I think cards like Magister Sphinx and Sorin Markov are important. There aren't too many, but it's not that uncommon to see people have decks that can gain 20 - or much more - life each turn. When someone has 300-400 life and some defenses, these cards come in handy.
JustSin do not go down Jyalt's road. It is fraught with pain and discomfort. Your articles are a mark of excellence, you have no need to mention the less interesting article writers at all. In fact it does you a disservice. Just keep entertaining us with your travails in budget magic and drafts and leave the negativism for those with nothing better to do.
that would be incredible, but I'm not sure you could do that and keep competitive.. itd prob have to be gobos, which are strong in tribal and pauper and if they fit pauper theyd prob fit heirloom, trick would just be byos
Disagree completely with theft being disliked, I love playing with or against thief decks, they make for hugely entertaining games and allow you to pretty much play with different cards every single game.
Players have to realize that magic is a game designed for competitive players. Ever since hasbro has become involved, the game has become more and more about making money for them and wizards than it was when it was just wizards running the show. Mythics have been around a lot longer than a vast majority of players and people around the game realize, it is just now they have a new color for their set symbol and a name. There have always been "rarer rares" in sets. But now that they have a name, they are worth more money, because now it's more widely known. If all you want to do is "play" standard (be able to join FNMs or Standard queues) you can just buy a precon, which i'd suggest doing over playing some of those decks in the article. If you're looking to play a deck and actually get into the format and do well, you have to invest the money into the format, unfortunate that it's become so expensive, yes. But it's something you have to do. Fortunately, magic is one of the few hobbies that can pay for itself. I have always been a blue player, so the moment the new jace came out, i picked up my playset via trades. He came out at $40, and has since gone up, breaking into triple digits at one point. Magic can be much more affordable than it seems if you are smart about it. I bought my frost titans at 6 dollars each, because i knew how good they were well before states. (I actually wound up buying two extra playsets from a buddy, which i have now sold for profit as well). Magic is expensive, but if you're trying to get into the standard, you should do so with a real deck, as you won't make much money just playing casual decks. Even if you go to events, scrub out at 0-2, and then just win a few side events, you can come out ahead on the day. But you won't do that with casual decks.
"On the subject of land destruction, I think cards like Ruination, Blood Moon, Magus and Back to Basics are pretty okay. They're a good way of keeping people honest with their mana and are good for those annoying lands as well."
~Something you have to take into account is Ruination against a lot of decks is no different than Armageddon. I would say the majority of decks are running more than one color, and as such have a lot of non-basics for fixing, and even mono-colored decks should be running a few just because they're good (maze of ith, temple of the false god, wasteland, reliquary tower, etc).
@Scartore
Even "casual" players like the ones you're talking about have to go into the format understanding the card pool for it does not serve them very well. It is an expensive format (moreso in paper than on MTGO), and even if you don't want to build a tier 1 deck for EDH/Commander, just to make your deck even have a decent chance at being in the game beyond your first 7 or 8 turns you have to have an understanding of how gameplay progresses in the format, as well as what decks are trying to do. The same is true for every format. If you're playing nothing but creatures in your wart deck, you have to accept that you will lose to wrath effects (and EDH/Commander is a format that wrath effects are very heavily played in), even the casual players are able to try and improve.
As for a general comment, I enjoyed the article. But something i think should be noted is a lot of these cards are darn near staples of the format. Every deck with white should definitely be running condemn and hallowed burial(and rafiq and/or 5-color decks bant charm). To me, there's no question about it. I understand the format was designed to be "casual" and "social", but the card pool it pulls from makes that difficult, especially for people who have money to invest into it. They're given access to some of the most powerful cards in Magic, they should be able to play them without being ridiculed for it.
If I were you, I'd play in the TP room. Not only will you face mainstream (non-rogue) decks, but also you can play with a sideboard. You know, in tournament play, you play more sideboarded games than unsideboarded, so having that experience is really an asset. Sideboarding correctly is really tricky business and can drastically change the outcome of a match.
Oh, I know, I'm just trying to let some others know who may be reading that there ARE cheaper options that can't really be discussed openly here. Standard PDC particularly can be built for less than 1 ticket if all the commons are 1 cent.
