Hehe - When I wrote this I never expected that Mind Funeral would be the one card to generate so much discussion. It's interesting how many people are so for it. I'm going to stick my original assessment however - remember at the end of the day these articles are just that. It's a card that I never want to play in my decks, nor do I anticipate losing to one in a game that I hadn't already lost.
I would be really interested to see a screenshot from any games you guys may have won or lost by casting the card. - IE: to see the game state and such
So true.. A Hydra flipped over by Sunlight would've made me want to vomit.
So, I'm looking but I can't really tell if the 4 points of life were relevant. I'm just wondering because, at Common, Captured Sunlight seems like a great pick if its in your colors, but nowhere near Butt Blast or some of the others which force me sometimes to splash.
I also wasent trying to attack, just thought that you should have a rational thought saying it seems hard. No offence meant to be given or taken.
cheers
Well, my analysis of Swiss wasn't based on the assumption that you *always* go 2-1; the claim is just that if you think you're a 2/3rds favorite against the field, then your EV for a Swiss tournament is 2 packs. This is pretty straightforward: your three rounds are independent events (we're making a simplifying assumption for both cases here that your opponents don't get harder as you progress), each with EV 2/3rds of a pack, which means that your total EV is 2/3 + 2/3 + 2/3 = 2 packs.
The one assumption that's most likely to be wrong, though, is the glaring one: that your quality of opponent is going to be the same from 4322 to Swiss. Looking at the spreadsheet above (and restricting only to formats where he played both styles), his overall record in 4322s was 174-128, for a 57% win percentage; meanwhile, his record in Swiss drafts was 69-30, for a 70% win percentage. That's a pretty drastic difference, and unsurprisingly it leads to a major difference in results. (Again, sample size issues mean that you can't really trust the swiss results -- he's played fewer swiss drafts total than he did AAA 4-3-2-2s! -- but with 100+ matches they should be accurate to within about 10%.)
I'll see if I can't share out the spreadsheet of 'actual' vs. 'expected' EV for the 4322s later, but the short version is that his overall EV there (1.68 packs/draft) was more than close enough to the expected EV based on a 57% win percentage (1.74 packs/draft), with the one real anomaly being RRR draft, where a ton of 1-1 drafts drastically skewed the final results.
(And congratulations on getting me to finally register for an account here. :-)
Turn 20? I'd say that's a little high. If they have 5 Mana Fixers, it's turn 15. Lots of draw? even quicker. And like I said before, they're only really useful if you get 2, but then, they can win all on their own, assuming you have other competent picks that help you block or control the board.
I also disagree on the mind funeral assessment. It is a great late game surprise when if your opponent has been using land cyclers or panorama to thin the cards in this deck. It is especially good if you can get more than one mind funeral, a nemesis of reason, or even a wall of denial to hold off your opponent. I am not calling it a bomb first pick or something, needs a control based deck, but calling it Tier 7 seems way overboard to me.
heh, I suppose it would have been convenient of me to mention who I was, sorry about that. I think my screen name back then was simply my name, Jason Chorman. I'm currently inactive, but like all MTG players, I will be back at some point.
About building the deck: did you consider dropping the land enchantment for the green forestcycling-lifegain spell? You keep the fixing aspect of it, lose the ability to ramp to 4 mana, but you eliminate the chance of revealing that enchantment on a cascade effect. Kind of a toss-up I guess. Playing 4-drops a turn early is always good.
Who are you? Still playing? Come on back to Spoon clan! We've rotated out seemingly-inactive members here and there so maybe you were cut if it seemed you were no longer playing, but I'm sure we can make room if you want back in.
I still have those sealed-deck files, and still have a complete OTJ set online. I'll throw down with "free" OTJ sealed any time. ;)
I've looked over my post numerous times, especially in the wake of the comments.
I am simply critiquing the article Aaron put forth, commending his work and asking questions. I then provide my opinion on the deck and warn him of pitfalls he may encounters.
In my opinion, my post, directed at the article, was not harsh- emotionless perhaps, but not harsh.
Now, my replies to other posters in these forums have in all likelihood been harsh since I have been attacked and basically insulted. The crux of these have been "Motu said this deck was not for competitive play" and I counter with "He's testing it against tournament decks, providing sideboard plans for tournament decks, and provides meta data for tournaments to run it in." Am I missing something here? I find the notion that I disrespect Motu flat out wrong- if I did not respect what he wrote in some way, why would I invest my time in commenting?
