Magic: The Gathering C/D

here's my first 3-0 DGR draft deck:
http://i.imgur.com/Lcwy1kF.jpg

nothing too exciting, extort is still an absurd mechanic in full block. i wanted to try lyev decree and it was okay and even won me a game that nothing else would have, but i boarded it out for shielded passage a lot.

were you close to playing bane alley?

i drafted it with the intention of playing it but there were almost no good blue cards or controlling cards for the rest of the draft so it was an easy cut

this draft format is hard imo

:DDDD My card (Soulfeaster's Rising) made it to the voting phase of You Make the Card 4! http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/247b

oh sweet, i think i voted for that one

my favorite is Consuming Contract, though i'm not sure how fun it would be as a constructed playable card, i just think it's the most novel/innovative of the batch

Well I voted for it. Many of those are quite interesting. Double Down and Eldritch Rites seem downright broken.

Awesome Vinnie! I voted for your card.

Thanks, dudes. My favorite is probably the Mummy one, that's exactly the kind of weird, flavorful card I like them to print.

except it's really dumb with Vampire Hexmage

Consuming Contract seems like the most interesting though it seems really abusable with bounce - I'd think it would need a "if this leaves play, you lose" clause plus indestructible

Make that hexproof

i think its fine to let you bounce it! 2 card combo to generate delayed card advantage does not seem overpowered compared to even a wrath of god effect let alone sphinx's revelation

i guess it's all dependant on what the third ability is

i dunno, as much as I like the design, I'd like it more if people actually wound up losing to it from time to time

Yeah the concept is great, and I guess they picked it despite thinking one mode was problematic. The thing about it being an enchantment is that the deck that plays this card probably won't run too many ways to save themselves from it. Bounce isn't that useful. So I could see a timely counterspell making someone lose the game - I think the card is fine as is.

would be even more interesting with like 3 positive modes and 2 negative ones (you lose the game and like 'discard a card' or something)

anyway - I had always wondered what the Vraska tokens looked like. every time I've gotten close to getting it to work my opponent has conceded (as a result of them being so far behind that the charged Lux Cannon functionality wasn't even that useful). BUT in a sealed I got it. Behold:

http://i.imgur.com/ZDb6Nn2.jpg

I pulled one irl

I really wish you could play Vraska and Doubling Season together!

wait a sec. you can do that in Modern can't you

lol @ your 2/2 Assassins

yeah that is a really good boardstate I got there for Limited

it's called synergy

Vinnie were you thinking about Quest for the Gravelord with your design? The card it's up against also kinda reminds me of Quest for the Nihil Stone, because QUESTS.

Not consciously, though I read the YMTC thread on mtgsalvation and Quest for the Gravelord was mentioned there a zillion times. It's exactly the same concept, but it's one of those cards that made so little impact I'd completely forgotten about it. I like my card more, haha. Necrotic Ooze was on my mind for sure though.

ok I finally tried block draft and holy cow is this complicated. I'm so confused on what to do in the DGM pack and wind up just picking like 4-5 colors worth of stuff. So many decks I want to try!!

I'm really not sure how high to take guildgates. Also I'm starting to realize that Pyroconvergence may actually be playable. Lobber Crew is nutso.

my current strategy is to try to cut a gatecrash color pair during the DGM pack because otherwise the gatecrash pack tends to go terrible

guildgates are usually all gone by the midpoint of the pack so be careful that you don't end up playing the 6-6-6 manabase

grr had a pretty good jund deck tonight. lost to a top decked aetherling, one life away from a win.

I'm always in rtr color pairings w/ terrible gtc but it still works out for me

almost all my losses so far are to UWR decks

just won a game by casting Burst of Strength on an opponent's Unleash creature, huahuahauhaha

I'm hearing the 'try to get an rtr guild and a gtc guild' thing a lot actually and I think the reason why it's not as sensible as it seems is that you're not really hedging your bets - "at least I'll get some stuff in each pack" - not necessarily - if someone to the left cuts guild 1 in gtc and someone to the right cuts g2 rtr, you got nothing. whereas if you accept that you'll prob have one bad pack, you're also going to have one good to great pack where it's almost impossible to be 100% cut.

also if you do it w/ rtr guilds and they were both flowing p1, the chances that the same guilds will be there p3 are pretty high. w/ gtc it's harder.

don't you get at least one guild of each no matter what combo you're playing? or am I misreading this

yeah sorta but one is gonna be a bit off ie UWR you 'get boros' but most boros cards suck in UWR

for UWR pack 2 i just look to get all the skyjerks and assault griffins usually

yeah 3 power flyers really do work in this format

rakdos drake is somehow really good, it's consistently overperformed for me in my first handful of events

it's a card I don't like but would never cut from my deck

a 2 power *post unleash* creature for 3 feels like such a rip-off but the format is slow enough that it's still gonna be hitting

my decks all look like trainwrecks on paper but play out pretty smoothly

thoughts on electing to defer the draw?

i wouldn't in draft unless both players have attrition-y decks. in sealed you probably should but i've still been taking the play because i'm stubborn

yeah I only would think about it if my fixing was realllly rough

that's a really important thing to get a feel for though early in a format - at the end of every game take note of whether you were in topdeck mode and whether your opponent was in topdeck mode. choosing to play is basically saying you think you can win the game before you run out of things to do and are playing off the top of your deck

it also informs the value of bounce spells, since if games are regularly ending before the players have been able to cast all the spells in their hand then bouncing becomes a lot closer to removal in value - this is why mist raven was unreal good in AVR

in other news, voidwielder has finally passed armored skaab as the card with the most copies on my mtgo account. watercourser is tied for 3rd.

maybe the real reason i didn't like gatecrash limited was because the Blue Common Defensive Creature was bad...

And now you get Murmuring Phantasm! How have you guys found the speed of the format compared to RTR and GTC?

I did perfectly fine w/ a deck w/ a single two drop and a single three drop yesterday. because it's as slow as it is, something like spike jester can win a match though.

I feel like the quicker decks are coming but nobody really knows how to make them yet. DGM simply doesn't have that many quality 2 or 3 drops and the ones that are good are things like Nivix Cyclops or Tithe Drinker.

the quicker decks are the 2c decks. they exist, you just have to get lucky to draft a solid one. but anyone who's playing a 3c deck w/ cluestones needs to give up any dream of having a relevant board t1-4.