Brage

What WOE cards are you guys most excited about? Personally I am really curious about the Young Hero Role cards: [[Besotted Knight]] and [[Return Triumphant]]. The Young Hero Role seems really strong with cards that can consume +1/+1 counters, such as [[Experiment One]], [[Festercreep]], [[Shinewend]] and [[Phantom Nomad]]. Also great with Modular cards.

Seems like a neat little deck.

Hi folks, I'm wondering how you organise your wishlist/tradelists. I'm not looking for much, I just want to have a place to save two lists of cards; one with cards that I want to trade away/sell and one with cards that I want to trade for/buy.

I want to post these lists to my local magic discord on occasion and sometimes copy paste the wishlist into a place like cardmarket for buying the cards.

Today I am using deckbox.org and it feels a bit on the clunky side. There are several features in there I don't really use, plus the UX is a bit bad for some things (the search function sucks and the visual list is not very compact, for example).

I am not looking to organise my entire collection. I am also already using Moxfield for decklists and am pretty happy with that.

I'm tempted to just make a spreadsheet with cards names, but I admit it is nice to be able to see visual cards if you forget what a specific card is and for sharing the list as a visual list.

As I play pauper and wishlist a lot of cheap commons, the wishlist can get quite long, perhaps up to 200 unique card names or so.

A classic combo that I've personally never seen in action. There is something about combo decks in Pauper that feels unappealing to me.

When I brought up Pauper in my local MTG discord, some players said that Pauper was too linear and much like two ships passing in the night and that's why they don't think it's such an interesting format. They mentioned they played Pauper once and realized that they had no interaction at it was merely a game to see who could combo off first.

I guess I have a bone to pick with that take on the format which leads me to steer away from combo decks. My local area is extremely Commander-dominated, which I think warps the players' perception of how to win a game of magic.

In commander you mostly need to win big by doing insanely busted things. The other day, a friend of mine who hasn't played Pauper was looking at my [[Reality Acid]] deck, which is a control deck that wins slowly with [[Kor Skyfisher]] and [[Mulldrifter]] beatdown, and he struggled to understand how the deck was meant to win. There were no huge bombs or combos to "win big" with, so to him it felt like a deck that was "going nowhere".

I think seeking that kind of big win experience can draw a Commander player towards mostly combo decks in Pauper, thus playing into the perception that Pauper is just linear decks passing in the night.

Decklist

I saw this deck on a lemmy-like social media platform that shall not be named, and fell in love with it. I think this is a really cool and tight package. The cards work together super well and you get to draw so many cards that it feels very consistent. I play [[Annihilating Glare]] instead of [[Lash of the Barlog]], but I'm otherwise mostly on board with the card choices (some minor substitions for cards I don't own, such as the artifact lands).

My local meta isn't super competitive (it's mostly just me and a friend who borrows my brews) so I haven't tested its mettle against really powerful decks, but it feels like it has game against a lot of decks. I've been toying with with the idea of using [[Dark Ritual]] to speed up the deck, which I think we could get away with since the deck draws so many cards and uses mostly black mana. I've also considered [[Crack the earth]] but I suppose that's more of a sideboard card against decks that play very few permanents such as turbo fog or something.

I think [[Reckoner's Bargain]] should be considered over [[Nasty End]] since sacrificing an artifact is much easier, but an extra card off the ring bearer is of course pretty sick. Not sure if one should play [[Lightning Bolt]] over [[Cast into the fire]]. That feels like a meta dependent choice. I feel that in my janky meta there is very often something you can kill with Cast into the fire, and it's worth it.

Andrea Mengucci plays Thoralf Severin in a friendly, but fierce match. I like the good vibes and excellent video production from the video team at Cardmarket.

Here are some of mine:

[[Cavern Harpy]] – So much ETB shenanigans!

[[Sultai Emissary]] – Nice value card and possibly a really cool payoff if you have something good on top of your library.

[[Moldgraf Scavenger]] – Pauper Goyf??

