun more often? And the conclusion you draw is that they are complaining too much? Guess what my friend: Magic the Gathering is a GAME. The enjoyment of playing it is an important reason for alot of people to play. Therefore making it more enjoyable makes it a better game in that respect. And nobody enjoys wasting minutes of their time with a dud game that goes nowhere because of one or other player's mana screw.
And hey guess what - part of the "game" of Magic is that it has players who are allowed to give feedback to Wizards that might actually affect future rules of the game. Let's compete to see who can have the best ideas that Wizards can incorporate into the rules and make Magic more fun for everyone, OK?. Now that it's a competition can you get behind it?
I really think you missed the entire point and substance of fumphis's very well thought out and well presented message.
That's ridiculous! It's super unlikely that I will win, so I should just keep my 5/0 land hand and scoop?
Sorry, are you saying that keeping a 5/0 is an auto-lose? It's not, not any more than mulliganing to 4. You still have your chance to win with 5/0. So now we're just quibbling about how much of a chance to win a person needs to have before we cut them off from mulliganing. I feel that the small difference in chance to win with 5/0 versus 2 more mulligans (has anyone *ever* won with a mulligan to 2? I highly doubt it!) is not worth making the mulligan system completely unsustainable by allowing 13 mulligans per player per game.
Anyway, let me restate the mulligan rules I proposed: 7-6-5-5-0. Yeah, you can mulligan past 5. To zero.
And I'm pretty sure we can discuss these ideas without having to call each other's positions "ridiculous" (or "disgusting") if we try hard enough.
Why take out the ability to mull to four? We've all won on mulling to four a few times... why force me to keep 5/0 lands?
Because of the reason I already gave?
Allowing 13 mulligans is just too many from a time wasting perspective. Allowing a player that many opportunities to draw a certain card is undesirable as well.
Why allow you to keep 5/0 lands? Because that would be the rule, and you'd know it ahead of time, so you'd mull to your second five very carefully and live with the consequences.
Scry 7 then draw 7. Nothing further. It's simple and the best mulligan system I've seen.
But that's a pretty radical departure from the normal mulligan rules where you don't get to pre-filter your deck. Pre-filtering would be a huge change to the way initial draws work. I am not sure we're ready for such a big change.
EDIT: Also, I question whether Scry 7, Draw 7 is really "simple". Yeah, there happens to be two keywords that each describe a multiple-step operation (i.e. scry and draw), but that doesn't mean that the actions are simple. Drawing 7 cards and then putting some on top and some on bottom, then drawing 7 more cards, seems more complex than just drawing and reshuffling on a fairly simple schedule.
Of course, Scry 7 Draw 7 doesn't require a reshuffle which would save time. Since I play MTGO pretty much exclusively that doesn't matter much to me though
I think that's pretty solid. Another potential approach would be to involve a free Scry effect somehow, but 7-6-6-5-5 is a lot simpler.
My experience is that a mull to 6 is still a very winnable position. A mull to 5 much less so. Therefore I agree with the 7-6-6-5-5 idea.
Now this scheme, if carried all the way through to 1 (i.e. 7-6-6-5-5-4-4-3-3-2-2-1-1) would result in way too many mulligan opportunities, making something like 39-swamps-plus-Pack-Rat much better. Therefore I would go with:
7-6-6-5-5-done. You can't mull to 4. Your chances of winning are so low (in limited, anyway) that you are mostly wasting time even trying to play from that position. The chance for a very, very rare win from 4 isn't worth the downsides of allowing so many mulligans.
The Pack Rat deck does get slightly better because you can see 29 total cards via mull in 7-6-6-5-5 versus only 28 with 7-6-5-4-3-2-1, but it's a very small effect.
Generally, if you can afford to be doing that, you would have won anyway. So I'd classify that as win-more.
I think the "win-more" argument is getting a little threadbare.
Orzhov, in my (admittedly limited) experience, does roughly half its damage directly in combat and the other half via extort. The combat damage part is necessary and Court Street Denizen facilitates that.
As an example, if the Orzhov player has a Kingpin's Pet and the opponent has a Drakewing Krasis, the Orzhov player will often be happy to tap that Krasis so that the Pet can get in for two damage.
