Wonder if P9 will even be worth much online. If they appear enough and vintage isn't popular online they won't be anything special. The price is in no way related to the real P9 except being about the same cards.
For the draft itself i can definately imagine many cards being better picks than say a timetwister. Black lotus may not even be an absolute bomb if the removal is good and the creatures are weak, you are 2 for 1ing yourself for tempo afterall. Acceleration is unlikely to do the busted things in limited compared to what it can do in constructed anyway. Ancestral recall is always busted though no matter the format.
Ban fetches and take off nacatl and ponder.
Fetches are slowing games down incredibly much and dominate the landbases that every deck runs fetch+shocklands setup. Without fetches gamespeed is improved a ton, the barrier to entry get's much cheaper and there are actually more decisions for deckbuilding in terms of mana and how many colors you run, lots of other lands like filterlands, painlands, other duals and what not all get interesting then.
Deathrite shaman and nacatl are automatically nerfed substantially, making the first no longer an issue and the second bad enough to return. Ponder without shuffle effects is fine too especially since ritual based decks are nerfed enough as is.
Other cards like ancestral visions, BBE, bitterblossom and punishing fire could probably come off. I don't think they would be too strong but i don't mind keeping them on either as they are not particularely interesting.
Looking at the PT naya looks to be a pretty weak deck.
It doesn't have all the comboish power of the devotion lists so those matchups are all pretty poor untill you board in lots of removal. Looking at what top8'ed and what did reasonably well I think you either want to be playing lots of removal ie play a controllish deck OR play something devotion comboish like in this standard. Disrupt them heavily or use some more rampish/devotion synergies to go over the top.
Naya is just a goodstuff aggro deck which has trouble disrupting them which is not where i'd like to be if people start copying devotion lists. If you're going with the domri core you simply can't play much interactive stuff at which point you're probably better doing some GR rampish deck like mihara's. If on the other hand you make it more aggro without a domri core and more removal I think you might as well run monored, more stable and synergizes better with a large burn suite.
Magic is a large part luck. Just accept the randomness when playing games like this, bad players/decks/moves can still win and even worse they can work out well sometimes for them. In poker everyone knows to ignore the bad call into lucky out from the newbie, in magic you just have to do the same. A player having a sideboard card main can actually help them win against you but just ignore it really
always use packs to draft if you're any good at it.
Any value you open will still be yours but you have fun playing the draft and you draft for value. The store I play at occasionally used to have 4 packs entry fee with 1 pack going to everyone going 2-1 and the the rest, almost always 5, to the winner which would net me a decent return as I tend to do quite well. Probably netting me about 2 packs on average. Now it's just a pack per game win which arguably makes it more fun for everyone as games still matter if you're 0-2 etc. but the payout for good players is worse, i still average 2 packs I think but have to pay slightly more.
Either way opening packs for value is terrible, not only are you getting far less then using it in draft or trading, you also have a bigger hassle turning that what you open into what you want. I don't care about collecting so just drafting is easy, any winning packs go into next drafts and any good singles are sold while i just gift the trash to the store or the youngster that happens to be there.
Many things make this very hard to use in a proper way.
Like others said, some of the individual events have very low samples. I'm looking especially at those mull to 5 and mull to 4 statistics that are probably just noise.
As for the cards, it only counts times when the card is played which gives the obvious issue with situational cards and high mana cost cards. Ashen rider and boulderfall are kind of bad but when they do get played they are obviously going to win you the game often. Time to feed is similarly going to get stuck very often. Still for relative ranking of similarly costed cards and not situational ones it can be slightly useful, for example nimbus naiad being over wingsteed rider (while the rider is even more restricted in cost) is interesting.
If anything relative popularity of draft types is most interesting from this I think, the archetype stats are for many not so interesting as most differences are not significant anyway but UB and RW being so popular is quite interesting.
Finally i'm surprised by the low or virtually nonexistant advantage for being on the play. I had estimated this to be in the 55-60% range from my own experiences where i vastly prefer being on the play. So many plays like ordeals etc. are just lethal on the play while sometimes just weak on the draw. Maybe the draw mulligans better making up that way but i'm very suspicious of this number. Maybe it refers to match wins and not individual game wins? Or possibly there is some other effect I can't think of now pushing this to 50-50 because this just feels very wrong.
If you're not aggressive portent of betrayal is completely useless, while peak eruption is a fine board card against some of the slower red decks which get's better in multiples I feel.
You're unlikely to ever play both but the marginally useful pick over the dead pick is still better.
I'd take naiad probably. Wingsteed rider is the better card if you get the deck going but it's a far more restrictive pick. You want to be heroic and you want to heavy in white for it to really shine, plus white is a somewhat shallow color and overdrafted in my experience.
