September 5th Session

I have created this posting for the September session.

Below I hope we discuss where, when, and what we are doing.

The Great Debate

Hey all,

Since we got so bloody off-topic, I thought I'd just summarize the actual points we were discussing.

First, objectively:

Should we allow our outside M2010 cards to be brought into the tournaverse, and if so, how should it be done?
Facts: There are roughly 10 people worth of sealed deck and M2010 (so 60 packs, or 7-8 packs per tournaverse player) out there that are currently not in the tournaverse, + one draft deck (green, red and white).

Article 1: These cards be added to the Tournaverse by dividing them up by rarity, shuffling, then dealing them out.
Yea or nay?
If your vote is Nay, please explain. This isn't an attempt to discredit your explanation, but it would be nice to know if, for example, you were okay with adding cards in, but not in this particular way.

Now, a subjective description of the issue:

Christos and Stu: why don't you two retards get your heads out of each other's asses and let us get to the point of playing a little bit quicker, hmm?

"Oh, but I want to see my deck evolve, watch it blossom like a beautiful flower"

You wanker. You want to watch shitty things evolve into slightly less shitty things? Go play Spore. Oh wait... that sucked too, didn't it? Yes... things that sound interesting in theory may still go on to be shallow, boring and mindless.

Bring on the imports!

'Elements'

Gentlemen...

It's not strictly on topic, but it is relevant to our interests.

Having just wasted an evening and night on this online strategy trading card game, I wanted to share it with you so that you might as well. http://www.elementsthegame.com/

It's not Magic, but it's pretty fun.

The Next Sealed

This Forum was made to discuss the next sealed set which we are looking for.

Outside Cards

Hello again,

Many of us have piles of non-tournaverse Magic Cards and nothing to do with them, so I'd like a way to somehow bring them into the Tournaverse. Now, by saying that, I don't mean that I want to add them to my card list so that only I can benefit them; I'd like to bring them in in such a way that they're spread out in a fair and even way, with no preference given to the donator whatsoever.

For me, the fun of the Tournaverse is that everyone is given an equal chance and less-so that there's such a limited selection of cards. As it stands now, deck building can be quite frustrating. If you decide to play a particular colour, you're shit out of luck if 2+ others had decided that already and had already collected all those cards. 'Well yeah man, you have to pick a colour combination that has the cards you'll need available!'; great, now I have minimal say in what colours I play.

Jesse and I talked about this briefly and he suggested that something as simple as each of us choosing a selection of these cards of roughly equal power to be added to their Tournaverse list. I feel that this would work, but that doesn't mean there isn't a better way to do things, so an suggestions?

Your Reigning Champion, Coolness Idol and Spiritual Leader,

- Christopher Beresford Bebbington

Trading Guidance

Greetings,

I've been scouring through the spreadsheet trying to find some appropriate trading partners, but I've been struggling with keeping track of who wants to play what, making things very difficult.

I'm building 2 decks:

1. A fast, goblin + direct damage red deck. I need things like seismic strikes, a couple more seige-gang commanders, ball lightnings... etc.

2. A weird, blue/black control deck. I need things like various counter spells, black 'kill target thing' spells, sign in bloods, divinations, ponders, rise from the graves...

Big things I have to trade:

Black: Xathrid Demon, Cemetery Reaper

Blue: ... it's basically all crap

Red: Infernal Elemental, Prodigal Pyromancer, Beserkers of Bloodridge

Green: Elvish Archdruid, Overrun, Awakener Druid, Enormous Baloth, Nature's Spiral, Prized Unicorn (don't doubt this card!) and LOTS of good green commons like borderland ranger, stampeding rhino, llanowar elves, giant growths, etc...

Land: Two dual lands: Drowned Catacombs and Glacial Fortress

What colours are each of you aiming to play?

