Glad you posted this, it totally reinforces what I was saying above about Swiss vs. 84 vs. 4322. Swiss and 84 both pay out 12 packs per draft. Swiss has, on average, much worse players than 84, so it only stands to reason that you will net more in the long run at Swiss than you will at 84.
If your primary goal is to improve your drafting, you may want 84 anyway because you learn more against better players. If your primary goal is "sustainable drafting," then Swiss is clearly a much slower bleed than 84 or 4322.
The big bummer of Swiss, besides no dropping, is that with each round having four matches, they always take longer to finish than elimination drafts.
I appreciate the rundown of my deck, that helps me in future and to get a discussion going. Bracers: I should probably stop playing with them, unless I really can't find another card to use. They can be good, but only in certain situations, and only about 10% of the time.
Enchantress: Like Exodus said, I need to start considering her more.
Grizzly Bears: Aren't the worst thing in the world, they are at least a body, filler, but nothing more. I did have better creatures to play, but I wouldn't say never.
Hill Giants: Should have been played.
Verdant Force: Is what the deck played at the top of the curve. Each time I drew it and played it, I won. Without it, I would have lost those games, with the board situation as it is. It demands removal immediately, and gives you 2x free creatures every turn that they fail to remove the force. I will always play it if it is in color in a 10th sealed.
I think I went overboard with the Flute and Abundance. I didn't like them being in my deck for every first game.
Commune With Nature I think is a fine card to play as long as you have 15+ creatures. It has a great chance of just making your deck 39 cards.
Composite Golem: I'm really low on. A 4/4 body for 6 that is subject to more removal than other 4/4s, I would much rather pay 1 more for the force.
Thanks again for the comments.
I'm not sure why I played Joiner Adept (a poor Grizzly Bears) and the Bears in this build. I guess I didn't even see the Hill Giant or Bodyguard, and I haven't been high on the Enchantress until after this draft. Sylvan Basilisk, I could have sworn was already in there. I still like Bogardan Firefiend, even for its drawbacks. It is better when you have a higher curve and it can help clutter up the board without killing your own creatures.
I think Abundance is fantastic... in theory, or in a constructed deck where you can use it better. Citanul Flute might also shine better in Constructed, maybe in a Rebel deck. However, I found that the only creatures I could grab were the Grizzly Bears and Joiner Adept, everything else was too high of a casting cost that wasn't already in play.
I agree that Air Elemental is nice, as is Aven Windreader, but I didn't feel like there was enough support, and the double U didn't help if I splashed. Remove Soul is at best psuedo removal as you say. I'm not too high on it.
Thank you for the comment.
Im Glad u won!! And thanks for all your help & advice online last week!! :-)
I built this deck, but WITHOUT the dual lands(too pricey). I subbed in some Coastal Towers, Salt Marshes, & Rupture Spires. And honestly, Im having some MIXED results with this deck. On the other hand, my EXTENDED version of this deck has some Mesmeric Orbs, Dreamborn Muses, and Traumatizes. That one is far more successful!
But similar to land destruction, MANY people online don't TOLERATE milling. Hence alot of folks end up conceding quickly after the 1st couple spells.... LOL
Verdant force, a 7-drop in the decks main colors and a game ending bomb, is worse than a vanilla 6-drop 4/4?
I dont know what to say to that comment except WOW. Seriously...wow.
The reason the deck is good is the power level of the creatures is good and the mana is very consistent. And its backed up by instant speed removal and two bombs (angel and verdant force).
On the - side I'm not sure why you run 7 Mountains...seems like one too many...and Id probably have run the Hill Giant or Anaba Bodyguard (bodyguard because incinterate/giant growth/arcane teachings + first strike = good). I do however agree with not including both Red and Black. Its very tempting but being able to always cast guys followed by a touch of removal seems just fine.
Since you run only two colors then Id probably not run the Joiner Adept. Also the Grizzly Bear is ok but not fantastic. The Enchantress is probably better than both of those since your opponent could cast enchants + your three makes him potentially better than a 2/2 all the time bear.
All of these are minor though. I think you did fine with the build and grats on the T8.
