This seems like the best place to post this. I'm thinking of picking up some of the planechase decks, I need some variety from drafting and my friends decks are getting competative and stressful. I think it'd be fun to play a little bit more of a crazy format. I'm wondering how other people have found them? Are very many people playing them?
When I'm playing Duels 2013, the planechase format has one deck in the middle everyone draws from, but it seems like each of the decks and their posted rules has a seperate planar deck for each player.
Curious what other people's experience's are with these cards and if they're worth the investment for my play group.
Tolkein was a jerk. Seriously, what DM sends 9 Wraith Lords at a Lvl 2 party of Halflings.
The only 'correct' way to play D&D is by whatever method is making the group you have at that session, have the most fun.
My experience has only been to use the planes as a singel deck for the table. In order to take advantage of the "a deck for every player" varient (and not use pre-cons) the group basiaclly needs to buy a whole bunch of the planes to tweak the planes decks to their actual magic decks. No one who I played with was interested in doing this. But I did get one planechase set as a gift and got another when I bought a friend's collection. I went through the two (I don't know which) sets and made a pile of planes that I thought was fairly well split at helping ramp decks/wennie decks/control decks/ and some other archetypes. Then we play with the deck as the only deck for the group. When you 'walk, you don't actually know if it will be beneficial. Other times you are trying to get the hell off one plane to stop someone else from getting a massive advantage. It's fun enough.
While I think Planechase and Archenemy are good ideas, but they do not scale well to groups that play a lot of multiplayer. Planechase encourages you to make a gimicky deck with lots of planes that help you. As for Archenemy, even with a balls-to-the-wall deck with schemes, if it isn't combo, three very well built multiplayer decks should regularly kick it's ass.
Also, I was at college when both Planechase and Archenemy were released, and very few people picked them up. No one cared until I made the one plane deck, and then it was a different variant of Chaos Magic that The Ferrett Talked about here. My group freaking loves my Chaos Stack, we modified the rules slightly but the group in general has a lot of fun with it. In my experience, the weaker players actually enjoyed it more- they were generally less heavily affected by swings. Or they got to take advantage of keeping a bad hand becuase a Mana Flare flipped because they can drop a 6 drop on turn 3 and an eight drop on turn 4 if it sticks around. When they had no ramp, card draw, tutor, or other method of getting into the game.
Face it, you're pretty much here as a meat shield.
If you are at York College and need a play group, PM me. We mostly do MP and casual.
The way that Duels 2013 does it is actually pretty common with groups. Mine does it the same way, big planar deck in the middle. There's also an Eternities map varient that is pretty popular but I haven't tried it yet. www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.a...
We use it as a suppliment. It's not terribly fun everytime but you can get some mileage out of it. One of the problems we have is we get to a safe plane and no one wants to roll away from it, thus the game just dissolves into regular chaos, sadly this has been our average experiance with it. That or people just forget that there are planes and end up not rolling. We'll probably do it a couple of games per month at the most.
For Archenemy, we did it once when it first came out. We never liked it too much and I don't think any of us have done it since.
One of the problems we have is we get to a safe plane and no one wants to roll away from it, thus the game just dissolves into regular chaos, sadly this has been our average experiance with it.
I haven't had that problem, but it could be from the different decks being played. What was your typical planechase game like? Mine often had a fast aggressive deck, a slower control deck, a couple mid range deck, and a late game monstrosity of G/B with Primeval Titan Drana, Kalastira Bloodchief and a Kessig Wolf Run to help force lots of damage or a U/R Urazatron deck. We rarely had a plane that helped the whole table, and having people feel different ways about creatures as the game plays helped.
Also, we had a decent amount of people who wanted to get the effect, and those people tended to help 'walk us to the next plane.
Face it, you're pretty much here as a meat shield.
If you are at York College and need a play group, PM me. We mostly do MP and casual.
My experience with Planechase is that someone has a stack of planes and phenomena - it may or may not have doubles - and that stack sits in the center of the table. Folks sit down with whatever deck they have; last Saturday, it was a Standard duelling deck, one of the Planechase precons, an EDH deck (with general shuffled in), a 'fun' deck, and a deck built for MP games.
The end result is that some planes benefit a few, but most benefit no one, so we quickly leave those planes. The random pile o' planes does seem to make the game drag out more - then again, it could be that meta (they seem to prefer one looooooooooooooong game over several fast ones).
I'd like to try the map version, as well as to get my own planes (to include those from the original release), to keep my own planechase deck. Until then, I may just build a deck 'for' Planechase, that includes a pair of Fractured Powerstone s I have somehow acquired.
Cheers!
A shout out to Gaming Grounds in Kent, Ohio and Gamers N Geeks in Mobile, Alabama.
www.zombiehunters.org for all your preparation needs.
http://shtfschool.com/ - why prepping is useful, from one who has been there.
