The meta is still pretty loose, but I'll try to review some of the staples as best I can pretty quickly.
Lightning Bolt, Force Spike, Spell Pierce, Ponder, Incendiary Command, Terramorphic Expanse, Signets, Boil, Relic of Progenitus, Back to Nature, Smash to Smithereens, Pyroclasm, Duress, Doom Blade, Bojuka Bog, Mind Shatter, Faerie Trickery, Negate, Llanowar Elves, Simian Spirit Guide, Quicksand, Tendrils of Corruption, Aether Adept, Psionic Blast.
A lot of these are sideboard cards, but then there is so much variety in the format it's hard to find anything else that gets played in a lot of decks.
The meta has been I'd say combo/engine on top, with tempo-control/tempo-disruption next and aggro after that. Midrange good stuff decks and ramp decks have not proven to be very good yet though the winner of the last 15 man event was a green white midrange good stuff deck so maybe that will become more viable, and aggro has simply not been played much yet even though people still have their pyroclasms or infest in the board often times to deal with it. Counter spell control has not been played much or very successful as far as I've seen, counterspells are generally used to protect combo or for tempo purposes.
I'm sure that a certian kind of meta has evolved and will continue to change but will eventually settle until each major revision. I don't think this is a bad thing, but of course I don't anticipate any deck being able to stay on top despite hate for very long.
I do agree with you, but I find some of your points very contradictory. U/W has no way to deal with myrsmith, yet you say U/B has Ratchet bomb and contagion clasp.... But I do agree, U/W isn't really the deck to beat. I could see venser with tumble magnet being good... maybe. Venser with contagion engine seems really good to me. Maybe an esper deck with skinrender and venser? That seems like a pretty good interaction, but the mana seems awkward. I wish Koth was in the 2nd set. I remember playing Zendikar constructed before worldwake and there were like no money cards at all being used so it was a cheap format to get into.
Every new format I played so far started as crazy Aggro. Then things slow down in time and Control decks start to emerge. And I don't think SoM Block will be any different.
I expect to see a lot of WW Metalcraft decks at the beginning and some Big Red, but in time (after people manage to get their 4 Koth of the Hammers) Big Red will be dominant. Control will then emerge but not as WU but as UB.
People definitely will try WU and sadly they all will fail. WU has two good planeswalkers but lacks any good early removal. Dispense Justice? Well, say hello to Myrsmith then! As long as she doesn't attack, there is not much WU can do to stop her from spawning Myr tokens.
Sunblast Angel is awesome surely but most of the time she will be too late to the party. WU doesn't have a chance against WW Metalcraft nor it is my favorite against Big Red (how many times can you counter Kuldotha Phoenix?).
UB on the other hand has Black's Skinrender and Grasp of Darkness which are great removal spells (as well as Contagion Clasp and Ratchet Bomb). And Skittie is a great finisher all by herself. Blue will then provide Stoic Rebuttal, Trinket Mage, Steady Progress, maybe also Disperse and Dissipation Field. This I believe will be a better choice than WU.
I don't expect any Infect decks to become Tier-1 by the way; at least not until Mirrodin Besieged comes out. Infect creatures are too weak and too slow.
I even think Combo will have a chance in SoM Block. I have a few interesting ideas which I will share next week.
By the way, in case anyone cares, the article title is an oblique dual reference to running away from an OP deck, and also running towards green (hills are green, right?) as an option for future drafts.
Yeah, I am excitted for SoM block constructed. I love 1 set constructed. It should be interesting to see what is good. Poison? WU control? Big red? Metalcraft?
"sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself if you want to win is just play dudes and stuff that blows up dudes. That's typically a good formula."
That was my favorite quote from your article. It's very true.
Thanks for writing this. As someone who doesn't play Magic with pants, it's really helpful to read a tournament report before same tournaments happen online.
I suspect that revoke existence is more likely to show up as an answer to wurmcoil engine than to deal with indestructible stuff, personally. I also think venser is probably better than you're giving him credit for (see chapin's uwr list, for example). Venser loves spreading seas!
I agree with most of your views though, especially sunblast angel, which just seems nuts to me.
