Would you bother playing a game with this Alchemy Draft deck?
I think I'm better off resigning and not losing any rank points.
u/HeWhoLovesSpaghetti — 17 hours ago
r/mtglimited
first premier draft... does my deck look reasonable?
I tried to splash green for mind into matter but I just couldn't pick up the fixing for it so I decided to cut it in this build. I also saw almost zero counterspells, and was only able to pick up brush off. So all I have is a lot of removal and bounce/stun effects. will definitely struggle against other controlling decks I think. Would you build it differently? Advice on tweaking this build? My whole pool is included in the second photo.
u/Obloquy5 — 1 day ago
Field Disparity and Cheating the System
This post is attempting to highlight two major flaws in the online gaming community. While I see there is a small (or maybe large?) group that may be defensive because they are part, I think the majority of us would agree that these are problems. I anticipate professionals and others with immense time would not be in agreement of the following. Or, they may be in agreement but not going to be a part of the change they are profiting off. I hope some sort of solutions can come.
1 - the concept of the “Arena.” In very few competitions do casual competitors (amateurs) compete against professionals. In Magic, that’s commonly the case. When we think of the game of Magic, one of the most important factors to skill development is time. And while professionals and others devote an immense amount of time to this game, others simply cannot. Yet we put both groups against one-another on a daily basis. This needs to change because it is simply unfair, and pits people with totally different skills levels against one-another.
2 - I am a huge fan of the current set and love playing limited. What continues to give me a bad experience is playing against players that clearly know their stuff in both gameplay and card pools, yet they are walking around in Bronze, Silver, and Gold late in the month. This tells me they are working with multiple accounts. That simply add to an experience that is not fair or fun for others.
Possible solutions:
While I think both problems can in some ways be intertwined, I do feel like Wizards needs to begin exploring solutions. If not, play experience will continue to dwindle for those that cannot put in comparable time.
Severe penalties for creating multiple accounts should be the start. If this happens, they can track specific players. Or, when signing up, there needs to be more personal data shared when creating accounts. I would imagine Wizards can see which credit cards (bank info) are paying for multiple accounts and use that.
I love this game and I cannot get out to LGSs often, so I hope these are things that we as players can begin to notice and voice so that solutions and a better play experience can come about.
-The Common Magic Player (like most of you)
u/American_Person — 1 day ago
SOS draft seemed to flip from soup to aggro, not sure how I should have read the signals to know to draft aggro earlier
https://www.17lands.com/draft/26d902f3dd9942b9b923c699320939ed/1/1
Looked back at the draft and I could see picks here and there (such as Elite Interceptors and Last Gasps) that I could have went in more for WB earlier, but I felt like my picks (for soup) are pretty defensible or at least only slightly off. Without knowing how the draft was going to go, what should I have noticed that I should have been drafting WR or WB earlier in the draft?
I usually shy away from aggro decks in draft (I enjoy more controlling draft decks), but I don't say no to them if I think it's what's being passed. What is also weird in this set is that, if you draft white, you tend to draft aggro if black is getting passed, and more grind/control if red is getting passed, which is the opposite of my usual guideline for most sets.
The black at the end of pack 1 was a decent signal, but signals have felt weird this set so it's hard to know if they're a signal or if a particular pack had 4 good cards in the same color so some bled through. Any thoughts?
u/Dimmins2 — 2 days ago
SOS - Why must all the goodies be in the same pack?
https://www.17lands.com/draft/f1401aba4b14440b9a85c69df9c8c2d9/1/1
A couple of punts resulted in a 5-3 record, but the deck really wasn't great. I was expecting a 1-3. I think Snarl Song was the right pick here, but it hurt to pass my baby Brain Freeze. What would you have picked?
u/Dimmins2 — 3 days ago
▲ 75 r/mtglimited
I trained a free draft model on 6M+ Arena drafts (94.5% accuracy on top 3 picks)
Hi everyone,
NemeDraft is a free and open source draft overlay for MTG Arena. It's staying free. No ads, no telemetry, you retain all your data. I made it after reading a lot of research papers about MTG draft theory and I was surprised no similar tool existed for free (please correct me if I am wrong).
