Magic: The Gathering C/D

wow @ new draft league competitive tier
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-online/magic-online-event-updates%E2%80%94november-2016-2016-11-03

this seems like a really strong addition

yeah those will be the bulk of my magic playing once they're live

yeah...kaladesh may not be the right environment for me to make the switch, lol

i haven't really killed a format since oath tbh. i hit my all time high elo 1882 during that and have been regressing steadily since. think i am going to need to rebuild confidence at friendly before i think about competitive

ive done slightly more than thirty leagues to very middling success but i dont really feel like i have a solid grasp of the format. i think green is kind of the trap color because its so much deeper so you (or at least i) end up misreading a late peema outrider or rhino as a signal instead of just variance in the common runs. so my trainwreck drafts typically start with me picking a strong green uncommon and then getting cut but not quite cut enough to give up on green and playing some 3+ color pile that doesnt really do anything. like all my 1-2 or 0-2 drafts are G/x/y. whereas i think once you have a solid idea of what exactly the red and blue decks should look like you can draft those if theyre open in yr seat/you get powerful rares &c.

i also dont really think this is a synergy format, i think the easiest way to lose is to overall card quality rather than someone 'going off' with a synergy deck. like i almost never lose reasonable games to the module/era of innovation jerkoff decks, which i think are kind of awful. i really like black in this format, or at least the mtgo meta because i think its underdrafted, particularly rush of vitality which is just insanely good imo. and no one respects the 4/6 croc which i love and always play. also dhund operative routinely goes too late. my most recent strat is taking every late sky skiff and the 1/1 drain life guy pack one as a backdoor out. if i dont get enough solid midrange cards p2 i just jam a million of those, the 3/4 and the black combat tricks and 14 land into my deck. managed to salvage two p awful drafts w/a 2-1 doing this

excited for the comp leagues although ive enjoyed being able to play out my drafts in this format. i also probably need to buy a new mouse to play those. its started to stick and ive misclicked my way out of three trophies so far including targeting my opponents operative with rush of vitality instead of my own freighter. i think that was the only possible way i lose that game

I also have been doing terribly at this format fwiw. something about it seems way different from your normal limited format.

ben stark put a draft guide up on cfb yesterday, pretty interesting. he organizes by single colours which i liked - i think during the draft you want to start in a colour and know what you can do with it, because the individual colours have more distinct identity than colour pairs, where there is a lot of overlap.

i've done really well in this format so far. i wouldn't go as far as to say its not a synergy format but it's definitely a light synergy format rather than a heavy one - artifact count is important in a lot of decks and you often find yourself playing some crappy ones to reach whatever threshold your deck needs to operate, but beyond that you generally just want to play the highest impact cards at each slot.

i was watching the vod of lsv's most recent draft on twitch & one of the subscribers was named burt_stanton which i thought was really funny

also i have been running kind of insanely bad at kld limited & need to just complain about it to someone, somehow. i finally was 2-0 in a draft tonight and my opponent in the finals had a million rares including skysovereign. i dont think ive ever been this tilted by magic in my entire life :/

i think red is the trap color in this set, not blue

Yep I'm ready to call this now too. It's no green in BFZ and I'll splash Welding Sparks all day long, but I can't get success with base-red

I've gone 2-1 in about 90% of the KLD draft leagues I've done, weirdly consistent, and I've done more than 20 now. I guess I can't complain, but it's weird how tough it is to get that last win. I've had bonkers decks that win two rounds easily and lose the last due to luck or bad play; I've had trainwreck decks that somehow eke out two wins. as I mentioned, one of the only 3-0s I've done was with an partially-autodrafted deck, which is pretty lol since it's one of the only trophies I've received

My god, yeah. the number of times I've started 5-1 in a Sealed League and finished 5-4 is disheartening, I always seem to run into the decks with two Smugglers Copters, or the ones that play six bomb rares. Dunno if this is just variance or what. I'm doing pretty poorly in this format too. In most formats I can usually judge my chances of winning by my opening hand - by turn 4 or 5 I'm usually fairly confident in what's going to happen. I seem to be wrong a lot about this in KLD - I've lost a lot of games where I thought my opponent was dead to rights, and I've won a few where I was a second away from conceding five turns prior. I'm not sure why that is.

its pretty easy to stabilize the board in this set, so there's a lot of games where your opening hand doesn't matter as much as your deck's ability to go long and mitigate land flood

I'm definitely still struggling around how to draft this properly. I've had a lot of underpowered decks and a lot of try-hard trainwrecks. And yes, it was super tilting when I played against the guy with both green Gearhulk and Skysovereign in his deck.

