I'm a fanatical zealot for the Alpha Tyrannax (or T-Dog) cause, but looking through your packs I did begin to wonder what it would take before you considered moving into blue! I think I'd've been in itfrom the middle of the first pack.
I agree with Scitzophrenic, that you may need to read Masticore a little more closely, Hammy. You didn't seem to understand what his upkeep was even in your text review of mistakes. Also on the untapped mountains thing.
This made me curious about the MBC. It's a deck I would want to like, but I feel like the card power isn't quite there.
Hey Hamtastic, thanks for the article, it was nice to see the new RDW in action. Kinda rough to see so many misplays, but I understand lack of time with the deck. Not trying to be a jerk, just let you know here. In addition to what you noted about bursting Sorin when you shouldn't have, it was also frustrating to see you constantly target untapped lands with Koth's untap target land ability. Even if you weren't holding burn, you should at least be able to fake it. As for the Inquisition, you must just not be familiar with the card, it only can choose CMC 3 or less, so searing blaze was the only legal option for him.
Also, not sure what you're getting at with forgetting to pay Masticore's cost. Masticore's upkeep cost involves discarding a card, not pay mana, and you don't have a card during your upkeep phase if you threw it away last turn needlessly.
Wow, now looking at my post, I feel like I'm really criticizing you a lot. Don't want you to take this the wrong way, I really enjoy your articles, keep them coming! Happy thanksgiving, and good luck in the queues.
BREAD is useful for noobs, but it is also useful to fall back on when you are doing poorly.
Think about the person who is a pretty good drafter, but gets in a rut (as mentioned in this article) who can't figure out why their low-removal, high-poison deck never quite gets there. They might step back, realize they're valuing a non-bomb, non-evasive dude like the black 2/2 poison (can't think of his name :/), over decent removal (like the 4cc -1/-1 cantrip), which is the type of card that might let them "get there" a little more often.
Bread, while not the be-all, end-all, is often a good way to step back and look at why you're having trouble in a given format.
Actually, I was in the draft as well, but we didn't get to play each other because I almost completely sucked out that draft. After having some success with Infect, I wanted to try another archetype, so I draftet some sort of control deck. It ended out being, like you described pretty accurately, "the weaker UW deck" - although it actually was UB. Certarch is such a house when you get metalcraft, but I just couldnt get the artifacts, so I couldn't pick him!
Glad at least someone watched my misery when I was crushed by those bombs in game three :-)
Game 2 was awesome though! When I defeated him with Invisimancer plus Grafted Exoskeleton that sure was good!
What do you think of that card? I really really like it and I think I'd pick it over most things now, except for removal and bombs maybe. I had two in my first BG infect deck, and had two Necrogen Scudders to wear them. And tell you, those won games!
I think the Exoskeleton works just fine in non-infect decks. All the stuff about diluting your win conditions being said, it turns your 2/2 flyers into dragons! Who cares about diluting your win conditions when you can just swing three times and win?
I did have the Exoskeleton even in another game that draft when it allowed me to try to win against odds. Unfortunately, it was destroyed though, and I lost.
The "sacrifice" drawback so far hasn't been so bad for me, and neither for my opponents. In the infect deck, Exoskeleton is awesome because it turns the few non-infect creatures that fill out your deck into really powerful infect creatures, for example in my case it powered up the Necrogen Scudders, Mana Myrs and Moriok Replicas. With the Scudder you have your opponent on a 2-turn clock, so it might just be worth the risk. Losing a myr to the sac effect shouldnt be that bad in the late game, and the Replica can just be sacced anyway.
And in my UB deck in the draft you wrote about it was maybe one of the few good cards I had ;-)
What I noticed so far, I win most of the games through infect. Even today I had zero infect cards in the deck, but "stole" a Blight Dragon via Mimic Vat and punished my opponent with his own beast.
Right now I'm thinking that maybe the whole "100% infect or 0% infect" dogma might be not that right after all...
Sure, although I think there is a major difference between the end step activation example and the BREAD example: the "end step" rule is unlikely to become a major active hindrance to your success whereas BREAD is.
I get that mnemonics are really helpful to some people -- in fact, I said that BREAD is a great way from going from being terrible at drafting to being mediocre. It's similar to how EGBDF helps you go from being completely ignorant of reading music to being a little better at it.
I'm not saying nobody should ever use BREAD (well, I kindof implied that but it was more hyperbole than anything), but I do think that anyone who is serious about drafting should avoid this shortcut which will hurt them later on, or at least know that it's a shortcut that may make things easier in the short term but will require major adjustment to get to the end goal.
And yeah, breaking up paragraphs has always been an issue for me ><
I seriously doubt it. Sure there will be some but one of the things people forget after playing eternal formats for awhile is that the non-eternal formats tend to be not as fun. (I just had this conversation with someone who got bored with standard after coming back to it for 15mins.)