Thanks for the lists. I have been wanting to get into standard this season since I started playing/drafting a little over a year ago online and now have a good collection of standard cards. However, every time I check deck lists they always contain numerous cards I don't have like the titans and Jace, etc. Not only that but as a fairly new mtg player I wouldn't want to invest in an expensive deck if I don't know how to pilot it properly. Many of these decks look quite doable for me. One question, do you recommend playing in the tourney room or the casual room with these?
I hate to defend 4-3-2-2 drafts as they really should be 5-3-2-2 but there are some rare circumstances when they are the right choice.
1. When no other kind of draft is available. Some of the classic sets have valuable rare, uncommon, and even common cards, and when those sets are available, they are usually only available in 4-3-2-2. Examples include Urza's Block and Tempest Block.
2. When you're a reasonably good player looking for easier competition. All of the math that suggests that 8-4 is better than 4-3-2-2 at a certain skill level assumes that the skill level of your opponents is the same for both formats. This is not true and impossible to account for in a mathematical model because you can't reasonably model how difficult your likely opponents are going to be.
Of course, if you're on a budget, and not drafting several times during a week, which is the main point of this kind of article, schedule your time to play ONLY in the Thursday Night Magic drafts and the 64-man release event drafts. They have the biggest payouts hands down.
What I dislike is huge differences in the powerlevel of decks. 3/4 powerfull decks against each other is extremly fun, 3/4 decks which have low power can be quite nice too. But everything else seems to degenerate into something unfun for atleast some of the players...
If you have no chance to win/lose alot of the appeal goes away :/
One thing I would like to add that you might think of trying is a universal budget deck that can be played in all the PRE's so it would need to be legal in Pauper, Tribal, BYOS and maybe even Heirloom. That deck would give you value for money for sure.
Thanks for posting these. I love evaluating draft walkthroughs. Some ????
P1P6: Spellbomb over Drake. Prefer fixing over 3rd color. Note you needeed the spellbombs later to support all your colors.
P1P7: Myr over Heatstroker. Take the accel/fixer over mediocre grey oger. No need to cut colors in Swiss.
End of Pack 1: solidly in Red, white not showing up outside of Arrest. Keep options open.
P2P1: Tumble Magnet over Revoke. Colorless art will make deck. White still ????
P2P2: Barrage Ogre is at least = to Steed if not better.
P2P3: Take the Ember Smith. Best Smith and in color.
P2P4: Again I would not commit to color and take lifestaff, Gloemn or even Replica over the tapper.
P2P6: Prob would take Dias here, but could consider spellbomb or even Fume Spitter is colors still open.
P2P7: Necropede. Please. Bestcard in the pack. As an artifact will fit any deck, and has relavent ability.
End of Pack 2: Definatly in red, but still a bit unfocused. I would be looking at R/G/?, not necesssarly 4 color.
P3P2: By taking this you commit to green. I would look at R/G/w now. If you are more committed to white then Idol is the pick.
P3P3: Trigon should be considered. Reusable removal is Good!
P3P4: This is late for Grasp. Definatly green committed now.
P3P7: Molder Beast + Spellbombs is good. Consider the trampling fatty here.
P3P9: Molder Beast again.
P3P11: Hate the Corpse Cur.
Hard to argue with results, but 2-1 in swiss is still losing EV. Poisin was quite open and should be considered esp when quality cards wheel.
Please let me know whether you agree with any of these suggestions, or better why you disagree. Always looking to learn more on the format.
I would break down Draft #2, but sometime bombs just win :-)
Lets try and look at this from the casual players view, OK spikes? An EDH deck that you've built yourself is an investment in time and treasure. Maybe its a Wort the Raidmother deck with a r/g arcane spirit subtheme. Whatever it is it's yours. Now you haven't really playtested it a lot because of time constraints, so pretty much all of your playtesting is live in a commander game online. Probably not with your clanmates because you don't have any. If you're lucky you get a group of e-migos you can deal with, but who knows sometimes. The game starts and you say hi to folks, people start playing lands. Then out of the blue the player to your left ramps into a Smokestack on turn 3, followed by all sorts of griefer cards. By turn 5 everybody at the table is sacrificing 2 permanents a turn and even if you manage to draw your Krosan grip you can't cast it because you just sacrificed your third land. And when you try and politely point out the pretty brutal opening your opponent has had he calls you a whiny baby and doesn't give a crap what you think as long as he wins?
