MTG Arena
War of the Spark Pre-order Packs
Today is a weird day as far as days go.  I took the day off in order to go see Avengers Endgame as an 11 am matinee in a hope of avoiding the majority of the crowds. Past that I got up and around like a normal day but because of the lack of pressure it is meaning that I am doing everything a little big slower than normal since I am not actually required to get out the door and on my way to work by 7 am…  aka the time I am actually starting this blog today. Yesterday was the beginning of War of the Spark on Magic the Gathering Arena and with that I finally got to open my 50 pre-order packs. If you are playing Magic the Gathering Arena you too can also get three free packs by entering the new “PlayWarSpark” code. On a whim I decided to stream opening the packs last night and I am super thankful to a bunch of people who tuned in to watch and comment on my pulls. I love opening packs, and honestly so far I am really liking what I am seeing of this set. If you are curious you can check out the full opening over on my YouTube channel or through the Twitch VOD. Be warned however with the VOD there is a bunch of faffing about with sound levels early on that I cut out of the eventual upload to YouTube. If you are simply curious about what I pulled I exported the list to Google Sheets including everything I currently have from War of the Spark including the 50 pre-order packs and the 3 free packs that you get from the “PlayWarSpark” code.
This morning I am going to talk about a few of my favorite cards so far from the expansion. Please not that I have deep ties to green and black and as a result am mostly going to be talking about the cards that I know I will be playing. I can already tell that I will be building an amass zombies deck sooner or later.
Leyline Prowler
What is not to love about this card. It is a 2/3 for 1BG with Deathtouch, Lifelink AND is a Bird of Paradise. It allows you to be offensive with it when you need to… but if for some reason you can’t be… you can tap it for mana. It is a weird card but man do I love it. I think mostly I just love it because it is a standard legal bird of paradise that happens to be in my favorite Golgari colors. Even if you take the tap effect off of it… 2/3 with deathtouch and lifelink for 3 seems really good.
Banehound
This is another of what seems to be a stupidly good common card…. its a one drop black 1/1 with lifelink and haste. Sure this probably does not matter at all if you are not getting this on turn one… but still it seems like something worth playing and probably godly in sealed. It is going to add a lot of turn one pressure I think.
Duskmantle Operative
Another one of the really good commons I think is Duskmantle Operative. You get a 2/2 for 2 that cannot be blocked by creatures with power 4 or greater… which probably won’t come into play when you are actually dropping this on the board but later in the game it might be useful. Definitely playable in sealed, potentially less so in constructed… but I still like the card.
Eternal Taskmaster
So the initial problem with Eternal Taskmaster is the fact that it enters the battlefield tapped, meaning you are going to get this a turn later than you probably want it. However still a 2/3 for 2 seems pretty okay… but why you would really play this is for its effect. When it attacks you can play 2B and if you do so return target creature card from your graveyard to your hand. What I like about this… is it is triggered on attack… not dealing damage meaning just turning this card horizontal is going to allow you to bring back a creature regardless if your plan actually works. I view it as a capable early game creature with an optional resurrection card built into the text.
Arboreal Grazer
Another card that seems just stupidly good is Arboreal Grazer. Firstly this is a one drop that gives you a 0/3 with reach…  so basically you are just going to use this as anti-air defense. If it was just that I would probably play it… but it also allows you to put a land card from your hand into play tapped, adding some mana ramp. In a Standard format that already has Llanowar elves… this might not be a first round choice depending on your draw but it would definitely be an alternative slightly slower mana fixing option.
Living Twister
Now this card sorta falls in the stupid party trick category… but it might be fun to build a land dredge deck around it. Living Twister is a decent creature for RRG at 2/5 but then has the ability to plink any target for 2 by discarding a card and spending 1R. Additionally you can pay G to return a tapped land you control to owners hand… giving you potential fodder for the first ability. It has a lot of weird use cases, but I still think if you are running this you will want to build a deck around setting up a condition where you can keep pulling lands out of the graveyard and throwing them at your opponent for 2.
Sorin, Vengeful Bloodlord
I’m only calling this one out because at some point I will be building a Castlevania deck full of white/black vampires with Sorin as the focal point. Vampires are already good but if you can dredge up a creature from your graveyard and turn it into a vampire along with the other types that seems interesting… and worthy of building a weird deck around that mechanic… and then using the various Ixalan block cards that buff vampires to make it stupid. I’m not entirely certain what I will be doing with it but it should be fun… also Sorin is absolutely Alucard.
