Practice and build more stuff is the basic advice I offer to anyone wanting to get more serious in playing multiplayer Starcraft.
Without getting into many real sort of strategies (you can find those VERY easily), the advice that I offer to anyone new to SC is to basically just build stuff. Don't stop building probes (your worker units), and keep spending your money on buildings and units. You could have horrible micro, timing sense, army composition, attack move into everything, etc, etc, as long as you build more stuff, often times you will get there.
Eventually, you will find that just building stuff won't get you there, and you need to develop some sort of strategy, but by then, your mechanics should be decent enough, and you can explore more paths backed up with solid mechanics.
Also, I think the order of importance for cards needed in Metalcraft in drafts needs to be more fleshed out before we can say whether it's weak in drafts or not.
Metalcraft really does feel like "fixed" Affinity. You get some sort of benefit the more artifacts you play, in Affinity's case, you get more and more free guys once you hit some sort of critical mass of artifacts, and for Metalcraft, you get undercosted guys once you hit 3+ artifacts. But Metalcraft dudes often do something when you don't have 3+ artifacts (even if they are overcosted), but stuff like Myr Enforcer are just dead cards if you don't get that pile of artifacts to begin with (but once online, you are playing REALLY undercosted dudes).
So I think we might have to approach Metalcraft in drafts with the Affinity mentality. Which, like Tahn said, we probably have to draft worse artifacts first before we draft coloured cards in order to correctly draft a deck focused on Metalcraft. Also, just like Affinity, you can't be willy nilly about it, and have to dedicate your deck to it.
It does look interesting, but I'm just afraid of the fact that there are SO MANY artifact destruction that people maindeck in this block.
So if it's something that you can do on the side, like a U/B Proliferate deck that plays like 10-12 artifacts (with Throne of Geth, Contagion Clasp, Trigons, etc), it seems it could work quite well, as it provides you with free blockers while you go to town on their poison counters. Otherwise, I don't think you should build an entire strategy around just this single card, seems a bit too fragile.
So how high do you take this in draft? Is it one of those things that you don't miss much if you pass it and don't see it back, or something that you are pretty happy about when you see it pack 3 pick 4?
I've been playing netdraft, and I've been consistently passing this card. Haven't seen it being played either, so I really have no idea how well it plays. Seems decent with a couple of the spellbombs, particularly the white one.
I noticed that a real strength the deck has is the ability to blank shatters. There were a bunch of times where my opponent's shatter or scrapmelter sat in their hand while I went about my business.
I feel like this is the biggest strength of the Infect archetype in Scars drafts. There are just so many decks where Shatters are pretty much Doom Blades when used against them.
This is a pretty big plus for the Infect archetype. When you don't run the risk of being blown out when your opponent turns off metalcraft for you mid-combat, or can blank like 4 removal spells in your opponent's deck, that's pretty huge.
Why are you thinking that it's so hard to get the cards to support infect? It's a keyword found on 10 commons and 6 uncommons. 13% of the set has infect on it. There will be a sizable number sealed pools where it is strong enough to play. Even if 10% of the pools have enough to play infect that is just as good as any other particular limited archetype in sealed.
I'd agree with you if I you were merely saying people shouldn't force Infect, but I still think you're letting your personal experience in a short period of time cloud your judgement on it. At least to some degree.
No harm done, forgave and forgotten.
As for the issue at hand, I guess I was trying to state that it's still a bit early for Scars limited, and Infect is a new enough mechanic (something that we've never really had before, consistently winning with poison counters and stuff), that there are more people that manage to get away with winning with Infect because it's still quite new, and people haven't gotten around to placing priority on different threats, or playing around the necessary tricks, etc, so I think the numbers for Infect being playable might be inflated a little bit.
An example from myself would be in RoE drafts (yeah, I know, drafts are different than sealed, but this example works in this context). I managed to get away with Aura Gnarlid aggro in RoE for the first few weeks, winning a bunch of live drafts (raredrafts and moneydrafts), but now we know that particular strategy isn't very good (while very good strategies like grixis control took a while to be developed).
So I guess I'm wondering more about whether why Infect seems so good isn't because people haven't gotten around to changing their playing styles to accommodate this new mechanic, and if indeed Infect would be still as good as some people think it is when the format's been fleshed out for a few weeks. Which is why it leads me to believe that Infect might not be as good as it seems.
