This sucks. It sucked when they did it before and it sucks now. I hate trying to figure out ahead of time which guild is gonna be best, or having the ultimate feel bad of opening 4 rares in a different guild, but not having the commons or uncommons to make a deck in that color cause you're down a pack.
Oh, now I get it. If your measure of consistency is how consistently you will end up in your chosen colors, then sure, a seeded pack will increase consistency. That is correct.
But those apples do not compare well to my oranges. I am talking about how consistent the card pool quality will be between players. Completely different thing, we seem to have been talking past each other.
What's more important though? That players get to force their preferred colors, or that players get to play on a playing field as even as possible, so that deck building proficiency and play skill pays off, instead of letting more players have an uphill or downhill battle for the entire event based on the booster opening lottery?
I know for sure what I prefer.
And as I've already noted, Sealed is an inherently unfair format. You don't have to be skillful to open 2x Jace, Memory Adept and steamroll every opponent. That's simply how the format works.
And especially in terms of the Prerelease, it is far more important to WotC that players have a good time playing their preferred guild. Prerelease is not supposed to an actual competitive tournament.
EDIT: Derp hit "Reply" instead of "Preview" so this post is going to keep changing for awhile.
People always say this, and yet good players, especially good players who practice sealed, regularly do much better than worse players.
I'm basically going for Azorious or Orzhov if they are available, so I can get more cards for my Aminatou deck. Otherwise Izzet as usual and hope for the best.
I generally just auto-drop after one round unless my sealed pool is hyper-busted, preferring to 2HG with a friend of mine.
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The "Crazy One", playing casual magic and occasionally dipping his toes into regular play since 1994.
Currently focusing on Pre-Modern (Mono-Black Discard Control) and Modern (Azorious Control, Temur Rhinos).
Find me at the Wizard's Tower in Ottawa every second Saturday afternoons.
I'm basically going for Azorious or Orzhov if they are available, so I can get more cards for my Aminatou deck. Otherwise Izzet as usual and hope for the best.
I generally just auto-drop after one round unless my sealed pool is hyper-busted, preferring to 2HG with a friend of mine.
Neither of those guilds are in this set. All you can do for Esper is go dimir.
People always say this, and yet good players, especially good players who practice sealed, regularly do much better than worse players.
No kidding? Good players win more than bad players? You don't say! You've certainly opened my eyes.
Of course good players can find ways to win with sub par pools. That's what good players do. They find ways to win when the odds are stacked against them. That doesn't change the fact that sometimes your pool is either extremely good or extremely bad and it puts you at a significant advantage/disadvantage that is outside of your control.
well now we are just talking about a general limitation of well...limited. the flip side of that is better players gain a significant edge in deck building.
seeded boosters only makes sense. identifying with and supporting your favorite guilds is a major selling point of the plane, and having some method in place to better ensure people can build decks in those colors is a part of that.
also, although it doesnt always work out, the guilds should be relatively balanced. if they arent its a fault in the design of the set, and not so much a fault in pre-release.
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Modern: UWGSnow-Bant Control BURGrixis Death's Shadow GWBCoCo Elves WCDeath and Taxes (sold)
i wish more of it was seeded than just one pack. i remember the last time we were on ravnica i really wanted to play golgari, picked the golgari kit... and.. ended up having to play rakdos, the simic kit and i had to go gruul. its not fun, its frustrating.
i wish more of it was seeded than just one pack. i remember the last time we were on ravnica i really wanted to play golgari, picked the golgari kit... and.. ended up having to play rakdos.
Funny I wound up doing the reverse. Picked the Rakdos kit, wound up playing Golgari. Abrupt Decay will do that.
People always say this, and yet good players, especially good players who practice sealed, regularly do much better than worse players.
No kidding? Good players win more than bad players? You don't say! You've certainly opened my eyes.
Of course good players can find ways to win with sub par pools. That's what good players do. They find ways to win when the odds are stacked against them. That doesn't change the fact that sometimes your pool is either extremely good or extremely bad and it puts you at a significant advantage/disadvantage that is outside of your control.
If it was completely based on what you opened, everyone would have the same win %. They don't, so it's clearly not. Yeah, sometimes you have a 4 pool and have to go against a 10. And sometimes in constructed you draw 5 land hands all day. Sometimes the person next to you in a draft pod sends bad signals, or opens a bomb rare and moves into your color in pack 3 and you get a ***** deck. Magic has variance. If you don't like variance I'm kind of confused why you would play magic at all. It's fine to say you don't like sealed. There's nothing wrong with that. But saying it's a fundamentally unfair format suggests to me you just aren't very good at reading sealed pools.
