I keep coming back to this nagging question in my mind:
Is KTK Limited legitimately good, or is to just really complicated?
Before you dismiss this because you think KTK is among the greatest formats ever because everyone says so -- what makes it good?
Does KTK do the best job of rewarding strategy and knowledge? Sort of. Knowing the Morphs and the tricks of the format can pay dividends, but what about when everyone knows all the tricks? I would argue that the set has such high variance that beyond the basic level of not walking into traps, it doesn't really reward strategy. It's the old argument that lucking into Plains, Mountain, Island, Mantis Rider doesn't take much skill.
Maybe KTK has the most diversity of deck styles? Eh, not really. There's the greedy 5-color deck, the streamlined 2-color deck, and a bunch of vague splashed stuff in between. The mechanics aren't "build around me." They just...exist. You're happy to use them but you can't really draft around them. The closest thing to a build around card is probably the much debated Secret Plans, and the jury is clearly out on that one. Some swear it's the best card in the set, others maintain it's an unreliable combo piece.
KTK may offer the most consistent gameplay, an always rewarding experience. I'd say no since while Morph limits the damage that can be done from not drawing your colors, it also magnifies the damage done by not curving out to 3 and 5 mana. You can't really win in KTK if you're stuck on 4 mana for a while and your opponent has 5+. Good luck blocking.
So what's the deal? Despite all these shortcomings, people love KTK. And I wonder if it's simply because it's really complicated.
Magic is not a new game. The player base is experienced. They analyze, consume, and grow tired of new product quickly. (No other game puts out new content anywhere NEAR the pace of MTG, and we still grow bored with formats after a month or two.) So that's why I think KTK is so popular right now. It just takes a lot longer to get bored with it because of the combination of gold cards and Morph.
So what do you think? Is KTK really a pantheon set? Or are we just happy to have a set that we couldn't solve in about 3 days because that means the enjoyment lasts longer?
Put it this way -- if you could do just one draft of any format in MTG history, how high would you rank KTK-KTK-KTK?
Definitely more diverse deck styles. Including everything from 2-5 colors is a huge increase in the number of available choices that can't be downplayed. Especially in sealed, makes for many options to consider for every pool; you could get by drafting in your own style every time, if you want, since the card pool is so deep. Options are still available regardless though.
Build around uncommons for draft also include the BW warriors ones (Chiefs, Raider's Spoils, etc) and Quiet Contemplation. I don't know if the morph deck and the quiet contemplation deck are top tier, and I'm not sure it matters. They're something fun to do that can work out pretty well. Some version of the BW warriors deck is pretty much always drafted.
Khans hits a sweet spot in speed where it's slow enough that it's not too volatile, but not so slow that you can just durdle around the whole game. Means you don't necessarily have to make a very fast deck, or a very slow one. Very skill intensive, games offer many meaningful decision points that can be the difference between winning and losing.
Of course there's luck in any format. Building a deck to have the highest chance of getting the mana you need to cast the spells you want takes skill, however. Getting stuck on 4 lands is rough, but there are (or should be with a good deck) lots of things you can do still do at that number of lands. If you can't block, you can always race, if they flip they are spending 5 mana to get on average like 2 more power on the board.
Khans is fairly easily my own favorite Limited format thus far. Again, lots of decisions to be made in draft, in deckbuilding, and in play. If that falls under complicated, so be it, I think it's very important to have in a format. Most games are tense and exciting. Admittedly, I'm kind of on-again-off-again with Magic, so I didn't play in some of the most lauded formats such as Innistrad.
KTK has a really good pace. Or rather, KTK has the tools to set the pace based on your preference. This is the biggest thing I like about the set: the slow decks aren't stronger than he fast decks and vice versa. They've struck a really nice balance there.
The complexity of the format is nice, but I don't think it's the biggest selling point. DGR was a complex format but I was bored by it pretty quickly. But I do like that I can get to the end of a game, knowing that I had to make specific choices but not knowing even by the end of the game which choice was best. That keeps the game fresh for me in a way that very few formats have done.
There's also the general lack of bombs. Other than a guy I played a couple days ago with double Duneblast in his deck, most plays seems pretty beatable if you read the board carefully and play around what you've seen in previous games. There aren't any cards that you can play in the early or mid-game that just decide the game several turns before it actually ends, and that has been a significant problem with almost every format for a long time.
I'd say, in order of importance to me, the things that make KTK good are:
1) narrow band of power
2) good pace
3) genuinely difficult gameplay decisions
4) tremendously relevant sideboards
I do think the lateral drafting strategies like Secret Plans or Goblinslide could have been afforded a bit more, but I always think that. I was the guy who always tried to draft Rooftop Storm decks.
as a not-very-good and non-Spike player, i love KTK because i /always/ feel rewarded for the choices i make in draft. it always feels like the card pool is so deep that i *always* have the power to draft the kind of style of deck i like (which is slow, grindy, durdly decks). i also always feel like each game i play is a legitimate game of Magic with lots of interaction, instead of something like Theros where i felt whoever lucked out to get their combo pieces in their opening hand first would win. (i've yet to encounter a turn 3 Mantis Rider -like scenario, actually; but i also draft far, far less than you all here on this forum). i feel this way even if my deck is clearly inferior -- that before i lose, i still feel satisfied with my deck being an expression of myself and that it got to DO something characteristic of it before i lost.
i like your question and your challenge to those who like KTK, though, and i'm curious to see otehrs' responses.
(however, i will echo Puddle Jumper's point that i miss having as many sideways strategies as sets tended to have in the past (well, ignoring Theros, which seemed to have very, very, very few)).
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
----------------------------
Goblins have poor impulse control. Don't click this link!!
some of my favourite flavour text:
Wayward Soul "no home no heart no hope"
—Stronghold graffito
Raging Goblin He raged at the world, at his family, at his life. But mostly he just raged.
So what's the deal? Despite all these shortcomings, people love KTK. And I wonder if it's simply because it's really complicated.
What shortcomings?
From where I sit there's always a tension between power and stability when it comes to splashing in your manabase. I love that this format
1. Has powerful cards that pull you to 5-colour, but the mana won't let everyone do that
2. Has morphs, which are below the curve as grey ogres, but powerful when flipped up
3. Has a bunch of bears that you'd think would be outclassed by morphs, yet are incredibly necessary to your curve
4. Has mechanics that discourage blocking (weak removal, pump spells, unmorphing), yet a high toughness/power ratio for the creatures generally
5. Creatures trade all the time, yet often the games come down to board stalls and winning via evasion
And what's best is that NONE of these things dominate the format. You might think that the best and most powerful thing you can do is draft a 5-colour deck. You're not going to consistently win with that strategy.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is be aggro. Sometimes it's being a powerful midrange deck. Sometimes it's going deep on graveyard/delve strategies.
