I managed a nice little chaos draft on a Sunday afternoon. I followed my own advice from last time (and Logan did too) and opened Ixalan first. (Ace actually mentioned that if you open March of the Machines, you have a higher probability of getting a Companion... I will definitely be keeping that in mind!)
Here's what we opened. (I picked the same three packs as last time. I have fallen into a chaos rut.)
Lost Caverns of Ixalan has its pre-release at the end of this week, so people wanted to open some old Ixalan.
I did not get a companion to build around this time, sadly. Nevertheless, I got passed a bunch of cards that seemed great for five colors; I didn't have to make many very hard picks. Then, however, in the third pack, I opened one of the most valuable cards I've opened in a draft: The One Ring. Here are all my picks:
Immediately in a sleeve.
I had plenty of non-basic lands this time around. I quickly built this deck. (I needed all the islands in order to have any chance to cast Invoke the Winds.)
With an odd number of people, I prefer to do single-game rounds and see how many people we can each match up with. We managed to get all 10 matches in!
In the first round, I was up against a first-time drafter running a well-built Golgari deck. The game was running pretty even, with creatures dying on both sides evenly. I spent a turn getting
Sharknado down, then got played
Vivisurgeon's Insight the following turn to get my 5/5 Flying Shark.
The Infinitokens got a work out today!
See that
Rise of the Witch-King in the picture? It killed my Shark immediately and gave my opponent a big beatstick back from the yard. Thankfully, the three cards I drew made the difference, and I popped out a bunch more creatures and overwhelmed them.
These were all from that one game!
In game 2, I was matched up against a Temur value deck. I started off by trading over and over again with
Master of Death. Nevertheless, I fell behind in the life totals quickly, but I felt like I was about to stabilize when I lost to a spell I can't remember that made my opponent's creatures unblockable that killed me at 5.
In game 3, I was matched against another first-time drafter piloting a Grixis deck. Sadly, they got extremely mana flooded, even with a number of card draws. I managed to overwhelm them before they could get into normal card mode. I did draw The One Ring midway through the game, but I had enough cards in hand that it didn't seem necessary to play.
In game 4, I fought the only undefeated player at the table, playing a Boros Aggro Humans deck.
Perimeter Sergeant kept got on the board and kept getting past my blockers, especially after
Eowyn, Lady of Rohan came down and granted it first strike every turn. I got some chump blockers in, trying to get something that would survive a flow from the Sergeant, but it kept getting bigger power with the help of equipment and counters. I had a
Chrome Courier made bigger by
Lagrella. I got
Wingspan Mentor down, but had to spend my man doing things other than activating it. Finally I got Sharknado again, which meant fliers and blockers to keep things in check. I think I was able to win two turns later.
I went 3-1 and with that win had a three-way draw with the Boros and Temur players. I guess that is a downside of single-game rounds: the lack of tiebreakers.
This was a super fun draft! All the decks seemed really good, and I escaped just barely. (I won one of the games at 1 life... but I don't remember which one it was. I'm sure someone will remind me. In the future, there'll probably be an update after this.)
