1) I know a while back you made a post about how you feel bad a newcomer to YT is outdoing you in numbers, and I don’t think I commented but I wanted to say how much I appreciate your in-depth analysis. It’s very interesting to watch! 2) For your top 10 videos, if you could include which set the card came from I’d like it a lot! Just a personal thing. 😅 3) I don’t think you touched on it but Dire Downdraft can, in a pinch, also be used to save your own creature as well. Obviously it’s niche and not as useful there, but it’s a niche that does come up sometimes! 4) I don’t do drafting, only pre-release sealed environments, but your videos for each set breakdown and how to evaluate cards are extremely helpful regardless so thanks for those too!
I drafted a sick deck last night. Glarb was my p1p1 and leaned heavily into the simic frog theme, somehow was passed TWO unsummon reprints (the one that you can gift a fish to bounce ANY nonland permanent) and then opened the turtle pack 2, passed the one drop dude who cares about frogs entering. Pack 3 opened the uncommon frog that flickers stuff, and then was passed a DREAMWEAVER
I would say the otter duo fits more into rats, being able to fill threshold & proc rat based synergies like marshstomer and has the upside of prowess to synergise with your removal! Also I’ve not seen anyone talk about how good waverider is in U/G or U/B if you manage to draft even a single copy of splash portal! Being able to drop him turn 6, draw 1-2 cards and then kill something along with a 4/4 body is such a tempo swing in your favour it’s crazy!
The thing with Ravine Raider is that it is mostly “secret” Rakdos card - it is pretty underwhelming in any other deck, and people are not willing to commit to a 2 colour combination early which makes sense (epeciallh for Lizards, which is an archetype that really needs to be open to perform
I just want to say I watched this from start to finish no interruption which is huge for me because I’m the worlds most distracted person™️ You really are an excellent presenter. This was super informative! I was most shocked by ruthless negotiation, I thought that card was pretty terrible and I was wrong!
I honestly think it fits better in non-red decks. UR decks want to get on board early with creatures and then sling spells to ping or trigger prowess. 4 mana is a lot for a creature in that kind of deck. It also competes with Coruscation Mage for the common 4 drop slot. And by turn 5 or 6, you want to be pinging, not prowessing. In other decks, though, opponents still must treat it as a 4/5, which are good stats for 4 mana. And surveil 2 is almost equivalent to draw a card in most decks, definitely in the black or green decks
11:36 I think this is one thing that is greatly helped for me by being a Yugioh to Magic player looking at this. "Spinning" effects as we call them (Effects that send cards back to the deck) are by far the best form of removal in Yugioh, because they force your opponent to send cards back to the deck that need the resources again, and getting cards out of the deck tends to be the hardest way to recur them since very few cards trigger in the deck (The only ones that do in Yugioh are some crappy monsters that no one plays, then the only one I can think of in Magic that does is rulings nightmare Panglacial Wurm), or if you do, it's coming at the expense of a new card, either basically delaying them an entire turn with no new cards, or locking them out of that thing despite it now being in their hand.
Rules Nightmare indeed: "While searching your library, you must keep your library in the same order until you shuffle it. This order could matter if you tap Millikin for mana, for example, to pay for a Panglacial Wurm you cast from your library."
Game in hand win rate is a funny stat for ruthless negotiation when one of it's great strengths is that it can do things without needing to ever be in your hand
Great analysis. I do think players need to be careful around the Mudflat Village though depending on what you've drafted. Consumed By Greed or Feed the Cycle make it a little scary. I'd love to see a final gallery of the cards featured or a list in the video description for reference.
