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Attempts: 5 Winning Deck: Red/Green

x2 x5 x3 x3 x3

#1: Since it's all the greatest hits of Magic the Gathering this set, and Red has consistently been a hit throughout all sets, yeah it makes sense why they're back as top color center-of-the-world. It doesn't help that they have both Disintegrate and Fireball for annihilating your opponent with all that mana you're not using in lategame. All the really fun and balanced cards are here and together they're an absurdly strong common base, especially if you get the spells that should've been banned by this point. Examples include: Errantry, Blood Lust, any of the red cards I played. Admittedly at the uncommon level they don't have a lot of stellar choices. I drafted the only good ones, arguably. The rest is all expensive or just, useless. Maybe if you get Ball Lightning or Shivan Dragon? However, point for point, you can't go wrong with a good selection of creatures and just shooting your opponent in the head with a fireball.

#2: Meanwhile if you want to play honest creature Magic this set's got you covered. Most of the spells are powerful combat tricks or mana ramping and most of the creatures can apply some solid pressure. ...I mean for some reason they reprinted Chub Toad but the expensive creatures are overall solid. For noncommons, BEES are also still here and got buffed to be uncommon.Elven Riders is still good, Thicket Basilisk is here too, we thought Desert Twister was appropriate for this color so we reprinted it. Birds, Sylvan, Verduran Enchantress. Green actually has more usable uncommons and rares than most other colors and thus it can be pretty easy to draft this color, even if you aren't lucky. I'm proud of it. It's come a long way from when the only nice thing I had to say about it was, "It's not white."

#3: We get to really see black's pros and cons in this set, huh? It has some of the best cheap creatures in Vampire Bats, Drudge Skeletons, and Frozen Shade. It also has some of the best common spells like Dark Ritual, Howl from Beyond, Drain Life, Fear, Terror, and Pestilence. But since they don't have choices for strong creatures that can win games outside of evasion and using other cards with their creatures, they must also get the right spells. Ideally you'd want to be able to have at least some commons get you advantage and then take it all home, but black has to draft and play additional cards to do that. Course, black can easily be a secondary color if you don't get the good stuff or your game plan needs a creature to close the game out. At uncommon, you get stuff like...actually over two- thirds of their uncommons are good choices and that's why black's at this ranking. Thing about black is that they have a lot of great uncommons and drafting black when you get that closer I was talking about allows it to be very competitive. It of course needs to luck out in a set like this but once the packs favor you, you can build some really nasty decks. You know Necropotence is here as well, and I'm not playing a game where I can witness its true power, and perhaps I'm better for that.

#4: I got hit by Force Spike enough times to hate that card, nevermind the other solid blue choices that were reprinted here like the four other counterspells at common. The benefit of having a set with too many cards is that all your greatest hits get reprinted, so blue's spell repetoire is absolutely insane. Just, don't play blue for its common creatures. Your best creature is a 3/3 for 5 with a weird form of pocket shroud. Luckily because this is still a very spell-focused Magic and blue has a lot of ways to say no it works with other colors easily. Unfortunately there isn't a lot at uncommon that really helps a blue deck. Plenty of strong flyers, Binding Grasp is really mean, and that's about it. Their rares are especially stinky with the best that I can think of being, Statis, and that's not really viable for limited. Otherwise it's like waiting for 9 mana to play a bad card or playing cards with islandhome. This is where blue can struggle, and that'll drop it down the power rankings.

#5: White's best common creature in this set, and also most expensive creature in this set, is a 2/2 for 3. (I'm lying it's the white Tim.) Okay so there's good common spells right? Well the Circles are back. Missed them? It's okay we at least fixed Wards by making them 1 card and making it common...in exchange for it not granting protection anymore and just prevents all damage. Okay so what else? Uhh, you can, gain, life? Hey 1 whole life can make a difference! Bottom-tier auras? You know we JUST had Visions. It's like white's inability to have anything expensive and impactful at common level is part of its color idenity. I mean at uncommon we have Abbey Gargoyles that is pretty good for an uncommon 5-drop but you know what would've been better that we're missing? Serra Angel. You know what else we're missing? Swords to frickin' Plowshares. Sure it was overpowered but what the hell else does white have then?! (The answer is nothing. White doesn't have hard creature removal in this set outside of Wrath of God.) I'm sitting here trying to figure out what they thought this color can do that others would not just invalidate. Welcome back to being bottom tier, white. Your day in relevancy sure was brief.

Set Observations:

So do you remember when I said things about old blocks in booster draft watering down its good cards by taking packs away from the main set and hinging this all on how the small expansions did? Well I didn't learn until I approached this set for draft that this is the largest set in Magic the Gathering at 449 cards. For the record, sets, even the large sets, are supposed to be around 300-350. I would say something like they overloaded the set with trash but no all your favorites are here. The good to trash ratio is actually pretty in favor of the good cards.

If anything that's a problem because you still get cards like Fireball and Disintegrate. In the same set. It doesn't mean as much because this is a bloated set, but this returns to my previous concern of the more cards you throw in, the lower chance you'll just get a stupid amount of the same good common. Which means when it does happen, it's even more infuriating than it normally is. The limited meta becomes a caustic soup as a result.

The game still continues to be very unfriendly to creatures with 1 toughness. There's like some ways to deal with that but if your core pieces can't stand getting pinged for one you will have to build around someone bringing Tim or his many cousins to the board. But also, they reprinted Rod of Ruin. Literally anyone can be a Tim.

So right now Magic's biggest problem is that burn spells are degenerate and despite us having sets that move away from that, no we're back where we started with this core set. There's been attempts to cut out problematic cards and yet what worked in Beta still works here. Can't say nothing's really changed for the better. We've had colors that were at a better level than this and they just, played it safe I guess. With the last set in Mirage block to go I have to wonder if they are even interested in anything more than what's going on here. If anything I may be predicting a monkey's paw wish waiting to happen because I do know about Urza's block. I just forgot exactly when this game goes to hell.

Walls are now a precious commodity because the ONLY common wall is Wall of Spears and that's a whopping 2/3 for 3. With first strike! But it's not blocking much. Okay I guess there's Dark Maze in blue's commons but, that costs 5. Walls aren't available anymore. There's still some uncommon walls but you have to get very lucky to have a reliable set of them. However, I don't think stalling in a limited setting is much harder to do. It just requires some different strategies and creatures. If anything you just got to remember that regenerating creatures could do everything walls could, and they didn't axe them.

Finally, there's no new cards. It's all reprints. So I can only say so much about a set that's just a bloated amalgamation of the constructed meta at the time. Give and take some cards that were still legal but not here. I obviously don't like playing this, there were way too many cards.