Magic: The Gathering C/D

yep, always curious whether there's something big that slipped through the preview week cracks like boros reckoner did last time around.

looks like the rest of the cards are starting to leak out now though from whoever had the early copy of the fat pack encyclopedia
http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=504862

I think this is gonna be a really fun set

Hidden Strings 1U
Sorcery
You may tap or untap target permanent, then you may tap or untap another target permanent
Cipher Common

has a lot of potential

put it on a one drop and a blue deck can cast a 4 mana instant on its second turn

I could see Crypt Incursion being a nice sideboard card

the beetle mage is awesome for limited

damn that's a common?

3/1 haste for BR seems pretty good

That's gonna be an annoying card for sure. Can even be pumped as an instant.

heh xp Spike Jester looks like one of those Constructed cards that's a little under the radar - it's way better than Chainwalker, which has seen play in some mono-red decks.

yes, that card is potentially quite good. haste is one of the best abilities in constructed because creatures don't live that long

jesus, Craterhoof is now worth 15 tix online. wish I wasnt so stupid when I did AVR and just sold everything

well i couldnt have predicted that one either

whoa, I just noticed that if you play every common evolve creature in order (Cloudfin/Shambleshark/Crocanura/Anemones/Snapjaw) that you hit every evolve trigger. cool

GTC Phantom Sealed is starting to make me hate myself. I can't seem to catch a break with this thing.

I think I need to admit that I'm just not very good at GTC.

Yeah I constantly 1-2 those things with wonky Simic/Gruul decks. I never seem to get like 5-6 of the good common Orzhov guys like everyone else does and my Boros is often garbage. Or I get like 18 cards to a good Dimir deck. I have real terrible luck with getting Gates that match the colors I want to play, too!

even when I get a decent pool, I seem to undermine myself by mis-clicking or letting time run out

gatecrash is also not a very good sealed set. play some RTR sealed, it's more fun

yeah rtr sealed is 10x more fun

had a pretty nuts deck in paper draft today:

frontline medic
wrecking ogre
gift of orzhova
boros charm
3 x daring skyjek
2 x wojek
sunhome guildmage
3x syndic of tithes
3x court street denizen
skynight
warmind infantry
cinder elemental
armored transport
martial glory
righteous charge
angelic edict

yeah the boros decks ended up being the most fun to play but they are never ever open on mtgo

complete spoiler is up on the wizards site - haven't looked through much of it yet but i am v v excited to draft this set

this is gonna be rad

great cards all around

feel like the rtr guilds might be slightly ahead overall

maw of the obzedat is my fav art in a long time. is it a cat?!

card is sweet too. there are really just gems the whole set around. draft is gonna be great fun, and a total deckbuilding exercise as opposed to GTC which was completely a signal reading exercise

looking at the full set guild by guild, i'm noticing that each guild has exactly one multicolored creature at common. none of them are particularly good. meanwhile, all of the multicolored guild cards are at uncommon, and the stable of uncommons is really quite solid.

meanwhile, we have a range of monocolored commons. their power level is lower than the uncommons, but they only commit you to one color.

the tradeoff thus becomes: do we spread ourselves thin taking a spread of powerful uncommons/rares early, and then hoping we can zero in on a playable 23 cards later? or do we settle in on one color/guild at a time? or do we adopt the "gobble up the early guildgates" strategy? i think each of those approaches could prove fruitful or disastrous.

this draft environment is really really really gonna reward going in with a specific vision of what you want your deck to look like. every pick is going to be incredibly challenging. GTC rewarded play skills, DGM is gonna reward draft skills. we're gonna need to know the archetypes inside and out to have any success with this.

i really don't think there are going to be archetypes per se, i would hope/expect it to just be really fluid and most decks will trend towards midrange so you'll want to look for card-level synergies to get you ahead. also you should be drafting the gates pretty high and if other people aren't you can really take advantage of that by setting yourself up to steal all the individually powerful cards in packs 2 and 3

thought about this more and there definitely are archetypes still but they're more about what your deck is doing than about rigid gameplans like in the single set formats. like for example there's the +1/+1 counter abuse deck but that could be simic+golgari or it could be one of the two simic colors plus rakdos, or it could be simic plus one of the two rakdos colors. likewise, there will be the aggro deck which is probably going to want to have boros and/or rakdos in it for the cheap above-curve creatures but the other half could be azorius, gruul, or even izzet which all have mechanics that punch damage through in different ways.

