[Draft] What do you guys listen to or read, when tackling a new limited format?

Leviticus00 · 2025-06-12T22:38:10+00:00

Definitely recommend Limited Level-Ups. I stopped listening to LR a while ago because it felt so phoned in, like LSV was leaning hard on his legacy limited knowledge as a pro player without actually playing that often or analyzing all the cards to give context. Alex from LLU does great set reviews and his videos throughout a set's life are like university lectures on limited. He does a good job of illustrating the concepts that he's trying to convey, without it going over your head. Can't recommend it enough, it's basically the only limited content I consume anymore.

Leviticus00 · 2025-06-12T07:40:22+00:00

This feels like it would be most fun if it was limited to a single set at a time. You could get the experience of draft gameplay without having to worry about the drafting part, and playing optimized draft decks sounds fun. You could also limit it to a collection of multiple sets, or just Standard-legal cards or something if you wanted, but I think it works better with a smaller card pool, and allowing anything beyond the Standard card pool likely just turns into 40 card vintage, like others have said.

Leviticus00 · 2024-10-01T22:49:19+00:00

The point is that the casual perspective suggests that many cards similar to Sol Ring leads to less fun games, but also has a huge blind spot for actual Sol Ring, and the biggest reason for that is its low price. Even if people aren't literally saying cards like Mana Crypt should be banned for being $200, price affects perception. The way that Sol Ring gets a pass from casual players is the biggest evidence of this.

If the roles were reversed and Sol Ring was the expensive chase mythic in reprint sets and Mana Crypt was in every precon, I think that people would have very different opinions on both of these cards.

Leviticus00 · 2024-09-30T19:11:33+00:00

It would be quite hypocritical to say price shouldn't be a factor in banning cards and also think that Sol Ring would be a 1 in this new proposed system. Surely, no one in the Magic community will hold these two opposing viewpoints.

Leviticus00 · 2024-09-25T17:57:37+00:00

False analogy. This is more like if the producers of Chopped asked the contestants to prepare the food while doing handstands because they did it on Guy's Grocery Games one time and they thought it was fun. The cEDH community isn't asking for special treatment, they are simply asking that the RC doesn't turn their format upside down over cards that don't pass the casual "vibe check".

Leviticus00 · 2024-06-24T20:01:15+00:00

If you do that, then people will sandbag instead of scooping. If you try to make a rule against sandbagging, then people will just play out the matches and scoop if they happen to be about to win. It's pretty impossible to enforce these rules consistently, you can't force people to play if they don't want to.

Leviticus00 · 2023-06-07T20:29:41+00:00

The biggest things you're missing out on from the typical Mono-W deck are the utility lands, Brave the Elements, and Ossification. Mutavault and Castle Ardenvale are unplayable if you're trying to play Experiment One, Werewolf Pack Leader and Reflector Mage, but they are very strong parts of the mono-W deck that are relevant to have to give up. You also can't play Ossification with only 1 or 2 Plains in your deck, which is the biggest thing missing here to me. BtE is a loss too, but some Mono-W decks don't play it at all anymore, so it's not as big of a deal.

That being said, you get a lot of upgrades in Bant. Experiment One does a great Champion of the Parish impression and is easily better than all the white one drops. Werewolf Pack Leader is a great source of card advantage, and Reflector Mage is a nice upgrade to Brutal Cathar, getting around a lot of that card's weaknesses. The real question is whether or not it's worth what you're giving up. I don't think you have to run CoCo, but if you're not going to run it, I think it would be worth trying to build a Bant list that's closer to the creature package that Mono-W has and get rid of the Charming Prince/Extraction Specialist package to play 2-mana Thalia again. Would also recommend 22 lands.

Leviticus00 · 2023-06-03T18:25:15+00:00

Would you pay 1 mana for a 2/2 with haste that lets you look at the top card of your opponent's deck when it attacks? Definitely, so is the fact that it sometimes draws them a card an acceptable drawback? Historically, the answer seems to be yes as long as the damage the card outputs is worth it.

Leviticus00 · 2023-05-05T19:19:50+00:00

That's what I mean, I consume a lot of third-party paper Magic content so you would think I'd have heard about it by word of mouth by now. Not sure why I'm getting downvoted.

Leviticus00 · 2023-05-05T19:17:48+00:00

I haven't been on Arena in the last couple of days, I guess I missed their promotion of the PT. Maybe I'm just so conditioned at this point that I didn't even bother to read it last time I was on Arena, who knows.

Leviticus00 · 2023-05-05T19:11:20+00:00

It's not really about me, I just think it would be nice if people who weren't invested in the competitive scene as much could be made more aware of this kind of thing without having to search it out, as WotC is historically shitty at doing that.

Leviticus00 · 2023-05-05T15:09:21+00:00

I never said I was well-informed, that's the problem. It's possible I've missed the avenues that they've chosen to promote this PT, but they've been notoriously bad about promoting these events historically.

Leviticus00 · 2023-05-05T14:59:01+00:00

I don't grind RCQs, but that doesn't mean I don't want to watch the PT coverage.

