Why is most of the discussion here about a card that isn't even in the pack?
It started with someone talking about Hordeling Outburst which is in the pack, and spiraled from there. We've established that the actual outcome of the forum draft is not really as meaningful as the discussions along the way, so why not debate a card that's not even in the pack?
My interest is piqued with this idea of UR All Spells but my gut still tells me it's more a fun diversion than a real strategy at a competitive table. I mean, the whole thing falls apart without a Goblinslide on the table, right? Without the tokens it would seem impossible to deal 20 and it has a bunch of card draw so you're going to mill yourself out first even if you have enough good spells to maintain control.
I was thinking about alternative win cons for an abnormally high concentration spells deck while I was drafting it, as I had 1 creature after pack 1 in that draft and I was trying to think through how I intended to win. Goblinslide is great, and ended up being my main wincon, but my alternatives were to recur Warden of the Eye with Dutiful Return (which I got and provides excellent inevitability, but is awkward and clunky if drawn in the short game), run a cranial archive (which I wasn't able to get), win with tokens after killing everything my opponents played (since a lot of removal does not work well on a ponyback brigade played as a morph with 8 mana up), beat down with my few normal creatures if my opponent wasn't packing removal, or burn my opponent out with 6-8 damage Master the Ways.
Edit: I will agree, its entirely possible this isn't a real strategy if your draft mates know what they're doing. My experience came from the first draft of a new set at FNM, so everything is going to be weird. I was actually kind of surprised there was another deck posted here that seemed to be similarly in on the almost all spells plan, so I thought I would mention my experience in case it actually is possible for this to be an archetype. I kind of hope it is, this was one of the most fun decks I've played in limited in a long, long time.
I'll just echo that this is why the gold rare was the wrong first pick. It's committing us to colours early which inhibits our ability to take good cards in the next few picks.
And I'll echo what has also been said multiple times. You should not feel committed to any card picked first or even second.
You're right that we shouldn't. But that's just not how these 'draft by committee' projects work.
I stand by that this set is deep enough that picking a 3 colour card first is fine if it is the best card in the pack, even if it is not a bomb. You just need to be able to not feel committed.
Agree, and if you're capable of having that discipline, then no problem. However, see my first point above.
I agree that is how forum drafts usually end up, but I think the point is to say the pick you would take, given the previous picks, if you were drafting the deck yourself. Pretend your friend got up from MTGO and told you to take over, then pick what you would at that point. At least that's how I play forum draft.
If your goal is to steer the forum draft to the best possible deck by avoiding common forum pitfalls then I don't think that is the as interesting or useful, because we will never draft by committee IRL.
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Top MTGO Limited Rating: 1968
2nd place behind Paulo after round 3 of Pro Tour M15
(finished 8-8, but beat Alexander Hayne and Ben Stark)
I don't understand. You goal *isn't* to have a coherent deck at the end of the draft? How is that even possible? That's what my goal is in EVERY draft I do or backseat-draft.
I agree with you that individuals are much smarter at making choices like these than the mob is.
I think he means that there's a difference between making picks based on what we would do in a regular draft, and making picks influenced by the circumstances of a forum draft. If we're taking this as a chance to discuss what we might pick if we saw these cards in our own drafts, then it is beneficial to try to ignore the fact that majority rule may mess things up, and make choices as if we were drafting just by ourselves. That is, instead of just trying to make the best deck possible within the constraints of the situation. I'm not sure what the right call is here myself.
That said I don't really like our first pick either, but mostly because I think Sultai Scavenger and Sultai Flayer were just better choices without considering gold/mono color.
I don't understand. You goal *isn't* to have a coherent deck at the end of the draft? How is that even possible? That's what my goal is in EVERY draft I do or backseat-draft.
I'm just saying, I don't think it's a great idea to take lessons away from a forum draft based on our collective inability to avoid treating a P1p1 like a commitment, when it isn't such an actual problem in personal drafts. P1p1 Master the Way might have been the worst thing we could do to make a forum draft go well, but the people who voted for it didn't vote for it because it'd be a good forum draft pick. They voted for it because it would be a good personal pick.
