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A card-by-card look at Conspiracy, this week focussed on the Conspiracies themselves, and the "draft matters" cards.

So is anyone else getting some weird max headroom jerky motion at around the 1 hour mark? It's kind of funny and odd...

QWOP-cam has returned! All hail QWOP-cam!

On a more serious note Conspiracy seems like so much fun, so disappointed that I missed the (so far, knock on wood) only draft of it my LGS did.

Ok, so I put the conspiracies into my cube because they looked like fun. I drafted with my group of friends and I let Unexpected Potential go past me because I didn't have any thing outside of my colors. Then game one of match one I got absolutely blown out by a mono-blue control deck that happened to resolve a Fusion Elemental on turn five with nothing but islands in play. Respect the conspiracies and pick them highly because if you can't break them, someone else will.

Great episode. I'm getting some more packs today, hopefully with a better outcome this time

Qwop Cam doesn't bother me at all but I am curious what happened?

One thing that you guys missed (mind you, I would have had I not heard about it on one of the podcasts I listen to) is Agent of Acquisitions > Lurking Automaton combo.

I did this on my first Conspiracy Draft. P1P3 I got the AoA, then P1P5 I got a pack with a Lurking Automaton. Flipped over the AoA and drafted the rest of the cards, saving the Automaton for last. At the end, I had 14 cards drafted and "picked" the Automaton last, making it a 15/15 for 5 mana. I managed to get 3 more Lurking Automatons during the draft, which meant I was close to guaranteed to get at least one per game (my LGS set up Conspiracy to have two games, where you paired up 4 people after the first game)

I understand why one would think that Paliano, the High City is useless in non-draft formats, but my reading of the text seems to make it still tap for colorless:

"Add one mana to your mana pool of any color chosen as you drafted cards named Paliano, the High City."

The "add one mana" is conditioned on tapping the land. It's the color that is set by drafting; if you haven't drafted, then isn't the color set to "colorless"? You still get one mana, it's just not of any draft-defined flavor.

I just had a thought about Worldknit. If you have a pack of total crap in front of you, you can grab the basic land, thus reducing your deck size by one and not clogging your deck with crap.

Edit: For that reason I think that Agent of Acquisitions wouldn't combo well with Worldknit. You need to draft as much basic land as possible to act as a graphite rod to the nuclear accident that is your deck.

Also, the idea of someone casting Chromanticore from Unexpected Potential makes me giddy.

Bratmon wrote:I just had a thought about Worldknit. If you have a pack of total crap in front of you, you can grab the basic land, thus reducing your deck size by one and not clogging your deck with crap.

I think they said Conspiracy packs don't have land.

no basics in CNS boosters.

Cogwork Grinder is a good combo with worldknit.

Oh. I did not know that.

Something that was making me twitch during the video was Kathleen seeming to imply that Dethrone only works if you hit the player. You get the counter on the attack, not on damage.

Another note was during the discussion of Aether Searcher. Each Aether Searcher is not tied to a specific card. If you draft more than one, you get to note a card name for each of them, and then each Aether Searcher can look up any card noted with any Aether Searcher. Granted, it's unlikely you'll get more than one, but if you do, it drastically increases the flexibility of the card, I think.

Other than that, it was cool to hear a run through of the cards. I learned a bit about Lore Seeker, which made me a bit sad. I was of the impression the pack was added after the current pack was finished, essentially adding another round, so drafting an Agent of Acquisitions, a Lore Seeker, and a Worldknit could allow you to run an entire pack of something other than Conspiracy in addition to your three packs worth of Conspiracy. You could still get extra cards out of the deal (if, say, someone passed you the Lore Seeker a few picks into the pack and you had the Agent of Acquisitions ready to go), but it would mean giving up the rest of the Conspiracy pack.

TTC wrote:Crack-a-Pack Intro
Kathleen: We just had somebody from Sweden...
Graham: ...send us Zendikar and Scars and Shards and Future Sight. And Unhinged?
James: I think they all came from...? Yeah, they all came from one person.
Kathleen: I can't remember what his username is.
Graham: Captain Falafel.

