Praetor EDH Project, not Pauper, but still grassroots.

Along with my burgeoning interest in the Pauper format, both online and in real life, I've gotten seriously hooked on EDH. If you don't know what that is for some reason, just google it and you'll find quite the tempting rabbit hole to get lost in. I do like a lot of the non-pauper cards, and EDH is a great format to feature those cards. You only need (are only allowed actually) one copy of any card, so expense is a little less of an issue (though there are plenty of expensive cards that you'll find in EDH decks). Five of my favorite non-pauper cards are the Praetors from New Phyrexia. I've seen multiple reviews of them calling all but two unplayable because of their cost in mana, but that's okay, I'd never build a 60 card deck with any of them anyways. But an EDH deck with one of them as a general is entirely different.

Then I stumbled on choosing which one to use and quickly decided that I should make a deck for each of them. This I will eventually do, but it'll take awhile and some cashola, so I'm going to take an idea I got from a forum poster on www.mtgsalvation.com. I'm going to propose to some other EDH players that each person pick a praetor and construct an EDH deck to fit. Then I'll just hand out the praetors at the game (I couldn't help but order one of each) and we'll have a game.

The trick I think will be to build a playable deck that is true to the flavor of the corresponding praetor. I don't think it would be as fun to just plug Urabrask, the Hidden into an already built mono-red deck as it would be to take a look at cards that relate to him, either directly in Scars of Mirrodin block or throughout Magic history, and try to build a deck based on Urabrask's philosophy of ignoring the strife between the other praetors and continuing to keep the forges underground burning. This is certainly what I'm going to do when I build decks for the praetors, but I'm excited to see how other players would interpret each praetor's flavor.

Here's a link to an article on Wizards' site on the praetors: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/stf/142

I'll keep posting here to chronicle my Praetor EDH adventures.

They're Geeks and They Don't Know It

I work at a call center where there's a fair amount of down time between calls. People do all sorts of things to keep themselves occupied, from reading books, to knitting socks, to playing cards, to the omnipresent messing around on the internet. Aside from knitting, I've done my fair share of these. But recently I've been using my down time at work to organize my Magic cards, test my decks, and work on my Pauper Cube. Some people actually ask what I'm doing, but most just give me odd looks. Those that do ask usually make some comment to the effect of "still in the eighth grade?" or "interesting... um... hobby". I quickly found myself becoming self conscious about the geekiness level of my activity.

Then I took a good look around me. There are those that read and play games, but most of my coworkers are madly clicking away to stay on top of their imaginary mafia or farm on facebook. I realize these are surface level games that don't require a lot of learning or invite heated discussion. Maybe that's what makes things like Magic the Gathering a geek activity, how "into it" players get. But all those normal people playing internet games are still dedicating hours and hours of time to an imaginary world in which they interact with other real people also playing in that imaginary world. Not that different from what people playing Magic, either in the real world or online, are doing.

So what can I conclude? Perhaps just that humans of any age and stereotype like to use their imaginations, especially on an interactive level. Humans like to be entertained while being competitive at the same time. And whatever distinctions can be drawn between the various activities, ultimately I'm playing Magic for the same reasons they're watering crops on Farmville.

From MTGO making me a pauper, to playing pauper on MTGO.

Maybe it's my obsessive personality, maybe it's the depth of Magic the Gathering, or more likely it's the combination of the two, but somehow I've gone from opening an account on MTGO to just try the game out to having several thousand virtual cards, about a thousand paper cards, and a burning interest in multiple formats. Is this normal? Wait don't answer that. Doesn't really matter anyways. I'm hooked.

I'm just grateful that I discovered the pauper format on MTGO before another set came out. It's probably fairly normal for a new Magic player to think he's got some crazy new out of the box thinking that will make waves in the standard format, and it's probably fairly normal for the same new player to spend too much money on cards only to find out he's not so hot. I do have a couple of standard decks online that I came up with (ahem, came up with after reading the deck lists online) that do alright. I love playing white knights, especially with a little blue control thrown in. But that knight deck cost me... well you can probably guess what it cost me. About ten pauper decks worth. So I've been loving playing pauper online. So much so that a friend of mine and I thought it would be awesome to play the format with real cards. The only problem was when I asked around the local card shops I found out not a lot of people have paper pauper decks...

But then I discovered Adam Styborski's awesome blog about his pauper cube and I was inspired. I was interested in learning to draft anyways, so just create a commons cube and I could play pauper, learn to draft, and live happily ever after.

The only problem is, Adam's cube is formidable. He's got knowledge, and friends with knowledge, and he's worked that cube into a well-oiled machine. Me? I don't have much Magic know how, and neither do my friends. But I do know the cards in standard because I've been playing with them. And the commons in standard are pretty readily available (in fact I already had 3/4 of them). So I built a standard commons cube.

Boring...

Yeah, probably for the experienced player. But as a new player I find it approachable. I can't help but think other 'noobs' would too. So maybe I'll gather up a playgroup of new MTG initiates and we'll learn together, amass some knowledge. Maybe together we'll make my cube formidable someday.