I want to restate the fact that I hold absolutely no ill will towards Motu and think that this article and line of thought represents a drastic improvement over his previous efforts. He should be commended for taking the criticisms from his previous pieces and incorporating suggestions.
There's not much more for me to say. I stand by what I said and am sorry if I offended Aaron, which was not my intention. However, I still believe that this article was aimed towards some level of competition and believe my comments are appropriate for that. If you disagree, well, then nothing I can say or do will change your mind since you may have already settled on me being a soulless Spike.
Whiffy, this is not a direct post to you, just a general comment.
Man this has quickly become my favorite Magic thing to read on the net, period. I get more out of one of these articles than I do out of most of the Magic reading I do for a whole week. The way the article goes over every step, from cracking the first pack to when to mulligan to tough tricky play arounds, it's just invaluable for someone learning the ins-and-outs of drafting.
I am a proponent of Swiss drafting as well, and I draft almost exclusively Swiss at this point. After probably 40+ drafts in RRR and ACR, I have only once gone 0-3, have won my fair share, and go 2-1 the majority of the time. For me, the return on packs is much better, but also just the fact that Magic is a high variance game, where flood/screw are absolutely part of the equation means that I want to lower my variance as much as possible.
I can think of many times where I drafted a really solid deck in a 4322 only to have it epic-fail in round 1 and then I never even get to try it out, let alone win any packs with it.
I would also like to add another point in regards to the benefits of Swiss. You just get to play more games with the decks you draft. People have mentioned getting bang for buck by playing more games vs the slowness that exists with Swiss, but my angle on it is that you get to actually use the cards and the deck you drafted for a longer period of time. This means that you get to see which cards are working and which aren't. It also teaches you to sideboard well and really hammers home what works and what doesn't.
If all you play are 4322 and 84, you get significantly fewer games in, and in a format that is fairly new, this is a big disadvantage.
Anyway, keep up the good work and keep these great articles coming!
Easily my favorite draft walkthrough that I've read on this site. You obviously know your stuff, you explain situations and thought processes clearly and have a nice subtle humor about it all. Well done.
We were actually clanmates back in the OTJ era. I remember when you simulated opening like 700 OTJ sealed sets for league practice. Sniff... leagues...
Good job, I really enjoyed that especcially the video. You should continue to put results on your ideas as it validates your opinion much more then " hey this should be awesome".
Alex, I have to say you come off to hard. I know your feelings about how you scrutinize new ideas in your format, I do it in classic as well, but you have to remember that every tier 1 deck was in a this stage of deck design. Namely a good idea but just needs a little work, also remember that meta decks exist in tournament magic. Lastly you defend your abrasive posts by saying that you speaker more harshly to your playtest partners/friends, he is most likely not in fact your playtest partner/friend but instead another member of the community who should deserve your respect.
Allright people, let`s do some math, so those of you who happen to like a singleton Mind Funeral might be convinced that it`s chaff:
Let`s say you on average play 16 land in ACR, as you will play 0-2 borderposts. That means 10 randomly selected cards will on average contain 4 lands. This means that Mind Funeral will on average mill 10 cards. We`re not playing a card that`s only good if we`re lucky, we play it assuming average (the same thinking can be used on Skyclaw Trash, except that card is actually pretty good). Mind Funeral is a Glimpse the Unthinkable for 1 more, but the casting cost is pretty much completly irrelevant when you just have 1 copy in the deck.
So, is Glimpse the Unthinkable good? When is milling 10 cards relevant? Easy answer: when your opponent has 10 or less cards remianing in the deck. Next question, how often will this situation come up? I`m going to assume that you on average draw around 3 extra cards in the average deck, due to cycling and straight-up draw-spells that you would often find in blue decks. That means that your opponent will have (again, on average) 10 cards left in his library turn 20. Third question, how often does your games go to round 20? While I belive this would be easier to see on something like MTGO, I can tell you right away that the obvious answer is: Very rarely. If youre still not convinced, I don`t think you are able to understand how long time 20 turns take. Please, those of you who actually play the card, or are considering doing so, sit down and count the number of turns in your limited-games. I`m in little doubt you will find that this never, if ever, happens.
