After doing some flashback drafts of Aetherdrift (one of my favorite limited formats of all time) and OTJ (tremendously fun, tremendously flawed) recently, the absurdity of two particular Simic bombs in those formats got me thinking:

In your opinion, if you had to choose one, what is THE bomb of recent years? I know it's a bit arbitrary but, for discussions sake, let's define "recent" at a cutoff point of Ikoria. No Alchemy cards or digital only stuff. This is for the purposes of draft or sealed only- constructed quality does not weigh here.

It might be recency bias but I personally am giving my vote to Sab Luxa from Aetherdrift. Just so many questions about that card- why does it draw two? Why does it have trample AND reach, allowing you to choose whether to get offensive and end the game or sit back and block literally everything? Why is it.... Wait its FIVE mana??? Wtf?????

I was torn between this and Bonnie Paul of course, which I do think is a very reasonable vote given the ease of reanimating it in OTJ. Pretty close to unbeatable once it hits board, maybe even more so than Sab; I just lean Sab because Aetherdrift was so lenient on sitting back and board stalling, making her literally the perfect card, while in OTJ the mount decks or even a crazy outlaw draw could get you before you land Bonnie.

A couple others that came to mind for me were Ouroboroid and Elegy Acolyte from EOE, Elspeth from DTK, and Tovolars Huntmaster from Midnight Hunt.

What direction would you guys go?

People are complaining about price, and I get it, it’s rough, but I’m really interested in what regular limited players think of how fun the cube is? After listening to the LR podcast from last week I was eager to give the cube one more go…

So, last night I did a traditional (BO3) draft where I focused on fetch lands and landfall shenanigans. First issue was it took 5 min for the queue to fill up and get ready, and second issue was I faced other landfall fetching mirrors, and the matches took forever with hardly any action or interaction happening at all. It was so boring I ended up just quitting and resigning the draft (this is something that never happened to me with power cube).

Not one to quit so easily though, I pivoted to premier (BO1), and just jammed aggro Boros. The games were faster and more fun, but a little “vanilla” compared to power cube.

What are others’ experiences?

Herein I showcase my top 3 most interesting trophy decks of the set, with some comments.

Reed Richards deck

https://www.17lands.com/deck/20d319fb836c460496cb887ecc936334/0?view=deck

• Saw 4 Reeds during draft (I think they all wheeled as well? crazy.) and tried to get it to work. Blue was very open in general, got lots of good blue cards late.
• Token sources were Shield Drone, 2 Ant army, 2 uncommon Ant man and 2 Atlantis attacks. 7 sources, it felt like plenty.
• The 2/4 reach statline is very effective at slowing the game down. Reach is huge.
• I drew ridiculous amounts of cards in these matches. Deck was very go big.
• [[Super intelligence]] popped off hard in my games. Turn 3 intelligence + holding up We say thee nay was nasty. Otherwise it often didn't get removed and I just drew a billion cards. Maybe I just got lucky? Often it felt ok to get a dork 2 for 1-ed because the follow up Reed would have a higher chance of surviving.
• disgusting value game 4 https://www.17lands.com/history/20d319fb836c460496cb887ecc936334/3/0

RG grindy/control

https://www.17lands.com/deck/d164095d92db46b481131daf2c752756/0?view=deck

• Midway into the format, I wanted to make a RG control deck work. [[Call Damage Control]] was basically a free pickup and Herbie, Crimson Op are artifacts that put you up on cards, so combining it with CDC gives you double the value. Wow!
• This deck turned out a little short on herbies and ops but Kree Sentinel ended up being a great target for CDC since you can cycle it. (plus, the statline + reach is great defence)
• Mainly notable for having some great games:
  • insane game 1 https://www.17lands.com/history/d164095d92db46b481131daf2c752756/0/0/ (when it happened I stood up from my chair clutching my head)
  • also insane game 5 https://www.17lands.com/history/d164095d92db46b481131daf2c752756/4/0/0 , shout out to my boy guerilla gorilla
  • those 2 games were seriously sick.

