Limited Resources: Out with the old…

Posted on September 25, 2010 by Limited Resources

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  2. Nice vids but you really screwed up the draft part (sure let’s pass a pick 5 mitotic slime! *_*).

    The “UR Mum” line was sooo funny!

  3. I like your obsession with Yamiyava Wurms (why the hell would you prefer it to a Hawk?) considering your dislike for Harbor Serpents, which you refuse to maindeck on other drafts.

    I also fail to see why you’d prefer a Berserker to a Spitfire (which would have shut down almost the entire offence of game 1′s opponent), and I think that even Golem and Expanse might have been better picks).

    Best part of the draft is pick 4 though (Slime? No thx!). Awesome!

    That said, I thoroughly enjoyed your video anyway and am eagerly looking forward to listening to your latest podcasts =]

  4. Hi guys, i’m done with M11 too. Back to ROE and UZUZUL draft for me. Would love to see you guys do urza block :) Or the IPA sealed tournament tomorrow :)

  5. I’d like to see another RoE draft, though an older format or Alara block draft would be good too. Basically anything but M11/ZZW.

    @Mira:
    There’s a world of difference between Wurm and Serpent. Most of the time the Serpent is a 5/5 defender, whereas the Wurm is a 6/4 Trampler. The Hawk isn’t that much of a consideration. Hawks generally aren’t particularly good except in the White Agro deck that’s running multiple Infantry Veterans.

  6. This idea is a little crazy…but you could have cast Shiv’s embrace on the Blinding Mage on R3, and then plummeted it. Not sure how that would have affected the outcome, who knows.

  7. Its kinda interesting to see the trainwreck unfold, how fast it can happen, and how sage like reactive you’d of had to been to get out under it. I think Ryan might have a more up to date grasp on what it takes to get it done in this format, Like I would of liked to see the birds over the wurm, though ya it might of been to late after your very first pick the way that draft went.

    But as always, I freaken love you guys and these vid’s. I to vote URZA’s that shit would be tight.

  8. yeesh, passing slime was insane

    I’d love to see a draft format you’re unfamiliar with, to see you guys evaluate cards on the fly, similar to what we will be doing for Scars soon.

  9. I vote either Nixtix IPA or whatever is after 7th ed. (those morons need to stop with these waste of nixtix weeks with crap coresets) or anything but M11 and Urza’s since its REALLY boring. Played 4 in a couple days and im sick of it already. Its not like MVW or TSE which is actually fun to play. MVW tricks matter. TSE, broken cards in each color is awesome. Saga is just boring- nothing exciting. Open a black card and cut black. If cut then take it in the 2nd pack.

    I was rather appalled that you didnt take the Slime. It should be strong enough to switch colors over a wild griffin which isnt that great.

  10. Thought your draft was a little unfocused to say the least and I think that is probably due to you doing the draft together. I think you guys both had a different idea of where your draft was going and you weren’t really in agreement on every pick. I don’t think passing the slime was terrible but I would have been much more reluctant to get into green after that… probably just would have tried to go straight WR aggro.

    CJ makes a really good point, not that it occurred to me, but shivs embrace his mage and plummet it makes a lot of sense.

    Still love the vids! Thanks!

  11. I would love to see more zzw vids!!! As it is my favorite set to draft and who doesn’t want to open a Jace 2.0.

  12. Really disappointed with the download speed of the videos and constant freezes.

    And for some reason quite confident this is not my ISP issue.

  13. I stopped watching after you picked the wild griffin over the mitotic slime. Not sure how the rest of the draft went, but a slime and a spider in the same pack should have been your signal to jump in green. Trying to force an archetype P1P1 seems like a pretty poor way to go into a draft. But hey, love your podcasts and movies, so everyone is allowed a mulligan!

  14. it’s actually better that you cast sylvan ranger tapping both green. it hides your plummet a little better.

  15. Yikes – what a scattered draft. Sometimes two heads are not better than one. It seemed like you guys were not on the same page in terms of your overall goal regarding color and curve. The both wurm picks were a little odd, but as you yourselves and others pointed out the derailing point was passing the slime. That sends a huge green signal, and the depth of the pack hurts you because it also contained late spiders etc.

    From my point of view it was that pick that set up the cross currents that kind of bounced you around for the rest of the draft. You ended up based WG with white cut on one side and green on the other and that is just a terrible place to be.

    Thanks for the vids. I’d love to see some nix tix drafts until scars comes out.

