(I shouldn't have drafted this set either, for better reasons.)

Attempts: 1! Winning Deck: Blue/Black

x2 x5 x5 x2 x5

#1: Blue got Power Sink back, Counterspell back, and Tim version 2.0. But it gets even better: blue just got Brainstorm, one of the best draw spells in the game that is not Ancestral Recall. In the same color in the same set is a way to shuffle your library on command as well, all that and Brainstorm is a common. There's also Ray of Command, a treason spell, while in the future that'll be a red staple, blue gets it early because blue has everything in old Magic. It's as powerful as you can imagine even if it costs 4. And finally they have Illusionary Forces, which has a cumulative upkeep but is a common, 4/4, flyer, for 4. You may just have enough mana to swing it the 3 or 4 times it takes to win a game with a 4/4 flyer. We had a 4/1 flyer in core set and apparently we needed to do better? What? Oh yeah at uncommon we have a way to steal creatures and a 2/3 for 5 with firebreathing. Blue's loaded this set. It may not win directly at the snap of the fingers but it is possible to get everything to make a winning deck with just blue.

#2: Black however is another appealing choice with Dark Ritual and Fear returning. The new cards they got are pretty solid: plenty of good 3-drop creatures like Gangrenous Zombies, Norritt who is really funny, and Hoar Shade which has firebreathing. Their new common spells aren't good but Krovikan Fetish is very playable and does contribute to the board. Soul Kiss can also work. The best common card in black is Brine Shaman, a simple 1/1 for 2 that can snack creatures to give a +2/+2 pump, or snack creatures to do Remove Soul. The creature counterspelling requires you to play blue, but, well, Blue's #1, so why wouldn't you? For uncommons we have Knight of Stromgald, we brought back Animate Dead as an even wordier and more confusing card but Dance of the Dead is still good, and they reprinted Hypnotic Specter, except made him a 2/3 for 4 instead. It's still Hypnotic Specter. And finally, I ignore most rare cards because even the good ones aren't worth writing home about, but Necropotence is here. And yes, it works just as good in limited as it did in constructed.

#3: Well they've finally toned down Red except they toned it into the ground. Gone are the days of burn spells, solid creatures, and unga bunga. Their burn spells are now okay, (Though Lava Burst is here and continues the spirit.) they have a lot of bad gimmick creatures, and while they can get 3/3s and 3/2s, that alone does not win games. Their best is gonna be Incinerate and their auras, which aren't as good as they were. The rest is either not great for winning games or ineffective. Red does have some good cards at rare and uncommon but in a draft format good luck seeing them. I do need to extra point out that red's gimmick creatures are hideously awful, like Orcish Conscripts. The discreprency between blue and black and the rest of the colors is so ludicrous that I should just put red at like 5th, green at 6th, and white at 8th or something.

#4: Green's only relevant spell at common (once again) is Giant Growth, but green does have beefy high cost creatures in the form of Shambling Strider and Scaled Wurm. Unfortunately black has common hard removal and a better curve of creatures, so stalling to play a fatty has a high chance to fail outright. There isn't even any good walls at common for any color. (Illusionary Wall and that's it, and it only lasts as long as you can pay its cumulative upkeep.) That's all they got going for them at common, but we do have a 0/1 flyer for 3 that can regenerate for a green, becoming one of the best blockers as a result. At least green can just eat flyers even though it's supposed to be the flyer-hate color. If you're lucky you can find a Lhurgoyf. Actually green has a lot of underwhelming uncommon and rare cards. They have gimmicks and mechanics that might work but with snow lands being badly implemented and the set's spells able to stuff any creature, Green is strapped for win conditions.

