I did a few quick sealed pool, seems like the RNG generator is off or the seed for the RNG inst random enough , way to many doubles and triplicates of cards. While it's common to get doubles and the occasional triplicate in sealed, I don't ever recall pulling 15 doubles and 3 triplicates; 14 doubles and a triplicate; 14 doubles and a 2 triplicates; 13 duplicates, 1 triplicate and 1 quadruplicate.
Yea, went back an drew one more pool 13 doubles, a triplicate and 1 quintuple. Yep, 5 Cartouche or Ambition.
In fact, it's the real packs which are "not random enough". Real randomization produces more duplicates on average than you see in packs with print runs.
[strike]
I'd have to crunch too much math for the doubles, but triples, have less than a 2% chance of occurring. It's a simple combination probability to figure out a single triple. Five pools in a row each have at least one triple is a 1 in 100 million chance.[/strike]
Edit: Actually, I've got a mistake there. That's the probability of a specific card occurring in triplicate in a sealed pool. We what any card getting triplicate. I follow now, essentially the class birthday issue in the packs if not controlled, roughly a 50/50 chance of a duplicate of the non-foil commons if you didn't control it.
One of the rules of thumb I picked up around here a while back was the splashing double color mana cards doesn't work. For a splash to work you need to have a reasonable chance of hitting it on turn 4,5 or 6 and having it playable and be impactful.
Eyeballing, I'd go White/Blue, skip the splash.
Cut all the green, add sacred cat, Binding Mummy as filler, Those Who Serve, blue creatures add the initiate, skimisher, seeker, guardian and vizier and maybe a slither blade (weak but annoying). Add the Cartouche of knowledge, you'll want to fish for the flyers. You're going air and pinging to death until you draw your double blues.
I did a few quick sealed pool, seems like the RNG generator is off or the seed for the RNG inst random enough , way to many doubles and triplicates of cards. While it's common to get doubles and the occasional triplicate in sealed, I don't ever recall pulling 15 doubles and 3 triplicates; 14 doubles and a triplicate; 14 doubles and a 2 triplicates; 13 duplicates, 1 triplicate and 1 quadruplicate.
Yea, went back an drew one more pool 13 doubles, a triplicate and 1 quintuple. Yep, 5 Cartouche or Ambition.
Thank you I missed factoring the on the battlefield. I was principally thinking of how nice it was against embalm which it won't hit. Nor will it hit cycling, so you're right, it doesn't hit much. Luckily it's a rare and I probably won't get to make that mistake.
My concern with Scavenger is it isn't really looting. You need to discard first then draw. Loot is draw then discard. This is grubbing, first chuck what I think is my worst card or useless card and hope to get a better card. Draw then discard loot is much stronger, IMHO. Still as you note, a very nice way to get rid of that useless land on turn 8 if my red aggro is still fighting. For those of us with more questionable lower end card cutting skills from a deck, a great way to learn how many cruddy cards we've got in our deck.
The exert trigger is also interesting to me. Nef-Crop Entangler is a good example. Powerful on exert however exert takes it out of usefulness for two full turns. Exert him to keep him alive otherwise 2/1 trampler or maybe exert him if it'll finish your opponent. I'm concerned how costly that two turn tap is going to be.
Harsh Mentor - 1.5. Even though the ability may make this card seem better than just a bear, when you actually look up which commons and uncommons have activated abilities in the set, you'll find out that this will probably just be a bear without relevant creature types 90% of the time, which is very solidly bad filler tier. There are ~1-2 relevant common targets per color so perhaps this is good enough to be mediocre filler, but I'm not even sold on that.
So I've done virtually no studying of the AKH set, just starting and overall my card ranking ability is pretty poor so I'd like to ask a question on Harsh Mentor. And part is just understanding the rubric.
When I build, I try to be very conscious of my mana curve, I tend to look at my 2 mana drops against other two mana drops. So if Harsh Mentor is a 1.5, then a bear would be a straight up 1.0? That kind of makes sense to me as you'd cut a straight bear to any other bearish with some sort of upside. However the rubric has Welder Automaton as a 2.0 good filler, whose ability is a 4 mana one point burn. Granted that was in the artifacts uber alles set for synergy.
