Well, i'm also swiss but didn't vote this time. I'd have voted against the prohibition. But not necessarily for the "correct" reasons. I really didn't like the propaganda for the intiative and the given reasons. So it would more have been some sort of anti-SVP vote...
On the other hand, if there was a communal vote to build a minaret (or any other explicitly religious looking building, including churches) across the street from where I live, i'd possibly vote against it.
I have no problem admitting that i'm intolerant enought to not like any religious symbols standing around in public. I'm not actively doing something about it like formally complaining about the church waking me up sunday morning by ringing it's bells. But i'd always prefer a neighborhood without them and will say so if asked.
Your own numbers are working against you, you know.
PT Hollywood 2008
Since faeries fits the build he labeled, it should be about 35% by his deckbuilding rules.
Faeries doesn't play Reflecting Pool and holds a pretty tight color discipline. If we interpret those rules with a bit leeway my figure also rises, since Bant and Cascade Control only differ by playing blue...
Of course, by looking at single events, we only take snapshots of the meta. But it was the best indicator i could think of. (also 70% Faeries or no bloodbraids is very extreme, I never was at a PTQ/NQ that was so skewed metawise. But then, we dont have T2 FNM around here, so there I imagine it could be different story).
The statement that Jund is more dominant than Faeries was is simply false. Also, your oversimplified deckbuilding instructions are just a mirror-image of Lorwyn Standard:
1. Pick any group of colors as long as it includes blue
2. Play Cryptic Command and Reflecting Pool
3. Fill out the rest of the deck with either a linear group of aggro creatures (tribal) or just the most powerful spells there are, because color doesn't really matter.
At least now we have color discipline, interaction of cards from both blocks, and relevant use of commons and uncommons. It's no nice not to be playing Yugioh anymore.
27% Faeries, with only 1 in Top8
Decks fitting your Deckbuilding Rules: about 2% (the "Chapin Deck" futher down the list also followed that description as far as i Remember)
Worlds 2008
Faeries 89 27.05%
Black-White Tokens 48 14.59%
Five Color Control 39 11.85%
Red Kithkin 28 8.51%
Kithkin 21 6.38%
Red-Black Aggro 17 5.17%
Blue-White Merfolk 14 4.26%
Rock 14 4.26%
RDW 9 2.74%
Doran 5 1.52%
Elves 5 1.52%
EsperLark 4 1.22%
Elves! 4 1.22%
Jund Ramp 4 1.22%
27% Faeries, with 5 in Top8
Decks fitting your Deckbuilding Rules: about 13%
35% Jund, with 3 in Top8
Decks fitting my Deckbuilding Rules: about 64% (without the Bant lists, that differ by like 4 rhox war monks from my rules)
When you go even futher and look at the Aggro/Midrange-Aggro Decks (so decks that follow the efficient creatures+removal principle) you see that they make over 84% of the Metagame.
Come on, 84% aggro, 10% control and 6% combo (estimated, didn't count exacly how they are distributed between those two) don't make a diverse meta. Even if there are 8 different aggrodecks. As long as they are 8 different implementations of the same principle... There isn't even a real distinction between Token-aggro and "normal"-aggro like there was with Elves<->Kithkin, Blightning<->BW Token etc.
I would say it does in draft. A good mill can keep a player from draying the couple of bombs in his deck.
Yeah, so if your opponent has 20 cards in his deck and a single bomb. Playing Tome Scoure has 25% chance of milling his bomb and a 75% chance of making him draw his bomb 5 turns earlier... Very disruptive.
In the aftermath of it all, we are left with... well, what we've been wishing for since Faeries became a dominant deck: a diverse metagame.
How is the Metagame "diverse"? Jund is even more Dominant than Faeries was and the meta consists of Jund and about five other Aggro/Midrange Decks trying to beat Jund. The general rule for deckbuilding at the moment seems to be:
1. Pick two or three colors but not blue
2. Play Bloodbraid Elf or Range of Eos, whichever is in your colors
3. Play the best agressive Creatures in your colors and 8-12 removal spells.
In the Faerie Metagame, the other decks were at least drastically different than faeries and not just the same deck in different colors.
People really REALLY need to stop complaining about this standard. It's rather apparent that almost nobody remembers the Reign of Affinity, or Psychatog, or Academy, or any other deck that absolutely dominated a format for a length of time. Feel free to complain when Jund becomes the only viable deck as none of the alternatives even have a chance against it (which is NOT going to happen).
Why is always someone coming up with this stupid argument. Just because the metagame did suck even more back then doesn't mean one can't be unhappy about a slightly less sucky metagame right now.
I draft a lot, but sometimes i also go to Vintage events. At FNM we rare redraft, and after the relevant T2 cards are gone, i start picking stuff that is relevant vor Vintage/Legacy, like sphinx of steel wind, Invell leviathan, foil playbles etc. Then I can usually trade quite efficently, especially since Vintage ant T2 players tend to value cards completely different. While painlands were still T2 legal I got a playset underground rivers from a vintage player for something like: 2 foil yixlid jailer, foil ponder etc...
