MTG Salvation

Quote from NorthernPolarity »

The vehicles are a bit iffy

Well seeing as how Renegade Freighter is usually good for at least one win per event, when it is played out on turn three and opponent can't answer it, I kept it in, and sure enough, it won a game or two. The other vehicle is good with the bounce/flicker effects for value as well as being at least a threat from a deck that doesn't have many. Also I think it's good to have a couple of creatures that can kill the opponent in the midgame, even if they are vehicles, to act as removal bait at least until the real bombs can come out.

How is it possible that the attached deck went 3-0?

I considered the draft a train wreck. First pick Renegade Freighter from a very weak pack. Second pick Revoke Privileges from another weak pack. White didn't flow. Everything was going wrong. About midway through pack 1 I decided to just give up, take Metallurgic Summonings and go crazy trying to build around it. Even then I didn't feel like I was getting any good instants/sorceries. I felt like the deck was so bad, with 11 weak creatures, no really good removal, and only a second pack Aethersquall Ancient as a legitimate bomb, and a very expensive and slow one at that.

And yet, I cruised right through. I always seemed to have a relevant instant in my hand. Metallurgic Summonings to Tezzeret's Ambition happened in several games and it's brutal. Even Captured by the Consulate did its bit, and that's a pretty bad card; but it's amazing how many players don't understand it and end up playing unnecessary removal against their own guy (for example, one player with a captured Bastion Mastodon that was gumming up my ground attack quite well tried to play Revoke Privileges on my Skyswirl Harrier that was holding his two 3/1 Foundry Screechers at bay, all that did was make his Bastion unable to block as well as unable to attack and allow my ground crew through).

Oh yeah even Insidious Will was a star, several times redirecting removal back to their own problem creature/vehicle, sometimes countering a creature at just the right moment and giving me a 4/4 at the same time. Insidious Will for cripes sake!

This deck shouldn't have 3-0, but it did. Oh well sometimes you're lucky I guess.

Could spoilers have something to do with it? I could be misremembering, but 5 - 10 years ago wasn't mtgsalvation the first place to get most spoilered cards? I would expect that would drive a lot of people to the site and this would spill over into other forums.

It seems to me like lots of places get the spoilered cards at the same time now. Is my perception off base here?

I envisioned pumping out lots of energy (which I always did) and hitting on a Whirler Virtuoso to fill the skies, possibly with Era in play. Or maybe sitting with Rashmi on the board drawing lots of cards and winning on card advantange. All with Confiscation letting me steal their bomb and beat them with it. Anyway, it happened like clockwork one round, but the other rounds were all screw and flood.

I just want more games. Best of 5 would be better than best of 3.

My point was not that the deck was great. It was OK. The point is it would be fun to pilot, just look at all of the effects and trickery, and yet I got to do just about zero of it because of the best-of-3 format for drafts. I think that online they should be best-of-7 at a minimum, because in my opinion a big part of the fun of drafting is actually seeing your deck in action, and too often you get only one or even zero good matches in best of 3 because of screw/flood variance.

So next event after the one that I complained about in the venting thread, I ended up going 3-0. But it doesn't change the fact that I still want more play time with my decks. I'd prefer to play 10 rounds even if it meant that I didn't win the event.

Blue is almost always open, so much so that I will start out trying to get a different color but pretty quickly fall back to a base blue deck. This deck was pretty good at gumming up the ground, stabilizing, using lifelink to get back to a comfortable position, and then winning with inevitability, usually with card advantage via Padeem. Also Shrewd Negotiation was an all-star.

By the way, my greed is evident, and I never even played Cloudblazer one time in the entire event.

The thing I hate, absolutely hate, the most about Magic is the amount of variance and how it just ruins the whole game. I draft decks that I look forward to playing, to see how they perform, and I end up dying to flood and screw at least one, sometimes two, out of three rounds. All I want is for all online events to be 10 rounds. Then I will at least have a chance to ENJOY my deck a large percentage of the time instead of end the event frustrated. At least half those games should be reasonable instead of flood/screw fests. That's all I want - to enjoy playing the deck I drafted without screw and flood resulting in ONE match that I get to play with the deck being reasonable. By the way, the old style leagues used to be this -- you could play the deck huge numbers of times for tiebreakers. But no more. Now you draft for 20 - 30 minutes and then 3 quick and usually flood/screw-decided rounds later, that's all you ever get out of that deck. I HATE IT.

Attached is the deck I drafted. It wasn't great, but it should be reasonably competitive, and at the very least, lots of fun to pilot. Round one went 1-1 and then I flooded to a loss. Round two I dominated my opponenent. Round 3 my opponent had the nuts twice and each time I was just about to stabilize they had exactly the spell they needed to finish it off. OK that will happen, but the worst part is that I completely mana screwed out of game 2 which was a major contributor to the loss.

Oh by the way I drew Rashmi exactly ONCE out of 7 games, played it and it was immediately taken away by that 1/3 guy that exiles creatures. I drew Confiscation Coup exactly one time. Out of 7 games. And it didn't matter because it was one of the games where I destroyed my opponent without even playing it.

