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13 thoughts on “The Horrors of Drafting Innistrad: From FNM to Pro, The Genre’s Gone Too Far

  1. 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.

    1. 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.

  2. 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) ?

  3. 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!

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

  4. 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.

    1. >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?

  5. 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?

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