Ok, so you don't want boggart loggers used against you, but you hate drafted when a bomb was in the pack. Incremental growth is just a better card. Also, I don't think wolf-skull shaman was a bad pick, but I think the raw power of the battle-axe is better. You have lots of warriors, and early drops to compensate. Other than that good job.
The cards are expensive, but there are people in the clan more than willing to let you borrow cards if you give the proper collateral. Don't break the bank building a deck because I'm sure you can find someone to borrow from.
You did a good job steering the course away from blue/white. I think your 3rd pick Elvish Harbringer saved you. I think most people would have picked double Douser and then instantly would have had a clunky draft pack two and three.
I think that once you noticed you were going to settle into green you should have reoptimised your draft strategy. The best colours for green are either G/R or G/B, and your deck could have been a little bit better if you noticed that red was flowing like crazy. Pick 11 and 12 Mudbottom Torchrunners pack 1? Pick 13 Inner Flame Igniter? That's a huge signal that you might have wanted to take advantage of.
But in the end, pack three did give the Violet Pails, so maybe it was better in the end, but had you opted for red, I would have tried to draft an aggro deck, picking the extra Incremenetal Growths and the Obsidian Battle-Axe.
It could very well be that I'm just ignorant, but this is the first time I've seen this kind of "top-down," post-mortem approach to draft analysis. It's all fine and nice to talk about signaling from a single player's perspective; seeing the whole table is something else entirely.
Perhaps this method could be applied to pro tour drafts?
It seems like in order to be competetive in standard, the costs of mono black tier 1 decks far outweigh the tutor. I realize you have to break a few eggs to make the omlette but still....
just a thought on the Rager idea. I had considered them myself at one time, but the deck is really structured around the Gatekeepers and to make the removal work properly, you really don't want to have other creatures on the board with them. The majority of times, draw is not a problem. you merely have to find a harvest and drifter and go to town. That is also why I have used Stinkweed Imp in the deck. they arent just defensive, but they also are to dig for a harvest to get the recursion going. As I mentioned, I even had pulled the Aboms for Mournwhelks because the only creatures I ended up wanting on the board for any appreciabe amount of time were the Shades in the endgame or in a defensive posture.
something like this would only be accomplishable from hamtastic... (I pretty much trust whatever Ham has to say.. so i too was fooled).. come to think of it.. next year i may not even log onto a computer on april's fools because of the sillyness.
The deck must be mono black: all spells within it except artifacts and lands must be the color black.
Does this mean I can run Prismatic Lens or even River of Tears and Academy Ruins using the blue to activate it? Not actually breaking the rules but not exactly in the spirit of the competition either.
Vampiric Tutour?! That is one kickass prize, Djdark is the raredrafting man with a plan, batman. (If I rhymed one more time, a kitten would have died).
I am going to do everything in my power to enter this Mono Block Challenge, even though it obviously should have been a mono GREEN challenge. Obviously.
its times like this that i wish i werent a poor mtgo player....and i dont mean poor as in bad i mean poor as in MC Hammer after he 15 minutes of fame blowing through $30 million dollars i cant afford jack would you like fries with that poor.... le sigh
ah.. I do remember 2 people telling me it was infinite but I didn't see it anyway. I never managed to get the luxury of an explanation which I assumed might have been a mistake.
guess there's another thing about my deck I don't know. lol. It's just a mirror entity that costs R! nice find. ack.. to think I played it without knowing I could do that..
For the techs out there I think we are interested in what design is being used for the BE.
I know that the detailed info cannot be released to protect the security of the design and the servers. But can we find out ie is it a load balanced cluster ? What I want to know is whatever solution they put in is easily scalable so that if they do start getting new performance issues they can just chuck hardware at it until they can run full load performance tuning.
I saw that some stats that they said 100% to 900% improve over 2.5 on some features this was not really elaborated exactly what was 100% and 900% better. Can you get performance data on what we should be seeing ?
It's hard to argue against the fact that it does turn on your opponent's removal, which everyone and their sister is packing now because of the warped "let's run lots of creatures" format that this is turning into. I think I would have a hard time finding spells to replace them though, and the fact is that it does make you draw gas, gas, and more gas if it does stick.
Well, there is a marked lack of control-centric decks around nowadays. It is partly because of the anti-wrath manlands like mutavault which fit everywhere, and partly because another thing you'll notice with most of these decks is that they all come out pretty fast and then keep laying threats down.
Also, don't discount the non-actual-wrath wraths which exist in many of these decks. A resolved sulfurous blast pretty much spells wrath unless you have a bunch of fatties on the board, and Elves regularly dies to as little as Pyroclasm.
...but what I see here are a bunch of creature decks, and a paltry 3 Wraths. I figured that would be the case with Giant Indestructable Trees and the Irritating Anti-Wrath Kithkin, but I see neither. I do see lots of man-lands, though. Is that the problem?
do most people even play nameless inversion in their faeries deck these days anyway? Seems like most people I've seen online opt to play rune snag instead of it.
Thoughts about a Crusher deck without the namesake? Over at tcgplayer, Kuan-Kuan made a compelling argument that it just turns on all your opponent's removal and gets chumped by anything. But I do like the inclusion of Browbeat. I've had Extirpate used on that more than any other card in my deck.
You wrote: "Greater Gargadon, despite only sufficient for a finite number of times..."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you stack it correctly, the loop is infinite. Activate Garg, stack Rev's ability, let Rev's ability resolve, repeat. As long as you never let any of the "remove a time counter" resolve and you sac the extra guy (Riftwatcher, Rider, etc.) before you repeat the cycle, you get as many as you please.
Ok, so you don't want boggart loggers used against you, but you hate drafted when a bomb was in the pack. Incremental growth is just a better card. Also, I don't think wolf-skull shaman was a bad pick, but I think the raw power of the battle-axe is better. You have lots of warriors, and early drops to compensate. Other than that good job.
