Magic: The Gathering C/D

Golgari did everything I wanted - nice mana, removal, an endgame plan, etc. Mossdog is crazy good - the Ars Arcanum guy called it the best common in the set, right? Certainly didn't seem far off.

i don't know what the best common in the set is - maze glider is really high impact in the right deck but as a 6-drop it probably won't be snatched up early. the common removal isn't particularly efficient except for runners bane and that one doesn't really deal with anything you were scared of anyway. most of the multicolor commons seemed good, deputy of acquittals might be the early frontrunner

another random thought - the red gatekeeper was really impressive at the prerelease. this format is much closer to RTR than to older slower sets in how the games play out tempo-wise. i think a lot of 'aggressive decks' are going to be looking to play a more midrange game and set up a couple big attacks rather than come out fast with 1 and 2-drops, and the gatekeeper's threaten effect is exactly what you want here. i didn't really think about this much before but it's actually the highest-cost effect on any of them (act of treason is 2R, the rest of the gatekeeper effects are all 1-2 mana cards on their own)

also i think zhur-taa druid is in the running for best common

the green and black ones are both great too

7 life swing is pretty huge and if you have, say, dramatic rescue

to expound on druid a bit, i think 2-drops with long-game value are going to be a hot commodity in this format, and it's one of the best in a world where everyone else is ramping on turn 3 or not at all. other than pack rat and gyre sage, i can't think of anything else i'd want to see less than it from my opponent on turn 2.

as for other 2-drops, the guildmages all get a bit better, and even something like the grizzly bear with 6-mana pump ability is probably better than it looks.

I loved my Junk deck for the prerelease. Very slow and grindy, six Gates and two Cluestones so no mana issues, two black Gatekeepers that always hit, and Teysa. If I got to turn 7-8, I couldn't lose.

the thing that makes it tricky is that that druid, cyclops and deputy are all great early picks but you can't justify committing to those two colors for them. split cards where either card is playable seem like even better picks given how a draft is gonna operate - turn/burn has like an 80% chance of ending up in your deck if you p1p1 it.

most of the big losers in the 2-slot are from gatecrash really - metropolis sprite, bomber corps, gutter skulk, even skinbrand goblin and disciple of the old ways are all things i'm not as happy to have anymore

and the split cards are all uncommon, i'm trying to pin down the best commons still and i don't think any of the removals are them except maybe runner's bane. i do think there's a high probability that you will be first picking either an uncommon/rare or a gate every draft, since most of the commons in the set just aren't impressive enough to commit to them p1p1 while the uncommons are mostly insane and you want to set up to play as many as you can.

druid, cyclops and deputy imo

cyclops is fun enough to play that I will prob try and force izzet anytime I see it again

yeah i went izzet at my 2nd prerelease after i saw your post about those and it sounded fun, but i got a pretty unworkable pool for izzet with none of those and no playable instants/sorceries anyway. should be better in draft though where you actually get to choose which half of the izzet cards you get

yeah the difference between my pool being pretty bad and my pool being v. v. good was 2 cyclops

I think an izzet deck w/ one cyclops and one frostburn is in a pretty good place

after getting cut out of aggressive decks for pretty much the entirety of gatecrash limited i am probably going to be trying to beat people up in this format as much as possible. i've cast enough corpse blockades and basilica guards for a lifetime at this point, i want to hit people with cobblebrute again

I played an aggro rakdos/orz deck for my 2nd prerelease yesterday. it was decent, I went 3-1, but yer always in a rough spot when your aggro deck is 3c w/ 4 guildgates, a keyrune and a cluestone. I had 6 pieces of removal so it was mostly just a slow beat down w/ a rakdos drake or w/e while they stayed behind on board.

not a huge fan of viashino firstblade

I mean it'll be amazing in that true boros deck that happens to get built but most of the time that deck won't happen and this guy will just hit them once and then you'll be stuck w/ a 2/2 in a format where they're kinda useless

i don't necessarily want to play the come out of the gates fast aggro decks, just something more proactive than sitting behind walls for 8 turns because other people refused to draft bane alley broker or one thousand lashes, which was the bulk of my gatecrash experience.