Mnemonics are effective for beginners. Yes :) They can also be useful for the forgetful or easily distracted. My feeling is it is a step in the right direction like learning to tap at the beginning of your opponent's end step whenever possible. There are reasons to not follow bread and equally valid reasons to not activate on your opponent's beginning of end step.
The main point is flexibility comes with experience. I would not reflexively rail against a mnemonic that works for people. If they find themselves in a rut then analysis is in order. Otherwise it is better to have some plan no matter how sub par for the set than no plan at all.
I do not like mnemonics for personal use because I tend to forget what they stand for (EGBDF = Every Good Boy Does Fine = lines of the musical treble staff...one of the few I remember correctly.) but I believe they are useful tools for the average person. Keep in mind people learn things at different rates too and your impatience with rote may not serve them well.
By the way break up your posts with a few carriage returns between potential paragraphs, will you? If you have as much to say as you clearly do I assume you want people to actually take the time to read what you are saying. :)
Ohh no worries, I'm not going to reiterate the same point again or anything =)
And yeah, the BREAD comment wasn't exactly directed toward you, it's more just a general rant that I have that I sometimes feel compelled to unleash whenever I hear the acronym mentioned.
Anyway, just a few quick comments on your comments:
While you may have committed to either WR or WB/r at the Kemba pick, I think in that situation you need to be pretty careful. You hadn't really seen a lot of good white up to that point, so it's possible that either the pack was absolutely stacked and/or the white drafters in front of you underrate Kemba (or you overrate it). With a pick like that unless you've been seeing good white you have to wait a little bit before you go all in on the color. Sometimes the packs will force you to make this choice quickly while other times you can afford to wait a bit. The next pack featured a Chrome Steed that likely would have been fine no matter what you end up doing from there, followed by another safe rusted relic. You aren't asked to pick something until pick 8, and even then it's not a real commitment at all. At this point you've seen enough packs to notice that white isn't actually flowing at all. That said, you have enough colorless stuff at this point to go white anyway if you get the real hookup in pack 2 (as you do). That answers your question a bit -- you commit when the packs make you commit (and knowing when this is happening is an inexact science at best, so you definitely have my sympathy there... we all screw it up plenty often.)
I submitted an article last week that has not 'aired' yet. This one was posted fewer than 12 hours after I submitted it, so you are getting this a little out of order. That is where the Rut references come from. In that draft I commented, as you are here, that I am too late in picking a deck, and then am swayed late. So, that is more than fair. But, when do you commit? I feel like I commited to white after the Kemba pick, and at that point it was either, red-white, or black white splahing red. I think I made that commitment in pack two.
Perhaps the better name for the article should be 'Sending Signals.' Yes, I saw a white signal in Kemba, in that it came late. To me that meant that there weren't many white drafters to my right. So, I wasn't getting much white, but I was passing even less. I wasn't getting any black, and I wasn't passing any. I wagered that because of this, I would see good black in pack two and good white again in pack three. Three skyguards was fine enough to call the guess an accurate one.
I hadn't thought of BREAD until responding to the poster. It isn't something I live by. Although 'B' for bombs is good advice all of the time.
I agree with your assessment of shatter and necropede.
Thanks for the comments. I can't wait to see how 'harsh' you will be when the other article hits :P
Thanks for the explanation again - I had the comments off when I went through it the first time. As the above poster said, I still think it was a mistake taking the Necropede over the Shatter, and then passing the Turn to Slag as well. P1P8 you take the Sabreclaw Golem, and comment that he's "on-color" yet you had just passed the Shatter and Turn to Slag a few picks before. Then you want to jump into black in P2 after taking none in P1 with Grasp of Darkness (a great card, no doubt, but also double black to cast). I think if you had stayed with Red after the Galvanic Blast pick, you could have had a very nice RW Metalcraft deck. For the purposes of discussion, here is what I would have picked from your packs:
Normally I would suggest running 15 artifacts in a metalcraft deck, but I think you can cheat on that a bit 1) beacuse you have lots of removal, and 2) you have the 2 Hippogriffs to rebuy your artifacts. I think this build has a lot of nice synergies, too.
Hopefully this provides you with some food for thought. Thanks for taking the time to write this up, and good luck in your next draft!
The only way I see a mass exodus of people leaving MTGO is if they make such a major change to the game and client that it is a totaly unplayable game to most people, and not to people of one format. When we had the M10 rules change there was threat of people leaving the game. Some probably did, but not enough to effect the game as a whole. The only game I ever seen this happen was Starwars Galaxies where they changed the game so much, it litterally was a new MMO with a Starwars theme.
I really wish that people would forget about BREAD and never mention it again. BREAD is a good way to transition from being a terrible drafter to being a mediocre one (and I don't mean mediocre by pro tour/mtgo shark standards, I mean mediocre in the context of all people who draft). BREAD is reasonable for learning the very bare basics of card evaluation, but the problem is that it completely ignores context. It doesn't take into account the dynamics of the set and completely ignores archetypes. A drafter won't make the leap to being legitimately good at drafting until he or she abandons the whole BREAD thing and learns to shift the majority of his or her attention to context. So BREAD is kind of like eating candy bars right before a race if you're a marathon runner. It might give you the initial burst of energy to help you start fast, but after a little while it actively starts to hinder you instead of helping.
