I am sure this is very easy if I look (maybe harder in Japan) but I’ve been taken by the idea of ordering proxy decks of my best friend’s decks and of my own to gift to him. What’s the best way to do this? He’s in the US so easier for him than me.
There is the aliexpress store I got my black lotus from which I find incredible, but that was like 3 dollars a card so out of my price range for a lark.
I followed infernarl’s guide when I got miffy’s Christmas gift and it went great
Different kind of post today. I have been playing the 1997 pc game magic the gathering shalandar. I’m sure some of the elder magic heads have experience with this game. It is a real gnarly looking crpg-ish game where the combat is mtg battles. The version I played had cards up through The Dark from 1994, so it was really fun to get a sense of how the earliest period of magic actually played.
So the game works like this: you choose a colour at the start and it gives you a fairly shitty deck of mostly that colour. You walk around the isometric world which is full of towns and enemies. If you get into a battle, you have an ante, so every time you fight you either win or lose a card. This was pretty thrilling honestly except for in the late game where I felt like I was just meant to save scum forever to protect my super good cards. In the towns you can buy cards, edit your deck and get randomly generated quests that have sometimes worthless, sometimes extremely valuable rewards.
The game doesn’t really have a narrative or anything. The layer of juice it adds to just playing old magic is this honestly very intricate and gripping web of resource management and time pressure that I will try and fail to explain clearly.
You start the game at 10 starting life. Different enemies have different starting life ranging from like 6 to idk 30 or so for bosses maybe. You can increase your starting life by getting mana links (represented by an ankh in the above screenshots). These are offered as quest rewards from towns maybe like 30% of the time. When you accept a quest, you have a time limit to complete it (usually like 3 days, which is idk 5 minutes walking around time (I think the clock only progresses when you’re in the field)). If you don’t complete the quest, the town is mad at you and will never offer you another quest.
Another resource is money, which you can use to buy lower value cards in towns. Each town has a specific collection of one-off cards you can buy. You can basically only get money by selling your cards at the towns.
Then there are emblems, which are also quest rewards. These are represented by the mox jewels, so there are five colours of emblem. They are more valuable than money, and you are sometimes offered to buy rarer cards with them that you can’t buy in a town.
Then there are dungeons, which are not marked on the map and are pretty tough. You can get hints about their location and what you will find in them. They usually have some permanent effect like life loss carries over, or a permanent enchantment effect (eg. bad moon is always active and you can’t play black cards). The dungeons contain the super high value cards, most notably the power 9, as treasure if you can delve deep enough. You cannot save while in a dungeon which I think was a good move on their part. Cause otherwise you’d just be scumming your way to the end.
So that’s basically all the ways you want to be accruing stronger cards and getting more powerful. The tension comes from the 5 evil wizards. The wizards will send out creatures into the world to attack towns. When this happens, you get a warning and can rush to the town to kill the creature. But honestly most of the time you’d have to drop everything you’re doing to get there in time. If they take over the town, it is now locked off and you need to win a more difficult boss fight to free the town. If any one wizard claims 3 towns, the game ends immediately. They are literally tapping the land to cast a huge spell that destroys the world! Pretty cool. If you save a town, you get this incredible screen that made me laugh like 10 times.
So you must constantly be managing this threat, while also trying to power yourself up. Defeating the wizards is the main goal of the game. They each have a tower, which is also a dungeon but has no prize cards. If you can find them in their dungeon and defeat them, they die forever. You can check the status of the wizards with this pre-rendered screen.
The most brutal part of this whole system of push and pull took me fucking ages to realise: if you previously got a mana link (plus one to your starting life) from a town, and that town then gets tapped by a wizard, you lose that mana link, effectively getting a permanent -1 life. For 90% of my playtime I was just going down in life and didn’t know why. I assumed it was maybe something that has a chance to happen if you lose a battle. But no, it’s all about the lands. As far as I can tell, if you save a town, they will not offer you another quest to get another mana link. On my second run, I had defeated 3 of the 5 wizards, and was struggling to keep up with their tapping. My life at its highest was around 24, but by the time I gave up it was at 9. I think I had effectively failed the run at that point. I couldn’t keep up and I was struggling to find more quests that offered mana links to bump my life up.
