Wolf Run Ramp

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Creatures (15) 4 Viridian Emissary 3 Solemn Simulacrum 3 Wurmcoil Engine 3 Primeval Titan 1 Acidic Slime 1 Birds of Paradise Planeswalkers (4) 4 Garruk, Primal Hunter Instants (4) 4 Beast Within Sorceries (12) 4 Rampant Growth 4 Green Suns Zenith 3 Slagstorm 1 Devils Play Lands (26) 4 Inkmoth Nexus 4 Rootbound Crag 4 Copperline Gorge 2 Kessig Wolf Run 9 Forest 3 Mountain Sideboard (15) 4 Ancient Grudge 3 Sword of Feast and Famine 2 Thrun, the Last Troll 2 Batterskull 1 Devils Play 1 Slagstorm 1 Viridian Corrupter 1 Ratchet Bomb

Hungry like this wolf?

My two losses on the day before I dropped were to the mirror match. I don't remember a ton of details about the first loss other than I kept a speculative 7 in game 3 on the draw with a lot of ramp spells, two land, and no green mana, and I ended the game with no green mana. The second loss against eventual finalist Brad McArtor sticks out, though. I lost game 1 rather convincingly, and in game 2, I had the advantage with a super quick Primeval Titan. I fetched up an Inkmoth Nexus and a Kessig Wolf Run, but he had the Beast Within for the first Wolf Run. I grabbed the second one, and he had another Beast Within, leaving me without any way to pump my creatures. He was able to stabilize with a Primeval Titan of his own, and he ended the game on 9 poison and 7 life. It didn't help that I drew nothing but land for 4 turns, but when you have an opponent so close to losing the game, you always have to look back at alternate routes to victory.

What tools are there to dominate the mirror? Here are a few cards to take a look at when building your deck if you expect a lot of Kessig Wolf Run in your tournament.

Devil's Play

This was my chosen addition to the deck going into States. With cards like Hero of Bladehold becoming more popular in white-based token and aggressive decks, Devil's Play can be an effective answer where Slagstorm can't always finish off those bigger creatures. In the mirror match, Devil's Play can pick off a pair of Primeval Titans or end your opponent's game in two sudden bursts. The problem with this plan, though, is it's often a little too slow, and not quite versatile enough. It doesn't deal with Kessig Wolf Run or Inkmoth Nexus. It's a pretty inefficient answer to Wurmcoil Engine. It doesn't really solve the problems the mirror match puts in front of you. It does shine somewhat in other matches, but overall, I wasn't thrilled with it.

Into the Maw of Hell

One of the problems the mirror match presents is your opponent playing a Primeval Titan, fetching up a Kessig Wolf Run and an Inkmoth Nexus. You look down at the one Beast Within in your hand. What do you hit? You really want to kill that Kessig Wolf Run, but he's just going to tutor up another, and you don't have an answer ready in hand for it. Do you kill the Primeval Titan and hope to dig for an answer to the Run/Nexus combo in the two turns you have left in this game? Into the Maw of Hell does a lot in this situation. You get to kill the Wolf Run AND the Titan! They don't get a Beast token! The value is unreal... but it's probably too narrow. Maybe it's a good response to Not Solar Flare reanimating a Sun Titan? I don't know. It doesn't seem like it's good enough in any other matchup to justify slots in your sideboard unless your metagame is severely warped towards Wolf Run. If that's the case, you might want to take a look at Cedric Phillips's States-winning deck as it eats Wolf Run up for dinner:

U/W Tokens by Cedric Phillips

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Creatures (7) 4 Blade Splicer 3 Hero of Bladehold Artifacts (4) 4 Shrine of Loyal Legions Planeswalkers (4) 4 Elspeth Tirel Enchantments (10) 3 Oblivion Ring 4 Intangible Virtue 3 Honor of the Pure Instants (8) 4 Midnight Haunting 4 Mana Leak Sorceries (3) 3 Timely Reinforcements Lands (25) 11 Plains 4 Island 4 Glacial Fortress 4 Seachrome Coast 2 Moorland Haunt Sideboard (15) 3 Day of Judgment 2 Celestial Purge 2 Flashfreeze 2 Negate 2 Sword of Feast and Famine 1 Snapcaster Mage 1 Oblivion Ring 1 Timely Reinforcements 1 Hero of Bladehold

Kessig Wolf Run

Yes, it's already in the deck. Hell, it's part of the deck's name! But in the mirror match, it's so important that you should have access to four copies of the namesake land. If your opponent has early Beast Withins to destroy your Wolf Runs, you're left with 1/1 Inkmoth Nexuses as your opponent tramples all over you. In addition, drawing it naturally isn't bad in the mirror, where it can be suboptimal in other matchups. The question is, do you build your maindeck's manabase to support 4 Wolf Runs, or do you use sideboard slots up with more copies of the land? Right now, I'd advocate 3 Wolf Runs main, and if you feel like there's a lot of chances to have mirror matches, or if there are matchups where you want more land, have the 4th in the board.

