Cheater Hater's picture
By: Cheater Hater, Vincent Borchardt
Nov 10 2015 12:00pm
0
Login to post comments
2771 views


This week of Commander 2015/Legendary Cube Prize Packs (LCPPs) spoilers has been a mess for my predictions. I wrote the promised follow-up article on my design on Monday, submitted it Wednesday afternoon (with a promise of more updates as the week progressed), and it was almost immediately out of date. You can read the article here if you want to see how my thought process progressed as we learned more about Commander 2015 and the LCPPs, but it's obviously useless as an actual prediction article now. Even so, there are a lot of points that Wizards tried to make though the spoiler week:

  • My understanding of the number of new cards from C15 was constantly changing, not only in the rarity distribution, but also the total number.

  • The LCPPs will have rarity shifts, not only from commons upgrading to fit in the uncommon slot, but also between the supported rarities.

  • Both Commander-focused cards and cards for competitive formats will be reprinted, completely contradicting my initial theory (most embarrassingly when I specifically said Deceiver Exarch would not be in the set, then it was spoiled the next day)

  • The LCPP packs have foils, so there is a slight bias towards cards with new foil versions (both Commander-exclusive cards, as well as cards that made their new-frame debut in the supplemental sets)

  • The prize payout of the Legendary Cube is surprisingly generous—6.5 LCPP packs are given out per draft, and the Play Point payout means each pack is only worth about 0.25 tickets to Wizards, and that's with a below-average Wizards take for each draft.

However, now the time for prediction is over, and the full set has been released. However, before I get to the analysis part of the article, let me take a moment to rant about just how poor that list structure is for allowing someone to look through a set. In principle that list is fine, and it works well for the actual cube. However, it is missing way too many columns to be usable, most notably the color. It also has plenty of errors, both minor (wrong originating set) and major (misspelled card name). If you want a more organized list, I've made a list similar to my previous setlists that's organized by color and rarity, in addition to other metadata.

Nahiri, the Lithomancer The Mimeoplasm Maelstrom Wanderer

Let's start the analysis with a big picture view of the set. The biggest unknown was how many rare-to-mythic ratio would be for the set, and it ended up being between my two extremes, with 16 mythics and 63 rares. Overall my mythic predictions weren't that far off with both the cycle of Commander 2014 Planeswalkers and the cycle of Commander 2011 “face” commanders included. However, the biggest shock is what's missing: all ten of the Commander 2015 commanders have been downgraded to rare! In fact, the treatment of the Commander 2015 cards in general is one of the most surprising parts, as the existing rarity structure was almost completely disregarded. Instead, the cards directly relating to multiplayer (such as the Myriad cards, or cards relating to Commander specifically) are uncommon, while most of the other cards are rare (other than the upgraded-from-common Thought Vessel, the only cards to break that rule of thumb are Shielded by Faith, Arachnogenesis, and Great Oak Guardian).

Next, we have one of the bigger surprises from the spoiler week: all the Commander's Arsenal cards are in the set. While some Commander's Arsenal cards were always going to be in the set (notably Diaochan, Artful Beauty—but we'll get to her in a bit), all of them seemed unnecessary, especially since many of them had already been printed as promos or in Vintage Masters. In addition, all of them being at rare (except for Command Tower, Maelstrom Wanderer, and the C11 face cards) feels like an inefficient use of space as well.

Another big question coming into the spoiler week was how color-balanced the LCPPs would be. Now that we have the full setlist, the answer is: not very. Sure, an effort was made at rare and mythic at least (the split is 8/11/11/11/8, the gold cards are mostly made of cycles, and the imbalances partially balance each other out), but that isn't where the problem is. Instead, we have to look at uncommon, where the split is 9/9/4/6/15—that's a massive slant towards green, and even three of the four gold cards are part-green! At least there are a lot of colorless cards, as I expected.

Loyal Retainers Rhystic Study Scroll Rack

One other thing we were told to focus on is that a lot of exclusive card versions would be in this set. To an extent that was true—in addition to the 56 new cards from Commander 2015, 39-41 cards have new foils (the uncertainty coming due to not knowing which version of Command Tower and Brainstorm will be in the set), which is a lot even if five of the slots are taken up by the Vow cycle. There are also three new frames from Commander's Arsenal (Loyal Retainers, Rhystic Study, and Scroll Rack) to go along with the debut of Diaochan, Artful Beauty.

Fact or Fiction Dack Fayden Marchesa, the Black Rose

Even with all that praise, there is one major problem with the set: the complete lack of interesting cards from Conspiracy, which has exactly four unique cards: Reya Dawnbringer (which is admittedly a new frame for the old art), Fact or Fiction, Dack Fayden, and Marchesa, the Black Rose. Nothing else: not new cards, not expensive cards that need to be reprinted, not cheap cards with new arts, not even other constructed-playable cards that were printed the first time (like Coercive Portal). With all changes in the set to reduce the potential value (like the upgrades of True-Name Nemesis and Shardless Agent), I feel like at least Exploration could have been fine, even if it was upgraded to mythic rare.

