Patriot Games

Tuesday 22 January 2013

A Short Break

Hello there.  The blog is taking a short break for the next two weeks while pre-release, release and GP London happen.  I will be back with a GP report on Monday 11th February 2013.

Thank you for all the kind messages about the blog and telling me you actually read it, I do see the page counter going up (currently over 5,000 hits since July 2012) so I know someone is out there looking at this.  Enjoy the first few weeks of Gatecrash even if the set looks terrible.

All the best.

Richard

Ok so this card is really good - but most of them are pants!


Friday 18 January 2013

Let's talk about bullying...

I'll keep this very brief.  This is not the blog I had intended, unfortunately as circumstances have overtaken it, I doubt that blog will ever appear.  I posted a blog on Monday which seems to have caused some controversy.  This was not actually my intention.  I feel that the original blog was badly worded and I did not take into consideration everyone's feelings on the subject.  What I should have written was something like this;

"So we are adding draft to the formats for FNM Relax as people seem to want it.  As 95% of the players at Relax have no experience or concept of the subtleties of drafting I feel that it would be inappropriate for experienced drafters to take part in this initially while people get to grips with it.  We will review this after the first three months and look to open the drafts to everyone."

I'm sure this would not have caused as much debate, and for that I apologise.

However, the resulting conversation led to someone posting a link comparing me to Cartman from South Park.  I found this very insulting and upsetting.  I know I am fat and I really don't need people to point at me and laugh about the fact.  There is no legislation preventing people from calling you names or making comments about you when you are fat but it is still a form of bullying and I feel was really not deserved in this case - ironically when I was trying to ensure that people that this was exactly what didn't happen to people in a relax draft.  By the way this does not mean I am saying all Magic Players that are not casual are bullies, dick heads or anything of the sort.  In fact it has made me think long and hard about some of the conversations myself and Callum have had recently and I am very sorry if I have caused him any upset.

As a result of this combined with other factors from my job and personal life my mental health has suffered and my self confidence has taken a severe blow.  I will not be putting up any more blogs or indulging in any magic related activity on the facebook  group.  I am already committed to pre-release and GP London but I will be considering my options post GP London.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Richard Tinsley 

Monday 14 January 2013

The Times they are a changin

Thanks to Bob Dylan for the title of today's blog.  Although the album came out in 1964 some 2 years before even I was born, my feeling towards Bob Dylan are a metaphor to the content of this blog.  Here is a performer who has grown over his long career and adjusted with the changing times.


The Legendary Mr Bob Dylan.


FNM Relax has been going since July 2012 and has tried to cater for the many diverse tastes of Magic players out there.  It has never been the place to play the latest net deck and has tried to maintain an atmosphere of friendly competition as well as being somewhere that nurtures new players and helps to make them understand the game in more depth without feeling like they have just been physically assaulted.

We seem to have developed some strong players in that time; Mark Smith, James Brooks and Micheal Shillitoe to name but three.  However, in order to give people the best experience I feel it is very important to listen to feedback and where possible act on it.  To this end we have changed the formats slightly with the start of the New Year to make things more fun for people and encourage participation.

Some cards are just too good...

So with effect from 1st February 2013 we are going to make even more changes.  At present we have an 8 week cycle of formats which includes Standard, 2 Headed Giant, Legacy, Pauper and Modern.  We have one of these formats that just doesn't really work in the grand scheme of FNM Relax despite our best efforts and that is Legacy.  There is just no such thing as "casual" Legacy at the end of the day, or if there is those who have actual Legacy cards will win against a casual Legacy deck every time.  There are also other formats which people would like to play more of like Standard and 2 Headed Giant.

Too busted for casual...

