Author: basilisk

  • Pauper DE: UR Post

    JoINrbs pilots a customized UR Post deck through a Pauper DE. Notable changes include Deep Analysis over Mystical Teachings.

    Building the Deck

    JoINrbs builds the deck while explaining how it works.

    Round 1 vs. Kiln Fiend

    Stick around at the end for some analysis of Surging Flame, which turns out to be bad card. Certainly much worse than Needle Drop, which is the best card in the world.

    Round 2 vs. Mono Black

    There are also some chess tactics vs. the slightly disfavored black pieces.

    Round 3 vs. Kiln Fiend

    Needle Drop, still the best card in the world.

    Round 4 vs. The Mirror

    Not a great game pre-board. Post-board, the entire deck changes, and it becomes a battle of stone rains.

    Be sure to stop by the forums thread to weigh in with your feedback!

  • Modern: Ascension Vs. MTGO

    Poker prodigy JoINrbs takes us through a match of Ascension versus various decks on MTGO. Since this is exclusive premium content, he recorded his face so you can watch him while he plays!

    Ascension vs. Infect

    Just playing and talking and picking my nose.

    Ascension vs. Goryo

    There is an entire game in this match where I know what my opponent is playing.

  • Wives and Girlfriends Respond to “Planeswalker Points”

    Amid all the buzz surrounding Wizards’ new “Planeswalker Points” system, there’s one pocket of dissent that you may not have heard from yet, but soon will. I’m speaking of course, of the girlfriends and wives of Magic players.

    “The changes to organized play will have a devastating effect on all of us,” said one disgruntled girlfriend, who was seen picketing outside the Wizards building on Tuesday afternoon. “There are at least 17 of us worldwide, and we’re all mad as hell.”

    The ladies’ concern stems from the fact the new system rewards volume of play instead of quality of play.

    “Previously, Steven would get a good finish and then sit on his rating until Worlds invites,” said another picketer between sobs. “We used that time to focus on activities we both enjoy, like picking out new towels for the guest bathroom or going jewelry shopping. Now, he’ll have to play constantly just to keep up! This is just awful!”

    In the face of mounting opposition, a Wizards spokesman released the following statement: “At Wizards of the Coast, we believe in making decisions that benefit the majority of our customers, and we just don’t see this as an issue for most of our player base. Seriously, have you seen those guys? Christ.”

    But some magical girlfriends have already begun to cook up a plan to combat the hated points system.

    “The way we see it, you have to fight fire with fire,” a representative told us. “Enter girlfriend points.”

    She was kind enough to offer us an exclusive look at some preliminary point values.

    +1

    Surprise chocolate

    +1

    Surprise flowers

    +4

    Surprise pony

    +1

    Cuddling during movie

    +2

    Cuddling during romantic comedy

    +4

    Cuddling during “Twilight”

    +1

    Telling me I look pretty and convincing me you’re not just saying that for the point

    +1

    Assenting to my psychological assessments of our friends

    +3

    Buying me that thing I’ve been hinting that I want

    -1

    Out playing Magic

    -2

    Out drinking with the guys

    -4

    Out at the strip club

    -10

    Out playing drinking Magic with the guys at the strip club

    Multipliers:
    x2

    In public

    x3

    In front of my girlfriends

    x4

    In front of my ex

    x5

    While I’m on my period

    “We’re still working out the kinks in the system. For example, it might still be too easy for our boyfriends and husbands to think and talk about Magic while eating dinner,” she added.

    You can find out more about this exciting new system by calling your wife or girlfriend today!

  • I’m glad our next set is Dark Ascension

    by Fake Mark Rosewater

    Monday, September 5th, 2011

    Here at Wizards of the Coast, our work – like the work of Sir Isaac Newton before us – is all about experimentation. Whenever we introduce an exciting new idea, we are testing the waters to see what works and what doesn’t, and what we can rehash further down the line. The ‘free spells’ mechanic in Urza block was a huge success, so we revisited it in New Phyrexia. Increasing planeswalker complexity and utility with Jace, the Mind Sculptor didn’t cause any problems, so we decided to push forward with the five-ability Garruk Relentless, who requires a degree to operate correctly.

