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Hope that all is well in your part of the world, either Magic the Gathering world, or the real world.  Innistrad has proven to be an interesting and exciting set to play, and especially draft.  The probability that there may be multiple rares to choose from in your first pick of each pack is also something to excited about and leads to some very interesting decisions.

It is now, more than ever, that I wish that the Magic website had a draft simulator for more than just M12.  I suppose they push the core set, to stick with the "keep it simple" idea, and that more newbs practicing drafts will ultimately get more customers, and core sets are less confusing.  However, Magic is an intricate game, and there are some many levels of play, especially when draft is involved,

Past in Flames (Mythic): This card seems really cool - but sadly, not in Limited. Four mana is a lot to enable the casting of a handful of spells for one round. Even if you can recast one spell of this, and another off its flashback cost, you've basically only gotten the same (double) effect as you would of any normal Flashback spell. If you end up in heavy-black with loads and loads of Victim of the Nights or something, it might be playable, but it is not going to be much better than a [c]Call to Mind[/c], not exactly a Limited star.

For this reason, I don't think I'll be picking this highly in drafts, and unless people really have the discipline to not care about picking a money rare, that means I won't ever end up with this in my pile. I'd consider picking this up if it ever makes its

Blue in general seems to have several things going for it; It's part of a nice W/U Wings tribe deck, it has the potential to be a Mill deck, and it can also be a fast (if swingy) Stitched/Skaab monstrosity. I am very excited to see how the colour works out, but it looks absolutely playable to me currently.

Black:

Abbatoir Ghou (Uncommon)l: This seems like a really solid card to me... 3 power first strike for 4 mana is really good, especially in a format where the "magic toughness" seems to be a mere 2. The lifegain clause is marginal but still worth noticing. It is the best kind of lifegain in Limited; The "free" kind, sugar coating of a card that it definitely playable without it.

In drafts, I wouldn't be adverse to picking this in the first few picks, probably not as the very first,

This might be a bit ambitious. I am going to open the (now complete) Innistrad Card Image Gallery. I am going to start at the first card, and end at the last. These are my thoughts on how Innistrad Limited might look, and how the cards will do. I will be wrong about some of this, but I want to put my impressions into words, and if at all possible, to have a base from which discussions can be taken (in the comments, on Twitter, whatever).

If people for some reason don't want to know the cards of Innistrad yet, please stop reading now since I will be referencing the stats and abilities of cards as they appear in the spoiler.

WHITE:

Abbey Griffin (Common): We like evasion a lot, which is a plus on this card. I am not sure how relevant the Vigilance will be on such a relatively fragile creature,

Starting off with an update from my last blog, I have played six M12 drafts: lost two (1-2), won (3-0) two, and did 2-1 in two drafts in that order. My hinderences in most of the games was knowing the power level, how to use planeswalkers to their fullest, and trying to force colors that weren't necessarily open. My wins happen most when I have creatures with flying and removal. I am noticing though, statistics of winning the draft depend on what you pull in your first 2 picks per pack: what your bombs are.

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Moving on to what I really want to talk about is my deck building for Standard (type II). I'm a Johnny, almost an Uber Johnny. You won't know what that means if you haven't read about the Magic R&D player classifications^1,2. I will build my own decks using cards