Black Lotus
The 5 Moxes
Time Walk
Time Twister
Ancestral Recall

Cool.  I can build a deck not using those...  :-)
I'll pick a table LAGO and we'll see who joins us...

Welcome to two new players added today - BumptiousBard and Elixar!

Feel free to introduce yourselves and seek a game...

Hey hey! thanks for the welcome!

I downloaded the awesome spreadsheet (it's awesome, btw.), but I need a bit of help, both with using the spreadsheet, and in actual gameplay.

First and foremost, I have a prepped EDH deck I want to play. it's the first one I ever made, and that was about 2-ish years ago. Fair warning, the commander is Rafiq, and it's exalted based. I'd love to play with someone (I'll post it in the challenges area in a moment too.).

I had a question about gameplay first. I noticed in the RTJ, and when playing with the spreadsheet, that the moves are generated on entire turn at a time. maybe my play IRL is making me jaded, but how exactly are instants, counters, working with the stack, and intentionally waiting for main phase 2, handled? I mean, if for example, I'm waiting on my opponent to play an inturrept and spend their mana so I can play a summon on main phase 2 without worry of a counter, how is that handled, when most turns display the full action economy, and "End of turn" at the bottom? am I just not understanding something here, or missing a button on the sheet?

Also, I need some help navigating the excel document. I populated my first deck, made sure my commander was the first card, and it properly displays as exiled, but I can't seem to change my turn from 1 to 2 and so on. I draw a card, and it still says turn one. am I expected to manually change that when posting, or am I again missing something?

Hi Bard - hope you don't mind if I call you Bard for short - BumptiousBard is a bit of a mouthful :-)

Gameplay:  With regards to how we play instants and responses etc - well, it can be tricky here.   In general, if you want to respond to something with an instant/activated ability etc, then most of the time, we have to do it in retrospect...  i.e. someone posts that in their go, they cast X, and you want to counter it, then you might post straight after their go "Hang on, I tap U and cast Counterspell - do you need to change the rest of your turn?" - they then might re-do the second part of their turn.   In a multiplayer game, that can get quite awkward, especially if you've been away for the weekend and every other player has already had their turn by the time you get to see the thing you want to counter.    In those sorts of situations, we kind of just muddle through - figuring out how the counter spell would have effected things and people reposting their turns.  It is fair to say that this "retrospective" way of doing instants and activated abilities can be a pain and is the biggest disadvantage for playing the game via this sort of medium, as opposed to playing it with real cards in real time!

However, the advantages, i.e. the ability to play at any time - or at least have active games ongoing all the time - and the ability to really stop and think through your turn before you post it - I feel they outweigh it - especially if, like me, your opportunity to play for real is limited to once in a blue moon!

The flip side of the coin is if you know there is a likelihood that someone might have a reaction to a spell or attack, be it a counterspell or a boost spell for a blocker etc, then you might pause your go in the middle, to give them the opportunity to have their response, before you continue.  The most common point for that is when attacking - when what you choose to do in the second main phase depends on how your opponent blocks for example.

Sometime, you might be devious, and pause for a response even when you it won't affect your decisions about what else you play... for example, if you know your opponent is playing a deck with counter spells in it - and you might want to tempt their counter spell out against something mundane whilst keeping back the special item - or even having played the special item, and bluffing them into holding back their counter spell for something which then turns out to be mundane :-)   Of course, playing with/against blue control/counterspell type decks is probably the hardest type of deck to play - since all those instant effects can really slow things down if you try to pause before every one!

Finally, let me address your query about the spreadsheet - in particular the button to create the post....  You might notice the wording of the button...  "Copy Draft Initial Post to Clipboard"

The clue is in the button :-)   The macro only creates your first post for you - after that - the spreadsheet is only used to manage your cards in the various zones.  To make your posts for subsequent turns, you need to QUOTE your previous post (as opposed to just copy & paste into a REPLY) and then edit it manually - removing the <quote> tags, updating the turn number, card counts, life, and any cards you've played/lost, using the right-click "Copy to Clipboard" option on the spreadsheet to then copy the appropriate card details into your post.  Much that I like the idea of making the spreadsheet so comprehensive that it keeps track of everything and creates each post afresh - that is a level of complexity too far I'm afraid!

All of these things make sense, and I'm happy with the answers. I'll likely play my turns "Assuming" there's no counters, then adjust as I see fit. and yeah, playing against a control deck is what I worry about. they seem to be the only thing I see IRL in game shops, heh.

