On high priced cards: Worth famously stated on the mtgo forums that he thought $100+ were a good thing for mtgo. I strongly disagree. Collectibility of virtual items is vastly overvalued. I don't bring my friends in front of my computer to show off my FoWs (for one thing, I actually like them, I don't want to impose the MODO interface on their eyes). It is especially more true nowadays with the democratization of online card games: The game of Magic might still be very special, Magic Online not so much.
With cardboard legacy and Vintage dying each year a little more because of cards availability, Wizards have stated on several occasions that these formats will live on on mtgo. This is not going to happen as long as the high prices constitute a hard barrier to entry. Note that I actually have a Legacy collection, I am not complaining I can't afford it. I am however complaining that I don't find that many people to play with. Now, I don't really want the prices of my collection to come crashing down, but would it not be time to put price of individual cards against the need for a thriving community? No, I did not buy my cards to show them off, I bought them to play with. I am very worried when Wizards says they want the black Lotus to be very special online, because it does not bode well for the future of eternal formats.
The thing is that goyf likely wouldn't be that format warping. Without fetchlands or strong 1 CMC discard he'd likely only be a 0/1 for 2. He'd be good later game but I just don't think he would be that strong in a lot of standards.
Aerie is a deceptively strong/weak card. Strong if you have no way to reset it (rift or other bounce) or get rid of it, and weak if you can. I think that is why it is an auto-include in any birds deck. I dislike auto-includes on principle, but can't help respect the card as a good call usually.
Thanks! I don't think you need to pick Aspect of Hydra early, I find those usually table and I don't think anybody takes it as a signal if they see it past pick 8. If the print runs weren't to the point where you see multiple Skyguard and Bolts, Green might be drafted much more often but that isn't the case. Hopefully it stays that way! :D
I knew I wanted Cabal Therapy as my hand disruption because it A) gives me a sac outlet for the Kami dragons, and B) in a pinch I can target myself to put them in my yard, in a pinch. Plus I consider myself pretty decent at casting Cabal Therapy, and it's one of my favorite spells. So that is largely why I used Bloodghast, to have those huge plays where Cabal Therapy turns into a 3-for-1 because I can cast Bloodghast on turn 2, sac it to flashback Therapy, and get Bloodghast back later. Bloodghast also gives me renewable fuel for Phyrexian Tower. I didn't really have any room for simple mana ramp like Signets, so I was leaning on Tower and Crypt Ghast to help accelerate into the top-end threats. And if I added in Recurring Nightmare, Bloodghast would be important there too. But I think Therapy and Tower alone are enough to justify Bloodghast, and I base that on playing all those cards together twice with Orzhov Vampires last year also.
In goldfishing the deck, I was drawing too many Karmic Guides without anything to use them on, which is why I cut back on the combo-ish side of the deck. This has to be a Pure Tribal deck, because death-trigger dragons don't work when 60% of the field has 4x StP and 4x PtE in their deck. So that means Entomb is banned, and I don't care for Buried Alive, so it really couldn't be an all-in reanimator deck.
Toxic Deluge was OK, I chose it mostly because it was 3-cmc, and everything in my deck either survives a Deluge for -3/-3 or comes back from it, and it can kill pretty much anything. I don't like to rely on 4-cmc sweepers because they're usually too slow unless I am playing Sol Lands or Signets. I thought I would have enough life gain to make Deluge castable and flexible throughout the game, but I think that was optimistic. I would cut it to 2 maybe, but there aren't any other great options. Against red aggro decks, the life loss is a bigger problem, because they can just burn you out. Against white weenie decks it usually wouldn't be a problem, because their follow-up to a board sweeper is some stupid 2/1, but the Bird deck overcame that in game 3 by having Soulcatcher's Aerie out prior to the board wipe.
I'm pleased with the performance of Toxic Deluge in my deck. There is no harm from one copy or even two. It's actually quite effective against aggressive decks, if you manage to cast it during early turns as a cheap mass removal to stabilize the board. And its life drawback is not that much relevant as you're trading future combat damage possibility priorly as a slight life loss (only 2 or 3 life loss, instead of 6-8 life). Later, it can also serve as a one sided sweeper in a deck, full with lords like Slivers or Merfolks.
Yeah, Rex, you typically prepare too much against combo, but Tribal Wars will always be mostly aggro, or at least something that can easily go the aggro route when they see you're starting slow.
