Two things happened since last article. MTGO came back, and we had a prerelease. Neither of these was perfect, but both show some signs of progress. Overall, the weekend was not quite optimal. Only the weather was perfect, but I was inside most of the time.
The weekend started on a sour note. I played in a FNM draft. I’m pretty sure I was cheated, although I can’t be 100%. I could be mistaken, but I don’t think so. Yes, I talked to the judge. I was not certain enough to justify a DQ investigation, but we will be keeping our eye on that player for a while. In any case, I was feeling pretty bummed.
At Midnight, the first Shadowmoor pods began. We had 107 players in Madison. Unfortunately, I was not one of them.
At 9am the next morning, a bunch more pods began. I wasn’t playing — I was working on prep for the Public TV Auction. I wasn’t happy. Okay, I was doing something worthwhile, with good people and enjoying myself, but I sure wish I could have scheduled things a bit differently.
I finally got the Auction stuff wrapped up and got to the prerelease about noon. That was too late for the first round of pods, and too early for the second round (only a handful of players, like me, were waiting to play. One draft was in progress, but only one person was signed up for draft #2.)
The one event that was ongoing was open dueling. For $15, you get a random Shadowmoor precon and you play single game matches against other players with other precons. If you play five matches, regardless of the outcome, you get one pack and a prerelease foil.
It was actually a lot of fun. I played six thoroughly enjoyable games in a little over an hour.
Shortly thereafter, I did get into a sealed event. I did not do well. Maybe I misbuilt my deck. Maybe I did not have good cards. I was notably short of creatures — and two of those creatures were Lurebound Scarecrows. I only played one, but still got two-for-oned a couple of times.
Sundays we run one big pod. I was head judge, which is probably the only thing that saved my rating from further damage.
The event was pretty much uneventful. I had a number of questions, but no serious penalties or problems. We were done reasonably early: a plus, because the weather was glorious. It was tough being inside on the first really nice weekend of the year. Still, I didn’t spend the whole tournament looking out the window and sighing. I took time to notice a few cards that should have a big impact on Shadowmoor Limited.
The first is Tatterkite.
For a while, I was keeping track of which cards generated the most questions. This guy was leading most of the day. Yes, he can block Wither creatures all day. Yes, he can be targeted with Scar or Incremental Blight, but nothing much is going to happen. No, you cannot cast Scardale Ritual if Tatterkite is your only creature, just like you can’t cast Scardale Ritual if you control no creatures at all. You must be able to pay the costs.
I mentioned Incremental Blight. This was the other card that caused no end of questions.
Yes, you need to be able to target three separate creatures. You can’t cast it if only two creatures are in play. You cannot hit any single creature twice. You can target your own creature. You can target Tatterkite, but it won’t get a counter. Etc.
Incremental Growth was nice, but not game breaking. This is. Incremental Blight is right up there with Volcanic Wind, Cone of Flame, and Fire Coven as a backbreaking, opponent-destroying effect. Watch out for this card. I watched one player lose a game he had locked up because of it. I was about to call time. The opponent had twelve life and nothing but lands in play. The first player had a 4/3 and a 2/1 beater in play, and then cast an x/2. Incremental Blight cleared the board, and the game went through the five extra turns without a winner.
Incremental Blight may be better than the rare I had in my precon: Din of the Fireherd.
In my precon, Din would typically kill two to four creatures and the same number of lands, but I often died with it in hand because I had not yet hit eight mana. If it got cast, however, it is often a bomb. Incremental Blight does almost as much, and is far easier to cast.
I did see one bomb that can get around both Din and Incremental Blight. Ingrid spotted it, built her deck around it and managed to win packs despite facing opponents with both Din and Blight, round after round. She played the following:
Flourishing Defenses
4G – Enchantment
Uncommon
Whenever a -1/-1 counter is placed on a creature, you may put a 1/1 green Elf Warrior creature token into play.
That card was a complete blow-out all day. -1/-1 counters are everywhere, so this triggers a lot. (If a creature comes into play with a -1/-1 counter, it triggers. Something deals lethal damage via Wither, it triggers. Etc..) It gives your opponent headaches. Suppose I have Flourishing Defense in play. I am attacking with a 3/3 equipped with Blight Sickle (equipped creature has +1/+0 and wither.) Do you take four, or do I get four elves?
