kurosh,

why not play the mnemonic walls? You have a ton of targets for it and I'd say it advances your game plan (defend, drop a fatty, win).

Wall has been bad for me. It doesn't block a whole lot of turn 4/5 plays. It also takes me another full turn before I can cast the spell it returned - 5 mana is so expensive. I'm not sure what you'd cut either.

Another UB controlish deck. 2-0 so far. Returned Phalanx is soooooo good and everyone undervalues it. I also got a griptide 13th pick. I probably should've cut the vaporkin for something.

Kurosh - i just had a similar deck with Agent of the Fates that I went 3-0 with. I think leaving Vaporkin in is correct; I'd cut a Fate Foretold or Sealock Monster first.

wat

I haven't seen it, but I'm not surprised by that statement. They often rush to put out initial set reviews based on little to no actual playing of the format.

Or Scourgemark.

Curse of the Swine is a pretty solid catchall answer to lots of fatties, but then again this deck has 6 bounce spells so probably not needed.

the set reviews are good for initial impressions, he'll get somethings wrong like rating pack rats 4.0 instead of 6.0

and some cards look sweet but are meh, or cards that look meh but are actually pretty good like the ordeals

Yeah, for sure. I wouldn't be able to do any better than they do without playing several drafts. But once you've played the format a decent amount, like kurosh seems to have, it's not surprising your evaluations would differ a good amount from the best player in the world's blind evaluations.

team cfb did a couple of theros drafts where it was just basically lsv trolling ben stark the entire time. theyre very high entertainment value but they didnt really draft well or anything. not exactly good for learning. the best part imo is trying to figure out if thats actually bens real personalitly or if hes just acting.

Just finished drafting this one, and it feels like a decent enough build but wanted to get some thoughts.

Would definitely cut the 2 walls for the prescient chimera and aqueous form.

Splash the Walker you have so much fixing in your sb.

Agreed. Run burnished hart, unknown shores, one mountain and xenagos.

Still having tons of success with u/w and u/g, so much so that I'm starting to wonder if it's worth just hard forcing it almost every time. A "bad" u/w tempo with heroic seems to smash even a really good r/b or u/b board control strategy.

Basically it seems like the best strategy in the format is: 1) Find a random dork with heroic 2) voltron him up with tons of creature enchantments, bestow guys, and heroic triggers, 3) LOL @ your opponent because all the removal in this format is terrible.

I force WR pretty much every draft, occasionally do UW.

Yeah. It's pretty much this or play monoblack.

After an ok number of drafts I'd agree with this. I'd throw in RW heroic too if it's not being overdrafted (which it feels like is usually the case). It's just so difficult to overcome a large number of starts in this format.

Your second paragraph highlights the problem with this set in my experience: the vast majority of games involve one of the players just sitting there unable to really do anything. It doesn't matter if it's a giant hoplite, a vaporkin, a rider, or an agent of horizons ... most decks have a method of quickly making a giant creature near impossible to deal with. So one player is curbstomping another, that player knows they can't really catch up, and it leaves an unfun taste in your mouth on both ends.

I'm still undecided if it's just different and I need to adjust something or if it's just bad. The number of games I've played in this set which ends with my opponent claiming the set is unfun and terrible is significantly higher than in any set in recent memory, so I don't think I'm the only one unhappy with it.

Though it was fun when I went lifelink eidilon into white ordeal into +2 +2 enchantment into another +2 +2 enchantment on the play and attacked with an 8/8 lifelinker on turn 4 and had 45 life at eot. It's a pretty good block for absurd stories in limited.






The deck seems meh I thought (no riders ), but ended up working out alright. I had a Naylea's Presence and an unknown shores for the Triad (Chronicler's, Disciple, Elder's all nice being blinked) but decided not to make the mana worse when I had two Leaders. Think that's right?

Yeah no need to splash good creature in aggressive decks.

Personally I almost rank Sedge Scorpion as best green common. There are so many large creatures you don't need the best. Every 3-0 green deck I have drafted had 2+ of them. They are pretty much your only defense until you start dropping fatty into fatty. Kinda same with black deathtoucher, Merchant is better but Eidolon very well might be better than rest of the commons.

Ya, won 64p draft. Effectively monoG and monoB decks. Monoblack especially ended up quite strong since I was 1 of only 2 black drafters in table (I think). Still splashed 3 different colors

I happen to hate the set. And I'm pretty bad at it, but whatever. Still feels like the power level of individual cards is too high.

Standard tournament?

I think this response is pretty indicative of what I don't like about the format. I specifically play limited because I don't like formats where the game is effectively over on turn 4-5.

I'm not saying there's no removal, but there's definitely less removal than average, combined with way more very strong early starts than normal, means there's just too many games where things never really evolve into an interesting game state.

I'm fine taking the free wins that come off enchanting a turn one Hopeful Eidolon with a turn two Ordeal of Heliod (or whatever) but it happens too often for my taste. It's beyond the point of "hey this cool thing happened" to the point of "if your deck isn't doing something busted and unbeatable in the first 2-4 turns, it sucks."

I don't really want to play matches that go "Game 1 I blew out my opponent and they couldn't fight back, then game 2 they missed a land drop, so I blew them out again." I mean yay winning is cool, but after the first few times, it's not really entertaining.

I'm still baffled as to why the removal in this set is so comparatively expensive and bad. They specifically designed bestow so that you don't get 2 for 1ed by removal, and at least some of the heroic triggers give you something even if the guy is killed in response. It's like they answered the "but what about removal?" question really well, and then severely nerfed the quality of the removal anyway, when they didn't really need to.

I'm hoping that things work out as the format evolves and people get used to how aggressive the format is, but I have the suspicion it's just doomed to a lot of non-interactive games.

Agreed with all of the hate for Theros limited. I've done two RTR drafts today - never done that before when a new's set out.