MTG Salvation

As a Judge, I'm really glad of this implementation.
I'm a bit worried about the incrementing terminology a new player has to grasp, but, well, since it's at mythic rarity, we shouldn't worry, should we?

Quote from Molten Shark

I can't believe they passed up on the chance to make the planeswalker from Bant give you a 'sigil' instead of an 'emblem'.

They did it for the same reason they chose not to make the hybrid symbols little versions of the Ravnica guilds' symbols - because they'll use them again in an environment where the initial striking flavor wouldn't make any sense. That's why "emblem" is preferable to "sigil"

Quote from Bulkathos2

I want it to deal enough damage to a creature to have it destroyed, and the remainder to that creature's controller.

Quote from Castle

So it's a burn spell with trample?

Quote from Cyouni

Hmm.

Perforate (If this spell would deal lethal damage to a creature, you may have it deal the rest of its damage to that creature's controller)

I'd see that fine at 3RG - compare to Boartusk Liege.
Also, the third and fourth ability need a full stop at the end of the sentence, while the first one doesn't

Quote from Castle

The original idea was to reward activity, but since we don't like demoting people the system kinda falls down there.

That's also true, thanks for another argument

Quote from Castle

What I had hoped would be plausible one day would be to have a kind of competition between the groups, but overall activity isn't quite consistent enough for that to happen.

Exactly.

Quote from Castle

Nobody around here ever pulls rank, it's all just a bit of fun.

I think that's because it doesn't really have all that importance... I personally don't know who are the other members of my group by heart. It's not that someone brags about their rank, we never even mention the topic - it doesn't come up during contests, card creation, flavor discussions, music discussion, spoiler discussion... My mindset about it is very manaburn-y - if you don't need it, why keep it? Is it still fun if most of the time everybody acts as though it doesn't exist?
Honorable Judge, the prosecutor rests

Quote from Jenesis

At our large Regional prerelease, we had 6 female staff members out of 24, and ten or so other girls who actually played (between all flights, drafts, and open dueling). Whatever it is that attracts more females to judging than playing, it's probably true of me too...

Lol, in Italy we have 1 certified female Judge - that's all
And we don't have those anymore I remember the Lorwyn one, we had like 140 players...

Quote from Jenesis

Thoughts on Juggernaut? I played against two opponents with Cudgel Troll at the prerelease (and saw Earth Servant in quantity in other matches), and it dies to a bunch of 3 drops as well. Is the large front end an auto-include in this style of deck? (I guess I could always Cloak it...)

No, it's not... it was the best candidate among the sideboard cards you posted

Quote from Jenesis

If you're behind on board when you cast Liliana, do you want to use her discard or tutor?

Scenario 1: you make your opponent discard a card, he attacks YOU with his three creatures (if he's a good player), and you are dead on the next attack.
Scenario 2: you tutor for an Obstinate Baloth or a removal, your opponent attacks Liliana (if he's an average player - I mean, who doesn't think it's great to kill a planeswalker?), autofogging one of his creatures. Next turn, you stabilize.
You choose

Yes.
The last ability is a triggered ability (it starts with "when, whenever, or at"), therefore as soon as the Lich comes into play, it will go on the stack, where it can be responded to by instants like Fling

Bonus: it's a particular type of triggered ability named "state trigger" - if you counter it once, say with Stifle, it will trigger again as long as there still aren't any artifacts with phylactery counters on them.

Welcome back Kat! I'm so happy we have mixed-gender discussion in here At my prerelease there were an incredible two girls out of 23 participants, and impressing 8%. I've never seen more than 1, and never the same one... If more vampires, less cleavage and less Dave Allsop is what it takes to make the community less stereotypical, I say, please keep doing it, Wizards!

I'll repost the list we and Jen are discussing in case someone else wants to follow the discussion

Quote from Jenesis

I didn't see the need in Plummet maindeck because I had Giant Spider, which holds off 90% of nonrare fliers, and extra removal in the white (which everyone I met told me was a worthwhile splash).

When I have playable alternatives and enough removal in-color I generally would avoid splashing unless it's mass removal or wins you games (a Fireball, for example, needs very, very strong reasons NOT to be splashed :p). The mana base is your top-most priority, second only to the mana curve, so much that a deck with efficient b&c can win games even without removal or finishers of sort, top examples being weenie strategies like Exalted in ACR or Levelers in RRR...

Quote from Jenesis

Would you choose to play or draw first? On the draw I never want to t2 SIB because it would leave me with 8 cards in hand, but on the play, if I don't have SIB in my opener, the tempo is much less useful than the extra card because I'm not doing much until turn 3-4 anyway.

