See response above, I agree on Bit Blast. With no blades to turn on, though, I don't like maindecking the outlander and upping my land count to remove the two sunlights. If I could do it over again, I'd cut one sunlight for the Paragon of the Amesha. I think the Paragon's first strike and single-color requirement make it a better main deck play than the outlanders. It's close though, outlander isn't much worse main deck than the yearling.
When I bring to the table a good-faith, clinical assessment of the correct strategy in a Magic scenario, and someone disagrees with me through worthless and patently-incorrect hyperbole that adds nothing useful to the discussion, you can expect me to be sarcastic and arrogant in response, yes.
You mean the cards in the draft? That's from the Benjamin Peebles-Mundy draft converter. http://www.zizibaloob.com/. You could probably trick it into producing half-card html for non-draft stuff by changing the cards in a draft output file to be the cards you wanted half-size graphics for, but for me it's just the magic box that turns my text drafts into picture drafts.
The other win is less efficient, but you can Magma Spray the screecher at EOT, burn out the cormorants with naya charm, and enchant the griffin with Sangrite Backlash to swing 7/1, then ping. That's a strictly worse play than simply winning with the charm, though.
Vectis dominator gives your opponent choices, which is not good unless either choice is great for you. Compare him to Fatestitcher, for example.
Since I see him going 14th a lot I can't argue against him being underrated since there's no way to go but up from there, but I would hope to never have to play him, and if he's the best you can come up with against me after a Sphinx Summoner, I like my chances in the match.
Re: meditant vs. bounty: at that point, I don't know what kind of fixing I'm going to get for the rest of the draft. What I mean by my comment is that I'm more likely to be in desperate need of a 2cc fixer than I am a 2/4 vanilla cantrip man for 4. It also frees me up to take powerful spells over fixing in Reborn, which is a position I relly like to put myself in.
Re: Trace: cascading into it twice sucked because you would never want to play a 4-mana enchant land that gained you four life and allowed the enchanted land to tap for extra mana of any color. The biggest problem with Trace is that is is ideal on T2, and that is not the play you are hoping for
Consider all the turn-two mana fixing plays in Alara: panoramas, Druid of the Anima, Rupture Spire, five basic landcyclers in Conflux, five basic landcyclers in Reborn, and Trace...if you assume the ability to do the fix on turn two, Trace is actually the best of them, accelrating you to 4 mana on turn three and fixing all colors.
That's a big assumption, though, and the big knock is that it is "fixing" that requires GR or GW to pull off. However, in base-green Naya, fixing W with GR or fixing R for GW should happen often, and don't underestimate the raw power of moving Naya's mana curve up a turn. turn-three Rhox Brutes, turn-four Rakeclaw Gargantuans, and turn-five Enlisted Wurms are pretty good. It's hard to call Trace "fixing" in anything but base GW, base GR, or Gwr Naya, though.
Re: Yearling: yeah, he's not great, and I agree with you and others that Jund Sojourners was the better pick there, although Yearling both turns on your blades and trades with all but Bant Sureblade.
Your articles are really good. I only play constructed right now but I'm getting the itch to start doing some drafts, you look like you are having an awesome time in yours.
I think you are correct, Bit Blast was the correct pick as a single Swamp makes it splashable with negligible damage to my mana base, and helps the Matca Rioters to boot.
From a personal perspective, I don't mind my pick, though. Too often, I pass up opportunities to test drive a rare that seems to have potential in favor of a known quantity, and I've been trying to correct that a bit. I probably overcorrected in this spot, because Bit Blast is *that* good. I don't hate experimenting with the rare, though, particularly when I'm going to be making a walkthrough, and am therefore experimenting on behalf of others.
Now that I've tried out Retaliator Griffin, I would take the Bituminous Blast if faced with this pick in this scenario again.
My current take on Captured Sunlight is that it is playable but not great, but how playable depends on what it can flip and what you are playing it over.
If it can only flip removal, creatures, and maybe an annoying borderpost or two but no pure blanks, and you have a shallow 4-hole and only marginal cards to play over it, it's solid. It just pales in comparison to the removal- and permanent-based cascade spells, and in future drafts I hope to avoid running it main deck. There are worse cards to have to run due to playable count, though.