I'm feeling pretty bad for Cassius Marsh

http://mtgfan.tumblr.com/post/153021179070/mtg-realm-magic-the-gathering-cassius-marsh

Of course, if I had all those sweet decks, I'd probably be a little more protective of them...

land flood in particular seems to be a problem. can't count the number of games where there's been 12 lands in the top half of my deck and there's really not much you can do about that. not a whole lot of sinks or ways to form long-term plans

draft aether theorists!

interesting that you are playing the sealed league, seems like this would be a pretty poor sealed format. is that not the case? i've noticed that in 2-set-block world, the way they have been making them so far at least, the first set is pretty high synergy and poor for sealed and the second set gets watered down to good card decks and is great for sealed.

sealed is fine, this set isn't nearly as linear as BFZ or SOI and artifact sets naturally solve some of the other problems with sealed

renegade freighter is much more obnoxious in sealed where everyone has one though

sealed league is just good value, you can break even winning like 56% of your matches. It's a decent sealed format though different than the SOI and BFZ formats, where you could often build say a W/G deck and a B/R deck and swap them out depending on matchup - with so many artifacts you often end up with 1 or 2 colors where you have less than 5 or 6 playables.

Huh did not realize the sealed leagues paid that well. I should switch to doing those sometimes. I haven't had to put money into MTGO for a long while now, despite coming close a couple times, but all these 2-1s plus not opening any money cards thus far, is quickly dwindling my ticket supply

Or maybe they can just bring back Shards of Alara drafts again. I 3-0d more in that format than I can count, cause apparently no one remembered that you just draft every good card plus fixing

https://www.goatbots.com/ev_calculator.php

always a good reference. breakeven is now 59% - guess it went up since many KLD cards went down in price

Oh yeah totally forgot about that one. Thanks for the reminder, and yes, looks like sealed leagues pay out way better

tilttilttilttiltilt

had a fairly disappointing 3-3 performance with W/U flash at another PPTQ yesterday. This included dropping a couple of rounds in match ups that I consider pretty favorable. There was definitely a factor of bad draws, mana screw, and especially mana flood, but I know that this doesn't all just come down to luck. I kept a lot of functional opening hands that were primarily lands plus 3- or higher drops. This led to way too many slow starts, which just isn't going to work in this format. In order to fix this, I'm dropping a land from the deck, bringing the curve down a bit with a few more 2-drop creatures, and working on mulliganing more aggressively if I draw slow hands. The last will be the most difficult because I really don't like pitching hands that are even somewhat playable.

UW flash's main weakness is that it doesn't have cheap interaction, so sometimes it just folds to 1-drop 2-drop + removal for the spell queller that would otherwise block those and/or eat the 3-drop. not sure this is fixable within the colors without putting narrow cards in your deck that can punish you in other ways

true, it may not be fixable. My answer is to lean a bit more in the direction of tribal by going like -1 Plains, -2 Thalia, -1 Reflector Mage, - 1 Selfless Spirit, + 3 Rattlechains, +2 Nebelgast Herald. Not a huge change, but could help with quicker starts and bit more protection for my spirits. This is a bit softer to delirium, which was already not a great matchup.

i did a couple drafts over the weekend. the one that got me riled i had a decent uw blink/control deck, nothing too powerful but solid and topped with cloudblazer and wispweaver. i lost match 2 to an aggro deck that had perfect curve out and draws all 3 games, which was fine, it was the most likely way i was going to lose. however, it did get to me a little bit and i spewed match 3 playing like a dickhead and that was what really got to me.