Also, Bard is fine. many people online call me Bard, and I'm cool with it. Bump, however, irks me for an unknown reason. :P

Ok Bump....tious Bard :-)   I'll try to remember to just use the last part  :-)

:P

what's the standard practice with in game chat? like if people form temporary alliances etc mid game, keep it here, or on the table chat?

from what I've seen, in game chat stays in the in-game thread. Some people don't like it though, and some don't mind.

Hello, I'm Michi, relatively new player.

Also, this may be a random question but on the spreadsheet, certain cards like: Mind Funeral, Diabolic Tutor and Nemesis of Reason are listed as "Modern Illegal" despite them not being illegal in modern?

Sorry for not posting lately, I guess my games csn drop me or they may have already, I won't be able to post until the 15th.

Welcome Michi.

With regards to the cards you have identified, the way in which my spreadsheet works out legality is tricky..  I used to pull it from magiccards.info, and have massive lookups for each card name.  However to try to pull those lists from that website each time a new set was released was a) a real pain, b) not 100% accurate due to mistakes on magiccards.info, c) more prone to me making mistakes and d) time consuming.

SO, instead, I went to http://magic.wizards.com/en/gameinfo/gameplay/formats and decided to simply get a list of edition names instead that were legal...  Sounds like a much easier solution!

However, that in itself has raised a different problem.  Many cards appear in different editions.  IF we use Mind Funeral as an example, it appears in Modern Masters and Alara Reborn.   The list of editions that are Modern includes Alara Reborn, but NOT Modern Masters.  Alara Reborn was released in Apr 2009.  Modern Masters was Jul '13.   As you can imagine, my spreadsheet includes many duplicate cards since many cards are re-released in later editions....

So, in the case of Mind Funeral - the Modern Masters version is illegal in Modern, and the Alara Reborn one is legal.

I have a column that indicates whether a card is a duplicate or not - and when I populate that column, I make the assumption that the one we want to display will be the latest edition, not the oldest...  So the Alara Reborn card is marked as a Duplicate, and when you do a search on the All Cards tab, the one you actually find first is the Modern Masters version - which is therefore showing as illegal.

Now the easy fix for this, could be to simply add Modern Masters to the list of cards that should be legal in Modern, but that would probably make a whole bunch of other cards that shouldn't be legal in Modern legal.

Similarly, if we look at Diabolic Tutor, the card appears in lots of editions:

• Magic 2014 Core Set
• Magic 2012
• Commander
• Magic 2011
• Magic 2010
• Tenth Edition
• Ninth Edition
• Eighth Edition
• Odyssey

Listed in reverse order of release date...

And the latest one - Magic 2014 Core Set - is not one of the editions listed in Modern format!   "Aaarrrggghhh!"

So... I've applied my thinking hat, and I think I've come up with a solution - essentially I have reworked my formula to look up if a card is legal in any edition and then it will re-mark them all legal in all editions.

I'll hopefully get around to uploading a new version in the near future...  But for now, I will need to get off to work shortly!

Matthew, question about the ripple effect. do I just use the scry/reveal button, and "play" the cards that are the same? or is there a ripple button somewhere I don't see. :P

Scratches head...  re-looks up how Ripple works... realises I had only programmed in Cascade not Ripple!   Yeah - just scry 4 and play the cards that are the same as the one you first cast.

I figured, and just did so. Enjoy the results. :P

Relentless Rats with Ripple?  Ouch!  That's a NICE combo!

it's worse than I intended. T.T TOO OP!!!

also, I wouldn't go through my whole deck, as the non-rippled cards go to the bottom of the library. I'd eventually put every relentless rats onto the field, if I were lucky. though, a single board wipe would ruin it, so I stopped. :P

In reply to BumptiousBard (msg # 943):

I would call it absolutely brutal.  Awesome ... but brutal.

They go to the bottom of the deck, not the Graveyard.

Yeah - I amended it almost immediately I posted it...

Now, where is my Wrath of God?
This message was last edited by the GM at 05:40, Wed 08 June 2016.

Actually, it says I MAY reveal, then I MAY cast from the revealed cards. I'm choosing not to reveal.

Hmmm... you are right!  Sometimes I seem to have selective vision!  Sorry about that!

no prob. not offended or anything, just bolding for emphasis.

Hey guys I'll be out of pocket for a few days.  Working on my final stats paper and wrapping up some things at work.  Will post in a few days.