MTG thread

Can also kill Masteries sometimes. And just having ~2 of them forces your opponent to play around it, and it has a lot of awkward situations for the opponent.

"Countering" a Roast and eating one of their dorks is perfectly acceptable.

Tom Ross cut his Mono R list down to 17 mountains and no 3 CMC spells. Have fun with that UB control.

List?

Creatures (21)
4 Akroan Crusader
4 Foundry Street Denizen
2 Frenzied Goblin
3 Lightning Berserker
1 Mardu Scout
4 Monastery Swiftspear
3 Zurgo Bellstriker

Lands (17)
17 Mountain

Spells (22)
3 Dragon Mantle
4 Hammerhand
1 Coordinated Assault
2 Lightning Strike
4 Stoke the Flames
4 Titan's Strength
4 Dragon Fodder

Sideboard
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
2 Searing Blood
3 Wild Slash
2 Magmatic Chasm
3 Roast
1 Scouring Sands

Blah. I guess the five pre-releases busted folks budgets because we only had 14 people show up to draft last night. Irritating as shit to not drop a game the entire night and be out of pocket after gas(yay 3 hour round trip to LGS...). DTK draft seems good though not as fun as I had hoped. Wish the uncommon dragons were 5 cost/6 to flip. The entire cycle is damn near unplayable in draft.

Took it down with a no rare mono green deck. Two 5/5 Elks, three Dragonscarred Bears, three +1/2 fights, three 3/4 /w reach megamorphs, two 2/2 +4/4 ferocious, three 1/1 /w 2 counters pay 3 to move a counter... My pod was retarded. P1P1 was the 6/4 UW dragon. Gave up on U/W by 4th pick and no one moved into green until half way through the 3rd pack. Misers Spidersilk Net and destroy flyer/bolster 2 saved the day a time or two. So much flying I honestly think your first net is 4th or 5th pickable if you're in red green or black and can't count on getting your own flyers. Killed FOURTEEN 2/2 flying monks in a 45min game one round two with the 3/5 force block guy. Opponent was six turns from decking when I finally got in for lethal. Then he got pissy when I called for time and we went to turns G2. Got in for lethal on turn 5 of turns anyways. Lived the dream of casting a three mana draw 4 all my guys are indestructible for a combat blowout too. 3 cost counter movers sooooo good in draft.

Seems to be a lot of people who do drafts for profit rather than fun. Don't you think that's kind of backwards? Why would you possibly expect to always come out ahead and then get mad when you don't? Just have fun, bros.

It's not exactly odd to expect 1st place to pay for your tourney. Which it did I just have a shitty situation with location. That's what I was QQing about in tandem with half the usual release week attendance.

In my specific situation it's 3 hours driving on top of 4-6 hours playing. The fewer entrants there are the less time I spend playing v driving, the lower the prize pool is making 1st place a net loss(smallest concern but /feelsbad), and the more often I'm matched up against the same three people in every draft. Since I got here in October I have played the guy I talked about in all but one tourney when I tanked hard at our PPTQ. We're really good friends and it would be nice not to put him into losers in 75% of the tournaments I play in. Limited is the only format I really enjoy and it's 100% about fun. Going infinite is awesome of course but I'd rather go 0-5 and have close, tough, and interactive games than 5-0 steam rolling everyone I play. The most fun I had last night was the 45min game I spent 30min at 4 life in. I could have lost at almost any point and it was more about representing tricks I didn't have and playing around my opponent doing the same than it was the stalled board state. Every other game was just turning big bodies sideways and moving counters to create bad blocks for easy wins. Which is why I usually hate drafting green.

Got my second 4-0 with my U/W Heroic deck (one before and one after Dragons), playing one of the best control players and one of the best midrange players at my quite competitive store. It ain't dead yet.

More one drops, more protection spells. I hope that mono red deck is popular because I can block that shit all day

I like the 4 of plan. Must be consistent as hell.

Burren_sl said:

Seems to be a lot of people who do drafts for profit rather than fun. Don't you think that's kind of backwards? Why would you possibly expect to always come out ahead and then get mad when you don't? Just have fun, bros.