That's the douchebag we're talking about when we talk about the "social contract" in EDH
I really want to be like Paul and or AJ and say "bring what you want, lets have a good time" If you ramp out Emrathulu on turn 6 with your Azusa deck and start recurring him, I really want to be able to say "Neato, well I guess that's good game." But I've found that the folks who suspend Obliterate/Emrakul on turn aren't very nice people, or at least don't care what people think of them, which can amount to the same thing.
This really shouldn't be that hard. Try thinking of it this way... the player who sits down across from you in a commander game might very well be on a limited budget. Or maybe he's a relentless tinkerer. Or maybe he's just not the worlds best deckbuilder. My understanding of the social contract in EDH is that those folks get a chance to have fun too, ok Spike?
1) Actually, the mana for that deck was very good overall if you actually do the math. Most of the colored cards in that deck were good both early and late, with the exception of the green I think. I don't really want to be using revoke existence on turn 2 or arrest on turn 3. A turn 1 Vedalken Certarch literally does nothing. I guess Embersmith is much better early, but usually even drawing him late is good because that 1 damage can make combat really awkward. If I am missing any color of mana, that only accounts for 1/20th of the cards in the deck. I was only color screwed 1 game, and that was out of blue, with both blue cards in my hand (they killed a silver myr earlier). I checked the deck over with Godot, another writer for this website and a better limited player than me, and he said the mana is how he would have done it too and it actually looked pretty solid.
2) I guess I will just leave it blank? I'm just re-inforcing if there are a bunch of bad cards in the pack in this set, you take the artifact over anything else. I will take worse artifacts over better colored cards quite often in this set, because a high density of artifacts is important.
3) I think I agree with you here. I overrate mana myr, but I think you probably underrate mana myr. Turn 2 mana myr eat removal so often in this set even if you didn't need it that it makes them very good. However, relying on mana myr in this set is just horrible, because whenever you need a myr to live it never does. Having something to do with your mana myr late game is extremely important, which is why I am such a big lover of culling dais. I will gladly turn mana myr into other cards late game. I remember I had a M11 draft where I had 3 llanowar elves and still played like 16 lands because I had fauna shaman.
4) Yea, it's a huge flaw of mine. I have no problem putting people into infect though, because I honestly have never lost a match to being poisoned twice. I try to draft against infect. If I'm not drafting infect, I have to make sure I am beating infect.
I'm looking forward to following this series, especially your ventures into the Pauper PREs. I played in some of those quite a while back & fine them to be a lot of fun.
I am curious, were your drafts 4-3-2-2 queues or 8-4s? I've seen various analysis on ROI, there's a threshhold of average win percentage below which the Swiss queues give you the highest EV, and above which the 8-4s do. The 4-3-2-2 queues are never the highest expectation value choice at any level of skill - which is intuitively obvious without doing the math, as the others pay out 12 boosters and a 4-3-2-2 only pays out 11.
For people just starting out, who would seem like the best target audience for this kind of series, I think it's unlikely they'd have the kind of win percentage that would justify playing in 8-4s. Also I have to say that Swiss queues minimize your variance if you care about that. You can't win as big, but you almost always win 1 or 2 boosters. I'd think when starting from nothing, it's nice to know you're almost always going to get some collection-building value beyond the 45 picks.
I did a lot of low-budget collection building a few years ago by stalking Ebay for low-price common & uncommon sets, too. Not sure how viable that is these days, but worth a look.
On the bots vs. MTGO store, it's worth mentioning that you're also saving sales tax when you buy boosters from a bot. Not insignificant savings, there! Used to be you could get tix through Ebay from 80 to 95 cents on the dollar, but various changes Wizards have made adjusted the supply & demand ratio such that you can't do that any more.
To say the least, these were two interesting drafts . . . some minor comments/suggestions:
1 - To say the first deck had "minor" consistency issues is probably a huge understatement. Raw-dogging four colors by turn 4 isn't indicative of how the deck should run, etc. A little more explanation might be useful - were you stuck w/ cards in hand? Did you get lucky on drawing lands? Etc.
2 - Comments like "Artifact." aren't particularly useful for the reader - we can see that it's an artifact, and after a certain point, there's no use in pointing out that you're upping your artifact count.
3 - I think you vastly overrate off-color myr. Unless you have something to do with them late-game, it's really easy for decks to choke on 4+ myr - I've found (in ~20 drafts, rating 1775ish so obv no expert) that 2 on-color myr works best barring some very good equipment, a Barrage Ogre, etc. 16 lands + 2 myr is 18 mana sources - going up to 20+ leads to consistency issues.