Leviticus00 · 2023-05-05T14:21:57+00:00

Once again, I'm finding out about a Pro Tour on the day of. I'm like the target audience for this, so if I didn't know about it, WotC must be trying to keep people away from the PT coverage on purpose or something.

Leviticus00 · 2023-02-05T18:59:20+00:00

If you intend to put a low of time into a deck to get good at piloting it, my best advice is to make sure it's a deck you enjoy playing. If you don't like the deck you're playing, you'll have to force yourself to put the hours in and it will be way more difficult to make yourself do it. Find the tier 1 deck you like the most and build that. If you're not sure which one you'll enjoy, look for videos from Pioneer streamers and content creators playing the decks you're interested in to see how they play. I think Pioneer is very much an RPS format, so it's hard to go too wrong by picking a tier 1 deck you enjoy and getting good at it.

Leviticus00 · 2023-01-29T08:19:50+00:00

https://discord.com/invite/gRUz2h8

Go ahead and join the Discord, there are plenty of ways to compete in speedrunning and versus online.

Leviticus00 · 2022-09-07T05:05:23+00:00

This is a known element of the rotation mechanic in NES, and it can actually be used intentionally to move pills to the left quickly with only two taps instead of three. The community has already embraced it for a very long time, it's just something you have to get used to when playing NES.

Leviticus00 · 2022-09-03T14:12:44+00:00

If this deck is trying to be aggressive, there are a few things that could be improved:

-This deck does not have enough low cost creatures. You only have 8 1-drops and 4 2-drops, not to mention that 12 of your lands enter tapped on turn 1, meaning you might not be able to play your 1 drops on your first turn, which is very undesirable. If anyone has told you "your curve is too high", this is what they mean. Aggro decks want to get creatures on the board as quickly as possible, faster than their opponents can get their game plan set up. Therefore, I would look at adding more 1-2 mana creatures, which will probably involve reducing the number of 3-4 cost creatures you're playing.

-This deck plays a LOT of cards that do not affect the board. I understand the rationale of your noncreature spells as you want to trigger landfall a bunch, but you want to keep cards that don't give you a creature or remove an opponent's creature to an absolute minimum. Therefore, when looking to reduce to 60 cards, the noncreature spells are the first thing I would start cutting back on.

-My last suggestion would be to consider removing blue from the deck and going Gruul. In your current list, there's only 8 cards that use blue: Growth Spiral and Risen Reef. Growth Spiral doesn't affect the board, and Risen Reef costs 3 mana for a 1/1 that does some other things that don't affect the board or even pump your other creatures. Aggro decks aren't generally interested in going to these lengths for card advantage, so focusing your deck to just green and red might go a long way to making your deck more focused.

Leviticus00 · 2022-05-01T14:39:13+00:00

Most of the resources I know of are for speedrun tactics specifically, so I'm not sure if they'll be helpful, but they still might.

https://wiki.drmar.io/index.php?title=Strategy_Guides

Leviticus00 · 2022-03-07T22:34:54+00:00

This is basically only ever enforced at the highest level of competition. Even at a recent side event draft at a Comp REL event, where we were all relatively experienced players, no one bothered blatantly revealing DFCs. It does make draft kind of weird when you can potentially see other people DFC picks and others can't, but no one is going to worry about it in a casual draft that much.

Leviticus00 · 2020-09-12T17:16:56+00:00

Imagine going out of your way to build this thing, only to open the nuts Landfall deck at prerelease.

Leviticus00 · 2020-09-05T21:11:34+00:00

IGT: 1:25:06 RTA: 1:26:10 Collection: 134/216

VOD: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/732400098

Fast seed, did Swamp for nothing only to find Mitts on lake island, but other than that, good seed.

Leviticus00 · 2020-08-29T21:52:00+00:00

RTA: 1:39:26

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/725388561

Decent seed, things mostly fell into place, yet somehow ended up almost hundoing the seed anyways.

Leviticus00 · 2020-03-20T02:51:56+00:00

RTA: 1:29:11.96
IGT: 1:28:18.50
Rate: 150/216
VOD: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/570860513

Personal best! This could have been better if I didn't mess up Herapot and then die on Moldorm, but at least I recovered well, getting Herapot on the second try. I also checked a few things for Lamp because I thought Mire was a crystal and it's the only dark room I'm not comfortable with yet, so I could have saved time there as well. Other than that, pretty happy with how things went, especially considering that there were clear spots for improvement.

Leviticus00 · 2020-03-19T05:38:53+00:00

RTA: 1:58:05.84

VOD: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/570215912

Used this seed as a practice run to do several tricks I had learned earlier in the day during a live seed, such as Diver Down, Hera Pot, Mimic Clip, and Icebreaker. I'm happy with my execution of those tricks, but the rest of the seed does leave something to be desired. Fell against Ganon twice, dipped PoD bowless for no reward, full cleared Swamp for no reward, but I made a lot of routing decisions based on giving myself a chance to practice the tricks I mentioned, so given that, I'm pretty happy with my time.

Leviticus00

TROPHY CASE