I will present my opinion on all the cards in order they were presented.
Prismatic Soul : This card cries out for Auras, but to have any COP in play give your opponent a 4/5 chance of neutralizing all your creautres makes this unplayable.
Azure Devourer : A non-blue counterspell for 7 mana?? The acitvation cost is too costly. It would be more playable if it were 2 generic mana, tap, and remove 2 counters. Remove the per turn limit.
Leader of the Meek : This card comes broken with the infinite loop on itself...
The Warden : I like this card, being a fan of Elementals (but I think this deserves to be an Elemental Shaman). It would combine well with Bloom Tender, and Smoke Braider, as well as Reflecting Pool.
Will of the ... : Being a force of wills, the effect should encompass whichever mana was used the most...
Grizx, The Inquisitor : I find this card too powerfull for the cost. A well-timed Tormod's Crypt making this creature too powerfull, with haste vigilence, and first-strike to boot... In keeping with it being an inquisitor, it should only target creatures, and remove only one from an opponents library.
Ravaging Charm : I would just change the text to Choose up to 3...
Sewing Dreams : I feel that this card is too powerful for its cost, by being able return the card to your hand. Also, nit picking, the card should have shuffle library.
Pandora's Minion : I can't see white being associated with any card named Assasin.
I played a lot of Alara draft this weekend and I think that:
1- The format is somewhat slow. Which is something that should be and could be taken advantage of. A fast Bant deck with decent 1-3 cost exalted creatures backed up by a few Oblivion Rings and/or Resounding Silences (even a few Excommunicates would do) can easily make it to the final.
2- Bant's exalted white and blue creatures work very well in an Esper deck. In fact, I won one draft with such a deck; attacking with a 5/5 lifelink+flying Windwright Mage is not a joke, believe me.
3- Jund was so far my favorite shard. I had another deck with some decent token generators (such as Sprouting Thrinax, Jund Battlemage and Goblin Assault), a few devour creatures but most important of all, the deck had also Broodmate Dragon plus Violent Ultimatum. So with all the burn spells of red and removal of black and fatties of green, Jund was by far my favorite shard.
4- I didn't like Grixis. Tried it once, had also some decent cards but didn't do well at all. Grixis seemed as the worst shard among all shards.
5- Cards like Algae Gharial, Rockslide Elemental and Scavenger Drake are very dangerous. If you cannot deal with them immediately, they become a VERY big threat in no time; especially in a deck that generates a lot of tokens and then devoures them.
All in all, I can easily say that I enjoyed Alara drafts very much.
Templating I think he means OTHER creatures when he comes into play. He comes into play as a 2/2
No I don't mean OTHER creatures, I mean exactly ALL creatures. And yes, he comes into play as a 2/2 (kind of Nekrataal; he is 2/1 for 4 mana with first strike, and this one doesn't have first strike but is 2/2).
So unless you can find a way to remove his -1/-1 counters, he stays as 2/2 and if you happen to play another one, the first one gets killed and that's the reason he isn't legendary (so you can play another one).
Just reading about the CBS bot thing was amazing. Whenever there is money involved, there are always those who think they have a right to it and take it from you. Difficult to know who is at fault though, ethics & the internet are never on friendly terms unfortunately.
Hey Hammy! Great job on the state of the program articles each week!
Being a big numbers guy, I usually go right to the card prices section and see what's hot and what's not. I've noticed for a few weeks that some of your specific card listings aren't sorted by anything except maybe a personal bias toward how you list the cards. You seem to have the "moving up" cards listed by greatest percentage change. Maybe you could do that for your "moving down" list?
It's a GREAT set of articles as it is. No major complaint. Just a bit of a pet peeve of wanting better order in things. Keep up the great work!
I wrote this article under the assumption that only Cranial Plating would be banned, seeing as how every indication from Mike Gills is that they will follow the hard work done by the PDC Community. This isn't gong to be a one shot article, I plan on expanding upon it as more information comes out way.
As far as the top 4/8 lists, when I do some articles on each specific decks, I will look at some of the top lists and recommend changes.
