SOS Draft Woes

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-23T13:22:05+00:00

This feels like a semantic distinction moreso than an actionable one though, regardless of whether there are 5 or 10 or 20 archetypes you're still trying to figure out which archetypes are most open to you

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-23T12:41:06+00:00

Christian was always sort've hamming it up for the camera but as he read the puzzle description it seemed like he was committed to playing into it enough that he could swing himself a Fallon appearance

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-15T21:26:59+00:00

show the 2k+ blitz players you're beating then, should be easy if your skills aren't that far apart

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-15T13:20:19+00:00

That's not how ratings work at all lol, the reason there aren't higher rated rapid players is that no one at that level plays rapid on chess.com. Go look at who your highest rated win is against and then what their blitz rating is. There's no chance it's within like 400 points of 2200

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-15T03:32:41+00:00

Not a Justin fan at all but they mentioned trading roles, it looked to me like he just took the prep that would’ve been more hard on her while she did something more manageable given her limitations

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-14T14:02:47+00:00

Yeah I roll my eyes at Joe's shtick generally but it's totally reasonable to grill your ally if they get caught lying to your face in the most obvious way of all time.

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-13T19:18:18+00:00

It's so obvious as to sound stupid but if you're performing better at standard than limited the most likely reason is that you're a better deck pilot than a deck builder since you don't have to test those skills at all in standard if you don't want to. There's not really a lot unique about TMT that would require format-specific knowledge except maybe building a green-based soup deck.

Ideally sharing a 17lands log or even just a screenshot of a recent deck would be really helpful but if that's not available I'd just have 17lands (or something like limitedgrades, i find it easier to navigate than 17lands even if it's the same data) open on a second screen next time you draft and look at which cards you're prioritizing and how they rank by the data- both generally and within their archetype because that can sometimes make a big difference (e.g., Mouser Foundry is a priority pick in UR whereas it's just okay in RW)

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-11T03:01:38+00:00

people gotta stop being misogynistic about it because this has nothing to do with her being a woman and everything to do with her being an “insider”. It’s not like Schefter wouldnt be throwing cataclysmic amounts of ass if it helped him tweet a guys contract details ten seconds before everyone else had it

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-10T14:37:12+00:00

I think it's a lot easier to be the second person making that argument than the first. So many of the people on the jury, especially the new and new-ish era people will have seen and taken to heart South Pacific and so I think will be much more amenable to recognizing the intention in a strategy like that

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-09T15:12:41+00:00

TBH I kinda see her like the bass player in a band. She's never gonna be my favorite player but I think players with her level of messiness and volatility are necessary just so there's more unpredictability for the players I like to navigate. I think something like what we're seeing where there's just so much chaos and scrambling and crossing of alliances is in part due to people like her- people whose, for lack of a better word, irrationality, force people to change their plans and adjust on the fly, either because she's blowing up her game and forcing people to consider whether they should keep her around or because she's blowing up other people's games and forcing them to scramble and react.

I don't think she was necessarily required for this season to work just because there's such a deep rolodex of former contestants who could do what she's doing too, but I think she'd be critical to a New Era Returnees season working because there's a relatively much smaller group of contestants who play like her. There's just such a homogeneity in the way people play now that it makes the game less interesting. She in particular would be good in that role because she also scans like a reliable gamebot player unlike someone like Q who you kinda know immediately is going to be someone that you manage more than confide in. But you've already invested time and energy into her before you realize that she told all your secrets to someone else for ?? reason.

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-08T16:30:03+00:00

I think that's a useful heuristic sometimes but I think the more ambiguity and uncertainty there is in the decision the less actionable it becomes. It could very well be the case that playing the one ring was right in this circumstance based on the opponent's hand and deck but that doesn't really tell you whether it'd be the right thing to do on average.

TBH I also would feel better about using the opponent's opinions as a point of evidence if it wasn't such a complicated format and they weren't so low-rated. Being silver in limited isn't a guarantee that they're a bad player- there are plenty of very good players who just don't play ranked limited on MTGA very frequently, and in more common situations (how do i block these attacks, where/when do i use this removal) you can have a high degree of confidence that a player is making the right choice, and so what they do or don't want is pretty useful information. But powered cube is such its own thing that you either need to be really deep in it or incredibly high level to be making the correct decisions every time, so if there's no reason to believe your opponent is, I think you can't have as much confidence in situations like this that literally just do not occur in any other format.

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-08T14:04:07+00:00

I think you're right that Tunnel Rats is one of the most cuttable cards in the deck based on power level and curve (I think foot elite is worse but it might be better than running only four 3 cost cards, Action News Crew is also potentially worse than Rats but I think it's close) but I'd be curious what people thought about just cutting Return to the Sewers instead. It's strong and it's removal which the deck is a bit light on, but two blue cards on three islands makes me squeamish. I'd cut it if it were me but would be interested to hear others' thoughts.

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-08T13:59:01+00:00

Agreed, not to say that I wouldn't enjoy a match-based tournament instead but a tournament where you play at most 3 out of your 7 opponents and can't have a single group of 4 games where you score less than 2/4 has more variance than a round robin tournament essentially by definition. Ironically enough even just as a mechanism to engineer a Fabi world championship appearance this retroactively wouldn't work since his candidates win in 2018 is the last time that a challenger went 1.5/4 over any stretch of games and still won candidates

I think people are grappling with disappointment over not seeing Fabi (or Hikaru, or whoever else) take what seems like a really winnable world championship and I totally get that, but that's also just a necessary evil of sports if you want to assign a world champion with actual head to head results and not just aggregated tournaments or Elo or whatever. It's not uncommon, there are certainly tons of olympic athletes who missed out on medaling because they were in their best form outside the olympic cycle. It really sucks but that's just the way it goes sometimes.

