cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24212126

Bonus artist pic:

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24159309

Tl;dr: basically the same as regular Secret Lair but more random?

A surprise clue has Magic: The Gathering fans convinced that the last set of the year will be Avatar: The Last Airbender - could it be true?

A tokens deck in Magic: The Gathering is one of the renowned deck strategies that revolve around creating a large number of creature tokens to overwhelm opponents through sheer numbers. I remembered it as one of my iconic decks in the past during my competitive prime as a Magic: the Gathering player.

2024 was a huge year for MTG. It was a lot of things. Controversial, exciting, frustrating, promising, and refreshed. We saw some formats get ruined, then fixed, then ruined again. We saw some great changes to Standard that not everyone was fans of at first, but they seemed to quickly warm up to them. We saw Wizards effectively abandon a format in favor of propelling Standard into a more prominent position. We saw some great cards printed for Standard, and some promising things to come in the next year that were announced. Along with that, a fair amount of people were still bothered by the new trajectory of the format. Some are calling into question the longevity of MTG now with the heavy lean into Universes Beyond. A little bit of everything happened this year in the MTG world, and it was interesting if nothing else. On a personal level, it was also a hell of a year for me, as I took down two different events and grew a lot as a player. We are going to look at The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly from this year!

Learn what you need to know about Standard Rotation in 2025, including which sets will stay legal, and how rotation is changing.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23760750

Richard Garfield blogs about the differences between a ranked ladder and tournaments for competitive play.

Recently I started playing a digital game. There was a tournament announced for the top players. Although I wasn’t a top player – the game was new enough and there was enough luck in the play that I thought maybe I could qualify, and so I started paying attention to my ranking.

Quickly I noticed that I was having less fun because I was no longer experimenting and trying new things – I was focusing on what I knew worked. I began to lean more heavily on what other people said was correct rather than finding my own way. Losses were setbacks rather than learning experiences. When I rose to a level that corresponded to my actual skill, I stalled. Then the games became more samey, with the players mostly playing similar styles. I noticed that I felt like a mediocre player even though I was in the top 10%.

The experience brought into focus and made personal some of the misgivings I have had about extensive player rankings in games. [...]

Howdy folks!

Back again to get the word out about The Dynasty Cube, a living, ever changing draft league.

Season 1 just wrapped up over the weekend (Congrats to the Theros Demigods for taking down the Innistrad Creeps in the Championship!), and The League is now voting on rule changes for the next Season while Teams strategize ahead of the Season 2 Draft which begins January 9th!

What is The Dynasty Cube?

The Dynasty Cube is a collaborative, living draft format that combines several concepts.

• Rotisserie Draft, where players make draft pick selections publicly, one at a time.
• A Fantasy Sports League, where each team is matched up against one other team per week, culminating in "playoffs" where the teams with the best records play an elimination tournament to determine a champion.
• Blaseball, an online horror-baseball-sim league that evolved over time as a result of collaborative efforts of the members of the different teams.

How The League Works

In The Dynasty Cube League, Teams of players draft rotissierie-style through the history of Magic, beginning with (nearly) all of the first 500 or so unique cards contained in the earliest Magic sets, and replacing undrafted cards with new cards in chronological set order as The League goes on.

As each Season progresses, the decisions made by each Team continue having an affect on The League. After each Season, Teams will vote on new rules to enact and other changes that will take effect in the next Season.

Season 1 of The Dynasty Cube began on Oct 24th. and completed December 28th with the Theros Demigods claiming the Championship! Season 2 is scheduled to begin January 9th 2025 - This list currently reflects the Draft Pool for Season 2. League Calendar

Draft Pool Curation & Rotation

Cards (currently) excluded from The Draft Pool

• Cards referencing either "ante" or "banding".
• Cards banned in Vintage.

Rotation

• When cards go undrafted, they are removed from the Draft Pool to make room for new cards from the next chronological set to be added.
• As an exception to the above, if a card has been drafted more frequently than it has gone undrafted, it will get a limited number of opportunities to be drafted in a future Season.
• Cards to be added to The Draft Pool in the next Season can be found in The Chamber

Getting started with The League

• Join a Team on the Discord Server and start collaborating with your new teammates, or you can simply be a "Spectator" which gives you some extra access that you won't otherwise have without a Team affiliation.
• If you're not sure which Team best suits you, you can ask the different Teams to give you their sales pitch in ⁠⁠the #team-recruitment channel.
• If you give yourself the Spectator role, you can always remove it and give yourself a specific Team role later on, but it's much more difficult to leave a Team once you've joined it.

Meet the Teams

🌟 Alara Shards 🌟 "Why not both?"

⛩ Kamigawa Ninja ⛩ "Omae wa mou shindeiru."

🧟 Innistrad Creeps 🧟 "Graveyard, Gatekeep, Girlboss"

🌞 Theros Demigods 🌞 ”The Fates will decide”

🔗 Ravnica Guildpact 🔗 “A Championship is won and lost before ever entering the battlefield”

👽 Lorwyn Changelings 👽 ”Expect the unexpected”

💠 Zendikar Hedrons 💠 "Good Vibes, No Escape"

🐲 Tarkir Dragons 🐲 "No cost too great"

If you want to learn more about The Dynasty Cube or join a Team and participate, all details and League organization are kept in Discord

Something like edhrec , but that has Brawl/Standard Brawl as a format. Does such a thing exist?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23645733

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23611774

Standard format is experiencing one of the most varied moments of recent years and there are always surprises. Today we are going to talk about a new entry in the format, namely Esper Aggro, which has managed to get 5 times in a row a score of 5-0 in the Standard League of MTGO.