I think that Spirit deck can take two routes, either lose those Dragons and go midrange Orzhov Rock with Obzedat as your finisher, or commit to graveyard combo. Both the Dragons and Bloodghast are combo pieces to me (Bloodghast can't block, doesn't buy you time, I can only see it played straight in some super-fast aggro Vamps where everything costs 2 or less). They need enablers.
I like Souls of the Faultless a lot, that's a right call, in both possible versions of the deck (in a version with green I would use Carven Caryatid in that spot, but it's interesting doing it in Orzhov colors for a change).
How was Toxic Deluge? You and romellos are the first using it in TribAp. Losing life when you're already hemorrhaging can be tough against aggro, but it's certainly a very fast BSZ.
I appreciate the feedback. I understand where you're coming from with the clarity issues: sometimes things seem very clear to me (as the writer) and I will definitely take that into consideration.
As for CER comparisons,I stated "So, after recalculating the “new” CER, I went back and recalculated using data from the last article and compared." Maybe it was unclear, but I went and re-ran the numbers from last week through the new method to make them comparable.
For "buying in" to Standard, this numbers in this article are to identify the most efficient staples to buy. Yes, many of the tier 1 decks have expensive cards like Mutavault, Jace, etc. The point of the CERs is to give people a place to start. You might not be able to run the full-fledged Burn deck (ie, with Mutavault), but many(all) of its staples are inexpensive relative to how frequently they are played. I understand why this may not have been clear, but the point here is to give players new to Standard a place to start. I am going to try something different in my next update to try to present that information.
"Investment", yes I understand in the realm of Magic Finance that this does have a different meaning. From my point of view, whenever you pay tickets to buy a card/deck, that's an investment. You invest in your deck and in yourself when you buy new cards. I understand this piece of criticism, but from the perspective of semi-competitive/casual players, I think it's fair to use this term.
As far as "rotation-proofing", I will be looking for ways to address rotation. But I'm not going to speculate on what decks will/won't be good when Journey Into Nyx arrives because it's baseless. These articles are about what Standard is right now.
I appreciate the feedback and criticism. Thanks for reading!
I think you need to more efficiently explain your math before your articles can start to mean anything. Comparing your previous article to this one, it looks like you copy/pasted segments without regard to what new information was being presented. Your blurb about "standardizing" the data states that you “took the number of card appearances/number of decks observed,” so how was this applied to your original CER of appearances/dollar cost? Is your CER now appearances/(number of decks * dollar cost)? If this is true, how can you have a comparison column if your metrics have changed? It makes no sense to have comparisons between inconsistent methods. You report Temple of Silence has decreased by 1%. Well, 1% of what? Last week’s CER was 139.83; the move to 109.38 is not a 1% decrease. So does this mean a 1% decrease in the number of copies played? A 1% decrease in the number of decks it was played in?
The overall purpose of this article is also unclear, despite the fact that you have clearly labeled purpose statement. You say you want to lower the cost of “buying in” to standard. However, buying a bunch of cheap staples doesn’t allow you to play a deck. You’re still missing the powerful money cards that make all of the top tier decks work. The cheapest way to play standard is to go rogue. The second cheapest way is to play decks that are tier 1.5 or tier 2. I see you’ve made this connection by presenting the dredge and burn decks. Yet these decks are so metagame dependent they may be non-existent when Journey into Nyx rotates in. Then where does that leave you with respect to money management? You’ve taken an (probable) 100% loss, whereas if you had bought into a tier 1 deck, at least a few of the powerful cards would (probably) still be playable.
This segues into my final observation. You throw around the word “investment” quite liberally, but this is not an investment article. You present cards with a high CER that will have a massive drop-off in value once rotation happens. It is a terrible idea to “invest” in Detention Sphere and Nightveil Specter. Sure, they’re used in a lot of decks right now and are fairly cheap to acquire, but that doesn’t mean you should be buying out a bunch of bots. Maybe you’re trying to give readers a sense of how “future-proof” certain decks are? That sort-of makes sense with the way you’ve presented the data, though you’d still need to work on your CER metric and define what time period the “future” is. If you were trying to future-proof your deck choice, you’d be playing something akin to G/R monsters. That deck uses a majority of Theros/BoTG cards, and currently G/R is tearing up block constructed (which is as much of a testing ground for next standard as we can get).
Tl;dr: Fix your math, work on clarity, and interpretation of statistical data is anything but “cold-hard fact.”
