Magic: The Gathering C/D

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

that's crazy

the painlands being worth something also seems crazy to me considering how many times they've been printed / how basically bad they are

THS block EV must be pretty high right now

not really, it's just the handful of cards in the top standard decks are in high demand right now as people buy into the format

xxp enemy painlands haven't actually been printed much, just apocalypse and 10th edition i think, neither of which were heavily printed sets compared to today

9th too

oh and 9th. but people basically didn't buy core set before m10

yeah the huge difference between printings makes me really suspicious about peoples' predictions on the future of cards being printed right now. like there are *so many* shocks out there and the only serious demand for them comes from the growth of modern. until there are as many modern players as there were std players a year ago, how could shock prices be justifiable at above $10? yet these things often seem to break this kinda of logic. cards sit in peoples collections / people don't want to trade things that they think will grow in value / people don't want to trade things that are hard to re-trade for.

yeah i've definitely been re-evaluating the contents of my hoarding-not-trading binder lately, along the same lines. like, my serra's sanctums feel a lot more valuable than my snapcasters right now even though they're about the same price at the moment and the snapcasters are played way more in actual formats

yeah I feel like there had to have been more overall demand for snaps during innistrad standard yet they're more expensive now. part of that is just beyond some simply supply/demand thing - there really are a lot of snapcasters out there - and more to do w/ snapcaster now being part of the category 'hard-to-trade-for eternal card'

actually snap is played in 33% of modern decks right now so maybe it's close
http://www.mtggoldfish.com/format-staples/modern

i do think secondary mtg prices come more from perception and less from actual demand than people think

yeah i think the market is deeply distorted but its hard to exactly pinpoint why or speculate on where prices are going - i sold about 3K worth of cards two months ago and felt p good about it but i can see prices still climbing ::shrug::

i have no idea how standard prices are being justified though

standard is more demand-based than older formats

i think selling cards that aren't on the reserved list is always a fine move regardless of their trajectories, i've long wanted to unload a lot of my stuff but i'm waiting until i have decks built that i'm happy with in each format

I think in the case of Snaps everyone saw what happened with Dark Confidant and doesn't want to unload them at $15-20 when they're pretty clearly as pushed as that effect is likely to ever get

yeah and snap is actually a 'better' card than bob at least insofar as it's playable in wayyy more decks. how many people really need bobs right now?

deathrite is a better card than both and never commanded $20+ price even when it was modern-legal, whereas snapcaster was $20 on day 1. hype cycles and price memory are a big part of it.

Frank Karsten's KTK draft article is out:

http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/frank-analysis-a-pick-order-list-for-khans-of-tarkir-draft/

Some interesting observations here. He thinks that blue is the best color (and U/G the best combo) and that black is the worst; IMO it's hardly a core-set level imbalance, and the fact that most decks are 3-color minimizes if one color isn't pulling its weight. Best common, all things considered: Mystic of the Hidden Way. I would still argue it's Debilitating Injury but I don't think black is as bad as he thinks it is.

Overall KTK has an awful lot to think about. It's not very much like RTR or Gatecrash or Alara where you try to hit your faction as hard as possible. I could write a whole article on a card like Force Away or Sultai Flayer since there is just such a depth to what the different clans do. I recently 3-0'd a draft with Sultai (though it only splashed blue for 3 cards) and it had only one card with Delve - it was sort of a Green/Black big toughness deck that won with Pine Walkers and Savage Punches. There's nothing like Populate or Battalion where a bunch of good cards chain together to produce something even better.

a lot of karsten's observations were somewhat at odds with my own and that will definitely give me a different angle when i am drafting from now on, although i am not quite ready to throw out my own experience/instincts wholesale, by which i have managed to get up to a respectable win rate now. i did agree with him about u/g more or less. definitely if i do not have a strong early pull elsewhere i am looking for u/g because i have found it gives me the highest chance of not ending up with a garbage deck. so the upside is consistency rather than power, but you can do a lot of powerful things off of that consistent base, which can be sultai or temur obv, both are super solid, but the mana is there is do anything.

and although i don't rate mystic of the hidden way as highly as he does, i would guess if i ranked the cards that have done the last points of damage to finish me of then mystic and direct damage spells would be way out on their own at the top of the list.

mystic is so good, in some other format it might be pretty eh, but being able to get in for 3 a turn in a format filled w/ clogged up morphy boards

I rate singing bell strike as a top common tho

dig through time as a 'decent single color card' seems kinda lol, whenever that card is resolved against me I basically know, deep down, that I am not going to win

ride down is also a lot better than decent

i don't think bell strike is a top common in the abstract but it's very good in the aggressive UGx and URx decks i prefer to draft so i still take it highly to make sure i get it. i feel like my archetype preference is the same as his but my pick orders are pretty different & im not too interested in changing them unless i start getting crappy decks on the regular