Ingrid won her last match. Her opponent had three real bombs in hand — Incremental Blight, Grief Tyrant, and Grim Poppet — but could not play any of them without being overrun by elves.
Early on, I had dismissed this card. Bad mistake.
The set does have some cards that can get around Flourishing Defenses. I don’t just mean enchantment kill, but it does look like the format has enough powerful enchantments to make running Disenchant effects worthwhile. I don’t even mean Firespout, although that also seems fine. I’m thinking of this two-edged sword:
Blowfly Infestation
2B – Enchantment
Uncommon
Whenever a creature is put into a graveyard from play, if it had a -1/-1 counter on it, put a -1/-1 counter on target creature.
This can take out any number of 1/1 elves, provided just one creature with a counter on it dies. However, this is not an optional ability and it can bite you in the ass. I saw a couple players end up Wrathing the board without really intending to. If you are unlucky, this can start a cascade. If you are lucky and careful, you can harness that cascade.
I saw one player send five attackers into five blockers. Some careful blocking and pumps meant all five blockers lived — four at one life each, and the fifth at two life. The attacker then dropped Blowfly Infestation and hit the two life blockers with Puncture Bolt, and the Infestation wiped out the other four.
I also saw it go the other way, when the owner of the Infestation ended up losing most of his own board.
I think you can draft a killer deck around Flourishing Defense and Wither creatures. Building around Blowfly Infestation will be more difficult — but Infestation is a really powerful effect. My first thoughts would be to draft cards like Morselhoarder, Leech Bonder, and maybe even Woeleecher — cards that let you control the number of -1/-1 counters on cards you control and that can gain some benefit from them — really highly. Obviously, something like Grim Poppet would be golden.
The prerelease was pretty good, even though I could not win enough sealed matches. The cheating, if that’s what happened, was bad. That brings us to the ugly. I’m talking, of course, about MTGO 3.0.
It is ugly. Sorry, Wizards. I really try not to dump on your products, since that does hurt the game we love, but I have to say it. I don’t like 3.0.
I’ll start with the good stuff. The program appears solid. I have taken my laptop to work, and left MTGO running on a corner of my desk. The only time I have had the program crash is when I lose my wireless signal, and that is my problem, not the program’s.
Gameplay also appears solid. I have played a few matches, and everything seems to work pretty well. The old engine seems to be intact, and anyone familiar with the older versions should have little trouble with the new one.
The deckbuilder has one very good feature: it recognizes all the cards that are legal in Standard, even copies that were printed in older sets. That means that when I want to build a Standard deck, it shows me that I have four Adarkar Wastes available, even though one of those is a Ninth Edition version and one a Seventh Edition copy. MTGO v2. 5 did not work like that.
On the other hand, the Extended card filter is a bit stranger. I’m in deck construction area, with the Extended filter on, and it is currently showing me that my card pool contains 0 Dragon Masks. I actually own several Dragon Masks, but Dragon Mask is not legal in Extended, so it shows the card, but changes the number.
Interesting.
I also tried building/recreating a Tenth Precon, because someone was looking for a game with those cards. In that case, the deck validator would not approve a matching decklist that used a different version of the card: in other words, you cannot use Ninth Edition Shock in an Eight Edition precon. I’m not sure if that applies to basic lands as well — I was not about to buy the additional cards to find out.
I have another problem with the deck editor: it’s ugly. Here’s a picture of a chunk of the editor:
I have spent a lot of years writing on a variety of monitors displaying various word processing packages. Back in college, I worked Commodore 64 computer driving a brown screen monitor. The word processor was written in machine code, and the computer was completely underpowered. (Commodore 64 got its name because it had 64 kilobytes of memory. Period. Not 64 Gig, not Meg, 64 kilobytes.)
The point is that the display looked similar. It was a step up from Pong, but not that far up.
I have also worked on green screen monitors, B&W monitors, and stared at monitors displaying white text on blue backgrounds (a la early Word Perfect.) Without question, black text on a white background is the easiest to read. Light text on a dark background is tougher, and some combinations just create headaches. The brown on brown isn’t quite in that category, but I’m not too thrilled with it.
Why can’t I change it?
