MTG Salvation

Quote from cryogen »

Store owners are used to customers "playing dumb" to try and take advantage of the fact that it is hard to go through thousands of cards due to fluctuating prices. A store is not obligated to sell you something which is incorrectly marked, because then any kid with a price gun could make the price whatever they want. You admitted to knowing that the two named foils are worth much more than their listed price (the two cards alone were worth what he wanted to charge for the sum of all the cards you picked). Since you knew you were getting a steal you should have been happy with that deal the first time.

Quote from Galerion »

Besides what other people said already I think another reason why BUG is doesn't well is that UB as a color combination is underdeveloped and kinda bad. If you take a look at the newly emerged Grixis decks you won't find a single UB gold card in them. There are all bad and much of them are wasted on milling.
Mark Rosewater wrote an article two years ago about designing Dimir in RTR and he talked about the problem that they have with UB as a color combination.

What's the Easiest Thing About This Color Pairing?

Blue and black tend to be the kings of card advantage. Blue is primary in card drawing and black is secondary (tied with green). Blue has counterspells and bounce. Black has discard and creature destruction. The two colors are excellent at slowly, and sometimes not so slowly, gaining the upper hand, often subtly enough that less-experienced players aren't even aware of it.

What this means is that blue and black thematically click together well. The two colors have a clear flavor and feel that mesh well. Blue is sneaky and cunning. Black in underhanded and ruthless. Mix them together and you have a guild you might not want to trust.

What's the Hardest Thing About This Color Pairing?

While philosophically the two colors mesh well, mechanically they are the two ally colors that have the least in common. Now, this is a pain for making hybrid cards, but shouldn't a clear mechanical identity make gold cards easier to design? The problem here is that while blue and black don't overlap much in actual mechanics, they have a lot of abilities that are close to the other but just a little different.

I'll walk through some of them to demonstrate:

Card Drawing: As I said above, blue is #1 and black is tied for #2. But blue always does its card drawing straight up, often these days at instant speed. Black always has to trade something for its cards—most often life. Black usually does this at sorcery speed.

Evasion: Blue and black both have flying. Blue also has unblockability and islandwalk. Black has intimidate and swampwalk. Black also has deathtouch, which doesn't technically give it evasion but heavily encourages the opponent not to block.

Library Denial: Blue "mills," meaning it makes the opponent put some number of cards from the top of his or her library into his or her graveyard. Black "extorts," meaning that it goes into the library and exiles particular cards. The flavor here is that blue makes you forget in general while black lobotomizes you.

Hand Denial: Blue and black are the only two colors that can easily deal with a threat before it hits the battlefield. Blue has the ability to use counterspells while black has the ability to force the opponent to discard.

Tutoring: Blue and black are the two colors best at getting specific cards out of your library and into your hand. Blue tends to be more focused, with cards directing you what kind of card you can get, while black has the more blanket tutors, sometimes with an additional cost associated.

Stealing Creatures: Blue takes the opponent's creatures while they are alive, while black takes them after they've died.

Learning the Opponent's Hand: Blue has spells that peek. Black gets glances as part of certain discard spells where it needs to see the hand, such as Duress or Coercion, to make choices of what gets discarded.

In each case, they are similar but a little different. That's great for giving each its own identity but it makes it more difficult to make blue-black cards. The blue ability always feels close to black, and vice versa, often making the cards feel like they'd fit in one color or the other rather than in both.

Looking at the quality of more recent UB cards it seems like they still haven't found a solution to this problem although Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver, Silumgar, the Drifting Death and Dragonlord Silumgar are at least steps in the right direction in the sense that you don't embarrass yourself completely if you show up with those(in Standard).

Both colors being similar actually lead to them kinda competing with each other in a sense with the most obvious example being discard vs counterspells. You have to choose which one of those you prefer. You can't just run a ton of discard and counterspells in the same deck because they pull you into different directions. Counterspells require untapped mana when the opponent is playing his spells which leads to the typical draw-go play style of blue decks because they can't further their gameplan without lowering their shields. Discard is the opposite since it's proactive and you can fire them off whenever you want. The thing about them though is that you want to back them up by furthering your own gameplan along with them. Playing a discard spell and then not doing anything for 4 turns is pretty pointless.
Not saying that these are the sole reasons why BUG isn't a thing but those are definitely some problems that you face in UB/x decks.

Gerrad Fabiano actually won a SCG Open with his Sultai Control deck but it didn't catch on. I played with it for a bit and I see two big problems with that deck.

1) There is no good one-drop removal spell in black. Red has Lightning Bolt and white has Path to Exile. Black has to do with stuff like Disfigure, Tragic Slip, Vendetta, etc. which are all pretty underwhelming compared to the red and white one. Ulcerate could have been the black one but they had to ruin it. Still waiting on Innocent Blood...

2) Snapcaster Mage is definitely one of the best blue cards available but he loses a lot of his appeal if the spells you want to flashback are on the more expensive side. That's the reason why he is an unquestionable 4-of in UR/x decks but not in decks like UW/Esper Control or Scapeshift for example.
Cryptic Command is similarly a pretty powerful blue card but in the end it's still just a 2-for-1. Now here comes the thing. For you to be able to play a card like Cryptic Command you have to give up on Liliana of the Veil which is a card advantage/disruption monster in her own right and which can dominate and win games on her own. Something that Cryptic Command can't really do. This also ties back to the problem that blue and black awkwardly compete with each other.

If you consider this along with point number 1 you really have to ask yourself if you actually gain power by adding blue in your BG deck? I think the answer to that is currently no. The losses are bigger than the gains in my opinion. It really needs better removal and/or an additional card advantage engine for this color pair to be able to compete with Jund and Abzan.

Quote from ty blitzer »

Quote from FadeToBlack1004 »

I don't sell cards on eBay due to fees and shipping alone. I've already sold two boxes via preorder on craigslist locally for $250 each, with $25 nonrefundable deposits. eBay is for buying, not selling. The table is heavily tilted towards buyers and it makes no sense to sell things on eBay if you have a healthy local market for said items. I can get right around eBay prices for most stuff I sell via craigslist.

I read SaffronOlive's article, and to be realistic, it means nothing unless we know how large the original print runs are. You can't throw numbers out there and say "omg market is going to crash" when you have no context. 10,000 goyfs sounds like a lot, but if there's already 150,000 goyfs out there between Future Sight and MM13, it's not really that many, is it? I mean, hell 20% might have a decent impact, but to bring prices down to "crash" levels on the best material, you'd have to dilute populations by 50% or more.

Go ahead, keep explaining how stupid I am for buying boxes at $200 and reselling them at $250. I'll keep making money. Sell four cases, one is free!

Wait, so you have already pre-sold something that you preordered, that has not even come in yet? Plus the $25 nonrefundable.



This is certainly not stupid, this feels more than a little unethical to be honest.