Good, I like it when someone points me to the wiki page for sample size, because I really don't understand statistics, even if I majored in it. Should I point you to some research articles or show you what my textbooks say about sample sizes also, just so we are on the same page?
Your statement is absurd, because your entire collected experience of observing games played this past weekend is still a minuscule fraction of a percent of all the games played in prereleases. You're an ant calling a dust mite small.
Infect is not an unplayable mechanic. Stop saying it is. It's the stupidest thing I've seen someone say on a Magic forum since Future Sight came out and someone said Tarmogoyf was underwhelming. Creatures with infect are still decent even if you only have one in your deck. Wither is powerful on its own.
I think you are barking up the wrong tree here. I've never said anything of the sort that Infect is unplayable, and I've always maintained that Infect is good when you've got the cards to support it (which is not that often in sealed, since you don't dictate your pool). Maybe you would like to address your diatribe to the OP. If you've read anything I've said at all (which I doubt you have, given that post), you would have seen how I've been on the side of certain playable Infect creatures like Blight Mamba, etc, from the start.
Exoskeleton, Scythe, Barbed Battlegear, Argentum armor all win in 3 hits aswell most likely and they can win faster. The fact that it kills in three hits is not the reason its good, often when youve hit your opponent 3 times with it theyre dead from the damage alone in which case any 2 power boosting equipment couldve done the job.
Well, SoMaB also gives 4 other crucial powerups besides the combat triggers,
+2/+2 and 2 protection colours is quite good at swinging past green infect dude, blue fliers (and blanking blue removal like Bond) and putting something outside of burn range, making it pretty easy to connect with it. Plus, the green wolf trigger is also tacked on to provide blockers or additional equipment carriers, all for the price of costing only 2 to equip and 3 to cast, and we are talking about the whole package here.
The connecting 3 times to win is merely one part of that, and I think the sum of all that definitely makes it better than most of the other equipment. Though I think I can see a point where someone prefers the Axe, because of the Indestructibility and very low cost, but I think the pros on the Sword is totally worth it.
This thread is called "Pre-release notes and stories". When was it not in the territory of personal anecdotes?
Well, my conversation, in context, had to do with how we debated whether infect was or was not "playable", and I mentioned you can't really use a personal anecdote as overwhelming evidence to refute another player's conjecture on the format. But whatever, we aren't philosophy students (at least I hope we all aren't :P).
Actually, it seems like a lot of people are chiming in with stories of infect decks across the spectrum working like gangbusters in here. Seems to me that it's a solid limitied mechanic.
But if you read the threads around the limited forums about Infect, most of them actually was either something along time lines of: "I had this and this and this, and my opponents died (replace 'this' with some sort of bomb, Infect or non-Infect)", or it was: "I Untamed Mighted someone for a bajillion and came back to win so many games!".
The 2nd scenario is something that I'm not too comfortable with, because I have seen players being blown out by tricks with Infect, but I've also seen tons of solid players just evaluating the threats correctly and never got blown out. And I think as the format becomes more familiar, people will have less and less chances to make those ridiculous plays that really shouldn't happen in the first place.
And in response to you: I had no bomb rares, I had no Untamed Mights, I still went 4-1 with Infect. It's all well and good to say that infect is costed at 1 when it comes to building the warm body, but each point of power they have is attacking what amounts to a life total of 10 for which there is no life gain and when your opponent blocks them his creatures are put even further behind the curve.
Other creatures can be blocked indefinitely by a fat back end or regenerator, but the damage dealt by infect creatures is permanent and bypasses both regeneration and indestructibility. It turns any scenario where two creatures would normally bounce into a win for the infect creature, and even chump blocks improve things for you in the long term.
We are getting into the territory of personal anecdotes here. I mean, it's great that Infect worked out for you, even with a "crappy" pool, but that doesn't mean that this would be the norm. In fact, I would wager that more people saw the situation being that the ridiculous Infect deck won easily, and most of the mediocre Infect decks performed quite poorly in their pre-releases.
It's pretty valuable this time too, even though the overall commons and uncommons aren't as powerful as they were in MMM or MD5, off colour Myrs are still totally worth it.
Pretty much every type of deck will run some sort of "artifact matters" cards, and every deck would want acceleration. Even if you can't equip a Myr to a Vulshok Morningstar, or a Viridian Longbow, turning on metalcraft for even one thing a turn earlier is often pretty big, particularly since this format is actually not as slow as I thought.