I can change the skins on Firefox or most any Windows application. I can even change the display in my various word processors display in a variety of ways — I can even recreate the old Word Perfect white on blue if I want. Why can’t I modify MTGO’s appearance?
Maybe I can, but I just cannot find the right buttons. For example, here’s a chunk of the MTGO opening screen. Assume you want to play some Standard to practice for PT: Hollywood, what would you click?
Don’t click the giant “Play” button. That takes you to the casual play room. To do any serious playtesting, you will want either the tournament practice room or the 8-man Constructed queues. The “Play” button can’t get you to either of them. You need to click on the small “Menu” icon at the bottom, then make a few more selections to find the right room.
I played for 3-5 hours before I finally found the tournament practice room. In the meantime, I smashed my good decks into some kids’ “all I own” homebrews. None of us had much fun.
Trading is bugged right now. It works, but it can take forever. Dealers are in a world of hurt.
People have reported a bug with Clans — one that basically kicks all the members out of a clan, and makes it impossible for anyone to rejoin.
Chat is
possible,
but the
chat screen
is now
vertical.
This makes
chatting
and reading
a bit of a
pain.
Chat also
scrolls
really fast,
and can
scroll off
before
you can
read it, if
people are
saying much
of anything.
There is a way around this. You can find advice in the forums. Finding the work around without advice, however, is unlikely. If it is documented anywhere other than the user forums, I cannot find that, either.
The “find a game” screen is a mess, and appears to be bugged. Here’s a recent screenshot.
The program does not separate the ongoing games from those looking for players into separate lists. The best you can do is sort by status. However, when you do that, the list keeps changing as status keeps changing. Since the new games appear at the top of the list, and games that fill move down, the position of the game you may want to change keeps moving very rapidly. Very, very rapidly. I was never any good at “whack a mole,” and that is just what joining a game has become.
The games list seems to have a bug. The list has dozens of games that are waiting for players, but have no players at all. I’m guessing that the player who requested the game got no takers and abandoned it, but that the program has not taken the game request down. At the moment — early morning on a weekday — there are over 100 dead game requests filling the table.
I saw a player ask an Adept (Adepts are volunteers trained by Wizards to provide help) why he could not get an answer to his repeated private messages about a problem. The response from Adept_Ponza: “Some Adepts cannot receive PMs because of a bug.”
That about sums it up.
Friday afternoon: Draft Queue
I had MTGO up at work on Friday, watching to see if it was going to crash. I was watching the draft queues when the “free” drafts started. These were initially supposed to be “nix tix / nix product” drafts to the first few comers. The purpose was to test the queue, and numbers were limited. I was lucky enough to see the queues go up, and jumped in.
An Adept explained that the queues were not really “nix tix / nix product.” Instead, Wizards wanted to check that everything worked — meaning you had to supply tix and packs. These would be replaced after the draft.
In any case, I was in the queue. The queue went from two players to eight, then dropped back down. I was not in the draft. It did that four times, and I never drafted. The other queue closed. Then an adept explained that the queue I was in was broken, and closed it. I was not drafting.
Wizards did, indeed, provide two replacement tix and three replacement packs to everyone in the drafts that fired. My draft never fired. It looks like I somehow paid 2 tix and three packs to not participate in a “nix tix / nix product” draft. (Again, I think. Wizards says the tix and product was never paid. I haven’t had a chance to pull up my pre-changeover CSV file to check.)
In any case, drafts now work differently than in 2.5. For the past several years, drafts automatically took the first eight players in the queue. Now they don’t. When a draft fires, it grabs eight players at random from the queue. Wizards says that, if you are in the top eight on the list and are not chosen when the draft fires, you will automatically be chosen the next time that fires. (Could be true, but other parts of that official post were either flat-out wrong or badly out of date.) In any case, that’s not what happened to me — I was in the queue waiting while five drafts fired. The queue no longer shows you your number, so I don’t know whether I was ever in the first eight players.
I haven’t tried drafting since. I’m not ready to trust my tix and packs to the program yet.
Oh, well, we will survive this. Wizards is supposed to release an update on Wednesday. Maybe it will help. In any case, Shadowmoor looks really good — and Limited play was a lot more fun than I thought it might be. Even when I was losing.
PRJ
Suffering as “one million words” on MTGO III