Magic: The Gathering C/D

Vinnie, you should write to Wizards support and ask them to reimburse you for the draft that didn't work at all. Their software is supposed to update itself to the latest version when you open the client. I wrote to them when the prerelease launch bugged out, hung repeatedly and eventually dropped me, unprompted, from the sealed event I'd entered. They refunded me twice over, since I'd asked for some consideration for the lengthy amount of time I'd lost.

I just drafted that exact Traveling Minister + Voice of the Blessed combo, heh. Haven't started playing matches, but I hope I can run it out on turn two at least once ^o^

Oh here's the support link btw: https://mtgarena-support.wizards.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Already wrote them but cheers

they're generally pretty good about refunding your draft entry if anything goes wrong

agree with a lot of these assessments. every match I seem to get into some board state reminiscent of those old "Magic: the Puzzling" articles Mark Rosewater would do for InQuest - you have so many moving pieces on the board, you know you can do something, but you can't really get through by attacking so many creatures have high toughness. I have a U/B deck going in Sealed like that...half the creatures form an engine of some kind but I'm never quite sure what I'm supposed to be doing with them. Conversely, when I do have removal it's often not clear what I'm supposed to be targeting with it. Ultimately, I just wind up winning with Hullbreaker Horror.

I guess in some respect it's a real skill testing format but I am hearing a lot of players better than me say it's poorly designed in the same way Avacyn Restored was. There's not a lot of good removal and there are a bunch of backbreaking rares. Also, idk if this is just the deck I'm playing, but there are some parasitic mechanics which force you into interesting choices but aren't a lot of fun. The Blood tokens can be used for like a dozen different cards, and also you want to sac them to cycle, but my deck seems to want way more than I can produce. Several cards exile stuff from your graveyard but others want you to keep it full. There just seems to be a lot of tension within your own deck. I suppose you could make the argument that this is actually good gameplay and that recent sets tend to hold your hand way more but in my first few tries at least I'm not finding this very fun.

I do wonder if the presence of Blood tokens makes this a format you want to play 18 lands in. What are the pros doing?

people who think this set is like avacyn restored didn't play avacyn restored. the removal here is totally average for a modern limited format, and AVR was bottom 1 all time. AVR was also not a very bomby format, half the time you played your bomb it got bounced by Mist Raven and you died to commons

AVR had normal power level rares that couldn't be dealt with because there was no removal in the set, this set has some really high power level rares and normal removal which makes it more comparable to war of the spark or theros beyond death

idk I do think the removal is at least less efficient than other sets. Black has a 1 mana -2/-2 and a 4 mana one for 2BB. Red's common removal costs 5 and deals 4 damage. Blue has a -X/-0 one that I suspect is really not any good. Green's fight spell is kinda weak. White gets one that's either 2 or 6. It doesn't feel on the order of Defenstrate/Moonragers Slash/Candletrap/Duel of Dominance to me

AVR's problem was it based its Limited play around the Soulbond mechanic which I think necessitated that instant-speed removal at least was hard to come by, since it would make it too easy to blow out your opponent and make its central mechanic unfun. I guess I can't say if it really did have more bomb rares but my impression was that it was heavy on rares that were not really playable in Constructed but could utterly unravel a game in Limited if left alone for more than a turn. this set seems to have that problem too...too many rares like Tolovar's Huntmaster, where either you kill it right away and wind up a little behind, or just watch helplessly as it ruins everything

xp I think I played 18 lands in the R/B sealed deck I've already mentioned, because I had blood tokens and mana sinks (Kessig Wolfrider) and my gameplan was "Stay alive until I can find and cast my 7 mana demon." But I haven't like adopted it as a general rule

Red also has Flame-Blessed Bolt at common, and White has Sigarda's Imprisonment.

