Let’s get one thing out of the way early, this article has nothing to do with the value in the packs, the prices, or anything having to do with the finance side of the game. There are some great cards for most formats in this set. There’s no doubting that. This is purely about the play experience we had from doing some small drafts in house and playing with the cards in general. Just wanted to throw a quick article at you and get your feedback about the experience.
Now, with that out of the way, this set was always odd in my mind. The idea seemed fun and novel, but most the cards listed and previewed seemed more and more like they were just powerful staples or at least staple cards for the sake of hype. It’s a masters set after all, but trying to draft it seemed truly like it was trying to decide which color i wanted to pair with artifacts.
No matter how many packs we went through, it was just artifact after artifact. The other color cards were for the most part, just better ways to use the artifacts so every match just seemed to blend into the next. It felt like playing the same decks and the same archetype every time. I know the set probably wasn’t exactly meant for draft and limited but I’ve seen people trying to fire VIP drafts for upwards of $250 a person or more. Besides doing it for value drafting, I can see no way to have fun doing this.
In the end maybe it’s just us that didn’t enjoy this type of experience but for the cost, I truly expected to have more fun actually playing with the cards. They will do great in my EDH decks and I can mess around with which tron lands I want to run now but… I just ofund myself wanting to play more JumpStart. Just me?