Erebos is fine too but slightly weaker than naiad I think and blue is a better color.
Basically for me in drafts at the moment it's "when in doubt take the blue card". Blue is the best color by far, works well with every color and is deep enough to provide good cards even if shared by too many players while not needing to be your main color. Black and white both have plenty of double color cards (wingsteed rider, pharika's cure etc.) that they really want to be dominate yet they are shallow so they suck if they are shared. Opening with a wingsteed rider and then not having white flow and only ending up with 8 good white cards sucks, I want to play 9-10 plains or no plains at all.
Naiad is close to strongest, the deepest color and the easiest to play even if you end up with little blue, ie strong + likely to play makes it an easy pick.
This is a mistake, only play them if you're both colors. The ETBT tapped is far worse than the benefit of scry 1.
Sure early on you can play them without hindering your curve possibly but the scry 1 is often quite useless as well then. Any time you're topdecking for another land to make a certain play and you get this though is terrible which far outweighs the benefit of scry 1. Scry 1 is really very lousy, it's like 0.2 card or so probably and missing a crucial tempo play is huge. I'd bet that the average game in draft this format is at least 6-7 turns so you're just as likely if not more to see your temple from a topdeck then from the opening hand and the minor benefit it has in your opener or as 'free' scry later on is far outweighed by the possibility of having it screw your tempo play.
Absolutely same thing counts for traveler's amulet by the way, people playing that in 2 color decks are just bad.. Tempo is huge and missing just 1 turn is too big a risk for very minimal fixing/scry effects.
in R/G he is ok otherwise unplayable. His ability tends to be most useful just to sack him at will, for example to prevent being griptided. To 'fizzle' sip of hemlock or pharika's cure etc.
The ramp doesn;t come up much but can be good, bestowing is virtual card advantage too so saccing a guy to bestow something can be a fine play. Also against some decks putting out turn 3 stoneshock giant or just pumping your ill tempered cyclops at turn 5 etc is a fine play. black/red/green typically lack answers to high toughness guys so going for the turn 3 big dude is fairly safe and i would usually do it. (barring deathtouch guys or some other obvious problems). Against white it's even fine on the play as you get one attack before divine verdict anyway and that is easy to play around.
voyage's end is not even the best common i'd say. It's good and the only 2 mana out to bigger guys but it's definately not that fantastic to say it's a must pick.
Ton of rares and uncommons that are better.
At common lightning strike, gray merchant, wingsteed rider and even some green like nessian asp and voyaging satyr are defendable over it. Heck i'd even say griptide is about is about as good. For now I'd probably pick voyage's end over any other common because while those other commons are stronger they are more restricting in deck choice. Blue is pretty much always good and while people at paper drafts still kinda suck i rather be in blue then potentially share white/red/black with too many people.
meh it's alright.
Too many players in this format play poorly and try to go for the blowout with removal. In this format it's rarely a good move to try to respond to ordeals etc. just cast the damn removal turn 3 when the player is tapped out for his wingsteed rider. You don't need the blowout agianst heroic, just make sure they don't get a wingsteed or another big guy going early and you'll tend to crush it later.
God's willing is good but it's not amazing. You always want 1 but 2 or 3 can often feel like too many in the heroic deck because you want everything to be (heroic) guys and pump. A good player will not really run it to it much either, as you often have to tap out for the creature or for the pump anyway, if you wait a turn to have both be safe the opponent usually get's time to get the more expensive removal online. Just kill anything on sight against heroic if you can
I find advent of the wurm better than both chandra and xenagos.
They are all good threats against control but the big body of wurm is just great. Especially with elspeth being so popular I just like the trampling ability of wurm is more useful than the constant stream of 2/2s or chandra's incremental card advantage.
Especially just having a 5/5 in your deck is great for enabling domri to profitably take out stuff like blood baron or stormbreath dragon.
Against aggro I prefer the wurm most of all over the other options, it just blocks really well and is pretty good for taking out opposing planeswalkers. Xenagos just ended up being a little too vulnerable for my liking.
Have to say I run experiment 1 though unlike some others which biases my preference for advent but even without that (i just run 2 xp1's) i'd still go with advent probably. Chandra certainly not and xenagos is close but overall still slightly worse than wurm I think.
Turn 4 kills are easy and happen from time to time for the aggro decks, turn 3 is basically only possible in bad decks with comboish setups.
There are of course many you can think off, turn 2 fabled hero into turn 3 pump spell... A ton of options with some BTE's getting a huge reverent hunter or mana of shrine to nyx.. etc.