Gut Shot/Marrow Shards

These cards are made to answer the Inkmoth Nexus half of the deck even when you tap out for a Primeval Titan. Marrow Shards gets much less exciting if your opponent has a Sword of Feast and Famine, but is more versatile in other matchups. Both cards rely on surprise factor. The more people know you have one or the other post-board, the differently they'll play against you, being more willing to deal 20 damage to you instead of relying on 10 poison counters. They're interesting answers to different, yet similar problems aggressive decks pose as well. They're obviously miserable against the control decks of the format, but a card that has game against a lot of popular matchups is something I'd certainly look at right now. If you think these cards provide enough value in the mirror, I'd lean more towards Marrow Shards due to its value against token swarm decks, but keeping in mind Gut Shot is better in the mirror.

Acidic Slime

Green Sun's Zenith is an important card in the mirror match, finding accelerants and Titans. Adding another copy of Acidic Slime can give your mid-to-late game Zeniths real utility as it allows you to tutor up land destruction. It also provides utility against the token matchups if you can survive the early rush of critters, catching an Intangible Virtue or Honor of the Pure in its moldy grasp.

These are just some of the cards that can help tilt the Wolf Run mirror in your favor. Let me know what else you think is powerful in this matchup in the comments or on Twitter @StillHadThese!

Removal

When you're evaluating a set for limited play, you need to know what removal spells there are, whether they're instant speed or not, and what hoops you have to jump through to get the desired result.

Common

• Avacynian Priest can keep your opponent's largest non-Human tapped down turn after turn. It won't stop a card like Bloodgift Demon from getting incremental advantage on you, though.
• Blazing Torch's first line of text should be more relevant in Innistrad, but as long as you have a creature around that doesn't want to attack, you can represent two quick damage.
• Bonds of Faith will either pump a friendly Human or pacify something else. Be careful about putting this on a Werewolf.
• Brimstone Volley is your typical Volcanic Hammer variant. This one gets better if a creature dies. More on Morbid in a bit.
• Claustrophobia can keep anything locked down. Still doesn't do a ton about bombs that don't need to tap or attack to create advantage, like Bloodgift Demon or Grimgrin, Corpse-Born.
• Corpse Lunge needs you to have a creature in your graveyard to kill a creature.
• Dead Weight is essentially a sorcery speed Disfigure that can't be countered with a pump spell.
• Frightful Delusion is the evil twin (not Evil Twin) of Runeboggle.
• Geistflame will draw comparisons to Lava Dart. Getting two damage out of it will always take five mana, which makes it worse than the one mana and done Dart. It'll also draw comparisons to Firebolt. It's in an awkward spot in between those two cards, but both those cards are probably too good for burn spells.
• Harvest Pyre can kill just about anything in the format... if you have enough cards in your graveyard.
• Lost in the Mist is the common hard counter in Innistrad. Expensive, but countering a spell and bouncing a land seems super-cute.
• Pitchburn Devils need to die to perform their Mudbutton Torchrunner impression. The 3/3 body is a lot more scary than Mudbutton's 1/1 frame, though.
• Prey Upon might be the best piece of green removal ever. You just need a creature.
• Rebuke and Village Bell-Ringer are going to leave opponents confused. They're both going to punish careless attackers in different ways. Very reminiscent of Choking Flames vs. Dispense Justice.
• Smite the Monstrous looks at Reprisal and feels very sad. Then it looks at some of the monstrous transform cards and smiles.
• Typhoid Rats are essentially a removal spell that sometimes pings you for 1. Bad if they get Geistflamed, though!
• Urgent Exorcism does double duty. There are a lot of good Auras in this set, and this blows them up and the pesky Spirit here and there. Dearly Departed is glad there's no exile clause.
• Victim of Night will be killing any non-monster creature it can find. The types of creatures that this card can't hit are going to come up more than you think, though.

Uncommon

• Burning Vengeance is a draft around me type card in the vein of Raid Bombardment. By itself it does nothing. In the right deck it will single-handedly win the game.
• Dissipate is Cancel with tons of upside in a flashback world.
• Fiend Hunter is a cheaper Faceless Butcher. Same sweet timing tricks apply.
• If you absolutely, positively need a flier killed, Geistcatchers Rig is here for you.
• Into the Maw of Hell is doing a pretty nice Plague Spores impression.
• Morkrut Banshee turns an odd trade or attack into a Flametongue Kavu with better stats.
• Rolling Temblor is a quality mini-Earthquake that you don't mind not getting max value out of the first time you cast it.
• Skirsdag Cultist can turn on your Morbid spells and shoot down something (or someone) in the process.
• Slayer of the Wicked does just that. The anti-Victim of Night won't be able to hit as many things, but he'll still be important in limited.
• Tribute to Hunger is a sweet Diabolic Edict with minor upside for just one mana more.

