Magic: The Gathering C/D

selesnya was the best but bant wasn't as good as he suggested

w/ gtc he's still stuck on a revisionist history where he was the only human being who noticed that dimir was the best guild

haha that's certainly true

i think by the end of gatecrash i'd completely full circled back to considering boros the best guild, the problem was red cards were always way overdrafted on MTGO for some reason so you couldn't get a good deck most of the time

i think i won every gatecrash draft where i actually ended up in boros, but happened in far fewer than 1/5th of my drafts (fewer than 1/10th even i think)

I think the general narrative has settled on selesnya and rakdos as the best for rtr and boros and orzhov as the best for gtc. boros being 'the best' def depended on it being open enough ie at most 2 people splitting it whereas orzhov could often support 3 pretty good decks.

but again context dependent, context usually being 'cause nobody was drafting dimir...'

i dont think boros was the best archetype in gtc but it was the archetype that defined the limited environment which is probably a more important thing to identify anyway - it gives you a sense of how you should be drafting + what you're looking to beat and also gives you a good sense of what other people are looking to draft and beat. i have some ideas about this new set but will wait until i can draft it on mtgo until really trying to formulate ideas

fwiw i think the ars arcanum guy is really bad at asking the right qn, but i still like his articles a lot

i haven't drafted gtc much, less than 10 times for sure, but even in that sample size a recurring theme was that there were no white cards. the couple times that i really tried to go all in for some kind of orzhov deck were disastrous. and the couple times i won were with simic.

his articles definitely lost something once you became unable to view random replays. I do give him credit for being one of the few writers out there to insist that Dimir wasn't terrible but I think he's come to some pretty bad conclusions overall. like he says that Cipher + Extort is a huge thing for Dimir when in reality you probably average an Extort trigger off a Ciphered spell once a match. The guilds in GTC are really well balanced in my opinion. I do still think that Boros is the best guild though as I'm sure many of you have experienced it's so easy to wind up with 18-19 playables especially as the Orzhov and Gruul decks are tending to favor a little more aggression. Simic is one of the shakier strategies but when you curve out Cloudfin/Shambleshark/Croc you're really tough to beat.

ok boros battleshaper is a pain in the ass to play against

I successfully landed it a few times in the prerelease, dude really takes over a board

i came very close to winning a long game through it until my opponent, at 1 life facing down 3 fliers, revealed blast of genius off his melek which killed 2 of them and drew him into a warleader's helix to kill the 3rd and get out of extort range

UWR is so fun to play in this format

yeah agreed - i tried to force it in my first draft last week at FNM though and it went poorly because i passed a helix p1p2 to raredraft a sacred foundry, then unsurprisingly got completely cut in pack 2. that my resultant deck still played decently makes me think its a pretty deep color combo though

the other day I had tajic, nivix cyclops out turn 4, opponent dropped the 5/3 dude, I traitorous instincted and swung for 18 turn 5

traitorous instinct and act of treason work really well in this format cause you're not stealing a 2/2 anymore

also i think i've come around on helix as the best non-rare in the DGM pack, narrowly beating out far/away and turn/burn. and punish the enemy is better than i expected too.

yep I've already first picked punish the enemy. helix's life gain has been v relevant every time I've seen it used / used it...it's absolutely worth moving into those colors if you see it.

I think unexpected life swings are one of the defining things for this format - helix, punish, the green gatekeeper all have a way of screwing up the clock for your opponent.

I love these types of articles, although it takes away some of the fun of figuring things out yourself: http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/pvs-playhouse-dragons-maze-interactions/

Vizkopa Guildmage + Alive // Well is ridic.

I like the ivy lane/guildmage interaction

runner's bane is terrible due to what he mentions

Wow @ Korodza Guildmage + Ivy League Denizen

I did already notice some of the anti-Selesnya strategies in GTC, like Smog Elemental and Voidwalk. But yeah G/W doesn't look so hot in triple draft.

I have the sense that there are a lot more cool combos just waiting to be discovered. R&D work real hard on this.

Just recently I realized the extra value of Agoraphobia in GTC as a means of triggering more extort and getting a cheap on for Incursion Specialist.

i think runner's bane is fine still as long as you're aware of that interaction - as long as it resolves, their guy is tapped and they can't blow you out by pumping it and attacking in the same turn unless they have a very specific card (savage surge, burst of strength, ???)

also note that korozda guildmage sacs nontoken creatures so you can't go infinite with it, you need other guys out to do that combo

well it falls off so easily that it's closer to being a tempo card than a removal card (unless you're playing it on a hover barrier)

agoraphobia tricks remind me of a scars block draft i did where i kept replaying forced worship on my opponent's guys to charge up my white shrine until he realized he was going to lose to it and had to just use a removal spell on his own guy to stop me

agoraphobia + simic manipulator pretty much wins the game

yep i've had that one

True but it gets exponentially bigger. I wonder if any of the other guildmage abilities will have neat interactions like that - thinking specifically of Dimir's "lose one life for each card that hits the graveyard" which has scored me a lot of surprise wins (such as activating it twice in reponse to the Mindeye Drake's death trigger - people seem to miss that quite often)