On top of this several Relax players have turned up for drafts recently (and I hope a whole bunch of them will do so on release weekend the 2-3 February 2013) and really enjoyed them.  So Mark Smith has managed to do what I couldn't and come up with a 12 week cycle of formats to give people what they want and it looks like this;

  • Standard.
  • Pauper.
  • Draft.
  • Modern.
  • Standard.
  • Two Headed Giant.
  • Draft.
  • Pauper.
  • Standard.
  • Two Headed Giant.
  • Draft.
  • Modern.
I would normally, at this point, apologise for mucking around with the formats and say sorry for the list that is up on the Patriot web site not being right, except that the list has not been changed to the current formats so it is not going to make much of a difference!

Stoneforge Mystic -  broken even if it is in Chinese.

Drafts in Relax will be £10 with everyone getting a booster in prize support.  A lot of FNM Relaxers tend to buy boosters afterwards anyway so hopefully the additional price for playing draft will no effect people adversely, and £10 for 4 boosters is pretty sweet really.  However, there is a caveat to draft in Relax; draft is a whole different set of skills (Mike Radford may well have written a couple of excellent blogs about it which can be found here and here).  As a result anyone who could be considered "Elite" players (sorry Joe Alexander that includes you) will be banned from Relax drafts.  The only exception to that is me as I am running the damn thing!  I shall try to play nice...honest.

A copy of Clique without an Eduardo joke...

So to look at the formats by date from here to rotation (when "Friends" comes out) here is what it looks like:

01 February 2013
Standard.
08 February 2013
Pauper.
15 February 2013
Draft.
22 February 2013
Modern.
01 March 2013
Standard.
08 March 2013
Two Headed Giant.
15 March 2013
Draft.
22 March 2013
Pauper.
29 March 2013
Standard.
05 April 2013
Two Headed Giant.
12 April 2013
Draft.
19 April 2013
Modern.
26 April 2013
Standard.
03 May 2013
Pauper.
10 May 2013
Draft.
17 May 2013
Modern.
24 May 2013
Standard.
31 May 2013
Two Headed Giant.
07 June 2013
Draft.
14 June 2013
Pauper.
21 June 2013
Standard.
28 June 2013
Two Headed Giant.
05 July 2013
Draft.
12 July 2013
Modern.
19 July 2013
Standard.
26 July 2013
Pauper.
02 August 2013
Draft.
09 August 2013
Modern.
16 August 2013
Standard.
23 August 2013
Two Headed Giant.
30 August 2013
Draft.
06 September 2013
Pauper.
13 September 2013
Standard.
20 September 2013
Two Headed Giant.
27 September 2013
Draft.
04 October 2013
Modern.

I have even colour-coded it which may help.  That means this Friday is the last ever FNM Relax Legacy event, if you haven't tried it yet give it a go it is great to play so many amazing cards - it actually makes you smile when you see your hand!  Oh for those that have not yet guessed all of the card images I have used this week are in my deck (even the Chinese Stone Forge)!  Have a good week and be well I will be back on Friday with the Magic version of new year resolutions.


Friday 11 January 2013

If you go down to the Don today...


So a change of plans today.  Firstly I'd like to congratulate the following for qualifying for this Octobers Invitational last weekend;

Steve McAleer
Joe Alexander
John Kay
Chris Parks
Michael Shillitoe
Alistair Kennedy
Andrew Munro

They join the 17 others already qualified.  There will be more qualifiers between now and October but more on those after Gatecrash comes out.  Today the block is brought to you by one of those already qualified, the master of Legacy Owen Debenham.  Here is Owen's take on what to expect if you want to win the SCG Legacy Invitational this Sunday.

If you're going to the Star City Games Legacy Invitational Qualifier on the 13th then you'll need a Legacy deck. When you're making a deck you need to figure out what you want your deck to beat, because as much as you want to beat everything, in a format as wide as Legacy you won't be able to. Once you've worked out what you need to beat you have to find out how to do it. I'm going to look at some of the more common effects in Legacy and how best to combat them.

Here is a list of the cards you are going to have to take into consideration if you want to win and not just hand over your hard earned money to Meta Games for no apparent reason other than them getting richer.