On vampires, I think the deck is more likely to survive as a mono-black creature deck with skinrenders and nantuko shades, and just cut the captivating vampires. Essentially becoming a mono-B creature deck which just happens to run quite a few vampires.
I think that "0: Proliferate" ability for a planeswalker is beautiful, by the way. Very tidy design, and it took me a moment to realise that it would +1 tezz.
Personally, I'd love to see them just reprint original tezz (mostly because I'd like to play my lux-cannon, voltaic key + tezzeret deck in standard)
@Westane - see you in the SoM queues, but stay away from my Koths!
@Paul - Luck definitely wasn't with me in game 2, but even if it had been I think the result would have been the same.
@LE & raredrafting in general - I suffer from the same inclination to draft value rares over something that will actually help my deck, but not down to the level of Dragonskull Summit and Cyclops Galdiator! When I'm drafting I'm more in the mindset of "Azure Drake! Fantastic!" but I'd obviously find a completely off-colour Titan impossible to ignore.
I'll be returning to 'my roots' soon! Hard to do my usual sort of article with the format about to change, but normal service will be resumed ;)
@XaosLegend - Taking the dragon would have put me in red and I didn't want to go there. Not worth it for one card that died to Doom Blade. Or Ice Cage for that matter. The Cystal Ball was a close call though.
@unspeakable - you're possibly right, but those cheap flyers kept on coming, and that's hard to ignore. And it's true, I should be grateful I didn't meet that deck in round one.
@smallchild & archgenius - I wonder how the cycle will go with SoM? White's pretty strong, will it be initially overdrafted, then more open once people realise it's overdrafted? We'll see... Though I think the shortage of removal will drive a lot of picks and make people want to keep their options open more than with M11.
@Sanador - Absolutely nothing is wrong with that play except that I didn't see it ;) As I said, I wasn't playing especially well it seems.
In Match 1, Game 2, what is wrong with excommunicating both the Ancient Hellkite and the Chandra's Outrage, attacking with all fliers to reduce him to 1 life, then swinging for lethal next turn?
You picked pretty much exactly as I would have in your draft. Yeah his deck was over the top. This is what can happen sometimes when everyone passes Green.
It's also one of the basics of drafts. Stronger colors will be drafted more heavily than weaker colors.
The trick is to find the color or strategy that is currently under-rated and go for that strategy.
Example: In Zendikar draft, black is very good and very deep. Therefore people started drafting it heavily. Then people realized that it was drafted heavily and started to avoid it. Of course, if you get enough people at your table with that philosophy, it suddenly becomes a really good strategy to draft black again.
I think you're seeing the same kind of thing with white and blue in M2011 drafts
I've noticed this trend too, although I think it's more exaggerated at the 4-3-2-2 and swiss tables than it is at the 8-4 tables (strangely enough). In a table of good drafters who know blue and white are the top colors and generally don't like green, you'll still usually see 2-3 green drafters because there are often enough good green cards to support that many and good players know not to categorically ignore a color.
Where you see the tables with 0-1 drafter of the "bad color" are at the less skilled 4322 and swiss drafts where you have a lot of folks who are savvy enough to read up on a draft format but also tend to take the advice way too literally. They see the pros don't like green so they will almost never draft green unless they open a sick bomb (which is ironically the worst reason to get into a weak color). This Primeval Titan guy might have been just such a drafter. He was lucky enough to open Titan which gave him the reason to jump into green at a table where it just so happened that green was very open.
This is a great idea. I kinda wish MTGO would give this option for casual drafts, not that many people actually DO casual drafts.
Generally speaking I think that rare drafting is actually fine in moderation. If I'm drafting swiss it needs to be a really good card for me to take it over something that is worth 2+ tickets simply because the expected value of the card you take over it is actually not that high. In an 8-4 my threshold does go up a bit, although I'll still raredraft there to a certain extent. If you find yourself taking .25 ticket rares over playable cards though, then yeah you should probably stage an intervention!
I think Pyretic Ritual is never the right pick - it's debatable whether there's a home for it in constructed yet, though I imagine there will be at some point.
