January 27, 2012

MTG Southwest Website – a Further Update

By admin

So I ditched BuddyPress and started investigating Mingle as the software to power the new MTG Southwest website. Mingle seemed perfect – the theming was intuitive, the navigation of the site was fine and so on. Then I came to test the social aspect of the social network site – you know what I mean, sending messages, adding friends, looking at profiles, that kind of thing.

To do this I created a second user account, fired up a second browser, logged in with both accounts at the same time and sent a message from my original, admin account to the new one. Turns out you can only send messages to people on your friends list. Bit inconvenient, and something I’d like to configure before the site goes live. So I navigated to the other account’s profile and added them as a friend. Except, I couldn’t find a way to do that.

So here I was, with a social networking site, with two accounts both logged in and both completely unable to interact with the other. Fucking brilliant.

And back to BuddyPress I went. For all the failings of the theming engine, at least users of a social networking site could actually use the social networking site for social networking.

So that’s where we are. Actually, we’re quite a lot further than that. There’s forums and groups. The groups allow some forums to be kept private if that’s ever needed. Users can search these to find relevant information and if they can’t find it they can create a group to discuss their interests. There are user profile pages it’s possible to post comments to, rather like the wall of another site you might have heard of. There’s private messaging for, well, messaging in private. And there’s even an events section – a calendar of events, colour-coded by town or city, visible a month at a time with links to information about each event.

There’s a chap called Tom Palmer. Now, Tom is brilliant. He’s only gone an designed a logo and a masthead for the site. I’m really pleased with his work and how the site looks as well as how it functions.

At the moment I’ve thrown it to the lions’ den and a group of about 10 people are using it, trying to break it, making sure that everything works as they expect it to and that the tasks they needs to perform are performed how they expect. This has thrown up a couple of things. First, email notifications were happening for every single action that takes place on the site that affects your account – for Tom this was generating about 200,431 emails a day. Fortunately there are options in user account settings for such things. Phew! Also, another user identified that the way I’d structured the forum did necessarily make sense in all circumstances – although I’ll defend my decision, I can see how having two separate groups for Modern and Legacy format discussion might be an obstacle if you want to discuss prize support for Modern and Legacy events you plan to run.

But that’s all part of the process and all those detail will get sorted out.

So thank you to Tom and thank you also to the testing people.

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January 14, 2012

More on the Current Deck – Esper Control

By admin

Take out the Grave Titans, I said. They seem too cute, I said. I’ll admit that a deck running Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite, Karn Liberated, White Sun’s Zenith and Grave Titan seems somewhat threat heavy to my control-player’s eyes, but Jesus Christ was I ever stupid.

I played FNM at the Giant’s Lair again this week, and again went 2-3 in matches. I can’t remember my exact list, but basically I tried to skew the build to beat an aggro meta, added a Timely Reinforcements and Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite to the main and ran Karn Liberated in the sideboard. I added a 4th Doom Blade to the side along with a pair of Steel Sabotages and a Ghost Quarter. Enough decks were running powerful artifacts and Inkmoth Nexus that the Sabotages seemed like viable options and the extra GQ was to help deal with Kessig Wolfrun and Inkmoth Nexus decks. I think the build was still not skewed enough to beat aggro and still cares too much about control.

I don’t want to do a full tournament report – even less so that last week – and I can’t even remember which round each of the following matches were but I think it’s worth noting a few things that occurred to me during each match.

UR Delver, 0-2
Mental Misstep is a real card in Standard at the moment. Sideboard material perhaps, but there are enough 1cmc spells to make it a good card.

Mana Leak is horrible. It’s been said a lot recently but, actually, it’s true. Dissipate and even Negate are much sweeter.

It’s not OK to gloat in victory. I’ve had two gloating opponents ever since starting to play again during M10 – one was a young teenager who beat me in a triple-Worldwake draft and this opponent, who gloats everytime he beats me. I don’t know how he responds when other players lose to him, but apparently I should take it as a compliment. I don’t.

U/w Delver, Rune Chanter’s Pike, 2-1
First it was “fucking Delver.” Now it’s “fucking Rune Chanter’s Pike.” The way to win this matchup is to counter Geist of Saint Traft and to counter or remove the Pike. Invisible Stalker, without any equipment, is oh-so-very crap – just as I said it would be during Innistrad spoiler season.