Hey, I love these videos looking at card ratings well after a set comes out. I think it's easy to get lost in one's opinions from the very start of the format and not update evaluations as the format goes along. I'm going to share my own thoughts and experiences for each of your picks. I also just hit mythic top 1200 for this month, and I've been pretty happy with Bloomburrow where some others have been not super into it. Ravine Raider: I also quite like the lizards deck, while some others are down on it. I think the reason ravine raider is good is that, obviously yes it gets in for a ping to turn on your bloodthirst effects. But the other reason why it works so well is that there is just an abundance of menace in BR, between the hybrid card that can give itself menace and the 4 mana red common. What this means, it that on turns where you attacks with 3-4 creatures, often your opponent would have good blocks for this thing, but they just can't spend the time to give up blocking better creatures, and so it gets a free pass to the opponents face in the midgame. All this said, I would not want to ever play this in anything but BR. Lightshell Duo: I have the least experience with this, but I think the key here is that it is one of the few blue creatures, and one of the very few blue commons, that is reasonably sized for the cost. Just about everything else is small (at least without threshold) while this can both attack and block well from turn 4. Lupinflower Village: There's not too much to say here. I also agree that the white and black villages are the best in a vacuum, though I would suggest not ignoring the red one in WR. I would only think about cutting (or not picking it) it if I had a good WW card or two, and the only (non-creature) cards in the set with WW in their cost are: Rabbit Response, Parting Gust, Starfall Invocation, and Season of the Burrow. And to put some numbers behind how often it hits, if you have 12 creatures of the requisite types, you have a roughly 91% chance to hit one of them in 6 cards. I will say for Mudflat Village, I think it more often hurts your mana, because Consumed by Greed is such a good card. Dire Downdraft: Time Ebb effects are always good. Getting it for 3 mana (or with some other upside) is the tipping point to turn this from mediocre into actively pretty good. Ruthless Negotiation: This also surprises me a lot. It doesn't feel great to play with in any matchup that isn't two grindy decks. I was curious, and it seems that it's stock goes down a little when filtering by top users. It's not a huge jump, but it goes from like a B- to a C+ or so, and that seems about more in line with my experience. Daring Waverider: I love this card in UB or UG. This is one of the only non-rare cards that will pull me into blue if I'm already drafting black or green. Sometimes it feels even better than Wick's Patrol, as it can usually draw cards if you don't need removal, or it's less scary to cast in some games where decking yourself is a real possibility. Glidedive Duo: This is another one that surprises me just how high up it is in the data, but I get it. When you look at it, it's a little unassuming, but it just does everything you want. It's also funny to think that this is essentially a reprint of a BW gold card from RNA. Also, to note on this in BR, one non-lizard card that BR loves to play is Starscape Cleric (it gets in for damage early, and triggers off of Scales of Shale and Agate-Blade Assassin), and so you often get a little bit more synergy with the drain effect.
Importantly for mudflat village, multiple black decks want cards added to the graveyard, so it's got even more synergy as it puts itself into the yard.
Does getting picked late affect win rate? Like, does the Lightshell Duo have a higher win rate because by the time you pick it you "need" it more for your blue deck to work? Math that goes further out like is beyond me, and I was just curious. Thanks.
Brief note: I think nizzahon said that IWD only counts when it’s drawn after your opening hand, but I’m pretty sure the stat is just game in hand win rate minus game not seen win rate. Just a PSA for anyone looking at their 17lands data; still a great video! This is my favorite one every set
I've stopped playing lupinflower village in my good white green and white red decks. It sucks to not be able to play carrot cake, hop to it, rabbit response and activate Warren elder. Also the targeting and save spells. And if I'm going fast (white red, good white green) , I don't get to the point where spending that mana and going minus one on lands will win me the game.
I think we should think of Ruthless Negotiation as (slightly worse) Lorien Revealed. The 1 mana makes a HUGE difference. It takes you and your opponent both down a card but, since limited is rarely about 1 drops, it usually costs you nothing mana wise. Then, late game, it is basically a Lorien Revealed (i.e. a 5 mana draw 3). You draw one, your oppo discards 1 and it doesnt actually cost you a card itself, since it is from graveyard, so it is the same card advantage as Lorien Revealed
One other thing obout rulhless negotuation is that it does not care about the flashback at all. it only cares about beeing cast from the graveyard. Ther are a few cards that can cast it from there and then it is just a 2 for 1 for free. And that is pretty good.
