I like that. I think he's underrated anyway.

I actually have very good experience with the Hippocamp. It's even capable of 2 for 1ing, or in rare cases 2 for 0 our oppunents. Crusader doesn't do anything in our deck. We can't abuse him with Ordeals.

I'm in favor of dropping Crusader for Hippocamp.

I'm also in favor of keeping the Unknown Shores.

It's absolutely necessary to have access to all of your colors in a 3-color deck. We almost lost game 1 because we didn't see blue. If we don't need to to tap for colored mana it's just another land. When we do need it to tap for colored mana it will be saving our ass, even if it does cost 1 more. Sure, there are fringe situations where an Island would be better, but I believe the ability to make any of our 3 colors is invaluable.

I completely agree with NobodyPicksBulbasaur. Hippocamp over Crusader just means we're a bit swollen on 4 drop spells (which I think Absinthman brought up when we were debating about adding Portent of Betrayal), but it has a nice SURPRISE! ability. Unknown Shores has saved me personally a couple games early in drafts when I needed to colorfix. Even if we have a game that goes through a lot of turns so we draw all the colored mana we need, Shores still provides early colorfixing that we could need.

Honestly being a bit swollen on 4 drops is sorta the point.

When you have a 50% of getting an SGR by turn 6 alone your most important drops are turn 4 and turn 5.

I was actually looking to draft one more good 6 drop in our deck actually. Looks like we did draft it a long time ago lol.

I can see the merit in running unknown shores. I just thing you are overratting it.

Only running 4 plains will make it very difficult to cast a turn 2-3 Leonin Snarecaster if we are forced to mulligan. If we mulligan to 6 we only have a 60% chance of having a usable white source by turn 2 with only 4 plains, and I'm not sure about you but I'm not exactly comfortable with only having 4 reliable 2-3 cmc drops.

If we mulligan our chances of not making a 2-3 drop are a lot higher then I'd prefer them to be.

Yes, I understand that color screw sucks. I understand that we almost got color screwed in game 1 (we didn't though, the island came like it should of). I understand that we will get color screwed occasionally. It's no reason to overreact and ignore the statistics, and imo make our chance of getting color screwed for white worse.

Running Shores over another Plains only really increases our odds for an island. That "island" is pretty much unusable to cast SGR which only leaves 2 (now 3) cards that actually benefit from it. We already have a 78% chance of having an island by turn 4, and even if we mulligan to 6 that chance still remains at 74%. Adding an extra "island" does increase our chances of getting one to 84% (80% if we mull to 6).

The Shores really makes me nervous when mulliganing. I don't think increasing our chances of having an island by turn 4 from 74% to 80% is worth decreasing our chance of having a plains by turn 2 from ~70% to ~63%. Just because we almost got color screwed out of casting a grip tide doesn't mean we should color screw ourselves out of casting our 2 Leonin Snarecasters on curve. They are nice that they don't HAVE to be cast on curve, but not being able to cast them on curve makes the card significantly worse.

Hi, guys, no new info regarding the DDD. I just thought I would share with you a drafted deck that I played at the latest FNM in my local store. I wish every one of my decks looked like this. No kidding, this is what I really had: 13-12-8 - FNM Draft

While only really relevant in fringe-cases, the shores also enable us to regenerate Deathbellow Raider for 4 :P

Hello from Italy. It seems that Goody and DeckBuilder haven't concluded their match yet, so I'll try and schedule our match on when I come back home (Wednesday or something like that). It might be difficult though because preliminary inquiries have shown that Goody can't play later than 7:30pm Pacific which is waaay too early for me (4:30). I'll try and arrange a more reasonable time, but if that turns out impossible, I'll just have to go by it I guess.

Hello guys, I've come back from my trip to Italy. Latest news on our third match: It will most likely start on Thursday somewhere around 5 or 5:30pm Pacific (1, 1:30am GMT). I'm not sure yet because I don't know what Caley will have to say about it. The problem is that Goody start a match at 7:30pm at the latest which is like a middle of night for me. 5:30 works for us, but it may not work for Caley. I'll keep you posted with further development.

