Dunkelste Stunde: Masters Edition IV Draft Set Review

Hey all, welcome to my first installment on MTGOAcademy! I hope this is not the last one as well… you know, actually I should write weekly, but I’m soooo incredibly lazy. Right now I have no real plan on how often I will write, but twice a month is not unlikely. For this first piece, I will be treating you to my views on ME4 Limited- primarily how I see the cards in Draft. This was written well before Masters Edition IV was available on MTGO, but I think it is fairly accurate from watching the MOCS winners draft it at Worlds.

Anyway, ME4, the fourth Masters Edition,ah, such great expectations everyone crossed their fingers for Power 9 and Vintage, but it didn’t happen. And, of course, a lot of people are now disappointed. Even I thought WotC would release Power 9, but… they didn’t. So instead, we get a bunch of reprints and a few new cards for the borderline Vintage format- Classic. Constructed wise, this set is one of the most boring ones I’ve ever seen. Sure, it makes duals more acquirable, but I hoped for more new old cards for Magic Online. You should know that I’m a very nostalgic guy, at least when it comes to Magic. I like the art and the style of all the pre-Mirage cards. Time Spiral was my favorite of the newer sets, since it featured to many relics from the past. In a similar way, I will like ME4 just look at the expansion symbol, it’s another hourglass! And the old artwork for cards that have been reprinted will be welcome. I just wish we hadn’t got so many reprints of rares already online… Oh well.

Okay, enough with the complaining from my side. Magic players whine too much, and I better try to make up for my part in it with discussion of cool things Limited! I don’t know how people played Magic between 1993 and 1995, but when I play Limited, I feel reminiscent of those times that I never experienced. Playing cards out of the packs is always so fun. In Draft, the meta is restricted to only 24 packs worth of cards, so there won’t be as many power rares (and theres a similar power level feeling in Sealed), and that void allows for all of the interesting cards to stand up and have a chance for glory! Oh, how I miss the smell of freshly cracked packs of cardboard. (Okay, a few cards from the Portal sets also made it into ME4, but without interesting rares, Limited would be largely stalemates of unplayable crap staring each other down, eventually degenerating into Fireball wars.)

Enough for an introduction, it’s time to talk about the reason youre (hopefully still) reading- Masters Edition 4 and how I expect the Draft (and to a much lesser extent, Sealed) format will shape up. Its probably worth noting that I’m too busy trying to win packs on MTGO (grind, grind!), so I never play the beta (making all I say pretty theoretical).

I’m sure a lot of you already played the previous MED formats or M11. This format is going to be very similar. There are not a lot of synergies and I expect the format to be rather slow compared to M11 and ME3, but still faster than MED and ME2. My initial thoughts are as follows:

As per usual, flying is important- but its even more so in this format since there are a lot of commons that are good at stalling the ground (Yotian Soldier is a good example of the average, defensive ground pounder). And as I alluded to earlier, the set is boring, so there aren’t a lot of synergies but a rather a few select cards to build around. I will go more into detail about these cards when I come to them while examining the colors.

Similiar to Mirrodin and Scars, there is a large number of artifacts in the set. It’s still nowhere close to the two artifact sets, since these old cards are usually expensive to cast and don’t have unifying mechanics. Still, artifact removal will be at a premium since it is playable in the main deck in this format, and a few decks will end up mono-colored as they fill in their second color with colorless spells of Magics past.

There is no enchantment removal here. Seriously, I have no idea why Disenchant wasnt reprinted over Dust to Dust when there is Island Sanctuary in the set. As I said, flying will be really important, and I think every deck will need at least one flyer to defeat the Sanctuary, but planting this card into a set without any distinct removal next to Counterspell makes me feel fuzzy (in the least positive sense of the word).

This set is all about uncommons. The general quality of them is amazing! Even the good rares somehow feel just like upgraded versions of the uncommons (probably because they are boring). A lot of rares are either crap, too expensive, or lands…

Color hosers are annoying and, despite their rarity level in the set, pretty common. There are just too many of them, and as they never make the main deck, they will go late in Drafts. Most of them are enchantments as well, so you can’t get rid of them! Of course, I value them at the bottom, but you should be prepared for them to steal some wins (and piss you or your opponent off).

Well, with just a few of my thoughts about the format out of the way, Ill forge deeper into the different colors and talk about how I feel the actual cards fit into Limited environment.

Like other authors before me, I’m going to use a simple rating system as some point of orientation for Draft value. After the rating, I will go as deep into detail as I can. Enjoy!

Dunkles (and Many Others) Patented Rating System

Crap = *

Playable, but unexciting = **

Great card = ***

First pick quality = ****

Bomb = *****

HOME | WHITE | BLUE | BLACK | RED | GREEN | COLORLESS