Ravine Raider was one of my biggest contributors in my 4-1 Prerelease deck. If I had it in my opening hand, it was sensational. Late game, it's still fine. I was in Black/Red with mostly jank cards but with excellent lizard synergy.
Shore up has been very good for me in UB specifically. I’m usually in The deck because of high powered rares or uncommons and shore protecting them for 1 mana has been clutch.
Ruthless negotiation is just really good because the lowest it can go is a one for one. But the best it can be is 3 for one . Of course it can blow you out if you draw it late. But playing it early is pretty punishing. Specially if the rest of the deck is fast.
You did a lot of explaining your thoughts and the information behind your, ah, information this video. Which isn't always great since it can big things down, but I think it was good specifically here imo. Good timing and good video.
Ruthless negotiation DESTROYED me in draft. he had two in the oppening hand and than a Rat that also let me discard, all my plans were just vanished. hate that card
Your evaluation on villages is a bit flawed: there are many times when you draft them and cut them because you can't allow to play them and hurt your mana. That's why when you do play them, they have a higher winrate. They are being picked in the right place.
Also: you often don't want more than one and in the early picks of pack 1 and 2 you don't usually want to take a land (unless it's a great one) and in pack three you may be short of playable if you didn't lock in your colours early
I think you really need to start using win rate statistics for each color archetype instead of just showing the overall win rate. Some cards are awesome synergy in a specific deck, but really suck in any other deck.
Not a terrible suggestion, but a debatable one. This video is already front loaded with a lot of context information. There's a thought that throwing out the percentage win rates of each color (each color pair? Feature creep, likely...) would make it so that, later, there's less explaining necessary when talking about comparative win rates. ... Or - the later explanations would *still* require call backs to that original data as a reminder of where things are landing, and the intro would just unnecessarily be longer and more fatiguing. Percentages and numbers are inherently fatiguing and just become "noise" when thrown out one after the other. And this kind of video that depends on both numbers and percentages has to be mindful of that fatigue.
Temporarily throwing up the average win rate for each colour on screen when he first references it would be brilliant I think. Same kind of thing if he's really focusing on the win rate of a colour pair being particularly high/low win rate to display the number. I think the way he describes it all is brilliant and don't want to add lots to the editing job, but adding that context would probably make a lot of people happy
Villages are a trap for most decks, I think. Too often you only have the village as your 2nd color and 2 removal spells in hand that you can't cast.. I think if it's your big main color and don't have too many noncreatures they're really good though.
Yeah I remember cutting them in my "splash" colours because they literally can't play other spells. But they're great as like your 7th land in a colour
Why would you play them as the only source of splash color to begin with anyway? Cause you'll need that color activate them and you can't use their mana to do that
@@orian3638 splashing more than one land? You never activate it early because it also puts you down a land. It's a late game thing when you've drawn other sources. If I'm only splashing creatures I'd still play it
Blue is not "one of", it is "THE WORST" color in this set. I have only won 2 games and gone 0-3 every time I have been forced into Blue, it just does not do enough against the fast tempo of this format. I have seen Simic be good against me, but I am nowhere near good enough to make it work.
Blue commons are taken late, because single blue drafter at the table busy collecting their uncommons and rares.
Lmfao yessss
1) I know a while back you made a post about how you feel bad a newcomer to YT is outdoing you in numbers, and I don’t think I commented but I wanted to say how much I appreciate your in-depth analysis. It’s very interesting to watch!
2) For your top 10 videos, if you could include which set the card came from I’d like it a lot! Just a personal thing. 😅
3) I don’t think you touched on it but Dire Downdraft can, in a pinch, also be used to save your own creature as well. Obviously it’s niche and not as useful there, but it’s a niche that does come up sometimes!
4) I don’t do drafting, only pre-release sealed environments, but your videos for each set breakdown and how to evaluate cards are extremely helpful regardless so thanks for those too!
