I am an analyst by profession, and data is key. So Below I will present the raw metagame data that we’ve gathered so far in terms of deck performance over the first two weeks of the May 2019 league. A few caveats
CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION!
Looking at the metagame lists below, one might think that in terms of sheer match wins Grixis Control would be the pure winner, which by the numbers is true. But it is also piloted by one of the most active, experienced, and overall best MTGO players, lowman02. The incipient MTGO Meta is still coalescing. Blue Decks are still powerful, and are everywhere, but the format is wide open. Week two saw 4-0s for three distinct archetypes Grixis Midrange, Boros Aggro, and W/G Walkers, and week one saw Injunjoe23 achieve a flawless victory off of Hightide, with strong showings from all over the place, including RDW, Abzan Midrange and MUD Control.
Midrange Decks still dominate in terms of overall registration, and combo is appears under-represented. Abzan is a popular color combo, but not the only one. So peruse the raw data below, check out the decklists, look for the spice, and as Sun Tzu said, KNOW YOUR ENEMY
This month we are going to try something different. What
makes Canadian Highlander great? It is Singleton, uses the Vintage banned list,
and is governed by a points list that aims to keep one archetype from dominating
the format. Plus Canada is great. But you know what other commonwealth country
is Great? AUSTRALIA
So this months MTGO League bonus challenge will be:
AUSTRALIAN HIGHLANDER!
Australian Highlanders rules are quite different from
Canadian Highlander, but It looks like it has all the makings of a format full
of Powerful Magic stories. From the Auseternal website:
“7 Point Highlander has been played across Australia and New Zealand for 20+ years. It is a competitive 60 card singleton format (15 card sideboard) which uses the vintage ban list and in addition a points system. Only 7 points are allowed per deck, and changes to the points list are made by the Points Committee to promote the health of the format. Announcement of changes, if any, take place on the release of each new standard legal set (once every 3 months).”
Players who want to earn bonus match wins in MTGO league this
month can register their lists starting on 16MAY2016 (standard entry forms will
be provided via Facebook and the Discord). This gives you a week to do some
research into the format, check out the archetypes and winning lists, and
determine what deck YOU want to play. And, with access to a tighter list and a
sideboard, maybe you can finally run that Choke,
Flashfires,
or Deathgrip
you been wishing you could put in a deck.
In my middle school, this HOSED Force of Nature
The best resource for this is the Auseternal portal, which contains the Australian Highlander rules, and links to decklists for you to browse. So get brewing, and we’ll see you next week for some spicy brews! Each league player that register’s a deck for the challenge can play up to 4 matches for bonus points.
In this last installment of our Introduction to Canadian
Highlander on MTGO series, we are going to discuss the nuances inherent in the MTGO
U/I as they impact a normal Game of Canadian Highlander. There are definite pro’s
and cons of the interface, so lets dive into it.
PRO: No More Shuffling!
Plain and simple, on MTGO you do not have to go through the
physical task of shuffling your deck. Canadian Highlander can involve a lot of
shuffling. Like a whole lot. Fetching and Tutoring alone can add plenty of minutes
to a normal paper match. In and of itself this is not so bad. In plenty of
matches you can probably short cut through some erroneous shuffles pretty easily.
Primeval Titan off of Natural Order is an easy example, you can just go get the
lands while you tutor up Prime Time right? Sure, you can, but from a technical
play stand point that is incorrect. There is an ETB trigger, which can be Stifled
or Disallowed. This doesn’t come up every match, but when it does it is a real
game changer. You can easily declare your intent to do so, and your opponent
can declare that they are going to stifle your ETB trigger. So that begs the
question…
Secret Tech!
Does it matter? I would say yes. I came to highlander as an
EDH player, and because there are more players at the table you are more incentivized
to short cut things. But I realized after I started playing the Canadian
Highlander that in 1v1 playing tight, always doing something when it is the
best and most optimal time to do it, is what it is really all about. This will
come as no surprise to many players, but the specific trigger you are
responding to can be the difference between a match loss and victory. In competitive
formats the stack can get pretty hairy, and navigating it correctly can
introduce lines of play that are crucial decisions in your game. This is one of
the things about MTGO Canadian Highlander that can improve your play, as
highlighted in our previous “Judge!” article.
