I am glad you are deciding to be a regular. Since I joined a year or so ago, I have always viewed you as one of the better writers with great perspective on strategy and well thought out card valuation.
Way to go. I also really respect your decision to stick with Pure.
So, you've been playing Magic for a month and decided to make videos and submit them as an article? I'm not trying to be harsh or anything, as you seem like a competent enough player, just wondering what compelled you to this spot after only a month of the game.
Watching AVR drafts makes my blood boil; never before have I seen so many people make so many bad picks. I am constantly shaking my head or rolling my eyes, and I don't just mean with your videos, I mean with everybody all over the net who makes these types of videos. In this video, I had to stop watching when you passed Seraph of Dawn P2P2. Well, okay, I actually stopped watching when I saw you could have had a 2nd one on the next pick. Also, passing Soul of the Harvest (a huge game winning bomb) for a mediocre 5th pick kind of card made me cringe. Earlier in pack one, picking Favorable Winds over Bad Mulldrifter was making me shake my head and roll my eyes. At any rate, thanks for making the videos, even though I didn't watch them through. Hopefully somebody will eventually make good AVR videos.
You're saying that fewer packs being given away cheaply somehow drives the prices further down? This doesn't make any sort of sense, setting aside any sort of advanced logic and looking at basic economics: supply vs. demand. As the supply of cheap packs (cheap vs. entry fee, as per article above) goes down, less packs will be available to meet the draft demand and the price will go up. That's just how things work. People who want to draft will still want to draft whether packs are 3.33 tix or 3.74 tix.... those sorts of changes don't radically change the number of events firing.
As for the idea that WotC wants you drafting... That's very incomplete. WotC wants you to spend money on MTGO. If they had some intangible gain from people drafting beyond making money, they'd just make draft free. When packs are available on the secondary market for far cheaper than they sell them for in the store, they make less money. I'm not seeing any other reason for Wizards of the Coast to want you to draft other than the fact that you'll buy tickets from the store when you want to buy packs for drafting.
On another note, pending rotation causes pack prices to tank, and has a far bigger effect on secondary market prices than supply vs. demand, in my experience.
Anyway, good article, thanks for writing it, Million.
I want part 2 now (although, i do know how it ends).
I know how you feel with RG aggro. I had a horrible weekend playing decks that I probably have no business playing.
'stick to your guns', 'mull that awful hand', and 'just f***ing kill him' are the M;tG cliches that had to be re-etched into the grey matter of my brain...
Shocklands, sorry. I mean fetch lands. I screw the 2 up.
I know the cards by picture, not name. When they are released in a set where it is triple drafted like AVR is though the Rav shock lands will be 2-3 MAX a piece, and people who play competitively will still want the originals.
Lingering Souls is an eternal card from an underdrafted set. And btw, Dismember was easily available and it was a $5 uncommon.
It won't be today, maybe when ISD/DKA becomes what SOM Block is today, but it's played in Legacy, Modern, and on modo, is played in every deck that can fit it in.
Either way, I bought them originally at 0.25, then at 0.50, and now you are lucky to find them for <$1. Luckily I found a small bot that puts up 4 a day at 0.50 a piece, so I just spend 2 tix a day and can basically manipulate the market, haha.
DKA vampires are important. At the Saturday TCQ I was at on Saturday Zombie pod was about 2% of the field, and it was based on a sac outlet. What better sac outlet is there than a 4/1 haste flyer with indestructibility.
Btw, I refuse to ever play a TCG player event ever again. I came in 9th place! 9th! God dammit!!!!!
Funny enough though 75% of the field was delver, 20% some form of RG, either aggro or ramp, 1% of some human makeup, 1% of superfriends, and 0.00000000001% of Naya Pod. Funny enough, of the 3 Naya Pod decks in the entire tournament, 1 was 15th, I came in 9th, and the 3rd deck came in 1st. Delver was only 3/8 of the top 8.
My problem with AVR draft is that there is very little to no interaction in many of the games, and the power level between all of the cards is so inconsistent that the games are nothing short of annoying. Here's a short list of what makes me never want to play this format again...
