Sun Mar 25, 2012 DOTP 2012 Eglin's Decks v1.01

[sadlyblue]

Thanks for more new decks, and cards.

[Eglin]

Thanks for more new decks, and cards.

Thanks a billion, Blue! I learned an awful lot studying cards and posts by kind folks like you. I'm happy that you are all supportive and sharing.

[sadlyblue]

Just a couple of things.
Some decks still sometimes crash.
Illusions of grandeur didn't triggered the loss of life when i targettted it with the oblivion ring. I had already given to my oponnent and the 1st turn didn't removed any counters, but not sure how the turns in play were counted.
Love the "I'll take that" concept. But it takes a while to put some of the key cards in play. So i think adding a board cleanser like pyroclasm would improve against faster decks. Maybe instead of 2 bazaar trader (they are only there for the jinxed idol, right?).
I was trying similar, but red and blue. This way i could have Propaganda, and an all time favorite of mine, Reins of Power.
But love the decks...

[yuriap]

Hope not to be taken as complainer, because I really appreciate all your decks and surely know it's hard work to get it done, but I noticed that cards image quality are kind of low. Just saying that as a question and/or advice: is it possible to improve then by adding HQ images?

Cards illustration are the magic element and the very essence of the game. So I think they are as important as the rules and strategy. Anyway, it's just my opinion, and I don't know how to do that. But I'm willing to help... If there's anything I could do about it.

[Eglin]

Just a couple of things.
Some decks still sometimes crash.
Illusions of grandeur didn't triggered the loss of life when i targettted it with the oblivion ring. I had already given to my oponnent and the 1st turn didn't removed any counters, but not sure how the turns in play were counted.

Thanks for the feedback, Blue.

Are the decks primarily crashing at the end of a match, or are they more random like the previous poster described?

Without looking, I bet that I trigger Illusions of Grandeur on hitting the graveyard (possibly from play). Changing that to trigger on zone-change where erstwhile zone = in-play would be better. Honestly, I never thought about o-ringing the illusion. Haha. It gets soooo expensive to pay the upkeep sooo quickly, that it's pretty much a game-ender on its own. The workaround for paying the cumulative upkeep is pretty clumsy, though, so I hope to make some changes to the card in the near future.

Love the "I'll take that" concept. But it takes a while to put some of the key cards in play. So i think adding a board cleanser like pyroclasm would improve against faster decks. Maybe instead of 2 bazaar trader (they are only there for the jinxed idol, right?).
I was trying similar, but red and blue. This way i could have Propaganda, and an all time favorite of mine, Reins of Power.
But love the decks...

Thanks! It's a VERY frustrating deck for me to play against since, as you can probably tell from my deck selections, I tend to prefer beatdown/ramp decks. The deck is just BRUTAL in multiplayer games. I can see how a sweeper would be useful in this deck - although the deck is so jam packed with creature-stealing cards that I usually fare well against everything slower than, say, elves. Bazaar Trader is key here. You can win without it, but he's really one of the key pieces. Note: Bazaar Trader will let you give any target you /currently/ have control over to /any/ target player (including yourself) permanently. Thus, you can cast Mark of Mutiny on an opposing creature, steal it, give it haste, give it +1/+1, then tap Bazaar Trader to target the stolen creature and yourself - this card is now yours permanently. In multiplayer games, I'll even often spread the love - steal a creature and then give it to a teammate for the rest of the game. The effect persists, even if you yourself are taken out of the game. I'm disinclined to splash blue, since the deck is already stretched to splash green and black - it does use a retro T2 landbase, after all. And although I only use the black and green for Awakening Zone and Quest for the Gravelord, those two cards provide a HUGE synergy for the rest of the deck. The eldrazi spawn make great chump blockers, and you can sacrifice them to the Culling Dais or Jinxed Idol after you've declared them as a blocker - you take no damage from the attack, and you reap great rewards. They also cause the Quest for the Gravelord to ramp really fast, and an extra 5/5 beater will always come in handy.

