Board 8 > Magic the Gathering: Kaldheim spoiler season etc

(+) Yeah! (+)

pyresword posted...

Question for people who are more experienced in limited that I am:

How do you play/think about hands that have say 3 lands but all in 1 color? Assume you have a typical 2-color deck. Also let's say that you can cast 2-3 of your spells on a decent curve even if you don't draw the other color of land since probably I'm going to mulligan a hand with like 3 Swamps and then 4 red cards. But in the case I described it seems very borderline and I just don't know what the play is. I hate keeping hands that only have 1 color of land but also mulligan-ing at all just feels really really bad to me in limited even if you mulligan into a good 6 card hand. (At least this type of limited. I suppose if I'm playing like MTGO vintage cube it's probably a different story)

Yes I am asking because I kept a hand like I just described above (ie. 3 Swamps, 3 black cards with cost 2-4, and a red card) and then drew red cards on each of the first 3 turns and was very sad, but I'm not especially convinced I made the wrong decision.

This is, of course, highly variable. In a generic sense, 3 lands and 3 playables off of those lands isn't a mulligan, unless those playable cards really don't further your goals. You'd just be trading one "unplayable" card for one less card. When deciding to mulligan you can never account for what your draws will be, but... in the "typical" draft deck every card off the top is ~15-20% likely to be the missing type of land (the % chance rises with every "missed" draw). If you have turns 2-4 covered with the black cards in hand, that means you have action in hand until turn five. In a "typical" game that's plenty of time to draw into your second color.

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Lots of people playing Tibalt's Trickery nonsense in the Play queue and I have to say beating that feels quite satisfying. (at least when they don't just mull to 2 and then scoop)
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I played with one of those nonsense decks on Thursday just for the lols. It is bar none the fastest way to get your 15 daily win rewards if that's what you're after. I do think there could be a real deck there, though. Maybe it'd need the brokenness of an eternal format, but I'd love to see something more than a cheap joke deck come out of it.

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Over this past month I've had a very hard time getting any traction in constructed, and as of last night I was at Plat 4. Thanks to my good friend RDW and a few new cards (Frost Bite is a rogue-crushing god send) I just hit Diamond. The funny thing is that before I started playing Arena RDW was never that much of a go to deck for me.

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The Green/White/Black Elves deck I had yesterday didn't do nearly as well as I'd hoped at 4-3, but this Green/Red/Black Snow deck with Tibalt, two Svella's, and tons of removal did great! 7-2

It ended on a great note, where I top-decked my 7th land to play tibalt, exiled one of the opponent's creatures, an got an instant-concede.

I think I enjoyed early Ikoria more, I had a lot of fun with mutate before cycle got out of hand. But overall I'm definitely leaning positive for this format.

Edit: Forgot to save the deck :(

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I kind of want to run a deck of nothing but negates and bounce spells right now

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Yeah I won this game

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Welp. Just went into a draft with Jund berserker elves that I started out trying to play as Sultai snow. It went about as badly as it sounds. Easily one of the worst drafts I've ever done.
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Yeah, I just can't seem to get a handle on this format. I've put in 6 drafts so far and I haven't been able to pass 4 wins, with my overall record being under 50%. I don't know why it's tripping me up, I'm usually pretty quick to pick up new formats, but this one is just stumping me.

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With an aggro RW deck that really only had the 4-mana enchantment as a great card and not many boast synergies, I finished at 7-2.

I think that there are some really strong uncommons in this set as well as efficient removal. It's easy to get baited by a lot of the value engines and ultimately damaging your deck's consistency by forcing snow, at least I think those are mistakes I made with my earlier drafts.

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I'm in the same boat. Don't think I really understand how the format works.

If I had any faith in the aggro in this set I might agree but shitty snow pile seems better to me than basically any aggro deck you can reasonably expect to get, and I've easily had more success with the former so far.
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Im not exactly sure how many drafts Ive done so far, but Im definitely at 3 with 7 wins now and at least a couple that were straight up bad.

just got the third 7 win run with an R/U/G snow / giants deck. I had five of the six possible sagas in that combo (just missing the rare U/G one). Previous good decks of mine have used the rare R/W saga, both W/B sagas, and both R/B sagas.

I think sagas are good. Thats my Kaldheim draft advice.
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Good point, the 2RW saga showing up on pick 4 or 5 for me helped me identify that that was the direction I wanted to go in. I didn't get much equipment or boasters until towards the end of the draft.

