However you slice it, black is deeper than blue, and I don't think this is debatable.
Depends on what you mean by "deeper". Only half the cards you draft actually get played, so the bottom X cards in a colour aren't really ever going to be the metric by which that colour is judged.
Taking the top 10 Commons in each colour, Blue and Black and moderately evenly matched. In that sense, I think it's reasonable to conclude that Black is no deeper. A lot has to go wrong with a draft before we care that Black's 12th-best Common is better than Blue's.
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Yeah, I steamrolled every other deck in the sealed prerelease with a Gw aggro/midrangey deck and then got massacred byt a UGb deck 2-0. My only round loss... Really reconsidering my initial views on Blue right now. Still don't think it's as strong a base as green but I'll definitely be drafting it when the opportunity pops up.
I find these two statements to be somewhat contradictory.
Go read Conley woods review and he gives it a 2.5 which is exactly where it should be.
A 3 means you should always be playing that card if you are in that color, clearly this isn't the case with Archaeomancer because if you don't get the sorceries and instants to go along with it its worthless.
"This is generally going to be worse than Gravedigger is due to consistency issues"
So I've seen a bunch of people's early evaluations of M13 limited, and the apparent consensus is that blue is the set's worst colors. I have only played three events, mind you, but I consider myself a bit of a core set limited guru, and while I think it's a bit early to say that blue is the set's best color, I think it's significant;y more in the conversation than people are giving it credit for.
As I've posted elsewhere, Archaeomancer is my pick for the set's best common.
Depends on what you mean by "deeper". Only half the cards you draft actually get played, so the bottom X cards in a colour aren't really ever going to be the metric by which that colour is judged.
Taking the top 10 Commons in each colour, Blue and Black and moderately evenly matched. In that sense, I think it's reasonable to conclude that Black is no deeper. A lot has to go wrong with a draft before we care that Black's 12th-best Common is better than Blue's.
I don't agree with this. Being able to pick up playable commons later means that you are more easily able to switch colors later as well as insure against being cut. Plus it's hard to comment at the moment on how many spare playables you end up with at the end of a typical draft - if you always end up with 35 playables then sure whatever, but if this is more like AVR then you bet I care about how good the marginal cards are. I think black's average commons are better than blue's anyway, but without going too nuts on card-by-card comparisons the above reasons still stand as to why black is a deeper color.
@semantics: sure blue's top 6 commons are probably equal on balance to black's, but color depth really matters the most when you're being cut and trying to salvage. At that point you typically don't get a shot at the great to good commons, but rather are trying to build a deck from commons 7 through
19 hence the above analysis.
I am very relieved to hear that blue is better than people were giving it credit for. Archeomancer is a card I initially wrote off but I will definitely keep an open mind going into this one.
I'm happy to see timemaster is up to his old tricks. I'm starting a betting pool for his next ban date. PM for details.
I don't agree with this. Being able to pick up playable commons later means that you are more easily able to switch colors later as well as insure against being cut. Plus it's hard to comment at the moment on how many spare playables you end up with at the end of a typical draft - if you always end up with 35 playables then sure whatever, but if this is more like AVR then you bet I care about how good the marginal cards are. I think black's average commons are better than blue's anyway, but without going too nuts on card-by-card comparisons the above reasons still stand as to why black is a deeper color.
@semantics: sure blue's top 6 commons are probably equal on balance to black's, but color depth really matters the most when you're being cut and trying to salvage. At that point you typically don't get a shot at the great to good commons, but rather are trying to build a deck from commons 7 through
19 hence the above analysis.
