Sets [ELD] Throne of Eldraine

Erik Twice

Erik Twice

My experience in Sealed so far has been dull. My matches have been decided by mythics, colour screw and not having enough removal. Either by me or my opponents, mind you. Games go long and cards are worth slighty more than they do in a normal set so I'm sure it's heavily tainted by my inexperience.

Chances are the set improves in draft by a significant margin.
 
shamizy

shamizy

I'm so glad that they've moved prereleases to 6:30PM on Friday instead of midnights. Being able to function at normal hours has been a godsend. Opened up a solid pool that had some good Red, Black and Green cards. Fixing in this set is too rough to be solidly in 3 so I had to make a decision whether I wanted my second color to be Red or Green as my black was pretty deep. It was either creature quality in Green or actual removal in Red, but I figured that Green just made things easier in the long run and allowed me to play my Golgari Quad-brids on curve.

Went 3-0-1 with a split in the final round, deck ran pretty well all night long:

Adamantly Golgari










My gameplan was pretty much just to curve out and pressure the opponent, only 3 pieces of removal and they were all tied to my creatures (really weird that I had no actual removal effects in Black or Green), but the deck somehow functioned all night. There were a lot of tight plays that had to be made, two games came down to various sequencing decisions that let me stabilize around 1-3 life before turning the tables and coming back. I had completely underestimated Food when I first saw it comparing it to Clues in my mind but 3 life is a LOT to get back later in games. Really helps cushion and branch you into the later game if you're under serious pressure. I actually think it's a sweet mechanic as interactions with Savvy Trader, Wicked Wolf, and Giant Opportunity were so fun to play with all night long.

There are a lot of bombs in this format, but there is just so much good removal that I don't think it's really that much of an issue. What is important is curving out though, if you're on the backfoot early it can be really hard to get back into games with how punishing some of these cards are. I concur with others on Adventures; they are just great to play with and feel good when you can maximize the value.
 
Peter LaCara

Peter LaCara

I've got two 7 win runs on Arena under my belt so far. The Great Henge is an insane Magic card. I would absolutely recommend main-decking a disenchant effect, at least in sealed. A lot of really good removal is artifact or enchantment based. All the mythic artifacts are huge bombs. There's even a bunch of good equipment in the aggressive decks.
 
TrainmasterGT

TrainmasterGT

This format manages to be a lot of fun basically just because the cards are so flavorful.

At my prerelease, I trapped a Clackbridge Troll in a tower, and proceeded to beat down it's controller with a Goat token holding a Giant's Skewer.

I don't think it would have been as fun if the cards weren't so novel. I think this will get old before Theros: Beyond Death releases, but it should be fun while it lasts. The stuff that works in this set really works well!
 
Kirblinx

Kirblinx

Developer
Staff member
So I did a couple of pre-releases and went 3-0 both times. Don't know if I am just lucky or if this set likes me.
WtY6rV0.jpg
When you open a pile of on colour aggressive rares you put them all together and hope for the best. Curving Worthy Knight into Acclaimed Contender is just gross. This deck also managed to have a decent long game too, thanks to Piper of the Swarm and Ayara. The only game I lost was to a GB Food deck that curved Questing Beast into Garenbrig Paladin.

My next prerelease I decided to go with my usual tactic of going 5 colour:
xHPdWrk.jpg
The quadbrids make for an interesting build experience, as it makes you want to go mono colour more than try and go 2 colours. This deck just played big boys and cracked in. Never got to cast Garruk, but he seems like a beating in limited.

Specific Cards Notes!
  • Revenge of Ravens - This card is insane in limited. If you have any board presence at all it makes the race hilariously in your favour. It pretty much cuts off any go-wide strategy by itself. During prerelease weekend, there was only twice where I saw anyone beat this card. Once was by mill, the other was when one Gingerbrute was suited up with so much Glitter it was ridiculous.
  • Crashing Drawbridge - This card is secretly the best 2-drop in the set. Giving every creature you control haste breaks all sorts of colours. Green and Blue have some big creatures that turn from good to great when they can swing in straight away. I am thinking of putting this in half my commander decks as it is just that powerful of an effect.
  • Clockwork Servant - Never unhappy to see this little guy. 2/3 is a decent statline for a cantrip. Never had that much of an issue getting the cantrip either.
  • Scalding Cauldron - It is amazing what 1 more point of damage does, as I have never liked Explosive Apparatus, but I am really high on the cauldron. Works really well with the blue artifact theme as well (I have attacked with many cauldrons already)
  • Tempting Witch - Have been surprisingly impressed by this card. Lavaspiking people is no joke. Usually these effects would be symmetrical in black, but the one sidedness makes this a great way to swing races in your favour.
  • Keeper of Fables - This card just doesn't seem to fit the set IMO. Still seems like a strong uncommon. The stats are too generous for something that can give you cards if it connects.
Not entirely sure what is cubeworthy in this set after this weekend. But it feels like there is a decent amount of layers in this set that could make it quite fun to play multiple times. We'll see how it all pans out.
 