One rule of thumb is that typical draft games often last long enough for you to see about half of your deck. So if you're splashing the Cyclops off a Pyretic Ritual, you should have 1/4 your games with Ritual and no Cyclops (bad), 1/4 of your games with Cyclops and no Ritual (bad), 1/4 your games with neither (neutral), and 1/4 your games with both (good). Except in some fraction of that 1/4, you don't have a mountain. D'oh! Since including both cards is good in less than 1/4 of your games, I think the correct way to build the deck is to leave 'em both out rather than try to splash that way.
That said, it was a fine draft overall. Thanks for sharing it with us! I was wishing for you to somehow get the Pyromancers AND the Lightning Bolts, though of course that's not possible. Pyromancers go so great with the Spitfires you got later - but of course the Triskellion makes a fine substitute.
I remember trying CamStudio before my old PC died on me. I had to play with the settings a little bit before using it efficiently but IIRC I ended up with OK results.
If only I could remember the correct settings...
This is a reply to both you and ArchGenius. I love videos as a way to fill all the visual gaps that a written article, no matter how well written, will leave. I don't see them as a substitute for good writing, however. Videos are an excellent supplement to an article, but should not be treated as the article itself.
I think telling authors to stick purely to plain text is extreme, as we shouldn't be forced to limit the form of content we put into our articles. However, the read-from-work demographic is something that should always be considered, as I'm part if it as well.
I realize that my articles have started to lean into movie-over-meat territory, and it's a trend I intend to rectify. That said, I'll never stop putting video references into my articles.
Nah, I thought about it though XD. I decided against it for the sake of shock value. Also there comes a couple issues when you try to record the encoding process, and FRAPS hides itself automagically.
Hey midi2304,
The meta is still pretty loose, but I'll try to review some of the staples as best I can pretty quickly.
Lightning Bolt, Force Spike, Spell Pierce, Ponder, Incendiary Command, Terramorphic Expanse, Signets, Boil, Relic of Progenitus, Back to Nature, Smash to Smithereens, Pyroclasm, Duress, Doom Blade, Bojuka Bog, Mind Shatter, Faerie Trickery, Negate, Llanowar Elves, Simian Spirit Guide, Quicksand, Tendrils of Corruption, Aether Adept, Psionic Blast.
A lot of these are sideboard cards, but then there is so much variety in the format it's hard to find anything else that gets played in a lot of decks.
The meta has been I'd say combo/engine on top, with tempo-control/tempo-disruption next and aggro after that. Midrange good stuff decks and ramp decks have not proven to be very good yet though the winner of the last 15 man event was a green white midrange good stuff deck so maybe that will become more viable, and aggro has simply not been played much yet even though people still have their pyroclasms or infest in the board often times to deal with it. Counter spell control has not been played much or very successful as far as I've seen, counterspells are generally used to protect combo or for tempo purposes.
I'm sure that a certian kind of meta has evolved and will continue to change but will eventually settle until each major revision. I don't think this is a bad thing, but of course I don't anticipate any deck being able to stay on top despite hate for very long.
X-
I do agree with you, but I find some of your points very contradictory. U/W has no way to deal with myrsmith, yet you say U/B has Ratchet bomb and contagion clasp.... But I do agree, U/W isn't really the deck to beat. I could see venser with tumble magnet being good... maybe. Venser with contagion engine seems really good to me. Maybe an esper deck with skinrender and venser? That seems like a pretty good interaction, but the mana seems awkward. I wish Koth was in the 2nd set. I remember playing Zendikar constructed before worldwake and there were like no money cards at all being used so it was a cheap format to get into.
Every new format I played so far started as crazy Aggro. Then things slow down in time and Control decks start to emerge. And I don't think SoM Block will be any different.
I expect to see a lot of WW Metalcraft decks at the beginning and some Big Red, but in time (after people manage to get their 4 Koth of the Hammers) Big Red will be dominant. Control will then emerge but not as WU but as UB.
People definitely will try WU and sadly they all will fail. WU has two good planeswalkers but lacks any good early removal. Dispense Justice? Well, say hello to Myrsmith then! As long as she doesn't attack, there is not much WU can do to stop her from spawning Myr tokens.
