SCG Daily: Ask Pugg

Welcome to another edition of Ask Pugg! Ok, so it’s the first, last, and only edition of Ask Pugg. I won’t tell anybody if you don’t.

I’m literally going to answer every single question posed to me (that was meant to be a part of Ask Pugg). Yep, every single one. If you ever wanted your name in lights (or your name against a light-colored background anyway), you had your chance. Let’s go!

(Warning: I’m suffering from a rather nasty sinus infection or some such right now, so there’s a good chance I’m going to be offensive and blasphemous, and often make no sense whatsoever. I urge you to blame the Sudafed and not myself. Hear that? Whatever you do, don’t eat the delicious cards.)

A. I haven’t checked my real-life ratings for a while, so I might as well do that now. *checks* It seems I’ve got a composite of 1656 and a Limited of 1711. I’ve played no sanctioned Constructed matches that I know of.

(I’ve got nothing to hide, so here’s my DCI page as proof of my rating and proof that I’m not Ted Knutson. Unless I entered some random DCI number, which I’d never, ever do.)

I actually haven’t played anything in real life for about a year, the last being the Champions prerelease. I’m not sure why this is. I know attendance has been down for events across the board lately, which people are largely blaming on Kamigawa block not being all that impressive. I don’t think that’s my reason. I think a lot of it has to do with how I just don’t feel comfortable playing the cardboard game. By hour four of any prerelease or PTQ, I wanna go home.

I was more comfortable with FNM drafts, but in that case, the economic realities of real life drafting hurt. In situations where you win packs, you can’t use the packs to fuel your next draft. When you win store credit, the payout becomes the equivalent of a 3-1-1 draft queue. Simply put, I can draft more on Magic Online for the same amount of money, and I’m a very, very cheap person.

I’ve got no pro points. Yet.

My IQ is anywhere between 130 and 160, depending on which terribly flawed test I’m taking. I’m still awaiting my detailed intelligence profile for which I paid a pretty penny. Incredibly enough, my results dropped twenty points after my credit card went through.

I’ve actually never taken the SATs, but I assume I’d get something like an A minus, B plus. I dunno.

A. I don’t know! I honestly know next to nothing about automobiles. I can change a tire and I can check the oil, but that’s about it.

I know that answer is less than satisfying, and I want to give as complete an answer to all of you who took the time to write in as possible. I will research your question thoroughly, and I will respond in kind in the form of my first Premium article. Look out for that in the next couple of weeks.

A. Very well, thanks.

Favorite format? If you pay any attention at all to my writing, you’d know I’m not much of a Constructed person. Yet I do take an interest now and then. I actually very much enjoyed reading about Standard at the time both Odyssey and Onslaught were legal. Psychatog, Wake, and U/G Madness were all interesting decks to me, and I thought it was awesome that the metagame seemed to change weekly, with Astral Slide, R/G Beats, W/G Beasts, Mono-Black Control and even G/B Cemetery and G/B Nantuko Husk/Caller decks taking shots at the title of Best Deck. Fascinating times.

It’s probably no coincidence that that period marks my re-entry into Magic after a fairly long absence. During the time of Onslaught block, I read nearly every MtG site from top to bottom. Well, except most of the multiplayer/casual stuff. Not my bag.

You’d think, then, that Onslaught would also be my favorite Limited format, but you’d be wrong. I loved Onslaught draft at the time, but Mirrodin block was actually the point where I learned draft could be more about just picking the best cards; it’s about making a deck. Archetypes and synergy weren’t words that really entered my vocabulary until then.

Mirrodin block (and Onslaught) gets quite a bit of criticism as a draft format. As the argument goes, Morph and artifacts make it so that even bad drafters can put together a pile of 23 playable cards and do much better than they have any business of doing. That may be true, but I found that Mirrodin block was really where the best drafters were putting the good and above-average drafters to shame, because they were drafting decks while everybody else was drafting cards. I believe it was none other than Phil Samms who may really have driven home this fundamental principle, as he was having great success with the “Lashdraft” deck back in triple Mirrodin (and he wasn’t afraid of letting people know). I was coming off a run of about ten straight draft losses, and his funky little notions really made me reevaluate everything I was doing. By the end of the block, I was doing quite well for myself.

