Summing up Return to Ravnica Block - 7/22/13

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M14 is gonna come online in just a few more days, and I'd like to take this opportunity to reflect on Return to Ravnica block limited and my overall impressions.  Both Return to Ravnica and Gatecrash drafted on their own were a blast the whole way through.  I never got burned out on either of those and it took me a long time to figure out why I was getting burned out on full block, but not the individual sets.  When Dragon's Maze first came online, everybody already had their guild preferences in mind that they wanted to play, and it was fun....for awhile.  The bane of the format ultimately came from the fact that the Dragon's Maze pack was pretty much worthless in helping to determine the direction you were going in the draft.  A strategy that became popular was to just simply draft to the Gatecrash pack.  This way, if what you wanted to draft out of Gatecrash got cut, you got the opportunity to fill the cracks in the deck with the Return to Ravnica pack.  Drafting to the Return to Ravnica pack often led to very disastrous results.  Even if you were dedicated Rakdos out of your Dragon's Maze pack, you could be getting cut in Return to Ravnica Rakdos cards and not be aware of it at all during your Gatecrash pack, while simultaneously not being appropriately signalled by your Dragon's Maze pack.  Basically, signalling was a nightmare.  It turned out five color grab-all-the-guildgates was a strategy since you didn't have to have a real semblance of a color scheme.  These problems made the format ultimately a little disappointing, and in addition, not enough of each guild's mechanics was represented in Dragon's Maze, which I felt was a miss too.  Needless to say, I'm excited to draft M14 online and get back into the habit of easily signalling what colors I'm in. 

 

Check out this week's Mortarpod to see us draft a Rise of the Eldrazi deck.  We go over the lore of the set, and the strategies of the format.  I think you guys will dig it.  If you don't already subscribe to me on youtube, I would really appreciate it if you would go here http://www.youtube.com/SeemsGoodMagicVids and subscribe.  Thanks!

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