At least I hit Trace of Abundance in this draft and not the Apocalypse Hydra.
Really makes me wish I had time to draft more, or I'd get leagues back.
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.
Meh in the ARB pre-release in my area a guy won the whole tournament w/ a singleton Mind Funeral but that is pre-release where you have at most 16 land.
Nice article, only pick I really disagree with is griffin over blast. Blast is just so much better, and with all your fixing you could've splahed for it easily and it would also have made rioters better now that you are playing a fourth color. Lastly I would have run another land and the Outlander instead of two captured sunlight, sorry I'm just not a fan of captured sunlight.
From your report it looks like you got lucky in your first round vs Affinity. As I read the report it seems that your opponent could have activated the Nexus he drew and sacrificed it to Ravager to deal that extra point Leaving you at 0 instead of 1.
Your articles want to me try to draft more :) Good job.
But since I'm a casual player, without much time so 4322 is my favorite. I like it when I don't make the best deck to be booted and move on. But I also don't win very much (I got second place once) so getting 2 packs is fun. I can definitely see Swiss as a good way to reduce the cost.
Thanks for another awesome write up! It's so good, I've started telling my friends to read you!
(Another one, and I'll have to put it on my FB Status!).
In particular the play by plays, screen shots and "what's the play" are such a great learning tools, for making crucial decisions. Keep them up! :-)
I did have one question... R2G1, when "He swings into me with the knight and four mana up. What’s my combat plan?":
I would have blocked with Topan Ascetic, and tapped him to pump himself up. Then wait, and see what villain plays.
If nothing, ping his 2/4 at end of turn. If you need to, pump your Topan up with Vithean.
What's wrong with this play? What else could he have that makes this worse than taking 2 free damage, given that you want to draw out any removal anyway.
Oh yeah and: "Buck up, carry on, still have a Behemoth Sledge. These mistakes happen to us mortals, it's just that most of us mortals don't then post screen shots of them on the internet." made me LOL.
I think you should have played Pithing Needle maindeck (over the 1/1). It's a high-variance card in that it could easily do nothing, but when it does work, it's an excellent answer to many dangerous creatures/artifacts/equipment. Think of it like Naturalize. Aside from that, your build looks perfect. Maybe you could consider splashing the Cloud Elementals and Sift if you had to go 8-0 at a Grand Prix, but for a 5-round modo tournament, I think you made the right call.
One other comment, regarding this quote:
"He blocks my Giant with his Cyclops, and I use my Giant Growth as removal, then drop Tim."
I wrote in response to another of your articles that I believe you overvalue Giant Growth, and here is a perfect example. All you accomplished in this scenario was to use Giant Growth as a cheap 3/3. That's fine, but not in the same league as an actual removal spell.
About the hypergenesis deck, I've never thought of it as a real "viable" deck in the format because there are simply too many heavily played cards that can easily stop it from working properly. Reanimator is a much more consistent strategy if one would want fat creatures in play early because hypergenesis only works once (one counter is game), you can't really control what you have in your hand (the fatties) and it is not easy to have a cascade in hand. All these factors make the deck very inconsistent to play.
From my testing, my 83 land deck will give better results because it is much harder to disrupt without counters (and even with, if lucky) but even so, I still don't think the 83 land deck is good enough at the competitive level because it needs to be able to consistently beat control decks to be a "tournament viable" deck.
If aggro finds it a problem, it could attempt to 1) attack the mana base as it has always done, 2) disrupt the hand, 3) max out removals like swords to plowshares, path to exile, oblivion rings (cos not all its creatures are super-akromas) or simply be built more aggressively with more burn spells... especially since the hypergenesis deck does not consistently spit out bombs early.
Yeah, Red Deck Wins (or Rakdos Deck Wins, or Gruul Deck Wins, or Boros Deck Wins) will have some great toys once M10 comes around! I expect we'll see some other strong cards for the other colors as well.
Pack 3 Pick 1 only displays 14 cards, with a rare missing, so it looks like you dropped something somewhere.
That magic box is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!
I thought that might be what he meant, but he specifically cited "combat" rules.
See response above, I agree on Bit Blast. With no blades to turn on, though, I don't like maindecking the outlander and upping my land count to remove the two sunlights. If I could do it over again, I'd cut one sunlight for the Paragon of the Amesha. I think the Paragon's first strike and single-color requirement make it a better main deck play than the outlanders. It's close though, outlander isn't much worse main deck than the yearling.