Once a guy aleo gave me 3 mox diamonds for a ton of dci promos and recent T2 cards he found "funny".
Especially the shuffling part is interesting. I very often see people in tournaments shuffle excessively. From a "Statistical" standpoint, a deck of poker cards can be considered randomized after 6-7 riffles. But at magic tournaments I often see people do like three iterations of three pileshuffles and 6 riffelshuffles etc.
At this years nationals I had a match where we had 10 minutes for the last game and my opponent used like half of that time to sideboard, shuffle, schuffle, schuffle, mulligan, shuffle, schuffle, schuffle, mulligan, shuffle, schuffle...
Hi, it's about this post: http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showpost.php?p=4496610&postcount=31 . But i guess, this one will have the same problem. When I save the post, the forum software seems to drop all my line breaks (but making bold text etc. works). Also the formatting tools in the editor dont seem to work. When I try to edit that post, I still sea the text without line brakes and HTML, as well als "escape sequences" ("e; etc.). What am i doing wrong? This is new behavoir and I didnt, change my browser or its settings...
Where do you draw the line between netdecking and accidentially building a very similar deck? Consider Faeries in the pre rotation standard format. Even if you try to build that deck in a vacuum without looking at decks on the internet you will end up with 80-90% identical lists (at least if you evaluate the cards correctly). The only possibility to avoid this kind of "netdecking" is to completely stay away from Faeries... The same goes for Reveillark, Elves, Jund etc.
So what's the definition of Netdecking? Is it: "Looking at a deck online and copying it." Or is ist: "Playing a deck very similar to a list on the internet." So im coming back to my faeries example. I never copied a complete list i found somewhere else. Before turnaments I would usually sit down, lay out the core cards of the deck and then try to fill in the gaps considering my last tournament expiriences and metagame predictions. I switched to UBr faeries very early but ended up with lists that differed by only about three maindeck cards from the list i afterward found on the net. Of course when I built my faerie deck in the first place I had already looked at other peoples lists so I knew which cards to think about in the first place, but there is simply no way to avoid that.
Even if you came up with a deck without seeing the "popular versions" of them, you would very soon see why they are superior to yours (well at least most of the time). Do you simply ignore the obvious improvements you know about and stick with your inferior version because ist's "yours" and you don't want to be uncreative? Last year a met someone at NatQs that asked me if I had any Grimoire Thiefs to trade. So I said something along the lines of: "So you are playing the drowner of secrets mill deck?". The guy was very irritated and said something about that he wouldn't netdeck, and that he invented the deck etc.. He was very confused when in "guessed" about 80% of the cards in his deck without having looked at it.
If you come up with an original deck that can compete in tournaments, the chances are extremely high that someone has had the same idea and a very simliar deck is already somewhere on the net. Now it's easy to say "but it was my idea and I didn't look at the other guys deck when I built mine!". But then you can't complain about other people playing decks you have seen on the net, since the could have come up with it, or put their twist to it, also by themselves.
I only, dislike what I call "extreme netdecking". You know those guys that you never see at FNMs or playtesting groups, that pop up at a tournament with a list of last weeks Top8 PT deck in hand, still frantically searching for half of the deck. In the first round, they start wondering if the should mulligan that hand, how the should play that card and you even have to explain to them how their own cards work, because they are constantly misplaying them.
"Dies to removal" is a valid argument in some instances.
If you are playing a deck like ramp, that uses lots of cards that are only in there to get out big guys then the big guys shouldn't die too easily.
Also if you are playing a deck with very few creatures, say UW Control with 4 Baneslayers as the only creatures, their dying to removal is very relevant. Even aggro Decks will play more removal than you have creatures in your deck, which means in most cases, your opponent is going to have a removal in his hand after turn five, which means you'll have to protect your angel somehow (like waiting until you have 7 Mana and negate, just to discover its already the ninth turn and your opponent has drawn another removal spell...).
On the other hand, if the deck you are playing is some sort of aggro, which usually means creatures are more or less redundant, the argument is only valid if there is an obvious alternative that dies to less removal.
This reminded me of this recent XKCD
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/numbers.png
Leeched image snipped and warned.
I guess I should open a thread now: "Google proves high IQ linked to internet usage"
On the other hand, if there was a communal vote to build a minaret (or any other explicitly religious looking building, including churches) across the street from where I live, i'd possibly vote against it.
I have no problem admitting that i'm intolerant enought to not like any religious symbols standing around in public. I'm not actively doing something about it like formally complaining about the church waking me up sunday morning by ringing it's bells. But i'd always prefer a neighborhood without them and will say so if asked.
Faeries doesn't play Reflecting Pool and holds a pretty tight color discipline. If we interpret those rules with a bit leeway my figure also rises, since Bant and Cascade Control only differ by playing blue...
Of course, by looking at single events, we only take snapshots of the meta. But it was the best indicator i could think of. (also 70% Faeries or no bloodbraids is very extreme, I never was at a PTQ/NQ that was so skewed metawise. But then, we dont have T2 FNM around here, so there I imagine it could be different story).