If it was completely based on what you opened, everyone would have the same win %. They don't, so it's clearly not. Yeah, sometimes you have a 4 pool and have to go against a 10. And sometimes in constructed you draw 5 land hands all day. Sometimes the person next to you in a draft pod sends bad signals, or opens a bomb rare and moves into your color in pack 3 and you get a ***** deck. Magic has variance. If you don't like variance I'm kind of confused why you would play magic at all. It's fine to say you don't like sealed. There's nothing wrong with that. But saying it's a fundamentally unfair format suggests to me you just aren't very good at reading sealed pools.
What makes you think I don't like Sealed? I've been to every Prerelease since I returned from my break (M12). I wouldn't say I'm great at Sealed, but I don't believe I've ever done worse than 2-2 in any Prerelease, and more often than not end up 3-1 or 3-0-split, with an occasional 4-0. This isn't to toot my own horn, I'm merely trying to explain my background in regards to Sealed so that when I say it is an inherently unfair format, you understand I'm not just salty because my last pool was garbage or whatever.
If you'll notice in the post you quoted, I was directly responding to someone else:
What's more important though? That players get to force their preferred colors, or that players get to play on a playing field as even as possible, so that deck building proficiency and play skill pays off, instead of letting more players have an uphill or downhill battle for the entire event based on the booster opening lottery?
This person said they would prefer a balanced as possible playing field in regards to Sealed, which is simply incompatible with the format. As long as the packs are randomized, there will always be some imbalance. Hence my statement, "inherently unfair format".
What's more important though? That players get to force their preferred colors, or that players get to play on a playing field as even as possible, so that deck building proficiency and play skill pays off, instead of letting more players have an uphill or downhill battle for the entire event based on the booster opening lottery?
This person said they would prefer a balanced as possible playing field in regards to Sealed, which is simply incompatible with the format. As long as the packs are randomized, there will always be some imbalance. Hence my statement, "inherently unfair format".
So as long as it is to some extent unfair in the first place, it doesn't matter if it becomes more unfair? Yeah, I disagree.
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When I hit my 3000 post mark, I'm gone for good.
Stay reasonable, be mindful of your expectations and don't feed the trolls.
lets inject some perspective here. we are talking about the difference between a prerelease and a regular sealed event. prereleases are probably the most casual event type that are regularly run throughout the year. the motivations of the event and the intended audience change. therefore there isnt anything inherently wrong with the structure/implementation reflecting that.
@pierrebai put it nicely. it depends on your starting point. if you want to play with your chosen guild, then a single seeded (note that it is just 1) is a minor adjustment to make that more possible; hence a better experience.
also this isnt just any old plane. its fricken ravnica. which everyone goes nuts over because the guilds are awesome. its not like wizards decided to re-introduce seeded packs for any old set.
i understand how some might see this from a lore/flavor vs. gameplay angle (which dont have to be mutually exclusive). however at a prerelease, where the audience is comprised of more new/beginning/infrequent players; there are extra incentives to hit the flavor mark because those said players may not know better. you dont put training wheels on a bike to enhance its speed or utility. a seeded pack is akin to training wheels when people inevitably force their chosen colors by giving them a slightly higher chance of at least a few powerful cards.
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Modern: UWGSnow-Bant Control BURGrixis Death's Shadow GWBCoCo Elves WCDeath and Taxes (sold)
So as long as it is to some extent unfair in the first place, it doesn't matter if it becomes more unfair? Yeah, I disagree.
Well that's a bit of a stretch. There is no difference between a Seeded pool vs. a regular Sealed pool in terms of overall quality, especially when everyone is playing by the same rules.
So as long as it is to some extent unfair in the first place, it doesn't matter if it becomes more unfair? Yeah, I disagree.
Well that's a bit of a stretch. There is no difference between a Seeded pool vs. a regular Sealed pool in terms of overall quality, especially when everyone is playing by the same rules.
It's not a stretch at all, it's a fact: With seeded kits, for the reasons I've laid out in detail to the best of my abilities, the bad pools are worse and the good pools are better compared to nonseeded kits. The pool quality is less consistent from kit to kit when they contain a seeded pack. This difference increases variance.
We can disagree about the significance of this difference, but not the existence of this difference. There is a difference, that's simply a fact.
I have a hard time letting go when I see someone on the forums stating over and over again something that's just plain wrong, but this is it. I give up. You're either not actually reading my posts, or you're just unable or unwilling to grasp it. I'm out. I just hope you don't mislead too many other people.