I don't think the originally-intended 'everyone has their own planes' game was ever played much at all. Certainly I'm not aware of anyone, in real life or on the internet, who ever bothered with it.
Planechase is good, though. Worth a go (steer clear of Archenemy; it doesn't succesfully solve the issues with one-vs-many games). I do prefer the Ferrett's chaos deck linked above, though; you might be able to put together one of those for less money that would be more fun to play. I like having two separate chaos decks, flipping one on the roll of 1 and the other on a 6. You get combinations of effects that way, and can make a 'helpful' deck and a 'harmful' deck, or whatever. There's more potential variety than the planes, too.
I do prefer the Ferrett's chaos deck linked above, though; you might be able to put together one of those for less money that would be more fun to play. I like having two separate chaos decks, flipping one on the roll of 1 and the other on a 6. You get combinations of effects that way, and can make a 'helpful' deck and a 'harmful' deck, or whatever. There's more potential variety than the planes, too.
My group just uses one chaos deck and flip it on a roll of 1 or 6. We wanted it to flip more than just a few times per game, so we went with more numbers. It still doesn't flip a ton, but enough that it is exciting and we remember the games were a whole bunch of chaos effects happened.
As for the helpful and harmful, I tried to move away from "harmful" cards because they dragged the game on. Cards like Destructive Force , Wildfire , Worldpurge , heck we took out Warp World because the rules involved were bonkers with 6 players. I also don't know how great the original Chaos Stack the Ferrett posted was. I never had all those cards and hunting them down was annoying. Instead I made my own and just kept asking for feedback from people.
Also we modified the timing for the flip to be in between turns so that we could run more upkeep effect cards and not have to worry about the flipper not getting triggers, and it let some fun cards like Clear the land to actually help the person who flipped it, not everyone else.
Face it, you're pretty much here as a meat shield.
If you are at York College and need a play group, PM me. We mostly do MP and casual.
We tried flipping a card on a 5 or 6 for a while, but found that an average lifespan of three turns for any given effect was a little too short to create an interesting impact. Two decks, and two effects in play, means each one stays around for twice as long, as well as allowing effects to mix.
I don't really know how good Ferrett's example stack is either; mine is a lot bigger. There's a lot I want to add to it too. But he's right that cards like Wrath of God don't fit in so well. Chaos decks sometimes end up packed with sweepers and global damage, and I find that's not a great way to build them.
One of the problems we have is we get to a safe plane and no one wants to roll away from it, thus the game just dissolves into regular chaos, sadly this has been our average experiance with it.
I haven't had that problem, but it could be from the different decks being played. What was your typical planechase game like? Mine often had a fast aggressive deck, a slower control deck, a couple mid range deck, and a late game monstrosity of G/B with Primeval Titan Drana, Kalastira Bloodchief and a Kessig Wolf Run to help force lots of damage or a U/R Urazatron deck. We rarely had a plane that helped the whole table, and having people feel different ways about creatures as the game plays helped.
Also, we had a decent amount of people who wanted to get the effect, and those people tended to help 'walk us to the next plane.
Pretty much just using the decks we use for regular multiplayer chaos, so it can be basically anything. Most seen decks are Jund (sort of Shards of Alara standard), Legacy Affinity, Ninja's, B/R Midrange thingy, whatever-deck-the-guy-with-30-decks-plays (note, we all have multiple decks, this guy just has a ton and I'm just listing the ones we'll play the most, he plays them all equally...it's really cool and unpredictable, and his are also really, really well done).
Example of a plane would be something like Akoum . The effect of it would basically be irrelevant to the point where we don't even notice the planes anymore (not a ton of enchantments floating around in a game where that happens) and since the main effect was irrelevant we'd forget about the chaos. I think I'm overexaggerating, I just remember some people complaining about how we usually end up forgetting that it's planechase. That's more on us though, we need to be more proactive with rolling.
One of the fondest (or nightmarish, can't figure out which) memories with Planechase was ending up on Otaria and the Ninja guy ended up taking like three or four extra turns (he'd roll chaos, go to his next turn, and roll chaos again)...I can't remember, but that game might have turned into an Archenemy game...yeah, definitely worth a run through.
Example of a plane would be something like Akoum . The effect of it would basically be irrelevant to the point where we don't even notice the planes anymore (not a ton of enchantments floating around in a game where that happens) and since the main effect was irrelevant we'd forget about the chaos. I think I'm overexaggerating, I just remember some people complaining about how we usually end up forgetting that it's planechase. That's more on us though, we need to be more proactive with rolling.
One of the fondest (or nightmarish, can't figure out which) memories with Planechase was ending up on Otaria and the Ninja guy ended up taking like three or four extra turns (he'd roll chaos, go to his next turn, and roll chaos again)...I can't remember, but that game might have turned into an Archenemy game...yeah, definitely worth a run through.