Behind it isn't ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini looking at your pack and hallucinating. It's a specialized transformer I trained from scratch on Arena draft data: roughly 6 million platinum-or-higher picks for pre-training, then fine-tuned on around 400k picks from trophy decks only. It does one thing: rank the cards in your pack given your current pool and the archetypes still open.
The model isn't optimizing for average winrate. It's trying to pick what a trophy drafter would pick in your exact situation. Sometimes that's the card with the best raw stats/WR. Sometimes it's a worse card on paper that locks you into a coherent archetype. There is also a column in the UI showing the GIHWR from 17Lands. At the end of the draft, the overlay also hands you a 40-card decklist built from your pool.
Accuracy on SOS (Secrets of Strixhaven set):
- Top-1: 64.9% -> on ~2 out of 3 picks, the card the model ranked #1 was exactly the one the trophy drafter took.
- Top-3: 94.5% -> on ~19 out of 20 picks, the trophy pick was somewhere in the model's top three.
That second number is the one I actually care about, because it means the right pick is almost never hiding outside the top of the list.
The overlay is done and running in closed beta. I need more eyes on it before a wider release.
I'm specifically after:
- Gold or Platinum rank and above (Premier or Quick Draft)
- People who draft often, not once a month
- Testers who will actually report bugs and talk to me, not install it, draft one time, and vanish
If that sounds like you, DM me and I'll send a Discord invite.
The project: https://github.com/negaga53/nemedraft-client (open source)
Here is a demo of a EOE draft I did recently using the overlay: https://youtu.be/O98gK2GrwM0
By the way what do you think about the model picks and the recommended deck? I would be happy to discuss about it as well!
Thanks!
u/Nemegasoft — 3 days ago
▲ 3 r/mtglimited
How did you make the jump and get better?
I started playing around 6 months ago and immediately realized limited was my favorite way to play. Sealed or draft doesn’t matter. The problem is I feel like I am terrible at it. I get to plat on arena easily but then seem to have a hard time breaking 3 wins in a draft and more often recently have only had 1 or 2. With as much as I play I feel like I should be doing better by now. I watch some videos , but that’s really it. So, what helped you start to do better?
u/berferd77 — 3 days ago
How'd I do on this SOS draft?
Turn 1 is supposed to be a tap land because I just didnt see any 1 drops. The only 1 drop I saw was Pack 3 Pick 6 and I had to take fixing over it. With all the mana requirements I figured it would be important. I can catch up with my late game spells later and the Artistic Processes.
https://magic.flooey.org/draft/show?id=Z3iNAs2TTost8RmQNTAROlOtlSs
The Sylvan Library should have been a Dig Site Inventory but I had to rare draft to pay for the draft. Ajani's Response could have been Interjection but I wanted the removal at the time. Now that the draft is over Interjection would have fit the curve better because I don't have any 3 drops and the removal is kind of expensive. I'm mostly on the offensive and I won't have as many opportunities to kill tapped creatures.
Otherwise, got hooked up in pack 3 for cutting all the red and white cards in the first two packs. Molten Core Maestro could have been the Scrollsmith but I was focused on early game and figured I could use the mana for all my expensive spells.
Now we need to cut 1 if you like the looks of what I have here.
u/Nblearchangel — 3 days ago
Strixhaven precon
I’m not a” full in” player, more of a social player. This is also why I enjoyed my Bloomburrow Zinnia Valley Voice deck, with some minor updates. Now I’m looking for a new commander, but it needs to be one that is one step up from what I have but not too complex. I’ve been suggested to look into Strixhaven and I’m gravitating towards either Lorehold or Silverquill, which one should I go for?
u/Tsjoekie77 — 4 days ago