Last night at my FNM, I got put into a draft pod of 11 players. At first I didn't think much of it but after what was quite possibly the weirdest draft ever I wonder if making pods bigger than the standard 8 is a good idea.
Do you all frequently run into situations like this with big draft pods and what are your thoughts on it?
Its not necessarily that they want people to think they sold out at $25, its that they sold out at whatever the price was at prior, raised their buy price to acquire more stock, and raised their selling price to maintain their margins over their new buy price.
I'm really not sure why people come up with these crazy theories about SCG's pricing and its not always them 'manipulating' the market, sometimes they're the followers.
Amen - the amount of workarounds that they'd have to do to implement something like that is nothing to scoff at (they essentially have to trick their own inventory system into thinking a specific item has 0 on hand). That stuff comes with risks as well as having to dedicate manual resources to trick the system. I'm sure they have much better things to do with their time and money than to pull that crap off.
Maybe if the original poster worked for an online retailer for a bit he'd change his conspiracy theories.
But on to better things - just got passed one online in a swiss release draft and am not selling it like I normally would. Will hold on to it for a bit like other's have suggested.
Playing Gruul yesterday the one thing that was huge was having guys with trample. They become incredible targets for bloodrush, especially if the guy across the table does not have the beef to soak up the damage. If you have a guy with both (ex. Ghor-Clan Rampager)it's probably going to be better to cast him as a critter. Here are some other observations from my day -
- As mentioned, getting gruul 2-drops is tough. I dipped into the Boros 2 drops which worked great for me
- Madcap Skills is common and crazy good with Gruul. Plop it on a trample guy then bloodrush him for crazy damage. I had situations where I literally wiped his team with a dude pumped like this.
- Miming Slime is great to cast after you have bloodrushed one of your 4-power guys. I had a 9/9 ooze and a 7/7 ooze yesterday - booyah.
- My max casting cost was 6 - I don't see a need to have guys with a casting cost more than that since you are usually winning by round 6. The bulk of my team were the 3-5 casting cost guys (3/4s, 4/4s, etc). They do the real work.
The hunch that Boros dominated many of the results because it was good and the majority of players picked it may have legs. I went to the Sunday event at one of my LGS and you could not pick Boros unless you had pre-registered for the event earlier in the week b/c they had almost run out after the Friday/Sat events. So we only had a few Boros players among the 32 there (honestly I can't remember seeing one of the Boros boxes!).
I went 4-1 and finished 4th with Gruul splash white for Boros. Lost 2-1 to the winner who played a straight Simic deck. I do not believe there was a Boros in the top 5, which kinda makes sense. The decks I beat were 2 Dimir, one of which was a very good mill deck, 1 Simic, and 1 Orsohv.
I opened no impactful rares in Gruul or Boros - the only rares in my deck were the promo Rubblehulk and the gruul shockland. Kept the curve low with the biggest dude being the 6 mana Rubblehulk. Had no flyers beside the occasional flying Daring Skyjek. It was an incredibly unspectacular bunch of cards that somehow worked good together. Here are some cards that really did great -
Miming Slime - he came out as a 7/7 and even a 9/9 after a bloodrush pump to a guy.
Crowned Ceratok - Mostly b/c of trample and being able to occasionally give another dude trample. Did a TON of work.
Truefire Paladin - Hot damn that guy won me 3 games, and I even screwed up and forgot his vigilance until the last game of the event!
Sunhome Guildmage - Didn't open the Gruul guildmage but got this one. Those tokens really helped out in a few games where I was behind or tied in board critters. Swarm with little dude then bloodrush the one that gets unblocked. Just plain awesome.
Madcap Skills - Yep, what folks are saying about it is true - pure awesomeness at common.
Scorchwalker - Opened two and played them both w/o hesitation. Never casted it as a creature. Even better when you have trample guys to pump with him.
Smite - Played two b/c it was really my only removal beside one Massive Raid (which was a dud). Even in an aggressive build I still was able to do well with it, and it flat out won me my 4th match.
Underperformers were Massive Raid and Act of Treason. Never had an opportunity to use either to any real effect all day.
It seems hard to tell the correlation. Obviously Boros is winning the most often, but it also seems like EVERYBODY is playing it. When 50%+ of the people are playing the guild, it only makes sense that it is going to be the one most likely to win. It would be more helpful to see % victory from each guild, but that isn't possible.