So I guess my favorite format is MD5. I really liked what Sunburst did to Limited and its interactions with Affinity. I also really liked the way each color had its own distinct interaction with artifacts, something I think Kamigawa block lacks. Every color has Spirits and Arcane spells, Spiritcraft, Splice. While not every color has Soulshift, deck synergies usually boil down to playing as many spirits and arcane spells as you can. The more the better. It’s sort of like Onslaught’s tribes, but there’s only one, and every color’s got it!

I guess I just wish the colors each had a different approach to Spirits, or even that the block had another overarching theme that wasn’t so linear. Shortly after its release, Champions was hailed as one of the best Limited formats in some time, but I personally see it as somewhat of a failure.

A. Speak of the devil! I’m not so sure you want to be suggesting that I’m all that bad, seeing as how I’ve learned so much from you. Here, have some pie.

Q. In a recent 9th Edition sealed tournament on Magic Online, my opponent spent almost the whole of games two and three accusing me of being a lucksack. Considering he drew Loxodon Warhammer in three games of three, I found myself sorely in need of a suitable counter-insult that would not be filtered out by the MtGO obscenity filter. As a clean living family man yourself, could you recommend anything? -Dom (bateleur in t3h legendary SCG forums)

A. Oh, that G0dd*mn obscenity filter. Am I crazy, or are there more blocked words now than there used to be? Some of those terms wouldn’t upset my grandmother, and she gets squeamish at seeing the twin beds on I Love Lucy. I mean, “dammit?” “Sucker?” I know the latter is part of a far harsher phrase, but by itself it’s quite harmless. Why not block the letter C while you’re at it? @ssholes.

As for your particular dilemma, there are plenty of ways to creatively dole out the verbal abuse while remaining in the bounds of Magic Online’s fascist algorithms. (“Fascist” is blocked, while as of this writing “Algorithm” isn’t, giving MODO users free reign to haunt me with memories of the 2000 elections.)

There are many words and phrases that were once considered quite scandalous but barely raise an eyebrow nowadays. For example, in Shakespeare’s time, calling someone a popinjay rapidly boiled the spleen, sinking that person into a deepe, deepe melancholie. If that’s not your bag, you can always go with “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” which is the MODO-safe way of saying “lol ur gay”.

However, my favorite method of irritation has to be using the Magic Online gameplay macros instead of your own words and phrases. You’d be surprised at what you can convey with even this limited vocabulary. When your opponent plays Loxodon Warhammer, counter that with “Nice deck,” the implication being that the rest of his deck sucks. If you’re losing because his deck is way better than yours, wait until he plays one of the lesser cards and say “Nice card.”

Or you can just use them completely out of context. Imagine the following exchange:

rootofallgreevils33 plays activated ability of Umezawa’s Jitte targeting Bile Urchin.

rootofallgreevils33: ggs

GerrardsMom: Give up yet?

rootofallgreevils33: you shouldve blocked my ninja game 1

rootofallgreevils33: just so you know in the future

GerrardsMom: C’mon top deck!

rootofallgreevils33: what lol

GerrardsMom: Hello and good luck.

GerrardsMom has disconnected.

Keep that up, and soon nobody will talk to you again.

A. Ha! Nice name. Isn’t that supposed to be I.P. Freely?

Okay, I like TV. A lot. Used to be I’d watch any old crap that was on, but I think my tastes have matured in the past few years. My favorite comedies are Arrested Development, Scrubs, American Dad and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. (Family Guy hasn’t been the same since it came back, but I still watch it.) On the other side of the coin, I like 24, The Shield, The Sopranos and stuff I only discovered on DVD like Firefly. I’m still a Trekkie at heart, but Enterprise’s fourth season really started to go downhill, and now it’s cancelled. Other shows no longer on that I’ve enjoyed include Futurama, The X-Files, and The Simpsons. (What? The Simpsons is still on the air? Not to me it isn’t. It’s dead to me.)

I also watch far too much G4 (the video game channel) than a 27-year-old, or any human being, should.

A. I like it enough. I only play about once or twice a year, and I’m not very good. Costs too damn much. Also, my back starts killing me around the eighth hole. Draw any parallels to Magic that you wish.

That fuzzy feeling on my fingertips means either my mailbag is empty or I shouldn’t have taken that sixth Sudafed. Join me tomorrow when I dive headfirst into the shallow pool of 9th Edition draft.

Pugg Fuggly

[email protected]

Confidential to David S: Alligators are neither birds nor maxi pads.