Baldur's Gate Commander Draft #2

I got a four-person CL: Baldur's Gate Commander draft going today.  We decided to use the Wilderness dungeon, which is awesome.  We also decided to change the way we drafted.  Although we still made two picks when we first opened a pack, we only picked one card at a time after that instead of two.  (We did an extra 2HG game after the normal commander game.)

Why not Wilderness?

The drafting part did not go great for me.  I floundered on colors in the first pack.  At the beginning of the second pack I pulled Baba Lysaga and tried to go Golgari.  In pack three I counted my playable spells so far and realized that wasn't going to work.  Here were all my picks:

A late decision was made when I picked Rilsa Rael.

When I counted, I realized I didn't have enough cards.  In a Commander Draft, you want about 37 playable spells (including your command zone) to pair with 23 lands.  There's a real danger with drafting too many of the lands (mostly gates) that you might not be able to get enough spells to fill out that 37.  After my first five picks in pack 3, I had 22 in Golgari.  Despite the fact that I'd been drafting things to sacrifice to Baba Lysaga, I had to switch to Dimir.  I got lucky because I saw a bunch of blue coming around, but even then I was only barely able to get a deck.

 

I only managed 36 spells instead of 37.

 

I picked Rilsa Rael instead of a black/blue commander + blackground combo partly because Rilsa's mana value worked better with Cloudkill. 

 

My opponents were:

• To my left: Skanos Dragonheart with Agent of the Shadow Thieves. "Shadow Skanos".
• Across: Gut, True Soul Zealot with Noble Heritage.  "Noble Gut".
• To my right: Livaan, Cultist of Tiamat with Hardy Outlander.  "Livoutland".
  

Two other players were running green, that's why I couldn't make it happen.

Skanos got the start and things moved quickly.  I got Safana down on turn three, followed the next turn with Passageway Seer.  In between those turns, I had accepted Noble Gut's deal, so Safana had two +1/+1 counters.  I started the combat by attacking the Skanos player.  I got my initiative bonuses from Safana and the Seer and passed the turn.

I dealt first salsa blood.

I took the deal again on Noble Gut's fifth turn.  They wanted the Initiative, and Coronation of Chaos made them unable to block so Gut stole the initiative.  

Team goaded.

On my subsequent turn, I played my commander, Rilsa Rael, gave my Tymora's Invoker deathtouch so it would go unblocked and I could safely attack with my goaded creatures.  On the next turn, Shadow Skanos (their turn five) attacked me for 7 commander damage with all their buffs to take the Initiative.  I thought that was good, because then Noble Gut swung hard at them knocking them down to 14 with their growing army of skeletons and taking the Initiative themselves.  Livoutland continued to get some things out, but didn't have any big threats on the board yet. 

 

On their sixth turn, the Skanos player got out an enormous Ambitious Dragonborn and started challenging the Gut player as the archenemy.  On my sixth turn, I attacked Gut for a bunch and got the initiative yet again by playing Aarakocra Sneak.  I was charging through the Wilderness dungeon, hoping to get that sweet benefit of completion for my creatures.  This time I was at Grymforge, so I got to goad one creature each of my opponents controlled.  (I should have spent more time thinking about this.)  On their seventh turn, the Skanos player cast Giant Ankheg.  

That goaded token means they're going somewhere else.

Shadow Skanos came at me and this is where I made a misplay for the ages.  With all his buffs, Skanos was a 16/16 creature that now had trample.  I was at 7 Skanos commander damage.  I need to block at least three of that damage.

Chump blockers, I choose you!

Four toughness is enough to keep me alive, right?  Right?  

Nope!  Skanos had deathtouch as well from its shadowy background.  That means 14 damage is trampling over.  

First to draw blood and first to die.

21 commander damage exactly!  And the bloodbath continued!  On the very next turn, the Gut player swung out and killed the Skanos player.  Unfortunately, the Livaan player had taken the Noble Gut deal, so they couldn't respond by attacking back on their seventh turn.  They equipped Livoutland with Saddle of the Cavalier and played some other creatures.

The Gut player gathered their resources on their (eighth) turn, but couldn't win.  The Livaan player, however, had drawn to Two-Handed Axe and cast the Sweeping Cleave part to win in combat.

What a great game!

Since that had finished pretty quickly, we randomized teams and played a Two-Headed Giant game.  

I got teamed up with the Skanos who killed me. 