Wolf Strike is strange to me because it almost seems like an anti-Werewolf card. If you're playing werewolves, +2 power at night isn't super relevant because your creatures are already bigger than everything else. If you're U/G or G/W, though, you can potentially trade the Strike and one of your 2/2 or 3/3 dorks for a couple big beefy werewolves (as long as they don't Strike your creature in response and blow you out)

ah, forgot about the bolt

Sigara's Imprisonment is fine as alluded to above there seems to be a bigger difference in this set between removing a creature and making it useless in combat

red also has Abrade, its got 2 really good removals at common. the 4 damage one sucks but you don't need it

red, black, and white all have 2 good common removals plus an extra weaker one, green has one good one, and blue has 2 playable counterspells. pretty sure that's running above average for recent sets. MID was an outlier (and even then only for black and blue, white and red have better removal in this set imo and green is a wash)

(for comparison, in AVR red had one good common removal and all other colors had 0)

if youre playing sealed as usual, maybe your pools have just sucked removal-wise. i promise it's there

that could be true, I don't look at spoilers and I didn't even see Abrade yet

to be clear I don't mean to imply this is as bad as AVR but in my limited experience it does bring back that feeling of "what's that do, holy shit that's bad for me, I don't think I have a single card in my deck that can deal with that" a lot. or maybe I'm just running into too many Sorins :)

yeah basically i'm trying to say that it's not AVR until you're saying "I don't think I have a single card in my deck that can deal with that" about commons and not rares

personally i'm just glad to finally have a set where none of the 10 color pairs is a trap, its been a while

I was playing draft the other day and thinking 'should I really keep discarding lands for these blood tokens? What if i draw my DREADFEAST DEMON, I'm going to want those lands!'

Currently sitting at 3-2 with that deck, obviously I'm going to lose the next match but it's been fun.

xp re: Two playable counterspells in Blue -- every single time I have put Syncopate in a deck & drawn it, it's like some kind of alarm goes off in my opponent's head and they play around it perfectly. I've literally never countered a relevant threat with. I don't *think* I'm telegraphing it, but... I guess I must be? Since they don't even get the telltale Arena priority stick until there is something on the stack that I can target.

yeah there shouldn't be a priority tell for counterspells, just suspicious open mana. obviously cards like syncopate get way better the more instant speed things you have in your deck since you don't lose your mana when they play around it

I mean if you F6 a bunch (pass all priority) or whatever the Arena equivalent is and then you suddenly don't it's an obvious tell that you've got something

counterspells are weird in these sets b/c blue doesn't really have much night/day stuff and passing the turn to counter something can really hurt you in fact

the white wrath effect in this set seems particularly good/brutal

I don't know what level of players you're getting paired against, Bernard, but I think the higher you go, the more players play around counterspells. And Syncopate in particular is a good one to play around, because 1) unlike, say, Wash Away, there are windows where it's easy to play around and 2) it exiles, which is quite relevant this set. And unfortunately there is kind of an Arena tell, which is that the pause only happens when there's a spell on the stack. So if my opponent is holding up UU, I will cast a spell that won't tap me out (if I have the luxury) and if there's a pause there but not at beginning of combat, you can be sure they're holding Syncopate

Feeling quite pleased with myself -- In my last draft, I first-picked Dying to Serve (black enchantment, whenever you discard a card create a tapped 2/2 zombie token, limit 1x per turn), which I've been wanting to play with to see if it can be good in a deck full of ways to make blood tokens. I didn't want to force it, but when I got passed a second Bloodtithe Harvester in pack 2, I realized Black/Red Vampires was open and buckled in.

Somewhere along the way, I also managed to snag the busted mythic uncommon Dormant Grove (green enchantment, put a +1/+1 counter on a creature every combat, transforms into a creature and gives your whole team vigilance if the thing you put the counter on has toughness 6 or greater), plus enough mana-fixing to splash for it. I ended up with an absolute beast of a deck that went 7-1 (one loss could have been a win had I not badly misplayed, saccing my Bloodtithe Harvester to try and kill something with 3 toughness... when I only had one blood token on the board)

Full list:
1x Blood Fountain B

2x Doomed Dissenter 1B
1x Mindleech Ghoul 1B
1x Ragged Recluse 1B
2x Bloodtithe Harvester BR
1x Wedding Invitation 2