When I bring to the table a good-faith, clinical assessment of the correct strategy in a Magic scenario, and someone disagrees with me through worthless and patently-incorrect hyperbole that adds nothing useful to the discussion, you can expect me to be sarcastic and arrogant in response, yes.
I think he means the time you mana burnt for 1.
You mean the cards in the draft? That's from the Benjamin Peebles-Mundy draft converter. http://www.zizibaloob.com/. You could probably trick it into producing half-card html for non-draft stuff by changing the cards in a draft output file to be the cards you wanted half-size graphics for, but for me it's just the magic box that turns my text drafts into picture drafts.
Did I miss something? When did it come up? I didn't see any outcome being different under M10 combat rules.
The other win is less efficient, but you can Magma Spray the screecher at EOT, burn out the cormorants with naya charm, and enchant the griffin with Sangrite Backlash to swing 7/1, then ping. That's a strictly worse play than simply winning with the charm, though.
Vectis dominator gives your opponent choices, which is not good unless either choice is great for you. Compare him to Fatestitcher, for example.
Since I see him going 14th a lot I can't argue against him being underrated since there's no way to go but up from there, but I would hope to never have to play him, and if he's the best you can come up with against me after a Sphinx Summoner, I like my chances in the match.
Re: meditant vs. bounty: at that point, I don't know what kind of fixing I'm going to get for the rest of the draft. What I mean by my comment is that I'm more likely to be in desperate need of a 2cc fixer than I am a 2/4 vanilla cantrip man for 4. It also frees me up to take powerful spells over fixing in Reborn, which is a position I relly like to put myself in.
Re: Trace: cascading into it twice sucked because you would never want to play a 4-mana enchant land that gained you four life and allowed the enchanted land to tap for extra mana of any color. The biggest problem with Trace is that is is ideal on T2, and that is not the play you are hoping for
Consider all the turn-two mana fixing plays in Alara: panoramas, Druid of the Anima, Rupture Spire, five basic landcyclers in Conflux, five basic landcyclers in Reborn, and Trace...if you assume the ability to do the fix on turn two, Trace is actually the best of them, accelrating you to 4 mana on turn three and fixing all colors.
That's a big assumption, though, and the big knock is that it is "fixing" that requires GR or GW to pull off. However, in base-green Naya, fixing W with GR or fixing R for GW should happen often, and don't underestimate the raw power of moving Naya's mana curve up a turn. turn-three Rhox Brutes, turn-four Rakeclaw Gargantuans, and turn-five Enlisted Wurms are pretty good. It's hard to call Trace "fixing" in anything but base GW, base GR, or Gwr Naya, though.
Re: Yearling: yeah, he's not great, and I agree with you and others that Jund Sojourners was the better pick there, although Yearling both turns on your blades and trades with all but Bant Sureblade.
Your articles are really good. I only play constructed right now but I'm getting the itch to start doing some drafts, you look like you are having an awesome time in yours.
I think you are correct, Bit Blast was the correct pick as a single Swamp makes it splashable with negligible damage to my mana base, and helps the Matca Rioters to boot.
From a personal perspective, I don't mind my pick, though. Too often, I pass up opportunities to test drive a rare that seems to have potential in favor of a known quantity, and I've been trying to correct that a bit. I probably overcorrected in this spot, because Bit Blast is *that* good. I don't hate experimenting with the rare, though, particularly when I'm going to be making a walkthrough, and am therefore experimenting on behalf of others.
Now that I've tried out Retaliator Griffin, I would take the Bituminous Blast if faced with this pick in this scenario again.
My current take on Captured Sunlight is that it is playable but not great, but how playable depends on what it can flip and what you are playing it over.
If it can only flip removal, creatures, and maybe an annoying borderpost or two but no pure blanks, and you have a shallow 4-hole and only marginal cards to play over it, it's solid. It just pales in comparison to the removal- and permanent-based cascade spells, and in future drafts I hope to avoid running it main deck. There are worse cards to have to run due to playable count, though.
At least I hit Trace of Abundance in this draft and not the Apocalypse Hydra.
