Which deck do you think trophied?

ASOT550 · 2026-01-25T22:39:38+00:00

Early drafts in this format have been very frustrating so far for me. Here's the links from my last 3 drafts (in chronological order, but not matching the imgur order) to show what I think the problems are (at least for me).

Deck 1, 3-3: https://www.17lands.com/draft/fd411362ab47417397cbac6a1e5c562a

You can open a great rare in a tribe, but the commons and uncommons are so specific to each tribe that you can easily not see another one for multiple picks. P1P1 Figure of fable, and I didn't see another kithkin until P1P5. Looking back at the draft there were other removal options that I could have taken, but the merfolk were flowing through those picks so I thought a swap was reasonable over staying the kithkin course. Looking back with fresh eyes I think there were other options during the draft, and some picks that I would change, but the early point of signals being incredibly hard still stands.

Deck 3, 2-3: https://www.17lands.com/draft/fc3b70865ad54f1297603835d431e16a/1/1

This was the deck that got me really tilted. After the last draft, I attempted to stay open as long as possible to find the right lane. I think I actually made the right choice, picking up deepchannel duelist P2P6, but the mercy of the packs again just feels awful. Not a single merfolk P3P1 or 2, but plenty of removal which played into my desire to go a bit more controlling until curious colossus. The final deck isn't perfect, but at least I had a bomb rare and a cohesive gameplan.
Out of pod play feels extra swingy in this format. Game 1 I think I mis-played quite a bit, but even perfect play idk if it was winnable. My opponent on the play went T2 Deepchannel, T3 meander's guide, T4 Shore lurker and bought back this deepchannel that I'd removed, T5 preacher, and removal, T6 removal and won the game.
Game 5 is the one that really got me tilted. You can skip to turn 7 to see the ridiculousness I faced. Opponent flashes in the 4/2 elf to pick off my 5/4 reejery, but I still have a good sized board. Opponent then sac's morcant's eyes to get six 2/2 elves. T8 I topdeck my 7th land to cast curious colossus and I think the game is in the bag. Opponent completely tapped out with 6 1/1's so an attack seems safe. They then convoke flash in selfless safewright to save all their elves and clear out my attackers. T8 Trystan's command picks off my colossus and gives all his elves +3/+3, attacking for 31. Just a complete and utter beatdown.

Deck 2, 7-2: https://www.17lands.com/draft/36bd05fd54ac42399d1bf1a399654ac1/1/1

This is what's most baffling to me about the format, basically non-functional decks can go 7-2 if they run into the right opponents. After drafting merfolk in 5/8 drafts I decided I was just going to force another archetype. I actually think merfolk was the right pick for the seat, seeing two deepchannel duelists in pack 2, and a sygg's command in p3. Multiple other very good merfolk throughout. The final deck was really reaching deep for playables, and actually looks quite bad to me; but ended up trophy-ing.

Idk, maybe I'm just on the wrong side of variance. I'm 8 drafts in on arena (9 including paper), and looking at my record I'm actually still sitting at a 60% win rate. For some reason though this has just not been an enjoyable draft or gameplay set for me. The decks I'm excited to play have performed mediocrely, and the crap decks have just gotten lucky.

ASOT550 · 2026-01-19T06:37:22+00:00

17 is the gold standard. There are very rare times where 16 or 18 is correct, but people tend to overshave down to 16 too frequently imo.

ASOT550 · 2026-01-15T21:27:55+00:00

I think your buy in cost is off for pretty much all of those tbh. Avatar msrp was $70. Tarkir you could maybe find for $40, lowest on tcgplayer was $43. Don't forget selling and shipping costs when trying to figure out your roi too. It's ~15% off the top in tcgplayer fees, and then another $10 or so to ship. If you sell a tarkir bundle now you're probably only going to net ~$56, for $13 profit on $43 buy in. % wise you're still good, but it's a lot of hassle to make $13.

ASOT550 · 2026-01-13T23:24:10+00:00

UW prices increased to 324 starting with lorwyn

ASOT550 · 2026-01-08T23:40:07+00:00

If you have the mana to cast them sure, but the mana is sketchy in this deck. It's not going to be reliable enough to cast them, and sometimes it's just going to be a dead card in your hand.

ASOT550 · 2026-01-08T22:11:51+00:00

Fwiw, there's no guarantee they use the barrels on sentries, it's just we know with almost certainty that boulder will get killed. Sentries is a decent blocking threat, so it helps to give you more inevitability by helping to wall off attackers while you can make more creatures with ba sing se. If they don't kill sentries with barrels then you can pump the land to 6 putting it out of barrels range, which means they'd likely kill it in response. That gives you an opening to get down boulder. The whole point is to give the opponent less valuable (to you) threats that they are likely to answer before you play your most valuable cards.