1x Dying to Serve 2B
1x Blood Hypnotist 2R
1x Bloody Betrayal 2R
1x Honeymoon Hearse 2R
1x Vampires' Vengeance 2R
2x Blood Servitor 3
1x Foreboding Statue 3

1x Bloodcrazed Socialite 3B
2x Bleed Dry 2BB
1x Dormant Grove 3G

2x Falkenrath Celebrants 4R

1x Grisly Ritual 5B

6x Swamp
6x Mountain
2x Forest
2x Evolving Wilds
1x Voldaren Estate

okay hmm I guess that's not how hidden text tag works

Yeah, nice when the synergy comes together

I'm about eight drafts in and not feeling this set much but hard to put my finger on why. Maybe the gameplay is not novel enough? I'm not totally sick of it yet but I suspect I'll be calling it early on this format. Tho there is going to be a draft Arena Open next month, which is enticing me to practice

yeah I think a lot of people feel the same way. I've heard a lot of grouching about this set. feel like it might play better once you get used to it. one thing I will say is the -13/-13 instant exiling the creature seems super relevant - there are just so many death triggers/ways to bring things back. it deals with a bunch of those rares that otherwise would just win you the game.

my current pool has 3 Ancient Lumberknot and 3 Sheltering Boughs. so that's pretty fun, at least

i dont think its a total dud of a set but i dont really feel like playing it since there's not enough good new stuff. the vampire/blood deck is new but pretty much every other color pair is stuck doing a less fun/impactful version of what they were doing in the last set. except for exploit which is a retread of a mechanic i didn't like much the first time around

well the Lumberknot deck is something new at least

had a fun game recently, I managed to stabilize and get into a winning position, then my opponent plays Avabruck Caretaker and I go from "I think it's okay as long as this isn't some totally busted rare" to "wow, that's pretty bad for me" to "holy shit it comes into play flipped and does WHAT!??"

Yeah that's pretty much my exact feeling, cider

Caretaker is such a stupid ass card

luckily its a mythic and my one time running into it they played it into my counterspell

Note to WoTC make it uncounterable next time

Btw am I the only one who needs to read the Cleave cards four times to understand what they do? I find the design weirdly unintuitive when at the end of the day it’s the same split/modal design they do every year

It totally is unintuitive. It's a popular mechanic among amateur designers because it's clever but I think it reads worse than their usual way of wording it, and I'm disappointed that they made it into real cards. I just end up memorizing what the cards do. Liked this parody of the mechanic: https://i.imgur.com/IBXDQth_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

Cleave just seems silly,they should have just made them kicker cards

This set has a lot of bombs. Too many maybe?

I tried a BU exploit deck and thought it was pretty good but it didn't work out for me

lol Vinnie that gives me such a headache but bravo

I am having a lot of fun with this set so far! For anyone who's burned out on drafting, I would recommend giving Sealed a try. Opening 6 rares makes it much more likely that you'll have a bomb rare to play with, but so will your opponents. There's a lot of strategy that goes into building your deck, and you can end up with some very funky builds that use cards you wouldn't normally play (or wouldn't normally play *together*) in a draft deck.

As an example: I am 4-1 with my current white/black sealed deck. I opened Halana and Alena, which is a legit game-breaking bomb rare; but all of my good removal was in white and most of my other good creatures were in black, so I ultimately decided not to play the best card in my pool. Instead, I went all-in on vampires and lifegain synergies, which then dictated the shape of my creature curve: I'm less worried about having two-drops to trade with theirs and prevent early damage, since I can easily gain 4+ life every turn once I get my Restless Bloodseeker + Gluttonous Guest + Heron of Hope engine online. And I ended up playing a Nebelgast Beguiler, which is generally too expensive to be good in draft, but fills multiple roles in my deck as a big ground blocker as well as a piece of pseudo-removal in case my opponent manages to draw out all my hard removal spells before playing their bomb.

I don't have a problem with the Cleave cards, but lol @ that parody.

