ITT: MTG rules nit-pickingFollow

Absolutely. But barring the need to pad a low count deck to some tournament minimum (a point I hadn't considered, but not relevant in his 78 card example), there is absolutely no reason to put an otherwise useless card in your deck which only serves the purpose of allowing you to discard it and draw a different card. You'll accomplish the exact same thing by not having it and thus allowing you to have drawn a different card in the first place.

Also, his particular card choice probably wouldn't have worked anyway. As I said, it's been a long time since I've played, so I could be off on the rules, but IIRC you can't use a targeted effect without having a legal target for the effect. Since he has no creatures, he'd have to rely on the other guy having them out to be ale to use the card and he'd be buffing up the other guy's creature in the process.

Where that card would be useful is either in a deck (with creatures) in which you have some kind of beneficial effect for red creatures, allowing you grant that effect to creatures which would not ordinarily gain it (and get another card). Alternatively, if you have some detrimental effect that only hits red creatures, you could use it to target your opponents creatures for your own benefit.

None of those conditions are present in this deck, so the card should be dropped.



Yes, of course. But what makes top players top players is that they know when to include cards like that in a deck and how to construct the deck so that it takes the most advantage of those sorts of cards. They don't start with a deck that has a lot of useful cards, but a hard time getting the right combo out, and then start putting more cards into their deck to help them draw cards faster. They start out thinking they're going to use card draw options, look at the cards they have available which do that, and then tailor the entire deck to take advantage of the secondary effects on the cards which allow them to draw other cards.


The first rule to building a good deck is "take out everything that doesn't forward your main plan for winning". The second rule is "Take out more cards, cause you still have stuff you don't need". The third rule is... well, you get the point. The very best decks I played against back in the day were so well designed that every card worked with every other card in some way, allowing a good player to make use of them without sitting around waiting turn after turn for just the right card. Card draw strategies negate having to do this, and can have some elegance to them, but can just as often be poorly implemented.

For someone starting out building decks, I'd strongly recommend working on building decks without any sort of card draw or token tricks in them first. Find out what sorts of combinations are successful first and learn how to make them work consistently. Then move on to those other strategies. The lessons you learn by building more straight decks first will help you use the sneakier tricks much much more effectively.

Cestin you keep talking about budget, what u need to do is research when/where your nearest Week-Night-Magic (WNM) events are held and pop along when they do a booster draft night or maybe play for a sympathy vote on a Type II night and you will literally get 100's of commons like lightning Bolt GIVEN too you.

Commons are literally ignored by serious players in terms of value, I mean seriously i have 40 4th edition lightning bolts from back in the day sat in a shoebox, if a get one in a M10 draft i'm going to take it because it's a good card in sealed but i'm going to leave it on a table or give it to a kid who needs it when i de-sleave my deck at the end of the night.

I'm not at the stage where i can do that with Uncommons yet because i've only restarted playing in the last 2 months but most of the people I play WNM with are and have been feeding me Uncommons for the last 8 weeks or so. Basicly Rares are traded and even then junk rares that aren't type II worthy shouldn't be costing you more than $0.75 and would fit in casual decks that you play.

Thank you tarv for the excellent points. I could learn a lot from this forum.

My deckbuilding is being put aside for now - These days I'm busy owning my 21 year old brother at Super Smash Brothers: Brawl and now we're working on getting a LAN going for some StarCraft.

I'll definitely take most (if not all) suggestions and work them into the final list, in order to get this one in working order. My blue control is working well against my opponents so far, I am liking it. Eventually I need to fix my green deck, that thing's a mess.

In the mean time, I'll be starting a thread over in the Hardware forum.

What about the new rules don't you like?

I'm pretty sure you're wrong about the stack change, and maybe the main phase thing as well. If you bolt my priests, it's dead and the effect doesn't go off. What that rule applies to (as it was explained to me), is mostly do deal with how attacking and blocking is done. The stack does not count when assigning blockers; that is, all blockers are assigned at the same time and then things happen before combat damage is dealt... so there's none of that assign blocker -> tap the blocker to do something, then assign a new one crap. I could be completely wrong though.

