DGM Release

I love this set.

MTGO - Dragon's Maze Prerelease Results

I've been on MTGO all day playing the horrible value prerelease events. What can I say, I'm a sucker for new stuff. Regardless of how many tickets I lost today I've had a blast playing the new set. Though in my haste to begin the fun, i mistakenly bought 20 guildmarks and 1 ticket in my first go around. Yeah oops. Hope they refund me soon, that's quite a bit of money.

Buying stuff while half asleep and before caffeine and nicotine is a bad idea. 

Throughout the day I ended up playing in 8 Sealed and 6 draft. My first sealed pool was insane (value wise). Double Voice of the resurgence, foil Ral and some other 4 tix rares. Sold off the foil Ral and double queued my next two sealed. Overall I ended up poorly on the winning side of things. 4-0, 4-0, 3-1, 2-2, 2-2, 3-1, 2-2 and a 3-1 in total. There are some truly broken things you can do with this set that I didn't end up with and got wrecked.

Now on the draft side of things, whoooooo boy I tell ya what. I love funky draft formats and 3x DGM is funky as they come. First off its a small set, so expect 5-10 of your primary common. Secondly gates and gatekeepers are just so much value. I love them all. Check this 3-0 (no game losses) deck. I dub it, "Esper Value.dec"

Yep, this deck was sick. Got passed the Mirko pack 3 pick 3 for some odd reason. The only weak link in the deck was the Woodlot Crawler, it was merely a 2/1 for 2 in every matchup. Rakdos Drakes were insane as were the Ascended Lawmages. There are so few flyers and reach creatures in DGM they just rule the sky. And of course, the gatekeepers. Every time they hit I was getting value, even if it was even just an extra card. Add the singlton Deputy and the black one and you have yourself a solid removal spell. It was pretty fun to pilot this deck.

While I don't recommend 3x DGM ever, it was fun for what it was. It let us see each DGM card in potential matchups and how they play out. Its a great way to learn a new set, especially a small one where you get multiple of every card. Such as my Tithe drinker spell where I got 11, yes, 11 Tithe drinkers. While I lost to the guy with 8 Green Gatekeepers (gain 7 life) and 3 bombs including Tesya, it was still hella fun to play.

All in all, a great day of magic. Even if I lost overall value.

Eve - A story of a Misclick

While I haven't mentioned it yet, I play Eve online. I was on reddit today and something reminded me of an event that happened to me once. One of the most memorable moments in my eve career. One of the best and worst engagements I have ever FC'd before. Here is the story.

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There was one time we were baiting an overeager new titan pilot into a fight. He had this habit of DDDing lone battleships just for fun, so we used that.

We began by forming up, as always. I picked up about 40 battleships, 30 support ships, 15 cap ships and 2 titans for bridges and possible damage. Plenty for what we were trying to accomplish. Everyone had the utmost confidence in my abilities to pull this off, for I had done this several times before in the past.

We setup the fleet about 7 jumps out from the target system and started the baiting process, and a small cap fleet ready with 2 titans as support. We were going to pwn this guy.

Attempt #1: We tossed in 3 battleships and let them rat in the belts, all with coverts watching them with cynos. About 15 mins into it, he took the bait. We lit the cyno, jumped the BS fleet in and engaged. Sadly he popped the cyno cov ops before we got points on him and we lost a few over eager carriers. In the engagement. (He did have support in the system). So we disengaged and headed back to the staging POS 7 jumps away licking our wounds and posting some battleship killmails we got in the fight.

So we get ready to jump back, and suddenly, one of the cov ops pilots says over comms: "Oops just lit a cyno off the station. Don't use to me!" Then, the Avatar suddenly jumped for no reason.

I as an FC asked, "Uh, where the hell did you just jump to <name withheld> the cyno isn't up yet."

About 30 seconds later I received a phone call, it was the titan pilot. Odd I think to myself, why the hell would he call my phone? So I answer.

"OH MY GOD OH MY GOD I JUST JUMPED TO BACK TO THE SYSTEM THEY HAVE POINTS ON ME AND I BROKE MY MIC AND KEYBOARD AHHHHH"

Begin Attempt #2.

At this point every cyno pilot was dead in the system, we had nothing there. Our entire support fleet was 7 jumps away with only 2 cynos left. This was not going to be good. I told everyone in battleships and lower to go as fast as they fucking could back to the system and start targeting support. Had the 2 cynos remaining hold back and wait for the smaller ships to engage.