4 - Infect was wide open draft 1 - I know you noted you don't think it's a real deck, but when it's this open, you likely sweep the table. Bad infect decks are the dregs, but good ones are clearly the most favorable archetype in Scars. Your deck was still very good, but it's worth noting: this was what good infect conditions look like (even if there wasn't a natural place to jump in hindsight).
5 - The second draft was awesome - bombariffic and you put yourself in a great position to take advantage. Must have been a blast to play.
Yeah, I should have mentioned mass hand destruction, like the black Myojin. There are plenty of other cards out there that I'm sure that I missed as well, so feel free to mention more here in the comments.
What Paul said is essentially correct: It is the wild west out there, so you should expect to play against everything. If you really don't want to play against Eldrazi or Time Stretch, start a game a put that in the comments. If you do like to play Obliterate/Dimensional Breach/Emrakul and people concede upon seeing you drop the spell, don't get upset if someone concedes. It just means they probably aren't prepared for the spell, and you will win anyway. The Social Contract doesn't have set rules, so everything is open to interpretation. One person may hate Blood Moon, while the next might hate Forbid. The moral of the story is be prepared.
Assuming your general gets tucked but you manage to get it back into your hand, when you cast it the mana cost of your general will be its true mana cost, no added 2 or 4 mana necessary. If it then gets destroyed, you will have the option to return it to the command zone. The game won't forget.
Just an FYI I am still looking for a volunteer who is willing to quest write a small section for my next article. I'm offering 5 tix and it is about the premade decks (ie Garruk vs Liliana) and their playability. Find me in game or AIM - EyeJustSin, if I don't hear soon I'll have to submit the article without that info and I'd hate to do that.
I think cards like Magister Sphinx and Sorin Markov are important. There aren't too many, but it's not that uncommon to see people have decks that can gain 20 - or much more - life each turn. When someone has 300-400 life and some defenses, these cards come in handy.
JustSin do not go down Jyalt's road. It is fraught with pain and discomfort. Your articles are a mark of excellence, you have no need to mention the less interesting article writers at all. In fact it does you a disservice. Just keep entertaining us with your travails in budget magic and drafts and leave the negativism for those with nothing better to do.
All the screenshots were from Standard Daily events, so I would imagine that they are actually pretty up to snuff.
that would be incredible, but I'm not sure you could do that and keep competitive.. itd prob have to be gobos, which are strong in tribal and pauper and if they fit pauper theyd prob fit heirloom, trick would just be byos
I would have, but i havent see godot write in a long long time
Disagree completely with theft being disliked, I love playing with or against thief decks, they make for hugely entertaining games and allow you to pretty much play with different cards every single game.
Players have to realize that magic is a game designed for competitive players. Ever since hasbro has become involved, the game has become more and more about making money for them and wizards than it was when it was just wizards running the show. Mythics have been around a lot longer than a vast majority of players and people around the game realize, it is just now they have a new color for their set symbol and a name. There have always been "rarer rares" in sets. But now that they have a name, they are worth more money, because now it's more widely known. If all you want to do is "play" standard (be able to join FNMs or Standard queues) you can just buy a precon, which i'd suggest doing over playing some of those decks in the article. If you're looking to play a deck and actually get into the format and do well, you have to invest the money into the format, unfortunate that it's become so expensive, yes. But it's something you have to do. Fortunately, magic is one of the few hobbies that can pay for itself. I have always been a blue player, so the moment the new jace came out, i picked up my playset via trades. He came out at $40, and has since gone up, breaking into triple digits at one point. Magic can be much more affordable than it seems if you are smart about it. I bought my frost titans at 6 dollars each, because i knew how good they were well before states. (I actually wound up buying two extra playsets from a buddy, which i have now sold for profit as well). Magic is expensive, but if you're trying to get into the standard, you should do so with a real deck, as you won't make much money just playing casual decks. Even if you go to events, scrub out at 0-2, and then just win a few side events, you can come out ahead on the day. But you won't do that with casual decks.
"On the subject of land destruction, I think cards like Ruination, Blood Moon, Magus and Back to Basics are pretty okay. They're a good way of keeping people honest with their mana and are good for those annoying lands as well."
