wickeddarkman

In case you don't know, your deck format is known as 93/94

Here's one of my own decks.

I often forget the buy up chain of wotc.
But at some point hasbro bought them, and disney brought hasbro, and d&d got bought before disney entered the scene.

I think the my little pony move is about making magic more accessible for girls which are a so far unexplored player base.

There was a time in magic where I've seen and heard enough about girls to take and interest in how girls could warp the meta in terms of deck favourites.

And here's the deal, the goth environment dragged a lot more girls into the game, so the better marketing angle will be goth and emo, and when looking at it that way, crimson vow and kamigawa neon dynasty will likely bring the goth and the emo types to the game.

I personally love the guts it takes for someone to dress up vampire style and drag the girl/boyfriend to a tournament in full cosplay, with bloddy eye lenses an black fingernails.

A group of goth people entered my play area around the years where omnitell was popular.

Getting more girls into the game is a solid marketing move, and frankly, I like having them at tournaments, as well as the goths and the emos.

The whole zendikar thing with vampires trying to strike deals with older gods is lovecraftian which does appeal to the goth/emo universe and was likely why they started appearing in my game area.

It's part of the fae mythology, and dates back to Saxon druid culture if I remember it right.
The hunt is basically part of a fertility ritual, but the mythology became deeply tied to the fae, and later to witchcraft as Christian's mistook the horned one (the huntmaster, who wore an antler) as the devil.

Queldorei:
You can always like his deck which will put those decks on top for about a day.
You can also refer to him in your own posts, creating links to some of his work.

Interesting.
I haven't followed arena so much these days as I'm testing a lot of my own stuff.
I'll make sure to view it a little if I get the time.
I do have a longer dream about one day bringing paper and online closer by translation tools of a statistical kind, and alchemy will stand in my way :)

Werewolf did get mentioned by cgb and arjuna, and both cgb and crokeyz used one in their battle of the titans against each other, so it must have something going for it. Ofcourse they were trying to metagame each other, so that might have been a factor.

Is the alchemy meta starting to diversify ?

Heh, alchemy lists are not to be trusted outside its format.

It was fun to see how content creators went yay, over a format with basically dragons and clerics being played.

Magic is difficult because it's a game of imperfect information, alchemy is a level up in imperfect information, so it will not be an easy format at all.

Ordinary magic has been fixed based on imperfect understanding of the meta when it recieved fixes, so believing that alchemy is "more" fixable is a laugh, they will only understand it less themselves. It will be much more complex to fix than ordinary magic, and we all know how that's going to play out.

Nah, alchemy is a research station for player behaviour.

With some luck they will use the data to fix ordinary magic, as they could run early pre releases on alchemy and fix problems for paper before releases.

In the past, or is it seeing a revival ?

Saw the video and is almost speechless.
I can only conclude that mtgonline is supporting the most expensive decks.

It takes metal balls to battle with metal tits.

No problem.

I guess the paths are to remove the relic warder ?

You will also be vulnerable to cards like chalice of the void, engineered explosives and ratchet bomb.
So something that prevents counters to be put on artifacts if there's such a card out there.

A classic will be apostle's blessing as it protects either a creature or an artifact.

Looks as if it will be a competitive prototype once the owner gets the right cards.
So budget is based on owner.

8 cards fetches the right equipment
5 cards equip the chosen equipment

It's a blend abilities where the end goal is getting trample and double strike on the board.

8 cards protect the combo.

Not a bad idea.

Yeah, I see your deckcount, 644 :)
I think we have about 4 other budgeteers hanging around regularly.
We also got some trolls around who spam continuously, so the stuff we build is only visible for a brief period of time.

So your best chance of being seen is by connecting a little with those other guys.

I saw that you got bothered by one back in 2006 or something, which might explain why you've kept your posts to yourself for a long time.

The trolls are part of a team of thieves, and one of the things they try to chase away are budget players because they want this place filled with rich kids who will be easy victims.

They've been very active these last 2 years.

But try to reach out to these other budgeteers, they are real fighters, so you might learn something new.

Welcome back.

There's a number of people in here who produces budget beginner material.
I'd like to think that all of you could somehow collaborate, as you'd all cover more ground.

You actually don't need to collect.
Buy booster boxes and simply wait.
After three years sell it, buy many more booster boxes and wait three more years.
Best stock market ever.
Someone's probably calculated the optimal time rate to sell at. If done carefully you more than double your income, but you have to be prepared for the wait of it.
It's a lot easier to sell booster boxes like this than individual cards, so I'm going to slowly convert my collection like this.

In a17 years wait you get 13 times of what you invested. But you'll be 17 years older.

I've just seen crokeyz vs cgb.

Quite a battle.

Here's what I think is the safe bet.
Branching out is a relatively new thing in economics, so only time will tell if it turns out to be a safe model.

What IS known is that when a company has grown to a certain size, it sort of starts rotting from the inside and if it starts burning money on grandeur, it will be the start of its downfall.

This has been the lessons from bureaucracy and large kingdoms of the past, and was described as way back as in Parkinson's law.

Hasbro/wotc is burning lots of money now by buying into algorithmic research.

All of the virtual marketing machine is a tool for marketing control, as machine learning will reveal consumer behaviour.

Take a look at kamigawa, neon dynasty.
They're learning that collectors can be coaxed into buying more by diversifying the art.

In this new set you can get one creature with 5 alternative versions of art, where the only thing altered is the color of some background flames.

The set name, neon dynasty hints at this marketing style, you will be able to collect at least 5 versions of the same deck if it's a neon dynasty deck.

Your deck can be assembled in your favourite color style now.

Alchemy is also a pretty revealing set name, as the goal of alchemists was to make gold of lesser substances.

All of this hints at a serious bunch of money being poured into a number of projects, even d&d, so hasbro/wotc is at an expansionist phase, and all empires expand before they drown in intern bureaucratic fights before dissolving.

What I'm getting at is that at some point the company will shift its goal and forget what the real money maker was, which is support of the game.

This means they will eventually go down, and from there card prices will drop as fans abandon the game.

However, smart collectors know that over time the cards will become much more valuable, and that may revive the game one day, making it retro.

The story here is to follow the real value, the physical cards, because virtual economy is too new to the arena of marketing to know if it doesn't suddenly collapse in on itself like all other kingdoms of the past.

You should support the physical sets as they will likely be the safer bet when seen on a larger timescale.

Yeah, economy can be harsh.
Perhaps you could exploit the divide.
There will be a segment of paper only viewers, that will need to follow something new, when the "big guns" are going for alchemy.

Alchemy is basically a new wrapping for the same game. It will end up the same way as morp's
It will get continuous fixes and people will come and go just like it's always been.

A game like magic can never be fixed.

I think one of the real reasons why rogue mill became such a success is because of the deathtouch on thieves' guild enforcer. It sits there, mills and deals with the large attackers.

In the case of glacial grasp it's meant to take out the big creature for a while. It needs to be in a mill that can also deal with the weenie and that can draw more glacial grasps.

I tested it against merfolk together with echoing truth and winds of rebuke.

No alchemy commons ?