Neapolitan Commander Draft

I went to a Neapolitan Commander Draft last night.  Each of the six of us opened, in order, Commander Legends, Commander Legends: Baldur's Gate, and Commander Masters.  This was a great idea that one of our students came up with.

Six Neapolitan Commander Draft sets

 

We included an important Commander Masters draft rule that I didn't know about: Mono-colored and Colorless legendary creatures are considered to have Partner, even if they don't have it on the card.  Thankfully, one of our alums knew this rule!  Since we were including Baldur's Gate, we added the rule that those legends also have Choose a Background to help facilitate more card and color combinations. 

By my count, there are 7 total legends in the sets who have WUBRG color identity, and... I didn't see any of them.  However, I was lucky enough to get passed an Archelos, Lagoon Mystic right away in the first pack.  Although I focused on the Sultai from that point, I took plenty of cards of other colors just in case I saw a WUBRG legend come up.  I also spent a little bit of effort on collecting gates, but only got three.  (Don't worry, it made a difference later!)  Here are my picks:  (Reminder: in a Commander Draft, you pick two cards instead of one each time you see a pack.)

First picks in front.  Left: pack 1; Right: pack 3.

In the end I didn't take enough Sultai cards.  Minimum deck size in a Commander Draft is 60 cards; the usual balance is somewhere around 24 lands and 36 spells.  Including Archelos, I only had 34 spells.  Deckbuilding was very fast; I took all the cards I could play and added five each of the relevant lands.  Here's the resulting deck:

I like these spells, but I needed more.

The eleven non-basic lands were a great boon, and they're even better with Archelos: all the tap lands enter untapped!  Opal Palace is amazing; two copies are even better.  The multi-color lands made up for the few colorless lands I had.  Some of my picks helped make up for the lack of spells, but all too often I found myself with my hand full of lands.  

We formed two random groups of 3 for our games and got to playing.  In Game 1, I was pitted against Belbe and Miara + Saervok.  Saervok hit the board and the life totals started to drop quickly.  I got Archelos down and managed to swing with it every turn, which kept my opponents slowed down.  (It also had Armory of Iroas, so it kept getting bigger.)  Scion of Halaster helped me filter out the many lands.  The life totals continued to drop; we each tried to get one of our creatures killed on each of our turns to avoid losing three life to Saervok.  (Having Miara with ways to kill her was a pretty good combo with Saervok!)  The Belbe player started to drop a lot of threats, so the Miara/Saervok player focused on them and took them out with 11 life left.  

Archelos got killed and I replayed it, but with four +1/+1 counters using both of my Opal Palaces.  On the next turn, I drew and played a second Basilisk Gate, then proceeded to use all of the cards I had except for one land to win the game.  

• For four mana, I played the last card in my hand, Manifold Key, and activated it to make Archelos unblockable.
• For four more mana, I activated both Basilisk Gates to give Archelos +4/+4.  (Now it had 10 power.) 
  
• I created an elf with Freyalise, then immediately sacrificed it to Ashnod's Altar to reequip Archelos with the Armory of Iroas.  
• With only one untapped land remaining, Archelos swung for the necessary 11 to end the game.

Our game ended fast, so we started another one while the other game was finishing.  This time my opponents were more wary of Archelos and I couldn't get it to stick for long.  When I did, I greedily used it to attack instead of as a blocker.  (I wanted their stuff to be tapped, but also to cash in on the extra Belbe-mana.)  The Belbe player got some good card draw going with Mask of Memory.  They soon got Giant Ankheg on the board, which got the two of us to attack each other even more.  When the Ankheg started swinging, I had no good means to soak the damage, so I died first.  Belbe died a few times on attacks.  The Miara + Saervok player was able to remove the Ankheg from the board and it looked like they would win, but the Belbe player drew into Exsanguinate and had enough to win with that alone.  