At the same time, ask yourself the question "why haven`t I won yet?". Maybe, just maybe, a real card instead of Funeral would have helped:)
Very Nice article,
I love how you show the opening hands to several of your games. I think deciding on the mulligans is one of the most crucial skills there is in playing this game and having extra practice at it is great. It's also one of the skills where I want to improve the most.
I also really like the way you analyze certain points in the game and whether or not you are going to try to trip your opponent's trap. That seems to be a critical choice we make over and over again in this game and it's another very useful skill to practice.
Very nicely done. You've inspired me to use similar "What would you do" situations in my next article. I'm thinking that would be especially useful in analyzing what to get with tutors in 100 singleton games.
I don't feel ACR is terrible. I agree that there are some really bomby cards, but there are interesting angles of attack against those cards. The presence of powerful equipment with a substantial equip cost increases the value of artifact removal and "bad" instant-speed creature answers like bounce and tappers.
Since ACR, i've moved Naya Battlemage up in my pick order, as well as picking Vithian Renegades and Stun Sniper even higher than i had them in triple-Reborn. (maybe the fact that i played triple-Reborn points out that i'm a very, very bad player) Naturalize and Filigree Fracture were terrific in AAR, and they're even better now that they can instant-speed Stone Rain and destroy critical pieces of the Robot Army you pretty much have to defeat to 3-0 a draft these days.
I think you can make the point that all those answers are just fine without Sledge distorting the environment, but for myself, I'll disagree.
I've really enjoyed both of your articles so far. It's clear you put a great deal of work into them, and accurately capture both your uncertainty and the subtlety of board positions from your opponent's point of view.
I also appreciate that you own up to your mistakes.
Re: Cascade and Trace of Abundance. Do you feel that the interaction with Cascade pushes up the value of the landcyclers (the X-cycling creatures in Reborn and the basic landcyclers in Conflux)? Every time i get to dodge an unfortunate cascade on a landcycler, or topdeck a landcycler in the late game, i do a little fist pump for flexible cards.
In a vacuum, is the acceleration from Trace worth the trade-off with good Cascade misses and instant-speed search? (if you knew you were going to hit that card twice with Cascade, you probably would have played the Sylvan Bounty instead)
I've never played it, but I've played against it in four matches, and I have never so much as lost a game against it.
There was one game that was close, I was down to about 7-8 cards in my library and I was just hoping my opponent didn't have another Mind Funeral. He didn't, and I won.
In another game, my opponent played Mind Funeral and put the top four cards, which happened to be lands, in my graveyard. I said a simple "ty" and my opponent then proceeded to tell me that I was not a skilled player and could only win because I'm lucky. I'm using nicer words than he used. It was an amusing game.
Anyway, Mind Funeral is only really a scary threat if you have 3-5 for them. If I'm drafting, I might hate draft them if they show up in the last 5 cards and there is nothing else I can use, but I'm probably not going to draft it higher than that, and I'm not planning on playing it anytime soon.
"ACR is turning out to be an awesome limited environment. Much better the the previous multicolored block (Ravinica/Guildpact/Dissension) because the third pack really compliments the first two, whereas in RGD the dissension pack almost always clashed with what I'd managed to draft."
ACR is pretty bad. Much worse than RGD or Invasion Block. The sheer number of bombs make any game a toss up. i.e. making a game changing mistake, but still winning because u have behemoth sledge, which obv shouldnt be uncommon.
Indeed it would! Against Elves, it wouldn't do much since it Sorcery speed, but against Merfolk the magic number is 3 to fight off double Merfolk lords, it would definitely become handy. I feel that sometimes it's redundant to Devastating Dreams which is a true Pyroclasm effect unlike Firespout, which is why I omitted it for this event.
I did get lucky in round one; Sandydog just mulled heavily then dropped the whole tournament, so something must have come up. That turn he sacrificed all his lands (and Nexus) to make the Ravager big, then played a second Nexus the following turn which he played a Skullclamp, so he was tapped out.
I think the point is that you don't have the RR that you would need, at least based on those screenshots, to cast Naya Charm and Sangrite Backlash on the same turn to get the Griffin through for the win. Backlash may have some flexible color requirements, but they're not flexible enough to let you cast it for GW. :-)
You did a quick thumbnail of Swiss as a 2-1 affair, then a big breakdown of 43 that includes 3-0 scenarios. Let's do a quick thumbnail of each with an expectation of going 2-1. Let's represent which round the loss is in like this: 0-1-1, 1-0-1, 1-1-0.