Absolutely - that's what I'd like to see. Eventually it will all pan out though since stores have a limited amount of guild packs for each guild. Boros may have more players early on but later events will be the opposite as those packs go bye-bye.
I think it has a lot to do with what I call safety cards.They're cards that makes you feel safe and in control when you got them in your deck and in your hand. Safety cards varies with experience. Beginners tend to view life gain as safety cards. More experienced players see removal as safety cards. Currently, I like dramatic resuce and druid's deliverance.
In your case, removal, it probably made you feel safe while drafting, but the problem with removal (except mizzium mortar, obv.) is that it's quite often 1-for-1 unless you can trick them to double block or play it when they try to enchant something. So you need to also value either card advantage (in Rakdos, that would be mind rot and the 5cc random discard), or be able to get value directly from removal. That's why lobber crew is good: you keep your removal for the actual big threats and use the crew to block lesser threats while slowly pinging them down. There are other ways, but the trick is to be on the lookout for what goes around during draft that will be your way to finish your opponent. Pick rogue passage or splash for teleportal. Even a sewer shambler can get there if you opponent has swamps. I've often been lured in that false sense of safety that goes with having a lot of removal, without a way to properly finish the games.
You know that's probably the reason I fall into R/B/g so dang much in RTR. I get a Stab Wound and another decent red removal and I'm hooked. Maybe I am valuing this stuff too high.
On a better note, I thought I drafted a pretty decent Azorious deck with a splash of red for Izzit Charm and Quest for Flight. Unfortunately I didn't see how it did as modo crashed R1G1, leading to my laptop crashing and me timing out of the draft:(
So in a nutshell I find myself falling into Radkos frequently in my drafts (4 out of 5 to be exact). Often times I'll also have a splash of green b/c I'm not getting enough good R/B to build a full deck. Essentially I'm sucking horribly at RTR drafts - I mean really, really bad.
With this as a base, what kind of a deck would you have been gunning to build? Total aggro? I ended up with a typical middling heap that ended up going 1-2. How I fail like this when I'm getting passed this much removal is beyond me:-/
Man I totally dorked this one up. Last week, I was at Target and saw these packs, and even held 3 of them that had the commander decks. When I saw them, I figured that it was the normal stick a decent card in the front and fill the rest with jank that you can't see biz. So I left them. Went back after checking here on a hunch and all the commander ones were gone, only a few ones with SoM starter packs were left....
But I did manage to salvage something today when I checked Wal Mart and found a sealed Knights vs. Dragons duel deck for original asking price. There was only one there and I definitely had to do a double take on it but it's mine now:D
I'm getting a Trostani deck together as we speak, and may even have all the components to try it out tomorrow night. In general, I'm trying to focus on stuff that makes big boy tokens - 3/3's and up. Since you are only going to get 1 or 2 populate opportunities per turn, I figure you should be using them for the best value.
What would be cool is if there was a way to tap/untap/tap/etc. Trostani in order to make him into a rapid-fire token birther....... Only using him once a round is OK, but it sure would be nice to have him crank out 3 or 4 tokens a turn.
Pascha - I looked at your draft screenshot and wanted to point out that Kitesail works great with exalted since the biggest "weakness" of exalted is getting damage through chump blockers. I've been having a blast with it. I used to think it was just good with giving fat green dudes some lift, but it's even more devastating flying an exalted backed attacker over his blockers.
The going rate for NPH boosters is just north of 3 tix. I have four NPH boosters left over from release events and I have not seen the price of these boosters do much at all for months now. So at the going rate of 3 tix, do you think it's still a better idea to sell them or have we reached the point where cracking them makes more sense? Thoughts?
Do you all frequently run into situations like this with big draft pods and what are your thoughts on it?
Amen - the amount of workarounds that they'd have to do to implement something like that is nothing to scoff at (they essentially have to trick their own inventory system into thinking a specific item has 0 on hand). That stuff comes with risks as well as having to dedicate manual resources to trick the system. I'm sure they have much better things to do with their time and money than to pull that crap off.
Maybe if the original poster worked for an online retailer for a bit he'd change his conspiracy theories.
But on to better things - just got passed one online in a swiss release draft and am not selling it like I normally would. Will hold on to it for a bit like other's have suggested.
