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[Commodore Chuckles]

If a village is missing, Black Market is doing way less, may not be worth having.

If there's no Village on the board, that's all the more reason to get Black Market because there's probably one in there. I ignored Black Market on a Villageless board once, and wow did I get burned. Black Market is pretty close to being the most must-buy card in the game. It's still one of my favorite cards, by the way.

[popsofctown]

So guys did you know that magic has a format where you get to handpick every single card you would like in your deck, and every player has every card equally available to them?
And it has another format where you open six packs of cards, build a deck out of the random cards in that pack, sometimes have no access to certain types of effects in the game, and go play against other people who got six packs?
And that decades of time and a preponderance of data shows the second format has a far higher skill multiplier?


One thing to consider about this whole, "one guy gets a thing only available in the Black Market", is that his winrate is not set to 100%.  If we're generous, his winrate is set to say, 80%.  How much choice/player agency was taken away from the "grabbing a thing only available in the black market" option?  DXV made a colorable argument that you don't even necessarily take it, but let's say you just always do, it's so good.  That takes away the player agency from 1 purchase of the whole game, you'll buy like 20 things all game.

But that 80% isn't sticky.  The losing player is now in a novel gamestate where he knows an unequal card availability has impacted the game, and so is the winning player. If you leverage that advantage, you'll get lots of win%, if you don't, you'll lose a lot.  When is that last time you were absorbing curses but not also designing a deck that is designed to play its curser frequently?  Probably 50 games ago, the last time there was a black market.  So there's this novel situation and a lot of adaptation going on and it's a hard calculus.  You are playing the opposite of a game where all 10 kingdom cards are Laboratory, for sure.
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Now that I know that disliked cards affect ranked, is there a way I can be a jerkward and look up my personal win% by card and dislike all the cards I'm bad at?  I care about that way more than fun factor preferences.

[Jack Rudd]

Like: Grand Market, City, Black Market, Prince, Captain, Inheritance, Summon, Innovation

Dislike: Wall, Wolf Den

Banned: none

[silverspawn]

Banned: Possesion, Masquerade, Smugglers, Lurker
Disliked: Legionary, Rebuild, Urchin, Mountebank, Familiar

[Gubump]

Liked:
Recruiter - Phenomenal trasher, but not as much of an auto-buy as Chapel.
Raze - Same reason as Recruiter.
Royal Carriage - My favorite Reserve and my favorite Throne Room variant.
Fortress - Can be used for amazing, fun combos.
Mountain Village - Hands down the best Village variant in the game, and one of if not my absolute favorite cards.
Disliked:
Torturer - Slows the game down by making it into a painful slog.
Knights - Same reason as Torturer, and can be swingy depending on which Knight is on top, especially if one player has a / split.
Treasure Map - Swingy/luck-based.
Hireling - Too swingy based on who wins the split.
Banned:
Chariot Race - Way too swingy. Would be leagues better if it discarded your opponent's card.
Lookout - Forced blind trashing.
Sauna/Avanto - Games with it are determined by who wins the split.