izzet has been my favorite guild in the block to play thus far and i don't see that changing much with the new cards. plus i suspect the izzet model of setting up a couple big turns in the midgame rather than curving out fast is going to be the best aggressive strategy in this format

yeah I don't want to oversell the cyclops but it really allows izzet to be an aggro deck. play it and a traitorous instinct t4 and you'll be swinging for 8 on turn 4. if you have some burn coming up or some other izzet tricks, you're already not far from a win at that point - the cyclops sits back until then and they're afraid to attack into it w/ anything good. staticaster seems better in this format than straight rtr too.

a lot of 'gonna be played' creatures w/ 1 toughness - the 2/1 extort, 3/1 fs flyer, 2/1 evolve dude

I tried to go aggro with a RGB deck that had a bunch of unleash and bloodrush dudes. I used the bulk of my two guild packs and just a small bit of Dragon's Maze cards. It was fine if I got off to a good start, but seriously lacked removal, so was prone to stalls.

Weirdly, I ended up playing against my son in two different matches in the same event. He ended up with an insane pool that included Boros Reckoner, Mizzium Mortars, Blood Baron, Teysa, Master of Cruelties, and foil Beck // Call. Master of Cruelties just ripped through all of my guys and I had no way to stop it.

i went izzet at my prerelease, my companion guild was simic which was sorta :/ - i hadnt realized that you could only get companion guilds for your other set colors and i was hoping for more azorius/rakdos stuff but i got a zegana in my guild pack so i crushed anyway. no real insights about this format tbh - i basically just played good creature cards and only dropped a game to a resolved 2/2 pro blue that i never quite managed to find answers for. the simic creatures seemed overall better in DGM - the 2/2 that becomes a 4/4 flier was really effective for me and evolve in general seemed more consistent - having the generally imbalanced red izzet creatures helped but there are also some simic guys w/positive p/t ratios which made a big difference - it was nice not having to lean so hard on a single copy of drakewing krasis or shambleshark. best rare i had outside of zegana was plasm capture - people were playing tonnes of high cmc cards against me and it was also useful to be able to fix my mana a bit - countering some ridiculous six drop and then using the mana to overload mizzium mortars was p lol since i only had one red source

one other thing was that fairy imposter was p good for me and i think, if i had had it, the 6/6 bounce guy would've been p great too - i'm way more interested in this effect than i was in either RTR or GTC at least in a base u/g deck. anyway this was about a 100x more fun than gtc sealed so im happy

also this particular sealed format was p fast/aggressive - i only ran one six and it was a mythic and my only ramp was the 2/1 gate guy but i also dont think this will be that representative of draft in general

a guy on cockatrice passed me this hot tip

4-5 color deck

p1: pick all cluestones, guildgates, and ramp (and maybe a bomb p1p1)
p2-p3: pick all bombs

i actually beat him with a focused rakdos deck splashing white for blood baron, but i trust him in that his deck only loses to hyper aggro.

gonna try that one out next draft i get in

i was drafting something like that in RTR a lot of the time, so presumably it's gonna be viable now with more fixing/ramp. there's a huge number of removal spells and good threats at 6cmc in the format so if you can build a deck that consistently hits 6 mana by turn 4-5 you can do crazy things

the fixing will be there, the bombs aren't always

like, I think it's surely gonna be way more viable than 5c in rtr or gtc because the format is slow and there is crazy fixing. but when you invest most of a round in fixing you are putting yourself at the mercy of the pool. and if anyone else is going 4c nearby or just keeping themselves open late...

well i usually only go for it when i start off the draft w/ an expensive bomb so that i already have a reason, like that RTR tournament i won with 5 color ramp my p1p1 was archon of the triumvirate. if you open something like teysa or savageborn hydra or progenitor mimic that's when you go for it.

thats also a deck where debt to the deathless can be a legitimate wincon

also despite all the talk about slow format etc i've really come to think this is going to be only slightly slower than 3x RTR, you won't always be able to spend your first few turns doing nothing other than developing mana like you could in the old Rav block

I think it's gonna be highly dependent on the pool - sometimes there's gonna be a buncha skyjeks and chainwalkers floating around, sometimes there will be pretty much nothing. I played a rtr/gtc draft tonight and did pretty well w/ azorius/orz deck that wouldn't have been fast enough in straight rtr or gtc. (and then lost to a boring but fast deck, so...)

