Draft help:
Any tips on this draft deck? I have to run some errands before I play it out. Wincon is just aggro UW flyers. I'd love to run at least one aerie but I don't have the lifegain to support it.
I managed to hobble together a cycling deck for Artisan XP. It wasn't great but I got a win.
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Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
edited August 2020
I made a very fun mill deck for the future artisan event
Munkus Beaver on
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
After modifying the NPE BR Sacrifice deck for the Artisan event, I decided to try and brew a 2021 list based on the same skeleton and spend some Wildcards. After working on it through Gold 3, I think I've hit the bounds of its capability, as the 2021 metagame seems very resilient to most aggression while being sufficiently diverse that it's a bit hard to attack within the restrictions of my card pool and the the Bo1 format. Had some fun victories Claiming large Stonecoil Serpents as my Firstborn, but also lost quite often to Extinction Event thanks to a predominantly 2-costed list.
And boy do I not enjoy playing against the Zenith Flare decks.
Having "the nuts" start as it were is actually the worst.
Because whenever anyone has it the other person concedes as soon as they realize. Which means you don't actually get to play magic.
Both players having only bits and pieces of their set up leads to the best magic.
Also why decks that try to win before the other person does anything are lame as fk.
It varies. Not just player to player, but game to game. If my opponent goes off and I think I have outs to pull back into the game, I stick it out. I did this last night vs. a monored deck thanks to a bunch of timely removal (including Despark for their first Embercleve) and Sorin's lifegain + reanimating Yarok's Fenlurkers dragging me back to victory. I also pulled off the big-brain play of knowing how to defeat a 1/1 wearing Embercleave with a pair of Fenlurkers and only enough mana to pump once (pump the second one). That game was epic, and I'd like to think my opponent thought so too since they were a timely burn spell or two from sealing it.
Other times in that same situation I'd have a hand full of lands or an facing down, say, a Nissa with no way to get rid of her and just not bother. *shrug*
This works both ways of course. When another opponent missed their third land drop and my turn 3 play was swinging in the air for 5 (2/2 Stonecoil Serpent -> mutate Vulpikeet), they scooped and I 100% didn't blame them.
With the talk about 'the nuts' and ramp, it reinforces what I've been thinking about my previously only FPS theory:
A low time-to-kill is bad (the time between seeing an enemy and a subsequent dead enemy), because it gives the opponent less time to engage in counter-play and this means less skill can be expressed by both the opponent and the attacker. Which is less fun in my opinion.
After beating up the Throne of Eldraine queue 'til Platinum, I feel comfortable stating it is one of the least balanced draft formats I've played, at least in its Bot-form. Some of that is likely a sense fortified by it being a "solved" format, but the fact that Monogreen is THE DECK and you will play it and against it in ~80% of your matches really soured my experience.
And as I familiarize myself with the various sets in 2021 Standard, it's interesting how Theros/Eldraine/Ikoria feel very much like the the 3-set blocks of yore, but by being three discrete planes they seemed to have avoided some of the pitfalls of the earlier Block environments. One predominant expression of this thought is how there are many generalized mechanical throughlines to experiment with in a given color or its pairings, something that was less common previously because they were so focused on iterative development of a single plane's flavor and keywords; for example, the idiotically antagonistic Tarkir block with its divergent mechanics meant that you simply would not have a significant amount of Constructed-playable cards representative of a given idea, so Standard at the time was very much just indistinct "good stuff" decks.
That said, I do worry the mana is too good, such that Future Standard could just as easily devolve into 3+ Color Good Stuff decks. After all the headaches wrought by fetchlands in the past, Fabeled Passage is a curious card to print.
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
After beating up the Throne of Eldraine queue 'til Platinum, I feel comfortable stating it is one of the least balanced draft formats I've played, at least in its Bot-form. Some of that is likely a sense fortified by it being a "solved" format, but the fact that Monogreen is THE DECK and you will play it and against it in ~80% of your matches really soured my experience.
And as I familiarize myself with the various sets in 2021 Standard, it's interesting how Theros/Eldraine/Ikoria feel very much like the the 3-set blocks of yore, but by being three discrete planes they seemed to have avoided some of the pitfalls of the earlier Block environments. One predominant expression of this thought is how there are many generalized mechanical throughlines to experiment with in a given color or its pairings, something that was less common previously because they were so focused on iterative development of a single plane's flavor and keywords; for example, the idiotically antagonistic Tarkir block with its divergent mechanics meant that you simply would not have a significant amount of Constructed-playable cards representative of a given idea, so Standard at the time was very much just indistinct "good stuff" decks.
