@vaughnbros So you crack a fetchland, and you can't find a land, so you show your deck to your opponent? I think think WotC solution is better here :D

@walking-dude The trouble with Young Pyromancer is: with only Shardless Agent and Bloodbraid Elf as kill cards, even a few tokens can really mess you up as blockers. I think you really need something that wipes them out. Like @garbageaggro said, my preference is Slice and Dice, but anything that sweeps their x/1s and keeps your board around would work as well.

The basic idea is it lets me keep my counterspell count up without having to run cards like Flusterstorm/Pyroblast which get cascaded into, and the (sizeable) drawback is mitigated by all of the card draw in the deck. It came into play only once against an Ancestral Recall, but it could have been a Misdirection instead. It's a concession to the cascade strategy.

It's definitely a "fun-of", but I was never too disappointed to draw it.

Posting an offbeat list I played to 3-2 finish in a league last weekend. Not running sideboard cards for Delver was an oversight, I expect it would have been an easy 4-1 if I had. The list as posted has a serious problem handling an active Young Pyromancer, even when you're seriously outdrawing your opponent, so a handful of Slice and Dice (or your favorite Pyromancer removal spell) would go a long way.

The list can draw a ton of cards, and cascade makes you suprisingly counter resistant, despite not having access to cheap counterspells.

As Foretold didn't do much, but it was threatening enough to draw opposing countermagic. I suspect I want more than 0 but less than 4. Reviewing the list in retrospect, Jace, Vryn's Prodigy has less to do here than it usually does, but I'm not sure I want anything else more.

This definitely could support more Null Rods, which might be correct in the meta right now.

@maximumcdawg said in Reverting cards to original functionality:

And, then, can we persuade Matt Tabak that more players benefit if we revert the card to original text than if we do nothing?

Pretty unlikely. He does not care about this.

I tried this a bit when it came out, and was pretty disappointed. Building around a flipped copy of this card unfortunately means running cards that are less great when you're trying to flip him (think Intuition vs Preordain). I think Baral, Chief of Compliance has a lot more potential, and even then has some of the same problems. Flipping him immediately on turn 3 is a lot more difficult than I wanted it to be.

If I'm being honest, I don't think Seeker of the Way is particularly great right now either. The decks I've seen running Seeker tend to spend life very aggressively (Sylvan Library, for instance), so I suspect the Lifelink is important in those decks. Even still, I'd bet you could do better with some different sort of card in that slot.

It's important to remember that as there is no such thing as a sanctioned proxy/playtest tournament, there is also no such thing as official rules for making proxy cards.

Typically every TO has their own set of rules, so the only sure thing is "read the announcement, ask the the head judge". However, there do tend to be common themes between the rules. A good playtest card is:

Clear: It should be completely obvious to your opponent what the card you're playing is. There should be zero chance they mistake it for something else, even at a glance. At a quick glance your opponent should be able to tell "that's a playtest card", and they should be able to tell which card it is without having to give away the fact that they're looking at it. (e.g. they shouldn't have to pick the card up to read the name). Many tournaments will require the full card text to be written on the proxy as well, but if there's so much text that it makes the card less clear, I would opt for clarity and confirm with the head judge ahead of time

Unmarked: This should be obvious, but you should not be able to tell that a card is a proxy if it is in a face down sleeve. Whatever you use to make your playtest card shouldn't be visible through the back of a sleeve, and it shouldn't change the thickness in a notable way. A low-key, 100% proxy event might allow a deck entirely using paper printouts inside a sleeve, but a larger event never will.

You should confer with the TO and/or Judge first, but practically speaking, I've never been to an event that didn't allow "A basic land + Sharpie" as a valid playtest card. Just be sure to make it clear that they're proxies, and don't use a basic you're also running in the deck :D

@zedan I think you can definitely perform with an Outcomeless build, too. One nice thing about TPS/DPS vs Outcome is far less vulnerability to Null Rod effects - it's pretty trivial to Ritual through them, where Outcome decks usually have to find an answer first.

I would avoid the list in the original post of this thread, though. Something like @MacDeath 's list is a lot closer to what a modern Ritual storm deck looks like. With the recent Yawgmoth's Bargain unrestriction, I think people are pretty excited to build around that. I've played against a few Dark Petition/Bargain lists online but I don't know of any published lists.

To be clear, as a player, I want the meta data. I want the full breakdown, and I want an unbiased sample (i.e. not the biased sample that wotc is providing for leagues). For the purposes of maximizing my personal odds in winning an event, I want the information to be as accurate as possible./

For better or worse, these days I spend a lot more time community-building and content-generating than I do trying to increase my chances of winning tournaments. In that sense my priorities might be different than a lot of the people using the site - in the same way that WotC's priorities when choosing which league decks to show are different than a player's priorities when choosing which league decks they want to see.

I can't begrudge anyone for doing the research and collecting the data that's important to them, personally ... especially not when their motivation is clearly altruistic.

@mediumsteve that's right steve :D fixed the original post