I keep wanting that card to be called Death to the Deathless, even though it obv makes no sense.

sam black ranked all the cards in the set for limited and he seems to agree with me re: zhur taa druid being the best common. he had deputy way down his list though, and had the gatekeepers almost at the bottom, which seems kind of crazy - normally the guy is excellent at figuring out limited but maybe his article was a bit premature, unless i have less of an understanding of the format than i thought.

lsv rated the gatekeepers pretty high

yeah i guess i'm more inclined to trust lsv's judgment on slower multicolored sets. all these guys are going to be drafting at the pro tour in a couple weeks though so there's a weird conflict of interest with them giving out all their best tips in articles right now.

punish the enemy is also up there for best commons

crisis of confidence yesterday. i have hit a groove that i am ok with for now, playing phantom sealeds and going 2-1 p much every time, and cashing in the boosters so i get to play a lot without spending too much. i won a gtc earlier this week and decided to put my 3 boosters into a draft just for the hell of it. i got a watery grave p1p1 and dimir was wide open from that point. i was psyched with my deck, it felt like an embarrassment of riches on a good curve. i went out first round to another dimir deck 0-2. both times i lost to a turn 3 nightveil specter, with the other dude casting my good spells. i swear the only other cards he played out of his own deck were a gutter skulk, a frilled oculus and a psychic strike the only time i dug out any of my removal. i had a feeling i should just quit there but i jumped into the last seat of a gtc phantom and got a horrible pool of cards, all white and black but like 4 x guildscorn ward and purge the profane was 2 of 3 gold cards. the curve ended up being too heavy and i just got destroyed by two aggro decks. not satisfied that i had hit rock bottom yet i entered a rtr phantom. i cobbled together what i thought was actually a pretty good controlly izzet splashing white with a bunch of fliers. first match i quickly lost 0-2, just totally mana-screwed despite reasonable fixing. i wanted to just hard shutdown my computer and go to bed, and probably never play ever again. instead i stuck with it and won both the last matches without dropping another game, with a deck that worked perfectly when it was given the chance to. so, 10 tix and 3 gtc boosters = 1 rtr booster. a successful outing.

yeah its interesting how variance always feels worse to me playing online than irl even though you can play more events in X amount of time online to offset the variance.

Bleh that's the worst, where you lose quickly in a tournament and get on a losing streak. There's this compulsion that you can't stop playing until you win something and at least for me, it's really easy to spend (lose, really) a lot of money in a short period of time.

what's your sn on modo rs?

3 events isn't really a good sample size. I went on a real bad downswing when I started doing phantom sealeds...like 7 or so without going 2-1 in any of them (a stretch in which my rating fell nearly 200 points). Recently I accidentally joined RTR and GTC drafts at the same time (they both fired within one minute of each other, too) so I was drafting two decks at once and my internet went out through some of pack 2 - I missed picks 1-7 in Gatecrash and like 1-5 in RTR, wound up with two pretty awful 3-color decks, and 3-0'd them both. One game I won even though my opponent played Assemble the Legion before I even got to cast a spell thanks to Master Biomancer and me using Stolen Identity on an extorter and stacking Cipher to get in that final point of damage. I won a game 3 in RTR where it was clear after turn 15 or so that neither of us could win by damage barring some sort of rare/mythic effect but my opponent had clocked down to like a minute when I had 5 cards left in my deck so he wound up just trying to deck me while I tried to clock him (I won by about 5 seconds). Just crazy good variance for me with two of the worst draft decks I've ever made. Then I get what feels like a perfect Orzhov deck with bombs and like 7 cheapo extorters and go 1-2 with it.

i went on about a 30-draft losing streak during triple innistrad, but that format was so fun and deep that i barely even got discouraged. when the same thing started happening with gatecrash though i just sort of shut down and stopped playing the format because i didn't like it much.

yeah I mean magic has a large element of luck to it. I don't get mad when my good deck draws poorly, I do get very mad when I have internet/computer problems...which is fairly often.

very likely gonna go to the providence gp

internet dropping during a draft really sucks because then you think "I could have just passed a Sphinx's Revelation and I'll never know..."

eh I just think 'I am an idiot for doing this w/ shitty internet'

iatee I'm planning on going too, should be a really fun event. With so many packs there should definitely be enough cards for one really solid aggro deck, while the other two decks may be a bit slower. I just hope my friends and I can agree on deck construction and who plays what deck haha.

cool, we can hang out

Yeah man, it'd be cool to finally meet an ilxor. It's shameful how long I've been on this site without ever meeting anyone in person!