That said, I do worry the mana is too good, such that Future Standard could just as easily devolve into 3+ Color Good Stuff decks. After all the headaches wrought by fetchlands in the past, Fabeled Passage is a curious card to print.
That's really only because they changed the drafter to value mill cards much higher since it used to just dive headfirst at the greens and ignore the blues and everone was making mill decks.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
Well, that still leads to the same conclusion: if the format is so degenerate you have to code the bot to try and carve away at the overpowered paths, your format could never be balanced.
admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
With the current Standard 2021 sets the mana is pretty mediocre. Fabled Passage + tapped tris + tapped duals barely even makes three-color viable if the format is slow. The last time we ended up with 3+ color decks being the norm was when we had fetches and fetchable fastlands, and even adding fastlands to the current format would be a far cry from that.
Also the dirty secret is that when mana is good the format is good.
@admanb Well, between the available lands, Solemn, Cultivate, and Beanstalk Giant, it didn't seem like my typical opponents have had much trouble getting their diverse manabases online and readily able to stave off some Monored Embercleavin'.
There's Good Mana, where the distinct color groupings and their mechanical vision is well supported, and then there's Too Good Mana, where Standard becomes an indistinct collection of Ramp/Removal/Planeswalkers. Right now, I just sense it to be on the precipice of being "Too Good" due to my expectation that Zendikar Rising will bring with it another round of exceptional powerful lands (per Zendikar tradition).
@milski I was pretty explicit that I recognized my judgments were rooted in the nature of Bot-drafting.
Well, that still leads to the same conclusion: if the format is so degenerate you have to code the bot to try and carve away at the overpowered paths, your format could never be balanced.
One of the ways high-tier draft players analyze a draft format is by figuring out how many drafters each archetype or color can support. A truly busted color/combination might support 3-4 drafters, but none of them are going to end up with busted decks while the players drafting the weaker archetypes will have their choice picks. Without this type of analysis, every draft format is broken.
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Drafting is a skill, and bots are not skillful.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
Well, that still leads to the same conclusion: if the format is so degenerate you have to code the bot to try and carve away at the overpowered paths, your format could never be balanced.
One of the ways high-tier draft players analyze a draft format is by figuring out how many drafters each archetype or color can support. A truly busted color/combination might support 3-4 drafters, but none of them are going to end up with busted decks while the players drafting the weaker archetypes will have their choice picks. Without this type of analysis, every draft format is broken.
Acknowledging Munkus comments aside, are the bots not designed to "learn" based on the behaviors of higher-ranked players?
Recognizing that maybe it's not terribly interesting for y'all to litigate the merits of old formats, does anyone want to describe their opinions of Throne that conveys how dynamic and interesting it is in a traditional context?
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
My understanding with draft bots is that they work off a priority system, and that’s why they make stunningly bad picks late in the draft. There is no way to program bots in a way that replicates the normal experience. In normal drafts, you will have hate drafting, forcing archetypes, recognizing signals, and sending your own signals. Bots do none of this.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
@admanb Well, between the available lands, Solemn, Cultivate, and Beanstalk Giant, it didn't seem like my typical opponents have had much trouble getting their diverse manabases online and readily able to stave off some Monored Embercleavin'.
There's Good Mana, where the distinct color groupings and their mechanical vision is well supported, and then there's Too Good Mana, where Standard becomes an indistinct collection of Ramp/Removal/Planeswalkers. Right now, I just sense it to be on the precipice of being "Too Good" due to my expectation that Zendikar Rising will bring with it another round of exceptional powerful lands (per Zendikar tradition).
I agree that the ramp in the format is still, unfortunately, quite good. I consider that distinct from whether the mana is good across the board because it's so dependent on Green. In a broken-mana format you end up with decks like Jeskai Black fighting against 2-3 color aggro decks and 3-4 color midrange/control decks, which is rad. In a broken-ramp format you end up with, well, *sighs in Standard and Historic* a lot of Green.
With the lands we have so far and the lack of a busted color-neutral fixers like Arcum's Astrolabe the mana in 2021 is quite bad, and aside from fetches I can't imagine a rare dual cycle in Zendikar single-handedly breaking it.
Well, that still leads to the same conclusion: if the format is so degenerate you have to code the bot to try and carve away at the overpowered paths, your format could never be balanced.