There were a lot of games where one or two life points made all the difference for me last week. I won one of those, against you Kuma, but was on the losing end in the others. It is certainly possible that with some tweaks and a bit more luck, the deck might go 3-1. It also took me quite a long time to figure out the correct lines of play, which is because I can no longer test out tribal decks in the Casual Room on account of the Tribal Wars filter still being gone, so I was relying on just goldfishing a bunch of hands with no practical experience having played a few of those cards in any real match.
The main problem I perceived with the deck is that I got totally blown out by a very straightforward red aggro deck and by any hyper-aggressive start by the Bird deck. I didn't upload the replay against mihahitlor because it wasn't very exciting, and my commentary consisted of figuring out how to live slightly longer and eventually hoping that mihahitlor would make a mistake, which I knew he wouldn't because he plays about 99% mistake-free. I did a pretty decent job predicting what would be in his hand, and what he might play, and it just didn't matter. My deck had a fun and appealing endgame but needed some more help to actually get there. I assumed Souls of the Faultless would be great against aggro in the Pure Tribal environment, but I kept facing down armies of fliers and direct damage.
If I played anything like it again, I would need to solidly improve the aggro matchup. I would certainly add in at least one Recurring Nightmare, you're totally correct there.
Yeah that seems like a good strategy. I think at some point I want to write about investing in rotating cards, because it is kind of a weird subject. Thanks for reading!
The big take away again is get the manabase! I think that is important. I've long heard that if you want to build a collection for Constructed, you start by getting lands, then the tournament staples (so they appear in other decks!), and then everything else.
Right now, if I had sets of the Scrylands, I think the next place I would look is something like Hero's Downfall. A lot of the better CER cards are going to be rotating out - you can still get a good 5 months out of them, but you can just as easily get into Block right now and be prepared for the next Standard. I think that's where I'll be starting!
I'm in for the Temple lands - a great investment right now.
And I love Dredge, so now is the time to build and run it.
Thanks for crunching the numbers. It's all good!
Hi guys,
I'm been listening for a long time and have always enjoyed the MTGO content. But this one and the last were very lacking. 15 and 22 minutes? The dialog is very sparse with many lapses. Sebastian's voice is also low and hard to hear. And it seems you aren't playing very much. With the recent excellent promos, I have been trying hard to get QPs and playing a lot more in comparison. But it seems like you both aren't into it as much as you were. You could have dived into the April Phool's sealed events a bit more discussing strategy for each. I played in 3 and went 2-2 in each (sigh), but it was lots of fun and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Maybe a little break to recharge the batteries is in order? Don't just phone it in. I only am critical because your show has been very entertaining in the past. I hope you can get there again.
Thanks,
-radman99
Thanks a bunch! This was a really fun recap. When I drafted the format regularly I usually went for the more consistent decks, but after drafting this one, I think I really missed out on some fun! Of course, I'm not always going to open/get passed cards like I did here.
Really good job. As I was reading, I was thinking that I'd have went U/W, but I think you ended up making the correct choice. I expected blue to flow more in Pack 3 - we saw Thassa's Emissary early, but not much else after that. P1P1, I may have gone Pain Seer just because Black tends to be pretty open in my experience, but I actually think white ended up being really open for you which is pretty rare from what I've seen. Really well done, and I like how you talked about your stats in the article description too!
Congrats on the wins. RTR is a great limited format for playing several/many colors, and your deck was packed with bombs to take advantage of the manabase. Nice job, nice article.
Thanks for reading! Yeah I can't say I've never been frustrated by losses. Like you said, good players usually get out of the phase, and that's where improvement begins!
I think I like Green in both Sealed and Draft. I have played at least a green splash in my last five Sealed Dailys. There are decent enough cards in BNG and then it really picks up in THS. In draft I am really leaning toward green lately. It seems like it's usually open and it gets you out of the scrap for R/W cards. I recently drafted a (basically) mono-green aggro deck and it was quite good. If you can load up on Swordwise Centaurs and Aspect of Hydra early, you're in really good shape and some decks will just fold to it.
This is a great article. I don't get this too often, but when I do, I try my best to ignore it. I'd be lying if I said I never got frustrated after a loss - I think a lot of people go through a phase where they do this, but good players usually get past it I think. I think everyone should aspire to this! Great job.
Thanks for the article as always.
On high priced cards: Worth famously stated on the mtgo forums that he thought $100+ were a good thing for mtgo. I strongly disagree. Collectibility of virtual items is vastly overvalued. I don't bring my friends in front of my computer to show off my FoWs (for one thing, I actually like them, I don't want to impose the MODO interface on their eyes). It is especially more true nowadays with the democratization of online card games: The game of Magic might still be very special, Magic Online not so much.
