Chaos at a store: WUBRG drafting!

I saw that Nostos Boutique in Ipswich, MA, ran chaos drafts, so I headed over there two weeks ago to meet a friend and draft.  Sadly, they cancelled the event.  While there, two sisters visiting from Alabama also showed up for the draft.  The four of us decided to head over to Webb Games for their FNM draft scheduled slightly later.  We were the only ones there to draft, so we just held our own 4-person chaos draft.

An excellent smattering of packs from the current standard format.

I managed to get a good amount of color fixing from my picks:

I don't know why I get so hung up on Ivory Tower.  I loved the card many years ago, and it's quite good if you can get it to work... but that's pretty hard to do in draft.

 

From these cards, I built this deck:

Back on the 17-land train this time.

This deck was problematic, but really fun to play.  I did a great job of picking lands from across all the sets, which made things work out well.  I didn't have much of a hard time fixing colors, and in multiple games I had WUBRG on or before turn 5!  I do think I was too excited to take the battles; I probably should have gone for the multi-color flip-creatures instead.

Some of the great cards (aside from the lands) were:

• Invasion of Zendikar: Explosive Vegetation has been real good for drafting WUBRG.  This is even better.
• Roaring Earth was just amazing.  It's good both either early game or late game and it works especially well with the auto-fetch lands from New Capenna.
• Big Score helped me fix mana and my hand.  Excellent!
• Raffine was an excellent payoff for going five colors, though in one game I had to stop attacking because I nearly decked myself.
  

I lost the first round to my friend, who won the whole thing 3-0.  I lost the second round as well, but won the third round.  The three of us tied in a cycle, each beating one of the other two.  Sadly I don't remember more about these matches, as it was two weeks ago!

However, the true winner of the draft was not my friend, but my last opponent.  That round was great, because she managed to draft a tribal deck in a chaos draft!  Her rat tribe had: Karumonix, which gifted her other rats toxic; Blightbelly Rat; Nezumi Freewheeler; and one at least one other, which I think was Nezumi Prowler.  Amazing!

I hope I get to do more chaos drafts and post about them here!

LotR: Tales of Middle-Earth WUBRG Draft #2

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to draft Tales of Middle-Earth again, so I took it.  This time I was playing at Webb Games in Topsfield, MA, which is a really nice and clean store.  They run Monday night drafts, and 20 people showed up.  (I wish more places near me ran non-FNM drafts!)

We split into two pods of 10.  I think I was lucky enough to be the only person drafting WUBRG in the store.  Here's what I grabbed:

Picks, left-to-right and front-to-back.

This was a really fun set of cards to play with.  I didn't have a great base of creatures, but there were plenty of other things to make up for it.  Here's the deck I built:

Deck.  I've been risking it and going with 16 lands lately.

The usual color-fixing suspects continued to be very helpful, but there were some extra great cards:

• Mirkwood Spider: Deathtouch blockers give me time to get into my colors and draw the bombs.
• Ent-Draught Basin: This card was great in limited.  +1/+1 counters are great.  I even used it on an opponent's creature to remove it with Eowyn, Fearless Knight.
• The best card was easily Anduril, which I won multiple games with.
   

I won my first round, though I don't remember what the deck was like that I played against.  (Sorry, it was two weeks ago!)  I won both games with Anduril.  In the second of those wins, my opponent destroyed it, but I got it back with Rise of the Witch-King.  

I drew my second round.  My opponent had Horn of Gondor, which is really good, and which he aggressively mulliganed to.  We each took a game, but didn't finish game three.  After turns had finished, he tried hard to convince me to throw game three to him, because he thought he would have been able to win if we kept going.  I didn't go for it, and I don't know whether I should have gone along with it.

I felt confident in the third round, but it was not to be.  I won game 1, but lost both games 2 and 3.  They played a permissive Azorius deck and kept my things tapped down.  I sided in Ioreth, but they did a good job of keeping Sting off the board and closed out the round in strangling fashion.  All three of these games were close, though!

This continues to be a really fun set to draft!  I think I could do better than 1-1-1, and I should probably prioritize land cyclers over some of the other fixing.  Of particular note here, I didn't draft any Lorien Revealed, which is an absolute house of a card.

I did hear from others that this set might be losing some interest drafting-wise, but I really hope I get to do it at least once more!

Notorious WUBRG: LotR: Tales of Middle-Earth Draft

I missed the first week of drafts, but got out on Friday (June 30) for my first LotR draft.  TL;DR: I went 1-2 and I love this set for WUBRG drafting.

Going in to this draft, I had played at the prerelease, so I knew about the landcycling cycle, Shire Terrace, and Wizard's Rockets.  I only managed to pull three land cyclers, one terrace, and two of the rockets, but I also grabbed two Wose Pathfinders, an Inherited Envelope, a Shire Scarecrow, and even a Delighted Halfling!  For everything else, I focused mostly on picking rares, legends, and removal.

Picks, first to last, first pack on left.

I actually found that I had too much additional color fixing, and didn't run the Delighted Halfling nor the Inherited Envelope.  Here was the final version of the deck:

My deck.  The curve was pretty low, but that was okay.

This was super fun.  I never wound up activating the ability on the Mines of Moria, but that didn't hold me back.  

I lost my first match 0-2 to a really well-focused Blue/Green Scrying Elves.  There were real good cards for that in our six-person pod, and my opponent kept dropping relevant legends over and over.  I managed to draw both games out longer than I had any right to, but still got overrun big time.

In the second round, I won 2-0 against White/Green Hobbits & Food.  My opponent was never able to get any big pieces together and I had real good answers to everything they played.  After the match they threw two more colors into their deck and we played another game.  That actually worked really well for them because they had drafted 4 Entish Restoration, which I had either ignored or not seen.  That card is real good!  (Not as good as Harrow, but better than Roiling Regrowth.)  

The third round, against Black-Red, was the closest.  I won game 1 handily, but (finally) had trouble with colors in games 2 and 3 and lost 1-2.  All three rounds were fun.

Tales of Middle-Earth in General

This set may be one of the best for 5-color drafting, because it isn't a core strategy.  For many recent sets (e.g. March of the Machines and Dominaria United) there are other people at the table drafting WUBRG, which makes it more difficult.  That was not the case here.  If you go for it, you're likely not competing for a bunch of fixing.  This is very similar to the problems I had drafting Ravnica Allegiance after Guilds of Ravnica.  I rarely ran into people drafting five colors in guilds, but they were all over the place in allegiance, even though there was only slightly more payoff in that second set. 

Additionally, this is a slower, grindier format than some drafts.  You are likely to have some time to build up your mana base and play the bombs you pulled.

Having said all that, there is actually a wealth of color-fixing in the set.  Here's a quick run-down of my favorites, from best to worst:

• Lórien Revealed: Big blue draw spells are one of the reasons to run a bunch of colors.  These cards often sit in packs way late and can resolving one can easily result in a win.  Combine that with the land cycling, and you've got a real winner.  Draft this card.
• Shire Scarecrow: A colorless creature that filters mana and can block pesky bears is awesome.  The one I had got me out of a bunch of jams, to the point where my opponent had to kill it with removal.
• The rest of the land-cyclers: Creatures are good.  If you need the land instead, then you can do that.   
• Shire Terrace: Yes, fetching colors is good in a land.
  
• Entish Restoration: I never played this in the draft, but Harrow was good.  

Those are all great cards for a non-WUBRG-enabling set, and that doesn't include the Wizard's Rockets and the Wose Pathfinders, both of which are also great.  This set is more WUBRGy than people realize.

Give it a try!  I'm not going to get to FNM again for a bunch of weeks, so you won't be competing with me.