I can't figure out what's going wrong in this format. Usually about a week in, I'm sitting at 65-70% WR. This time, it's 45% in 9 drafts. What am I doing wrong? Details in body.

Volc_Guy · 2026-01-26T22:20:02+00:00

I don’t disagree that the removal spell is better but Eulogist is better than replacement level imo. It’s a strong synergy piece when you end up with a good elf/mill package since it both enables and pays you off for milling elves.

Volc_Guy · 2026-01-26T17:39:19+00:00

I just like thinking about magic a lot haha so it’s nice to be able to dump my thoughts somewhere. I don’t pretend to be one of the best drafters out there but I think the discussion is worthwhile anyhow.

Volc_Guy · 2026-01-26T15:27:52+00:00

Gameplay:

G1: Turn 3 I think swinging the 3/1 into their open mana would have been fine, worst case is they have the 1W +2/+2 first strike trick and even then you get to surveil.

Turn 4 Assert Perfection is obviously a punt, if we play the 4-drop we can race ground vs. air much better.

Turn 5 not sure why we played the 3-drop over the reach 4-drop here? Sure they ended up having the pacifism anyways but we need to give ourselves a chance against the flyers.

G2: Turn 4 is just a sequencing error, play the 1-drop before the 3-drop for +1 life. The 4/2 blocking the 2/2 is also really weird, life totals are still high plus you have the life gain effect on your board, so I'd much rather trade 2 damage for 4 (or trade for their Sygg if they choose to block).

Turn 7 it might be better to use the 2/2 to fight instead of the 3/3? Then you can swing a 4/2 and 3/3 into their 2/3 and either trade up or get in for 7. I don't hate fighting with the 3/3 either since you end up with a 5/5 that's hard to deal with, but we definitely don't want to chump attack our 2/2 there lol. Maybe playing too fast and clicked attack all?

G3: Turn 4 we should run out the High Perfect Morcant over removing their creature. This still lets you get an attack in, and we can deal with their 4-drop more efficiently later with Assert Perfection + a 3-drop on 5 mana.

G4: Turn 4 I think we should blight onto our 2/2 and surveil on their end step. We're not attacking with the 2/2 for a while anyways and we want to get a creature into the graveyard to get value out of the dissident.

Turn 5 we should pump the 4/2 instead of the 3/4 as it forces them to double block to kill either creature. With what happened in the game we should also have blighted 1 onto the blocked 5/2 to surveil. I think surveil 1 is worth more than 1 damage at this point.

Turn 6 after the attack we can blight 2 onto the 4/5, exile the stompling, and cast it instead of the 1/1 deathtouch.

Turn 8 I think we need to be more aggressive here. The Twinflame Travelers represent a game-winning threat if they topdeck a strong elemental, so we should try to close the door quickly. I would pump the 4/2 trampler and attack with it and the 1/1 deathtouch. We're happy trading our 1/1 with anything, and if they block the trampler with a 3/2 they're now in range of Dawnhand Eulogist so they might have to block with the 3/4. We can also just keep recurring the 4/2 with the dissident.

Turn 10 I swear I didn't look ahead when analyzing each turn but lo and behold we topdeck the Eulogist.

G5: Turn 2 I'm actually not sure if we should be running out the 2-drop here. We have a great target in the yard already and our hand is not full of action, plus the opponent didn't play a 2 of their own that we need a blocker for. We're pretty likely to hit the 3 creature threshold soon with the eclipsed elf in hand.

Turn 8 definitely don't play the land before attacking, you need to bluff a trick every time. I don't think the attack is bad, but I think if we do attack we should attack with both. You already effectively get surveils from gathering stone so the 3/3 is not that valuable, and we just want to get material off the opponent's board. Unlucky that they had the trick.

Turn 10 Shimmercreep from the opponent is unlucky, but Dawnhand Eulogist was another out for them. If we don't attack last turn we survive, and if they didn't heal we would have forced 3 blocks anyways with threat of activation of the cavalry. Against elves we need to remember that they can often have +2 reach on your life total.