We were able to win without me even playing Rilsa Rael, because I got to play Juvenile Mist Dragon, locking down their creatures that were benefiting from Noble Gut's two +1/+1 counters that they were getting.  

 

Tap those big guys down!

When they tried to kill the dragon shortly thereafter, I had Blur ready to go.  Oops, locked down again!  They got their blockers untapped, but were down to 10.  I drew really well and Sea Hag's Aquatic Ingress got us in for the kill.

Yeah, Skanos was doing a lot of the damage.

We almost had time to do an Archenemy game, but it wasn't in the cards.  Nevertheless, this was a really fun draft.  There is a lot of breadth to the cards in Baldur's Gate and with the Choose a Background combinations, games are always very different.  I like chaotic things, but I am always excited to do a straight-up Baldur's Gate draft.

 

I have been brainstorming ideas for packs themed around the New Year.  I know that it's well past that holiday, but I haven't done a chaos draft in 2025 yet, so I'm reserving the right to celebrate that with a theme.  (I wish I had some Masters 25 packs!)

Happy Magicking!

Kaldheim Round 2 (WUBRG Drafting)

My FLGS (Friendly Local Gaming Store) just got new digs!  On New Year's Day, Intergalactic Plastic (IGP) moved to a new building a mile north of their previous location.

No visible street sign yet, but the window decorations are coming along!

They are great about mixing it up with old draft formats, but this one is real old!  It has been three-and-a-half years since I draft triple-Kaldheim at my makeup draft weekend.  This was very exciting!

There were nine people at the draft, and a lot of weird stuff kept coming around.  I very nearly picked multiple Demon Bolts, but in the end got none.  Nevertheless, I drafted a bunch of removal, though I didn't do a good job of being spread out among my colors.  Here's are all my picks:

At a glance, it looks like I drafted a bunch of White, but...

I also got (yet another) Aegar.  I don't know exactly why, but I really like him.  He was all over a bunch of my March of the Machines drafts.  Because of that, I definitely focused on giants, which paid off.  I wanted to run the Doomskar, but I just didn't have enough white to support a 2-pip spell.  Thankfully, Battle of Frost and Fire worked well as a boardwipe.  With all of the color-fixing snow lands I got, I felt pretty good.  However, another player pulled even better WUBRG stuff than I did and got both Esika and The World Tree.  (I am so jealous!)  Still, I was able to put together a good deck:

I didn't have the Waking the Trolls in there in the first round.

In the first round, I was matched up against someone who I'd lost to the last time I drafted at IGP.  This time they had an aggressive Mardu deck, but without many snow lands.  I lost the first game, but won the second.  

They did the thing!

The third game was really tight.  I had Tergrid's Lantern down and had two life while they were at four.  I had just enough mana to sacrifice Path to the World Tree, play a land I drew, and equip my new Bear token with the wings to be able to block the angel.  If I drew a land.

Here's the board right before I sacrificed the Path.

So, first I tapped the lantern.  (The bird died.)  Then I sacrificed the path and I drew... the only swamp in my deck.  (I already had the Shimmerdrift Vale producing black mana.)  My bear was able to block the angel, and on the next turn I tapped the lantern three times, getting them to discard both cards and sac the angel.  I won the following turn. 1-0.

In the second round, I was up against someone who had been playing since Thanksgiving!  They had a nice Bant deck and in the first game stopped me from awakening a bunch of trolls.

Sad!

I still won off of value, especially since I got to sacrifice Path to the World Tree again (third time of the draft).  In the second game, I had to use Search for Glory to tutor up a snow dual.  

Got that White mana-fixing.

I got some treasures off of Goldvein Pick and that allowed me to cast Tergrid front side, who led me to victory.  2-0.

The third round had me up against a tough Boros player.  I'm not really ready to deal with more aggressive decks!  I lost game one both because they had an awesome start and I kept a bad hand that didn't lead into anything.

Where's my red?  Could there be a downside to running five colors?

I got more aggressive with my hand in game two and mulled to five.  I got lucky and my opponent got mana flooded, so I got to get out of the gate even after being stuck on one land for two turns.  Battle of Frost and Fire completely turned the tide and I pulled out that game.  The mana problems continued in the third game.  My opponent mulled to five and got stuck on two lands.  I played a slow but strong game and won with the help of my fourth sacrificing of Path to the World Tree.  3-0.