The other group had already finished and three people had to call it a night.  (I think the winning player over there won by dealing 23 damage to one player on the last turn!)  The remaining three of us were me, Belbe, and a player from the other group running Captain Vargus Wrath.  We got in one final game before even I needed to call it a night.  

I used Belbe-mana to power out Goliath Sphinx on turn 5.  I swang with it back and forth to keep my opponents' life low.  (I had confused Exsanguinate with Bond of Agony, so I was determined to keep the Belbe player at a life total below both of ours.)  The Vargus player built Izzet pirates well, however, and they got a group of dangerous flying creatures that kept me low as well.  I spent a bunch of turns drawing only lands. 

As the end of the game drew near, Vargus sent most of their army into the red zone.  One attacker threatened my exact life total against my tapped board, while the rest came at Belbe.  I used Sword Coast Serpent's Capsizing Wave to last another turn while the Belbe player perished.  On my next turn, I swung back, hoping my Treasure Keeper would meet a glorious end and find some more flying blockers (or anything) but my opponent chose correctly and it just went unblocked, along with the sphinx.  I then sacrificed to Ashnod's Altar and got Clockwork Fox.  I immediately threw that on the altar and got... more lands.  I died to flying pirates directly thereafter.  I don't think I had a path to survive that turn.  

I'm pretty happy with the one win I got.  More importantly, Neapolitan Commander Draft is an awesomely fun format!  I combines the fun elements of EDH with the unpredictability of Chaos Drafts.   If you choose to partake, I recommend using the rule we adopted: All colorless and mono-colored legendary creatures automatically have Partner and Choose a Background.  If your group does something different that works well, please leave a comment and let me know!  I am sure you will come upon some cool new unexpected interactions.  

Note: Thanks to Tristan for thinking of the name: Neapolitan Commander Draft.

Wilds of Eldraine: WUBRG Drafting

Drafts have not been firing at my prior FNM haunt of choice due to a sudden exodus of players.  (There's more behind this that I won't get into, suffice to say that the ad-hoc boycott seems justified.)  

Thankfully, a local group formed in response and I was invited to join in for a Wilds of Eldraine draft on Friday, which was during release weekend.  This was super fun and I got to know a bunch of people really well.  

Here's what I drafted in the 8-person group.  The left pile is the first pack, right is the third.  The picks go from first in front to last in the back.  (Sorry for the glare.)

That first pick Hatching Plans turned out to be just fine.

I prioritized Hatching Plans because I had taken a look at the spoiler and knew I could probably pick up some bargain-based cards.  As it turned out, I did manage to get a few, most notably the Diminisher Witch, which turned out to be extremely useful.  Other than that, I grabbed stuff that seemed good or might be good. 

Here was my deck after the matches ended:

That empty sleeve is in place of the third Diminisher Witch that I must have lost after the last match.

I probably should have run the second Brave the Wilds, but I forgot about it.  Also, initially my deck contained Wicked Visitor, Johann's Stopgap, and Rowan's Grim Search, but I sided them out partway through round 2 for the Flick a Coin, Compulsion, and Break the Spell.  I never cast the Wicked Visitor or Rowan's Grim Search, but the three spells I put in definitely should have been there from the start.  Especially Compulsion.  I ran four of them in a standard deck back in 2003, so I know how to use the card, especially for cycling lands away late in the game.  For the other two, Break the Spell is great against roles and Flick the Coin is tremendously good.  Especially when drafting WUBRG, and even more especially when having a bunch of bargain cards that would like to sacrifice a token.  The most important thing for this deck is that every time I cast Hatching Plans, I wound up drawing three cards off of it.  It was absolutely amazing.

In the first round I matched up against a fast Boros deck.  I think I lost 1-2, but it could be 0-2.  Either way I put up a good fight.  I definitely made some play mistakes, most notably using a Diminisher Witch to put a Cursed Role token on Kellan, the Fae-Blooded.  That was a problem because it counted toward's Kellan's bonus as well as didn't cause an opponent's role to fall off.  (Important: roles only replace others if they are controlled by the same player!)  Future note: Shrouded Shepherd is really good, and caught me off guard multiple times!  I should draft those.

