I got another chaos draft in this week. We had a smaller group, four drafters, and had a blast. Someone said this was their favorite way to play magic, and I agreed completely. We picked twelve different packs! Here's what we opened:
I picked removal pretty highly, even over some rares and fixing. The most important picks, however, were the first two I made: Raffine and Boon-Bringer Valkyrie. Thankfully some good mana-fixing made it back around the table. This was made a lot easier because (for the first time in forever) I wasn't fighting anyone for WUBRG supremacy.
After taking Gwaihir, I tried to build a bit of bird-kindred. After that I had two chances to add Balmor to my pile, but I turned it down for Artillery Blast and then Pixie Illusionist. As much as I like Balmor, I think those were the right choices. Here are my picks:
I nearly cut the Valkyrie while deck building. Luckily I was heaviest in white, so I figured it would be okay to keep the two-pip spell in. (I did cut the Unexpected Windfall, though I was torn about it.) Here's the deck I put together: (I really think I could have built this better, please feel free to critique my choices!)
In the first round I was up against a Simic player. In the first game, I got Raffine out, but it got put into Witness Protection. (That is such a good card, and I think they played it in most of their games!) That was a bit sad, but they got hit with the mana screw, so I had plenty of time. I got Thran Power Suit on my Legitimate Businessperson, so the Witness Protection helped pump it up a little bit. After a bit, I also got Hulking Metamorph down, which was happy to become a Raffine.
In the second game, instead of having a dearth of land, my opponent got flooded. I got the Boon-Bringer Valkyrie down, which was almost enough to win on its own. 1-0.
Note: we knew we were going to try and get all three rounds in, so we purposefully avoided matching up the two winners for the second round. (I like doing this because then the draft winner might not be decided after the second round.)
In our second round I was up against a Jund deck, which was extremely surprising because this player always drafts a savage white weenie horde that often runs me over early in our games. Well, this was an efficient Jund weenie horde, and some of them got pretty brutal.
1/1? No, this is a 7/3 Blazing Rootwalla.
Nevertheless, I had enough removal to stay alive. The Valkyrie won me the first game and Raffine came in early to win me the second. The Valkyrie is a bomb the turn it comes in and Raffine is a bomb if it sticks around to attack. I won both games. 2-0.
In the third and final round, I was up against Jund deck #2! Like... what??? This time I made good use of Mimic, which I ran primarily for the mana fixing, but then never sacrificed it all night. In the first game, I won with the air supremacy of the Valkyrie and Gwaihir. In the second game, my opponent used two cards (Morgul-Knife Wound and Cut Down) to kill the Valkyrie. That was probably the right choice! Thankfully, my Hoarding Ogre did a lot of work and helped me power out the rest of my team. Raffine got to play with four +1/+1 counters on it. I was pitching removal to keep other removal with the connive triggers and won again. 3-0.
This deck was wicked fun to play. I'm definitely branching out from needing to be green-centered, which makes sense now that there's more support in other colors as well.
I'm still addicted, though. I hope I get to draft again soon!
No comments:
Post a Comment