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Some people enjoy winning and being competitive. If the prize for FIRST is barely enough to be profitable, then that's a shitty prize payout. By that logic, why should any tournaments have a prize pool? Should we all just pay the store to run the tournament and not expect any prizes at all?
He's not being unreasonable to expect that if you do well, you receive appropriate prize payout. For him personally anything less than 1st isn't profitable, since he has added costs with attending a tournament, but he's not holding that against the store.

edit: Plus, the whole 'profit vs fun' regarding draft specifically is because casual and non-competitive players want to make some cool deck design to show how smart or creative they are. They tend to dislike draft because they think it's too random or hard, and rarely do well. I know at most of my LGS, which are all fairly casual based these days, limited events really only happen the first couple weeks after a new set then they die off. Hell, we barely had 8 for a draft this Saturday on RELEASE weekend. The store had to give a friend of mine free entry to make it a full pod. He showed up last minute, not knowing there was a draft, and they put him in for free to convince him to do it.

Alright. What was the entrance fee and what were the prizes.

Arbitrary_sl said:

Alright. What was the entrance fee and what were the prizes.

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Norm is $15 entry. $3 of which is added to the total prize pool. The other $12 "pays" for your three packs to draft with. In drafts payout is almost always only to top 3. If you run a partial pod (4-6) you only pay down to 2nd. Paying to 4th and below in big drafts isn't unusual but very much up to the store and handled case by case in my experience.

Anyways an 8-man pod would have $24 payout. So $12, $8, and $4 is the average payout. 16 man draft $24, $16, $8 and so on. So in a standard pod unless they decide to only pay top two you lose a couple bucks winning and hopefully opened a couple decent cards. It's a big part of the arguments involving "rare/money drafting" and how people try to justify rare re-drafts. In a casual 8-man pod you would have to be retarded not to take a $10 card just for value. The larger the pool of players the less value you need to get out of your cards to make it financially worthwhile. If 1st place is a $50 value taking the $5-10 off color rare over the common your deck needs is less of a no-brainer and you end up with better, tighter draft decks. But I'm getting away from the topic.

In my case we had a 14-man draft. I drafted to build a good playable deck and ended up with two 50 cent rares (1st pick ended up off color 2nd rare got cut) and passed two rares worth a couple bucks I think but nothing big. So my card pool had no value. We also went enough rounds to only have two undefeated players allowing a split. Opponent offered the draw and I accepted because $17-18(I forgot the payout tbh since I always take credit) and breaking even before travel costs is always going to be better than risking RNG knocking me into 2nd, sometimes 3rd due to tiebreakers. By accepting the split I paid for my next draft and the coffee I had that night rather than chance taking a loss since winning into 1st was such a minor increase in payout. Even winning into 1st left me out of pocket on gas. I was just QQing about my situation and the low turnout. The higher the turnout the better the odds of seeing really good decks that are fun and challenging to play against.

If all I cared about was making a profit I couldn't play the game because it's damn near impossible. There are almost never enough players in a draft for it to happen and when there are the extra rounds introduce more variance making winning less likely. I'm very good but I'm no where close to good enough to reliable grind out limited for profit. All my winnings just mitigate the cost. It's why I stopped borrowing decks for FNM. I didn't enjoy it all that much and felt bad shitting on the more casual players just to make a few bucks.

Just a quick anecdote. A few weeks back I went to town for a draft. When I got in the car we had 10 people who wanted to play at X time. At X time we had 8 people, two of whom were "on their way" and a newer player and really nice guy traded in his Ugin for credit to draft (we tried to talk him out of it) so we could start as soon as they got there. They finally get there then two other people back out. So now we can't run a full pod and dude is out an Ugin. Fuck that. Friend and I put up choice of fetchland for 1st and 2nd place out of our binders and an hour later finally get our 8-man draft started. I'm up 1-0 in the finals against my friend when we realize we're retarded and draw to keep our fetches. Ugin guy takes 3rd which was his highest placing in a tournament ever. So we had high fives all around.

Re: SCG Invitational. I enjoyed how they spent the first two days raving that Abzan was dead, it was nowhere, no siege rhinos in sight, PLEASE GO TO STARCITYGAMES.COM AND BUY THUNDERBREAK REGENTS. Aaand then a third of the 7-1 standard decks are Abzan, with 3 out of 8 of the top being Abzan... and Abzan wins.

