[Podcast] Everyday Eternal Episode 31: Ovino Stories and Eternal Weekend Vin. Preview

[sdematt]

http://itsjulian.com/?p=376

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In episode 31 of Everyday Eternal, Julian (@itsJulian23) regales Sam (@thecravenone), Matt (@SDE_Matt) and Sean (Nedleeds) with tales from this year’s Ovinogeddon. Later, Sam and Sean talk expectations for vintage at Eternal Weekend 2014.

Download Link: Everyday Eternal Episode 31 (Duration 1:11:11 — 65,16 MB): http://itsjulian.com/podcasts/EverydayEternal/EW2014preview.mp3
00:28 Problems at Ovino
11:48 Current dominance of Miracles
15:05 Funny stories from Ovino
41:13 Eternal Weekend Vintage Preview
44:16 What’s in Sean’s Gauntlet
52:02 Influence of MTGO on the metagame
53:21 Shops’ problems: BUG and Young Pyromancer
59:42 Expectations for best performances at Eternal Weekend: Dredge a surprise contender, Oath falls flat?
1:04:59 LCV results
1:08:33 Announcements and Outro

Sorry for the late posting, it'll be up on Eternal Central when Jaco uploads it...

-Matt

[ween]

Another great cast guys
Almost a full house too!

[Phelix]

yeah, this was quite good, I particularly found the vintage insights nice.

[nevilshute]

Great cast guys. Regarding your slow play discussion:

It seems like you guys agreed that probably one minute is an appropriate amount of time to spend at most, before having to make a game decision. One of either Matt or Sam chipped in with "well what if I'm resolving Doomsday?" but that wasn't really debated.

If I'm playing Doomsday, I feel confident that I can play fast for all of my turns up until the time where I need to resolve Doomsday. Sometimes it's a simple pile, but sometimes it's extremely complex. Now, if I've been a good boy up until this point and have played fast and effeciently every preceding turn (say, faster than my opponent), but now I enter the tank and would like to spend, say, 3-4 minutes resolving Doomsday.

If this was on MTGO there would be no problem. If it's game one, then by the time we reach this point, I might be sitting at say, 21 minutes on the clock, my opponent the same or a little less. But in paper magic no one (except me and my opponent, possibly) are keeping track on which player is taking how long to do what.

How do you approach situations like this? Is it all just "the same rules no matter what, make your decision in one minute or get a warning"? Or do you feel, at a competitive level, that there can be room for fast players to take prolonged periods in the tank at pivotal times as long as they aren't using up more than there share of the total time?

[maharis]

Just got to start to listen to this yesterday, but the discussion about Ovino made me cringe after this past Eternal Weekend.

I understand that WER is a terrible piece of software (par for the WoTC course) so it's hard to get too mad at Card Titan (though blaming the bridge traffic was a little scummy, just say that the software crashed and we all direct our derision at Wizards).

Do they use something different for Grands Prix? There are already 1k people pre-regged for NJ and I can't imagine them having to key in all of them manually.

[nedleeds]

Yeah, I wasn't actively playing Legacy on Saturday morning but I registered just to get a 2nd Crucible playmat (they look awesome by the way, the colors are super rich), show up for round 1 and drop. It was a horrendous delay, one of my teammates just basically went to sleep. You get jacked up to play, get some coffee, get some eggs from the memnites. Then ... sit for 2 hours. Last year everything went like clockwork. This year I saw two things, one was a horde of people who showed up kind of late and the wristband process got bottlenecked. Then something was obviously fucked with the DCI / entry process as peoples names were fucked up.

Besides that failure everything else I think was pretty good, pairings on Twitter, sufficient space to play comfortably, most judge calls were handled well, by competent vintage/legacy aware judges.

Sorry the preview came out a little late. I think I was reasonably correct in my predictions ... Oath squeezed in and preyed upon delver (and drew his Lotus twice) in the final. There was a ton of Merfolk, lots of u/r delver, I think I gave BUG a little too much credit -- seems like the same players who would choose BUG are in the pool of personalities who would choose U/R delver so they kind of split the vote. I think my shops deck was fine, I got my second loss in round 5. One loss was to Ryan Glakin who top 8'ed, he had lotus in both his wins (once on the draw where I chalice 1'ed), my other 2 losses were to a bomberman player who had lotus AND crypt in both his openers. Meh.

My entire team scrubbed out by round 5 so I played another round for LOLz then it was time for food and buying shit.

The vintage prelim I played Junk Dudesweats so a 4-2-1 finish and it paid off ... round 1 my opponent had seen me playing it the prior day and I blew his dome off with a chalice and a trinisphere.

Overall it's still an awesome event, with awesome people, awesome staff and awesome beautiful magic cards being played. Hopefully by next year Legacy won't be a smoldering box of rabbit shit and I'll have the desire to play.

