On my previous Captain’s Log, kadeworld congratulated me on my PTQ win and left a few questions that I didn’t feel like I could answer in one small comment reply, so I’m going to devote an entire article for this task, which will basically cover a lot of different Limited-related topics. Here’s his comment:
Congratulations KYT! I am really glad for you.
Apart from the acknowledge that you had been overvaluing [card]Frost Lynx[/card], what else changed in your approach to the format from those 12 first drafts to the next ones?
Also, what is your take on the best way to test limited? How do you draw conclusions?
I find it hard sometimes to understand why a deck works and why other doesn’t. Do you seek input from fellow players? Do you analyze it on a vacuum, match by match…? And also, do you believe in pick orders? Any tips in this regard?
Share your knowledge on dominating this format! 🙂
Thanks, and again, congratulations!
K.
Thanks again, kadeworld. You asked a lot of M15-specific questions but also some more general ones that can apply to the upcoming Khans of Tarkir Limited format. I am likely to be attending one Friday at midnight. I always regret it but I keep showing up. I clearly love punishment.
Testing Limited
It might simply be the case that the only reason I won the PTQ last month was because I ran really hot. There’s no denying that my Sealed pool for that tournament was very good. However, top players have told me that I have always been a legitimate threat at local PTQs, so I hope I’m doing something right and that there’s something that you guys can take away from my approach.
With that said, I don’t actually think about what the best way to test Limited is. I focus on what I can do with what I have and thankfully, I’ve got quite a bit. Two of my friends who I respect for their play skill, Tom Cheung and Frédéric Lefrançois-Jutras, are players who no longer try to play every single local competitive event.
However, they love the game so much that they are willing to buy boxes of the latest sets and we just play non-stop Sealed tournaments against each other. Each match is a best-of-five so that we get a better feel for our decks. After the tournament, we generally sit down and discuss how our card evaluations have changed. The fact that we are usually exactly three is actually beneficial to our games because the person sitting out can comment on better lines that each of the players could have taken.
We have also made it pretty competitive. I keep track of all our tournament matches and use that data to generate ELO ratings for us, so we can see who is probably understanding the format more. I think ELO ratings for specific draft formats can be fairly telling.
I realize I can’t talk about this playing group of mine without mentioning that we also plug in some crazy stipulations sometimes. Fred always finds the idea of one of us buying an expensive piece of technology enjoyable, so after the last Sealed, Tom now has to get himself an Apple Watch at Launch Day. We are apparently happier when there’s one big loser and no winners. I can’t explain it.
That’s for Sealed, but for draft, MTGO has been an invaluable resource and although it’s expensive, I can tell you that the first twelve M15 drafts that I did online (0 final wins!) contributed a great amount to my PTQ win. What’s important to note is how easy it is to play with your draft decks even after the queue is over. It certainly makes you learn more. I did a draft video where I won a 4-3-2-2 with a BG Monstrosity that played a [card]Flesh to Dust[/card] and three copies of [card]Covenant of Blood[/card]. I destroyed the queue, but when I loaded it up and played against Tom who piloted his own queue-winning Rakdos deck, I was getting completely destroyed and it told me what I needed to know. My BG deck was not that good.
Pick Orders
I think pick orders or card ratings are a good starting point. I think LSV produces the most useful Limited set reviews on the planet, but it’s just important not to fall in the trap of treating everything you read as gospel. The pros are constantly learning about the format and their ratings change over time. For example, I definitely currently rate [card]Hunt the Weak[/card] and [card]Sacred Armory[/card] higher than LSV did in his set review series.
Of course, it’s always awesome to get different perspectives. I read Karsten’s and PV’s M15 articles during the week before I won my PTQ. It was important for me to see if there were cards that maybe I overrated or underrated in their eyes. I recommend checking those two articles out.
Frank Analysis – A Pick Order List for M15
Ultimately, I don’t use a pick order because outside of the first couple of picks, the rest depend on a variety of factors such as which colour seems to be open, what my curve looks like, etc. It would take too much effort to make a thorough pick order of any kind.
At the end of the day, you have to trust yourself. Despite players who are better than me thinking that BG Self-Mill decks in M15 are more playable than I claim they are, I have been sticking to my guns. It’s more than likely that I am wrong in my evaluation, but if my goal for a draft is to win and not to learn, I need to use the cards that have served me the best because I know that I can win with them. Before the top 8 draft of my PTQ win, I didn’t ask anybody for their opinion of which archetypes would be good for me to draft. I didn’t play over 20+ 8-4 drafts on MTGO to last-minute ask someone what they think.
