Please Answer A,B, C, or R&D Now

Yo yo, what’s up, party peoples?

Before I get on to my topic, I’ve got a couple of announcements:

First (and I should have mentioned this before, but time seems to be going so much faster now for some reason), there’s a Vintage tournament this weekend in Columbus:

Meandeck Mox Pearl Tournament
$15 entry gets you Unlimited Proxies!
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Registration starts at 12:30 p.m.; round one commences at 1 p.m.

The Soldiery
4256 N. High St.
Columbus, Ohio 43214

These are always a good time, so come down and hype Sandusky tournaments to them, so we can bring the fun north too. If you need directions or a place to stay or to borrow cards, lemme know.

Also, Thurman’s afterwards. That’s really all I should ever have to say.

Second, I want to mention again that there’s a Mox Sapphire up for grabs in Sandusky next month.

Mox Sapphire Tournament
$20 entry gets you Unlimited Proxies!
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Registration starts at 12 noon; round one commences at 1 p.m.

The Gamers Lounge
127 E. Market St.
Sandusky, OH 44870
(419) 621-0282

Just as a reference, this is not the day of the OSU-Michigan game. I’d like to pretend that wouldn’t matter to people, but I know that’s not true. You won’t miss any important college football that day unless you really care about OSU-Northwestern.

I should also mention that first gets the Mox Sapphire and second through fourth all get store credit to a degree merited by the final standings. I’d imagine it will be like last time where second will get around $40, third $30 and fourth $20, but I don’t know, so don’t quote me. I’ll have more information for later.

Also, Diana’s afterwards, home to world-famous poopcake, which is delicious.

Alex at the Gamers Lounge in BG wanted me to point out three tournaments they have coming up:

October 30 at 6 p.m. there’s a free Legend of the Five Rings tournament with a prize of four painlands of your choice. I’d like to say more about this, but I know nothing about L5R.

On November 30, also at 6 p.m., you can break out your Circular Logics and pony up $10 for an Odyssey Block Constructed tournament. If you win, you’ll get $100, which is certainly not insignificant. If I get a chance (by which I mean remember) I’ll try to do a blog on OBC as it comes closer.

On December 9 at 6 p.m., the Gamers Lounge BG will celebrate Christmas with an RG Vintage format. All decks must contain only red and green cards, no blue, black, white or artifacts. Again, entry is $10 and the prize is $100.

Anyone want to guess what the winning deck is? I’ll send a playset of altered Tempest Mogg Fantastics to anyone who wins that tournament without using any Goblins. I’ll definitely have a write-up about this tournament as it approaches, and if I get a chance I might head up there myself for the fun.

There just better be Christmas cookies.

Anyway, the Gamers Lounge BG is located at 902 East Wooster St., Bowling Green, OH 43402. It’s easy to find off of I-75 and can be reached by phone at (419) 352-0531.

All right, so I’ve already spent 600 words telling you and reminding you about upcoming tourneys and it’s about time for me to move on, so I will.

Here I go.

So I took the Magic R&D test the other day. It was pretty cool. I have no idea how realistic it is or how applicable it is to actual Magic R&D, but regardless I think I learned a lot.

If you haven’t taken the test yet, go ahead and do it now since I’m going to talk about and give some of the answers. I don’t feel too bad about that because Rosewater’s going to present the answers in a column tomorrow.

The test is here.

For example, I learned that I am very good at the subtle nuances of creating red Giants. Not the stars, obviously, but the creature type of the appropriate color. There were four questions about Giants, and I got all of them correct. Can you imagine what a house that 5/5 guy with the Panic Attack ability would be in Limited if it was a common? And that Firebreathing one will cost a lot to play—at least five, maybe six.

Somebody told me that the first-striking, card-drawing Card Loving Guy seemed like a pretty clear blue-white creature, but no, it’s red-green all the way. White does lend first strike, and blue is good at drawing cards, but once Wizards printed Ohran Viper they said that card drawing from attacking was a purely green ability. No more Ophidians because blue has to discard with its draw like Looter il-Kor. Plus, red also gives first strike, just not as often as white.

I’m pretty sure that for Touch-Me-Not, the 8/8 untargetable stoner (by which I mean guy with a stoning ability, not unemployable hippie), they just combined Kodama of the North Tree and Thicket Basilisk. An awesome combination of new hotness and old and busted.

Card Loving Guy would also be super expensive to cast. A solid 3/3 beater that draws cards and kills creatures? That’s huge! Good thing it would get a slight discount for being multicolored.

The first question I missed was number nine regarding Card Loving Guy, and I missed it with my first four guesses:

9. Let’s assume we wanted to switch out first strike for an ability with more synergy with the second (draw cards) ability. Which swap would be the poorest with regards to synergy?
A. Double Strike
B. Fear
C. Haste
D. Trample
E. Vigilance

My first guess was Double Strike. I didn’t realize at the time that double-striking an opponent would mean drawing two cards, which would probably make this card incredibly broken or cost close to double digits.