In game three my opponent played a turn one Gitaxian Probe and saw Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite and sandbagged a counter for it. This meant I could land Gideon Jura, Karn Liberated and White Sun’s Zenith with almost assured impunity. A resolved Elesh Norn wrecks his board and stops him playing any creatures. If he doesn’t draw a Vapor Snag, and I never saw one, it’s simply good game. Bad beats. Who’d have thought that a turn one uncast 7cmc beatstick would win me a match?

Look at me gloating. How ironic.

G/W/r Wolfrun Ramp, 1-2
Thrun, the Last Troll is a bastard. Mind you, if I was the last human I’d be a bastard too.

End-of-turn White Sun’s Zenith for 6 (12 power on the board) into pre-combat main phase Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite (for 28 power on the board) has become one of my favourite plays.

B/u Tezzeret Infect, 0-2
One poison counter means Esper Control is dead. This was a black and artifact deck that seemed to play blue only for Tezzeret only. I was expecting and playing around counters, so it’s possible that my opponent decided not to run out his Mana Leaks into my three untapped mana, I guess, but the only blue card I saw was Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas.

So yeah, cards like Throne of Geth, Contagion Engine and little infected gits like Inkmoth Nexus and Plague Myr did for me. It was very hard not to keep accumulating poison counters, although I suspect it’s possibly a case of practice.

Oh, and I made a horrible mistake in this game. Post-combat, after we’d traded all our creatures, I thought that playing Timely Reinforcements was the order of the day. I paid three to discard a card. Genius.

RUG Delver, 2-1
Refer to my artical from last week. This is an aggro-control deck geared very much towards an aggro meta. Mine is a control deck accidentally balanced for aggro and control opponents. Apart from some crappy draws in game two my deck did like what it oughta. And apart from some stupid plays in the same game I did alright in this match.

I loved it when I used my fourth, third then second best spells to bait counterspells, only to watch them resolve – followed by watching my best spell resolve on the last turn of the match.

Conclusion
That’s all for now. Some cards are good, some suck, some are annoying. I’m so good at this “breaking news” crap.

Laters.

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January 14, 2012

An Annoyance

By admin

Question: How do you know you’re paired against a U/x deck?

Answer: Turn one – Island, Delver of Secrets, go.

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January 11, 2012

MTG Southwest Website – an Update

By admin

There is a project currently underway to unite the various geographic-based groups in the Southwest that play Magic into one uber-group. This is no small task and at the moment is being rolled out through Devon then is planned to incorporate the rest of the Westcountry.

My part in this is building and managing the website for the group. And this is an update for the people who have an interest.

There’s a common phrase in software development: “It’s always good to throw one away.” If that’s so, then I’ve been very good indeed. It’s now just less than a week into the development of the website and I’ve tried and discarded various bits and bobs. If Magic was software and creatures were PHP and mana was HTML then I’d have tested an entire format.

For various reasons, I’m disinclined to build an entire site for MTG Southwest from the ground up. It’s too time intensive, it’s not worth the money, testing for such a project is more than even I have the stomach for, let alone my volunteer testing team. Not to mention the design work involved with making it look pretty and usable. Instead I’m using a freely-available content management system (CMS) called WordPress. Well, strictly speaking WordPress is a blogging system but it has features that lends it to working as a CMS. In fact, being a blogging system makes WordPress even more suited to the needs of the community than a more business oriented CMS. WordPress is made by people who know what they’re doing and as a widely used system it’s been tested in various stages for years by thousands of people including commercial developers, business end-users and people who keep a blog about their knitting.

I like WordPress. It has some sweet extensions, or plugins, that offer all kinds of functionality to a site as well as themes to make it look pretty. And that’s what I’ve been buggering about with for the last week.

There’s a plugin called BuddyPress. What this does is, after a bit of configuring, it turns a website in a social network site. It supports groups and profiles and all that gubbins and with some further extensions designed to work with BuddyPress it offers forums and event management. There’s one problem with this – BuddyPress only plays nicely with themes designed specifically to work with it. If you don’t use one of these themes then all kinds of funny things happen – menus don’t display, pages fail to render, the functionality that BuddyPress offers doesn’t exist, that kind of thing. This is all well and good. But.

But this site has a few specific requirements that couldn’t be met by themes written for BuddyPress. For example, we decided we needed a “feature box” to appear at the top of the home page, just beneath the banner and above the first article teaser, that provides links to calendars of events run by each of the various groups. Whilst this is possible to achieve in BuddyPress, it’s only achievable through the themes and I discovered that the themes are, well, rather incestuous. And when you think you need to be working in one theme – the theme you’re using on your site – you actually need to be making changes in another theme. And after digging through code to try and find the right script to edit, that script points at a different script and… well…

So I ran out of patience. I ditched it.