We all have to remember the great thing about drafting is there is no clear cut best deck. Each of us could draft very different decks and all be competitive among ourselves.
We have a some that have drafted the set and know the play of the format, and others theory crafting from past experiences. Its all good. I just wish we could play the deck in an actual draft to show some how cards work out.
I don't understand. You goal *isn't* to have a coherent deck at the end of the draft? How is that even possible? That's what my goal is in EVERY draft I do or backseat-draft.
I agree with you that individuals are much smarter at making choices like these than the mob is.
I think he means that there's a difference between making picks based on what we would do in a regular draft, and making picks influenced by the circumstances of a forum draft. If we're taking this as a chance to discuss what we might pick if we saw these cards in our own drafts, then it is beneficial to try to ignore the fact that majority rule may mess things up, and make choices as if we were drafting just by ourselves. That is, instead of just trying to make the best deck possible within the constraints of the situation. I'm not sure what the right call is here myself.
That said I don't really like our first pick either, but mostly because I think Sultai Scavenger and Sultai Flayer were just better choices without considering gold/mono color.
So what is the goal if it's not to draft the best deck possible?
I don't understand. You goal *isn't* to have a coherent deck at the end of the draft? How is that even possible? That's what my goal is in EVERY draft I do or backseat-draft.
I'm just saying, I don't think it's a great idea to take lessons away from a forum draft based on our collective inability to avoid treating a P1p1 like a commitment, when it isn't such an actual problem in personal drafts. P1p1 Master the Way might have been the worst thing we could do to make a forum draft go well, but the people who voted for it didn't vote for it because it'd be a good forum draft pick. They voted for it because it would be a good personal pick.
Sure, but I think we're seeing why it wasn't actually a good personal pick either.....
Part of the problem is that people make mispicks in regular drafts all the time, but they *never* get any feedback that they were wrong to pick that Master of the Way first pick over a random morph. So they keep making the same mistakes again and again.
I agree that is how forum drafts usually end up, but I think the point is to say the pick you would take, given the previous picks, if you were drafting the deck yourself. Pretend your friend got up from MTGO and told you to take over, then pick what you would at that point. At least that's how I play forum draft.
If your goal is to steer the forum draft to the best possible deck by avoiding common forum pitfalls then I don't think that is the as interesting or useful, because we will never draft by committee IRL.
Yeah, that seems like the most practical way to rationalise making picks without having following your na=ormal valuation techniques on previous picks.
Regarding your second sentence, very little of this project is going to be directly applicable to a conventional IRL booster draft. Isn't the point to use the different skills of the different format? I would argue that being able to persuade people to pick cards that result in the best deck is actually the core of this particular exercise/format. Not that I'm good at that or anything....
We all have to remember the great thing about drafting is there is no clear cut best deck. Each of us could draft very different decks and all be competitive among ourselves.
We have a some that have drafted the set and know the play of the format, and others theory crafting from past experiences. Its all good. I just wish we could play the deck in an actual draft to show some how cards work out.
Oh hey, I completely agree with this. I recall a while back doing some cube drafts, and I specialise in durdly control decks with 5-8 creatures. I won a few games with it, then let someone else pilot it and they were unable to even come close to winning a game with it because of how different it was from the normal decks they played. It had more in common with a UW standard deck than with a normal draft deck.
Even if we could 'just play this in a draft to see how good it is' is a little misleading. The other 7 drafters at the table are ALL Sene, who is at worst a 'semi-pro' magic player. That this deck is going to be hands down the worst deck drafted at the table is a given, even if it was only a single person on the forum making all of the choices. Plus, when we play, even if we pick our the best player here they will probably still be worse than Sene in terms of technical magic skills as well.
One thing that might be interesting is if any of us who are interested kept track of the cards we'd have picked, and then made a separate thread to compare after p1p8 (before the picks start affecting what we get passed).
The point of this would not be to compare our individual "drafts" to the forum draft (the forum draft will be less cohesive, since that's just how it works), but rather to compare our individual drafts to each other. That might be something worth discussing.