Anyway I guess I’ll talk a little about magic cards. It was so thrilling to cast cards like Time Walk for the first time in my life, and I got to learn the power some of those key early cards like time elemental and hypnotic specter. Just looking at these old cards in a set list, it is very hard for me to grasp which ones are good and why. The top end boss cards of each colour, like shivan dragon for instance, look pretty bad by the standard I’ve learned from contemporary pauper magic, by in this setting they really are hugely threatening (though can still just die to terror or counterspell, that much hasn’t changed). Definitely the most powerful card that I had never even heard of was contract from below, which is basically just one mana draw seven cards. That’s 4 more cards than ancetral recall! Disgusting. I assume the reason it has less of a reputation, and is not part of the power nine, is that any card with ante mechanics is basically ignored now? Idk, ante seems like it’d be cool to include in a cube, or you could just ignore that part and make it like exile one card instead in a casual game. But yeah, on my second run I basically played a red burn deck, with lightning bolt (exactly as good as it is today in pauper), ball lightning and heaps of disintegrate/fireballs, mana flare to win the game, and then I splashed black basically for contract from below, dark ritual and a couple more cards. I was fun to play something this aggressive that also just refueled itself forever.
Also look how gorgeous the battle screen is! How could anyone tolerate looking at Arena after seeing this.
Anyway uhhh I think this post is long enough. I love this game and am very happy for the education it gave me. I will probably attempt another run or two. You can play it pretty easily thanks to various fan efforts. I clicked on the first result when I searched it, downloaded, unzipped, clicked the exe and it just worked. So go ahead and try if you like.
what the hell this sounds amazing
it sure was
you’re gonna love MTGO
have been watching plenty of videos of dudes playing mtgo pauper, i think it looks honestly fine yeah though certainly not beautiful like shalandar. i rly dont wanna get into it tho cause i dont wanna anonymously grind games in my house and even pay money for the misery. I like the in-person aspect of the game and feel like splitting my money and cards between two games is just not worth it.
Shandalar is iconic and I really wish they’d make another game like it! Open-world exploration with antes is such a compelling format for computer MTG.
A guy from my local shop informed me that someone has indeed done the math, and it can be read here
tldr is that if you run 4 of each land and 4 expedition map, the odds of having turn 3 tron in your opening hand are 14.91%. If you mulligan to 4 your odds of one of those hands having it are 47.98%.
That’s worse than I expected! I have been mulliganning very aggressively, only allowing myself to keep hands where I can see assembled tron. So in my deck, this also means I allow a hand with world map and turn 4 tron (though in faster matchups doing nothing for 4 turns is basically a guaranteed loss). I have also been mulliganning to 3, so that must put the odds somewhere in the high 50s. I have won the majority of games where I’ve mulled to 3 so I’m not too worried about that. But basically the question I hoped these numbers would answer for me is: should I be keeping a hand with, for example, 2 urza lands and a candy trail? Whereas before I was not permitting myself to do so, I think now I am less certain. Basically 50% odds of being able to play the game at all is not convincing, so if I see a hand like that on my mull to 5 should I keep it? Maybe. I guess I’ll play like that for a few events and see how things go.
Shalandar was amazing when it came out, I had one friend where we’d just play that or HoMM on his machine when we weren’t playing Magic or D&D. Every single Magic computer game has been a huge disappointment since. I don’t think any of the new deckbuilder games have come close to the same sort of HoMM-esque structure where you just fight all the battles using Magic games.
Played a lot of magic last few days. Kept going with the colourless tron deck, getting much better with it. My knowledge of the deck and its matchups has expanded a lot, I’ve gotten better with opening hands. I do still lose to bad hands and mulligans sometimes which is impossible to avoid with this deck, but much less than previously. I’m thinking of replacing world map with chromatic star because it just sucks so bad I hate using it. Rush of knowledge has performed super well honestly, it lets me overwhelm every slow or midrange deck.