Plus, with any sort of uncommon equipment (i.e. the decent ones), or some of the smiths, they become suddenly quite good.
I think for Infect decks, they have to be busy locking down on Infect pieces, so they probably won't have the leisure of taking an early off colour Myr and try tabling their piece, so they probably won't want it high, but I would think most other deck would want them pretty high.
Infect is fine if you are deep enough, but that doesn't happen very often (there were like 2 really good infect decks, and a ton of other people trying to build infect with a shallow pool and just getting crushed left and right).
Plus, I didn't see any of the decent players actually get blown out by infect (and by decent, I mean just your regular PTQ/GP players). As long as you play around Untamed Might, and maybe prioritize your threats a bit differently, most decks should be fine against infect.
Otherwise, I tend to agree with the OP. Though I thought the format was going to be slower, but it turned out to be slightly faster than I imagined (and it was in sealed too, which would suggest it might even be faster than that in draft, and no, it had nothing to do with Infect, it was mostly due to those damn metalcraft +2/+2 guys, which are just so big for their manacost when you hit metalcraft).
I think Sword of Body and Mind is like the best card in this set too, even better than all the other bomb creatures and whatnot, since you can just saddle it up to any random creature and win in like 3 hits. It even makes dudes for you to attach it to and swing with! Seriously, it's not that hard to win with this card. Random dude + SoBoM is good enough in most games.
I will not always play Tempered Steel, even if it's "better" (conditionally better).
I also personally dislike forcing, so I'm going with the splashable FtK here.
Wait....
/in
Without getting into many real sort of strategies (you can find those VERY easily), the advice that I offer to anyone new to SC is to basically just build stuff. Don't stop building probes (your worker units), and keep spending your money on buildings and units. You could have horrible micro, timing sense, army composition, attack move into everything, etc, etc, as long as you build more stuff, often times you will get there.
Eventually, you will find that just building stuff won't get you there, and you need to develop some sort of strategy, but by then, your mechanics should be decent enough, and you can explore more paths backed up with solid mechanics.
Metalcraft really does feel like "fixed" Affinity. You get some sort of benefit the more artifacts you play, in Affinity's case, you get more and more free guys once you hit some sort of critical mass of artifacts, and for Metalcraft, you get undercosted guys once you hit 3+ artifacts. But Metalcraft dudes often do something when you don't have 3+ artifacts (even if they are overcosted), but stuff like Myr Enforcer are just dead cards if you don't get that pile of artifacts to begin with (but once online, you are playing REALLY undercosted dudes).
So I think we might have to approach Metalcraft in drafts with the Affinity mentality. Which, like Tahn said, we probably have to draft worse artifacts first before we draft coloured cards in order to correctly draft a deck focused on Metalcraft. Also, just like Affinity, you can't be willy nilly about it, and have to dedicate your deck to it.
So if it's something that you can do on the side, like a U/B Proliferate deck that plays like 10-12 artifacts (with Throne of Geth, Contagion Clasp, Trigons, etc), it seems it could work quite well, as it provides you with free blockers while you go to town on their poison counters. Otherwise, I don't think you should build an entire strategy around just this single card, seems a bit too fragile.
I've been playing netdraft, and I've been consistently passing this card. Haven't seen it being played either, so I really have no idea how well it plays. Seems decent with a couple of the spellbombs, particularly the white one.
I feel like this is the biggest strength of the Infect archetype in Scars drafts. There are just so many decks where Shatters are pretty much Doom Blades when used against them.
This is a pretty big plus for the Infect archetype. When you don't run the risk of being blown out when your opponent turns off metalcraft for you mid-combat, or can blank like 4 removal spells in your opponent's deck, that's pretty huge.
No harm done, forgave and forgotten.
As for the issue at hand, I guess I was trying to state that it's still a bit early for Scars limited, and Infect is a new enough mechanic (something that we've never really had before, consistently winning with poison counters and stuff), that there are more people that manage to get away with winning with Infect because it's still quite new, and people haven't gotten around to placing priority on different threats, or playing around the necessary tricks, etc, so I think the numbers for Infect being playable might be inflated a little bit.