One of the ways high-tier draft players analyze a draft format is by figuring out how many drafters each archetype or color can support. A truly busted color/combination might support 3-4 drafters, but none of them are going to end up with busted decks while the players drafting the weaker archetypes will have their choice picks. Without this type of analysis, every draft format is broken.
Acknowledging Munkus comments aside, are the bots not designed to "learn" based on the behaviors of higher-ranked players?
Recognizing that maybe it's not terribly interesting for y'all to litigate the merits of old formats, does anyone want to describe their opinions of Throne that conveys how dynamic and interesting it is in a traditional context?
As I understand it they have to be manually updated based on data the Arena team collects
I never drafted Eldraine outside of bot draft, as I haven't played paper or MODO Magic in years. My only seven-win decks per my records were UG and UGB Oko decks and U Mill so based on that I agree the format sucked. :P Those Oko decks were sure fun though!
My understanding with draft bots is that they work off a priority system, and that’s why they make stunningly bad picks late in the draft. There is no way to program bots in a way that replicates the normal experience. In normal drafts, you will have hate drafting, forcing archetypes, recognizing signals, and sending your own signals. Bots do none of this.
I would say in normal drafting you absolutely shouldn't have hate drafting, because it's a terrible low-EV strategy, but otherwise this is correct. Bots basically work based on "these cards are worth X value, and being in color is worth an extra +Y value, pick accordingly."
I should make an Artisan deck for the XP but honestly I have no idea what to make. I was going to just make some budget fliers but it seems a lot of the small drops are not valid here.
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
I should make an Artisan deck for the XP but honestly I have no idea what to make. I was going to just make some budget fliers but it seems a lot of the small drops are not valid here.
If you want I can post my mill deck.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
With the current Standard 2021 sets the mana is pretty mediocre. Fabled Passage + tapped tris + tapped duals barely even makes three-color viable if the format is slow. The last time we ended up with 3+ color decks being the norm was when we had fetches and fetchable fastlands, and even adding fastlands to the current format would be a far cry from that.
Also the dirty secret is that when mana is good the format is good.
Yeah that's why formats don't actually rotate early. It is highly likely that Zendikar will have some sort of replacement for the shocks (although nothing quite so good, obv). The real question is if it's a full dual cycle or only five cards.
I should make an Artisan deck for the XP but honestly I have no idea what to make. I was going to just make some budget fliers but it seems a lot of the small drops are not valid here.
I had a good time with Orzhov Griffen Aerie Lifegain.
Just threw some Aeries, Silversmote Ghoul, Gray Merchants and Indulging Patrician with a bunch of life gain incidental cards like faith's fetters and revitilize. Then just add whatever interactive cards. Not perfect but fun.
@discrider how much Mana fixing do you need in Eldraine? I didn't do any drafting the first time it was around
Minimal. The only three color archetype is WRB knights. You can safely go two color anything, but ideally you want to stick to one color as much as possible to be able to cast adamant. Golden egg is a common and will get you a one time Mana filter but it's a great card.
Spent the bulk of my Wildcard stockpile to keep fiddling with the 2021 sketch; current intent is something vaguely analogous to Modern Jund/Rock, albeit functionally Monoblack.
Obviously things are very loose, and the sideboard shown is just a place for me to put cards to think about as I collect them. The biggest dysfunction so far is that Fiend Artisan doesn't have a lot of tools to work with, so he's mostly an Inert Rattlesnake. Stormblood Crusader hasn't quite lived up to my dreams of a new Dark Confidant, but it hasn't been actively bad. If the 2021 queue were Bo3, I'd probably keep Freebooters in the Board, but at least they have some utility when they brick. Getting some number of Grey Merchants in the main would probably be good, as well as finding some more avenues for card draw, like Treacherous Blessing.
Kroxa without Fabled Passage seems very rough since it's mostly a pip heavy discard spell you'll rarely escape. Most of the creatures seem like a bad call; anything that isn't removal just seems to turn on enemy removal and don't inherently provide the huge threat of Goyf or card advantage of Bob, and Ayara, Artisan, and Standard Bearer all rely on a prevalence of aggressive low drops or self mill you aren't running. It seems like the list would be better turned towards being a mono-black control list, or a BG rock list. And make 4 passages!