This draft went really good, though there was a lot of luck involved.  Here's some thoughts in case Kaldheim ever comes up again:

• Grab those dual snow lands!  Mana fixing + snow is awesome.
• Horizon Seeker is great!  
• Ravenform is pretty good removal for big stuff.  
• There's lots of removal.  Grab it!
• The giants were really good.  With Basalt Ravager, it's really good.  Having all the changelings was really helpful too.
• I love drafting!

Happy Magicking!

Kingdom Neapolitan Commander Draft

The holiday season bestowed an adventurous spirit in us.  We had six players and (somehow) decided to run a Neapolitan Commander Draft with the addition of the Kingdom EDH roles.  This might have been the first ever Kingdom draft, and is almost certainly the first Kingdom Neapolitan draft.  The resulting game was one of the best multiplayer games of magic I've ever played.  There's a LOT to unpack in the four words of this post's title:

• Neapolitan Commander Draft:
• This is a Commander draft where players draft one pack each of the three (as of the writing of this post) commander draft sets: Commander Legends, Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate, and Commander Masters.  
• There are some additional rules: each mono-colored and colorless creature gets two additional abilities: Partner and Choose a Background.  
• This was my third Neapolitan Commander Draft.  The prior one was less than three months ago!  
• There's some discussion about whether you need to open the packs in release order.  The downside is that the only five-color legends are in Commander Masters, the third set, which matters because of the color identity rule.  We decided to randomize the order.  Then we rolled to open them in reverse-release order: Masters, Baldur's Gate, Commander Legends.
• We decided to (mostly) forget about the pick-two-cards-at-a-time aspect of Commander drafts.  The first pick from each pack was two cards, but then every subsequent pick was only one card.  (This really did solve the problem of people forgetting to pick two cards each time.  I highly recommend this!)  
  
• Kingdom EDH:
• I posted about this five years ago, cataloging all the different versions and describing the version one of my groups uses.  (We used them a lot with five players in Oathbreaker.)  As a quick refresher, here are the roles we use:
• King: The only revealed role.  They have more life and need to outlast everyone else (except the Knight).
• Knight: They win with the King, but they (like everyone else) aren't revealed until they die.
• Barbarians: There are two of them.  They win if the King dies while one of them are alive.  Barbarians know who the other Barbarian is.
  
• Our version differs from the "standard" in that we dropped the Usurper role in favor of a random choice of four alternative roles:
• Gravedigger, who wins if the three people die while they are alive.
• Black Knight, who wins if the Knight dies first, or if they kill the Knight, or if they outlast everyone.
• Villager, who when they die return at half life on the opposite team of the person who killed them (if a Barbarian or Knight/King kills them).
• Doppelgänger, who secretly becomes the role of first person that dies.
• Since we had six people, we had two of these random roles instead of one.  If I have done this before, it was never in draft and only once or twice.  
• How we combined them:
• We wanted people to know their role before drafting, so we assigned them first.  No one knew what the roles of the other people were.
• We randomized seating for the draft.  (We got real lucky and got the order we were already sitting in!)
• Before drafting, we let the Barbarians know who the other Barbarian was without telling anyone else.
• After drafting, we randomized seating for actual game play.
• Only after we were all seated with our decks to play did we reveal who the king was.

I got my role and was determined to draft based on it.  I will wait to reveal what that role is until after you see my draft picks so you can try to guess based on them.

Six draft sets and six face-down Kingdom EDH roles.

Commander drafts are a bit weird because you are simultaneously figuring out colors while looking for a commander (or combination) that supports those colors.  I did not get a five-color commander (but someone else did) so I had to pick and choose between colors.  I really wanted to be in red, because removal seemed vital to my role, so I committed to that early.  I didn't see good black removal early on, so that was kind of out.  Green, white, and blue had some good removal as well as some other cards that seemed relevant, so they were all in the mix to support red.

It wasn't until the third pick during pack two that I mostly committed to Izzet with Lozhan.  All my adventures and dragons could double as removal.  At that point nearly all of my picks were in Izzet.  Here are my picks:

I nabbed multiple dragons before I saw Lozhan!

I didn't think blue would be the choice, but it worked out great.  I can't really go any further without talking about my role, so, here we go.  If you want to try to figure it out based on my picks and what I said, do that now.  Otherwise, just scroll down.  I'll put some space before I continue below.