Post-draft reflections

• How would you all feel about playing more rounds in future tournaments? Facing off against a mere three opponents, particularly in a huge eight-player tournament like the one we just had, feels a bit silly. Particularly when individual decks can perform so dramatically differently against different ones (or when they, e.g., get mana-screwed once and it loses the match). And, plus, you just don't get to interact with the majority of the players. It would also add a lot of drama and interest to it if the people who were getting ahead, for example, were guaranteed to all play one another (I never played Stu and therefore didn't get to vie for second place with him, for example). And with more rounds there would be less need to do funny tiebreaking calculations, which I still find to be a disquietingly... a priori way of determining as weighty an issue as Tournaverse rulership.
• On that note, we should clearly sort out how rulership is being determined, if that's not already sorted.
• Is everyone on board for sealed with 2x(Shards, Conflux, Reborn) in two weeks' time? I'm very much in favour of getting out of M10 by now. Part of the reason I dumped all my soldiers on Christos was because I couldn't stand those being my only standby creatures in white -- and my other two decent colours, black and blue, are both rather mana-demanding. Most of the good cards want to be monocolour cards. So it should change things a lot to get all this crazy multicoloured shit, and it may make all our decks much more interesting. (On top of giving us the mana-fixing we'd need to ACTUALLY get a multi-coloured M10 deck off the ground.)
• I think everyone found making the spreadsheet keep up with our trades more or less impossible. I'm not sure what a good solution to that is, as recounting every card would be a bit odious, and it'll get considerably more complicated when new sets arrive. Suggestions?
• If anyone wants to do some constructed test-play in the next couple weeks, I'd be up for it. Although that means I have to actually make a deck.

Finalization

The draft shall be at the Rusak house circa 4 pm, Saturday August 8; it shall be attended by Chris, Christos, David, Gavin, Jesse, Shamus, Stuart and dark horse Costas; it shall raise our total count by 3 boosters of M10; its prize shall be a raredraft; and I shall win it.

The Card Trade

The first official trade of Tournaverse occurred tonight. It won't be common to blog about any old trade but since it is the first one it is appropriate to provide some detail. In order to facilitate some transparency about these kinds of things we added a woefully inadequate section to the spreadsheet with some details about who got what. When/if you decide to trade please update the section with your trade. I think it is good to have a public record of it so that people have an idea of what is going on.

Anywho, let's get to the juicy details!

The trade negotiations kicked off last night with Chris and Stuart discussing what the other was interested in. Chris declaring that he was going to play a typically Chris deck while Stu decided to break the mold and go with Red/Green. This conversation though fruitful did not lead to a new trade but rather to Christos and Stuart having a similar discussion this afternoon. It was then that a deal was struck and the executed some hours later.

The deal was big with a total of 20 cards changing hands. While the details can be found on the spreadsheet the highlights of the deal include the only Rare (Coat of Arms) going to Christos along with one uncommon (Undead Slayer) and a collection of commons. Christos got Blinding Mage (a common) which Stuart insists "was a great pickup, one of the best commons in my opinion". Christos was overheard yelling "what the hell else do you want man, it is a common I am offering some pretty fucking good commons".

Stuart left the trade with a net increase in the number of cards in his roster. Some of his notable pickups include the possible game winning Overrun (uncommon) and the pesky Pyromancer (uncommon). His mana ramp also got a further upgrade with the addition of rangers, elves and rampant growth.

Both traders felt they got fair deals and both feel close to ready to start testing their constructed decks. Stuart has informed The Tournaverse Blog that he has in fact constructed the first version of his deck and it is playing well on 5 turn opening simulations. He is likely full of shit.

It is rumored that both players have been in conversations with Chris trying to hammer out other deals with a few high profile cards getting quite a bit of attention. We have been asked not to reveal too much detail on ongoing negotiations.

The other four players have been relatively silent on the trading front. When approached (on the street in the rain) Gavin indicated that the North Knight team was unlikely to begin trading until after the draft. Will their wait and see strategy work out or will the players with a head start have secured strong positions on their future decks? We will find out soon.

Thanks for your time!

P.S. Do we think some uncommon are so powerful (Sara Angel, Fireball etc..) that there should be a Rare and Uncommon draft?

Updates and Upcomings

Hey all,

Our blog is missing something: a Reigning Champion acknowledgement on the sidebar. As I so generously allowed someone else to experience the glory of victory, this week's champion is Stuart Lally; if that name doesn't sound familiar, he also goes by 'Monique' on weekends, or weekdays by appointment.

Second is the issue of our next event. If we're going to stick with our once every two weeks plan, then that takes us to the weekend when I'll be away for at least Friday, possibly the whole weekend. I have a wedding to go to on Friday in NB and I may stay over for a couple of days afterwards; I'll know more shortly. I suppose there's not much to discuss in terms of planning until I do know more... hmm... what a useless paragraph...