I really have no idea what this'll be like but a lack of too many "junk" commons + the 15th slot being a dual land instead of a basic means that DGM will likely have a lot of influence on your final deck and honestly I just don't see 2 color decks working

2 color's not supposed to work, its supposed to be 3 by default. so 2 would be equivalent to playing a mono-color deck in most normal formats, which is only very occasionally viable

i'm trying to envision a scenario where you could hit one guild super hard but it just doesn't seem possible. what's going to be interesting is that if you go like Red/Blue/White then you get Boros in GTC and then Azorius and Izzet in RTR, so you have to hit RTR hard even though it's the 3rd pack. also all that artifact destruction may be nice with the Cluestones floating around.

my problem is going to be keeping it to 3 colors and not always going for 4 or 5.

btw i think the cluestones will be just okay and you won't want to load up on them too hard, they're just mid-pack picks to flesh out the manabase of a more midrangey/controlling deck. they're worse than the keyrunes, for comparison, and you never really wanted more than 2 keyrunes in your deck. the gates are the strong fixers in this block and should go much earlier in draft.

and going for 4 or 5 colors seems fine, just make sure you prioritize mana fixing and keep your early game plays to 2 or 3 colors with the rest of the colors being cards that are strong mid-to-late game plays or removal that you don't mind potentially getting stuck in your hand until turn 8 or whatnot.

The guilds in orig Ravnica were a bit more uniform in speed and play. Boros and Rakdos, for example, weren't nearly as aggressive as they are in GTC and RTR iirc. So all decks tended toward midrange or control, and that was especially true once the full block was in play and you were forced to play 3 colors. Like you mention, cider, this set is gonna be interesting because unlike orig Ravnica there are guilds that pair well in style of play like Boros/Rakdos or Gruul/Rakdos, but there's so many combinations that it won't boil down to easy archetypes. I think this'll be a very challenging, freeform set to draft, with lots of opportunity for savvy players to put together synergies. I'm excited!

What's also interesting in that in both the combos I mentioned, the third guild of the triad doesn't match the same style of play, but probably has cards that would fit well into the deck. Yeah this is gonna be a fun block.

Yeah I'm already thinking of Izzet/Dimir with Guttersnipes and Cipher cards. So yeah Rakdos isn't going to fit in that well but every guild has those sort of cards (like say, Auger Spree) that are good enough to fit anywhere.

I do think the Cluestones are at least on par with the Keyrunes, which I never really activated too much anyway. They seem like back-end picks to me that are basically there to prevent mana screw. That said I wonder if having all this ramp and midranging everything makes something like Totally Lost a much higher pick.

there are really very few aggressive commons here. even the common battalion dude is just a 2/2 that gets lifelink. the unleash guy just becomes a 2/3 flyer. meanwhile there is like a 1U 0/5, a 1B 1/3, and so on. I think this'll be a good two turns slower than pure GTC.

i did my number crunching on this format already and the numbers came out a bit slower than 3x RTR or M13, but still faster than ROE

so my first take - golgari, simic seem much more playable, dimir, orzhov, esper far less playable than before.

yeah i mostly agree with that. i also think izzet and azorius will play really strong due to having a lot of cards that break board stalls. like if everyone's just dropping 2/4s and 3/5s that bounce off each other and games stall out with big boards on both sides, then something like teleportal suddenly reads "you win the game". i don't know if this is actually what the format will look like in practice though

in particular i think the izzet play pattern from RTR is going to be the best plan for making aggressive decks work, though it doesn't necessarily require izzet cards, just the ability to put a bunch of power on the board and then use light disruption spells to get a couple heavy hits in

i am guessing orzhov takes the hardest hit of any guild in playability

there are lots of teleportal equivalents too, gridlock, gruul charm and now gruul war chant

yeah orzhov depended on getting a critical quantity of extort and a critical quantity of removal and you're not gonna get that w/ the dgm and rtr packs

yeah with only one common extorter in DGM it looks like you can't count on getting more than 3 extort cards. i'm sure orzhov will live in some way though. it looks like most limited decks will be a combination of 2 or 3 strategies.

im interested in an orzhov-based hand destruction deck probably W/B/r i guess? i was always looking for shrieking affliction decks to be open in rtr and there are a few additions in the other sets. biggest downside is not getting access to multiple afflictions tho so it may not work.

i also think izzet and azorius will play really strong due to having a lot of cards that break board stalls

yeah i was thinking izzet is the best bet for the prerelease since it has a bunch of really nice synergies btw the various touching guilds and i think it has the most flexibility. i cant really tell what the initial default is going to be for people - my inclination is to use a single color as a base and then build around that taking any gates p high and looking to take any solid multicolor card that shares my base. but maybe thats too narrow a strategy?

so there are apparently ways to play this on cockatrice if anyone is interested

yep, works

http://www.woogerworks.com/
http://www.anothermagicblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/dragons-maze-on-cockatrice.html

from a 2 draft sample size, this format is insanely slow

fennel your cockatrice first impressions infodump for gatecrash was incredibly valuable so if you end up playing this a bunch please do the same