Magic: The Gathering C/D

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

getting the chandra prestige avatar might be harder than i thought

yeah it was like 1000 ppl on competitive vs 5500 on friendly when i went on

1000 is a lot more than the 120 that were in it when i was on

obv because of single elimination it'll show fewer people in the league at any one time though even if the throughput is the same

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

Dubious Challenge and Madcap Experiment are my two most opened rares by far in this set (still waiting on that Smuggler's Copter) so I'm glad someone's at least trying one of em out :)

as much as I like the payout structure of the competitives it looks like a bad run can shred through a ton of tickets very quickly. I do enjoy the friendly leagues giving you a gimme match every once in a while

i'd be fine with just playing the friendly leagues if they hadn't moved the QPs and rewards to competitive only - i still kind of want to play in the MOCS events despite my long string of brutal failures in them a few years ago

yeah i liked always having enough tix whenever a limited mocs monthly came around. i do think it was the correct decision to move qps out of friendly tournaments tho. my aim will be to play competitive if there are enough ppl but i will be realistic about switching if i am getting murdered. i think it will be v format dependent for me.

i don't recommend playing the competitive draft league yet unless you don't mind waiting 5-10 minutes for matches

Ugh that's disappointing to hear. As I'm in a time zone with few MTGO players to begin with, that translates to like 15-20 minutes for me, I'd bet

i'm hoping by the weekend more ppl will have moved over, i want to see closer to 1k in the league (which would probably be equivalent to 2-3k in friendly league due to single elim) before i try again

since the trophy counts have carried over for friendly i'm wondering if there might be some investment in that for grinders who otherwise would flip to competitive. that can't be huge numbers of ppl tho.

you dont get anything for friendly league trophies after your 5th though, its just showboating after that

but yeah i do wonder if it will take a new set reset to fully get everyone playing the 'right' queue for them

just as an FYI, KLD pack prices are starting to bottom out, you can snap them up for about 2.50

effectively this makes the Sealed Leagues a total of 19 tix, if you've got the tickets you can just stockpile play points now.

realized yesterday that it is exactly 2 months until the release of aether revolt. meanwhile, eldritch moon was around for about 2 months total. mtg release calendar is really something.

yeah I'm kinda overwhelmed by it lately

yeah the fall set always gets the longest run because of the holidays, and the summer set gets the shortest run because it used to be core sets which were less popular

it actually looks like they're finally adjusting the release schedule next year to fix this though, the fall pro tour is scheduled for november which implies the set will release in october rather than september

I've been hearing rumblings that Kaladesh has been a big flop. Is this true? What went wrong? Seems like a pretty good set to me. Are the masterpieces backfiring and causing the set to tank in value?

yeah that doesn't seem right to me

would suck to have sets like this flop while "Return to X" blocks do well, because we all know WoTC pays very very close attention to their bottom line

can't be sure about for constructed but for limited seems to have been generally well received? only ppl i can recall complaining about it are those e.g. pvddr who are convinced it is a one dimensional all aggro all the time format.

lol what its definitely a fine format for control decks, theres no real tempo disasters to be on the wrong end of like aether adept style cards

yeah, I haven't heard people complain about the set, only people saying it wasn't selling well. I have no idea if there's any truth to that though.

it ticks all the right boxes for me - nothing seems too underpowered or overpowered, there are a lot of skill-testing decisions (Fabricate), aggro is good but outside of the Longtusk Cub/Rhino draw it's not overpowering. plus there are a lot of fun rares to build around, like Animation Module and Panharmonicon (which is way better than I thought it was in Limited, since it triggers on every Fabricate and energy creature)

i'd rate it as 'fine' for limited and slightly problematic for constructed (the fact that a bunch of viable standard decks are essentially block constructed decks is worrying me given that there's still another set of this stuff coming. also aetherworks marvel is some real bs)

and by 'fine' i mean better than most recent sets which other than eldritch moon have been uninspiring

so far under the new system both small set limited formats have been significantly better than their parents imo, hoping that continues with aether revolt

agreed. i think ktkx3, ogw/bfz and edm/soi are my clear favourite 3 draft formats since i started playing (c. gatecrash)

kldx3 is not that far off, it has v high heights imo but if i'm not doing something fun with it it feels kinda flat. a big chunk of the format is solid/unexciting curve out decks that can feel p uninspiring. also some high impact aggressive low drop commons and uncommons plus the absence of the kind of smoothing mechanics they have done well with recently, and the scarcity of mana sinks, makes variance seem higher than normal too which harms the overall perception of the set.

yeah i'm not a khans liker as everyone else seems to be, i've just never liked the morph mechanic, and on top of that it had the same issue as old ravnica where the common lands were too good and its not that interesting or fun, at least to me, to just draft a lot of lands.

i've drafted most sets going all the way back to invasion block, but since i started drafting a lot circa scars of mirrodin, the ones that i've had the most fun with are ISDx3, DKA/ISD, M13, THSx3, ORI, EDM/SOI, with an honorable mention to DGM/GTC/RTR sealed which is afaik the only time in the game's history where a sealed format has been significantly more fun than draft.

on top of that it had the same issue as old ravnica where the common lands were too good and its not that interesting or fun, at least to me, to just draft a lot of lands.

yeah that's a big problem with KTK, especially since you're basically forced into a tri-color archetype. but I did love the format since all five of the combos were so well defined, they all had their own unique goals and ways of creating value. it was a slow format but the agro decks had a lot of ways to bust through. thought things got worse when Fate Reforged was introduced and DTK was pretty much a dud, though the dual concurrent draft format thing was pretty cool.

older formats that i enjoy but don't have enough reps to really compare them against the newer sets: invasion/planeshift/apocalypse, 3x champions of kamigawa and champions/betrayers, 3x time spiral, 3x shadowmoor, 3x rise of the eldrazi