If you're trying to make a deck mostly on the back of mediocre commons in a particular color, odds are one of two things has happened:
1. It's pack 2, and you weren't able to send a great signal due to a good deal of color depth in pack 1, so you end up cut from your main color. If this is the case, you just focus on strengthening your second color rather than piling up mediocrity.
or
2. You're poorly reading signals and should be taking some other color's top commons as they come your way.
Good drafters seldom switch colors so late in a draft that you're locked out of your correctly read color's top 6-7 commons when you need them most. If it somehow happens, it's usually correct to just make it work by following through with #1. However, it doesn't really matter much, as being cut hard by a bad drafter is going to significantly hurt your deck no matter what colors you're drafting. If you read well-sent signals from your neighbor, however, this won't often be a problem, and I would personally rather be blue in that spot than black.
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If you're trying to make a deck mostly on the back of mediocre commons in a particular color, odds are one of two things has happened:
1. It's pack 2, and you weren't able to send a great signal due to a good deal of color depth in pack 1, so you end up cut from your main color. If this is the case, you just focus on strengthening your second color rather than piling up mediocrity.
or
2. You're poorly reading signals and should be taking some other color's top commons as they come your way.
being cut hard by a bad drafter is going to significantly hurt your deck no matter what colors you're drafting.
This is where color depth really matters. The whole idea behind depth of color is that someone can open a bomb rare two seats up and cut you out, but if your first two picks are the same color you don't have to abandon it if the color is deep.
If you read well-sent signals from your neighbor, however, this won't often be a problem, and I would personally rather be blue in that spot than black.
Color depth isn't a relevant concern here, since neither color is so shallow that it's reasonable to expect no playables from packs if nobody else is taking them. If you read well-sent signals from your neighbours, you'll be the only guy in your main color for two seats to your right anyway.
Quote from OhDaisy! »
Is it just me, or has this thread made it really obvious that Semantics and T1memaster are the same person?
I'm kind of jealous. How many of the forum regulars have a pet troll of their very own?
But more seriously, I do think that Semantics is slightly underselling the importance of a color's marginal cards to its depth in draft (though this does, of course, depend greatly on the format in question). I agree that if you're looking at marginal commons to fill out your deck it is often the case that something has gone wrong in your draft, but:
a) that can happen even when you draft "perfectly", and
b) it isn't always wrong.
As an example of a (b), consider a non-rare situation that came up while drafting GW in Innistrad. You'd sometimes go GW because you took strong white early (say, a Fiend Hunter) and got passed a lot of green (Darkthicket Wolves and Prey Upons, etc). If you started getting cut on white, it was sometimes correct to stick to your guns and take lower-tier white cards (like Silverchase Fox or Elder Cathar) rather than moving into something else, as long as the green wasn't cut too. White had a lot of cards worse than its premier commons that were still playable and could fill out a curve, so even when you got cut on white you could still salvage enough playables to stay on color if you wanted to.
Basically, because white had depth in its more marginal cards in Innistrad, it enabled you to stay in even when you got cut, at least to a greater extent than many colors in many draft formats. That wasn't always the right choice, but sometimes it was. It could be due to synergy (you've got a sick green deck with some travel preps, and you'd rather be GW than try to splash in your aggro deck), or because of high power in the white cards you did have (you opened a Geist-Honored Monk).
That's why the marginal commons still matter. I agree with Semantics that if you're rooting around in the low-quality commons to salvage your main color something has gone wrong, but having depth in marginal playables adds a level of safety when something incentivizes you to move into a color late, or stick to a color that's being cut. Overall, it certainly can make a color more attractive.
Is it just me, or has this thread made it really obvious that Semantics and T1memaster are the same person?
I'm insulted. I at least make a concerted effort to use correct grammar, and I'm so long winded that it's impossible for me to even have time to make more posts than I do.
Quote from Dire Wombat »
But more seriously, I do think that Semantics is slightly underselling the importance of a color's marginal cards to its depth in draft (though this does, of course, depend greatly on the format in question). I agree that if you're looking at marginal commons to fill out your deck it is often the case that something has gone wrong in your draft, but:
a) that can happen even when you draft "perfectly", and
b) it isn't always wrong.
