I was just in the most chaotic draft I've ever participated in. In a good way, for sure. And it was in a store! And then I did another one!
I went to Krum's World for their 1pm Friday draft today. I found out about it last week. I didn't go, but while exchanging emails with the owners last week, I learned that they often run chaos drafts and then play multiplayer games starting at 30 life. That sounded right in line with the kind of thing I'd like, so I planned to go today.
There were seven people ready to do the draft. That meant that after drafting we were going to be splitting into a three-person game and a four-person game. We were then asked whether we wanted to do three draft/play boosters or a single jumpstart pack followed by two draft/play boosters, which was something they had done at least once before.
I decided immediately that I was just "Along for the ride" and would do whatever the consensus was. If you go to participate there, I highly recommend adopting that mindset. It was chill and fun and light-hearted. That attitude will go far. I think that most of the people I played with had limited magic experience; multiple people told me they had been playing about a week.
The consensus was for the Jumpstart option: we opened one Jumpstart pack followed by drafting two packs in the group. I picked a Foundations Jumpstart pack and a March of the Machines and Bloomburrow boosters. Other packs people picked, starting to my left and going around, were:
- Brothers' War Jumpstart, March of the Machines, Aetherdrift
- OG Jumpstart, Bloomburrow, Bloomburrow
- OG Jumpstart, Bloomburrow, Duskmourn
- OG Jumpstart, Duskmourn, Bloomburrow
- Foundations Jumpstart, Duskmourn, Aetherdrift
- Foundations Jumpstart, Bloomburrow, Bloomburrow
We opened the Jumpstart packs first, I got the Ninjas pack, a Blue-colored set, which was pretty cool. (I wish I had gotten the Multicolor pack, but that would have been a bit too amazing.) After opening Jumpstart, some people swapped out the packs they were going to open to draft, which is a cool idea I've toyed with in the past, and made a lot of sense so people could adapt to what their Jumpstart was. (Thus, my list above is certainly a little bit wrong.)
Then we got to drafting. I figured I would need a lot of mana fixing to "balance out" the amount of Blue I would need to run, so I picked lands quickly. I also knew that evasion would be more important in multiplayer than in duel-magic.
I asked whether we were zone drafting. Zone drafting is when only one pack is allowed to be in transit between any two players while drafting. This means that if one player finishes a pack and there's already a pack waiting for the next player, they have to hold on to theirs in their hand until that space opens up. They didn't know what Zone Drafting is here, and seemed to be okay with packs piling up. Thankfully it didn't get too bad.
On the good side, there was lots of friendly table talk during the drafting. It was clear this group liked to do weird stuff, which is just excellent.
With all that in mind, here are all the cards I got:
And then we got another surprise. We each picked a color and then got a random promo card from that color for our decks. I picked blue and got Aether Channeler, which seemed really strong in combination with Ninjutsu and especially with the Gossip's Talent I got.
Here's the deck I built from this:
This was a real five-color ninjas deck. I was psyched.
I got slotted into the three-player pod game. My opponents were wicked nice: a Golgari deck with some graveyard recursion to my left, and a Boros deck with some surprisingly fast hitters on my right. I got Nightveil Sprite out on turn two, which I planned to do some ninja shenanigans with. Unfortunately, it got Chainsawed, a card itself which gathered seven counters over the course of the game. I got stuck without green for a bit then, while the Boros player got Cleon out and hit me for eight with the help of Mirran Banesplitter. I got Aether Channeler down and drew Hidden Grotto! The next turn I killed Cleon with Invasion of Ulgrotha and made the Golgari player defend it.
I did that because all this time the Golgari player had been stuck on one land. He drew his second swamp on turn six and started to draw more lands thereafter. He cast Deep-Cavern Bat that turn, a good creature in a multiplayer game like this. On my next turn, I dropped Rocketeer Boostbuggy, which turned out to be vital. I needed those treasures and cast-ninjas were at least good at crewing! On my next turn I killed the battle, freeing Grandmother Ravi Sengir, who slowly built up counters. I also got Prosperous Thief out and gathered even more treasures. Unfortunately, the Boros player was stuck on four land just as the Golgari player was starting to take off.
On my next turn I got to four treasure tokens. You know who likes four tokens? Baylen does. I played him and then passed the turn. At the end of the Boros player's turn, I tapped the four treasures to throw the counters on Baylen. There was no doubt at that point, I was definitely the archenemy. (Maybe I should have put Skithiryx in after all.)
