i've had a good RG aggro deck but red's been a supporting color in all my other good ones iirc
― ciderpress, Thursday, 3 November 2016 01:29 (seven years ago) link
tonight's 3-0 draft deck: http://i.imgur.com/2xdBTO6.png
― ciderpress, Thursday, 3 November 2016 04:58 (seven years ago) link
v nice. see, i would've 100% played the prism and had another card that doesn't really do anything.
― Roberto Spiralli, Thursday, 3 November 2016 13:14 (seven years ago) link
i boarded in prism along with the incendiary sabotage vs aggro which was effective - prism doesn't do enough in 2 color decks though unless you're way heavier on artifact synergies
― ciderpress, Thursday, 3 November 2016 13:36 (seven years ago) link
Inventors Goggles strikes me as very very good in that deck - think the auto-equip is a lot better than it looks there since you often just curve into it.
How did Aether Tradewinds play in that deck? Its cool to get a bounce + re-cast some energy dude but that scenario doesn't seem to really play out to my advantage too often.
― frogbs, Thursday, 3 November 2016 15:00 (seven years ago) link
I take Prism pretty highly but don't always play it. With Serpent, Aether Tradewinds, Quicksmith, Era, and a couple double-colored cards, I'd play it in cider's deck though, probably over Rebuff, which is a card I always get trapped in hand. Nice deck though
― Vinnie, Thursday, 3 November 2016 15:01 (seven years ago) link
yeah I'm very anti counterspells in general in Limited, though Ceremonious Rejection has actually been ok in my maindeck a few times
― frogbs, Thursday, 3 November 2016 15:02 (seven years ago) link
I'm rarely excited to play them maindeck, but some are great in the right machup. Same goes for pinpoint discard effects like Duress. Stuff with riders like Dissipate and Harsh Scrutiny I'll play more readily
― Vinnie, Thursday, 3 November 2016 15:17 (seven years ago) link
xp tradewinds was the card i boarded out for more relevant stuff every match but it did win me some game 1s by protecting chandra
rebuff was just in becuase i was light on 2s and wanted to reduce my chance of getting run over, its not a card i'm generally looking to play. prism would certainly be preferable if i had like one more 2-drop creature
― ciderpress, Thursday, 3 November 2016 15:33 (seven years ago) link
in general I'm friendlier to the 4- and 5-mana counterspell effects that come with decent upsides (for example the generate 3 clues one, from SOI) - they just never play well early game to me, but can be game-changers later on
not sure what to think of Harsh Scrutiny - in general I'm not big on cards that only really work well when they're in your opening hand. still, see their hand + nab their best creature + scry is pretty good for one mana
― frogbs, Thursday, 3 November 2016 15:36 (seven years ago) link
peregrine drake got an emergency ban in pauper fyi
― ciderpress, Thursday, 3 November 2016 15:43 (seven years ago) link
Confirm Suspicions was legit good, but you can put Investigate 3 on almost any card and it becomes good
xp what I dislike about Rebuff is that even when you have it in solely for that purpose, not to get run over, your opponent can play a vehicle or artifact creature. maybe it's worked for you but I haven't had much luck with the card
― Vinnie, Thursday, 3 November 2016 15:49 (seven years ago) link
yeah I have no problem inserting iffy 2-mana counterspells if I don't have many 2 drops, but a lot of decks seem to play 4-5 artifacts and many of those are 2 and 3 drops so yeah
― frogbs, Thursday, 3 November 2016 20:48 (seven years ago) link
Finally gave in and went for the full midrange UW flash deck and it absolutely destroyed FNM. I lost my first game after a mulligan to 5 and then didn't lose again all night. Don't know why I resisted it fir so long.
― Al Moon Faced Poon (Moodles), Saturday, 5 November 2016 03:49 (seven years ago) link
the secret is that it plays 4 gideon and 4 avacyn, the strongest cards in the format
― ciderpress, Saturday, 5 November 2016 03:53 (seven years ago) link
I only own 3 of each and have been playing them all along. The big change for me was dropping Rattlechains and Nebelgast for Reflector Mage, Thalia, and some more removal and counters.
― Al Moon Faced Poon (Moodles), Saturday, 5 November 2016 03:58 (seven years ago) link
another blue draft deck, another 3-0 http://i.imgur.com/nz9SaA1.png
― ciderpress, Monday, 7 November 2016 04:18 (seven years ago) link
very nice
― Al Moon Faced Poon (Moodles), Monday, 7 November 2016 06:27 (seven years ago) link
as much as things have been going well for me with standard, I've really been struggling with getting a grip on kaladesh drafts. I'm really trying to be more disciplined and draft cards that are synergistic instead of just jamming cards I like into a deck and hoping it pans out. I definitely think this is a format that really pays off a coherent strategy more than just good stuff.