I do wonder how tough it'll be to really get a handle on this format - I started drafting 'seriously' around AVR so I've only done 3x whatever, I feel like it's really hard to force anything because you really just never know what you're going to get passed to you.

that was an xxxxp by the way

some dude landed that mythic 6/5 dragon that I always forget even exists and I stole it next turn xp

True but it gets exponentially bigger. I wonder if any of the other guildmage abilities will have neat interactions like that - thinking specifically of Dimir's "lose one life for each card that hits the graveyard" which has scored me a lot of surprise wins (such as activating it twice in reponse to the Mindeye Drake's death trigger - people seem to miss that quite often)

also easy to miss 'you should use this ability every time they cast a spell'

i had that dragon so many times, i think i opened it more times than every other mythic combined in gatecrash

it's crazy how long it's been since the last full block draft format

Necropolis Regent and Giant Adephage are the two mythics that I always get surprised by. They seem like Innistrad block cards (especially the former).

it's crazy how long it's been since the last full block draft format

I have yet to draft full-block RTR, but I love the idea of them using the large/large/small pattern more often, where large sets get drafted individually and only once the third set is added, you get the full block draft. It seems like it adds a lot of replayability to draft. Even with large/small/large like we had with Innistrad block, DKA/ISD/ISD didn't hold my interest that long, because it didn't change the draft format all that much from triple ISD.

I guess it depends on how much the set being added shakes things up.

yeah i agree that large/small formats are lame, at least when they're following the triple large format, which they always are to date. i don't think large/large/small really works for most blocks though, and it's a lot of extra design work on their part to make 2 separate large set formats that also play together; i suspect the main reason it was possible here is because they're building off a previous block mechanically rather than working from scratch, and also using a tried and true overall mechanical theme (multicolor) so there's a lot less of the big picture design work to do.

i assume they'll continue to experiment in the future though - for example i could easily imagine them doing a 'medium' sized set for the middle set of a block that's a bit bigger than a typical small set and is drafted as B/B/A instead of B/A/A

i won't be surprised if theros block has a traditional large/small/small structure though, coming off of 2 nontraditional years in a row (and 3 in the last 4) and purportedly being an 'experimental year' mechanically and thus pulling its innovation weight via that

Yeah I think you're right about Theros, and that we'll see BBA soon enough.

Where did you hear that Theros is supposed to be experimental mechanically? I'm all for having a crazy block after two fun-to-play but not particularly innovative blocks (barring Miracles, maybe).

i don't have a source but i distinctly remember forsythe making a passing comment at one point in some interview last fall that the next block was 'something we've never really done before'. it was really vague though so who knows, all i know is that i'm irrationally excited for theros since it's the first block since zendikar where we don't really have any idea how it's going to play going in (people figured out innistrad = graveyard set just from the initial liliana promo art, but no one's drawn any logical conclusions from huge guy holding a spear awkwardly)

If I had to guess, a battlecruiser set like Rise of the Eldrazi fits Theros' theme of men and gods. Or ugh another set focused around legends (though IMO that well was dry even before Kamigawa). Hoping for something totally out there. The last time a set mechanic really blew my mind was Time Spiral with suspend and split second, though stuff like level up and proliferate have come close.

"a Golgari deck for example is going to be very bad against a deck that wants to mill them"

reading the article vinnie linked and this seems completely opposite to what i would've thought. what am i missing?

a full battlecruiser magic block would be insane, definitely hoping they give that a try at some point though i don't know how healthy it is to go quite as slow as ROE for an entire block. there's still lots of "format-speed space" between ROE and an average-speed set like RTR or M13 that they haven't been using lately, though it's where most pre-lorwyn formats live.

i didn't get to draft ROE much, but it seemed like it had a bunch of pretty well delineated and linear archetypes and i think if they managed to instead create a battlecruiser set with innistrad's level of modularity and depth it would probably be the holy grail of limited formats. i'm not sure how possible that is to do though, you probably need aggressive options in a format to create enough depth for a year's worth of limited play.

reading the article vinnie linked and this seems completely opposite to what i would've thought. what am i missing?

if you help them mill you, you'll get decked before scavenge wins you the game

oh yes, i see. although i wonder if the benefit of them milling you on your behalf doesn't outweigh that risk

it works both ways depending on the game state. if your deck is built to use the graveyard though, you can't just sit there and not cast your grisly salvage against a mill deck unless you're comfortably ahead on board. you need to play to win, not play to avoid losing, and sometimes that requires doing counter-intuitive things.

i remember last fall i played a few nephalia drownyard control mirrors in standard, and if you were in danger of being milled to death the correct play was generally to cast the largest sphinx's revelations possible, even if it took you down to only a handful of cards left in your deck, since you needed to maximize the chances of drawing your 1 pithing needle or ghost quarter or elixir of immortality before it got milled away

yeah I mean dedicated mill is still basically a fringe strategy and scavenge is stronger than ever

also most of the self-mill cards are only borderline playable

otoh mind grind is slightly better now I think? lotta games gonna reach turn 12