Magic: The Gathering C/D

the removal seems mostly crappy this time around. is it still always high pick just cause it's removal? the 1RR lightning bolt esp tough if you're running 3 colors and red isn't your base, I would think.

the thing with Frostburn is that he buys you so much time, throwing a wrench into the early game plans of G/W and B/R, since they can both drop a lot of early 3-power creatures. he trades with nearly any creature you'll see if you have mana open and if he goes unblocked you can get him up to 4. really great value for a two-drop.

one card I'd be interested to try is Stealer of Secrets. seems like Azorius has so many ways to temporarily wipe out blockers. Not just all the detain stuff, but there is also Arrest and two commons that bounce creatures (the instant one is very good vs. populate)

nah its still fine unless your red is just a small splash. the 2 red burn spells, stab wound, auger spree, trostani's judgment are all high picks just for being good removal, even if they're awkward in various ways

also one card which is non-obviously insane is Thoughtflare. its not good in aggro and there might be a couple other uncommons that are better than it but if i'm midrange or control i'm going to windmill slam it almost every time, and will happily splash it as my only blue card

anyway if it wasnt obvious, this format seems pretty difficult - maybe not quite as difficult as 3x innistrad, but yeah don't be discouraged if your first few draft decks fail to do anything

haha on saturday i realized at the end of pack two i had 15 playables at a stretch and... 8 guildgates :/

stuff i have realized: goblin electromancer is really good but requires some work, unleash seems like it ends up overdrafted, blue slightly underdrafted, non-flying evasion is really important.

one thing I'm kinda realizing is that Golgari doesn't really have a whole lot of synergy. you can build up creatures but when you look at the commons it has there is little outside of the Imp that really WANTS those +1/+1 counters. I have a hunch that G/B is a trap unless it's part of a 3-color splash, but can't say for sure.z

yeah golgari is probably the weakest guild and is definitely the guild that most wants to be the lots of colors / ramp deck, the hard part is finding an endgame that actually goes over the top. big ground guys don't really do it.

I do like how Scavenge is built in card advantage, but the creatures are often trading down so it's not really a huge thing. It reminds me of M13 blue or AVR white, you can really do well with it if you get enough bomb-ass uncommons and rares - but many of them will be splashed by Rakdos and Selesnya players, so first-picking a Golgari Guildmage seems like it can really lead to an ineffective deck with a weak early game and a bad late game, with Guildmage functioning as your best card. That said it really worked well for me, but I think my deck was kind of a fluke.

on the contrary, i think the guildmage is the exact type of card you need but could have trouble getting - the golgari cards are interchangably good at generating board stalls but can't break them

What I'm saying is that the Guildmage is excellent but the deck as a whole is not going to be good without other power uncommons and rares, and you can't count on them coming to you. On the other hand you can build good Selesnya or Rakdos decks that use 18-20 commons. First picking the Guildmage can certainly pay off but I think you're also kinda likely to be first-picking a Drudge Beetle in pack 3, wondering how things went so wrong. Unless of course you splash red or white.

I think Golgari is going to have trouble coming up with 23 playables, that's all

Yeah, Scavenge is less impressive than I was expecting. The best thing I can say about it is that unlike the other guild mechanics, you don't have to actively use it for it to have an effect. Just having creatures with Scavenge in play will cause your opponent to think twice about killing them (similar to Undying).

I drafted G/W/B last week and mana fixing was definitely an issue. I came up with very few gates and found myself stalling out in the early game. I guess the flipside to that is to avoid overdrafting small multicolor cards. Maybe multicolor needs to be a bigger factor after the first bunch of turns.

The Green and Black Scavengers are both different; the Green ones are generally on the curve but have a higher scavenge cost, while the Black ones are under the curve but scavenge for much cheaper. The 5B 3/3 bug is kind of interesting scavenge for only 2BB is a good deal; with Grisly Savage you can essentially draw 2 (or more) cards for BG, the second being something like "2B: put two +1/+1 counters on a creature"

does detain actually make much of a difference in games?

yep, it plays pretty well

the detain guys are way more powerful when used as goblin shortcutters instead of for stalling

like you can just tempo your opponent out of the game completely with a well timed Justiciar

it's a great mechanic when you're racing, and the cards it appears on only add like a one-mana "surcharge" for it (besides Lyev Skynight which is insane)

Have yet to do a draft but the detain cards were all very good in my experience, even the 2/1 guy.

I'm playing in a PTQ this weekend and feel hopelessly unprepared. Is there an article that lists all of the combat tricks? I remember reading one for another set a while back.

Here are the ones you'll need to watch out for:

Populate stuff - not only can it make instant-speed blockers, but they're combat tricks as well. Rootborn Defenses and Trostani's Judgement can be blowouts. The fog isn't as good but note that it only prevents damage to players, making it a little better, as they can kill exploit blocking matchups.

