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New Deck Pricing Tool
July 21, 2010
I’m happy to announce the launch of a deck pricing tool. The deck price tags have been useful to many MTG players, so I thought it would be good to let you price your own decks. To my knowledge, this is the only deck pricing tool based on eBay prices from Magic Traders. eBay is usually the best place to buy Magic The Gathering cards if you’re looking for low prices.
Click here to price your own decks.
[Video] Chapin on M11, New Extended, and Deck Building
July 18, 2010
Great interview with one of my favorite MTG deck builders and theorists.
Full 50 minute interview is here.
Deck Price Tags Are Now Automatically Updating Daily
June 9, 2010
I’m happy to announce that the deck price tags are now updating automatically each day. My brother is a programmer and he created a program to scan the Magic Traders eBay price guide (Non-Foil Physical Magic Cards) each day and then use the new data to update the posts. Each of the deck price tags are recalculated daily and you’ll be able to see the latest deck prices.
The MTG card market can be volatile and I wanted a way to keep up with the latest price changes. I hope you find the program helpful.
I know I’ve only created two deck price tags but I will be adding more soon.
If you see any bugs or problems, please leave a comment or contact me. Thanks!
Group Game Draft: Combining Free-For-All Multiplayer With Draft
January 6, 2010
I don’t usually cover multiplayer formats since I’m a competitive player instead of casual. But this format called Group Game Draft seems pretty fun and competitive. It’s competitive because of the draft and “Rumble Rule”.
Here are the basic rules:
- Each player uses four booster packs, rather than the traditional three (with the pass order being left-right-left-right).
- The draft is capped at six players with a minimum of four.
- All players play one big game of free-for-all multiplayer Magic.
- The “Rumble Rule” is in effect.
The “Rumble Rule” is pretty sweet and adds a fun strategic element to the game. Basically, every time you deal 20 damage, you can set aside a card in your sideboard and cast it for free anytime you could normally cast it.
This means that you can potentially play off-color bombs (Progenitus!) so you have to keep that in mind while drafting. The rule gives you incentive to attack, which is a good thing in free-for-all multiplayer since many players like to stay under the radar and not attack to avoid conflict.
Also, the rule makes certain cards insane like Breath of Malfegor.
Running Diary of the Top 8 Webcast for Worlds 2009
November 22, 2009
2:50am CST — Looks like they’re a little late. The webcast was supposed to start at 2:45am CST but there’s no link yet on the webcast page.
2:56 — Ah, just got a tweet. It starts in 6 minutes. No problem. That gives me time to make some predictions.
David Reitbauer (Jund) vs Florian Pils (Jund) – The dreaded Jund mirror. Both decks have similar decks including a full set of Ruinblasters in the sideboard. I’ll pick David since he has Stag in the board which seems better than Florian’s Mind Rots.
How to Evaluate New Cards for Constructed
September 28, 2009
Josh Utter-Leyton on using the average case scenario for evaluating new cards instead of the best case or worst case scenarios:
Lotus Cobra is symptomatic of a flaw in how we think about Magic: we tend to be pretty bad at thinking in terms of average case. We do a good job of thinking about the best and worst case scenarios for cards, but the average case, the true value of cards, proves to be pretty elusive.
Take a look at what happened with Tarmogoyf. It’s not like we didn’t see the potential of a two mana 5/6 or better. It’s just that we also saw the potential of a two mana 0/1, and the worst case scenarios seemed so much more likely. It took quite some time, and presumably a fair amount of play with the card, for us to catch on to how good Tarmogoyf was on average.
It is completely understandable that we are bad at thinking average case. It is easy to imagine the best possible scenarios for a card, as well as the worst. It’s easy to see that Lotus Cobra could possibly fuel turn three Ultimatums, and it is also easy to see that at its worst Lotus Cobra will be a vanilla 2/1 for two. It’s also easy to see that neither of these cases is especially realistic. Honing in on what exactly is realistic – that’s more difficult. We can’t just think of one scenario that will demonstrate the average value of a card like we can for the best case and worst case.
States is Back for 2009
September 27, 2009
Bill Stark brings us the scoop.
States is back on December 5, 2009. The format will be Standard and the winner gets a plaque, a custom DCI card, and free entry into all Constructed Premier Events for a year. Also, the top eight players get a custom design playmat that’s unavailable in stores.
The 2009 States website will launch on October 10. It can be found at the2009s.com.
Early PTQ Schedule for Pro Tour San Diego
September 10, 2009
Thestarkingtonpost has an early look at the schedule of the upcoming Zendikar sealed Pro Tour Qualifiers (PTQs). Here’s the link.
The list is not complete since some tournament organizers have not finalized their PTQs. But the list does have a good number of PTQs already.
Paul Rietzl’s Magic The Gathering Hall of Fame Ballot
July 14, 2009
From Thestarkingtonpost:
I didn’t think Hall of Fame voting was going to be so hard this year. After eliminating everyone I had not heard of or had a negative impression of, I ranked all the remaining players using criteria such as integrity, sportsmanship, general contributions to the Pro Tour, quality of finishes and how scary they are/were as an opponent. Ultimately many of my close friends ranked quite well as you can imagine because I know more about them.
Two MTG Pros Fight to Make the Top 8 of GP-LA More Fair
January 25, 2009
Bill Stark has a great story about Mark Herberholz and Michael Jacob, two Magic The Gathering pros.
In Grand Prix–Los Angeles, for some reason, the head judge did not give out the decklists to the top 8 players. (Giving out the decklists is standard procedure.) Mark and Michael had an advantage since they were able to access the internet with their cell phones. Before the top 8, they had knowledge of some of the top 8 decklists since those decklists were covered already on Wizards.com.
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