Just being able to draft and re-draft the set so many times speaks to how well designed the set is. There's so much uncertainty and things going on during the draft and the game play. Yet skilled players can still leverage angles to win more than they lose.
So what do you think? Is KTK really a pantheon set? Or are we just happy to have a set that we couldn't solve in about 3 days because that means the enjoyment lasts longer?
Put it this way -- if you could do just one draft of any format in MTG history, how high would you rank KTK-KTK-KTK?
I definitely think it is a pantheon set.
Right now I'm prepared to put it up with ROE and INN as in the top 3 limited sets of all time. Maybe Modern Master is up there too. But better than Ravnica. Better than Mirrodin.
I find myself in a somewhat unique situation: I have created several dozen MTGO accounts over the past 12 years or so (because I frequently quit, "throw away" my account, and then a couple of months come back to play again and open a new account because by that point I don't have the old password and I can't be bothered to call customer support).
I finally decided to call up Wizards and spend an hour or two recovering as many old accounts as I could. I ended up getting back about 21 accounts, which wasn't all of them, but was most. I even got back my original account, created in 2002 and not logged into since like 2003-ish.
Anyway, because of the way that Wizards awarded Phantom points to all accounts a while back, I now have several hundred phantom points to spend. So I've been playing alot of phantom 6 pack KTK sealed (also alot of new player drafts since somehow I ended up with tons of new player points in those accounts too).
I have both positive and negative things to say about KTK sealed. On the positive side, I feel like the games have the same good qualities mentioned above - lots of choices, always something interesting happening, usually (aside from the normal mana screw/flood games) back-and-forth satisfying affairs.
However, I feel like the deck construction for sealed is somewhat repetitive. Almost everyone is going to have 6 - 8 dual/tri lands in their pool, along with enough powerful morphs to make a "three color plus two splash" strategy nearly always viable. And in the end, it becomes very tempting and almost always achievable to go 5 colors like this. I have not played a sealed yet where I wasn't 5 colors.
And the thing is, it mostly works. The great thing about KTK from my perspective is that it allows me to play the way I like, and still be nearly as successful as I would be playing optimally. Most other sets have a wider chasm between the success rate of optimal deck construction vs. suboptimal construction, when compared to KTK. KTK is very forgiving - you can play many different decks out of the same card pool that will all do about as well as the others, and the optimal deck for that pool will only perform slightly better than the rest (most of the time). This allows me to play 5 colors with durdly "fun" cards and still win a decent percentage of the time.
Whereas I can see that being a turn off for the spike types who always want to play the optimal strategy regardless of "fun factor" and expect to achieve a notably better win rate in doing so, it's great for players like me, who don't mind trading a few points of win percentage for much more fun, wacky, wild, etc, games.
While Khans doesn't break into my personal top few Limited sets of all time, I do think it's quite good. I have no major complaints and consider it a successful draft format.
As for why I like it, I don't have any great insights, I think it mainly just has very good fundamentals. By "fundamentals" I mean the characteristics that I think are necessary conditions for a good draft format; taking a stab at listing them, something like:
1) Depth of playables (self explanatory, I think?)
2) Color balance (this is related to #1, I suppose)
3) Diversity of speed (you want varying levels of aggressive/defensive decks to be viable. If aggro or control is uniformly superior games become more repetitive, and, unless R&D did that on purpose, it tends to work against criterion #1)
4) Interactivity (this seems hard to define, though I think we're all familiar with the principle: games that in some way feel like one or both players are playing solitaire should be rare)
I think Khans is very good on criteria 1 and 3, and good on 2 and 4.
I don't think those "fundamentals" listed above are everything. Some possible "extras" could be:
- Novelty (Usually substantially new mechanics, like Innistrad's DFCs, Zendikar's Landfall, etc, even Morph for many players in Khans)
- Personally preferred play style (if you like ramp decks and giant monsters, you probably liked Rise of the Eldrazi; if you like fast beatdown, you probably enjoyed that about Gatecrash)
- Offbeat decks (Spider Spawning, Furnace Celebration, Homicidal Seclusion (Ha! No one saw a positive reference to Avacyn Restored coming! But seriously, that format sucked))
- Flavor and general "feel" of the set (totally subjective, of course)
For me, Khans doesn't score a lot of points from "extras" (I do like Morph, and the slower than average speed, and a lot of the art). That's why I prefer, for instance, Innistrad. (Despite Innistrad arguably having slightly weaker fundamentals; the color balance was no better than okay, for example. There were several offbeat things you could draft, and I thought the creative and overall feel were fantastic.) But that doesn't stop Khans from being good.
If I understand Phyrre's main complaint correctly, it's that certain elements in the set (like the inordinate importance of hitting 5 lands) increase variance in frustrating ways, which perhaps you could assign as a special demerit (akin to AVR's Miracles?). I understand the arguments for those things increasing variance and they seem plausible. But in practice, I'm just not seeing it. I don't feel like good/bad luck is deciding appreciably more games than usual (which, let's face it, is never negligible).
I don't like it at all. Aggro is basically unplayable. Morph outclasses the 2 drop aggro creatures in every conceivable way. I just played a sealed where I was 2 color splash a third aggro with 4 1 drops 8 2 drops 4 morph and 7 removal/tricks. I had 4 Mardu hateblade and 3 Mardu skullhunters. I went 2-2. In a different sealed i played a match where my opponent went turn 2 bondkin turn 3 mantis rider turn 4 impersonator. 2 games in a row. This set is draw the right mana draw your bombs win. It seems to me that sealed is about what you open way more than any other set I have seen. Sure people can say variance variance. But it seems that luck is much more of a factor than any other set I have played before. Only have done 1 draft so I cannot comment on drafting the set; sealed is utter crap though.
I think it's both a really good format and a really bad format. It all boils down to why you're drafting.
If you're drafting for fun, it's great. There are lots of really fun and interesting games. There's enough variety that I expect it to stay interesting longer than the average format.
However, if you're drafting competitively, it's pretty bad. The variance is significantly higher than normal. The percentage of games where either myself or my opponent never stood a chance is noticeably higher than normal. And the variance applies to the draft stage as well as the actual games. I've been in drafts where my 3 colors were decided early and remained open throughout the draft, but where I saw few if any relevant fixing. Sitting next to people going 5c can ruin your chances.
This isn't the first format like this...I think RoE is another good example of a format which is really fun but not the best competitively.
Yeah, I don't think this is a very high variance format, either. The people with a good grasp on this format have found themselves doing very well, so far as I've seen, and my personal experience is that games seem to come down to enough major decisions that it's very difficult for me to say which player "should" have won (given perfect play), which is almost never how I feel at the end of games in most formats.
