I got another chaos draft in. I didn't have a good theme, but I did run a WUBRG deck with little green. That's a bit rare for the maybe obvious reason that green is good at mana fixing.
We had seven people, which, for an odd number of people, has a nice drafting property: if you open a 15-card pack (as opposed to 14) you get that extra "pick" at the end of the round. We also agreed to do single-game rounds again. (Though I expect my group may be getting a bit tired of that.) Here's what we opened:
I am officially stuck in the Ikoria-first rut.
My pack-1-pick-1 was a mana (fixer) dork, Humble Naturalist, that I didn't end up using, mostly because it was in green. Here are all of my picks:
I tried to find a good theme as I was drafting and failed over and over. First strikers with Kwende didn't pan out. Neither did Evolving Door. (I didn't even take any colorless creatures!) I actually first-picked the Humble Naturalist over Frondland Felidar, which I regretted as vigilant creature after vigilant creature came through the packs.
However, I still got a ton of removal that served me very well. Additionally, Lorien Revealed, Mental Journey, and Unfathomable Truths kept my hand refilled. Here's the deck I built:
(My apologies; I failed to take a lot of photos this time! That means my memory of the details for some of them is a bit hazy.)
In the first round, I was paired up against a Golgari deck, and I drew into all the removal I needed, including
Holy Cow as a flash-in blocker. Not to mention I learned just how good
Sentinel of the Nameless City is. 1-0.
In the second round, I was matched up with a Mardu opponent who often goes WUBRG, but just couldn't force it this time. (I'm sure that's partly why I actually got lands!) This was a long fight, but I managed to pull it off, thanks again to my plentiful removal. 2-0.
In the third round I was up against a fast Boros deck. This time
Nimble Brigand showed off, as each piece of removal made it unblockable, meaning it was sneaking in for
Ophidian-level card advantage. I feel like I kept playing removal, then drawing a replacement removal spell off the Brigand to get me ready to kill next turn's creature. 3-0.
The fourth round was extra fun because my opponent had managed to build two functional decks: Orzhov and Gruul. (That seems really hard to pull off!) I didn't know about the second deck and definitely struggled against the Orzhov, as it got down some efficient small creatures that kept me on my back foot, but I managed to pull it off. 4-0. Bonus: we played again, but with the Gruul deck. That was wicked fun. I took a lot of early damage, but was stabilizing at 9. Then they played
Kogla and Yidaro, and haste-smashed my face down to 2. I played
Mirrorhall Mimic on my next turn and had them fight as though it was the
second-incarnation of the legend rule. After that,
Obscura Initiate was able to get in for damage while bringing my life total back up, slowly but surely until I won.
The fifth round happened in a make-up round today. This needs a little bit of explanation: after I had great success with
Keruga earlier in the week, one of the other drafters followed the Ikoria-first plan. They were lucky enough to open a companion:
Lurrus, and drafted around it, resulting in what they described as a "really bad Lurrus deck" in Esper. In our match they out-removaled me, showing off a wealth of 2-mana prison-effect-enchantments. Although I killed Lurrus as soon as it appeared (they never attacked with it all night) they were able to keep me on my back foot deep into the game.
I dragged it out with all of my own removal, but couldn't keep up with their quantity of creatures. 4-1.
What fun! My deck was really fun to play and I had a good balance of mana-fixing lands and two powerful blue landcyclers to boot. Once again removal was the key to victory, but perhaps I should switch up the packs I choose and get out of the rut I'm in. Until next time, happy magicking!
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