Winding Constrictor and Kujar Seedsculptor did most of the work.
The Implements were very good as well.
Resourceful Return was just value.
Fourth Bridge Brawler 2-for-1's
Yahenni's Expertise was never cast.
Am I mistaken or do you always post a deck that is basically every 1, 2, and 3 drop in your pool, and then say you go 4-0 with it? I'm sure I'm exaggerating but I feel confident that you've posted similar decks for previous prereleases, to the point that I thought before, "wow this guy just builds a super low curve and then goes 4-0" and here it is again.
Is it really that easy to 4-0? I wonder how such decks would perform on Magic Online. Is it just that the player base at your local store is easy to beat? Or is the secret to winning just having an average casting cost of 2?
EDIT: I just checked Fedders post history and clearly it wasn't him, this is his first prerelease post as far as I can tell. Something about the Bill Murray avatar tickled my memory. I have to go search to see who I am thinking of.
Just curious what the groupthink is on why these forums have lost the majority of their usage over the past 5 years or so. 5 - 10 years ago the number of threads here, the number of posts, the number of active participants, it was all an order of magnitude or more larger than what is here now. Where did all of that discussion go? Is it happening in another venue that I don't know about (maybe reddit?) Or is Magic just being played less so there are fewer people to discuss it?
Card is great. Played a deck with 2x green fabricate two dude, 2x aviator, 2x blink, 1x aether tradewind, 1x decoction module, and just drag out the game till combo win.
Then you lucked into a win, because there is no way you're winning against the fast aggressive decks of this format with that without a lot of luck involved.
I've seen the aviator on the other side of the board a few times. It's never done anything in my experience.
Yeah there are alot of do-nothings in that deck. I am fairly certain that if I put together that exact deck I'd be completely thrashed by my opponents. But I'm glad that you had fun with it and that you went 3-0!
Very narrowly useful card in this format. You have to be playing a blue deck that is heavily control oriented. You need seven or eight instants/sorceries to make this card worthwhile. That means that this card will only make a deck that didn't have a better early pick than this (which would be exceedingly rare) and could then build around it. Or, a deck that was already heading towards heavy instant/sorcery based blue control and this mythic just happened by. Also rare.
I dunno, I played a whole bunch of the limited set right before Kaladesh (I can never remember the name though - Shadows over Innistrad/Rise of the Eldrazi -- right?) and the sealed play was really good. Most pools were fairly balanced and most games were reasonable. Maybe I just had good luck with SOI/ROE, but I enjoyed those games, and maybe I just had bad luck with Kaladesh, but the games mostly sucked. And I mean, not sucked because I lost alot (although that is true), but because even when I won, it was almost pointless.
But maybe you all are right, maybe draft is the only way to go with KLD. I just think it's weird to draft and then play out of your pod, it seems odd to not be playing against players that made different choices than you did when presented with mostly the same cards. Drafting and then playing against random pods just seems too weird to me; but sealed is fine played that way because my deck is completely unrelated to anyone in my "pod" anyway. So I stay away from draft leagues, which is why I am playing KLD sealed.
Also I don't like draft during prerelease because of rare drafting skew.
And ... KLD sucked for me not just because of the freighter. It felt like, for whatever reason, a vastly larger percentage of games were completely one-sided than normal. I have never played so many games where I died on 15+ or my opponent died on 15+ than I have in KLD. All of those creatures that grow when they attack or energy is pumped into them, they just push the attacking power level up too high and their butts are usually fat and can't be effectively blocked. Red has so much good low cost removal at its disposal, it can be nearly impossible to keep anything on the board in some games.
Maybe the larger pools do have something to do with it. I guess in draft I wouldn't be expecting people to be dropping Planeswalkers and Mythic Gearhulks left and right like they have been in sealed.
My very first KLD pool had three planeswalkers in it (Nissa, Chandra, and the weakish blue/red one). I mean, what the hell. By the way, I only 2 - 3 that event despite this, because even planeswalkers in this set can be easily overrun by the humungous attacking power available to everyone, and you often don't have time to stabilize the board to the point where a planeswalker can have good effect.
I'll try a few more KLD sealed, and maybe a KLD draft, but I don't expect to be playing too much limited in this format. Just not fun enough.