I know the review said few creatures with relevant abilities at common/uncommon, however the core mechanics are mostly activated abilities and many of the 3.0+ cards we're looking to fill our decks with have them (although they may not get used). Battlefield Scavenger is rated a 3.0 for a bear that does the discard/draw when you trigger just exert.
Is the capability of you opponent chosen not using their exert, embalm, cycle etc, and taking 2 damage what makes Harsh so much less desirable as a card? Pinging for 2 adds up quick, granted, I don't want to top deck Harsh although the ping for 2 has my opponent embalms one of his 3.5/4.0 cards seems like a nice upside. Or is that just best case blindness?
As always thanks for taking the time to write the review.
From an aggo standpoint, I see Nef-Crop, Brawler. Not seeing Scavenger as that much stronger than Harsh, it card mining but you need to first discard, which early game is great, but late game, not so much. I'd probably re-rank, going Brawler, Nef, Pathmaker, then a toss up between Harsh and Battlefield (although in an aggro deck I'd probably go Harsh) and Khenra bringing up the bottom.
Had a good time, did okay. Only played three rounds went 2-1 (really 1-1-1 but other person was dropping so he forfeited the win), went 2-1 round 2 (again 1-1-1 to a person that was going to drop, and I was about to be killed when ran out of turns), then 0-2 in round three and I needed to drop. I was playing the night round on Saturday.
Much smaller group than normal maybe 1/3rd the size of the SOI pre-release and it seemed like a rather rich set of packs opened and color aligned.
For draft with a very heavy green deck, Decimator of the Provinces definitely is bomby. For pre-release, not really feeling it. That triple green, SAC and six mana is steep.
Saw another review talking about the many games we'll see with this emerging on turn 6 or 7 and blowing out and thought, nope. That's like 5% of the time you'll see this on turn 6 have six mana, three green mana and a sac-able 4 mana creature. Slightly better on turn seven but you still have the flood or miss drops issue and hope you're not about dead for it.
I don't want to see this in my opening hand. I don't want to see it in my first few draws. Top deck it on turn 7 with six mana already up, probably ecstatic provided I'm not about to be wiped out. Really needing a stars align set of draws to have hit good drops on turn 3-6 to stay competitive in pre-release.
Draft is a different story. And I'll still put it in if I can build a green deck at pre-release, I just have zero expectation that'd I'll have a chance to play it in the four rounds we play.
Carrots, I thought that was a good and fair review.
I looked up the rule on Elder Deep-Fiend for cast as you mentioned. Probably old hat for the old pros here but for us noobs, always good to refresh. When cast effects trigger when the card is played (cast). The happen before anything else is added to the stack. Hence, the player with Elder, plays it, pays the cost and then does the preferred tap downs before the opponent can choose a response. Distended Mindbender has the same when cast.
While implied in many of the write-ups, I don't think anyone has spelled out the stack impact of "when cast" trigger. Maybe it's common knowledge, I don't recall a lot of cast triggers in the last few sets. Thank you.
Both require double color mana on the emerge cost. Given a fairly typical 9/8 land mix, if you're starting on the play, you still only have a 1 in 5 chance of being able to play this by turn 6 something like 1 in 8 on turn 4.
I see Elder carrying it's value on impact into turns 6, 7 and beyond. What about Distended Mindbender?
At least reading the thread clued me into the fact that I was misreading emerge. I had missed the mana reduction by the mana of the sac'd creature.
Went from being a horrible mechanic, to a so-so mechanic. Primarily evaluating from the sealed pre-release standpoint and not a draft. I think it's better in draft than sealed.
Best scenario, the cards have decent impact. Still require a 2 for 1 of yourself though to invoke in most cases. Most of them don't strike me a game ender especially in view of you just creature disadvantaging yourself.
Seems like to reap value from this they really need to hit on the curve. If they don't their value goes down.