I finally won a GTC draft last night - after five 2-1 and 1-2s I finally got there. And it was with an Orzhov deck. And my Orzhov deck had twoCourt Street Denizens. They were extremely helpful in getting 4 - 8 points of damage in per game.
I also had four Kingpin's Pets, and 6 other extort creatures, along with 6 cheap removal spells (1x Death's Presence, 1x Smite, 2x Executioner's Swing, 1x Orzhov Charm, 1x One Thousand Lashes). I think this is a pretty good setup for Orzhov. When you have thirteen 1/2, 2/2, and 3/2 guys, you certainly appreciate being able to tap a blocker once in a while so that your guys can do more than just extort.
He means "connent with any creature (not just the one ciphered on)" which is why he later talks about how you only need to kill a single creature for the cipher "engine" to go away and how he mentions that the pack rat engine goes on even if the original is killed. Seems simple enough.
I must be dense but I had a really hard time understanding the O.P.s point when phrases like "you connect" are used to mean "creatures that have not been enciphered with Stolen Identity do combat damage to a player".
Anyway the pack rat copies itself aspect is what makes it a good early game play. The copies any creature on the board (possibly over and over again) is what make Stolen Identity good. I'm pretty sure that in any game where I made it to 6 mana on the board I'd rather top deck Stolen Identity than Pack Rat. Pack Rat is better but not always.
Everyone knows that the cipher part of the card does not trigger everytime you connect right?
What do you mean by "connect"? If the ciphered creature "connects" with a player (i.e. does combat damage to them) then yes, the card is triggered every time, and you will always have a creature to copy, including the ciphered creature if it's the only one on the board.
The difference here is that you don't need an army for the tokens to be relevant. Getting any generic creature of any size bigger than a 1/x will seal you into a near-unbeatable position the turn you drop this card unless your already on the brink of death, and even then it is very capable of saving you by generating two blockers. Remember that you don't even have to copy the same creature each time it triggers.
Imo this card is the biggest bomb in the format, I've yet to see someone lose after playing it.
I lost with it.
It was very late game and I was on the defense. I had to cast it to copy their Zhur-Taa Swine, cipher onto my 2/2 dork and attack into their 6/2 Adaptive Snapjaw, otherwise their snapjaw and swine would overrun my 2/2 dude and 1/4 Basilica Guards. So for me it killed their Adaptive Snapjaw and turned my 2/2 dork into a Zhur-Taa Swine. Next turn they attacked with everything, I blocked Zhur-Taa against Zhur-Taa, one of their 2/2s with my Basilica Guards, and the other 2/2 I had to let through. I went to 4 and the remaining card in their hand was Boros Charm. gg.
- Why are people still passing Madcap Skills? The number of times I received massive beatings from Bear/Madcap was embarrassing, but nicely balanced by the times I had pit fight or naturalize for the blowout.
I noticed this also. Madcap Skills tabled repeatedly in the drafts I did. I didn't understand.
- Aetherize is a thing, although maybe not against Orzhov. These should not table. If your opponent is blue and representing one, you almost have to play around it - best bluff in the set!
The thing I don't like about Aetherize is that it has to be played against attacking creatures. People usually attack when all of their mana is up. Which means that they can re-cast as many creatures as they have mana for after the Aetherize. Aetherize was played against me maybe three times and twice I was able to re-cast all of my team except one afterwards. It wasn't that huge of a blowout really, it was mostly a fog/timewalk.
Prerelease drafts seem very easy so far. In 4 drafts I've gone 2-1, 3-0, 3-0, 3-0 losing that 1 round only because I drew only lands for both games in a 16 land deck. I've used every guild so far except Boros and had very strong draft decks each time.
In the first 21 matches I played in RTR 4 ticket phantom sealed I went 18 - 3. I really and truly did. I've never come close to matching that win percentage (86%) at any other time over such a long string of events.
There is alot of variance involved here is my point.