Yeah, to be clear, what’s shown is very much mid-transition; it was the more aggressive NPE sacrifice deck, and is currently in “Fiend Artisan seem fun, maybe I’ll try that”, so you’re right that it’s this confused amalgamation of MBC and Rakdos aggro.
And alas, I spent my Rare WCs on Temples, but certainly Passages are next.
EDIT: Also, one of the awkward parts of brewing as I climb is that I’m always reacting to the equally nonsense hodgepodge of my opponents tier to tier. Bo1 kinda exacerbates this reactionary development.
Yeah, to be clear, what’s shown is very much mid-transition; it was the more aggressive NPE sacrifice deck, and is currently in “Fiend Artisan seem fun, maybe I’ll try that”, so you’re right that it’s this confused amalgamation of MBC and Rakdos aggro.
And alas, I spent my Rare WCs on Temples, but certainly Passages are next.
EDIT: Also, one of the awkward parts of brewing as I climb is that I’m always reacting to the equally nonsense hodgepodge of my opponents tier to tier. Bo1 kinda exacerbates this reactionary development.
Just switch over to traditional ranked. Bo1 is always going to be about building a fast linear deck that attacks along an axis your opponent is unlikely to have an answer for. It's a terrible format that MTG is not balanced for on a very basic level. My win rate basically tripled when I switched over to Traditional Ranked. Hit Mythic once so I could say I've done it and now I just chill in Plat/Diamond playing random brews and enjoying the game.
XBL: Morgan Coke Yes, there is a space, not an underscore. I'm old school like that.
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Any tips on this draft deck? I have to run some errands before I play it out. Wincon is just aggro UW flyers. I'd love to run at least one aerie but I don't have the lifegain to support it.
My last loss with the UW flyers deck was from Alpine Dog + Animal Sanctuary because I couldn't get to any tapping spells to mind control the dog.
3-3
And boy do I not enjoy playing against the Zenith Flare decks.
Having "the nuts" start as it were is actually the worst.
Because whenever anyone has it the other person concedes as soon as they realize. Which means you don't actually get to play magic.
Both players having only bits and pieces of their set up leads to the best magic.
Also why decks that try to win before the other person does anything are lame as fk.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/august-24-2020-banned-and-restricted-announcement
It varies. Not just player to player, but game to game. If my opponent goes off and I think I have outs to pull back into the game, I stick it out. I did this last night vs. a monored deck thanks to a bunch of timely removal (including Despark for their first Embercleve) and Sorin's lifegain + reanimating Yarok's Fenlurkers dragging me back to victory. I also pulled off the big-brain play of knowing how to defeat a 1/1 wearing Embercleave with a pair of Fenlurkers and only enough mana to pump once (pump the second one). That game was epic, and I'd like to think my opponent thought so too since they were a timely burn spell or two from sealing it.
Other times in that same situation I'd have a hand full of lands or an facing down, say, a Nissa with no way to get rid of her and just not bother. *shrug*
This works both ways of course. When another opponent missed their third land drop and my turn 3 play was swinging in the air for 5 (2/2 Stonecoil Serpent -> mutate Vulpikeet), they scooped and I 100% didn't blame them.
A low time-to-kill is bad (the time between seeing an enemy and a subsequent dead enemy), because it gives the opponent less time to engage in counter-play and this means less skill can be expressed by both the opponent and the attacker. Which is less fun in my opinion.
And as I familiarize myself with the various sets in 2021 Standard, it's interesting how Theros/Eldraine/Ikoria feel very much like the the 3-set blocks of yore, but by being three discrete planes they seemed to have avoided some of the pitfalls of the earlier Block environments. One predominant expression of this thought is how there are many generalized mechanical throughlines to experiment with in a given color or its pairings, something that was less common previously because they were so focused on iterative development of a single plane's flavor and keywords; for example, the idiotically antagonistic Tarkir block with its divergent mechanics meant that you simply would not have a significant amount of Constructed-playable cards representative of a given idea, so Standard at the time was very much just indistinct "good stuff" decks.
That said, I do worry the mana is too good, such that Future Standard could just as easily devolve into 3+ Color Good Stuff decks. After all the headaches wrought by fetchlands in the past, Fabeled Passage is a curious card to print.
That's really only because they changed the drafter to value mill cards much higher since it used to just dive headfirst at the greens and ignore the blues and everone was making mill decks.
Also the dirty secret is that when mana is good the format is good.