As an example of a (b), consider a non-rare situation that came up while drafting GW in Innistrad. You'd sometimes go GW because you took strong white early (say, a Fiend Hunter) and got passed a lot of green (Darkthicket Wolves and Prey Upons, etc). If you started getting cut on white, it was sometimes correct to stick to your guns and take lower-tier white cards (like Silverchase Fox or Elder Cathar) rather than moving into something else, as long as the green wasn't cut too. White had a lot of cards worse than its premier commons that were still playable and could fill out a curve, so even when you got cut on white you could still salvage enough playables to stay on color if you wanted to.
Basically, because white had depth in its more marginal cards in Innistrad, it enabled you to stay in even when you got cut, at least to a greater extent than many colors in many draft formats. That wasn't always the right choice, but sometimes it was. It could be due to synergy (you've got a sick green deck with some travel preps, and you'd rather be GW than try to splash in your aggro deck), or because of high power in the white cards you did have (you opened a Geist-Honored Monk).
That's why the marginal commons still matter. I agree with Semantics that if you're rooting around in the low-quality commons to salvage your main color something has gone wrong, but having depth in marginal playables adds a level of safety when something incentivizes you to move into a color late, or stick to a color that's being cut. Overall, it certainly can make a color more attractive.
This is a really interesting point, but I think the example is a tad inappropriate in terms of supporting the general argument. In Innistrad's GW aggro archetype, there were very few cards that were absolutely essential to the archetype (Avacyn's Pilgrim, Travel Preparations, and maybe Prey Upon), and while cards like Voiceless Spirit and Chapel Geist were really good and ideal, the aggression of the curve was always much more important than exactly what was in that curve. I won with plenty of GW decks that were more full of Silverchase Foxes and Elder Cathars than Geists and Spirits simply because I was still able to curve out and prepare for travel as normal. In M13, outside of "the Exalted deck", I don't think you'll be as lucky as this, in that every color's mediocre cards are so, well, intrinsically mediocre that they don't really have the ability to be adequate replacements for the better options you aren't seeing.
However, I do see your general point, and I readily admit that I'd rather have a deck with Canyon Minotaurs and Silvercoat Lions than one with Kraken Hatchlings and Negates, but I just don't see the Minotaur/Lion quality deck doing any better than 1-2 at a good draft table anyway. Sure, the incentives of being able to pick up that 2nd pack Ajani after seeing nothing but marginal white commons in pack 1 might seem comforting, but I will always favor solid decks with strong commons over decks with a couple bombs and mediocre commons.
The takeaway from this thread was meant to be that nobody should be disregarding, disrespecting, or disengaging from blue, because it's nowhere near as bad as people said it was going to be. I'm by no means promoting forcing it in draft or suggesting that it's easy to draft and play well. I actually think the opposite: blue looks like the hardest color to draft and play optimally, as its cards are more likely to become more powerful when they work in concert with a dedicated game plan.
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Signalling is like farting: it's a natural thing that helps people avoid being where you are, and if you try to do it deliberately, things turn to crap fast.
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I hereby found the American Chapter of the Zealots of Semantics. All glory to The Curmudgeon.
Izzet Chronarch was ridiculous. But it had Peel from Reality to create a soft lock with. And he had Savant and Steamcore by his side.
I can see how the Mancer could be considered a spectacular common and the possible power it could generate, but why should I take her over an aggressive evasive creature that's going to start my opponent's clock ticking?
Can't see this as anything higher than a 5th pick. That being said, woe to the man who plays against 5Arch.dec.
It's a good card, but tertiary in terms of what decks should looking for.
I'm insulted. I at least make a concerted effort to use correct grammar, and I'm so long winded that it's impossible for me to even have time to make more posts than I do.
In a sealed I played at the prerelease, I opened a Stormtide Leviathan and Sphinx of Uthuun, but ended up playing neither (even though I went blue), in favor of a build with a more aggressive curve that topped out at 5 for a single Faerie Invaders. I didn't do particularly well with it, mainly because my opponents had better bombs than what I was playing, and I couldn't easily end games through large numbers of cards that gummed up the ground, and quite a lot of removal. I realized after a few losses that Leviathan would have been both castable and dominant in every game I played with that deck.