Anyway, the other issue is what we're going to do for the next tournament. It sounds like most people are up for a draft, is that right? I'd prefer one, but I'm not hugely opposed to another sealed. I'd be up for a Shards 0f Alara block draft, but we do have some M2010 packs left, so we could draft that instead. Monique suggested we draft a combo of M2010 and Shards, but I'd rather not do that as Shards is so heavily oriented around playing multicolour (3+, really) decks that I think you'd need the 3 Shards packs to get enough mana fixing to make the 3 coloured gold cards playable, but that's just my opinion.

Any thoughts?

Rewards, Riches, Doubloons

So the question of how to motivate tournament success — and how to equally demotivate drafting for the sake of enhancing one's previous decks — still hangs. It would probably be wise to resolve this before the night of, when we will all be drooling impatiently at things shrink- and foil-wrapped, so let's sort this out. The options on the table right now are, as far as I know:

1. The winner may bring in outside card/s of his choice. This is a very tactically interesting reward and it attracts me because of all of the cards, even from our two recent tournaments, that I'd really like to get to use in the Tournaverse. However, despite the fun of it, getting to bring in even one or two cards of your choice, especially early on, will probably be immensely powerful — probably over-powerful. One way to balance this would perhaps be to allow everyone to bring in some limited number of cards, and maybe to limit by rarity. e.g., the winner can bring in one rare or two uncommons or four commons, second place can bring in two U or three C, everyone else gets one U or two C, or something like that. That way the power creep would be spread out a bit.
2. Extra boosters go to the winner. This dilutes the advantage the winner gets from the previous one, as only a portion of the cards will be applicable to your deck and you're not guaranteed to get any game-winners in the pack. A mild disadvantage is that this increases the cost a bit, and, more acutely, tomorrow night we won't have any extras anyway unless someone goes and gets some. A bigger disadvantage to both this and the previous one is that we don't generally want to make repeat tournament winners all that much more powerful than everyone else in the first place.
3. Honour. The winner's only reward is to be celebrated in the tournament rankings on here. We are all fairly mature game players who can comply with an honour system pretty well, as far as I know, and I suspect we'd mostly just be smart and draft for the situation instead of for our pool's pre-existing cards. Drafting to your on-going constructed deck isn't even that advantageous, because we can always trade afterward anyway. What's more, we also enjoy having bragging rights, so posted rankings aren't without their own incentive. But still, some of us may be more closely wedded to single colours than others regardless of how hard we try to draft fairly, which makes it still seem like a bit of a problem. I'm not such a fan of this because of that, and also because trading isn't quite that free and easy (are you really going to not take that huge mythic you want and just hope whoever takes it will be happy to part with it?).
4. Raredraft. This usually makes me kind of sad, as I get attached to the cards I draft, but it solves the drafting-best-cards problem and rewards the winner withou providing him with a vastly superior pool of cards. My favourite option so far.
   
5. Shamus' Magical Map. I will leave this to someone else to explain. It looks like...a lot of work. And fun?

That's all I've got for now. Votes? Suggestions? Refinements?

The House of Rusak

We shall meet for battle at the House of Rusak. We have a 7th participant in Shamus though we will only have 6 for the games. This does bring up a question though... I have 36 cards in the box and we now need 42. Can someone please secure the remain 6 packs. I believe Christos wanted to come down to open his packs but he was going to be unavailable to play.

I am busy today so will not be able to get these packs.

Fancy New Shrink Wrapped Box

We have cards! I met up with Steve today to pick up the box of cards and they are now sitting on one of my TV tables. It is wrapped in that official wizards' shrink wrap that only makes me want to rip open the box right now. I will try to refrain from doing that, though it does have a picture of Alluring Siren on the top of the box.

I also may have been a bit premature announcing the location of this shin-dig. David is checking out with his parents about the availability of the Rusak abode... so we will wait for results of that before we finalize the location.

END TRANSMISSION

Card Spreadsheet!

Christos has put together a spreadsheet for the list of cards we collect. I've added it to a section on the right, "Important Links." Other suggestions for such links are welcome.

Genesis

Greetings, fellow magi.

This Friday we all shall embark upon a grand endeavor – one which shall shake the foundations of the universe as we know it. Each of us shall set forth to expand our power and compete for riches untold. [citation needed]

As we grow in strength, so too do our enemies. Fight as we may, all are bound by the rules of the Tournaverse. On these humble pages will the Tournaverse's history be chronicled.

Let the battle begin.