The person in question wasn't a newcomer
I drafted a sick deck last night. Glarb was my p1p1 and leaned heavily into the simic frog theme, somehow was passed TWO unsummon reprints (the one that you can gift a fish to bounce ANY nonland permanent) and then opened the turtle pack 2, passed the one drop dude who cares about frogs entering. Pack 3 opened the uncommon frog that flickers stuff, and then was passed a DREAMWEAVER
I would say the otter duo fits more into rats, being able to fill threshold & proc rat based synergies like marshstomer and has the upside of prowess to synergise with your removal!
Also I’ve not seen anyone talk about how good waverider is in U/G or U/B if you manage to draft even a single copy of splash portal! Being able to drop him turn 6, draw 1-2 cards and then kill something along with a 4/4 body is such a tempo swing in your favour it’s crazy!
The thing with Ravine Raider is that it is mostly “secret” Rakdos card - it is pretty underwhelming in any other deck, and people are not willing to commit to a 2 colour combination early which makes sense (epeciallh for Lizards, which is an archetype that really needs to be open to perform
I just want to say I watched this from start to finish no interruption which is huge for me because I’m the worlds most distracted person™️ You really are an excellent presenter. This was super informative! I was most shocked by ruthless negotiation, I thought that card was pretty terrible and I was wrong!
I’ve ended up in blue a couple times and the lightshell duo has always performed well for me.
I honestly think it fits better in non-red decks. UR decks want to get on board early with creatures and then sling spells to ping or trigger prowess. 4 mana is a lot for a creature in that kind of deck. It also competes with Coruscation Mage for the common 4 drop slot. And by turn 5 or 6, you want to be pinging, not prowessing.
In other decks, though, opponents still must treat it as a 4/5, which are good stats for 4 mana. And surveil 2 is almost equivalent to draw a card in most decks, definitely in the black or green decks
I got Shrekt by one yesterday. Forgot it had prowess 😅
I opened two in sealed and it was awesome in blue black
11:36 I think this is one thing that is greatly helped for me by being a Yugioh to Magic player looking at this.
"Spinning" effects as we call them (Effects that send cards back to the deck) are by far the best form of removal in Yugioh, because they force your opponent to send cards back to the deck that need the resources again, and getting cards out of the deck tends to be the hardest way to recur them since very few cards trigger in the deck (The only ones that do in Yugioh are some crappy monsters that no one plays, then the only one I can think of in Magic that does is rulings nightmare Panglacial Wurm), or if you do, it's coming at the expense of a new card, either basically delaying them an entire turn with no new cards, or locking them out of that thing despite it now being in their hand.
Rules Nightmare indeed: "While searching your library, you must keep your library in the same order until you shuffle it. This order could matter if you tap Millikin for mana, for example, to pay for a Panglacial Wurm you cast from your library."
new Panglacial Wurm official ruling: "Please don't play this card."
Game in hand win rate is a funny stat for ruthless negotiation when one of it's great strengths is that it can do things without needing to ever be in your hand
Great analysis. I do think players need to be careful around the Mudflat Village though depending on what you've drafted. Consumed By Greed or Feed the Cycle make it a little scary.
I'd love to see a final gallery of the cards featured or a list in the video description for reference.
Hey, I love these videos looking at card ratings well after a set comes out. I think it's easy to get lost in one's opinions from the very start of the format and not update evaluations as the format goes along. I'm going to share my own thoughts and experiences for each of your picks. I also just hit mythic top 1200 for this month, and I've been pretty happy with Bloomburrow where some others have been not super into it.
Ravine Raider: I also quite like the lizards deck, while some others are down on it. I think the reason ravine raider is good is that, obviously yes it gets in for a ping to turn on your bloodthirst effects. But the other reason why it works so well is that there is just an abundance of menace in BR, between the hybrid card that can give itself menace and the 4 mana red common. What this means, it that on turns where you attacks with 3-4 creatures, often your opponent would have good blocks for this thing, but they just can't spend the time to give up blocking better creatures, and so it gets a free pass to the opponents face in the midgame. All this said, I would not want to ever play this in anything but BR.