 

10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

Hopefully that's enough lines!

I got the Knight!  What a great role!  I can't block for the King, but I could kill threats, so removal seemed really useful.  I stuck with Izzet, even though that meant I didn't get to use a lot of great cards including Kirtar's Wrath, Acidic Slime, and Jahiera's Respite.  Here's what I built:

Two colors is so weird.

 

We sat down to play and the king revealed themselves.  They were running Pianna and Sarevok.  That seemed like a pretty good combination.  To their left was Minsc and Boo, Timeless Heroes.  Then me, the Knight, running Lozhan.  Then Aryel.  Then The Ur-Dragon.  (I was WUBRG with envy!)  Then Azusa and Alharu.  

Unlike the rest of my compatriots, I have played quite a bit of this.  So I admitted to the group that it was common for all players to start out claiming to be the Knight.  I followed that up by pouring on the role-playing with "my liege" and "your majesty" at every chance.  Some of the others joined suit, most notably Azusa/Alharu.  It was great.

In the first four turns, three important things happened.  First, Minsc & Boo played two mana dorks and was able to attack with 4/4 Boo on turn three.  Second, Aryel played Wyrm's Crossing Patrol, which dealt a bunch of damage the first few turns and continued to be a factor in the game.  (In fact, they used Dread Return once to get it back.)  Third, on my turn four, I played Sulfurous Blast and took out a bunch.

Cast during my main phase, I took out a lot.

This seemed like a good move to slow down my opponents without hurting the King.  This sent a good signal that I was the actual Knight, but I didn't have them convinced yet.  

Even though Minsc & Boo had lost some tempo, they had a big turn with Boarding Party cascading into Avenging Hunter.  The Initiative was in play and the Boarding Party hit me for 6.  

We had both The Initiative and The Monarch out later in the game.

I played Lozhan on my fifth turn.  On my sixth turn I cast Livaan and killed a threat to the King with Lozhan's trigger.  Around the same time, Aryel put an Assault Suit on a Nefarious Imp and started passing it around the table, but only to people they thought wouldn't attack the King.  Confidence in me being the Knight was waning. 

The +1/+1 counters came later.

 

I honestly commented that I was nervous the Barbarians wouldn't rush the King soon.  Everyone else had taken significant damage, but the King still had 37 life.  I started throwing around comments about which roles I thought people had.  I got greedy and Lozhan died to the Ur-Dragon player's removal.  Then, on their (Ur-Dragon's) turn 7, the Barbarians revealed themselves and started swinging in: they were the Ur-Dragon and Minsc & Boo.  On that same turn they had played enough ramp to cast The Ur-Dragon (the creature).  Of course, the two random-role players also didn't want the Barbarians to kill the King (at least not right away) so the Barbarians became the Archenemy for the moment.

On the King's turn 9, they built up enough to kill the Minsc and Boo Barbarian.  Upon dying they revealed their role.  Sure enough, they were a Barbarian.  (It's not usually good to lie about that.)

On Aryel's turn 9, they claimed to be the Black Knight, then attacked me to 7.  Azusa/Alharu finished me off on their turn 9.  I revealed my Knight role.  They did not reveal themselves, so they weren't the Black Knight.  

At this point, it's important to point out the dynamic.  The remaining (supposed) Barbarian was trying to kill the King.  The (supposed) Black Knight and other unknown player both probably needed the Barbarian to die before the King.  So, the King had some competing interests.  They wanted the Barbarian to not be able to kill them, but had some incentive for them to live so the other two wouldn't focus on them next.  

The one case where that wouldn't be true is if one of the random-role players was the Gravedigger.  In that case, they would win so long as any of the other players died first.  (Even if it was the King, they would win and the Barbarians wouldn't.)  In that case, everyone else would want the Gravedigger to die next.  At the table there was a bunch of suspicion that Azusa/Alharu was actually a Gravedigger.

Aryel seemed distraught that they hadn't killed me, so it seemed more clear that they were actually the Black Knight.  On their next turn (10) they killed Azusa/Alharu, who revealed themselves to be... the Villager, not the Gravedigger!  Their life was reset to 15, they continued in the game with the rest of their current state, but didn't join one of the other teams, since a non-Barbarian/King/Knight had killed them.  They continued their turn by playing Slaughter the Strong, which among other things killed the Ur-Dragon.

