Todd Anderson--always on a boring deck, always lucksacking a bad draw from his opponent. Sat next to him at an Open once--he was super salty and a complete <snip> to his very nice opponent.
This is flaming. Please be kind to others even if you have a negative opinion about them. Thanks! -- Lugger
I think it always depends on what you actually end up drafting, but I'm someone who tends to run high land counts (frequently to 18-19 in KTK and BFZ block drafts). Still, all of my draft decks so far in KAL have been 17 lands and I have been doing very well. I have also noticed a fair amount of complaining among my opponents about flooding out, meaning they aren't finding much to do with their late game mana or aren't finding much playable filtering/draw in their drafts.
A couple of other factors I think that go into KAL being a low land count set are:
- With so many artifacts, you can frequently draft a deck that doesn't NEED to hit it's colors on curve, so drawing any land can be almost as good as drawing the correct land. Maybe I can't give my peafowl flying on T5, but I can still deploy it on curve.
- Playables seem fairly deep if you are in the right colors--I had trouble in multiple drafts trying to decide what to cut from the maindeck and had deep sideboards I used--and splashing is really poor if you aren't heavy green due to a lack of fixing and double colored mana in the good non-artifacts. Three colored decks were more viable in other formats than this one, once again making it less common to increase land counts to hit colors.
Though many players refuse to do them, it's pretty obvious what things players can do to avoid turning FNMs into slow play drawfests. I'm wondering what measures game stores have taken to discourage slow play at their events. Sadly, I'd suspect that many stores are negligent in addressing even eggregious instances of slow play.
I still think there's time and space for Thunderbreak Regent + Draconic Roar to play well in standard. The effects are powerful for the investment and require little setup. I'm not sure if it's beside blue or beside black, but I'm working on it!
One problem is Khans was a great block , I know a lot of people are glad to see rhino go but it was a fine block overall. Khans gave us the mana to be creative . It's not a power creep issue with khans it just work together better than the last two blocks. Having fetches generated a lot of buzz for khans. A lot of players I have talk to don't like the speed of rotation in standard because it keeps you buying cards that won't be playable long enough to warrant the investment into the format.
Absolutely--the fast rotation killed it for me. Standard is now a format for pros and wanna-bes who either aren't buying their own cards, can consider them part of the cost of going 'pro', or just have lots of disposable income. Buying inflated standard decks for FNM just to have them rotate so quickly just feels bad to most players. I'm not sure we'll ever have another standard FNM fire in my area again. WOTC really screwed that one up, but sadly it doesn't seem like the sort of decision they'd backtrack on.
I think a big reason you are seeing that now (and have for a while under the NWO) is the trend towards goodstuff decks of various speeds. Most of the winning decks are Green-x goodstuff just playing the most efficient creatures/walkers on a pound for pound basis. Synergy matters but is not the priority. In that kind of environment it is natural to see rares/mythics seeing such heavy play.
Exactly. And to take it a bit further, I think at least a couple of the reasons for the trend toward goodstuff decks are 1) since the new rotation paradigm the overall card pool in standard is smaller so you have fewer available cards to make any given synergy work, 2) they pre-sabotage potentially good synergies to avoid creating broken decks which results in many synergies being too weak to even pursue.
I think WOTC really screwed up when they shortened the rotation period. They could have easily moved toward the 2 set per block, 2 blocks per year model and still allowed 24 months worth of sets in standard. Our cards would have been standard legal for longer (which I would like but apparently their bottom line disagrees) which would somewhat alleviate price spikes and there would be more cards and mechanics in the card pool which would increase deck diversity and better support synergy decks. These are the reasons that if the barrier to entry (i.e., rare manabases) weren't so high, many more standard players would flee to modern.
I agree with others that printing staples at mythic and good removal at rare is a cynical milking of players. I'm basically out of standard, just still playing my DTK-Origins cards until they rotate.
Y'all know where WOTC gets the money to pay players just for showing up, right?
Consider me fine with the idea that I won't have to pay 5 bucks a booster pack next year to prop up an unsustainable program that subsidizes 40 guys with foiled-out tier 1 decks for every format and play a kid's game for a living.
How naive are you? They cut this program and put a pittance back into the prize pool. You'll be paying the same price, and that money that would have gone to pros goes to stockholders instead.
Speculation. Who's to say they won't use the 100K saved to create a couple of design/development positions, positions that a couple of highly-enfranchised Platinum pros would be well-suited for? For all the howling, the change might actually produce new opportunities for a career in MTG.
Y'all know where WOTC gets the money to pay players just for showing up, right?
Consider me fine with the idea that I won't have to pay 5 bucks a booster pack next year to prop up an unsustainable program that subsidizes 40 guys with foiled-out tier 1 decks for every format and play a kid's game for a living.
This is flaming. Please be kind to others even if you have a negative opinion about them. Thanks! -- Lugger
A couple of other factors I think that go into KAL being a low land count set are:
- With so many artifacts, you can frequently draft a deck that doesn't NEED to hit it's colors on curve, so drawing any land can be almost as good as drawing the correct land. Maybe I can't give my peafowl flying on T5, but I can still deploy it on curve.
- Playables seem fairly deep if you are in the right colors--I had trouble in multiple drafts trying to decide what to cut from the maindeck and had deep sideboards I used--and splashing is really poor if you aren't heavy green due to a lack of fixing and double colored mana in the good non-artifacts. Three colored decks were more viable in other formats than this one, once again making it less common to increase land counts to hit colors.
Just my thoughts.
Also, any card that lets my opponent search my deck is pretty unfun.
Absolutely--the fast rotation killed it for me. Standard is now a format for pros and wanna-bes who either aren't buying their own cards, can consider them part of the cost of going 'pro', or just have lots of disposable income. Buying inflated standard decks for FNM just to have them rotate so quickly just feels bad to most players. I'm not sure we'll ever have another standard FNM fire in my area again. WOTC really screwed that one up, but sadly it doesn't seem like the sort of decision they'd backtrack on.
Exactly. And to take it a bit further, I think at least a couple of the reasons for the trend toward goodstuff decks are 1) since the new rotation paradigm the overall card pool in standard is smaller so you have fewer available cards to make any given synergy work, 2) they pre-sabotage potentially good synergies to avoid creating broken decks which results in many synergies being too weak to even pursue.
I think WOTC really screwed up when they shortened the rotation period. They could have easily moved toward the 2 set per block, 2 blocks per year model and still allowed 24 months worth of sets in standard. Our cards would have been standard legal for longer (which I would like but apparently their bottom line disagrees) which would somewhat alleviate price spikes and there would be more cards and mechanics in the card pool which would increase deck diversity and better support synergy decks. These are the reasons that if the barrier to entry (i.e., rare manabases) weren't so high, many more standard players would flee to modern.
Speculation. Who's to say they won't use the 100K saved to create a couple of design/development positions, positions that a couple of highly-enfranchised Platinum pros would be well-suited for? For all the howling, the change might actually produce new opportunities for a career in MTG.
Consider me fine with the idea that I won't have to pay 5 bucks a booster pack next year to prop up an unsustainable program that subsidizes 40 guys with foiled-out tier 1 decks for every format and play a kid's game for a living.