Omenspeaker is terrible, scry 2 that early on is not worth much at all for control. Often you'll have little information to go on and the scry is only great when you are really looking for specific stuff. So basically it's a 1/3 with small upside but how good is a 1/3 now?
Well pretty bad actually, it's too small to threaten planeswalkers in mirrors and just turns on some otherwise dead removal they have if they really feel they must deal with it. Against aggro it should be good but it actually isn't that much. It get's easily killed or nullified by RDW (firefist striker or chandra). Against G/W it's too small to block much, usually just being a chump block. More white weenie focussed G/W it's fairly good blocking militant and soldier of pantheon but still not great. Just playing removal in it's place is just so much better.. Some people say that you're happy if they burn it with lightning strike or waste a removal on it, well you shouldn't be because they got to play creatures first and get to attack freely. If you play removal instead and remove their creature you're much better off than them burning your omenspeaker and having an extra attacker when it matters..
For the draft itself i can definately imagine many cards being better picks than say a timetwister. Black lotus may not even be an absolute bomb if the removal is good and the creatures are weak, you are 2 for 1ing yourself for tempo afterall. Acceleration is unlikely to do the busted things in limited compared to what it can do in constructed anyway. Ancestral recall is always busted though no matter the format.
Fetches are slowing games down incredibly much and dominate the landbases that every deck runs fetch+shocklands setup. Without fetches gamespeed is improved a ton, the barrier to entry get's much cheaper and there are actually more decisions for deckbuilding in terms of mana and how many colors you run, lots of other lands like filterlands, painlands, other duals and what not all get interesting then.
Deathrite shaman and nacatl are automatically nerfed substantially, making the first no longer an issue and the second bad enough to return. Ponder without shuffle effects is fine too especially since ritual based decks are nerfed enough as is.
Other cards like ancestral visions, BBE, bitterblossom and punishing fire could probably come off. I don't think they would be too strong but i don't mind keeping them on either as they are not particularely interesting.
It doesn't have all the comboish power of the devotion lists so those matchups are all pretty poor untill you board in lots of removal. Looking at what top8'ed and what did reasonably well I think you either want to be playing lots of removal ie play a controllish deck OR play something devotion comboish like in this standard. Disrupt them heavily or use some more rampish/devotion synergies to go over the top.
Naya is just a goodstuff aggro deck which has trouble disrupting them which is not where i'd like to be if people start copying devotion lists. If you're going with the domri core you simply can't play much interactive stuff at which point you're probably better doing some GR rampish deck like mihara's. If on the other hand you make it more aggro without a domri core and more removal I think you might as well run monored, more stable and synergizes better with a large burn suite.
Any value you open will still be yours but you have fun playing the draft and you draft for value. The store I play at occasionally used to have 4 packs entry fee with 1 pack going to everyone going 2-1 and the the rest, almost always 5, to the winner which would net me a decent return as I tend to do quite well. Probably netting me about 2 packs on average. Now it's just a pack per game win which arguably makes it more fun for everyone as games still matter if you're 0-2 etc. but the payout for good players is worse, i still average 2 packs I think but have to pay slightly more.
Either way opening packs for value is terrible, not only are you getting far less then using it in draft or trading, you also have a bigger hassle turning that what you open into what you want. I don't care about collecting so just drafting is easy, any winning packs go into next drafts and any good singles are sold while i just gift the trash to the store or the youngster that happens to be there.
Like others said, some of the individual events have very low samples. I'm looking especially at those mull to 5 and mull to 4 statistics that are probably just noise.
As for the cards, it only counts times when the card is played which gives the obvious issue with situational cards and high mana cost cards. Ashen rider and boulderfall are kind of bad but when they do get played they are obviously going to win you the game often. Time to feed is similarly going to get stuck very often. Still for relative ranking of similarly costed cards and not situational ones it can be slightly useful, for example nimbus naiad being over wingsteed rider (while the rider is even more restricted in cost) is interesting.
If anything relative popularity of draft types is most interesting from this I think, the archetype stats are for many not so interesting as most differences are not significant anyway but UB and RW being so popular is quite interesting.
Finally i'm surprised by the low or virtually nonexistant advantage for being on the play. I had estimated this to be in the 55-60% range from my own experiences where i vastly prefer being on the play. So many plays like ordeals etc. are just lethal on the play while sometimes just weak on the draw. Maybe the draw mulligans better making up that way but i'm very suspicious of this number. Maybe it refers to match wins and not individual game wins? Or possibly there is some other effect I can't think of now pushing this to 50-50 because this just feels very wrong.
You're unlikely to ever play both but the marginally useful pick over the dead pick is still better.