The Ur-Dragon player surprisingly let it go to the graveyard, but the reason for that became evident on their next turn (10) when they cast two huge spells.

A 10/10 and a copy of Ur-Dragon.  Seems good.

On their following turn (11) the King played Githzerai Monk, which prevented the Ur-Dragon player from killing him.  On the King's next turn (12), they swung back and killed the Ur-Dragon player.  They were the Barbarian, as claimed.  The remaining three players: King, Villager, and (supposed) Black Knight were each on their own.  The Villager had built up a a strong board and the King hadn't done much.  On their turn 13, they took out Aryel, who revealed themselves to be the Black Knight they had claimed.

Then there were two.  And one brownie left.

Sadly my teammate didn't have enough to hold on and on the Villager's next turn, their 14th, they attacked and killed the King.

What a game!  This was so fun!  Even though I died second, the game continued to be exciting for me and it was fun to see everything play out.  The Minsc and Boo player pondered how it would have gone if they'd've started attacking the King straight off instead of throwing their damage around.  I honestly don't know!

If you are thinking about trying this format, please do!  It worked really well with six and I expect it would also be fun with the usual five.

There are some changes I would like to make to the format/resources:

• I would like to update the original role cards to make it more clear how they work with the roles we added.
• I would like to make an FAQ of clarifications.
  
• I would like to give the Barbarians an extra option: any of them can reveal their role during any non-combat phase (and without using the stack).  This could be relevant whenever something references opponents/teammates and also because teammates cannot attack each other.
• I would like to clarify how the Villager works.  How do you know the role of the player that killed you?  I would like to change it so that the player who kills the Villager is forced to reveal themselves.
• When the Villager "undies" I would like them to have the option to shuffle any cards in their graveyard/exile into their library.  That way if they died from decking, they can stay alive for a meaningful amount of time. 
  

What do you think of these changes?  

Bonus Addendum!  The Barbarians want to show off their decks as well!

Ur-Dragon:

Minsc & Boo:

Wilds of Eldraine 4 (WUBRG Drafting)

I made it to another draft at my Friendly Local Gaming Store (FLGS), Intergalactic Plastic.  This was their last draft before they move to a bigger location, which is pretty exciting!  IGP is different from other gaming stores because they have a ton of budget memorabilia like old He-Man and Transformers toys for sale.  It's pretty great.  

They also do a great job of running older sets for drafts.  I haven't drafted Foundations, nor Bloomburrow, but I got in yet another Wilds of Eldraine draft.  This set is very kind to me!  I don't know if that's a personal thing or that it's just very good for 5-color drafting in general.  (I would ask my intelligent readers for feedback, but I think it's nearly impossible to leave comments in Blogger for weird cookie reasons.)  This time was no different!

The drafting portion seemed crazy.  There were a lot of valuable cards getting passed around.  I think that's because I got really lucky in my seating:

• The store owner was seated to my right, and he didn't care about passing money because he has a huge collection.  (I don't feel bad about this.  You can sit next to me anytime!)
• The person to my left had never drafted here before and hadn't drafted in a while (Wilds was new to them) and they were expecting rares to be redrafted at the end.  Oof.  I 100% feel bad about this.  (I wrote a post nine years ago about the pros and cons of redrafting.  The cons still outweigh the pros to me.)  I will touch back on this later, but I don't want to spoil things.

In addition to directly where I was sitting, there were two or three other people at the table (of eight) who hadn't drafted before.  Given all of that, I drafted some crazy stuff:

I wish I could have run that Grave Pact!

I didn't get much in the way of land-based mana-fixing (LBMF?).  One of my WUBRG friend/foes was at the table, but they didn't even wind up running all five colors.  Nevertheless, this group seemed to know that lands were good.  Thankfully I got some other ways of fixing.  (Collector's Vault is real good!)  I got removal and I got tons of crazy enchantments.  I started off without the Forced Fruition, then realized that was a bit cowardly of me (props to my WUBRG friend for the appropriate peer pressure) and put it in.  Here's what my deck looked like:

Removal, removal, removal, board wipe, removal, one-sided board wipe, ...

In the first round I was up against an aggressive Boros deck piloted by a first-time drafter and relatively new magic player.  We took our time so I could make sure everything made sense, but at the beginning of game 2 I realized there was a misconception about mana you could spend to pay for spells.  (E.g. 2R is not equal to RRR.)  The second game went way better for them.  I was doing okay, playing without green, then they had a big turn that flipped control of the board.  