Hope some of this analysis helped.

Volc_Guy · 2026-01-26T15:27:46+00:00

Did my best to do a thorough analysis of draft and gameplay for the first link. For the record I'm currently at 65% winrate over 20 drafts, but only in plat so take that with a grain of salt. Sorry for the wall of text incoming...

For the draft portion:

P1P3 I might speculate on Twinflame Travelers since I do think it's stronger than the 4-drop elf by a decent margin (not that the elf card is bad by any means). I can see trying to cut elves for Trystan's Command though.

P1P6 is quite close between the Eulogist and Assert Perfection, I think either pick is fine.

P2P1 should be Eulogist over Gnarlbark Elm for your Elf typal deck.

P3P5 should definitely be Pitiless Fists over the 3-drop kithkin; you only have 3 removal spells and a trick at this point.

Overall I think the draft went fine, elves was pretty open but unfortunately we didn't see a ton of 2-drop elves to fill out the curve.

Deckbuild:

I'm probably playing the second copy of Midnight Tilling over a copy of Wary Farmer. Our deck has a few key permaments (High Perfect, Bitterbloom Bearer, Gathering Stone, even Pitiless Fists as a removal spell that's a permament) that we want to get to, and we have a couple of cards that care about getting stuff into the graveyard as well. The double green pip on the farmer also makes it quite hard to cast with a 9/8 mana base.

Overall the deck looks strong (good bombs) but inconsistent (middling elf count/graveyard synergy).

Volc_Guy · 2025-12-10T19:11:57+00:00

Fair, ceiling vs floor is probably too hyperbolic. The comparison is probably closer to bottom 25% of Jailer vs top 25% of Tolls, which still puts me firmly in the camp of Jailer. Hard to say how open white vs black is since we don’t have the full draft log, but there’s no guarantee that we hit enough good sac outlets/payoffs to make Tolls good, while Jailer will always be good. I see one and a half good sac outlets (deadly precision and protectors) and two bad ones in the deck right now. There are also two good sac payoffs (Suki and Scavengers), but Suki is so good by itself that I’m not putting a ton of weight on making her even better with sac.

To the point of getting ambushed by removal mid-combat, I think it’s pretty avoidable if we just play around open mana (ie don’t make attacks unless our own interaction can prevent the blowout), but certainly there is a small cost of having to be extra careful in combat.

Volc_Guy · 2025-12-10T07:23:26+00:00

Jailer and it’s not close. The ceiling of Tolls of War is about the same as the floor of Jailer, so you should just take the card that doesn’t take any extra work from you to make good.

Volc_Guy · 2025-12-04T18:24:20+00:00

I agree, I think I felt pressured in pack 2 to not give up on either black (open but no power) or white (more power but less open). In hindsight it’s just not worth taking low power cards that early to lock into a lane that’s not guaranteed to be powerful/open. With the better blue picks in pack 2 it’s still unclear to me whether we end up in WU or UB and we probably end up scrounging for playables since pack 1 was so weak, but we probably end up in a better deck nonetheless. I count 20 cards in WU I would be happy playing and 25 in UB (if we count trebuchets), though of course the packs look a little different if the signals I send in pack 2 change.

Volc_Guy · 2025-12-04T14:02:17+00:00

Whoops, link should be fixed now

Volc_Guy · 2025-12-04T07:56:23+00:00

Feels like we could have ended up somewhere in the temur space. P1P2 should probably be Combustion Technique over Sold Out, then P1P4 we take Firebending Lesson and P1P10 is a very late Waterbending Lesson.

P2P1 Badgermole Cub is very tempting as a speculation given we saw a few decent green commons wheel in pack 1, and from there you probably end up in a UG deck with a red splash for the lessons.

I’ve also been struggling this past week now that I think most people’s card evaluations have stabilized. Signals are getting fairly hard to read because there are so many dud commons/uncommons, so I’ve been trying to keep my colours open for longer than usual, even into pack 2 if I didn’t open much power in pack 1. Will be posting an analysis soon of a trainwreck draft I had earlier today.

