The white pool is really bad. You only have 1 amazing card in Avian changling, 2 decent cards in the 4/4 giant and the 3/3 flyer first striker which are both double white casting cost. All the other white cards are pretty lackluster without some support (see coordinated barrage and kithkin zephyrnaut

one other question here:

could someone explain how/when the cards rotate out? If I buy 10th edition cards what will happen when 11th comes out. Can you still play 10th in standard, will some of the 10th cards get 'upgraded' to 11? What about LOR MOR cards? How long can I play them in standard?

appreciate the help

splash packs disdain too, use wanderers twig etc

They rotate cards in and out of the base set. 70-80% of the 10th cards will be in 11th.

ah ok. Just didn't want to buy a bunch of cards and have them phased out in a year or whenever the next edition comes out. Whats the story with MOR and LOR though, how long will they be in standard?

They are arranged in blocks. A block consists of 1 major set and 2 minors. The major set comes out in october and then the 2 minors come later on spaced out. 2 blocks at a time are in standard so the main set lasts 2 years and the minor sets lat a little shorter because they come out later.

I could be off a little on this explanation because things could have changed over the years.

cool, thx for the help. For whatever reason I'm having a hell of a time finding out some of this info

Any other tips or things to avoid for noobs, like never just buy and open packs?

My only contribution is that I've found you can buy 10th boosters then sell them to the serabot for 4.5 tickets/pack which is obviously cheaper then buying them from the card shop and afaik this is scam proof. It had lor for 4.6 the other day but dropped it to 4.5 today unless I was looking at another. Anyone know of any better deals? Some article I had read mentioned that you could trade for like 4.5-5 but I haven't seen any higher then 4.6.

I'm guessing I will take the plunge and spend some dough on various boosters and give the drafts a try.

Selling cards and rare drafting:


Ok, I try to free roll as much as possible as I hate spending money on this crap. Here are some tips.

Selling cards: I usually sell all my cards to cardbuyingbot. He gives the best prices imo. If you get a big ticket card it is better to search the sell list and try and get top dollar or even list it yourself to try and get more.


Rare drafting: Seems like you guys mainly play sealed, but I almost exclusively play draft. It's a good idea to rare draft to at least some extent. Memorizing the prices of cards is a good idea as taking 50c is a lot better than some card that probably won't make your deck. It also helps to know if a card is worth $10 and worth rare drafting or $2 and your better off just taking a powerful card for your deck.

tl;dr version about 2 years

Formerly, each block was 3 sets and spanned one year, and standard allowed the most recent 2 blocks (meaning sets stayed in standard for 2ish years). This time they've printed 4 sets this year, and they're calling it two "blocks" even though the sets are all related, but it's apparently still working the same way (they all rotate out at the same time, approx. 2 years later)

ok, so i did a lorwyn-morningtide sealed and since this is the first time i've seen these cards and some of these abilities, looking for some help with deckbuilding

ok, I need to learn the mechanics of this game. I suck at the whole game, but especially endgame.

I attacked with Mosquito Guard (4/3 - first strike) and Changeling Sentinal (5/4 - with equip). I got blocked by Lairwatch Giant (5/3 - first strike if blocking two).

My logic was he would kill my Sentinal with FS, and I'd kill his Giant with Mosquito's FS. Ending the battle.

So in order to prevent this, I evoked Briarhorn onto my sentinel (8/7). FS death, and I go onto the win. Needless to say, it didn't happen. Oh well, I'm clueless in this game.

Benza, First 3 minutes looking at it go white/red definately with the 2 artifacts of Moonglove and Veteran's

Benza13: Here you go, this is one of the easier sealed I've done due to the strength in 1 color and decent creatures in another.

White 12
austere command
swell of courage
oblivion ring
weight of Conscience
cenn's heir
goldmeadow harrier
goldmeadow stalwart
kinsbaile ballonist
kithkin healer
kithkin zephyrnaut
order of the golden cricket
wizened cenn

Red 9
blades of veils-vel
adder-staff boggart
changeling berserker
flamekin harbringer
hamletback goliath
seething pathblazyer
soulbright flamekin x2
warspike changeling

Artifact 2

Veteran's Armaments
Moonglove Extract

9 Plains
8 Mountains


Notable sideboards are:

Shields of velis-vel: slightly playable against mirror type of match up where you can basically swing your 2/2 into their 2/2 and then use shields for the creature save. Obviously since shields gives all your creatures +0/+1 AND gives them all creature types (useful with wizened cenn), it can change the game around.

Hillcomber giant: A decent size creature. 3/3 for 4 is relatively ok, but it gets the cut here because it's slow and we have a lot of creatures (I'd have put it in main if we were low on creatures). Side in it against players playing red as a main color. There is only 2 common red cards I can think of that deals with the giant (Lash out/Shard Volley), and if it swings for a few times, it's practically game.


Basically the way you want to win is to overwhelm the opponet with creatures beating on him fast and if the game stalls you can use swell of courage to win and/or austere command to sweep his big creatures off the board while yours stay in play.

thanks for all the advice sykes, i figured white was good, just wasnt sure which other color matched best since i was so unfamiliar with the cards and i'm pretty rusty with this stuff in general

also, its a kithkin harbinger not healer, not sure if that affects my choice

Ok, Kithkin harbringer is about 1000 times better than healer. Include it as well. You can search out zephyrnaut, cenn's heir, wizened cenn, goldmeadow harrier, changling berserker, blades of velis-vel (although the last 2 i'd rather search out with flamekin harbringer).

cool, definitely seems like i've got a decent deck, too bad my current opponent is drawing sick against me

benza just play wrath, drop dudes, then win games

Finally won a match with sykes build. Thank you! Kinda bummed to find out leagues are only 1 week long until V 3.0 comes out. Was hoping to get 4 weeks of play outta this event.

The most likely way you can avoid trading creatures is to attack with both and let him block both creatures with his giant. Then wait for first strike damage to be assigned and go on the stack. Once you see where he is sending his damage but before damage is resolved, then evoke briarhorn and pump whoever is going to die.

If you pump your sentinel before damage is assigned, he can just direct his giant's damage to the Mosquito Guard that is still small to ensure than there is a trade.

I finally signed up and am checking out the software now. How does draft work? Is it just some sort of swiss tourney or something? It seems like it'd take a rather long time to finish with 8 players though.

I haven't decided what to do yet. I think I'll try a 10th edition booster league since that seems to be the most straightforward way to get started.

lol. I think I get to lose by server crash in one of my 'tiebreaker' games (not that it matters with 8 pts)

Oh yeah, the block was explained to me better. Once it's declared, you can't 'negate' the block. You can remove damage that would be done by removing the creature, but your attack is stopped. So while I killed him with First strike, the block was still declared so my attack didn't hit him.

Draft is single-elimination, so three rounds at the most. Rounds last up to 1 hour each time, but will end early if everyone's matches are done. I've had drafts go the entire 3.5 hours or so, and I've had drafts where I won all 3 rounds and it took 1.5 hours.

In general, you should have at least 2 hours available if you want to be able to play into the semi's.

Ah okay, cool.

I'm hoping they get the v3 beta server up and open again as I would like to cut my teeth on some free drafts. I'm looking forward to getting into mtgo and just pray that hasbro doesn't screw things up. Not a good sign when they are planning on taking the whole system offline for a week+ when v3 comes out -- that spells downie devs. Any competent team would get 90% of the work done on the beta server (or dev server) and take like 2 days to migrate and do some QA.

Where are you getting your info about 3.0?