Play, for the exact reasons you stated: if you have a SiB in your opener you'll have a hard time loosing with all that card advantage in addition to having more mana than your opponent; if you don't, the fact that you don't have much early game forces you to start first in order to put on the board your more expensive but superior creatures as soon as possible, while receiving one attack less from your opponent's bears.

On the draw, if SiB is your only play on turn 2, do play it: discarding a card of your choice is well worth digging up a turn 3 play or that second forest, plus you can always throw away the third land in your hand, a Sylvan Ranger when you already have the second forest, or a Reassembling Skeleton

In general, in all the limited formats I've played, your deck really needs to be something special to make you not wanna start - if you're aggro, you want to deliver those punches as soon as you can, if you're control, you don't want to fall way behind. The only example that comes to mind is when you have multiple reset buttons (say, a Jund Charm and a Volcanic Fallout in ACR, or a Pyroclasm and a Day of Judgement in M11) and you actually want to make your opponent overcommit in order to smash him and then start overwhelming him with your threats. Note however how this works only in the first game of the match if you win the roll, because if he sees the sweeper he'll pay more attention next time and your plan won't work anyway.

Quote from Jenesis

I wasn't thinking in terms of "I want to hit all my land drops until t6" because "that was ROE and this is a different format, right?"

True for most decks, but less for this one - other than considering the obvious need to cast the wurms if I have them in my hand, think about having the possibility to cast a four-drop with mana open for removal or a Cloak equipping, triple pumping the Shade on its first attack, or playing the second five-drop without deciding whether to smash or not with your Awakened land

Quote from Monkey_Playing_MTG

I went to a prerelease and opened a baneslayer angel and a jace beleren in the same pool. Players hated me. Will elaborate tomorrow.

Quote from Castle

@Life Weaver: I've just realised that you're still in the "stray lambs" category as well... Do you have a preference for where you go now that you're active again? If you're happy to be a Pathcutter, then Kat can be a Howler.

Somebody care to explain me the need of the categories again? I mean, especially the various grades within, there's no privilege associated with being a Greater, so why differentiating in the first place? Plus, updating usually happens every new thread, and in that months-long time span an user may post frequently and usefully without seeing its efforts rewarded in time, and others, like me, disappear for days or even weeks in a row, and maintain their status in spite of other more active members. Can't we all just be, friends?

Quote from Apex

Then I'm going to go with the Vampire over Bog Raiders. Let's say you are playing 3 matches, on average, your draft pod can at max support 2-3 drafters playing some sort of black, and therefore, swamps. The chances of you playing against swamps is therefore, not super high.

I think this is the correct answer in a 4 or 8 man draft.

Quote from Tahn

Bog Raiders. It'll sometimes do something (being unblockable against black decks) while giving one random non-evasive dork a +1/+1 bonus is hardly relevant.

I didn't take into account their non-evasiveness and their low toughness, so I'd go with the Raiders in the next big Sealed tournament.

Thanks guys

I would maindeck Plummet and forget white. I want to curve out Sign in Blood and 2 Liliana's Specter every game, so I'd cut Llanowar Elves, which is good only turn 1 and precludes you a turn two Sign in Blood, while giving access only to a turn 3 Awakener Druid, and nothing else (with a Forest and a Llanowar you can't cast a Specter anyway). Between the Wurms and the Shade, and thanks to a great filtering engine in the aforementioned draw spells, Liliana, and Terramorphic Expanse, I would've played 18 lands without being afraid to flood. I don't wanna miss a land drop until turn 6, when you've seen 13/14 cards, which is a third of your deck, therefore you should statistically see a third of your lands ;). Note how the mana base is also tune against color screw - it should give, again, at least statistically, BB on turn two and GG on turn four - 10 Swamps means that you have 1 swamp every four cards, therefore, by turn two, when, even on the play, you've drawn only one card, for a total of 8, two of them should be swamps. 8 forests means that there's 1 every 5, therefore by turn four, when, on the play, without seeing a Sylvan Ranger nor a Sign in Blood, you've just seen 10 cards, 2 would still, statistically speaking, forests. Note that if the Baloth was just another Spider i would've played 11 - 6 - 1 with the Raiders instead of the Ranger.

All my talk about statistics doesn't apply to non-foil duplicates in the same pack.
That's a mistake

Since the entire process is automatic, it can sometimes happen that two identical commons end up in the same booster. I've seen it once at my store, and at a Pro Tour some time ago they had this tweet about a guy who opened a booster in his pool with SIX Pili-Pala

Not taking into account counterspells but counting situational ones (like Plummet) you still reach like 15 common removal spells in the set. This means that out of 6 packs you should get and average of 9 removal spells more or less spread out (different colors have different percentages). Let's make an example: if you build a two-colored deck, you should get, like, 4 common kills - say, a Pacifism, two Ice Cage, and an Unsommon; or a Lightning Bolt, a Chandra's Outrage, a Plummet, and a Hornet Sting.