--Thatcher's Revolt + Commander/Ringleader
--Righteous Blow/Pillar of Flame being pretty terrible, when 2 damage spells should be a decent bread and butter
--The power variance in Soulbond (Druid's Familiar//Forcemage > Pathbreaker Wurm...your best Soulbond creatures should not be right in the middle, but at the top curve (Deadeye Navigator doesn't count for this example)
--Miracle being the stupidest thing created. I'm so happy I could go through setting up a position where I have a chance to win, in order for you to reveal a miracle and make it all worthless. The cards are all completely fine without being stupidly cheap. I wish they had gone with some of the original thoughts, and just given more value if you Miracled- maybe having Terminus allow you to keep 1 creature, or Wrath to do 7 damage instead of 5)
--Power level among creatures being absolutely idiotic. At common, I for 4U I can have a 3/3 on the ground, who mills someone 5 when he dies, or a 3/2 in the air who draws me a card immediately. For 2R I can get an anthem or a guy that first strikes (and gives it away). For 1W I can get a 2/1 vigilant, or I can get a guy who gets first strike. In some corner cases, there could be thought as to which choice is better in the pairs...but in general one is usually much better than the other.
--Most importantly, the bomb cards are just too swingy to want to deal with. I am undefeated in draft versus Tamiyos and Bonfires (granted, the second is because he never got to Miracle it). However, it is the exact opposite for Terminus; Devastation Tide, Wolfir Silverheart, Deadeye Navigator, etc. Yes, there are good cards that should be good.....but the way these cards completely dominate and end the game is ridiculous.
What finally set me over the edge was getting Terminus-ed earlier. I know I am a broken record, but I worked out a path to victory to have a chance against my opponent (he also had a Tamiyo out and active...). Then he topdecks Terminus, miracles it, drops the 3 creatures in his hand, and kills me the next turn. Yay. Thanks Wizards for the "fun".
I hope, HOPE, that Rav is fun for the drafting again. I have enjoyed almost every draft format recently, with the exception of Scars and SSE (though I still participated in the latter). But AVR is the first draft format that I will be legitimately boycotting from this point going forward. When Wizards Designers can make a format that is defined more by what you can draft, and less of what you can open, maybe I'll be back.
EDIT: Regarding Sphinx Bone Wand....it was a card that started off as "unplayable", but by the end of the format was a solid tier 2 strategy that you could go with if you got into it immediately. I'd say it was on the level of the Raid Bombardment/Broodmother + Spawn decks, though with either of those, you could draft the support cards and luck into the card that tied it all together, but if you didn't you still had Ok cards, like Predator, Hatcher, Drone, etc. In the wand deck, if you didn't get the wand, you were not going to win.
"To me, it appears that Wizards was not trying to kill the formats, just to balance giving Pauper and Momir Vig players the opportunity to play with the need to protect the value of M12 (and eventually M13) packs and to support the value of other constructed cards."
I think WOTC is making a huge mistake here. M12 packs have completely tanked, and while they may have lost value due to impending rotation, I suspect the lack of Pauper and Momir events actually caused this. Fewer events means fewer new packs, which means fewer drafts, and drafting is what WOTC wants you to be doing.
I have never understood WOTC choice not to better monetize the pauper format. Streamlining the format to be the same in paper and online would have also been nice, but they clearly just have little to no interest in it despite event decks every once in a while.
Similarly people really do enjoy Momir, but it seems especially good to me at teaching new players mechanics, both because it draws from an insanely large card pool, and because it essentially dumbs down magic, which can be a good thing, because just reading the board can be extremely intimidating to newer players.
Meanwhile, Vintage/Classic and Legacy events are a complete waste. The cards are too niche and expensive for the vast majority of players, and it is a very small community of interested people. WOTC would be much better served by finding ways to give prizes for community run events, because there just isn't enough interest to fire events, and likely never will be.
I just think its a huge mistake not to give players an alternative to Standard or Block, but really that's all there is now.
UM Mbeasly Ill buy all your shocklands at 2.5 a piece!
Lingering Souls wont be a $5 uncommon due to the fact that it is easily avaliable on MTGO atm.
The DKA vampires has already hit an assumed peak point IMO as it is already quite expensive.
The Dual lands I agree with you about though
Ya I don't really get this perspective, rise draft was fun but the available archetypes were pretty limited, you had something very specific in mind and if the right amounts of the interacting pieces didn't get to you somehow your deck could easily become a pile of crud. Many of the decks had ramplike elements to them, in effect you wanted early disruption then ramp then fatties, it was fine enough but I found it to have more variance than alara block draft or ZZW, th levelers deck would just often get blown out by the magicalchrismasland draws from opponents. I actually loved full alara draft, again there were a whole slew of decktypes you could draft which meant your evaluations of cards could not be based almost wholly on prior knowledge, you had to react to each pack and each match for sb with your whole brain. ZZW was almost the polar opposite but again it was very punishing to mistakes where ALA was very rewarding to creativity and insight.