I would say that this statement is pretty debatable (I know it is from the interview and not the author, but it reflects upon the author since it was presented in such a way that it was not commented upon, which makes it seem that the author agrees even though he may not):
"Quick creature decks are much cheaper to build than control, so all the last minute players build them"
In my experience Aggro decks are probably quite a bit more expensive than control decks, assuming that we are talking about optimized lists for both. Control is able to run quite a bit more basic lands if it wants to than aggro can, which cuts a huge chunk of the cost from any deck. As far as creatures and spells I would say that the average aggro deck is higher there as well since it contains many rare creatures. Things like Tarmogoyf and Figure of destiny and also things like Loxodon Hierarch. Wheile control has far fewer threat cards that tend to be concentrated at rare. You might have Aeon Chronicler and Meloku, but those tend to cost less than the aggro threat counter parts. Additionally control decks tend to run a lot of spells, which tend to be removal, counters or card draw. These types of spells tend to be printed at common and uncommon. Control decks may often have some very big splashy effects on a few rares such as Cruel Ultimatum or Upheaval, but these cards tend not to make up the bulk of the deck and are also generally inexpensive to acquire. I understand that Aggro has many commons and uncommons too, but I would say that on average the price of a RGW aggro deck is far above that of a UB or UBW or UBR or some other multicolored control deck.
The reason people build aggro decks at the last minute is because it is much easier to build a last minute aggro deck than a last minute control deck, since the control deck requires you to have knowledge of the metagame whereas the aggro deck does not. The aggro deck only requires you to present questions for your opponent to figure out how to handle. This is also why control has made a poor showing so far. Control has not yet adapted itself to the types of aggro decks that exist.
I have been playing around with quite a few control decks to tackle this aggro metagame. One interesting thing that I questioned and it seems that mlinderbt did as well is "What are coutnerspells actually doing for me in the context of the format and are they necessary?" What I found is that the answer is "Not much" and "No" respectively. Counterspells are generally good because they can solve any type of threat, with the caveat that you have to have it and mana available when the threat is presented. Whereas removal can be drawn at any time the threat is present, with the caveat that it has to be the right kind of removal. The thing that I noticed is that almost everything worth countering could either be Burned, Terrored, or Similar. It seems that mlinderbt realized the same thing with his relative lack of counterspells and increased removal count. About the only threat that must be dealt with in some other way from aggro are geddon effects and there are ways other than countering them. One is to run artifact mana. One is to make sure they have no threats on the table when the geddon is cast. Another is to make sure that you have better threats out than they do. Other than geddons all of the other things in an aggro deck can be dealt with more efficiently with removal than counters. One of the main reasons is that there is more 2 mana removal than 2 mana hard counters. This often pushes counter strategies to use many 3cc answers to 1 and 2cc threats, thus putting it behind from the very start.
Based on this theory I have built 2 different control decks one UBW and one UBR that use 3 and 0 counters respectively and I have had far more success with either of these decks than with a more counterspell centric deck. Additionally I have had some short conversations with another avid player of the format and his 4 color deck and whether or not blue for counterspells was necessary and that perhaps the deck could be made stronger by cutting the color altogether. Whether or not he does I cannot say, but I may end up trying out a deck similar to his without the blue for myself.
Quite a long comment, and quite possibly the basis for it's own article altogether.
If you are playing either Ravages of War or Armageddon in your Singleton 100 deck, you would have to think long and hard about why you are not running both. If one of them is good enough for your deck, surely you would run them both to have a greater chance at drawing it.
Generally in this format it is better to think about how many of a certain effect that you want and not focus too much on what card fills that effect until tuning the deck.
EDIT: Well ArchGenius beat me to it, I guess I had the article open on my desktop for quite awhile.
