Any news on MTGO v3.5 for the browsers?

So far I have enjoyed all of your articles, keep it up. I run a deck very similar to this that I play in CLASSIC, but I don't use the equipment theme. I use more direct damage spells with Lightning Helix/Bolt, removal from Path to exile, and a couple Noblis of War to beef up Serra Avenger and Hearthfire Goblin. Of course, having access to CLASSIC duals helps a lot too. I like this deck though and may try running a few more double strike creatures with jitte.

the secondary market is going to push me out of magic. call it supply and demand if you want, its absolutely secondary market manipulation and a joke.

I don't agree with this at all. I think what they did was perfectly fine and more then anything it was more of a message.

"Don't cheat. Period."

You don't need to have MTGO in charge if you have respectable players. I remember watching Gary Wise call a judge on himself because he drew and extra card after he mulligan'd. Back then it was a game loss and he knew it but still did the right thing.

MTGO is not the answer. Respectable players are.

seriously? do we need family guy quotes everywhere? This guy says YES!

Hmmm, yes. I also agree, shallow and pedantic.

Worlds/pro tours should never ever be held online. Ever. I love mtgo and I don't even play magic in rl anymore but I would be very upset by that since it would take away a lot from the game that could never be replaced.

I recall one friend specialising in singleton legend tribals for the well-equipped tribes.

When I review my picks (or read someone else's draft walkthrough), I often find the cardpool had options that could have led me into at least two different possible strong, viable decks. Sometimes more. So I can't think of someone else's draft as "wrong" if they went into a different archetype than I did, and it performed well. This particular deck won the first two rounds fairly convincingly, and lost in the third with two games of particularly bad draws - it may well have been competitive there too if we'd both gotten roughly average draw quality.

If I'm looking at a walkthrough of an archetype I know, I might want to look at what key picks led them to diverge from what I might have picked, see if I agree or disagree with the thought process, signal reading, etc. If it's an archetype I've never played or heard much about, I'm gonna look at the archetype itself and see if it's one I might want to try.

The two-colors-only idea isn't about getting steered into a shard in a later pick, it's about trying to end up in a deck with only two colors, to have a lot more speed and consistency than the three color decks you'll be up against. As I said, I learned about this by reading multiple draft walkthroughs by some of the top pros on the pro tour, so I wouldn't say it's an unworkable strategy.

As I also said, about half the time when I try it, I get tempted into one shard or another, at least as a splash. Should I be sticking to my guns more and insisting on only two colors no matter what? Or should I say "If I'm not comitted enough to the two color plan, should I be aiming to end up in some shard or other from the start, every time"? I don't know. I do know I've gotten pretty good results overall in Shards, though certainly I could do better.

I did consider the Kiss of Amesha, but I think it's a poor fit in the kind of faster decks that Alara Reborn tilted the format towards. If you look at my deck, there's 6 two-drop creatures and 4 three-drop creatures. The support spells are all at 2 and 3 mana as well. Kiss is a good strong card, but for this particular deck I think it's too slow to fit with the deck's main plan. If the deck ends up not winning early and going to "plan B", I think the Kiss could have value along with the Ethersworn Adjudicator and the Grixis Slavedriver. But if I've already drawn one of my 5 drops or my one 6 drop, I'd rather be playing them first than eating a turn and playing out Kiss to play a board-affecting spell the turn after.

As the games played out, though, there was one game where the Slavedriver was good, and one game where the Adjudicator got played out and promptly ate a removal spell. While the Vedalken Outlander, Ethercaste Knight, Brackwater Elemental and Illusory Demon all got to be stars for me in multiple games. Having 3 unearth creatures just adds to my chances to force through more damage before the other guy can get enough creatures out to handle my onslaught, along with the exalted subtheme and having 5 flyers.

The draft has some mistakes. Kiss is a better card overall than Dregscape Zombie in the abstract - is it better in this archetype? That's more debatable. Dregscape Zombie is a "roleplayer" in some decks and you really want him there, he's pretty weak in other deck archetypes. The trick is knowing how good he is in what you're drafting at the moment. One person already suggested I actually had a slow control deck and didn't know it - certainly if I'd decided to go that way, Kiss becomes the pick here. But with four exalted guys, flyers, unearthers, and a decent number of weenies, aggro worked out reasonably ok for me.