Some pretty good spellslinger-enablers.

Time was almost up, so I played Forced Fruition, then played Expel the Interlopers, choosing 0, the next turn.  They played a few spells on turn two after time, went to one card in the library, and I had enough to keep them stuck.  Time was called and I won the match with one win.  1-0.

The second round had me up against the drafter to my left, running Golgari adventures & food.  He was clearly a skilled player, but had been out of the scene for a while.  He gobbled me up in the first game, though I extended it with all that removal.  In the second game he got a bit mana screwed and it was enough for me to charge in with a bunch of little guys.  The third game was really tight and I held out at low life for a while, but ultimately got knocked off.  Despite all of my removal, their synergy was too strong and they played their cards really well.  They went on to win the final round to win the tournament 3-0.  (I hope they thought the packs they won were a good substitute for passing rares!)  1-1.

In the third round I was up against the store owner!  They had a really quick and aggressive Selesnya deck, but the MVP of the match was definitely Gingerbrute.  In the first game they got me down to 12 on the back of that cookie alone.  I was honestly looking to get to five mana so I could activate Agatha just to give my creatures haste so I could block the dang thing.  I got the food golem off the table another way and won with Asinine Antics on their turn (how is that card fair?), followed up by Song of Totentanz, powered (on the second attack) with Agatha's pump.  In game two, Gingerbrute came out again, but this time beefed up with Royal Role from Betroth the Beast.  A Titanic Growth sent me down to 11, and I had to change priorities to kill it with Rip the Seams the next time it attacked.  It's a good thing I did, because it got another Titanic Growth the next turn.  Nevertheless, I was in danger and fell to 3 life to their 16.  I slowed the board back down, kept attacking for small amounts of damage in the air, and they were out of a hand.  I didn't have good gas in my hand, though, so I played Forced Fruition, hoping they would have a limited number of spells and I could outplay them.

Nope.

Their second spell was Spider Food, killing my potential-game-winner and drawing them 13 other cards.  They played a bunch, discarded a lot, and I dug in.  Thankfully, I had held Asinine Antics back to deal with whatever they got in their big draws, and that kept me alive in the ensuing combat.  After I got the board back in control, I drew Song of Totentanz and won that turn.  I can't believe I pulled that off.  2-1.

Wilds of Eldraine is a really fun draft set.  The card pool is so varied with all the Enchanting Tales that you have to expect anything.  I hope I get to draft it again!

Board Wipes in Chaos (WUBRG Drafting)

Board wipes aren't very chaotic, but they are very good.  (One of my first decks I was proud of as a kid packed a lot of red/white board wipes.)  We had a very interesting nine-person draft two days ago.  I chose my picks ahead of time to celebrate my football team's recent impressive victory.

Maize and Blue!  The Ravnica theme was unintentional. 

 

Since there were a lot of us and an odd number, we went for single-game rounds again.  (I'm sure some of the players are getting sick of this.  I'm sorry!)  The packs were all over the place, with a block of 6 Theros Beyond Death.  (Those actually work great with other sets.)  Here's what we opened:

Lottery ticket donated by one of the players.

 

A question came up about Wastes.  Should players be allowed to add Wastes to their decks?  It makes sense that if only one player opens a set with Wastes, it would be a bummer for multiple people to have unplayable cards just because other packs won't have them.  On the fly we decided to allow players to add up to two wastes.  I would like to see what other people think, so here's a poll, using STAR voting: https://star.vote/zcke3ayk/. 

My picks were unexpectedly thin on mana fixing.  One other person went WUBRG and yet another tried, but wound up in Gruul instead.  I only got two fixing lands, but I also had Glamorous Outlaw, which is just about as good.  I very nearly passed a Springmantle Cleric until I realized it had pseudo-converge.  (It helps to read cards!)  Most notably, I picked up two board wipes: Starfall Invocation and Unstable Glyphbridge.  Here are all of my picks, in order:

Removal and removal and more removal.

I went heavy on removal, even after cutting Drown in the Loch and Thraben Charm.  Here's the deck I built:

Missing: all the fixing lands I wish I'd picked.

I managed to get in seven rounds of the eight possible!  The only person I missed was the person who went 4-0, which I think means they won the draft.  As with last time, my WUBRG rival who was dead set on winning his first match against me wanted to drag out the drama; we played last.