Add to that the fact that you don’t have to worry about
boxing your deck, splitting sleeves, damaging your cards etc, and the lack of
shuffling is a convenience factor that streamlines your play and let’s you
focus on the match and not the mechanics of riffling cards. This also comes
into play when tutoring. Need to look at your library? BOOM there it is in alphabetical
order, and when you grab your card you are right back in it, with out worrying
about randomizing your deck. For the player on the go, this is a time-saver to
be sure, and lets you jam that many more games, but with the speed advantages
that the interface gives you in terms of shuffling, there comes a definite
drawback…
Some people view shuffling as a strength, not a weakness.
CON: Click, Click,
Misclick, Scoop
Certain styles of deck are definitely hampered by the MTGO interface.
Anything that involves a lot of discrete game actions, or resolving something
that repeatedly triggers or targets, can do one thing that will lose you the
game, chew through your clock. You only get 25:00 minutes to make your plays,
and some times the interface works against you. Combo, Prison Decks and decks
like Lantern Control suffer from this the most, as evidenced on a recent
Benjamin Wheeler stream. This presents your opponent with the tempting
opportunity for a Bad Magic Moment. If you have a minute left on the clock, and
are presenting an infinite loop that would allow you to make infinite mana and
draw your entire deck, at the cost of approximately 2,000 mouse clicks (and
more importantly, that many triggers, passes of priority in which you opponent
can respond etc), and your opponent says “ok let’s see it” then you will likely
lose the match by timing out. Dexterity cards are banned for a reason, and a
match on MTGO shouldn’t involve you winning by pulling out your Overwatch
skills with precision mouse clicking.
The simple solution to this is sportsmanship. If you are
willing to win at the cost of your soul, just for the shot of dopamine you get when
you see the “Player XXX Wins The Match!” pop-up than the Canadian Highlander
might not be the place for you. That being said, winning because your opponent
clocks out isn’t automatically bad magic. Forcing your opponent to tediously
wrestle with the MTGO interface and be beaten by the crufty U/I is. A reminder
here, abusing the interface is a violation of MTGO League
rules.
In conclusion, the MTGO interface provides benefits and
drawbacks, and most of the drawback can be mitigated through good
sportsmanship. It is the beginning of May and the beginning of a new monthly
MTGO league tournament. Lets get out there and play some Powerful Magic, enjoy
each others company, and shun the growing sunlight like good gamers!
If I can claim any credit within the Canadian Highlander scene for brewing a deck, that deck is 4C Trisk-rite. Any credit I get will not be for building a finely tuned machine, or a deck that will break the format and win tournaments. It is credit for building this soup sandwich at all. I want to say first and foremost THE DECK IS BAD, at least from a competitive stand point. It is incredibly fragile, and you have to run some real duds in it. But for flavor, and for fun, it tops my list. It is a deck where you have to earn those wins, and when they come it feels like a triumph of the human spirit. When you win a game off of a Triskaidekaphobia or a Hidetsugo’s Second Rite in a format that runs cards like Ancestral Recall, Strip Mine, and True-Name Nemesis, then you feel like a CHAMPION. The walls around you fall away, and Thor rolls up in front of your house on a flying chariot pulled by goats to give you a lift straight to Valhalla, the hall of hero’s.
Chariot is a relative term.
The reason for this deck tech is that the deck highlights
everything I love about Canadian Highlander. The seed for it was planted in my
brain by Liam Coughlan on an early North
100 Podcast. He described a deck designed by Nelson Salahub, that got him into
the format, Second Rite. Second Rite was an Izzet deck that killed players off
of its eponymous card Hidetsugo’s Second Rite. The premise of the card is
simple: at instant speed, kill your opponent if they are at EXACTLY 10 life. I
love build arounds. I love dumb meme cards. So, when I built one of my first paper
decks (Gruul Prison), I threw Second Rite in there because maybe, just maybe, I
could live the dream. My Gruul Prison deck was also bad, it is basically Burn
with a few green surprises that help push through damage (Berserk being a good
example). I noticed I actually was able to Second Rite someone on occasion
because if they could stone wall my aggro plan, then I only had to get them to
10, and then I thought, “Hey 10 is half of 20, they will think they are safe!”
and it was off to the races. One of the things I observed was that if they could
do the things that a lot of decks do to stabilize and protect their life total,
it didn’t really matter. Wall of creatures? Ok, gut shot you to 10 then second rite?
Who doesn’t want to live that way?
Surprise!