I loved being able to say "In response.." when I played. The stack makes sense to me, and afaik, has always been around.

I've never quite understood the stack. This will require further investigation. Not going to school tomorrow or Friday, heading off to a Mastodon concert. :P Maybe there'll be a mosh pit for meh to get into.

Anyway, I believe I've finished my red deck, with many changes.


-Sorcery-
Volcanic Hammer 3
Flame Jet 3
Lava Burst 3

9

-Instant-
Shock 3
Barbed Lightning 3
Fiery Temper 3
Needle Drop 3
Blazing Salvo 3
Crushing Pain 3
Staggershock 3
Tarfire 3

24

-Enchantment-
Seal of Fire 3

3

-Land-
Mountain 23
Sandstone Needle 4


27-36

66

40.9% mana

Then The creature is dead and no mana is gained, with or without stack rules revision.

I think someone has been cheating where he's playing.

If that where true then counterspells would be useless because they remove a spell from play in the same way a bolt removes the PoT. and no one would argue that the effect of a spell that has just be counterspelled still resolves.

If memory serves, it didn't exist for Alpha/Beta, but the rules at that point had issues.

Thanks for the input everyone.

Gbaji, as for the tapping for mana thing, tapping lands (and other cards if they say so) produces the effect called a 'mana source', which happens at interrupt speeds. Mana sources happen apart from the stack(instant). This 'interrupt speed' is actually faster than traditional interrupts [counterspells], they coined the term 'mana source' circa......1998~2001.

Edited, May 13th 2010 11:56pm by TWA

Not under present rules.

Under present rules, as long as all the ability does is add mana to your mana pool (and it can't target anything to do so - if it targets, that rules it out from this), it's a "mana ability" and can't be interrupted. See the Comprehensive Rules, rule 605 for specific details.

I like this type of discussion. It's more entertaining when the question is something like "How would I word this keyword's rules text for cards I'm making?" but I'll settle for the normal rules questions.

Woe MTG! I haven't played in so very long. I still have my cards from high school though. I bet my entire deck is legacy cards now. I should go find it and post it.




Edit: wootfound. My black and white angel deck:

Lands (19 cards):
4x Scrubland(revised)
1x Maze of Ith (The Dark)
7x swamp (2x beta, 2x unlimited, 3x revised)
7x Plains (2x alpha, 2x unlimited, 3x revised)

Artifact (1 card):
1x Sol Ring (Revised)

White (13 cards):
1x Balance (revised)
1x Glorious Anthem (7th edition)
2x Honor Guard (7th edition)
3x Angelic Page (7th edition, 2xUrza's Saga)
2x Disenchant (4th edition, Mirage)
4x Serra Angel (Revised)

Black (27 cards):
1x Demonic Tutor (Revised)
4x Fatal Blow (Weatherlight)
4x Dark Ritual (Revised)
2x Sorceress Queen (Revised, 4th Edition)
2x Ritual of the Machine (Alliances)
2x Bad Moon (4th edition, my friend's brother I traded one from wrote 'E.W.' on one of them)
4x Nether Shadow (3x revised, 4th edition)
4x Terror (Revised)
4x Fallen Angel (Legends)


Honestly, the deck is different than I remember it. I could swear I had breeding pits in it for the fallen angels to eat. Also, for some reason my Sword of the Ages isn't in it anymore, though I still have it in my box. Breeding pits for a pile of thralls, feed them to the fallen angels, sword for a bajillion damage.

Our group was fairly inbred when it came to card trading, and generally you knew who had the rare cards from week to week. The Sword of the Ages my cousin actually brought it, he had gone to the card shop on a trip and his parents let him get it. I eventually way down the line trade it from it, I'm sure for an arm and a leg.

I remember my cousin had a very evil library burn/control deck with icy manipulators and millstones and such. My other friend had a blue deck. I never played blue, it just seemed rude. I was more into the smash face with wicked creatures type decks.

Edited, May 14th 2010 10:16pm by digitalcraft