There's a certain amount of variance to it in terms of the importance of 3 and 5 mana, but it's a far cry from Theros block, where Heroic turned every deck in the format into a combo deck of sorts. The format does have room for improvement and could use a scry-like mechanic for hitting lands, but I don't find that that's any more oppressive than losing to a sligh deck that a format supports.
Still, which past sets are you holding it up to for comparison? Magic has a very poor history of "perfect limited sets"... Innistrad, MM, and RoE are the only ones that come to mind, and the latter two have a lot of downsides in my personal opinion. Sets in which one color is not significantly better than the rest are few and far between, let alone one where 2 color, 3 color, and 5 color are equally draftable. There's really no other standard set that has been remotely this interesting since Innistrad, though the history is not stellar. Perhaps what we find interesting about it is less the gameplay, which is nonetheless solid, but rather pick complexity, which for once is worthy of discussion.
Also, for what it's worth, I watched LSV draft an extremely powerful Goblinslide deck live on stream the other day that would've gone 3-0 if not for a misplay and game of mulligan/slow hand on the play. If you're looking for innovative strategies, you might want to give that a shot the next time you first pick End Hostilities.
Well, I'm winning a lot in Khans, so it's not a high variance format.
Jokes aside, this certainly is one of my favorite limited experiences, particularly in draft. I think this set plays quite a bit better in draft than it does in sealed. I agree with all of the points already made about variety of strategies (of course, I fear change, so Mardu every draft for me), decent color balance, difficult decisions, consistency vs. power, etc. There is so much to think about while drafting, deckbuilding, and playing. All aspects of the limited experience offer a lot to think about in Khans.
I wasn't playing during ROE due to a gap in my Magic playing and didn't do Modern Masters because I'm not Uncle Scrooge, so Innistrad is the only set I can say I have personal experience with that I would rate above Khans (very slightly).
On a bit of a side note, I also unfortunately only did a little bit of stuff during Lorwyn block. That also seemed like a good draft experience. I know it's way too early to say definitively, but if Fate Reforged does what I think it's doing, it may wind up blending elements of Shadowmoor (or is it Morningtide that did this... somebody correct me...) into the KTK experience. It looks like hybrid will be a thing, perhaps more in abilities than in casting costs? So, if that's the case, the idea might switch from 2 colors + 1 splash being the most common strategy to 1 color + splash being the most common and having some rewards to go with it. Maybe a focus on "mono"(ish) color could actually come about if Fate Reforged and then the last set go down that path.
I don't know for sure obviously. Just a hypothesis. I think it could make for an interesting shift in the draft.
Here's a list of reasons why you'd like drafting KTK:
1. If you like doing powerful things.
2. If you like stable mana bases.
3. If you like hidden information.
4. If you like tough decisions in the draft, deckbuilding, and gameplay.
5. If you like your bomb creatures to not get killed for 2 mana.
6. If you like strategic variety that ranges from attacking with lots of 1/1s to attacking with multiple 6/6s.
7. If you like holding up mana.
8. If you like pack 1, pick 12 to matter in a draft because the playable count is so deep.
9. If you like attacking.
Here are a list of reasons why someone would not like drafting KTK;
1. If you forced Boros 50 times in Gatecrash and white tokens 50 times in M15 (aka you want there to be a 'best deck' so you can force it every time).
2. If you like playing powerful spells so much that you can't bear to pass some of them so that you can play the ones you picked earlier.
3. If you really like bomb noncreature spells so much so that you play 13 creatures and 17 lands.
4. If you don't like boardstalls, especially in a set with few ways to break them.
5. If you highly value knowing every possible trick/morph in the format with certainty.
6. If you like blocking.
7. If you like killing 5 mana creatures for 2 mana.
Personally, I the first list describes me better. I just love the overall balance of the set between the colors, clans, removal suite, creatures, and different strategies. I love the depth of playables so that I never feel like I'm playing the exact same deck (not sure how someone else has the opposite experience as me?) and it's rare that the same decision tree opens up even within the same deck on a consistent basis.
I'm an optimist at heart and so I'll put KTK in the Pantheon for now. I'm 60 drafts in and closer to the beginning than the end (after less than 30 M15 drafts).
I only draft at FNM for this set, and not even every week, so my experience is more limited (haw! haw!) than usual.
I've found the set fun to draft so far. There is variety and I've played against every deck types. The most common built-around I've seen is the Mardu tokens deck. I've played against all possible clans and 5-colors decks.
What I really don't like is the mana. There is always a 5-colors drafter (or more) sucking up all the mana fixing. It doesn't help that sometimes (like last Friday) we're 10 to draft. (This reduces the likelihood that your colors are deeply open and kills chances that something will wheel. In a 8-man draft, if every-one drafts a clan, there are two clans with only 1 drafters.) Watching the GP this week-end showed that I still don't pick two-colors lands high enough. IIRC, I saw Jacob Wilson pick a dual over removal. OTOH, I saw a painful draft from Tom Martell in the semi-final where he picked 5 colors without fixing and only started picking lands in the 3rd pack and still he won to go on the final... (I mean, after picking RUG in the first pack, 1st picking end hostilities in the 2nd?!?) Still, land drops are more important than in other sets and getting the right mana early also influences greatly the outcome. (I tend to play 7/7/4 or slightly better mana bases, like 8/7/4, 8/7/5, ...) due to that, I find that mulliganing is worst than usual since reducing the land drop / mana fixing probabilities hurts so much.
I've been frequently pushed into Abzan, so I've not been drafting as much variety as I'd like. I've always finished 2-1 so far. Usually, I lose in the final round. So far, I've always open or won more value than the price of entry, so the result have not influenced me negatively. OTOH, I've yet to really open money cards outside of fetch lands.
Another thing I don't like is that games still tend to go long. Especially some archetype, like the dreaded Sultai mirror which always seem to go to time. Even other decks tend to go long. The main thing keeping matches on time are the short games decided by mana or mulligans. Yay that.
Still, the difficulty of pick orders and the complexity of the game play makes it a fun format for me. I just wish I could draft it more often. (Yes, I've still kept my vow to stay off MTGO.)
On the plus side, I've had many games go to the wire, winning or losing by a hair. There have been fun blow-out and nice come-backs. I suppose it's the somewhat flat power level doing its work.
I don't like it at all. Aggro is basically unplayable. Morph outclasses the 2 drop aggro creatures in every conceivable way. I just played a sealed where I was 2 color splash a third aggro with 4 1 drops 8 2 drops 4 morph and 7 removal/tricks. I had 4 Mardu hateblade and 3 Mardu skullhunters. I went 2-2. In a different sealed i played a match where my opponent went turn 2 bondkin turn 3 mantis rider turn 4 impersonator. 2 games in a row. This set is draw the right mana draw your bombs win. It seems to me that sealed is about what you open way more than any other set I have seen. Sure people can say variance variance. But it seems that luck is much more of a factor than any other set I have played before. Only have done 1 draft so I cannot comment on drafting the set; sealed is utter crap though.
