Ravnica Allegiance, Pre-release report
Once again, it’s time for the happiest day of the year: pre-release time! The loving Momma Raptor gave me an afternoon pass. So it was day-drinking, ramen with King Ziggy & friends, and then cracking some packs. Unfortunately they went back to “seeded packs” for this pre-release. While it’s nice for me to pledge my loyalty to Azorius, I dislike how it renders a bunch of the cards you open unplayable. There’s not a lot of splashing tools, so I knew any red card I opened would be nearly unplayable.
Read moreRavnica Allegiance, Homework
There are many resources that do a much better job of breaking down the new mechanics of a set, card grades, and such like. This will not be any of those things. Instead, I like to focus on a high-level summary of what direct this set will be going. Are there build-arounds? Is ramp a thing? What are the splashing tools? What does the removal suite look like? How should your assumptions from baseline Magic shift for the first few drafts?
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Guilds of Ravnica, Review
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.
Read moreDraft #25 @ Gamma Ray
12/8/18 Golgari @ Gamma Ray
Draft Log
Ugly draft as I didn’t move into Boros when it was clear, as I got overly attached to the single signal of a P1p5 Dead Weight. Yes, in disciplined drafters that’s a pretty strong signal. But there’s a lot more noise at an LGS. My deck is pretty messy, bland curve-out deck with some power.
Game Log
- Lost to a fellow Golgari that just had stupid 4/5 Dowser of Lights that just stone-cold blocks everything. Some very fun games
- Beat a bad Selesnya deck that was trying to run the Angel-maker… to limited success.
- Beat Chris in round three who was running a good Selesnya deck that was cruelly sabotaged when opponent #2 cut him. Had some sweet curve-outs topped by Izoni.
Learnings
The Glaive remained very useful in a deck that lacked finishers, quintessential “good card in a bad deck”. Also I need to work harder when the board gets confusing. I had a complicated match against Drew where the board was getting clogged and I gave him way too many outs by being slow.
Land box update 11-27-18
Alright, we’ve had to sneak in some Basic Land updates. First to add some variety and then to, uh, add some variety. This is important dammit!
In
Odyssey Island
Celebrity Magic!
By “celebrity” I mean “fairly popular podcaster”, but I’ll take what I can get. I had a fun round 1 versus Mister Metronome of Lords of Limited. My deck wasn’t particularly special, but it was an interesting matchup against his very good Dimir deck. I recommend the watch!
My Deck
(I made it a little more aggressive against him in subsequent rounds, taking out the walls and putting in sideboard material and some low drops)
Diving into Guilds!
Listen, sometimes I’d just rather mash the draft more button than tell you guys about, okay? The Baby Dragon is shifting gears from four-wheel drive to two wheel and is growing increasingly possessive of her toy trucks. The preemptive screech when a classmate comes over to play is effective. And worrisome. So let’s crash in with what I’ve been up to! I’ve been streaming a little less, as I’ve found that trying to talk and play Magic resulted in me doing both poorly. When combined with the Raptor Momma trying to get her C.V. in order to apply for a promotion, the upside of me shouting, “WHERE’S MY LAND DROPS?!” has been limited. On the plus side, I’ve drafted over a dozen times already! I’m recording results on a new tab, the Draft Record. Here you can see my deck layout and my draft. There has been some really fun ones, and some brutal regression to the mean.
My first 7 drafts of Guilds went well, each time hitting 2-1,w ithout even sniffing the finals. There’s been some very interesting moments where I felt like it could have gone either way, but the question of whether or not I’m playing “high-floor/low-ceiling” is one that will have to wait. It’s interesting playing a set with only 5 archetypes. It makes the non-guild pairings just about completely untenable.
Distraction: Bad North
I spent a week in Chicago. That’s one week without a one-year old. The downside was that for four of those days, I literally never left O’Hare airport (staying on the Hilton there) for business meetings that were long but tolerable. Then I spent three days running around with old friends. Again, without a Baby Raptor. Plane flights are for books again! And video games! And movies! (even if Deadpool 2 was inexplicably dubbed to PG-13. We’re on headphones people.) I’ve dribbled out of Core 19 and Kyle hooked me on a new game: Bad North. Let’s discuss.
Bad North is a mashup of tower defense and RTS. As you can see above, waves of zombie-Vikings assault your island. You move around your units to defend them, hopefully utilizing the random-ish terrain to your advantage. In-between assaults, you upgrade your troops. It’s a perfect Switch game as it naturally fits into 5 minute bits. It’s very terse on instructions and game mechanics, so exploring how it works has been a lot of fun for me. It has thar Dark Souls-y feel of being merciless and letting you discover the nuances of the mechanics. The rest of this post will detail my strategic tips, so if you want to avoid “spoilers” just go buy the game and jump in.
M19 Retroview
Well our time with M19 has come to an end. I did about a dozen drafts, which is a pretty high count for me. I know the core sets feel generic for people, but find it a really good way to level up without being overwhelmed by complicated card interactions. Plus two trophies!
Bread & butter can win
Benalish Dad 