First round is a Pants first! Got hatball pretty early (I think it took 3 or 4 lvl. 3 triples?). Never found Fork/Wand, but it was enough.
Second round is 5th with Mad Catter - strong midgame and got a bunch of random 6s from Ogre Princess+, but didn't get anything coherent and died with Herc+Treasure Map about to go off
Paused stream for a bit, but should be back now - will probably be mostly muted because now I have a bunch of friends in the background playing a very loud board game.
Hm I was apparently having some trouble with delay, so now stream is back without delay (but still muted mostly)
3rd round is another 5th. Really horrible shops on the first 3 turns, where basically everything was a 1/1, leading to a lot of bleeding. Never found anything coherent in midgame either. Died with 7 people left in lobby and got 5th though, so that's nice :P
4th round is a second! Good early Loki start (2x eenie -> shrink -> gingerbread -> wish), unfortunately lost a close finals because my opponent started at >30 and I started at 2.
5th round is a 3rd with Loki - lost to a ghost's cupid, but was probably getting 3rd anyways. Sadly Pandora's Box didn't give me Round Table. At 35 points now, so top 4 in the final round is basically a lock for day 2 (and otherwise probably I don't make it)!
And finishing it out with another Pants first! First two treasures were hatball lol
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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