I find that aggressive decks in this format have a higher curve than usual, like maybe one mana higher than what you listed. There just aren't very many one-drops I would run, and most of them work better on defense like Disowned Ancestor, and yeah Mardu Hateblade. Hateblade is kind of like 1/1 unblockable on offense, which I think isn't generally playable. Morphs are really mana intensive, so you can run over someone who is relying on morphs with a good curve of 2-3-4.
And OK, some games are bad beats and decided really quickly. I went T3 Anafenza into T4 Butcher of the Horde once. But come on, that's really rare, they first have to have the really efficient rare/mythics and the right lands to make that deck. Then they have to draw the bombs, as well as the mana to play them at the start of the game. And even with the right lands, the citp tapped lands might even stall another turn. It's far more unlikely than just something like T2 Ordeal in Theros.
Khans is my second favorite draft set, behind Rise of the Eldrazi and slightly ahead of triple Innistrad for me. Things that I love about it:
-There are a lot of viable styles. You can do very slow, very fast, or midrange decks and have all of them be good.
-There aren't a lot of unbeatable bombs. The only cards that automatically win when resolved are the X spells very, very late game, which you can answer by killing the player before they matter. There is nothing like Pack Rat that immediately demands specific answers or death.
-Removal is plentiful relative to recent sets, and although generally weak, it is still good enough. This helps dampen the effect of a lot of bombs, because something like Mountain->Island->Plains->Mantis Rider can be wholly or partially answered by Bring Low, Suspension Field, Cancel, Arc Lightning, Murderous Cut, Arrow Storm, Master the Way, Monastery Flock, Kill Shot, Savage Punch, all 5 Charms, Debilitating Injury, Singing Bell Strike and more. There are just so many possible answers to things in this format, its wonderful.
-The morphs make for a very interesting environment with a lot of hidden information and possibilities to misplay by being too aggressive or not aggressive enough about blocking.
-People have hugely varying opinions on what is good, what is playable, and what is bad. Multiple pro teams came to wildly differing conclusions about the best colors and strategies in the format, with simultaneous claims that blue and black were the strongest/weakest colors. There are people on these boards who have claimed just about every possible strategy is both the best and worst possible thing to do in this set. I love the lack of certainty about what is the best, unlike the M15 triplicate spirits decks or the Theros white based heroic decks.
I like KTK draft a whole lot, much better than M!4, M15, 3xTHS, and BNG-THS-THS, and a bit better than full THS block (those are the only formats I have drafted, I recently returned to Magic from being away since the late 1990s).
The reasons I enjoy KTK draft:
1. Challenging, more complicated
2. Huge diversity in deck types
3. You can draft synergies such as +1 counters and the cards which gain advantage from that, ferocious, and warriors but the synergies are not ridiculously insane combos
4. Mana is important and strategic from a draft standpoint, not just a matter of sticking in 17 or 18 basic lands of two types
5. Blocking is important, unlike 3xTHS
6. Slower format, I do not like an aggressive format (matches the aggro sucks comment above), I enjoy longer games, I hate games ending on turn 6 (unless I win!)
7. No bomb commons like Triplicate Spirits or Wingsteed Rider
What I do not enjoy about KTK draft:
1. Hitting 5 mana is important, though not as auto-game-over in my view as in some others' views; if you are stuck on less than 5, though, and your opponent is at 5 or higher then I agree that it pretty much is game over though that is also true of some decks in other formats
2. A bit too many board stalls, though that's a consequence of having so many high toughness creatures which fits #5 above, I don't mind this really because you can draft cards which break these stalls such as Roar of Challenge and Barrage of Boulders
Another minor point: this is the first format I can remember where double queuing leaves you significantly open to losing on time in one or both queues. I have lost several matches that I am almost positive I would have won with another minute to play. All because I got greedy and impatient while waiting between rounds and decided to join another queue, hoping that I can play most of each match during the between match times of the other event, and in probably 1/2 of the cases, losing one or more matches on time.
That being said, I believe that a large part of this is the v4 client, which seems to be absurdly slow in some way that I can't quantify. Even playing quickly, it feels like time dwindles away alot faster. Some of the mechanical things you have to do (choosing targets, clicking through the OK dialog, tapping mana and then undoing because you accidentally chose the wrong color from your dual land, etc) take alot longer on this client than previous clients. Also board stalls often take much more thinking between moves.
I used to be able to play MTGO on my Mac with VirtualBox PC emulation, but I can't anymore, because something about the v4 client makes this so laggy that I run very close to time even when single queueing.
I really enjoy drafting KTK. There are a lot of playables and drafting is complex with a lot of decisions to make. Gameplay is fun and it seems like you can get behind on the board in a game and through careful play swing the game back in your favor.
I know that everyone has different opinions, but it seems like right out of the gates the deepest possible decks were BW Warriors or Jeskai. Now that people have caught on to that, it's difficult to corner those decks so you can sometimes get a pack deep and really feel like you drafted random crap and need a way to dig out. Usually when that happens, I know I'm not gonna be able to race so I go for super grindy. I must not be the only one, because KTK limited games seem to be REALLY slow and you have to be careful to not deck yourself. I can see why WOTC made sure not to include much to enable mill decks--Mind Sculpt and Grindclock would be a nightmare in a Sultai (or Abzan) deck.
I guess my only complaint is that I almost always see hard-to-pass black removal (Throttle, Dead Drop, Murderous Cut, Debilitating Injury, etc) in each of the first few packs, so I can't resist trying to draft removal-heavy B/x decks even though I want to try other strategies and don't enjoy playing against removal-heavy decks myself. I kinda miss that most other draft formats have had a viable UW fliers deck but it's pretty hard to make that work in KTK.
Another minor point: this is the first format I can remember where double queuing leaves you significantly open to losing on time in one or both queues. I have lost several matches that I am almost positive I would have won with another minute to play. All because I got greedy and impatient while waiting between rounds and decided to join another queue, hoping that I can play most of each match during the between match times of the other event, and in probably 1/2 of the cases, losing one or more matches on time.
Grumpy Cat says..... "good."
I've won about about 4 matches on time so far in KTK. 2 of them were clear losses otherwise. But, hopefully this will encourage faster play and it will discourage double queues. I've doubled queued about twice ever and both times it was a mistake that lead to worse play and I also just find it to be disrespectful and inconsiderate. It's impossible to actually play out two games in a fashion where you're not making at least one if not both of the players wait inordinate amounts of time during the matches. When I sense somebody has double queued, I actually go for beating them at their own game and just casually stroll through my turn and I wait 10 seconds or so before hitting "OK" on priority passes because odds are they just finished a move in their other game and would be ready to move on. But, waiting a bit means they'll have to make a move in both games.