    With Innistrad we attempted the largest experiment of all, the Magic R&D equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider: double-faced cards. Although St. Richard Garfield originally intended to use card-backs as a means to differentiate between expansions, for the past eighteen years the reverse of a Magic card has been considered sacred ground. Imagine if we could unlock the full powers of both sides of a Magic card – that’s 100% more design space then we’re currently using. In this economic climate, that’s exactly the kind of efficiency-increasing solution we need to be coming up with.

    Double-faced cards, of course, have been hugely successful. Meeting with a glowing community reception since they were first spoiled, DFCs have consistently smashed any misgivings that might have been initially held with regards to issues like shuffling and drafting. The fact of the matter is, the idea of a CCG that uses a standardized card-back to conceal information is antiquated. I have previously stated that Innistrad is the beginning of a seven-year plan; by the end of these seven years I hope for every card in Magic to have a completely unique card-back.

    We understand that this will be a lot to take in, so rather than leap right in with flip-morph-transform cards that have a card from an entirely different CCG on the reverse, we will be introducing staggered changes to the card-back over the next few sets. Dark Ascension brings us the first and most obvious addition: Color-coding. Starting next February, all card-backs will be subtly recolored to indicate rarity.

    I could talk for pages and pages about how great an idea this is, but it might be more interesting for you if I answered a few of your questions instead! Here, then, is the official preliminary card-back FAQ!

    What about opaque sleeves?

    To properly accommodate the new card-backs, we will regrettably be forced to disallow the use of opaque sleeves from all Magic tournaments. If you really don’t want to go Au-natural, we are pleased to announce that our friends at UltraPro will be selling ‘booster packs’ containing eleven common-backed sleeves, three uncommon-backed sleeves, and one rare-backed sleeve. A small proportion of these packs will even contain a mythic rare sleeve!

    While I’m sure that UltraPro’s new product will be of the highest quality, I can’t afford to collect all these sleeves. Must I risk damage to my precious collection?

    We’ve got you covered – we will be giving players the option to swap their library with sixty checklist cards.

    Doesn’t this mean that all card rarities will be public information?

    It absolutely does – we feel that knowing when your opponent is about to draw their mythic bombs will add a strategic dimension to the game, not take anything away from it.

    Aren’t you worried about the possibility of cheating used marked card-backs?

    Nope!

    Tune in next time for the reveal of the next stage in the evolution of the cardback!

  • Jace proves too powerful for standard once again

    Earlier this year, the controversial decision was announced to ban Jace, the Mind Sculptor from standard tournaments. In his article explaining the banning, Director of Magic R&D Aaron Forsythe expressed his regret that Jace, who leaves the format in October, “nearly made it this time”. “Of course we were wary about reprinting a card with a history like Jace’s, but the higher power of modern standard environments allowed us to reintroduce cards like Lightning Bolt and Stone Giant last year. We thought we were ready for Jace. We were wrong.”

    Surveys taken at FNMs across the world revealed that although 68.5% of players thought the banning was justified, less than ten percent were even aware of the card’s lineage. Several local scrubs insisted that Planeswalkers were only introduced in the Lorwyn expansion until we showed them an original beta Jace.

    Jace, the Mind Sculptor was one of the cornerstones of early magic tournaments, providing a much-needed win condition for drawn-out control mirror matches. Under the original rules Jace’s ‘counts as a player’ clause meant that the card could not be countered and had to be provided with its own seat; when reprinted last year, these rules were done away with for logistical reasons.

    After a pro player tragically died of dehydration during a week-long match involving Stasis, Time Elemental, and chained Timetwisters, the DCI realised something had to be done, and banned Jace outright from all further tournaments. Jace remained banned from even vintage events due to health and safety risks until its printing last year in the Worldwake expansion.