But then we were chatting about meme cards in the Discord,
and I was like, “meme-iest card ever, Triskaidekaphobia!” and then I realized,
13 and 10 are separated by a single bolt. There’s some action here. If you are
only trying to get your opponent to lose 7-10 life over the course of the game,
then your solution space is reduced a lot. Plus, the head games are real. While
it’s on the battlefield, everybody is playing around Triskaidekaphobia. You and
your opponent have to avoid being at 13 on your upkeep or the parties over. You
can warp the other players game plan since they have to play around it. It
means they have to play around all your burn spells, make chump blocks they
wouldn’t normally etc. Most importantly, in terms of sheer unadulterated
powerful magic, it means they can play to KILL YOU WITH YOUR OWN CARD. And if
for some reason life totals fly past 10-13 because your opponent is draining
themselves with fetches and paying costs, and you have nothing but burn in your
hands, then it becomes a pretty normal burn game.
The Deck
You can summarize Trisk-rite as a collection of packages. Those packages are Burn, Disruption, Tutors, Fast Mana. The burn package is intentionally sub-optimal. You are trying to get your opponent to an exact life total, so there is a spread of 1/2/3/4 life burn spells. You are playing around an opponent who is cracking fetches, and you are running cards like Ankh of Mishra and Black Vice so you can burn them and spend your mana tutoring in the early game. So, utility burn is where it is at. The deck isn’t running any X damage spells because they are too expensive and slow you down. You are trying to top out at 4 mana, and casting a sorcery speed burn spell and Second Rite in the same turn is hard to pull off. The best scenario is if you can blitz out some damage or mana quick. There’s plenty of blue disruption and black hand attack in the format so you are trying to do something dumb, fast. If the match is going to grind, then Triskaidekaphobia is the best bet if you can stick it on the board. In a faster match, or where your opponents can’t interact with your strategy very well, then Second Rite is a better bet, because you can surprise them. Here’s the list:
Points are: Mox Jet-3; Demonic Tutor-3; Vampiric Tutor-3,
Enlightened Tutor-1
The “Strategy”
Some of the cards may come as a surprise, or look out of
place, but they are part of the plan. The biggest challenge piloting the deck
is remembering to stay on message. You are trying to kill someone with Second
Rite or Triskaidekaphobia. All other considerations go out the window. You may
have to pivot into a burn strategy, and knowing when to do that is key.
Generally, it is when you have all your damage and no way to get your combo
piece into your hand.
Grant Wood may or may not be rolling in his grave from this sweet art
There’s some fun LD in the deck, Sink Hole, Molten Rain,
Orcish Settlers, Dwarven Miner. Yes, they function as disruption, but if your
opponent has a pain land or an Ancient Tomb on the Board, it can completely
destroy your game plan. Reading your opponents deck and knowing their strategy
comes in very handy. Instead of concentrating on how they are trying to kill
you, focus on what means they have to manipulate their life total. The hand
attack works similarly. Slow them down and limit their options while you durdle
for a turn or two trying to set up your glorious triumph. Healing Salve is in
the deck for that reason, it can blank the damage dealt by lands, or gain life
at instant speed. Is the card trash? Yes! Does it have a role in your strategy?
Absolutely!
The deck is running blue solely for mystical teachings. Splashing
for one card is fine, because you have to run a tainted pact mana base (another
tutor) and Underground Sea and Volcanic island meet your fetch requirements for
your primary colors.
You are also running red style card draw (exile then play)
in order to up your chance of hitting your stuff. Could you switch this to
Grixis? For sure, I built this deck with the plan for making it in paper (minus
the mox) and have most of the cards to make Mardu. No matter how you do it,
remember the core principal:
Get One of your Alternate Life Total Win Cons in Hand, and
then on the board. Anything that helps you get there is part of the program.
The Bottom Line
People prone to introspection may ask themselves “What is it
I love about Canadian Highlander?” For me the answer is simple. This deck is
what I love about the format. With access to the entire history of Magic you
can go for it on a thing you want to try. Decks that look like a pile on paper
can come together to be greater than the sum of their parts. Benjamin Wheeler is a big
proponent of The Garbage Plate/Platter/Trough
deck, which finds synergies in a massive pile of combo pieces. When you look at
a Triskaidekaphobia (or a Thousand Year Storm, or a Sentinel Tower) during a
draft, you might ship it as the dirt rare that it is. In Canadian Highlander,
these cards can find a place. I couldn’t run Simian Spirit Guide, Sink Hole,
and Mox Jet in Shadows over Innistrad limited, but in Highlander a clunky alternate
win condition might find a home. And in the MTGO metagame you will find enough deck
diversity that your tier 5 strategy can still get match wins. The stakes have
never been lower when it comes to MTGO Highlander. Do I have powerful, tier 1 decks?