It always seems like there would be a way to stagger games between the two drafts, but that very rarely works out. So, in the meantime, screw double queuers. I hope they lose every single match they play in KTK, preferably to time in matches they would have otherwise won.
I don't like it at all. Aggro is basically unplayable. Morph outclasses the 2 drop aggro creatures in every conceivable way. I just played a sealed where I was 2 color splash a third aggro with 4 1 drops 8 2 drops 4 morph and 7 removal/tricks. I had 4 Mardu hateblade and 3 Mardu skullhunters. I went 2-2. In a different sealed i played a match where my opponent went turn 2 bondkin turn 3 mantis rider turn 4 impersonator. 2 games in a row. This set is draw the right mana draw your bombs win. It seems to me that sealed is about what you open way more than any other set I have seen. Sure people can say variance variance. But it seems that luck is much more of a factor than any other set I have played before. Only have done 1 draft so I cannot comment on drafting the set; sealed is utter crap though.
Perhaps you have unreasonable expectations of your deck. In what format was building an aggro deck viable in sealed? Were those good formats?
I think that building your manabase correctly is a very difficult skill and one that is taxed severely in this format.
It always seems like there would be a way to stagger games between the two drafts, but that very rarely works out. So, in the meantime, screw double queuers. I hope they lose every single match they play in KTK, preferably to time in matches they would have otherwise won.
I can understand and sympathize with your sentiment here. I don't like playing in a way that is unnecessarily annoying for my opponents, and I try really hard to be responsive, but it's nearly impossible when two games are going at the same time to play responsively in both. The new client makes it much harder than the other one did, but no matter what the client, it's inevitable that you'll make your opponent wait at times.
That being said, as far as I can tell it's 100% legal and acceptable in MTGO to double queue, so it's a self-policing issue with two conflicting goals: I want to play continuously without getting bored waiting between rounds, but I also want to remain responsive in all of my matches. I try to balance these by only joining the second queue in between the second and third rounds of an event, which means that I am limited in general to only making the first opponent in the second event wait at all. And I've given several opponents wins because of my slowness that I am pretty sure they wouldn't have had otherwise, so hopefully that makes up for it a little bit.
But really, not trying to justify this behavior. It's inconsiderate, and I know that.
Maybe it's just variance, but I have never had a losing record before over an extended period of time and I think 15 sealed events is enough to author a judgement of sealed in the set. It just seems that pools are more variable than I have ever seen. Powerful multicolored cards but wrong fixing? Good luck. Bad morphs? Good luck. Preponderance of mono colored cards? Have fun limping to 2-2.
Maybe it's just variance, but I have never had a losing record before over an extended period of time and I think 15 sealed events is enough to author a judgement of sealed in the set. It just seems that pools are more variable than I have ever seen. Powerful multicolored cards but wrong fixing? Good luck. Bad morphs? Good luck. Preponderance of mono colored cards? Have fun limping to 2-2.
Where does a super deep playable pool factor in?
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Modern RBGLiving EndRBG
EDH UFblthpU BRXantchaRB BGVarolzGB URWZedruuWRU
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Is KTK Limited legitimately good, or is to just really complicated?
Before you dismiss this because you think KTK is among the greatest formats ever because everyone says so -- what makes it good?
Does KTK do the best job of rewarding strategy and knowledge? Sort of. Knowing the Morphs and the tricks of the format can pay dividends, but what about when everyone knows all the tricks? I would argue that the set has such high variance that beyond the basic level of not walking into traps, it doesn't really reward strategy. It's the old argument that lucking into Plains, Mountain, Island, Mantis Rider doesn't take much skill.
Maybe KTK has the most diversity of deck styles? Eh, not really. There's the greedy 5-color deck, the streamlined 2-color deck, and a bunch of vague splashed stuff in between. The mechanics aren't "build around me." They just...exist. You're happy to use them but you can't really draft around them. The closest thing to a build around card is probably the much debated Secret Plans, and the jury is clearly out on that one. Some swear it's the best card in the set, others maintain it's an unreliable combo piece.
KTK may offer the most consistent gameplay, an always rewarding experience. I'd say no since while Morph limits the damage that can be done from not drawing your colors, it also magnifies the damage done by not curving out to 3 and 5 mana. You can't really win in KTK if you're stuck on 4 mana for a while and your opponent has 5+. Good luck blocking.
So what's the deal? Despite all these shortcomings, people love KTK. And I wonder if it's simply because it's really complicated.
Magic is not a new game. The player base is experienced. They analyze, consume, and grow tired of new product quickly. (No other game puts out new content anywhere NEAR the pace of MTG, and we still grow bored with formats after a month or two.) So that's why I think KTK is so popular right now. It just takes a lot longer to get bored with it because of the combination of gold cards and Morph.
So what do you think? Is KTK really a pantheon set? Or are we just happy to have a set that we couldn't solve in about 3 days because that means the enjoyment lasts longer?
Put it this way -- if you could do just one draft of any format in MTG history, how high would you rank KTK-KTK-KTK?
Definitely more diverse deck styles. Including everything from 2-5 colors is a huge increase in the number of available choices that can't be downplayed. Especially in sealed, makes for many options to consider for every pool; you could get by drafting in your own style every time, if you want, since the card pool is so deep. Options are still available regardless though.
Build around uncommons for draft also include the BW warriors ones (Chiefs, Raider's Spoils, etc) and Quiet Contemplation. I don't know if the morph deck and the quiet contemplation deck are top tier, and I'm not sure it matters. They're something fun to do that can work out pretty well. Some version of the BW warriors deck is pretty much always drafted.
Khans hits a sweet spot in speed where it's slow enough that it's not too volatile, but not so slow that you can just durdle around the whole game. Means you don't necessarily have to make a very fast deck, or a very slow one. Very skill intensive, games offer many meaningful decision points that can be the difference between winning and losing.
Of course there's luck in any format. Building a deck to have the highest chance of getting the mana you need to cast the spells you want takes skill, however. Getting stuck on 4 lands is rough, but there are (or should be with a good deck) lots of things you can do still do at that number of lands. If you can't block, you can always race, if they flip they are spending 5 mana to get on average like 2 more power on the board.
Khans is fairly easily my own favorite Limited format thus far. Again, lots of decisions to be made in draft, in deckbuilding, and in play. If that falls under complicated, so be it, I think it's very important to have in a format. Most games are tense and exciting. Admittedly, I'm kind of on-again-off-again with Magic, so I didn't play in some of the most lauded formats such as Innistrad.
