Between the holidays and already mentally moving on to salivating over Ravnica Allegiance, it’s time for me to put a capstone on my Guilds experience. LR and Lords of Limited have already put together their excellent sunset shows, so rather than parrot their talking points (the weakness of the green guilds, gate decks, &c) let’s try and take a look at my personal learnings.

Summary

I drafted GRN 25 times, which is probably a record for me in a single set. By comparison, I had 14 MTGO M19s and 15 MTGO Dominarias. I finished 41-30, with a respectable 58% win-rate, though only nabbing two trophies is a bit disappointing. Let’s take a look by guild.

Guild	Drafts	Wins	Losses
Golgari	5	9	6	60%
Selesnya	7	13	8	62%
Boros	6	12	6	67%
Dimir	4	0	8	0%
Izzet	2	5	1	83%
Other	1	2	1	67%
	25	41	30	58%

Quite the distribution! First, that smooth ZERO percent win-rate with Dimir is simply amazing. Sure, small sample size but yeesh. That’s a little ugly. Half my drafts were the hated green guilds, doing a pretty good 60% percent. I’ll take that!

Most Drafted

Skyline Scout baby with 16! I also had Rosemane Centaur at 13, Luminous Bonds at 12, and Direct Current at 11. I loved this guy. Solid 2-drop that curves out well and isn’t a total blank of a topdeck with the evasion.

Learnings

As pointed out, GRN really emphasized the importance of finding the undrafted guild. Yes, nobody *wanted* to be in Golgari/Selesnya, but it’s a fine place to be if you are the only one (and you get lucky with key uncommons/rares) and I often found myself willing to take that slot. That seems to be where most of my key good decks came from. I also got enough reps in to know the key variations of these decks and draft.

This came with two weaknesses. First–and somewhat ironically–I didn’t do that well with what was widely considered “the best guilds” in the format. Possibly because I let myself get pushed out of blue so easily, I didn’t get a lot of reps and didn’t get good at drafting them (I think my Izzet win rate is HILARIOUSLY deceptive). Second, my openness might not be as good if there aren’t clear-cut frontrunner guilds. If Ravnica Allegiance is more balanced then there won’t be easy underdogs for me to take.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with GTR. The shallowness of the green guilds made for a less interesting drafting experience but overall it did well.