There's nothing odd with the above examples; on the contrary, it's a great thing that nowadays developers take seriously into account all these scenarios in order to deliver an equilibrate environment, and to do this, they use the only tool they have in a similar random situation - statistics. These same statistics state that each common has 10% of being in a determinate booster, therefore, any common will appear 60% of the time in your sealed pool. The possibility of any of the 15 removal spells NOT showing up in your sealed pool is roughly (4/10)^15, which is an extremely rare occurence, I'll give you that, but rather than focusing on this, consider that randomness doesn't distinguish between removal and other cards (in the same way it doesn't distinguish between lands and spells when it makes you mulligan). If you open a sealed pool with 60 completely different and unique commons, none of which are removals, the laws of probability aren't broken, and the most determinant factor here is that 60, as a number, is exaggeratedly low for statistical purposes. You'll see the real life occurrences become closer to the calculations with each new pool you lay in front of you - and you'll certainly open, sooner or later, one which, instead of the average 9 removals, has 10, or 12, or 13. And once you'll open 1000 (which is a very small part of all the pools that have been opened this weekend) and count the total common removals you have, you'll see there will be an average of 9 for each one of them.

In conclusion (forgive me the lenght) it's not the print runs that are weird... you just got a bit unlucky

Jace's Erasure is a strong turn-two play in any control-style limited archetype, although I wouldn't play it as a one-off.

Specifically, in a dedicated mill deck, Tome Scour is not what makes it shine most- an efficient stalling strategy paired with card draw does. It works great when backed-up by counterspells and bounce, and following it with a turn three Scroll Thief puts you in a good position. The best pairing is with white, which offers Blinding Mage, Palace Guard, Safe Passage, Siege Mastodon... you know, stuff that buys you turns.

I'm not going to give advice on playing disruption or good uncommons and rares, which is taken for granted, but I would indeed feel safer with a Plan B, namely a squad of flyers or a random bomb - Air Servant being the most easily attainable one.

Just make sure to make these little enchantments table at least once, sometimes even twice. If the players at you pod actually open them, you don't need to worry about getting your hands on them because nobody cares; rather, instead of wasting your first picks in the second or third pack on Jace's Erasure and Tome Scour, give precedence to stuff you would take regardless of the archetype you're forcing - efficient and/or evasive beaters, removal, Foresee.

Quote from Apex

But I doubt you can reliably get BB all the time on the third turn with 10 black sources.

When I build my manabase and focus on my manacurve's needs, I think rather statistical: if 10 out of 40 cards are Swamps, that means that most of the time I'll have at least two in my opening hand, increasing that possibility with each card I draw. Therefore, during my third turn, even if I started, by the time I put my third land into play, I've seen at least 9 cards, which should contain the black mana sources I need, since, simply enough, 1 in 4 cards is a Swamp. However, I made that statement specially because I didn't want mana costs to be a factor of the equation at all, so there's no point talking about this

Let's reformulate: in abstract, between two 2/2 for 3, would you rather maindeck the one that ocasionally makes two other cards better, or the one that is better on its own, but only against opponents playing Swamps?

I think it is fair to take into account the power of black in M10 when answering, in the same way people were maindecking otherwise subpar Quag Vampires in ZZW Limited because black was the best, and therefore more popular color.

I opened Honor of the Pure, Leyline of Punishment, Leyline of Sanctity, Captivating Vampire, Goblin Chieftain, Primeval Titan and foil Obstinate Baloth. Since I play only Limited, I asked the TO if he gave me my money back and offered me a draft for the pool after the event, which he gladly did. I finished third in the prerelease, won some boosters, then went on winning the draft, picked a Grave Titan and a Sun Titan, which I gladly traded again with the TO for other boosters. I went home with 6 boosters and the fun of a Prerelease and a Draft. For free

If you played a deck with 10 Swamps (where you could reliably have BB on your third turn), no problematic manacosts for the previous or next turns (no Ember Hauler nor Cyclops Gladiator) and two other vampires (Child of Night and Barony Vampire), would you maindeck Captivating Vampire or Bog Raiders?

I opened Honor of the Pure, Leyline of Punishment, Leyline of Sanctity, Captivating Vampire, Goblin Chieftain, Primeval Titan and foil Obstinate Baloth. Since I play only Limited, I asked the TO if he gave me my money back and offered me a draft for the pool after the event, which he gladly did. I finished third in the prerelease, won some boosters, then went on winning the draft, picked a Grave Titan and a Sun Titan, which I gladly traded again with the TO for other boosters. I went home with 6 boosters and the fun of a Prerelease and a Draft. For free