Also yesterday got to play pauper cube with some ppl from pauper locals. It was my first time drafting and was heaps of fun! I went 1-2 with a blue/red deck that was a little too greedy with the big brain blue cards, blinking archaeomancer and man-o-war over and over, buybacking capsize and etc. That stuff was awesome and fun when it worked but my creatures and removal were too weak and got run over. Noob mistake of falling for temptation. Here is the deck
Anyway got family visiting so no magic for 10 days or so. Keep tapping those lands everybody
Hi friends. I’ve played a bit last few days with a new deck, dimir terror. Dimir means blue black, terror means Tolarian Terror, which is a card that has kinda shaped the structure of blue control decks in pauper for many years. My understanding is that these decks were originally called Delver decks after Delver of Secrets, which was a card people even played in the super powerful formats like vintage as the main threats in their control decks. Basically you would play delver on turn one with a deck that was full of counterspells, and flip the delver and now you have a pretty threatening creature and you just deny your opponent from playing cards for the rest of the game. This was also how the decks worked in pauper, until Tolarian Terror came about. Terror restructured the decks into still doing the delver thing, but also trying to put as many instants and sorceries in the graveyard as possible, to play an early terror for one or two mana. This was like a new mid-game threat that really strengthened the deck. It slowly got honed over years by a million different players into this extremely efficient, perfectly balanced deck that was just good enough at killing every other deck. Basically it just plays the best card draw cards like Brainstorm and Ponder, along with Mental Note and Thought Scour specifically to put cards in the graveyard for Terror. Then the rest of the deck is just counterspell and stuff. There is also a worse version of terror called Cryptic Serpent that you play because 8 big snakes is better than 4. Eventually, people played versions without delver, then put delver back in etc etc. A more recent version of the deck is the one that also plays black, the main reason being that the mono blue deck had a bunch of counterspells but blue doesn’t have good on-board removal, so if the opponent gets something past the counter window, you don’t have much of an answer. Mono blue terror is playing cards like Deem Inferior, which is frankly pretty shit, and Sleep of the Dead, which is honestly kinda awesome cause you can recast it from the graveyard over and over. But it is clear these are not exactly efficient cards, and the whole point of the deck is that it is extremely efficient. So, people started adding black to the deck to be able to add Cast Down and Snuff Out. There is also a black version of terror, Gurmag Angler, which is better than Cryptic Serpent in some ways (can be played for 1 mana, cannot be pyroblasted) and worse in others (can be awkward to play it before terror, and consequently increase the cost of terror). The deck really hit a new level when Sneaky Snacker came out, which ended up being the replacement for delver of secrets in the blue/black version. While it is weaker than delver, it is so easy to bring it back from the graveyard that you can end up playing like 8 snackers per game without even trying. There are some really dirty plays like Brainstorm, put back two snackers, mental note, mill the snackers and draw a card. You also play Abandon Attachments over Ponder specifically to throw snacker in the bin and instantly resummon it.
So I wanted to play this deck for a while, but it is one of the more expensive decks in pauper. A lot of the cards are also played in the high roller formats, so despite being commons that have had a million reprints, they are arbitrarily worth like 10 dollars instead of 10 cents. So I was really happy that the colourless tron deck was going well for me, cause I able to perform well in enough events to earn enough store credit to get the majority of this deck for free. Yay!!
Anyway having now played with it, I have been kinda disappointed with my performance lol. It feels like it should be this hyper efficient machine that just pumps out big boys and says no to everything, but it does not always feel like that. Sometimes it just doesn’t work, sometimes you have to play a blind mental note and you mill over two cards you wanted and draw a bad card you don’t need. Sometimes you can’t cast the terror, sometimes sneaky snacker doesn’t do anything, sometimes a 5/5 being your biggest threat is simply not enough (especially against decks with Nyxborn Hydra or Writhing Chrysalis). I know that a lot of this is probably down to user error. I am not a very good player yet, and this is my first time piloting a blue deck. They are notoriously the hardest decks to play, there is endless discussion over how to properly play cards like brainstorm, you have to really know what your opponent is doing to know what cards to use counterspell on etc etc. I will definitely keep playing it and try to improve. I think I had mildly unrealistic expectations that since it’s like my first “meta deck” I’d just get some free wins with it. But so far my colourless tron deck performed way way way better for me. I think part of it is that this deck is a real known quantity, and all my opponents know what I’m doing better than I do. Anyway, will play more with it in the coming days and I hope I can report back with some good results next time, but so far I have gone 1-5 with the deck.
Commander night last night, we got three games in!