In my experience the GTC queues were not easier than normal. I played 4 drafts and went 2 - 1, 1 - 2, 2 - 1, 1 - 2. That is worse than my average performance over a long stretch of RTR queues. Maybe I suck (worse) all of a sudden, but I doubt it.
I just don't get the vehemence of your argument here. Once the rules are that you can't mull to 4, then everyone is playing by the same rules, everyone knows the rules ahead of time, and everyone can strategize according to these rules and exercise their skill within those rules.
This is exactly equivalent to Wizards taking away the damage stacks rule, which is why I brought it up. The rules changed, people had to adapt. If they changed the mulligan rule, the same would apply. Whether or not you could have done something differently had the rules stayed the same isn't particularly important at that point.
Anyway, I already stated that my proposed rule would be 7-6-5-5-0. You are welcome to mulligan from 5 to 0 if you think it will improve your odds of winning, similarly to how you are welcome to mulligan from 5 to 4 if you feel the same. But then again by the time you got to the last 5 in the 7-6-6-5-5 you already had a better chance at a playable opening hand than you would have had in the 7-6-5-4-3-2-1-0 rules.
Also the notion that I'm proposing that players are not allowed to play if they mulligan to 5 is useless hyperbole so please stop saying it.
Yes, and we should use extreme corner cases and once-in-a-million events to justify our positions as well. Makes sense.
By the way, they never should have changed the damage stack rule because somebody somewhere would have won had the rule still been in place.
It's in Orzhov colors and Orzhov is often happy to take damage once in order to cheaply kill the creature and then use extort to recover much of the lost life. Not always, but often.
Other players like a game but think it can be better, where "better" = more interesting and more fun more often? And the conclusion you draw is that they are complaining too much? Guess what my friend: Magic the Gathering is a GAME. The enjoyment of playing it is an important reason for alot of people to play. Therefore making it more enjoyable makes it a better game in that respect. And nobody enjoys wasting minutes of their time with a dud game that goes nowhere because of one or other player's mana screw.
And hey guess what - part of the "game" of Magic is that it has players who are allowed to give feedback to Wizards that might actually affect future rules of the game. Let's compete to see who can have the best ideas that Wizards can incorporate into the rules and make Magic more fun for everyone, OK?. Now that it's a competition can you get behind it?
I really think you missed the entire point and substance of fumphis's very well thought out and well presented message.
Sorry, are you saying that keeping a 5/0 is an auto-lose? It's not, not any more than mulliganing to 4. You still have your chance to win with 5/0. So now we're just quibbling about how much of a chance to win a person needs to have before we cut them off from mulliganing. I feel that the small difference in chance to win with 5/0 versus 2 more mulligans (has anyone *ever* won with a mulligan to 2? I highly doubt it!) is not worth making the mulligan system completely unsustainable by allowing 13 mulligans per player per game.
Anyway, let me restate the mulligan rules I proposed: 7-6-5-5-0. Yeah, you can mulligan past 5. To zero.
And I'm pretty sure we can discuss these ideas without having to call each other's positions "ridiculous" (or "disgusting") if we try hard enough.
Because of the reason I already gave?
Allowing 13 mulligans is just too many from a time wasting perspective. Allowing a player that many opportunities to draw a certain card is undesirable as well.
Why allow you to keep 5/0 lands? Because that would be the rule, and you'd know it ahead of time, so you'd mull to your second five very carefully and live with the consequences.
But that's a pretty radical departure from the normal mulligan rules where you don't get to pre-filter your deck. Pre-filtering would be a huge change to the way initial draws work. I am not sure we're ready for such a big change.
EDIT: Also, I question whether Scry 7, Draw 7 is really "simple". Yeah, there happens to be two keywords that each describe a multiple-step operation (i.e. scry and draw), but that doesn't mean that the actions are simple. Drawing 7 cards and then putting some on top and some on bottom, then drawing 7 more cards, seems more complex than just drawing and reshuffling on a fairly simple schedule.
Of course, Scry 7 Draw 7 doesn't require a reshuffle which would save time. Since I play MTGO pretty much exclusively that doesn't matter much to me though
My experience is that a mull to 6 is still a very winnable position. A mull to 5 much less so. Therefore I agree with the 7-6-6-5-5 idea.