[nedleeds]

If I'm playing Doomsday, I feel confident that I can play fast for all of my turns up until the time where I need to resolve Doomsday. Sometimes it's a simple pile, but sometimes it's extremely complex. Now, if I've been a good boy up until this point and have played fast and effeciently every preceding turn (say, faster than my opponent), but now I enter the tank and would like to spend, say, 3-4 minutes resolving Doomsday.


Honestly I feel like this question is best answered by an experienced judge(s). The spell Doomsday requires a number of complicated steps, it's also likely your last or second to last turn (for better or worse). Goblin Recruiter is another card. Dwarven Recruiter less so.

[Plm]

About miracle on modo :

The thing is that the chess clock benefit more to the miracle player than his opp.

In paper magic, everybody knows that miracle is slow, and people abuse that, not actively stalling but playing with at a suboptimal pace.

On modo both players have the same amount of time at disposition, so the non miracle player cannot "play the clock" is he won game 1, it makes a big difference.

That was my 2 cents.

Thank you for this podcast, it's really entertaining :smile:

[Julian23]

Great cast guys. Regarding your slow play discussion:

It seems like you guys agreed that probably one minute is an appropriate amount of time to spend at most, before having to make a game decision. One of either Matt or Sam chipped in with "well what if I'm resolving Doomsday?" but that wasn't really debated.

If I'm playing Doomsday, I feel confident that I can play fast for all of my turns up until the time where I need to resolve Doomsday. Sometimes it's a simple pile, but sometimes it's extremely complex. Now, if I've been a good boy up until this point and have played fast and effeciently every preceding turn (say, faster than my opponent), but now I enter the tank and would like to spend, say, 3-4 minutes resolving Doomsday.

If this was on MTGO there would be no problem. If it's game one, then by the time we reach this point, I might be sitting at say, 21 minutes on the clock, my opponent the same or a little less. But in paper magic no one (except me and my opponent, possibly) are keeping track on which player is taking how long to do what.

How do you approach situations like this? Is it all just "the same rules no matter what, make your decision in one minute or get a warning"? Or do you feel, at a competitive level, that there can be room for fast players to take prolonged periods in the tank at pivotal times as long as they aren't using up more than there share of the total time?

No, there is no bending of the rules for someone resolving a spell that requires a lot of thinking. If that person can't resolve his Doomsday within 1 minute, you should definitely call a judge for slowplay.

It's one of those myths that keep lingering around the community that you could build up some kind of virtual "time bank" by playing really fast before moving into something requiring more thinking.


About miracle on modo :

The thing is that the chess clock benefit more to the miracle player than his opp.

My experience is the other way round. MODO often makes it much easier to beat them because they will eventually run out of time. Entering the 3rd game of MODO with Miracles at only 5 minutes (to your >10m) is nothing unheard of. I'm much more positive about playing vs Miracles on MODO as they can't just stall out the game into a 1-0-1 for them after winning the first game.

[Plm]

My point was something in the lines of : Miracle makes for long games but fast turns.

And the stalling after first game win goes both ways I suppose.

Anyway experiences differ, but a good point for modo is that miracle player don't go to the draw bracket as much.

[nevilshute]

No, there is no bending of the rules for someone resolving a spell that requires a lot of thinking. If that person can't resolve his Doomsday within 1 minute, you should definitely call a judge for slowplay.

It's one of those myths that keep lingering around the community that you could build up some kind of virtual "time bank" by playing really fast before moving into something requiring more thinking.

I guess that was kind of my point. That on mtgo there is such a "time bank". I understand that it is a fallacy to compare mtgo and paper here but I do find it unreasonable when my paper opponent has been spending an avarage of 20 seconds resolving each of his top activations for the past 5+ turns while I have been spending a maximum of 30 seconds on "resolving" each of my turns in their interity including brainstorming, pondering and what not that there isn't some leeway if I need to tank over the apex of my strategy. At this time, if it had been on mtgo I would have spent maybe 3 minutes total whereas my opponent might have spent 8-10 minutes....

Well, there I went and compared the two platforms anyway hehe.

In practice I think there is actually an understanding that you can save up some "good will" (perhaps not against you Julian :wink:) if you are quick at resolving each turn and then need a bit of leeway at a pivotal point.

[Julian23]

I guess that was kind of my point. That on mtgo there is such a "time bank". I understand that it is a fallacy to compare mtgo and paper here but I do find it unreasonable when my paper opponent has been spending an avarage of 20 seconds resolving each of his top activations for the past 5+ turns while I have been spending a maximum of 30 seconds on "resolving" each of my turns in their interity including brainstorming, pondering and what not that there isn't some leeway if I need to tank over the apex of my strategy. At this time, if it had been on mtgo I would have spent maybe 3 minutes total whereas my opponent might have spent 8-10 minutes....

