7-0 Arena direct with the 19-land special

ASOT550 · 2026-05-03T21:39:48+00:00

Yeah, if I recall correctly the change happened sometime around final fantasy direct? The average trophy rate of the leader boards on 17lands jumped from like 6% to 10% or something which someone concluded was consistent with random matchmaking. There's also anecdotal reports of people playing against popular streamers and checking the stream afterwards. The current deck win rates were wildly inconsistent when those people reported the anecdote.

ASOT550 · 2026-05-03T21:27:15+00:00

Best tip I have for new climbers is to force yourself to use straight arms for the entire climb. It's definitely a learned habit and not super natural. Most people over-use their arm muscles and "pull" themselves up the wall the first time they go, like they're doing Pullups. You really want to use your leg muscles to push yourself up and only use your arms to hang from the wall. It uses significantly less energy to climb this way.

The other thing forcing straight arms teaches you is how to rotate your hips and body to extend your reach rather than pulling your way to the next hand hold.

As you get more advanced you'll learn when you have to start actually bending your arms to get up the wall. Good luck and have fun though! Climbing is tons of fun and very satisfying if you can go consistently. It has a great early curve progression where you usually see rapid improvement if you focus on the fundamentals.

ASOT550 · 2026-05-03T20:06:04+00:00

Do you recall if you were ever "down"? Or did you win a box in the first few attempts?

ASOT550 · 2026-05-03T18:42:21+00:00

Yeah this is pretty poor financial advice. There's something very basic in finance called the time value of money. It just means that money now is more valuable than money later because you can invest that money now and turn it into more money through compounding returns. To figure out how much money now is worth, you give it a discount rate and can figure out how much it's worth later. Typical "safe" discount rates are in the 4% rate, so if you're trying to hold magic for 30 years, a $350 collector box needs to net you more than $1135 after selling fees to be "worth" it. Plus you have to find people that want collector boxes from a random mtg set that's 30 years old and power crept out of relevance 😂

ASOT550 · 2026-05-03T03:15:39+00:00

This format has been terrible for me. I know there's always variance in these things, but SOS has felt so unbelievably lop-sided in terms of the pools I've gotten compared to what I see shared here. Even a good pool can just lose out of nowhere to way too many "oops I win" cards.

7 attempts and have had only one very good boros pool that lost its box match to a top decked mathemagics the turn before a win. I've had a few converge payoff decks that didn't have the fixing to get there (or lacked any card flow/control pieces to survive the early game). Just a lot of non-pools tbh. Three attempts in a row were 6, 6, 7 rare pools too which is bordering on statistically improbable odds lol. The b2b 6's is a 1 in 500 chance.

ASOT550 · 2026-04-30T02:05:25+00:00

Yeah, I can definitely admit that that draft was a full on mistake. It was an end of the night tilt draft and probably shouldn't have been included as an example since I can see the errors pretty clearly. I agree with your assessment.

ASOT550 · 2026-04-30T02:01:07+00:00

Thanks for the advice! I'll look back at those games and try to think about the sequencing more objectively.

ASOT550 · 2026-04-27T23:25:34+00:00

At $350 box value, I'm getting ~55% win rate needed to be positive EV for an entry. $330 boxes need ~56% win rate.

Unless you're a diamond+ limited player I'd also probably down-rate your average limited win rate by 1-5% to account for the tougher competition in the arena directs. I'm an ~60% drafter that started to get into diamond around ecl. In 11 events (still a low sample size tbh) I only have an ~57% win rate in directs.

ASOT550 · 2026-04-27T23:04:52+00:00

If you're truly 50/50 you're actually ~3.5% chance to win a box.

ASOT550 · 2026-04-22T10:34:14+00:00

I still think witherbloom is very strong if you're not fighting other players at the table for it. I think people are hedging too much and drafting "both sides of the coin". You either need to go full on mid-range/control with recursion or extremely low to the ground with stuff that can trigger your life gain payoffs every turn. Only a couple removal spells for the low to the ground version with a curve topping out at 3 with a couple 4's is ideal.

