Magic Draft: May 26th

I’ve been going to the weekly Magic the Gathering draft night at Gauntlet games for about nine months now, and I have so much fun every time. Even when I lose every match, it’s a great chance to socialize, have friendly competition, and get out of the house for an evening.

This week’s draft was March of The Machine, a set that I’ve done a lot of recently, and have had a lot of fun with. I arrived extra early this week as the buses haven’t been the most reliable in the past and I didn’t want to keep anyone waiting, so I had plenty of time to relax and watch as a good number of people filtered into the game store.

Sixteen players signed up, perfect for two eight player draft pods. I was in pod one with a lot of faces I’ve come to be familiar with over time. Dave, Tyler, Aaron, Chris, Dave, and Alexsej.

The packs were passed out, and my picks were as follows

As soon as I had Ghalta and Mavren I was leaning hard into a Selesnya draft, and getting Renata sealed that decision.I loaded up with synergy though the first half of pack 1, but the last six picks were all pretty weak.

Pack two gave me the least to work with of the three, I was getting the white cards cut by the two players to my left. I’m not sure what I was thinking with first picking the Seraph of New Capenna. A 3 mana flyer isn’t terrible or anything, but was it really the best option in the pack? Just sticking to the two colors was hard enough, and I was thinking I’d do a little lean into Azorious knights as a backup if I didn’t pull together a good enough Selesnya deck, but I really didn’t want to focus too hard with so little fixing in the format.

Pack three gave me the white I was missing, and my last four picks were Mono-blue, so I had just enough to justify sliding in a couple knights to round out my curve, but I wanted Ghalta and Mavren and those four pips made it hard to justify a third color.

Deck Building:

Once I had cut out all the non-synergystic cards I had exactly 25 cards with an aggressive curve that just fit with fifteen lands, Nine Plains and Six forests.

Non-creatures

Elspeth’s Smite

Seed of Hope

Sunder the Gateway

Realmbreaker’s Grasp

Seal from Existence

Fertilid’s Essence

Creatures

Enduring Bondwarden

Botanical Brawler

Daxos, Blessed by the Sun

Shanna, Sisay’s Legacy

Norn’s Inquisitor

Sigiled Sentinel x4

Kami of Whispered Hopes x2

Chomping Kavu x3

Converter Beast

Knight of the New Coalition,

Renata, Called to the Hunt

Golden-Scale Aeronaut

Infected Defector

You’ll notice that I didn’t add Ghalta and Mavren. They didn’t seem to fit the synergy and were a bit high on the mana curve, but after some words of encouragement from players sitting across from me during deckbuilding, I swapped out the Infected Defector for Ghalta and Mavren. I was now half a forest short in my mana base, but that wasn’t accounting for the Kami ramping me up a lot faster than I expected, so maybe I could have even fit in the blue cards and used the Kami for fixing in retrospect.

With the deckbuilding done, I got myself a 6-inch sandwich from subway, horfed it down, and started my matches.

Match 1

I’m up against my rival Aaron. I don’t think he considers me his rival, but all me harshest losses have come at his hands, and I have faced him in matches for top position many times before. I’m hopeful that my aggro backup-heavy strategy will take him down. I win the die roll and take the first turn, a great benefit for such an aggressive deck.

  Game 1: I mull to 6, so does Aaron. I’m on the play and I start swinging in hard, combing out and will win next turn, but he slams in for 11 in the air out of nowhere.

  Game 2: I get a nutty hand, I’m on the play and slam down bondwarden into vigilant knight x2. I transfer the tokens onto the kami of whispered hopes and ramp into Ghalta, rushing Aaron down.

  Game 3: I keep a hand with a turn 1 and turn 2 drop, but fail to hit my stride in time  and lose out to Elspeth giving his creatures flying.

It’s a little disappointing, but not unlikely for me to lose to Aaron at this point. He is really good at stabilizing the board and grinding my game to a halt. It’s like I’m an avalanche and he’s a concrete dam. No matter how much momentum I build up I come to a crashing stop and have nowhere to go.

Match 2

I’m up against Tyler, one of the sweatier players, he really takes the game seriously, but that isn’t to say that we didn’t have our laughs.

  Game 1: I cast all 4 Sigiled Sentinels, but get overwhelmed by Phyrexian tribal.

  Game 2: I load up a botanical brawler, make some bad attacks that my opponent exploits, he makes some bad removal and can’t get any swamps to set up his board.

  Game 3: I slam take a good hand, opponent mulls to 6. I over commit to my brawler and feel bad when it’s removed and my board presence stalls out.

We both made some misplays, in game one I made it and asked for a rollback which he refused, in game two it was his turn to point out an error and my turn to return the favour. He apologized, having forgot that we were in the loser’s bracket and there was very little on the line for the match. Game three was a lot more casual and fun, but I just wasn’t getting where I needed to be to take the victory.

Match 3

I’m up against Graham, a guy I didn’t recall having played against before. He had a very recognizable eyebrow piercing so I think I would have remembered him, but he clearly knew what I had been playing on the past two draft nights, so he must have a much better memory than I do. We were both proud of our decks despite each of us being 0-2. I won my third die roll of the night and took the play for the seventh time this evening.

  Game 1: I demolish my opponent with an unrelenting opening four turns of Bondwarden into triple backup that tidies up in under five minutes

  Game 2: I put together a smart and well distributed board that is wiped out by Invasion of Fiora, I gained over 15 life that game but couldn’t stabilize after the board wipe.

  Game 3: I mull to 6, keeping a land heavy hand, and build a reasonable board that had the engine going by turn 5, is wiped by white sun’s zenith on turn 6, and though I recover is wiped again and I lose the final game of the night with 25 minutes still left in the round.

In reflection I really think I should have drafted more bombs and removal, as much as a heavy synergy deck is the dream for a Johnny like me. When I had Renata and a Kami of Whispered Hopes on the board, I was getting two +1/+1 counters on every creature that entered the battlefield. I was loading the Kamis and Brawlers up with backup counters and swinging in repeatedly with the Vigilance granted by the Sigiled Sentinels. It all felt awesome, but it had no resilience to removal and not nearly enough evasion or anything to handle flyers.

I really think this was just a bomb draft for everyone involved, and we had a lot of good matches. I was close to victory in every game, this wasn’t a night where I had gotten a trash draft and was steamrolled every time, I really was a massive snowball building up momentum that just happened to crash into the sturdiest opponents imaginable.

I had a lot of fun writing up this game night report, and hope to do the same next week!