Are you a Quiet Speculation member?
If not, now is a perfect time to join up! Our powerful tools, breaking-news analysis, and exclusive Discord channel will make sure you stay up to date and ahead of the curve.
Watch videos of Forrest drafting Innistrad on MTGO here: QS Drafts: Drafting Innistrad #1
Dye a Tribe Unfun: How To Wreck Competitive Drafts
What do you do when you open your first booster in M12 draft?
I’d bet that most people out there do the same thing as I do: look at the cards, pick the best card, figure out what will probably table, then pass it to the left.
What do you think you will do when you open an Innistrad booster in draft?
Are you going to look to your right and try and see which double-faced card the person feeding you opened and if he takes it? He doesn’t have to tell you, but it’s open information and you can’t get in trouble for trying to find out what it is.
Hell, you might as well take a peek at the rest of the pack. Wizards gave you the perfect excuse if you’re caught.
What are you going to do next? Look at the person to his right?
And his right?
You haven’t even looked at your own pack yet!
Okay, you’ve looked at your pack and figured out what the best card is.
Is it the best card? Are you sure?
What if the person to your right takes the double-faced card that’s in the same color? Better wait and see what the person to your right picks.
What’s taking him so long?
Oh, he’s just waiting for the next person to take his pick. Can you blame him? There’s a huge advantage in knowing what color your draft partners are in.
On the flip side, should you even take that double-faced bomb? If the other drafters see it, good luck getting any decent late picks.
Hate drafting has a much higher EV when you know you’re actually affecting somebody.
Doesn’t this sound like fun?
It sounds like they’re taking the horror theme of this block so far that it makes draft horrifying.
And this draft is only at your local FNM. There’s a whole new set of problems at a professional draft.
Wizards says the double-faced cards are open information and you can hide them if you want but don’t have to. Good luck hiding one in a professional draft.
There’s nothing on the table to hide it under. And when you pass the packs you lay out the cards individually so they can be counted by the next person. Even if you try to hide it under your second pick, everybody will see that it’s missing when you lay out the pack.
That is, if they want to take the risk of looking around.
Wizards says you’re free to look at them, but what if a judge thinks you’re looking at the other cards in the pack?
Instant DQ.
Is it worth the risk?
That’s up to every individual player to decide.
Why don’t they just replace the double faced card with the corresponding checklist card during professional drafts? That would solve all these problems, right? Well, what if you don’t know exactly what a card does?
Knowledge of every card is a good idea if you’re on the Pro Tour, but not a requirement.
You better believe I’m going to call a judge for the wording on a card even if I’m 99.9% sure of what the card does. There’s too much on the line to risk making a mistake.
So what happens when you call a judge? There’s only one person calling the draft and the entire draft has to wait until they get you the wording.
What if they just give everybody a crib sheet with all the double-faced cards on it? Looking through a list of twenty cards takes time, and that is in very short supply during a called draft. You probably have enough time to find your first pick, but what if you get an 8th pick that you don’t know?
You have forty seconds to pick up your pack, look through it, try and remember what the card does, realize that you don’t know it, put down your pack, pick up the cheat sheet, find the card, read it, pick up your pack, and figure out what the best pick is. That doesn’t sound very reasonable to me.
I was super excited to draft Innistrad in a few weeks after the drafting disaster that M12 was, but this announcement and the way it fundamentally changes the strategy for drafting has dampened much of the enthusiasm I had.
That’s enough ranting about double-faced cards for now. Time to talk about the things that I actually like about this set.
Get 'em While They're Not Yet Too Hot
No. 1: Richter Flipping Belmont
This is my favorite card spoiled so far and I’ve already preordered a set. Do I think it will increase in value? No. Do I care? No, it’s [card elite inquisitor]Richter Flipping Belmont[/card]. This card has potential to be good, but White Weenie will never be the premier aggro deck while Tempered Steel is in the format. If Vampires becomes really good again, or after Scars Block rotates, it might see some play.
No. 2:
Dearly Departed makes me excited, too. I’m not very excited about the card itself, but rather at the prospect that there will be other cards with similar abilities. Graveyard-based abilities like this are so easily abused in Eternal formats that something even slightly more powerful than this will see a lot of play.
No. 3:
The last card I’ve seen so far that excites me is Boneyard Wurm. There’s bound to be some deck designed around milling yourself in this block, between Flashback and all the graveyard abilities, and this guy has the potential to be the biggest two-drop ever.
Oldies But To-Be Goodies
I haven’t seen any other cards worth preordering from Innistrad so far, beyond [card elite inquisitor]Richter Clucking Belmont[/card]), but there are a few older cards I can recommend picking up to speculate on before Innistrad releases.
