@brass-man said in 5-8 December - Lucca, Italy - Nebraska's War 7:
Here's our up to date streaming schedule:
6th December: Start around 12:30 am CET Replay Artists Interviews
6th December: Start around 15 am CET Vintage All Stars and Alpha 40
7th December: Start around 11am CET Modern Main Event
7th December: Start around 12am CET Vintage Main Event
8th December: Start around 11am CET Legacy Main Event
Wanted to let people know that we're going to be doing live coverage of the Vintage event here, and I flew all the way to Italy to do it!
I'll be streaming with with my Italian cohost, Niccolo Covoni (@CovoniNiccolo on twitter)
the event will be streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/nebraskaswar_mtg
It's a full weekend, multi-format EW style event. The exact streaming schedule isn't completely fixed, but the current plan is the following:
tomorrow, Friday the 6th, 11am CET (5am ET) we'll be streaming Pioneer, Alpha 40, and Vintage All Stars.
Saturday the 7th, 11am CET, we'll be streaming matches from the main Vintage and Modern events (Vintage starts at noon)
Sunday the 8th, 11am CET, we'll stream the the Legacy main event.
The original plan was to stream more Modern than Vintage, but we talked the TO into upping the Vintage content if we promoted the event, so let's try and get some eyes on this and show them some Vintage love!
@trius said in November 18, 2019 Banned and Restricted Announcement:
I think that encapsulates the unhappiness perception. Vintage frequently doesn't feel like the vintage we're used to playing.
I agree entirely, but don't forget that "the vintage we're used to playing" is pretty ambiguous. I got into the format around 17 years ago, and back then there were plenty of players who were upset that their 5-color Keeper control decks couldn't keep pace with the bleeding-edge new style of play brought about by Fetchlands and Quirion Dryad. The game is constantly changing year over year, and almost by definition you're going to love the version of the Vintage that people played when you first became passionate about it (because if you didn't love it, you never would have gotten hooked). So almost by definition, as it changes you're going to run into patches where you enjoy it less than you used to. People tend to interpret this as a steady decline from some golden age, but it seems more like a sampling problem to me.
@protoaddict said in November 18, 2019 Banned and Restricted Announcement:
I'm not sure it is ok for you to be the arbiter of what is universally fun or unfun in any circumstance, as it is by definition a subjective judgement, including it being a neutral one.
I think we're in agreement here. That was entirely my point. Brainstorm is a card that makes the game more fun for me, and less fun for you. Therefore we can't just blanket state that it's fun or unfun, because that's subjective. I wasn't trying to make the claim that the card is fun-neutral. I certainly don't believe that I can arbitrate which cards are universally fun, my position is that nobody can do that, that different people like different games and it's impossible for any card to be universally fun or unfun.
Maybe my post needed more context. Even though the WotC explanation for the Narset restriction was "fast mana and draw spells", there have been several high profile comments in high visibility places about Narset being fun police. What comes first to mind is LSV's tweet that Narset stops him from doing the things he enjoys in Vintage. Make no mistake, of the people involved in the B&R decision process, more of them follow LSV on Twitter than have accounts on TMD. The idea that Narset stops people from having fun doing "Vintagey" things is one of the reasons why it was restricted. It is very probably not the only reason, but it's the one I was reacting to.
Anyway, my point is that judging anything from the perspective of fun is not a good metric.
That's trouble, because I think you make some good points there, and I strongly believe that making policy decisions based on fun has some real problems. Some cases seem clear cut, but others get vague very quickly, and I think it ultimately always comes down to picking specific groups of players to exclude, whether the deciding body is conscious of it or not.
But on the other hand, it's also sort of the only thing that matters. Because more easily measurable metrics like card diversity, strategic diversity, metagame penetration, win rate, game length, decisions per game, deck cost, etc ... these are all just proxies for the only question that matters: Do I want to spend my afternoon playing Vintage, or have a cup of coffee?
