Magic: The Gathering C/D

it is supposed to have drafts available on launch

I'm still trying to figure out the best option for two pre-constructed decks that are balanced and fun. These look interesting?

http://www.cardkingdom.com/catalog/shop/battle-decks

iconic masters cards are starting to get shared. new resto and kamigawa dragons art looks super nice

xxp

I'm under the impression that it is still an open question whether that means full drafts or something closer to HS arena mode

oh i see what you mean. would be a hell of a bait and switch if they said draft and then it wasn't real booster draft.

actually think several of those sound like a blast jordan but impossible to tell how balanced they'd be. tho for the price you could get 3 or 4 and see which played best.

I've never seen these 3rd party precons before - curious if they actually put anywhere close to $10 worth of cards in them or if it's just a way to move bulk. Card kingdom has enough of a reputation that id be surprised if they were complete ripoffs.

I guess being 3rd party gives them latitude to include a bunch of cheap rares and get more powerful decks out of it whereas wotc can't acknowledge that some rares are in lower demand than others.

arena seems more fun to play than mtgo already - I don't care if it looks exactly like HS and the similar games. from the preview, I saw a number of things that seemed well thought-out, like having the buttons say things appropriate to their context rather than just "ok" or "yes", and showing the suggested mana payment if you drag the card out but don't cast, in addition to the many visual tricks they are borrowing from other games. I am dubious that this will co-exist nicely alongside mtgo like they say - if they implement std and draft well enough, seems like that would essentially kill mtgo

I wonder whether arena would be better with booster draft against other players or Hearthstone-style draft. I mean, implemented right, they could work almost the same, and the advantage of HS-style is that you can go as fast as you want. I'm assuming the games would be league-style anyway so that it doesn't matter who you draft against

sounds like they are committed to having regular booster draft on arena so the possibility of exploring alternative draft approaches would presumably depend on numbers. if a HS-style option doesn't threaten the reliability of booster drafts firing i can imagine them trying it. i just listened to the latest LR episode with the ex-host who is now on the digital team and they seem to be p openly exploring the intersection of traditional magic and the innovations of the digital only ccg world.

i don't usually like tribal sets but Ixalan looks very tight so far

as long as it feels like there are sufficient directions to take a draft. the development article yesterday was interesting in explaining how they tried to give the 2 color pairs within the 3 colour tribes their own identity but we'll see how well that was realized

yeah i was reassured by stoddard's claim that they were intentionally trying to fall well short of lorwyn style critical mass tribal

yes I was also glad to see that (though I think Lorwyn was fun to play with, if not very interesting to draft)

my first impression is that this is going to be a weird set for limited

the treasure tokens are interesting since it enables 5c blue instead of green's usual monopoly on being the base color for that archetype

blue also has better aggro cards than it usually gets. good set for blue all around

aggressively costed fliers and tons of tempo plays in blue. looks like that will be what 'aggro' is in this format. hard to tell how reliable treasure will be to support 5c or even just 2/3 card splashes, there is scant other fixing.

control-ish decks probably want to start in white or black for the abundant lifegain. white preferably because you have some dino payoff built in. black looks like kind of a mess, may only be a supporting color for one of its two tribal types.

there sure are a lot of 2-drops in this set

set seems fun so far but the merfolk deck is the most frustrating to play against limited deck they've made in years

My prerelease involved lots of long board stalls, that mostly ended with someone landing a giant dino.

my draft games haven't stalled at all but they've mostly involved blue which has a ton of evasion in this set

3 good fliers and an unblockable at common, plus the aggressively costed flying aura

1 draft, 1 trophy. think i may retire. p sure i've already seen the most the format has to offer.

https://i.imgur.com/BWajvVS.jpg

^^^ilx needs a "like" function

People seem to be really down on it.
Is it as bad as everyone says?

Having not done a single draft but having watched several, it doesn't look promising to me. in what I watched, there were not many tough decisions to make while drafting OR playing. gameplay was pretty run-of-the-mill, not far from a core set. few strong build-arounds to encourage weird decks. I'd love to be wrong and I still intend to hit up the sealed Hong Kong GP in October

some ppl were saying it was one of the worst sets, or the actual worst set, within like 2 days of the prerelease, which you can draw your own conclusions about. it looks to me like they sacrificed raw power for synergy, but the synergy is also not particularly strong. i think there are a limited amount of decks there but they do seem p fun. so for the limited directions to go and the lack of build-arounds i suspect it will not have staying power, but i think it should be okay in the meantime.

my prediction (of course) is that rivals will be a significant improvement and the legacy of the 2 set block era going into the 1 set block era will be that the BBA formats were all, or nearly all, better than the respective AAA formats

so far i don't think it's that bad, just average

It seems bad in comparison to HOU drafts which were great. Cycling really is the most interesting mechanic.