First game, Grenzo, Dungeon Warden v. Olivia, Opulent Outlaw v. Chulane, Teller of Tales v. Y’shtola, Night’s Blessed
So, three aggro decks and me playing combo off the bottom, bad news for everybody else in that I got a great draw with the red priest that gives you 3R when he comes into play, an Imperial Recruiter, and a Soldevi Digger in my opening hand. Then, cherry on top, I drew an Ashnod’s Altar on Turn 3. I misplayed so I think I could have won a turn before I did; however, two Recruiter loops to grab a Zulaport Cutthroat and a Workhorse later, I was able to kill both the Chulane player and the Olivia player, and have an arbitrarily large amount of life and colorless mana, which I used to blast cards off the bottom of my deck until I hit a Meteor Golem, destroying the Y’shtola players’ enchantment that gave him life every time an opponent played a creature, which was keeping him life-neutral with my Cutthroat loops. Turn Six i think? A bit of a nasty deck; still, we had potentially two other people showing up late, so I deliberately played it to keep Game One shortish.
Second game, Teval, the Balanced Scale v. Olivia, Opulent Outlaw v. Pantlaza, Sun-Favored v. Y’shtola, Night’s Blessed v. Soul of Windgrace
A very even game to start with, with everybody taking turns hitting each other as various alliances were formed, Y’shtola got off to a great start with a lifegain loop that I tried to keep in check by dealing commander damage with Teval, until he got goaded and had to spread it around more. The Dinosaur deck was next to draw everybody’s attention, as the Olivia player kept blowing up every critical piece that I got in play and I don’t play counters in Teval, so I can’t really protect my stuff. In theory I can bring it back, two players were packing graveyard exile though and wisely kept wiping mine. I was doing just enough to stay alive, the Windgrace player managed to steal my Field of the Dead and was cranking out Zombies and Dragon Eggs for all like, four-five landdrops he got per turn. By the time we escaped the Dinosaurs by the skin of our teeth, he having wiped the other two, we were both insanely low and I swung out against Windgrace as most of the Eggs had turned to dragons and I hoped to use a board wipe in my hand to rebuild faster, he read the play though and created like six more eggs through chicanery and was able to get me next turn.
Third game, Radha, Heir to Keld, v. Pantlaza, Sun-Favored v. Linvala, Shield of Sea Gate
Both Pantlaza and Radha have loads of cascade-style plays, and in this case, Radha went off earlier, amassing a huge boardstate triggering a global wipe from Linvala, then recovered fast, playing a Screamer-Killer that killed the Pantlaza player outright just from huge bodies coming into play (I was drawing three cards every time I played a creature, and also triggering Sunbird’s Invocation every time I played something from my hand), more than enough to just crush Linvala…except that they had The Book of Exalted Deeds, which they triggered on their transformed Faceless Haven, which they managed to time exactly in a window where I couldn’t do damage to creatures. I don’t play any land destruction in Radha, so that was GGs.
Linvala supremacy once again. I used to run her in a very annoying Party deck back when that was viable
OK this weekend I’m going to do it. I’m going to follow in @dylan’s footsteps and put together a pauper deck. I might go with “Rakdos Burn” cuz I have a bunch of those cards already and I like black and red. I am open to suggestions though. I like ghoulies and skeletons and making things die.
@miffy says she is going to put together an elfs deck. I do not look forward to fighting the elfs. I hate elfs. She’s too good with them.
Yesss I’m so excited for you. Please write updates in this thread!! Rakdos burn is so fun, I’ve had a great time every time it has killed me. It can be tweaked into a few different decks too without much change. Put more artifacts in and you can add cornered by black mages/black mage’s rod and pactdoll terror, for example.
The elf deck is so good. It’s crazy that despite 1 or 2 damage board wipes being extremely ubiquitous it can just overpower every deck. I got owned by an elf token swarm deck last night that played raphael the damn ninja turtle to do ping damage lol.
I’m building a black devotion deck right now that will win by playing a bunch of black trinkets, then gray merchant of asphodel, then ephemerate. It won’t be good but I think it will be fun
Probably time for an update.