#5: Ugh god the circles are back. Why the hell are they back? We don't even have good red burn spells in this set. So white does have a 1/1 for 2 that can tap to give a creature +1/+1 for the turn, so long as your opponent controls zero snow lands because they're not interacting with one of the major mecahnics of the set. Buuut with how this is like in Forge that's more likely than you'd think! So what else they got at common? Oh just 1/1s and 2/2s? All they have is damage prevention, lifegain spells, and Disenchant? Oh cool, so that color's still functionally useless. See, white at least has scarabs instead of wards and scarabs are better than wards and also are actually sicknasty for auras, provided it's matching up against the right color and thus not being a dead card. (They've extremely become sideboard cards for me as the games went by, but that implies I have the cards that can be substituted for such things between games.) We have Swords to Plowshares again, a knight that has (really) good pump abilities, and an elite guard that will blow itself up if it fails to keep the creature it pumps for a turn alive, but there still isn't a terrible lot to work with and if this color is played it's usually just because of Swords to Plowshares. As an aside, they're still trying to make a different white anthem and I still turn up my nose at every one that isn't, like, the first anthem they made.

Set Observations:

Okay nevermind Ice Age has far more egregious and nasty color hate than the core set ever did. I almost got done in by an AI playing Drought but it turns out keeping a Stench of Evil in the sideboard is a way to get out of the nastiest lockdown I've seen. I can still use my swamps but if I pay black mana I do lose a swamp as well. Gross.

But hey, on the bright side, we have color liking, (not an actual term) or, cards that do additional things if you have colors outside of their mana cost. Brine Shaman's the big one I think of.

There's an insane amount of artifacts in this set. This has actually been the norm for previous sets but I've noticed a very large list of them. Forge is telling me there's 45. Versus a color having 67 cards to it. There's even one common artifact, Barbed Sextant, and it doesn't sound too bad if you want a slowtrip and also some mana fixing so you can splash.

They also kind of forgot to make sorceries. Everything's either an enchantment or an instant. There's 95 enchantments in this set versus 29 sorceries. A lot of the enchantments are auras as well and that's really funny in a set with hard removal, a bounce spell, etcetera.

Slowtrips are here, which are cantrips but poorly worded so they function weird because I guess they didn't want to just give you a card after casting a card. They also wanted to make these super expensive. But it turns out, I'm willing to pay 3 for a +1/+1 aura if I get a card on top of it. It's not like auras are a rare commodity here anyway.

So funny thing about this set that I can't confirm but I'm pretty sure was an issue if you did anything limited with this: there's several cards that care about snow lands. Great. Where are they? Not in the booster packs, which is a problem when playing this in Forge, or just doing a booster draft instead of sealed deck like how they did it before, because that was where the snow lands were. (Which I refuse to do because I hate sealed.) Even if they were in packs, there's 4 of each basic land type and ONE of them is snow-covered. So even if I got lands in the packs and then ignored them, I had a 1 in 5 chance to get the land I want, followed by a 1 in 4 chance for it to be snow-covered. This made all the cards I played that cared about snow worse, but since Gangrenous Zombies did do quite a bit of work since there's a lot of 1 toughness creatures in this set, not worthless. ...Unless you're Legions of Lim-Dul in which case thanks for nothing. Anyway yeah I didn't play with snow lands and none of the AI did either.

What I do appreciate though is that the set had a lot of reprints of what I would consider vital cards for the colors, giving it the sort of backbone that was missing from previous sets that weren't the core set. I think the set is still worse off than Fourth Edition and blue and black are ridiculously overpowered in draft but at least you're getting some of your favorites.

Speaking of the colors, the best this set did was introduce two mechanics, one of them take a lot to get functional, (snow) and the other adds an ongoing, escalating cost to spells that I don't think they knew how to use. I still think Illusionary Forces is the best creature in the set, and Arnjlot's Ascent gives flying for free and honestly, considering when you'll want it, (lategame) for cheap. There's some good stuff here so I can see the set having some impact on constructed, but since I would have to put together a bunch of decks the AI can play and I think is good, that's not happening, especially when you consider that the Forge AI is not robust enough to figure out how to use cards like Demonic Consultation or Phantasmal Mount. I could do solitaire but ehh.

Finally, I somehow got the 7-0 in one try. It was obvious pretty quickly that blue and black had the most ridiculous stuff and despite several AIs also going for those colors I lucked out with the correct blend of tools and also the proper color hate cards to win first try. They were long, grating, and dangerous games but I did do it. (The green/white deck with Drought and Seraph was absurd to deal with as my colors.)