  16. p1p1- doom blade is the definite pick. tutor and mind rot will not be signals, and blinding mage is a worse splash than doom blade. Definitely blade
    p1p4- this pick is why you had the deck that you did. You ignore signals and you suffer for it
    p3p2-You just got a sword of vengeance. Hawk makes more sense, especially since you need to maximize your playables. Wurms table all the time.

    Your plays were better than the draft though. Fun commentary, and thanks for posting guys!

  17. I admit that (at least from my perspective, Marsh can speak for himself) taking the griffin was ignoring a signal to stick to a color preference, but I think people are being a little more critical than they would be because of how the draft went from there. If we had ended up with a nice aggressive base-white deck that made the finals instead of an acknowledged train wreck, the tone of the replies would be a lot different, even if many/most would still favor taking the slime.

    It was a conscious decision to continue to fight for the superior color by taking a weaker but solid card instead of branching into a third color for a card I consider very good but not a bomb. While it didn’t work out this time, the griffin is a defensible pick, but I generally agree that the better EV overall would have been to go with the green signal there. I just think the actual results are coloring the impression of just how much of a mistake that pick was given all potential results.

    Finally, lol @ wjb147. “I love your podcast and vids, but I disagreed with a pick, so I quit watching.” Seems like an oddly detrimental way to approach viewing draft vids, but OK. While the rest of us finish up here, you can wait around exchanging smug nods with the people who stop reading my walkthrough articles if it comes up that it’s a Swiss Draft.

    Thanks all for the feedback.

  18. @ Godot – Not to speak for others, but I do my best not to be results based in my draft analyses. Reasoning can be (and often is) sound and still not pay off. However, as I mentioned before the griffin pick really had to be backed up with a cohesive draft and here is where I think the two person draft hurt you guys. In listening to the draft it felt like *you* (Ryan) wanted to fight for the aggro white strategy – wanted to take the more flexible and generically powerful cards. This is also reflected, somewhat, in your discussions about p1p2 (pyromancer vs. ranger). Then when you ended up picking cards like the ranger p1p5 Marshall seemed to be off the “force white” and ended up talking you into a couple of picks that you would have made differently were you left to your own devices.

    This is not to castigate your chosen format, as usually the two person draft adds a lot of value to your videos, but in this case it made a strategy (that was already a little dicey after an early signal the the fight for white was going to be a tough one) even chancier.

  19. I was careful with my words: I didn’t even suggest that if we had fared better that people would have agreed with the P1P4 pick, just that the opinions would have less of an undertone of “duh, obvious, what’s wrong with you,” and that the potential benefits of the griffin pick would have been more fairly considered/acknowledged. This is just coming from a lot of experience now in sharing drafts publicly in columns and videos.

    Drafting in pairs is definitely a double-edged sword, although I don’t think it was too much of a negative factor past the middle of pack one, as the squadron vs. wurm was the only debated pick iirc. My desire to pick the hawk there was not out of any sense that we needed to continue pursuing aggro white specifically; I just felt that green beef would be easier to come by than hawks, and that if we didn’t secure a second ASAP, the first would be unplayable.

  20. Fair enough – I was just trying to make the direction my criticism was coming from clear.

  21. I disapproved of the Slime pick because it is such a blatant signal- there are no better commons in green, and the only comparable uncommons are Packleader and Cudgel Troll. Not to mention that after picking the Blinding Mage P1P1, you didn’t see anything that would indicate white being open. Pick 3 or 4 is right about where I’d expect a Griffin to go in the average-to-good strength pack. Chances are good another white card was taken out of that pack already, but you know there was no green card taken, and chances were very good one of the other green cards from pack 4 would table.

    Yes, White is a much stronger color than green, but if you’re picking a Wild Griffin over the Slime after not seeing any playable white cards picks 2 or 3, that is akin to saying “I don’t care what signals I see, I am forcing white and not playing green under any circumstances.” From the way you were talking about drafting the “aggressive white deck top players swear by,” then “looking for Pegasi” after P1P1 Blinding Mage, on to “we’re in white- or hoping to be in white” in pick 3 (after being passed zero playable white cards the last two packs), you gave off the impression about deciding on your main color after P1P1 Blinding Mage, and you didn’t seem very flexible in terms of your colors.

    Of course it’s always good to think about what type of strategy your deck is leaning towards, but this foresight is not beneficial if it restricts your thinking without warrant. A single Blinding Mage is not worth sacrificing the potential to jump in an open color that may show itself early, at a time when you can still easily switch colors without forfeiting multiple picks you’ve already made. Jumping into green also provides the additional fixing to let you play that Blinding Mage as an easy splash.

  22. p1 first 2 picks had both act of treason and bloodthrone vampire. P1 p1 and 2 act of treasons sets you up pretty well to run that arctype.