Skip to main content

Masters 25

This review will be very short, because so much has been said about Masters 25 regarding its value and the fact that, as a Masters set, it's not much of a synergy-based set. I agree on the first count: It's sad to pay full price for a booster and pulling, you know, a tree. On the second count, though, I'm not so sure. The set looks like a blast. And when it comes to chaos drafting, Masters 25 is a true dreamboat. Not too tight and parasitic and full of wonderful commons, some decent uncommons and fun rares. With morph as one of the main mechanics, you are granted at a minimum off-color, barely playable cards at almost all points within the pack, but also add to that some decent removal and useful cards that can fit in all basic archetypes. In this sense, it feels a lot like a core set (which is something I've seen mentioned online), but the main difference lies in that the power level of common cards is much much higher. A25 packs feel like they can fit at any point within a chaos draft too, making the experience much more dynamic and fun while also raising the bar for card value in your deck. Imagine a Fourth Edition booster with some Onslaught in it, but exchange the rare for a modern playable card and you get the gist of it. This, I feel, makes it probably one of the most exciting additions to chaos drafting since Conspiracy 2.
Anyway, randomly generating a couple of boosters should give us an idea of what to expect during a chaos draft:

This is a lovely selection of cards. If this were my first booster during a chaos draft, I'd probably pick Diabolic Edict, but there's a ton of fun cards to play with. Depending on the pool, Elvish Piper could be a strong pick (if you have some BFZ or XLN, for instance), Boros Charm is a great card to splash for, and Ihsan's Shade is a personal favorite. Almost all of the cards in the booster are at the least playable, and that's a great sign.


I'm not sure I'd pick the rare during a draft, but this booster has a bunch of good cards I'd love to take. Kindle is a personal favorite, and if there's more than one A25 booster in the pool, I'd value the card highly. Honestly, it feels like all the cards, save for the rare, are super playable. This booster is sweet. And I think that's the main takeaway: This set has so many good commons that it probably chaos drafts really well.

The main thing I dislike, besides the value, is the fact that, even though this set was partly touted as a nostalgia-driven product, I hardly feel nostalgic: So many of the cards are just not that symbolic, even though I remember pulling many of them ages ago, and many of the ones that are indeed very symbolic have new art that simply does nothing for me. Shame.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

[February 2018] Unstable Master Conspiracy

There may be underlying notions that chaos drafting is mostly about chaos . Mixing things up with no particular thought on what is exactly being mixed up. I'm generally OK with that, but to me, chaos drafting is more about mixing things up beyond the constraints of set design, with enough openness to allow for environments that may have some minimal cohesion beyond the fact that it's Magic cards (this too could be challenged, I think, but that's neither here nor there... for now). This being the case, I put together a draft session centered around three different types of sets: Unstable, Masters sets and Conspiracy sets. This time, every drafter got a fixed set of boosters to draft from (which you can see on the picture) with the idea that every booster would present specific options in how you draft them. Anyway, the packs were the following: Player 1 (Seba): • Unstable • Conspiracy 2 • Eternal Masters Player 2 (Rob): • Unstable • Conspiracy • Iconic Masters...
Post a Comment
Read more

[March 2018] 4 players

After the more structured chaos draft we had during February with Unstable, Conspiracy and Masters boosters, I thought it'd be a good chance to go back to a more traditional sort of chaos draft. It seems that 4 players has become the norm, and well, it's hard to get a bigger group interested in drafting in a more or less regular fashion, so I'll take it anyway. This time the pool consisted of 12 different boosters, most of which were rather new, but with some extra spicy cards: • Rise of the Eldrazi • Return to Ravnica • Theros • Origins • Khans of Tarkir • Fate Reforged • Dragons of Tarkir • Battle for Zendikar • Eldritch Moon • Amonkhet • Ixalan • Iconic Masters To me this looked interesting enough, especially because of that ROE booster hopefully giving us some big bodies and dumb spells to play with. We took the boosters in a rather random fashion (and I can't recall who opened what for the most part). This time the games felt a lot closer, and three ...
Post a Comment
Read more