Drafting M15
M15 has already become a dead format in real life this week but there are still some online PTQ preliminaries to be played and from what I assume, the upcoming online PTQ will be M15 Limited. Like I did for my last article, I’m just going to drop some quick thoughts that I have that might prove useful. I’m also going to talk about how I have been misevaluating splashing and card draw for most of my Limited career.
Sticking to Your Guns and Avoiding Blue
Resident draft video producer Travis Sowers mentioned this on one of our Men from Modo podcasts and Owen Turtenwald also wrote an article about this particular strategy. It involves forcing a single colour. The main reason this works is that all of the colours are fairly deep so that if you decide to marry yourself to a powerful card, you are punished less than in previous formats.
I don’t use this approach 100% of the time as my drafting style is to basically stay as open as possible (almost to a fault), but every time I have forced a single colour, I experienced success. I think the fact that [card]Cone of Flame[/card] (or Cone of Game) is an uncommon ultimately gives you at least nine shots of opening a bomb in red, so it helps to be able to draft that up when you aren’t already committed to two other colours.
Blue is considered by many to be the worst colour in M15 and I have made it a point to pass blue when there’s cards of similar value in the pack but of a different colour. I mentioned in my previous article that I only want to jump in blue if I am getting fed an aggressive [card]Welkin Tern[/card] deck. [card]Coral Barrier[/card] is a fine card and it’s good in slower decks, but there’s no guarantee that you will actually have a better late-game than your opponent, so I’m never excited to be going towards that direction.
Verdant Havens and Meteorites
Before really analyzing every facet of my M15 game, I was in auto-pilot mode when it came to splashing. If I drafted a Fireball in one of the older formats, I would follow the commonly shared advice that I should have at least 2 sources of red mana in my deck. In M15, if I drafted a [card]Lightning Strike[/card], I would make sure I had enough sources covered by a combination of [card]Evolving Wilds[/card], [card]Verdant Haven[/card]s, and [card]Meteorite[/card]s.
But the more I drafted, I realized that whereas [card]Evolving Wilds[/card] allowed a splash that did not affect your spell total, [card]Verdant Haven[/card]s and [card]Meteorite[/card]s can certainly dilute your deck’s power. The other night, I was able to beat a deck easily because my opponent’s spells were [card]Satyr Wayfinder[/card], [card]Verdant Haven[/card], and [card]Nissa’s Expedition[/card]. I had three action cards instead of those three. It made me realize more than ever before that when you go out of your way to ramp, your deck has to be able to make up for the fact that you have less business spells. And if you are just splashing and not ramping, you better have a very powerful splash card to make up for those lost slots.
If you are playing ramp to get to [card]Hornet Queen[/card], then that’s great as she and her army can catch you back up or simply push you ahead. If you are playing 2 [card]Verdant Haven[/card]s just to be able to play that [card]Stab Wound[/card] though, you are likely doing it wrong.
In Khans of Tarkir, instead of [card]Verdant Haven[/card]s, you get to play with Banners that can cycle for a card later on in the game, so I definitely value that more highly than gaining 2 life. I’m still going to be very conscious of how many Banners my decks will contain.
Card Draw
I was always scared of card draw, because of how I used to view the game. I thought card advantage was the key path to victory. Life is a resource that you can sacrifice most of the time, but if you fall behind on cards, you are likely to lose, which is why I often rate cards like [card]Jace’s Ingenuity[/card], [card]Divination[/card], and [card]Sign in Blood[/card] so highly. They are the cards that scare me the most when cast by my opponents.
At some point though, I believe it was Alexander Hayne who made me realize that every card drawn in a typical deck (ignoring the starting seven) has roughly a 23/40 chance (57.5%) of being an actual spell which means that in the late-game, [card]Divination[/card] is actually not that scary as the lands drawn are usually going to be dead cards.
I think I am so used to 2 for 1s on the battlefield being a blowout that I basically viewed [card]Divination[/card] in the same light but it’s not. When you are trading one for two on the board, the spells traded are usual relevant threats. [card]Divination[/card] might not draw you anything.
All of this seems so obvious as I write this but it actually took me a while to understand why I have been overrating card draw all these years. At Grand Prix Montreal this year, I snap locked in [card]Divination[/card] for my UR Theros Sealed deck because it’s a 2 for 1, but Francis Toussaint was the first to look at my deck and say that [card]Divination[/card] was not something that my deck wanted to do on turn 3 or needed later on. I just sat there going “Really?!”, so even as recently as this year, I didn’t have a full grasp on how to evaluate card draw properly.
I believe all these little tweaks in my thinking (regardless of how minor each of them individually are) add up to something. In my case, they added up to a PTQ win. I hope you too can break down simple-looking concepts and become a better player than you were before.
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Until next time,
KYT
Kar Yung Tom (KYT) is the Digital Content Manager for Face to Face Games. He oversees the F2FTour.com and Magic F2F websites.