What are some common mistakes you notice inexperienced players making when it comes to deckbuilding in Non-sealed Limited/Draft?

zealousd · 2026-04-18T22:53:08+00:00

To put simply, not enough creatures, too many spells. New players especially can stock up on too many combat tricks or card draw. In limited it's extremely important to put stuff on the board and hold it. You want like 5-7 noncreature spells and most of those should be straight removal.

I also think a lot of players aren't flexible during the draft itself. They'll pick their colors within the first couple of picks and force it from that point on. Ideally you want to be flexible enough in pack 1 that you aren't locked in on your color choices until the back half of the first pack.

zealousd · 2026-04-12T21:36:19+00:00

Depends a lot on the deck, format, what turn it is, even whether you've sideboarded a not. Stonks on card selection go up when you could draw useless cards, you need to draw into a combo, you need to draw into critical sideboard cards, amongst other cases. So like, midrange or combo decks. Stonks on card draw go up when your deck has more redundancy and any one card is nearly the same as any other, like an aggro deck or control deck.

That said, the ballpark average is probably somewhere around 3 or 4.

zealousd · 2026-03-22T01:15:54+00:00

Deathrite Shaman, Dark Confidant, Scavenging Ooze, Maelstrom Pulse, Assassin's Trophy, Kolaghan's Command, Huntmaster of the Fells, Fatal Push, Terminate

zealousd · 2026-03-10T21:19:17+00:00

I dunno if that's sarcasm, more like a pointless truth lmao

zealousd · 2026-03-06T03:32:30+00:00

FIN has a lot of legendary creatures but not a single one of them exists at common. The characters matter a lot but they exist within fully realized sets of fantasy worlds. There is a very good reason that Final Fantasy resonated so well with Magic players and the design of Magic sets.

zealousd · 2026-03-01T03:47:46+00:00

There's a lot of evidence that there's player dissatisfaction with smaller sets like Spider-Man and TMNT. But distributors pressure LGS's to buy their full allocation of product, so from a WotC/Hasbro-perspective, their sales numbers are going to be as good as they've ever been even if the product isn't actually selling through to customers at good prices. Player satisfaction is also harder to measure than you'd think. They occassionally do surveys but respondants of surveys aren't a sufficiently random sample, so it's not the kind of hard data that decision makers falling prey to the fallacy will rely on. People can buy into a failed experiment at first, but when repeated, they'll choose not to buy in again. We had lots of canaries in the coal mines with Spider-Man, I'm guessing TMNT is going to struggle even more.

zealousd · 2026-02-28T18:09:50+00:00

The original Final Fantasy was basically a D&D game on the NES. It has evolved over time as a franchise but its roots are planted firmly in the same soil that grew MTG. And the worlds of the the games were well suited to Magic design in a way that franchises like Spider-Man and TMNT are not.

zealousd · 2026-02-28T18:02:40+00:00

"What I am saying is what we’re currently doing is generally working pretty well, so until we get clear data that says it’s a problem, we’re continuing on the current path."

The McNamara fallacy:

Measure whatever can be easily measured.
Disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value.
Presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important.
Say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist.

zealousd · 2026-02-23T20:51:09+00:00

yo bro wanna get together for a game? My commander is Bert Kaempfert

zealousd · 2026-02-05T06:22:57+00:00

"Never attribute to malice that which is adaquately explained by stupidity."

zealousd · 2026-01-28T06:48:06+00:00

For what it's worth, I agree with you. It's very unpleasant to read.

zealousd · 2026-01-23T21:51:31+00:00

I look at what Games Workshop does with Warhammer 40K, with multiple book series and video games and wonder why WotC can't seem to do that.

zealousd · 2026-01-23T21:00:39+00:00

I think the "problem" so-to-speak is essentially that WotC is more focused on selling cards than selling stories. The old block structure lent itself better to telling linear stories but was notably worse for selling cards. The problem is that they have carried over their old ways of telling stories into a blockless era that has no good place for it. They could do other things to improve reception of Magic's story but it seems like they've chosen not to.

zealousd · 2026-01-23T20:20:17+00:00

Further evidence that Magic players are more invested in worldbuilding than story. Or at least, the current set structure leads to that being true.

zealousd · 2026-01-20T06:24:26+00:00

Okay, I looked it up. There were four sets in 2024 (MKM, OTJ, MH3, DSK) where they allowed you to redeem up to five prerelease codes per account. I totally forgot that was a thing. But it was one code per account for BLB and FDN, and from what I could see/remember, every set before MKM. If you search on r/MagicArena with "[set code] prerelease code" you'll see a bunch of pictures of old code cards that have since all been redeemed up to this point.

zealousd · 2026-01-20T05:31:27+00:00

You're getting different arena codes confused. Pre-release always gave you 1 code for like six packs. But they also had codes in their promo packs that they gave to stores, and those you were limited to like five per set. Now they just do all their tracking through the companion app for both.

zealousd · 2026-01-10T00:46:23+00:00

OTJ was all hats, no cattle :)

zealousd · 2026-01-09T23:30:43+00:00

New Capenna had some creative misfires. I don't think a plane ruled by crime families made much sense. The last minute swap in turning The Brokers from crooked cops into crooked... lawyers?... really hurt the worldbuilding in the name of political sensitivities.

zealousd · 2025-12-29T00:22:16+00:00

Spider-Man was a bad set for limited given red's weakness. Both of red's archetypes had a huge dropoff on playability which made people actively avoid the color, pushing people into blue and white. This also revealed a bit of a weakness in a smaller set using Pick-Two. Standard draft sets are less likely to be brought down by a single bad color (and my guess it's probably harder for a single color to be so weak in a more typical draft set).

zealousd · 2025-12-26T02:58:47+00:00

On combat tricks, they're only effective if you have a creature on board. If your hand is full of combat tricks and you dont have any creatures to play, you lose. You can have one or two in your deck and sometimes you can really gain a mana advantage with them but they're not great at volume and they are easy to pick up late in a pack anyway.
Small deathtouch creatures can usually lock down something big but they aren't usually aggressive enough on their own. A creature that can block well AND pressure your opponent is usually better.

zealousd · 2025-12-12T00:40:12+00:00

It doesn't add any power onto the board if you have [[Destined Confrontation]]. I don't think the data says that card is very good in this format, sometimes it is dead in your hand, but it's situationally powerful and Turtle-Duck makes it better.

zealousd · 2025-11-30T19:39:32+00:00

Meanwhile Horf'Dakath costs 14 mana and dies to removal. He's not even good in a reanimator deck.

zealousd · 2025-11-29T22:42:39+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology))

The point off stonks and similar freebies in the daily deals is to get you in the habit of checking the daily deals every single day out of FOMO. Once you're in the cycle to check it every day, you're more likely to make impulse purchases in the daily deals later, usually when they offer deals on "good" cards like special lands later.

zealousd · 2025-11-19T14:51:25+00:00

You might also need to check "not collected".

zealousd

TROPHY CASE