Seems like a scale of 1 to 10 is a really lame judging scheme... I'd rather have seen analysis on the decks in terms of the criteria, because the scale of 1 to 10 basically means that the judges completely picked who won, and that makes voting rather pointless... I mean for any other deck to beat two perfect scores from the judges required it to have both runner up scores and win the vote... I dunno, it just seems extremely shady that the winner of the popular vote came in fourth... fourth? really? Also, even more suspicious is the incongruity in the voting scores listed: two decks rank 6th in the voting; Now, one of the duplicate 6th place in the voting is really the one that came in dead last... that means the deck ranked dead last in voting came in either 3rd or 5th, which really makes the whole voting aspect into a sham... If you guys wanted to pick your favorite deck out of the list, then by all means go ahead, just don't disguise the contest as vote-based; especially since there is no prize for runner-up or voter's favorite.
Really my complaint is the lack of explanation of why which deck got what ranking. Just "I like this one" isn't enough justification for me. Maybe I'll just have to write a column analyzing the 10 contest decks for Kaleidoscope play, since the contest really didn't show me anything I wanted to see...
The link to the article with the 10 finalist decks; seems like an obvious thing to do.
Sorry if I came off a bit harsh there...
One last suggestion: if you win one contest you should really be ineligible for the other, since handing all the prizes to the same person (especially with a judging scheme where votes are not terribly relevant) would be rather suspicious.
Interesting article. I started playing 100CS a couple weeks ago. I already had an EDH deck that I did not play at all since v3, so I made some changes into a 100CS deck. It's evolving slowly and has some problems against fast aggro draws. Anyway, the biggest problem I see so ar is that it's hard to ind opponents to playtest. Sometimes I have to wait half hour to get a match at the tournament practice room.
Well,
If you are playing one, you are probably going to want to play the other one to increase your chances of drawing it. This is 100 singleton afterall.
Ravages of War > Armageddon b/c it does the same thing at the same CMC, but for 3 tix less. People... pay attention to stuff like this and you can save some money.
Heres a link to my stats, I currently have 417 drafts since May 2008 and I have won more packs in Swiss in average.
Look at the line "won packs" from the link below,
I would play more swiss but they don´t fire often enough and sometimes I gotta go and dropping is not possible in those.
I've put this together just to try out the K-scope format. It's not performed that well but I think we can blame the pilot and not the deck at this point. :o)
First change was using Salt Marsh insted of Frost Marsh as I had neither so bought the cheapest one.
I wasn't going to invest in Sygg just to try things out so he was replaced with 2 cents worth of Gravelgill Duo.
Highlight so far, and well worth the $6 I spent getting the cards, was playing a Countersquall on my opponents plainswalker when he was sitting on 1 life for the win.
Thanks for the decklist and the article, Good times.
Great article, you might be single-handedly bringing me into the format.
As for the metagame comments, I don't think Necro was saying that all aggro decks are good against all control. However, in theory and probably in practice, the ability to put down 2-3 beaters with 2+ power before control can, well, control the board is a real problem. However the metagame shakes out, it seems that you have to prepare for both a mirror match (control) as well as the other two (aggro, combo).
The enclopedia of classic is in Eternal wisdom. Good job mate, as usual, your is an awesome source of information. Did you observe that the Rock deck isnt so much ran in the current meta ? this is strange, because qasali pridemage, putrid imp and pulse are good stuff for it anyway ... and gift rock could be around too ;)
interesting article on the that format. About non-basic land disruption, i think Ruination should be mentioned because it is the only real armaggedon for non-basic lands ... Maybe it is not used a lot in the current meta (i dont really know the format) but if this strategy is the core, for sure ruination will find a place into.
i really like the deck, but what's with only 22 lands? this honestly seems really low given said covenant's mana cost as well as lich lord activations, which are not cheap. seems like you really want to be making your land drops with this deck. otherwise, great job!
Well, im not very lucky.. I never get covenant, when want it.. even with 4.. or I end up with 4 in hand which isnt so bad cause a lot of ppl play discard.. and im gonna draw into sumthing =P.. why dont you play the deck see for yourself =D
Glad you posted this, it totally reinforces what I was saying above about Swiss vs. 84 vs. 4322. Swiss and 84 both pay out 12 packs per draft. Swiss has, on average, much worse players than 84, so it only stands to reason that you will net more in the long run at Swiss than you will at 84.
If your primary goal is to improve your drafting, you may want 84 anyway because you learn more against better players. If your primary goal is "sustainable drafting," then Swiss is clearly a much slower bleed than 84 or 4322.