Captivating Vampire:
Vampires is a super popular casual tribe, and this card is extremely powerful in a Vampire deck versus any sort of creature deck (aka: any casual environment). It was only printed in one set and is getting pretty hard to find since it's been out of print for a year. Right now you can pick these up for $3-4, maybe even less if you can find somebody getting rid of them since they’re rotating from Standard. With all the Vampires being printed in Innistrad, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the tribe become popular enough to rival even Elves in tribal popularity. That could cause their best lord to easily break $8, or even higher, as time marches on.
Jace, Memory Adept:
This guy has seen some very fringe play in Vengevine decks in Standard, but hasn’t broken out yet. Between the Flashback, cards that trigger from your graveyard, and Boneyard Wurm, you can bet your sweet bippy that somebody is going to want to get their own library into their graveyard, and Jace, Memory Adept is currently the best known way in Standard.
Checklist Cards
If double-faced cards see tournament play or become popular with casual players, these are going to be required to play with sleeves. I’m going to spend the next year grabbing every one that I can from drafts and toss them in a box next to my Zendikar lands and Poison Counters to sell in a few years when they become scarce.
Until Next Time...
Although this article may come off as overly negative, I am still looking forward to playing with Innistrad. I realize that I don’t really provide any solutions to the problems I present with double-faced cards. This article is meant to point out what I think is a legitimate problem and provoke discussion.
Almost every piece of art I’ve seen from this set is beautiful and oozing with flavor. I’m just extremely skeptical that the double-faced cards were necessary and not sure they’re worth the logistical nightmare. I’ll still be there from midnight on the 24th until the store closes on 25th playing every event I can squeeze in.
The most [card bant sureblade]reliable[/card] way to [card urza’s contact lenses]contact[/card] me is via [card whippoorwill] twitter[/card]: @KrillinUSoftly.
-Forrest Ryan
@KrillinUSoftly
You made some strong points about the flip cards. I feel like creating them is a mistake but we will see in time.
Great article bro. I hope to see more of you.
Magic players want to act like poker players until it comes time for hand protection and then they want to complain it's not fair. Hand protection is your job just as much as anyone's.
It's true that looking at someone drafting is wrong. At the same time, if you don't want to get in trouble, don't look at other people's cards. Not too hard.
The problem is that Wizards encouraging players to look at others while drafting by making the double-faced cards open information during drafts. It bothers me that to get all the information that's available to you during a draft you have to run the risk of being disqualified from a tournament if you see more than one of the fourteen cards in a pack.
whats the official ruling on those that use checklist cards in their deck? are they required to have the actual copies… this is to say if you own one can you just have one in play. if you want to play the second of the same checklist card can you just wait for the other to leave play in order to cast the second. Do checklist cards need to be replaced if they end up in the graveyard (mill / discard) ?
According to http://www.wizards.com/magic/tcg/article.aspx?x=m… the checklist card is supposed to be replaced by the double-faced card whenever it's in a revealed zone.
Hum… Why don't you just wait for actual drafting before complaining? This is not unfair: there is one flip card in each booster pack, so everyone is at the same level!
Yes but the fact that there is one flip card is the reason to complain. If you read above it talks about how if someone picks one you know what they have picked. I for one don't like the guy to my right knowing what my p1p1 is.
There's no reason we can't start a discussion about these issues now.
Unless Wizards makes a real decision on whether or not this information is public instead of throwing their hands up in the air and letting people do whatever they want there is going to be an unfair disparity of information that will favor anybody that uses the methods outlined in this article.
Forrest is upset beacuse he can't use his yellow sleeves with flip cards.
Considering we don't yet have any guidance on how competitive drafts will be run with these cards, flipping out seems rather premature.
By the way, it was announced and encouraged that you use a basic land as your draft pick cover.
>flipping out seems rather premature.
I like the pun! Intentional or not. But do you think Forrest is flipping out? Or simply using his experience as a drafter to call this a likely issue?
Unless you're at a pro tour where the basic lands are removed…
I think the double faced cards are great for two reasons
1. I don't draft — hate it actually — and these cards work just fine in EDH/Commander
2. They legitimize the placeholder-proxy, meaning I really only need to own 1 copy of the card total for all of the potential commander decks it could go in (and I just have to have enough checklists for that card).
For those of you that like drafting, isn't the reason people draft because they want to make a lot of fast, complicated, unexpected, real time decisions about what to play in their decks (rather than crafting ahead of time)? Doesn't this extra level of complication make it _more_ fun?