In the second round, I faced off against a brutal Azorius deck that kept tapping my creatures down.  This is apparently a really good strategy against me, as evidenced by my loss earlier this summer to a similar style deck.  Solitary Sanctuary came out just about every game and was really hard to play around.  I won a close game 1, got steamrolled in game 2, and then got really lucky in game 3 to sneak out a second win. 

In the third round, I matched up against an Esper deck with lots of rats, including Lord Skitter.  In this match, I had more time to set things up, so Hatching Plans and Diminsher Witch both turned out to be extremely useful.  The games went the same as round 2: I won games 1 and 3 to round out another match win.  Unlike my other rounds, all three games were extremely tight.  I played a lot better and started to use Diminisher Witch as post-combat removal against creatures that blocked with a high toughness.

This was a really great and chill event.  Everyone was super nice and the stakes were happily low.  I felt pretty good about going 2-1 in my first WOE draft, even though all of my wins were squeaked out.  I hope I get to draft with this group again!

Chaos for Store Championships: WUBRG drafting

My usual Magic haunt wasn't running a draft last night, but another nearby store, Intergalactic Plastic, was running a Chaos Draft, so I went there instead.  I had been to the store before and picked up some cards, but I had never played there.  The draft was for their store championships; the person running it told me they like to hold chaos drafts for championship events.  

I thought there were lots of people there, but it turns out most of them were playing EDH and weren't there for the draft, which I think had ten people.  Most, if not all, of my match opponents were commander players first and foremost. 

In this chaos draft, everyone was given the same three packs, Brothers' War, March of the Machines, and LotR Tales of Middle Earth, to be opened in that order.  (Perhaps I don't have to abandon the term "Wacky Draft", and can keep using that to mean three packs from any sets, chosen by each player.)  I love drafting all three of these packs, so I was excited.

I definitely undervalued some of the mana fixing and didn't get a second look at many of the land cyclers that I probably should have taken.  I didn't see many dual lands; I think I only saw one that I didn't take.  On the other hand, I saw a lot of big bomby creatures, so I took them.  Here were my picks:

Picks, by pack, left-to-right and front-to-back

I got some really big cards late, including the Goreclaw and the Argivian Avenger.  Even the Blanchwood Prowler, a last pick, turned out to be very helpful.  

Lately I've been running 16 lands with lots of color-fixing, but since I didn't get much fixing, I ran 17 lands instead, hoping I could go slow and play the game out until I could drop my big creatures.  I didn't wind up running Su-Chi Cave Guard, and I'm not sure whether that was a mistake on my part.  In the end, I was surprisingly low on blue spells this time around.  Here was my deck at the end (I don't think I made any changes during the tournament):

I should have taken the picture from further overhead.  Oops!

In the first round I was matched up against someone I'd played half an EDH game with directly before the draft.  He had put together an aggressive Boros deck.  I relied heavily on my removal to keep myself in the game until I could get my big threats out.  In game one, we were both very mana flooded.  I played Etali late and was able to transform it the following turn for the win.  In game two, Goreclaw helped me power out some early beats and I won again.  

I had a great chat with my first-round opponent while we waited for the second round to start.  It was at this point that I found out we were in a single-elimination tournament!  That's not my favorite, since I'm often on the losing end in the first two rounds and I really like playing. 

In the second round, I matched up with someone who had an absolutely amazing playmat.

Seriously, this is super sweet.

They were running a Rakdos deck and had gotten a bye in the first round so they hadn't played with it yet.  In the first game, they ran out two Mordor Trebuchets on turns 3 and 4.  I have used those to great effect in drafts, so I knew how powerful they were.  Thankfully, I was able to kill their other orcs and I only got hit a few times by flying goblin-boulders.  I managed to get enough big dudes to break the stalemate and win.  They made a bunch of changes to their deck for game 2 and it made a big difference, but I was able to win again.