~Something you have to take into account is Ruination against a lot of decks is no different than Armageddon. I would say the majority of decks are running more than one color, and as such have a lot of non-basics for fixing, and even mono-colored decks should be running a few just because they're good (maze of ith, temple of the false god, wasteland, reliquary tower, etc).
@Scartore
Even "casual" players like the ones you're talking about have to go into the format understanding the card pool for it does not serve them very well. It is an expensive format (moreso in paper than on MTGO), and even if you don't want to build a tier 1 deck for EDH/Commander, just to make your deck even have a decent chance at being in the game beyond your first 7 or 8 turns you have to have an understanding of how gameplay progresses in the format, as well as what decks are trying to do. The same is true for every format. If you're playing nothing but creatures in your wart deck, you have to accept that you will lose to wrath effects (and EDH/Commander is a format that wrath effects are very heavily played in), even the casual players are able to try and improve.
As for a general comment, I enjoyed the article. But something i think should be noted is a lot of these cards are darn near staples of the format. Every deck with white should definitely be running condemn and hallowed burial(and rafiq and/or 5-color decks bant charm). To me, there's no question about it. I understand the format was designed to be "casual" and "social", but the card pool it pulls from makes that difficult, especially for people who have money to invest into it. They're given access to some of the most powerful cards in Magic, they should be able to play them without being ridiculed for it.
If I were you, I'd play in the TP room. Not only will you face mainstream (non-rogue) decks, but also you can play with a sideboard. You know, in tournament play, you play more sideboarded games than unsideboarded, so having that experience is really an asset. Sideboarding correctly is really tricky business and can drastically change the outcome of a match.
Oh, I know, I'm just trying to let some others know who may be reading that there ARE cheaper options that can't really be discussed openly here. Standard PDC particularly can be built for less than 1 ticket if all the commons are 1 cent.
Thanks for the lists. I have been wanting to get into standard this season since I started playing/drafting a little over a year ago online and now have a good collection of standard cards. However, every time I check deck lists they always contain numerous cards I don't have like the titans and Jace, etc. Not only that but as a fairly new mtg player I wouldn't want to invest in an expensive deck if I don't know how to pilot it properly. Many of these decks look quite doable for me. One question, do you recommend playing in the tourney room or the casual room with these?
I hate to defend 4-3-2-2 drafts as they really should be 5-3-2-2 but there are some rare circumstances when they are the right choice.
1. When no other kind of draft is available. Some of the classic sets have valuable rare, uncommon, and even common cards, and when those sets are available, they are usually only available in 4-3-2-2. Examples include Urza's Block and Tempest Block.
2. When you're a reasonably good player looking for easier competition. All of the math that suggests that 8-4 is better than 4-3-2-2 at a certain skill level assumes that the skill level of your opponents is the same for both formats. This is not true and impossible to account for in a mathematical model because you can't reasonably model how difficult your likely opponents are going to be.
Of course, if you're on a budget, and not drafting several times during a week, which is the main point of this kind of article, schedule your time to play ONLY in the Thursday Night Magic drafts and the 64-man release event drafts. They have the biggest payouts hands down.
Play in which way duel deck vs duel deck or duel deck vs the classic hordes?
edit:
On second thoughts after looking at the deck lists I wont be able to help as I can't afford the cards I'm missing.
What I dislike is huge differences in the powerlevel of decks. 3/4 powerfull decks against each other is extremly fun, 3/4 decks which have low power can be quite nice too. But everything else seems to degenerate into something unfun for atleast some of the players...
If you have no chance to win/lose alot of the appeal goes away :/
One thing I would like to add that you might think of trying is a universal budget deck that can be played in all the PRE's so it would need to be legal in Pauper, Tribal, BYOS and maybe even Heirloom. That deck would give you value for money for sure.
Thanks for posting these. I love evaluating draft walkthroughs. Some ????
P1P6: Spellbomb over Drake. Prefer fixing over 3rd color. Note you needeed the spellbombs later to support all your colors.
P1P7: Myr over Heatstroker. Take the accel/fixer over mediocre grey oger. No need to cut colors in Swiss.
End of Pack 1: solidly in Red, white not showing up outside of Arrest. Keep options open.
P2P1: Tumble Magnet over Revoke. Colorless art will make deck. White still ????
P2P2: Barrage Ogre is at least = to Steed if not better.
