Sorry if the question is out of the blue or inappropiate.
Raredrafting can certainly improve your average cost to draft if done intelligently. You do need to make sure you know the values of cards, though. Just taking every rare you see is terrible, because most of them are nearly worthless.
Incidentally, a better place of questions like that is the Limited forum. You'll get a lot more responses and probably a lot quicker!
My first impression is that seems more like Modern Masters than ME-ME4 in that the power level at common is pretty high. Also, the standout mechanic at common is cycling, which I think is a good thing for the format.
Also, cards like Feast of Dreams are great, but so horribly swingy. I don't like that feeling of "OK, if his 5-drop happens to be an enchantment creature then I win this game, but if not I lose".
That's hardly new, though. Most formats have a 2-cost black removal spell which hits very roughly half the creatures in the format. (Victim of Night, Ultimate Price, Go for the Throat, etc.)
At any rate, we don't have to suffer this format for much longer. Vintage Masters is coming and they seem to have taken the same general approach which worked so well with Modern Masters.
You've got a point, I think that speaks volumes about how shallow MTG villains are these days.
He's not a great villain, but he would have made a great character. Imagine him at the climax of any block storyline, showing up out of nowhere and disrupting the plans of the protagonists and antagonists alike with a well-timed party.
I think it's more accurate to say that she's mostly dead. She's not moving, but she's not Yawgmoth-dead either. She can still be revived by a Rescue from the Underworld. As long as Ajani doesn't look back, of course.
I don't understand your objection. The underlying math is based on a distribution of skill levels for two player games. What part of that exactly is invalid in Magic?
The core of ELO is a mathematical equation which predicts the results of a match based on the ratings of the participants. If both players are 1700, for example, it will predict that (ignoring draws) each player has a 50% win chance. If the ratings are correct, if the players play each other a large number of times their ratings will remain approximately the same.
The problem arises when you have a gap in rating between the players and increases as you have a larger gap (say an 1800 plays a 1600). The ELO algorithm makes a prediction which ignores the effects of variance and therefore the wrong number of points are added/subtracted when a player wins/loses. So even when a player's skill in unchanged, their rating will vary wildly based on RNG as well as things which should not affect it (such as type of event they play).
It's not perfect but at least it's something. I'd rather have ELO than nothing. I know it has limitations but even if it's misleading to most people, it's interesting to me.
Personally I use the ticket system to track my progress. If the value of my collection in tickets has increased during my play session, I've made progress.
More specifically, your rating at any given moment is not indicative of any sort of progress/skill level. The real issue that there is no way to see your rating over time. If I could look at my profile and see a graph of my rating and how it has changed over the past two years, I think it would do a good job of showing my growth as a player. But the specific number that it currently sits at isn't all that helpful.
Even long-term trends have a problem, because aside from having separate Limited/Constructed ratings there aren't different ratings for different formats.
So if my Constructed rating is lower than it was 2 years ago, maybe I've gotten worse...or maybe I just play more Momir Basic now than I used to.
I would hate to see ratings go away because they're one of the few ways to actually track your progress in MTGO. Sure, I could track it all myself, but that takes quite a bit of work that a computer could be doing for me. Realistically, we should be swimming in stats since MTG is such a quantitative game -- numbers of cards, life totals, casting costs, power, toughness, turns -- there are numbers everywhere! Yet we track so few of them. As a statistician who looks to numbers to infer truths, this makes me sad.
This would be the case if rating were an accurate measure of skill/progress. But it's not. The underlying math is based on chess and is invalid when applied to Magic. If you're a statistician you should know what happens if you do statistics based on invalid assumptions. So it's good that they're getting rid of rating. Your rating doesn't mean what 99% of people seem to think it means.
Rating is useful for one thing and one thing only. If you're in a match on the current (V3) client and your opponent seems to be taking a while, check your rating. If it's above 0, everything's fine. If it doesn't show up, you've been disconnected from the server and need to restart the client.
It's an appropriately crappy end for one of the least coherent block storylines.
For starters, we have a mysterious hole in the Theros pantheon (the RG god) which to my knowledge is not explained or even noticed by any of the characters. Xenagos fills that hole and the existing gods react by throwing a tantrum. Everyone blames him instead of blaming those who are actually doing it — even our planeswalker "heroes", who should know better.
And now we have Xenagos's undeserved death, followed by Elspeth's probable death. In Greek mythology, when tragedy befalls a hero it's supposed to be because of a failing in the hero's character. You aren't supposed to get killed by a god for following that god's instructions.
Fortunately it's vague enough that they can easily retcon it in a way which doesn't sound too crazy.
Next turn, draw Wolfir Silverheart, play it and swing for lethal.
He said rare redrafting.
My first impression is that seems more like Modern Masters than ME-ME4 in that the power level at common is pretty high. Also, the standout mechanic at common is cycling, which I think is a good thing for the format.
That's hardly new, though. Most formats have a 2-cost black removal spell which hits very roughly half the creatures in the format. (Victim of Night, Ultimate Price, Go for the Throat, etc.)
At any rate, we don't have to suffer this format for much longer. Vintage Masters is coming and they seem to have taken the same general approach which worked so well with Modern Masters.
He's not a great villain, but he would have made a great character. Imagine him at the climax of any block storyline, showing up out of nowhere and disrupting the plans of the protagonists and antagonists alike with a well-timed party.
I think it's more accurate to say that she's mostly dead. She's not moving, but she's not Yawgmoth-dead either. She can still be revived by a Rescue from the Underworld. As long as Ajani doesn't look back, of course.
The core of ELO is a mathematical equation which predicts the results of a match based on the ratings of the participants. If both players are 1700, for example, it will predict that (ignoring draws) each player has a 50% win chance. If the ratings are correct, if the players play each other a large number of times their ratings will remain approximately the same.
The problem arises when you have a gap in rating between the players and increases as you have a larger gap (say an 1800 plays a 1600). The ELO algorithm makes a prediction which ignores the effects of variance and therefore the wrong number of points are added/subtracted when a player wins/loses. So even when a player's skill in unchanged, their rating will vary wildly based on RNG as well as things which should not affect it (such as type of event they play).
Personally I use the ticket system to track my progress. If the value of my collection in tickets has increased during my play session, I've made progress.
Even long-term trends have a problem, because aside from having separate Limited/Constructed ratings there aren't different ratings for different formats.
So if my Constructed rating is lower than it was 2 years ago, maybe I've gotten worse...or maybe I just play more Momir Basic now than I used to.
This would be the case if rating were an accurate measure of skill/progress. But it's not. The underlying math is based on chess and is invalid when applied to Magic. If you're a statistician you should know what happens if you do statistics based on invalid assumptions. So it's good that they're getting rid of rating. Your rating doesn't mean what 99% of people seem to think it means.
Rating is useful for one thing and one thing only. If you're in a match on the current (V3) client and your opponent seems to be taking a while, check your rating. If it's above 0, everything's fine. If it doesn't show up, you've been disconnected from the server and need to restart the client.
For starters, we have a mysterious hole in the Theros pantheon (the RG god) which to my knowledge is not explained or even noticed by any of the characters. Xenagos fills that hole and the existing gods react by throwing a tantrum. Everyone blames him instead of blaming those who are actually doing it — even our planeswalker "heroes", who should know better.
And now we have Xenagos's undeserved death, followed by Elspeth's probable death. In Greek mythology, when tragedy befalls a hero it's supposed to be because of a failing in the hero's character. You aren't supposed to get killed by a god for following that god's instructions.
Fortunately it's vague enough that they can easily retcon it in a way which doesn't sound too crazy.