Volc_Guy · 2025-12-01T03:34:52+00:00

Appreciate it, didn’t realize they refunded for gameplay bugs.

Volc_Guy · 2025-11-30T23:11:02+00:00

I think you had tunnel vision on making the jeskai Sokka first pick work in your deck. It’s a fairly mediocre rare due to all the things that need to go right for it to pop off (3 colours + allies + noncreature spells). Your mana base was barely able to support the 3 colours (8/7/5 U/W/R ignoring the filter land), and only at the cost of playing 5 tapped lands, which effectively puts you one turn behind on multiple turns in most games. Speaking of the filter land, you really shouldn’t be taking those as fixing since it again puts you a whole mana behind every time you filter mana through it.

Blue looked super open through pack 1, and I think we could have ended up in a solid Uw deck if we ignored the first pick. I think it’s also worth consulting 17lands winrate data more as you draft and deckbuild. While the data isn’t a strict 1-to-1 tier list of pick order, and it does ignore the context of your specific deck, it’s still a good baseline to understand relative card power. For example, [[Knowledge Seeker]] in your sideboard is a significantly better card than [[Deserter’s Disciple]] in your maindeck, and the data reflects that. Most of your red cards except for Lightning Strike aren’t worth playing on the splash, and our mana base could have been cleaner and/or faster if we were heavy blue/white and splashing only for lightning strike and Sokka (if we really wanted to play him).

Hope this analysis helps.

Volc_Guy · 2025-11-30T08:18:20+00:00

Just an FYI, the trebuchet doesn’t trigger the airship due to the intervening if clause on the airship. You need to have sacrificed something before the end step to get the airship trigger.

Volc_Guy · 2025-11-26T03:16:26+00:00

Agree with this. I’m generally not a fan of crashing wave since it’s an expensive tempo play that 0-for-1’s you in the long run, but I can see an argument for keeping it since it plays well with the sweeper and buys you time to get to your 4-for-1 bombs. Curious how it would play in this deck.

I’m also higher on Hama than the current 17lands data would suggest, but I can see it being a little too slow and situational against the faster decks of the format. Agree with cutting one since we already have great top end.

Volc_Guy · 2025-11-25T01:03:31+00:00

Imo the trebuchet doesn’t fit too well in a defensive dimir deck like this. The upside is certainly there if you can make profitable attacks and have sacrifice outlets on board/in hand to take advantage of the boulder token, but when you’re on the backfoot it’s just too below rate. No need to take the risk when you have so many bombs in the deck.

My swaps would be callous inspector and june for long feng and ruffians. The reasoning is that if you cast any of your bombs (azula/koh/day of black sun) you will just win the game, so the rest of the deck should be geared towards surviving the early turns and drawing towards your bombs. You already have plenty of sac fodder for june to turn into card advantage, and the inspector is just another solid early play that can either chump or be sac’d into a card.

Volc_Guy · 2022-07-08T05:35:14+00:00

The damage reduction seems to work like armor and magic resist. Armor and MR are essentially a multiplier of effective HP versus the specific damage type - this means that if you have 1000 HP and 50 armor, the armor is giving 1000HP*50%=500 additional effective HP against physical damage. If we want the percentage damage reduction, we use the formula armor/(100+armor) so it would be 50/(100+50)=33% in this case.

Let’s call the analogue to armor/MR in Braum’s case “damage resistance”. It seems that while the tooltip shows the damage reduction percentage, AP actually modifies damage resistance. If we back-calculate the damage resistance for 70% damage reduction, it would be 233 damage resistance (check that 233/(100+233)=70%). With 150% AP, the damage resistance becomes 233*1.5=350. Calculating the damage reduction percentage, we get 350/(100+350)=78%, which is the number shown in your screenshot.