In Swiss, each of those patterns wins two packs, for 2.0 packs per draft (ppd).
In 43, 0-1-1 wins 0, 1-0-1 wins 2, and 1-1-0 wins 3, for 1.67 ppd.
Obviously, a deeper study would take into account the frequency of 3-0 in Swiss vs. 43, and how often you are going to 1-2 or 0-3 Swiss. I don't have a huge Swiss sample size (maybe 15-20 drafts?), but I have yet to 0-3 Swiss, and have only gone 1-2 once. I would guess I'm about 20% 3-0, 75% 2-1, and 5% 1-2.
In 372 43 drafts, he won 619 packs, for 1.66 ppd
In 29 84 drafts, he won 44 packs, for 1.52 ppd
In 33 Swiss drafts, he won 69 packs, for 2.09 ppd
Note how closely his results reflect my "quick thumbnail" look at Swiss and 43 with an expectation of going 2-1.
His numbers are hard to argue with, and makes my point quite well. I haven't contacted manzanill to ask his rating, but note that he is almost exatly at 1.5 ppd in 84, suggesting he is an "average" 84 drafter, or somewhere in the mid-1700s.
The sample size for Swiss is small, but Swiss is far less volatile than 84 or 43, and will produce more accurate numbers than 43 would with a small sample size. Meanwhile, his 43 count is enormous, and quite statistically relevant.
Also note that he is making 39% above average (1.5 ppd) returns at Swiss compared to 21% above average (1.375 ppd) returns at 43, which also reflects what you'd expect from an "average" 84 drafter.
I'm thrilled that manzanill has been keeping such careful records, and has shared them. It really drives home in practice the math that's right there: 43 has tougher opponents and pays out fewer total packs. Swiss has easier opponents and pays out more total packs. That scenario favors Swiss, and Manzanill's results bear it out with a 1.66 pack-per-draft average at 43, and a 2.09 pack-per-draft average at Swiss.
Hehe - When I wrote this I never expected that Mind Funeral would be the one card to generate so much discussion. It's interesting how many people are so for it. I'm going to stick my original assessment however - remember at the end of the day these articles are just that. It's a card that I never want to play in my decks, nor do I anticipate losing to one in a game that I hadn't already lost.
I would be really interested to see a screenshot from any games you guys may have won or lost by casting the card. - IE: to see the game state and such
So true.. A Hydra flipped over by Sunlight would've made me want to vomit.
So, I'm looking but I can't really tell if the 4 points of life were relevant. I'm just wondering because, at Common, Captured Sunlight seems like a great pick if its in your colors, but nowhere near Butt Blast or some of the others which force me sometimes to splash.
fair enough :)
I also wasent trying to attack, just thought that you should have a rational thought saying it seems hard. No offence meant to be given or taken.
cheers
Well, my analysis of Swiss wasn't based on the assumption that you *always* go 2-1; the claim is just that if you think you're a 2/3rds favorite against the field, then your EV for a Swiss tournament is 2 packs. This is pretty straightforward: your three rounds are independent events (we're making a simplifying assumption for both cases here that your opponents don't get harder as you progress), each with EV 2/3rds of a pack, which means that your total EV is 2/3 + 2/3 + 2/3 = 2 packs.
The one assumption that's most likely to be wrong, though, is the glaring one: that your quality of opponent is going to be the same from 4322 to Swiss. Looking at the spreadsheet above (and restricting only to formats where he played both styles), his overall record in 4322s was 174-128, for a 57% win percentage; meanwhile, his record in Swiss drafts was 69-30, for a 70% win percentage. That's a pretty drastic difference, and unsurprisingly it leads to a major difference in results. (Again, sample size issues mean that you can't really trust the swiss results -- he's played fewer swiss drafts total than he did AAA 4-3-2-2s! -- but with 100+ matches they should be accurate to within about 10%.)
I'll see if I can't share out the spreadsheet of 'actual' vs. 'expected' EV for the 4322s later, but the short version is that his overall EV there (1.68 packs/draft) was more than close enough to the expected EV based on a 57% win percentage (1.74 packs/draft), with the one real anomaly being RRR draft, where a ton of 1-1 drafts drastically skewed the final results.