Avabruck Caretaker is ridiculous, it was very satisfying when someone played it against me in standard the other day, but far too late in the game for it to matter (also it still dies to 1/1s with deathtouch).

encountered another incredibly stupid card: Toxrill. if you don't counter it and can't remove it right away, what the hell are you supposed to do?

Dreadfeast Demon is another stupid one, where you pretty much have to counter it or have Bleed Dry up to survive

I hadn't played with Toxrill until today, and had to laugh at two stupid things I'd hadn't caught until playing with it. 1) that it triggers EVERY end step, not just on the controller's turn and 2) that the slugs can be sacked for cards. both are egregiously unnecessary additions to a card that's already a bomb. in the couple games I faced Toxrill before, I was too demoralized to even notice those details

its so fucking dumb. I guess its at least kinda nice that it doesn't put on actual -1/-1 counters, so if you manage to kill it on your turn you might wind up okay. that said you probably won't be holding hard removal by the time it lands. and if you can't kill it, its kind of hard to envision a realistic board scenario where you can still win after they play it. at least the Demon is just one creature that they can only trade 1-for-1 with, so if you've got a big board advantage you can still maybe get through.

first game I encountered Toxrill I had a huge advantage so I was like, "dont care about this" and then watched as my entire board got decimated after a single turn. second time I had 5 creatures out and they had none, I was up 28-2 in life, and still scooped immediately after my next draw was not my single Bleed Dry.

Yeah that was one of my games today. Behind on board, behind on cards, think I was at like 4 life? First end step got me two slugs and after they didn't draw a removal spell, they had no shot and scooped. It's like the stupidly busted cards I designed when I first started playing the game in 8th grade

I feel like there are about 8 ludicrous bombs in this set but can only think of toxrill and dreadfeast off the top of my head. both have done for me.

I have only drafted this 4 times thus far because I have done so badly in all my drafts that I don't win hardly any gems

look at the flip side of Avabruck Caretaker it's arguably worse than either of those - "all your permanents have hexproof" get the fuck outta here

Caretaker might be the worst because of how hard it is to answer. Even the Day side is extremely good. My list of kill-them-immediately-or-lose bombs:

Avabruck Caretaker
Hullbreaker Horror
Toxrill
Dreadfeast Demon
Olivia

But the tier below that is the problem imo, where you get repeated card advantage or will end the game in 2-3 turns:

Sorin
Cemetary Desecrator
Henrika
Manaform Hellkite
Volatile Arsonist
Savior of Ollenbock
Welcoming Vampire
Glorious Sunrise
Bloodvial Purveyor
Wedding Announcement
Howlpack Piper
Eruth
Halana and Elena
Torens
Anje

It feels like there's a very wide gulf between these cards and the other rares/uncommons/commons imo. I'm not sure how it compares to other sets but it has felt like a higher percentage of my games have been decided by who draws their bomb

God, I keep having Toxrill stories: today, I was up on board, opponent dead on board but both of us low on life. then my opponent played Toxrill. I lost three creatures, they went up three slugs, and I said to myself, if I don't draw my Bleed Dry exactly, I'm going to concede. I did draw my Bleed Dry so I killed it, but at this point, it was almost even on board. they alpha'd and had the pump spell to make me dead to the stupid slugs!

thats fun, draw your one out and still lose cuz the card is that good

anyway one thing about that list is that Olivia isn't necessarily a game winner on its own, you need stuff in your graveyard which may not be there for a number of reasons.

Wedding Announcement can be a pretty nutso card - feel like I never lose when I play it

That's a good point about Olivia and maybe it belongs in the second list, but I think it's very common to have at least one creature in the graveyard by the time you get Olivia down. Last week, my opponent played Olivia, pulled a Diregraf Scavenger out, drained me, and I traded with the Scavenger. Then I realized that the creatures Olivia brings back only get exiled when Olivia dies, not if you kill them. So next turn they did it again haha

Yeah I've never beaten Wedding Invitation and I've won every game I've played it