I went back to the drawing board – which looks rather a lot like a popular search engine – and I looked for an alternative to BuddyPress. Something that provides user-to-user messaging, forums, customisable user profiles.

And I found a system called Mingle. Mingle isn’t precious about the themes it shares sites with. Mingle is easy to configure. Once you’ve customised one WordPress theme you know exactly what needs to be done to customise a theme for your Mingle-based site.

So that’s what we have. We’ve got got one collection of websites, screwed up into balls and thrown into the corner. And we’ve got one social network site that is powered by a Mingle-enabled WordPress blogging system. It’s got custom features built by my own fair hands, it’s got an event calendar that can be used by the different groups that run events, it’s got forums, it’s got user profiles and the best thing is it’s taken a lot less time to get to this point than if I’d done the whole thing myself from the ground up.

What it doesn’t have is the right look. And a few of the features are in the wrong places. But that’s fine, that’s fixable. Those things are simple jobs to be done next.

And I’m really excited at the prospect of doing them.

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January 10, 2012

A Return

By admin

I’ve been on a short break from Magic. My third child was born a few months ago and with her she brought mayhem, madness, disarray, confusion and no sleep. One of the results of this, and the only relevant one here, is that I haven’t played Magic since August…

Or rather I hadn’t, until I went to Friday Night Magic at The Giant’s Lair in Plymouth. The breath of fresh air that having my first night out in almost four months, combined with meeting some fantastic new people and playing with a deck and cards I haven’t played with before all add up to me having had a brilliant night. Thank you to all concerned – the TO, the players and the venue staff.

So yes. A new deck. I’ve retired Tezzeret for now; not necessarily permanently because I think the deck might be quite well placed in my local metagame, but I’d been working on the deck for months and it was definitely time to mix things up a bit. So instead I rocked an Esper control deck. Here’s the list.

I was all set to take down the metagame with a 4-0 storm of raging cardboard doom. That’s not quite what happened. I went 2-3, handing out devastating death to Bant… something and RUG Delver. My arse was handed to me by Red Deck Wins and I also lost to Wolfrun Ramp and Tempered Steel.

I don’t want to do straight up tournament report, because I think those things are of limited value for FNM events. However, I think it makes sense to talk about a few specifics in the matchups. So obviously I start with the general run of the deck: 2-3 in matches, and 6-6 in games (0-2, 2-0, 1-2, 2-0, 1-2). The games I won I felt that the deck did what a control deck should do. Or rather, the games I lost I made horrible mulligan decisions, keeping hands with the wrong mana or too few lands or keeping an [ca/]Isolated Chapel[/card] and a [card]Glacial Fortress[card].

Round 1, RDW vs David McGlinchey
It was a common theme at this event that it felt like I had the cards in my 75 to win but didn’t see them. And even worse, the games when I did see the cards that could save me, I lost anyway. The first problem is due to making shocking mulligan decisions. The second problem was due to arsing up my plays. Against Dave I make some awful decisions and missed a critical activation on Gideon Jura – where I didn’t use its +2 ability in the face of about 5 damage Dave’s side of the board.

Of the cards I had I would have like to see more Timely Reinforcements – another recurring theme. That card is insane in this deck, possibly even the best card. Against aggressive decks like RDW getting an extra 6 life a couple of time during the game as well as getting a blocker for each attacker represents at least another couple of turns to stay alive – long enough to dig maybe another 6 to 12 cards and find a win condition.

Round 2, Bant, vs Ron Leacy
I got the feeling that Ron’s deck never really got going. That said, in game one my life total went down to 1 but even then I’d only really been pecked at by Skinshifters and pumped Birds of Paradise. Again, Timely Reinforcements lived up to its name and my life total never again dropped below 7.

Post-board Grave Titan was a beating – or rather the zombies he left behind after he was Oblivion Ringed before even recovering from summoning sickness. White Sun’s Zenith was bonkers. Actually, simply being able to keep mana open for counters and removal and play threats and draw spells (Blue Sun’s Zenith, Think Twice, Forbidden Alchemy) at end of turn is insane.

I’d like to keep the Titans and I think they’d work well in the main deck actually, but I think the cats are just a better threat and it seems better playing a Zenith for 5 cats into an empty board followed by tapping out for Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite.

