Open the Ikoria pack first. Open the Ikoria pack first. Open the Ikoria pack first...
I held a four-person chaos draft last night. It went really well, but I need to learn an important lesson: Open the Ikoria pack first.
I got pretty lucky, because I lost a lot of dual lands to the other drafters early on, especially in pack 1. That is usually the worst thing for me, but in this case, it turned out to be great. I got fewer dual lands, instead got some higher spell picks, and that helped me in all of my games. I needed nearly every spell I could get. And it's all because of Ikoria.
Here are my picks. If you look at the first card I picked in the second pack, you'll see that I needed to pump the brakes on dual lands and focus on as many spells as possible. (First pack is on the left, picks go from front to back.)
Yorion called out a challenge to me and I took them up on it. Thankfully that was the first card of pack 2 so I had barely enough time to draft the spells to play a 60-card deck. If I had opened Ikoria third or if my table had passed me more dual lands in pack 1, I might have been stuck with some real bad cards. I even pushed it a little bit and took the fancy Kamigawa island instead of a spell midway through pack 2. As it is, I ran 35 of the 39 spells I drafted, not including Yorion. My sideboard only had 3 spells! (I really wanted to run Goblin Test Pilot, but I just didn't think it was good enough.)
I also got lucky because I got passed a bunch of removal. Red was underdrafted at the table, and I was able to grab Voltage Surge, Fires of Victory, and Foray of Orcs all pretty late. I think I undervalued Foundry Helix; I probably should have run that too.
Here's the deck I ran:
We got a bit of a late start, so we only got to play about half of the games. We finished round 1 and then played one game in round 2.
My first match was against a strong Golgari deck with a bit of graveyard recursion. Both games were wars of attrition. In the first game, removal on both sides kept big creatures off of the board for the most part. I tried to remove Glissa, Sunslayer with a kicked Fires of Victory during combat, only for Bombadil's Song to not only keep Glissa alive, but fizzle the Fires, negating my draw. They drew off the combat damage for an effective 3-for-1 play. I luckily had Fog on the Barrow-Downs in my hand, which stuck for the rest of the game. I forced a good trade with Efreet Flamepainter and managed to pull ahead with Yorion's help.
In game 2, I mulliganed down to 5, but got really lucky on my draws. Jelenn Sphinx came out, but got Possessed Sinisterly, so I kept off the attacks for a while. Once I had a chance to get Yorion out, the Sinister Possession came off the sphinx and I was able to attack and force some trades, all while Smeagol, Helpful Guide was out. I gave the sphinx the ring and once I was twice-tempted, I got to start looting, which put me on top enough to win the game.
We only had time for one game of round 2, where I was matched up against a brutal Esper deck with lots of menace. Thankfully my removal all showed up. Foray of Orcs, Deal Gone Bad, and Immolation all picked off targets, with a Fire Prophecy waiting in the wings when I swung out for lethal.
I got real lucky last night, but I'm really glad I took up Yorion's challenge!
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