Things to beat:
Stifle/Wasteland/Rishadan Port/Sinkhole
Spell Pierce/Daze/Flusterstorm
Hymn/Thoughtseize/Cabal Therapy/Inquisition/Duress
Deathrite Shaman/Rest in Peace
Terminus/Deed/Verdict/Moat
Swords/Abrupt Decay/Liliana/Innocent Blood/Karakas
Engineered Plague/Perish/Dread of Night
Bob/Sylvan Library/Jace
Thalia/Teeg
Stoneforge/anything
Counterbalance/Top
Tendrils/Show and Tell/Glimpse of Nature
Dredge/Belcher/Lava Spike
Aether Vial/Cavern/Abrupt Decay
Delver/Goyf/Tombstalker/Mongoose/Clique


Mana Denial

Legacy players are often greedy with how many lands they play. Other players take advantage of this by playing cards like Wasteland, Rishadan Port and Stifle. Not being able to play your spells is one of the least fun ways to lose so you should probably try to avoid it There are two important things to remember when building your deck to beat these effects; one is not to play too many expensive spells - often the same decks will be playing Daze/Spell Pierce to abuse the fact that they constrain you on mana. The other is to just play more lands. Often people will play a few basics and think they've solved the problem, but the best response to people disrupting your mana is to simply play more sources.



Hand Disruption

Legacy players love playing cards that let them tear your hand apart. Turn 1 Thoughtseize, turn 2 Hymn to Tourach is a common play. Generally the way to beat discard is to either just draw more cards; them one-for-oneing you over and over is much less impressive when you've had a Dark Confidant or a Sylvan Library in play the whole time. It's also important that if your deck relies on a few important cards, like most combo decks, that you play as many ways as possible of finding additional copies after one has been discarded. You'll usually see combo decks running the full 4 Brainstorm, 4 Ponder, 4 Preordain for exactly this purpose. Another thing worth noting is that Stoneforge Mystic is particularly vulnerable to discard the turn after you cast it - if you're planning on playing Stoneblade it might be worth running a second Batterskull as back up.



Graveyard Hate

Graveyard hate has always been present in Legacy - no one wants to lose to Dredge after all - but Return to Ravnica contained Deathrite Shaman, now one of the most common maindeck cards. Whilst Deathrite Shaman isn't going to remove your entire graveyard it can make it difficult to resolve your reanimation spell, and it will mean that when you draw a Knight of the Reliquary later in the game it won't automatically be a 10/10 any more. Another card in Return to Ravnica is Rest in Peace. This card doesn't see much main deck play but is a common sideboard card in white decks, and when resolved completely shuts off any graveyard based interaction. With Leyline of the Void, Relic of Progenitus, Grafdigger's Cage and Tormod's Crypt all being played it's rare to find any deck without some amount of graveyard hate in the 75, yet with Deathrite Shaman being so popular the full graveyard 'sweepers' have somewhat fallen out of favour.



Removal

Removal is played in every format; if people are playing men other people will be wanting to kill them but in Legacy you have access to the best removal ever printed. Abrupt Decay is probably the most common piece of spot removal at the moment, but Swords to Plowshares, Liliana and Karakas can also deal with some of the harder to kill creatures. If you play Standard you'll know about how powerful a miracled Terminus can be but in Legacy that card works entirely differently. The decks playing Terminus in Legacy are also playing Sensei's Divining Top and Brainstorm, allowing them to miracle Terminus pretty much at will. If you're playing creatures you need to be prepared to rebuild after they all die at instant speed for a single white mana. Depending on the kind of creatures you're playing you might see Engineered Plague, Perish or Dread of Night out of sideboards.