Round 3, Wolfrun Ramp vs Marcus
I didn’t get his surname – or at least didn’t make a note of it. Wolfrun did what Wolfrun does and I only saw a couple of Ghost Quarters. There was a horrible choice between Quartering a Kessig Wolfrun or an Inkmoth Nexus. It’s like being ask how I’d like to die. Not pleasant. Again, I wanted more Timely Reinforcements. I should really think about packing a full playset in the main.

Round 4, RUG Delver vs Marc Silk Morris
We spent about 45,000 turns dancing around each other counterspells. Eventually the draw spells started flying, followed by the threats. Game two was a classic. I draw a grip of two Snapcaster Mage and got a third in my first draw step. I decided to play beat down and flashed them in end of turn and swung for 2 on turn three and for 6 turn five. Later on I tried to bait a counter with a Blue Sun’s Zenith for 6 and was allowed to draw the cards. By that point it was game over as it’s even for me not to sculpt a winning hand out of 14 cards.

Round 5, Tempered Steel vs George Williams
This matchup felt very much like I had the cards to win, and in fact I did win game 1. I think this suggests in some part that his sideboard was better than mine, but considering it was designed by LSV to take to Worlds 2011 I’m not surprised. This was another bad mulligan match. Game 2 I went to 6 with a grip that seemed OK if somewhat land-light. Game three my opening 7 has all my best cards but again 2 lands. Both games I struggled for mana, my draw spells didn’t dig me into removal and I got overrun but an army of 1/1s (3/3s game 3). It wasn’t pretty.

Conclusion
It’s a story as old as time: I need to make better mulligan decisions. I find it really difficult to do that though. I can judge a hand fairly accurately, I think, but I hate throwing my grip back and drawing a smaller one, especially if I’m going to be drawing 5. I’ve convinced myself that that any hand of 6 cards is better than any hand of 5 – and I genuinely believe that to be the case and the cold heat of battle it’s hard to let go of that.

I’m bad a sideboarding. I have an awesome array of big cards to choose from but I don’t trust myself to pilot my deck into the late game so I’m not bringing them in. For a control player not to trust they can see the late game, that seems a tad lame.

I want to rebuild the sideboard. I didn’t feel like I had enough answers for aggressive decks. I think I can afford to run fewer answers for control as that matchup seems pretty sweet. Without wishing to give away what I’ll be running this upcoming Friday, I think I need more spot removal. I’d like Day of Judgment 5 and 6 and Ratchet Bombs are too slow for that. Grave Titan was oddly cute when I played him but just feels too clunky at 4BB and sorcery speed. I feel I have better options for kill conditions.

Main deck, I loved Timely Reinforcements and wanted it in every game I played. I’d also like to swap around my threats.

So, to summarise, I need to man up, wise up, make better decisions and run better cards. Easy.

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September 7, 2011

Recently I Have… Been Playing Tezzeret

By admin

Tezzeret, Agent of BolasTezzeret, Agent of Bolas. A black-blue planeswalker who cares about artifacts.

I fell in love with this guy the first time I saw him in the MTG Salvation spoiler page and since he rotated into Standard I’ve tried a number of different builds with him.

First there was the Esper (blue-white-black) build that ran Day of Judgment and Gideon Jura. My initial concerns about this build were about the mana-base, but oddly of all the problems that deck had, getting the right colours at the right time wasn’t one of them. The trick, I found, was to minimise the number of Islands I was running (none) and run a shedload of Scars duals (Seachrome Coast and Darkslick Shores), filling out the rest of the land slots with a handful of Plains, a couple of Swamps and some Worldwake manlands – a 2/3 split between Creeping Tar Pit and Celestial Colonnade. The real problem the deck had lay in trying to do too many things. On one hand Tezzeret wants you to run a goodly number of artifacts so as not to miss on his Impulse ability (look at the top five cards of your library and put an artifact in your hand) and to make his ultimate (drain life based on twice the number of artifacts you control) look like a real threat. On the other hand, it wants to do irritating things with Gideon and mass removal as well as useful things with spot removal.

This was also before the bannings, where Stoneforge Mystic and Jace, the Mind Sculptor became illegal in Standard. It seemed so wrong to have Jace and not run him – the deck actually suffered for that decision, I think, despite the raw power of fateseal, Brainstorm and Unsummon. Once he won me an otherwise stalled game by exiling my opponent’s library, but otherwise is was something of an albatross.