All that said, I value your suggestions for deck improvements, and I will try to learn more about deck unlocks. My decks, in general, are a little queer in the way that so many of them have one-ofs and two-ofs and such. For the most part, it comes from constant tinkering over an extended period of time. It would, however, be nice to be able to add a bunch of cards as potential unlocks so that users can make deck edits without having to install mod tools and a deck editor. Does a guide to unlocks exist anywhere? I'm especially interested in knowing if it is possible to ship a deck with all the unlocks already unlocked while maintaining my desired 60-ish card designs.

[thefiremind]

Hope not to be taken as complainer, because I really appreciate all your decks and surely know it's hard work to get it done, but I noticed that cards image quality are kind of low. Just saying that as a question and/or advice: is it possible to improve then by adding HQ images?

Cards illustration are the magic element and the very essence of the game. So I think they are as important as the rules and strategy. Anyway, it's just my opinion, and I don't know how to do that. But I'm willing to help... If there's anything I could do about it.

Just a tip for Eglin about this: I follow kevlahnota's advice and search for all the pictures on Google. You can't find every picture in high resolution, but the more the card is recent and famous, the more chances you have to succeed. If I can't find the high resolution picture, the second resort is a site called aegen.nl (you'll surely step on this while searching on Google) which uses cropped scans of decent quality, about 420px width for post-8th edition scans. If aegen fails, too, I usually search for the best scan I can find, then I do some work of resizing, colour correction and edge sharpening until I'm satisfied.

It's true that we have a great resource on this site and it would be possible to find high quality scans here, but the problem is that we have to download a whole set for illustrating maybe 3-4 cards. I downloaded the scans for the Kamigawa block from here when I was making my Spirit deck, but that was because I knew I would have needed many scans from the same 3 sets.

[Eglin]

Hope not to be taken as complainer, because I really appreciate all your decks and surely know it's hard work to get it done, but I noticed that cards image quality are kind of low. Just saying that as a question and/or advice: is it possible to improve then by adding HQ images?

Cards illustration are the magic element and the very essence of the game. So I think they are as important as the rules and strategy. Anyway, it's just my opinion, and I don't know how to do that. But I'm willing to help... If there's anything I could do about it.

I, too, have noticed that the quality of the images I've used for my cards seems to be significantly worse than what ships with the game and with some of the excellent work of other posters. I'm not 100% sure how the game handles various file-sizes, to be honest. I just point the deck editor to an illustration and let it handle the conversion (via Gibbed's Tools) and so forth. It appears that you can feed the game images of any size for card art, and it will dynamically resize the images.

If one were so motivated, it appears it would be possible to unpack my wad using Gibbed Tools by dragging the wad file and dropping it right onto the unpack.exe file. Then, go into the DATA_DLC_2868\DATA_PC\DATA_SHARED\ART_ASSETS\ILLUSTRATIONS directory, highlight all the files and drag them all at once onto the textureconvert.exe in Gibbed's Tools. This will convert all of them to .PNG files. Finally, replace every image with a corresponding high-quality image using the same filename (which, unfortunately, do not always correspond directly to the card names) and repack the wad file with WADPROGRAM (I suspect it will be far too large at this point for Gibbed's Tools to work correctly, as it doesn't use compression).

I also see no reason that images have to be contained within the same WAD file as the cards that use them, so it may be possible to offer two separate wads for images (one HQ and one as is) along with a WAD containing just the cards. It would be really awesome if one would even dynamically overwrite the other if both exist in the same game directory, but I'm not sure how the game handles name conflicts at the moment. This division would be fine with me if you'd like to take ownership of maintaining a high-quality card image wad - the uploads already take forrrreeeever for me, so having someone else uploading the bulk of the images would be pretty sweet. As for doing it myself, I simply don't have the source materials or motivation to obtain and distribute them. But I am crazy about Avon lands and am totally in love with Rebecca Guay.

[Eglin]

Just a tip for Eglin about this: I follow kevlahnota's advice and search for all the pictures on Google. You can't find every picture in high resolution, but the more the card is recent and famous, the more chances you have to succeed. If I can't find the high resolution picture, the second resort is a site called aegen.nl (you'll surely step on this while searching on Google) which uses cropped scans of decent quality, about 420px width for post-8th edition scans. If aegen fails, too, I usually search for the best scan I can find, then I do some work of resizing, colour correction and edge sharpening until I'm satisfied.