(And congratulations on getting me to finally register for an account here. :-)
Turn 20? I'd say that's a little high. If they have 5 Mana Fixers, it's turn 15. Lots of draw? even quicker. And like I said before, they're only really useful if you get 2, but then, they can win all on their own, assuming you have other competent picks that help you block or control the board.
I also disagree on the mind funeral assessment. It is a great late game surprise when if your opponent has been using land cyclers or panorama to thin the cards in this deck. It is especially good if you can get more than one mind funeral, a nemesis of reason, or even a wall of denial to hold off your opponent. I am not calling it a bomb first pick or something, needs a control based deck, but calling it Tier 7 seems way overboard to me.
heh, I suppose it would have been convenient of me to mention who I was, sorry about that. I think my screen name back then was simply my name, Jason Chorman. I'm currently inactive, but like all MTG players, I will be back at some point.
About building the deck: did you consider dropping the land enchantment for the green forestcycling-lifegain spell? You keep the fixing aspect of it, lose the ability to ramp to 4 mana, but you eliminate the chance of revealing that enchantment on a cascade effect. Kind of a toss-up I guess. Playing 4-drops a turn early is always good.
Who are you? Still playing? Come on back to Spoon clan! We've rotated out seemingly-inactive members here and there so maybe you were cut if it seemed you were no longer playing, but I'm sure we can make room if you want back in.
I still have those sealed-deck files, and still have a complete OTJ set online. I'll throw down with "free" OTJ sealed any time. ;)
I've looked over my post numerous times, especially in the wake of the comments.
I am simply critiquing the article Aaron put forth, commending his work and asking questions. I then provide my opinion on the deck and warn him of pitfalls he may encounters.
In my opinion, my post, directed at the article, was not harsh- emotionless perhaps, but not harsh.
Now, my replies to other posters in these forums have in all likelihood been harsh since I have been attacked and basically insulted. The crux of these have been "Motu said this deck was not for competitive play" and I counter with "He's testing it against tournament decks, providing sideboard plans for tournament decks, and provides meta data for tournaments to run it in." Am I missing something here? I find the notion that I disrespect Motu flat out wrong- if I did not respect what he wrote in some way, why would I invest my time in commenting?
I want to restate the fact that I hold absolutely no ill will towards Motu and think that this article and line of thought represents a drastic improvement over his previous efforts. He should be commended for taking the criticisms from his previous pieces and incorporating suggestions.
There's not much more for me to say. I stand by what I said and am sorry if I offended Aaron, which was not my intention. However, I still believe that this article was aimed towards some level of competition and believe my comments are appropriate for that. If you disagree, well, then nothing I can say or do will change your mind since you may have already settled on me being a soulless Spike.
Whiffy, this is not a direct post to you, just a general comment.
-Alex
Man this has quickly become my favorite Magic thing to read on the net, period. I get more out of one of these articles than I do out of most of the Magic reading I do for a whole week. The way the article goes over every step, from cracking the first pack to when to mulligan to tough tricky play arounds, it's just invaluable for someone learning the ins-and-outs of drafting.
I am a proponent of Swiss drafting as well, and I draft almost exclusively Swiss at this point. After probably 40+ drafts in RRR and ACR, I have only once gone 0-3, have won my fair share, and go 2-1 the majority of the time. For me, the return on packs is much better, but also just the fact that Magic is a high variance game, where flood/screw are absolutely part of the equation means that I want to lower my variance as much as possible.
I can think of many times where I drafted a really solid deck in a 4322 only to have it epic-fail in round 1 and then I never even get to try it out, let alone win any packs with it.
I would also like to add another point in regards to the benefits of Swiss. You just get to play more games with the decks you draft. People have mentioned getting bang for buck by playing more games vs the slowness that exists with Swiss, but my angle on it is that you get to actually use the cards and the deck you drafted for a longer period of time. This means that you get to see which cards are working and which aren't. It also teaches you to sideboard well and really hammers home what works and what doesn't.
If all you play are 4322 and 84, you get significantly fewer games in, and in a format that is fairly new, this is a big disadvantage.
Anyway, keep up the good work and keep these great articles coming!
Easily my favorite draft walkthrough that I've read on this site. You obviously know your stuff, you explain situations and thought processes clearly and have a nice subtle humor about it all. Well done.
We were actually clanmates back in the OTJ era. I remember when you simulated opening like 700 OTJ sealed sets for league practice. Sniff... leagues...