The argument that prereleases are casual events and that the seeded packs make for a better experience for players who don't care about playing sealed the "correct" way, that's completely valid. I can get behind that. It's just not what I personally would prefer that they do.
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When I hit my 3000 post mark, I'm gone for good.
Stay reasonable, be mindful of your expectations and don't feed the trolls.
As someone who has gone through the "seeded pack" era, I can agree it does tilt the variance, simply by the virtue that a seeded pack draws from a smaller pool of cards than a regular pack.
But, I would point out that it was terrible experiment back then because WotC was convinced it was the way to do all pre-releases. When you have to pick a color for a Core Set prerelease with no flavor backing, the problem becomes obvious. Likewise, when there are sufficient flavor reasons, like choosing a Ravnica Guild and/or a Mirrodin/Phryexian War, people tend to enjoy the flavor to be willing to overlook the tiled variance - Prereleases are among the most casual (and flavored) events and if the flavor drive itself brings enough enjoyment, most players don't mind sacrificing a bit of gameplay efficiency (and shiny new cards are always a nice distraction on top of all that).
So, from that aspect of my point of view, I'm okay with what they're doing now, mainly because they didn't announce it would a structure moving forward (pretty darn sure they already learnt their lesson and probably have along the same lines of thinking I do now). I won't be surprised if the 3rd set of the "Block" (we all know the second set is a repeat of the first with the other 5 guilds) features a "Gatewatch Allegiance" VS "Bolas Allegiance" format like Mirrodin Besieged did, except I think they'll skip the whole marketing bluff this time round and just go "you're just fighting a skirmish among many others, tournament results don't actually affect anything".
i wish more of it was seeded than just one pack. i remember the last time we were on ravnica i really wanted to play golgari, picked the golgari kit... and.. ended up having to play rakdos.
Funny I wound up doing the reverse. Picked the Rakdos kit, wound up playing Golgari. Abrupt Decay will do that.
In Gatecrash I picked Orzhov and luckily had the resources to play it.
A pity Gatecrash was a bit too fast of a limited format.
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— Teferi
"Gatewatch Allegiance" VS "Bolas Allegiance" format like Mirrodin Besieged did, except I think they'll skip the whole marketing bluff this time round and just go "you're just fighting a skirmish among many others, tournament results don't actually affect anything".
It's not like they ever pretended that players could influence the outcome of SOM block - they just didn't confirm which of two possible final names/themes the final set would have (though the block structure actually made it quite obvious from the perspective of someone who didn't rely on wishful thinking). The bluff was played by the audience members on themselves or each other when among them some talked up the idea that the outcome is actually "yet to be determined" rather than just "yet to be revealed".
It was a similar kind of mass hysetria/communalself-deception as during SOI/EMN except less spear-headed by spite and more of an unfounded leap from someone's "wouldn't it be cool" baseless spculation to someone else's truth and gospel.
Cslling it s "marketing bluff" is basically revising history.
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Planar Chaos was not a mistake neither was it random. You might want to look at it again.
[thread=239793][Game] Level Up - Creature[/thread]
It's not like they ever pretended that players could influence the outcome of SOM block - they just didn't confirm which of two possible final names/themes the final set would have (though the block structure actually made it quite obvious from the perspective of someone who didn't rely on wishful thinking). The bluff was played by the audience members on themselves or each other when among them some talked up the idea that the outcome is actually "yet to be determined" rather than just "yet to be revealed".
It was a similar kind of mass hysetria/communalself-deception as during SOI/EMN except less spear-headed by spite and more of an unfounded leap from someone's "wouldn't it be cool" baseless spculation to someone else's truth and gospel.
Cslling it s "marketing bluff" is basically revising history.
My apologies for the poor wording choice and sentence structuring. As you mentioned, they didn't state that players have influence on the final product, but the very fact they went through the effort of flavoring a delayed announcement (as opposed to just announcing a delay like they do most of the time) really gave me the feeling they knew it would invoke the deceptive self-hype train to begin with.
I could be overly skeptical and it was just an enthusiastic flavor boost they really pushed for, in which I would also agree that calling it a "marketing bluff" would be too much, but from my knowledge, no post-event (as in past the official announcement of New Phyrexia) statement could confirm the origins of the decision to flavor the delayed announcement was purely a creative one or not, so I choose to keep my skepticism that it was an intended move for marketing.
There's no way for us to confirm whether they actually really ever saw our self-delusion-hype sequence coming to begin with mainly because if it was a conscious marketing decision, part of that decision would include not admitting it as one as well. So in a way, the entire matter is more like a case of Schrodinger's history. Taking either side is effectively revising history regardless, I just actively chose one side based on my general perception of WotC's decision making.
