Magic: The Gathering C/D

actual lol @ those draft decks

they are pretty loose yes if that;s what you're loling about

this last one was actually good though i think

haha thats the one i like the least. but it was mostly that you got triple searing spear. i've had triple searing spear once in this format, idk why people keep passing it, it is the best.

i went 2-1 twice today with so so decks. i have been forcing u/r tempo decks because lightning w/e and voyage's end have been consistently amazing for me in paper drafts and i cannot seem to pass either of those cards or the uncommon chimera. iatee keep trying to convince me that u/w is a way better tempo deck but im not having it.

i like UR tempo too but haven't won out with it yet. its better than white if you get 3 searing spears though!

I feel like a lot of red creatures are bad in the ur build. but yeah searing spear is insane in this format.

http://www.mtggoldfish.com/limited/analysis/draft/theros-theros-theros
http://www.mtggoldfish.com/limited/cards/draft/theros-theros-theros

color ranking fits my views on the format but the fact that these numbers are all within 1% of each other - and even the strongest performing deck, boros, is only at 54% - does suggest that this format is very balanced

i'm a bit surprised at how low UW is in the color pairs since that seems to be the thing i most consistently lose to, but the margins are so small that it's probably not significant yet

yeah UW heroic with a zillion combat tricks and lots of scry seems nearly impossible to beat sometimes

3 color seems really doable in this format

yesterday I had a rad 4c 2 polis crusher, 2 chained to the rocks, 2 horizon chimera deck w/ tons of fixing

also my last 4 drafts have involved opening: 2 elspeths, xenagos, thoughtseize

I didn't open a single voice despite playing dgm all the time so this makes up for it

i have been killing theros limited. currently @ an 81% win rate across paper and mtgo. i have no specific strategy except never drafting green and its def working

omg you were trying to convince me green was better than white like less than two weeks ago

green seems like it should be really good! it just somehow is terrible in practice. also i don't really like white that much either but partly because i feel like whites somewhat overdrafted

green being good or not seems to depend on whether you can get one or more asps

like time and time again I run up against a green deck and the asp is pretty much the only relevant card they play but it is quite relevant. if the rest of green were better it might even be overpowered for a common, instead it just anchors an otherwise bad deck.

i feel like green just doesn't have enough ways to generate tempo in theros? the cards themselves are good and like r/g seems like it should just be amazing in this format but i am never happy to have a bunch of dumb green creatures, even the asp doesn't really do what i want cards in my draft deck to do, which is to generate tempo

i've been pretty bad with it...winrate around 50%, winding up with a lot of heavy blue decks that have a lot of bounce and scry but no solid creature base. so basically my games have been me getting to turn 12, running out of stuff, and losing because I have no creature base - Sea God's Revenge doesn't do much when all you have are Omenspeakers on the board. Believe it or not green with its 9th pick Nissan Couriers and Time to Feeds is the only way I've had any success here.

that said I really dig the draft format. the decision to move clean, efficient removal out of common (and uncommon, come to think of it!) really makes a big difference. you can spend 12 mana total on a monster snake and know there are only a few cards at common and uncommon that will take care of it. the only unconditional kill spell at common costs 6! (and is very playable, too!) There doesn't seem to be any consensus first picks here - Lightning Strike seems like maybe the best common, but the other common removal is nowhere near as good, even Lash of the Whip (2nd best common removal spell?) is 5 mana. Wingsteed Rider is quite good. Griptide too.

yeah best commons are strike, voyages end, griptide, rider, asp, nimbus. that's roughly the order I'd first pick them.

i dont think green's that bad, if it's the weakest color it's only by a tiny bit. i had a good one earlier but it had polukranos, boon satyr, and arbor colossus so yeah not the most representative of the color maybe

Lamp have you played any standard yet? i'm struggling to find a deck i enjoy that doesn't get crushed by red aggro or the Thassa deck which seem to be the main things you have to beat right now

Gray Merchant deserves a spot on that list IMO

man people are really devoted to that guy but I think he's mediocre 75% of the decks he's in

Lamp have you played any standard yet? i'm struggling to find a deck i enjoy that doesn't get crushed by red aggro or the Thassa deck which seem to be the main things you have to beat right now

i played a bunch pre-pt with some people here to test and i finished X-1 in a small cash tournament w/something that looked a lot like the orzhov midrange deck chapin and reitzel played at the pt this weekend. i had been playing around with a few different whip decks on mtgo and have had some success with golgari graveyard which played 7 enablers and lotleth trolls in order to fill the graveyard and a bunch of strong value creatures in g/b plus some removal. abrupt decay seems really good rn and it has a decent match-up against supreme verdict decks. the thassa deck wasn't really a thing yet though so i don't know how good yr devotion match-ups are? like, you have game against red for sure and i think scavenging ooze is actually p good against them but the blue decks require more removal than i was running and can probably just get ahead and sit on stuff while your answers are spread a little thin

having your removal spell in hand be abrupt decay when they play a master of waves for 4 or 5 is pretty miserable i can tell you that

had a goofy old pack chaos draft last night w/ my friends and opened a wasteland

Finally got the R/U deck to work. Having 13 creatures definitely helped. Spellheart Chimera + Steam Augury was such a cool combo (or at least, it wound up being one). Still went 2-1 because of a nuts UW heroic deck (which I'm convinced is the best deck in the format) but at least it was fun to play!