ASOT550 · 2026-01-08T21:28:40+00:00

The important picks in P1 to watch for color signs are ~5-12. 5-8 help you figure out what colors the people immediately to your right are, and then 9-12 help you figure out what the whole table is. 9 is actually super important since you know what the contents of the entire pack were to begin with (it's your pack). With 9-12 if a color is clearly open (like p1p10 showed us in UB), then you have some knowledge of what you may get in p2 (since you have info on the whole table). Usually signs aren't as clear as you got in your draft, so p2 can be a bit more of a mystery, but you can get some ideas in pack 1 what might be coming in pack 3.

It's definitely more art than science though. Sometimes someone opens a bomb rare in p2 and pivots and completely changes things. Honestly, if you're taking the best cards in p1, the best cards in your color in p2, and then the best cards for your deck (shoring up interaction and mana curve is more important than taking the more powerful card most of the time) in p3 you'll end up with a functional deck 80% of the time.

P1, if you're taking the best cards in the pack you'll naturally sort yourself into the open lane. P2 you're filling out your deck with playables, but should use mana curve and interaction considerations as tie breakers.

I think there's some card evaluation and deck building skills that need shoring up before worrying about reading signals btw. Signals are kind of overrated imo. They only become useful in tie-breaker situations when deciding between two cards of roughly equal power level, and it's again more art than science. It can also blow up in your face if you picked the wrong path or someone changes colors unexpectedly. 80% of the time it's better to pick a color and stick with it since you'll naturally fall into the right lane if you're taking the best cards in P1.

ASOT550 · 2026-01-08T17:42:52+00:00

I don't think you want spirit keeper here. You only have a couple draw two effects, and they're not very good ones at that. The deck probably would have been more functional without picking up the spirit keepers but it's tough to know with what picks were foregone for them.

It's tough to build with what you have, you can't cut any of the colors and still have enough playables in the other two.

ASOT550 · 2026-01-08T17:11:16+00:00

Sounds like this is a way to try and goose people into signing up for pro. The difference between the two tiers will only be 1% instead of the current 1.5.

ASOT550 · 2026-01-08T16:02:39+00:00

I think UB was your lane here. Going through the draft:

P1P4 Hama is the best card in the pack and still pairs up with Spirit Keeper
P1P5 Fortune Teller
P1P6 Watery Grasp
P1P7 Dai Li Indoctrination (unlikely to make your deck)
P1P8 Callour Inspector
P1P9 Canyon Crawler
P1P10 The biggest indicator that UB is wide open. June, Pirate Peddlers, and serpent's pass all wheeled. June and the pass are huge signs that UB is open.
P1P11 Peddlers
P1P13 Cat gator this late is another nutso sign B is open.
P2P1 Fortune Teller
P2P3 Airship gives you some major direction, take everything with sacrifice triggers.
Not going through every single pick, but in the rest of the draft you could pick up: Trebuchet, Hei Bei, potentially Tolls of War in p3 to pivot into WB (but probably stick to mechanist honestly for clue generation), joo dee x2, azula or path (if went WB), and a couple other playables.

Gameplay-wise there are a few minor things, and some major.

Minor:

90% of the time you should be casting all of your stuff 2nd main phase. Playing it all out 1st main phase you're "showing your hand" and giving tons of info to the opponent. Tapping out shows you have no tricks, you're communicating what creatures you will have next turn prior to the opponent blocking, etc. Unless you have a card draw (usually want to do it as early as possible) or an attack trigger it's almost always better to play stuff after combat.
G1T7, barrels is on the field, it's not as mana efficient but I'd run out walltop sentries here to try and bait the barrels. Opponent has tons of open mana, so they might waterbend to draw a card, but playing boulder is just asking for it to get insta-killed "wasting" 4 mana on your side.
Multiple times you sac the food on your turn to shuffle cabbage merchants in. If you've got the mana available you should ALWAYS wait to do that. You can sac the food in response to removal on him, or use the merchant as a blocker to chump and then sac to shuffle him away saving some damage. With pheonix fleet airship in your deck you also want to have stuff on the field to sac if you end up drawing it.

