Magic: The Gathering C/D

i went 4-1 at my prerelease playing two drops and removal and capitalizing on the # of people that werent playing spells before turn three. i agree with cider i found it hard to sequence my spells correctly and was often unsure of what to prioritize. the one round i lost i could have easily won game three if i had prioritized killing my opponents morph instead of leaving mana up to threaten unmorphing my own creatures. there were also just a lot of situations were i could only get max value out of some subset of my cards (outlast vs. attack for raid as an e.g.) and it made me feel like my games were v skill intensive.

not sure i have any real insights into the format yet except that understanding attacking and blocking into opponents morph creatures seems like the most important thing. i had no problem not hitting my 5th drop and won a couple of games on 4 lands but will admit my deck was probably not typical. also people having approx like 52 of the refuges in their sealed decks made playing aggro kinda irritating

the outlast stuff is really skill intensive. I got a total blowout thanks to a bunch of "all creatures with +1/+1 counters get ______" dudes and an Abzan Charm

well it's the turn management element that's skill intensive, not figuring out the clever card interactions

i played again today and tried just running every refuge/triland in my pool and splashing all the best cards, and it worked out much better, my deck felt way more powerful and the ticks of lifegain do help make up for the loss in tempo from having lands come in tapped.

i ran into 1 person playing 2-drop aggro who seemed to be doing well, but in general once you learn to suck it up and trade off your good morphs for their 2/2s its hard for them to win.

has anyone gotten to raid the 3/3 add RWB guy into the 2/3 + 1/1 yet?

had it happen to me actually

haha no. i did have someone cast that into a free mardu charm though. #value

my raid allstar was the halvetongue kavu unsurprisingly but the 2/1 discard was a lot better than i had anticipated. even nabbing a land would often pay off because peoples hands against me were so often chocked on mana - there are so many effects and spells at 5 and 6 &c

so...standout commons? that 2/1 outlast for 2 and 3/3 reach outlast dude seemed kinda insane together. prowess seems kinda underwhelming and but I plan on forcing it regardless. sultai/slow delve seemed way better than expected but idk if your average draft deck will get as much dedicated delve mechanic stuff as the prerelease decks. the 4/4 apes is a really high pick tho.

I'm a fan of most of the raid cards, I think it is definitely the stongest non-morph mechanic in the set. Had a sweet turn today where I was able to cast Warshrieker > Warshrieker > Hordechief. I also jammed a lot of Ponyback Brigades over the past couple days.

Outlast seems too dependent on taking off turns to grow your guys and getting a critical mass on the board, when it can all be thrown off nicely with a well-timed Bring Low. I suppose it will work better in draft where you can get a more consistent deck.

Cool pickups: 3 fetches, Bloodsoaked Champion (nuts!), Rattleclaw, Sorin, and a random Keranos from a JOU prize pack.

im honestly stumped on best commons other than bond-kin and injury

the 3-color ones are obviuosly powerful for commons but theyre also 3 colors which tempers them a lot

some pretty potent-looking jeskai ascendancy storm lists going around. would be kind of amusing if that card needed a modern ban

i am excited by the idea of a standard combo deck

yeah I noted Prowess's similarity to Storm and figured any pushed card with Prowess might be trouble

the standard lists i've seen have mostly looked flimsy and misbuilt, my friends and i worked on it a bit yesterday but didn't come up with anything too inspiring but i think there's at least a playable combo deck there, on the order of burn at the stake combo or whatever

the main issue is that you have no redundancy on the ascension in standard so you have to play inefficient dig spells to find it. in modern you can glittering wish for it which is pretty efficient, so you get 7 copies instead of 4 which makes all the difference

we tried to solve this with the inspired tutor guy but the manabase turns into such a mess then since the deck was already 4 colors and he adds in the 5th

Sultai Scavenger is pretty strong for a common. It's not unreasonable to get him out turn 4, but I suppose he suffers from a similar problem to the Wedge morphs, in that sometimes you just can't cast him. It seems like this set has a very consistent power-level among commons. Tons of playables, no Triplicate Spirits.