P2P3: Take the Ember Smith. Best Smith and in color.
P2P4: Again I would not commit to color and take lifestaff, Gloemn or even Replica over the tapper.
P2P6: Prob would take Dias here, but could consider spellbomb or even Fume Spitter is colors still open.
P2P7: Necropede. Please. Bestcard in the pack. As an artifact will fit any deck, and has relavent ability.
End of Pack 2: Definatly in red, but still a bit unfocused. I would be looking at R/G/?, not necesssarly 4 color.
P3P2: By taking this you commit to green. I would look at R/G/w now. If you are more committed to white then Idol is the pick.
P3P3: Trigon should be considered. Reusable removal is Good!
P3P4: This is late for Grasp. Definatly green committed now.
P3P7: Molder Beast + Spellbombs is good. Consider the trampling fatty here.
P3P9: Molder Beast again.
P3P11: Hate the Corpse Cur.
Hard to argue with results, but 2-1 in swiss is still losing EV. Poisin was quite open and should be considered esp when quality cards wheel.
Please let me know whether you agree with any of these suggestions, or better why you disagree. Always looking to learn more on the format.
I would break down Draft #2, but sometime bombs just win :-)
___helper_monkey on MTGO
Lets try and look at this from the casual players view, OK spikes? An EDH deck that you've built yourself is an investment in time and treasure. Maybe its a Wort the Raidmother deck with a r/g arcane spirit subtheme. Whatever it is it's yours. Now you haven't really playtested it a lot because of time constraints, so pretty much all of your playtesting is live in a commander game online. Probably not with your clanmates because you don't have any. If you're lucky you get a group of e-migos you can deal with, but who knows sometimes. The game starts and you say hi to folks, people start playing lands. Then out of the blue the player to your left ramps into a Smokestack on turn 3, followed by all sorts of griefer cards. By turn 5 everybody at the table is sacrificing 2 permanents a turn and even if you manage to draw your Krosan grip you can't cast it because you just sacrificed your third land. And when you try and politely point out the pretty brutal opening your opponent has had he calls you a whiny baby and doesn't give a crap what you think as long as he wins?
That's the douchebag we're talking about when we talk about the "social contract" in EDH
I really want to be like Paul and or AJ and say "bring what you want, lets have a good time" If you ramp out Emrathulu on turn 6 with your Azusa deck and start recurring him, I really want to be able to say "Neato, well I guess that's good game." But I've found that the folks who suspend Obliterate/Emrakul on turn aren't very nice people, or at least don't care what people think of them, which can amount to the same thing.
This really shouldn't be that hard. Try thinking of it this way... the player who sits down across from you in a commander game might very well be on a limited budget. Or maybe he's a relentless tinkerer. Or maybe he's just not the worlds best deckbuilder. My understanding of the social contract in EDH is that those folks get a chance to have fun too, ok Spike?
I really really want to build a UR chaos deck...i think it would be a blast
1) Actually, the mana for that deck was very good overall if you actually do the math. Most of the colored cards in that deck were good both early and late, with the exception of the green I think. I don't really want to be using revoke existence on turn 2 or arrest on turn 3. A turn 1 Vedalken Certarch literally does nothing. I guess Embersmith is much better early, but usually even drawing him late is good because that 1 damage can make combat really awkward. If I am missing any color of mana, that only accounts for 1/20th of the cards in the deck. I was only color screwed 1 game, and that was out of blue, with both blue cards in my hand (they killed a silver myr earlier). I checked the deck over with Godot, another writer for this website and a better limited player than me, and he said the mana is how he would have done it too and it actually looked pretty solid.
2) I guess I will just leave it blank? I'm just re-inforcing if there are a bunch of bad cards in the pack in this set, you take the artifact over anything else. I will take worse artifacts over better colored cards quite often in this set, because a high density of artifacts is important.
3) I think I agree with you here. I overrate mana myr, but I think you probably underrate mana myr. Turn 2 mana myr eat removal so often in this set even if you didn't need it that it makes them very good. However, relying on mana myr in this set is just horrible, because whenever you need a myr to live it never does. Having something to do with your mana myr late game is extremely important, which is why I am such a big lover of culling dais. I will gladly turn mana myr into other cards late game. I remember I had a M11 draft where I had 3 llanowar elves and still played like 16 lands because I had fauna shaman.