The big bummer of Swiss, besides no dropping, is that with each round having four matches, they always take longer to finish than elimination drafts.
I appreciate the rundown of my deck, that helps me in future and to get a discussion going. Bracers: I should probably stop playing with them, unless I really can't find another card to use. They can be good, but only in certain situations, and only about 10% of the time.
Enchantress: Like Exodus said, I need to start considering her more.
Grizzly Bears: Aren't the worst thing in the world, they are at least a body, filler, but nothing more. I did have better creatures to play, but I wouldn't say never.
Hill Giants: Should have been played.
Verdant Force: Is what the deck played at the top of the curve. Each time I drew it and played it, I won. Without it, I would have lost those games, with the board situation as it is. It demands removal immediately, and gives you 2x free creatures every turn that they fail to remove the force. I will always play it if it is in color in a 10th sealed.
I think I went overboard with the Flute and Abundance. I didn't like them being in my deck for every first game.
Commune With Nature I think is a fine card to play as long as you have 15+ creatures. It has a great chance of just making your deck 39 cards.
Composite Golem: I'm really low on. A 4/4 body for 6 that is subject to more removal than other 4/4s, I would much rather pay 1 more for the force.
Thanks again for the comments.
I'm not sure why I played Joiner Adept (a poor Grizzly Bears) and the Bears in this build. I guess I didn't even see the Hill Giant or Bodyguard, and I haven't been high on the Enchantress until after this draft. Sylvan Basilisk, I could have sworn was already in there. I still like Bogardan Firefiend, even for its drawbacks. It is better when you have a higher curve and it can help clutter up the board without killing your own creatures.
I think Abundance is fantastic... in theory, or in a constructed deck where you can use it better. Citanul Flute might also shine better in Constructed, maybe in a Rebel deck. However, I found that the only creatures I could grab were the Grizzly Bears and Joiner Adept, everything else was too high of a casting cost that wasn't already in play.
I agree that Air Elemental is nice, as is Aven Windreader, but I didn't feel like there was enough support, and the double U didn't help if I splashed. Remove Soul is at best psuedo removal as you say. I'm not too high on it.
Thank you for the comment.
Looks more like a singleton 99, if you ask me. ;)
Im Glad u won!! And thanks for all your help & advice online last week!! :-)
I built this deck, but WITHOUT the dual lands(too pricey). I subbed in some Coastal Towers, Salt Marshes, & Rupture Spires. And honestly, Im having some MIXED results with this deck. On the other hand, my EXTENDED version of this deck has some Mesmeric Orbs, Dreamborn Muses, and Traumatizes. That one is far more successful!
But similar to land destruction, MANY people online don't TOLERATE milling. Hence alot of folks end up conceding quickly after the 1st couple spells.... LOL
Verdant force, a 7-drop in the decks main colors and a game ending bomb, is worse than a vanilla 6-drop 4/4?
I dont know what to say to that comment except WOW. Seriously...wow.
The reason the deck is good is the power level of the creatures is good and the mana is very consistent. And its backed up by instant speed removal and two bombs (angel and verdant force).
On the - side I'm not sure why you run 7 Mountains...seems like one too many...and Id probably have run the Hill Giant or Anaba Bodyguard (bodyguard because incinterate/giant growth/arcane teachings + first strike = good). I do however agree with not including both Red and Black. Its very tempting but being able to always cast guys followed by a touch of removal seems just fine.
Since you run only two colors then Id probably not run the Joiner Adept. Also the Grizzly Bear is ok but not fantastic. The Enchantress is probably better than both of those since your opponent could cast enchants + your three makes him potentially better than a 2/2 all the time bear.
All of these are minor though. I think you did fine with the build and grats on the T8.