Yes, I love my 4C
Lands Midrange deck and my Goblins
Deck. Playing Flying
Men is a white-knuckle ride that I love every second of. But whenever I am
playing someone I haven’t played before, I love whipping out my Triskrite deck,
going 1-2 during the match, and getting the lol’s out of my opponent. Because after
all, getting a laugh out of your opponent is one of the greatest feelings in
magic. Well, that, and this reaction.
For part two of our introductory series on the MTGO Canadian
Highlander scene, we’re going to talk about Cards, Cash, and Deck Building.
There are benefits and drawbacks to playing on MTGO, and the most obvious one
is the benefit to your bottom line. You can see our previous introductory
article for my TLDR on why MTGO is the financial solution for more games,
this article will focus on deep diving into the numbers and available services,
with a warning at the end, and a discussion about some of the constraints of
playing digitally. As a disclaimer, I am not in contact with any of the services
outlined below, I am merely providing the information based on my own experience.
The Invisible Hand of
the Market.
It’s 2019, and you want to get into Canadian Highlander on
MTGO, but you’ve never been a big online player. Maybe you are a Commander player
who never felt the need to play online, maybe you are a Modern or Legacy player
in a city with a scene that affords you plenty of games. Maybe you are new to
Magic in general and have played Arena, but heard about the format through
online or social media. Where do you start? Let’s start at the beginning, what
is your Magic budget, and what is your current MTGO card pool? Because at the
end of the day the decision will come down to RENT or BUY.
Buying Digital Cards
and Building a Deck.
There are a number of digital vendors for cards, and you can
go into the “Trade” section of your MTGO client to see a snapshot of some
prices for top cards. For the purposes of this article I am going to be using the
Card Hoarders website because it is the service I am most familiar with. Personally,
I am a buyer of cards, so this is the method that I use. Over the long term (over
a year) it is probably more cost effective, however, for upfront costs it is
more expensive than a card rental service, which will be covered below.
First things first, what deck do you want to play. If you do
not have a existing pool of Legacy or Modern staples on MTGO, and have never
played Canadian Highlander before, I would highly recommend doing a quick net
deck. The Canadian
Highlander Database on Tappedout has dozens of different deck archetypes
for you to choose from. For todays demonstration let’s build Medium Red
There are a few features on Tappedout that are designed to facilitate
MTGO play. The first is the export feature on the left side menu:
Click the download button. It will let you download the deck
list as a .txt file or a .dek file, either of which you can load into the MTGO
client. You will want a copy of this later in the process, so you can save it
down now. There is a link on the right that will port the decklist straight
into the Card Hoarder Website for purchase, but we will demonstrate how to do
it manually.
Go to https://www.cardhoarder.com/ to buy you
digital cards. On the front page in the top left you will see a link to the
Deck Editor:
Use the deck editor to load your list:
Now that your list is loaded you can see the total cost, and
all the cards available:
There are two useful features on here to save some scratch. “Optimize”
and “Remove Owned Cards” The Optimize feature will chaoose the cheapest version
of all cards based on all the available printings. As a rule of thumb for old
cards reprint Vintage Masters foils are significantly cheaper than original art
copies. So, a VMA Mox Sapphire (3.62 tix currently) will be much cheaper than a
black bordered beta (132.69 Tix currently).
“Remove Owned Cards” does exactly what it says. If you have
a profile on Card Hoarder (which you will need to create to receive delivery of
your cards), there is a tutorial on how to load your entire MTGO collection in
order to use this feature (or if necessary, sell it back). You can also update
the list by synching your purchase with it if you are a regular user.
You can see that buy removing the cards I already owned I saved
$140. Since you only need one copy of a card on MTGO for Canadian Highlander,
this scales as your collection grows. This is also a good time to scrub through
the remaining cards and see if there are any outliers that cost more than they
bring to the deck. MTGO card prices are dictated by Modern, and so some modern
staples (like Lilliana of the Veil, 31.33 tix) are worth more than a Black Lotus.
Cards from supplemental sets with low printing or use on MTGO can also be
expensive. True Name Nemesis (59.44 tix) is expensive because many less entered
the MTGO ecosystem. Nobody was cracking packs of Commander 2013 in draft. You
should also double check the remaining cards to make sure that there were no
errors and it loaded a card you already have. In the above example, it left
Rishadan Port in the list, because I had gotten one in trade at hadn’t updated
my online collection. Checking this saved me 8 tix.
Once you are ready, add the cards to your cart and place
your order. Card Hoarders bot will initiate a trade with you, which you
complete using the standard MTGO trade interface. Give them the tix and they
ship you the cards. It usually takes about 5 minutes.