I drafted w/ friends yesterday and built a pretty sweet esper control deck. idk how normal going outside of the klans will be but the fixing is so good it really doesn't seem hard...you're only missing out on the strong 3 color commons/uncommons.

the game play was super fun, really interactive games

I wondered exactly how possible that was going to be; I think the 5 tri-color commons and the fixing is going to make it tough but once all the commons and uncommons came out it's clear that this isn't exactly a "wedge" set the way Alara or RTR was - you couldn't go "off color" in those sets

yeah you had to do something reallly janky to build an off color rtr or gtc deck

this was actually really easy...I took the good black removal and some dual lands + good u/w slower cards / flyers

yeah my 2nd prerelease deck was essentially UBR

i think more often than not though if you're doing that you'll end up splashing a 4th color just to get one of the strong 3-color cards in your deck

http://mtgtop8.com/event?e=8226&f=MO

someone finding success w/ the deck cider was describing

yeah imo its a tad worse than pyromancer ascension storm but its still a working storm deck which is powerful

pros: doesn't care about graveyard so a lot of current storm hate doesn't touch it
cons: pretty much 100% in on resolving the right card, really hard to imagine this ever beating a uwr who knows what the deck is trying to do

cons: possibly even worse against the eidolons which already made storm unplayable imo

The Ascendancy deck is pretty sick, from what I've seen almost always goes off turn 3 w/o disruption. It's like Storm+ - you have to keep track of four colors of mana instead of two, and you have to keep track of storm counts for each creature you have (+1/+1 boosts) instead of just one. Not as slow to play as Eggs and susceptible to all the same hate as Storm, so I could see it avoiding the banhammer

I feel kinda snobby as a (well, ex-) storm player since 'going off' is so much easier, I don't think mana is really an issue beyond "I need to cast ascendancy" since all your cantrips are blue / green

like the only interesting decisions you're making here is via glittering wish for sb toolbox stuff

as soon as I saw Jeskai Ascendacy I thought "this would be cool with mana dorks, too bad it's UWR" - cool that people are making it happen

I don't know Modern well enough but even with consistent turn-3 wins is this worth a ban? Seems like there are a lot of ways to hose it all with just one card.

I think people have to play w/ it more before we really know, but if it should be banned it's probably more because it creates non-interactive games

almost think treasure cruise is the most ban-worthy card really

the untap is so incongruous, the card would've made perfect sense for the clan without it. they have clearly just forced it in there

i think they wanted a combo engine for standard, it does cute stuff with inspired etc.

so I've been really enjoying playing ur delver w/ swiftspear/cruise/9 fetches 17 land/no 3 drops

the deck feels very powerful atm like the p

pod/jund/uwr type matchups have just been insanely in my favor

affinity/burn not great when I'm doing like 10 damage to myself but my sideboard is really tilted towards those matchups

anyway I really really don't want it to be banned because I enjoy playing w/ a legacy-powerful card

but the argument that it's objectively stronger than ancestral visions...which is banned...has merit

my current approach to modern is to play valakut decks until the end of time or until it's re-banned

i'm not too excited about the decks at the top tables of the standard PT, i could see myself playing the UWR aggro-control deck or the green nykthos ramp deck, but i'm hoping some more options arise in the follow-up GP and such. i think it's cool that the combo deck made top 8 but it looked like a massive turd in its feature match and i'm not going to touch it until someone's tuned it better.

this deck is greedy as hell but I'm going into round 3 without losing a game (nor drawing Sorin) - the format is slow enough to make this kind of thing work

http://i.imgur.com/4kCDnMf.jpg

between paper and online I've done 7 drafts. I didn't play any ROE but this format is shaking out to be the most skill-intensive I can remember. I'm running super hot in these but even some of the matches I lost were ones I could have won if I had played differently.

IMO Jeskai is the toughest clan to play. It kinda plays like RTR Izzet in a way where you try to survive to a certain point and then all of the sudden you just win out of nowhere. Like generally the gameplan is to play a couple of Prowess dudes, then play stuff like Singing Bell Strike/Force Away/Act of Treason/Smite the Monstrous/any burn to clear out blockers. 4/2 Hexproof Prowess guy looks weak on paper but I definitely want one in the deck, especially with all the 0/5s and 1/5s that can hold you back. Also Act of Treason is a monster in this deck. I like playing it but the games are so stressful.