Lightshell Duo: I have the least experience with this, but I think the key here is that it is one of the few blue creatures, and one of the very few blue commons, that is reasonably sized for the cost. Just about everything else is small (at least without threshold) while this can both attack and block well from turn 4.
Lupinflower Village: There's not too much to say here. I also agree that the white and black villages are the best in a vacuum, though I would suggest not ignoring the red one in WR. I would only think about cutting (or not picking it) it if I had a good WW card or two, and the only (non-creature) cards in the set with WW in their cost are: Rabbit Response, Parting Gust, Starfall Invocation, and Season of the Burrow. And to put some numbers behind how often it hits, if you have 12 creatures of the requisite types, you have a roughly 91% chance to hit one of them in 6 cards. I will say for Mudflat Village, I think it more often hurts your mana, because Consumed by Greed is such a good card.
Dire Downdraft: Time Ebb effects are always good. Getting it for 3 mana (or with some other upside) is the tipping point to turn this from mediocre into actively pretty good.
Ruthless Negotiation: This also surprises me a lot. It doesn't feel great to play with in any matchup that isn't two grindy decks. I was curious, and it seems that it's stock goes down a little when filtering by top users. It's not a huge jump, but it goes from like a B- to a C+ or so, and that seems about more in line with my experience.
Daring Waverider: I love this card in UB or UG. This is one of the only non-rare cards that will pull me into blue if I'm already drafting black or green. Sometimes it feels even better than Wick's Patrol, as it can usually draw cards if you don't need removal, or it's less scary to cast in some games where decking yourself is a real possibility.
Glidedive Duo: This is another one that surprises me just how high up it is in the data, but I get it. When you look at it, it's a little unassuming, but it just does everything you want. It's also funny to think that this is essentially a reprint of a BW gold card from RNA. Also, to note on this in BR, one non-lizard card that BR loves to play is Starscape Cleric (it gets in for damage early, and triggers off of Scales of Shale and Agate-Blade Assassin), and so you often get a little bit more synergy with the drain effect.
Importantly for mudflat village, multiple black decks want cards added to the graveyard, so it's got even more synergy as it puts itself into the yard.
Love when I’m at work on break and first thing on my mind, time for Nizza Notes!!
Does getting picked late affect win rate? Like, does the Lightshell Duo have a higher win rate because by the time you pick it you "need" it more for your blue deck to work? Math that goes further out like is beyond me, and I was just curious. Thanks.
Brief note: I think nizzahon said that IWD only counts when it’s drawn after your opening hand, but I’m pretty sure the stat is just game in hand win rate minus game not seen win rate. Just a PSA for anyone looking at their 17lands data; still a great video! This is my favorite one every set
I've stopped playing lupinflower village in my good white green and white red decks. It sucks to not be able to play carrot cake, hop to it, rabbit response and activate Warren elder. Also the targeting and save spells. And if I'm going fast (white red, good white green) , I don't get to the point where spending that mana and going minus one on lands will win me the game.
Ravine Raider is great. In one of my trophies it was the MVP.
love to see these informative notes vids, but i wish you uploaded more draft gameplay!
I think we should think of Ruthless Negotiation as (slightly worse) Lorien Revealed. The 1 mana makes a HUGE difference. It takes you and your opponent both down a card but, since limited is rarely about 1 drops, it usually costs you nothing mana wise.
Then, late game, it is basically a Lorien Revealed (i.e. a 5 mana draw 3). You draw one, your oppo discards 1 and it doesnt actually cost you a card itself, since it is from graveyard, so it is the same card advantage as Lorien Revealed
One other thing obout rulhless negotuation is that it does not care about the flashback at all. it only cares about beeing cast from the graveyard. Ther are a few cards that can cast it from there and then it is just a 2 for 1 for free. And that is pretty good.