It's true that we have a great resource on this site and it would be possible to find high quality scans here, but the problem is that we have to download a whole set for illustrating maybe 3-4 cards. I downloaded the scans for the Kamigawa block from here when I was making my Spirit deck, but that was because I knew I would have needed many scans from the same 3 sets.

That's solid advice, and I ought to get around to installing BogWraith's excellent images before they disappear. But I already have a massive collection of lowish quality crops for use in Magic Workstation and another for use in MTGO, plus whatever cache MTGOv4 Beta is using. I don't see replacing any of these existing stores on my machine and I don't see myself wanting to spend hours scouring Google or retouching in Photoshop. Sorry, but thems the breaks. I also have to pay per MB to download and upload, and it's not much fun to shuttle large files about. Internet service options in the much of the US are AWFUL.

Still, thanks for all the feedback and advice, everyone!

[sadlyblue]

Bazaar Trader is key here. You can win without it, but he's really one of the key pieces. Note: Bazaar Trader will let you give any target you /currently/ have control over to /any/ target player (including yourself) permanently. Thus, you can cast Mark of Mutiny on an opposing creature, steal it, give it haste, give it +1/+1, then tap Bazaar Trader to target the stolen creature and yourself - this card is now yours permanently. In multiplayer games, I'll even often spread the love - steal a creature and then give it to a teammate for the rest of the game. The effect persists, even if you yourself are taken out of the game. I'm disinclined to splash blue, since the deck is already stretched to splash green and black - it does use a retro T2 landbase, after all.

Never thought about that trick with Bazaar Trader.
And i'm not saying to splash blue in that deck either. Just wanted to let you know i had a similar idea, of stealing creatures, just was a little different one. And Bribery, against some eldrazi decks is too cruel.
But your deck only problem is against fast decks.

[Eglin]

Bazaar Trader is key here. You can win without it, but he's really one of the key pieces. Note: Bazaar Trader will let you give any target you /currently/ have control over to /any/ target player (including yourself) permanently. Thus, you can cast Mark of Mutiny on an opposing creature, steal it, give it haste, give it +1/+1, then tap Bazaar Trader to target the stolen creature and yourself - this card is now yours permanently. In multiplayer games, I'll even often spread the love - steal a creature and then give it to a teammate for the rest of the game. The effect persists, even if you yourself are taken out of the game. I'm disinclined to splash blue, since the deck is already stretched to splash green and black - it does use a retro T2 landbase, after all.

Never thought about that trick with Bazaar Trader.
And i'm not saying to splash blue in that deck either. Just wanted to let you know i had a similar idea, of stealing creatures, just was a little different one. And Bribery, against some eldrazi decks is too cruel.
But your deck only problem is against fast decks.

Haha, Bribery is NASTY. If you wanna' crank out a similar deck, I'd love to play it. Don't let my humble offerings stand in your way - I've certainly built on themes that you've used. The more the merrier, as far as I'm concerned.

[elminster63500]

hello Eglin,

I managed to solve my problem and i should have think it !!! I've only changed the language of the game (French to english) and then, oh surprise, the texts appeared on the cards !! Stupid i am sometimes !!

[elminster63500]

and i forgot : your decks work fine now.

[Eglin]

hello Eglin,

I managed to solve my problem and i should have think it !!! I've only changed the language of the game (French to english) and then, oh surprise, the texts appeared on the cards !!
and i forgot : your decks work fine now.

Congratulations, that's awesome! For future reference, how did you change the language?

[elminster63500]

I bought the game on steam.

Simply, i choice "game" options. I go to magic the gathering 2012 game. Choice "propriety" and at last "language" and take "english" in stand of "french"

all decks work - soemtimes the game crashes after the match but not annoying (deck : jund ). the AI isn't able to play the deck "sharing is caring" : it plays no cards and discards all the time. When i play this deck, i have no problem! Just funny !

[Eglin]

I bought the game on steam.

Simply, i choice "game" options. I go to magic the gathering 2012 game. Choice "propriety" and at last "language" and take "english" in stand of "french"

all decks work - soemtimes the game crashes after the match but not annoying (deck : jund ). the AI isn't able to play the deck "sharing is caring" : it plays no cards and discards all the time. When i play this deck, i have no problem! Just funny !

This is all very good information to have! Thank you for taking the time to share what will surely help others in the same situation.