An example from myself would be in RoE drafts (yeah, I know, drafts are different than sealed, but this example works in this context). I managed to get away with Aura Gnarlid aggro in RoE for the first few weeks, winning a bunch of live drafts (raredrafts and moneydrafts), but now we know that particular strategy isn't very good (while very good strategies like grixis control took a while to be developed).
So I guess I'm wondering more about whether why Infect seems so good isn't because people haven't gotten around to changing their playing styles to accommodate this new mechanic, and if indeed Infect would be still as good as some people think it is when the format's been fleshed out for a few weeks. Which is why it leads me to believe that Infect might not be as good as it seems.
Good, I like it when someone points me to the wiki page for sample size, because I really don't understand statistics, even if I majored in it. Should I point you to some research articles or show you what my textbooks say about sample sizes also, just so we are on the same page?
I think you are barking up the wrong tree here. I've never said anything of the sort that Infect is unplayable, and I've always maintained that Infect is good when you've got the cards to support it (which is not that often in sealed, since you don't dictate your pool). Maybe you would like to address your diatribe to the OP. If you've read anything I've said at all (which I doubt you have, given that post), you would have seen how I've been on the side of certain playable Infect creatures like Blight Mamba, etc, from the start.
Well, SoMaB also gives 4 other crucial powerups besides the combat triggers,
+2/+2 and 2 protection colours is quite good at swinging past green infect dude, blue fliers (and blanking blue removal like Bond) and putting something outside of burn range, making it pretty easy to connect with it. Plus, the green wolf trigger is also tacked on to provide blockers or additional equipment carriers, all for the price of costing only 2 to equip and 3 to cast, and we are talking about the whole package here.
The connecting 3 times to win is merely one part of that, and I think the sum of all that definitely makes it better than most of the other equipment. Though I think I can see a point where someone prefers the Axe, because of the Indestructibility and very low cost, but I think the pros on the Sword is totally worth it.
Well, my conversation, in context, had to do with how we debated whether infect was or was not "playable", and I mentioned you can't really use a personal anecdote as overwhelming evidence to refute another player's conjecture on the format. But whatever, we aren't philosophy students (at least I hope we all aren't :P).
But if you read the threads around the limited forums about Infect, most of them actually was either something along time lines of: "I had this and this and this, and my opponents died (replace 'this' with some sort of bomb, Infect or non-Infect)", or it was: "I Untamed Mighted someone for a bajillion and came back to win so many games!".
The 2nd scenario is something that I'm not too comfortable with, because I have seen players being blown out by tricks with Infect, but I've also seen tons of solid players just evaluating the threats correctly and never got blown out. And I think as the format becomes more familiar, people will have less and less chances to make those ridiculous plays that really shouldn't happen in the first place.
We are getting into the territory of personal anecdotes here. I mean, it's great that Infect worked out for you, even with a "crappy" pool, but that doesn't mean that this would be the norm. In fact, I would wager that more people saw the situation being that the ridiculous Infect deck won easily, and most of the mediocre Infect decks performed quite poorly in their pre-releases.
Pretty much every type of deck will run some sort of "artifact matters" cards, and every deck would want acceleration. Even if you can't equip a Myr to a Vulshok Morningstar, or a Viridian Longbow, turning on metalcraft for even one thing a turn earlier is often pretty big, particularly since this format is actually not as slow as I thought.
Plus, with any sort of uncommon equipment (i.e. the decent ones), or some of the smiths, they become suddenly quite good.
I think for Infect decks, they have to be busy locking down on Infect pieces, so they probably won't have the leisure of taking an early off colour Myr and try tabling their piece, so they probably won't want it high, but I would think most other deck would want them pretty high.
Plus, I didn't see any of the decent players actually get blown out by infect (and by decent, I mean just your regular PTQ/GP players). As long as you play around Untamed Might, and maybe prioritize your threats a bit differently, most decks should be fine against infect.
Otherwise, I tend to agree with the OP. Though I thought the format was going to be slower, but it turned out to be slightly faster than I imagined (and it was in sealed too, which would suggest it might even be faster than that in draft, and no, it had nothing to do with Infect, it was mostly due to those damn metalcraft +2/+2 guys, which are just so big for their manacost when you hit metalcraft).
Otherwise, my list would be:
1) Sword of Body and Mind
2) Strata Scythe
3) Grafted Exoskeleton
4) Darksteel Axe
5) Argentum Armor