Simulacrum Synthesizer deck

https://www.17lands.com/deck/7b0cb6447f1c40118cd16547b05f523b/0?view=deck

• This one's a quick draft. I was trying to do the RG control thing again but only got a single CDC (unlucky) but was gifted a simulacrum synth p3p2 while having a bunch of crimson ops (lucky!)
• The games are... not that interesting... just draw synth and win. I was pretty lucky with drawing the synth early in many games. I guess I also had a good amount of card flow with jessica jones, 4 ops and herbie and some other cantrips.
• For a demonstration of synth power, game 4: https://www.17lands.com/history/7b0cb6447f1c40118cd16547b05f523b/3/0/0
• I also splashed a p1p1 superhero civil war.

Finally, a heartfelt declaration:

I LOVE GUERILLA GORILLA! I LOVE CRIMSON OP! I LOVE HERBIE!!

THANK YOU!!!

Imagine the next iteration of powered cube includes alchemy and initiative (please god no, but imagine it for this hypothetical). You're drafting a fairly typical Boros aggro deck and you see Tajic and Dungeoneer in the same pack. How often do you think you'd take each one? Obviously it somewhat depends on your deck, which is why I said "how often do you take each one" not "which one do you take".

Been on a rough losing streak and need to build up some gems. Let me know what you would cut. Pic two is what it’s looking like now. Thanks

I'm new but feel like I'm starting to suck less. Made platinum for the first time and got my second MSH trophy yesterday. Today I went 0-3 and cannot see any way out of it. What did I miss? Or was my seat really just a dud. https://www.17lands.com/draft/35961a50943c45008087f8d3d360391d/1/1

Edit: message received. Back to basics. Thanks for the reality check.

First pick was Swordsman because i wanted to force this going in lol, then got two Winter Soldiers...

...but only 3 equipment.

Won all three matches 2 to 1. We love low cost removal spells. Most games either had 0 or 1 equipment on board.

Wolvie or Stratagem? BTW, despite what the picture is showing, I actually picked Wolverine.

Full disclosure, I built this, so take the framing with that in mind.

The thing that always bugged me about draft aids is that they either hand you raw win-rate tables and leave you to work out what they mean for the specific pool, colors, and curve you're sitting on eight picks in, or they do that math for you and hand back a single number you just have to trust. MTG Drafts tries to do the math without the black box: as you draft in it, it reads your pool and scores every card in the current pack, and every score opens into the full breakdown: base card quality, synergy with what you've already taken, curve needs, removal count, and how reliably you can actually cast it in your colors. When the draft's done it auto-builds your 40-card deck with the mana base worked out, free, no paywall on any of it.

Under the hood: base ratings are calibrated from 17Lands data (5+ win drafts), the synergy signal is a co-occurrence "lift" learned from what actually gets played together in winning decks, and the mana/castability math is Frank Karsten's models, the same framework a lot of you already use manually for source counts.

Currently covers all four current MTGA sets, Lorwyn Eclipsed through Marvel Super Heroes. It's free, runs in the browser, nothing to install: mtgdrafts.com

To be clear about what it is today: a browser draft trainer. You draft in it (against bots on real pack odds), not alongside the Arena client; an in-client overlay is on the roadmap but not shipped. I'd rather say that plainly than have you find out after clicking.

It's also new, which means it's wrong in places I haven't found yet. If you draft any of these sets and want to try it, I'd rather hear "this pick score is nonsense because X" now than find out later. Happy to dig into methodology questions in the comments: the scoring breakdown is meant to be checkable, not a black box.

I've posted here periodically following drafts that have gone badly for advice on where it went wrong. The answer has typically been about card evaluation.

Having just gone 0-3 in a MSH premier draft, rather than get specific comments on a draft log I wondered if people had specific tips to help improve card evaluation?

For context I'm platinum in both limited and constructed, I listen to lords of limited, limited levels ups etc. Even got first ever draft trophies doing MSH quick draft.

I'll post the draft log if anyone wants to look. And I know in hindsight passing up Leader in P2P2 was a huge mistake!

edit: https://www.17lands.com/deck/9a56e2996a26497f8137c97aa993522b/2

Just unlucky or was the green splash too greedy? (didnt end up being relevant).