Siege Rhino Stronk.

It was also hilarious hearing the sheer relief in the announcers' voices when G/W Devotion lost at the 2-hour mark.

"THANK CHRIST WE DON'T HAVE TO SIT THROUGH ANOTHER ROUND OF THIS."

And @Taloo, ugh, that draft cost/prize structure sounds painful. Pretty much every draft we run locally is $15 (or 6 packs of the current set) entry, $12 if we're cleaning out overstocked product, 8packs first/4 packs second (generally they just split 6/6 and fire another draft using their prize packs). Running prize out to half the players just makes it garbage EV for everyone. Draft ends up using 36 packs for $120, a better deal for the store than the $100 they normally sell the box at, and half the good rares that get cracked in it end up getting traded back to the store at half value, netting them more profit when they sell, plus the drinks and candy our leviathan-esque gaming population hoovers up while they draft.

The way that draft is set up, y'all pay in $120, get MSRP ~$96 (+Tax) worth of packs, and get $24 worth of prize (Forced to take it as Store Credit too?). You're probably better off just buying a booster box, ignoring the store, and running your own draft.

Also, top 3 payout? Dafuq. Do they have the people who lost round 2 play-off to see who is third?

Yea, out of $15 entry, roughly $6 should be going to prize payout. The store shouldn't be charging full MSRP for the draft packs, and even at $3 they are still turning a profit. That's generally the baseline at most stores. Some go even higher and do like 2.5 or 3 packs per player, figuring that they pay around $2.25 per pack in costs.

I don't understand people who think they need to be able to generate profit to enjoy their hobby.

I had a really average RG draft going yesterday. Got passed Mob Rule pack 3 and oh, wow, look, 3-0.

I understand paying to play in an event, winning that event, and feeling like you should have something to show for it. A booster box of a current set is like 95 dollars shipping included on eBay. That works out to 2.68 a pack. Mediocre prize support combined with a long drive is a good recipe for people not showing up because the math won't work out. You could get some friends, have everyone chip in 11.85, and run your own 8 person draft at someone's house with an 8-4 prize payout. And have drinks.

That prize payout is balls and I wouldn't do it either. Store by me is 15$ with 5 packs to the pool to per person playing in a pod, and I still barely bother to go to that.

Appreciate the insight and comprehensive write-up. Thanks Taloo.

Kuro_sl said:

Re: SCG Invitational. I enjoyed how they spent the first two days raving that Abzan was dead, it was nowhere, no siege rhinos in sight, PLEASE GO TO STARCITYGAMES.COM AND BUY THUNDERBREAK REGENTS. Aaand then a third of the 7-1 standard decks are Abzan, with 3 out of 8 of the top being Abzan... and Abzan wins.

Siege Rhino Stronk.

It was also hilarious hearing the sheer relief in the announcers' voices when G/W Devotion lost at the 2-hour mark.

"THANK CHRIST WE DON'T HAVE TO SIT THROUGH ANOTHER ROUND OF THIS."

And @Taloo, ugh, that draft cost/prize structure sounds painful. Pretty much every draft we run locally is $15 (or 6 packs of the current set) entry, $12 if we're cleaning out overstocked product, 8packs first/4 packs second (generally they just split 6/6 and fire another draft using their prize packs). Running prize out to half the players just makes it garbage EV for everyone. Draft ends up using 36 packs for $120, a better deal for the store than the $100 they normally sell the box at, and half the good rares that get cracked in it end up getting traded back to the store at half value, netting them more profit when they sell, plus the drinks and candy our leviathan-esque gaming population hoovers up while they draft.

The way that draft is set up, y'all pay in $120, get MSRP ~$96 (+Tax) worth of packs, and get $24 worth of prize (Forced to take it as Store Credit too?). You're probably better off just buying a booster box, ignoring the store, and running your own draft.

Also, top 3 payout? Dafuq. Do they have the people who lost round 2 play-off to see who is third?

Click to expand...

No I chose credit. You can take packs if you like. Not sure about the last question. I'm guessing there are in person drafts that aren't swiss? All of ours are swiss so 2nd and 3rd place are done on tiebreakers unless top two split.