I'm assuming this is a problem because players can choose the guild they want to play, but if the packs were randomized then you have to make do with whatever guild you get, problem solved.
If you get more cards in your 5 packs to build a strong guild deck then fine, if not then it's your problem.
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I generally like the flavor of this type of think but it really sucks when you get hosed by not having the color you picked. The whole two color thing if they go with guilds could help mitigate that quite a bit though.
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SonofaBith - Wizards was so excited about making the packaging for Modern Masters 2 recyclable, they decided to make most of the rares and all but 1 of the UC's recycle-bin ready too. Convenient!
Aw man. Those seeded packs were a bad idea before. How will that be any different this time?
Basically, what happens is that people realize they'd rather have Seeded Pack [Guild] because that guild is better, so those packs go first to the people who arrive earliest. (Stores around where I live let people sign up for a particular guild).
Why would they do this? They're not genericizing the PR kits so that the guild is unknown, are they?
So now we know: The Golgari kits are going to be the hardest to get
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This sucks. It sucked when they did it before and it sucks now. I hate trying to figure out ahead of time which guild is gonna be best, or having the ultimate feel bad of opening 4 rares in a different guild, but not having the commons or uncommons to make a deck in that color cause you're down a pack.
375 unpowered cube - https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/601ac624832cdf1039947588
People always say this, and yet good players, especially good players who practice sealed, regularly do much better than worse players.
375 unpowered cube - https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/601ac624832cdf1039947588
I generally just auto-drop after one round unless my sealed pool is hyper-busted, preferring to 2HG with a friend of mine.
Currently focusing on Pre-Modern (Mono-Black Discard Control) and Modern (Azorious Control, Temur Rhinos).
Find me at the Wizard's Tower in Ottawa every second Saturday afternoons.
Neither of those guilds are in this set. All you can do for Esper is go dimir.
375 unpowered cube - https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/601ac624832cdf1039947588
Of course good players can find ways to win with sub par pools. That's what good players do. They find ways to win when the odds are stacked against them. That doesn't change the fact that sometimes your pool is either extremely good or extremely bad and it puts you at a significant advantage/disadvantage that is outside of your control.
seeded boosters only makes sense. identifying with and supporting your favorite guilds is a major selling point of the plane, and having some method in place to better ensure people can build decks in those colors is a part of that.
also, although it doesnt always work out, the guilds should be relatively balanced. if they arent its a fault in the design of the set, and not so much a fault in pre-release.
UWGSnow-Bant Control
BURGrixis Death's Shadow
GWBCoCo Elves
WCDeath and Taxes(sold)Funny I wound up doing the reverse. Picked the Rakdos kit, wound up playing Golgari. Abrupt Decay will do that.
If it was completely based on what you opened, everyone would have the same win %. They don't, so it's clearly not. Yeah, sometimes you have a 4 pool and have to go against a 10. And sometimes in constructed you draw 5 land hands all day. Sometimes the person next to you in a draft pod sends bad signals, or opens a bomb rare and moves into your color in pack 3 and you get a ***** deck. Magic has variance. If you don't like variance I'm kind of confused why you would play magic at all. It's fine to say you don't like sealed. There's nothing wrong with that. But saying it's a fundamentally unfair format suggests to me you just aren't very good at reading sealed pools.
375 unpowered cube - https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/601ac624832cdf1039947588
If you'll notice in the post you quoted, I was directly responding to someone else: This person said they would prefer a balanced as possible playing field in regards to Sealed, which is simply incompatible with the format. As long as the packs are randomized, there will always be some imbalance. Hence my statement, "inherently unfair format".
Stay reasonable, be mindful of your expectations and don't feed the trolls.
Doomsdayin'
@pierrebai put it nicely. it depends on your starting point. if you want to play with your chosen guild, then a single seeded (note that it is just 1) is a minor adjustment to make that more possible; hence a better experience.
also this isnt just any old plane. its fricken ravnica. which everyone goes nuts over because the guilds are awesome. its not like wizards decided to re-introduce seeded packs for any old set.
i understand how some might see this from a lore/flavor vs. gameplay angle (which dont have to be mutually exclusive). however at a prerelease, where the audience is comprised of more new/beginning/infrequent players; there are extra incentives to hit the flavor mark because those said players may not know better. you dont put training wheels on a bike to enhance its speed or utility. a seeded pack is akin to training wheels when people inevitably force their chosen colors by giving them a slightly higher chance of at least a few powerful cards.
UWGSnow-Bant Control
BURGrixis Death's Shadow
GWBCoCo Elves
WCDeath and Taxes(sold)On top of the 6 boosters we're getting.