The other thing that really gets me about this draft is that you call it "Reading Signals." Honestly I'm not sure what you are referring to at all, as the 5th pick Kemba ended up being a false signal. You picked up essentially all your good white in pack 2 -- in the rest of pack 1 all you got was an Abuna Acolyte that you took over the far superior Chrome Steed, and in pack 3 you saw basically no white aside from a few mid-pack Kemba's Skyguards.
I definitely think you have potential as a drafter, and I think focus is really what you need to get to the next level. My impression from reading through your drafts is that you tend to focus too much on card to card evaluation and don't pay enough attention to what you're building towards. As a result you end up with a lot of fairly unfocused decks that have pretty good overall power level but relatively poor consistency and quite a few missed opportunities for synergy. Decks like this can absolutely win drafts (and this draft is an example of that), but you aren't going to win consistently this way. There were a few critical junctures in this draft. The most important was probably when you picked Kemba. At that point you have red and black cards in your pile and you are adding a heavy white card. Your goal over the next few picks has to be to figure out what colors to stick with. You never really did this and ended up with a three color deck in the end, which is definitely not ideal.
I also just want to comment a little bit on the shatter vs. necropede pick. If you hadn't picked galvanic blast in pick 2 I agree that this would be close. The power level of the cards is in the same ballpark, but necropede is a little bit more flexible as it does not commit you to a color (although it's worth noting that if you don't end up in infect, it's only good in a controlling deck). That said, the fact that you already have galvanic blast removes some of the flexibility advantage of necropede. Ultimately, your main justification for taking the 'pede is that it "alters board states in ways that shatter does not." While this statement is technically true, the reverse is just as valid. Shatter alters board states in ways that necropede does not. Necropede can get card advantage sometimes, and it's good at stalling early attackers. Shatter, on the other hand, is almost always a one for one trade but it has the advantage of being able to take out some extremely threatening cards like Steel Hellkite and Sword of Body and Mind. Shatter beats bombs, while necropede beats weenies. Both do their own thing and both do it well. When you make a pick like this you have to start getting an idea of what your plan is in your mind so that you can adjust your future picks accordingly. I don't get the sense that you did this here, although it's a little tough to say as the Kemba threw a bit of a wrench in the works.
Anyway, I apologize if I sound overly harsh -- I don't mean to be. You say you want to get out of your rut, and I think the best way to do that will be to take stock of how you draft and start to shift the way you think a bit. I definitely think it's what you need to take the next step.
That would be amazing!! I'm looking forward for it. I've tried to find it in the Internet but found only zip folds at shared files SE http://filecraft.com . They wery so large that I doubted it was what I needed.
To be honest if they've been reading the Tribal articles I find it unusual that they haven't banned the other cards on the PRE ban list. Surely they're more troublesome? This feels more like someone at WoC has been over playing Moat and the Banned and Restricted list people have been somewhat narked so they've banned it out of spite!
The three 100cs bannings I'm assuming are because wizards has an idea on what the format should play like and they believe these cards stop it from doing so.
a) It feels like banning both SoF and Top at the same time are an attempt to support the more random nature of the format. SoF allows almost unlimited tutoring and the Top consistently smooths your draws. I'm sad to see SoF banned but not overly surprised . The Top however, if I'm honest, I'm over the moon about! I've been complaining about this artifact since I started playing the format. When it's common to see someone using a wordly tutor for a trinket mage into a Top, that's 2 tutors!!, as early as they can in a format where tutors are KING speaks to the power of the Top. The difference in early draw power density in a random format is ridiculous.
b) Mind twist is a little odd. I suspect that the Mind Twist is banned because they expect games to be slower and wiping a players hand for 5 mana'ish is possibly a little too difficult to recover from?
As I've said I'm not upset about Top but Survival, and definitely Mind twist, seem a little harsh.
Really nice catch Etriol. I didn't notice that before or after the game.
OGB: I explained those picks. I was taking versatile picks to keep my infect/ non-infect options open. Necropede is very versatile. It goes in any deck, not just infect. It is a great deterant when the boardstate is not in your favor. After my first four picks I wasn't committed to any colors and could still go into metalcraft, infect, or other. Okay, so I didn't follow BREAD because Necropede is not a bomb, but it is solid, and semi-removal. I stand by the pick.
The ordered pairs below are in the form (Casting Cost, Equip Cost).