http://puremtgo.com/articles/ars-arcanum-theros-draft-overview

basically agree with this though I don't think 'black devotion' can really be drafted reliably enough to be considered an archetype. any deck that relies on drafting multiple copies of a single card is more of a gimmick deck than a format staple.

note that he avoids mentioning that all his predictions were wrong

there really aren't many good two-drop commons in this format are there? the 2/2 1G reach bestow guy maybe, Vaporkin...what else?

voyaging satyr, returned phalanx, baleful eidolon, leonin snarecaster, omenspeaker are all good though nothing's an auto-include really other than maybe leafcrown dryad

is arena athlete an uncommon? i really like that guy

yeah thats unc

really surprised at the winrate chart since many people seem to think that UR is the weakest blue deck and even the weakest pair overall

haha early on i was trying to convince iatee that u/r spells was the best archetype in theros. i am currently 22-5 drafting theros on mtgo and i was playing a lot of u/r. i think his point that it was just reasonably open compared to other stuff feels true, i was getting really solid red cards 8-10th. i often played 16 lands 10 creature decks in u/r stuff like form on the adept, lots of good twos to target with ordeals, great tempo.

u/r is great so long as you get enough creatures

you dont need that many creatures if your spells are good

well. the way I see it having a bunch of bounce and low-level creature kill (stuff that kills small dudes but not fatties) will definitely help prolong the game but you still need your own dudes, particularly ones that don't die to most common removal. if you don't have that you just wind up waiting for your opponent to play the threat you can't kill.

never thought i'd be caught dead playing mono-black in standard, but had some success with it in testing last night and chaining gray merchants in constructed is pretty fun

I've been toying with this too, but I can't quite bring myself to ditching my green and red spells. My deck right now is more black devotion lite.

http://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/205992

^ cool standard deck imo

Surprised they didn't find a way to include Chained to the Rock in there

i tested that white weenie deck, its definitely my style but is a bit rough vs the devotion decks that can flood the board pretty fast

here's a good (& pretty cheap) RDW deck i've been playing:

4 rakdos cackler
4 burning-tree emissary
4 firefist striker
4 ash zealot
4 chandra's phoenix
4 boros reckoner
4 fanatic of mogis

4 lightning strike
4 magma jet
3 shock

21 mountain

sideboard:
1 hammer of purphoros
2 skullcrack
2 chandra, pyromaster
3 mizzium mortars
4 frostburn weird
3 ratchet bomb

i have no idea what's good in standard but that looks pretty solid, makes me glad that CoP: Red has been out of standard for a long time

cider i saw you 4-0'd with that - what do you think of the (pricier) chandra red deck?

What kind of prize support do your local shops have for events?

Had a FB complaint about the prize support for Theros Game Day on Saturday, turns out my manager didn't give out anything but a Theros game pad and some foil packs and thinks that was fine. So I'm going to have to set up a prize system for Friday Night Magic and game days, I guess, but I don't know shit about Magic.

for a traditional 8 man draft, mine does 6-4-3-3 packs for 1/2/3/4, the hipster wburg one I go to once in a blue moon does 8-4-2-2. those are both probably 'fair' and mirror the online draft payout, though the second one is less egalitarian and not necessarily good for morale for new players. I wish mine did store credit.

milo for a constructed tournament like game day the players should only be getting prizes if they're paying to enter the tournament. the only official prize support from wizards for game day are the promo cards and the play mat. there are a bunch of ways to organize prize structure for small shop tournaments like fnm and game day most of which involve some trade-offs, i think mostly a store just needs to have a clear, consistent policy. if your shop has a bunch of regulars for stuff like fnm i would talk to them and see sort of prize structure they're interested in

fwiw the game day i played in was $5 to enter. all that money went into the prize pool, everyone that plays gets a promo cards, top 8 got another foil promo card. the winner got a playmat. the prize money was split btw the top 8 players not actually sure how the breakdown worked % wise but i got ~30% of the pool for splitting the finals

the store i play at has a pretty basic setup for FNM that works well for everyone as far as i know:

standard constructed - $5 entry fee, a fixed 4 swiss rounds of play regardless of attendance, pay out store credit prizes by record to everyone with a 3-1 record or better, in a way such that you pay out most of the entry money

booster draft - $15 entry fee, form 8-man pods, draft and play 3 rounds swiss, pay out store credit $25 to 1st place and $15 to 2nd place in each draft pod

for larger events with a top 8 cut to elimination rounds like Game Day you have to improvise a bit more with the payouts but its still $5 entry per player for constructed and the prize pool is still about $5 per player