The first thing that jumps out is that there's not a ton of instant-speed removal in this format at common and uncommon. There's a lot of quality removal, but it's slow or conditional. This means cards that break creature stalls, like fliers, mass protection effects, Falter-type effects, and tempo generating spells should be more important. It also means that if you are trying to be aggressive in this format, you'll need to push the speed of the game using bounce spells as well as removal.

Morbid

The new ability word in Innistrad is Morbid. Morbid abilities give your spells and creatures a bonus if something died in the turn. This encourages creature trades by players with more Morbid spells in your deck. Only 9 cards have the Morbid ability word, though, so it won't come up a ton. Here's what you need to be on the lookout for when your opponent makes an 'obviously bad' attack.

• Festerhide Boar and Somberwald Spider come onto the battlefield with +1/+1 counters. This and Morkrut Banshee are the most dangerous of the common and uncommon Morbid cards.
• Woodland Sleuth gives you a random Gravedigger effect and a better body.
• Hollowhenge Scavenger gives you 5 life to help win the race.

There isn't a ton of Morbid effects in the set, so you should be able to get a good read based on what open mana the opponent has if they're setting up a morbid trigger.

Hopefully, armed with this information, you'll be able to wrestle the most packs possible from the darkness at your Innistrad prerelease!

Double Faced Cards

The big innovation in Innistrad is double-faced cards. They start out in play on their front side, and through some sort of condition, they transform into the card on the back face. To evaluate these cards, we need to look at how easy it will be to transform the card, and what value we're getting out of the card if it never transforms.

Werewolves

All of the Werewolf cards in Innistrad share the same transform mechanic.

The front side of each Werewolf card has a transform trigger based on no spells being cast the turn prior. The back side of each Werewolf card has a transform trigger based on a player casting two or more spells the turn prior.

Obviously, the cheaper a Werewolf spell is, the easier it's going to be to transform from the human side to the werewolf side. Reckless Waif is a one-drop, so you can always consider her Merciless Predator side. Conversely, Grizzled Outcasts costs five mana, so you won't often get to see the softer side of Krallenhorde Wantons. On the back side, getting the werewolves flipped back to humans requires a player to cast two spells in the same turn. If werewolves are good in limited, then players are going to bring their curves down a bit so they can reliably flip opposing werewolves back. If they're running a lot of werewolves and trying to be aggressive, you may see them run less optimal instants over better sorceries so that they can maximize their mana usage from turn to turn without bringing day back to the battlefield. Let's take a look at the common and uncommon werewolves and see what they have to offer our decks.

Village Ironsmith // Ironfang - 1R
First strike
1/1
//
First strike
3/1

A 1/1 first striker isn't exciting at all. You need to have this guy transform before he becomes useful. At 1R, he's going to be able to flip a lot and stay flipped for a while. The value in Ironfang is going to be how good a one-toughness creature is. We'll take a look at that more closely when we look over the removal available in the set.

Villagers of Estwald // Howlpack of Estwald - 2G

2/3
//
4/6

A 2/3 for 2G is slightly below the curve. A step better than a 3/2 for sure, though. On the play you might be able to skip your four-drop to transform Villagers of Estwald into it's furry side. On the draw, however, you'll be hard press to force the issue yourself. In the end, you're getting a 4/6, which is really good for 3 mana, but it's gonna be hard to make the back half of that deal work out. You'll need to evaluate this card based on the front side, and a vanilla 2/3 for three isn't embarrassing, but nothing to write home about.

Tormented Pariah // Rampaging Werewolf - 3R
3/2
//
6/4

For 3R, you get the flipside to Villagers of Estwald. A 3/2 that transforms into a 6/4. A 3/2 for four is actually embarrassing and the back half is going to be hard to achieve. You won't be able to put on the brakes for a turn to flip him, and even if you get him flipped, you get to the point in the game where your opponent can turn him back off... or you might have to you yourself if the board requires you to commit extra forces to the battlefield! I'm not excited at all about the prospects of getting to Rampaging Werewolf.

Grizzled Outcasts // Krallenhorde Wantons - 4G
4/4
//
7/7

A 4/4 for 4G is unspectacular filler, but it does have size at the top of the curve. If you can summon some Wantons out of the grizzled soup, the 7/7 is one of the biggest things on all of Innistrad. Getting on his good side's gonna be real difficult, though. It's not likely that your opponent is going to be out of spells on turn 5/6. And even if you take the time to flip him, your opponent can easily calm him down with a couple spells for a turn. Being this expensive is a bit of a boon, though. Unless your opponent is drawing extra cards, they're probably not turning him off more than once. I wouldn't want to be depending on a lot of Outcasts, but one might not be the worst thing in the world. You can probably do better, though.