One thing that might be interesting is if any of us who are interested kept track of the cards we'd have picked, and then made a separate thread to compare after p1p8 (before the picks start affecting what we get passed).
The point of this would not be to compare our individual "drafts" to the forum draft (the forum draft will be less cohesive, since that's just how it works), but rather to compare our individual drafts to each other. That might be something worth discussing.
Drilling Hoot Men... erm... Hooting Mandrills. It's just a solid card. Pairs well with pick 2, and doesn't hate pick 1. It just seems better than the blue and red options. Outburst would be my second choice.
So what is the goal if it's not to draft the best deck possible?
I thought I was spelling it out. To discuss and try to draft the best deck that a person would be able to draft in a regular setting.
To draft the best deck taking into consideration the effects of a forum draft may be an interesting exercise, but seems to me ultimately pointless. We aren't even going to get to play with the deck, right? And, as far as I know, there aren't any events or anything where we would be able to draft like this competitively.
I'm of the mind that needing to deal with the fickle whims of a crowd controlled draft is good practice for when a normal draft is not going well for less avoidable reasons. It's easy to look at this draft and say 'god, i'd never open a draft this way. It's so far off base that it has no baring on my more sensible drafts' but sometimes you just get a lot of garbage or make what seem like good picks but the packs just don't go your way and now you have to salvage a pile. Sometimes the forum draft will also be presented with the same choice as the normal draft, like both decks would wind up largely black and both would get passed a pack 3 pick 2 with the rare missing and a very similar conversation about fixing vs power might come up in the thread as you would have in your own head despite getting to that point from very different angles, except in the thread you can bounce ideas and opinions off other people at your leisure instead of forcing the issue internally as a mtgo timer ticks down. It's also a good opportunity to see deck types or draft strategies you normally wouldn't or to just get a feel for what cards people perceive as good early in the format and why so you can maybe hedge on cards that you think are better than the majority to come around later than they should be.
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bloodfire expert seems bad.... except that I have seen it win a lot of games. 3/4 a turn is nothing to scoff at. It seems like It would just run into a morph and die but it ends up dodging removal for a bunch of turns and with the tempo available in Jeskai deal serious damage..
Scaldkin keeps getting cut from all my decks :S its that typical 23rd card.
Ponyback :S.. wish I could take it but Its too late to be mardu now (I would of been with my two scavengers)
hooting mandrils I guess are pretty good but I haven't seen it be as good as it was hyped... I am unsure about temur I am yet to see a good temur deck it gets overwhelmed by mardu and out tempoed by jeskai, creatures killed by Sultai and stonewalled by deathtouch from Abzan.
Mark your pick by either bolding it or putting it in Quote tags. If you want to change your vote, either edit your previous post or bold it & strike it through ([s][/s]) as you post your new pick.
Next pick will be tomorrow (unless there is clear consensus, in which case I might post the next pick earlier). Have fun!
I'm tempted by smite the monstrous and treasure cruise but i'm still hungry for a creature base and this is the first pack we've got with a common missing. While there's a long list of commons i'd take over elder which makes it somewhat sketchy as an early signal, blue is generally the least popular color so there's a good chance even if someone within 3 spaces to the right is blue it is a secondary or even tertiary color for them. Elder also has merits above and beyond being a reasonable creature that is blue, the old gal is a role player for both tempo beats and delve fuel which makes it an ideal follow up to both bell strike and mandrills.
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"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?"
Treasure Cruise. Elder is a decent 2-drop but it getting through more than once requires us to be playing non-creature instead of building up our board. I feel like treasure cruise will fuel us better in the long run.
Ugh! Terrible pack for us. For me its between Treasure Cruise or Blossoming Sands. I will go with the crowd and say Treasure Cruise but I think the land is a very close second here. All the creatures are in my experiences, underwhelming or get cut.
Can we start the "when do we take fixing" debate, cause I want to pick up Blossoming Sands (pick changed below) here. Everything else here is filler or sideboard tech. I like the Sands now where I didn't last pack because Nightblade was a house, but now we have a green card, so we could be Jeskai splash Green or Temur splash white.