Now this scheme, if carried all the way through to 1 (i.e. 7-6-6-5-5-4-4-3-3-2-2-1-1) would result in way too many mulligan opportunities, making something like 39-swamps-plus-Pack-Rat much better. Therefore I would go with:
7-6-6-5-5-done. You can't mull to 4. Your chances of winning are so low (in limited, anyway) that you are mostly wasting time even trying to play from that position. The chance for a very, very rare win from 4 isn't worth the downsides of allowing so many mulligans.
The Pack Rat deck does get slightly better because you can see 29 total cards via mull in 7-6-6-5-5 versus only 28 with 7-6-5-4-3-2-1, but it's a very small effect.
I think the "win-more" argument is getting a little threadbare.
Orzhov, in my (admittedly limited) experience, does roughly half its damage directly in combat and the other half via extort. The combat damage part is necessary and Court Street Denizen facilitates that.
As an example, if the Orzhov player has a Kingpin's Pet and the opponent has a Drakewing Krasis, the Orzhov player will often be happy to tap that Krasis so that the Pet can get in for two damage.
I finally won a GTC draft last night - after five 2-1 and 1-2s I finally got there. And it was with an Orzhov deck. And my Orzhov deck had two Court Street Denizens. They were extremely helpful in getting 4 - 8 points of damage in per game.
I also had four Kingpin's Pets, and 6 other extort creatures, along with 6 cheap removal spells (1x Death's Presence, 1x Smite, 2x Executioner's Swing, 1x Orzhov Charm, 1x One Thousand Lashes). I think this is a pretty good setup for Orzhov. When you have thirteen 1/2, 2/2, and 3/2 guys, you certainly appreciate being able to tap a blocker once in a while so that your guys can do more than just extort.
Such as all of the cards that you mentioned as being better bombs?
I must be dense but I had a really hard time understanding the O.P.s point when phrases like "you connect" are used to mean "creatures that have not been enciphered with Stolen Identity do combat damage to a player".
Anyway the pack rat copies itself aspect is what makes it a good early game play. The copies any creature on the board (possibly over and over again) is what make Stolen Identity good. I'm pretty sure that in any game where I made it to 6 mana on the board I'd rather top deck Stolen Identity than Pack Rat. Pack Rat is better but not always.
What do you mean by "connect"? If the ciphered creature "connects" with a player (i.e. does combat damage to them) then yes, the card is triggered every time, and you will always have a creature to copy, including the ciphered creature if it's the only one on the board.
Or did you mean something else by "connect"?
I lost with it.
It was very late game and I was on the defense. I had to cast it to copy their Zhur-Taa Swine, cipher onto my 2/2 dork and attack into their 6/2 Adaptive Snapjaw, otherwise their snapjaw and swine would overrun my 2/2 dude and 1/4 Basilica Guards. So for me it killed their Adaptive Snapjaw and turned my 2/2 dork into a Zhur-Taa Swine. Next turn they attacked with everything, I blocked Zhur-Taa against Zhur-Taa, one of their 2/2s with my Basilica Guards, and the other 2/2 I had to let through. I went to 4 and the remaining card in their hand was Boros Charm. gg.
I noticed this also. Madcap Skills tabled repeatedly in the drafts I did. I didn't understand.
The thing I don't like about Aetherize is that it has to be played against attacking creatures. People usually attack when all of their mana is up. Which means that they can re-cast as many creatures as they have mana for after the Aetherize. Aetherize was played against me maybe three times and twice I was able to re-cast all of my team except one afterwards. It wasn't that huge of a blowout really, it was mostly a fog/timewalk.
In the first 21 matches I played in RTR 4 ticket phantom sealed I went 18 - 3. I really and truly did. I've never come close to matching that win percentage (86%) at any other time over such a long string of events.
There is alot of variance involved here is my point.
In my experience the GTC queues were not easier than normal. I played 4 drafts and went 2 - 1, 1 - 2, 2 - 1, 1 - 2. That is worse than my average performance over a long stretch of RTR queues. Maybe I suck (worse) all of a sudden, but I doubt it.