I haven't drafted the set yet, but in general sealed seems very slow to me, and reliant on big, powerful effects to end games. If that's true, blue's lack of strong blockers and lack of powerful lategame effects seems to kind of doom it to marginality. So is it more that you disagree with my premise about the format, or that you disagree that blue can compete in that kind of environment?
Wit's End is the PERFECT answer to your opponent's Monomania however.
Just hold on to your Wit's End when they Monomania, so you can Wit's End them on your next turn!!!
I think this is fairly reminiscent of the "Jace Battles" we have seen in past standards.. My guess is we will soon witness the great Monomania-Wit's End battles.
Is it just me, or has this thread made it really obvious that Semantics and T1memaster are the same person?
Whats obvious is there's some really bad players on this forum, including Semantics. Either way he provided me with a nice quote.
I'd like to add that Semantics entire post goes against everything the actual pros(like Conley Woods) have said about m13. I like how he called himself a core set limited guru that was hilarious.
I'm insulted. I at least make a concerted effort to use correct grammar, and I'm so long winded that it's impossible for me to even have time to make more posts than I do.
When all else fails and you get completely logically destroyed, make a comment about grammar or typos. You are as transparent as you are stupid. "significant;y"
Infraction for flaming. Calling other users stupid is not acceptable.
Double posts merged, as well.
—meg
So I've seen a bunch of people's early evaluations of M13 limited, and the apparent consensus is that blue is the set's worst colors. I have only played three events, mind you, but I consider myself a bit of a core set limited guru, and while I think it's a bit early to say that blue is the set's best color, I think it's significant;y more in the conversation than people are giving it credit for.
As I've posted elsewhere, Archaeomancer is my pick for the set's best common.
In a sealed I played at the prerelease, I opened a Stormtide Leviathan and Sphinx of Uthuun, but ended up playing neither (even though I went blue), in favor of a build with a more aggressive curve that topped out at 5 for a single Faerie Invaders. I didn't do particularly well with it, mainly because my opponents had better bombs than what I was playing, and I couldn't easily end games through large numbers of cards that gummed up the ground, and quite a lot of removal. I realized after a few losses that Leviathan would have been both castable and dominant in every game I played with that deck.
I haven't drafted the set yet, but in general sealed seems very slow to me, and reliant on big, powerful effects to end games. If that's true, blue's lack of strong blockers and lack of powerful lategame effects seems to kind of doom it to marginality. So is it more that you disagree with my premise about the format, or that you disagree that blue can compete in that kind of environment?
Well, I think there are two ways of looking at this. You can certainly look at it as a format in which only the late game tends to matter, or you can look at it as a grindy type of environment in which powerful spells can often punish decks that rely on expensive threats. It's merely, ahem, semantics, but if you choose to look at the format as the latter, blue does just fine in either a main or support role. The reason I'm so bullish on Archaeomancer is because I think the 1/2 body, while not usually relevant, is good enough, and the effect is often so powerful that you can easily make up for the fact that you haven't aggressively contributed to the board. In a grindy format, resource advantages often lead to wins, and this set thankfully has some very powerful spells at common and, especially, at uncommon. If this card were in M12, I would have written it off as mediocre, as the set was just too fast to justify a 1/2 for 4. Here, though, assuming the format isn't faster than it seemed last weekend, it's exactly the type of card I want, because it does three things that commons almost never get to do:
1. It makes just about every spell in your deck better,
2. it can provide incremental advantage due to its being a creature, and
3. it offers raw card advantage and often, more importantly, card quality advantage, both of which are really important in slower limited environments.
As I've admitted before, I'm likely overselling the card by quite a bit. It's not the blanket "best common", as I said it was, but I still contend that it's the card that I most want in the decks in which it strives, as when it's good, nothing at common is better. I understand that when it's not optimal, it's just mediocre-to-bad, which is why I've taken a step back from my apparent fanaticism, after reading people's thoughtful replies.