4) Yea, it's a huge flaw of mine. I have no problem putting people into infect though, because I honestly have never lost a match to being poisoned twice. I try to draft against infect. If I'm not drafting infect, I have to make sure I am beating infect.
5) It was. Bombs AWAY!!
Oh, and you should recommend people read Godot's draft writeups too. I'm pretty sure he's a better drafter than I am, and he's an excellent writer.
I'm looking forward to following this series, especially your ventures into the Pauper PREs. I played in some of those quite a while back & fine them to be a lot of fun.
I am curious, were your drafts 4-3-2-2 queues or 8-4s? I've seen various analysis on ROI, there's a threshhold of average win percentage below which the Swiss queues give you the highest EV, and above which the 8-4s do. The 4-3-2-2 queues are never the highest expectation value choice at any level of skill - which is intuitively obvious without doing the math, as the others pay out 12 boosters and a 4-3-2-2 only pays out 11.
For people just starting out, who would seem like the best target audience for this kind of series, I think it's unlikely they'd have the kind of win percentage that would justify playing in 8-4s. Also I have to say that Swiss queues minimize your variance if you care about that. You can't win as big, but you almost always win 1 or 2 boosters. I'd think when starting from nothing, it's nice to know you're almost always going to get some collection-building value beyond the 45 picks.
I did a lot of low-budget collection building a few years ago by stalking Ebay for low-price common & uncommon sets, too. Not sure how viable that is these days, but worth a look.
On the bots vs. MTGO store, it's worth mentioning that you're also saving sales tax when you buy boosters from a bot. Not insignificant savings, there! Used to be you could get tix through Ebay from 80 to 95 cents on the dollar, but various changes Wizards have made adjusted the supply & demand ratio such that you can't do that any more.
To say the least, these were two interesting drafts . . . some minor comments/suggestions:
1 - To say the first deck had "minor" consistency issues is probably a huge understatement. Raw-dogging four colors by turn 4 isn't indicative of how the deck should run, etc. A little more explanation might be useful - were you stuck w/ cards in hand? Did you get lucky on drawing lands? Etc.
2 - Comments like "Artifact." aren't particularly useful for the reader - we can see that it's an artifact, and after a certain point, there's no use in pointing out that you're upping your artifact count.
3 - I think you vastly overrate off-color myr. Unless you have something to do with them late-game, it's really easy for decks to choke on 4+ myr - I've found (in ~20 drafts, rating 1775ish so obv no expert) that 2 on-color myr works best barring some very good equipment, a Barrage Ogre, etc. 16 lands + 2 myr is 18 mana sources - going up to 20+ leads to consistency issues.
4 - Infect was wide open draft 1 - I know you noted you don't think it's a real deck, but when it's this open, you likely sweep the table. Bad infect decks are the dregs, but good ones are clearly the most favorable archetype in Scars. Your deck was still very good, but it's worth noting: this was what good infect conditions look like (even if there wasn't a natural place to jump in hindsight).
5 - The second draft was awesome - bombariffic and you put yourself in a great position to take advantage. Must have been a blast to play.
Good article, hope to see some more. Thanks!
Yeah, I should have mentioned mass hand destruction, like the black Myojin. There are plenty of other cards out there that I'm sure that I missed as well, so feel free to mention more here in the comments.
What Paul said is essentially correct: It is the wild west out there, so you should expect to play against everything. If you really don't want to play against Eldrazi or Time Stretch, start a game a put that in the comments. If you do like to play Obliterate/Dimensional Breach/Emrakul and people concede upon seeing you drop the spell, don't get upset if someone concedes. It just means they probably aren't prepared for the spell, and you will win anyway. The Social Contract doesn't have set rules, so everything is open to interpretation. One person may hate Blood Moon, while the next might hate Forbid. The moral of the story is be prepared.
Assuming your general gets tucked but you manage to get it back into your hand, when you cast it the mana cost of your general will be its true mana cost, no added 2 or 4 mana necessary. If it then gets destroyed, you will have the option to return it to the command zone. The game won't forget.
Just an FYI I am still looking for a volunteer who is willing to quest write a small section for my next article. I'm offering 5 tix and it is about the premade decks (ie Garruk vs Liliana) and their playability. Find me in game or AIM - EyeJustSin, if I don't hear soon I'll have to submit the article without that info and I'd hate to do that.