So, I'd like to ask... How many Unhinged packs do you have? If you only have the one, that was actually the one I gave Graham at LRRcon. (He mistakenly told me during a stream that they'd already cracked it, but I think he was thinking of the Alpha pack someone else gave him.)

I am certainly fine that you put it in the random cracking pile.

WP&P wrote:I understand why one would think that Paliano, the High City is useless in non-draft formats, but my reading of the text seems to make it still tap for colorless:

"Add one mana to your mana pool of any color chosen as you drafted cards named Paliano, the High City."

The "add one mana" is conditioned on tapping the land. It's the color that is set by drafting; if you haven't drafted, then isn't the color set to "colorless"? You still get one mana, it's just not of any draft-defined flavor.

Very understandable error. The card text requires you to choose a color from a set of colors defined by the conditions stated on the card. Due to the rules that define colors, you are unable to choose colorless and therefore unable to receive colorless mana.

'105.1. There are five colors in the Magic game: white, blue, black, red, and green.'

'105.4. If a player is asked to choose a color, he or she must choose one of the five colors.
“Multicolored” is not a color. Neither is “colorless.”'

~ Magic: The Gathering Comprehensive Rules

I'm actually paused about two thirds of the way though this episode because I feel obligated to inform you about something: Great episode, just finished. (^_^) I want to point out something I noticed while viewing the episode:

Æther Searcher actually says "When Æther Searcher enters the battlefield, you may search your hand and/or library for a card with a name noted as you drafted cards named Æther Searcher. You may cast it without paying its mana cost. If you searched your library this way, shuffle it."

There is a lot of text and you kind of misrepresented the last part of the rules text when replacing "cards named Æther Searcher" with "it".

Basically if you somehow drafted two or three Æther Searchers, when any of them enter the battlefield you can get one of any cards that have a name noted by any of them. You do not need to keep track of which one was named by a specific copy of Æther Searcher.

Atifexe wrote:Something that was making me twitch during the video was Kathleen seeming to imply that Dethrone only works if you hit the player. You get the counter on the attack, not on damage.

We cover Dethrone in the next episode and we're pretty clear about it.

Graham wrote:We cover Dethrone in the next episode and we're pretty clear about it.

Fair enough. As I say, it's just the way she was talking about it made it seem like that's how she thought it worked. I realize she probably just meant that in order to really get value from it you need to be able to hit your opponent with it.

In the episode, you say that you can wait to flip up Muzio's Preparation until everyone responds (or not) to your creature, but this is incorrect.

Revealing them IS a special action that doesn't use the stack, but you do have to have priority to do so. You get priority first when you cast the creature, and that's your last chance to flip up the preparations, assuming everyone else passes to let your creature resolve. If you wait for everyone else to pass to let it resolve, you don't get priority again until the creature is on the battlefield, at which point, it's too late.

You guys forgot the best possible use case for Whispergear Sneak: Naming it with Secrets of Paradise! My brother did this in our draft and nicknamed them "Bots of Paradise" and they were pretty darn effective mana dorks.

Man, this crack a pack takes me back. MM was the first set I drafted at a tournament ever. I still have I think more MM cards than any other set of paper cards because I won so many packs at the tourney that I just opened instead of drafting and just kept most of them.

Maybe I'll make a poster of just terrible, terrible cards from that set. And then, just for fun, stick some of the 20 counterspells around it as a border.

Man I'm old(er than anyone at LRR)

Ooh, a crack a pack with a good rare in it!

I actually run Dust Bowl in my Legacy Stoneblade deck, since my manabase can't fit 4 Wastelands and not be considered greedy. Dust Bowl does so much work once it gets going, and it gives me something to do with extra lands (Since JTMS and Batterskull are my two highest costing cards, and I honestly can run on 2-3 lands)