v3 beta servers are up and you can login now. A nice opportunity to play some free drafts.

What formats/sets are running?

8 draft -- LOR LOR LOR
-- TSP PLC FUT

8 con -- standard, lor block

casual has whatever.

Only like 1 person in 8 con, but there are 64 in 8 draft.

I just logged into the 3 client and it's asking me to buy cards. ???

You buy cards just like normally, but use the credit card # they have already imputed.

Hmm... I don't remember any problems with the signup. I thought it had a bogus cc number already in (I know it does for purchasing boosters/tickets) -- if it doesn't I would just type in some garbage. After that goes through (hopefully) you have to activate your account via a token sent to your email.

That message never existed!

When buying cards on the beta, make sure you select the credit or debit option (the 3rd one) and not the credit/debit and coupon option (the default).

I'm doing some LRW LRW LRW drafts right now, if anybody else is.

Im such a nit I dont want to spend $10 for a modo account

Tried out the beta. It runs really poorly on my PC. My PC is outdated but it's not like a dinosaur, 2.4ghz / 768mb ram / etc. I don't think a card game should be grinding my machine to a halt, 16 tables of poker+pokerace+pt run fine. I also did not like a number of the aesthetical changes like having the chat window on the right side of the screen rather than below, not having a popup of cards you scroll then when building a deck, etc.. I really hope they clean up the interface eventually.

Bitching aside, it was a ton of fun getting to play some free drafts. I'm far away from being able to profitably play those but it was nice actually getting to only pick cards that would work well for your deck.

I'm trying to improve on understanding starting hand values. Here are 8 of my recent starting hands. How excited would you be about each of the following draws? The deck is as recommended from lennytheduck with one small change (-1 mountain, +1 Diviner's Wand) :


Here are the hands:
1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

To start, I'd say you definitely need to keep it at 17 lands, or maybe even 18, in this deck with 2x shard volley, mutavault, hearthcage, thorntooth.

1) Very crappy. I might keep it and hope I draw a mountain by turn 4, since you have Wort and one way to recur it at least. Better players than me probably mulligan this all day.

2) Great hand. 3 dudes, equipment, and just enough land to play it all.

3) Kinda crappy. The good: Fire-belly and Mutavault for pressure while you try to draw land. bad: the other spells area dead for a while if you don't draw land just right.

4) Pretty bad, you only have 2 spells you can cast anytime soon if you don't draw a swamp.

5) Another mana starved hand. Hearthcage and Shard Volley are dead for a while. You'd have to draw well.

6) Decent but need to draw some creatures.

7) Another hand that really sucks if you don't draw a swamp.

8) This one sucks. If you draw a mountain by turn 3, you are golden. If you don't, you are totally dead.

(NOTE: I don't know much about this format in particular but I've been playing on and off since ice age. My limited rating peaked around 1750-ish)

1) Mulligan, not close. You need a mountain to cast 2 of your cards, but you already have 4 land. The only other card you have is graveyard recursion and you don't have anything to recur.
2) Easy keep. Banneret allows turn 3 Wort if you want it, though I'd probably go banneret, changeling, Wort in an attempt to bait removal. If all they get early is ground creatures you'll be able to block their stuff while Wort gets in there for damage. If the worst happens and Wort gets killed and you draw nothing else relevant, the changeling can stall a bit. If the best happens you draw Nameless Inversion or Tarfire leaving villain with almost no hope whatsoever.
3) Mulligan. Some 2-land hands are keepable, but that's only when the hand suddenly becomes good-to-awesome if you draw a land or two. With this hand, one land means you get to cast a 1/3 accelerator with nothing to accelerate into, a -1/-1 spell (maybe) and a 3 damage spell requiring a land sacrifice.
4) I would have to know the format better to have an opinion on this one; it looks terrible at first glance, but you have the turn 2 changeling, plus 2 removal spells and you only need 1 swamp to make Pack's Disdain good in this case. Also the clash spell helps; if I kept this hand, I would probably aim release the ants at the first thing I could kill with it just for the chance to smooth my draw.
5) Looks like a close mulligan to me. I can see the argument for keeping on the draw against a removal-light deck hoping 5/3 haste on turn 4 + Pack's Disdain come through.
6) Another one I don't know enough about. This is where it's helpful to know how your deck shapes up against your opponent's deck (or the average deck). Against some people/decks you can just kill all their relevant creatures until you draw a giant or Wort and win. Against others you'll be dead before your deck gets around to doing anything.
7) I'd keep. If you draw a swamp, you can cast this entire hand and it's pretty good. If you draw more mountains, you can use shard volley, the changeling and mutavault to their full potential. Yes it sucks if you draw more black cards and no black mana but I'm willing to take that risk, especially since tarfire can help stall for time in that case.
8) You are about 43% to see a mountain by your second draw step, 58% by your third, 69% by your fourth. Since there aren't any good spells in your deck that cost 1B (pack's disdain sucks if you have no creatures) I'd send it back.

16 land one of which is colorless is definitely a mistake, particularly with no mana fixers and particularly if you're going to replace the 17th with a card that usually needs 7 mana to even do anything.

17mana sources is a minimum in almost every deck.

2 and 6 are def keeps, others depends on whether play or draw.

Drafting on MTG 3.0. Getting a big head, because I've won 5 of my 6 drafts. (But people aren't really taking it seriously, since it's for pretend packs.) This is the deck I'm playing now, it's LOL:



Holy ****. Somehow I lost round two. Game 1 guy went turn two 3/1 flier, turn 3 peppersmoke my leaf glider, and I couldn't race; game 3 he worked me over with dreamspoiler witch, while I stalled on 4 land and was stuck playing one spell a turn for the next 7 turns. Died with a handful of bombs.

Thanks for the recommendations. I really think I was undervaluing having sufficient mana in a draw since if I only drew 2 I figured I had a 42% chance of drawing one on the next turn, but yeah - miss mana for a couple of rounds and things can go so bad so quickly. Even more so if I'm missing a specific color of mana.

I changed my deck a little bit more. I removed the Thorntooth Witch (he seemed great, but all my shapershifters are pretty cheap and usually come out way before he does - although him + nameless inversion + wortie would be one sick trio) and added another mountain and have been having great results with a little bit more prudence on my starting hand selection.

I also ran into a new combo today. Vigor + Nath's Elite is so incredibly sick. That basically ends the game if you don't have removal to get rid of Vigor asap. And somebody can get that combo out so incredibly quick with all of the +green mana creatures.

Vigor + anything is sick

I'm on super mega MTG tilt, I just lost like three drafts in a row with awesome decks. U/W merfolk hasn't worked for me AT ALL.

I just suck at the game, I suck at drafting. At least the recent lessons have been 'free'

best combo evar. playing R/G giants. deal 7 damage, get vigor from under spirerock, then thundercloud from under mosswort. gg

JUDGE!!! My opponent is cheating.

Yeah, after drafting a little bit of Lorwyn, I think I'm gonna start doing drafts on the real MTGO. Would anybody be interested in doing like a draft with me type thing were I post each pool of cards for every selection (up until like...the 5 or 6) and we can discuss which cards to pick?

Yeah that sounds like a good idea, but you will find opinions will vary widely.

You could try using Draftcap (http://www.blargware.com/draftcap.html), which can record your entire draft (and picks) and format them in HTML (with images) for you.

Is there some trick or something to deal with cloak and dagger + flying? I have like one flying creature in my deck and I just got completely spanked by a guy who didn't really do anything but cast a pestermite and put cloak and dagger on him, in both rounds. 4/1 flying shroud = game over in 4 or 5 turns regardless of what I draw or do I think?