Then go to your MTGO collection and import the decklist you
downloaded earlier as a Vintage deck:
Annnnnnnd BOOM you have a deck, forever, ready to play. Just
go challenge someone. We’ll cover finding matches more extensively in
subsequent episodes, but you are ready to rock and roll.
I like this way to do it because as you build your
collection, you can brew new decks and make swaps quickly just by going through
your collection. Just like in real life. If you like to brew a deck by pawing
through your collection and seeing what you have, this is for you. I can’t
emphasize enough how much the cost goes down for decks as you accumulate
staples, especially mana base cards and signature cards in each color (Ancestral
Recall, Lightning Bolt etc.)
But let’s say you are starting from scratch. You just
created a MTGO account, or you sold off your previous collection. $180 (the
stock price for Medium Red as of today) is too much for you right now. Maybe you’re
a student, teenager, underemployed etc. Then you might want to consider…
Card Rental Services
Card rental services use bots, as in the purchase scenario
above, but instead of them giving you the cards, you are renting them. It is
expected that they will be returned. Mana Traders has a number of rental plans
based on your needs:
I do not us Mana Traders, but if I didn’t already have a
substantial collection, this would be a completely reasonable option. The Premium
plan looks like it could cover just about any conceivable highlander deck.
Higher tiers look to be geared towards players engaged in serious grinding and
play testing, or at least people that want to hold multiple decks (possibly for
multiple formats) in inventory at any given time. I do not have a walk through
on how the process works because I am not a Mana Traders customer, but a number
of streamers use them, and you can see how easy it is just by watching them
swap out decks mid-stream. The whole process may take upwards of ten minutes,
and then they can be playing a whole new archetype.
If there is a drawback to card rental services, it is that
over the long run it will cost more money, and that it requires a lot more
player action to switch between decks. However, the long-term costs are easy to
justify. If you are interested in trying Canadian Highlander and want to see
all the decks you can, sign up for a couple of months, and see how much action
you get for your money. If it is worth it to you then you can easily switch
from renting to buying.
Regardless of whether you are renting the cards or buying
them outright, there is one pitfall when loading decklist’s that players should
always beware of, and that is…
There Are Some Cards That
Do Not Exist On MTGO.
Sad as it is to say, there are some cards that have never
been ported over onto MTGO. Almost all of these are from sets printed prior to
the initial launch of the client in 2002, or cards from supplemental sets never
released online, notably conspiracy. Cards from prior to 2002 have been
released through the Vintage Masters sets, which is why we have access to Power
Nine, Duals and Demonic Tutors, and so this doesn’t impact most decks, however
there are some notable exceptions.
To me, the most glaring omission is the card Sacrifice,
which is a key part of the engine that makes Liam Coughlan’s Tin Fins deck
such a powerful monstrosity:
I am also partial to Raging River in my red-aggro decks to
make savage work of my opponents combat math:
Again, out side of a few decks, this is not a problem for
most players. In most cases it can be fixed by a quick substitution for a different
card, and outside of the Tin Fins example above it shouldn’t drastically reduce
the power level of your deck.
That’s all for Part Two, our next installment will go into
the advantages and drawbacks of the MTGO interface itself, and delve into the
topic of MTGO etiquette.
It should come as no surprise that playing Canadian Highlander
on MTGO is a some what different experience than playing in paper. This series
of articles aims to highlight those differences, both the positive and the
negative, and aid players who may be new to the MTGO interface, Canadian
Highlander, or both.
PRO: JUDGE!
Play at your kitchen table is generally loose. Things like
layers, corner cases, bizarre card interactions, and oracle text, are resolved
via common consent (hopefully). You may have access to a phone, and can look up
the legality rulings of cards on Gatherer (https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Default.aspx),
but it generally comes down to the players interpretation. These interpretations
can mean that you and your play group collectively misunderstand a rules
interaction, but can continue play.
I remember a specific example. When I first got back into
magic, I was all about Goblins. Always have been. So when it came time to build
a Commander deck, I immediately went for Krenko, Mob Boss. Obviously, you want
to use him multiple times a turn if you can get away with it, so I searched for
a list of untappers, and along comes good old Jandor’s Saddle Bags. Ordering my
cards online, of course I wanted the awesome Arabian Nights version for the style
points. After a few days the card showed up in my mailbox and I sleeved up the
deck, and was playing a game when I found these cards on the table:
If you’re not making custom Mortiis goblin tokens, are you really living?