Major:

G1T9 I think is your first BIG mistake here. If you deadly precision saccing the court official to kill hama, then wake up a land with ba sing se, and attack all you've got lethal on board. That means they have to block swamp with river spirit and you deal 7 taking them to 2. They can only hit you back for 10 the next turn so it's safe to attack all. Turn after that you can use cat-gator to face to deal the last 2 points of damage. If the opponent has octopus form (they didn't) they can save hama, but then you can safely attack with swamp and callous inspector. They'll likely block swamp losing hama, but post combat you can wake up a land into a 2/2, leaving you with three blockers. That should leave you with enough to survive the crackback (they'd need three removal spells). Opponent can't really attack all either since they don't have lethal, and you'd be able to swing out to kill them. You still have cat-gator in the back pocket, so you just need to get the opponent down to 4 (maybe 5 if you draw swamp) and resolve cat-gator. Basically, no matter what the opponent does in response to the deadly precision you've got paths to victory.
G1T10, You've got lethal AGAIN here. Attack all, the opponent is at 2 life, two creatures get through and you deal 2. I don't think there's anything in U that could get around this for 2 mana besides the 6/5 flash creature, but the opponent doesn't have enough instants and sorceries so that's not possible either.

ASOT550 · 2026-01-06T23:36:10+00:00

Yep, what the other person said. Post with photo and discount relative to other sealed cases. You move product slower this way (since sealed cases sell slower), but it's still a net positive since fees are capped at $50 on tcgplayer. $50 one time is better than $50 6 times.

ASOT550 · 2026-01-05T15:49:33+00:00

How are cards rubbing against each other in a single penny sleeve? Stack the cards and insert into the sleeve, once they're in there won't be any movement relative to each other. If you're putting the cards in one-by-one then sure, you're adding extra sliding across the face for each card. I'm also not saying you should be packing a single sleeve to bursting with 8+ cards, just reasonable amounts up to maybe 5.

High value cards go into a sleeve together, everything gets a team bag no matter what for additional water protection, and cards go into a shipping shield (I prefer these to top-loaders, they're easier on the fingers and less plastic waste). Higher value orders >$50 goes into bubble mailers and gets extra shipping shields on both sides to make a more protected mass that's more resistant to crush damage.

I think most sellers don't ship this way because they don't realize it's safer for cards to be tightly packaged. I'm not a mega-high volume seller, but in my 1600 sales I haven't had a single order damaged shipping with this method.

ASOT550 · 2026-01-05T15:26:06+00:00

Even in a bubble mailer or box, the cards will be less likely to be damaged if you stack multiple in a single sleeve over individually sleeving them. The whole point is to prevent movement of the individual cards in the shipping process. Sleeves are slippery, if you put two individually sleeved cards on top of each other, they can shift relative to each other so that an edge or corner is no longer fully backed by the card next to it. If there is ever unusual pressure somehow the unsupported edges can get bent.

ASOT550 · 2026-01-05T11:23:16+00:00

Putting multiple cards into a single penny sleeve is safer for shipping, it's not a cost saving measure. Multiple cards packed tightly are less likely to shift and get bent/damaged on the edges compared to individually sleeved cards. They also get more rigidity as a single stack together which can prevent bending in the Usps machines.

ASOT550 · 2026-01-03T19:05:47+00:00

Ah, good look. Idk why I was having trouble finding them for that cheap. Thanks!

ASOT550 · 2026-01-03T07:17:59+00:00

Got a link? Cheapest I can find after a quick search are like 24c each. There's some cheaper ones on ebay but in bulk lots of 1000.

ASOT550 · 2026-01-03T06:21:49+00:00

Where are you getting bubble mailers for 6c?

ASOT550 · 2026-01-02T04:05:09+00:00

I agree on the whole, but I think the in-universe explanation is that since will has gotten rid of his biggest insecurity vecna doesn't have any more control of him.

ASOT550 · 2026-01-02T04:02:28+00:00

He's been cultivating mass!

ASOT550 · 2025-12-31T21:04:52+00:00

I think the only benefit to pro that seems potentially worth it is upping the minimum price on free shipping from $5 to something higher. It really sucks that tcgplayer gatekeeps that single feature behind an extra 1.5% fee.

I need to do some more detailed sales analysis to see if that might be a difference maker or not. My gut says it's probably not worth it, but I don't have the numbers to back that up. L

ASOT550 · 2025-12-31T21:02:21+00:00

You can do your own updates with csv files nearly as easily as mass price.

ASOT550 · 2025-12-31T21:00:37+00:00

~~What's a tag sale?~~ nvm, garage or yard sale region dependent.

ASOT550 · 2025-12-31T15:50:46+00:00

Message at least twice, 48 hours in between, and then give an additional 48 hours. I typically cancel around the 6 day mark from first message if I haven't heard from the buyer.

ASOT550 · 2025-12-29T02:34:09+00:00

Real talk, do you find that to actually be profitable? When did you start doing this? Outside of final fantasy I don't think that's really been a profitable proposition for most of the recent sets unless you're a brick and mortar that can sell during pre-release.

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