Thanksgiving Day Slaughter!

Late to posting it but here is out stream from Thanksgiving Day. The Wattlegobber DLC from Borderlands 2


Watch live video from SnowCoveredSwamp on TwitchTV

Happy MUCThanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Turkey Day - GW
World Enchantment
Whenever a player casts a spell, they may say why they are thankful for it. If they do, they put a 1/1 green turkey onto the battlefield under their control.
0, sacrifice a turkey: Gain 2 life. Any player may activate this ability.

Sorry we have been so absent this week, tends to happen around the holidays. We should be streaming tonight at some point a Turkey Day special so check that out.

We went with a World Enchant because...why not!

Hope you enjoy our silly card!

RCotD #221

Random Card of the Day #221:

Pygmy Allosaurus - 2G
Creature - Lizard
Swampwalk
2/2

The card itself? Whatever. Slightly below curve and will never see play outside of draft.

Creature type Dinosaur being oracled out? Seriously? C'mon wizards, you can do better than that.

Wait, this thing was a rare?

2/5 Limited
2/5 Constructed

Unless it was to build a dinosaur deck. It wouldn't be that great, but 5/5 for flavor.
(I know, I know. A very uninteresting card to talk about. But c'mon. Dinosaurs.)

RCotD #220

Random Card of the Day #220:

Rotted Hystrix - 4G
Creature - Beast
3/6

Well this isn't a very interesting card to talk about. It's a vanilla green creature that's very splashable.

So instead I'll reiterate something I mentioned about mana costs and break even points for vanilla creatures.

1-cost 1/1
2-cost 2/2
3-cost 3/3
4-cost 4/5
5-cost 6/6
6-cost 7/8
7-cost 9/9

These are the baselines for "good" vanilla creatures. The reason is that basically up 3 mana, there is not much of a use. But you aren't guaranteed 4 lands in a hand, and anything beyond that becomes more valueable (as it should be--the more mana you put into a spell the better).

Color intensity also matters. So for example a 2-cost GG should be a 3/2 or 2/3. See: Garruk's Companion. For GGG you can get Leatherback Baloth.

Making it multi-colored also makes it's value increase as you aren't guaranteed the colors. Such as a GW 3/3 Watchwolf or RGW Woolly Thoctar.

But as a vanilla creature, it will never see constructed play.
It could be okay in draft. 20-23rd card.

SCSLive! The Ship....OF JIMMY THE BELLBOY!

So anyone remember this card? You don't stop lying to me. Well this card with from MUCMonday 7 and was inspired but the unsavory man in the art. Why am I telling you this...well because todays stream is of The Ship the very game he is from.

Come join us as we kill or be killed on a boat!

www.twitch.tv/snowcoveredswamp

Lolzor's Current Life in Standard.

So...anyone who follows us on twitter (@SnoCoveredSwamp) or at least me personally (@Lolzor_SCS) should know that I said I was quitting standard...I lied. Basically I saw my friend playing a sweet Rakdos deck and I made a similar version of it and now I'm back in this. I figured for this weeks article I'd talk about it.

The deck is simple Removal + Removal + Removal + 2 Good Creatures = Win. The 2 good creatures being Desecration Demon and Stormbreath Dragon. Basically Demon is sweet since its  6/6 for 4 and its "downside" is more board control, and Stormbreath is just the Thundermaw of this set in the sense that it is an efficient haster that brings in the win. The deck also runs 4 Mutavaults and 3 Rakdos Keyrunes so you can also run the ping war while you control the game.

Red/Black gives you all the relevant removal spells being: Dreadbore, Hero's Downfall, Devour Flesh, Ultimate Price, Anger of the Gods, Shock...ect.

The strength of this deck is it's very adaptive which is a blessing and a curse. A casual player wont know what's being run in his or her store or probably what even that popular, but a more experienced play knows what to have main decked and what to have sideboarded each week. Again the strength is that the core is just the idea of 2 biggies and removal so you just fit the removal needed for that week in and bam top 8 deck.

Other versions of this deck run Chandra for the control match up among other things...I couldn't get my hands on any so I sub'd in 2 Rakdos Returns mainboard to basically add some hand control (That and that card is just insane right now).

Over all i have been pulling out mainly 3-1 with the deck due to my poor sideboarding or greedy play. The deck is simple but careful but I am having a great time with it.

That's all for today see you guys on Sunday for SCSLive! over at www.twitch.tv/snowcoveredswamp

RCotD #219

Random Card of the Day #219:

Infernal Tutor - 1B
Sorcery
Reveal a card from your hand. Search your library for a card with the same name as that card, reveal it, put it into your hand, then shuffle your library. Hellbent — If you have no cards in hand, instead search your library for a card, put it into your hand, then shuffle your library.

A balanced version of Demonic Tutor? Without Hellbent I want to say it's like a bad Transmute, and with Hellbent it's just a strictly worse version of the aforementioned Demonic Tutor

Now that said this card is really good. Trying to make it compare to one of the best fetch in the game and then saying "it's worse than it" doesn't really say much about the card. This card could most definitely see play in many formats (well, maybe not singleton/EDH) and has the potential to be a very clutch topdeck.

Constructed: 4/5
Limited: 2/5, honestly how many cards could it pull without Hellbent?

Trivia on Hellbent:
If a hellbent ability of a spell is a self-replacement that changes the effect of that spell, the number of cards in its controller's hand is checked as the spell resolves. It is not checked when the spell is played.

Poros, Time Lords, and the Desert Bus.