My eyes went wide, not only could I make infinite hasty 2/2
goblins, I could draw my entire deck, and find any number of even spicier cards
to cast with all this free mana! How come no one was talking about this? The
judges and players familiar with the Saddle Bags already know the answer. Take
a look at the difference between these two Jandor’s Saddle Bag’s, the original
Arabian Night’s printing (released December 1993) and the subsequent Revised
edition printing (April 1994):
Why don’t you cry about? SADDLEBAGS!
See the difference? I got my first Starter Deck of Revised (3rd)
Edition for my 11th birthday in late June of 1994, continued getting
new cards up through Ice Age, and then stopped as an active player, just
playing games out of bunk decks constructed from a pile of shash my RPG friends
and I had when waiting for someone to show up to play Exalted or some other pen
and paper game. I came back in around Battle for Zendikar in November 2015,
which is a story for another time. I am positive that I did not understand the
distinction between Mono Artifacts and Poly artifacts until somewhere around
April 2016, when this came up. See, a Mono Artifact, by definition, taps as
part of its activation. Somewhere during those feverish days at the inception
of Magic: The Gathering and the Collectable card game between August of 1993 (the
release of Alpha Edition) and April of 1994 (the release of Revised Edition),
Wizards of the Coast, most likely none other than Dr. Richard Garfield himself,
realized that the concept of Mono, Poly, and continuous artifacts was not
necessary and could be handled within the card text as they refined the concept
of activated, triggered, and static abilities. This interesting tidbit of Magic
R&D lore is something that was lost on me at my neighbor’s kitchen table.
The only reason I learned about it was because I looked it up when I got home
because it seemed TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE.
If you are at your LGS you likely have access to an L1 Judge
under normal circumstances, or possibly an L2, who can be appealed to for a
ruling on a particular card. Judges are still human beings, subject to
interpreting the rules, and are capable of making errors. This is not to knock
on judges at all, but to highlight that the type of card interactions and judge
calls that are going to come up in a Highlander game. The Judge at your LGS may
have mastered interactions in standard, modern, Legacy, and maybe even Vintage
and EDH, but they will have to have seen some crazy stuff to see the volume and
variety of cards that get slung around during a Canadian Highlander match. Listen
to a Powerful Magic story on the North 100 podcast and ask yourself, “I wonder
how often that comes up?”
So why did I go on this tangent about my poor rules and lore
knowledge when I got back into the game, and how it impacted my EDH deck a few
years ago? Because on MTGO you have a constant judge determining the legality
of every play you make. Can a card not legally target something? The MTGO
client won’t even let you try. Have a hard time remembering your upkeep
triggers? No problem, they all trigger regardless, and then you can arrange
them on the stack as you see fit. Both Tolarian Community College and Limited
Resources have mentioned in the past the power of MTGO to make you a better
player because you have to play the game BY THE RULES. If you want to up your competitive
game, and move past the kitchen table, then the MTGO is the perfect resource, and
there is no format that is more reliant on understanding core rules
interactions than Canadian Highlander. Just remember that when you go to your
LGS to play a match, you have to handle your own triggers.
I try to be a generally positive person (at least when it
comes to gaming), so I like to focus on the good. But just as every coin has to
two sides, for all the greatness that comes from having a judge helping you out
at all times there’s a drawback, and that is…
CON: Bugs!
Simpsons Season 4, slightly older than Magic: the Gathering
Imagine the above scenario, but that perpetual judge went
out back and slammed a bottle of Ripple between matches and came back in a foul
mood ready to ruin your day. That’s what MTGO bugs feel like. It means the
judge doesn’t understand the fundamental rules of magic, usually in reference
to a specific card. Above I mentioned that judges were human beings, and programmers
are too. The difference being that if a programming mistake is made, then at a
fundamental level a card will not interact in the way YOU KNOW IT IS SUPPOSED TO.
And that can both be incredibly frustrating, and even on occasion break the
game. Let’s look at a few examples from the current (18APR2019) bug report
available at https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-online/magic-online-bug-blog-april-18-2019:
Crypt of Agadeem is not a Canadian Highlander staple, but
consider how annoying this bug is.