and then i drafted this: http://i.imgur.com/Ks7Jltq.jpg
proof again that i'm a match for anyone when i have a bunch of sweet rares in my deck.

very nice deck

oh my god that deck is stupid

my #2 key to this format, after drafting sweet rares, is to bump everything with scry up in your evaluation.

yup. #3 rule is prophetic prism is better than whatever you're considering against prophetic prism

Saheeli was pretty bad, in my experience, the one draft I had her. I also had an opponent play her and I ignored her and won easily. I mean, certainly still playable, but I think worse than a lot of commons. I can't imagine picking her up at the place where she's worth taking (mid-pack), because I never see planeswalkers go that late. Curious what you thought of her, Roberto

i was passed her maybe 4th pack 2. i had her in play 3 times, and two of those occasions i was getting m/l the most my deck could out of her, one game scrying behind creatures and the other making an innovator a couple times. the planeswaker effect is real though, you can ignore her for sure but instead my opponents put a premium on getting her off the table. the +1 is honestly the best ability, the -2 is super slow and there are not many creatures in those colours you can get significant value from ETB

she's pretty good, not nearly as good as whirler rogue but better than a 2nd or 3rd of your color's good commons i'd say

http://i.imgur.com/8VnWofd.jpg

went 1-2 with this deck though I thought it was pretty solid. seem to be getting these sorts of builds a lot.

that deck does not look good to me. the black cards aren't particularly good, i would cut them all except aetherborn marauder and maybe die young, then just play 1 swamp (which is still 6 black sources) and run some of the red cards from your sideboard.

Hazardous Conditions no good? Can see removing Tidy Conclusion, I just liked the straight removal.

but yeah Conclusion for Pyrohelix kind of a no brainer in retrospect, the whole deck is about bashing with a 2 drop

hazardous conditions is pretty garbage except as a sideboard card or in the hardcore GB counters deck. here it's just going to kill all your 3/2s

yeah indeed. forgot I played two Quicksmiths.

but you're right, the deck wasn't very good. I think my first pick was the Marauder and 2nd was the Cub. Had to flip over to red and wound up with this.

xp yeah PWs can be great when the opponent has to make bad attacks or stop attacking you in order to take them out. I just don't see Saheeli being worth it to take out. I agree that the Scry is the best ability, but the other two are extremely situational. I'd put her on about par with Aether Theorist, but as a two-color card obviously that's worse. but if she worked well for you, Roberto, then maybe I need to try her more

frogbs, I think you have a pretty good deck hiding in there. I love Attune with Aether in energy decks, but you want to be running more Forests if you are using those to cut lands. yeah I'd cut exactly the cards cider mentioned and play Pyrohelix, Whirlermaker (sick with Handicraft and Geniuses), and maybe Bomat Courier. I don't even think Hazardous Conditions is that great in a dedicated counters deck, it just doesn't kill enough stuff - so many 3-toughness creatures and vehicles in this format. I've never even sided it in but I could see a theoretical matchup where it shines

never considered Whirlermaker - hasn't been good against me but yeah I can see it as a good late game card

reason why I ultimately played Hazardous Conditions is because of the two Quicksilver Geniuses - can just pitch it if you won't get an advantage. I've played sealed leagues where it's been a one-sided Wrath but ultimately I think you guys are right, it just ain't that good. plus with all the Fabricate stuff they can play around it.

I don't think your deck is a great fit for Whirlermaker, but has some synergies, and there aren't any other RG creatures to put in. If you had any other two/three drop creature, I'd put that in instead

Put another way, 12 creatures is very low for a deck that wants to be aggressive. That might even be a bigger problem than your being split between 3 colors

Indeed, was really hoping for more than solid 2-drops

This, on the other hand...

http://i.imgur.com/Fvyds1H.jpg

deck is ultimately a bit slow but thus far it's doing well

Yeah that looks sick

i have an early report on the draft league split. played a friendly league, drafted a p mediocre uw deck, 3-0 6-0, in the 2nd game of finals got stuck on 3 lands and my opponent cast dubious challenge and gave me a riparian tiger that i rode to victory

no one was in the competitive one yet last night, i had to wait a while for a draft whereas they fire instantly in friendly