In case 2 hours is to much for you, here is a TL;DR 🧵
Retro Artifacts (RA) are going to be a real piece of the format. A specific RA will show up roughly as many times as a regular card of similar rarity.
Most RA's are better in certain archetypes, but all of them are colorless and can be used by multiple drafters.
Artifact removal looks main deckable and we would run more than 1 piece. Disenchant > Shoot Down > Raze to the Ground.
Enchantment based removal will be tricky due to this, but even more with sacrifice being a serious part of the format.
Sweepers are almost non-existent.
(Close to) mono colored decks will be a thing. Think 12+ basics of the same color. There are solid pay-offs for doing so and the amount of good (almost) colorless spells will allow you to make playables.
Green stompy, blue spells/control and black sacrifice/grind all look solid.
Boulderbranch Golem is basically a colorless card.
For other colorless cards with a colored pip in the textbox, several colorless fixers are available to allow your mono colored deck to get full value out of these.
@JasonILTG created a slide for most of the colors, trying to identify in-color synergies. These will be important given that archetype synergies look weakly supported.
Below an example in which we theorize on how to break Warlord's Elite with Recommission (spoiler; we do not).
We dedicated a full slide to Assembly-workers. Big question was around the 3 workers and whether they are playable or not.
We landed on Mine Worker being a reasonable colorless 2 that can be a 23rd card in a deck, but none of us believed in the potential of the full 'set'.
Due to archetype synergies being weakly supported and white as a color feeling underpowered, we did not feel strong about the W-colorpairs GW, WB, WU and RW.
We explored the 'draw 2' theme in UB, but felt a combination of our mono-U and mono-B skeletons would simply be better.
RB looks great. Sacrifice is supported very well both in the regular set, but also within the Retro Artifact slot.
It looks like this deck can be both aggressive and grindy, dependent on what you build towards.
UB Prowess is an archetype both @TaJoordan and I love and we obviously hope it works out here. Availability of instants/sorceries looks to be there, but the lack of a 1-mana cantrip might be problematic.
Just got back from an amazing time in Japan 🇯🇵. Went there primarily for work, but added quite some holidays to the trip given that it was my first time in the country.
Writing this 🧵to put it all together for myself. Hopefully it inspires, helps or simply entertains others.
Day 1: After landing at Narita, Tokyo, I spent my first afternoon in nerds heaven (Akihabara). I got to buy some nice #MTG cards and Pokémon plushies (for the kids of course). Met early @17Lands dev @maxwindiff for dinner in the evening which was super nice!
Day 2: More Tokyo! Visited Uenopark, Sensō-ji, Skytree (went all the way to the top) and Kokyogaien by bike. Unfortunately the royal palace was sealed off. Really enjoyed the office area around Tokyo station. Reminded me a lot of Canary Wharf.
All 3 of these decks are pretty heavy B and this is no coincidence. First reason for this is very well captured in this slide from the Archetype breakdown stream @JasonILTG, @Sierkovitz and I did before the set came out.
With the release of #MTGAFR nearing, I felt it appropriate to wrap up and look back on what overall was one of my 'better' formats, #MTGSTX BO3 #draft. At the moment of writing this, I am holding the 40th spot on the @17Lands leaderboard with 27🏆 and a 76,2% MWR.
@17Lands I played 63 events. 47 on college with or without a slight splash, 16 in a straight up 3 color wedge and 1 allied color pair. I sadly never got into the patented @samuelhblack 'Dimir-mindset' and am a big proponent of staying on-college due to the presence of gold cards.
As a true @Chord_o_Calls student, I played W based aggro >50% of my drafts. Driven by W having 6 B-level commons that were undervalued throughout the format. Whether I ended up LH or SQ was mostly driven by either R (debate) or B (hunt) commons going late.
Most of this week I am attending the @gartner Data & Analytics Summit - EMEA (from inside my home office. yay!). I will be sharing my appreciation for some of the speakers/sessions in this 🧵as well as knowledge that I gained and think is worthy of sharing!
Morning started off well with a great session by @danielmintz on how to 'Break the adoption barrier'!
Colleagues are so used to have seamless access to data in their personal lives, while accessing data at work is an horrendous struggle. The gap is huge!