Thopter Foundry I have to agree with Anonymous above on. It's still got potential in a slower deck, in fast damage races it's just too slow and weak & the hit it took from the M10 rules changes makes it a lot less powerful than it was. The two knights helped me win multiple games, the Thopter Foundry I did take on another pick was actually never helpful for me in any of the games I drew it in, this draft.

I apologize for the incorrect decklist - if you count it up, you'll see that it's only 39 cards. Looking at it in the deck editor, I now remember that I saved off the list before I was done to make sure I didn't run out of deckbuilding time without saving, then I didn't end up saving a final build. I believe I added a 6th island after saving out the list above. I almost always play 17 or 18 lands in 40 card formats, and this draft was no exception.

As for the level of quality of my drafts & drafting skills - it is what it is. My main goal with this series is to put every choice I make, in both drafting and playing, under the microscope. I don't mind showing people a play mistake or a sub-optimal pick, because if I can figure out what could have been better, or they do, or both of us spot it, that's an opportunity to learn to play Magic better. I hope these columns provide at least a few opportunities to learn and improve for players of a range of playskills, from beginners up to "well above average, but not perfect yet". I do like to consider myself above average, and I win more than I lose, but there's still plenty of room for improvement in my game. If you want to read draft walkthroughs by top players, I would recommend columns by people like Luis Scott Vargas, Olivier Ruel, etc. (who I read myself). I think on this site, Godot is drafting and playing at a higher skill level than I am (though I hope to catch up to him with more practice!)

I do find that the "go carefully through game walkthroughs to write up play decisions under a microscope" approach has been very valuable for me personally. Much as I might think "I know what mistakes I made and should learn from" after I finish a game, doing this series has shown me there's usually a few subtle decisions, factors, or nuances about a game I didn't notice at the time, or sometimes even a game-swinging play I missed. Any time I take the time to analyze replays this way, I learn. I hope some of my readers have picked up a thing or two from watching my analysis along with me. Currently I'm learning more about gameplay than about draft picks, though I always want to improve both of course!

P1P1: In triple shards or SSC I would have grabbed the Strix in a heartbeat, as I was an Esper fiend (and did quite well with it). I might have overreacted to all the articles by magic pros I read encouraging 2 color archetypes for SCR drafts, but that was why I took the knight. Had I ended up in 2 color I think his double-white requirement is ok, if I were going for 3 color from the start I agree it's an issue. But his exalted and first strike still make him highly relevant when he's not down on turn 2, so I think he's ok.

P1P2: I might overvalue tappers because cards like Master Decoy or Puppeteer are so nice in 10th, or Blinding Mage in M10. They come down sooner than the Fatestitcher, and are in slower formats where they can do more to function as "pseudo-removal". Still, Fatestitcher doesn't cost a mana for activations once you get him down, he can have synergy with things like the Pupper Conjurer I passed, etc. But I think you're right, Knight of the Skyward Eye is a very good quality beater, and I probably should have taken him over Fatestitcher. My bias towards blue over green threw me here, white/green is supposed to be quite good in this format.

P1P3: As it happened, I didn't play it, except in some sideboarded games. I tend to undervalue bounce and was trying to "teach" myself to give it more of a chance, but I like Fleshbag there even though it dips into a third color early, or maybe Mosstodon if I'd taken the Knight pick 2. I still need to work on appropriately valuing bounce, but 3rd picking a weak card isn't the way to do that. Excommunicate is a much better bounce spell than Wave in this format, or the only-1-mana Unsummon in M10.