It wasn’t a happy deck.

Next I tried infect. In theory this is a fine but lacks the explosiveness of other infect builds – infect artifact creatures are over-costed for one thing – whilst still having the same problem of running out of gas just as you want Tezz to start being valuable.

I’ve tried other builds that require Tezz to function properly. These mostly involved cards like Vault Skirge. This little chap is fine and dandy as long as you can find a reliable way to make him bigger – say with Tempered Steel or Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas’s second ability. Thing is, Tezz isn’t always around to look after the little guy and even if he is there’s often more value to be had in digging for artifacts.

So, lessons learned so far with this deck are:

  1. Don’t try to do too many things
  2. Don’t try to be too explosive – Tezz is a mid-game card.
  3.  Don’t rely on Tezz to make the rest of the deck good – if you don’t draw him you deck will fall flat on its face.

So with all that in mind I’ve updated my Tezzeret deck’s build, removed the parts that need Tezz to work (Vault Skirge and friends), removed parts that offer no synergy (Gideon Jura) and have introduced more parts that enable a longer game (Tumble Magnets, hand disruption, countermagic). Now I have a blue-black artifact midrange-control deck that likes Tezzeret but doesn’t have a codependent relationship with him.

 

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August 30, 2011

Manifesto Fish

By admin

So, I’ve moved to a new server on a new host and I now manage all my own domain names and email addresses. This makes things much more agile but also makes indulging in whims and pet projects all the easier. This, depending on how one looks at it, could be a good thing or it could very much be bad; either way, more on this at some later date and probably not until I’ve convinced at least one other person to jump aboard.

Notwithstanding, something I don’t think I did clearly before the move was to set out my terms of reference, the Normalfish.net Manifesto, if you will. Whilst I hadn’t set it out in public, I also hadn’t planned it in private and as a result the site felt rather modular and disjointed. Whilst I used design features to pull the separate parts together, and it probably worked as well as needed, I still felt dissatisfied with the site’s coherence.

If I were to make this plan only for me, then I’d draw a diagram. It would be a pretty spidergram using a different colour for each of the primary branches – or the main legs from the spider’s body. Said body would be labelled “Normalfish.net”. The primary branches of the diagram would read “Target audience”, “Content”, “design”. I think it’s reasonable to assume that you are the target audience and that you don’t want me to dissect the site’s design in front of you, anymore than you’d want a proctologist to talk too much about they intricacies of their craft. So here is my content manifesto.

Static Content

I plan to make more use of static content on this site to avoid it becoming – or rather remaining – purely a blogging site. Mostly I intend this to be useful to those starting out playing Magic: the Gathering. Phase 1 for static content will be describing the main card types (lands, creatures,planeswalkers, artifacts, enchantments, sorceries and instants) and the formats I want to discuss in the dynamic content (Standard, Modern, Legacy and to a lesser extent – for reasons I’ll touch on at some other time – Draft). Beyond this I could describe archetypes and strategies but for now, I’ll wait until I have those 10 pages written and signed-off.

Dynamic Content

I will keep the “personal adventures” theme from the last incarnation of this site. I aim to discuss the decks I play with, how they evolve, what I learn from playing them, as well as “tournament reports” from WNM and FNM events.

I will also continue my favourite semi-regular columns: Card of the Week, Announcements and Recommended Reading. Before the move these had their own mini-banners. I like the pretentiousness of this and will be extending these for all my dynamic content, such that all of it will be in one column or another. I will keep using the post categorisation and taxonomic tools available in the CMS however, as already I can see that my content could easily be published under more than one column. So why bother with column at all? Because I want to control content and its publication in a linear, coherent way.

The aim is to publish (at least) one article in each column each week, but I am aware that that’s a rather tall order. Card of the Week will be weekly, Announcements will be made when the Mothership has interesting news that I want to share. Recommended Reading is an oddity. Whilst it could quite easily be a daily column, highlighting one or more articles that are worth exploring every day, it could just as well be a weekly list of such articles. In the first instance I’ll aim for the latter and see how that goes.

Collaboration

I’ve always been interested in collaborating with others, particularly other players from my local group. This is something I plan to push for with more vigour. I’d like deck techs for interesting builds from the local meta. I’d like the best players to provide insights into the game. I’d like to publish winning deck lists from local tournaments – for this I’d need the support of local TOs.

So…

So there you have it. That’s the plan. I’ll get on it.

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