With cardboard legacy and Vintage dying each year a little more because of cards availability, Wizards have stated on several occasions that these formats will live on on mtgo. This is not going to happen as long as the high prices constitute a hard barrier to entry. Note that I actually have a Legacy collection, I am not complaining I can't afford it. I am however complaining that I don't find that many people to play with. Now, I don't really want the prices of my collection to come crashing down, but would it not be time to put price of individual cards against the need for a thriving community? No, I did not buy my cards to show them off, I bought them to play with. I am very worried when Wizards says they want the black Lotus to be very special online, because it does not bode well for the future of eternal formats.
I saw a t-shirt at a tournament last week that said, "Thank God for Chinese counterfeiters."
The thing is that goyf likely wouldn't be that format warping. Without fetchlands or strong 1 CMC discard he'd likely only be a 0/1 for 2. He'd be good later game but I just don't think he would be that strong in a lot of standards.
Neat action while I was away.
Aerie is a deceptively strong/weak card. Strong if you have no way to reset it (rift or other bounce) or get rid of it, and weak if you can. I think that is why it is an auto-include in any birds deck. I dislike auto-includes on principle, but can't help respect the card as a good call usually.
Thanks! I don't think you need to pick Aspect of Hydra early, I find those usually table and I don't think anybody takes it as a signal if they see it past pick 8. If the print runs weren't to the point where you see multiple Skyguard and Bolts, Green might be drafted much more often but that isn't the case. Hopefully it stays that way! :D
I knew I wanted Cabal Therapy as my hand disruption because it A) gives me a sac outlet for the Kami dragons, and B) in a pinch I can target myself to put them in my yard, in a pinch. Plus I consider myself pretty decent at casting Cabal Therapy, and it's one of my favorite spells. So that is largely why I used Bloodghast, to have those huge plays where Cabal Therapy turns into a 3-for-1 because I can cast Bloodghast on turn 2, sac it to flashback Therapy, and get Bloodghast back later. Bloodghast also gives me renewable fuel for Phyrexian Tower. I didn't really have any room for simple mana ramp like Signets, so I was leaning on Tower and Crypt Ghast to help accelerate into the top-end threats. And if I added in Recurring Nightmare, Bloodghast would be important there too. But I think Therapy and Tower alone are enough to justify Bloodghast, and I base that on playing all those cards together twice with Orzhov Vampires last year also.
In goldfishing the deck, I was drawing too many Karmic Guides without anything to use them on, which is why I cut back on the combo-ish side of the deck. This has to be a Pure Tribal deck, because death-trigger dragons don't work when 60% of the field has 4x StP and 4x PtE in their deck. So that means Entomb is banned, and I don't care for Buried Alive, so it really couldn't be an all-in reanimator deck.
Toxic Deluge was OK, I chose it mostly because it was 3-cmc, and everything in my deck either survives a Deluge for -3/-3 or comes back from it, and it can kill pretty much anything. I don't like to rely on 4-cmc sweepers because they're usually too slow unless I am playing Sol Lands or Signets. I thought I would have enough life gain to make Deluge castable and flexible throughout the game, but I think that was optimistic. I would cut it to 2 maybe, but there aren't any other great options. Against red aggro decks, the life loss is a bigger problem, because they can just burn you out. Against white weenie decks it usually wouldn't be a problem, because their follow-up to a board sweeper is some stupid 2/1, but the Bird deck overcame that in game 3 by having Soulcatcher's Aerie out prior to the board wipe.
I'm pleased with the performance of Toxic Deluge in my deck. There is no harm from one copy or even two. It's actually quite effective against aggressive decks, if you manage to cast it during early turns as a cheap mass removal to stabilize the board. And its life drawback is not that much relevant as you're trading future combat damage possibility priorly as a slight life loss (only 2 or 3 life loss, instead of 6-8 life). Later, it can also serve as a one sided sweeper in a deck, full with lords like Slivers or Merfolks.
Yeah, Rex, you typically prepare too much against combo, but Tribal Wars will always be mostly aggro, or at least something that can easily go the aggro route when they see you're starting slow.
