Magic: The Gathering C/D

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!

so are the lorwyn draft queues worth doing? i didn't like shadowmoor nearly as much as i thought i would, but my roommate is always talking up lorwyn as his favorite limited format, while i've heard the opposite from other people whose judgment i also trust

it's very very linear...same as RTR and GTC are about "picking guilds" rather than colors, Lorwyn is very much about picking a creature type and hoping you get enough to support it

yeah it looks better designed than onslaught but i still don't really like full on tribal sets, plus it seems very 'spikey' because of the clash mechanic, which seems like it would increase variance until you realize that it adds scry 1 to tons of cards in the set. will probably try it once or twice just to get a taste though, and i do think changeling is one of the coolest keyword mechanics they've ever done.

also, bonus points if you can name morningtide's 2 exclusive keywords from memory. i don't think either of them ever showed up in constructed

one of them is the thing were you look at your top to see if it shares a type. I remember because getting like 8-9 Ink Shredders in a triple Morningtide draft swept a tournament. don't know the other.

I kinda liked Onslaught draft back in the day but yeah Lorwyn is probably better. Its just that it is kinda hard to get too creative because all the tribes have their own strategy and the set didn't have much room for deviations. Still, IMO there hasn't really been a 'bad' draft format in a long time. Maybe AVR or full block Scars where Infect was in all 5 colors.

Nah, I don't think it's that linear. Definitely less linear than Onslaught block. Sure, the nut decks are all elves or all treefolk or whatever, but more often there's balancing between quality and consistency. Like taking a powerful but narrow non-tribal card, or staying open with a Changeling card. It's actually a pretty challenging and fun format to draft, I think you should give it a shot, cider. I like it way more than Shadowmoor, anyway.

Sorry that was actually two separate things I rolled into one point. Meant "powerful but narrow tribal card, powerful but non-synergistic non-tribal card, or Changeling."

Onslaught had some nuance as well, but Lorwyn definitely allowed you to do some nutso things, especially if you got one of the good tribal rares. plus the power level of some of the uncommons was unreal - the WW 2/2 that gave all your Kithkin +1/+1 is just nuts for a two-drop, and right there it seems like your goal is just to get as many Kithkin (or Changelings) as you can. That said it's been years since I've done either. Onslaught has Sparksmith which is easily one of the top 5 Limited format-warping commons ever (next to Armadillo Cloak and Pestilence)

I might be misremembering these sets, it's been years for me too. Come to think of it, the bulk of play in Onslaught block wasn't that linear, I was only remembering the cards that were (like Amplify, a terrible mechanic). I remember it being more easy to draft though, as in, the best card in the pack was usually very obvious. There were more choices in Lorwyn draft.

Oh yeah, that uncommon lord cycle was stupid. I do recall there there being a lot of removal in Lorwyn, spread across the colors too, but cards like Imperious Perfect shouldn't be uncommon.

There's a certain type of Magic card that kind of just makes you nervous sitting across the other end; like, "I have to deal with this real quick or it's going to overwhelm me, and I know exactly how it's going to play out". Usually these things are rares like Ogre Slumlord or Mercurial Chemister; occassionally uncommons like say Vitu-Ghazi Guildmage. Lorwyn was just full of cards like that at both Uncommon and Rare.

i can understand armadillo cloak and even sparksmith but that they decided to put pestilence at common still floors me

the one of those that annoys me the most though is sprout swarm, since it's a blight on a limited format that's otherwise really fun and well balanced and also my personal favorite

xp lorwyn also had way more efficient removal at common than recent sets though so in theory it balances out

though it also had 5 planeswalkers at regular rare which seems kind of nuts in retrospect

well at least they were generally at a lower power level than the "modern" planeswalker. Garruk was the only real bomby one IIRC. Jace, Chandra, and Ajani all seemed good (Ajani was really good with Kithkin IIRC), while Liliana was only borderline playable.

it is true that Lorwyn had a lot of ways to deal with creatures, which I think was a great decision. Crib Swap is one of my favorite designs ever (at least from a flavor perspective)

and yes Sprout Swarm definitely belongs on the list. I imagine for MTGO players it must be that much more obnoxious since it takes so long to resolve at EOT. awesome design but just an overall stupid card in a slow format that made the opponent feel helpless.

it's not really that annoying on mtgo compared to GRAFT

i have seen RGD matches won and lost on time entirely due to one player having a couple aquastrand spiders in play in a long game

my suspicions about woodlot crawler were confirmed. got to play with it for the first time in my match today. it is extremely good. color-hating abilities are just so much better in a format where people play 3 colors. as in, there's a 60% chance that little bug shuts down the board. which it certainly did for me.

the format remains slow. in my draft today i played against two decks which tried to go fast. they failed.

i still haven't tried the 5-color ramp deck. i think you guys are right about needing to p1p1 an expensive bomb to get into it.

still haven't drafted this yet, will for the first time at FNM tomorrow, but i have some vague ideas on how to make fast decks work. i think izzet/azorius tempo decks are going to be the most fun proactive decks to play though so that's what i'm going to be looking for early on.

had a pretty good draft last night w/ a RUG deck

weapons surge is a scary card to play against

my first DGR draft went kind of mediocre since i raredrafted a sacred foundry over a warleader's helix pack 1 then got cut from my colors pack 2 becasue of it, plus i raredrafted a gyre sage in pack 2 over a card for my deck since i needed 1 more for my standard deck.

i did a 4-man draft afterwards though where i ended up with a really fun grixis tempo deck that had so many spells that i actually ran Uncovered Clues and it kept hitting 2 every time (even though it should have only hit 1 on average)

i had a fun time yesterday at a DGR sealed GPT. i had a couple really borderline violations (accidentally drawing 8 cards at the start of r1g1, registering a 39 card deck after a last-second splash) that led to judge-ordered game losses in rounds 1 and 2. thankfully, i played them out and lost proper matches each time, giving me some peace of mind. 0-2 and disgruntled, i decided i'd play round 3 as a bit of a fuck you round, and also just to get some practice. i ended up running the table and finished 12th, good enough to get me 3 packs. started from the bottom!

also i just played against eggs for the first time in modern and wow that is an unpleasant deck. i hope the second sunrise ban nerfs it enough that i won't see any at GP

Drawing eight cards at the start of a game shouldn't be a game loss anymore, iirc, I think you just shuffle a card back at random and get a warning. Maybe you don't even get a warning. They've taken good steps in recent years to not punish players for making mistakes that are easily undoable. And yes, I think the Eggs deck is well and fully nerfed (or so I hope).

yeah if your deck is randomized then drawing 8 cards should be considered 'something that happens before the game begins'

but I guess this could be taken advantage of - like not if the cards were draw face down, but if someone drew 7 face up and didn't like the average quality of card or w/e they could 'accidentally' draw an 8th and have a chance at a slightly better hand.

I guess if you ensured that they had to return that 8th card rather than a random card that wouldn't work.

yeah the Eggs deck seems to appeal to a very specific type of Magic player and it's often the kind of dude you hate even playing casual against