One final stupid question: are there more packs in a prelease sealed? Maybe so many more mythics and bombs due to more packs in the pools is the reason? If so, that could bode well for post-prerelease sealed.
I do like sealed, I just like making the best out of random assortments of cards. Drafting is OK too, and if I could do phantom drafting, I'd totally do it. But playing phantom sealed online costs me very little; maybe $2 per event on average. Playing prerelease sealed has been costing me like $14 per event, that's just too expensive.
EDIT: To answer my own question, phantom sealed and KLD prerelease sealed are both 6 packs, but according to the Wizards website, the KLD prelease also includes an extra "premium rare or mythic rare", which I guess explains the obscene number of planeswalkers, gearhulks, and other bombs I have been seeing. Also explains the rapid drop in KLD planeswalker values over the past day and a half.
EDIT 2: OK so I played two drafts tonight. They were, indeed, much better than the sealed events. Still a bit too swingy for my liking, but much better than sealed.
It's just that I have this gut feeling that if I don't miss land drops, and my opponent misses their third land drop, I have a very good chance of winning the game, regardless of other circumstances. That's how it's felt in the past anyway. I agree that bouncing something with ETB value like a puzzleknot is probably the best case scenario for using a turn 3 Aether Tradewinds on their land, to force a simulated "missed land drop".
Could be because I play sealed the vast majority of the time, or occasionally swiss draft queues, and in my experience, those formats are slower and having no play for the first three turns is not uncommon, and using tradewinds in this way could be a way to be way ahead on mana for the majority of the game.
In my experience, 8-4 queues are populated with players who go for the "efficient low cost creatures and combat tricks" strategy rather than the "power cards" strategy, and in that environment, the technique is vastly less likely to be effective.
Aether Tradewinds lets you bounce an opponent's permanent, including land. Say you're on the play, turn 3 you have a 2 drop and 3 land to your opponent's two drop and two land. Is it a good idea to spend your tradewind on bouncing their land? It puts you behind a creature, but them behind a land. They'll spend their turn 3 playing their second land and possibly another two drop. You'll next have a turn 4 with 4 lands and can play something that they won't be able to attack into, and for a while at least, you'll stay two lands ahead.
Is that generally a good play? Or is temporary resource limitation like that not typically effective?
Oh and a related question: is an energy counter a permanent? Could you bounce an energy counter and their land instead of a creature and their land?
I understand that it is flexible. However, it is an expensive utility piece that itself doesn't ever put any pressure on your opponent. I do not rate such cards highly because by themselves they do very little to win the game. I would rate it at a 2.0. Like any card, there are situations where it will be exactly what you need. But like many utility cards, it isn't valuable except when the board state is arranged in a certain way. I reserve 3.0 and above for cards that can have a significant impact on the game regardless of board state.
Here's another card that I disagree with LSV's rating of. He puts it at 3.5, saying:
"A pinger with two shots still does most everything you want a pinger to do, and this is a lot more than that."
I completely disagree with that first statement. A pinger with two shots doesn't do anything close to what I want a pinger to do. Getting two activations is not terrible, but it's not great either. Yes, it can get more activations, but that requires energy, which is not a free resource. If I've got free energy, I think I'd rather be putting +1/+1 counters on my attackers than pinging a creature with it.
Yes there are times when you play this and the next turn it does 6 damage to your opponent. That makes it a cheaper lava axe that does one more damage, at the cost of some energy. Also it has to live for a turn to do so, and with 2 toughness, it's pretty vulnerable to pretty much every type of removal.
If you've got gobs of energy and can keep it alive for multiple turns, then it can win the game by doing 12+ points of damage to your opponent. But I suspect that will be well outside of its normal use case.
OK so I actually spent some time playing Magic Online the past few days. I played a ton of phantom sealed Eldritch Moon/Shadows over Innistrad, I mean something around 22 events in three days. Overall my success was surprisingly good; I felt like I had a reasonable level of bad draws instead of the terribly bad luck I had the previous couple of times I played Magic Online. Overall I went 3-0 I think four times, 2-1 about 10 times, 1-2 6 times, and 0-3 only about twice. It would have been three or four times but sometimes my third round opponent dropped. My rating improved about 100 points during this time, and I only spent a total of about 18 tickets, cruising on my winnings the majority of the time.