We rushed back, I don't think I've ever seen a battleship fleet move so fucking fast. Our Cap pilots furiously checking to see if they could jump in and engage. Everyone's heart was racing. Our first cyno made it one jump out with the battleships. They go through, warp to the station and start engaging. It was 7 carriers, one titan and 30 battleships engaging our dumbas... I mean Titan pilot. His shields were down and armor already failing. (It was an avatar fyi). They engaged the tacklers and the cyno jumps into the system.

BOOM! Some random ass roaming fleet was there, not in anyway connected to either side. They just happen to get to that stargate on their little roam. My heart stopped, I could hear the high command yelling at me already for losing a titan. The whole time my dumbass titan pilot was on the phone with me screaming and losing his shit. All I could hear was "HELP HELP HELP HELP" on the phone and "IS the cyno up, is the cyno up, is the cyno up" on TS and "WE NEED BACKUP" from the BS fleet all at the same time. So now, half my support fleet is locked down on the gate from some random roaming fleet. I was stuck with them, unable to give commands in the fight. But I had one shot left. It had to count.

When we began the fleet, I did a quick check of fittings for the BS fleet. When I saw one of our newbros fitted a Cyno to his battleship I almost made him take it off. We had a strict fleet setup at the time and this just wasn't acceptable. He even had medium guns on his mega to fit the cyno. However being a good manager that I am, I allowed him to do it. I told him it was a bad idea and we have fittings for a reason, but to keep it. I wanted to show him why this was a bad idea. He was 8 months fresh, and he was now our only hope to save a dumbass titan from a misclick jump in a failed op that may of gotten me fired from the high command.

I cleared comms. Took a deep breath and asked, "Hey Newbro, where are you exactly?" The seconds it took him to answer me felt like an eternity. The silence was killing me, knowing I was losing numerous battleships and support, knowing the titan pilot was going to die of a heart attack. My game career flashed before my eyes.

"Oh I went the wrong way, I'm at the other gate about to jump in, sorry about that." (little info, the constellation was circular, so he ended up going around 5 jumps and ending up at another gate)]


Other gate? Are you fucking kidding me? My heart started racing. Suddenly the idea that we might actually do this entered my mind.

"Jump in, warp 100 off the station and light that cyno. GO NOW"

Then I heard it, "Hey as I was warping from the gate a huge fleet started landing on the gate". They... went the other way? "Go light that cyno newbro! The rest of the support fleet Jump in and engage anything you can! GO GO GO! Cap fleet, jump as soon as you see the cyno!

Newbro on comms: "Aww I died"

My heart sank again. Even after a high, I get another low. We're out of cynos, 6 more carriers and a dread jumped in time to their doom. I begin calling primaries but the depression of losing hundreds of billions of isk weighed on me. I sighed, started to ignore the pleas for help and begging from my fleet for commands, the cries of pain and destruction as we lose battleship after battleship, carrier after carrier. The cap fleet grew in size during this whole thing. The entire alliance was well aware of what was going on, cyno trains for cap pilots were hot. We had over 100 cap ships ready to jump and engage, ready to destroy this titan (who was still engaged). Our titan was in hull, about to die. Then I saw it.

There, on my raiper. A cyno. I had gotten into the wrong ship. I had gotten into the wrong ship. I HAD GOTTEN INTO THE WRONG SHIP! WOOHOOOOOOO!!

Comms: "I HAVE IT! I HAD A CYNO! JUMP IN 3, 2, 1 JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP!!"

After the battle, the entire TS was a buzz with laughter, sorrow and partying like I've never seen before or since. On the way home tales of valor and awesome mini fights were abound.

We had done it. We killed our target. We saved our titan with 10% hull left. We had destroyed them. A newbro who also took the wrong ship. Those carriers he brought in kept our titan alive and my own dumbness, taking the wrong fucking rapier on the trip.

I'm still not allowed to command a cap fleet to this day.

Dragon's Maze Thoughts - Drafting 5 color or "Not a color" decks.

Is this the best draft format in years? Why I think it will be!!!

Ok, first let me preface this with, I hate GTC-GTC-GTC drafting. Its horrible. The pack runs suck, the cards suck, and aggro only formats suck. Its a suck circle that only sucks more suck while it's sucking on it's own suck. Read my previous blog entries for more. GTC sucks.