In the third and final round, I was matched up again against Rakdos!  So much red!  In the first game we were both mana screwed for many turns, but I escaped it faster and won.  In the second game, I didn't get my colors until very late.  I thought I would be able to turn the tide as I drew into my lands, but a couple of unexpected blasts to my head ended it before I could start to play bombs.  In game 3, my opponent was mana screwed again for a few turns, and it gave me enough time to get my big beaters out.  Gandalf the White was a great turn 5 play that let me flash out a bunch of my other six drops.  I had lost a lot of life to efficient little creatures, so I had to be more aggressive than normal, but I was able to clinch the win.

One change I made this time around that I believe made a difference was to choose to draw instead of play.  I did this because I didn't have good fixing and needed to rely on my removal and deathtouch creatures to keep me in the game until I could play bigger things.  Many years ago I used to choose to draw, but most of the past two or three years I've mostly been choosing to play.  

I was really excited to win the tournament!  The prize was a Saruman of Many Colors, which seemed very appropriate! :)  Nevertheless, I felt very awkward having never played there before.  I hope I get to come back and do more drafts! 

Local Chaos Draft (WUBRG drafting)

I ran a chaos draft at the end of this weekend!  (This means I managed to trick three other people into chaos drafting with me.)  Here are the packs we opened:

I keep opening Ikoria hoping for some tri-land goodness.

These were pretty good packs for going five colors.  One of the players was advocating for New Capenna, and that sounded just fine to me!  Here's what I managed to pull:

From left to right, packs 1 to 3.  Pick 1 in front, pick 15 in the back.

I unintentionally drafted a very strong combo in the first two picks of pack 3: Mount Doom and The Mightstone and Weakstone.  

 

After drafting, I noticed what a great combo this was and started praying to Karona that I could pull it off.  Here is my deck:

 

Will 6 non-basics be enough?

 

Aside from the color fixing land, I had:

• A bunch of removal, including Torch Breath, which was a card I didn't know existed.
• Some treasure synergy, with Bootlegger's Stash (which I never saw), Big Score, and Jetmir's Fixer.  
• Some army cards (Grishnakh, Dunland Crebain, and Warbeast of Gorgoroth) to work with Mauhur.  
• And a bit of a deathtouch theme with a Nazgul, a Midnight Assassin, and a Riveteers Initiate. 
  

In round 1, I got matched up against a Gruul deck with a pretty good mana curve.  I managed to get enough removal to squeak out the first game, but we didn't finish the second before time was called.  We ended the five turns without a winner.

 

In round 2, I was up against a Bant deck with lots of mana fixing.  I pushed through a victory in game 1, and then game 2 went to time with a battlefield full of creatures.  In one of the first extra turns, I cast The Mightstone and Weakstone with Mount Doom on the board.  I was ready to clear out the board and swing in for the win.  However, on my opponent's turn, they tapped down my bigger blocker and swung in for the win.

 

In round 3, I matched up against an Esper deck with a lot of good value cards.  I was winning the first game and tapped my attackers out to put my opponent at 1, while I was safely at 13.  Then they played both Shriekdiver and Flowering of the White Tree, just enough to hit me for exactsies.  In game 2, I was on the back foot.  My opponent had gotten an extreme amount of value out of Cirith Ungol Patrol, using it to profit off of the times I had to use my removal on other creatures.  (I never quite had enough to kill the patrol outright.)  Although I had had the upper-hand early on, my opponent was clawing back into the game with all the extra life and card draw.  Then I drew The Mightstone and Weakstone while Mount Doom was on the board.  I activated Mount Doom the following turn and cleared all but my best two creatures, winning the game shortly thereafter.  Yes!  

 

While not quite a WUBRG-based accomplishment, Mount Doom + The Might- and Weakstones seems like a pretty good combo achievement to get in draft.  Also, 1-0-2 is pretty good for me.  