So you may have noticed a few things popping up on out Twitter and Facebook...those things kinda look like the picture above. Well good job on noticing because its that time of year again! What time is that you ask? Well it's Desert Bus time! Which, for the uninformed, is a charity event put on by the fine people over at LoadingReadyRun. Basically they play a video game known as Desert Bus for as long as we keep donating. The game itself is possible torture but its torture for a good cause. For more info go to that fancy website in the graphic.

So why is SnowCoveredSwamp advertising for another site? Well duh we like charity and also Lolzor has been an avid donater since DB2 and Baalhrezem since I believe DB4. This is just a great event for a great charity.

As an added bonus Stream watcher and friend of the site PennyLane has a piece in the give aways! She has been nice enough to link our site in her post (Having no actual site of her own)
http://desertbus.org/giveaway/33

And on top of that our old comic artist Azyzl has 2 items as well (Surprisingly not pony related)
http://desertbus.org/giveaway/80


Anyway that's enough of that. Watch and donate it starts next week.

No Stream This Week

Enjoy this highlight from one of our previous casts:

Watch live video from SnowCoveredSwamp on TwitchTV

Stream Highlight

Just some stream highlights:

Maybe this could become a regular thing. But I've noticed that there tends to be significantly more views if I just embed a highlight in this site.

In case you missed our live stream (link is over on the right), here was an amusing happen stance in a Hearthstone game we played.













Enjoy! (it may require an ad to play)

Watch live video from SnowCoveredSwamp on TwitchTV

Tournament Structures (group stages)

Tournament Structures:

Alright so this may seem more like a rage-article more than anything--or atleast that's how the idea came about. I've been trying to gather my thoughts on it for a while now so I can illustrate the poor example that the League of Legends Season 3 World Championship set for tournament structures.

In case you didn't know, the S3WC had 14 teams present. 4 of them got BYEs for performing well in the All-Star tournament. The other 10 teams were split into groups of 5 in a best of 2 (bo2), where the top 2 advance and the other 3 drop out of the tournament. The seeding for those 4 that advance out of the group stage are randomly seeded, and then the bracket stage begins where it's a bo3 for the quarterfinals, bo5 for everything beyond that in a single elimination bracket.

Alright, that was quite a mouthful. Now let's break this down into what is wrong with this. Firstly let's break down how the group stages should go. Similar to how the UEFA group stage is set up would be optimal--3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, 0 for a loss. This is important because there is a blue-side advantage in League of Legends. So there must be an even number of games played versus each opponent--one on blue and one on purple (red) side. (Or 2 and 2 in the case of NA/EU LCS.)

It made it so the difference between 1 point per each game win and 3 points for each series win is meaningful. The overall results would not have changed in the S3WC group stages, but it's nonetheless a better system.

Okay now for a less important topic on group stages: the number of teams in each group. It may seem like a trivial thing (which is really is) but the optimal number of teams in a group stage is 5. Why five? Because it's the smallest integer above four--and 4 is inadequate.

So the first problem with 4 teams in each group is that it is impossible for a team to not play back-to-back. If you have the schedule:

A vs B

C vs D

A vs C ; A vs D ; B vs C ; B vs D

Then one unfortunate team is forced to play with no downtime in between. You can decrease this advantage by having mandatory breaks between matches/games but it's still a disadvantage nonetheless.

Another thing that could be wrong with 4 teams is the general structure. In Blizzard's WCS for StarCraft II, each group has four players. A vs B ; C vs D -- then the winner of each match faces each other and likewise for the losers. Then the winner of losers and the loser of the winners face each other to see who qualifies for the 2nd seed of the group. The problem? This is exactly a double-elimination bracket. Honestly, why even call it a group stage?

If you make it go round robin, then there's chances of 3-way ties, which make the whole group twice as long, and if you were going to do round robin to determine seeds why not combine all the groups and play round robin? Or even better: do swiss rounds? Why even make it so the loss of group stages makes it so a team is out of the tournament, without playing many of the other teams? This was especially frustrating in Riot Games' S3WC group stages where the regions of NA, WU, KR, etc. clash once a year--and more games were anticipated for many of the regions.

A lot of unanswered questions will come soon in part 2 of my rant on proper Tournament Structures along with bracketology.



Thanks for reading!

MUCMonday #43

Making Up Cards Monday #43: (it's really black, think of it as a late halloween)

A return of our most popular segment of Snow Covered Swamp: MUCMonday.

So these cards started off when I looked at the set, and I told Lolzor, "Hey we need a bunch of black cards for MUCMonday, preferably sorceries." I got back a bunch of ideas and Lolzor turned them into cards.

Lolzor will fill these in with valueable information about how the card was made when he gets the chance.





Lolzor here! So I'm going add some text here. These are all part of a cycle I tossed into our set. I felt we were missing a bit of draft combos and cross play in a less grand sense so I game up with about 5-7 cards that would work well with each other.



Diabolical Cleric - 2B
Creature - Zombie Cleric
Sacrifice a creature you control: Creatures you control gain protection from the sacrificed creatures colors until end of turn.
1/3

One of the first things I saw was lacking and also is a decent combo piece was a sac outlet. Simple stuff, basic but usable.











Assemble the Legion - BBB
Sorcery
Search your library for any number of zombie cards and put those cards into your graveyard.

More of the zombie theme it's very flavor heavy but could be quite the  combo piece














Kicking and Screaming - 1BB
Sorcery
Target player loses one life for each creature card put into the graveyard this turn. You gain life equal to life lost this way.

This one was made around the name actually...I really like how it came out.