A lot of those things don't exist yet. If you go to PDCmagic.com you can review top4/8 decks of the past in PREs, but a weekend event hasn't occured yet. Also, Cranial Plating will 99% likely be banned, with no other restrictions. That's my guess at least.
Any idea of the format's restrictions? There's no point in testing specific archetypes until a clear delination as to what is allowed in the format is given to those of us who wish to participate.
A top8 breakdown somewhere? The format looks admittedly fun and it would be something I would be interested in learning a bit more about. Being a die-hard classic player I would obviously lean in the direction (classic) but some established decklists would be nice.
I don't know if its just me or what, but isn't giant growth really good? pick 4 I'd have gone for the growth I think not the rootwala,
pick 5 I guess im a bit of a timmy for these guys(actually its probably more the spike in me) but llanowar elves seems vastly superior, especially with green likely to give you plenty of fat, and optimizing the deck would then probably be coming from getting good removal and mana excel and tricks,
pick 6 I'd probably be thinking black might have to end up being a spash since it's been pretty weak, and go with the vedelken mastermind who can just be an insane creature on the board
pick 8 sift seems then a natural follow up
pick 12 im thinking commune could be really good, especially if you pick up a nice bomb creature
pack 2 pick 3 a second sift then would have been awesome,
pick 4 windreader
pick 5 remove soul for your main
pick 7 cloud elemental maybe or the baloth could be good with enough excel and 10th draft being a bit slow
pick 8 rootwater cammando seems pretty solid
pick 11 if it had been me the sift wouldnt be there anymore (wow it tabled insane, just shows how open blue was in your draft) without sift Id go with naturalize for the sideboard or the beetle to trade early since the deck would be shaping up as fairly controllish with card advantage and lategame fatties
pack 3 Im going to stop saying what i would do if I were doing what i would have wanted to, and go of where you are that point anyway
pick 5 dryad I think, as far as grizzly bears not being good in the format, you have 2 giant growths and 2 aggressive urges, early bodies take far more advantage of cheap tricks than late game fatties that can dominate on their own, besides you dont want to play against the dryad either
pick 6 i think i like afflict better than rootwala, maybe your creature count is low though, not sure
pick 7 llanawar elves, (can you play too many?)
pick 8 naturalize it's better to give youself options against dumb enchantments like seismic assualt and artifacts like loxodon warhammer than to hurt one blue player's deck
pick 11 lure, even if you leave it in the sideboard, against the right deck it can be devestating
I always really like 3 for a 2/3 (llanowar sentinel) in drafts so maybe drop an aggresive urge to fit him in, too bad you didnt pick up a few bears your deck certianly would have loved a few in that slot I think,
manaflood certianly sucks, though with your late drops Im not sure you played too many maybe 17 instead of 18 would have been good, though enormous baloth and blaze don't mind alot of mana, and you want to hit your fatties consistently on the soonest possible turn, an 1800+ player is always going to be iffy though, I sigh every time I see one join a game with me (which is way too often) job in general the deck seems to have worked out fairly well.
The River Selkies are in there as redundancy for the Plumeveils - the deck would definitely run 8 Plumeveils if it could. Substituting Memory Erosion isn't redundancy, it's a different strategy.
I'm no drafting expert, but there are a few picks I would definitely have done differently.
P3P3: I would definitely take Dryad over Spider. A good number of limited decks play forests.
P3P5: I might take Dryad again. Mold is nice, but creatures with evasion win games. I might have taken Naturalize over sift earlier for the random non-creature answer in my sideboard.
P3P7: If I could change only one of your picks, it would be this one. You already have 2 Urges and 4 good 3-drop creatures. Having a second Llanowar Elf almost guarantees a turn 2 3-drop in most games. As it was, you got pretty lucky drawing your 1-of when you needed it, but I think this small change would have made your deck much better.
I wish there was an ME2 8-4 queue. Keep up the good work. I enjoy reading your articles. Espeically the 10E or ME2 ones where I know the cards a little better.