I was running Accorder's Shield (0,3), Infiltration Lens (1,1), and Strider Harness (3, 1). I value Barbed Battlegear (3,2) over all of those most of the time. I'm not going to run four equipment, so if the Battlegear is in the Strider Harness is out. The shield and lens have synergy with the Glint Hawk and the Glint Hawk Idol. The Glint Hawk has synergy with the Trigon of Rage. I made the choice to run the inferior Strider Harness over the Battlegear because of the Regent. It allowed me to equip and swing with a new creature or a flyer and then reequip back to the regent for token creation. This happened for me many times with the Strider Harness, where it would not have with the battlegear, as the equip/ reequip cost effectivey goes from 2 to 4, it would have been prohibitive. My deck was pretty quick in the 0-2 spot, had nice stablilizers at the three spot, and finishers at the four and five spot. That isn't to say that the Barbed Battlegear would have been just as great, especially for my flyers.
As passionate as Classic players I don't see a massive defection happening. I agree that it loses a lot of luster for every time they delay and put us off and give us equivocations. Sadly the inner workings of a company run by Hasbro is somewhat of a mystery to most of us.
Can you explain why you took the Necropede over Shatter P1P3, and then Trigon of Rage over Turn to Slag P1P4. You could have had 3 removal spells in your first 4 cards that would have basically dealt with all the bombs in this format.
The Trigon/Slag pick may just be a difference in pick order, but I don't understand the Necropede pick at all.
Also, given the number of flyers you have (not to mention Kemba), it seems you should be playing the Barbed Battlegear, perhaps over the Trigon of Rage.
The problem is with a delay there may not be a classic/vintage community. If wuzards keeps pissing off the classic olayers they may just quit the format outright. And by the time power 9 hits it wont be enough to save vintage.
Fastbond is banned.
Library of Alexandria is banned.
Mana Vault is banned.
Mind Twist is banned.
Regrowth is banned.
Sensei's Divining Top is banned.
Survival of the Fittest is banned.
Time Vault is banned.
Wheel of Fortune is banned.
Subject line says it all--what on earth is going on with this list? I can understand the preemptive bannings of cards like Fastbond, Regrowth, Time Vault and maybe Wheel of Fortune, but what on earth is the reasoning behind banning these?
* Mind Twist
* Sensei's Divining Top
* Survival of the Fittest
Survival is surely a pain to play against, but as previous posters here and on the other page have noted, it needs some degree of support from your deck. And there are answers to it like: Planar Void and graveyard hate to some degree, Pithing Needle, Aven Mindcensor and Leonin Arbiter, Disenchant(!), etc. I could go either way on banning Survival, especially since I can't afford a copy myself, but when you think about it there are plenty of other effects which are just as abusive: Oath of Druids, Scapeshift, Painter's Servant combo, etc. Just how far does the line of thinking that says Survival should be banned go?
The other two bannings above are bringing us into real WTF territory. Mind Twist can often win games, sure, but again there are solutions: counterspells, giving yourself shroud, cards like Obstinate Baloth or Dodecapod that punish players for playing discard, Divert, and maybe a few others. It's also part of the way we approach games to assume that black decks will try to force us to discard cards at some point in the game. It's completely dumb to ban, as the article's author above has noted, one of the few good reasons for playing black in this format, not to mention that it's removing a very useful tool for keeping combo and permission-based control decks in check.
Finally the biggest WFT of all: Sensei's Divining Top. This makes zero sense. Absolutely none. Have people been complaining that it slows down the game too much or something? Or that it goes in almost every deck? What?
To answer the first point: players have individual chess-like clocks for a reason; if your opponent is running down their clock by making lots of decision each turn, then that's /their problem/. I think that the vast majority of players who actually want to play in the format want to do so because it's challenging and presents us with the opportunity to have games where we /have to/ do a lot of thinking. If this banning is down to the moaners who just want instant gratification and are complaining because players like to actually think things through and play magic the same way they would play a game of chess, say, then I really despair for this format.
To answer the second point, just have a look at the price of the card: it's currently 1.25 on this site. That's hardly a barrier to entry or anything, now is it? There are many expensive staples for this format (dual lands and fetchlands being one obvious example) which /are/ a barrier to entry, but nobody was ever put off the format because they couldn't pick up a copy of Sensei's Divining Top.
I'm still shaking my head in disbelief about this announcement. Seriously, WHAT?
I'm a fanatical zealot for the Alpha Tyrannax (or T-Dog) cause, but looking through your packs I did begin to wonder what it would take before you considered moving into blue! I think I'd've been in itfrom the middle of the first pack.
Still, you can't argue with results (or Geth)!
Damnit, WotC, where are my flying Talas pirates?
I agree with Scitzophrenic, that you may need to read Masticore a little more closely, Hammy. You didn't seem to understand what his upkeep was even in your text review of mistakes. Also on the untapped mountains thing.
This made me curious about the MBC. It's a deck I would want to like, but I feel like the card power isn't quite there.
Hey Hamtastic, thanks for the article, it was nice to see the new RDW in action. Kinda rough to see so many misplays, but I understand lack of time with the deck. Not trying to be a jerk, just let you know here. In addition to what you noted about bursting Sorin when you shouldn't have, it was also frustrating to see you constantly target untapped lands with Koth's untap target land ability. Even if you weren't holding burn, you should at least be able to fake it. As for the Inquisition, you must just not be familiar with the card, it only can choose CMC 3 or less, so searing blaze was the only legal option for him.
