You've probably heard by now about the mysterious bo1 opening hand. The question is, how do we as players discern exactly what it's doing, and how we adapt our decks to take advantage of this system?
It seems clear to me that the bo1 opening hand improvement has led to the proliferation of mono-colored decks. This is due to the ability to play absurdly low amounts of land compared to any other format. (I heard someone saying they were playing 16 land with mono-red and still getting consistent 2 land hands.)
I'm playing Gruul aggro with good success on the bo1 ladder. My strategy to adapt to this strange meta has been to lower my mana curve to the extreme and remove lands. I try to make every card provide more than one cards worth of value. My removal is as cheap as possible. I play many cards that help me filter/draw cards when they hit. Cards such as merfolk walker and silhana wayfinder provide immediate value/deck filtering when they drop, which allows me to play fewer lands, and still hold off aggro decks.
Another oddity is the seemingly overabundance of 2-3 mono colored lands in opening hands. It seems to me that mulliganing in bo1 usually spells doom. It just seems like a much worse disadvantage then what you'd experience in bo3. This is because of the hand-fixer giving mono-colored/streamlined decks a better advantage. They run fewer lands, don't have to mulligan as much, and therefore make it a bit harder to build 2-3 colored decks. Back to the mono-colored opening hands. Due to this higher disadvantage from Mulliganing, I often just pray for luck and keep the opening hand if I have anything to play. Lady luck is usually on my side in this instance. To be fair, I built my deck to be able to run on 1 color for a few turns specifically for this reason. It seems to pay off ridiculously frequently. These are hands I would not have kept in paper bo3 normally as the statistical chance of it paying off are too small.
It seems clear to me that the bo1 opening hand improvement has led to the proliferation of mono-colored decks. This is due to the ability to play absurdly low amounts of land compared to any other format. (I heard someone saying they were playing 16 land with mono-red and still getting consistent 2 land hands.)
I'm playing Gruul aggro with good success on the bo1 ladder. My strategy to adapt to this strange meta has been to lower my mana curve to the extreme and remove lands. I try to make every card provide more than one cards worth of value. My removal is as cheap as possible. I play many cards that help me filter/draw cards when they hit. Cards such as merfolk walker and silhana wayfinder provide immediate value/deck filtering when they drop, which allows me to play fewer lands, and still hold off aggro decks.
Another oddity is the seemingly overabundance of 2-3 mono colored lands in opening hands. It seems to me that mulliganing in bo1 usually spells doom. It just seems like a much worse disadvantage then what you'd experience in bo3. This is because of the hand-fixer giving mono-colored/streamlined decks a better advantage. They run fewer lands, don't have to mulligan as much, and therefore make it a bit harder to build 2-3 colored decks. Back to the mono-colored opening hands. Due to this higher disadvantage from Mulliganing, I often just pray for luck and keep the opening hand if I have anything to play. Lady luck is usually on my side in this instance. To be fair, I built my deck to be able to run on 1 color for a few turns specifically for this reason. It seems to pay off ridiculously frequently. These are hands I would not have kept in paper bo3 normally as the statistical chance of it paying off are too small.
Anyone else have other thoughts/comments?