Last weekend featured the prerelease of a new main set - and frankly, this is the best time to start drafting again. When you can operate with three swings of the same set, you will start to see the greatest amount of repetition in your packs, allowing signals and submissive drafting to assemble a great deck even out of a mediocre card pool. I managed to 3-0 two different pods, participate in a money draft, and a pair of"drunken drafts" over the course of some eighteen-plus hours of drafting on Saturday and into the wee hours of Sunday. What I would like to do is give some quick impressions on the format and relate a few of my experiences. Let's wait on Constructed for awhile; no one should be capable of delving too deeply into it yet.

First off the great thing about this set is that all strategies are viable again. If you want to go mono-colored, you can. If you want two allied colors, feel free. If you want opposing colors, go for it. Three colors are workable, though not recommended. This will be a real change for many newer players who may have only drafted with Invasion. Odyssey heads back into the more traditional realms of drafting, and includes a number of old favorites - and cards that seem very familiar, but have the word"Threshold" printed on them.

Green seems to be the best place to start off. With the ability to throw out a number of token creatures twice (Elephant Ambush, Beast Attack, Roar of the Wurm, Chatter of the Squirrel, and the rare Call of the Herd), the idiotically-powerful Muscle Burst (and it's helper the Diligent Farmhand), one of the best bears in the set (Wild Mongrel) and a variety of solid Hill Giants, Green looks to be the most stable of the colors. While not flashy, green actually does have removal in the form of the Ambush and Beast Attack, and I had to keep explaining all weekend long how an Elephant was just hiding behind my forests. This color also features some bomb rares if you can get them. Solid and dependable, Green was my base color for nearly every draft.

Red is, of course, the nut. With an insane array of common removal (something like five spells that deal two or more damage), the"crazy" Barbarian Lunatic, and a few very solid creatures to back them up, Red is quickly becoming the most overdrafted color at every table. It also has a common Falter effect (Demoralize) and Song of Blood (Rites of Initiation). Oh yes - and on a timing issue, if you cast Demoralize and respond with Rites of Initiation, you can get threshold for Demoralize. It checks for Threshold on resolution, not announcement - I killed seven different opponents with that"Combo." Unlike most of the other colors, Red has very little chaff cluttering up the common run for it; just the land destruction spells, really. I don't even want to get into the uncommon or rare runs. Initial impression? Red is the best color to draft, unless the rest of the table is drafting it.

Black seems strangely weak this time. While it does have one insane common, Ghastly Demise, the rest of the run varies from pretty solid (Gravedigger) to terrible. The fix seemed to become common knowledge pretty quickly, and so we had a couple of tables where seven players were not touching it - yet one player managed to draft a fairly powerful monoblack deck. I'm not sure how to value black yet. It can't be all that bad, but it hasn't been proven yet to be all that good, either.

Blue seems to be as solid as ever. It backs a number of powerful cantrip and card drawing effects, the most powerful of the"Burst" spells with Aether Burst, and a variety of overcosted flyers and gimmicky tricks. Green and Blue seem to combine particularly well in this format, so if you're looking for a good support color to fill out Blue's ranks of creatures, the forests of Gaea and her stealthy elephants would be the place to start.

White seems to have the overall highest power levels. It has the most powerful threshold effects in the common run, a variety of really powerful damage prevention spells (Hallowed Healer, plus the useful tricks of Embolden and Shelter), some really solid early drops for tempo, and the most broken rares in the set. White seems to combo well with every color except green, where its damage prevention effects (which makes up most of the tricks) intermingles poorly with Green's boost, which basically just mirrors it. I recommend using a heavy color commitment to white with a splash of another color, (preferably Black or Red) rather than an even split.

The largest issue is I have with the set to date is the print runs. We did a number of Rochester drafts after the prerelease was over, and the results were staggering. A pack would be opened without any cards of a given color. Then another. This kept happening. One pack would have no Green at all, the next no Red, then it was okay, then Black would dry up. In one eight-man draft with twenty-four packs, not one Flame Burst or Firebolt was opened. This was not a drafting issue - it was just the packs themselves. The problem with this is when it comes to being submissive and following signals."Let's see.... No red in this pack, but there are two great blue cards, so I guess I'm blue." It can turn out that there were actually three insane blue cards in the pack and no red at all! This worries me a great deal, and if the runs continue like this we may have a very difficult time with signals of any sort.

So what causes these odd color runs? Well it may be a prerelease issue, but I doubt it. What we were finding was that with all of the horribly unplayable lands in the commons run, mixed with occasional foil lands, you could (and often did) have three fewer picks overall in the packs. This was not such an issue in Invasion, as the lands were actually playable and somewhat useful, but the new lands are totally unnecessary and a waste of slots. Additionally, blue and black do have a few totally chaff commons, which hurts as well.

From a conceptual standpoint, I love this set. It was very enjoyable, easy to play, very powerful, and fairly balanced. From an execution standpoint, I remain a lot more reserved. The print runs may prove to be a very large nuisance - not only in draft, but also in sealed deck. Imagine opening a sealed deck that has five or more of the common lands in them, plus a foil Plains to boot. Well, better luck next time, buckaroo; you're starting with six less cards than your opponents. It's even conceivable that you could open eight or nine of the stupid things. Small little errors like this can really grate on your nerves. There is always some crappy pedantic little do-nothing land in the commons run of each main set, and it drives me crazy that they keep on doing it; they always screw up Limited.

Generally speaking, have fun and good luck with a new set. Keep your eyes out for Vampiric Dragon, since the actual text is that he gets a +1/+1 counter each time he deals damage, combat or not. MTGNews had the wrong info there. It cost me a match, so make sure you read each card carefully in the coming weeks.

Talk to you soon,

Jon