The cards are expensive, but there are people in the clan more than willing to let you borrow cards if you give the proper collateral. Don't break the bank building a deck because I'm sure you can find someone to borrow from.
It could very well be that I'm just ignorant, but this is the first time I've seen this kind of "top-down," post-mortem approach to draft analysis. It's all fine and nice to talk about signaling from a single player's perspective; seeing the whole table is something else entirely.
Perhaps this method could be applied to pro tour drafts?
It seems like in order to be competetive in standard, the costs of mono black tier 1 decks far outweigh the tutor. I realize you have to break a few eggs to make the omlette but still....
Tyler:
just a thought on the Rager idea. I had considered them myself at one time, but the deck is really structured around the Gatekeepers and to make the removal work properly, you really don't want to have other creatures on the board with them. The majority of times, draw is not a problem. you merely have to find a harvest and drifter and go to town. That is also why I have used Stinkweed Imp in the deck. they arent just defensive, but they also are to dig for a harvest to get the recursion going. As I mentioned, I even had pulled the Aboms for Mournwhelks because the only creatures I ended up wanting on the board for any appreciabe amount of time were the Shades in the endgame or in a defensive posture.
Jaknife/Dave
something like this would only be accomplishable from hamtastic... (I pretty much trust whatever Ham has to say.. so i too was fooled).. come to think of it.. next year i may not even log onto a computer on april's fools because of the sillyness.
To Rasparthe:
Yes, you could do it. Like you said it wouldn't be in the "spirit of the competition", but it is a loophole I forgot to close.
Question about the rules:
The deck must be mono black: all spells within it except artifacts and lands must be the color black.
Does this mean I can run Prismatic Lens or even River of Tears and Academy Ruins using the blue to activate it? Not actually breaking the rules but not exactly in the spirit of the competition either.
AWESOME!
Vampiric Tutour?! That is one kickass prize, Djdark is the raredrafting man with a plan, batman. (If I rhymed one more time, a kitten would have died).
I am going to do everything in my power to enter this Mono Block Challenge, even though it obviously should have been a mono GREEN challenge. Obviously.
as a side note i probably am bad at magic too, but thats not the issue here...
its times like this that i wish i werent a poor mtgo player....and i dont mean poor as in bad i mean poor as in MC Hammer after he 15 minutes of fame blowing through $30 million dollars i cant afford jack would you like fries with that poor.... le sigh
What's Platinum Control? I assume it's a UG Control build using Platinum Angel and Pact of Negation, but I've never seen it mentioned before...
ah.. I do remember 2 people telling me it was infinite but I didn't see it anyway. I never managed to get the luxury of an explanation which I assumed might have been a mistake.
guess there's another thing about my deck I don't know. lol. It's just a mirror entity that costs R! nice find. ack.. to think I played it without knowing I could do that..
Hi Hammy, Another great article.
For the techs out there I think we are interested in what design is being used for the BE.
I know that the detailed info cannot be released to protect the security of the design and the servers. But can we find out ie is it a load balanced cluster ? What I want to know is whatever solution they put in is easily scalable so that if they do start getting new performance issues they can just chuck hardware at it until they can run full load performance tuning.
I saw that some stats that they said 100% to 900% improve over 2.5 on some features this was not really elaborated exactly what was 100% and 900% better. Can you get performance data on what we should be seeing ?
Regards
Jetmox
It's hard to argue against the fact that it does turn on your opponent's removal, which everyone and their sister is packing now because of the warped "let's run lots of creatures" format that this is turning into. I think I would have a hard time finding spells to replace them though, and the fact is that it does make you draw gas, gas, and more gas if it does stick.
Well, there is a marked lack of control-centric decks around nowadays. It is partly because of the anti-wrath manlands like mutavault which fit everywhere, and partly because another thing you'll notice with most of these decks is that they all come out pretty fast and then keep laying threats down.
Also, don't discount the non-actual-wrath wraths which exist in many of these decks. A resolved sulfurous blast pretty much spells wrath unless you have a bunch of fatties on the board, and Elves regularly dies to as little as Pyroclasm.
...but what I see here are a bunch of creature decks, and a paltry 3 Wraths. I figured that would be the case with Giant Indestructable Trees and the Irritating Anti-Wrath Kithkin, but I see neither. I do see lots of man-lands, though. Is that the problem?
A lot of them are moving into terror as well.
I actually only read this today (2nd of april), so I wasn't aware this was an article from yesterday until I was over half finished.
If you could see my face after the first few paragraphs, you could have laid down a rhino with it...
Best april fools joke played on me this year, you actually got me for the most part :). Well done!
do most people even play nameless inversion in their faeries deck these days anyway? Seems like most people I've seen online opt to play rune snag instead of it.
We are talking casual here, you see them all, from Avian Changeling to Taurean Mauler.
In fact, I snatched maulers and changeling heroes while playing this in casual. =)
Thoughts about a Crusher deck without the namesake? Over at tcgplayer, Kuan-Kuan made a compelling argument that it just turns on all your opponent's removal and gets chumped by anything. But I do like the inclusion of Browbeat. I've had Extirpate used on that more than any other card in my deck.
The only changelings in popular decks is Mutavault and Chameleon Colossus. Not that many colossues around realy.
Looks fun but I have a question.
You wrote: "Greater Gargadon, despite only sufficient for a finite number of times..."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you stack it correctly, the loop is infinite. Activate Garg, stack Rev's ability, let Rev's ability resolve, repeat. As long as you never let any of the "remove a time counter" resolve and you sac the extra guy (Riftwatcher, Rider, etc.) before you repeat the cycle, you get as many as you please.
Maybe your deck is better than even you thought.