Sultai is way more fun - you can probably support 4-5 Delve cards, especially as so many of them are so powerful. Scout the Borders is a must have - the deck is usually kind of bomb-oriented but it can work.

I'm a little conflicted on how aggro is supposed to work in this format. I think a two-color B/R deck could work well with lots of combat tricks. I don't think an aggro deck has to be very good to win matches but it will need some late game.

trumpet blast/rush of battle have been the keys to winning with aggro for me in this format. that said ive been happy trying to position myself in g/b most drafts - i really like the cheap high toughness creatures and stuff like kin-tree and death frenzy still go later than i think they should and then you can go into blue or white depending on whats more open

i think this format is incredibly skill intensive but its also really high variance, ive seen so many games decided by how smoothly your first five turns go

http://i.imgur.com/kMMk6gK.gif

just 2-0 split w/ this, felt like I was playing my delver deck

barrage of boulders is a card that looks like garbage until you read the whole card and realize it's teleportal

the 3/2 unblockable morph guy is also pretty awesome

overall I feel like there isn't a 'best deck' in this format and it's a little rock-paper-scissorsy - but it's a little safer to not go into a really aggro build since the format has a strong late game. tempo decks are a little safer since tempo has more good blue commons than aggro has cheap red creatures.

I have also found drafting 2c to be easy, really just forcing one color hard

not a fan of Scaldkin but that kind of deck is exactly what I'm talking about. White doesn't add a whole lot in that respect but it does have some good Prowess dudes, the 2/2 for 1W that gets lifelink is nuts if you can get him.

I played Mardu in a draft at the store here and went 4-0, only losing one game, thanks to 4x Ponyback Brigade and Trumpet Blast/Rush. there's just no good way to stop it and the lifelink with Rush can create such a huge swing. I would think the Warrior deck with Chief of the Edge is probably the best way to do aggro but I think you would need multiple Debilitating Injuries. By the way I'm convinced that Injury is the #1 common in the set by some margin, it's such a big leg up in the early game

yeah scaldkin is bad in general but I didn't want to be playing 13 creatures and the dude has reach

I tried forcing warriors hard once and it didn't work out great because I didn't get either of the warrior-lords, there was only one in the pod to begin with. uncommon-dependent decks are like that - you look like a genius when it works, but it's really hard to predict whether you'll be uncommon-lucky.

yeah i think injury is probably the best common but i will still often take swiftwater cliffs over it #playoneway

only 1 win in 5 drafts for me so far, and that with a deck i thought was by far the worst i had drafted yet. a couple of decks that i thought were sick that lost R1. i feel like i keep dying to crater claws. i am going to prioritize lifegain so i just die from having a shitty deck for a change of pace. most fun i've had was after a P1P1 jeskai ascendancy which i assumed was worth something but not right now i guess, plus a couple of the pay 1 to freeze enchantments and a bunch of cantrips. unsurprisingly was so good when the pieces came together and absolutely miserable when it didn't. i miss my lofty win % from m15 but yeah this is just a ton better so far.

yeah the deck I posted above was kinda like that, if you win you can completely control every aspect of the game, if you don't you lose with 6 cards still in hand. I had Jeskai Asendancy in a draft and got it out nearly every game and it really hurt my brain - such a potent card but it's tough to play in tight games.

there have been lots of games where at the end of the game I notice that the lifegain via lands was the difference between a win and a loss

injury is the best common but bell strike is my favorite / is reaching p1 territory for me

trying to decide whether to pull the trigger on buying $300 worth of cards so i can play standard

this shit is expensive

khans cards seem overpriced across the board, it still seems like the EV of opening up a box is too high

sylvan caryatid is $16 lmao

i noticed that the GB and RU temples went thru the roof recently too, i sold my playsets online for about 15 and 12 per card respectively