I actually enjoyed myself. I still wish Magic Online would go away so that I wouldn't have to be tempted to play it.
OK now ... I checked out the leagues, I didn't play any, but I took a look at them. There are about 10,000 players currently playing leagues across all leagues. That is surprisingly low. The events are a month or two long, and that means that at best, Wizards is selling 10,000 league entry fees a month. If they make $20 on average in entrance fees per player, then they're pulling in $200,000 per month from leagues. At best. That's really not that much. One thing I don't know though is if you can enter a league more than once, and if so, whether the listing of player is a listing of entries or a listing of unique players. For example, if I entered the same league three times (is that possible?) would I be counted as 3 in the listings or just 1?
It used to be that at least two drafts would fire every minute on Magic Online, often more (these days it feels alot closer to 1.5 drafts per minute, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say 2). Taking one per 30 seconds as a baseline, and multiplying by the entrance fee of $10 (on average because some people will enter at a reduced rate by using previous winnings as entry fees), that's 876,000 dollars per month income from drafts. This dwarfs the league income. I don't know if those people playing leagues would spend the same, more, or less on drafts if they didn't have leagues though.
I get that there is a very distinct difference between "lucky" and "good", but you seem to argue a very though case. OhDaisy! has, according to his post, a 34-5 record (this is single-elimination). You have a very far-fetched definition of skill in Magic if you do not think that indicates that someone is "good" in a particular format.
By your standards, he needs to perform worse than 50/50 for the next 60 matches until he can call himself "good". If 3xSoM queues were up for another two weeks, I am sure they would be happy to oblige.
Well I went 28 - 3 in games once during a stretch of RTR. I can't remember what that worked out to in matches won but it must have been 80% at least. My rating during that time managed to exceed 1800 for the only time in my life.
It was just a stretch of good luck. I was no better then than I am now, and I'm barely scraping 1600 these days. If you flip enough coins, you will hit heads 10 times in a row sometimes.
(For context, I am bji_until_I_quit_again, different account name)
I'm not saying the rats is unplayable, I'm just saying it falls more under mediocre to decent filler as opposed to being a top common.
NFLed said it was unplayable. My comments were directly mostly at him.
To be honest I don't play the brand of Magic that includes 2/3 cards just for the aggro potential. I get bored to tears with just turning guys sideways, so the decks that just want to do that with the greatest efficiency are not decks that I play. That means that I don't win as often as I could because sometimes that's the best strategy given the cards that you have available in your sealed pool or are being made available to you in your draft. So no matter how good a card this 2/3 for 3 is, I will almost never play it, unless I get to do fun things with the energy.
That's one of the problems with Magic (and probably just about every competitive endeavor, really). If you are willing to sacrifice any amount of "best play" for "more fun", you will always lose to players who want nothing other than to win to the exclusion of pretty much any other consideration.
Not saying Thriving Rats is great, but ... a 2/2 for 2 is not going to have much more impact in the late game than a 1/2 would have. And a 2/3 played one turn earlier does leave your turn three open to playing something much better than a 2/3. What I'm basically saying is that a 2/3 on turn 3 is not a good play, but a 2/3 on turn 2 is not bad at all.
Also, if your deck cares about energy then the 2 energy that the rats gives could be relevant even in the late game.
That being said, I looked at all of the energy cards and I was mostly meh on them. The majority of them don't produce more energy than they want to use, and leaving energy on the board that could be used for something now, in hopes of drawing a card that can do something more significant with the energy, seems like a bad move in general. Which means that I expect that most cards will use their energy as soon as they can rather than trying to save it for some better purpose. And most common and uncommon cards that use energy don't have a particularly strong effect, and only get a limited number of built-in uses of that effect, which in my thinking is a major limitation.
And all that being said ... Wizards development process usually balances mechanics pretty well, so energy will probably be reasonably valuable and significant in many matches in which it is used. However, the one time that I find Wizards to consistently miss with mechanics is with resource granting mechanics, as they are usually really afraid of creating something broken (which often happens with resource granting mechanics), and can design timidly and as a result, nerfing the mechanic out of fear. That could very easily have happened with energy.