Good job, I really enjoyed that especcially the video. You should continue to put results on your ideas as it validates your opinion much more then " hey this should be awesome".
Alex, I have to say you come off to hard. I know your feelings about how you scrutinize new ideas in your format, I do it in classic as well, but you have to remember that every tier 1 deck was in a this stage of deck design. Namely a good idea but just needs a little work, also remember that meta decks exist in tournament magic. Lastly you defend your abrasive posts by saying that you speaker more harshly to your playtest partners/friends, he is most likely not in fact your playtest partner/friend but instead another member of the community who should deserve your respect.
Allright people, let`s do some math, so those of you who happen to like a singleton Mind Funeral might be convinced that it`s chaff:
Let`s say you on average play 16 land in ACR, as you will play 0-2 borderposts. That means 10 randomly selected cards will on average contain 4 lands. This means that Mind Funeral will on average mill 10 cards. We`re not playing a card that`s only good if we`re lucky, we play it assuming average (the same thinking can be used on Skyclaw Trash, except that card is actually pretty good). Mind Funeral is a Glimpse the Unthinkable for 1 more, but the casting cost is pretty much completly irrelevant when you just have 1 copy in the deck.
So, is Glimpse the Unthinkable good? When is milling 10 cards relevant? Easy answer: when your opponent has 10 or less cards remianing in the deck. Next question, how often will this situation come up? I`m going to assume that you on average draw around 3 extra cards in the average deck, due to cycling and straight-up draw-spells that you would often find in blue decks. That means that your opponent will have (again, on average) 10 cards left in his library turn 20. Third question, how often does your games go to round 20? While I belive this would be easier to see on something like MTGO, I can tell you right away that the obvious answer is: Very rarely. If youre still not convinced, I don`t think you are able to understand how long time 20 turns take. Please, those of you who actually play the card, or are considering doing so, sit down and count the number of turns in your limited-games. I`m in little doubt you will find that this never, if ever, happens.
At the same time, ask yourself the question "why haven`t I won yet?". Maybe, just maybe, a real card instead of Funeral would have helped:)
Very Nice article,
I love how you show the opening hands to several of your games. I think deciding on the mulligans is one of the most crucial skills there is in playing this game and having extra practice at it is great. It's also one of the skills where I want to improve the most.
I also really like the way you analyze certain points in the game and whether or not you are going to try to trip your opponent's trap. That seems to be a critical choice we make over and over again in this game and it's another very useful skill to practice.
Very nicely done. You've inspired me to use similar "What would you do" situations in my next article. I'm thinking that would be especially useful in analyzing what to get with tutors in 100 singleton games.
I don't feel ACR is terrible. I agree that there are some really bomby cards, but there are interesting angles of attack against those cards. The presence of powerful equipment with a substantial equip cost increases the value of artifact removal and "bad" instant-speed creature answers like bounce and tappers.
Since ACR, i've moved Naya Battlemage up in my pick order, as well as picking Vithian Renegades and Stun Sniper even higher than i had them in triple-Reborn. (maybe the fact that i played triple-Reborn points out that i'm a very, very bad player) Naturalize and Filigree Fracture were terrific in AAR, and they're even better now that they can instant-speed Stone Rain and destroy critical pieces of the Robot Army you pretty much have to defeat to 3-0 a draft these days.
I think you can make the point that all those answers are just fine without Sledge distorting the environment, but for myself, I'll disagree.
I've really enjoyed both of your articles so far. It's clear you put a great deal of work into them, and accurately capture both your uncertainty and the subtlety of board positions from your opponent's point of view.
I also appreciate that you own up to your mistakes.
Re: Cascade and Trace of Abundance. Do you feel that the interaction with Cascade pushes up the value of the landcyclers (the X-cycling creatures in Reborn and the basic landcyclers in Conflux)? Every time i get to dodge an unfortunate cascade on a landcycler, or topdeck a landcycler in the late game, i do a little fist pump for flexible cards.
In a vacuum, is the acceleration from Trace worth the trade-off with good Cascade misses and instant-speed search? (if you knew you were going to hit that card twice with Cascade, you probably would have played the Sylvan Bounty instead)
I've never played it, but I've played against it in four matches, and I have never so much as lost a game against it.
There was one game that was close, I was down to about 7-8 cards in my library and I was just hoping my opponent didn't have another Mind Funeral. He didn't, and I won.
