This comment was mine. It should be noted that it was based solely on my games versus safra (and that the games were enjoyable). I would like to revisit this comment and all of the below after a good 5-10 drafts of Jason's cube; in my opinion, three matches of gameplay is not enough of an indicator to make changes.
safra versus chris
My deck:
#LINK#
Her deck:
#LINK#
As this was my first Riptide draft, I'm sure that I valued a lot in the drafting portion incorrectly, but I think that taking
Dryad Arbor in the ULD and playing less lands would've helped this deck. I even had a decent amount of card advantage (3 pieces of graveyard hate versus cards looking to glean their advantage from the tombs and about 9 other sources, ranging from 2-for-1s to
Phyrexian Arena).
It is worth noting that I also know that I was playing suboptimally, and perhaps an extra mull would've been beneficial as I never resolved a turn-1 mana creature versus safra (if my recollection is correct). I did mulligan a lot of 7-card hands, though.
In our games, her deck provided pretty good pressure with early
Brainstorm setup and then
Treasure Cruise/
Fact or Fiction/late Brainstorms kept the gas flowing. I was able to interact positively with Delvers and
Dark Confidant but
Curse of the Shallow Grave provided a steady stream of pressure while her 1-for-1s buried me. In all midgames(T3-6), I found myself at middling life with a slightly inferior board position, flyers promising additional pain and less cards in hand.
I also believe that Jason's deck would've buried me with
Consecrated Sphinx, Jace TMS, Brainstorm, Dig or Sphinx's Rev after his supporting spells alleviated pressure. (I know that Brainstorm isn't card advantage, but the card quality increase due to selection provides a sort of virtual card advantage that is amplified with a shuffle effect.)
Maybe this experience was a combination of mismatched card draw sequencing, a bad matchup pairing or safra's deck coming together to be a monster in the particular draft (I know it was mentioned that rarely would a single player get 3 Brainstorms), but it reinforced past experiences where blue spells with "draw" on them ran away with limited games.
My assumption is thus: given a more-or-less balanced cardpool from a red-zone-interaction and threat-versus-answer design paradigm, decks that do a better job drawing quantity of their interactive cards will win. Blue draw and card selection spells are superior to card advantage in other colors, especially in terms of cards that add quantity/quality to the hand. Properly built decks with blue card advantage/selection will trump properly decks without them. (Additionally, the card advantage from semi-spells, a.k.a. incidental effects or wimpy creatures, is on average much less valuable than a spell drawn from the deck, given time to cast said spell).
(Here is where I get lazy when real research would make a better case.) Hell, there must be a reason that
Tidings,
Jace's Ingenuity,
Divination and such are loved by pros in retail limited environments or a deck like burn can become top-tier when Treasure Cruise was legal in Eternal formats.