Am I mistaken or do you always post a deck that is basically every 1, 2, and 3 drop in your pool, and then say you go 4-0 with it? I'm sure I'm exaggerating but I feel confident that you've posted similar decks for previous prereleases, to the point that I thought before, "wow this guy just builds a super low curve and then goes 4-0" and here it is again.
Is it really that easy to 4-0? I wonder how such decks would perform on Magic Online. Is it just that the player base at your local store is easy to beat? Or is the secret to winning just having an average casting cost of 2?
EDIT: I just checked Fedders post history and clearly it wasn't him, this is his first prerelease post as far as I can tell. Something about the Bill Murray avatar tickled my memory. I have to go search to see who I am thinking of.
Then you lucked into a win, because there is no way you're winning against the fast aggressive decks of this format with that without a lot of luck involved.
I've seen the aviator on the other side of the board a few times. It's never done anything in my experience.
Yeah there are alot of do-nothings in that deck. I am fairly certain that if I put together that exact deck I'd be completely thrashed by my opponents. But I'm glad that you had fun with it and that you went 3-0!
But maybe you all are right, maybe draft is the only way to go with KLD. I just think it's weird to draft and then play out of your pod, it seems odd to not be playing against players that made different choices than you did when presented with mostly the same cards. Drafting and then playing against random pods just seems too weird to me; but sealed is fine played that way because my deck is completely unrelated to anyone in my "pod" anyway. So I stay away from draft leagues, which is why I am playing KLD sealed.
Also I don't like draft during prerelease because of rare drafting skew.
And ... KLD sucked for me not just because of the freighter. It felt like, for whatever reason, a vastly larger percentage of games were completely one-sided than normal. I have never played so many games where I died on 15+ or my opponent died on 15+ than I have in KLD. All of those creatures that grow when they attack or energy is pumped into them, they just push the attacking power level up too high and their butts are usually fat and can't be effectively blocked. Red has so much good low cost removal at its disposal, it can be nearly impossible to keep anything on the board in some games.
Maybe the larger pools do have something to do with it. I guess in draft I wouldn't be expecting people to be dropping Planeswalkers and Mythic Gearhulks left and right like they have been in sealed.
My very first KLD pool had three planeswalkers in it (Nissa, Chandra, and the weakish blue/red one). I mean, what the hell. By the way, I only 2 - 3 that event despite this, because even planeswalkers in this set can be easily overrun by the humungous attacking power available to everyone, and you often don't have time to stabilize the board to the point where a planeswalker can have good effect.
I'll try a few more KLD sealed, and maybe a KLD draft, but I don't expect to be playing too much limited in this format. Just not fun enough.
One final stupid question: are there more packs in a prelease sealed? Maybe so many more mythics and bombs due to more packs in the pools is the reason? If so, that could bode well for post-prerelease sealed.
I do like sealed, I just like making the best out of random assortments of cards. Drafting is OK too, and if I could do phantom drafting, I'd totally do it. But playing phantom sealed online costs me very little; maybe $2 per event on average. Playing prerelease sealed has been costing me like $14 per event, that's just too expensive.
EDIT: To answer my own question, phantom sealed and KLD prerelease sealed are both 6 packs, but according to the Wizards website, the KLD prelease also includes an extra "premium rare or mythic rare", which I guess explains the obscene number of planeswalkers, gearhulks, and other bombs I have been seeing. Also explains the rapid drop in KLD planeswalker values over the past day and a half.
EDIT 2: OK so I played two drafts tonight. They were, indeed, much better than the sealed events. Still a bit too swingy for my liking, but much better than sealed.
Could be because I play sealed the vast majority of the time, or occasionally swiss draft queues, and in my experience, those formats are slower and having no play for the first three turns is not uncommon, and using tradewinds in this way could be a way to be way ahead on mana for the majority of the game.
In my experience, 8-4 queues are populated with players who go for the "efficient low cost creatures and combat tricks" strategy rather than the "power cards" strategy, and in that environment, the technique is vastly less likely to be effective.
Is that generally a good play? Or is temporary resource limitation like that not typically effective?
Oh and a related question: is an energy counter a permanent? Could you bounce an energy counter and their land instead of a creature and their land?