Also, not sure what you're getting at with forgetting to pay Masticore's cost. Masticore's upkeep cost involves discarding a card, not pay mana, and you don't have a card during your upkeep phase if you threw it away last turn needlessly.
Wow, now looking at my post, I feel like I'm really criticizing you a lot. Don't want you to take this the wrong way, I really enjoy your articles, keep them coming! Happy thanksgiving, and good luck in the queues.
BREAD is useful for noobs, but it is also useful to fall back on when you are doing poorly.
Think about the person who is a pretty good drafter, but gets in a rut (as mentioned in this article) who can't figure out why their low-removal, high-poison deck never quite gets there. They might step back, realize they're valuing a non-bomb, non-evasive dude like the black 2/2 poison (can't think of his name :/), over decent removal (like the 4cc -1/-1 cantrip), which is the type of card that might let them "get there" a little more often.
Bread, while not the be-all, end-all, is often a good way to step back and look at why you're having trouble in a given format.
Hey, nice article!
Actually, I was in the draft as well, but we didn't get to play each other because I almost completely sucked out that draft. After having some success with Infect, I wanted to try another archetype, so I draftet some sort of control deck. It ended out being, like you described pretty accurately, "the weaker UW deck" - although it actually was UB. Certarch is such a house when you get metalcraft, but I just couldnt get the artifacts, so I couldn't pick him!
Glad at least someone watched my misery when I was crushed by those bombs in game three :-)
Game 2 was awesome though! When I defeated him with Invisimancer plus Grafted Exoskeleton that sure was good!
What do you think of that card? I really really like it and I think I'd pick it over most things now, except for removal and bombs maybe. I had two in my first BG infect deck, and had two Necrogen Scudders to wear them. And tell you, those won games!
I think the Exoskeleton works just fine in non-infect decks. All the stuff about diluting your win conditions being said, it turns your 2/2 flyers into dragons! Who cares about diluting your win conditions when you can just swing three times and win?
I did have the Exoskeleton even in another game that draft when it allowed me to try to win against odds. Unfortunately, it was destroyed though, and I lost.
The "sacrifice" drawback so far hasn't been so bad for me, and neither for my opponents. In the infect deck, Exoskeleton is awesome because it turns the few non-infect creatures that fill out your deck into really powerful infect creatures, for example in my case it powered up the Necrogen Scudders, Mana Myrs and Moriok Replicas. With the Scudder you have your opponent on a 2-turn clock, so it might just be worth the risk. Losing a myr to the sac effect shouldnt be that bad in the late game, and the Replica can just be sacced anyway.
And in my UB deck in the draft you wrote about it was maybe one of the few good cards I had ;-)
What I noticed so far, I win most of the games through infect. Even today I had zero infect cards in the deck, but "stole" a Blight Dragon via Mimic Vat and punished my opponent with his own beast.
Right now I'm thinking that maybe the whole "100% infect or 0% infect" dogma might be not that right after all...
Sure, although I think there is a major difference between the end step activation example and the BREAD example: the "end step" rule is unlikely to become a major active hindrance to your success whereas BREAD is.
I get that mnemonics are really helpful to some people -- in fact, I said that BREAD is a great way from going from being terrible at drafting to being mediocre. It's similar to how EGBDF helps you go from being completely ignorant of reading music to being a little better at it.
I'm not saying nobody should ever use BREAD (well, I kindof implied that but it was more hyperbole than anything), but I do think that anyone who is serious about drafting should avoid this shortcut which will hurt them later on, or at least know that it's a shortcut that may make things easier in the short term but will require major adjustment to get to the end goal.
And yeah, breaking up paragraphs has always been an issue for me ><
I seriously doubt it. Sure there will be some but one of the things people forget after playing eternal formats for awhile is that the non-eternal formats tend to be not as fun. (I just had this conversation with someone who got bored with standard after coming back to it for 15mins.)
Mnemonics are effective for beginners. Yes :) They can also be useful for the forgetful or easily distracted. My feeling is it is a step in the right direction like learning to tap at the beginning of your opponent's end step whenever possible. There are reasons to not follow bread and equally valid reasons to not activate on your opponent's beginning of end step.
The main point is flexibility comes with experience. I would not reflexively rail against a mnemonic that works for people. If they find themselves in a rut then analysis is in order. Otherwise it is better to have some plan no matter how sub par for the set than no plan at all.
I do not like mnemonics for personal use because I tend to forget what they stand for (EGBDF = Every Good Boy Does Fine = lines of the musical treble staff...one of the few I remember correctly.) but I believe they are useful tools for the average person. Keep in mind people learn things at different rates too and your impatience with rote may not serve them well.
