Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Dig through time vs. Treasure Cruise

Hi Everyone!

The holiday season is pretty slow for Magic Online because most people aren't focused on Magic. Earlier this week, I stepped back from Magic Online finance to talk about Modern and how Treasure Cruise most likely won't be banned because it's something I have been hearing since it's debut.

I immediately looked at Treasure Cruise as superior to Dig Through Time. I recently noticed that is not the case for most people. My theory on this is that players have certain things they value from cards that vary from player to player. Cruise draws three cards for "1" mana and Dig chooses two of seven cards for "2" mana. Obviously, most of the time choosing two of seven is better than three random cards from your deck, but is it worth "twice" the price? I don't think so.

So why is Cruise common and Dig rare? I don't draft, I don't think it's fun and I really don't see anything fun about the draft format at all (I'm happy for you if you like draft formats and I respect them, but I don't enjoy it) but I discovered over the summer right after Vintage Masters came out that the rarity of cards ONLY depended on draft. The original rarity or quality in constructed didn't matter, it was all about selling draft packs.

When I looked at other sets since then, I quickly noticed the same thing. Let's test this out...Is Dig or Cruise better in draft. Seeing 7 of 40 cards is pretty sweet compared to 3 random cards. I know that back before drafting was what it is today (read:not as good), it was sometimes amazing because commons were sometimes the very best cards in the set and many rares were unplayable. The driver of rarity back then was complexity of cards and cards that were good in constructed formats.

I always think of the good cards like Cruise that are at common that would be valuable if they weren't common or uncommon.

Happy Holidays!

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