I played a deck with double Archaeomancer, a spell suite of about 8 spells, and Stormtide Leviathan this past weekend, and it was perfect. The great thing about blue's spell suite in particular is that it can often rely more on a card like the Leviathan, as short of Murder, there's not really anything that can deal with it that blue can't handle. I tried to build the deck to be adaptable, able to be aggressive enough to put on pressure through cards like Welkin Tern, Wind Drake, and Talrand's Invocation while also strong enough from a control standpoint to survive and thrive into the late game through card advantage sources like double Archaeomancer returning any of my plethora of spells. I liked the fact that the blue cards in particular allowed me to play either game, but I certainly would like to be more focused when I give the format a try again this weekend. I like that blue supports either type of deck, and really everything in between. I prefer playing control, which is probably why I love Archaeomancer so much, but the main point is that if you're an aggro player, blue still offers you a flier suite at common and tempo opportunities that no other color can match. It's obviously light on removal, but Encrust is pretty solid, and every other color offers options on that and the other fronts with which blue struggles, like creature size and reach.
For the record, in that Leviathan deck, I never played any of my rares other than Clone all day, and Clone copied Archaeomancer to get back Prey Upon for the third time. I regularly buried my opponents in card advantage, reusing Invocations, Unsummons, and Prey Upons all day, and I won a couple games in which I never drew a Forest. Niche example? Sure, but I still was impressed by what blue was capable of doing on its own, a situation you'll never have to worry about practically.
Quote from Pseudofate »
Izzet Chronarch was ridiculous. But it had Peel from Reality to create a soft lock with. And he had Savant and Steamcore by his side.
I can see how the Mancer could be considered a spectacular common and the possible power it could generate, but why should I take her over an aggressive evasive creature that's going to start my opponent's clock ticking?
Can't see this as anything higher than a 5th pick. That being said, woe to the man who plays against 5Arch.dec.
It's a good card, but tertiary in terms of what decks should looking for.
Again, I think it's a bit Pyrrhic to use other sets as evidence too much, as the card quality in Ravnica block was so much higher than any core set anyway. The environments are different, and even if you find a slow set that compares, like Rise of the Eldrazi, the spell bases and competing archetypes are variable enough to throw off the direct comparison.
I don't think I ever want to first pick Archaeomancer. I just think it has the highest power potential of any common in the set, a potential that, if realized, makes your deck really tough to overcome in such a (seemingly) slow format. Yes, Welkin Tern and Wind Drake are clocks, and I think the former is a card I would first pick over a 'mancer if the rest of the pack were weak, but I don't think this format caters well to aggro in general. Calling Archaeomancer a "tertiary" need is a bit silly, as grindy, controlling decks (which I guess will rule this format when all's said and done) want a 3rd 'mancer before they want a single Wind Drake.
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Quote from Hardened »
I hereby found the American Chapter of the Zealots of Semantics. All glory to The Curmudgeon.
I think a lot of you guys are underestimating blues power late game. Card draw is insane, archaeomancer is insane, and essence scatter is insane.
Well, the easy response to that is that card draw is only as powerful as what you have available to draw with it. If you're just drawing more middling threats, then it won't save you from a Serra Angel. However, if drafted and played well, it should be easy to translate blue's sources for card advantage into board and game state advantage.
Essence Scatter is good, but calling it insane is a bit much. I do like it more in the later game than the early, though, as you gain maximum value out of it when you're countering impactful 5-drops. I really like how well Faerie Invaders and Scatter work together, in the same kind of way that Bone to Ash and Nephalia Seakite worked together.
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Depends on what you mean by "deeper". Only half the cards you draft actually get played, so the bottom X cards in a colour aren't really ever going to be the metric by which that colour is judged.