Here's another card that I disagree with LSV's rating of. He puts it at 3.5, saying:
"A pinger with two shots still does most everything you want a pinger to do, and this is a lot more than that."
I completely disagree with that first statement. A pinger with two shots doesn't do anything close to what I want a pinger to do. Getting two activations is not terrible, but it's not great either. Yes, it can get more activations, but that requires energy, which is not a free resource. If I've got free energy, I think I'd rather be putting +1/+1 counters on my attackers than pinging a creature with it.
Yes there are times when you play this and the next turn it does 6 damage to your opponent. That makes it a cheaper lava axe that does one more damage, at the cost of some energy. Also it has to live for a turn to do so, and with 2 toughness, it's pretty vulnerable to pretty much every type of removal.
If you've got gobs of energy and can keep it alive for multiple turns, then it can win the game by doing 12+ points of damage to your opponent. But I suspect that will be well outside of its normal use case.
I would give it a 2.5, not a 3.5 like LSV did.
I actually enjoyed myself. I still wish Magic Online would go away so that I wouldn't have to be tempted to play it.
OK now ... I checked out the leagues, I didn't play any, but I took a look at them. There are about 10,000 players currently playing leagues across all leagues. That is surprisingly low. The events are a month or two long, and that means that at best, Wizards is selling 10,000 league entry fees a month. If they make $20 on average in entrance fees per player, then they're pulling in $200,000 per month from leagues. At best. That's really not that much. One thing I don't know though is if you can enter a league more than once, and if so, whether the listing of player is a listing of entries or a listing of unique players. For example, if I entered the same league three times (is that possible?) would I be counted as 3 in the listings or just 1?
It used to be that at least two drafts would fire every minute on Magic Online, often more (these days it feels alot closer to 1.5 drafts per minute, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say 2). Taking one per 30 seconds as a baseline, and multiplying by the entrance fee of $10 (on average because some people will enter at a reduced rate by using previous winnings as entry fees), that's 876,000 dollars per month income from drafts. This dwarfs the league income. I don't know if those people playing leagues would spend the same, more, or less on drafts if they didn't have leagues though.
Just trying to keep Icarus away from the sun ...
Well I went 28 - 3 in games once during a stretch of RTR. I can't remember what that worked out to in matches won but it must have been 80% at least. My rating during that time managed to exceed 1800 for the only time in my life.
It was just a stretch of good luck. I was no better then than I am now, and I'm barely scraping 1600 these days. If you flip enough coins, you will hit heads 10 times in a row sometimes.
(For context, I am bji_until_I_quit_again, different account name)
NFLed said it was unplayable. My comments were directly mostly at him.
To be honest I don't play the brand of Magic that includes 2/3 cards just for the aggro potential. I get bored to tears with just turning guys sideways, so the decks that just want to do that with the greatest efficiency are not decks that I play. That means that I don't win as often as I could because sometimes that's the best strategy given the cards that you have available in your sealed pool or are being made available to you in your draft. So no matter how good a card this 2/3 for 3 is, I will almost never play it, unless I get to do fun things with the energy.
That's one of the problems with Magic (and probably just about every competitive endeavor, really). If you are willing to sacrifice any amount of "best play" for "more fun", you will always lose to players who want nothing other than to win to the exclusion of pretty much any other consideration.
Also, if your deck cares about energy then the 2 energy that the rats gives could be relevant even in the late game.
That being said, I looked at all of the energy cards and I was mostly meh on them. The majority of them don't produce more energy than they want to use, and leaving energy on the board that could be used for something now, in hopes of drawing a card that can do something more significant with the energy, seems like a bad move in general. Which means that I expect that most cards will use their energy as soon as they can rather than trying to save it for some better purpose. And most common and uncommon cards that use energy don't have a particularly strong effect, and only get a limited number of built-in uses of that effect, which in my thinking is a major limitation.
And all that being said ... Wizards development process usually balances mechanics pretty well, so energy will probably be reasonably valuable and significant in many matches in which it is used. However, the one time that I find Wizards to consistently miss with mechanics is with resource granting mechanics, as they are usually really afraid of creating something broken (which often happens with resource granting mechanics), and can design timidly and as a result, nerfing the mechanic out of fear. That could very easily have happened with energy.