Reckless Waif // Merciless Predator - R
1/1
//
3/2

R for a 3/2 is nothing to sneeze at. Aggressive, cheap to control opposing werewolves, and difficult to justify using removal on half the time; this card is all upside. There aren't a lot of one-drops I'd like to play, but this is certainly one of them.

Gatstaf Shepherd // Gatstaf Howler - 1G
2/2
//
Intimidate
3/3

Grizzly Bears with upside are nice filler for your sealed decks, depending on the format. In Zendikar and M12, any bear will do, while in Rise of the Eldrazi, Glory Seeker is a fairly late pickup. A 3/3 intimidate creature is pretty nice for 1G, but it's only going to flip on an opponent who stumbles on their curve or starts late with you on the play. If your deck needs a bear, play it. If it doesn't, think twice before putting this one in your deck.

Hanweir Watchkeep // Bane of Hanweir - 2R
Defender
1/5
//
Bane of Hanweir attackes each turn if able.
5/5

Man, that 5/5 at the end of the rainbow for 2R, that's a good deal. It feels like it'll be easier to skip a turn yourself with Hanweir Watchkeep in play since it has such a huge body. The 'drawback' on Bane of Hanweir isn't all that much of a drawback, unless they have a Typhoid Rats or two. This card is probably making the cut, unless your deck is extremely aggressive.

Ulvenwald Mystics // Ulvenwald Primordials - 2GG
3/3
//
G: Regenerate Ulvenwald Primordials
5/5

No one's gonna run out and embrace a Hill Giant, especially in green. If you can get him to flip, you get a card that's slightly better than Cudgel Troll without the guarantee of regeneration all the time. This card is probably riskier than you'd like for an investment of 2GG.

Other Transform Cards

While werewolves are the showcase for the double face card mechanic, there are a handful of other transform cards, highlighted by Garruk Relentless. Some allow you to control when they transform. Others are a bit less predictable.

Delver of Secrets // Insectile Aberration - U
At the beginning of your upkeep, look at the top card of your library. You may reveal that card. If an instant or sorcery is revealed this way, transform Delver of Secrets.
1/1
//
Flying
3/2

Obviously, the more instants and sorceries you play, the better this card gets. There's no top of the deck manipulation in Innistrad, so you're going to be flying blind on flipping this critter. To have this guy flipped by turn 4 over 50% of the time, you'll need 8 or more instants or sorceries. By that time you could have a 3/2 flier the easy way with Moon Heron. Probably best to avoid this dirty little secret unless you have a good reason to be running 10 spells or more.

Civilized Scholar // Homicidal Brute - 2U
T: Draw a card, then discard a card. If a creature card is discarded this way, untap Civilized Scholar, then transform it.
0/1
//
At the beginning of your end step, if Homicidal Brute didn't attack this turn, tap Homicidal Brute, then transform it.
5/1

Looters are typically good, although this one is particularly fragile and can't block all that well. UNTIL IT GOES MAD! But are you really gonna want to risk sending your looter into combat as a 5/1, especially if you won't get to loot again for a while? I think the loot until you have to block then MAKE HIM ANGRY plan is probably the best for our Civilized Scholar.

Cloistered Youth // Unholy Fiend - 1W
At the beginning of your upkeep, you may transform Cloistered Youth.
1/1
//
At the beginning of your end step, you lose 1 life.
3/3

I'm not super excited about this angry little girl. Being able to control when Cloistered Youth will transform is a bonus, but Unholy Fiend isn't particularly exciting, even for a 2 drop. No one jumped for joy when Sangrophage was printed. I'm afraid the kids will need to stay in bed when I play my next sealed deck.

Screeching Bat // Stalking Vampire - 2B
Flying
At the beginning of your upkeep, you may pay 2BB. If you do, transform Screeching Bat.
2/2
//
At the beginning of your upkeep, you may pay 2BB. If you do, transform Stalking Vampire.
5/5

Now this is a bat I can get behind. Wind Drake is a perfectly reasonable card for limited. It's pretty pricey to get yourself a 5/5 at 4BBB, but it's not the most embarrassing thing in the world. Add in the fact that you can control the transformation both forwards and backwards and this card seems really sweet.

Thraben Sentry // Thraben Militia - 3W
Vigilance
When another creature dies, you may transform Thraben Sentry.
2/2
//
Trample
5/4

A 2/2 vigilance creature for four mana is well below curve. Thraben Sentry does create an interesting subgame when he's in play though. Every trade offered makes a 5/4 trampler loom on the horizon. But how good is a 5/4 trampler? This is the one transform card you can reliably turn over the turn you cast it. 5/4 for four mana is slightly above the curve. The question is how easily it will be to kill this guy with the transform trigger on the stack.