These videos remain the reason why I keep going back to draft.
Ravine Raider was one of my biggest contributors in my 4-1 Prerelease deck. If I had it in my opening hand, it was sensational. Late game, it's still fine. I was in Black/Red with mostly jank cards but with excellent lizard synergy.
My man, if you could make a video about smokestack and stasis decks it would be so great
Shore up has been very good for me in UB specifically. I’m usually in The deck because of high powered rares or uncommons and shore protecting them for 1 mana has been clutch.
Lupin and mudflat both help with forage aswell and mudflat helps with threshold
Lupinflower Village & Hop To It = an opening hand where I should have taken the mulligan
Ruthless negotiation is just really good because the lowest it can go is a one for one. But the best it can be is 3 for one . Of course it can blow you out if you draw it late. But playing it early is pretty punishing. Specially if the rest of the deck is fast.
You did a lot of explaining your thoughts and the information behind your, ah, information this video.
Which isn't always great since it can big things down, but I think it was good specifically here imo. Good timing and good video.
Bog* things down
Ruthless negotiation DESTROYED me in draft. he had two in the oppening hand and than a Rat that also let me discard, all my plans were just vanished.
hate that card
Oklahoma going down on Friday!!
Seems highly unlikely
seeing that youre from oklahoma makes me wonder if ive run into you before!
Your evaluation on villages is a bit flawed: there are many times when you draft them and cut them because you can't allow to play them and hurt your mana. That's why when you do play them, they have a higher winrate. They are being picked in the right place.
Also: you often don't want more than one and in the early picks of pack 1 and 2 you don't usually want to take a land (unless it's a great one) and in pack three you may be short of playable if you didn't lock in your colours early
The best card on the list is the frog
I think you really need to start using win rate statistics for each color archetype instead of just showing the overall win rate. Some cards are awesome synergy in a specific deck, but really suck in any other deck.
He does talk about that with every card he goes over
Not a terrible suggestion, but a debatable one. This video is already front loaded with a lot of context information. There's a thought that throwing out the percentage win rates of each color (each color pair? Feature creep, likely...) would make it so that, later, there's less explaining necessary when talking about comparative win rates.
... Or - the later explanations would *still* require call backs to that original data as a reminder of where things are landing, and the intro would just unnecessarily be longer and more fatiguing. Percentages and numbers are inherently fatiguing and just become "noise" when thrown out one after the other. And this kind of video that depends on both numbers and percentages has to be mindful of that fatigue.
I think his audience is in-tune enough to notice when a 'weaker' card can be more acceptable under the right circumstances.
Temporarily throwing up the average win rate for each colour on screen when he first references it would be brilliant I think. Same kind of thing if he's really focusing on the win rate of a colour pair being particularly high/low win rate to display the number.
I think the way he describes it all is brilliant and don't want to add lots to the editing job, but adding that context would probably make a lot of people happy
Villages are a trap for most decks, I think. Too often you only have the village as your 2nd color and 2 removal spells in hand that you can't cast.. I think if it's your big main color and don't have too many noncreatures they're really good though.
Yeah I remember cutting them in my "splash" colours because they literally can't play other spells. But they're great as like your 7th land in a colour
Why would you play them as the only source of splash color to begin with anyway? Cause you'll need that color activate them and you can't use their mana to do that
@@orian3638 splashing more than one land? You never activate it early because it also puts you down a land. It's a late game thing when you've drawn other sources. If I'm only splashing creatures I'd still play it
!
Blue is not "one of", it is "THE WORST" color in this set. I have only won 2 games and gone 0-3 every time I have been forced into Blue, it just does not do enough against the fast tempo of this format. I have seen Simic be good against me, but I am nowhere near good enough to make it work.
Nah, red is worse
This sounds like you just don’t know how to play effectively with blue cards, I don’t think that means its a “bad” color
2 minutes ago
These cards are legal? I thought this was a joke set.