We know that basing policy decisions on fun doesn't work, but at the same time, we know that the only way to make policy decisions is to base them on fun, if only indirectly. C'est Absurde!
The last few posts here have gotten me thinking. At least to an outsider, it does sort of look like the format is circling around itself, eating its own tail maybe. But I think more precisely this is a back-and-forth between two or more separate factions.
I think, for the most part, there are players who want certain strategies hated out, and those are not the same players who want those hate cards restricted. (And for any given player, they probably lie in a different camp regarding each card/strategy etc). You have a rotating group of vocally angry players as the metagame moves month to month. Sometimes it's a near-consensus, and sometimes it's just a vocal minority, but at the scale of players we're talking about, to anyone outside the community (read: WotC) it just looks like Vintage players are always unhappy.
If Narset was bad specifically because it stops people from playing fun cards like Preordain, then you could restrict it. But if cards like Preordain are fun and you want to let people play more of them, you could also just unrestrict Brainstorm instead.
But of course, Brainstorm isn't a fun card. Neither is it an unfun card. Brainstorm is a card that some players enjoy and some players don't. There's no cohesive view of which sorts of cards and decks and play patterns are considered vintage-appropriate (in the way that Modern has a more clear vision), and therefore all B&R decisions end up being reactive, which can often make things self-contradictory.
Please don't read too much into this as an opinion on Narset specifically ... the same could be said about Chalice of the Void and Lotus Petal, Mental Misstep and Ancestral Recall, Gush and Thorn of Amethyst.
The completely reactive approach we have isn't necessarily the worst possible approach, it may even be the best approach available, given what WotC has to work with, but certainly isn't without its flaws.
This is super cool, I don't feel like I have enough Dredge expertise to comment on the results, but I love people taking vastly different approaches to to analyzing the game and seeing how they shake out.
Are there any decisions/conclusions you came to from running simulations that were counter to your assumptions going in? If you end up running a list you built with this method, I'd love to hear how it worked out for you!
oops! the old thread for this post got displaced so I'm recreating it - Brass Man
Fun episode as always! Looks like it was recorded right before Mystic Sanctuary was spoiled which is why they didn't mention it.
So far personally this has felt like a pretty nice set for Vintage. Wishclaw is playable, but not as scary as I personally feared, Sanctuary and Stonecoil both seem solid without being problematic. A nice balance was struck here, I think.
Kevin Cron and Steve Menendian review Throne of Eldraine, for Vintage.
0:01:00: Announcements
0:16:25: Modern Horizons Report Card
0:59:00: Throne of Eldraine Mechanics
1:04:12: Wishclaw Talisman
1:46:50: Once Upon a Time
2:01:00: Mystical Dispute
2:06:10: Shimmer Dragon
2:10:10: Witch’s Vengeance
2:20:00: Questing Beast
2:27:20: Emry, Lurker of the Loch
2:34:51: Deafening Silence
3:22:55: Stonecoil Serpent
3:34:47: Robber of the Rich
Total runtime: 3:50:50
Show Notes
– Throne of Eldraine visual preview
Contact us at @ManyInsanePlays on Twitter or e-mail us at SoManyInsanePlaysPodcast@gmail.com.
Hey @clausuk23 ! The site theme is custom, and honestly a little hacked together, I'm not sure I'd recommend using it, but you're absolutely welcome to, I've open sourced it here: https://bitbucket.org/andyprobasco/nodebb-theme-themanadrain
Some of the design also comes from plugins and custom widgets, which I'm happy to talk about, but it could definitely be annoying to put it together.
However the theme is MOSTLY based on the existing 'Material' theme, which you can get here: https://github.com/pichalite/nodebb-theme-material. It looks like it was updated 3 months ago so it might be in better shape than mine anyway. I'm willing to bet that the Material theme will give you a lot of what you're looking for with a lot less work than setting up mine would be. Both my theme and the Material theme should be free to use so don't worry about that.
I'm happy to talk forum-admin'ing so if you have any other questions let me know.