Magic: The Gathering C/D

http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/the-aether-revolt-draft-guide/

this by ben stark is really interesting to me. many things that are contrary to my experience and make me want to reevaluate. i do think red is the strongest colour but inside that, revolution over shock and chaser i am not sure about, and all three of those over scrapper champion??? and then at the other end, i know white being the weakest colour is a pretty commonly held opinion and, even accounting for variance, i think i am benefiting from that personally. i believe 8 of my 10 3-0s played white. imo there are four strong white commons - eagle, brights, infiltrator, crusher. infiltrator is good to great because of crusher, and even bastion enforcer is playable because of it, although you can usually do better. and i think eagle is in contention for best common, even if you can only play a couple max. also, if you can get say 3 infiltrators plus a couple random revolt payoffs, a copy of conviction becomes a strong inclusion too. and for most of the life of this format you can be passed any of the good white cards up until late late in the draft.

and also, laying it out like this supports a thought i've had that green often doesn't seem open not just because it is overdrafted but also because it is pretty shallow. i do think bandar is a very strong 2 drop but implement is not super exciting as the 2nd best common, although i agree it is, and after that the cards are varying degrees of filler.

i think druid is the card he's the lowest on relative to conventional wisdom, most ppl i talk to had it as the best green common

druid IS underwhelming though. the effect is unusually low impact and the 1 power really plays badly. i would probably take leaf gilder higher but still not over, idk, leopard?

i think i tend to weight low cmc higher than most people in evaluating things, like i usually take the white 3/1 over dawnfeather eagle. you can always pick up crushers as finishers, or the 3/4 flying in pack 3, but if you prioritize eagle then you cant always get the 2-drops later. i've had too many drafts ruined by pack 3 being completely devoid of 2-drops with more than 1 power

caught in the brights is currently my most drafted card from this set, which is really unusual for it to be a good removal spell rather than some middle of the pack common that i rate higher than most people

i think a lot of ppl would straight up say it is the latter rather than the former, altho i do think that is crazy, even in a hostile environment for pacifisms.

it does give you a sneaky way to trigger revolt though

I do agree that Revolution > Shock, because as mentioned cheap, limited removal isn't a lifesaver in this format the way it would be in others. Tapping a land with Revolution is surprisingly obnoxious.

that said it is kind of difficult to evaluate these cards in a vacuum, since the set is so big on synergy - a card like Defiant Scavenger can be incredible in the right kind of B/G deck, but it's mostly unplayable. Maybe this has just been my drafting style but I tend to go all-in on a Improvise or Revolt strategy. I play the R/G beaters deck in Sealed but I don't think I've ever drafted it. So my card evaluations are maybe a little off.

yeah white is so underdrafted at this point that 'always force white' is probably a viable strategy. like, white is relatively weak, but it's not like m14 draft where you'd pass p1p1 serra angel for divination. I think people have overreacted / there's a lot of groupthink with these things.

I routinely see Eagles and the U/W uncommon wheel. I think the Skies deck is really underdrafted - maybe cuz it's kind of boring

owen turtenwald posted his draft stats for this format: https://twitter.com/OwenTweetenwald/status/838917736046587906

makes me want to start doing this myself, i've tracked my constructed matches in the past but never draft

hope to see saheeli combo banned today - i can live with there being a really good aggro deck but emrakul was clearly bad for the format and i think this is worse

the cards of a lot of high $ standard stuff kinda tanked on MTGO over the last week, I think they're anticipating something getting the axe

man, when was the last time there were standard bans? Ravager/Artifact Lands? Jace? I can't remember.

before kaladesh the last one was jtms/stoneforge mystic.

haven't thought or read too much about the bans, but why was emrakul chopped instead of marvel?

i find ppl going OTT criticizing wizards at every opportunity is overall a pretty tiresome element of the culture of the game, BUT... missing the saheeli combo entirely is fucking unreal.

it definitely feels like something about their internal testing has been off recently - they missed reflector mage as a standard-playable card too

almost as if in both cases the pairing of a gold card with a card of a different colour confounded them.

although i guess reflector mage had rally to abuse it first

wow, I thought that combo was totally done on purpose. it was figured out like 10 seconds after the card was spoiled, how the hell do they miss that?

emrakul was banned more for its overeffectiveness as a finisher and for the traverse the ulvenwald interaction than for the marvel interaction - it's got a really unfun 'playing with your prey' style of closing the game that wore itself thin really fast when it happened literally every game thanks to traverse. it was also enough stronger than other finishers that it basically pushed traditional ramp decks and control decks out of standard relevance. the last standard deck i really enjoyed was the goggles ramp deck from SOI standard, and that deck literally went from fine to unplayable just due to that one card entering the format.

The first set of bans was dumb, the second set will be worse. Confidence in wotc is crumbling because it's hard to predict whether your high cost cards will hold value for more than a couple months.

If they want things to improve, they should print more answers, stop having 1 or 2 ridiculously op cards in each set, go to a shorter rotation (they bailed on this much too quickly).

xp thanks, that makes sense.

missing reflector mage seems okay to me, that card isn't obviously powerful. in standards where it was surrounded by worse cards, it wouldn't be oppressive.

