Lawsuit: click here
Wizard's response: click here
Response of Director of Organized Play for WotC: click here To put it in simply terms, the judges claim that their work meets the legal definition of employees, and Wizards has failed to compensate them appropriate. According to law, we cannot treat judges as volunteers. Volunteers are those “who perform [..] hours of service for a public agency for civic, charitable, or humanitarian reasons, without promise, expectation or receipt of compensation for services rendered.” However, judges receive compensation usually in the form of Magic products, which is rather symbolic in comparizon to such responsible and time consuming task, which surely judging at Pro Tour, Grand Prix level is.
The court will decide who is right, unless the parties settle.
RG Tron has been a favorite deck of mine. As you know, I even wrote a 36-article series on the deck. RG Tron is exactly what I want to do in Magic. I am a Spike first but I am probably a Timmy second. Playing big creatures and sweeping the board is just awesome. Maybe my emotional attachement to the deck has depleted my ability to see things clearly. RG Tron was a tier 1.5-tier 2 deck at best and now it is even worse.
I will put Tron away for a while. I will closely follow what happens to the deck, rejoice at its successes and think hard about the card choices, but it will not be my deck of choice this spring.
Starting on April 26th on my YouTube channel (http://youtube.com/magicgatheringstrat) I will be playing a new Modern deck, a tier one deck - a very well known deck. I have assembled the cards and right now I am studying hard to understand the theory behind the deck. I will reveal the deck here next week.
Hidden Card Error handles any situation where a player screws up and the error can't be corrected using publicly known information. This includes situations where a player draws two cards when they were supposed to draw one, drawing too many cards for your opening hand, scrying 2 when you were supposed to scry 1 and more. In the past, some of these situations were fixed with a Game Loss. Starting with Shadows over Innistrad prerelease almost all of them are given Warnings instead. In addition to the Warning, you're required to reveal all cards from the hidden zone that now contains the cards/information that should have been revealed. Your opponent then selects a number of excess cards or unverifiable cards and those cards are returned to the proper zone. If that proper zone is the library, the selected cards are shuffled back in.
Practical examples:
You draw eight cards for your initial hand. You reveal your hand, your opponent shuffles one card back into your library, and then you continue with your mulligan decision.
You put a card into your hand using Dark Confdiant ability, but you forgot to reveal it. You reveal your hand instead and your opponent chooses a card. Then, you loose life equal to its convereted mana cost.
You looked at seven cards while casting Collected Company. You reveal those seven cards and your opponent selects one to be shuffled back into the library. Afterwards, you choose up to two creature cards and put them into play.
Round nine
Round nine was played in the Tournament Practice room.Here are all the results of the round .
Cyborgs defeated Zombies 2-0
Aristocrafts defeated RakdosKitty 2-1
Spiteful Leeches somehow dominated 5-color Tortured Existence 2-0
The Green One ran into a quitter 2-0
WW Soul Tokens was defeated UW Tron in a tough match 2-1
Regarding the WW Soul Tokens vs Elves matchup the brewer had written the following:
Elves: Suture Priest and Standard Bearer = GG. Journey the Wellwishers. Watch out for arrows. Win in the air or on time. +3 Standard Bearer, +3 Prismatic Strands, +4 Lumithread Field, +1 Holy Light | -3 Raise the Alarm, -4 Doomed Traveler, -3 Order of Leitbur, -1 Guardian's Pledge
This was definitely not my experience in the match. Timberwatch and Wellwisher was just too powerful and he had eight of them while I only had 4 Journey to Nowhere. As soon as one of them landed the game was out of reach for the WW deck.
Here is the match so you can see for yourself.
What happens now?
We are now in weekly rounds and will go one round per week until the end. On Monday there will be a short practice round with all four decks with the round 10 matches following Thursday-Sunday on the MagicGatheringStrat youtube channel.
The results of the Pauper Gauntlet S03 so far 5th place (round nine):WW Soul Tokens 6th place (round eight): BUGs & Pigs, Pig Trinket, MBC, Bant Sword and Shield The playoff for the 10th spot in the top 10 10th place:Slivers (won the playoff)
11th place: Stompy Tokens, Mono Red Heroic (round five in the playoff)
13th place: Goblin Storm, BorosKitty Initiated (round four in the playoff)
15pth place: Stompy (round three in the playoff)
16th place: RUG Tron, Izzet Cooldotha and UG Madness Round seven eliminations - the decks in the Top 10 Playoff: BorosKitty Initiated, Slivers, Mono Red Heroic, Stompy, UG Madness, RUG Tron and Izzet Cooldotha. 19th place (round six): Infect, Blue Bichinho, Death Control, Burn (runner-up from last season) and Pauper Nightmare. 24th place (round five) Illusory Tricks, White Heroes, Goblins, Suicide Black, Turbo Angler, Simic Oracle, Kuldotha Mardu, Elves, Rhystic Tron, MUC, Black Auramancer, Love Train, 36th place (round four)Counter-Kitty,UB Trinket Control, Rakdos Vampires, Flying Ninjas, Turbo Zoo, Shroudfang Ninja. Delver, Green Ramp LD, Snow-Go, Turbo Exhume 45th place: Shared by the 26 decks eliminated in round three: Affinity, Exhume Control, Familiars, Rebel Grind, Pestilence Control, Encroaching Blight, Green Grifters, The Pauper Gauntlet, Project X, Tortured Toolbox, RG Land Crusher, RG Landfall, DelverFiend, Eggs, Gary Busey LD, Selesnya Flash, Abzan Grindhouse, Bant Fog, Crocajund, BUG Proliferators, Evil Allies, Land-o-derm, Pig Trinket, Sultai Delve, 5-color Green 70th place: Shared by nine decks that died during double Elimination, (round one and two): Red Land Destruction, Mono Black Land Destruction, Glass Cannon Red, Tortured Madness, Cheaty Morph, Living End, 1-land Spy, UB Justice Control and Dragon Delve.
Yesterday we released ML Bot 10.94, supporting the new set Shadows over Innistrad. Today we released a minor update (ML Bot 10.95) fixing a problem with the mtgo login - sometimes the bot was unable to detect correctly the loading, causing a restart loop.
The updated pricelist containing SOI cards is already available online. You can get it during the update process or in the installer. LITE bot users should update the pricelist as well.
Wikiprice has already SOI cards, we are just now fixing some card images problems.
The new Magic Online version, released today, requires a ML Bot client update. We have just released the update (ML Bot 10.93) and stopped the launch of the previous versions. If you run an older version you need to update the bot to 10.93. The bot should automatically update, but you can still download the installer from the Online Control Panel.
Please also note that WotC changed the way the "Submit" button behaves. The button does not blink anymore when the buddies submit the trade, and thus there is no way to recognize the submit action. We will try to read the "Trade Submitted" flash message to recognize the action, even if the message fades in few seconds. For now the bot will only recognize the "done" written in the chat, like the old MTGO v3.
Later today or tomorrow we will also release another update, supporting the new set, SOI.