That was mostly just a first pass and some of the cards that I will probably be playing around with. Again if you want to see everything that got opened I am embedding the youtube video. So far I think War of the Spark looks like a fun set. I might do some sealed later and see what it feels like in a more limited environment. My big takeaway is that I think aggro decks are going to get a lot of fuel for early game with cheap powerful creatures.
Faking Sealed Magic
This morning you are going to get a tutorial how to do something that likely no one has actually ever asked for. One of the more poorly documented features of Magic the Gathering Arena is the ability to directly challenge your friends. This is also one of the more poorly supported given that there is no construct for keeping a friends list or seeing who is actually online and available for dueling. Regardless… there technically is the functionality of being able to switch over to Direct Challenge mode and input your username + random digits BattleTag style handle in and purposefully link up to another human being that you actually known.  Recently Tam, Mor and Lyle have been dueling each other and having a good time building decks with the limited pool of cards that they had available to them. This largely meant that the three of them were relatively on even footing, and playing some really fun and really janky magic that mimics a sealed environment.
The challenge is that both Kodra and I have spent a lot more of our time and by reference money on MTG Arena, which also means that we have a much wider pool of cards available for building decks. This also means that in theory we can build way more efficient decks that are probably less fair than having to be forced to play with the cards available and not necessarily the cards you want to play with. It got me to thinking… Magic the Gathering is a community that has an amazing set of web based tools to simple Price Lists like MTG Goldfish or amazing search engines like Scryfall. I thought surely someone had already come to the point of wanting to fake out a sealed pool of cards… and if not I would potentially be trying to build one myself and at least needed to research the APIs that would be available to me.
What I found was MTGen a website that allows you to replicate a lot of the common sealed formats and generate lists of cards replicating the experience of opening packs… including as you can see above the various seeded boosters that occur in pre-release tournaments. The site more or less gives me what I was wanting minus a few problems. What I actually want is the ability to simply say I want X of this pack and X of this pack and X of this pack… but for sake of this experience I deemed it good enough. Now the challenge that we have in front of us, that I experienced last night is that the default sealed formats expect you to take the pool of cards and build a 40 card deck with them. When you are doing direct duels in MTG Arena it requires both players to have a 60 card deck meaning we are going to have to increase the total number of packs opened. So instead of 6 packs for a normal sealed deck you would in theory open 9 packs as Kodra suggested to me last night. Again if doing the pre-release format you would be adding 3 more packs… and thankfully the MTGen site supports this sort of functionality.
The only NEGATIVE however is that MTGen does not support Magic The Gathering Arena as an export format… and of course Wizards of the Coast had to be difficult and could not simply recycle Magic Online. This again lead me to find a work around. I figured MTGO would be the most common format for converting deck lists from that online tool to Arena. So I rolled with that and found that ultimately I just needed a list of cards minus the Sideboard heading. So when you copy the cards out from MTGen make sure to trip that first line.
Now we move on to another website… MTGArena.Pro and more importantly their Deck Converter tool. This allowed me to paste in that list of cards that I got from MTGen and it converted it to the more contorted MTGArena format. You can assign a deck name if you so choose, because the default in Arena will simple by “Imported Deck” if you do not. I personally left it alone given that I would not want to accidentally pick one of these “Jank in Progress” decks for playing proper magic with, and at least I would know if it was still named Imported Deck I should stay away. The site provides you a handy copy output button, which will place it on the clipboard stack… which is important because Magic the Gathering Arena works weird.
Lastly you go over to your Decks section of Magic the Gathering Arena and click Import… at which point it will automagically try and import anything you have put in the copy/paste buffer. This is not the behavior I expected… I would have instead expected to be presented a file dialog to go find a text file on my hard drive. I guess in theory they have gone this route to eventually make mobile support easier? I guess at this point all mobile devices pretty much have robust copy and paste functionality.
I realize I said lastly on the step before… but you are presented with a list of your cards that have been plugged into Arena. Now you can simply weed out the cards you don’t want to play and build your own janky sealed deck. There will of course be problems if you don’t actually own a copy of the card and as such will have to craft it using the proxies you have earned up to that point. This is also why you might want to draft a larger pool of packs if you happen to have a smaller pool of cards available. It also might steer you to certain colors, but while this is not a perfect solution it does at least allow you to manually replicate sealed environments and play directly against your friends in this manner without having to hope to get into the same draft or sealed event on Arena.