Really makes me wish I had time to draft more, or I'd get leagues back.
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.
great report also liked the flavor narrative. bet maktel was envious round 2 when you drew that bayou cheater!
Meh in the ARB pre-release in my area a guy won the whole tournament w/ a singleton Mind Funeral but that is pre-release where you have at most 16 land.
Nice article, only pick I really disagree with is griffin over blast. Blast is just so much better, and with all your fixing you could've splahed for it easily and it would also have made rioters better now that you are playing a fourth color. Lastly I would have run another land and the Outlander instead of two captured sunlight, sorry I'm just not a fan of captured sunlight.
i love naya charm
so far in the last three drafts 4322, i have drafted the charm usually falling into R/G/w/b and using the tapping all crits ftw during land stalls.
weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
From your report it looks like you got lucky in your first round vs Affinity. As I read the report it seems that your opponent could have activated the Nexus he drew and sacrificed it to Ravager to deal that extra point Leaving you at 0 instead of 1.
Good Report though.
One more thing I forgot to ask. How do you do the half size cards? I know (pic= and (tmb= how do you go inbetween?
Your articles want to me try to draft more :) Good job.
But since I'm a casual player, without much time so 4322 is my favorite. I like it when I don't make the best deck to be booted and move on. But I also don't win very much (I got second place once) so getting 2 packs is fun. I can definitely see Swiss as a good way to reduce the cost.
Thanks for another awesome write up! It's so good, I've started telling my friends to read you!
(Another one, and I'll have to put it on my FB Status!).
In particular the play by plays, screen shots and "what's the play" are such a great learning tools, for making crucial decisions. Keep them up! :-)
I did have one question... R2G1, when "He swings into me with the knight and four mana up. What’s my combat plan?":
I would have blocked with Topan Ascetic, and tapped him to pump himself up. Then wait, and see what villain plays.
If nothing, ping his 2/4 at end of turn. If you need to, pump your Topan up with Vithean.
What's wrong with this play? What else could he have that makes this worse than taking 2 free damage, given that you want to draw out any removal anyway.
Oh yeah and: "Buck up, carry on, still have a Behemoth Sledge. These mistakes happen to us mortals, it's just that most of us mortals don't then post screen shots of them on the internet." made me LOL.
I think you should have played Pithing Needle maindeck (over the 1/1). It's a high-variance card in that it could easily do nothing, but when it does work, it's an excellent answer to many dangerous creatures/artifacts/equipment. Think of it like Naturalize. Aside from that, your build looks perfect. Maybe you could consider splashing the Cloud Elementals and Sift if you had to go 8-0 at a Grand Prix, but for a 5-round modo tournament, I think you made the right call.
One other comment, regarding this quote:
"He blocks my Giant with his Cyclops, and I use my Giant Growth as removal, then drop Tim."
I wrote in response to another of your articles that I believe you overvalue Giant Growth, and here is a perfect example. All you accomplished in this scenario was to use Giant Growth as a cheap 3/3. That's fine, but not in the same league as an actual removal spell.
Hi hammy! Thanks for the support always.. =)
About the hypergenesis deck, I've never thought of it as a real "viable" deck in the format because there are simply too many heavily played cards that can easily stop it from working properly. Reanimator is a much more consistent strategy if one would want fat creatures in play early because hypergenesis only works once (one counter is game), you can't really control what you have in your hand (the fatties) and it is not easy to have a cascade in hand. All these factors make the deck very inconsistent to play.
From my testing, my 83 land deck will give better results because it is much harder to disrupt without counters (and even with, if lucky) but even so, I still don't think the 83 land deck is good enough at the competitive level because it needs to be able to consistently beat control decks to be a "tournament viable" deck.
If aggro finds it a problem, it could attempt to 1) attack the mana base as it has always done, 2) disrupt the hand, 3) max out removals like swords to plowshares, path to exile, oblivion rings (cos not all its creatures are super-akromas) or simply be built more aggressively with more burn spells... especially since the hypergenesis deck does not consistently spit out bombs early.
-Tarmotog
Yeah, Red Deck Wins (or Rakdos Deck Wins, or Gruul Deck Wins, or Boros Deck Wins) will have some great toys once M10 comes around! I expect we'll see some other strong cards for the other colors as well.
At least, I hope so!