Next up, we'll take a look at the removal in the set. What kills big guys? What kills little guys? What kills everything?

You don't know what that means? Read on to find out.

Over the past several years there have been major concerns with the limitations of the ELO system for rating Magic players. The nature of ELO ratings discourages players with a high rating who are looking to qualify for events and byes from playing in events, especially events populated with lower-rated players. It's a problem Wizards Organized Play acknowledged and combated on Magic Online with the MOCS qualifier. And now?

Planeswalker Points are here, like them or not.

On Tuesday, Wizards of the Coast announced that the DCI Ratings System is dead as of Worlds, replaced with a rankings system called Planeswalker Points. Mike Turian's article and the accompanying FAQ sheet do a decent job of explaining the system. Everything sanctioned adds points to the system, and nothing takes points away. Here's a quick breakdown of the points that are important to competitive players:

• You get a set number of points for event participation based on the number of players in the event. The more players in the event, the higher the participation points become.
• Your match points from the tournament get added to the participation points. For example, if you go 5-2-1 at an even, you earn 16 match points (5 wins at 3 points a piece and 1 point for the draw) and those points are added to the participation points.
• Your total points for the event are multiplied by a factor based on the type of event to determine the points you earn for the event. The bigger/more prestigious the event in WotC's eyes, the bigger the multiplier.
• The players with the top 100 point totals (give or take, there is some region bias with a third of the slots) during a given PT season qualify for the Pro Tour.
• Outside of the Planeswalker Points system, PTQs, and Pro Level (and for the first Pro Tour of 2012 in Honolulu, Grand Prix top 16 performances), there will be no other way to qualify for Pro Tours.

Like any rankings system, there are flaws. Much of the uproar over Twitter and on the interwebs since the announcement has been based on the fact that qualification is no longer based on an approximation of skill through ELO but by having more ranking points than someone and that people that 'don't deserve it' can just grind their way to a Pro Tour by spending a lot of money and a lot of time and winning, say, 50% of the time. If you look at the numbers, however, the panic is pretty unfounded. For the first PT season of 2011 (the season that didn't contain Nationals), 100th place was Tom Raney with 1297 points. That's around 80 points a week, and that's with none of the players near the rating cutoff for Premier events that weren't qualified any other way for the Pro Tour playing in regular events each week. How much is playing FNM each week worth? Quite a lot, actually.

Let's say your local FNM has 20 players and 5 rounds. You're one of the best players at your LGS and you win 65% of your matches, so 3 or 4 matches at your average event. Taking a look at the Planeswalker Points Information page, 20 players gets you 2 participation points per event. Over 17 weeks, that's 34 points. If you win 65% of your matches, that's 55 of the 85 matches you'd play over those 17 weeks. That's 165 match points to add to the 34 participation points for a total of 199 points. Multiply that by the FNM multiplier, 3x, and you get 597 points for a season of FNM.

Are all the top players going to rush to play in FNMs now that it won't affect their ELO rating by losing to players much lower rated than them? Not necessarily. But some of them will, and with the incentives pushing people to play more events instead of less, I would expect the threshold to qualify for the Pro Tour based on ranking to go up, not down, and the amount it will go up will be a significant amount. I wouldn't be surprised if players on 1300 points miss out on the rankings invites.

So who wins with the new rankings system and who loses out? The winners are the players that can perform consistently at a higher level and put forth some effort towards making it to Grand Prixs or SCG Open weekends (while the SCG Opens only have the same multiplier as Friday Night Magic, the fact that you can play in 2 or even 3 large events over the span of a weekend is valuable in the new system) as what once was a set of steak knives by finishing in the single elimination rounds of multiple PTQs in a season can still get you rewarded; something that was just unrealistic in the ELO system. The winners are players that are highly talented at the game and haven't been able to play in sanctioned events in the past because of the ELO system. The losers are players that don't have a strong LGS system in their area and don't have access to a large number of PTQ and higher level events. Getting a high ELO through strong GP performances just isn't meaningful anymore, and players in out of the way areas are going to either have to invest a lot more time and money in travelling to big events or end their grind. Players who got their taste of the Pro Tour through top 16 performances at GPs also suffer if they can't maintain that play level for an entire season. For the season we looked at with Tom Raney in 100th place, I was 103rd thanks to my performances in GP Paris and Denver, but had a rating to sit on or try to grow just enough to get to Nagoya. Under this system, I'm pretty sure I would have been qualified for Nagoya and I would have gotten airfare to boot. A player in my situation with a less strong LGS system than the Seattle area might not have been as lucky, though.