I'm just quoting this because they have happened to my group as well. We would usually forget that the planes are out when we get to a plane that doesn't help or hurt anybody. One time we all just let naar isle do its thang out of spite for not rolling it away!
Now that we've got more players, we don't play much planechase anymore. I primarily play chaos, and when we've got 5 to 6 players rolling the dice about 4 times at the end of their turn, it tends to drag out the already 2 hour long game.
When we play planechase, we always play chaos with 1 stack of 40-ish planes set in the center.
HOW TO AUTOCARD! When posting in a text box, type [c]Plains[/c] to make your post showPlains . Are you making a casual mill deck? Please read.Show
Control is the key of a mill deck. You should free up your mana as much as possible so that you can respond to whatever your opponent is doing. Having some way to remove threats, both real and percieved, is necessary to survival. Real threats are those that are already on the field, and are something a simple unsummon or doom blade can remove. Percieved threats are those that aren't on the field, something a simple duress or counterspell can deal with. Controlling the board will allow your mill deck to continuously perform, if you use permanent style mill, that is.
One-Shot Mill spells are something you should avoid. You can toss tome scour s at your opponent until your hand runs out, but that isn't going to be enough to mill them to death. With 1-shot mill spells, like tome scour , you have to treat them like burn spells. Therefore, the only "good" 1-shot mill spells are sanity grinding (in the right deck) and mind funeral . Try to find more permanent styles of milling, like memory erosion , hedron crab , and curse of the bloody tome , so that you don't have to waste your mana each turn doing something that those permanents can do with a single mana/turn investment. Keeping your mana open allows you to respond with control elements.
Traumatize Rant. Traumatize is a terrible card for a multitude of reasons. First, it costs 5 to cast, which is a large investment for a mill deck. Milling half a library sounds neat, but if you do the math, it really isn't that much. An average 60 card deck starts with drawing 7 cards. Then, barring any draw spells on their end, or ramp on yours, 5 turns will go by, where they draw 5 more cards, leaving 48 in the deck. Unless they had a deck with more than 60 cards, or you ramped it out, the most you'll ever mill with a single Traumatize on turn 5 is 24 cards. That's not too shabby, but hang on, there's more! If they drew any additional cards or if they were milled before turn 5, that number will be much lower. In addition, any more Traumatize's you draw will only mill less and less as the game goes on...which is the point of a mill deck. My whole point on Traumatize is the it is NOT worth the 5 mana investment, not even with haunting echoes . You can mill more than 24 before turn 5...which you can then cast the echoes.
If you look at a mill deck like a burn deck, you'll notice that it takes longer to win with mill than with burn. For example, lightning bolt costs 1 and does 3 out of the 20 damage needed to win (barring any lifegain or damage prevention). For mill, that same investment of 1 would have to mill 9 cards out of an average 60 card deck to be the equivilent of lightning bolt . The problem is that there is no mill card that can do that...except hedron crab , over a period of time. The initial investment of 1 will pay off in 3 more land drops to make the crab equal to a bolt. However, the crab nets you more mill beyond those 3 land drops, making it better as the game draws on. Other cards, like curse of the bloody tome , are excellent ways of milling an opponent because the initial investment of is all you have to pay in order to put your opponent on a clock. All you have to do is stay alive, which is the true goal of a mill strategy.
There are other ideas for mill decks that are specific to certain types of strategies. Combo mill decks can mill an entire player's library out from under them. Secondary mill strategies are usually tied to another strategy, like drowner of secrets in a merfolk deck, or halimar excavator in an ally deck. Milling can be done in certain decks that are able to ramp out enough mana to make use of the higher costing mill spells, like using 16 x post to pay for X on sands of delirium or for ambassador laquatus . Multiplayer mill decks are even tougher to build, but can be done. Being a slower environment[/c], it is easier to ramp in multiplayer, allowing for big X spells, like mind grind , to be useful. Consuming aberration is another star player. The more straightforward strategy is to use mesmeric orb and dreamborn muse while being the only deck at the table that can deal with it . There are always new strategies coming out with each new set, so check gatherer for any new mill cards that you find to be the most fun for you!
Now you can say that you haven't fallen into the trap that most new players fall into when they build their first mill deck!
: Order, Law, Faith. : Knowledge, Artifice, Control. : Corruption, Death, Self-Interest. : Freedom, Destruction, Victory. : Nature, Growth, Life. : Progressive, but too controlling. : Focused, but short sighted. : Skilled, but hypocritical. : Unified, but without a sense of self. : Cunning, but devious. : Inquisitive, but incautious. : Rational, but impulsive. : Powerful, but spiteful. : Instinctive, but selfish. : Fearless, but reckless.
: Order, Law, Faith.
: Knowledge, Artifice, Control.
: Corruption, Death, Self-Interest.
: Freedom, Destruction, Victory.
: Nature, Growth, Life.
Keino
=100 Class: 
x 236 Diety: 
125/200 
=2x
dmg/
=4
dmg)