M12 and DII also fail for me on the prior knowledge test. Not as punishing as ZZW not as rewarding as ALA, not an effective combo of both. Prior knowledge of M12 or DII gives you enough to drudge like a zombie though and still do almost as well as dynamic drafting.
Making money on modo isn't about holding onto cards unless its the correct time of the season. There is more that goes into it than just buying cards and holding them. BTW, I did buy my investment cards from the hammybot.
Like there are common sense things.
Don't buy rotating cards. That is unless a very important card is cycling out. A good example of that is Phantasmal Image. That is a card being "replaced" by clone. That means that the card will go up precipitously as people who play STD DE's will need them if Delver/Mage Blade keep staying in the 70% played range.
Other cards that have to go up are ISD/DKA cards. Underdrafted at the moment, people sold their money cards, and the time to buy certain cards is now.
1) Lingering Souls. Will be a $5 uncommon and is an eternal card. Those you can get cheap.
2) Geist of Saint Traft. Exalted + Geist = Very nasty deck.
3) Liliana of the Veil. Takes out Geist of Saint Traft, sideboard card at the very least, and is considered cheap for modo.
4) DKA vampires most notably Falkenwrath Aristocrat, and the Vamp captain. Those are cards that if they haven't gone up already should with the reprint of vampire Nocturnes. Bloodline Keeper is also one of those cards. And with BR Vamps already being playtested by pro's, it is stuff you need to grab ahold of.
5) Clifftop Retreat/Sulfur Falls. RW humans looks like a viable deck post rotation, and control players will always be control players so blue things are always going to cost more than every other color.
Then if you want to hold onto things long term, and I mean lllllong term, this is what I bought, some from the Hammybot.
It's modern rotation, so you buy some modern if you want to be smart about it.
It's basically a given, and nothing is a given, but with Return To Ravnica, and cards like Arbor Elf/Farseek basically reek of the return of the Rav shock lands. I mean every interview Wizards has done is talking about making Modern cheaper so it can retain it's popularity and not die out.
So if shocklands are being reprinted, and you have to think they are the same ones, then you don't touch them with a 50 foot stick.
What isn't being reprinted? Shock lands. So you get shock lands and other modern staples that won't be reprinted. And by modern staples, I don't mean Goyf. The whole point of making money on modo isn't buying expensive cards unless it's completely necessary. You buy low, sell high.
And since shock lands are 2.5-ish a piece, it wouldn't hurt to get yourself a few playsets of them, including the UR one, since there is a rumor floating around that Niv-Mizzet will return in Ravnica, but as a planeswalker rather than a creature. Would be very interesting to see what he does.
Last thing to "speculate" on. When they are released, since there is a 2 year rotation on planeswalkers, if the new Ajani is good, and the new Lilly 3.0 is good, they might be good long term buys.
good article, where is Thatdude? has anyone seen him? Can someone please tell me? I like cube. Its a great drink and draft format. I got 76th in the AVR tourny. i wanted 65 or lower. The promo looks dum. im going to bed now...
I pretty much loath AVR constructed. Similar to my feelings about ROE. I feel like instead of going in the great direction of the previous two sets they were like "uh oh people are going to have too much fun...better reign it in and make all these horribly unfun cards. (Eldrazi and now the antisynergy of AVR's various mythics and rares.)" Again, subjective but that's my perception which is why I have pulled back on MODO in general.
The primary reason I don't like AVR limited is that it isn't skill testing enough. Or rather, the skill testing part is drafting, not playing. I didn't draft Zendikar or Alara blocks, so I can't make any comparisons, but AVR drafting seems to revolve around understanding when bad cards are situationaly good or great and sometimes essential. It violates a lot of the true-isms of drafting which makes it very awkward for experienced drafters. And the next thing is rarity. You complain a little about rare bombs; well that happens all the time in every set. The problem with this set is the common and uncommon bombs. There are handful of each that are stupidly better than the rest, and so they show up way more than they should. Losing to Seraph of Dawn + Bladed Bracers or Mistraven + Peel from Reality or Riot Ringleader + Thatchers Revolt is incredibly aggravating because there is very little you can do to stop them, and being common they happen a lot. When your opponent kills you on turn 4 or soft locks you out of the game on turn 5, using only commons, it's not particularly skill testing.