Sunblast Angel is awesome surely but most of the time she will be too late to the party. WU doesn't have a chance against WW Metalcraft nor it is my favorite against Big Red (how many times can you counter Kuldotha Phoenix?).
UB on the other hand has Black's Skinrender and Grasp of Darkness which are great removal spells (as well as Contagion Clasp and Ratchet Bomb). And Skittie is a great finisher all by herself. Blue will then provide Stoic Rebuttal, Trinket Mage, Steady Progress, maybe also Disperse and Dissipation Field. This I believe will be a better choice than WU.
I don't expect any Infect decks to become Tier-1 by the way; at least not until Mirrodin Besieged comes out. Infect creatures are too weak and too slow.
I even think Combo will have a chance in SoM Block. I have a few interesting ideas which I will share next week.
LE
Thanks for the nice comment Jarunik.
By the way, in case anyone cares, the article title is an oblique dual reference to running away from an OP deck, and also running towards green (hills are green, right?) as an option for future drafts.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It's really interesting and helpfull to read your draft review.
Yeah, I am excitted for SoM block constructed. I love 1 set constructed. It should be interesting to see what is good. Poison? WU control? Big red? Metalcraft?
I look forward to your thoughts.
"sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself if you want to win is just play dudes and stuff that blows up dudes. That's typically a good formula."
That was my favorite quote from your article. It's very true.
Thanks for writing this. As someone who doesn't play Magic with pants, it's really helpful to read a tournament report before same tournaments happen online.
I suspect that revoke existence is more likely to show up as an answer to wurmcoil engine than to deal with indestructible stuff, personally. I also think venser is probably better than you're giving him credit for (see chapin's uwr list, for example). Venser loves spreading seas!
I agree with most of your views though, especially sunblast angel, which just seems nuts to me.
On vampires, I think the deck is more likely to survive as a mono-black creature deck with skinrenders and nantuko shades, and just cut the captivating vampires. Essentially becoming a mono-B creature deck which just happens to run quite a few vampires.
I think that "0: Proliferate" ability for a planeswalker is beautiful, by the way. Very tidy design, and it took me a moment to realise that it would +1 tezz.
Personally, I'd love to see them just reprint original tezz (mostly because I'd like to play my lux-cannon, voltaic key + tezzeret deck in standard)
Excellent walkthrough, will be really useful. Good idea for an article too.
Thanks for all the comments!
@Westane - see you in the SoM queues, but stay away from my Koths!
@Paul - Luck definitely wasn't with me in game 2, but even if it had been I think the result would have been the same.
@LE & raredrafting in general - I suffer from the same inclination to draft value rares over something that will actually help my deck, but not down to the level of Dragonskull Summit and Cyclops Galdiator! When I'm drafting I'm more in the mindset of "Azure Drake! Fantastic!" but I'd obviously find a completely off-colour Titan impossible to ignore.
I'll be returning to 'my roots' soon! Hard to do my usual sort of article with the format about to change, but normal service will be resumed ;)
@XaosLegend - Taking the dragon would have put me in red and I didn't want to go there. Not worth it for one card that died to Doom Blade. Or Ice Cage for that matter. The Cystal Ball was a close call though.
@unspeakable - you're possibly right, but those cheap flyers kept on coming, and that's hard to ignore. And it's true, I should be grateful I didn't meet that deck in round one.
@smallchild & archgenius - I wonder how the cycle will go with SoM? White's pretty strong, will it be initially overdrafted, then more open once people realise it's overdrafted? We'll see... Though I think the shortage of removal will drive a lot of picks and make people want to keep their options open more than with M11.
@Sanador - Absolutely nothing is wrong with that play except that I didn't see it ;) As I said, I wasn't playing especially well it seems.
In Match 1, Game 2, what is wrong with excommunicating both the Ancient Hellkite and the Chandra's Outrage, attacking with all fliers to reduce him to 1 life, then swinging for lethal next turn?
You picked pretty much exactly as I would have in your draft. Yeah his deck was over the top. This is what can happen sometimes when everyone passes Green.