Overall, I like the changes to the invite system. There are flaws to the system, but in the end, I don't think this will be the death of organized play or the rush of unskilled players with gigantic wallets to the Pro Tour. What it will do is reward skilled players who are dedicated to the game and consistently strong performers that don't manage to get the bits of luck they need to get the blue envelope.

I don't have a Gavin Verhey-esque allegory to describe how I feel about Magic right now. (On a side note, if you haven't check out some of Gavin's allegories on Star City Games, you should do so right now.) In fact, I'm likely just on game tilt after my *stellar* performance at Nationals:

• Lost the U/W Control mirror
• Lost the U/W Control mirror again
• Lost to Valakut
• Lost to Valakut
• Dropped to get draft sets
• Was only given one draft set, even though there is no day 2 cut
• Asked to speak to the TO about this situation, was refused
• Refused my draft set and left the main TCG hall, never to return that weekend

Pretty sweet, huh? Of the 372 people that registered for Nationals, I finished...

I'm not even bad enough to be worst! So I was done with Magic for the weekend (and probably for a while, until Innistrad sealed PTQs at the very earliest). Instead, I went over to hand with my roommate Dan Hanson over at the World of Warcraft TCG room. I had played the WoWTCG once before, at PAX last year, and I enjoyed the game. And GenCon weekend, they had one of their bigger open tournaments, Darkmoon Faire Indianapolis. Being sealed deck, I figured I'd give it a shot. It actually couldn't go any worse than Nationals, could it?

Reality check - I had never played a sealed deck event of WoWTCG before. I had drafted twice. I didn't have high expectations. I told Dan if I finished above .500, I'd feel like I was successful.

Building a WoW Sealed Pool

There are a lot of differences between Magic and WoWTCG when it comes to limited deck construction. Instead of 5 colors, there are 2 factions and 10 classes. And once you commit to a hero (a card separate from your deck that represents you in the game, with a specific faction and class), you're stuck with that hero for the tournament, no matter how much better a different build of your pool may be. Let's take a look at my sealed pool from the DMF as an example of what sorts of different challenges you have in building a WoW sealed deck.

I know the mouseover tools aren't as robust for WoWTCG as they are for Magic, but you get the idea. You choose an alignment and class, and then immediately disqualify about half of your card pool. It's very different, and it took me the entire deckbuilding period to get my pool together. I chose Alliance Rogue in the end as I felt the blue allies were better and I wanted access to the Axe and Leader of the Pack.

So how did this neophyte do? Well, I got a feature match in the last round of Swiss playing for the Top 8 against Rob Victory. As you can tell from the coverage, it didn't go well for our hero, but I was live going into the last round, and that's really all I can ask for.

I've been bitten by the WoW bug, and I expect to play a lot of events at PAX, a lot more than Magic, especially with no Magic Online Live Series this year.

What would you do if you were ineligible to play in sanctioned events?

What if the payoff was working for WotC?

These are some of the questions I began asking myself early summer 2010. I had been in talks to take a position working on MTGO, and get the "dream" of working for Wizards. I wanted to work somewhere where I could be passionate about the product, while making decent money, and this was it, all tied up with a bow. There was only one drawback: Working for Wizards means you cannot play in Sanctioned Events. This might not bother a casual player, or someone who only plays in FNM level events, but that wasn't me. I was a PTQ grinder, and I had just Qd for Nats. I'd have to give all of that up if I wanted to take this job.

Being put into this position forced me to ask myself some tough questions. Is the trade-off worth it? What if I hate working there? Would I feel empty without the grind? All of these led to the bigger question: Why do I play?

Do I play because the game is fun, and I like competition? Do I play because I love hanging out with friends and traveling to events? I also had to ask myself if this was something deeper, if I feel as if I "have" to play, because that's what I do, a sense of duty if you will. I didn't know if I would have something to fill the void, once I didn't have regular events go battle in, and no reason to brew decks.

I don't think that I would have ever even given any of this a thought if I weren't faced with the possibility of not being able to play. Its more or less a given that I would go to every PTQ within reasonable distance, and even some out in the middle of nowhere *cough* Boise *cough*. There's 100 different jobs I could take, why take the one that pulls me away from my hobby and lifestyle?

Utimately, I realized, I play because I love the local Magic Community, and I loved going to events, following how my friends were doing, rooting them on. Of course, I love to battle and to win, but I could let that go, I could play some other games, or Cube Draft or play unsanctioned events. I could do all of what I actually wanted to do, while unable to play sanctioned events. Even though I didn't realize it while I was doing it, I was pushing to better the local MTG community for years, and that was what actually mattered to me.

Of course, I snap took the job, and it was absolutely the best job I have ever had. Battling? Sure I missed it sometime, but I still went to every event, still followed and cheered on my friends, and still loved every second of it.

