It's hard to judge Magic expansions for chaos drafting. The appeal of chaos drafting is that of randomness and possibility, and so every single Magic expansion has something good to offer. And chaos drafting is highly dependent on context. Drafting Khans of Tarkir with Magic Origins will feel fairly different from Khans of Tarkir with Invasion. So we can evaluate expansions in a vacuum—sheer power level of individual cards—while also taking into account the relative power of a single booster. Now, generally when chaos drafting you won't use but a couple of boosters from some expansions, so while it's useful to know how archetypes work within a certain environment (because of possible pointers you might get for building a better deck), in the end the most important part is knowing what you can do with a couple of random packs. So don't count on getting an Elesh Norn, but maybe you can hope for a Serra Angel!
One good thing about Iconic Masters is that rares will generally be easy instant picks as there's no heavy multicolor cards that depend too much on the environment to be good, and the multicolor rares can be devastating, like Spiritmonger.
Instead of going through the cards in the set, I guess the best I can do is to see what a couple of random packs would look like.
Pack 1
One good thing about Iconic Masters is that rares will generally be easy instant picks as there's no heavy multicolor cards that depend too much on the environment to be good, and the multicolor rares can be devastating, like Spiritmonger.
Instead of going through the cards in the set, I guess the best I can do is to see what a couple of random packs would look like.
Pack 1
This feels like a decent pack for a chaos draft. I'd probably go for the Yosei, but Wing Shards, Doomed Traveler, Child of Night and Angel of Mercy are all great too. Removal is often hard to come by in decent numbers, so Wing Shards is a great card to play. Of course, if there are some older sets in the pool you may be able to find some more good removal in black. Virulent Swipe is also pretty good in that respect. Overall, while this booster is not outstanding and it's heavily skewed towards pushing you to either black or white (barely any cards in red, green or blue), there's enough playables that you'll be happy to see it.
Pack 2
Now this pack has two bombs, and both in black, but neither feel outstanding. Lord of the Pit and Noxious Dragon are both decent picks for the top of your curve, and the pack has some decent removal again in Grisly Spectacle and Virulent Swipe. Parasitic mechanics are usually not great to see in your chaos drafts, so cards like Dragonlord's Servant don't look too enticing, but in this particular case, a 1/3 for 1R is not all that terrible, though I'd pick Seeker of the Way or Ellusive Spellfist over it any day of the week.
I guess a litmus test for chaos draft picks is asking how they'd hold up alone on the board and against vanilla creatures. My thinking is, since often you will have to play cards that are designed for very specific synergies, you won't be able to take advantage of them except at their bare bones. Is Lord of the Pit a good creature if you don't control anything else? Probably not. Is Dragonlord's Servant good on the board? It's not terrible. Of course, if you do want to try to achieve some synergies, remember that density is king. Drafting Iconic Masters with Fate Reforged works because they have a bunch of cards in common, so you can achieve more consistency and synergy density with them, but you really shouldn't count on that.
Anyway, Masters sets tend to deliver good playables, and I think this is no exception, but it certainly looks weaker than the previous master sets. This is not necessarily a bad thing in any case, because chaos drafting is about polishing turds, one may say.
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