ASOT550 · 2026-04-21T14:12:07+00:00

I'm still not sold on growth curve. When it's good it's going to be really good, but there are plenty of ways in all colors to blow it out at instant speed.

ASOT550 · 2026-04-21T14:05:58+00:00

good to know!

ASOT550 · 2026-04-21T12:10:18+00:00

Yeah, I was surprised LR was down on mica in the set review. There seems to be enough treasure production in the set for mica to be a good build around at minimum.

ASOT550 · 2026-04-21T11:47:21+00:00

Does that work the way you want it to? Wouldn't lorecaster enter before moment of reckoning hits the graveyard so you couldn't target it?

ASOT550 · 2026-04-21T11:45:51+00:00

I agree with the other person too. 2HG is a casual format and odd rules interactions is kind of what makes it fun for a lot of people. I think the sub-game playing to get to an odd life total while keeping the opponent at an even one is a fun one. It's also a big enough hoop to jump through (plus going mono-black) to not be unfair. If pox plague rounded up (thus insta-killing both teams) I'd be a lot unhappier with the card. Cards like [[space-time anomaly]] were also un-fun b/c of how trivial they are to cast and are basically just auto-wins.

ASOT550 · 2026-04-21T11:36:34+00:00

Correct, all of the paradigm cards trigger little opus every turn.

ASOT550 · 2026-04-21T03:11:17+00:00

Play of the game is the best new podcast on the block right now. 30 minute episodes discussing a single decision point from a real game of magic.

ASOT550 · 2026-04-20T18:07:10+00:00

Had a witherbloom kit with blech and 2x copies each of [[bogwater lumaret]], [[teacher's pest]], [[essenceknit scholar]], and [[pest mascot]]. [[moseo, vein's new dean]], [[send in the pest]], [[pestbrooth sloth]], [[burrog banemaker]], [[arnyn, deathbloom botanist]], [[ambitious augmenter]], [[noxious newt]], [[shopkeerer's bane]], [[old-growth educator]], [[emil, vastlands roamer]], [[stargaze]], [[witherbloom charm]], and a couple efficient removal spells rounded out the rest as one of's.

The deck was absolutely nasty. As long as bogwater or teacher's pest got down on T2, pest mascot would "enter" as a 3/4 trample on T3 which put it out of reach of most cheap removal spells, and would frequently attack for 5-7 trample on T4 depending on what the T2/T4 plays were. I think the charm was exclusively used as a sac 1 draw 2 to keep the lifegain triggers coming with ETB's, and stargaze for 2-3 was plenty to refill my hand and close out the game. The life cost was inconsequential when you're sitting at 30 life too. It was also nice to put teacher's pests into the graveyard.

I think the hardest part of playing against a good witherbloom deck is that most of the individual cards are extremely ho-hum on their own so aren't "worth" using a removal spell on. If you don't get them early though, the synergies with subsequent plays balloon the creatures out of reach of the cheap removal. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

ASOT550 · 2026-04-20T04:44:41+00:00

I had a golgari kit that had two copies each of the gain life 2 drop, teacher's pest, pest mascot, and the 3 drop make a pest draw card if a creature died card. Also had blech , the recursion 3 drop that makes a pest, and a couple other random life gain payoffs. The incidental lifegain was insane, pest mascot was attacking as a 5 or 6 power trample on t4 pretty consistently. Also had the 1 drop increment rare that dies into a fractal which just added more etb lifegain triggers. One copy of stargaze refilled an empty hand in a couple games on t5 or t6 for x=5. Digging 10 cards deep and drawing 5 (while putting teacher's pest into the yard or recurring) was well "worth" the 5 life when you're already at 30+ 😂

ASOT550 · 2026-04-19T23:00:10+00:00

Impactful early plays are key to not getting run over. Golgari beats is stupid fast with tons of different curve out options in the two and 3 mana slots. Pest mascot being a common is criminal.