Now that my contract with WotC has come to an end, I'm brewing again, and getting ready to sling some spells at the PTQ later this month. I expect that I'll do well, but ultimately, the community as a whole will be there, that's what matters to me. Whether its your main reason, or just a bonus, take some time to keep your Magic community positive and thriving.

-Dwayne St. Arnauld

Black: Swiss - Red: 8-4 - Blue: 4-3-2-2

As a quick review, if the player base is of equal skill in all three queues, then if your probability of winning a match is less than .5, your best expected return is in the Swiss queues and in the 8-4 queues otherwise. The 4-3-2-2 queues never provide you with the best expected return. But yet, people still play in them. What are some of the reasons why?

Risk

The nature of an 8-4 draft is that it is a riskier proposition than a 4-3-2-2 draft or a Swiss draft. You have to win 2 matches without losing one to win any packs back at all.

Black: Swiss - Red: 8-4 - Blue: 4-3-2-2

Across the board, there is less risk to the player by playing in a 4-3-2-2 draft instead of an 8-4. Even at a 60% win clip, you have a 64% chance of missing the finals of an 8-4 draft vs. a 40% chance of missing the semifinals of a 4-3-2-2. But risk aversion can't be the only factor; playing in Swiss queues is by far the least risky choice of the three. At a 60% win clip, you'd miss out on any packs at all only 6.4% of the time in Swiss queues! What else plays into people playing in 4-3-2-2s?

Convenience/Time Commitment

Players don't have infinite time on their hands. Completing a Swiss draft can take over 3 hours for at most 3 packs. In a 4-3-2-2, you can have 2 packs by going 1-1 and be done in around an hour and a half. While it takes the near 3 hours to get paid in an 8-4, you're getting more packs than you possibly could in a Swiss event. And if you're 0-2 in a Swiss event going into that last round scraping by for one pack to make the draft not a total failure? Rough night.

The additional issue is convenience. You log into MTGO and there's 6 people waiting for a 4-3-2-2 to fire and the 8-4 and Swiss queues are empty. You know it's wrong. You know you should wait for people to load up the better queue. But there's a draft that about to start right now. You could be sitting there, waiting for that draft to fire for 15 minutes... a half hour... an hour? On top of the time it would take to play out that draft? You're on MTGO to draft, not to durdle around!

People make decisions based on factors other than EV. Opportunity cost is a real thing. The time investment in waiting for the right draft to fire and play out vs. the ability to just play in that 4-3-2-2 right now might sway you to the worse EV.

Quality of Opponent

Players in the 4-3-2-2s are typically not as good as those in the 8-4s. Some players may not think they're good enough to compete in the 8-4 queues, others may see the 4-3-2-2s as slump-busters. But how much worse do the 4-3-2-2 players need to be than the 8-4 players before it makes EV sense to play there?

As we showed earlier, you'd have to have approximately a 45.7% chance of winning a match or better before playing an 8-4 made sense instead of a 4-3-2-2, so we can ignore all cases below that threshold. We can also ignore all cases where the expected return on an 8-4 is greater than 4 packs as well, since at that point the only thing that could make you possibly want to go to a 4-3-2-2 queue is risk aversion or opportunity cost. It would have nothing to do with the difference in quality of opponent. So where's that point?

Solving an equation of this nature is really ugly, but we can use the graph to give ourselves a best guess-timate of the number for our needs. That estimate is .755. (Interestingly, a player with a just good enough win rate to not ever want to think about anything but 8-4s still will fail to cash over 40% of the time!) Obviously, the better you are against the 8-4 field, the greater the gap needs to be between the player pool of the two queues.

8-4 vs. 4-3-2-2

This table gives you an idea of how much softer the 4-3-2-2 queue would need to be to justify switching from 8-4s to 4-3-2-2s solely for expected return purposes. How much softer can we reasonably expect a 4-3-2-2 to be, though? Without access to player ratings, it's impossible to be certain. Even using results-based analysis on your playgroup's results against the two queues is flawed because presumably, the more you play Magic, the better you should get at the game, right? We can't even really guess and say that 4-3-2-2s are 10% easier or 20% easier. But the table can give you an idea of what win probability you'd need to have to make the jump down and shark the kiddie pool.

So what does this all mean? Is it a fool's errand to play in 4-3-2-2s at all? If it is, why do so many fire off on MTGO? Next, we'll look at the pros and cons of each draft format.

• Win 0 matches: . times times gives you . Expanding the cube out gives you .
• Win 1 match: . times times gives you . Expanding the square out and multiplying by gives you .
• Win 2 matches: . times times gives you . Multiplying the two factors gives you .
• Win 3 matches: . times times is .

