@thewhitedragon69 My sarcasm detector is demonstrably fallible. Flawed even.

@thewhitedragon69 infallible you say? my goodness!

@brass-man we are old... I, I simply have no words.

@john-cox YES. Barney would be great in Oath. We could do it Kelly style too, since we can presumably tap Orchard for purple and hardcast as well.

@fsecco Woah. Idk, this seems like it has potential to me. Rector into Ugin? Tezz? Feels pretty dangerous to me. Is there a PW control deck that just runs this for defense / combo? T2 Lily into T3 this? Idk, feels all potentially to me.

@fsecco @Dr-J I was curious about this one too. Is the Geezer there to target opponent or something? If not, isn't Cruise just as good a drain sink as Geezer and likely better? If we drain something at 4, than Geezer gets us 4 cards for UU, where Cruise gets us 3 for what will almost certainly be U and three cards out of the yard (one card is already Mana Drain). It's not until we are draining things at the 5, 6, 7 level that this is much better. Even then, Cruise offers lines to float mana into what we are drawing. And aren't the instances of just wanting to play Cruise pre-drain outweighing the Drain into big Geezers anyway? I mean, don't get me wrong. I like big Geezers, and I cannot lie. I but it just feels like Cruise has more impact more often.

@moorebrother1 Well I'll say this about players. I do think in terms of the calculator that I carry around in my head - third tier. But I like to think, at least, that a lot of other factors go into winning. Like those we mentioned, as well as staying balanced, not tilting, being disciplined, and actual practice. I keep trying to get Brassman to admit he's actually good. I think I'll get there someday. I'm sure he thinks he has a second-rate calculator, and maybe he's right. But setting sobriety aside for a moment, I think he's off the charts on the rest of those things. For those reasons, he's one of my favorite players to watch stream.

I'll also say that when I watch the VSL or things like that, I'm slapping my head thinking that if I played against Montolio running the exact same decklist as him, I might win 30% of those games depending on the deck list. The moral to me is not to run the same deck list.

What makes a good mtg player is really an interesting question.

I agree. It's like we got tired of marketing to 14 year olds so we started marketing to 7 year olds instead. A few more like this and I'll find myself running agro teletubbies with a purple splash to hardcast Barney the dinosaur.

@moorebrother1 I suck at actual magic. And I play it profitably (cashing tourneys for more than what I put in). The way I've done that is by doing exactly what you're doing. I try to predict the meta and be a little more prepared for what I'm seeing than it is for me. I think breaking down the %'s of what decks, and even what cards you're likely to see makes a ton of sense. Then play a deck that will let you pick up free-ish wins if you don't blunder too bad and stay out of it's way.

If I thought that Dredge and Shops were going to make up 40-50% of the meta. My inclination would be to run something Paradoxical. My knee-jerk reaction would be to run a paradoxical oath build, since those cards theoretically match up well with what you're likely to see, but that just might be me running back to Oath in general where I'm most comfortable. As a solid tier 3 player, I like a deck that just hands me a win every 4 or 5 games. To answer your question, I think its all skill, if you define skill as staying out of the way of good luck whenever you can. A lot of times in this game you just get run over, but if you make good decisions, you stand to run the other guy folks a little more. Pick off the weakies playing pet decks, pick off the people who blunder, and hope for busted draws against better players... it's really not a bad strategy.

How'd it shake out?