Well, there I went and compared the two platforms anyway hehe.

In practice I think there is actually an understanding that you can save up some "good will" (perhaps not against you Julian :wink:) if you are quick at resolving each turn and then need a bit of leeway at a pivotal point.

You will notice that I never talked about MODO with regards to your question. This is, because the fact that there are chess clocks on that plattform has zero implications for paper Magic.

The point you're not addressing (maybe because I didn't emphasize it enough) is that it is merely a question of time but of skill. I'm very much of the opinion that the better player should win within the rules. If your opponent can not resolve his Doomsday in what a judge watching the resolution of the spell would consider a timely manner, that is against said rules. It doesn't matter how he broke the rules, an infraction as a mistake and should be punished in order to have the better player eventually winning.

You're talking about leeway and "good will"; those are nothing else than euphemisms for making the game easier for one of the players. Why would you do that, don't you want to win the game? You should seek every edge you can gain in a highly competitive environment and that includes benefiting from your opponent's mistake. I've heard people say that an attitude like that is against the "spirit of the game". It's actually exactly the other way round: providing an unfair advantage to one of the players is against the competitive spirit of the game.

Also, really, this isn't even an actual issue if the Doomsday player knows what he's doing. When you are resolving Doomsday you should already know which cards you are going for. If you are not, you probably didn't think about it enough in the turns leading up to it. You have a lot of time to think about the eventual line while the game is progressing, so use that time. Of course there can be sudden changes the very moment you resolve Doomsday that require more thought. This is exactly where skill comes in. However, the inherent skill to playing Doomsday is not about finding the right line — it's about finding it in time aka in the boundaries set by the rules of the game.

[Higgs]

No offense intended but these two quotes read on the opposing ends of the spectrum for sportsmanship.



At Ovinogeddon 2011, a friend of mine was attacking for lethal into a tapped out opponent. Little kid, about 15 or 16. So what did that guy do? He picked up my firends deck and counted all the cards to maybe squeeze out a win for wrong sideboarding. It was pathetic.

Perfectly fine in a competitive environment.

Except for that it is not.


You're talking about leeway and "good will"; those are nothing else than euphemisms for making the game easier for one of the players. Why would you do that, don't you want to win the game? You should seek every edge you can gain in a highly competitive environment and that includes benefiting from your opponent's mistake. I've heard people say that an attitude like that is against the "spirit of the game". It's actually exactly the other way round: providing an unfair advantage to one of the players is against the competitive spirit of the game.

[Julian23]

Certain things are perfectly acceptable while others are not. Counting your opponent's deck "just because" is different from counting it because you (somehow) have reason to believe he sidedboarded incorrectly.

"Incorrect sideboarding" doesn't really exist anymore (except for going below 60), but under the old rules, when my opponent gave me any reason to believe there was something wrong with his sideboarding (like a look of surprise on his face after Burning Wish, followed by him finding something odd), I will definitely ask him to count his sideboard...which by the way is much more practical than counting the deck.

However, what bruizar said is that it is fine to count your opponent's deck every time you are about to lose. When you say something like that, you have to always hold it true to it becoming a generally accepted thing in tournament play. From a logistical point of view, that's 100% impractical. With regards to the time limit, I am against people counting their opponent's deck at the end of every game. If you really wanna do that, do it while pile-shuffling your opponent's deck before the game.

With me using the term "squeeze out a win", I think it was quite clear that the kid had no reason to suspect any kind of wrong sideboarding.

[iamajellydonut]

With me using the term "squeeze out a win", I think it was quite clear that the kid had no reason to suspect any kind of wrong sideboarding.

Just the same as you have no reason to suspect any kind of intentional or malicious slowplaying.

I agree with the concept of "anything to eek out a win", but don't put condemn someone else's method and try to justify your own. All of them are scummy and few of them have redeeming virtues.

[Julian23]

Just the same as you have no reason to suspect any kind of intentional or malicious slowplaying.

No. I'm sorry to not phrase this in a more friendly way, but the above statement indicates that you are not familiar with the rules regarding slowplay.

Slowplay - by definition - is unintentional. It is not "suspected" because it is evident.

What you are calling "intentional or malicious" slowplay is in fact STALLING. Stalling is cheating and will (at least!) be punished with a DQ without prize. Saito was actually DQ'ed and suspended for stalling, among other things.

You will see that in the light of these clarifications, your above statement doesn't make sense. I'm sorry to say it so directly, but I really feel that people need to become more familiar with slow play/stalling rules AND call a judge much more often for slow play, because it's becoming abundant.