By the way break up your posts with a few carriage returns between potential paragraphs, will you? If you have as much to say as you clearly do I assume you want people to actually take the time to read what you are saying. :)
Ohh no worries, I'm not going to reiterate the same point again or anything =)
And yeah, the BREAD comment wasn't exactly directed toward you, it's more just a general rant that I have that I sometimes feel compelled to unleash whenever I hear the acronym mentioned.
Anyway, just a few quick comments on your comments:
While you may have committed to either WR or WB/r at the Kemba pick, I think in that situation you need to be pretty careful. You hadn't really seen a lot of good white up to that point, so it's possible that either the pack was absolutely stacked and/or the white drafters in front of you underrate Kemba (or you overrate it). With a pick like that unless you've been seeing good white you have to wait a little bit before you go all in on the color. Sometimes the packs will force you to make this choice quickly while other times you can afford to wait a bit. The next pack featured a Chrome Steed that likely would have been fine no matter what you end up doing from there, followed by another safe rusted relic. You aren't asked to pick something until pick 8, and even then it's not a real commitment at all. At this point you've seen enough packs to notice that white isn't actually flowing at all. That said, you have enough colorless stuff at this point to go white anyway if you get the real hookup in pack 2 (as you do). That answers your question a bit -- you commit when the packs make you commit (and knowing when this is happening is an inexact science at best, so you definitely have my sympathy there... we all screw it up plenty often.)
I submitted an article last week that has not 'aired' yet. This one was posted fewer than 12 hours after I submitted it, so you are getting this a little out of order. That is where the Rut references come from. In that draft I commented, as you are here, that I am too late in picking a deck, and then am swayed late. So, that is more than fair. But, when do you commit? I feel like I commited to white after the Kemba pick, and at that point it was either, red-white, or black white splahing red. I think I made that commitment in pack two.
Perhaps the better name for the article should be 'Sending Signals.' Yes, I saw a white signal in Kemba, in that it came late. To me that meant that there weren't many white drafters to my right. So, I wasn't getting much white, but I was passing even less. I wasn't getting any black, and I wasn't passing any. I wagered that because of this, I would see good black in pack two and good white again in pack three. Three skyguards was fine enough to call the guess an accurate one.
I hadn't thought of BREAD until responding to the poster. It isn't something I live by. Although 'B' for bombs is good advice all of the time.
I agree with your assessment of shatter and necropede.
Thanks for the comments. I can't wait to see how 'harsh' you will be when the other article hits :P
Your analysis is highly plausible. Well done.
I dont think it will be a mass exodus from MTGO. Rather an exodus from classic.
Thanks for the explanation again - I had the comments off when I went through it the first time. As the above poster said, I still think it was a mistake taking the Necropede over the Shatter, and then passing the Turn to Slag as well. P1P8 you take the Sabreclaw Golem, and comment that he's "on-color" yet you had just passed the Shatter and Turn to Slag a few picks before. Then you want to jump into black in P2 after taking none in P1 with Grasp of Darkness (a great card, no doubt, but also double black to cast). I think if you had stayed with Red after the Galvanic Blast pick, you could have had a very nice RW Metalcraft deck. For the purposes of discussion, here is what I would have picked from your packs:
P1:
Necrotic Ooze
Galvanic Blast
Shatter
Turn to Slag
Kemba
Chrome Steed
Rusted Relic
Sabreclaw Golem
Neurok Replica
Accorder's Shield
Auriok Replica
Seize the Initiative
Goblin Gavaleer
Golden Urn
Relic Putresence
P2:
Razor Hippogriff
Gold Myr
Glint Hawk
Auriok Sunchaser
Razor Hippogriff
Glint Hawk Idol
Turn to Slag
Shatter
Rust Tick
Ghalma's Warden
Bloodshot Trainee
Necrogen Censer
Oxidda Daredevil
Vigil for the Lost
Forest
P3:
Masticore
Platinum Myr
Silver Myr
Horizon Spellbomb
Culling Dais
Skyguard
Skyguard
Skyguard
Strider Harness
Moriok Reaper
Plated Seastrider
Golden Urn
Blunt the Assault
Plains
And this is what my build would have looked like:
Galvanic Blast
2 Shatter
2 Turn to Slag
2 Razor Hippogriff
Glint Hawk
Kemba, Kha Regent
2 Kemba's Skyguard
Chrome Steed
Rusted Relic
Auriok Replica
Accorder's Shield
Sabreclaw Golem
Glint Hawk Idol
Rust Tick
Molten Tail Masticore
Platinum Myr
Silver Myr
Gold Myr
Strider Harness
Culling Dais
Normally I would suggest running 15 artifacts in a metalcraft deck, but I think you can cheat on that a bit 1) beacuse you have lots of removal, and 2) you have the 2 Hippogriffs to rebuy your artifacts. I think this build has a lot of nice synergies, too.
Hopefully this provides you with some food for thought. Thanks for taking the time to write this up, and good luck in your next draft!