I agree those two points are key differences although I think hoarding of non-foil/non-promo cards is near impossible and likely to have no real impact. I am not quite sure of the impact of being unable to short magic cards as it pertains to the validity of comparing this market to the stock markets.
Mythics and small set cards do have the added allure of lower supply, but then again I would assume that increased prices for those cards would already be accounted for. In essence, the price has already been determined by their demand and supply - same with regular rares so really my analysis is looking at changes in demand which will change the card prices.
Glad you liked the article. All data is sourced from our sponsor MTGO Traders. As with any free market, you will get slight price variances between sellers but for the most part in any competitive marketplace all sellers will have similar prices.
It is subjective, but the majority of people I've talked to would agree that ZZW and full Shards aren't wizards best work the last few years. I enjoyed full shards. I don't HATE avr, it's just kind of bad compared to ROE, M12 draft, or DII.
I think this is really a subjective judgment. I mean I loved shards full set. Was great. I won tons of packs, felt like a skillful game. Different people like different things. (Duh) I mean I loved tempest, hated Urza's, loved Masques, disliked Invasion. (Though loved it for constructed.) It really depends greatly on what you enjoy about drafting/sealed.
Yea, I'm not killing ZZW, but it and full set alara are the low points previously in the last few years... until now when it's by far the "worst" that they have produced in a while.
Dont agree about zzw, for me for limited that format was beauty in motion. I've never had such consistently good results in limited as I did with that set and never got tired of playing it. If you love to durdle though, sure it wasn't the set for you. Personally I found that mistakes had far more impact there than in most other limited formats, which I think made it one of the most skill intensive or at least very nub punishing. It also was actually highly rewarding to be aware of the multitude of color combinations you could draft and to read the color preferences of the table correctly. I'm not sure AVR is any good though so we may agree there. Blue seems too good as usual and without reasonable removal the tempo plan is sometimes just unbeatable. I actually like the concept of less removal but it needs to be combined with a set that compliments it.
Thanks, Andrew. I've always been an inconsistent writer up 'til now, but you've always left great comments for me, which I really appreciate.
I am glad you are deciding to be a regular. Since I joined a year or so ago, I have always viewed you as one of the better writers with great perspective on strategy and well thought out card valuation.
Way to go. I also really respect your decision to stick with Pure.
GL. I'll be reading, for sure.
Andrew
So, you've been playing Magic for a month and decided to make videos and submit them as an article? I'm not trying to be harsh or anything, as you seem like a competent enough player, just wondering what compelled you to this spot after only a month of the game.
yea. bunny wins. lol
Watching AVR drafts makes my blood boil; never before have I seen so many people make so many bad picks. I am constantly shaking my head or rolling my eyes, and I don't just mean with your videos, I mean with everybody all over the net who makes these types of videos. In this video, I had to stop watching when you passed Seraph of Dawn P2P2. Well, okay, I actually stopped watching when I saw you could have had a 2nd one on the next pick. Also, passing Soul of the Harvest (a huge game winning bomb) for a mediocre 5th pick kind of card made me cringe. Earlier in pack one, picking Favorable Winds over Bad Mulldrifter was making me shake my head and roll my eyes. At any rate, thanks for making the videos, even though I didn't watch them through. Hopefully somebody will eventually make good AVR videos.
You're saying that fewer packs being given away cheaply somehow drives the prices further down? This doesn't make any sort of sense, setting aside any sort of advanced logic and looking at basic economics: supply vs. demand. As the supply of cheap packs (cheap vs. entry fee, as per article above) goes down, less packs will be available to meet the draft demand and the price will go up. That's just how things work. People who want to draft will still want to draft whether packs are 3.33 tix or 3.74 tix.... those sorts of changes don't radically change the number of events firing.
As for the idea that WotC wants you drafting... That's very incomplete. WotC wants you to spend money on MTGO. If they had some intangible gain from people drafting beyond making money, they'd just make draft free. When packs are available on the secondary market for far cheaper than they sell them for in the store, they make less money. I'm not seeing any other reason for Wizards of the Coast to want you to draft other than the fact that you'll buy tickets from the store when you want to buy packs for drafting.
On another note, pending rotation causes pack prices to tank, and has a far bigger effect on secondary market prices than supply vs. demand, in my experience.
