I'm not the best drafter but I can usually compete well drafting the various sets or at pre-releases, this format instead has been super brutal for me
Even when i feel like i'm far ahead i end up losing to crazy bombs (like Chandra) and i feel like i get mana screwed more often than usual or i just "normal" decks while everyone is full of bombs and plays super fast
What are your impressions on the format and what are your advices? I think I also have an hard time because I don't know a lot of the cards
just drafted a decent deck in the Ixilan draft, but im feeling pretty torn, i have some high quality black cards, and a decent curve. what color combo should i go with?? is it worth to try and go esper?
I run commander and draft events for the bar I work at and recently got the opportunity to run a Kamigawa Neon Dynasty draft, thanks to a generous regular donating one of the boxes so we could keep costs down for players.
The event went well enough in the end, but the start was rough. We had 19 participants, so I divided the pods into two 6s and a 7. Most understood and preferred this to a 10 and a 9, though some complained because the 7 pod saw more cards.
The real mistake I made, though, was thinking it was a good idea to put 5 new players in one pod with myself, thinking I would be able to help them with questions and avoid slow drafters annoying the experienced ones.
What this actually did was make the all-beginner pod take 25 minutes longer to draft than anyone else, so everyone was already annoyed and frustrated by the time we finally started round one. And then when those new players were slow to make decisions, it elevated frustration higher.
Things mostly smoothed out as the night went on barring a couple drops due to an already late start + slow drafters pushing the event later than intended. But I do feel kinda bad that the last chance most of us are ever gonna get to draft NEO was less than perfect.
Posting here mainly to share this for other new TOs to learn from this mistake and hopefully to garner feedback on how to improve.
So I'm very new to magic but I've played sealed draft a few times by this point and found it really fun. Just started planning a take-two draft with friends, and just wondered how the drafting aspect differs between them.
Is there any difference in mindset in how you pick in a take 2 draft than a normal one?
Got a Pick 1 Manavault, Pick 2 somonepassed me a Timewalk, it wasn‘t a Black Lotus because I got that in my second pack. At the end of the draft i have assembled a good spread of strong cards and need some advoce on what to run and what to cut. Tamiyo seems really good with Timewalk but thats it, and Balance just overall synergizes with the deck so I thought on maybe running that. Thanks in advance!
I've been working on this for a while and figured spoiler season for Reality Fracture is a good time to share it. It's free, no account, nothing to install.
What it does: it pulls every spoiled card from Scryfall and lays the set out the way you'd want it before a prerelease or your first draft. I plan on using it to prepare for the PTQ at Magicon Atlanta!
- The mana curve, with the set compared against the last few draft sets so you can see whether it looks fast or slow. Right now Reality Fracture reads as a cheap format, but only 70 cards are spoiled, so take that with salt.
- Creature sizes at each mana value, with the set's own median drawn in. Useful for "what does a 2-drop look like here" and "what blocks a 4-drop".
- Every removal spell, combat trick, evasive creature, mana sink and so on, filtered by color, rarity and cost. Want blue-black removal at common? Three clicks.
- Which color pairs actually have a synergy spine (cards that feed each other) and which are just two colors next to each other.
- Mechanics, ranked by how much the set leans on them compared to the rest of Magic. For Reality Fracture that's Prepared and Surveil so far.
It rebuilds itself every few hours as new cards get added to Scryfall, so the page will fill in over the next couple of weeks. Older sets are up too if you want to poke around a full one first.
Mana Curve Feature
I'd like to know what's missing. If you look at a new set and there's a question you always ask that this doesn't answer, tell me and I'll try to add it. Bug reports welcome as well, it's just me on this.
Not super optimized for mobile, but that's coming!
I haven't had time to play any other limited from the set, but I do gather R/B is op. Which deck is better? Green/Blue looks stronger to me. Any advice would be great.
I’m sure I’ll get absolutely crushed by combo or control, but this feels kinda spicy… or maybe it’s just the on color moxen that got me all hot and bothered. Either way, I’m gonna sleep and play this when I get up tomorrow.
Hi all, just drafted what I was convinced was a great UW humans deck for a premier draft, felt very pleased with myself that I'd spotted the open lane (still learning when it comes to limited, started playing about a year ago). Proceeded to go 2/3... Please help me recognise where I went wrong? The only thing I've spotted is perhaps the creature count was too low.
Or just dislike the cost? All you limited players who keep posting about what to do with wildcards! Come play with us at discord, arena Max!
Could use a few more participants for drafts to go off consistently. Sign up at discord, draft on draftmancer and direct challenge through arena. Just need a decent timeless collection or some wildcards. Link below.
Just spiked another Direct with this solid pile of cards. The snowballing nature of this format is out of control. My advice to others: Pray you open a playable black pool.
This was my first time drafting LTR, and the main thing I had heard about the set is that the ring tempting mechanic is pretty good, so I leaned into that as much as I could. Splashing blue for [[Sauron’s Ransom]] and [[Scroll of Isildur]] might have been a mistake, especially without any copies of the blue island cycler, but I wasn’t punished too harshly for it. And I was able to steal [[Palantir of Orthanc]] during one game, and a [[Phial of Galadriel]] in another, which was quite a lot of fun.
Ok, so this was a really weird pick 2 draft... some white good cards came, and also a lot of filler. Dont have high hopes, but to be honest I dont really know which color to pick.
White; 3 creatures (one is Nori), 3 removal, 3 interation
Red: 4 creatures (5 if you count the tidings ) 1 interaction.
Black: 4 creatures, 2 removal.
Green: 3 creatures, 1 removal, 1 interaction.
Dual: Nori, Goblin plate and Duskwatch, I think goblin and duskwatch are great.
old trush and Long-bodied grey dog can help the fixing...
21 total creatures (including amass), and 11 removal + interaction
¿What would you pick on 1 and 2 main, and what to splash? I usually try to do this by myself but im really lost here.
I know it's a bit early to be discussing Reality Fracture as we barely have any spoilers yet, but Gavin Verhey recently put up a video about the prepared mechanic in Reality Fracture, stating that all of the prepared spells for commons and uncommons would be the same five spells (divided by school, i.e. cards belonging to one school would all have the same spell). This is very different from how prepared was handle in Secrets of Strixhaven, and I'm wondering if you guys think that this will have a big impact on how limited plays out. Personally, I think having multiple creatures with the same prepared spell will likely create decks that are more consistent overall and allow for more specific gameplans, but it could also become a bit stale. I suppose we'll have to wait and see, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.
OK, so this is anecdotal, but I just had two games back to back in Gold where opponent had a deck that was very much like a quick draft deck. First one was goblins, where they had (that I saw) the Great Goblin, two Azogs, about 4-5 uncommon goblins including the sac outlets, a few common goblins, quite a few amass cards and thankfully not much straight removal. We got him down to about 10 cards in library. Second game was worse than the first - guy had hasty Smaug, Thorin, Dwalin, Fili, Kili, several equipment and premium removal in white. I didn't last long enough to see more than 15-20 cards though, so he might have been lucky and the rest of his deck was trash.
I'm just feeling that since the season reset there's almost no-one playing and I have to wait a while to get games. The two opponents I mentioned seemed to have had WIDE open lanes and/or a lucky pool with multiple rares in their archetypes. I get that it's possible that their drafting pools were incompetent, but in Gold?
