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[RexMundi]

Mini story time. Every year my family goes camping with mother's side of family, and recently father's dad has come to. point being, uncle plus dad plus kids means lots of MTG. I've no idea the current meta or anything like that but..

This trip was dominated by 2 cards. Pox and Land tax (in 2 different decks)
Any ideas for fun decks based of those? My mind is also churning evil howling mine decks

[Bauglir]

There's a deck that uses both in here, maybe that'll do the job.

[RexMundi]

The first two cards listed are land tax and scroll rack.
Mmmm, I already like this, now just to find the cards (or more likely cheep land to proxy)

[miauw62]

Oh hey didnt even know we HAD a Magic thread.

[Leafsnail]

Gosh, they are pushing Gideon pretty hard in Origins.

For the record:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Flips into
(sorry for the insanely huge images)

Sounds fun in a red/white token deck, you could flip him on turn 3 pretty consistently.  There is an issue with cards like this though - monowhite aggro hasn't been good for a long time, and it's hard to splash a 1 mana creature because you need an untapped white land in your opening hand for it to work.  Other seemingly insane 2/1s for W have seen no play.

[Criptfeind]

I'm not sure if I should have made a new thread for this or not, since it's sorta a new game and sorta not, but whatever. I've never really played magic before. Mostly because it's always seemed to expensive to me. However, tomorrow Magic Duels Origins. Magics answer to hearthstones wild success in the digital market. (Although I couldn't find any actual numbers to compare to, the general consensus is that magics clients thus far have sucked.) A slick new client that they intend to replace their yearly game, a living platform to be updated for the next 39 thousand years. And it's free to play!

So, even though it's already released on the idevices I don't have that concrete information as of yet, but from what I've heard, I'm getting a bit hype. It seems to have a quick and proper interface, which is a pretty big deal, although I'm not sure how they are going to handle instants and a turn timer yet. Ether way, it's going to be A LOT better then the old 20XX games. The business model is based around gold coins, you earn them from playing the game and going though their little story mode, and thus far you can spend them on packs (possibly other things to come? Maybe!). You can't buy custom numbers of packs, but you do get a discount for buying them in larger bundles. Even though they do the incredibly cheesy thing where they sell gold coins and packs at odd numbers so you end up with like $40 worth of coins when you want to buy the $35 worth of packs, I was struck how quickly it seems you can earn packs. I don't know if there is a daily limit on gold earned, but from what I can see packs cost 150 gold, and you have daily quests ala hearthstone (I'm going to assume they have the same rewards as hearthstone, although all I can confirm right now is 40 gold quests) but then you win 20 gold with every win! Or even 15 if you're playing against the AI. That's obviously way way way more relative to pack cost then you get in hearthstone... Although the fact that you get so much gold for beating the AI makes me think that's going to be the quickest way to grind gold probably, which strikes me as odd. You also have weekly quests where everyone playing the game contributes to the overall progress. Which is prettty cool.

From what I've been able to see thus far though, this generosity with money might stem from from there being no equivalent to the card crafting system in hearthstone, which, since you obviously can't trade cards, brings up the question of what your excess copies of cards do. I've heard that possibly you can't actually pull copies of cards you're already full on... Which would be pretty amazing if true, although it'd mean for a bit you'd have no way to make the decks you need, making a complete collection seems like it'd be really easy that way... Which is sorta why I don't quite believe it yet. Ether way I've heard a number of "80" packs being roughly the number of packs you need to open to complete your collection, but I have no idea if that's true or not (if you actually can't pull duplicates that number does make sense.) but anyone who's played hearthstone knows that number of packs is just a drop in the bucket. I've been thinking, looking at all the numbers, a fairly casual FTP player might be able to make that much gold in a little over two months... Which does line up with magics "Every three months expansion"... So, if they decided that FTP players from the start should have fairly easy access to every card, these numbers actually do all seem to line up. That is sorta exciting, and also why I don't believe that they are all correct. But we'll have to see.

All in all, an exciting new entry to the digital card game space in a way that looks like it might beat hearthstone on the business model front. It'll almost certainly beat hearthstone on the like, complexity front, I don't think anyone's ever though of hearthstone as a serious or possibly even good card game next to magic (on the other hand I've not played magic, so maybe I shouldn't smack talk...). So we'll have to see how it actually works out as a game! If it's smooth and fun to play it seems like it's poised to beat hearthstone in every way. So, much excitement.