Hi folks. I have recently introduced a couple of friends to MTG. I've played the game for quite a while on and off (started in 2013) and have also played a bit competitively at times (Modern and limited). I've been out of the game for a couple of years and recently got back into it.

I would love to hear from your experiences with introducing new players to the game these days (the product lineup is quite different nowadays) and which formats you have tried in a group with a wide skill and experience gap.

I took one of them to the LTR prerelease and we had a good time. Afterwards we played pack wars with our prize packs and played our sealed decks against each other. We ended upgrading our sealed decks with cards from the packs and also make some extra 40-card decks with our extra LTR cards from the seald pool + prize packs.

We have since played some more with these LTR 40-card decks and it's been a lot of fun. These are the decks we used to introduce another friend to the game yesterday. We have discussed keeping this 40-card LTR format alive and I am consider buying some LTR jumpstart packs as a housewarming gift to the second friend who doesn't have any cards of their own (yet).

I am very cautious about imposing financial pressure on my friends and I try to not spend too much money on cardboard myself. Therefore, no matter what format we end up with, it should obviously be a budget friendly one. I like that the 40-card LTR format is very accessible (at least right now), but I know that it is ultimately a short-lived phenomenon that will become stale and inaccessible once the products leave the shelves. Another downside to going heavily in on LTR as a set is that it doesn't naturally transition to a financially viable 60-card format since most of the cards are only legal in Modern. Opting for current standard sets instead could be a gateway towards Pioneer.

Is then commander the natural next step? I suspect we will get there eventually no matter what, but I also think it's a bit of a big initial hurdle to get a full 100-card deck if you don't really want to spend much money on the game.

I am definitely pro-proxying and have been working on some proxy printing techniques and toying with the idea of handing out "booster packs" of commander staple proxies during our game nights to give everyone access to good cards.

I have also been toying with the idea of making an LTR cube/collection of cards to use for wizard's tower, fat stack, cube draft, premade decks or homemade jumpstart packs which would save everyone else money, but I am wary that my friends will miss out on the glorious experience of acquiring new cards and putting them in your deck which admittedly is quite fun.

I've also considered pauper as it has some event support at my LGS and I've wanted to play it for some time, but I think the main thing holding me back is the fact that it depends a lot on online research and buying old singles from the internet. New players will feel bummed that they don't get to play the new shiny cards from their booster packs and might be daunted by the vast card pool in Pauper.

Perhaps 60-card kitchen table magic could work fine, as well? In that case I would have to figure out some deck retrictions for myself, since my Modern decks would obviously be too strong.

The proxy angle is also something that boggles my mind. I haven't really done much proxying before but I kinda feel that it's not super fun to just grab top tier decks online and proxying them outright. I'm a big believed in the adage "limitation breeds creativity" and the creativity of deck building is such a huge part of the game, I think.

Obviously I'm not going to make a unilateral decision about formats, but I have the most experience and existing card resources so I have a big say in things by choosing which things I want to introduce or suggest to the others.

Just for reference, my LGS also sometimes does French duel Commander, Premodern, Oathbreaker or Highlander casual tournaments. Oathbreaker does seem kinda fun, I guess?

Am I doing something wrong? It seems to me that we ought to be able to find communities from other instances by searching for them, but I don't really see much when I search. Sometimes some communities show up, but it seems to be only communities I've visited before or something?

I won't go into too much detail, but I felt that most people were playing highly synergistic decks with a bunch of value engines that took a while to assemble, either in Abzan or Esper (or 4 color without red). I played Esper colours myself, with a lot of token and sacrifice synergy.

Didn't see anything I would describe as an aggressive deck. All of my matches went to time and I tied two out of three matches. I felt like I was playing essentially mirror matches every match, just with slightly different cards. One table at the event went 30 minutes overtime in the first round. It was the board stall from hell.

Even though the ring-bearer mechanic incentivized attacking, it was usually done to trigger the looting to get more value cards and the board states just kept piling up, despite the format having pretty alright removal, I feel.

I still had fun, but it was a bit draining, I suppose.