First, dimir terror. I continued playing the deck, did pretty well with it sometimes, and I think I learned something about what it means to play a deck that wins by being efficient, having enough but not too many of each resource, that kinda thing. I found that in certain games the deck does exhaust itself, but overall it plays some amount of threats/removal/card draw that feels ‘correct’. This is pretty different from, say, colourless tron, which if it were to play its whole deck would eventually arrive at like absurd levels of power but it doesn’t ever expect to get that far. Dimir terror can conceivably play the entire deck in one game. I know this because it happened to me! I was playing against esper affinity. Esper means blue white black, affinity means it has a lot of artifacts. This was a slightly older version of the deck, not the current version that is topping tournaments etc. My opponent played Kenku Artificer, which turned one of his indestructible artifact lands into a 3/3 flying creature. It being indestructible means none of my removal spells could do anything; I don’t have any exiling cards or anything. So, my way to deal with this was playing Unexpected Fangs on Gurmag Angler and attacking with it every turn. This ballooned my life total up to like 40-something while my opponent’s was at single digits for multiple turns. He would play all his threats like Gearseeker Serpent and Myr Enforcer. I would play my snakes and sneaky snackers, maybe getting in 2 damage here and there but also losing my creatures. Miraculously, the angler stuck around. At one point, I counted the cards in my deck and had 8 left. He had way more. I just had to get through him once to win. Every turn, it was just barely not enough. Eventually, I had 4 cards left after drawing Abandon Attachments. I had 3 sneaky snackers in the graveyard. I had no choice but to play it and draw 2 more cards to get the snackers back. I don’t remember exactly what happened but he overcame that too. Eventually, I drew the last card in my deck for turn and was able to win with 2 points of damage on that turn. It was such a thrilling match!
I eventually started playing tron again cause it’s more fun. One night I played against Jund (red green black) twice. I won against one and lost against the other. The biggest threat they have against me is Cleansing Wildfire, which they usually cast on their own indestructible land to ramp and draw a card for 2 mana, which is pretty unmatched value. But in a matchup like tron, they can use it to destroy my precious urza lands, and send me back to not being able to cast any of my cards. The worst part of this is I was only running one basic land, a mountain, so for the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Cleansing Wildfire I wasn’t even getting a replacement land. This was super rough so I decided to try out the more green variation of the deck. The main difference is it runs 3 forests, and then a green card package of Generous Ent (to find forests and be another big monster),Ancient Stirrings (to dig for urza lands or maps, or later, big monsters), and Crop Rotation (to turn your forest into an urza land). I thought this version might be more flexible in how it arrives at the 3 urza lands on board, and might be more resilient to Cleansing Wildfire. Especially if you can keep a crop rotation in hand, you can wait for them to cast wildfire, and then in response sacrifice the land they target to crop rotation, and just get the very same land back. On top of this, you can also play Bramble Wurm, which is basically exactly the kind of card you’re already playing except there’s a green pip. It also lets me play Tamiyo’s Safekeeping in the sideboard.
So I’ve taken this version for a spin twice now, and it hasn’t performed great. I do think there are more lines to get to tron at the start, but I think this has lead to me keeping hands that are too slow because I can see that I can get there on like turn 4 or something. By then my opponent is well on the way to winning and I’ll only be able to answer with one huge idiot per turn. There are also some hands where you get the green cards but no way to make green mana, which really stings. Whenever I see one of those I think man these green cards could just be lembas right now. So maybe I should go back to stricter mulligans and think of the green cards more as utility in the midgame? Idk. I’m not fully convinced that colourless is better than colourless-green yet but I am leaning that way so far, even if Ancient Stirrings is incredibly good.
A coworker of mine did the impossible: Convinced me to get into Magic. I want to make a merfolk deck. I bought a bundle of Lorwyn Eclipsed packs and got a handful of merfolk that way. What’s the best way to get beaucoup merfolk? Should I go to a local store and buy individual merfolk cards?
I mostly play commander and you can only have one of a card (unless the card specifies otherwise) and found ordering online much better. I think I used Card Kingdom for most of the orders and found what I wanted by scouring through different sites with filters.
I’d assume building other formats decks would be pretty much the same but it would be harder to get over buying four copies of an expensive card rather than the one.
Yeah don’t buy packs unless you wanna gamble. Either find singles in a store or order some online. Avoid tcgplayer, they’re owned by ebay and they relocated their warehouse rather than recognize their employees unionizing (which has also sent quality don’t the drain). https://manapool.com/ is a similar site that is, as far as i know, not anti-union and works just dandy.
merfolk are probably fine and dandy in commander but if you wanna play like…standard I’m sure @miffy could help you come up with a pretty swell merfolk deck if you’re interested (she is always interested in making decks, we share a moxfield account so i know this, there are like 300 decks on there, she’s very good at it)
We finally put our pauper decks together and it fucking rocked. We are still missing a lot of cards so we just proxied them. There’s an actual pauper scene down here so I’d like to go play other people but I’m wondering if they’d frown on our hand drawn proxies. Getting turned away cuz we didn’t have legit 15 cents cards would be very funny, to me. But I bet people are fine with whatever.