The 2UB one has been really underwhelming every time I've seen it, as well as the one in W/B that reanimates a creature on chapter 3. But most of the others have impressed me. The WG one that double pumps and then exiles is back breaking if played on turn 3 or 4.

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I just had one of the worlds worst 7 win draft decks. My opponent got extremely unlucky with a mill when I was 2-2 and he milled 3 straight removal spells and I milled 3 straight lands. He then drew lands the rest of the game.

Obviously I then won 4 straight after that. It was the epitome of B/G Junk. MVP was the elven bow artifact. That think did work. (Which really shows how bad the deck was)

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Tried the greedy strategy and splashed for a few off-color bombs in my next draft. Get paired against someone playing a ton of land destruction. I could not have eyerolled any harder. I don't think my deck was that great either way, but come on.

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theres the rare r/g saga and the r/g sacrifice land for sure, not sure if theres anything else off hand
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I think that all of the equipment that basically have kicker are all really good! Runes are meh, but I guess you could have worse cycling.

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UltimaterializerX posted...

Well those are rares, so having big effects makes sense. I meant at common/uncommon where you would see them often enough to matter.

The land is uncommon. But it costs like 7 mana to do any actual land destructing, so it still seems hard to build a land destruction deck.
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Calling it a land destruction deck was perhaps a bit hyperbolic on my part, but yes, the opponent had the rare saga and two of the lands (that I saw) and was able to ramp into them pretty quickly.

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UltimaterializerX posted...

That sounds brutal. Was drafting a thing back when Stone Rain and Boomerang were around?

Of course it was, and they were both commons in 9th Edition.

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Frustrating ways to lose a game: opponent slaps down a Crystalline Giant turn 3 that immediately gets hexproof and swings 7 times laughing at your hand full of targeting removal spells.

At least I won the match I guess.
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Finally manage to build a 7-win deck. Only took 11 tries. Ended up with a pretty strong BG Elves deck with Realmwalker and Esika's Chariot.

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I didn't play limited for a few days since I ran out of gems, but I just played another today and also got my first 7-win. It was a red/black berserker deck, and honestly I'm not even sure I got that many pieces of the red/black deck*. I always thought red/black was one of the better archetypes but I still wonder if I've been underestimating it. I drafted it once before and that was 4-3 which was also one of my better finishes.

*However I did draft Starnheim Unleashed, which was ironically the MVP in my red/black deck. Won each of the 3 games I cast it in, and there was only 1 match where it was awkwardly sitting in my hand without the ability to cast it. (Interestingly I still would have won that game with my other cards despite this if I didn't misplay...) Not sure how far one should bend over backwards to play the card without any other white cards and effectively no fixing, but I figured the card was powerful enough in limited to be worth it. Only ways to cast it were my 2 Plains or off treasure tokens from my Goldvein Pick or the 3 mana discard 1+draw2+make a treasure spell.

Goldvein Pick is not a card I would usually play I don't think but I specifically wanted to make it easier to cast Starnheim Unleashed here, which did come up.
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Starnheim Unleashed is pretty much the best card in the set so yeah.

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Based on the rulings on Gatherer, unless it is used to create a single angel from fortell then Starnheim Unleashed can be hit by Disdainful Stroke. If you cast it with, say, X= 3 then its cmc when cast is 7 (3[X]+3[X]+1[W]).

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Trying out the Tibalt's Trickery deck in standard. Definitely capable of some silly stuff, but so far it's way too fragile for all the people immediately calling for a ban.

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Yeah, there's no need to ban Tibalt's Trickery in standard. maybe it's causing trouble in Pioneer/Modern, but even that I'm not convinced of yet.

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The math that day9 did on it was pretty convincing. Something like a 70% chance of having an absolute bomb on board by turn 4? Just because it instantly loses to counters or hand hate doesn't mean it isn't meta-warping.

I've only done limited so can't speak from experience. Maybe keep it in bo3 and removed from bo1, like they did for nexus?

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I could see a best of 1 ban as it completely folds to disruption

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Yeah after playing like 50 games with that thing, the deck is straight up bad. Sub-50% win rate. I dont think itll be all over the place once people get it out of their systems and realize it sucks.

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Peace___Frog posted...

Something like a 70% chance of having an absolute bomb on board by turn 4?

Can you provide the source for this? I haven't done the math myself but this seems very very wrong and worth double checking.
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Early on in this vod

https://youtu.be/p9i90LTHihw

I think it was 67% chance of hitting it, and could sometimes lose even after hitting it by turn 4, bringing the total to the 60% in the title.