    While Jace proved too powerful for the current standard environment, two other Zendikar block reprints of once-banned cards failed to achieve the level of noteriety they once commanded. Obsidian Fireheart originally required players to physically set their lands on fire, and its infamous ‘the land continues to burn’ wording was interpreted to mean that if a card went out prematurely, its controller could be issued a loss for failing to maintain the game state. Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, remembered fondly by collectors for its confusing printed mana cost and meaningless ‘legend-gold’ frame, was briefly outlawed from tournaments after Wizards of the Coast’s lawyers expressed concerns over the phrase ‘spells with colour’. Ironically, Emrakul was in another sense one of the most racially progressive creatures in Magic, as the first card to be printed with two subtypes.

  • Exclusive: From the Vault

    Are you determined to buy the next Magic: the Gathering collectable deck, but don’t yet know what it is? Have you been to the wizards.com website looking for the latest Magic products, only to turn away lost and bewildered?

    Fear not, woeful spell-slingers! Good Gamery has a special announcement: we’ve been asked by Wizards of the Coast to join them for an exclusive partnership! With the unprecedented popularity of Commander, Archenemy, Duel Decks, From the Vault, Premium Deck Series, Event Decks, and the Deckbuilder’s Toolkit, the good folks at Wizards are keeping busy designing ways to sell you cards they’ve already printed. But their web marketing team is not able or willing to keep up with the deluge of new products. That’s where GoodGamery comes in.

    We’ve agreed to devote some of our front page to alerting you to the newest Magic products. By virtue of their sheer quantity, we’ll have the privilege of spoiling some of these first! You’ll doubtless see many, many of these in the coming weeks, so start making room on your shelves and closets and apologizing to your loved ones. For now, follow this link for a taste of what’s to come:

    From the Vault: ?????

    We know what you’re thinking: how big is that vault? Bigger than you can possibly imagine. Remember to check our front page regularly for the newest one-of-a-kind Magic products!

  • Kid at StarCityGames casts Earthquake for 6, causes havoc in Manhattan

    Richmond, VA (AP) Ben Bleiweiss, a 33-year old kid at heart, cast Earthquake for 6, setting off seismic activity that rocked the entire eastern seaboard of North America between 2:00 and 2:15 pm on Tuesday, USGS authorities said.

    “We were just playing a group EDH game in the lounge of our sales department at the Richmond office when suddenly the room started rocking,” said Bleiweiss, visibly shaken.

    “I don’t think that was the cause. I’m guessing it was Misterorange’s [Evan Erwin] Hive Mind,” said The Ferrett, who was still standing out in the parking lot with dozens of other editorial staff. “Granted, playing ‘quake on top of that wasn’t really well thought out,” he added.

    “Could have been the Terastodon I had played the turn earlier,” mused Mike Flores. Bleiweiss shook his head.

    The tremor caused a minor emergency alert at the Pentagon, and briefly stalled trading on Wall Street. It was also reported as far north as Toronto and New Brunswick, where it unleashed a tsunami of staid Canadian apathy.

    President Obama, on holiday at Cape Cod, noticed the tremor and said “Eight people at the head of the largest online card trading store in North America, and nobody is packing a Stifle. Dayum, son.”

  • All About Minecraft Slimes

    Slimes – Their Natural History and Husbandry

    Part 1. What are slimes?

    Briefly, slimes are complex organisms somewhere between algae and sponges. They also have qualities shared with bacteria and with fungi, namely phagocytosis and asexual reproduction. Unlike these kingdoms however, slimes are eukaryotes with behaviour-driven motility and lack a cell wall.

    ANATOMY OF A SLIME

    A slime has a top or lid, face, sides or sidewalls, rear wall, and a base. Living slimes are always oriented thus, and instantly re-orient themselves base down whenever they are tilted or fall at an angle. This is due to the statocyst or positional sensor organ in the slime’s lid. It functions like a primitive inner ear to orient the slime in space.

