I am! the new location and new thread give the impression that we'll see a much larger turn-out, which is when these are enjoyable.

Both of the decks I expect you to play beat me, but I'm happier that you're taking part =D

Winning is lame anyway. I don't need my awesomeness affirmed by silly card games.

yeah, I'm playing one of my classic decks. I figure with so much new blood the meta's gonna be really crazy so I should stick to something I know works. we'll see if that pays off.

I feel bad now making the first round last so long, because I already have 8 decks submitted, and you'll all have to wait a week and a half to actually see how you do.

I wanted to try a midweek schedule, though, and I didn't want to rush the first round, so here we are.

8 isn't that many, we can get more.

Yeah, I didn't join yet

A lot of the off again is forgetting that 3CM exists.

I'm not in yet either. Seldom do I submit early in a submission phase. I think about deck concepts during commutes over the course of a week and usually make my submission in the last 2 days.

Why do rounds need to be a full week? Wouldn't 3 or 4 days work just as well once people were actually playing the game?

I think it mostly has to do with the workload it puts on Jim. it also gives people more time to brew in alt formats if they want to. sometimes we've done two concurrent rounds, where one is vanilla and the other is an alt, but that's a lot more work for the host, and it asks a lot of focus from the player base as well. but hypothetically if this picks up the way I hope it does we might be able to switch to that if Jim's willing.

Also, grading can take some time.

Mostly, I've been running week-long rounds because it's simple and what I'm used to. The new season structure actually relieves some of the pressure, since none of the rounds depend on the results of a previous round. I'm open to the idea of shorter rounds, as long as there's a short break between seasons to figure out banned list changes.

On the other hand, a lot of people are busier during some parts of the week than others, so shorter rounds might lead to weird patterns in who's able to participate each round.

I'd prefer concurrent rounds to shorter ones. you could run vanillz starting on Mondays and alts starting Thursdays. that way it's still open for a week, but people will have two rounds to submit to so twice as much stuff to do in a week.



PS: shouldn't the low-scorer banning be restricted to the top deck in the round they lost in? I feel like just carte blanche banning gives too much power and thus incentive to play bad decks, and the point of the low-scorer thing in the past has been to get rid of things that were winning, not whatever card they happened to not like.

My goal there was to simplify the banning process, but yeah, that restriction might be worth having. Maybe I should just put a blanket restriction over all the bans saying that, in order to ban a card, that card must have shown up in one of the top three decks in either vanilla round.

I don't mind if the winners can ban whatever, they won and all. if mark wins everything and wants to get rid of lotus, they should be able to even if somehow lotus didn't do very well. (even though I will argue to my dying breath that the format is better with lotus.) I just feel like giving the losers complete control incentivizes losing (or "dooring it up" as the kids say) too strongly.

How about this?

The winners get to make changes as suggested. Then, instead of the losers banning things, people who didn't win all get to nominate a change and then we vote yay or nay on them? 3 with the most votes occur.


@Razorborne,
From what I have been reading, Black Lotus, Mishra's Factory, and maybe even city of traitors lead to a lot of stupidly good things you then have to try to compete with, which are not really viable without those cards. From Isochron Scepter strategies to ensnaring bridge; the things you can do when you have a lot of repeatable mana in the last two really sucks. And Black Lotus? The standard "I have no idea what the meta is going to be like" deck is 2x black lotus and 1x visara the dreadful or 1x the untargetable green dude.


It's why I think Dark Depths should stay on there too to be honest (someone made a complaint about it). Turn 2 Marit Large sucks, and you would have to ban stupid stuff to prevent that.



Edit: Heck. 2x Black Lotus + some big *** creature is pretty much what the thing is used for a lot of the time isn't it? I know there are alternatives, but I don't know any stupidly competitive ones that aren't better off with other mana producers.

eh, lotus-lotus-fatty is a good deck (the primary fatty is grave titan) but there's plenty of ways to disrupt it. it doesn't shape the meta nearly as much as it looks like it does.

What about black lotus, pox, nether spirit?

Already gives me the willies.

there are a lot of good decks with lotus. that's sort of my point: "lotus decks" isn't really a thing. each deck with lotus has its own strengths and weaknesses, and need to be planned for and accommodated separately. there are more playable decks when lotus is in the format, making it a healthier format with the card around. no one's denying it's powerful, but not all powerful cards are bad for the format they're in.

that said, there's plenty of people who disagree with me. mark and I have had numerous shouting matches on the subject.

Huh, I forgot that you could do that with ordinary Pox and not just Smallpox, not sure if there is a particularly good reason to do so (the reason not to would be Lodestone Golem?), but you could.

of course, you can do that without lotus as well, in fact, it might be better with Bottomless Vault just so you can avoid a lot of draws.