The only way I see a mass exodus of people leaving MTGO is if they make such a major change to the game and client that it is a totaly unplayable game to most people, and not to people of one format. When we had the M10 rules change there was threat of people leaving the game. Some probably did, but not enough to effect the game as a whole. The only game I ever seen this happen was Starwars Galaxies where they changed the game so much, it litterally was a new MMO with a Starwars theme.
I really wish that people would forget about BREAD and never mention it again. BREAD is a good way to transition from being a terrible drafter to being a mediocre one (and I don't mean mediocre by pro tour/mtgo shark standards, I mean mediocre in the context of all people who draft). BREAD is reasonable for learning the very bare basics of card evaluation, but the problem is that it completely ignores context. It doesn't take into account the dynamics of the set and completely ignores archetypes. A drafter won't make the leap to being legitimately good at drafting until he or she abandons the whole BREAD thing and learns to shift the majority of his or her attention to context. So BREAD is kind of like eating candy bars right before a race if you're a marathon runner. It might give you the initial burst of energy to help you start fast, but after a little while it actively starts to hinder you instead of helping.
The other thing that really gets me about this draft is that you call it "Reading Signals." Honestly I'm not sure what you are referring to at all, as the 5th pick Kemba ended up being a false signal. You picked up essentially all your good white in pack 2 -- in the rest of pack 1 all you got was an Abuna Acolyte that you took over the far superior Chrome Steed, and in pack 3 you saw basically no white aside from a few mid-pack Kemba's Skyguards.
I definitely think you have potential as a drafter, and I think focus is really what you need to get to the next level. My impression from reading through your drafts is that you tend to focus too much on card to card evaluation and don't pay enough attention to what you're building towards. As a result you end up with a lot of fairly unfocused decks that have pretty good overall power level but relatively poor consistency and quite a few missed opportunities for synergy. Decks like this can absolutely win drafts (and this draft is an example of that), but you aren't going to win consistently this way. There were a few critical junctures in this draft. The most important was probably when you picked Kemba. At that point you have red and black cards in your pile and you are adding a heavy white card. Your goal over the next few picks has to be to figure out what colors to stick with. You never really did this and ended up with a three color deck in the end, which is definitely not ideal.
I also just want to comment a little bit on the shatter vs. necropede pick. If you hadn't picked galvanic blast in pick 2 I agree that this would be close. The power level of the cards is in the same ballpark, but necropede is a little bit more flexible as it does not commit you to a color (although it's worth noting that if you don't end up in infect, it's only good in a controlling deck). That said, the fact that you already have galvanic blast removes some of the flexibility advantage of necropede. Ultimately, your main justification for taking the 'pede is that it "alters board states in ways that shatter does not." While this statement is technically true, the reverse is just as valid. Shatter alters board states in ways that necropede does not. Necropede can get card advantage sometimes, and it's good at stalling early attackers. Shatter, on the other hand, is almost always a one for one trade but it has the advantage of being able to take out some extremely threatening cards like Steel Hellkite and Sword of Body and Mind. Shatter beats bombs, while necropede beats weenies. Both do their own thing and both do it well. When you make a pick like this you have to start getting an idea of what your plan is in your mind so that you can adjust your future picks accordingly. I don't get the sense that you did this here, although it's a little tough to say as the Kemba threw a bit of a wrench in the works.
Anyway, I apologize if I sound overly harsh -- I don't mean to be. You say you want to get out of your rut, and I think the best way to do that will be to take stock of how you draft and start to shift the way you think a bit. I definitely think it's what you need to take the next step.
That would be amazing!! I'm looking forward for it. I've tried to find it in the Internet but found only zip folds at shared files SE http://filecraft.com . They wery so large that I doubted it was what I needed.
Yep I agree 100%, every additional banned card on the Tribal Apocalypse PRE banned list is more deserving of a ban than Moat.
To be honest if they've been reading the Tribal articles I find it unusual that they haven't banned the other cards on the PRE ban list. Surely they're more troublesome? This feels more like someone at WoC has been over playing Moat and the Banned and Restricted list people have been somewhat narked so they've banned it out of spite!
Oh to have that power :)
The three 100cs bannings I'm assuming are because wizards has an idea on what the format should play like and they believe these cards stop it from doing so.
a) It feels like banning both SoF and Top at the same time are an attempt to support the more random nature of the format. SoF allows almost unlimited tutoring and the Top consistently smooths your draws. I'm sad to see SoF banned but not overly surprised . The Top however, if I'm honest, I'm over the moon about! I've been complaining about this artifact since I started playing the format. When it's common to see someone using a wordly tutor for a trinket mage into a Top, that's 2 tutors!!, as early as they can in a format where tutors are KING speaks to the power of the Top. The difference in early draw power density in a random format is ridiculous.
b) Mind twist is a little odd. I suspect that the Mind Twist is banned because they expect games to be slower and wiping a players hand for 5 mana'ish is possibly a little too difficult to recover from?
As I've said I'm not upset about Top but Survival, and definitely Mind twist, seem a little harsh.
Really nice catch Etriol. I didn't notice that before or after the game.
