I may have drafted too much in the past 36 hours.
I drafted XXX on Friday. Then, I went to FNM later that night. I woke up Saturday morning to discover I had enough packs for another XXX. Then about 3:00 I got a call from tomjoad. They needed a 6th for cube draft. Around 11:00 that night, I stumbled through my front door realizing I had done 6 drafts in 36 hours. Here are their stories and, more importantly, the stories from in between.
Draft 1:Friday Afternoon
Format: XXX
Location: The Internet (It's a series of tubes.)
This one was pretty embarrassing, but maybe a bit funny in hindsight. My first pick was a Merfolk Looter. My second pick was a Blaze. Yes, someone passed one. I’m not going to call him a donkey because he took a rare that probably paid for his draft, but Blaze should always be the pick in this format on power. If your opponent is any combination of colors that does not include blue, he’s dead.
Obviously I was pretty excited about that second pick. After that, I settled pretty nicely into blue and red, getting a steady stream of fliers and aggressive red men. I didn’t see much in the way of burn or draw spells, but I took every bit I could and in the end I was pretty sure I was going to win the draft.
As you can probably guess, I didn’t. I bashed my first two opponents with quick and/or flying dorks and X spells to the dome. Everything was going according to the plan. Then the finals match started, and I got the ominous feeling that I was the worse player at that virtual table.
He played a turn one Island in our first game, which is a bad omen considering that it likely meant I would only get to resolve Blaze once during the match. After he lost that way once, he would just keep a counterspell ready for next time.
I bashed him in the first game except that I had to show him my Blaze. I tried to win without it, but it seemed too risky because he had a Chimeric Staff that was going to smash me, so I just domed him for his life total and went to game two. He was playing black and blue and drew a million cards and killed most of my creatures, which seemed like a fine matchup except for the small problem of a counterspell on my Blaze.
After game 1, I boarded in Smash for his Chimeric Idol since it was my only answer aside from randomly having Cancel or Discombobulate at the right time. Game 2 I didn’t draw Smash or Blaze and I got smashed by his Chimeric Idol which is a pretty good X spell in it’s own right.
Game 3 was a close one. That is, it was a close one until I donkeyed myself out of the game. I had a reasonably quick start and I got quite a bit of damage in before he started to dehydrate my creatures. The problem was that he had Chimeric Staff and I had Blaze but no Smash. He had drawn about a million cards in this game too, so I put him on having the counterspell.
Then I made the donkey move. I activated my Faerie Conclave and attacked with my team, but I forgot to click on the Faerie Conclave. He untapped with just enough mana (after playing a land) to put me at one by going all in on his Staff. Obviously, he decided not to and played a few guys instead. The game was starting to slip away from me at this point and I had no choice but an alpha strike which would put him at two, and then a Blaze to the dome. He blocked everyone he could, went to two, and the last card in his hand was a Flashfreeze for my Blaze.
And if I had just remembered to attack with that Faerie Conclave…
A few hours later I IM’d tomjoad. We talked a bit about Regionals and he convinced me not to play Lark. It was something about “too many faeries.” He clearly has the fear. I decided on playing Quick’n’Toast because the only thing it can’t beat is a Day Two. After all, at Regionals I will only need to 8-0 once.
So, having made my decision for Regionals, I proxied up the most random 75 I’ve ever thought of as a “real deck” and set off for the local card shop…
Tags: Magic Draft XXX
Related to:
Magic: the Gathering