Swift Justice - it's been talked up a bit on this thread, I'm coming around on it since it really does do a lot for a one-mana card. I think it's one of those Unsummon/Vapor Snag things, the lifegain is just enough to make it playable.

Chorus of Might - worth noting in games where you've landlocked your opponent and are winning with flyers, because there is a common that can give your opponent a giant trampler and if you don't block conservatively enough it could cost you games you should win

Giant Growth/Savage Surge - the Surge is a lot more dangerous, keep it in mind if your opponent is making "suspicious" attacks

Common Bond - instant-speed Travel Prep

Dramatic Rescue - nerfs populate if you only have one token; if your opponent has UW open, try to have at least two tokens out before you populate, if possible

Golgari Charm - particularly "regenerate all creatures you control" and "creatures all get -1/-1"

Hussar Patrol - 2/4, 2UW, Vigilance, Flash. easy to walk into

Any others I'm missing..?

Cool, thanks for the primer. I keep forgetting that Giant Growth is in the set, feel like it's been a while since it was in a non-core set.

It can be deadly. One game I got attacked by a Centaur token, played Auger Spree on it to kill it, then he Giant Growthed it, turning it into a 10/2 which I had to eat. The lesson is, maybe play Auger Spree on your own turn vs. green.

my draft went okay last night, I went 1-2, 2-1, bye and got screwed w/ the placing, but I pulled isperia in my p2 while already drafting the colors.

phantom general is a fun little draft archetype. it's surprisingly good, especially cuz you can get stuff like seller of songbirds and eyes in the skies pretty frequently. i wonder if while everyone is falling over themselves chasing 3/3 centaur tokens, 1/1 birds can be had for a song. i played a draft on cockatrice just now, picked 4 sellers of songbirds, didn't see my collective blessing once, and still steamrolled it. the only game i lost was the one where i didn't see the phantom general.

also, rootborn defenses is really, really good. it's never been anything less than a 2 for 1 for me.

Nearly top 8'd at the PTQ on Saturday but got absolutely crushed in my last round, even with what I thought was an awesome starting hand game 1. 2 Splatter Thug, Izzet Charm, the 5 mana damage spell, 2 mountain, 1 island on the play - I'd bet on that hand to win most of the time. However, it loses to my opponent playing turn 4 Detention Sphere. :-/

Meant the 6 mana for 5 damage spell.

kinda surprised that packs of RTR are going for only 3.47 on MTGO right now. lots of money rares plus really high demand for draft

there's just so many people playing this set, it's shattered MTGO records so far. with so much supply i can't imagine the cards will be worth much until the 'best decks' for standard get established

thats kind of what i envisioned a month down the line but not right now!
I mean M13 boosters are only like 20 cents cheaper

for a late draft pick Traitorous Instinct is a hell of a beating. Turn 2 3/2 unleash, turn 3 3/4 unleash, turn 4 Instinct their blocker, whoompo

I've still only drafted rtr once cause I had to miss my normal draft / can't do fridays

are you guys liking it more or less than m13 overall?

it's more fun than m13, though also much more difficult.

I've noticed in the last couple drafts I've done that selesnya is pretty wide open, people don't seem to be drafting it. There's much more demand for izzet, Rakdos and azorius. Are you seeing the same?

Makes me think that I should just force selesnya next time instead of splitting all the Rakdos cards with folks. Does this make sense as a strategy?

i havent seen that at all - selesnya is the strongest guild so if anything people here have been overdrafting it. i guess the people at your gamestore haven't figured this out yet.

maybe its just variance. i've gotten forced into Rakdos a lot and it's worked really well. IMO Selesnya and Rakdos are the two best, Izzet and Golgari the two worst (though it's easy to splash the power cards). Azorius is somewhere in between. What it comes down to is that Selesnya and Rakdos have the best plans for turns 1-4 and are capable of starts that just overwhelm the opponent, whereas Azorius is a lot more reactive, Izzet really only plays a long game, and Golgari is too slow.

izzet only really plays a long game

oh yeah. i admit i haven't done much with Izzet, just that the cards seem to be slower. i think i've only made one 'core' Izzet deck which really just tried to build advantages over time and got crushed by faster decks (unless you get Frostburn Weird early)

that said I'm looking at Stealer of Secrets as a great late-pickup in both Izzet and Azorius. Izzet can cast a Fire/Charm/Traitourous Instinct to clear the way and Azorius has lots of detain stuff to clear blockers.

- i'm an izzet fan insofar as it pairs nicely with azorius and rakdos. the key, of course, is stealer of secrets. if you aren't running at least 2 of those izzet is probably not the guild to play, but if you can consistently get one of them out you are in a god situation.

