Sure day 2 is draft, but unless someone just lucked out getting there and isn't trying to win I don't see much rare drafting happening.
At Pittsburgh, the last Limited GP, if you entered Day 2 with the minimum number of points and went 1-2 (or had one win more than the minimum and went 0-3) in the first draft, you had no chance to make money. All those people had no chance at prizes and were playing only for PWP, yet were basically being given free cards at their second draft. While the numbers might be different for Vegas, I can pretty well imagine that some people will figure they are no longer in contention at the start of Draft 2 and will be rare-drafting the entire time.
The problem is that this is being billed as a great drafting format, but there's not enough supply of it for it to be drafted with real cards more than a couple times per player. I am becoming more and more skeptical of their claim to have created a deep and interesting draft environment. Even if it's true, no one will ever know unless people actively save common and uncommon print runs. It seems silly that they would spend the same amount of resources on balancing an extra draft format that's barely going to get played; much more likely is that they're hyping the draft format to make sure people don't just save it as an investment and actually open the product in order to meet their goal of driving the price of the staples down a bit. They probably realized partway through their conception that they needed some incentive for people to open it as opposed to hoarding it due to the fact that it will likely only go up in price, and so have resorted to massively pushing people to discover and explore this amazing draft format - but not for long enough for people to realize it wasn't actually that great.
I will not be buying any of this ridiculously expensive product just to draft with it (nor will I ever use Magic Online again in my life; as appealing as the phantom drafts are it's still a concept I grew to loathe more every time I tried it out), but I would love to draft this format and would love it to become a great long-term format given the amount of work that apparently went into its conception. Thus, I am going to suggest that people save common and uncommon runs from actual packs they get; presumably the same ones will be used on Magic Online as well, from which it would be even easier to get said runs in an electronic form. Part of what balances Limited with fresh packs is the fact that they use print runs to color-balance the commons and uncommons - something that you're not going to do well yourself.
I am willing to do the work of creating proxies and maintaining the stock of cards to make packs from, as well as do any organization of data that others obtain, but I am not going to have the opportunity to collect my own data. I hope that there are enough others out there who find it a damn shame that what looks to be a great and nostalgic Limited format is going to be over and done with in no time. It remains to be seen whether it'll be as interesting to draft countless times compared to a well-constructed Cube, but I'd like to have the opportunity to find out.
What sucks about Grandeur is that it is terrible for limited.
Given that you have lower standards for what to play in Limited to begin with, the fact that some of the design of the card is irrelevant most of the time does not make it terrible. For instance, take Cylian Sunsinger. It was very good in Limited, even if some of what the card did required you having two or more of a rare, because additional copies weren't required at all - they only made it much better. All of the grandeur legends were decent in Limited and provided uncommon-to-rare-type effects even without being able to activate Grandeur.
Also, I did activate Grandeur on Korlash in Draft once. Once.
The Forbidden Mechanic was almost certainly Garfield's "Gunk", similar to a cursing attack in Dominion: Shuffling useless/bad cards into the opponent's deck. It fits all the pieces of information that can be found regarding the FM.
Not reading this thread to see if anyone else suggested it, but I feel like the Ravnica thing was a deliberate false leak given to certain associates who might know something of what goes on in R&D but doesn't work there directly to know for sure anything they might hear.
I have a feeling this is their typical removal spell that is incredibly awesome in older formats but only so-so in Limited, much like Go for the Throat (although the latter was pretty good in Limited, sometimes it was useless). I could see this not going particularly high because so many decks will be playing a very high concentration of non-targets. It'll be good against Human and Spirit decks, sure, but Celestial Purge has targets against 7/10 two color combinations and is much more versatile yet isn't a particularly high pick. We'll have to go through the spoiler once it's complete and look to see just what the percentage of non-targets in a typical black/blue, black/red, or red/green deck is going to be.