[Trapezohedron]

afaik the metagame of magic is more slower but tactical and hearthstone is speedier but still complex

but if so, then finally the series has received the digital game it deserves

#hype

[RedWarrior0]

Just note that it's not quite the same as the physical card game, since it appears that they're keeping the limits on cards by rarity (4 copies of commons, 3 copies of uncommons, 2 copies of rares, 1 copy of mythics) and also the card pool is significantly smaller. It's certainly a step in the right direction, but I'm hesitant.

[Criptfeind]

Yeah. I figure the limited card pool is so that newcomers are not overwhelmed, and my understanding is that magic cycles out old cards anyway via formats, so in a few years I would expect the game to be about caught up (although maybe I'm misunderstanding). But I do find the limit a strange change. Does anyone have any idea why they did that?

[RedWarrior0]

Yeah. I figure the limited card pool is so that newcomers are not overwhelmed, and my understanding is that magic cycles out old cards anyway via formats, so in a few years I would expect the game to be about caught up (although maybe I'm misunderstanding). But I do find the limit a strange change. Does anyone have any idea why they did that?

Well, for formats, there's Standard, which is the one that cycles, and then Modern, Legacy, Vintage, and a whole host of other formats that don't. Most of these formats are probably unlikely to get official support through duels because of the whole card limits thing, though there might be a possibility for mods to open new doors.

The card limits thing was part of last year's game (which was the first to allow actual deck building from the ground up) for some reason that probably has to do with something like the feel of the game.

Don't get me wrong, the Duels series has always been a great tool for learning the game, I just don't think Duels: Origins will ever be a replacement for MTGO or other, less official, offerings.

[Culise]

I had no idea this game existed before this post, but at a guess, two things come to mind.  The first is "Don't overwhelm the new blood." Criptfeind's pointed this out already. The second is to limit card interactions and avoid having to code everything before release. Alright, hilarity like Opalescence/Humility combos aside, there are potential coding issues in older cards that would take time to design for, and they probably wanted to get this game out this century.  As noted, as the game takes off, they can always go back and code in features like banding, but for now, most players don't play cards that old in either case.

And if it doesn't take off?  Well, at least they can reassure themselves by the fact that they didn't waste resources coding for stuff that was never going to be used, much less show a profit. 

[Leafsnail]

afaik the metagame of magic is more slower but tactical and hearthstone is speedier but still complex

That seems like a really weird generalization.  When you get to the older Magic formats there are plenty of decks that can do infinity damage on turn 4 or slam the best creature in the game on turn 2.  Standard is slow at the moment but aggro decks can exist and they're often faster than they are in Hearthstone.  I assume Duels contains no potential for unfair combos though.

[sambojin]

I know DotP 2015 had an infinite turns combo that they let through (forcesc2strategy has a vod of him playing it on YouTube), so there's no "rule" against that sort of stuff.

Archeomancer, Flickerwind and Time Walk? Something along those lines. It wasn't quick to get into place, but it was there.

[RedWarrior0]

I know DotP 2015 had an infinite turns combo that they let through (forcesc2strategy has a vod of him playing it on YouTube), so there's no "rule" against that sort of stuff.

Archeomancer, Flickerwind and Time Walk? Something along those lines. It wasn't quick to get into place, but it was there.

Archeomancer, Time Warp, and Species Gorger. And three-card combos that require consistently having ten mana available aren't the sort that they worry about. They worry about things like Splinter Twin + Deceiver Exarch, or Storm decks.

[JoshuaFH]

SO, EH, THERE'S A FREE TO PLAY MAGIC GAME???

http://store.steampowered.com/app/316010/

I haven't gotten a chance to play it, but my initial research seems to think it's too good to be true: it's free, it has planeswalker cards, it maintains the high graphic fidelity of playing a card game on a table, you still have full deckbuilding, we get 2-headed giant back, it promises to be the definitive version (so no more sequalitis bullshit) and just be updated constantly in the future, and most importantly, no microtransactions required. You can unlock all cards and stuff just from playing.

Now, how FAST you can do that is suspect, since there's a pay-to-get cards option to speed the process along... but I'm extremely interested in this. It looks cool and I intend to play it to find out. It's been a while since I've enjoyed MTG.