Fun Police
Yesterday during the day I posted a list of Ravnica guilds in order of my likelihood to play them. For the uninitiated the guilds themselves simply represent the various two color combinations that are available in Magic the Gathering. So instead of saying you are playing Black and Green… a lot of players simply say that they are playing Golgari as a not as short as saying GB sort of shorthand. The truth is I think it goes deeper than that and is instead a sort of tribalism that allows players to indicate that they are in fact “in the know” and part of the community. Whatever the case… they exist and I have certain proclivities. Here is my ordered list of guilds in decreasing likelihood that I would play that color combination.
- Golgari –Â aka Green and Black
- Gruul – aka Green and Red
- Rakdos – aka Red and Black
- Orzhov – aka White and Black
- Selesnya – aka White and Green
- Boros – aka White and Red
- Simic – aka Blue and Green
- Dimir – aka Blue and Black
- Izzit – aka Blue and Red
- Azorius – aka Blue and White
Later that night Kodra chimed in with a comment that I expected him to make at some point.
Stop hating on blue
— Kodra (@kodra22) January 23, 2019
You notice that pretty much on my list every combination that includes the color blue is sorted to the very bottom as in general it is the color that I am least likely to play at any given time. Also note that pretty much any combination of Black and Green gets sorted pretty high given that those are my favorite colors to play. So why then do I hate one specific color of magic. The truth is I hate what it stands for… which is control magic. The challenge of the color pie is that in modern magic every color has specific themes that it excels at. Black for example plays with dead things, and also things that are just as likely to backfire and harm the player as the opponent. Green wants to go big and go fast and stomp stomp stomp stomp. Red wants to burn you… GIVE ME FUEL GIVE ME FIRE GIVE ME THAT WHICH I DESIRE! White does a bunch of things… but mostly small creatures with tricks, flyers and ways to prevent damage from being dealt. Blue on the other hand… while it also has a bunch of flyers… it excels at the magic of denial.
Now I will admit that pretty much every color has some form of denial built into it. Green is good at blowing up flyers and artifacts, Red can nuke stuff… black has a lot of straight up death to a creature cards, and white can throw creatures into time out exceptionally well. Blue however just has a lengthy library of ways to keep you from actually doing anything.  If a control player is doing what they are intending to do… they effectively shut you down from being able to cast anything. This means that one player is having fun tormenting you… and the other player is frothing at the mouth and wanting to flip the damned table. Blue players tend to couch this commentary as that they like doing tricky things, but those tricks are played at the expense of someone else’s fun.
Don’t get me wrong I have played control before and fiddled around constantly with my “Mill” deck for years. For the uninitiated “Mill” is a deck style named after the card Millstone that forces the player to place the top two cards from their library into their graveyard. One of the alternate win conditions in Magic the Gathering is that when one player cannot draw a card they lose the game. So in Mill you are playing a constant stream of cards that force the player to discard over and over until they have nothing left. Right now there is a card called Persistent Petitioners that if you have 4 of them in play… can force the player to mill twelve cards at a time. Sure it is weird and entertaining the first time you encounter it… but if you keep encountering it the fun wears off for everyone but the person playing the deck. Ultimately the reason why I do not enjoy Blue… is because too often the fun of a control player comes at the expense of everyone else.
Of note this is also why I generally do not like broken combos like Krark-Clan Ironworks that if encountered you might as well just concede and move on with your life. There was an unlimited combo in Amonkhet that involved players creating a bajillion cat token creatures. The first time I encountered it… I let it play out just to see how nonsense it could get. Notice the opposing player has an army of token creatures… and is at 183 life to my 15. Once again this was entertaining the very first time I encountered it, but not at all from that point forward and if I even got the whiff on the wind of someone playing this combo… I could concede out and move on to the next match hoping for something more manageable. The players who love combos like this feel a sense of gratification for breaking the game… and everyone else just feels like the game is dumb for allowing something like that.
The times I am happiest playing Magic the Gathering is when you have some random back and forth interactions, the type that you see often among brand new players. I love two people sitting down with a bunch of random jank and hoping to succeed, and I guess that is why in general I prefer draft formats for the randomness. I’m working on a pauper singleton league at work as I have said before, in part because those constraints do a lot of things to stamp down power combos. If Arena had a format where they literally gave you a randomized deck that aligned to some basic color themes… that would probably be my favorite format ever. I think ultimately I am chasing the joy we felt first playing this game when we absolutely did not know any better and had six of us sitting around a table playing in a grand melee.