I think the Memory Erosion is good against slow decks, and it's good on turn 3 in any game where you didn't draw your Plumeveil but did draw an Erosion (Plumeveil's only a 4-of, you're not going to draw it EVERY game!)
Yeah, all of the goldfished openings are obviously under pretty ideal circumstances - in the real worlds things will not usually go so smoothly. Even slowed down by a turn though, those openings are still pretty brutal.
I would say that the simplest way to end up with a plains t2 from a knight would be if they played a Rampant Grow variant (ecspecially likely in a EDH game).
I think that the Selkie/Memory Erosion call depends a lot on your metagame. If you're up against a lot of aggro, then the 2/2 cantrip helps out a ton to slow down the early aggro rush.
In a draft deck, I had 3 Akrasan Squires, 2 Sigiled Paladins, and the Battlegrace Angel. I had the exalted enchantment too, can't recall the name, doesn't matter for this conversation. So I had an opening in my very first game where I got 2 of the Squires and 2 of the Paladins down with the Angel following it all. Game was over quick. Unfortunately, that ended up being the only game I won the whole match, as I never saw another exalted card the whole match.
I will present my opinion on all the cards in order they were presented.
Prismatic Soul : This card cries out for Auras, but to have any COP in play give your opponent a 4/5 chance of neutralizing all your creautres makes this unplayable.
Azure Devourer : A non-blue counterspell for 7 mana?? The acitvation cost is too costly. It would be more playable if it were 2 generic mana, tap, and remove 2 counters. Remove the per turn limit.
Leader of the Meek : This card comes broken with the infinite loop on itself...
The Warden : I like this card, being a fan of Elementals (but I think this deserves to be an Elemental Shaman). It would combine well with Bloom Tender, and Smoke Braider, as well as Reflecting Pool.
Will of the ... : Being a force of wills, the effect should encompass whichever mana was used the most...
Grizx, The Inquisitor : I find this card too powerfull for the cost. A well-timed Tormod's Crypt making this creature too powerfull, with haste vigilence, and first-strike to boot... In keeping with it being an inquisitor, it should only target creatures, and remove only one from an opponents library.
Ravaging Charm : I would just change the text to Choose up to 3...
Sewing Dreams : I feel that this card is too powerful for its cost, by being able return the card to your hand. Also, nit picking, the card should have shuffle library.
Pandora's Minion : I can't see white being associated with any card named Assasin.
I played a lot of Alara draft this weekend and I think that:
1- The format is somewhat slow. Which is something that should be and could be taken advantage of. A fast Bant deck with decent 1-3 cost exalted creatures backed up by a few Oblivion Rings and/or Resounding Silences (even a few Excommunicates would do) can easily make it to the final.
2- Bant's exalted white and blue creatures work very well in an Esper deck. In fact, I won one draft with such a deck; attacking with a 5/5 lifelink+flying Windwright Mage is not a joke, believe me.
3- Jund was so far my favorite shard. I had another deck with some decent token generators (such as Sprouting Thrinax, Jund Battlemage and Goblin Assault), a few devour creatures but most important of all, the deck had also Broodmate Dragon plus Violent Ultimatum.
So with all the burn spells of red and removal of black and fatties of green, Jund was by far my favorite shard.
4- I didn't like Grixis. Tried it once, had also some decent cards but didn't do well at all. Grixis seemed as the worst shard among all shards.
5- Cards like Algae Gharial, Rockslide Elemental and Scavenger Drake are very dangerous. If you cannot deal with them immediately, they become a VERY big threat in no time; especially in a deck that generates a lot of tokens and then devoures them.
All in all, I can easily say that I enjoyed Alara drafts very much.
Thanks
LE
Regarding Pandora's Minion:
Culex wrote:
Templating
I think he means OTHER creatures when he comes into play. He comes into play as a 2/2
No I don't mean OTHER creatures, I mean exactly ALL creatures. And yes, he comes into play as a 2/2 (kind of Nekrataal; he is 2/1 for 4 mana with first strike, and this one doesn't have first strike but is 2/2).