I first battled the Gruul player.  I got one of my lieutenants out, Harnesser of Storms, an otter who granted tons of value.  The otter saw lots of play that night.

Unfortunately, this one was a nonbo to exile.  I really wanted the fixing too!

My value kept me in the lead and I won.  1-0

In the second round, I went against a Selesnya deck.  I got all my colors and I think I curved into Alesha, Who Laughs at Fate plus Iroas's Blessing.  Combined with my other removal, I kept the board clear and just kept swinging in with Alesha.

I even got the Outlaw out.

Alesha is great, even if I didn't have anything to get out of the graveyard.  2-0.

In round three, I was up against a Golgari deck.  I started slow, but got out a 2/2 spirit, thanks to Phantom Interference with Sorcerer's Wand as my opponent built up their board.  Then I dropped a big Springmantle Cleric.  I was at 20 and thought I was safe and swung in with the cleric.  Then Garruk's signature spell appeared.

Note I did not have the mana for either of the board wipes in my hand, so it wasn't a misplay.

The picture shows my death.  It's almost like there's a downside for running five colors.  2-1.

In the fourth round, my very courageous opponent ran a Boros deck with lots of quick critters.  I had a fist full of removal, but I was missing the mountains and swamps to cast most of them.  Luckily I got to four-for-one with Starfall Invocation.  

I wish I had that Paragon of Modernity!

I still didn't have a board, though, and then they played Rite of the Dragoncaller.  I was pretty freaked out until I read Pharika's Libation more closely.

I wonder whether that's the first time that Rite has ever been sacrificed to the libation!

I got the 2/2 flying spirit from Phantom Interference again and kept a death grip on the rest of the board.  It managed 16 damage over eight attacks.  The remaining four damage came from a Rolling Thunder that I think took out two creatures as well.  3-1

For the fifth round, I graduated from 2-color guilds to 3-color shards and wedges.  (This was not planned.)  I faced off against a really aggressive Mardu deck that promised a short game by playing an early Ripples of Undeath.  I got some good blockers early, one of which was the Harnesser of Storms.  That got upgraded with a Sorcerer's Wand (combo!) and I just started picking off the little creatures and played Alesha.  My opponent had a good Take for a Ride.  

I didn't get to attack with her first!

I had the perfect response with a timely Hussar Patrol, but they still got the Alesha graveyard trigger.  Thankfully I had the necessary removal to keep everything under control, even with the card (from graveyard) economy, and win.  4-1.

In the sixth round I faced a neat Esper deck.  This was the player who opened Ikoria, then drafted and built around Gyruda.  Amazing!  He got to cast Gyruda twice, since he saved it after I killed it the first time.  

Byebye, combo pieces!

Swiftblade Vindicator held it's own in this game.  After Gyruda hit the second time, I nearly had a perfect Unstable Glyphbridge cast, except that it got Gitaxian Anatomist, which survived.  They rebuilt their board with Rite of Belzenlok, which got off.  

I needed the rite and the demon in the same photo.

Thankfully I had Dreadful Apathy for the demon.  I didn't even need to let the self-damage play out, though.  I transformed the Glyphbridge using the artifacts I'd milled, and won in the air.  5-1.

Final round!  I was up against my rival, who has also taken up a WUBRG mantle.  Unfortunately, they hadn't managed to draft a single fixing land.  I got stuck without much land and only had Stuffed Bear to fend for itself for many turns.  Later on he played real converge, and I played my fake converge card.

I'm glad mine had a higher casting cost.

We got locked down a bit, then he surprised my Vexing Gull with 

Double Vexation.

Swiftblade Vindicator hit again.  I strategically put Iroas's Blessing on it.  Then I won shortly after this:

I finally comboed the Stuffed Bear with a board wipe!

The Swiftblade Vindicator and the bear won the game in, I think, two turns. 6-1.  7-0 against my rival.  Oof!  (You know who my football team is; I don't take these long streaks for granted!)

All in all, my removal won for me over and over.  I can barely believe I only lost one game to a lack of colors.  I got really lucky!  

My games were wicked fun!  The back and forth of combat superiority is exactly the sort of thing I like.  Maximizing value on the board wipes was especially satisfying.  It'll be a long time before I get two of those again.

If you didn't already, please vote in the poll above!  I would like to use that to help us decide what to do in the future.