Boros - $39.99
Simic - $24.99
- As mentioned, getting gruul 2-drops is tough. I dipped into the Boros 2 drops which worked great for me
- Madcap Skills is common and crazy good with Gruul. Plop it on a trample guy then bloodrush him for crazy damage. I had situations where I literally wiped his team with a dude pumped like this.
- Miming Slime is great to cast after you have bloodrushed one of your 4-power guys. I had a 9/9 ooze and a 7/7 ooze yesterday - booyah.
- My max casting cost was 6 - I don't see a need to have guys with a casting cost more than that since you are usually winning by round 6. The bulk of my team were the 3-5 casting cost guys (3/4s, 4/4s, etc). They do the real work.
I went 4-1 and finished 4th with Gruul splash white for Boros. Lost 2-1 to the winner who played a straight Simic deck. I do not believe there was a Boros in the top 5, which kinda makes sense. The decks I beat were 2 Dimir, one of which was a very good mill deck, 1 Simic, and 1 Orsohv.
I opened no impactful rares in Gruul or Boros - the only rares in my deck were the promo Rubblehulk and the gruul shockland. Kept the curve low with the biggest dude being the 6 mana Rubblehulk. Had no flyers beside the occasional flying Daring Skyjek. It was an incredibly unspectacular bunch of cards that somehow worked good together. Here are some cards that really did great -
Miming Slime - he came out as a 7/7 and even a 9/9 after a bloodrush pump to a guy.
Crowned Ceratok - Mostly b/c of trample and being able to occasionally give another dude trample. Did a TON of work.
Truefire Paladin - Hot damn that guy won me 3 games, and I even screwed up and forgot his vigilance until the last game of the event!
Sunhome Guildmage - Didn't open the Gruul guildmage but got this one. Those tokens really helped out in a few games where I was behind or tied in board critters. Swarm with little dude then bloodrush the one that gets unblocked. Just plain awesome.
Madcap Skills - Yep, what folks are saying about it is true - pure awesomeness at common.
Scorchwalker - Opened two and played them both w/o hesitation. Never casted it as a creature. Even better when you have trample guys to pump with him.
Smite - Played two b/c it was really my only removal beside one Massive Raid (which was a dud). Even in an aggressive build I still was able to do well with it, and it flat out won me my 4th match.
Underperformers were Massive Raid and Act of Treason. Never had an opportunity to use either to any real effect all day.
Absolutely - that's what I'd like to see. Eventually it will all pan out though since stores have a limited amount of guild packs for each guild. Boros may have more players early on but later events will be the opposite as those packs go bye-bye.
You know that's probably the reason I fall into R/B/g so dang much in RTR. I get a Stab Wound and another decent red removal and I'm hooked. Maybe I am valuing this stuff too high.
On a better note, I thought I drafted a pretty decent Azorious deck with a splash of red for Izzit Charm and Quest for Flight. Unfortunately I didn't see how it did as modo crashed R1G1, leading to my laptop crashing and me timing out of the draft:(
Yesterday I was passed a plethora of removal -
2x Stab Wound
Mizzim Mortars
2x Explosive Impact
Launch Party
Annihilating Fire
With this as a base, what kind of a deck would you have been gunning to build? Total aggro? I ended up with a typical middling heap that ended up going 1-2. How I fail like this when I'm getting passed this much removal is beyond me:-/
But I did manage to salvage something today when I checked Wal Mart and found a sealed Knights vs. Dragons duel deck for original asking price. There was only one there and I definitely had to do a double take on it but it's mine now:D
What would be cool is if there was a way to tap/untap/tap/etc. Trostani in order to make him into a rapid-fire token birther....... Only using him once a round is OK, but it sure would be nice to have him crank out 3 or 4 tokens a turn.
- Neighbor colors work well together, especially if you are able to snag the cards like Arctic Aven, Flinthoof Boar, etc.
- The rings are BOSS. Most are even good when you are not in the color - the black ring that lets you regenerate can be particularly devastating.
- Exalted is for real this time. Many people are drafting B/W exalted decks with a lot of success.
- Always remember removal is key - don't be afraid to splash a 3rd color to utilize a solid removal spell.
- Don't overlook Kitesail. Hooking that up to a fat green guy or an exalted-backed attacker of any color is wicked.