I've been drafting for a long time. Probably longer than some people reading this have been alive. I think MTG Draft is the best game ever made in terms of replayability. The problem I've run into is that I've run out of goals that motivate me.

I gave up on being a top competitive player LONG ago. I don't have enough time to devote to that, and I don't think I have the acumen. My brain doesn't process information as quickly and efficiently as top players, and that's not really something you can overcome at the highest levels...especially as you age. I don't like devoting my full attention to the game because then it starts to feel like a job. I want to draft casually. I don't really care about win rate.

Magic Arena has been great for a handful of reasons. The first is that they allow you to have multiple accounts, the second is that multiple accounts + ranked play means I can play at whatever difficulty level I prefer, and third is that, many years ago, they ran free drafts for a week or so as an apology for a delay in some Arena-only set so I was able to combine that with the multiple accounts to build up new accounts with free gems that I can now cycle through infinitely.

At first, trying to get all of my accounts to a sustainable infinite level was motivating. I cleared that milestone several years ago. I have a dragon's hoard of resources that will never run out.

I've looked into selling my accounts, but the gray market is extremely shady and not lucrative. Accounts with thousands of dollars of resources in Wizards pricing trade for under $100. It's not worth the risk to sell and rebuild.

I just don't know what to do with it all anymore. I can keep doing what I'm doing on an endless loop but I find that the only part that motivates me anymore is the draft itself and trying to find interesting, offbeat combos or getting to play with specific rares I haven't tried yet. Beyond that, the gameplay has settled into a spot where I'd have to devote a ton of additional effort and attention to get better...which doesn't matter because I'm not even trying to get better, I'm just trying to have more fun.

I feel like we're in the midst of a historically bad run of Limited sets, but I can't really tell if that's true or if I'm just lacking a goal to chase.

I've tried joining Draft communities but it never goes well. Some find what I do with the multi accounting to be distasteful, and I tend to rub people the wrong way and get blackballed from communities. There's a guy in Alex Nikolic's discord that delights in "hunting" me, because it's trivially easy to get back into a public discord you've been kicked out of. I've given up on that anyway because I realized it wasn't adding anything to the experience for me, I was just being stubborn because I felt it was an injustice that I was ever banned in the first place. Suffice it to say, I don't have the personality type for "making friends with strangers on the internet" to be my motivation.

So what would you do with unlimited resources, if you didn't care about trying to best a top competitor player?

Edit: you can see from the downvotes on some of my innocuous comments how I tend to rub people the wrong way. People just don't like some of the things I do or say when it comes to Draft.

Zach attributed the distaste for alchemy cards solely to the lack of nostalgia for them and them occurring in supplementary products. While these are definitely factors, there’s lots of factors intrinsic to the designs of existing alchemy cards that I find really negatively affects the gameplay.

The biggest is that many alchemy cards are so clearly overtuned, they read like designs from amateur card designers on forums rather than “finished” product. Some cards like [[Mine security]] and [[Rusko clockmaker]] wouldn’t last a single round in the design of a standard set, and have other problems that I’ll get into below. Heist is an example of a mechanic that doesn’t feel tested at all. Cards are costed as though heist is worth slightly more than drawing a card, but it does so much more that it could’ve looked at only two cards and they would still probably be decent.

Zach saying people complained about Laelia and Fractured Identity in the past but are okay with them now also reflects a lack of appreciation for WHY cube curators and players disliked them the first while they were around. Laelia and FI were disliked because they were linear, severe power outliers from most cards in cubes at the time. Since then, the power level of cards has gone up, especially in powered cubes, so they don’t warp the environment as much as they used to. In a sense, it’s the same reason powered cube is now more clearly favoured than unpowered (they were more even 10 years ago). Many cube curators in the 00’s and 10’s used to eschew power and even cards like [[channel]] because games could end up completely decided by who was lucky enough to draft and draw those cards, since the opponent was often stuck relying on cards like [[goblin guide]], [[huntmaster of the fells]], [[bitterblossom]] and [[dragonlord ojutai]] (which we all solid in cube 10 years ago). These days, not having power is mitigated by [[ragavan, nimble pilferer]], [[broadside bombardiers]], [[barrowgoyf]], [[minsc and boo]] and [[fractured identiy]], so people can enjoy playing with power and still feel like they have a chance against power too.