P1P5: This wasn't a "continue with my plan" pick so much as a "hedge bets" pick in case I decide to go 3 colors rather than two, because there was literally nothing for my "fast blue/white beats" plan in this entire pack. Protomatter Powder is weak and overcosted, and I only took it later because it wheeled, and at this point I have zero artifacts so far though I might expect to pick some up. Cathartic Adept and Tortoise Formation I basically never play, and there's no white. So my only other choice here is Blister Beetle, which I strongly considered and might have been the better pick. Infest is a higher risk, higher reward option, especially since it will kill a lot of my guys if I end up with a weenie-rush deck. It is a great sideboard card to have around against enemy weenie decks, but I should have brought in more swamps in the games where I sided it in. I might pick the Blister Beetle if I had this to do over again - Infest is sometimes great, sometimes worthless. Of course your Blister Beetle is occasionally worthless too, but less often.

P1P10: I will refer back to my comments in the article, where I said Excommunicate is better. I don't agree that Call to Heel is totally unplayable, it's just more like a 23rd playable level if you have nothing better to finish off the deck. But Excommunicate is definitely better. In the "ideal" scenario where they throw removal on your best guy when you have mana open, and you Call to Heel so you can replay your bomby guy, you're still eating a lot of tempo loss in the creature race as you have to pay all the money for your big brute a second time. Wherease Excommunicate is generating nice positive tempo for you, and this is a tempo oriented format.

P3P1: Maybe so. I do love card advantage, and I've been wanting to play with Soul Manipulation more. I even wanted to try it in constructed when I first saw it, and never have. But the knights did quite well for me this match, and I did get them down on turn 2 maybe more than I deserved. As blue/white splashing black, with Esper Panoroma plus the borderpost I picked up later after this guy, he actually has decent chances.

P3P3: I was shooting for an aggressive deck, but in any format or archetype I love flyers, and this guy's a hyper-efficiently costed flyer that's a fine topdeck in a late-game creature stall, or very aggressive early. Grimblade is quite nice for a 2 drop but doesn't have evasion, I would rather have an Esper Stormblade (which sadly I was passed zero of). A deathtouch defender is nice if someone has a ground-pounder I need to hold back or trade for to win the race (would have been awesome against that Kresh I lost to, for instance) but the Demon is one of my best clocks/finishers in this deck, I think he's an "almost dragon" compared to a "good blocker that might beat in on the ground sometimes". Certainly 5 power flyers get picked over most cards, a 4 power flyer cheap with a drawback I still like a lot. Would have liked some blades as I do in any Shards draft, but I wouldn't count on the demon to table. More blades I might get, more demon, not as likely.

P3P4: I do like the drake here, I think my brain was parsing him as "red" or "grixis" rather than "blue/black flyer with haste" which is pretty darn good. Flyers win my a lot of games, I need to pay a little closer attention on picks like these. I don't think the Knight is bad for my deck, he adds to the exalted theme, the weenies theme, the artifact theme, and is an ok early blocker. The drake is just better, but I don't think I'd pick borderpost over him. The remnant, like all cascade cards, falls into the "I don't know well enough how highly to value cascade cards" category for me. It's like cantrips, there's many cards that aren't good playables without, but with "draw a card" or "cascade" that makes them solid playables. Tougher to evaluate, mostly I don't like walls or cards like Captured Sunlight too well on their own. Admittedly, with my exalted guys the remnant could occasionally attack for damage, which I didn't consider at the time.

P3P6: I agree on Soul Manipulation, I wanted one more piece of mana-fixing but this guy was the wrong kind, I should have gotten those zombies that A) can fix black, and B) can attack. This Plowbeast got sided out in most game 2s anyway, wish I had the Manipulation here.

P3P8: And if I'd taken the Manipulation, I could have the crappy Plowbeast over an unneeded card, rather than over a useful one and I still have him around to side out in game 2s! I agree, Thopter Foundry took a major beating when M10 combat rules came out, I think I am too nostalgic for it here as it appeals to my Johnny side a bit.

Update: I dug up the location again where MTGO auto-saves your tournament decks. For me, under Vista, it's C:\Users\Cat\AppData\Roaming\Wizards of the Coast\Magic Online\3.0\Decks\TournamentDecks. The missing land in the decklist above is a sixth plains. The deck has more blue than white overall, but it potentially needs white early for the Sigiled Paladin, which is why I went with one more plains rather than an island. Probably it was at 39 when I saved because I was thinking over that decision.

This rule is unenforceable. It'd require encyclopaedic knowledge and thorough checking.