BREAD is nice, but if she really is playing to do okay and have fun, focus on two colors and mana curve with 15 creatures. Core being the 3 & 4 mana drops. Bombs are important, but IMHO, chasing bombs results in the more hit or miss decks.
Start with focusing on removal first. Which colors did she draw it for. (This avoids the trap of seeing that nice green creature pile and then having no removal).
then mana curve and creatures.
Do not play three colors. Don't think about it. Build your two color deck. Then if you have a bomb in a third color that has a single third color mana color requirement, you can sub it in as a splash.
Avoid the mana pigs. EMN has a lot of heavy mana costers. Wretched Gryff being one of the lighter ones. IMHO, pre-released sealed is largely over by the time you're ready to cast a 7 mana spell unless you've got a lot of mana ramp. Which again, in sealed tends to be light.
Red/White, Black/White Black/Green, all tend towards being good combos. White/Green is weak in removal unless you get a bunch in white.
Blue, IMHO, is very bad in pre-release for inexperienced players since it relies on control, denial, mana management and knowing the card value and trade-offs
YMMV, I'm relatively inexperience and typically do 50/50ish at pre-release and favor aggro.
Is the uncommon pool in Eldritch Moon abnormally weak or did Shadows' red uncommons pool just spoil me?
In sealed formats, I use the uncommon as core building blocks and the uncommon pool seems very weak in EMN. Lone Rider has potential if you have the reliable means to transform them, but at a 1/1 for 2 mana, even the lifelink and the beastly transformation, while nice seems like a sure path to burn mana and end up with card disadvantage.
Red's pool didn't look much better to me. And granted, I haven't deeply studied the others so far. Are people seeing good uncommons in the other colors? Red & White, the meh uncommon seem to vastly outnumber the yea, uncommons.
Any pointers for keeping a casual game, casual while pulling that off? The beginning step is pretty loose with the untap, upkeep (if any), draw and straight to playing a land or first spell. Innistrad to me seems to favor exploitation of what I call technical play (oh, I'll tap for discard ability, discard, madness something etc.). Kind of like the before the end of your turn move in Gatewatch.
In a casual game, it's pretty common if we're not casting a spell to either drop a land and declare they'll attack with whatever creatures. Granted technically, they play a land, and you can respond with an instant or activated ability before they play their first spell, correct? Any action and priority passes so land play -> priority pass.
I suppose we could do "before your main phase", "before your draw", etc.
I have a question on when a player can play an instant during their opponents turn.
In Gatewatch, we had a number of cohort abilities that had us doing 'before the end of your turn', and executing cohort ability. In Innistrad, we have a number of flip card firing on upkeep.
Here's the scenario, we were playing our Innistrad pre-release decks against each other with the following:
I've got untapped mana at the end of my turn because I've Silverstrike and Fiery Temper and couple other cards. For some reason I carried mana over instead of playing the instant. Probably an error on my part. However, the question still applies to other instants that may be beneficial to play at the beginning of the opponents turn.
Naturally, I don't want her equipping the Missionaries and flipping them and banishing my Chaplain.
So starting with the end of my end turn. The steps for my opponent of Untap -> Upkeep -> Draw Card -> Begin Main Phase. When can I hit with an instant?
In the upkeep step, the active player, performs upkeep, any triggered abilities go on stack and gains priority, correct? So before the active player moves to draw a card, the active player needs to either cast their own spell or pass priority. So if my opponent is the active player, before she draws, priority passes to me and I may cast an instant correct?
In the draw step the player, the active player draws a card, any abilities triggered by card draw go on the stack and the active player gains priority to cast spells (instants) or abilities before resolving, correct? Again, thus priority must pass to non-active player before moving to main phase, allowing for the play of instants before active players plays a card or land, correct?
I over fixed this past pre-release for GateWatch. Do we have some rules of thumb around mana-fixing/tap lands? I'm thinking of the simple stuff like, can't splash cards with two of a color mana. Need 4 sources for an effective splash. Splash cards need to be playable turn 5 (and should be worth playing turn five.) You need 10 mana sources of a color to hit an early double mana in a single color. (Actually, many of those may be off a bit).