― Al Moon Faced Poon (Moodles), Monday, 7 November 2016 06:29 (seven years ago) link
indeed - feel like I've been going into Boros a lot with very mixed results. the cards are all good but it just runs out of gas. I think having multiple good 2- and 3-drops with 3 toughness is a real problem for that deck. on the other hand the decks based around energy and/or +1/+1 counters seem to work pretty well for me. and yeah I'm starting to think blue is pretty underrated in general.
― frogbs, Monday, 7 November 2016 14:16 (seven years ago) link
i think red is the trap color in this set, not blue
― ciderpress, Monday, 7 November 2016 14:38 (seven years ago) link
yep. Red has Welding Sparks which is probably the best common but other than that how many above average commons has it got?
― frogbs, Monday, 7 November 2016 14:42 (seven years ago) link
also had a 3-0 draft over the weekend with a blue deck. don't know if i can claim any greater insight into the format, but i do know that using saheeli's artistry to copy verdurous gearhulk twice is decent.
― Roberto Spiralli, Monday, 7 November 2016 14:48 (seven years ago) link
it's possible blue is underdrafted, so you end up finding more playables if you go into blue, even if the card quality isn't super great
― Al Moon Faced Poon (Moodles), Monday, 7 November 2016 15:22 (seven years ago) link
wow @ new draft league competitive tierhttp://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
― Roberto Spiralli, Wednesday, 9 November 2016 18:04 (seven years ago) link
yeah those will be the bulk of my magic playing once they're live
― ciderpress, Wednesday, 9 November 2016 18:22 (seven years ago) link
yeah...kaladesh may not be the right environment for me to make the switch, lol
― Roberto Spiralli, Wednesday, 9 November 2016 18:26 (seven years ago) link
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
― Roberto Spiralli, Wednesday, 9 November 2016 18:30 (seven years ago) link
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
― ( ^_^) (Lamp), Wednesday, 9 November 2016 20:54 (seven years ago) link
I also have been doing terribly at this format fwiw. something about it seems way different from your normal limited format.
― iatee, Wednesday, 9 November 2016 21:06 (seven years ago) link
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.
― Roberto Spiralli, Wednesday, 9 November 2016 21:18 (seven years ago) link
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.
― ciderpress, Wednesday, 9 November 2016 21:53 (seven years ago) link
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 :/
― ( ^_^) (Lamp), Friday, 11 November 2016 08:49 (seven years ago) link
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
― Vinnie, Friday, 11 November 2016 10:56 (seven years ago) link
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.
― frogbs, Friday, 11 November 2016 13:57 (seven years ago) link
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
― ciderpress, Friday, 11 November 2016 14:01 (seven years ago) link
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.
― Al Moon Faced Poon (Moodles), Friday, 11 November 2016 14:11 (seven years ago) link
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...
― Al Moon Faced Poon (Moodles), Friday, 11 November 2016 14:13 (seven years ago) link
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
― frogbs, Friday, 11 November 2016 14:18 (seven years ago) link
draft aether theorists!
― ciderpress, Friday, 11 November 2016 14:31 (seven years ago) link
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.
― Roberto Spiralli, Friday, 11 November 2016 14:31 (seven years ago) link
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
― ciderpress, Friday, 11 November 2016 14:34 (seven years ago) link
renegade freighter is much more obnoxious in sealed where everyone has one though
― ciderpress, Friday, 11 November 2016 14:37 (seven years ago) link
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.
― frogbs, Friday, 11 November 2016 14:51 (seven years ago) link
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
― Vinnie, Saturday, 12 November 2016 06:26 (seven years ago) link
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
― Vinnie, Saturday, 12 November 2016 06:29 (seven years ago) link
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
― frogbs, Saturday, 12 November 2016 13:26 (seven years ago) link
Oh yeah totally forgot about that one. Thanks for the reminder, and yes, looks like sealed leagues pay out way better
― Vinnie, Saturday, 12 November 2016 13:59 (seven years ago) link
tilttilttilttiltilt
― Roberto Spiralli, Sunday, 13 November 2016 01:29 (seven years ago) link
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.
― Al Moon Faced Poon (Moodles), Monday, 14 November 2016 15:34 (seven years ago) link