So let's say the Worlds metagame wasn't diverse
Ok, then let's have a look:
PT Hollywood 2008
27% Faeries, with only 1 in Top8
Decks fitting your Deckbuilding Rules: about 2% (the "Chapin Deck" futher down the list also followed that description as far as i Remember)
Worlds 2008
27% Faeries, with 5 in Top8
Decks fitting your Deckbuilding Rules: about 13%
PT Koyoto 2009
13% Faeries, with 1 in Top8
Decks fitting your Deckbuilding Rules: about 20%
Worlds 2009
35% Jund, with 3 in Top8
Decks fitting my Deckbuilding Rules: about 64% (without the Bant lists, that differ by like 4 rhox war monks from my rules)
When you go even futher and look at the Aggro/Midrange-Aggro Decks (so decks that follow the efficient creatures+removal principle) you see that they make over 84% of the Metagame.
Come on, 84% aggro, 10% control and 6% combo (estimated, didn't count exacly how they are distributed between those two) don't make a diverse meta. Even if there are 8 different aggrodecks. As long as they are 8 different implementations of the same principle... There isn't even a real distinction between Token-aggro and "normal"-aggro like there was with Elves<->Kithkin, Blightning<->BW Token etc.
I fail to see how I am "simply wrong"?
Yeah, so if your opponent has 20 cards in his deck and a single bomb. Playing Tome Scoure has 25% chance of milling his bomb and a 75% chance of making him draw his bomb 5 turns earlier... Very disruptive.
How is the Metagame "diverse"? Jund is even more Dominant than Faeries was and the meta consists of Jund and about five other Aggro/Midrange Decks trying to beat Jund. The general rule for deckbuilding at the moment seems to be:
1. Pick two or three colors but not blue
2. Play Bloodbraid Elf or Range of Eos, whichever is in your colors
3. Play the best agressive Creatures in your colors and 8-12 removal spells.
In the Faerie Metagame, the other decks were at least drastically different than faeries and not just the same deck in different colors.
Why is always someone coming up with this stupid argument. Just because the metagame did suck even more back then doesn't mean one can't be unhappy about a slightly less sucky metagame right now.
Actually, they are only twice as hard to get...
Once a guy aleo gave me 3 mox diamonds for a ton of dci promos and recent T2 cards he found "funny".
At this years nationals I had a match where we had 10 minutes for the last game and my opponent used like half of that time to sideboard, shuffle, schuffle, schuffle, mulligan, shuffle, schuffle, schuffle, mulligan, shuffle, schuffle...
So what's the definition of Netdecking? Is it: "Looking at a deck online and copying it." Or is ist: "Playing a deck very similar to a list on the internet." So im coming back to my faeries example. I never copied a complete list i found somewhere else. Before turnaments I would usually sit down, lay out the core cards of the deck and then try to fill in the gaps considering my last tournament expiriences and metagame predictions. I switched to UBr faeries very early but ended up with lists that differed by only about three maindeck cards from the list i afterward found on the net. Of course when I built my faerie deck in the first place I had already looked at other peoples lists so I knew which cards to think about in the first place, but there is simply no way to avoid that.
Even if you came up with a deck without seeing the "popular versions" of them, you would very soon see why they are superior to yours (well at least most of the time). Do you simply ignore the obvious improvements you know about and stick with your inferior version because ist's "yours" and you don't want to be uncreative? Last year a met someone at NatQs that asked me if I had any Grimoire Thiefs to trade. So I said something along the lines of: "So you are playing the drowner of secrets mill deck?". The guy was very irritated and said something about that he wouldn't netdeck, and that he invented the deck etc.. He was very confused when in "guessed" about 80% of the cards in his deck without having looked at it.
If you come up with an original deck that can compete in tournaments, the chances are extremely high that someone has had the same idea and a very simliar deck is already somewhere on the net. Now it's easy to say "but it was my idea and I didn't look at the other guys deck when I built mine!". But then you can't complain about other people playing decks you have seen on the net, since the could have come up with it, or put their twist to it, also by themselves.
I only, dislike what I call "extreme netdecking". You know those guys that you never see at FNMs or playtesting groups, that pop up at a tournament with a list of last weeks Top8 PT deck in hand, still frantically searching for half of the deck. In the first round, they start wondering if the should mulligan that hand, how the should play that card and you even have to explain to them how their own cards work, because they are constantly misplaying them.
If you are playing a deck like ramp, that uses lots of cards that are only in there to get out big guys then the big guys shouldn't die too easily.
Also if you are playing a deck with very few creatures, say UW Control with 4 Baneslayers as the only creatures, their dying to removal is very relevant. Even aggro Decks will play more removal than you have creatures in your deck, which means in most cases, your opponent is going to have a removal in his hand after turn five, which means you'll have to protect your angel somehow (like waiting until you have 7 Mana and negate, just to discover its already the ninth turn and your opponent has drawn another removal spell...).
On the other hand, if the deck you are playing is some sort of aggro, which usually means creatures are more or less redundant, the argument is only valid if there is an obvious alternative that dies to less removal.