Thinking in general, not specific to GateWatch.
For example, if I'm playing Red/Black or Red/Black/Blue, and have Cinder Barrens and others like it. How many is too many before it screws up your mana curve early game (turns 2-5)?
Mine were meh.So I got 1 wastes out of both sealed that I played and others got around 1-2 in their sealed pools,so colorless might not have enough support in sealed I'm guessing.Did anyone else have that problem? One thing though is I did get those other lands that make colorless to offset the problem,at least for my first sealed,the second one not so much.
Not us, too many, still had a meh session though. Two headed giant, combined colorless mana pool available: 3 wastes, 2 crumbling vestiges, corrupted crossroads, unknown shores, spawning bed, 2 Hedron crawlers, a cultivator drone, eldrazi skyspawner, 3 scion summoner, a grave birthing and a mirrorpool.
And sadly the best use for seemed to be blinding drone or havoc sower. I had enough mana to fire essence depleter a bunch, never made it out, Kozilek's Pathfinder ability in THG is kind of a waste of mana.
[strike]
I'd have to crunch too much math for the doubles, but triples, have less than a 2% chance of occurring. It's a simple combination probability to figure out a single triple. Five pools in a row each have at least one triple is a 1 in 100 million chance.[/strike]
Edit: Actually, I've got a mistake there. That's the probability of a specific card occurring in triplicate in a sealed pool. We what any card getting triplicate. I follow now, essentially the class birthday issue in the packs if not controlled, roughly a 50/50 chance of a duplicate of the non-foil commons if you didn't control it.
Eyeballing, I'd go White/Blue, skip the splash.
Cut all the green, add sacred cat, Binding Mummy as filler, Those Who Serve, blue creatures add the initiate, skimisher, seeker, guardian and vizier and maybe a slither blade (weak but annoying). Add the Cartouche of knowledge, you'll want to fish for the flyers. You're going air and pinging to death until you draw your double blues.
Yea, went back an drew one more pool 13 doubles, a triplicate and 1 quintuple. Yep, 5 Cartouche or Ambition.
My concern with Scavenger is it isn't really looting. You need to discard first then draw. Loot is draw then discard. This is grubbing, first chuck what I think is my worst card or useless card and hope to get a better card. Draw then discard loot is much stronger, IMHO. Still as you note, a very nice way to get rid of that useless land on turn 8 if my red aggro is still fighting. For those of us with more questionable lower end card cutting skills from a deck, a great way to learn how many cruddy cards we've got in our deck.
The exert trigger is also interesting to me. Nef-Crop Entangler is a good example. Powerful on exert however exert takes it out of usefulness for two full turns. Exert him to keep him alive otherwise 2/1 trampler or maybe exert him if it'll finish your opponent. I'm concerned how costly that two turn tap is going to be.
So I've done virtually no studying of the AKH set, just starting and overall my card ranking ability is pretty poor so I'd like to ask a question on Harsh Mentor. And part is just understanding the rubric.
When I build, I try to be very conscious of my mana curve, I tend to look at my 2 mana drops against other two mana drops. So if Harsh Mentor is a 1.5, then a bear would be a straight up 1.0? That kind of makes sense to me as you'd cut a straight bear to any other bearish with some sort of upside. However the rubric has Welder Automaton as a 2.0 good filler, whose ability is a 4 mana one point burn. Granted that was in the artifacts uber alles set for synergy.
I know the review said few creatures with relevant abilities at common/uncommon, however the core mechanics are mostly activated abilities and many of the 3.0+ cards we're looking to fill our decks with have them (although they may not get used). Battlefield Scavenger is rated a 3.0 for a bear that does the discard/draw when you trigger just exert.
Is the capability of you opponent chosen not using their exert, embalm, cycle etc, and taking 2 damage what makes Harsh so much less desirable as a card? Pinging for 2 adds up quick, granted, I don't want to top deck Harsh although the ping for 2 has my opponent embalms one of his 3.5/4.0 cards seems like a nice upside. Or is that just best case blindness?