The complexity of the format is nice, but I don't think it's the biggest selling point. DGR was a complex format but I was bored by it pretty quickly. But I do like that I can get to the end of a game, knowing that I had to make specific choices but not knowing even by the end of the game which choice was best. That keeps the game fresh for me in a way that very few formats have done.
There's also the general lack of bombs. Other than a guy I played a couple days ago with double Duneblast in his deck, most plays seems pretty beatable if you read the board carefully and play around what you've seen in previous games. There aren't any cards that you can play in the early or mid-game that just decide the game several turns before it actually ends, and that has been a significant problem with almost every format for a long time.
I'd say, in order of importance to me, the things that make KTK good are:
1) narrow band of power
2) good pace
3) genuinely difficult gameplay decisions
4) tremendously relevant sideboards
I do think the lateral drafting strategies like Secret Plans or Goblinslide could have been afforded a bit more, but I always think that. I was the guy who always tried to draft Rooftop Storm decks.
i like your question and your challenge to those who like KTK, though, and i'm curious to see otehrs' responses.
(however, i will echo Puddle Jumper's point that i miss having as many sideways strategies as sets tended to have in the past (well, ignoring Theros, which seemed to have very, very, very few)).
Goblins have poor impulse control. Don't click this link!!
some of my favourite flavour text:
Wayward Soul
"no home no heart no hope"
—Stronghold graffito
Raging Goblin
He raged at the world, at his family, at his life. But mostly he just raged.
What shortcomings?
From where I sit there's always a tension between power and stability when it comes to splashing in your manabase. I love that this format
1. Has powerful cards that pull you to 5-colour, but the mana won't let everyone do that
2. Has morphs, which are below the curve as grey ogres, but powerful when flipped up
3. Has a bunch of bears that you'd think would be outclassed by morphs, yet are incredibly necessary to your curve
4. Has mechanics that discourage blocking (weak removal, pump spells, unmorphing), yet a high toughness/power ratio for the creatures generally
5. Creatures trade all the time, yet often the games come down to board stalls and winning via evasion
And what's best is that NONE of these things dominate the format. You might think that the best and most powerful thing you can do is draft a 5-colour deck. You're not going to consistently win with that strategy.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is be aggro. Sometimes it's being a powerful midrange deck. Sometimes it's going deep on graveyard/delve strategies.
Just being able to draft and re-draft the set so many times speaks to how well designed the set is. There's so much uncertainty and things going on during the draft and the game play. Yet skilled players can still leverage angles to win more than they lose.
I definitely think it is a pantheon set.
Right now I'm prepared to put it up with ROE and INN as in the top 3 limited sets of all time. Maybe Modern Master is up there too. But better than Ravnica. Better than Mirrodin.
I finally decided to call up Wizards and spend an hour or two recovering as many old accounts as I could. I ended up getting back about 21 accounts, which wasn't all of them, but was most. I even got back my original account, created in 2002 and not logged into since like 2003-ish.
Anyway, because of the way that Wizards awarded Phantom points to all accounts a while back, I now have several hundred phantom points to spend. So I've been playing alot of phantom 6 pack KTK sealed (also alot of new player drafts since somehow I ended up with tons of new player points in those accounts too).
I have both positive and negative things to say about KTK sealed. On the positive side, I feel like the games have the same good qualities mentioned above - lots of choices, always something interesting happening, usually (aside from the normal mana screw/flood games) back-and-forth satisfying affairs.
However, I feel like the deck construction for sealed is somewhat repetitive. Almost everyone is going to have 6 - 8 dual/tri lands in their pool, along with enough powerful morphs to make a "three color plus two splash" strategy nearly always viable. And in the end, it becomes very tempting and almost always achievable to go 5 colors like this. I have not played a sealed yet where I wasn't 5 colors.
And the thing is, it mostly works. The great thing about KTK from my perspective is that it allows me to play the way I like, and still be nearly as successful as I would be playing optimally. Most other sets have a wider chasm between the success rate of optimal deck construction vs. suboptimal construction, when compared to KTK. KTK is very forgiving - you can play many different decks out of the same card pool that will all do about as well as the others, and the optimal deck for that pool will only perform slightly better than the rest (most of the time). This allows me to play 5 colors with durdly "fun" cards and still win a decent percentage of the time.
Whereas I can see that being a turn off for the spike types who always want to play the optimal strategy regardless of "fun factor" and expect to achieve a notably better win rate in doing so, it's great for players like me, who don't mind trading a few points of win percentage for much more fun, wacky, wild, etc, games.
As for why I like it, I don't have any great insights, I think it mainly just has very good fundamentals. By "fundamentals" I mean the characteristics that I think are necessary conditions for a good draft format; taking a stab at listing them, something like:
1) Depth of playables (self explanatory, I think?)
2) Color balance (this is related to #1, I suppose)
3) Diversity of speed (you want varying levels of aggressive/defensive decks to be viable. If aggro or control is uniformly superior games become more repetitive, and, unless R&D did that on purpose, it tends to work against criterion #1)
4) Interactivity (this seems hard to define, though I think we're all familiar with the principle: games that in some way feel like one or both players are playing solitaire should be rare)
I think Khans is very good on criteria 1 and 3, and good on 2 and 4.
I don't think those "fundamentals" listed above are everything. Some possible "extras" could be:
- Novelty (Usually substantially new mechanics, like Innistrad's DFCs, Zendikar's Landfall, etc, even Morph for many players in Khans)
- Personally preferred play style (if you like ramp decks and giant monsters, you probably liked Rise of the Eldrazi; if you like fast beatdown, you probably enjoyed that about Gatecrash)
- Offbeat decks (Spider Spawning, Furnace Celebration, Homicidal Seclusion (Ha! No one saw a positive reference to Avacyn Restored coming! But seriously, that format sucked))
- Flavor and general "feel" of the set (totally subjective, of course)
For me, Khans doesn't score a lot of points from "extras" (I do like Morph, and the slower than average speed, and a lot of the art). That's why I prefer, for instance, Innistrad. (Despite Innistrad arguably having slightly weaker fundamentals; the color balance was no better than okay, for example. There were several offbeat things you could draft, and I thought the creative and overall feel were fantastic.) But that doesn't stop Khans from being good.
If I understand Phyrre's main complaint correctly, it's that certain elements in the set (like the inordinate importance of hitting 5 lands) increase variance in frustrating ways, which perhaps you could assign as a special demerit (akin to AVR's Miracles?). I understand the arguments for those things increasing variance and they seem plausible. But in practice, I'm just not seeing it. I don't feel like good/bad luck is deciding appreciably more games than usual (which, let's face it, is never negligible).
If you're drafting for fun, it's great. There are lots of really fun and interesting games. There's enough variety that I expect it to stay interesting longer than the average format.