However... Dragon's Maze turns the format into pure awesome sauce. Allow me to explain. I've done aprox 30 drafts so far. 7 Paper, and 23 online. While it's not a lot by any means, it's enough to gain a decent grasp on the format. Thus far I've been drafting one strategy. It's what I like to call, "Not X color". For example, "Not Blue", or "Not Red". All 4 other colors are fair game. While this works now, once people figure out the format it will be less good, however it's been doing very well for me.

During Shards of Alara block draft, I developed a 5 color draft strategy. Pack 1, take bombs then mana fixing (most rares, Tower Gargoyle, and the like). Pack 2, take bombs then fixing. Pack 3 go wild. Bloodbraid Elf into Adrent Plea into a hate bear? Yes please. Since Return to Ravnica is similar, I decided to try this approach to the full block. 

Pack 1 is the key pack. You'll be fighting for gates, cluestones, bombs and the power commons. Do you take the gate over a bomb? Will you see another gate? Is the guy on your right going to switch to gates next? Can you risk losing a moderate gate for a moderate 5 drop? So far I haven't cemented my pick order. However I will almost always err on the side of caution and take the gate over everything else.

If you pick right, you could easily end up with 9-11 gates and just play everything. 

Take this pack for example:

DGM Example - Pack 1

My eye went straight to 3 cards. 

• Trostani's Summoner
• Sunspire Gatekeepers
• Gruul Guildgate

Since this is P1P1, I would take my first choice. Trostani's Summoner. This thing is a beast. 10 power for 7 mana is HUGE. The format has slowed down so much that dropping 7 drops is just something you can do without worry. I have never lost a game when I resolved a "Cone of Dudes on a Dude". 

If the summoner wasn't in the pack, I would most likely take the Gate first. Sunspire Gatekeepers is the best of the Pillarfield Oxen, making a 2/2 is huge as a bonus, but they typically come back around. 

Notion Thief is interesting, but it just ends up being reading: Target Opponent discards a card, you draw a card". The Snare Squad is pretty good, but it puts you in an aggro White based deck, similar to boros. While that is a strategy and I've seen it do good work, that's not what I'm talking about today.

Pack one should just be Gates, Bombs and Gatekeepers. Keep an eye out for the white, black and red gatekeepers. They're the strongest overall. Making a 2/2 to slow down your opponent or make something to populate with is huge. Killing their early drops with the black one, or a post combat trick is pretty good. And the red's act of treason effect can just straight up win games.

The Green Gatekeeper's 7 life effect is pretty huge. If you're going up against a boros/white based aggro deck its a godsend, however against another slow bomb heavy deck that effect is pretty worthless. Pick him up if the gate is missing or you really don't want a cluestone.

Blue's gatekeeper is by far the weakest. Keep in mind I say this as a control player. Drawing a card is great, but not really what you want to be doing with your 4 drop in this format. You really want value out of your gatekeepers. 

Pack 2 is pretty fun for you. This is where you pick up some invaluable cards for your deck. The filling if you will. Pick up value cards like good extort creatures, or solid Gruul bloodrushers. Take Prophetic prism's to 'speed up' your deck and fix your mana. Evolve creatures like Cloudfin Raptor become huge in a 5+ drop deck since everything will evolve them. Also the best utility creatures like Greenside Watcher automatically make the cut. You can also pick up some defenders if you feel your deck will be glacially slow since there are quite a few no one else will touch. 

Pack 3 is your bread and butter. There are so many great midrange creatures and big fatties. I would focus on the black removal, token makers and fatties. Lots of fatties. Grab midrange creatures like Centaur's Healer and Voidwielder. Ogre Gatecrasher is an autopick if you get the gates pack 1. I typically end up with at least 9 gates by the end of pack 2, so Ogre Gatecrasher is just a 4/4 for 4 mana. Great in any set. 

So that's it. Its pretty simple. Pack 1 take fixing and gatekeepers. Pack 2 take utility and fixing, Pack 3 go wild. With this strategy you can build fun decks like this:

DGM - Example Deck "Not really White"

Sure it may not look like much. But it has defense to last until the late game, removal to kill off early aggression and 6 and 7 drops to crush the late game

Go go army of indestructible 3/3s!