In another game, my opponent played Mind Funeral and put the top four cards, which happened to be lands, in my graveyard. I said a simple "ty" and my opponent then proceeded to tell me that I was not a skilled player and could only win because I'm lucky. I'm using nicer words than he used. It was an amusing game.
Anyway, Mind Funeral is only really a scary threat if you have 3-5 for them. If I'm drafting, I might hate draft them if they show up in the last 5 cards and there is nothing else I can use, but I'm probably not going to draft it higher than that, and I'm not planning on playing it anytime soon.
"ACR is turning out to be an awesome limited environment. Much better the the previous multicolored block (Ravinica/Guildpact/Dissension) because the third pack really compliments the first two, whereas in RGD the dissension pack almost always clashed with what I'd managed to draft."
ACR is pretty bad. Much worse than RGD or Invasion Block. The sheer number of bombs make any game a toss up. i.e. making a game changing mistake, but still winning because u have behemoth sledge, which obv shouldnt be uncommon.
Indeed it would! Against Elves, it wouldn't do much since it Sorcery speed, but against Merfolk the magic number is 3 to fight off double Merfolk lords, it would definitely become handy. I feel that sometimes it's redundant to Devastating Dreams which is a true Pyroclasm effect unlike Firespout, which is why I omitted it for this event.
Thanks for the well wishes.
I did get lucky in round one; Sandydog just mulled heavily then dropped the whole tournament, so something must have come up. That turn he sacrificed all his lands (and Nexus) to make the Ravager big, then played a second Nexus the following turn which he played a Skullclamp, so he was tapped out.
Thanks for the kind words :)
Oops! Correct, the Naya Charm is the only on-table win there.
I think the point is that you don't have the RR that you would need, at least based on those screenshots, to cast Naya Charm and Sangrite Backlash on the same turn to get the Griffin through for the win. Backlash may have some flexible color requirements, but they're not flexible enough to let you cast it for GW. :-)
You did a quick thumbnail of Swiss as a 2-1 affair, then a big breakdown of 43 that includes 3-0 scenarios. Let's do a quick thumbnail of each with an expectation of going 2-1. Let's represent which round the loss is in like this: 0-1-1, 1-0-1, 1-1-0.
In Swiss, each of those patterns wins two packs, for 2.0 packs per draft (ppd).
In 43, 0-1-1 wins 0, 1-0-1 wins 2, and 1-1-0 wins 3, for 1.67 ppd.
Obviously, a deeper study would take into account the frequency of 3-0 in Swiss vs. 43, and how often you are going to 1-2 or 0-3 Swiss. I don't have a huge Swiss sample size (maybe 15-20 drafts?), but I have yet to 0-3 Swiss, and have only gone 1-2 once. I would guess I'm about 20% 3-0, 75% 2-1, and 5% 1-2.
But let's not guess. Here's a significant sample size to analyze, posted in a previous comment thread by manzanill: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pcahsA9RlwScuTNnOm94YEw
In 372 43 drafts, he won 619 packs, for 1.66 ppd
In 29 84 drafts, he won 44 packs, for 1.52 ppd
In 33 Swiss drafts, he won 69 packs, for 2.09 ppd
Note how closely his results reflect my "quick thumbnail" look at Swiss and 43 with an expectation of going 2-1.
His numbers are hard to argue with, and makes my point quite well. I haven't contacted manzanill to ask his rating, but note that he is almost exatly at 1.5 ppd in 84, suggesting he is an "average" 84 drafter, or somewhere in the mid-1700s.
The sample size for Swiss is small, but Swiss is far less volatile than 84 or 43, and will produce more accurate numbers than 43 would with a small sample size. Meanwhile, his 43 count is enormous, and quite statistically relevant.
Also note that he is making 39% above average (1.5 ppd) returns at Swiss compared to 21% above average (1.375 ppd) returns at 43, which also reflects what you'd expect from an "average" 84 drafter.
I'm thrilled that manzanill has been keeping such careful records, and has shared them. It really drives home in practice the math that's right there: 43 has tougher opponents and pays out fewer total packs. Swiss has easier opponents and pays out more total packs. That scenario favors Swiss, and Manzanill's results bear it out with a 1.66 pack-per-draft average at 43, and a 2.09 pack-per-draft average at Swiss.
I deleted the basic land option out of all the picks. Your P3P1 rare was Time Sieve.