The calculations ignore the probabilities derived from having cards in your hand, assuming that most of the time you're mulliganing down to where having one ugin in hand doesn't dramatically alter the probabilities.

Basically, it hinges on the fact that the London mulligan is absurdly strong for this kind of style. You can mulligan down to two and because of the number of scry lands, as long as you have a trickery in your opening hand you'll be able to see enough cards to set it up.

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Speaking of Tibalt, the Tibalt PW Legacy deck looks surprisingly legit

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Using his numbers (which I did verify) I get about a 60% chance of hitting the combo by turn 3/4* assuming no disruption and that your strategy is mulligan until you see Tibalt's Trickery. There were a few steps where I rounded so maybe slap like a +/- 2% on that. This is also neglecting the chances of you getting mana screwed and how the probabilities are lowered by having some of the bombs in your hand, but I don't think that should drop it too significantly--maybe by around 2-5%.

*Really the condition here is after seeing 5 additional cards off the top of your library.

Still higher than expected but this is within the realm that I'm not too worried about the deck at least. Obviously sideboarding destroys it, but even in bo1 you're basically losing 40-45% of your games by default, and then even when you hit the combo you're still going to lose a noticeable amount to things like Binding of the Old Gods hitting your Ugin, for example. Also there are decks that maindeck countermagic anyways and can just counter the Tibalt's Trickery. (Rogues, U/B Control, U/R Tempo)

I'm totally okay with banning it on account of the fact the card isn't fun, and would be fine with that even if it's win rate was 30%, but I don't think the numbers or the results suggest it needs to be banned on power level alone.
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Menguchis CFB standard Tibalts trickery video was pretty funny.

The deck was terrible. He went something like 1-4 in best of 3 matches

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pyresword posted...

I'm totally okay with banning it on account of the fact the card isn't fun, and would be fine with that even if it's win rate was 30%, but I don't think the numbers or the results suggest it needs to be banned on power level alone.

That's definitely a good point too. As I said I haven't had the pleasure of losing too it yet, but I feel like occasional un-fun is ok as long as it's inconsistent. This could be more consistent than wotc thought possible in standard.

I was too lazy to verify the actual math so thank you for confirming that.

I know that the legacy formats have some stupid turn 1 combos so it shouldn't really be a problem there. Is anyone here dialed into Historic or Extended formats at all? I'm curious if the bombs available there can make it more of a closed case, as opposed to standard where there's still a chance of losing even after getting a hit.

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I'm not super familiar with the format as a whole but the Modern version seems a bit better. You have Eldrazi for the targets and the inclusion of Cascade means it's somewhat more consistent in terms of getting the combo. (You only need to have a cascade card in your hand since you build your deck so Tibalt's Trickery is the only possible spell to hit off cascade.)
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Yeah, the modern deck seems way more consistent, but with force of negation its also a much more suited format for it

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Yeah, the modern version is better. If I'm going to play a dumb combo that forces you to mull to 4 or 5 regularly, I need to win on turn 1 or on the spot. I think I still prefer Neobrand if I'm going to play that level of stupid, though.

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According to untapped.gg numbers Tibalt's Trickery is 46% to win in standard bo1. Day9 provided some pretty good numbers on goldfishing the deck, but real performance shows it isn't even good enough to try to ladder with in an environment where there is no sideboarding. The cries for banning it are just that, salty tears.

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ChichiriMuyo posted...

According to untapped.gg numbers Tibalt's Trickery is 46% to win in standard bo1. Day9 provided some pretty good numbers on goldfishing the deck, but real performance shows it isn't even good enough to try to ladder with in an environment where there is no sideboarding. The cries for banning it are just that, salty tears.

No, I think there is still an argument that it makes Bo1 games unfun coin flips. I really wouldnt oppose a Bo1 ban the same way nexus of fate was banned in Bo1

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Salty. Tears.

It's a bad deck that will fall off.

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My tears aren't salty, I've never even played against it!

More just conceptually - it's probably fallen off in effectiveness in the last week because of the rise in blue or black disruption tools.

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Managed to get my first 7 win Kaldheim draft yesterday. Went black/green elves and got passed a Resplendent Marshal in pack two so I splashed a bit of white just for it. Went pretty well since the deck could go wide to keep up the pressure and then the marshal would come in to seal the deal with +1/+1s across the board.

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