    Other important anatomical landmarks of the slime include:

    • Chiton – the thick outer slime coat that serves as a protective coating for the slime, and a primitive gut. The chiton is secreted by the capsule, the elastic true skin of the slime.
    • Macula(e) – the sensory apparatus of the slime. They have been called “eyes” and “mouth” because of their shape. They are relatively insensitive to light, but detect exquisitely small movements and magnetic fields.
    • Inclusions – These are mostly debris picked up and embedded in the thick chiton. Some inclusions are products of digestion from items the slime has engulfed.
    • Gonad – A region of the slime that seems to be more metabolically active in the company of other slimes of the same size.
    • Zoochlorellae – These are symbiotic algae and cyanobacteria that live inside the slime and provide it with oxygen and starches. In turn the slime protects the algae from heat and desiccation and provides trace minerals and reduced nitrogen compounds. These organisms are what give the slime its green color.

    Internal Structure of the Slime

    The capsule of the slime is tough and elastic, like a tendon or a thick sheet of rubber. Inside the capsule, the slime consists of three specialized areas, arranged roughly from front to rear.

    • The pyxosome is the area right behind the maculae and is a heavily pigmented mass of dense but friable gelatinous material. Microscopically, it is composed of myriads of nests and coils of sarcoplasm surrounding larger canals filled with serum. The serum component has a high content of soluble heavy metals including redstone, iron, gold, and adminium. It is possible that as much as 70% of a world’s elemental adminium is bound up in slimes, the rest occurring as the dark bars in common bedrock. The pyxosome may be responsible for slime’s sensory functions.
    • The opisthosome occupies the rear of the slime and contains the gonad. In truth the gonad is acellular but rather is made up of a few large, pale inclusions with high organic nutrient content. Bergensten et al. propose that the structure actually is where undigestible materials are stored so as not to damage the slime’s internal chemistry.
    • The elasmosome makes up the majority of the slime and is a colorless to light green, translucent material the consistency of Guk (TM). This is composed almost entirely of matted lattices of microtubules. This is the locomotive engine of the slime and surrounds the other two internal portions, anchoring them to the capsule and to one another. It also provides extensions through the capsule to anchor the chiton in place and stimulate additional chiton secretion in regions of high shear stress.

    The commercial slimeball is actually made up of the elasmosomes of freshly killed slimes.

    Habitat of Slimes



    This herd of slimes occupied the lava pool shown here for several minecraft days.

    Slimes are found deep underground, in areas where constant high temperature and humidity prevail. Since slimes are facultatively photosynthetic, they thrive in and around caverns lit up by magma flows, volcanic vents, and even the high energy lamps used in deep shaft mining. Due to their thick chiton, they are notoriously resistant to fire and burns.

    Since slimes require oxygen to live, they rely on their symbiotic zoochlorellae to provide a small amount. Transplanting a slime into a totally dark oxygen-poor volcanic flue or sulfur vent can suffocate it. However, if a light source is provided, the slime may survive indefinitely (although it will not grow or reproduce).



    The small slime in the center foreground is drowning.

    Slimes are limited to areas where water and ambient moisture are high. Although they can desiccate if stranded or trapped in dry air, they can retain a lot of water and this allows them to migrate long distances to new caverns.

    Contrary to popular belief, slimes can’t swim and they do drown when submerged in water. Commercial elastics harvesting relies on large deep pools or moving conveyors to drown young slimes.

    These slimes are migrating from a dry underground tunnel system to a freshly opened mineshaft, which is still damp.

    Slime Life Cycle



    Slimes of all sizes and life stages in a stampede, a rare and dangerous phenomenon associated with strip mining or flood mining.

    Slimes reproduce either sexually (details unknown) or asexually (fission) to produce daughter slimes. The daughter slime or calf is less than 1 m cubed and has little or no enzymatic activity. It contains relatively more nutrients in the form of inclusions. These sustain the small slime until its own enzymes mature.