So, yeah. My bad.

It’s Vigilance, though I’m not quite sure why. The color would change, but I’m not sure that matters. I guess making a creature into both an attacker and a blocker doesn’t really work with an attack-only ability.

Grave Matters is awesome because it’s utterly broken as written. Instant game win every time unless your opponent also plays one.

Grave Matters
Enchantment
Whenever a creature is put into a graveyard from play, put two 1/1 NAME tokens into play.
Sacrifice a NAME: Target creature gets +2/-2 until end of turn.

The trick to figuring out what color it should be is remembering the Flowstone creatures from Tempest block.

I liked question 16 a lot too:

16. Which of the following is usually not a reason for keywording a new mechanic?
A. It makes it easier for players to talk about the mechanic
B. It opens up design space
C. It lessens text on the card
D. It helps market the set
E. It helps ease understanding of other cards that have the same mechanic

Answer C is the correct one, but it’s funny because most people think of things like Vigilance and Fear and think that those condense entire sentences into one word (“Attacking does not cause this creature to tap” and “This creature may only be blocked by black creatures and artifact creatures”), so that seems wrong. Unfortunately, in most sets, Vigilance and Fear and their keywordy brethren are accompanied by a line or two of explanation text. So essentially “Vigilance (Attacking does not cause this creature to attack.), is one word longer than before it was keyworded.

I missed number 18 because I didn’t think of Kicker in the right way. I said Kicker does not help smooth manabases because it’s an extra cost, something that makes casting harder to do. What I didn’t realize is that it does smooth manabases by allowing cards to be function differently and appropriately both early- and late-game.

I blame that on me never having never played a kicked spell that wasn’t named Breath of Darigaaz.

If you missed question 19, I bet it’s because you saw “CARDNAME deals 2 damage to target creature” and though Shock instead of Tendrils of Agony or Drain Life. The first three answers are all too complicated to be commons, and E isn’t a necessary answer because D is correct. The spell is black. It probably costs 2B or so.

Number 20 I missed because I wasn’t sure what a linear mechanic was. When I went back over the test and took more time, I realized that a linear mechanic makes you play more spells with that mechanic or enablers of that mechanic. Like with UG Madness (omg, OBC!), you need cards with madness like Arrogant Wurm and Basking Rootwalla and enablers like Mongrel and Aquamoeba.

Affinity makes you play artifacts, threshold makes you fill your graveyard, amplify forces you into a specific creature type, Slivers are a duh, and buyback doesn’t give a crap what you do with the rest of your deck.

For number 22, efficient and powerful cards always show up in common. Uncommons make a deck-type and Rares are swingy bombs, but commons have to be good to hold a format together.

I really had no idea about number 29. I don’t think I play enough organized formats to really know what’s going on about them, and they all seemed like reasonable answers to me. I don’t think I got it right the first time, but the answer is B.

Being familiar with a bunch of cards is the key to numbers 26-28, 31 and 32. For 26, I couldn’t think of cards like Anger and Haakon, so I missed it. Even Jokulhaups doesn’t kill Enchantments for number 27. I’ve Terrorized more things than I have Funeral Charmed my opponent for number 28. I remembered Fatigue (and Time Walk to a degree) for number 31. And has anyone seen anything like Furnace of Rath anywhere else ever? I have seen Threaten, Infernal Tutor, Akroma’s Vengeance, and Dread Returns, though.

My final score was 27 out of 35, which I can live with, especially since I took the test at 1 a.m. on Sunday morning and didn’t take the time to look up any of the answers I didn’t know.

Of course, had I actually applied for the R&D internship, my 27 would not have been good enough to make it to the second round. I would have had to improve my score by at least three, and preferably eight to make it.

Hopefully Rosewater provides us with a breakdown of the percentages of people missing certain questions. Only a few people got 34 out of 35 correct, and I just have a feeling that they all missed the same question, maybe two questions.

Probably something like my 8th Grade Science teacher gave us:

To get the best grade on a test, you should:
A. Read the chapter
B. Take notes in class
C. Make flash cards
D. Sleep with the book under your pillow
E. All of the above

I hated Mrs. Lowry

Her argument was something about the first three being obviously correct answers, right? So even though D isn’t necessarily correct because, umm, humans don’t learn by osmosis from paper through the skull, E is the right answer. Yeah, well, our argument (and we were legion) was that you should also get a good nights’ sleep for the test, and having a hardback science textbook under your pillow might not exactly be conducive to that. The correct answer should be any of A, B, or C, but definitely not D or E.

She’s an idiot.

Sorry. I’m not bitter about that at all. I’m not even bitter about the time I had to work with one of the special-ed kids on a project and lost points because I did all of the work.

Grr…

Anyway, I hope you had fun with the test and that you make it out to some interesting tournaments in the coming weeks.

I’ll be in Columbus this weekend, pwning n00bs Vintage style with Stifles and Duresses.

Be there, or be rejected for a job in R&D.