Finishing with two trophies and a freshly regenerated pile of gems seems like a good place to stop and review the set. Just how far did Zendikar rise anyway?

trophies

Interesting looking at my trophies (the one missing is an RB party deck). Literally they all have mountains! All of them! And red was a pretty good color, but far from the best color in the set

most drafted card

Not too surprising that all my red trophy decks probably indicated drafting a lot of red. Fissure Wizard was #1 with 27 picks. Roil Eruption in the four-slot with 19 though, which is impressive for a card as good as that. Good cards are rarely among the most drafted since they tend to be a lot more contested than filler-esque cards like–well–Fissure Wizard.

personal lessons

Zendikar III: The Sequeling was the first set of magic where I did some coaching with Ethan from Lords of Limited. Like all things, it turns out that having an expert watch with you and pointing out mistakes offers a lot of learning potential. In particular, I think I drew two lessons:

Select two cards after P1p1

Picking out Pack 1 Pick 1 is an exercise in raw card evaluation. And while there will always be some room for discussion as to power level, flexibility, &c. it’s a single question. However, after that pick now the question mutates: what’s more powerful versus what fits in your deck? The heuristic I adopted is to always pick two cards: the raw power “P1p1” as well as the best card that goes with your previous picks. Then weigh the power level of the two picks. This makes it easier to carve a lane as well as be aware that it’s time to change lanes.

take the time for a plan: deck, hand, board state

You can’t change your plan if you don’t have a plan in the first place. After picking your 40, take the time to craft a plan for the deck. It doesn’t have to be an essay, just a sentence or two. Aggressive or controlling? Are there key cards to draw? Do you want to aggressively trade resources or not? Then, once you have that, it makes it a lot easier to look at your hand and come up with a plan for that. Are there any particular gaps in your initial card draw that would change the plan?

Finally, once you have all of those, it’s easier to track the board state too. You get to go from “I want to be the beatdown deck” to “I am the beatdown” to “Oops, I’m not beating down anymore, I need _____”. My goal with this is to make sure I identify key moments of the match where I shouldn’t make the automatic, mostly-correct play.

Overall record

30 drafts with 8 Trophies and a 62% win-rate. Honestly one of my better performances lately as I’m usually in the high 50s. Late time I was in the 60s was when I was stomping faces with Gruul in RNA. Which come to think of it, also had me playing a bunch of mountains. My god, what if I’m a red mage at heart?! (shudders)

summary

I enjoyed Zendikar Triplicate, though I certainly agree with the criticism that the overly strong tribal decks led to drafts and games being on rails. However, when I only drafted 30 times, that reduces my burnout factor. The party mechanic has a lot of potential, even if it didn’t quite reliably get there. Any set with Kicker is going to be enjoyable and I look forward to seeing more of the spell-lands (or MDFCs if you insist) in future sets. I think it’s a solid B, maybe B-. I’d rank it behind the most recent Theros set but ahead of most of the core sets.

Generally, I enjoy the core sets. Good, solid bread-and-butter magic without crazy mechanics to thwart my limited time availability. However I went on quite the rollercoaster with M21: I plunged to a sub 40% win-rate for the first time since tracking, panicked, got some coaching, and then clawed my way out of the pit (possibly aided by all the Spikes getting bored and moving on). REGARDLESS it remains a net-win in my book.

trophies