Unfair Things

Simian Spirit Guide, Rite of Flame, Rite of Flame, Goblin Charbelcher, Lion's Eye Diamond, kill you. There are a lot of decks trying to do unfair things in legacy, sometimes as early as turn one. You could be facing Show and Tell for Griselbrand or Emrakul, Ad Nauseum into rituals and Tendrils of Agony, Glimpse of Nature followed by absurd numbers of Elves amongst other things. There are too many combo decks to have specific hate for all of them but there are cards which are good against a lot of them. Many combo decks rely on resolving a single key spell which makes cheap counterspells like Spell Pierce good. They'll often have their own counterspells, or discard to take yours, so it can be better to be proactive with discard or 'hate bears' like Thalia, Gaddock Teeg or Ethersworn Canonist. Almost all combo decks will have ways of recovering from your hate so it's important that either you're able to completely lock them out with something like Counterbalance or Trinisphere, or you close the game out in a reasonable amount of time.



If you have the cards or can borrow them you should really consider going to Doncaster this Sunday to play Legacy. It's easily the most diverse and interesting format with far too many powerful interactions for me to talk about here. No other format will have people going into the tournament aiming to win one turn one with others planning on winning on turn twenty (if their opponents don't concede from boredom before then).


Thanks Owen that was, as expected a great insight into the meta of Legacy.  I will be back on Monday with a lot of information about changes in FNM Relax following the release of Gatecrash.  Until then play a lot of cards and good luck to all those going to Doncaster this weekend I hope it is worth the £30 for you.

Monday 7 January 2013

2012 - The Magic Year in Review...

So, Christmas and New Year are over, I started to write this blog at the end of 2012 and then started playing on my Xmas present from Rob - Minecraft on the 360, and that was that.  The world didn't end on the 21st December and so we have a whole lot of Magic to look forward too.  As it will be New Years Eve when this goes live on the Internet it seemed only right to jump on the ubiquitous band wagon and do one of those "Review of the Year" things that they love to do rather than make new TV programs.  

Firstly lets have a look at the year that was on a monthly basis;

January

Standard was a tale of two decks (what a surprise) with UW Delver and Wolf Run Ramp.  People were pondering flipping their Delvers and Thrun the Last Troll was waving a bunch of burning swords around.  January also saw the Pre-Release of Dark Ascension the second set in the Innistrad block.  Sadly there were too few outstanding cards to follow on effectively from the monster that was Innistrad.

*Sigh* It had to be didn't it...

February

The release of Dark Ascension was both frustrating and disappointing.  What had been one of the best limited environments ever suddenly had one less good booster in it and the experience became worse not better.  At Pro-Tour Dark Ascension Brian Kibler faced John Finkel in an epic encounter.  Sadly John Finkel proved that no one blocks at Pro Tour and Kibler had triple Galvanic Blast for the win (yes really).  Meanwhile, Zombies started eating brains in standard.

One of the other things from Pro Tour was how good is this guy!

March

Rumour was rife in March with a new banned and restricted list due out.  Delver was too powerful, Snapcaster was going to be banned, Vapor Snag was going to be banned etc.  In the end they banned Lingering Souls and Intangible Virtue in block constructed.  Everyone said "Oh yeah, that makes sense".  


Suddenly every other word out of players mouth was "Tempo"

Would have been the biggest anti-climax ever, but then we had...

April

We had been told earlier in the year that we would no longer get promos or support for release weekend but would rather have a Release FNM Promo.  We were also told that we would have a new and unique addition to future pre-releases to offset this loss.  So we got to Avacyn Restored - a meh set if ever there was one, with a few stand out cards (Bonfire of the Damned, Terminus, Cavern of Souls) but not much else.  Pre-release was centred around opening the Helvault to claim its contents!  This was a fantastic piece of marketing, that with just a little more care and attention to the contents would have been a game changer.  Sadly as I predicted (smug mode on) the only thing it held was disappointment.  Wizards consider this a triumph as they got loads of people to pre-release and not many people complained about it!


I keep this at home, as a reminder of why we can't have nice things...

April would have been a massive let down all over had we not also had the news that the October set would be called "Return to Ravnica" - nice save WotC!