Anyway, good article, thanks for writing it, Million.
good stuff outside of a bit of formatting issues
and that emo bunny is EPIC
I want part 2 now (although, i do know how it ends).
I know how you feel with RG aggro. I had a horrible weekend playing decks that I probably have no business playing.
'stick to your guns', 'mull that awful hand', and 'just f***ing kill him' are the M;tG cliches that had to be re-etched into the grey matter of my brain...
Shocklands, sorry. I mean fetch lands. I screw the 2 up.
I know the cards by picture, not name. When they are released in a set where it is triple drafted like AVR is though the Rav shock lands will be 2-3 MAX a piece, and people who play competitively will still want the originals.
Lingering Souls is an eternal card from an underdrafted set. And btw, Dismember was easily available and it was a $5 uncommon.
It won't be today, maybe when ISD/DKA becomes what SOM Block is today, but it's played in Legacy, Modern, and on modo, is played in every deck that can fit it in.
Either way, I bought them originally at 0.25, then at 0.50, and now you are lucky to find them for <$1. Luckily I found a small bot that puts up 4 a day at 0.50 a piece, so I just spend 2 tix a day and can basically manipulate the market, haha.
DKA vampires are important. At the Saturday TCQ I was at on Saturday Zombie pod was about 2% of the field, and it was based on a sac outlet. What better sac outlet is there than a 4/1 haste flyer with indestructibility.
Btw, I refuse to ever play a TCG player event ever again. I came in 9th place! 9th! God dammit!!!!!
Funny enough though 75% of the field was delver, 20% some form of RG, either aggro or ramp, 1% of some human makeup, 1% of superfriends, and 0.00000000001% of Naya Pod. Funny enough, of the 3 Naya Pod decks in the entire tournament, 1 was 15th, I came in 9th, and the 3rd deck came in 1st. Delver was only 3/8 of the top 8.
I really enjoyed this article. Your deck seems really good and your commentary was very enjoyable.
Shame about the spam in the comments.
My problem with AVR draft is that there is very little to no interaction in many of the games, and the power level between all of the cards is so inconsistent that the games are nothing short of annoying. Here's a short list of what makes me never want to play this format again...
--Thatcher's Revolt + Commander/Ringleader
--Righteous Blow/Pillar of Flame being pretty terrible, when 2 damage spells should be a decent bread and butter
--The power variance in Soulbond (Druid's Familiar//Forcemage > Pathbreaker Wurm...your best Soulbond creatures should not be right in the middle, but at the top curve (Deadeye Navigator doesn't count for this example)
--Miracle being the stupidest thing created. I'm so happy I could go through setting up a position where I have a chance to win, in order for you to reveal a miracle and make it all worthless. The cards are all completely fine without being stupidly cheap. I wish they had gone with some of the original thoughts, and just given more value if you Miracled- maybe having Terminus allow you to keep 1 creature, or Wrath to do 7 damage instead of 5)
--Power level among creatures being absolutely idiotic. At common, I for 4U I can have a 3/3 on the ground, who mills someone 5 when he dies, or a 3/2 in the air who draws me a card immediately. For 2R I can get an anthem or a guy that first strikes (and gives it away). For 1W I can get a 2/1 vigilant, or I can get a guy who gets first strike. In some corner cases, there could be thought as to which choice is better in the pairs...but in general one is usually much better than the other.
--Most importantly, the bomb cards are just too swingy to want to deal with. I am undefeated in draft versus Tamiyos and Bonfires (granted, the second is because he never got to Miracle it). However, it is the exact opposite for Terminus; Devastation Tide, Wolfir Silverheart, Deadeye Navigator, etc. Yes, there are good cards that should be good.....but the way these cards completely dominate and end the game is ridiculous.
What finally set me over the edge was getting Terminus-ed earlier. I know I am a broken record, but I worked out a path to victory to have a chance against my opponent (he also had a Tamiyo out and active...). Then he topdecks Terminus, miracles it, drops the 3 creatures in his hand, and kills me the next turn. Yay. Thanks Wizards for the "fun".
I hope, HOPE, that Rav is fun for the drafting again. I have enjoyed almost every draft format recently, with the exception of Scars and SSE (though I still participated in the latter). But AVR is the first draft format that I will be legitimately boycotting from this point going forward. When Wizards Designers can make a format that is defined more by what you can draft, and less of what you can open, maybe I'll be back.