Reporting that round 3 has been a 2-0 win for us. The current version of the deck is the one I played.

That first game was awesome. The second game less so, but still awesome. Curved out pretty much perfectly both games!

Just watched the matches.

Nice job playing smart in game 2. I know if I were playing I would have probably gotten blown out by those 2 magma jets lol.

The only thing I might mention that ...well isn't necessarily better, but different at least... was in game 1 where you saw goody miss a land drop and then magma jet you in the face to scry 2 if I were playing I would have been VERY tempted to end step griptide that akroan crusader since that would have pretty much guaranteed him to miss a second land drop in a row, and against someone who already had to mulligan to 6 and so far showing that the akroan crusader was the only thing he could play to the point of doming a magam jet to mainly scry would have pretty much put him at a huge tempo deficit. Sure, that Griptide saved you at the end, but griptiding earlier probably would have pretty much put you up an additional turn over Goody to where that turn probably wouldn't have happened in the first place.

Game 2, well, as much as Goody did get hit with some bad luck you also did end the game on turn 7 which is about as fast as a red/white deck like his would end the game at even with stronger then normal draws.

Yeah I would probably also have Griptided after the Magma Jet. I think that wouldve put him on the defensive a lot earlier which would've likely led to steamrolling him pretty much. Most of the lifegaining shenanigans would've probably not happened too.

Wow, I totally missed an awesome opportunity to be cruel. I'll have to pay more attention to similar situations in the future.

Yeah, people tend to forget that Griptide can also essentially act as a Time Seal.

When someone is missing land drops and all they have on the field is a 1 drop, Time Seal away.

Time Seal?

I was confused too. Did a little research and apparently, It's a card from a game called Yu-Gi-Oh! that skips your opponent's next draw step.

Yeah...it's a banned card too lol.
(I figured that someone would google it. I mean it's the first response)

Essentially making your opponent skip his next draw step is a VERY powerful effect that is overlooked way too often.

In a position for game and your opponent needs to top deck an answer? Nope! Akroan Crusader to the top! No Gray Merchant top decks for you today! Hope you have Scry.

But yeah, in a situation where someone is screwed and looking for that land it can essentially act as an instant speed Demolish attached to our removal. While I would never maindeck a demolish by itself it's still one of the best cards for screwing over the mana screwed, and can very easily seal up the game.

Now I'm not saying that not Griptiding was a misplay or anything. It's still a risky play that gives you a massive tempo boost at the expense of lategame power, and should only be considered if you have the means of closing out the match quickly after it's done. At the time a play like that would mainly be a judgment call and a gamble. Your hand currently didn't have the cards to finish the match in within 3 turns or so after the play, but your hand wasn't so bad that you couldn't draw into it either. It would mainly depend what you thought the odds were of drawing into cards that would help you close out the match (which in that scenario pretty much anything non-land would have worked).

Well, I usually check Gatherer if I don't know the card. I searched for Time, and searched for Seal. Both searches didn't turned up any card that would fit (except Time Ebb, which is a sorcery Griptide). :P

Any word about when the next match is?

Hi. Because of the general business of the Holidays, we decided to wait until after new year. The next match against Gurei will commence around 3rd of January.

The match against GureiSeion is today at 5pm PST (1am GMT). See you there.

Hi guys. KrazyCaley didn't respond to my and Gurei's scheduling announcements, so we're not sure whether he's going to be online (the match should start in 15 minutes and his stream is still offline). We'll wait until the scheduled time and if he does not appear, we'll reschedule.

Caley didn't show up last night, so the match didn't happen. Right now, I'm trying to get in touch with Caley to reschedule.

Alright, I was waiting for the Notification for Caley's stream, so now I know why :p