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.

Notorious WUBRG: March of the Machine Draft #3

I drafted again!  There's a clear issue: as with Conflux and Ravnica Allegiance and others, there is a problem with this set: drafting 5 colors is too popular.  In a pod of 6, after one or two cards had been pulled from the first pack, two people (not me) announced they were probably going "5 color good stuff".  The result is that I only got 3 dual lands.  Here's what I drafted:

Only three dual lands!  Urf.

I made up for the lack of lands a bit with the Beamtown Beatstick and the four land cyclers.  With those I took a risk and only went with 16 lands.  Here's the deck:

Enjoy my bad lighting.

I was heavy in black again, but black is really fun to play in this set.  Aetherblade Agent is great.  Deadly Derision seemed like a definite include.  The two Gloomfang Maulers were excellent.  And I felt like I had to run Horobi, Death's Wail.

In the first round, Horobi actually turned out to be great.  My opponent was on Boros equipment and backup.  (With Sram and two Reyav!)  Horobi temporarily shut down any equipping.  My opponent correctly noticed that they could use backup on my creatures.  In fact, if I pull Horobi again, I'm hoping I've got a bunch more backup creatures myself, because that seems like a good strategy.  I lost game 1 badly, squeaked out a win in game 2, swinging for lethal at 15 while I had only 1 life.  That wasn't enough and I lost game 3 pretty quickly.

In the second round, I lost to one of the five-color decks.  They ran a ton of discard effects and I just couldn't keep up.  They dropped Yarok both games and I managed to get it back on the board after I removed it.  I got beaten brutally in two games.  This was still a really fun match, as it was cool to see my opponent's deck go off.

I ran Tetsuko Umezawa again, and it worked great again, comboing with Valduk... again.  It managed to keep me alive a little bit longer in round 2, and then it helped me blow out my round 3 opponent in two games.  Tetsuko Umezawa is such a great card.  Valduk isn't quite as good as the Brudiclad I got in my first March of the Machines draft, but it's still great.

1-2 isn't great, but I had a blast again!  I don't know whether I'll get to sneak a fourth draft in before the next set.  We'll see!

Notorious WUBRG: March of the Machine Draft 2

I did a bit better in my second March of the Machine draft!  Here's what I picked:

(In order, left to right and bottom to top.)

Naturally, I was most excited that I got passed the foil Invasion of Alara!  Here's the deck I built:

 

I should have taken Zirda out, as they didn't really contribute much.  As always, the deck was super fun to play, though I think I could have used a few more dual lands.

In my first round, I played against a relatively new drafter and beat them.  In the second round, I played against a strong green + something (white?  red?  It's been a few weeks...) deck.  I lost one game bad, and squeaked out the other two wins.

In the third round, I got obliterated by a fast red (and black?) deck.  2-1 is not too bad!

It turned out that the Archpriest of Shadows and new Glissa were very strong.  The archpriest helped me bring things back and Glissa was great, even though I didn't have a lot of synergy in other phyrexians.  It just didn't matter.  The Beamtown Beatstick was also great; creating treasures can obviously be very helpful.  In the end, I often couldn't keep up with the removal everyone else had and that usually cost me a game.   

I hope that I can get another draft in!