    As the slime grows, it becomes capable of engulfing items for food. These digestive properties of the chiton may cause damage on contact with the slime. When it is roughly 8x the weight of a new calf slime, it can reproduce by fission. This often happens when the slime is damaged – the slime divides along a defect in the capsule, healing the defect and producing up to four daughter slimes.

    A mature slime is quite large, slow-moving, and heavy. It has a relatively low moisture content compared to the youngest slimes. To compensate, it produces more concentrated digestive enzymes and acids which are toxic to nearby lifeforms. As a slime ages, its elasmosome loses elasticity and tends to calcify. This can result in large, old slimes getting trapped in corridors or narrow spots and suffocating.



    Slimes have a remarkable elasticity. This image shows the range of slime compressibility in normal locomotion. Slimes may fit through doors and in stairwells that appear to be much too small.

    Slime Ecology



    A matriarch slime protecting a daughter.

    Slimes are found in herds throughout the world, always in geothermally favourable chunks. Although slimes do not exhibit nesting behavior or any other advanced social system, they do have a primitive herd behavior wherein the larger slimes may protect the smaller ones. Small slimes in a herd may collectively push invaders away from resources or off precipices. Slime intelligence is otherwise rather low.

    Slimes – unicellular or multicellular?



    Are these slimes identical, or fraternal, twins?

    Scientists are not sure how to classify slimes. So far no one element of slime anatomy or microanatomy definitely places them in either class. The slime has features of both:

    Features in favor of unicellular organism

    • Body plan consistent across all slime populations and ages/sizes
    • Asexual reproduction is the norm and produces slimes of roughly equal sizes
    • Never reconstitute into a single large slime after dividing into four smaller slimes

    Features in favor of multicellular organism

    • Sexual reproduction possible
    • Discrete and differentiated regions of the slime, i.e. organs and tissues
    • Appear multi-layered, similar to other algal colonies or syncytia
    • Cannot be divided without killing the original slime

    Perhaps the strongest evidence for slimes being multicellular is the macula, which doesn’t appear to have a direct physical communication to any other part of the slime, but activates locomotion and storage of trace metals in other parts of the slime.

    Slimes and the Future



    Slimes in a slime game park enjoying a brief moment in full sun.

    Slimes have been transformed by popular culture over the past 5 expansions. The slime is a strong symbolic figure in the human psyche as a rare, elusive, dangerous, alien, even droll and endearing creature. Modern technology relies heavily on slimeballs as a commercial product, from slimes grown in artificial labs in great numbers under ideal conditions. One disturbing development is the breeding of slimes for populating slime parks and safaris. Slimes are bred and brought to the surface and exposed to sunlight. This causes them to take on an intense green color and become agitated. They are then released into well-tended parkland and hunted from the air or the roadside. Some parks let hunters use packs of hunting dogs. This last is exceedingly cruel for both the slimes and the dogs.



    Hunting slimes with dogs is illegal in several countries.

    Slime petting zoos are common children’s roadside attractions in mining towns. Because the smallest slimes are innocuous, they can be held and petted. Sadly, they are force spawned by slimepunching, wherein adult slimes are placed in a machine and pummeled with pistons or even a handler’s gloved hands. The slimes accumulate damage and eventually split off daughter slimes. Once tourist season is over, the baby slimes are frequently drowned or dropped off a ledge. The resulting slimeballs are then sold to elastics firms.

    The Slime Protection Agency was founded in 2010 to protect slimes from exploitation and promote humane industrial and commercial slimeball harvesting.

    Since then Dupont has developed the first artificial elastic material for making sticky pistons. Slimes remain a curiosity and are still subject to abuses as pets and trophy game mobs.

  • Rule of Lol

    Mark Rosewater told me that it is Harry Potter themed to celebrate the end of the Harry Potter.

  • Krill Suit Cultist

    “Fish” is a famous aggressive archetype in Magic: The Gathering. It’s known for its splashy plays, sea-faring creatures, and transformative fish-liver oil combo sideboard.