 

Let's hope I get to hold another of these drafts soon!

 

   

Chaos at a store: WUBRG drafting!

I saw that Nostos Boutique in Ipswich, MA, ran chaos drafts, so I headed over there two weeks ago to meet a friend and draft.  Sadly, they cancelled the event.  While there, two sisters visiting from Alabama also showed up for the draft.  The four of us decided to head over to Webb Games for their FNM draft scheduled slightly later.  We were the only ones there to draft, so we just held our own 4-person chaos draft.

An excellent smattering of packs from the current standard format.

I managed to get a good amount of color fixing from my picks:

I don't know why I get so hung up on Ivory Tower.  I loved the card many years ago, and it's quite good if you can get it to work... but that's pretty hard to do in draft.

 

From these cards, I built this deck:

Back on the 17-land train this time.

This deck was problematic, but really fun to play.  I did a great job of picking lands from across all the sets, which made things work out well.  I didn't have much of a hard time fixing colors, and in multiple games I had WUBRG on or before turn 5!  I do think I was too excited to take the battles; I probably should have gone for the multi-color flip-creatures instead.

Some of the great cards (aside from the lands) were:

• Invasion of Zendikar: Explosive Vegetation has been real good for drafting WUBRG.  This is even better.
• Roaring Earth was just amazing.  It's good both either early game or late game and it works especially well with the auto-fetch lands from New Capenna.
• Big Score helped me fix mana and my hand.  Excellent!
• Raffine was an excellent payoff for going five colors, though in one game I had to stop attacking because I nearly decked myself.
  

I lost the first round to my friend, who won the whole thing 3-0.  I lost the second round as well, but won the third round.  The three of us tied in a cycle, each beating one of the other two.  Sadly I don't remember more about these matches, as it was two weeks ago!

However, the true winner of the draft was not my friend, but my last opponent.  That round was great, because she managed to draft a tribal deck in a chaos draft!  Her rat tribe had: Karumonix, which gifted her other rats toxic; Blightbelly Rat; Nezumi Freewheeler; and one at least one other, which I think was Nezumi Prowler.  Amazing!

I hope I get to do more chaos drafts and post about them here!

LotR: Tales of Middle-Earth WUBRG Draft #2

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to draft Tales of Middle-Earth again, so I took it.  This time I was playing at Webb Games in Topsfield, MA, which is a really nice and clean store.  They run Monday night drafts, and 20 people showed up.  (I wish more places near me ran non-FNM drafts!)

We split into two pods of 10.  I think I was lucky enough to be the only person drafting WUBRG in the store.  Here's what I grabbed:

Picks, left-to-right and front-to-back.

This was a really fun set of cards to play with.  I didn't have a great base of creatures, but there were plenty of other things to make up for it.  Here's the deck I built:

Deck.  I've been risking it and going with 16 lands lately.

The usual color-fixing suspects continued to be very helpful, but there were some extra great cards:

• Mirkwood Spider: Deathtouch blockers give me time to get into my colors and draw the bombs.
• Ent-Draught Basin: This card was great in limited.  +1/+1 counters are great.  I even used it on an opponent's creature to remove it with Eowyn, Fearless Knight.
• The best card was easily Anduril, which I won multiple games with.
   

I won my first round, though I don't remember what the deck was like that I played against.  (Sorry, it was two weeks ago!)  I won both games with Anduril.  In the second of those wins, my opponent destroyed it, but I got it back with Rise of the Witch-King.  

I drew my second round.  My opponent had Horn of Gondor, which is really good, and which he aggressively mulliganed to.  We each took a game, but didn't finish game three.  After turns had finished, he tried hard to convince me to throw game three to him, because he thought he would have been able to win if we kept going.  I didn't go for it, and I don't know whether I should have gone along with it.

