How do you feel about B4T?

The rewards reflect the grind.

That said, I am burnt out. But I love the rewards, so I have that going for me.

Likely if everyone is so inclined to not see another event like this, that would also mean the level of rewards in return. Kind of a bummer but it is fair. To ask otherwise to keep the rewards for less effort would be a bit too greedy IMHO.

I personally would like to grind slightly less... not a whole lot less... Because that gave us AWR.. which I hate because it is a slow, slow, slow and agonizing wait for recharges.

Aeroplane said:

This event is horrible for beginners. After the first level , my son is in Bronze just got mana ramped and utterly destroyed in 4 rounds in Blood Sun. I've never seen molten vortex do so much damage with red sky fall in one round. Basically, non-magic beginners will not have any fun in this game. Well, he tried again and died in 7 rounds with another crazy sky fall pulling out 3 dragons.

There are still 7 Merfolk and 3 Dinosaurs in post-XLN/RIX Standard.  Pirates will be the tricky one, as there's only Departed Deckhand.  

Otherwise we'll have to use the new copy stuff from M19: Metamorphic Alteration and Mirror Image.  

I like the challenge of trying to adapt a new Standard to old Events and objectives like this, but this event in particular is extremely time consuming and tedious.  I would like to see it either split into two (nodes 1-3, then nodes 4-5) like Oath of the Gatewatch which has a pt.1 & 2.  Or else converted to non-Coalition ladder-format, so that I could repeat a specific node repeatedly to find a working strategy without having to worry about node charges and coalition scores.  

When this event first debuted, most of my builds were very XLN/RIX heavy, so I haven't had to make many adjustments to them as Standard has shifted this last couple playthroughs, but there were always a few matches that require a rethink every time.  

Losing cycling when AKH left meant I switched to Doom loopers for a couple fights.  Now without HOU, I'm back to creatureless Ob on 4.2 (Angrath works as well, just a bit slower), and had to find a new damage combo that I could loop in 5.2.  I did once manage to hit both objectives on 5.2, but it's much more tricky and my deck relies on several contingencies to try to either keep him in line or keep myself from getting killed while doing setup for my combo (Alpine Moon, Haphazard Bombardment, Lich's Mastery, Immortal Sun).

My old Huatli2 dinosaur grindfest deck for Azor still worked with only a minor change (no more Hour of Promise), but in the interest of rethinking things to get it under 100 turns for a win, I came up with a new Teferi control deck to turn the tables and lock him down for a change, and incorporated a couple shiny new Angels (and Angel-generating MPs).  Making giant Angel token stacks is fun, but it's just my opinion that matches shouldn't take so long that I'm able to assemble a 273/273 creature over the course of many turns (doing that used to be much faster with AKH).  It got to the point that Luminarch Ascension was putting out 17 reinforcements for each activation - that means a minimum of 15 turns in which I didn't get hit, and I got hit a fair bit in that fight.  15 turns during which not much was happening as I occasionally whittled down Azor's HP total.  I know that match in particular is meant to challenge the player's ability to fight under severe constraints that change each round, but to give the boss 500HP on top of that just drags it out so much longer than necessary.  

It's just a war of attrition at that point.  Which pretty much sums up the whole event.  How many more times will the player base have the patience and tolerance for excessive grinds like this?

Enygma6 said:

My old Huatli2 dinosaur grindfest deck for Azor still worked with only a minor change (no more Hour of Promise), but in the interest of rethinking things to get it under 100 turns for a win, I came up with a new Teferi control deck to turn the tables and lock him down for a change, and incorporated a couple shiny new Angels (and Angel-generating MPs).  Making giant Angel token stacks is fun, but it's just my opinion that matches shouldn't take so long that I'm able to assemble a 273/273 creature over the course of many turns (doing that used to be much faster with AKH).  It got to the point that Luminarch Ascension was putting out 17 reinforcements for each activation - that means a minimum of 15 turns in which I didn't get hit, and I got hit a fair bit in that fight.  15 turns during which not much was happening as I occasionally whittled down Azor's HP total.  I know that match in particular is meant to challenge the player's ability to fight under severe constraints that change each round, but to give the boss 500HP on top of that just drags it out so much longer than necessary.  

Teysa said:

I'd agree that Slaughter the Strong is a bad choice for 4.1's deck. It is, however, possible to build around. Both Karn and Teferi are now capable of packing an solid amount of exile effects, so it's possible to keep your opponent from having any creatures on the board, *without* ticking up the 'kill <X creatures' objective. Losing the objective is still possible, but no more so than taking 30 damage on 2.3 from a run of bad luck. Mind you, when I started playing this event, my strategy was based around bounce (with IBC for vampire tokens), and I got 2 freezes doing that thanks to the by now rather antiquainted bounce bug. That thing needs fixing, badly.

5.1 became very manageable playing the exile strategy. I found it easy this weekend. My deck had a lot of moving parts - I think I'd compare the level to Tezzeret on RatC, which seemed impossible to some at first, but turned out to be achievable with the right deck. Of course, the right deck has BSZ in it, so, good luck if you don't have that. Casting BSZ every turn is a gas, gas, gas. Thanks, Muldrotha.

In fact, the exile strategy is so good, that I decided to try it on 2.2 with Ob, and the results were peachy. Ob doesn't have quite so many exile effects, so I had to supplement the deck with -X-X debuff effects. It worked just fine.

5.3 I just don't think is well designed. The objectives doesn't actually constrict your deckbuilding in any way. and neither does the node ability, it just slows you down, making the level an interminable grind.

The speed objectives on 3.2 and 5.2 are also a problem. It turns out there *IS* a dull combo deck that you can beat them with; no need to play the game with any amount of interaction, just assemble the right cards in your hand, tap on the screen for about half an hour, and bob's your uncle, you've won on turn 5 and are very, very bored. I'm not sure pure combo cards should be printed in MTGPQ (by which I mean, cards which are useless except as part of a combo deck, like Squee or Torgaar, rather than cards which can be used in or out of combo decks, like Sarkhan's Unsealing). Combo is a part of MTG that many players seem to like, but paper MTG differs from MTGPQ in a number of important respects, two of them being 1) your opponent never has 200 life, and 2) When you demonstrate your combo loop to your IRL opponent, he'll generally scoop, and they'll be no need for you to actually play the game out.

3.3 just needs to be dismantled entirely and rebuilt from scratch. A level which gives you crates full of extra cards and mana is hardly a challenge.