Board and Card Games

4:47 PM

Huh, WoTC decided to Ban Nexus of Fate, but only on Arena, and only in Bo1

magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/…

5:41 PM

Well, they banned it in formats that are only played in Arena

6:06 PM

ya, the break down they give on it is pretty good

Just one format, just in Arena

Just Arena Standard BO1

An ungenerous interpretation is they messed up and backed themselves into a corner because they can't ban a BAB promo

I don't think it is as big a deal in Bo3 or paper because of the format differences

mentioned in the article, but you can always call a judge for slow play if the player is being disruptive in paper

or shortcut things

as for Bo3 Arena, the deck can be dealt with by sideboard fairly straight forward I believe. Especially with the popularity of Sultai and Esper in Bo3 right now

I imagine if it wasn't a BAB promo, they'd ban it there too for disrupting play, even if it could be dealt with by sideboarding — because it would still disrupt game 1.

There is a paper standard tournament coming up soon, will have to wait and see if there are actually any issues with the deck in large tournament play

was a bit of an oopsie to print it but I don't know if play design could have reasonably been expected to catch it

it is the wilderness reclamation, Teferi, Hero of Dominaria and Azcanta, the sunken ruin interaction that really make it obnoxious.

@Malco i'm really just hoping this disrupts the viability of BAB exclusives, so they stop doing them

6:14 PM

not a fan? I haven't really been paying much attention to them so not sure about the issues.

not a fan

the shops love them

and that's good

Aren't the exclusive generally expensive Timmy type cards though?

but i think they're terrible

@Malco here's the list of them so far

they are generally expensive because they don't want to put anything modern-viable in the BAB promo slot

[cough nexus is modern viable cough]

Ya that is what I had heard, trying to make the cards interesting but non-competitive to avoid supply issues

they're also foil-only so they have the same curling issues that disrupts Kess in Vintage, and the moment one of those became tournament-viable that was going to start becoming a problem [cough nexus]

it's reported — in theory — that the distribution numbers of BAB promos outstrips the distribution of any given mythic in the same set

so that much is kinda good

6:19 PM

also it would probably theoretically cap the price of the mythic at whatever the BaB price is

well i mean, that's not really all that meaningful

a standard card isn't going to cost over $100

how much are in the BaBs? $100 seems high for a precon?

6:34 PM

BaB stands for "Buy a Box". When you buy a whole box of packs, you also get one promo card

Ahhhhh ok, I thought it was build a box

don't know where I got that from.....

7:09 PM

right

specifically, when you preorder a whole booster box, you get one promo card

if your game store happens to have a few left over, then you might get a BAB promo card when you buy a box without preordering it

7:44 PM

Ahh ok, I can see why the stores like it so much

1 hour later…

8:49 PM

Patch notes for Arena 0.12.00.00: mtgarena.community.gl/forums/threads/46580

Highlights include deck builder improvements, "Resolve All" button and Discord Integration

oh and Bo3 for direct challenge, should be much welcomed for online tourneys

9:03 PM

BaB's should be alternative-art cards in the set, not unique cards. You cannot change my mind

@Veskah sounds fair

Some love for those big Explosion decks:

> The "Choose X" browser has been updated for improved clarity. This includes the ability to +/- in increments of 5.

and for the Golgari Mirror:

> When attacking or blocking with a stack of tokens, you can click on the stack indicator ("x4") to issue attack or block commands to the entire stack.
When declaring a stack of tokens as blockers against a stack of attackers, clicking on the top creature in the attacking stack declares all of the blockers on that creature, and clicking on the stack indicator of the attacking stack will declare the blockers 1:1 with the attackers.

Woah this is pretty big...

Interesting

> More Information on Smooth Shuffling: We are currently testing changes to the shuffler algorithm to decrease the number of games with extreme examples of "mana flood" or "mana screw" (drawing too many or too few lands). While players may still find themselves in these scenarios, the shuffler changes are intended to mitigate the rarest scenarios, such as drawing 8+ Land cards in a row. As noted above, we are only testing these changes in the "Play" queue, and it does not apply to any Ranked or Traditional formats. We are using this opportunity to gather more data and to fine tune these cha…

I guess Resolve All is a step up from always Yield

Err, a step up from nothing but a still a step below Always Yield

If both your First hand and first mulligan are being smoothed, I wonder if you can play really greedy aggressive low land decks

9:16 PM

Probably, yeah. Mono-red can probably be even more greedy

JonTheMon

@Veskah My thought was that the BaB promo would be an alternate art card that would be present in the next set.

That would enable them to potentially print some pretty powerful cards.

That might be a pretty good compromise, and would be nice to have a playable "spoiler"

kinda like "early access" for physical/paper

@JonTheMon I guess I did kinda mean to generalize it as BaB should be a reprint. Also, that's a nice idea but it does seem a bit weird that the BaB isn't promoting the product it's being sold with.

9:33 PM

@Malco I think this is a bad idea

Adding any intention or counter-randomness to the shuffler creates a situation where the outcome of the game now can depend on choices made by developers, instead of just random chance

I wish they'd post the weights, especially with a 3-hand sample now. Is it just "Try and give them 3 lands" or "Give them all their colors" or something weirder

And if it's making it less likely that you draw 8 lands in a row, then it's affecting more than just the opening hands

Man, if it lets 20 lands deck consistently hit exactly their 4th land drop, things might be getting bonkers

Plus, if there's any pattern to the shuffler based on what cards you have, that's almost definitely exploitable

I enjoy staying in pre-con land for matchmaking. Free from the Mono-red pain and turbo fog

Shame that Valve lost their damn minds when making Artifact. Pay2Pay2Play

10:20 PM

@murgatroid99 I think it could have some unintended side effects for sure, hopefully they will post a break-down of what is actually happening.

don't think it can be data-mined reliably since shuffling is done on the server AFAIK