This means that this innocuous Cabal Coffer’s for your self-mill
reanimator deck is turned into a swamp that enters the battlefield tapped. I
doubt you’re building a deck around Crypt of Agadeem, but if you did, this
would feel bad. Maybe you just included it for some incidental value and don’t
find out until you are screwing around, wasting your clock as you try to
activate it to complete the line you thought out two turns ago, the Dark Ritual
you cast to pay for it’s activation has already resolved and there’s no going
back. That feel’s REALLY BAD. And then there is the other type of bug:
Full game freezes and restarts. They occur infrequently, but
they are incredibly annoying. I remember a year or two ago, Metal Worker would
just freeze the MTGO client. There was no option but for you to concede or time
out. It could make the difference between you going 2-1 or 3-0 in your cube
draft, with the difference in prize payouts etc. You could report the bug, and receive
refunded tix for your draft (if you dropped from it entirely), but that could
be after you had already invested 2 hours into the draft and a previous match
or two. Maybe your deck was sweet, an unbeatable artifact bomb train, that didn’t
even need metal worker to go off, and then you cast it and just… lose. There’s
another bug that is present today, where occasionally if another player
spectates on your game within the MTGO client it will lock the client up and
require both players to reboot. These things suck and don’t happen in paper Magic.
They are the legacy of using some Frankenstein’s monster of a code based, built
on an original client dating back to the heady days of Window’s XP, when the
top games were Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
I wasn’t supposed to go on a vehicular murder spree while rocking out to Joe Jackson’s “Stepping Out” either, and yet, here we are.
Thankfully the bugs are mercifully rare, and MTGO remains a
great way to play Canadian Highlander. If you do come across a bug, do the
community a favor and report it. Let other players know via forums. Remember,
that purposely exploiting the MTGO client is a violation of League Rules. Now
get out there and play more highlander! Tune back in for Part 2, when we will
talk about card pricing and availability.
If you are like me, for the last few years you keep seeing
content about this sweet format called Canadian Highlander. I was introduced to
it via the Loading Ready Run Tap Tap Concede podcast, and my curiosity kicked
into high gear when the North 100 podcast started coming out. I had been an EDH/Commander
player. I loved hundred card singleton. I loved dumb old cards. I didn’t really
enjoy grinding it out in standard at FNM, but I loved draft, especially cube. I
love exploring card interactions and having to think through my plays with
cards that in 60-card constructed are sub-optimal. So, when I heard the phrase “100
Card Singleton Vintage Banned List Cube Constructed” I was all in.
Except for one thing… BLACK LOTUS, OLD SCHOOL DUEL LANDS, MOXEN, ANCESTRAL RECALL. That’s more than one thing, but they all have one common factor: Price! A Near-Mint Unlimited Black Lotus at Card Kingdom currently comes in at a cool $16,999.99. That’s $4k more than the cost of my current car (a 2012 Toyota Corolla). You can absolutely build decks that do not rely on all these expensive cards for Canadian Highlander, and I have, and I love them, and they win matches. I bring them to my LGS and jam games with them. But, as a player who cast his first spells when the Dark came out, I want to play with the Moxen. I Want to cast a Triskaidekaphobia off of a Black Lotus. Enter MTGO!
Since Magic: Arena moved into open beta, places like Channel
Fireball have been reporting on the bottoming of the MTGO economy. Standard and
Draft, where the majority of players are, exited MTGO en masse for the improved
UI, the cheaper games, and a whole new economic ecosystem of wild cards, gems
and gold. Players were dumping their collections on the bots and cashing out of
the MTGO economy, which was quickly left as the vestigial haunt of eternal
players and people who wanted to draft Vintage or Legacy Cube. People, as it
turns out, like me.
I remember in January of this year (2019), sitting at my
house thinking “Man, I really want to play more Highlander.” A few of us in San
Diego were into the format, and started to meet on Monday Nights to jam a few
games. Like 4-5 matches a week. All of which were awesome, high stakes games.
The kind you want to go home and describe to your friends. But I wanted more
reps. I wanted to try archetypes I’d heard about, but that my card pool didn’t
support (and my pool is good). Spending a couple of hundred bucks to test an
archetype in few matches a week seemed like a bad use of my income.
And then Jeremy White posted on the Canadian Highlander Facebook page that he was going to do a stream. During that stream he mentioned that some eternal staples are shockingly cheap on MTGO, so I hopped over to card hoarder and took a peek. And noticed that Mox Pearl was 1.94 tix. I pulled my paper decklist off of Tapped out and loaded it into Card Hoarders deck editor, and saw that it was 234 tix. It is my Bant-mid-range deck, that runs all the Bant fetches, shocks, and old school duel lands, plus Dark Depths and a bunch of $20-$70 cards. My mind exploded as I realized I could assemble all the pointed cards, duels, and mox’s for a comparatively minuscule price. So I jumped in and purchased my Paper deck on MTGO. By the end of Jer’s stream I had gotten in 3 matches, by the end of the day it had moved past 10, and by the end of the week I was over 30 matches played. That’s more than I had played in my life up to that point. I was able to go online and purchase jank rares for literally pennies and swap them in. It was heaven. I played games of Canadian Highlander against players in Australia, New York, the UK. and Sweden. I played against a wide variety of archetypes. It was amazing.