Taking the top 10 Commons in each colour, Blue and Black and moderately evenly matched. In that sense, I think it's reasonable to conclude that Black is no deeper. A lot has to go wrong with a draft before we care that Black's 12th-best Common is better than Blue's.
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Go read Conley woods review and he gives it a 2.5 which is exactly where it should be.
A 3 means you should always be playing that card if you are in that color, clearly this isn't the case with Archaeomancer because if you don't get the sorceries and instants to go along with it its worthless.
"This is generally going to be worse than Gravedigger is due to consistency issues"
Either way its not the "best common in the set"
I don't agree with this. Being able to pick up playable commons later means that you are more easily able to switch colors later as well as insure against being cut. Plus it's hard to comment at the moment on how many spare playables you end up with at the end of a typical draft - if you always end up with 35 playables then sure whatever, but if this is more like AVR then you bet I care about how good the marginal cards are. I think black's average commons are better than blue's anyway, but without going too nuts on card-by-card comparisons the above reasons still stand as to why black is a deeper color.
@semantics: sure blue's top 6 commons are probably equal on balance to black's, but color depth really matters the most when you're being cut and trying to salvage. At that point you typically don't get a shot at the great to good commons, but rather are trying to build a deck from commons 7 through
19 hence the above analysis.
I'm happy to see timemaster is up to his old tricks. I'm starting a betting pool for his next ban date. PM for details.
If you're trying to make a deck mostly on the back of mediocre commons in a particular color, odds are one of two things has happened:
1. It's pack 2, and you weren't able to send a great signal due to a good deal of color depth in pack 1, so you end up cut from your main color. If this is the case, you just focus on strengthening your second color rather than piling up mediocrity.
or
2. You're poorly reading signals and should be taking some other color's top commons as they come your way.
Good drafters seldom switch colors so late in a draft that you're locked out of your correctly read color's top 6-7 commons when you need them most. If it somehow happens, it's usually correct to just make it work by following through with #1. However, it doesn't really matter much, as being cut hard by a bad drafter is going to significantly hurt your deck no matter what colors you're drafting. If you read well-sent signals from your neighbor, however, this won't often be a problem, and I would personally rather be blue in that spot than black.
:dance:Fact or Fiction of the [Limited] Clan:dance:
3. You are playing Avacyn Restored.
*DCI Rules Advisor*
This is where color depth really matters. The whole idea behind depth of color is that someone can open a bomb rare two seats up and cut you out, but if your first two picks are the same color you don't have to abandon it if the color is deep.
Color depth isn't a relevant concern here, since neither color is so shallow that it's reasonable to expect no playables from packs if nobody else is taking them. If you read well-sent signals from your neighbours, you'll be the only guy in your main color for two seats to your right anyway.
I'm kind of jealous. How many of the forum regulars have a pet troll of their very own?
Ain't that the truth.
But more seriously, I do think that Semantics is slightly underselling the importance of a color's marginal cards to its depth in draft (though this does, of course, depend greatly on the format in question). I agree that if you're looking at marginal commons to fill out your deck it is often the case that something has gone wrong in your draft, but:
a) that can happen even when you draft "perfectly", and
b) it isn't always wrong.
As an example of a (b), consider a non-rare situation that came up while drafting GW in Innistrad. You'd sometimes go GW because you took strong white early (say, a Fiend Hunter) and got passed a lot of green (Darkthicket Wolves and Prey Upons, etc). If you started getting cut on white, it was sometimes correct to stick to your guns and take lower-tier white cards (like Silverchase Fox or Elder Cathar) rather than moving into something else, as long as the green wasn't cut too. White had a lot of cards worse than its premier commons that were still playable and could fill out a curve, so even when you got cut on white you could still salvage enough playables to stay on color if you wanted to.
Basically, because white had depth in its more marginal cards in Innistrad, it enabled you to stay in even when you got cut, at least to a greater extent than many colors in many draft formats. That wasn't always the right choice, but sometimes it was. It could be due to synergy (you've got a sick green deck with some travel preps, and you'd rather be GW than try to splash in your aggro deck), or because of high power in the white cards you did have (you opened a Geist-Honored Monk).