Nest Invader Compulsive Research Faithless Looting

I feel more conflicted on the selection of uncommons. On one hand, there are a lot new foils as I mentioned above. On the other, I feel like Wizards could have gone much farther in pushing that narrative, like I did in my design. This doesn't even have to involve new cards or new arts either (though the Conspiracy-art Nature's Claim should have been a shoo-in); cards like Darksteel Mutation, Restore, Myriad Landscape, Aura Shards, and Soul Snare could have easily fit in the set as new foils. Instead, cards like Khalni Garden, Nest Invader, Compulsive Research, and Faithless Looting were upgraded from common to fill out the set. A lot of these commons feel out of place—they aren't even that outlandishly priced in their Commander versions, like Viscera Seer is (seriously, how has that gone up even more since last week, after the spoilers?). I don't know how much of this is related to the relative disinterest in foils on MTGO, especially non-redeemable ones, but it might be a factor.

Now let's get to the final part of this analysis: how I did in predicting the set. I am going to hedge a bit here; while I'm not going to use the spoiler-informed set list I was building in my previous article, I am going to use both the low-mythic and high-mythic versions of my original set list since the final list ended up between the two (especially taking the downgrade of all the C15 commanders into account). I'm also not going to fuss over the exact rarity distribution of the C15 cards; if it stayed at the same rarity as in C15 it's a yes, while if it changed rarities it was shifted (with the exception of Thought Vessel, the 56th card Wizards explicitly told us would not be in the set in the original announcement). Here are my overall results:

Total Exact Shifted
Uncommon 13/70 19/70
Rare 33/63 53/63
Mythic 12/16 14/16
Total 58/149 86/149

Ghostly Prison Worn Powerstone Sol Ring

As you can see, I did very well on the rares and mythics (especially when you account for all the rarity shifts). Even on the uncommons I wasn't completely off the mark—cards like Ghostly Prison, Worn Powerstone, and Sol Ring only were on the sidelines because there were already cards like them in the set. Wizards also didn't care that some of the cycles they wanted were incomplete—only four of the five dual storage lands from Time Spiral are in the set, for instance, and only three Judgment incarnations were available as well.

Overall, this set was a very interesting design with unique constraints, and I'm sure it was the same for Wizards. The selection of cards from supplemental sets was very scattershot, and if we assume Wizards either wouldn't or couldn't use new cards from Conspiracy it was even more limiting. With these limitations, while there still are some places for possible improvement, it was a very good set. It also feels like it is surprisingly-high value, even if C15 doesn't appear to have that one surefire Legacy-playable (the Confluences feel mostly safe, and while Mizzix's Mastery has an obvious use, Scourge of Nel Toth and Arachnogenesis also look interesting).

Before I go, I have one more piece of information related to this column. Along with the Legendary Cube article on Monday, Worth Wollpert posted a look-back on 2015 for MTGO. While stuff like bugs and Leagues isn't that connected to this column specifically, Worth did have news on Tempest Remastered and remastered sets in general. Unfortunately, Tempest Remastered did not perform well, and thus they're “putting [their] efforts elsewhere in the future.” That means they need to look at new ways to get certain cards (aka Rishadan Port and Misdirection, since they canceled Masques Remastered), but it also means I don't have much to cover in the near-future. If Modern Masters 3 is coming out in 2017, that means I wouldn't have anything to cover for a year unless something new comes up (such as a possible Commander 2016-related product, or a new summer product I can cover like Legacy Masters). Until then, is there anything else you want me to cover? Should I go into non-reprint set design? Or maybe dip my toes into cubes? If you have any ideas, I'll be happy to listen.

Vincent
@CheaterHater1 on Twitter

3 Comments

My sorted list by Cheater Hater at Tue, 11/10/2015 - 14:54
Cheater Hater's picture

I forgot to put a link in the article again--here's my spreadsheet for the LCPPs:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13FY9geyd3JKiijUFbJySQ0WSas_CFSpU...

Not only are the errors you by Paul Leicht at Tue, 11/10/2015 - 18:12
Paul Leicht's picture

Not only are the errors you mentioned there but the page does not want to stay put for me because of the continuing (and really idiotic) meta redirect to the login page. #thankswotc!

A new piece of information by Cheater Hater at Wed, 11/11/2015 - 03:42
Cheater Hater's picture

One thing that was just revealed is that the LCPP will have its own set symbol (which leads to more hilarious complications, like the set not being legal in Planechase--seriously, there is no reason why that can't just be a single line of code). I have no clue what that means for the original versions of these cards price-wise.