It's also one of the basics of drafts. Stronger colors will be drafted more heavily than weaker colors.
The trick is to find the color or strategy that is currently under-rated and go for that strategy.
Example: In Zendikar draft, black is very good and very deep. Therefore people started drafting it heavily. Then people realized that it was drafted heavily and started to avoid it. Of course, if you get enough people at your table with that philosophy, it suddenly becomes a really good strategy to draft black again.
I think you're seeing the same kind of thing with white and blue in M2011 drafts
I've noticed this trend too, although I think it's more exaggerated at the 4-3-2-2 and swiss tables than it is at the 8-4 tables (strangely enough). In a table of good drafters who know blue and white are the top colors and generally don't like green, you'll still usually see 2-3 green drafters because there are often enough good green cards to support that many and good players know not to categorically ignore a color.
Where you see the tables with 0-1 drafter of the "bad color" are at the less skilled 4322 and swiss drafts where you have a lot of folks who are savvy enough to read up on a draft format but also tend to take the advice way too literally. They see the pros don't like green so they will almost never draft green unless they open a sick bomb (which is ironically the worst reason to get into a weak color). This Primeval Titan guy might have been just such a drafter. He was lucky enough to open Titan which gave him the reason to jump into green at a table where it just so happened that green was very open.
This is a great idea. I kinda wish MTGO would give this option for casual drafts, not that many people actually DO casual drafts.
Generally speaking I think that rare drafting is actually fine in moderation. If I'm drafting swiss it needs to be a really good card for me to take it over something that is worth 2+ tickets simply because the expected value of the card you take over it is actually not that high. In an 8-4 my threshold does go up a bit, although I'll still raredraft there to a certain extent. If you find yourself taking .25 ticket rares over playable cards though, then yeah you should probably stage an intervention!
Awesome article. Always wondered how to make a video, now I know. Bookmarked for future use.
Not necessarily a red drafter, those cards are perfectly splashable, especially the bolt but the pingers are a very good card to splash too.
I think Pyretic Ritual is never the right pick - it's debatable whether there's a home for it in constructed yet, though I imagine there will be at some point.
One rule of thumb is that typical draft games often last long enough for you to see about half of your deck. So if you're splashing the Cyclops off a Pyretic Ritual, you should have 1/4 your games with Ritual and no Cyclops (bad), 1/4 of your games with Cyclops and no Ritual (bad), 1/4 your games with neither (neutral), and 1/4 your games with both (good). Except in some fraction of that 1/4, you don't have a mountain. D'oh! Since including both cards is good in less than 1/4 of your games, I think the correct way to build the deck is to leave 'em both out rather than try to splash that way.
That said, it was a fine draft overall. Thanks for sharing it with us! I was wishing for you to somehow get the Pyromancers AND the Lightning Bolts, though of course that's not possible. Pyromancers go so great with the Spitfires you got later - but of course the Triskellion makes a fine substitute.
I remember trying CamStudio before my old PC died on me. I had to play with the settings a little bit before using it efficiently but IIRC I ended up with OK results.
If only I could remember the correct settings...
lol. Yeah, I was just jerkin your chain.
This is a reply to both you and ArchGenius. I love videos as a way to fill all the visual gaps that a written article, no matter how well written, will leave. I don't see them as a substitute for good writing, however. Videos are an excellent supplement to an article, but should not be treated as the article itself.
I think telling authors to stick purely to plain text is extreme, as we shouldn't be forced to limit the form of content we put into our articles. However, the read-from-work demographic is something that should always be considered, as I'm part if it as well.
I realize that my articles have started to lean into movie-over-meat territory, and it's a trend I intend to rectify. That said, I'll never stop putting video references into my articles.
There's various pieces of trial software you can hunt for, but you'll be forever plagued by poor resolutions and ugly watermarks.
Nah, I thought about it though XD. I decided against it for the sake of shock value. Also there comes a couple issues when you try to record the encoding process, and FRAPS hides itself automagically.
Even better!
What? No videos describing how to do videos? You really coulda had a 2 for 1 there. I think that's a misplay. :P
Great help!
Is there an alternative to FRAPS, but for free?
Looking forward to your next article.