Like with Edge of Eternities, I did a follow-up post on Avatar over at Hipsters of the Coast, where I was able to get in some reps in with cards from the Avatar set, along with some reps with some Learn cards seeded into the draft. I kept it to the top 10-ish cards but I wanted to specifically talk about the 1/3 Katara:
Something that I had wanted to spotlight with the card was that although its primary functional looks like a “bad looter,” and thus is something you’d want to use for looter purposes (getting stuff into the grave, sculpting the hand) – it’s more similar to cards like Fire Nation Occupation – as a “cheap instant” payoff card and it’s a payoff card first and a looter second. I saw a streamer play it in Legacy and while I was watching, generally the opponent had to kill it ASAP but I wasn’t able to watch the whole thing, and the streamer doesn’t record their videos. I reached out to them for their thoughts on it there, but never heard back, but it is starting to see some very slight Legacy and Vintage play, so that’s something.
I was happy to have my original Avatar set review to be one where I was able to get my article here done by Monday, after the card image dump; even after nearly 15 years, I’m still learning how to improve the process and how to make things flow better and read better.
In the Hipsters article, I talked about how my usual method for trying cards out when a set comes out is identify what cards I want to try out and then seed them into the draft. It’s nothing too complicated, but it’s where if there’s 24 cards to try out and 8 drafters, I’ll distribute the 24 seeded cards to the 8 drafters (3 each) and then have drafters make packs as usual, making sure that the cards are in the packs. Usually, when I add new cards, I’ll cut back down later, but with perpetual preview season, it’d been on the back burner (but was something that I did, although I still need to update my CubeCobra list.)
Since I was done with both articles, I decided to do a draft of my cube as usual, without cards seeded in and distributed as normal.
While I liked the distribution of the Lesson/Learn cards with them seeded in, I found that with Eyetwitch, Divide by Zero, Sparring Regimen, Poet’s Quill, Professor of Symbology and Gnarled Professor in a 600-ish card cube, only Eyetwitch was in the draft. There were a few lessons in the draft, but only Eyetwitch as a Learn card and it’s… Eyetwitch; I ended up taking it for a weird 5-color creature pile, and it was likely the worst deck for it (I never drew it, but it did have True Ancestry in the side, so it could have done that.
A lot of the other Learn cards are just rough, with cards like Igneous Inspiration, which was one of the better red cards in Strixhaven (2nd highest WR) just looking terrible compared to other red burn spells, since it’s a sorcery.
A recent article about designing the Avatar set doesn’t bode well for the return of Learn cards:
Which isn’t the death knell for them, but also isn’t encouraging for their return.
I’m sure that if/when I trim the hedges again, there’ll be more learn cards in the average draft. I’m just unsure how often the juice will be worth the squeeze – like is it worth building an A+B synergy piece with Sparring Regimen and a fine lesson if cards like Adeline and Suki already do it without extra effort? I don’t know but… I doubt it.
That said, I’m still going to give it a go, since most of the Lesson cards are still fine (even if It’ll Quench Ya! is just fine, just not great in a world with a billion Quench variants.)
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