So unless you can find a way to remove his -1/-1 counters, he stays as 2/2 and if you happen to play another one, the first one gets killed and that's the reason he isn't legendary (so you can play another one).
Just wanted to clarify.
So what's up with the Tempest pauper precon? I hadn't heard about that.
From where I'm sitting, Cloak is a bigger piece of the meta that Blink, but Saturday is another day :) .
-lathspel
Glimpse of Nature and Regal Force are in an elfball deck that's running around extended right now.
Just reading about the CBS bot thing was amazing. Whenever there is money involved, there are always those who think they have a right to it and take it from you. Difficult to know who is at fault though, ethics & the internet are never on friendly terms unfortunately.
Hey Hammy! Great job on the state of the program articles each week!
Being a big numbers guy, I usually go right to the card prices section and see what's hot and what's not. I've noticed for a few weeks that some of your specific card listings aren't sorted by anything except maybe a personal bias toward how you list the cards. You seem to have the "moving up" cards listed by greatest percentage change. Maybe you could do that for your "moving down" list?
It's a GREAT set of articles as it is. No major complaint. Just a bit of a pet peeve of wanting better order in things. Keep up the great work!
I wrote this article under the assumption that only Cranial Plating would be banned, seeing as how every indication from Mike Gills is that they will follow the hard work done by the PDC Community. This isn't gong to be a one shot article, I plan on expanding upon it as more information comes out way.
As far as the top 4/8 lists, when I do some articles on each specific decks, I will look at some of the top lists and recommend changes.
-Alex
A lot of those things don't exist yet. If you go to PDCmagic.com you can review top4/8 decks of the past in PREs, but a weekend event hasn't occured yet. Also, Cranial Plating will 99% likely be banned, with no other restrictions. That's my guess at least.
Any idea of the format's restrictions? There's no point in testing specific archetypes until a clear delination as to what is allowed in the format is given to those of us who wish to participate.
Deck submission:
// Lands
13 [TE] Forest
9 [TE] Mountain
// Creatures
1 [TE] Skyshroud Elf
4 [TE] Rootwalla
3 [TE] Trained Armodon
2 [TE] Heart Sliver
3 [TE] Spike Drone
1 [TE] Skyshroud Troll
1 [TE] Fireslinger
1 [TE] Rootbreaker Wurm
4 [TE] Muscle Sliver
2 [TE] Mogg Fanatic
4 [TE] Metallic Sliver
1 [TE] Flowstone Giant
// Spells
1 [TE] Aftershock
1 [TE] Lightning Blast
1 [TE] Lotus Petal
1 [TE] Rolling Thunder
2 [TE] Elvish Fury
2 [TE] Rampant Growth
3 [TE] Kindle
My MtGO screen name: ZeroFusion
A top8 breakdown somewhere? The format looks admittedly fun and it would be something I would be interested in learning a bit more about. Being a die-hard classic player I would obviously lean in the direction (classic) but some established decklists would be nice.
I enjoyed the article and thanks for any help.
CH
I don't know if its just me or what, but isn't giant growth really good? pick 4 I'd have gone for the growth I think not the rootwala,
pick 5 I guess im a bit of a timmy for these guys(actually its probably more the spike in me) but llanowar elves seems vastly superior, especially with green likely to give you plenty of fat, and optimizing the deck would then probably be coming from getting good removal and mana excel and tricks,
pick 6 I'd probably be thinking black might have to end up being a spash since it's been pretty weak, and go with the vedelken mastermind who can just be an insane creature on the board
pick 8 sift seems then a natural follow up
pick 12 im thinking commune could be really good, especially if you pick up a nice bomb creature
pack 2 pick 3 a second sift then would have been awesome,
pick 4 windreader
pick 5 remove soul for your main
pick 7 cloud elemental maybe or the baloth could be good with enough excel and 10th draft being a bit slow
pick 8 rootwater cammando seems pretty solid
pick 11 if it had been me the sift wouldnt be there anymore (wow it tabled insane, just shows how open blue was in your draft) without sift Id go with naturalize for the sideboard or the beetle to trade early since the deck would be shaping up as fairly controllish with card advantage and lategame fatties
pack 3 Im going to stop saying what i would do if I were doing what i would have wanted to, and go of where you are that point anyway
pick 5 dryad I think, as far as grizzly bears not being good in the format, you have 2 giant growths and 2 aggressive urges, early bodies take far more advantage of cheap tricks than late game fatties that can dominate on their own, besides you dont want to play against the dryad either
pick 6 i think i like afflict better than rootwala, maybe your creature count is low though, not sure
pick 7 llanawar elves, (can you play too many?)
