Magic: The Gathering C/D

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.

prioritizing planeswalkers already worked really well for me in legacy cube so it makes sense that it'd be even better here where you have (almost) all the same planeswalkers but fewer of the other powerful cards

i think most small-medium cubes have about twice as many planeswalkers as they should. legacy cube is at least a 720 (i think?) so they're stretched more

speaking of planeswalkers, I found this article interesting:

http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/how-to-fix-standard/

I have never loved the card type

it's my longstanding belief that planeswalkers below 5cmc should not be 'generalists'. Tezzeret the Schemer, Arlinn Kord, Kiora Master of the Depths, Narset Transcendent all feel much more close to the right power level and positioning to me. i like the card type when they're targetted more specifically like that, but they've just been overstepping the bounds that they had previously set ever since they rebooted the storyline as planeswalker superhero comics

another planeswalker thought re: chandra - it used to feel really bad to run out planeswalkers like this just to kill a creature and gain 2 life, but spells have fallen so far behind that these minus abilities are equivalent to 3 mana spells rather than 2 mana now, so you're only paying 1 extra mana for the ability to run away with the game on stable boards

this is why decks can just jam a bunch of chandras even though the card should be bad from behind and bad in multiples - the opportunity cost relative to non-pw spells that fill that role is so small right now

looks like we're back to people mysteriously finding card from the next set in their booster that happens to have a set mechanic on it http://imgur.com/DEtClqY

but this is very strange. seems like one of those mechanics that gets 5 cards and then is done forever

(the mechanic is that the bottom half can only be cast from the graveyard - so basically a cross between split cards and flashback)

that is one ugly-ass template. is it confirmed to be real?

no but photo of physical card + untraceable art essentially always means real

i suspect the frame design is so that you can put them sideways in your graveyard and the front half will get covered up but the back half will stick out to the right like a mini-card. very much function over form.

Thats cool but ugly as hell

here's the mtgo uncommon run for modern masters 3: https://pastebin.mozilla.org/8982924

hopefully no mistakes in there, i threw it together pretty quick this time

superb, thanks man. i'd love to now how, if you are willing to disclose your trade secrets.

currently joint 8th on the trophy board with 1, next stop pro tour

that should be know how, obv

i just pull up a bunch of twitch streams and fastforward through the recorded vids recording all the uncommons and then piece it together in a spreadsheet. there were so many people streaming drafts this afternoon that it didnt take long

that's smart. well, thanks again for sharing here.

i'm probably going to shoot an email to the magic online folks suggesting that they complexify it for future sets, i think it slightly cheapens the draft experience once you know about it and i'd rather have a better draft experience than a small edge

100% agree with that in principle i.e. i am still going to use your list in the meantime. even if they are committed to the idea of replicating print runs, there has to be more than one.

yeah this is way simpler than the paper print runs, which if they work how i think they do can never be narrowed down to fewer than 8 possible cards for a missing uncommon

the only evidence i have supporting my paper print run theory though is that i opened an upside down renegade wheelsmith once

For this format, is multi-colored good stuff generally the way to go? What would put you in just 2 colors?

My one draft so far was straight RB. I had a consistent unearth deck, but it still felt like I was doing it wrong.

i think a strict 2 colour deck needs the pair to be really open. if you get the nut in RB, UW or GW those all look like they could be solid. i'm not convinced by GR and while i think UB could stand alone, since that deck is going to be more controlling i'm not sure why you wouldn't have 1 or more other colours with it. i actualy think RB is the one color pair that lends itself the most to 2 colour as it is the most dependent on synergy, i.e. a lot of the cards just suck if it doesn't come together.

i suspect the way to approach this draft format is to take whatever powerful cards 1-3 and then take lands and follow the lands you get to figure out the open colours.

it seems like there's a spectrum from 2-color aggro or linear deck to 2.5 color midrange to 3-5 color control. i think even the enemy-color pairs despite not being as supported are fine if your deck is focused because the card quality is so high across the board

i would approach this format like cube, as with all the modern masters sets - you're going to get 30 playables regardless of what you do so spend the first several picks figuring out what you want your deck's plan to be and then just draft with that endpoint in mind

i use this approach for every format but it becomes more correct the better the card quality

ive been drafting 3 color control decks simply because theyre easy to fall into - you draft a bomb, some removal, some fixing and then you cant really pivot into one of the leaner synergy-based decks w.o giving up too many picks. but i think the two color decks w/lots of synergy are the strongest decks you can draft, theyre what i keep losing finals too (although in leagues i know theres no guarantee theyre also 2-0)

but yeah ive just been trying to stay open and make sure i have a powerful enough topend to compete w/ w/e rares my opponents will have. counterspells have been really good for me, better than removal generally

wizards claimed draft league matching would be same record only. have they definitely deviated from that?

it generally is but i play at weird hours and have had non-matching records before. the MM3 league was busy enough last night i doubt that happened though

it looks for same record for a few minutes and then loosens more and more as it fails to find matches

i doubt you'll get mismatches in the intermediate draft leagues

ok makes sense

yeah it basically only happens when the draft league is slow which ime is like 4-6AM EST, later into a format. also a couple of times when ive played out an 0-2 draft ive gotten pair up presumably due to the lack of ppl playing out their 0-2. it happens more frequently in standard constructed leagues

it's really difficult to go any worse than 4-5 in the Friendly Sealed leagues because of that...if you start out 1-3 or something you WILL get to face a gauntlet of 48-card decks that splash two colors

Lamp have you had any luck with GW yet? its best common should be call of the conclave but i'm worried that card is not actually playable because of the vast amounts of mist ravens and dinrova horrors i'm running into

i've drafted core GW twice for combined 5-1. call and slime molding can easily outsize what a lot of decks are doing, especially if you throw in one of the anthems, and i suspect the advantage you can get is worth the danger of facing that one deck that will just murder your tokens. my one loss was to that deck of course, vanish into memory is a brutal beating, but even so it was close with the way the deck can curve out and flood the board. multiple token makers are good - a couple eyes in the skies recommended, fists of ironwood preferably on a moa, and lingering souls most of all of course.

the 4-drop slot is really juiced in this set, as if signets weren't already good enough