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sierkovitz.bsky.social
Data analysis in Magic: The Gathering; Magic Numbers podcast; Limited Resources regular guest. Interested in coaching - ping me a message. linktr.ee/sierkovitz for socials
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Always have been
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At least one player had fun in those games. And I managed to assemble it twice. Good times.
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youtu.be/aXvqjgTn0EA
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Will it tho?
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twitch.tv/sierkovitz
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Hope that helps you with the prerelease prep - and if you need more - don't forget me and the crew are recording our draft deck skeletons stream later today. Join us on my twitch at 5pm Eastern if you want to see our deck-centric set review! 10/10
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Keep in mind Phoenix Down has 2 targets in FIN. You only want to play it if you plan on reanimating, but don't forget it might be a removal spell once in a blue moon. And as you can see Suplex kills more than 3 damage tagline would suggest, thanks to artifact creatures. 9/10
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Airship Crash looks promising, especially if I am right in predicting that we will want to kill saga creatures proactively. Half of common creatures fit the Broken Wings criteria, which is a lot (I did count killing equipment as a kill, mind), and 30-20% at higher rarity. 8/10
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We also have some conditional removal. Battle Menu offers a good selection of options, but the top one has to be the power 4 or greater kill spell. That takes care of good 20% of high impact targets at C and U and 40% of high rarity, making me hopeful about it. 7/10
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No dedicated 5 damege spell, 6 kills most. But keep in mind I looked at face value toughness, it is a different story if a creature transforms - those can grow to a much larger size. For this analysis I counted equipped face value of the job select cards and tokens. 6/10
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3 damage gets ~3/4 C and U, par for the course in recent sets. But the only deal 3 spell (barring a sweeper) will get more as it can kill some chunky artifact creatures too. 4 damage deals with mose low rarity things, but higher rarity things can survive it. 5/10
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Shock and -2/-2 look decent, hitting half of common and uncommon creatures. There are fewer creatures at common in this set, even accounting for tokens and Job Select. But more at U, so those X/2s are potentially beefed and that might be important for early interaction. 4/10
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There is no real 1 damage spell (there is a mini -1/-1 sweeper) but quite a lot of creatures have 1 toughness. This might improve the random 1/1s (, leftover hero tokens etc, as they can potentially trade with real card, although several X/1s have some sort of evasion. 3/10
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This also means the X/2s are on the lower side. Rest is roughly typical - this is a small butt set with only 5% of creatures at common having toughness of more than 4. The Saga creatures are also not oversized - which means that a lot of their value must be in the chapters. 2/10
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My heuristic for Boros in this format - if Underdogs looks good in the deck - deck is good.
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youtu.be/E_LNwDag9kc
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I also look at how good are we as a community in predicting card power. Here I would like to thank @mtgds.bsky.social for support - I tapped into the #P0P1 datato see what were the biggest misses in card evaluation in recent sets. Give them a sub - amazing content creator. 3/4
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Or not all colors were made equal. Here is a small graph from the seminar showing the fraction of commons in each color that turned out to be B- or better. As you can see the difference between W and G is quite large, while B creatures are markedly worse than spells. 2/4
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Having said that - you can easily cut like 2x W tap lands without much loss, maybe even 3
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Based on the deck I can see t1 tap land into 2 drop into 2 drop and another tap land pretty often
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I'm sure "Shivam and Wheeler wield a Banhammer" is somewhere in the pipeline
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My fav flavour
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Does it mean it won't be banned in Commander then?
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I think splashes work here. I would definitely play the relic tho - potentially the 6 drop too and would cut the abzan hybrid and the 4 mana 4/2 for those
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Still trying to figure it out - but the cohort knows my slides so hopefully they'll notice
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You'll love slide no. 2
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twitch.tv/sierkovitz
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Perfect line - you gain 6 tho
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of note - if they kill boulderborn and leave the reliquary - they don't have lethal next turn.
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Ok - if they have a hard removal - there is that option, but I doubt anyone would took it without literally knowing I have the clone in hand.
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And all it requires is expanding questions - instead of asking "What do I copy" asking "Do I copy anything" first.
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Magic B hard - that's why I put it out there. And even after thinking about the line for some time I completely missed the one where I just cast the Naga without a target, copy the dragon and just win right out. Which wasn't air tight but winning here.
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That's the air-tight line, that can't be realistically disrupted. At least I don't see how.
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It would have worked here but it's not an air-tight line.
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I'm not 100% - but it might be I 'm dead before the Tombguard triggers resolve - but nonetheless that is still a losing line in this scenario (they have W exhale in hand as I learned).
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You just joined me in losing that game - despite taking a different line than me.
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Link to Alex's pod: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWmS... 11/11