That's why the marginal commons still matter. I agree with Semantics that if you're rooting around in the low-quality commons to salvage your main color something has gone wrong, but having depth in marginal playables adds a level of safety when something incentivizes you to move into a color late, or stick to a color that's being cut. Overall, it certainly can make a color more attractive.
I'm insulted. I at least make a concerted effort to use correct grammar, and I'm so long winded that it's impossible for me to even have time to make more posts than I do.
This is a really interesting point, but I think the example is a tad inappropriate in terms of supporting the general argument. In Innistrad's GW aggro archetype, there were very few cards that were absolutely essential to the archetype (Avacyn's Pilgrim, Travel Preparations, and maybe Prey Upon), and while cards like Voiceless Spirit and Chapel Geist were really good and ideal, the aggression of the curve was always much more important than exactly what was in that curve. I won with plenty of GW decks that were more full of Silverchase Foxes and Elder Cathars than Geists and Spirits simply because I was still able to curve out and prepare for travel as normal. In M13, outside of "the Exalted deck", I don't think you'll be as lucky as this, in that every color's mediocre cards are so, well, intrinsically mediocre that they don't really have the ability to be adequate replacements for the better options you aren't seeing.
However, I do see your general point, and I readily admit that I'd rather have a deck with Canyon Minotaurs and Silvercoat Lions than one with Kraken Hatchlings and Negates, but I just don't see the Minotaur/Lion quality deck doing any better than 1-2 at a good draft table anyway. Sure, the incentives of being able to pick up that 2nd pack Ajani after seeing nothing but marginal white commons in pack 1 might seem comforting, but I will always favor solid decks with strong commons over decks with a couple bombs and mediocre commons.
The takeaway from this thread was meant to be that nobody should be disregarding, disrespecting, or disengaging from blue, because it's nowhere near as bad as people said it was going to be. I'm by no means promoting forcing it in draft or suggesting that it's easy to draft and play well. I actually think the opposite: blue looks like the hardest color to draft and play optimally, as its cards are more likely to become more powerful when they work in concert with a dedicated game plan.
:dance:Fact or Fiction of the [Limited] Clan:dance:
...anything T1memaster wrote.
Izzet Chronarch was ridiculous. But it had Peel from Reality to create a soft lock with. And he had Savant and Steamcore by his side.
I can see how the Mancer could be considered a spectacular common and the possible power it could generate, but why should I take her over an aggressive evasive creature that's going to start my opponent's clock ticking?
Can't see this as anything higher than a 5th pick. That being said, woe to the man who plays against 5Arch.dec.
It's a good card, but tertiary in terms of what decks should looking for.
How you should approach every game of Magic.
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My Flawless Score MCC Card | My Other One | # Three!
But is it possible for you to have... t1me?
I haven't drafted the set yet, but in general sealed seems very slow to me, and reliant on big, powerful effects to end games. If that's true, blue's lack of strong blockers and lack of powerful lategame effects seems to kind of doom it to marginality. So is it more that you disagree with my premise about the format, or that you disagree that blue can compete in that kind of environment?
Whats obvious is there's some really bad players on this forum, including Semantics. Either way he provided me with a nice quote.
I'd like to add that Semantics entire post goes against everything the actual pros(like Conley Woods) have said about m13. I like how he called himself a core set limited guru that was hilarious.
When all else fails and you get completely logically destroyed, make a comment about grammar or typos. You are as transparent as you are stupid. "significant;y"
Infraction for flaming. Calling other users stupid is not acceptable.
Double posts merged, as well.