-M
I would say that this statement is pretty debatable (I know it is from the interview and not the author, but it reflects upon the author since it was presented in such a way that it was not commented upon, which makes it seem that the author agrees even though he may not):
"Quick creature decks are much cheaper to build than control, so all the last minute players build them"
In my experience Aggro decks are probably quite a bit more expensive than control decks, assuming that we are talking about optimized lists for both. Control is able to run quite a bit more basic lands if it wants to than aggro can, which cuts a huge chunk of the cost from any deck. As far as creatures and spells I would say that the average aggro deck is higher there as well since it contains many rare creatures. Things like Tarmogoyf and Figure of destiny and also things like Loxodon Hierarch. Wheile control has far fewer threat cards that tend to be concentrated at rare. You might have Aeon Chronicler and Meloku, but those tend to cost less than the aggro threat counter parts. Additionally control decks tend to run a lot of spells, which tend to be removal, counters or card draw. These types of spells tend to be printed at common and uncommon. Control decks may often have some very big splashy effects on a few rares such as Cruel Ultimatum or Upheaval, but these cards tend not to make up the bulk of the deck and are also generally inexpensive to acquire. I understand that Aggro has many commons and uncommons too, but I would say that on average the price of a RGW aggro deck is far above that of a UB or UBW or UBR or some other multicolored control deck.
The reason people build aggro decks at the last minute is because it is much easier to build a last minute aggro deck than a last minute control deck, since the control deck requires you to have knowledge of the metagame whereas the aggro deck does not. The aggro deck only requires you to present questions for your opponent to figure out how to handle. This is also why control has made a poor showing so far. Control has not yet adapted itself to the types of aggro decks that exist.
I have been playing around with quite a few control decks to tackle this aggro metagame. One interesting thing that I questioned and it seems that mlinderbt did as well is "What are coutnerspells actually doing for me in the context of the format and are they necessary?" What I found is that the answer is "Not much" and "No" respectively. Counterspells are generally good because they can solve any type of threat, with the caveat that you have to have it and mana available when the threat is presented. Whereas removal can be drawn at any time the threat is present, with the caveat that it has to be the right kind of removal. The thing that I noticed is that almost everything worth countering could either be Burned, Terrored, or Similar. It seems that mlinderbt realized the same thing with his relative lack of counterspells and increased removal count. About the only threat that must be dealt with in some other way from aggro are geddon effects and there are ways other than countering them. One is to run artifact mana. One is to make sure they have no threats on the table when the geddon is cast. Another is to make sure that you have better threats out than they do. Other than geddons all of the other things in an aggro deck can be dealt with more efficiently with removal than counters. One of the main reasons is that there is more 2 mana removal than 2 mana hard counters. This often pushes counter strategies to use many 3cc answers to 1 and 2cc threats, thus putting it behind from the very start.
Based on this theory I have built 2 different control decks one UBW and one UBR that use 3 and 0 counters respectively and I have had far more success with either of these decks than with a more counterspell centric deck. Additionally I have had some short conversations with another avid player of the format and his 4 color deck and whether or not blue for counterspells was necessary and that perhaps the deck could be made stronger by cutting the color altogether. Whether or not he does I cannot say, but I may end up trying out a deck similar to his without the blue for myself.
Quite a long comment, and quite possibly the basis for it's own article altogether.
If you are playing either Ravages of War or Armageddon in your Singleton 100 deck, you would have to think long and hard about why you are not running both. If one of them is good enough for your deck, surely you would run them both to have a greater chance at drawing it.
Generally in this format it is better to think about how many of a certain effect that you want and not focus too much on what card fills that effect until tuning the deck.
EDIT: Well ArchGenius beat me to it, I guess I had the article open on my desktop for quite awhile.
Seems like a scale of 1 to 10 is a really lame judging scheme... I'd rather have seen analysis on the decks in terms of the criteria, because the scale of 1 to 10 basically means that the judges completely picked who won, and that makes voting rather pointless... I mean for any other deck to beat two perfect scores from the judges required it to have both runner up scores and win the vote... I dunno, it just seems extremely shady that the winner of the popular vote came in fourth... fourth? really? Also, even more suspicious is the incongruity in the voting scores listed: two decks rank 6th in the voting; Now, one of the duplicate 6th place in the voting is really the one that came in dead last... that means the deck ranked dead last in voting came in either 3rd or 5th, which really makes the whole voting aspect into a sham... If you guys wanted to pick your favorite deck out of the list, then by all means go ahead, just don't disguise the contest as vote-based; especially since there is no prize for runner-up or voter's favorite.