OGB: I explained those picks. I was taking versatile picks to keep my infect/ non-infect options open. Necropede is very versatile. It goes in any deck, not just infect. It is a great deterant when the boardstate is not in your favor. After my first four picks I wasn't committed to any colors and could still go into metalcraft, infect, or other. Okay, so I didn't follow BREAD because Necropede is not a bomb, but it is solid, and semi-removal. I stand by the pick.
The ordered pairs below are in the form (Casting Cost, Equip Cost).
I was running Accorder's Shield (0,3), Infiltration Lens (1,1), and Strider Harness (3, 1). I value Barbed Battlegear (3,2) over all of those most of the time. I'm not going to run four equipment, so if the Battlegear is in the Strider Harness is out. The shield and lens have synergy with the Glint Hawk and the Glint Hawk Idol. The Glint Hawk has synergy with the Trigon of Rage. I made the choice to run the inferior Strider Harness over the Battlegear because of the Regent. It allowed me to equip and swing with a new creature or a flyer and then reequip back to the regent for token creation. This happened for me many times with the Strider Harness, where it would not have with the battlegear, as the equip/ reequip cost effectivey goes from 2 to 4, it would have been prohibitive. My deck was pretty quick in the 0-2 spot, had nice stablilizers at the three spot, and finishers at the four and five spot. That isn't to say that the Barbed Battlegear would have been just as great, especially for my flyers.
As passionate as Classic players I don't see a massive defection happening. I agree that it loses a lot of luster for every time they delay and put us off and give us equivocations. Sadly the inner workings of a company run by Hasbro is somewhat of a mystery to most of us.
Can you explain why you took the Necropede over Shatter P1P3, and then Trigon of Rage over Turn to Slag P1P4. You could have had 3 removal spells in your first 4 cards that would have basically dealt with all the bombs in this format.
The Trigon/Slag pick may just be a difference in pick order, but I don't understand the Necropede pick at all.
Also, given the number of flyers you have (not to mention Kemba), it seems you should be playing the Barbed Battlegear, perhaps over the Trigon of Rage.
The problem is with a delay there may not be a classic/vintage community. If wuzards keeps pissing off the classic olayers they may just quit the format outright. And by the time power 9 hits it wont be enough to save vintage.
First, a link, since nobody provided one: http://community.wizards.com/magiconline/blog/2010/11/19/magic_online_ba...
Fastbond is banned.
Library of Alexandria is banned.
Mana Vault is banned.
Mind Twist is banned.
Regrowth is banned.
Sensei's Divining Top is banned.
Survival of the Fittest is banned.
Time Vault is banned.
Wheel of Fortune is banned.
Subject line says it all--what on earth is going on with this list? I can understand the preemptive bannings of cards like Fastbond, Regrowth, Time Vault and maybe Wheel of Fortune, but what on earth is the reasoning behind banning these?
* Mind Twist
* Sensei's Divining Top
* Survival of the Fittest
Survival is surely a pain to play against, but as previous posters here and on the other page have noted, it needs some degree of support from your deck. And there are answers to it like: Planar Void and graveyard hate to some degree, Pithing Needle, Aven Mindcensor and Leonin Arbiter, Disenchant(!), etc. I could go either way on banning Survival, especially since I can't afford a copy myself, but when you think about it there are plenty of other effects which are just as abusive: Oath of Druids, Scapeshift, Painter's Servant combo, etc. Just how far does the line of thinking that says Survival should be banned go?
The other two bannings above are bringing us into real WTF territory. Mind Twist can often win games, sure, but again there are solutions: counterspells, giving yourself shroud, cards like Obstinate Baloth or Dodecapod that punish players for playing discard, Divert, and maybe a few others. It's also part of the way we approach games to assume that black decks will try to force us to discard cards at some point in the game. It's completely dumb to ban, as the article's author above has noted, one of the few good reasons for playing black in this format, not to mention that it's removing a very useful tool for keeping combo and permission-based control decks in check.
Finally the biggest WFT of all: Sensei's Divining Top. This makes zero sense. Absolutely none. Have people been complaining that it slows down the game too much or something? Or that it goes in almost every deck? What?
To answer the first point: players have individual chess-like clocks for a reason; if your opponent is running down their clock by making lots of decision each turn, then that's /their problem/. I think that the vast majority of players who actually want to play in the format want to do so because it's challenging and presents us with the opportunity to have games where we /have to/ do a lot of thinking. If this banning is down to the moaners who just want instant gratification and are complaining because players like to actually think things through and play magic the same way they would play a game of chess, say, then I really despair for this format.
To answer the second point, just have a look at the price of the card: it's currently 1.25 on this site. That's hardly a barrier to entry or anything, now is it? There are many expensive staples for this format (dual lands and fetchlands being one obvious example) which /are/ a barrier to entry, but nobody was ever put off the format because they couldn't pick up a copy of Sensei's Divining Top.
I'm still shaking my head in disbelief about this announcement. Seriously, WHAT?