As always thanks for taking the time to write the review.
Perhaps I'm better off just looking at the three main red 2 drop creatures Battlefield Scavenger, Nef-Crop Entangler, Bloodrage Brawler,Pathmaker Initiate, Nimble-Blade Khenra, and Harsh Mentor, 3.0, 3.0, 2.5, 2.5, 2.0 and 1.5 relatively.
From an aggo standpoint, I see Nef-Crop, Brawler. Not seeing Scavenger as that much stronger than Harsh, it card mining but you need to first discard, which early game is great, but late game, not so much. I'd probably re-rank, going Brawler, Nef, Pathmaker, then a toss up between Harsh and Battlefield (although in an aggro deck I'd probably go Harsh) and Khenra bringing up the bottom.
Much smaller group than normal maybe 1/3rd the size of the SOI pre-release and it seemed like a rather rich set of packs opened and color aligned.
For only seeing three decks other, my first opponent had Gisela, the Broken Blade and Thalia, Heretic Cathar and was running WU.
Round two, WUg, I faced Elder Deep-Fiend, Bruna, the Fading Light, Thalia, Heretic Cathar again, and Thalia's Lancers and another card I didn't see played that he had splashed green for in his mana pool. Unless the splash was for Mockery of Nature
Round three BU and I faced Distended Mindbender and Niblis of Frost
And mine WB had 2x Distended Mindbender, Voldaren Pariah meh card, and Markov Dreadknight from shadows.
Needless to say, emerge played every game either by me or to me and often both.
Saw another review talking about the many games we'll see with this emerging on turn 6 or 7 and blowing out and thought, nope. That's like 5% of the time you'll see this on turn 6 have six mana, three green mana and a sac-able 4 mana creature. Slightly better on turn seven but you still have the flood or miss drops issue and hope you're not about dead for it.
I don't want to see this in my opening hand. I don't want to see it in my first few draws. Top deck it on turn 7 with six mana already up, probably ecstatic provided I'm not about to be wiped out. Really needing a stars align set of draws to have hit good drops on turn 3-6 to stay competitive in pre-release.
Draft is a different story. And I'll still put it in if I can build a green deck at pre-release, I just have zero expectation that'd I'll have a chance to play it in the four rounds we play.
And played, yes this a blowing out the board. I
I looked up the rule on Elder Deep-Fiend for cast as you mentioned. Probably old hat for the old pros here but for us noobs, always good to refresh. When cast effects trigger when the card is played (cast). The happen before anything else is added to the stack. Hence, the player with Elder, plays it, pays the cost and then does the preferred tap downs before the opponent can choose a response. Distended Mindbender has the same when cast.
While implied in many of the write-ups, I don't think anyone has spelled out the stack impact of "when cast" trigger. Maybe it's common knowledge, I don't recall a lot of cast triggers in the last few sets. Thank you.
Both require double color mana on the emerge cost. Given a fairly typical 9/8 land mix, if you're starting on the play, you still only have a 1 in 5 chance of being able to play this by turn 6 something like 1 in 8 on turn 4.
I see Elder carrying it's value on impact into turns 6, 7 and beyond. What about Distended Mindbender?
Went from being a horrible mechanic, to a so-so mechanic. Primarily evaluating from the sealed pre-release standpoint and not a draft. I think it's better in draft than sealed.
Best scenario, the cards have decent impact. Still require a 2 for 1 of yourself though to invoke in most cases. Most of them don't strike me a game ender especially in view of you just creature disadvantaging yourself.
Seems like to reap value from this they really need to hit on the curve. If they don't their value goes down.
Start with focusing on removal first. Which colors did she draw it for. (This avoids the trap of seeing that nice green creature pile and then having no removal).
then mana curve and creatures.
Do not play three colors. Don't think about it. Build your two color deck. Then if you have a bomb in a third color that has a single third color mana color requirement, you can sub it in as a splash.