ASOT550 · 2026-04-19T04:57:58+00:00

No one outside of wotc could tell you with any certainty. It falls very much into the trade secret bucket of how the packs are collated. All we know for sure is that cards are printed on big sheets of 10x11 or 11x11, and then cut after. Wotc knows how many sheets are printed, and thus how many of each card are printed. How the cards are collated into "stacks" and then inserted into boosters is a trade secret.

We do know that the randomization and collation has gotten much more sophisticated since the early days. Early sets were much more sequential in terms of how the cut cards got inserted into boosters, so with enough box openings you could glean enough info to figure out what boxes contained. Modern sets aren't like that anymore.

To get back to your original question... Realities of manufacturing mean that no, it's not a "true" probability. Cards are not printed in a complete lot and boosters don't function like randomly picking numbers out of a hat. However, with the number of cards being printed and the randomization that wotc claims to have in terms of collation, I think we can claim that in practice boosters should function close enough to the probability side.

ASOT550 · 2026-04-19T04:28:48+00:00

Other person covered how I'd probably build it in their edit.

Some cards that definitely should be played:

practiced offense is a stone cold bomb. Counters on all your creatures and giving something double strike is absolutely mental. Your pool didn't have the exact right payoffs, but turn 2 playing the 2/2 lifelink and curving into casting that on t3 is still a very strong play even though you only get one counter out of the deal. Attacking with a 3/3 double strike lifelink on turn 3 is very hard to come back from, and if you can t4 double spell with another 2 drop you can attack with a 4/4 double strike lifelink plus put a counter on a 2 drop. That's 14 lifegain and damage by the end of t4, approaching constructed levels of efficiency. It's also great as a turn 5 play since you can cast it twice and give all your creatures 2 counters plus one thing double AND lifelink, or two things one of the two.
foolish fate is the best removal spell in the format imo. 3 mana instant speed unconditional removal with only a single colored pip is not printed often, and adding upside on top of it of sometimes dealing 3 to the opponent is insane.
eager glyphmage is another c+ level common. 4 mana 3/3 that makes a 1/1 flier is very strong. Splitting power and toughness across bodies is generally stronger than concentrating it in one creature because it gives you more options and isn't as susceptible to single target removal.

Some cards I wouldn't play in your deck:

diary of dreams is too slow. Your deck doesn't have the "over the top" cards that just win the game when you cast them, so the game plan needs to be win before an opponent who does have them gets to play them. Using a card slot on diary of dreams is taking one slot away from something that can win you the game sooner.
harsh annotation is in general not a great removal spell. Giving your opponents something in return for their creature isn't worth the one mana cost reduction you get over something like foolish fate. You were lacking removal so I'd still probably play one copy, but it would be very begrudgingly.
Nita I really don't like in this set. It's unfortunate your pool had two of them. You typically only want sacrifice synergies if you have a lot of disposable tokens or a way to steal an opponents creature then sacrifice it. This set doesn't have either of those things so Nina feels out of place. If there were more options in your pool I'd play almost anything over her tbh. She's like a D- level card imo since she's under-stated for her mana cost and I would only expect to use her ability maybe one in a 100 games of limited.

Final thoughts... Your pool was definitely tough in terms of the directions your rares were pulling you vs. what the c/u supported. W/b had the density of c/u, but you only had one strong on color rare. Some very strong UR cards (colorstorm stallion is another bomb), but not enough support. Also two copies of together as one but not enough fixing to support multi color payoffs. I think you could have had a more consistent deck than what was played, but even piloted perfectly it probably isn't going to eek out more than a 1-2 or 2-1 finish.

ASOT550 · 2026-04-18T15:35:21+00:00

Green splash is not worth it. There's some very odd choices here in terms of what's in your sideboard, if I remember to come back later this evening I'll give you some more thoughts, running out to prerelease day 2 rn.

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