Hmm, indeed "permanent type" does not mean the same thing as "card type". I guess I didn't read as closely as I normally do, but I could have sworn it said "card type".
Also, Praetor's Council does exile itself. I don't believe that a card that does all three things from my original post exists.
In (unsanctioned) team drafting, it can be a disadvantage to have your opponents know what color you really want to play and what bomb you might play against them if you end up playing that color. While I typically just casually team draft and pick teams randomly afterwards (and this gives yet another reason why we should pick teams after), those that are playing with arranged teams will likely want to allow themselves to conceal their picks.
Interesting. If my recollection is correct, this is the first card that (a) allows you to return multiple cards from the graveyard to hand, (b) is able to return itself, and (c) doesn't exile itself when cast. 2 of these will allow you to do unlimited recursion of Sorceries, while 3 can get back whatever you want however many times you want without other invested cards.
From how that story reports is, he apparently openly admitted to his opponent that he was trying to cheat, and had been very nearly caught in the past but they were unable to make anything stick. I hope he gets banned for an extremely long time; that kind of behavior needs to be punished as harshly as possible due to the high potential for abuse.
"DONTCLICK" has been added so that folks who read this don't do something stupid after going to that site.
The site in question then proceeded to put on a fake display of scanning my system for malicious files, and despite me canceling the request it made to download "protection", a file came up for download. Thankfully I was able to cancel the file download, but clearly this site was not being nice.
I can only imagine that it came from a malicious ad that was loaded.
At Pittsburgh, the last Limited GP, if you entered Day 2 with the minimum number of points and went 1-2 (or had one win more than the minimum and went 0-3) in the first draft, you had no chance to make money. All those people had no chance at prizes and were playing only for PWP, yet were basically being given free cards at their second draft. While the numbers might be different for Vegas, I can pretty well imagine that some people will figure they are no longer in contention at the start of Draft 2 and will be rare-drafting the entire time.
I am willing to do the work of creating proxies and maintaining the stock of cards to make packs from, as well as do any organization of data that others obtain, but I am not going to have the opportunity to collect my own data. I hope that there are enough others out there who find it a damn shame that what looks to be a great and nostalgic Limited format is going to be over and done with in no time. It remains to be seen whether it'll be as interesting to draft countless times compared to a well-constructed Cube, but I'd like to have the opportunity to find out.
Given that you have lower standards for what to play in Limited to begin with, the fact that some of the design of the card is irrelevant most of the time does not make it terrible. For instance, take Cylian Sunsinger. It was very good in Limited, even if some of what the card did required you having two or more of a rare, because additional copies weren't required at all - they only made it much better. All of the grandeur legends were decent in Limited and provided uncommon-to-rare-type effects even without being able to activate Grandeur.
Also, I did activate Grandeur on Korlash in Draft once. Once.
Read the following articles closely:
http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/190
https://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/eventcoverage/worlds08/garfield-v-forsythe
The Forbidden Mechanic was almost certainly Garfield's "Gunk", similar to a cursing attack in Dominion: Shuffling useless/bad cards into the opponent's deck. It fits all the pieces of information that can be found regarding the FM.
Also, Praetor's Council does exile itself. I don't believe that a card that does all three things from my original post exists.
Pegasus Charger.
It's official, just not Wizards of the Coast. As already mentioned, they don't run these state championships - everything is organized by Sunmesa.
http://liakelgend.co.cc/index.phpDONTCLICK?Qx3hMtT2bcVGAHr4MwxJjimCE5b43TepoeDyXgcWpNnV5y/ehCopDFHbqyXg3lt4uXCtBSp1HFc0G5WUo2LCjA==
"DONTCLICK" has been added so that folks who read this don't do something stupid after going to that site.
The site in question then proceeded to put on a fake display of scanning my system for malicious files, and despite me canceling the request it made to download "protection", a file came up for download. Thankfully I was able to cancel the file download, but clearly this site was not being nice.
I can only imagine that it came from a malicious ad that was loaded.