May

We had another Pro-Tour which was block constructed and won by Alexander Hayne with a highly tricky and technical miracles deck...

Lucky top decking seemed to be the flavour of the month and RUW miracles wasn't a thing unless your name was Rob Tinsley.  We had some Magic World Cup qualifiers - these didn't make up for not having any Nationals any more.


Can you deal with my mad top decking skillz?
June

June saw the latest instalment of the highly popular Duels of the planeswalkers on Xbox, PS3 and  steam for PC.  The promos were from M13 and came in a mini-booster with some other cards from the new core set.  Duels also featured planechase for the first time.  This was the first year that I didn't buy it on Xbox 360 and Steam (the PC promo was Serra avatar).  This was the month we also got a new set of planechase decks.  Sadly by this point I found the whole game about as enjoyable as having hot needles inserted into your nether regions and decided to give it all a break till M13 came out in July.

Planechase complete with Bloodbraid Elf and frickin' Ninjas!
  July

M13 and FNM Relax.  This was a good time to be playing MTG.  A new slightly down powered core set with some great cards - Omniscience, Thragtusk, Far Seek, Tormod's Crypt etc.  We also instigated this blog and FNM Relax - an alternative FNM for those whole didn't want to play like they were at Pro Tour all the time and finish early enough to go to the pub.  That seems to have turned out quite well so far - but more on the future of FNM Relax on Friday (spoiler alert)!  On a personal note I also won Pre-release for the first time which was pretty sweet.


Combine with tokens and Kill You!


August


We got to see our first official Returm to Ravnica card in Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord.  People still maintained that Shock Lands would not be back in the set - boy how dumb do they look now!  It was announced that Pro Tour is coming to Ireland in 2013 - no wonder Rich Fuller keeps going to PTQs.


We also had announcements for Commander's Arsenal (I'm still going what the hell on this one) and we had Zombies Rising to tier one.  Another nice addition to the whole affair was Planeswalker points achivements.  Every Xbox owner will tell you we love achievements!

Getting there in Zombies.

September


Was all about Return to Ravnica.  Sweet shock lands and cracking cards like Abrupt Decay, Sphinx's Revelation and others.  The guild packs were flavourful and fun, enhancing the pre-release experience unlike the dreaded Helvault.  People had fun and FNM Relax got more players.  Delver also had its last hoorah as the imminent depature of Ponder and Vapor Snag spelt its doom.  I don't think many tears were shed as Scars block went bye bye to make way for Ravnica (part 2).


Oh they also unbanned Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle in Modern, cause that is a fun deck to play in a format.


Did we really ever need to see this monstrosity again?

October


Ravnica is on the shelves and Delver dies for lack of Tempo!  Everyone is very keen and no one really notices that Return to Ravnica is great for value but overall is a bit lacklustre.  We also started a new era in Sheffield MTG with the first Patriot Sheffield Invitational tournament and the creation of the Steel City Patriots from the top 6 at the invitational.

How good are these cards?

November

Undoubtably the best part of a great month in Magic was the Sheffield PTQ, not just a PTQ but the Carlsberg of PTQs.  Great turn out, top side events and a Sheffield local in the  final.  Thanks to Nick for doing the results table without a hitch, I had to say that as he is sitting next to me right now... (LOL)

Almost an auto win in limited.

December

Sadly we don't get another of the world's best PTQs in Sheffield but Manchester still have their PTQ that they have every season.  Thank god for Manchester the Gathering or is it Wizards of the Manc?  December ends with the first official spoilers from Gatecrash the follow up set for the Return to Ravnica block.

Sorry for the gap in blogs this was due to me needing a break over Christmas and New Year and then falling prey to MInecraft - please see my Pyramids below.  If I can keep off Minecraft for the week I will be back on Friday with more.  Don't forget this Friday it is the debut of "Proper" Pauper where any common goes except Frantic Search and Cranial Plating.