Short thread today about Start From Scratch. ALSA 7.21, making it the second-least-drafted lesson in Bo3. Also, I'm going to be taking a break from these threads until Thursday, because I have a lot of final essays/projects due this week. 1/x
Here's the Card Evaluation Metagame graph for Start From Scratch in Bo3. Looks like people have come up on it since the start of the format, but have dipped back down recently for whatever reason. 2/x
The same thing applies here as for when I talked about Mercurial Transformation: since SFS is a lesson, the only cost to it is the cards you pick it over. But unlike for Transformation, I don't see why people dislike SFS, when it looks like a reasonable card. 3/x
The thing that surprises me the most is how much higher Containment Breach is taken than SFS. Maybe some of this is because green is drafted much higher than red, but there are only 4 enchantments and 6 MV<3 artifacts, compared to 20 X/1s (not even counting Inklings). 4/x
I've just found that SFS hits quite a wide range of relevant targets. There's a lot of X/1 fliers, including Inklings that aggressive white decks will play in almost every game. And there's a decent amount of artifacts, including bombs like Poet's Quill or Codie. 5/x
Even killing a pest can sometimes be relevant for clearing a chump blocker. And there's also just the mode of pinging your opponent's face; sometimes you just need an extra point of damage for lethal. 6/x
Other random synergies: copying it kills X/2s, you can sometimes finish off a creature post-combat, you can combo it with Transformation to kill anything without counters, and you can kill your own Codie. 7/x
Conclusion: Start From Scratch is both very low cost as a lesson, and kills enough things to be a pretty good one to have. It does a lot of work against X/1 fliers, especially Inklings, hits a number of relevant artifacts, and can sometimes just finish people off. 8/8
Too lazy to look up example decks/situations. @threadreaderapp unroll
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Was talking on Discord a bit about why I think the UW tap deck failed design-wise this format, and figured I'd translate my points here.
So, here's a thread: 1/x
It's pretty clear by now that the UW tap archetype just isn't working in WOE.
UW is the worst color pair in WOE on 17lands - just barely above 50% winrate, which is atrocious, same as LTR scry elves.
I think the reasons for this are actually quite interesting. 2/x
1. The simplest reason is just that blue and white are the two worst colors in WOE.
Every set has color imbalances, this set happens to have those converge on UW being weak. The card quality just isn't there, the commons just not as deep as Jund. 3/x
Bit of a different kind of "underrated card" thread today. I usually don't do rares, and one could reasonably argue that this card is actually mostly *overrated*.
But today, I want to focus on why and how 17lands stats dramatically underrate the card Invasion of Kaldheim.
1/x
As a rare that gets picked a lot higher than I take it (3.14 ALSA in Bo3!), I don't have that much experience actually playing with the card. But it reads pretty strong to me, and has seemed impressive when I've cast it.
So why does it have a whopping *48.8%* GIH WR in Bo1?
2/x
Having a GIH WR below 50% is really bad - by this metric, Invasion of Kaldheim is the 19th worst card in the set, in the vicinity of unsupported buildarounds like Kaheera, Dina, Theros, and Arcavios. If you were drafting purely based on GIH WR, you would never pick it.
As promised, underrated card threads! First up: Urn of Godfire.
I expected this card to be completely unplayable, but recently I've been trying it a lot, and have honestly been impressed.
It's not great overall, but I hope to show where and how to use it in this thread. 1/15
Urn is currently the 10th least-picked card on 17lands in Bo1 (12th in Bo3), with ALSA 8.62 (8.35 in Bo3). Its pick rate seems to be staying roughly even in both Bo1 and Bo3.
So where is Urn good? Well, one of the more obvious use cases is as a bad hard removal spell.
1+6 mana is a lot to remove something, but with a lot of bombs in the set, it can sometimes be quite important to have actual hard removal in your deck.
Thinking of doing underrated card threads again for this set, probably going to try for 2-3 times a week for a bit, and see how it goes?
But first I figure I should talk about Seed of Hope, which was very underrated, but is likely moving towards overrated as people hype it. 1/7
At some point Seed of Hope was the least-picked green common by ALSA, while having something like a 60ish% GIH WR in Bo1.
But after a bunch of content creators have been talking it up, this is no longer the case - it's quickly trending up in ALSA, and down to 56% GIH WR. 2/7
So how good is Seed of Hope? Well, if it didn't have the clause about permanents, it would be like a Consider that gains 2 life (with small differences like being able to bin the second card), which is great! Consider is solid but unexciting in limited, and 2 life is huge. 3/7
Okay I should be asleep right now but instead I did a bit more digging, and it's possible I'm missing something, but it seems that 17lands data contains an exhaustive list of all possible sets of commons in Arena packs of DMU, and that this list is surprisingly small. 1/7
So basically I took the 17lands DMU draft dataset I've been using (which is a bit old, but still has 251,574 drafts), and looked at, for each common, how many different sets of commons it appeared with. And it turns out that the answer is always between 2998 and 3000. 2/7
With about 100 commons, and 10 commons per pack, we can expect each common to show up 25k times, so if the possible sets of commons each show up equally, we'd expect to see each one about 8-9 times. 3/7