EDIT: Regarding Sphinx Bone Wand....it was a card that started off as "unplayable", but by the end of the format was a solid tier 2 strategy that you could go with if you got into it immediately. I'd say it was on the level of the Raid Bombardment/Broodmother + Spawn decks, though with either of those, you could draft the support cards and luck into the card that tied it all together, but if you didn't you still had Ok cards, like Predator, Hatcher, Drone, etc. In the wand deck, if you didn't get the wand, you were not going to win.
"To me, it appears that Wizards was not trying to kill the formats, just to balance giving Pauper and Momir Vig players the opportunity to play with the need to protect the value of M12 (and eventually M13) packs and to support the value of other constructed cards."
I think WOTC is making a huge mistake here. M12 packs have completely tanked, and while they may have lost value due to impending rotation, I suspect the lack of Pauper and Momir events actually caused this. Fewer events means fewer new packs, which means fewer drafts, and drafting is what WOTC wants you to be doing.
I have never understood WOTC choice not to better monetize the pauper format. Streamlining the format to be the same in paper and online would have also been nice, but they clearly just have little to no interest in it despite event decks every once in a while.
Similarly people really do enjoy Momir, but it seems especially good to me at teaching new players mechanics, both because it draws from an insanely large card pool, and because it essentially dumbs down magic, which can be a good thing, because just reading the board can be extremely intimidating to newer players.
Meanwhile, Vintage/Classic and Legacy events are a complete waste. The cards are too niche and expensive for the vast majority of players, and it is a very small community of interested people. WOTC would be much better served by finding ways to give prizes for community run events, because there just isn't enough interest to fire events, and likely never will be.
I just think its a huge mistake not to give players an alternative to Standard or Block, but really that's all there is now.
UM Mbeasly Ill buy all your shocklands at 2.5 a piece!
Lingering Souls wont be a $5 uncommon due to the fact that it is easily avaliable on MTGO atm.
The DKA vampires has already hit an assumed peak point IMO as it is already quite expensive.
The Dual lands I agree with you about though
Ya I don't really get this perspective, rise draft was fun but the available archetypes were pretty limited, you had something very specific in mind and if the right amounts of the interacting pieces didn't get to you somehow your deck could easily become a pile of crud. Many of the decks had ramplike elements to them, in effect you wanted early disruption then ramp then fatties, it was fine enough but I found it to have more variance than alara block draft or ZZW, th levelers deck would just often get blown out by the magicalchrismasland draws from opponents. I actually loved full alara draft, again there were a whole slew of decktypes you could draft which meant your evaluations of cards could not be based almost wholly on prior knowledge, you had to react to each pack and each match for sb with your whole brain. ZZW was almost the polar opposite but again it was very punishing to mistakes where ALA was very rewarding to creativity and insight.
M12 and DII also fail for me on the prior knowledge test. Not as punishing as ZZW not as rewarding as ALA, not an effective combo of both. Prior knowledge of M12 or DII gives you enough to drudge like a zombie though and still do almost as well as dynamic drafting.
Making money on modo isn't about holding onto cards unless its the correct time of the season. There is more that goes into it than just buying cards and holding them. BTW, I did buy my investment cards from the hammybot.
Like there are common sense things.
Don't buy rotating cards. That is unless a very important card is cycling out. A good example of that is Phantasmal Image. That is a card being "replaced" by clone. That means that the card will go up precipitously as people who play STD DE's will need them if Delver/Mage Blade keep staying in the 70% played range.
Other cards that have to go up are ISD/DKA cards. Underdrafted at the moment, people sold their money cards, and the time to buy certain cards is now.
1) Lingering Souls. Will be a $5 uncommon and is an eternal card. Those you can get cheap.
2) Geist of Saint Traft. Exalted + Geist = Very nasty deck.
3) Liliana of the Veil. Takes out Geist of Saint Traft, sideboard card at the very least, and is considered cheap for modo.
4) DKA vampires most notably Falkenwrath Aristocrat, and the Vamp captain. Those are cards that if they haven't gone up already should with the reprint of vampire Nocturnes. Bloodline Keeper is also one of those cards. And with BR Vamps already being playtested by pro's, it is stuff you need to grab ahold of.
5) Clifftop Retreat/Sulfur Falls. RW humans looks like a viable deck post rotation, and control players will always be control players so blue things are always going to cost more than every other color.
Then if you want to hold onto things long term, and I mean lllllong term, this is what I bought, some from the Hammybot.
