Aug 11, 2026 · 2 hr 7 min · 17 segments
Welcome to my eccentric, deck-centric set review. I look at some general stats for the new set, and fed with that information, set out to build functional draft deck and theory craft how the set might…
We've done it gazillion times, but if you're new here, um, instead of doing a card by card set review, we normally build decks.
And these decks are just simple approximations of what we think a deck in a given color pair could look like.
Um, normally we try not to put too many rares and mythics, so it's between like zero and two, normally around one.
Um, between zero and 10 uncommons in that deck because uncommons are the new currency of the limited formats, and then we fill it up with commons with, uh, with a small rule of we try to stick to maximum two of each.
But this is very loose guidelines.
And I would highly recommend you this kind of an approach to figuring out the new set.
It is actually something I always do.
I will normally play some sort of a draft simulator, either at 17 Lands or Draftsim, um, and play like a couple of dozen replicates of that, mainly by clicking on cards, but thinking while I do that.
And this allows me to think about what's going on in the format, what do I see? Do I find some weird interactions between cards that I think might be relevant? And it just lets me process the set much better than staring at individual cards because I put them in the context of the pack when I have to make decisions.
Oh, what would I pick here? Is this card better than that one? Now, obviously I don't know it yet, but it helps me build this kind of a ground collection of knowled- of knowledge and understanding of the format.
And after several of those, I have like some plans that are starting to crystallize and, you know, I play two, three dozen of those and I get a good, uh, idea of what I want to be building when I'm, uh, planning, uh, um, planning to build the skeletons.
We've done it gazillion times, but if you're new here, um, instead of doing a card by card set review, we normally build decks.
And these decks are just simple approximations of what we think a deck in a given color pair could look like.
Um, normally we try not to put too many rares and mythics, so it's between like zero and two, normally around one.
Um, between zero and 10 uncommons in that deck because uncommons are the new currency of the limited formats, and then we fill it up with commons with, uh, with a small rule of we try to stick to maximum two of each.
But this is very loose guidelines.
And I would highly recommend you this kind of an approach to figuring out the new set.
It is actually something I always do.
I will normally play some sort of a draft simulator, either at 17 Lands or Draftsim, um, and play like a couple of dozen replicates of that, mainly by clicking on cards, but thinking while I do that.
And this allows me to think about what's going on in the format, what do I see? Do I find some weird interactions between cards that I think might be relevant? And it just lets me process the set much better than staring at individual cards because I put them in the context of the pack when I have to make decisions.
Oh, what would I pick here? Is this card better than that one? Now, obviously I don't know it yet, but it helps me build this kind of a ground collection of knowled- of knowledge and understanding of the format.
And after several of those, I have like some plans that are starting to crystallize and, you know, I play two, three dozen of those and I get a good, uh, idea of what I want to be building when I'm, uh, planning, uh, um, planning to build the skeletons.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