- goblin electromancer is also good, and works really nicely with key izzet cards like traitorous/inspiration/inaction etc. the izzet creature base isn't bad either considering you have all the nice red unleash guys to pick from.

- people don't seem to realize yet how vital centaur's herald is to selesnya decks. at my draft last night i saw them tabling.

- pack rat is the best limited card i know. it's pretty much unbeatable. it works a little bit better in golgari decks with grisly salvage, stall tactics, etc, but is worth switching colors pack 3 to play. there is no reason to EVER pass this up.

- pack rat is the best limited card i know. it's pretty much unbeatable. it works a little bit better in golgari decks with grisly salvage, stall tactics, etc, but is worth switching colors pack 3 to play. there is no reason to EVER pass this up.

https://twitter.com/Juzam_/status/259715165707194368

on another note, sphere of safety is the most hardcore lockdown card in multiples (which is easy). if you get 2 out, each creature has to pay 4 to attack you, and that's not even considering any other enchantments you can play. i almost lost against this nice little combo yesterday, but managed to stab wound other d00d to death.

doing a draft now where I wound up beating this guy game 1, thanks to him drawing only 2 land. he starts to bitch about it saying stuff like "you're the best" and "oh, so it's all random right?" before concluding that mtgo wouldn't let him win because it was "my turn to win" and then...

http://i47.tinypic.com/35b86x2.png

ars arcanum RTR draft article is up: http://puremtgo.com/articles/ars-arcanum-rtr-draft-overview

some very interesting results in there, especially the guild winrates. i've been saying izzet is really good for a couple weeks now and everyone looks at me weird, but there it is.

Very interesting. one thing he didn't mention w/r/t Izzet is Traitorous Instinct, which turns an opponent's "save one blocker for Stealer/Cobblebrute" into "I just took a ton of damage". that's a card I was surprised tables so much. the +2/+0 is really big.

Izzet isn't necessarily bad; it's like Black Loner was in AVR - I think people realized straight on that Izzet had a tricky strategy and got outclassed fast, and as a result it got underdrafted, and now it has a high winrate.

One thing I noticed with Golgari is that it pairs with Selesnya and Rakdos. So 1st-picking a Golgari Guildmage with the plan of going G/W/B or B/R/G is fine. Golgari does have some excellent uncommons. Plus Grisly Savage, which is really great with Scavenge, since it's basically an Impulse with upside. I am also really liking Treasured Find.

I suspect he's correct about Voidweilder. What he says is definitely true - Man o' War type creatures are always better than they look in Limited. What follows is Dramatic Rescue can also be very good. Especially since you can nerf a populate trigger while it's still on the stack.

on tuesday I drafted a mostly golgari deck but there was soo much izzet tabling that my sideboard ended up almost being an izzet deck. also I pulled a foil niv-mizzet.

I have only drafted rtr twice at this point but playing against a strong populate deck seems...very difficult. maybe it's just my limited experience but that's the only deck that always seems to destroy me.

speaking of tempo izzet, my favourite izzet deck so far:

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/A5sr66cCAAAvzLj.png

wow, that's crazy. did you lose a game with that??

here's one I did - went 3-0 in Swiss and got a very nice rare in the process :)

http://www.raredraft.com/watch?d=3kn6i#all

almost lost my first game (to a guy that didn't submit his deck!) because i drew 14 of my 16 lands and he removed all my creatures, but after that it was relatively smooth sailing. looking at your draft i think you way undervalue knightly valor, and you seemed to go hard towards izzet and later selesnya when there was no real reason to deviate from azorius? what did your deck end up being? wu splash g?

p1p11, sure. I'm not really big on the card even though it's been doing well for me. I wanted to try the Cobblebrute/Detain/Persuit deck but it didnt quite work out. My view on Valor is that I usually don't want to play more than one and they come around often.

not sure what you mean toward "go hard towards izzet" - the 3 cards with red I took in pack 1 weren't early at the expense of good Azorius cards. I like to go 3 colors in this format since it can be tough to get 23 playables in just one combination. I like having a "main" 2-color combo which is 18-20 of your playables and then the remaining as a splash. I only wound up with 2 green cards in my deck - Centaur Healer and Loxodon Smiter. Maybe not really worth the splash for two above-average three drops? On the other hand I didn't really have too many options outside of that.

what really wound up happening is I would drop a Stealer of Secrets, then keep using Dramatic Rescue/detainers/Voidweilder/Trostani's Judgement to remove the threats. Stealer w/ Knightly Valor is very good by the way (I'm sure you know)

is dramatic rescue really that good? I mean in that context you're getting the card back w/ stealer. and I guess it kills tokens. maybe I'm just thinking about the card w/o the context of the set...