I started swinging in then, trying to keep my opponents at relatively even life totals. I was still attacking very conservatively for two turns, but then the Boros player dropped Mirrorwing Dragon on their eleventh turn. I have played with Zada many times. I know how that card works. I also knew that they had Unleash Fury in their hand, because it had been exiled by the Deep-Cavern Bat and come back.
I didn't have the time to keep being conservative. I swung in big at the Golgari player, killing them with Baylen's trampling power. I still had a bunch of blockers and a lot of life. Either the Boros player didn't know what they could do with that Unleash Fury or they didn't think they had enough to take me out, but they didn't attack all in, instead tapping out to get . On my next turn (I think turn thirteen) I bounced the dragon with Moonsnare Specialist. Ravi Sengir was big enough to kill him by itself, so I sent her in and won.
That game was wicked fun. My two opponents were super nice and the game wound up being pretty close. The other pod finished and then I was asked whether I'd stay for another one.
Heck yes.
We were supposed to start at 4pm, but didn't actually get to setting it up until closer to 4:45. We had five total drafters, which meant we were going to do a single game of five instead of combinations of three and four.
Looking back, perhaps I should have suggested a Star draft. It didn't cross my mind... Kingdom did, but that seemed like it would be too complicated. A star draft would have been great in this instance, though.
This time the group was not interested in the Jumpstart option and we instead decided to all draft Bloomburrow. That made things hard for me, for sure! To speed things up, we did two picks at a time. That's not my favorite, but I was just along for the ride.
The mana-fixing was few and far between. There isn't a nice cycle of common dual lands. I did manage to get a Hidden Grotto and two Three-Tree Mascots, which promised to help a lot. Here's everything I picked:
Lately I've been drafting so many non-basic lands that I haven't had to make a ton of cuts, but that wasn't the case here. I spent too long, trying to decide whether to keep any cards with double-pips of the same color. In the end, I put this deck together:
If this had been a duel, I might have chosen to draw instead of play. As it turned out, I didn't need to worry. I had three different basics in my opening hand, drew a fourth on the second turn, and used Heaped Harvest to grab the last one, my solo mountain. This led to natural WUBRG on turn four, and a Barkform Harvester to boot.
At this point we found ourselves in a time crunch. A big storm had picked up, the lights flickered a bit, and one person had a dog at home. We needed to try and finish as close to 7pm as possible. I think two people ran three colors, one ran four, and one (aside from me) ran five. Given the hurry, I don't think anyone noticed that I was successfully in five colors. My Hidden Grotto showed up and I barely had to worry about colors at all.
Play became sloppy here as we rushed to finish, mostly around suboptimal attacks. The player to my left had Sinister Monolith down for many turns. I tried to focus my attacks on them and whoever had the most life. Flyers were in the spotlight; everyone wanted to know who had flying blockers each combat. I had had Tangle Tumbler down and tried to get a +1/+1 counter on one of my creatures each turn, especially since I had trouble drawing into creatures. Unfortunately that put a target on my creatures. The Barkform Harvester died shortly after it hit 5/6. It was around this point that our first player died.
I wish we could have played the game to the end, but we ran out of time. We agreed that after a final round we would give it to the player with the most life. I was going second-to-last and it was clear that the last player was going to swing out at me. On my turn I attacked with my Wax-Wane Witness and an unblockable Three-Tree Mascot, but the bat flew back to my library due to a Dire Downdraft. I put myself into the top life spot, but I was vulnerable without my flying blocker.
The last player swung out at me, but I still had some tricks up my sleeve. I cast Sonar Strike and Take Out the Trash. That three life and the loss of an attacker kept me at the top of the life game.
I really don't like ending the game that way. Especially in multiplayer, having a slight life advantage when everyone is around ten life is not that big of an actual advantage. I wish we could have taken our time and really talked through the potential outcomes of everything, especially with the newer players. Everyone was really cool about going over what could happen in different situations, so it could have really been good. However, I understand there were outside forces causing us to stop.
I don't think there are a lot of WUBRG lessons here. I drafted lots of land in the first game and that worked out well. For the second game, Heaped Harvest was perfect for me and I took it from there. I think I got pretty lucky.
Krum's is a bit of a hike for me, but this was exactly the chill way I like to play magic. I hope I can make the trip again and experience whatever chaos they decide to run.
Happy Magicking!
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