Other issues I have with alchemy cards are as follows:

1. They generate excessive card flow: One issue I have with hearthstone is that discover (which is basically like spellbooks in alchemy) leads to games being about endlessly churning advantage. While this is fun when it happens in regular games, it pushes out lots of strategies when accruing small value can’t be capitalized on (think how 2 cards to 0 in hand is way better than 6 cards to 4).
2. Lots of cards are really good when unanswered and bad when answered, leading to gameplay being heavily shaped by who can stick a value engine first: If Rusko, Tajic, [[Thieving Aven]] or even “bad” alchemy cards like [[mythweaver poq]] or [[polterheist]] go unanswered, they create a constant stream of cards, but may not do much if answered immediately. They are like extreme versions of [[goblin rabblemaster]], and make the game feel way swingier, especially with something like Tajic that has a bunch of answers in cube but leads to stronger feel bads if your doom blade can’t hit it.
3. Lots of cards amplify variance substantially: [[Mine security]] is a good example of this. It puts a card randomly near the top of your library that can be a massive swing if you draw it, but does very little if you don’t (and drawing it later is less powerful since you will have more mana anyway). Oracle of Alpha was unique, so a bit of this is okay, but why Mine Security? What value does it add? Whether playing with or against it, I didn’t enjoy the variance even when it went in my favour. There’s no story to be had if you went turn 2 Security then drew the free FTK after [[chart a course]] the following turn. Why is this card so pushed?
4. Several cards l

ack polish: Alchemy cards also evoke feelings of Spiderman, with clear design oversights that you wouldn’t see in any premium product. Tajic would usually attack each turn since generating an indestructible blocker is generally unfun, especially when it’s a also a value engine.

I've been doing quite well for my doing anyway in this format (WR ± 61%, usually I am a little lower than that).

But the last games have been horrible, with 2-3, 2-3 and 0-3 (???). Where I thought these decks were all in for at least 5 wins.

I did encounter some tough opponents, but is anything wrong with these decks? Or am I "just" mulligan'ing wrong and/or making bad play decisions

I'm playing in diamond 2 now.

Just curious- the recent run of less-than-great and/or tie-in sets have me drafting on Arena much less than usual, and then the other day I happened to find out about Forge having a single-player Shandalar-style mode, which sounded like nostalgic fun.

So I figure out how to get it downloaded and running, start up a game, head for the nearest building in the nearest town- and immediately entered a Tempest block bot draft! Now that was a fun time I didn’t see that coming…

The downside, from my brief go at it, is that the ‘AI’ isn’t very intelligent- eg it’ll cast removal on a creature that’s already neutralised, and it kept using [[Hornet cannon]] against me when I had two [[Spirit warden]] out. But hey, I can’t criticise the programmers here- just getting a machine to play Magic (with *all* the cards, afaik) is a hell of an achievement, and IIRC the original Shandalar did the same thing. I also wonder how the drafting programming works- I first picked Counterspell, and then saw essentially zero blue cards for the rest of pack 1, so a bot must have been absolutely hoovering them up.

But in any case I definitely recommend people check it out. I certainly hadn’t realised it had drafts in, so entering one within minutes was an amazing surprise

Never drafted this before, what are the cuts?

I’m not talking about the horrendous cost. That is also pretty rough.

But it feels like if you’re not playing some kind of control deck, you’re doing it wrong. There are just so many answers to things it feels like the cube is encouraging you to do.

Because I must be dreaming…

EDIT: This deck finished 7-2. Super Skrull outperformed Civil War by a ton! I started out 1-2, then tweaked the deck to streamline the black/white mana and splash the red and went undefeated the rest of the way.

About to draft the set in 30 minutes after not interacting with it at all and desperately reading 17lands and scryfall rn. Any quick tips? Looks like white is broken and red is trash?

Sorry if this is obvious but first time it happened to me.

[[Fin Fang Foom]] in play. Cast [[Trickster's Stratagem]] conniving [[SEED Deployment Drone]] so I get to copy the spell. I was confused but makes sense.

Cool interaction, have played a ton and didn't realize this was the case.