—meg
Well, I think there are two ways of looking at this. You can certainly look at it as a format in which only the late game tends to matter, or you can look at it as a grindy type of environment in which powerful spells can often punish decks that rely on expensive threats. It's merely, ahem, semantics, but if you choose to look at the format as the latter, blue does just fine in either a main or support role. The reason I'm so bullish on Archaeomancer is because I think the 1/2 body, while not usually relevant, is good enough, and the effect is often so powerful that you can easily make up for the fact that you haven't aggressively contributed to the board. In a grindy format, resource advantages often lead to wins, and this set thankfully has some very powerful spells at common and, especially, at uncommon. If this card were in M12, I would have written it off as mediocre, as the set was just too fast to justify a 1/2 for 4. Here, though, assuming the format isn't faster than it seemed last weekend, it's exactly the type of card I want, because it does three things that commons almost never get to do:
1. It makes just about every spell in your deck better,
2. it can provide incremental advantage due to its being a creature, and
3. it offers raw card advantage and often, more importantly, card quality advantage, both of which are really important in slower limited environments.
As I've admitted before, I'm likely overselling the card by quite a bit. It's not the blanket "best common", as I said it was, but I still contend that it's the card that I most want in the decks in which it strives, as when it's good, nothing at common is better. I understand that when it's not optimal, it's just mediocre-to-bad, which is why I've taken a step back from my apparent fanaticism, after reading people's thoughtful replies.
I played a deck with double Archaeomancer, a spell suite of about 8 spells, and Stormtide Leviathan this past weekend, and it was perfect. The great thing about blue's spell suite in particular is that it can often rely more on a card like the Leviathan, as short of Murder, there's not really anything that can deal with it that blue can't handle. I tried to build the deck to be adaptable, able to be aggressive enough to put on pressure through cards like Welkin Tern, Wind Drake, and Talrand's Invocation while also strong enough from a control standpoint to survive and thrive into the late game through card advantage sources like double Archaeomancer returning any of my plethora of spells. I liked the fact that the blue cards in particular allowed me to play either game, but I certainly would like to be more focused when I give the format a try again this weekend. I like that blue supports either type of deck, and really everything in between. I prefer playing control, which is probably why I love Archaeomancer so much, but the main point is that if you're an aggro player, blue still offers you a flier suite at common and tempo opportunities that no other color can match. It's obviously light on removal, but Encrust is pretty solid, and every other color offers options on that and the other fronts with which blue struggles, like creature size and reach.
For the record, in that Leviathan deck, I never played any of my rares other than Clone all day, and Clone copied Archaeomancer to get back Prey Upon for the third time. I regularly buried my opponents in card advantage, reusing Invocations, Unsummons, and Prey Upons all day, and I won a couple games in which I never drew a Forest. Niche example? Sure, but I still was impressed by what blue was capable of doing on its own, a situation you'll never have to worry about practically.
Again, I think it's a bit Pyrrhic to use other sets as evidence too much, as the card quality in Ravnica block was so much higher than any core set anyway. The environments are different, and even if you find a slow set that compares, like Rise of the Eldrazi, the spell bases and competing archetypes are variable enough to throw off the direct comparison.
I don't think I ever want to first pick Archaeomancer. I just think it has the highest power potential of any common in the set, a potential that, if realized, makes your deck really tough to overcome in such a (seemingly) slow format. Yes, Welkin Tern and Wind Drake are clocks, and I think the former is a card I would first pick over a 'mancer if the rest of the pack were weak, but I don't think this format caters well to aggro in general. Calling Archaeomancer a "tertiary" need is a bit silly, as grindy, controlling decks (which I guess will rule this format when all's said and done) want a 3rd 'mancer before they want a single Wind Drake.
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Well, the easy response to that is that card draw is only as powerful as what you have available to draw with it. If you're just drawing more middling threats, then it won't save you from a Serra Angel. However, if drafted and played well, it should be easy to translate blue's sources for card advantage into board and game state advantage.
Essence Scatter is good, but calling it insane is a bit much. I do like it more in the later game than the early, though, as you gain maximum value out of it when you're countering impactful 5-drops. I really like how well Faerie Invaders and Scatter work together, in the same kind of way that Bone to Ash and Nephalia Seakite worked together.
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