Laz

Laz

Developer
Mondschwein said:
...in this very early phase, it changed Standard for me from 'unfun planeswalker-heavy piece of shit of a format' to (not-that)
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Not sure which new standard you are playing... Still looks like a Teferi, Chandra and Nissa-fest to me, they are just joined by a new 3-mana offender.

That said, I had kind of dismissed Oko as uninteresting previously, but after having seen him in action, I am now dismissing him for being oppressive... Being a self-contained token army and effectively disabling any creature as a plus is insane on a 3-mana walker.
 
Erik Twice

Erik Twice

I just won 7-1 on Arena with a food-based deck. It took me a while to build it, but the goal is simple: Get Trail of Crumbs in play, start sacrificing food to draw 2 cards and gain 3 life a turn. And then you win because your opponent can't face the card advantage. After a couple games I added Tempting Witch to have a non-creature win condition and a pump spell to get rid of fatties but as long as I used my removal on big or flying creatures it was fine. I got 6 removal spells plus a bunch of minor advantages like the Goose and a 4/5 that gave me more cards.

My cards are in Spanish so I'm going to share this instead of the decklist:

rsz_food.jpg

The Spider variant in this set is much better than it seems at first glance. All spiders are, but having 5 toughness walls the majority of the format. Here they are walling the entire table.

Games were very long, though.
 
Erik Twice

Erik Twice

I did use it and I think it's pretty bad. There are a lot of issues that aren't apparent at first glance.

1) This is a very mana-intensive format. You have more spells than usual thanks to the Adventure mechanic. Spending two mana and then one mana to active is more of a tempo loss than it seems at first glance.

2) It provides no card-advantage and it's hard to get card quality out of it. I played it to fetch Trail of Crumbs, but beyond that it was pretty middling. I often tutored removal because 2 pieces of removal gave me a slight advantage over the 1 piece the opponent spent on a middling card.

3) It lets your opponent fetch a counter. Nobody ran a disenchant effect or didn't get any. Hence, I got away with Trail of Crumbs. But if you are playing best of three or your opponent has a disenchant adventure creature or whatever, yeah, it's pretty bad.

I did not regret putting it on the deck but I don't think I would have missed it much, either. Generally speaking the "draw 2 cards, lose 2 life, create 1 food" card would have been better.
 
Mondschwein

Mondschwein

Laz said:
Not sure which new standard you are playing... Still looks like a Teferi, Chandra and Nissa-fest to me, they are just joined by a new 3-mana offender.

That said, I had kind of dismissed Oko as uninteresting previously, but after having seen him in action, I am now dismissing him for being oppressive... Being a self-contained token army and effectively disabling any creature as a plus is insane on a 3-mana walker.
Click to expand...

It's true that those three are still played (alongside Narset) and that's pretty annoying, but by playing aggro or UG flash those don't get as dominant - at least that's what I'm hoping for. T3feri is the worst of them all, just hate that card. Turns out not being able to play Magic is not fun at all.

Oh well, there were even more annoying cards in the history of MtG, the big difference is: those weren't planeswalkers. Ha.
 
Velrun

Velrun

Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Onderzeeboot said:
Embereth Shieldbreaker reads like a worse Manic Vandal.
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Velrun said:
About if Embereth Shieldbreaker reads as a worse Manic Vandal or it almost always being a better version of it we discussed here:

https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/eld-throne-of-eldraine.2033/page-3#post-84585

The Magic the Gathering Online Vintage Cube just replaced Manic Vandal with the more powerful and more versatile Embereth Shieldbreaker. And they only deal in power-maxing. Here is Greater Gnoll’s Cultic Cube video about the subject:
Click to expand...

I'm ready to admit my initial evaluation was wrong :p
 
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