pick 8 naturalize it's better to give youself options against dumb enchantments like seismic assualt and artifacts like loxodon warhammer than to hurt one blue player's deck
pick 11 lure, even if you leave it in the sideboard, against the right deck it can be devestating
I always really like 3 for a 2/3 (llanowar sentinel) in drafts so maybe drop an aggresive urge to fit him in, too bad you didnt pick up a few bears your deck certianly would have loved a few in that slot I think,
manaflood certianly sucks, though with your late drops Im not sure you played too many maybe 17 instead of 18 would have been good, though enormous baloth and blaze don't mind alot of mana, and you want to hit your fatties consistently on the soonest possible turn, an 1800+ player is always going to be iffy though, I sigh every time I see one join a game with me (which is way too often) job in general the deck seems to have worked out fairly well.
The River Selkies are in there as redundancy for the Plumeveils - the deck would definitely run 8 Plumeveils if it could. Substituting Memory Erosion isn't redundancy, it's a different strategy.
Congrats. Very nice draft.
I'm no drafting expert, but there are a few picks I would definitely have done differently.
P3P3: I would definitely take Dryad over Spider. A good number of limited decks play forests.
P3P5: I might take Dryad again. Mold is nice, but creatures with evasion win games. I might have taken Naturalize over sift earlier for the random non-creature answer in my sideboard.
P3P7: If I could change only one of your picks, it would be this one. You already have 2 Urges and 4 good 3-drop creatures. Having a second Llanowar Elf almost guarantees a turn 2 3-drop in most games. As it was, you got pretty lucky drawing your 1-of when you needed it, but I think this small change would have made your deck much better.
I wish there was an ME2 8-4 queue.
Keep up the good work. I enjoy reading your articles. Espeically the 10E or ME2 ones where I know the cards a little better.
I think the Memory Erosion is good against slow decks, and it's good on turn 3 in any game where you didn't draw your Plumeveil but did draw an Erosion (Plumeveil's only a 4-of, you're not going to draw it EVERY game!)
Go Naoki! That guy seems to be everywhere translating everything :D
Yeah, all of the goldfished openings are obviously under pretty ideal circumstances - in the real worlds things will not usually go so smoothly. Even slowed down by a turn though, those openings are still pretty brutal.
I would say that the simplest way to end up with a plains t2 from a knight would be if they played a Rampant Grow variant (ecspecially likely in a EDH game).
Congrats on your win Toshinori. Thanks also for letting Josh interview you and especially for sharing your decklist. Good luck.
How often are you going to be getting to fetch a Plains on a turn 2 Knight? Unless a Mox is involved, I'd say not very.
I think that the Selkie/Memory Erosion call depends a lot on your metagame. If you're up against a lot of aggro, then the 2/2 cantrip helps out a ton to slow down the early aggro rush.
Take out two Selkies and put in Erosions, or more. I'd rather play them than the cantrip.
This is especially true if they might run Guttural Response, etc..
In a draft deck, I had 3 Akrasan Squires, 2 Sigiled Paladins, and the Battlegrace Angel. I had the exalted enchantment too, can't recall the name, doesn't matter for this conversation. So I had an opening in my very first game where I got 2 of the Squires and 2 of the Paladins down with the Angel following it all. Game was over quick. Unfortunately, that ended up being the only game I won the whole match, as I never saw another exalted card the whole match.