(I finally got to watch Kenji playing some Khans last night. His Disowned Ancestor kept his opponent's Mandrills at bay, and the lifegain from multiple refuges was not irrelevant vs an aggressive Jeskai deck.)
Treasure Cruise: Is solid card advantage and goes well with what we have picked so far, either colorwise with picks 1 and 2 or because it incentivizes us towards delve enablers if we combine it with pick 3. Honorable mention to the Jeskai Elder and the Smoke Teller, as both are decent 2-drops.
I think taking a friend-colored dual land this early is a mistake. Stick to powerful cards for now, unless a tri-land shows up or a pack has a very low power level.
I was thinking about alternative win cons for an abnormally high concentration spells deck while I was drafting it, as I had 1 creature after pack 1 in that draft and I was trying to think through how I intended to win. Goblinslide is great, and ended up being my main wincon, but my alternatives were to recur Warden of the Eye with Dutiful Return (which I got and provides excellent inevitability, but is awkward and clunky if drawn in the short game), run a cranial archive (which I wasn't able to get), win with tokens after killing everything my opponents played (since a lot of removal does not work well on a ponyback brigade played as a morph with 8 mana up), beat down with my few normal creatures if my opponent wasn't packing removal, or burn my opponent out with 6-8 damage Master the Ways.
Edit: I will agree, its entirely possible this isn't a real strategy if your draft mates know what they're doing. My experience came from the first draft of a new set at FNM, so everything is going to be weird. I was actually kind of surprised there was another deck posted here that seemed to be similarly in on the almost all spells plan, so I thought I would mention my experience in case it actually is possible for this to be an archetype. I kind of hope it is, this was one of the most fun decks I've played in limited in a long, long time.
I agree that is how forum drafts usually end up, but I think the point is to say the pick you would take, given the previous picks, if you were drafting the deck yourself. Pretend your friend got up from MTGO and told you to take over, then pick what you would at that point. At least that's how I play forum draft.
If your goal is to steer the forum draft to the best possible deck by avoiding common forum pitfalls then I don't think that is the as interesting or useful, because we will never draft by committee IRL.
2nd place behind Paulo after round 3 of Pro Tour M15
(finished 8-8, but beat Alexander Hayne and Ben Stark)
I think he means that there's a difference between making picks based on what we would do in a regular draft, and making picks influenced by the circumstances of a forum draft. If we're taking this as a chance to discuss what we might pick if we saw these cards in our own drafts, then it is beneficial to try to ignore the fact that majority rule may mess things up, and make choices as if we were drafting just by ourselves. That is, instead of just trying to make the best deck possible within the constraints of the situation. I'm not sure what the right call is here myself.
That said I don't really like our first pick either, but mostly because I think Sultai Scavenger and Sultai Flayer were just better choices without considering gold/mono color.
I'm just saying, I don't think it's a great idea to take lessons away from a forum draft based on our collective inability to avoid treating a P1p1 like a commitment, when it isn't such an actual problem in personal drafts. P1p1 Master the Way might have been the worst thing we could do to make a forum draft go well, but the people who voted for it didn't vote for it because it'd be a good forum draft pick. They voted for it because it would be a good personal pick.
We have a some that have drafted the set and know the play of the format, and others theory crafting from past experiences. Its all good. I just wish we could play the deck in an actual draft to show some how cards work out.
So what is the goal if it's not to draft the best deck possible?
Sure, but I think we're seeing why it wasn't actually a good personal pick either.....
Part of the problem is that people make mispicks in regular drafts all the time, but they *never* get any feedback that they were wrong to pick that Master of the Way first pick over a random morph. So they keep making the same mistakes again and again.
Yeah, that seems like the most practical way to rationalise making picks without having following your na=ormal valuation techniques on previous picks.
Regarding your second sentence, very little of this project is going to be directly applicable to a conventional IRL booster draft. Isn't the point to use the different skills of the different format? I would argue that being able to persuade people to pick cards that result in the best deck is actually the core of this particular exercise/format. Not that I'm good at that or anything....