However, if you're drafting competitively, it's pretty bad. The variance is significantly higher than normal. The percentage of games where either myself or my opponent never stood a chance is noticeably higher than normal. And the variance applies to the draft stage as well as the actual games. I've been in drafts where my 3 colors were decided early and remained open throughout the draft, but where I saw few if any relevant fixing. Sitting next to people going 5c can ruin your chances.
This isn't the first format like this...I think RoE is another good example of a format which is really fun but not the best competitively.
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
Draft: (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5)
Still, which past sets are you holding it up to for comparison? Magic has a very poor history of "perfect limited sets"... Innistrad, MM, and RoE are the only ones that come to mind, and the latter two have a lot of downsides in my personal opinion. Sets in which one color is not significantly better than the rest are few and far between, let alone one where 2 color, 3 color, and 5 color are equally draftable. There's really no other standard set that has been remotely this interesting since Innistrad, though the history is not stellar. Perhaps what we find interesting about it is less the gameplay, which is nonetheless solid, but rather pick complexity, which for once is worthy of discussion.
Also, for what it's worth, I watched LSV draft an extremely powerful Goblinslide deck live on stream the other day that would've gone 3-0 if not for a misplay and game of mulligan/slow hand on the play. If you're looking for innovative strategies, you might want to give that a shot the next time you first pick End Hostilities.
Cubetutor Link
Jokes aside, this certainly is one of my favorite limited experiences, particularly in draft. I think this set plays quite a bit better in draft than it does in sealed. I agree with all of the points already made about variety of strategies (of course, I fear change, so Mardu every draft for me), decent color balance, difficult decisions, consistency vs. power, etc. There is so much to think about while drafting, deckbuilding, and playing. All aspects of the limited experience offer a lot to think about in Khans.
I wasn't playing during ROE due to a gap in my Magic playing and didn't do Modern Masters because I'm not Uncle Scrooge, so Innistrad is the only set I can say I have personal experience with that I would rate above Khans (very slightly).
On a bit of a side note, I also unfortunately only did a little bit of stuff during Lorwyn block. That also seemed like a good draft experience. I know it's way too early to say definitively, but if Fate Reforged does what I think it's doing, it may wind up blending elements of Shadowmoor (or is it Morningtide that did this... somebody correct me...) into the KTK experience. It looks like hybrid will be a thing, perhaps more in abilities than in casting costs? So, if that's the case, the idea might switch from 2 colors + 1 splash being the most common strategy to 1 color + splash being the most common and having some rewards to go with it. Maybe a focus on "mono"(ish) color could actually come about if Fate Reforged and then the last set go down that path.
I don't know for sure obviously. Just a hypothesis. I think it could make for an interesting shift in the draft.
1. If you like doing powerful things.
2. If you like stable mana bases.
3. If you like hidden information.
4. If you like tough decisions in the draft, deckbuilding, and gameplay.
5. If you like your bomb creatures to not get killed for 2 mana.
6. If you like strategic variety that ranges from attacking with lots of 1/1s to attacking with multiple 6/6s.
7. If you like holding up mana.
8. If you like pack 1, pick 12 to matter in a draft because the playable count is so deep.
9. If you like attacking.
Here are a list of reasons why someone would not like drafting KTK;
1. If you forced Boros 50 times in Gatecrash and white tokens 50 times in M15 (aka you want there to be a 'best deck' so you can force it every time).
2. If you like playing powerful spells so much that you can't bear to pass some of them so that you can play the ones you picked earlier.
3. If you really like bomb noncreature spells so much so that you play 13 creatures and 17 lands.
4. If you don't like boardstalls, especially in a set with few ways to break them.
5. If you highly value knowing every possible trick/morph in the format with certainty.
6. If you like blocking.
7. If you like killing 5 mana creatures for 2 mana.
Personally, I the first list describes me better. I just love the overall balance of the set between the colors, clans, removal suite, creatures, and different strategies. I love the depth of playables so that I never feel like I'm playing the exact same deck (not sure how someone else has the opposite experience as me?) and it's rare that the same decision tree opens up even within the same deck on a consistent basis.
I'm an optimist at heart and so I'll put KTK in the Pantheon for now. I'm 60 drafts in and closer to the beginning than the end (after less than 30 M15 drafts).
RBGLiving EndRBG
EDH
UFblthpU
BRXantchaRB
BGVarolzGB
URWZedruuWRU
I suppose, though more creatures than average can punch through the Parapet.
RBGLiving EndRBG
EDH
UFblthpU
BRXantchaRB
BGVarolzGB
URWZedruuWRU
I've found the set fun to draft so far. There is variety and I've played against every deck types. The most common built-around I've seen is the Mardu tokens deck. I've played against all possible clans and 5-colors decks.
What I really don't like is the mana. There is always a 5-colors drafter (or more) sucking up all the mana fixing. It doesn't help that sometimes (like last Friday) we're 10 to draft. (This reduces the likelihood that your colors are deeply open and kills chances that something will wheel. In a 8-man draft, if every-one drafts a clan, there are two clans with only 1 drafters.) Watching the GP this week-end showed that I still don't pick two-colors lands high enough. IIRC, I saw Jacob Wilson pick a dual over removal. OTOH, I saw a painful draft from Tom Martell in the semi-final where he picked 5 colors without fixing and only started picking lands in the 3rd pack and still he won to go on the final... (I mean, after picking RUG in the first pack, 1st picking end hostilities in the 2nd?!?) Still, land drops are more important than in other sets and getting the right mana early also influences greatly the outcome. (I tend to play 7/7/4 or slightly better mana bases, like 8/7/4, 8/7/5, ...) due to that, I find that mulliganing is worst than usual since reducing the land drop / mana fixing probabilities hurts so much.
I've been frequently pushed into Abzan, so I've not been drafting as much variety as I'd like. I've always finished 2-1 so far. Usually, I lose in the final round. So far, I've always open or won more value than the price of entry, so the result have not influenced me negatively. OTOH, I've yet to really open money cards outside of fetch lands.
Another thing I don't like is that games still tend to go long. Especially some archetype, like the dreaded Sultai mirror which always seem to go to time. Even other decks tend to go long. The main thing keeping matches on time are the short games decided by mana or mulligans. Yay that.
Still, the difficulty of pick orders and the complexity of the game play makes it a fun format for me. I just wish I could draft it more often. (Yes, I've still kept my vow to stay off MTGO.)
On the plus side, I've had many games go to the wire, winning or losing by a hair. There have been fun blow-out and nice come-backs. I suppose it's the somewhat flat power level doing its work.