Avoid the mana pigs. EMN has a lot of heavy mana costers. Wretched Gryff being one of the lighter ones. IMHO, pre-released sealed is largely over by the time you're ready to cast a 7 mana spell unless you've got a lot of mana ramp. Which again, in sealed tends to be light.
Red/White, Black/White Black/Green, all tend towards being good combos. White/Green is weak in removal unless you get a bunch in white.
Blue, IMHO, is very bad in pre-release for inexperienced players since it relies on control, denial, mana management and knowing the card value and trade-offs
YMMV, I'm relatively inexperience and typically do 50/50ish at pre-release and favor aggro.
In sealed formats, I use the uncommon as core building blocks and the uncommon pool seems very weak in EMN. Lone Rider has potential if you have the reliable means to transform them, but at a 1/1 for 2 mana, even the lifelink and the beastly transformation, while nice seems like a sure path to burn mana and end up with card disadvantage.
Red's pool didn't look much better to me. And granted, I haven't deeply studied the others so far. Are people seeing good uncommons in the other colors? Red & White, the meh uncommon seem to vastly outnumber the yea, uncommons.
Any pointers for keeping a casual game, casual while pulling that off? The beginning step is pretty loose with the untap, upkeep (if any), draw and straight to playing a land or first spell. Innistrad to me seems to favor exploitation of what I call technical play (oh, I'll tap for discard ability, discard, madness something etc.). Kind of like the before the end of your turn move in Gatewatch.
In a casual game, it's pretty common if we're not casting a spell to either drop a land and declare they'll attack with whatever creatures. Granted technically, they play a land, and you can respond with an instant or activated ability before they play their first spell, correct? Any action and priority passes so land play -> priority pass.
I suppose we could do "before your main phase", "before your draw", etc.
thanks
In Gatewatch, we had a number of cohort abilities that had us doing 'before the end of your turn', and executing cohort ability. In Innistrad, we have a number of flip card firing on upkeep.
Here's the scenario, we were playing our Innistrad pre-release decks against each other with the following:
My opponent had Avacynian Missionaries on the battlefield tapped, with mana tapped out, and a True-Faith Censer on the battlefield along with another weaker flyer creature. I had a Bygone Bishop on the battlefield, along with Nearheath Chaplain who is equipped with my own True-Faith Censer and another weaker flyer creature.
I've got untapped mana at the end of my turn because I've Silverstrike and Fiery Temper and couple other cards. For some reason I carried mana over instead of playing the instant. Probably an error on my part. However, the question still applies to other instants that may be beneficial to play at the beginning of the opponents turn.
Naturally, I don't want her equipping the Missionaries and flipping them and banishing my Chaplain.
So starting with the end of my end turn. The steps for my opponent of Untap -> Upkeep -> Draw Card -> Begin Main Phase. When can I hit with an instant?
In the upkeep step, the active player, performs upkeep, any triggered abilities go on stack and gains priority, correct? So before the active player moves to draw a card, the active player needs to either cast their own spell or pass priority. So if my opponent is the active player, before she draws, priority passes to me and I may cast an instant correct?
In the draw step the player, the active player draws a card, any abilities triggered by card draw go on the stack and the active player gains priority to cast spells (instants) or abilities before resolving, correct? Again, thus priority must pass to non-active player before moving to main phase, allowing for the play of instants before active players plays a card or land, correct?
Thanks
Thinking in general, not specific to GateWatch.
For example, if I'm playing Red/Black or Red/Black/Blue, and have Cinder Barrens and others like it. How many is too many before it screws up your mana curve early game (turns 2-5)?
Not us, too many, still had a meh session though. Two headed giant, combined colorless mana pool available: 3 wastes, 2 crumbling vestiges, corrupted crossroads, unknown shores, spawning bed, 2 Hedron crawlers, a cultivator drone, eldrazi skyspawner, 3 scion summoner, a grave birthing and a mirrorpool.
And sadly the best use for seemed to be blinding drone or havoc sower. I had enough mana to fire essence depleter a bunch, never made it out, Kozilek's Pathfinder ability in THG is kind of a waste of mana.