It's modern rotation, so you buy some modern if you want to be smart about it.
It's basically a given, and nothing is a given, but with Return To Ravnica, and cards like Arbor Elf/Farseek basically reek of the return of the Rav shock lands. I mean every interview Wizards has done is talking about making Modern cheaper so it can retain it's popularity and not die out.
So if shocklands are being reprinted, and you have to think they are the same ones, then you don't touch them with a 50 foot stick.
What isn't being reprinted? Shock lands. So you get shock lands and other modern staples that won't be reprinted. And by modern staples, I don't mean Goyf. The whole point of making money on modo isn't buying expensive cards unless it's completely necessary. You buy low, sell high.
And since shock lands are 2.5-ish a piece, it wouldn't hurt to get yourself a few playsets of them, including the UR one, since there is a rumor floating around that Niv-Mizzet will return in Ravnica, but as a planeswalker rather than a creature. Would be very interesting to see what he does.
Last thing to "speculate" on. When they are released, since there is a 2 year rotation on planeswalkers, if the new Ajani is good, and the new Lilly 3.0 is good, they might be good long term buys.
you would of hated the avr championship.
good article, where is Thatdude? has anyone seen him? Can someone please tell me? I like cube. Its a great drink and draft format. I got 76th in the AVR tourny. i wanted 65 or lower. The promo looks dum. im going to bed now...
I pretty much loath AVR constructed. Similar to my feelings about ROE. I feel like instead of going in the great direction of the previous two sets they were like "uh oh people are going to have too much fun...better reign it in and make all these horribly unfun cards. (Eldrazi and now the antisynergy of AVR's various mythics and rares.)" Again, subjective but that's my perception which is why I have pulled back on MODO in general.
The primary reason I don't like AVR limited is that it isn't skill testing enough. Or rather, the skill testing part is drafting, not playing. I didn't draft Zendikar or Alara blocks, so I can't make any comparisons, but AVR drafting seems to revolve around understanding when bad cards are situationaly good or great and sometimes essential. It violates a lot of the true-isms of drafting which makes it very awkward for experienced drafters. And the next thing is rarity. You complain a little about rare bombs; well that happens all the time in every set. The problem with this set is the common and uncommon bombs. There are handful of each that are stupidly better than the rest, and so they show up way more than they should. Losing to Seraph of Dawn + Bladed Bracers or Mistraven + Peel from Reality or Riot Ringleader + Thatchers Revolt is incredibly aggravating because there is very little you can do to stop them, and being common they happen a lot. When your opponent kills you on turn 4 or soft locks you out of the game on turn 5, using only commons, it's not particularly skill testing.
I agree those two points are key differences although I think hoarding of non-foil/non-promo cards is near impossible and likely to have no real impact. I am not quite sure of the impact of being unable to short magic cards as it pertains to the validity of comparing this market to the stock markets.
Mythics and small set cards do have the added allure of lower supply, but then again I would assume that increased prices for those cards would already be accounted for. In essence, the price has already been determined by their demand and supply - same with regular rares so really my analysis is looking at changes in demand which will change the card prices.
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It is subjective, but the majority of people I've talked to would agree that ZZW and full Shards aren't wizards best work the last few years. I enjoyed full shards. I don't HATE avr, it's just kind of bad compared to ROE, M12 draft, or DII.
I think this is really a subjective judgment. I mean I loved shards full set. Was great. I won tons of packs, felt like a skillful game. Different people like different things. (Duh) I mean I loved tempest, hated Urza's, loved Masques, disliked Invasion. (Though loved it for constructed.) It really depends greatly on what you enjoy about drafting/sealed.
Yea, I'm not killing ZZW, but it and full set alara are the low points previously in the last few years... until now when it's by far the "worst" that they have produced in a while.
Dont agree about zzw, for me for limited that format was beauty in motion. I've never had such consistently good results in limited as I did with that set and never got tired of playing it. If you love to durdle though, sure it wasn't the set for you. Personally I found that mistakes had far more impact there than in most other limited formats, which I think made it one of the most skill intensive or at least very nub punishing. It also was actually highly rewarding to be aware of the multitude of color combinations you could draft and to read the color preferences of the table correctly. I'm not sure AVR is any good though so we may agree there. Blue seems too good as usual and without reasonable removal the tempo plan is sometimes just unbeatable. I actually like the concept of less removal but it needs to be combined with a set that compliments it.