I felt confident in the third round, but it was not to be.  I won game 1, but lost both games 2 and 3.  They played a permissive Azorius deck and kept my things tapped down.  I sided in Ioreth, but they did a good job of keeping Sting off the board and closed out the round in strangling fashion.  All three of these games were close, though!

This continues to be a really fun set to draft!  I think I could do better than 1-1-1, and I should probably prioritize land cyclers over some of the other fixing.  Of particular note here, I didn't draft any Lorien Revealed, which is an absolute house of a card.

I did hear from others that this set might be losing some interest drafting-wise, but I really hope I get to do it at least once more!

Notorious WUBRG: LotR: Tales of Middle-Earth Draft

I missed the first week of drafts, but got out on Friday (June 30) for my first LotR draft.  TL;DR: I went 1-2 and I love this set for WUBRG drafting.

Going in to this draft, I had played at the prerelease, so I knew about the landcycling cycle, Shire Terrace, and Wizard's Rockets.  I only managed to pull three land cyclers, one terrace, and two of the rockets, but I also grabbed two Wose Pathfinders, an Inherited Envelope, a Shire Scarecrow, and even a Delighted Halfling!  For everything else, I focused mostly on picking rares, legends, and removal.

Picks, first to last, first pack on left.

I actually found that I had too much additional color fixing, and didn't run the Delighted Halfling nor the Inherited Envelope.  Here was the final version of the deck:

My deck.  The curve was pretty low, but that was okay.

This was super fun.  I never wound up activating the ability on the Mines of Moria, but that didn't hold me back.  

I lost my first match 0-2 to a really well-focused Blue/Green Scrying Elves.  There were real good cards for that in our six-person pod, and my opponent kept dropping relevant legends over and over.  I managed to draw both games out longer than I had any right to, but still got overrun big time.

In the second round, I won 2-0 against White/Green Hobbits & Food.  My opponent was never able to get any big pieces together and I had real good answers to everything they played.  After the match they threw two more colors into their deck and we played another game.  That actually worked really well for them because they had drafted 4 Entish Restoration, which I had either ignored or not seen.  That card is real good!  (Not as good as Harrow, but better than Roiling Regrowth.)  

The third round, against Black-Red, was the closest.  I won game 1 handily, but (finally) had trouble with colors in games 2 and 3 and lost 1-2.  All three rounds were fun.

Tales of Middle-Earth in General

This set may be one of the best for 5-color drafting, because it isn't a core strategy.  For many recent sets (e.g. March of the Machines and Dominaria United) there are other people at the table drafting WUBRG, which makes it more difficult.  That was not the case here.  If you go for it, you're likely not competing for a bunch of fixing.  This is very similar to the problems I had drafting Ravnica Allegiance after Guilds of Ravnica.  I rarely ran into people drafting five colors in guilds, but they were all over the place in allegiance, even though there was only slightly more payoff in that second set. 

Additionally, this is a slower, grindier format than some drafts.  You are likely to have some time to build up your mana base and play the bombs you pulled.

Having said all that, there is actually a wealth of color-fixing in the set.  Here's a quick run-down of my favorites, from best to worst:

• Lórien Revealed: Big blue draw spells are one of the reasons to run a bunch of colors.  These cards often sit in packs way late and can resolving one can easily result in a win.  Combine that with the land cycling, and you've got a real winner.  Draft this card.
• Shire Scarecrow: A colorless creature that filters mana and can block pesky bears is awesome.  The one I had got me out of a bunch of jams, to the point where my opponent had to kill it with removal.
• The rest of the land-cyclers: Creatures are good.  If you need the land instead, then you can do that.   
• Shire Terrace: Yes, fetching colors is good in a land.
  
• Entish Restoration: I never played this in the draft, but Harrow was good.  

Those are all great cards for a non-WUBRG-enabling set, and that doesn't include the Wizard's Rockets and the Wose Pathfinders, both of which are also great.  This set is more WUBRGy than people realize.

Give it a try!  I'm not going to get to FNM again for a bunch of weeks, so you won't be competing with me.