There is no game I have ever played that promises such fun and delivers such saddness and despair as Magic. Congratulations Wizards! You have created the most underdelivering game ever devised by mankind!

Quote from Funkenstein3D »

I'm a little bummed to see so many people down on this format. I've been enjoying it a good bit, although maybe it's just because I've been crushing it so far (14-1 match record all together).

No offense, but 14 - 1 is luck. Nobody goes 14 - 1 because of some kind of super awesome skill. So this format is full of variance and you've been on the lucky side of that variance. I'm glad you've enjoyed your run but it's not going to last. You're going to lose tons of games to the punishing nature of the format, where a single missed land drop or more likely simply having lost the roll of the dice and finding out that 75% of wins go to the player that plays first, will determine the outcome without you really having any say in the matter.

One thing I've found is that while decisions do matter in this format, with the faster pace and more explosive starts it often just comes down to a single right or wrong call that determines the outcome of the game. For example, one game I chose not to pump my Thriving Ibex because I wanted to blink it with the angel and get more energy. But valuing the additional ability to pump later over that single point of immediate damage cost me the game and eventually the match when I came up one damage short of lethal a few turns down the line. This makes games less forgiving than some other recent formats where you could make a mistake but make up for it in a protracted battle. Overall I find this change of pace fun as each decision feels very high stakes, since you never know when you could make a slight blunder that could cost you the entire game.

Sorry, there is no way you could have known that not doing a single point of damage at one point in preference to wanting to use a trick to build resources, was going to be a game losing move, and trying attribute that decision to "skill" instead of happenstance indicates, to me, willfully playing down the shortcomings of the format.

Sure, there are going to be good games in Kaladesh. It would be ridiculous to suggest that every game is going to go down to whoever drew first, or whoever didn't get the exact sequence of land and spell cards in a format that gives very, very little opportunity for working your way back from a losing position. Good games will happen. For me though, it's just not worth putting my money down if I know that a certain percentage of the time, the games will be frustrating and pointless. Frustrating and pointless games are a big part of Magic already, but with Kaladesh, they've been taken way beyond the threshold of acceptability. I won't play this set any more.

This set sucks and I don't enjoy it, so I decided to do *one last* Kaladesh event. 6-2-2-2 league draft. I cannot think of a more appropriate deck to have drafted as my last Kaladesh deck. This deck features everything that is wrong with Kaladesh. Here it is:

Renegade_Freighter.dec



Picked Renegade Freighter FIRST 3 PICKS. Saw two more Renegade Freighters in pack 2 but only took 1. After I got the Renegade Freighters picks 1 - 3, I was just focusing on cheap creatures of power 2 or more, and removal.

You can imagine how this deck played. Aside from a land stumble once or twice, this deck never had any problems steamrolling the competition. I seemed to always have a Rush of Vitality whenever my opponent tried to double-block a freighter out of desperation, leading to, of course, an absolute blowout. At one time I had 3x freighters on board with 3x thriving grubs and another freighter + creature in hand. Sick.

Goodbye Kaladesh. I'd like to say you were good while you lasted but ... you weren't.

After about 6 online Kaladesh drafts going 2-1 or 1-2 in all of them, I finally 3-0 with this:



Mostly this deck won because of the freighters, no surprises there. I picked those over anything except high quality removal and bombs. Took one over a second Unlicensed Disintegration in the second pack when I was still open for red/black instead of red/blue. Not sorry that I did because although my blue was mediocre, the early drops combined with freighters just put opponents on their back heel immediately. Freighter is a format defining card, and I think that's unfortunate because what it defines is a format that has too many non interactive games where one player doesn't even have a chance.

The Skyship Stalker is nice but I only drew it twice, and once it was at the very end of the game where my opponent conceded next turn with no way to stop a flyer and no way to not die to it, and the other game it was removed immediately. The deck won mostly on the back of early-ish beats combined with well timed removal, the freighter, and some flying over the top.

Quote from OhDaisy! »

EDIT: He was right, I'm only at 65% in MBS matches

That's still very good. I'd be happy with that win percentage.

Quote from infernox10 »

1. Woodweaver's Puzzleknot is insanely efficient in Limited. The lifegain and energy gain is just so good to "blank" an attack while building resources.

Quote from Darkonekosuke »

First impressions: this is a fun, synergy based format that will kill you if you try to durdle.

So who is right?

Quote from Avatar »

Energy is a miserable gimmick that doubles as pseudo special mana. I'm not eager to draft that set.

That's pretty off-topic.

It's probably because you're lucky, not because you're good. Winning 65 matches out of 100 happens because you are good. Winning 9 out of 14 probably means you are lucky. You can actually come close to 50/50 game win percentage and still win 9 out of 14 events (lots of 2-1s).

Unless you really are good, but we won't know that until you announce that you've won 65 out of 100.

When I make a dumb play, like forget to assign a blocker, or choose a bad target for a spell because I didn't understand the effect well enough and there was a much better target on the table, I often blame it on a misclick in the chat window. It makes me feel better.