Now we determine the expected value of those outcomes:

• Win 0 matches: 0 value.
• Win 1 match: . Since there are three different ways you can win 1 match in a Swiss draft (win the first round or win the second round or win the third round), we multiply by 3 to determine the expected value of this event.
• Win 2 matches: . Since there are three different ways you can win 2 matches in a Swiss draft (lose the first round or lose the second round or lose the third round), we multiply by 3 to determine the expected value of this event.
• Win 3 matches: .

The expected value of independent events each with the same probability is . For this case, it's . Now we need to compare the expected value of a Swiss draft to the expected values of 4-3-2-2 and 8-4 drafts. From the last article, we determined that the point where 4-3-2-2 and 8-4 drafts had the same return for a player is if their probability of winning a match is:

Or approximately .457. Below that probability, playing in 4-3-2-2s is better. Above that, playing in 8-4s is better. So below that line, we'll compare the expected value of a Swiss event to a 4-3-2-2 event:

Discarding the case and using the quadratic formula, we get:

We can throw out the minus case as it causes to be less than 0, so we end up with:

This approximates out to .618! This means that across the entire range where you would play 4-3-2-2s, only one of 4-3-2-2 or Swiss is right from an EV perspective. Which is it? Let's try a sample case...

For :

Very interesting! For the entire range where you would play 4-3-2-2 events, you should play Swiss events instead if your probability of winning is the same in both! Now what about where you should play 8-4 events, above the .457 probability?

Discarding the case and using the quadratic formula, we get:

Discarding the minus case as usual, we get:

We have two segments to test, between .457 and .5 and between .5 and 1. The first segment:

For :

So up to a probability of .5, you should be playing Swiss. Above that?

For :

Above a probability of .5, you should play 8-4s.

So what we've learned so far is that, given equal probability of winning a match across all three draft formats, if your probability of winning a match is less than 50%, you should play in the Swiss queues, and above 50%, you should play in the 8-4 queues, and you should never play 4-3-2-2s. But the reality is that skill level across the queues are different. 8-4 drafts typically attract better players than 4-3-2-2s and Swiss queues. Next, we'll attempt to take a look at how much better each queue is than the other.

If you normally play 4-3-2-2 draft queues, at what point (what does your win rate have to be) does it become better value to play 8-4's in the same format?

Being a bit of a math nerd, I decided to figure it out...

BEWARE! There be maths here! I hope you like formulas!

The probability of a player winning any given match is where is a value between 0 (never winning) and 1 (always winning). To determine the expected value of an 8-4 vs. a 4-3-2-2, we need to figure out the probability of each outcome and the value of that outcome. Multiply each outcome's probability by its value and sum them all up to get the expected value across the entire event.

For a single elimination draft, there are 4 possible outcomes:

• Lose in the quarterfinals
• Lose in the semifinals
• Lose in the finals
• Win the finals

The probability of each event is as follows:

• Lose in the quarterfinals: . The probability of losing a single match is .
• Lose in the semifinals: . To lose in the semifinals, you have to win the quarterfinals. The probability of winning the first match, , is multiplied by the probability of losing the second match, . .
• Lose in the finals: . To lose in the finals, you have to win the quarterfinals and semifinals. Multiply the probability of winning the first match, , with the second, , and losing the third, . times is , .
• Win the finals: . You win three matches to win the draft, and the probability of winning each match is . times times is .

Now that we have the expected probability of each outcome, we can multiple the values of those outcomes for each draft type to determine the expected value of that draft.

8-4:

• Lose in the quarterfinals: 0 return.
• Lose in the semifinals: 0 return.
• Lose in the finals: .
• Win the finals: .

4-3-2-2:

• Lose in the quarterfinals: 0 return.
• Lose in the semifinals: .
• Lose in the finals: .
• Win the finals: .

So now we have the expected returns on both events. Now we need to figure out where the two expected values are equal.

That equation will equal 0 if either factor equals 0. So if is 0, the EV is equal because you can't win a match in either case. Not particularly useful. But we can figure out where equals 0. It's a quadratic equation, and we can use the quadratic formula.

For :

We can discard the case as would be less than 0 in that case. So that leaves us with:

This value is approximately .457 and we have two valid roots for which the EV of both drafts are equal, 0 and .457. For all values between those two roots, only one side of the equation will be greater than the other, and for all values above .457, only one side of the equation will be greater than the other. We wouldn't expect someone with a of .2 and someone with a of .3 to have better EV with different draft types, and the same with s of .5 and .6. So we just need to test one value in each range to show which is better EV in each range.

For :

So under the .457 probability, 4-3-2-2s are better EV. How about over that probability?

For :

Over the .457 probability, 8-4's are better EV. So if you feel you're better than 45% against the field, you should play 8-4 drafts. But there's another option, Swiss drafts, that we'll explore in the next article.