Really my complaint is the lack of explanation of why which deck got what ranking. Just "I like this one" isn't enough justification for me. Maybe I'll just have to write a column analyzing the 10 contest decks for Kaleidoscope play, since the contest really didn't show me anything I wanted to see...
One other thing that seems like an obvious inclusion for this article:
http://puremtgo.com/articles/all-star-kscope-final-ten-decks
The link to the article with the 10 finalist decks; seems like an obvious thing to do.
Sorry if I came off a bit harsh there...
One last suggestion: if you win one contest you should really be ineligible for the other, since handing all the prizes to the same person (especially with a judging scheme where votes are not terribly relevant) would be rather suspicious.
Interesting article. I started playing 100CS a couple weeks ago. I already had an EDH deck that I did not play at all since v3, so I made some changes into a 100CS deck. It's evolving slowly and has some problems against fast aggro draws. Anyway, the biggest problem I see so ar is that it's hard to ind opponents to playtest. Sometimes I have to wait half hour to get a match at the tournament practice room.
Well,
If you are playing one, you are probably going to want to play the other one to increase your chances of drawing it. This is 100 singleton afterall.
Ravages of War > Armageddon b/c it does the same thing at the same CMC, but for 3 tix less. People... pay attention to stuff like this and you can save some money.
I know you mean Underground Sea, but it's funny reading this sentence:
"Oh no! That's an Underground River from a Flooded Strand! Those are more expensive than all the cards in my deck combined! I'm dead!"
You are a funny guy!
Heres a link to my stats, I currently have 417 drafts since May 2008 and I have won more packs in Swiss in average.
Look at the line "won packs" from the link below,
I would play more swiss but they don´t fire often enough and sometimes I gotta go and dropping is not possible in those.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pcahsA9RlwScuTNnOm94YEw
I've put this together just to try out the K-scope format. It's not performed that well but I think we can blame the pilot and not the deck at this point. :o)
First change was using Salt Marsh insted of Frost Marsh as I had neither so bought the cheapest one.
I wasn't going to invest in Sygg just to try things out so he was replaced with 2 cents worth of Gravelgill Duo.
Highlight so far, and well worth the $6 I spent getting the cards, was playing a Countersquall on my opponents plainswalker when he was sitting on 1 life for the win.
Thanks for the decklist and the article, Good times.
neat deck, glad this one won. congrats, gonna try this out in the casual room
Great article, you might be single-handedly bringing me into the format.
As for the metagame comments, I don't think Necro was saying that all aggro decks are good against all control. However, in theory and probably in practice, the ability to put down 2-3 beaters with 2+ power before control can, well, control the board is a real problem. However the metagame shakes out, it seems that you have to prepare for both a mirror match (control) as well as the other two (aggro, combo).
I'm off to build a 100cs Hypergenesis deck now.
The enclopedia of classic is in Eternal wisdom. Good job mate, as usual, your is an awesome source of information. Did you observe that the Rock deck isnt so much ran in the current meta ? this is strange, because qasali pridemage, putrid imp and pulse are good stuff for it anyway ... and gift rock could be around too ;)
interesting article on the that format. About non-basic land disruption, i think Ruination should be mentioned because it is the only real armaggedon for non-basic lands ... Maybe it is not used a lot in the current meta (i dont really know the format) but if this strategy is the core, for sure ruination will find a place into.
Again try the deck.. there is enough removal+draw in the deck to last until I get enough lands.. keep in mind mikokoro is draw as well.
i really like the deck, but what's with only 22 lands? this honestly seems really low given said covenant's mana cost as well as lich lord activations, which are not cheap. seems like you really want to be making your land drops with this deck. otherwise, great job!
When I want it*.. Also thx for the congratz.. and thx for the contest guys.
Well, im not very lucky.. I never get covenant, when want it.. even with 4.. or I end up with 4 in hand which isnt so bad cause a lot of ppl play discard.. and im gonna draw into sumthing =P.. why dont you play the deck see for yourself =D