Most of my success in XLN draft so far has come from black red pirate aggro, but I think blue green tempo is the strongest archetype. Dinosaur decks seem way too slow.

have been doing a few sealed leagues because i'm planning to play the mocs monthly on sunday. unsurprisingly, a synergy set does not make for a great sealed format. you can actually get a reasonable amount of fixing in green and blue especially but the synergy focus plus the depressed power level means you can easily have a pool with nothing powerful in it to splash. so far i actually think the best colour combo might be golgari, which is funny given that pair's technical omission from the set.

speaking of the omitted colour pairs, i'm sure everyone has figured this out now but favorable winds is the missing WU 'gold' common. that deck is very good. i guess the chupacabra is the BG one, although grim captain's call kinda sorta fits too. i'm not rushing the break the BG explore archetype in draft anytime soon tho.

hey did any of you guys end up going to gp pvd? how did you get on?

haha yeah my team flamed out and couldn't convert 5-2 to d2. we def put too many lands in two decks. I think explore and treasures make it really hard to have 'the right' manabase in this format.

oof sorry man. v much agree on the challenge with land count.

what decks did you put together?

we had one very good dinosaurs deck w/ huatli + settle the wreckage, one pretty good BR pirates deck that I played and one mediocre UG merfolk tempo deck that could steal matches from bad players but was underpowered. my deck needed to be 16 lands and the merfolk deck actually needed to be 15 lands. I got pretty unlucky regardless - I had some good rares (captivating crew, barrage) but I was basically never in a spot to really benefit from them - I had captivating crew on board twice over 9 rounds, once as a chump blocker, and once in a game where he resolved the draw 7. I drew into 9/10 lands so many times in the tournament that I lost count.

I think our cardpool was solid, so mostly bummed about misbuilding our decks / getting fairly unlucky. I didn't even feel like I made many in-game misplays since I just didn't have any opportunities to. with such an enormous sideboard I think there's lots of room to 'misplay' in not boarding in the right 8 cards - I think that's the area where the pros really get their edge in this format.

one weird thing was how everyone seemed to match our seating configuration - our dino deck was center, and he played against like 5-6 dino decks. I played pirates and played against 5-6 pirate decks.

huh that is weird. and i guess the way the tribes are distributed you are almost guaranteed everyone has 1 dino deck, 1 pirate, and then whatever's best out of what's left. also, variance in team sealed for this type of set has to be huge, some people are just going to open disgusting full-on synergy decks.

ha yeah we sat next to PGO r7 at 5-2 and next to PVD/Stark/Efro r8 and I was like "well if these guys are doing horribly too, maybe all that matters is whether you open up an insane tribal pool" - d2 results seemed to suggest otherwise...

I'm thinking of locking in ramunap as my deck choice for the pt, it seems like the format probably won't be broken in any other direction by then and the deck seems easier to play than temur emergy.

as long as people aren't maindecking hate i think that deck will be good

It's a reasonable choice, although I think energy is stronger. But then I've been playing an assortment of control varieties, so what do I know?

I feel like red gives me the best chance at just getting lucky and hazoreting people out, whereas energy requires playing super well. I have still played 0 games of standard in my life fwiw, though I'm gonna start grinding leagues soon I guess.

my other plan is to have everyone pass me this deck again:

https://i.imgur.com/qAG9AfB.jpg

I think Ramunap is a good choice for someone with not much experience. I played Block Constructed Robots at PT Nagoya for the same reason: I never play constructed, it was easy to play, it required little format knowledge. OTOH, my 4-color control deck at the next PT was a train wreck because I never knew what was a threat. If I ever make it back to the PT, I'm just playing the easiest deck

i suspect this red deck is harder to play than most standard RDWs

seems like all the pros are pretty dismissive about remunap now...

There are some good options for lifegain, good answers to Hazoret, and ways to blow up their deserts
All combined, red is definitely weaker in current standard.

rdw is always better than people say it is

yeah also everyone agreeing that it's bad might actually make it a good time to play it

https://www.channelfireball.com/articles/mono-red-at-worlds/

pvddr comments at the end basically boil down to red is still just fine, tier 1, although he wouldn't necessarily recommend it