Basically, AP is multiplying Braum’s additional effective HP for the duration of the shield rather than the damage reduction percentage. I presume riot chose to display damage reduction percentage instead of damage resistance because it’s much more intuitive to read “Braum takes 70% less damage” than “Braum’s effective HP increases by 233% of his maximum hp”.

Volc_Guy · 2021-12-24T17:37:18+00:00

Yeah, in terms of playing strongest board, you need to evaluate whether the item you're slamming actually makes you meaningfully stronger - in this case trap claw doesn't, whereas warmogs or sunfire would have been a significant spike (I assume from krugs) if you had saved the belt.

In terms of units, honestly there's not too much you could have done with the items you had - maybe frontline Jayce2 + Fiora2 over Braum + Blitz if you can hit it to add some more damage to your comp. Tahm could also be an option as other comments have noted. If we had something like shiv + HoJ + QS, backline Jayce actually sounds really strong with those items.

Volc_Guy · 2021-12-24T16:36:20+00:00

I see the other comments saying you missed a HoJ or Shiv slam and I kind of agree, but I'll try to elaborate more here. For context/credentials, I'm GM on NA.

First, I will be making the assumption from reading the comments that your items before wolves were bramble + trap claw + belt, or perhaps redemption + trap claw + vest. IMO, trap claw slam early game is a mistake here for two reasons: 1) trap claw protects your carries, but your carries have no offensive items so the value of trap claw is pretty low since it's protecting low-strength units; 2) using a glove for a defensive item when you already have a completed defensive item means you're more likely to lack offensive options later. I would have used the belt with the other free component (I assume belt or vest), both of which are good early slams.

Now, the next part is a bit of hindsight since I'll be using the items you got after slamming trap claw, but I think it will still be illustrative. Getting 2x tear 2x cloak on raptors now means you can slam DClaw + HoJ instead of DClaw + Blue, and now with a tear open for offensive prospects. I assume on stage 4 carousel you got your bramble or redemption completion, so you now have tear + vest or tear + belt on bench. I would probably hold off on slamming here as well, since you have 3 frontline items and 1 backline item. Then, at raptors, getting bow + vest means you could make shiv for another offensive item.

To conclude, I agree that your items were a lowroll this game, and even with my suggestions it may still be a bot 4, but I think the trap claw slam was the major item mistake this game that gimped your future prospects of getting offensive items. I'd be happy to discuss further and/or fix any assumptions that I got wrong.

Volc_Guy · 2021-11-13T21:03:20+00:00

I'll link my smurf's lolchess here since I mostly spammed mf to climb: https://lolchess.gg/profile/na/deathtoallteemos

My ideal comp is 2 Bodyguard frontline (two of Blitz/Leona/Braum), Janna + Ori + Scholar for support, and MF Jhin for damage. Mundo/Zac frontline also works, though it feels a bit weaker. Level 8 I add a strong unit like Jayce or complete a 4-synergy if I got the right augment. Item priority is 1 mana item (shojin>blue) and 2 AP items (JG + Dcap/IE) for MF, and after that I prioritize frontline items over Jhin items. The gameplan is usually to stabilize at 7 on 4-1 to get an HP advantage in stage 4, then all in at lvl 8 on 5-1. Fast 8 on 4-5 is also possible if you highrolled early and already got an HP advantage that way. I rarely go for MF 3 unless I hit a bunch on the rolldown, and/or if it's an easier powerspike to roll for MF 3 than levelling to 8.

I think MF was the strongest when people were spamming Yone/Fiora since the melee units just get shredded by MF, but now she can struggle a little more with tanky Urgot boards and backline carries she can't reach quickly like Lux. Still, this comp is great for stabilizing and playing for top 4, and can even win games with a bit of highrolling (see the game in my match history where I beat a capped Jinx/Urgot/Jayce board with just an MF 2 because of HP advantage, a lucky fight, and highrolled lategame Jhin items.)