I think before they sign off on any set they need to have someone be the combo police and go through literally every card in the set, attempting to break it for combo. they didn't know about twin either did they? it is always going to be very hard to predict a standard meta w/ a small group of playtesters so I don't fault them for having problems with that. but overlooking infinite combos means you're not doing your job.

what was the issue with Reflector Mage? I don't really play Standard so I'm a bit ignorant there.

I think before they sign off on any set they need to have someone be the combo police and go through literally every card in the set, attempting to break it for combo.

it doesn't even really have to be that complex. Saheeli and Splinter Twin have "infinite combo" written all over them. Ditto with the 4-mana 2/2 that gets +1/+1 for each activated ability, though I don't know if such a combo exists in Standard. not a whole lot else with that sort of potential.

the types of cards that can lead to an infinite combo are very limited and few in number, it can't be that hard to keep tabs on them!

emrakul is an interesting case re its development. i don't think the the un-fun-ness jumps of the card but maybe that should've come up in playtesting. probably there is too much of an onus on them to try lots of different things for ubiquity of a single card to really come up as an issue. that's an inherent flaw that ought to be addressed tho.

copter it's tempting to give them a pass because it's a new card type, but pushing a 2cmc card that every deck can play is playing with fire so much.

marvel seems so obliviously terrible for competitive play, i can't believe they gave that tournament-worthy #s

and...no bans

yea I'm gonna stick my neck out and say making a "take opponent's next turn" card that's pushed is gonna cause a lot of people to quit Standards

Thank goodness. The format is in terrible shape, but continuous bans aren't the way to go.

yeah as it turns out mindslaver is not a fun effect unless it happens very sparingly

i do think saheeli combo will be gone by the summer PT unless there's some good answers in amonkhet

standard could really use Banishing Light right now - they made that updated templating of the card as if it was going to become a regular reprint and then just haven't used it again since

theyve been weirdly reluctant to print answers to planeswalkers specifically (nerfing hero's downfall into ruinous path, despise into harsh scrunity, o ring into stasis snare &c) that it seems reasonable to assume they want pw to be the face of magic and thus v playable and present in standard.

fwiw this is the first standard since rally that ive played extensively and really liked. i think the games are interesting and fun like 70% of the time and theres a lot of depth to sideboard decisions. im really happy to play mardu/4c four out of every five matches in my leagues because theyre generally really good games.

whether or not this standard is fun, it seems to be one that rewards strong players. whether or not there are pros or a bunch of randos in t8s has always seemed like a telling mark. though part of that is 'strong players just don't play decks that aren't mardu/4c'. everyone in the room playing their fun deck is not actually in the competition

i just remembered the card Dampening Pulse exists today - kind of funny vs 4c Saheeli, it neutralizes both the combo and whirler virtuoso and most of the lists don't have a way to remove it other than negate

this standard has not been the complete worst but another large set without the kaladesh mechanics can only improve things

MM 2017 online is 6-2-2-2 (4 tix entry - gross) or else phantom for 100pp entry and the usual 150/100/40/10 payout. the set is so loaded that the $$$ lottery is hugely appealing but the value of infinite 2-1 drafts has gotta trump all.

normally a huge fan of the infinite 2-1 drafts but man have I gotten wrecked w/ the modern cube for some reason

phantom draft works better for these sets since you dont have to first pick shitty cards like tarmogoyf

i've only done 3 modern cube drafts but i did 3-0 twice. it is much less explosive than the vintage and legacy cubes altho i had a very solid mono green that was maybe only a turn or two slower than a legacy version and of course lacked the early win out of nowhere potential of natural order. i drafted a UB control deck in a seat that seemed very open for it and i ended up with a deck of half premium cards and then half like clunky counters and tier 3 finishers. it was fun tho!

its fairly close in power to the cube i've been working on building for a while so i'm kind of afraid to play it and find out that i don't like it

i think this cube has a few too many "why is this card here? (it's seems like a dumb inclusion)" rather than "why is this card here? (i am intrigued by the possibilities)". for example, winding constrictor and aethersphere harvester are reallylame inclusions imo, the former totally dependent on an archetype that doesn't come through and the latter not exciting or powerful enough for a card without a theme.

that the highly simplified key to cube design, i guess i am saying. make ppl ask the latter not the former.

yeah my favorite cards in that genre are the ones that ask a little bit of you but also enable themselves e.g. thopter spy network or ayli

its harder to convince someone to put something in their cube deck that needs very specific support like winding constrictor

how do you feel about the theros gods? they offer the level 1 payoff of animating them, which doesn't really demand anything extra in cube construction or the draft because cube type cards often lean more mana symbol heavy anyway, and a lot of them have a level 2 of an ability that can be built around.

purphoros is great, the others i am not as keen on for various reasons

thassa is a good card but most cubes don't really support a permanent-heavy blue deck. the other 3 and the multicolor ones are all kinda weak or boring or both

I play base blue decks that always lose to purphoros

w/ this cube planeswalkers are just a little too good I think. in normal cube planeswalkers are haymakers but not the most powerful thing you can be doing, in this cube they're the top end. dragonlord silumgar feels like the defining card to me.

that's disappointing - I don't really like how Cube matches turn into battles of planeswalkers. after losing a bunch I made an effort to just blindly draft more of them and I've been doing better ever since.