There's Good Mana, where the distinct color groupings and their mechanical vision is well supported, and then there's Too Good Mana, where Standard becomes an indistinct collection of Ramp/Removal/Planeswalkers. Right now, I just sense it to be on the precipice of being "Too Good" due to my expectation that Zendikar Rising will bring with it another round of exceptional powerful lands (per Zendikar tradition).
@milski I was pretty explicit that I recognized my judgments were rooted in the nature of Bot-drafting.
One of the ways high-tier draft players analyze a draft format is by figuring out how many drafters each archetype or color can support. A truly busted color/combination might support 3-4 drafters, but none of them are going to end up with busted decks while the players drafting the weaker archetypes will have their choice picks. Without this type of analysis, every draft format is broken.
Acknowledging Munkus comments aside, are the bots not designed to "learn" based on the behaviors of higher-ranked players?
Recognizing that maybe it's not terribly interesting for y'all to litigate the merits of old formats, does anyone want to describe their opinions of Throne that conveys how dynamic and interesting it is in a traditional context?
I agree that the ramp in the format is still, unfortunately, quite good. I consider that distinct from whether the mana is good across the board because it's so dependent on Green. In a broken-mana format you end up with decks like Jeskai Black fighting against 2-3 color aggro decks and 3-4 color midrange/control decks, which is rad. In a broken-ramp format you end up with, well, *sighs in Standard and Historic* a lot of Green.
With the lands we have so far and the lack of a busted color-neutral fixers like Arcum's Astrolabe the mana in 2021 is quite bad, and aside from fetches I can't imagine a rare dual cycle in Zendikar single-handedly breaking it.
As I understand it they have to be manually updated based on data the Arena team collects
I never drafted Eldraine outside of bot draft, as I haven't played paper or MODO Magic in years. My only seven-win decks per my records were UG and UGB Oko decks and U Mill so based on that I agree the format sucked. :P Those Oko decks were sure fun though!
I would say in normal drafting you absolutely shouldn't have hate drafting, because it's a terrible low-EV strategy, but otherwise this is correct. Bots basically work based on "these cards are worth X value, and being in color is worth an extra +Y value, pick accordingly."
If you want I can post my mill deck.
Yeah that's why formats don't actually rotate early. It is highly likely that Zendikar will have some sort of replacement for the shocks (although nothing quite so good, obv). The real question is if it's a full dual cycle or only five cards.
I had a good time with Orzhov Griffen Aerie Lifegain.
Just threw some Aeries, Silversmote Ghoul, Gray Merchants and Indulging Patrician with a bunch of life gain incidental cards like faith's fetters and revitilize. Then just add whatever interactive cards. Not perfect but fun.
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The one loss being to mana screw, with a hand full of 4 cost and no fourth land.
Minimal. The only three color archetype is WRB knights. You can safely go two color anything, but ideally you want to stick to one color as much as possible to be able to cast adamant. Golden egg is a common and will get you a one time Mana filter but it's a great card.
Steam ID: Obos Vent: Obos
I tend not to mana fix any 2 colour deck, aside matching tap lands as late picks.
RBW Knights has the RBW knight land too.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/august-24-2020-banned-and-restricted-announcement?qr=4
Obviously things are very loose, and the sideboard shown is just a place for me to put cards to think about as I collect them. The biggest dysfunction so far is that Fiend Artisan doesn't have a lot of tools to work with, so he's mostly an Inert Rattlesnake. Stormblood Crusader hasn't quite lived up to my dreams of a new Dark Confidant, but it hasn't been actively bad. If the 2021 queue were Bo3, I'd probably keep Freebooters in the Board, but at least they have some utility when they brick. Getting some number of Grey Merchants in the main would probably be good, as well as finding some more avenues for card draw, like Treacherous Blessing.
And alas, I spent my Rare WCs on Temples, but certainly Passages are next.
EDIT: Also, one of the awkward parts of brewing as I climb is that I’m always reacting to the equally nonsense hodgepodge of my opponents tier to tier. Bo1 kinda exacerbates this reactionary development.
Just switch over to traditional ranked. Bo1 is always going to be about building a fast linear deck that attacks along an axis your opponent is unlikely to have an answer for. It's a terrible format that MTG is not balanced for on a very basic level. My win rate basically tripled when I switched over to Traditional Ranked. Hit Mythic once so I could say I've done it and now I just chill in Plat/Diamond playing random brews and enjoying the game.
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There's most certainly is traditional standard ranked (not sure what your 2021 means there).
It's like the main competitive format.