Powerful Magic from MTGO, have you ever cast Tainted Pact to draw 72 cards so you could hit Simian Spirit Guide and exile it to pay for the red mana on your Deflecting Palm so you could kill your opponent with exactsee’s while they have lethal on the stack? I have!
It was at this point that I had a revelation. For those of
us outside of the Pacific Northwest, and for those of us that wanted more
matches, and value for their dollar (or pound or what have you) MTGO was the
answer. In terms of money in for matches played investing in a MTGO Canadian
Highlander collection has been the single best Magic: The Gathering investment
I’ve ever made. I get matches every day of the week, at all hours. You can
watch players you know pop into the discord looking for matches as the
terminator rotates around the globe, and as the East Coast cats are heading off
to bed the West Coast guys are popping in to jam their games. Everyone is
psyched to be playing this rad format, and if there is intentional Bad Magic going
on, I haven’t seen it.
If you are on the fence, let’s run through the numbers.
Below is the variance on tapped out between the Paper and Online version of 5C
Lotus Storm:
That is 272.87 TIX ($273 USD) vs $14,419.82, meaning the online version is approximately 2% of the cost of the deck in
paper. And it is a five color deck with a five color OG dual and fetchland
mana-base, which on MTGO you only have to buy once, and can switch between
decks in seconds, as fast as a mouse click. If you don’t care about the card
art, a Volcanic Island will run you about 8 bucks. And you can use it everyday
against a diverse metagame filled with amazing players. That’s money I feel is
well spent. After getting my mana-base sorted out, I can easily swap into new
archetypes for $20 or less. We ran a 2 tix decklist challenge in the Canadian
Highlander MTGO League and I died on turn 4 to a deck running a Tolarian
Academy (.27 tix). A turn 4 kill with Tolarian Academy for 2 dollars!
So, if you are considering dipping your toe into the vast ocean
of MTGO Canadian Highlander I can’t say anything other than “Do it!” pick up Goblins
for $50-60 (Strip Mine, Mox Ruby, Mox Emerald included), hop into the Discord
and say “anyone want to jam @MTGO?” and watch the powerful magic stories come
to you.
Welcome to the League Portal! This page is meant as a repository for league rules, rulings, tournament reports, metagame reports and more. If you are unfamiliar with the format, check out the intro page on the mothership: https://canadianhighlander.wordpress.com/intro-to-format/
Canadian Highlander MTGO Players can easily be found on the Canadian Highlander Discord
more content will follow, but the current MTGO league rules are:
The Canadian Highlander MTGO league follows the established rules for deck construction in Canadian Highlander and utilizes the points list maintained by the Highlander council. The only difference between MTGO and paper Canadian Highlander is the absence of cards that have never been published on MTGO, and the absence of the Sorenson Mulligan in the MTGO platform.
League play will be tracked weekly. Players can play up to 4 matches for league points a week. Decklists may be swapped at the end of each weekly event.
Each league match in a given week must be against a unique opponent
Match wins will result in points as follows:
W = 3
D = 1
L = 0
Match Results and decklists must be submitted to the google form links posted weekly, for more information email: canlandermtgoleague@gmail.com
Top players will be entered into a monthly Top 8 tournament to determine the monthly MTGO champion. The match results from monthly Top 8s will be used to determine players eligible for the Year-end tournament.
The Canlander League has the following code of conduct:
Magic: The Gathering is an inclusive game, and Canadian Highlander is a format embraced by a diverse audience. Harassment, bullying, hate speech and griefing will not be tolerated, and will result in a ban from league play. Behavior that violates the MTGO code of conduct, or social media platform policies will be reported as warranted.
Players must provide decklists to league organizers in order to validate deck construction and confirm points spread. Decklists will be posted to tappedout.com, which features validation for Canlander decks.
Canlander is about fun, interesting, and powerful plays. Players may not resort to “Bad Magic” in order to win. Attempts to exploit or abuse the MTGO interface in order to win games instead of playing the game will not be tolerated in league play.
Due to a unresolved MTGO bug, spectating on MTGO league matches is prohibited, it can cause the client to crash resulting in a complete restart by both players.
Watching an opponent’s live stream (Ghosting) if they choose to stream their Canlander play is prohibited and will result in a ban.
Canadian Highlander MTGO League 