Today I'll be talking about how to exploit the KHM quick draft bots! Slightly different topic than usual - still underrated cards, but this time underrated by bots. 1/x
So last night I wanted to play some draft, but I was bored of AFR and didn't want to try learning AKR. But then I realized that KHM was available in quick draft! Definitely wasn't going to turn down drafting one of my favorite formats, even if it was with bots. 2/x
So the first thing I did was to go to 17lands and look at KHM quick draft ALSA. This is an even more useful stat in bot draft than it is in human drafts, as bots are more predictable - if you see a card with very high ALSA, you can basically always count on it wheeling. 3/x
Worth noting - I'm filtering for this week only, since the bots may have been changed since last time KHM draft was around. The sample size isn't huge, but you don't need much sample size for ALSA anyways, especially for bots. 4/x
Top commons: unsurprisingly, bots take removal way too highly. But what's surprising are some of the random junky commons near the top here - Valkyrie, Skull Raid, Draugr, even Raven. Not bad cards, but between them and medium removal, most of my top commons are missing. 5/x
White commons: Battlefield Raptor is low enough here that you can pick it up on the wheel pretty often, and is a draw into white. Wings of the Cosmos is also worth noting, as is Shieldmate, as both solid cards. I'll get to Giant Ox. 6/x
Blue commons: I'm not a huge fan of blue in KHM in general, and there's not much to exploit here. Berg Strider is a bit low, but still highly picked. Funnily enough, Run Ashore looks like it's less underrated than in player drafts. 7/x
Black commons: Here's one of the biggest places to exploit bots I think. All the bad black removal is way overdrafted, leaving the good elf synergy pieces (Deathknell, Faithful, Gifts, Rites, Raise) free for the taking. 8/x
Red commons: Like blue, there's not much to exploit here. I think Tormentor's Helm is a bit harder to get than in player drafts; anecdotally my RW decks have felt short equipment a bunch. 9/x
Green commons: I'm both proud and sad that Sentinel doesn't wheel. But it and Lindwurm still go pretty late. Revenge, predictably, goes super late, which is great for elves. And the same applies for Arachnoform/Veil for the GW bogles deck, especially with Raptor where it is. 10/x
Colorless commons: Pick is picked about the same rate as in player draft, Karve a bit higher than in player draft. U/G snow lands (basic and dual) are all around 4.2-4.5 ALSA, a good 0.5 above player draft. From seeing this and the green common order, I'd avoid snow. 11/x
Snow uncommons: Again there's a lot of snow cards at the top: Caller, Narfi, Spirit, Pillar, even Brawl and Valkyrie. Everything in these ALSA numbers suggests that snow is very hard to get into. 12/x
Misc: There's a bunch of uncommons that I think are slightly underrated, but not consistently wheeling or anything: Shadowsage and Return for elves; Koll, runes, and equipment; Path to the World Tree. 13/x
But, other than snow being overdrafted, one of my biggest takeaways here is that the saclands are heinously underdrafted. I had a Naya deck (sadly only 6 wins) that played 7 saclands, and 19 lands total. They're *very* powerful; see this essay: docs.google.com/document/d/e/2…. 14/x
And finally, Colossal Plow always wheels. And since Ox always does too, you can pretty consistently get a good Ox/Plow deck. 15/x
Just to touch on rares and mythics: All of them are highly picked, even the bad ones. Don't try to wheel situational rares like Harald Unites the Elves or Pyre of Heroes. 16/x
Conclusion: My overall recommendation for exploiting bots are to try to be either RW leveraging Hawk and runes, BG leveraging elves, or non-snow multicolor midrange (probably GW) leveraging saclands. I'd stay away from giants and snow, but they can still come together. 17/17
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