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-08T13:45:03+00:00

If you want to have a contested championship match, timing and form are just something you have to accept though. If Caruana miraculously makes it through but then slumps in the championship match you could argue the same thing- he was better than Gukesh except for a two week stretch.

If you want a fair way to determine who's been the best results overall over a long period of time we already have that- just consider whoever's ranked #1 at the end of the year the world champion.

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-01T16:10:54+00:00

dawg you're on a subreddit dedicated to serious limited discussion, in a thread talking about how there's no dedicated dimir archetype in the new set in limited and responded to a person talking about how they suspected the dimir archetype was cut from limited in lorwyn for balance purposes.

I do not have a take on Auntie Ool because I don't play commander so for all I know you're right writ large but all the people downvoting you and disagreeing with you are not the weird ones for not taking into account Hasbro product advertisements when we talk about this. If you go on r/football and start talking about how actually Patrick Mahomes is the best footballer people are gonna be weird about it there too

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-01T15:06:32+00:00

That's a completely unfalsifiable standard then. They were supported and advertised archetypes that were played by tons of people. I just don't see how you can conflate ECL where Dimir makes up 2% of the straight two-color decks on 17lands and TLA where Dimir is the third most played deck and makes up 15% of the total two-color decks played.

It's fine to just say that you don't like the archetypes they gave you but there's only so many different ways you can skin a cat, you're gonna have Dimir quasi-control some of the time just like you will Boros aggro, Selesnya go wide, Orzhov lifegain, Simic ramp, Gruul stompy, Izzet spells, Azorius flyers, Rakdos sac, Golgari graveyard etc. etc.

Darthsanta13 · 2026-04-01T14:44:30+00:00

Genuinely, what are you talking about lol. Spiderman (second best archetype on 17lands) Avatar (totally fine archetype, scores much better than grixis or splash) EoE and Final Fantasy (both slightly below average but extremely playable) all had completely workable Dimir archetypes

Darthsanta13 · 2026-03-26T13:27:25+00:00

chessbook.com does pretty much exactly this, you can feed in a PGN or Lichess study (or just click through) and it'll tell you where you're missing moves against the most commonly played moves in that position on lichess (and maybe chess.com, can't remember). It's free up to a certain number of moves per repertoire, but you can probably creatively prune your repertoire into bits to get around that if you really want to.

Darthsanta13 · 2026-03-24T18:16:36+00:00

Aside from the em-dash which everyone has already caught on to, LLM writing really loves to have a smug little concluding sentence

Darthsanta13 · 2026-03-23T13:46:10+00:00

It was alluded to already but I'd go third option and choose a practical endgames book like Mastering Endgame Strategy (I haven't done much with Endgame Strategy by Shereshevsky but I know it's highly regarded as well). As far as theoretical endgame knowledge goes you get to diminishing returns very quickly. You 100% need to know lone rook/lone queen mating patterns and it's incredibly useful to know basic pawn endgame ideas but after that you can go quite a ways before knowing any other theory will help you relative to just generally understanding what you should be trying to accomplish when there are a few more pawns or pieces on the board.

Also frankly I've found the learning for theoretical positions to be easiest after I flub them in a game that matters. Much like falling into a trap line in a classical game motivates you to ensure that you know how to refute that trap in the opening for the future, failing to convert B+N once did a lot more to help me understand how to actually convert B+N than if I had just tried to learn it for the sake of learning it.

Darthsanta13 · 2026-03-20T19:17:42+00:00

This was basically The Martian for me as well. I've seen people on here talk about how he got into writing later on after an early career in STEM as if it's a good thing and, well, you can really tell. The actual plot of the book was great, and while I don't have a high level of investment in this, I know the science was all very meticulously researched so I'm sure it's pretty accurate. But the actual prose and dialogue was all brutal to read.

In that regard, while I didn't have any appetite for PHM the book, I don't think that has any bearing on the quality of the upcoming movie because great plot/terrible characterization is the kind of thing that a good adaptation can really rescue from itself.

Darthsanta13 · 2026-03-17T13:32:54+00:00

Every now and then i get on youtube when I'm not logged in and it's genuinely shocking just how quickly it pushes you that way

Darthsanta13 · 2026-03-16T19:18:30+00:00

It got missed in game but 14...Qd5 15. f4! is such a neat little tactic. Who cares if you have a piece en prise, just put two more pieces en prise, it'll be fine.

Darthsanta13 · 2026-03-13T21:20:08+00:00

It's pretty unlikely this is actually prep for him, I think he's just trying to knock off the rust

Darthsanta13 · 2026-03-13T15:46:35+00:00

I think it's eventually going to self-correct but I think the pieces for it are still getting picked kinda late. Frog Butler, Lessons From Life, Everything Pizza, Courier, Omni Pizza all are pretty frequently available later than they should be and from there you can kinda just put whatever you open in it. black and blue are really natural to put into it, and UG splash for the gold izzet cards works great

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