I mean if you stabilise with this one - how you win is secondary. You get so much removal and card advantage you get there. I mean one game i won with a 4/3 Lord Dregg. one with a 7/7 Pachyderm - whatever sticks really. Win cons are not a priority. Survival and value are.
Bonus logs:
www.17lands.com/draft/a8efaf...
www.17lands.com/draft/7fd353...
www.17lands.com/draft/7fd353...
www.17lands.com/draft/0f9bf1...
www.17lands.com/draft/d25cec...
www.17lands.com/draft/996774...
www.17lands.com/draft/c786f4...
10/10
Winning is fun, so I can't be straight face rave about the TMT, I am sure win streak is a large part of my enjoyment. But I also love figuring out 5C archetypes which I did a lot of in TMT so far. And P2 drafts let me doing way more reps per evening.
9/10
This one has a better creature suite and got 4-1. Sometimes those WB decks play weak on the draw and that happened here in one of the games. Opponent helped by playing multiple larger butt creatures - Mouser Mark III, 3/4 Donatello made it hard to get the damage through.
8/9
75% amazing deck, but was a bit unlucky in getting the sneak payoffs. And there were some cards in it I'd rather not play. Never a good sign, despite amazing top end. Managed to get 3 wins still, but few small changes would go a long way here.
3-2
7/9
5C comes with risks - bad mana draws will kill you and you will look pathetic, like a non-functional deck. That happened here twice. This one was maybe pushing the boundaries of 5C too hard. Even 2x Everything Pizza won't fix every draw.
2-2
6/9
Weird UR - the pair was open but I didn't see any artifacts. Lucky to trophy with that but I got good matchups where I was aligned well. Luck still determines the outcomes of some drafts. 4-0
5/9
This one just goes so wide big blockers can't negate your board. And there is enough interaction + Oatmeal Pizza and Rphael to push dmg without attacking.
Decks like this are a reason I might start prioritising Jennika's Technique in 5C decks. 4-0
4/9
5C isn't open every draft. Here I started with Sally (never saw it) and pivoted from WR to WB in P2. Early Sneak is key, other games were won with Madam Null. I was aggressive enough to be able to pay life with ease. And board was wide enough to sneak things through. 4-0
3/9
This is a classic example - some bombs, Everything Pizza, fixing is key. But other parts: Cam is amazing. Lets you develop the board while keeping life total healthy. Nobody lets you rebuy interaction. Pachyderms let you get back life lost early. Looks a mess, but easy 4-0.
2/9
Even with the slight improvement in WR for 17L users in TMT 81% WR is not normal. Part is variance but I think part is reluctance of the pods to embrace the 5C strategy and me figuring out the best 5C interaction pieces in the format. Some of the trophy decks to follow:
1/9
Hope it was a good enough mix of theory and format specific knowledge that even if TMT is not your jam - it will be useful for you.
Let me know what other data dives / questions you'd be interested to see explored! 15/15
Big cost of those rares is missed opportunity. 3 mana 2/4 menace can be fine if you get in on the wheel. But at pick 2 there are better cards in the pack for your deck, you miss out on, by falling into rarity trap. And if there aren't - maybe you are in wrong lane? 14/15
Raph & Leo is another win more'y card. Looks good but wins less than a common EPF Point Squad. Cause Point Squad does what you want: lets you go tall on top of going wide. With R&L, if you have attacks, it will speed the clock, but if you don't - it doesn't do anything. 13/14
Don & Raph is a 2/4 menace for 3. The "affinity" text just doesn't come up often enough. The fact it only discounts non-creature spells is an issue here - most of those are cheap in this format. Return to Sewers seems the best payoff, but that's not enough. 12/14
Another Raphael on the list. This one is a tried (and failed) design. WotC will probably continue to nail it but after Zuko from TLA, this is another fail in that respect. Problem with it is - it's a win more card. That is only good if you untap with it. And have attacks. 11/14
Party Dude is an interesting card. Against some decks it doesn't do much. Against others it is an active threat to the players playing it - opponent can mill you out. Sometimes it is perfectly in the middle and thus good. But the flanking cases make it imho SB only option. 10/14
Raphael might look interesting and the M symbol raises hopes, but if you look carefully - it's just a vanilla 4/4 in most games. I'd much rather play a Mouser Foundry or even a Nobody in my red decks and both of those cards I can get much later in draft. 9/14
April is a card I tried to make work. Maybe there is a shell for her but in my decks, early I didn't have attacks and late in the game I couldn't attack with her in fear of milling out to death. For a card like this to work there needs to be some unblockability theme. 8/14
Two equipment follow and those are U but just not powerful enough. UR deck is a bunch of 1/1s so Double Strike is underwhelming, and Armor is not aligned with gb plan and sacrificing is a bad deal for go wide WB deck. There are good equipment in TMT, those ain't it. 7/14
Second one promises amazing things but again - in retail limited it is hard to engineer a good version of that card. maybe if snuck version brought those creatures tapped and attacking, but as is you'd rather have a 3 drop creature instead. 6/14
First one is Cool but Rude. This is a classic "good in constructed, no support in limited" case. Cards like this require build consistency that never happens in draft. Maybe in a supported cube, but not in retail. And yet we try and fail. Being a chase rare doesn't help. 5/14
You can also see there is very little overlap between rares and the uncommons in terms of ALSA. Bit more on the U/C boundary. And that despite at the same ALSA U are much better than higher rarity cards. Gems and FOMO play a key role here.
So what are the overrated cards? 4/14
This graph is the same as the one above, but I split cards by rarity and did 3 separate trendlines. R2 metric tells us how well does the trendline explain the relation between ALSA and WR. And it does so best at common. Which means at rare, there are other factors in play. 3/14
But not only rares. Some uncommons made the list and we can speculate a bit about the reasons players overrate cards. The 1st one is rarity allure. Partly driven by value, partly by heuristic, partly by "for science" mentality, but rare cards get picked high. 2/14
Yesterday we covered under-appreciated cards (ALSA<3, win rare way above the trendline). Today time for overrated ones - this time ALSA doesn't matter, but they have to be below the trendline. They are mainly rares: those get often picked on rarity not on merit. 1/14
Knowing under-drafted cards helps in draft navigation, allows out-drafting your pods - use that knowledge wisely, you will boost your win rate in no-time.
Let me know if you also want to learn about the most over-valued cards in the set and I might make another one tomorrow.
7/7
Lastly,Turtle Blimp. Any aggro deck wants a copy or two and it goes really late. We often disregard colorless cards as designers tend to underpower those. But Rooftop Percher and now this show that's not always the case. Heuristics are mostly right. Not always right.
6/7
Another cards still going too late is the Beavers. This card is a bomb.
WB decks with Beavers are winning 3%p more than the ones without. Only Mutanimals and Sally Pride have similar numbers.
And their OH win rate is almost 71%. Picking removal over them means missing out.
5/7
I am happy playing Brilliance, Metalhead and Ooze Spill in those 5C decks too, but they are perfectly fine in UR as well, if they go so late. Blue good cards generally seem to be wheeling a lot, but U decks are notoriously harder to build, this might be the reason.
4/7