Oh hey, I completely agree with this. I recall a while back doing some cube drafts, and I specialise in durdly control decks with 5-8 creatures. I won a few games with it, then let someone else pilot it and they were unable to even come close to winning a game with it because of how different it was from the normal decks they played. It had more in common with a UW standard deck than with a normal draft deck.
Even if we could 'just play this in a draft to see how good it is' is a little misleading. The other 7 drafters at the table are ALL Sene, who is at worst a 'semi-pro' magic player. That this deck is going to be hands down the worst deck drafted at the table is a given, even if it was only a single person on the forum making all of the choices. Plus, when we play, even if we pick our the best player here they will probably still be worse than Sene in terms of technical magic skills as well.
The point of this would not be to compare our individual "drafts" to the forum draft (the forum draft will be less cohesive, since that's just how it works), but rather to compare our individual drafts to each other. That might be something worth discussing.
Agreed.
I thought I was spelling it out. To discuss and try to draft the best deck that a person would be able to draft in a regular setting.
To draft the best deck taking into consideration the effects of a forum draft may be an interesting exercise, but seems to me ultimately pointless. We aren't even going to get to play with the deck, right? And, as far as I know, there aren't any events or anything where we would be able to draft like this competitively.
I don't think there's anything else in this pack I really want to be playing.
R Norin the Wary: I've Got a Bad Feeling About This
UG Thrasios & Kydele: Knowledge is Power
RG Borborygmos Enraged: The Breaking of the World
BG The Gitrog Monster: All Glory to the Hypnotoad
WUR Zedruu the Greathearted: Endless Possibilities, One Outcome
WBG Karador, Ghost Chieftain: What's Dead May Never Die
Turn your junk into something great with PucaTrade!
Scaldkin keeps getting cut from all my decks :S its that typical 23rd card.
Ponyback :S.. wish I could take it but Its too late to be mardu now (I would of been with my two scavengers)
hooting mandrils I guess are pretty good but I haven't seen it be as good as it was hyped... I am unsure about temur I am yet to see a good temur deck it gets overwhelmed by mardu and out tempoed by jeskai, creatures killed by Sultai and stonewalled by deathtouch from Abzan.
Pioneer:UR Pheonix
Modern:U Mono U Tron
EDH
GB Glissa, the traitor: Army of Cans
UW Dragonlord Ojutai: Dragonlord NOjutai
UWGDerevi, Empyrial Tactician "you cannot fight the storm"
R Zirilan of the claw. The solution to every problem is dragons
UB Etrata, the Silencer Cloning assassination
Peasant cube: Cards I own
W
U
B
R
G
P1P3 final tally:
Hooting Mandrills - 15
Mer-Ek Nightblade - 10
Hordeling Outburst - 5
Scaldkin - 2
Bloodfire Expert - 2
Feat of Resistance - 2
P1P4:
Mark your pick by either bolding it or putting it in Quote tags. If you want to change your vote, either edit your previous post or bold it &
strike it through([s][/s]) as you post your new pick.Next pick will be tomorrow (unless there is clear consensus, in which case I might post the next pick earlier). Have fun!
I'm tempted by smite the monstrous and treasure cruise but i'm still hungry for a creature base and this is the first pack we've got with a common missing. While there's a long list of commons i'd take over elder which makes it somewhat sketchy as an early signal, blue is generally the least popular color so there's a good chance even if someone within 3 spaces to the right is blue it is a secondary or even tertiary color for them. Elder also has merits above and beyond being a reasonable creature that is blue, the old gal is a role player for both tempo beats and delve fuel which makes it an ideal follow up to both bell strike and mandrills.
Blossoming Sands(pick changed below) here. Everything else here is filler or sideboard tech. I like the Sands now where I didn't last pack because Nightblade was a house, but now we have a green card, so we could be Jeskai splash Green or Temur splash white.(I finally got to watch Kenji playing some Khans last night. His Disowned Ancestor kept his opponent's Mandrills at bay, and the lifegain from multiple refuges was not irrelevant vs an aggressive Jeskai deck.)
I think taking a friend-colored dual land this early is a mistake. Stick to powerful cards for now, unless a tri-land shows up or a pack has a very low power level.