Judge Foils being used as payment wasn't exactly legal in a lot of places. All they're doing is putting it on the TO's to actually pay the staff that runs the tournament, just like every other events company.
CF Game Center had 180 for the midnight, 202 for the Sat 10am and 167 for the Sat 4PM. Combined with the people that had to be turned away from the 10am flight, it was about 570 for 3 flights. Much better than most 2nd (small) sets. I wouldn't be surprised if today's attendance dropped heavily because of the Super Bowl though.
You can make a strong argument for it as one of the top 5 cards in Draft. It's basically a free spell that also turns all your creatures into combat tricks. Obviously you'd rather have it pack one so you can sculpt more of your deck around it, but it's very good in any deck that can play it consistently.
If you asked people about the best card in the set, most would probably go with Elspeth. If you look at the win % data it's Elspeth. If you look at the win % data and put a penalty for more expensive cards in, then it's Agent of Fates followed by Fabled Hero and Polukranos.
That's not because it's the second best card. It's because it's a finisher, and the way that data is collected skews towards finishers. Onslaught is a great card and a particularly great finisher, but the data definitely does not speak for itself in this case (and many others).
Seismic Stomp was a finisher that was unfairly bias. Dauntless Onslaught is cheap & useful enough that even if you deducted a handful of win % from a skew, it'd still be in the top 10. 2,000 games doesn't really reek of the bias usually associated.
If you look at the data every combat trick got a boost and it was because heroic is that good and the enablers are much better than combat tricks on average from the last few blocks. People like to say the same thing about fight cards, and yet we have more games involving Time to Feed than about 88% of the cards in the set.
Listening to Sam Black (who's currently doing very well at PT Theros), he made an interesting claim: "Dauntless Onslaught is better than every White Common except Wingsteed Rider".
He meant it as a compliment, but I'd have rated Dauntless Onslaught considerably higher than Rider.
So... how good is it really? Have I been overrating it?
FWIW, according to MODO data, Dauntless Onslaught has the 2nd highest win % of any common/unc in the set.
Just wanted to say that. Esper was the most played deck in the Pro Tour and there still six devotion decks in the top 8 and only a single Esper Control.
Saying that these decks fall to Supreme Verdict is a pretty questionable statement if you consider that.
I like how in the same breath you say Esper was the most played deck at the PT, but then lump every devotion deck together without seeing any issue.
I also love how everyone keeps chanting the 'most played deck at the PT!' with no context given. It was 46/428 or about 9.4% of the field. You could very easily have played the 10 rounds of swiss and dodged Esper or only played against it once or twice.
It'll be like this until Friday when the PR events start. Then people try to dump Theros cards to grinders for max profit for the first 36 hours since they happen to be legal. By Sunday the prices somewhat calm down and by that Weds they've sunken to their 'proper' place with a few exceptions.
So yeah, because of how they handle the release schedule there's always this 2 day pause of going from a lame duck format to just a very weird format of legal sets + any reprints in the new set. It's been like this for the past year, it's just not really noticeable except with rotations because of the massive flux.
So if you play any STD until Friday evening, expect either mono red or UW.
This diversity is terrible so far. Red, Gw, and control is literally all we've seen
People keep repeating the mantra that aggro does well early. When the tapout control decks have such powerful cards, it's the threat decks that need to be able to streamline and have decks to aim a sideboard against. You could easily come up with five relevant plans against something like RDW with UWx decks without trying.
Week 0 from this SCG looks like:
Esper beats UW beats Aggro beats Esper
Of course this is a simplification since Esper shares so many strong points against aggro like UW. So if Burning Earth isn't a thing, it falls on how strong people's general anti-control boards are. Owen has Hammer, but yeah... haven't seen much else.
What surprises me is how miserable midrange seems to be performing. It's possible it's just feature match bias since so many names are playing UWx Control.
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Seismic Stomp was a finisher that was unfairly bias. Dauntless Onslaught is cheap & useful enough that even if you deducted a handful of win % from a skew, it'd still be in the top 10. 2,000 games doesn't really reek of the bias usually associated.
If you look at the data every combat trick got a boost and it was because heroic is that good and the enablers are much better than combat tricks on average from the last few blocks. People like to say the same thing about fight cards, and yet we have more games involving Time to Feed than about 88% of the cards in the set.
FWIW, according to MODO data, Dauntless Onslaught has the 2nd highest win % of any common/unc in the set.
I like how in the same breath you say Esper was the most played deck at the PT, but then lump every devotion deck together without seeing any issue.
I also love how everyone keeps chanting the 'most played deck at the PT!' with no context given. It was 46/428 or about 9.4% of the field. You could very easily have played the 10 rounds of swiss and dodged Esper or only played against it once or twice.
So yeah, because of how they handle the release schedule there's always this 2 day pause of going from a lame duck format to just a very weird format of legal sets + any reprints in the new set. It's been like this for the past year, it's just not really noticeable except with rotations because of the massive flux.
So if you play any STD until Friday evening, expect either mono red or UW.
Don't take week one results as gospel. Treat them as a fresh starting point and go from there.
Yeah, Hammer is possibly the best card for red aggro in Theros. It's very strong.
People keep repeating the mantra that aggro does well early. When the tapout control decks have such powerful cards, it's the threat decks that need to be able to streamline and have decks to aim a sideboard against. You could easily come up with five relevant plans against something like RDW with UWx decks without trying.
Week 0 from this SCG looks like:
Esper beats UW beats Aggro beats Esper
Of course this is a simplification since Esper shares so many strong points against aggro like UW. So if Burning Earth isn't a thing, it falls on how strong people's general anti-control boards are. Owen has Hammer, but yeah... haven't seen much else.
What surprises me is how miserable midrange seems to be performing. It's possible it's just feature match bias since so many names are playing UWx Control.
When referencing a specific match, nobody cares about how good a card is in hypothetical other deck. Just an FYI.
Also Reid Duke is on Mono Red as well and started 1-2, so while Owen is crushing, not exactly some clean sweep.