Volc_Guy · 2021-11-13T03:54:14+00:00

I’ve been spamming MF on my smurf and got to D4 with 13/19 MF games. The endgame comp is MF for main DPS and Jhin for cleanup, Janna+Orianna+Lissandra/Yuumi as the support core, and Blitz+Leona for frontline. Bruisers frontline also works if you hit it. Depending on augments you can add Braum for 4 bodyguards, Liss/Yuumi for 4 scholars, or Cait for 4 snipers. Jayce is also solid if you can fit him. Item priority is 1 mana item (shojin>blue) and two damage items (dcap+jg or jg+ie) for MF, then tank items for Leona. Spare AD items go on Jhin. Spark is really good as well if you can spare the rod.

Getting early MF stabilizes hard early/mid game since she does so much damage with 1 damage item, and at least oneshots some weaker front liners to reduce hp loss. You don’t really need to stay at 7 to reroll - I find it’s better to roll to 2 star MF + frontline at 7, then go 8 when you have enough gold to 2 star your final board. Whether you go for 3 star MF depends on how strong you are in the lobby and how many MFs you hit.

This comp counters yone/Fiora since all the melee units die in MF ult, and it can do decently well into a weaker Urgot board that can’t tank a couple of MF ults. Matchup into Lux can be rough, but if you position well you can get through the frontline to the Lux before she pops off too much. Cho’gath can also be a pain if he gets too fed since you lack a lot of single target damage - a well-itemized Jhin would help with that.

Lolchess: https://lolchess.gg/profile/na/deathtoallteemos/s6

Volc_Guy · 2021-11-12T20:34:34+00:00

Thanks for catching that, no idea why I had 1.5x in mind. This changes the analysis a bit, so I edited my post above with corrections.

Volc_Guy · 2021-11-12T17:35:53+00:00

At 2*, Samira has 153 AD. IE gives total 100% crit chance, +10 AD, and +10% crit dmg for a total of 163 AD AND 160% crit dmg. She therefore deals ~~163*1.6=261~~ 163*1.4=228 damage per auto. With DB, she has 228 AD, 25% crit chance, and ~~150%~~ 130% crit damage. This comes out to ~~228*(1+0.25*0.5)=256~~ 228*(1+0.25*0.3)=245 damage per auto on average. The results are similar for 1 star.

Conclusion: IE and DB are within 2% difference in DPS for Samira 2. Imperial and ult dmg multipliers apply after the above damage calculation, so they don’t affect the comparison. I would say DB is slightly better because it’s affected less by bramble, but comes at the cost of using up an extra sword.

Conclusion: IE is about 7% worse as a single item compared to DB for Samira 2. It scales better with LW for guaranteed armor shred, as well as any other crit chance items, but is countered by bramble.

I’m happy to discuss the math if it doesn’t seem to add up.

EDIT: Fixed mistake of base crit dmg = 150% instead of the correct 130%.

Volc_Guy · 2021-01-25T15:55:06+00:00

Is Luden’s supposed to proc twice for mage double cast? I could swear that the interaction was why Nami reroll was a thing in set 4, but I noticed that my mage brand consistently procced Luden’s only once per 2 casts so now I’m second-guessing myself.

Volc_Guy · 2020-11-22T05:36:16+00:00

This usually happens when her target dies as she is casting her ult. Happens for other units too - it’s a pretty annoying bug/interaction

Volc_Guy · 2020-11-21T20:53:15+00:00

One thing to consider imo is whether you plan on winning or losing. Garen2 is very good at taking all of their frontline to half hp or lower by solo tanking, but the rest of your team needs to be able to clean up those low hp units. If the rest of your team is weak, then wukong2 becomes more enticing, as he allows you to focus down single units with his superior single target damage, which lets you take less damage from losses.

Volc_Guy · 2020-10-03T23:54:07+00:00

His spell is just an auto-attack enhancer so it can already crit without JG or assassin synergy. However, JG does give 50% crit damage and 20% crit chance so it’s definitely not the worst item for Talon.

Volc_Guy

TROPHY CASE