I think that Spirit deck can take two routes, either lose those Dragons and go midrange Orzhov Rock with Obzedat as your finisher, or commit to graveyard combo. Both the Dragons and Bloodghast are combo pieces to me (Bloodghast can't block, doesn't buy you time, I can only see it played straight in some super-fast aggro Vamps where everything costs 2 or less). They need enablers.
I like Souls of the Faultless a lot, that's a right call, in both possible versions of the deck (in a version with green I would use Carven Caryatid in that spot, but it's interesting doing it in Orzhov colors for a change).
How was Toxic Deluge? You and romellos are the first using it in TribAp. Losing life when you're already hemorrhaging can be tough against aggro, but it's certainly a very fast BSZ.
By the way, I do think this criticism is definitely fair. I'm just trying to explain my perspective of it.
I appreciate the feedback. I understand where you're coming from with the clarity issues: sometimes things seem very clear to me (as the writer) and I will definitely take that into consideration.
As for CER comparisons,I stated "So, after recalculating the “new” CER, I went back and recalculated using data from the last article and compared." Maybe it was unclear, but I went and re-ran the numbers from last week through the new method to make them comparable.
For "buying in" to Standard, this numbers in this article are to identify the most efficient staples to buy. Yes, many of the tier 1 decks have expensive cards like Mutavault, Jace, etc. The point of the CERs is to give people a place to start. You might not be able to run the full-fledged Burn deck (ie, with Mutavault), but many(all) of its staples are inexpensive relative to how frequently they are played. I understand why this may not have been clear, but the point here is to give players new to Standard a place to start. I am going to try something different in my next update to try to present that information.
"Investment", yes I understand in the realm of Magic Finance that this does have a different meaning. From my point of view, whenever you pay tickets to buy a card/deck, that's an investment. You invest in your deck and in yourself when you buy new cards. I understand this piece of criticism, but from the perspective of semi-competitive/casual players, I think it's fair to use this term.
As far as "rotation-proofing", I will be looking for ways to address rotation. But I'm not going to speculate on what decks will/won't be good when Journey Into Nyx arrives because it's baseless. These articles are about what Standard is right now.
I appreciate the feedback and criticism. Thanks for reading!
I think you need to more efficiently explain your math before your articles can start to mean anything. Comparing your previous article to this one, it looks like you copy/pasted segments without regard to what new information was being presented. Your blurb about "standardizing" the data states that you “took the number of card appearances/number of decks observed,” so how was this applied to your original CER of appearances/dollar cost? Is your CER now appearances/(number of decks * dollar cost)? If this is true, how can you have a comparison column if your metrics have changed? It makes no sense to have comparisons between inconsistent methods. You report Temple of Silence has decreased by 1%. Well, 1% of what? Last week’s CER was 139.83; the move to 109.38 is not a 1% decrease. So does this mean a 1% decrease in the number of copies played? A 1% decrease in the number of decks it was played in?
The overall purpose of this article is also unclear, despite the fact that you have clearly labeled purpose statement. You say you want to lower the cost of “buying in” to standard. However, buying a bunch of cheap staples doesn’t allow you to play a deck. You’re still missing the powerful money cards that make all of the top tier decks work. The cheapest way to play standard is to go rogue. The second cheapest way is to play decks that are tier 1.5 or tier 2. I see you’ve made this connection by presenting the dredge and burn decks. Yet these decks are so metagame dependent they may be non-existent when Journey into Nyx rotates in. Then where does that leave you with respect to money management? You’ve taken an (probable) 100% loss, whereas if you had bought into a tier 1 deck, at least a few of the powerful cards would (probably) still be playable.
This segues into my final observation. You throw around the word “investment” quite liberally, but this is not an investment article. You present cards with a high CER that will have a massive drop-off in value once rotation happens. It is a terrible idea to “invest” in Detention Sphere and Nightveil Specter. Sure, they’re used in a lot of decks right now and are fairly cheap to acquire, but that doesn’t mean you should be buying out a bunch of bots. Maybe you’re trying to give readers a sense of how “future-proof” certain decks are? That sort-of makes sense with the way you’ve presented the data, though you’d still need to work on your CER metric and define what time period the “future” is. If you were trying to future-proof your deck choice, you’d be playing something akin to G/R monsters. That deck uses a majority of Theros/BoTG cards, and currently G/R is tearing up block constructed (which is as much of a testing ground for next standard as we can get).
Tl;dr: Fix your math, work on clarity, and interpretation of statistical data is anything but “cold-hard fact.”
It is still possible to practice in Cas, it just takes patience, perseverance and spelling out things very clearly to people.