Erebos is fine too but slightly weaker than naiad I think and blue is a better color.
Basically for me in drafts at the moment it's "when in doubt take the blue card". Blue is the best color by far, works well with every color and is deep enough to provide good cards even if shared by too many players while not needing to be your main color. Black and white both have plenty of double color cards (wingsteed rider, pharika's cure etc.) that they really want to be dominate yet they are shallow so they suck if they are shared. Opening with a wingsteed rider and then not having white flow and only ending up with 8 good white cards sucks, I want to play 9-10 plains or no plains at all.
Naiad is close to strongest, the deepest color and the easiest to play even if you end up with little blue, ie strong + likely to play makes it an easy pick.
Sure early on you can play them without hindering your curve possibly but the scry 1 is often quite useless as well then. Any time you're topdecking for another land to make a certain play and you get this though is terrible which far outweighs the benefit of scry 1. Scry 1 is really very lousy, it's like 0.2 card or so probably and missing a crucial tempo play is huge. I'd bet that the average game in draft this format is at least 6-7 turns so you're just as likely if not more to see your temple from a topdeck then from the opening hand and the minor benefit it has in your opener or as 'free' scry later on is far outweighed by the possibility of having it screw your tempo play.
Absolutely same thing counts for traveler's amulet by the way, people playing that in 2 color decks are just bad.. Tempo is huge and missing just 1 turn is too big a risk for very minimal fixing/scry effects.
The ramp doesn;t come up much but can be good, bestowing is virtual card advantage too so saccing a guy to bestow something can be a fine play. Also against some decks putting out turn 3 stoneshock giant or just pumping your ill tempered cyclops at turn 5 etc is a fine play. black/red/green typically lack answers to high toughness guys so going for the turn 3 big dude is fairly safe and i would usually do it. (barring deathtouch guys or some other obvious problems). Against white it's even fine on the play as you get one attack before divine verdict anyway and that is easy to play around.
Ton of rares and uncommons that are better.
At common lightning strike, gray merchant, wingsteed rider and even some green like nessian asp and voyaging satyr are defendable over it. Heck i'd even say griptide is about is about as good. For now I'd probably pick voyage's end over any other common because while those other commons are stronger they are more restricting in deck choice. Blue is pretty much always good and while people at paper drafts still kinda suck i rather be in blue then potentially share white/red/black with too many people.
Too many players in this format play poorly and try to go for the blowout with removal. In this format it's rarely a good move to try to respond to ordeals etc. just cast the damn removal turn 3 when the player is tapped out for his wingsteed rider. You don't need the blowout agianst heroic, just make sure they don't get a wingsteed or another big guy going early and you'll tend to crush it later.
God's willing is good but it's not amazing. You always want 1 but 2 or 3 can often feel like too many in the heroic deck because you want everything to be (heroic) guys and pump. A good player will not really run it to it much either, as you often have to tap out for the creature or for the pump anyway, if you wait a turn to have both be safe the opponent usually get's time to get the more expensive removal online. Just kill anything on sight against heroic if you can
They are all good threats against control but the big body of wurm is just great. Especially with elspeth being so popular I just like the trampling ability of wurm is more useful than the constant stream of 2/2s or chandra's incremental card advantage.
Especially just having a 5/5 in your deck is great for enabling domri to profitably take out stuff like blood baron or stormbreath dragon.
Against aggro I prefer the wurm most of all over the other options, it just blocks really well and is pretty good for taking out opposing planeswalkers. Xenagos just ended up being a little too vulnerable for my liking.
Have to say I run experiment 1 though unlike some others which biases my preference for advent but even without that (i just run 2 xp1's) i'd still go with advent probably. Chandra certainly not and xenagos is close but overall still slightly worse than wurm I think.
There are of course many you can think off, turn 2 fabled hero into turn 3 pump spell... A ton of options with some BTE's getting a huge reverent hunter or mana of shrine to nyx.. etc.
Well pretty bad actually, it's too small to threaten planeswalkers in mirrors and just turns on some otherwise dead removal they have if they really feel they must deal with it. Against aggro it should be good but it actually isn't that much. It get's easily killed or nullified by RDW (firefist striker or chandra). Against G/W it's too small to block much, usually just being a chump block. More white weenie focussed G/W it's fairly good blocking militant and soldier of pantheon but still not great. Just playing removal in it's place is just so much better.. Some people say that you're happy if they burn it with lightning strike or waste a removal on it, well you shouldn't be because they got to play creatures first and get to attack freely. If you play removal instead and remove their creature you're much better off than them burning your omenspeaker and having an extra attacker when it matters..