We're gonna open a Narcomoeba in one of those boosters anyways...
UR Melek, Izzet ParagonUR, B Shirei, Shizo's CaretakerB, R Jaya Ballard, Task MageR,RW Tajic, Blade of the LegionRW, UB Lazav, Dimir MastermindUB, UB Circu, Dimir LobotomistUB, RWU Zedruu the GreatheartedRWU, GUBThe MimeoplasmGUB, UGExperiment Kraj UG, WDarien, King of KjeldorW, BMarrow-GnawerB, WBGKarador, Ghost ChieftainWBG, UTeferi, Temporal ArchmageU, GWUDerevi, Empyrial TacticianGWU, RDaretti, Scrap SavantR, UTalrand, Sky SummonerU, GEzuri, Renegade LeaderG, WUBRGReaper KingWUBRG, RGXenagos, God of RevelsRG, CKozilek, Butcher of TruthC, WUBRGGeneral TazriWUBRG, GTitania, Protector of ArgothG
We can disagree about the significance of this difference, but not the existence of this difference. There is a difference, that's simply a fact.
I have a hard time letting go when I see someone on the forums stating over and over again something that's just plain wrong, but this is it. I give up. You're either not actually reading my posts, or you're just unable or unwilling to grasp it. I'm out. I just hope you don't mislead too many other people.
The argument that prereleases are casual events and that the seeded packs make for a better experience for players who don't care about playing sealed the "correct" way, that's completely valid. I can get behind that. It's just not what I personally would prefer that they do.
Stay reasonable, be mindful of your expectations and don't feed the trolls.
Doomsdayin'
But, I would point out that it was terrible experiment back then because WotC was convinced it was the way to do all pre-releases. When you have to pick a color for a Core Set prerelease with no flavor backing, the problem becomes obvious. Likewise, when there are sufficient flavor reasons, like choosing a Ravnica Guild and/or a Mirrodin/Phryexian War, people tend to enjoy the flavor to be willing to overlook the tiled variance - Prereleases are among the most casual (and flavored) events and if the flavor drive itself brings enough enjoyment, most players don't mind sacrificing a bit of gameplay efficiency (and shiny new cards are always a nice distraction on top of all that).
So, from that aspect of my point of view, I'm okay with what they're doing now, mainly because they didn't announce it would a structure moving forward (pretty darn sure they already learnt their lesson and probably have along the same lines of thinking I do now). I won't be surprised if the 3rd set of the "Block" (we all know the second set is a repeat of the first with the other 5 guilds) features a "Gatewatch Allegiance" VS "Bolas Allegiance" format like Mirrodin Besieged did, except I think they'll skip the whole marketing bluff this time round and just go "you're just fighting a skirmish among many others, tournament results don't actually affect anything".
In Gatecrash I picked Orzhov and luckily had the resources to play it.
A pity Gatecrash was a bit too fast of a limited format.
The Vorthos community will await the consequences of the Eldrazi Titans' deaths/sealing. We will keep the watch.
“The wind whispers, ‘come home,’ but I cannot.”
— Teferi
+1 to this
it doesn't dilute the value of rares/mythics and still throws a bone to the guild-conscious people
It was a similar kind of mass hysetria/communalself-deception as during SOI/EMN except less spear-headed by spite and more of an unfounded leap from someone's "wouldn't it be cool" baseless spculation to someone else's truth and gospel.
Cslling it s "marketing bluff" is basically revising history.
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My apologies for the poor wording choice and sentence structuring. As you mentioned, they didn't state that players have influence on the final product, but the very fact they went through the effort of flavoring a delayed announcement (as opposed to just announcing a delay like they do most of the time) really gave me the feeling they knew it would invoke the deceptive self-hype train to begin with.
I could be overly skeptical and it was just an enthusiastic flavor boost they really pushed for, in which I would also agree that calling it a "marketing bluff" would be too much, but from my knowledge, no post-event (as in past the official announcement of New Phyrexia) statement could confirm the origins of the decision to flavor the delayed announcement was purely a creative one or not, so I choose to keep my skepticism that it was an intended move for marketing.
There's no way for us to confirm whether they actually really ever saw our self-delusion-hype sequence coming to begin with mainly because if it was a conscious marketing decision, part of that decision would include not admitting it as one as well. So in a way, the entire matter is more like a case of Schrodinger's history. Taking either side is effectively revising history regardless, I just actively chose one side based on my general perception of WotC's decision making.
If you get more cards in your 5 packs to build a strong guild deck then fine, if not then it's your problem.
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So now we know: The Golgari kits are going to be the hardest to get