It's exceedingly annoying. But is is doable.
There were a lot of games where one or two life points made all the difference for me last week. I won one of those, against you Kuma, but was on the losing end in the others. It is certainly possible that with some tweaks and a bit more luck, the deck might go 3-1. It also took me quite a long time to figure out the correct lines of play, which is because I can no longer test out tribal decks in the Casual Room on account of the Tribal Wars filter still being gone, so I was relying on just goldfishing a bunch of hands with no practical experience having played a few of those cards in any real match.
The main problem I perceived with the deck is that I got totally blown out by a very straightforward red aggro deck and by any hyper-aggressive start by the Bird deck. I didn't upload the replay against mihahitlor because it wasn't very exciting, and my commentary consisted of figuring out how to live slightly longer and eventually hoping that mihahitlor would make a mistake, which I knew he wouldn't because he plays about 99% mistake-free. I did a pretty decent job predicting what would be in his hand, and what he might play, and it just didn't matter. My deck had a fun and appealing endgame but needed some more help to actually get there. I assumed Souls of the Faultless would be great against aggro in the Pure Tribal environment, but I kept facing down armies of fliers and direct damage.
If I played anything like it again, I would need to solidly improve the aggro matchup. I would certainly add in at least one Recurring Nightmare, you're totally correct there.
Yeah that seems like a good strategy. I think at some point I want to write about investing in rotating cards, because it is kind of a weird subject. Thanks for reading!
The big take away again is get the manabase! I think that is important. I've long heard that if you want to build a collection for Constructed, you start by getting lands, then the tournament staples (so they appear in other decks!), and then everything else.
Right now, if I had sets of the Scrylands, I think the next place I would look is something like Hero's Downfall. A lot of the better CER cards are going to be rotating out - you can still get a good 5 months out of them, but you can just as easily get into Block right now and be prepared for the next Standard. I think that's where I'll be starting!
Thanks for reading! I'm glad you enjoyed the article. I'm currently running Dredge myself!
I'm in for the Temple lands - a great investment right now.
And I love Dredge, so now is the time to build and run it.
Thanks for crunching the numbers. It's all good!
Hi guys,
I'm been listening for a long time and have always enjoyed the MTGO content. But this one and the last were very lacking. 15 and 22 minutes? The dialog is very sparse with many lapses. Sebastian's voice is also low and hard to hear. And it seems you aren't playing very much. With the recent excellent promos, I have been trying hard to get QPs and playing a lot more in comparison. But it seems like you both aren't into it as much as you were. You could have dived into the April Phool's sealed events a bit more discussing strategy for each. I played in 3 and went 2-2 in each (sigh), but it was lots of fun and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Maybe a little break to recharge the batteries is in order? Don't just phone it in. I only am critical because your show has been very entertaining in the past. I hope you can get there again.
Thanks,
-radman99
Thanks a bunch! This was a really fun recap. When I drafted the format regularly I usually went for the more consistent decks, but after drafting this one, I think I really missed out on some fun! Of course, I'm not always going to open/get passed cards like I did here.
Really good job. As I was reading, I was thinking that I'd have went U/W, but I think you ended up making the correct choice. I expected blue to flow more in Pack 3 - we saw Thassa's Emissary early, but not much else after that. P1P1, I may have gone Pain Seer just because Black tends to be pretty open in my experience, but I actually think white ended up being really open for you which is pretty rare from what I've seen. Really well done, and I like how you talked about your stats in the article description too!
Congrats on the wins. RTR is a great limited format for playing several/many colors, and your deck was packed with bombs to take advantage of the manabase. Nice job, nice article.
Thanks for reading! Yeah I can't say I've never been frustrated by losses. Like you said, good players usually get out of the phase, and that's where improvement begins!
I think I like Green in both Sealed and Draft. I have played at least a green splash in my last five Sealed Dailys. There are decent enough cards in BNG and then it really picks up in THS. In draft I am really leaning toward green lately. It seems like it's usually open and it gets you out of the scrap for R/W cards. I recently drafted a (basically) mono-green aggro deck and it was quite good. If you can load up on Swordwise Centaurs and Aspect of Hydra early, you're in really good shape and some decks will just fold to it.
Great job as always!
This is a great article. I don't get this too often, but when I do, I try my best to ignore it. I'd be lying if I said I never got frustrated after a loss - I think a lot of people go through a phase where they do this, but good players usually get past it I think. I think everyone should aspire to this! Great job.