I find that aggressive decks in this format have a higher curve than usual, like maybe one mana higher than what you listed. There just aren't very many one-drops I would run, and most of them work better on defense like Disowned Ancestor, and yeah Mardu Hateblade. Hateblade is kind of like 1/1 unblockable on offense, which I think isn't generally playable. Morphs are really mana intensive, so you can run over someone who is relying on morphs with a good curve of 2-3-4.
And OK, some games are bad beats and decided really quickly. I went T3 Anafenza into T4 Butcher of the Horde once. But come on, that's really rare, they first have to have the really efficient rare/mythics and the right lands to make that deck. Then they have to draw the bombs, as well as the mana to play them at the start of the game. And even with the right lands, the citp tapped lands might even stall another turn. It's far more unlikely than just something like T2 Ordeal in Theros.
-There are a lot of viable styles. You can do very slow, very fast, or midrange decks and have all of them be good.
-There aren't a lot of unbeatable bombs. The only cards that automatically win when resolved are the X spells very, very late game, which you can answer by killing the player before they matter. There is nothing like Pack Rat that immediately demands specific answers or death.
-Removal is plentiful relative to recent sets, and although generally weak, it is still good enough. This helps dampen the effect of a lot of bombs, because something like Mountain->Island->Plains->Mantis Rider can be wholly or partially answered by Bring Low, Suspension Field, Cancel, Arc Lightning, Murderous Cut, Arrow Storm, Master the Way, Monastery Flock, Kill Shot, Savage Punch, all 5 Charms, Debilitating Injury, Singing Bell Strike and more. There are just so many possible answers to things in this format, its wonderful.
-The morphs make for a very interesting environment with a lot of hidden information and possibilities to misplay by being too aggressive or not aggressive enough about blocking.
-People have hugely varying opinions on what is good, what is playable, and what is bad. Multiple pro teams came to wildly differing conclusions about the best colors and strategies in the format, with simultaneous claims that blue and black were the strongest/weakest colors. There are people on these boards who have claimed just about every possible strategy is both the best and worst possible thing to do in this set. I love the lack of certainty about what is the best, unlike the M15 triplicate spirits decks or the Theros white based heroic decks.
The reasons I enjoy KTK draft:
1. Challenging, more complicated
2. Huge diversity in deck types
3. You can draft synergies such as +1 counters and the cards which gain advantage from that, ferocious, and warriors but the synergies are not ridiculously insane combos
4. Mana is important and strategic from a draft standpoint, not just a matter of sticking in 17 or 18 basic lands of two types
5. Blocking is important, unlike 3xTHS
6. Slower format, I do not like an aggressive format (matches the aggro sucks comment above), I enjoy longer games, I hate games ending on turn 6 (unless I win!)
7. No bomb commons like Triplicate Spirits or Wingsteed Rider
What I do not enjoy about KTK draft:
1. Hitting 5 mana is important, though not as auto-game-over in my view as in some others' views; if you are stuck on less than 5, though, and your opponent is at 5 or higher then I agree that it pretty much is game over though that is also true of some decks in other formats
2. A bit too many board stalls, though that's a consequence of having so many high toughness creatures which fits #5 above, I don't mind this really because you can draft cards which break these stalls such as Roar of Challenge and Barrage of Boulders
That being said, I believe that a large part of this is the v4 client, which seems to be absurdly slow in some way that I can't quantify. Even playing quickly, it feels like time dwindles away alot faster. Some of the mechanical things you have to do (choosing targets, clicking through the OK dialog, tapping mana and then undoing because you accidentally chose the wrong color from your dual land, etc) take alot longer on this client than previous clients. Also board stalls often take much more thinking between moves.
I used to be able to play MTGO on my Mac with VirtualBox PC emulation, but I can't anymore, because something about the v4 client makes this so laggy that I run very close to time even when single queueing.
I know that everyone has different opinions, but it seems like right out of the gates the deepest possible decks were BW Warriors or Jeskai. Now that people have caught on to that, it's difficult to corner those decks so you can sometimes get a pack deep and really feel like you drafted random crap and need a way to dig out. Usually when that happens, I know I'm not gonna be able to race so I go for super grindy. I must not be the only one, because KTK limited games seem to be REALLY slow and you have to be careful to not deck yourself. I can see why WOTC made sure not to include much to enable mill decks--Mind Sculpt and Grindclock would be a nightmare in a Sultai (or Abzan) deck.
I guess my only complaint is that I almost always see hard-to-pass black removal (Throttle, Dead Drop, Murderous Cut, Debilitating Injury, etc) in each of the first few packs, so I can't resist trying to draft removal-heavy B/x decks even though I want to try other strategies and don't enjoy playing against removal-heavy decks myself. I kinda miss that most other draft formats have had a viable UW fliers deck but it's pretty hard to make that work in KTK.
Grumpy Cat says..... "good."
I've won about about 4 matches on time so far in KTK. 2 of them were clear losses otherwise. But, hopefully this will encourage faster play and it will discourage double queues. I've doubled queued about twice ever and both times it was a mistake that lead to worse play and I also just find it to be disrespectful and inconsiderate. It's impossible to actually play out two games in a fashion where you're not making at least one if not both of the players wait inordinate amounts of time during the matches. When I sense somebody has double queued, I actually go for beating them at their own game and just casually stroll through my turn and I wait 10 seconds or so before hitting "OK" on priority passes because odds are they just finished a move in their other game and would be ready to move on. But, waiting a bit means they'll have to make a move in both games.
It always seems like there would be a way to stagger games between the two drafts, but that very rarely works out. So, in the meantime, screw double queuers. I hope they lose every single match they play in KTK, preferably to time in matches they would have otherwise won.
Perhaps you have unreasonable expectations of your deck. In what format was building an aggro deck viable in sealed? Were those good formats?
I think that building your manabase correctly is a very difficult skill and one that is taxed severely in this format.
I can understand and sympathize with your sentiment here. I don't like playing in a way that is unnecessarily annoying for my opponents, and I try really hard to be responsive, but it's nearly impossible when two games are going at the same time to play responsively in both. The new client makes it much harder than the other one did, but no matter what the client, it's inevitable that you'll make your opponent wait at times.
That being said, as far as I can tell it's 100% legal and acceptable in MTGO to double queue, so it's a self-policing issue with two conflicting goals: I want to play continuously without getting bored waiting between rounds, but I also want to remain responsive in all of my matches. I try to balance these by only joining the second queue in between the second and third rounds of an event, which means that I am limited in general to only making the first opponent in the second event wait at all. And I've given several opponents wins because of my slowness that I am pretty sure they wouldn't have had otherwise, so hopefully that makes up for it a little bit.
But really, not trying to justify this behavior. It's inconsiderate, and I know that.
Where does a super deep playable pool factor in?
RBGLiving EndRBG
EDH
UFblthpU
BRXantchaRB
BGVarolzGB
URWZedruuWRU