Intro
This is a tale about the paths we take in life, the roads we follow and the decisions that we make. Did I say life? I meant draft. Hang on… Draft is life. We are dead. We must draft to reclaim our life and bring glory to the founders.
I hate opening Glacial Ray in drafts. Can’t stand the path it takes me down. I tremble with fear and have problems with bladder control at the mere sight of this card. Whenever I see a Ray in the pack I hope and pray even more than usual that there’s a dragon, or a Kumano, or a Kabuto Moth in it as well. Do I think Kabuto Moth is a better card than Glacial Ray? I’m not entirely sure, but G-Ray is a card that ranges from solid to utterly spellbindingly incredibly out-of-this-world awesome. On a scale from 1 to 10 it ranks somewhere between 6 and 15. Good ole’ K-Moth on the other hand is a very reliable 9 pretty much all the time. Glacial Ray is a vile temptress that enthralls you with promise of power and eternal dominion, if only you bring along some of her beautiful friends. Meet Peer Through Depths and Vital Surge. They will make your deck awesome. Then you look at these “beauties” and realize how wretchedly ugly they are without G-Ray’s reflected glory. Mind you, not until you take the pile you just drafted out for a spin, heading straight for 0-3ville, Arizona.
A lot of people probably don’t have these sorts of problems, because they can control their urges to try to draft the absurd obscenity of a deck that is also the perfect definition of “win-more”. However, for people like me, who would have a gambling problem if they ever actually gambled and who are true Johnnies at heart, self-control isn’t easy to come by. The Danger of Cool Things isn’t limited to play situations in Constructed, but can already occur during the draft or deck construction portions of a Limited tournament. It is very useful to be aware of potential traps and this awareness is what I hope to contribute to with this article. An interesting note is that this article is completely about good cards, and doesn’t deny that their good, yet sort of rubbishes them at the same time. Feels very postmodern.
General
Colors
Red was a dangerous color in CCB because it had several awesome, first-pick-quality commons, but not much depth. This is one of the reasons Glacial Ray is such a dangerous first pick, it leads you squarely into a color that is unlikely to deliver the goods. Of course this has changed with the introduction of Saviors, though the repercussions are still there.
Take the Top 8 draft of Pro Tour: London. Siron won because he got almost all the Red cards at the entire table. How easily it could have all gone wrong, though. Had his neighbour and final opponent Fujita picked the largely superior Yamabushi’s Flame over Soratami Mirror-Guard, then the two may well have ended up fighting over Red. The result of such a fight would most likely have been an all-Scandinavian final with Siron and Fujita standing on the sidelines wondering where it all went wrong. Fujita’s first pick looks a lot like a dislike for Red developed over too many failed drafts of CCB where things dried up quicker than they do in the Sahara.
This draft was quite an anomaly as the Champions packs contained only two good Red cards. If a Glacial Ray had been opened on the other side of the table, then the whole draft would have become completely unrecognizable. In particular, all the red drafters would only have had it in a supporting role.
Choosing the wrong color is the most obvious way in which a draft can go wrong. Some colors have inherent flaws. Like Kamigawa Red, they can fail to deliver on the promise of an awesome first pick because they have no stamina. Some colors have a lot of playables, but very few actually good cards which then leads to underpowered decks, even if you have 37 cards to choose from. Sometimes, although this happens much less often than many people claim, colors are just weak. I can only think of one case where this was definitely true, Torment-era (OOT) white.
Of course there are intriguing possibilities in a bad color, because it is never so bad that getting every single card of that color at the table isn’t a good thing. At Pro Tour: Nice, Zvi Mowshowitz declared to the entire world that he was the White mage and would force it in every single draft. It worked a treat in his first draft, but then went all pear-shaped. Of course this sort of gambit is dangerous in an actually awful color; on the other hand it can be amazing in a color that is perceived to be bad. Before Day 2 of Grand Prix: Birmingham I was hanging out with many people who ended up at my draft table the next day and many of them professed a hatred for Green and said they would do just about anything not to be in that color. I conjectured that forcing Green at that table would lead to an awesome deck. Unfortunately I let myself be lead astray and ended up with a mediocre B/W deck. The two Green drafters at the table faced each other at the 2-0 table.
Sorry, that last paragraph is out of place in this article. It’s about drafts gone right. How embarrassing!
Another classic dilemma is the “several good cards in one color early in pack one” scenario. Say the best cards in a booster are Scuttling Death, Rend Spirit, Hideous Laughter and Teller of Tales. Do you take Teller of Tales over Hideous Laughter to avoid fighting with your neighbors over Black, or do you take the most powerful spell and risk the clash (no, not The Clash, London’s not calling anymore)? Of course several good cards in one color often get passed around like a hot potato, until eventually there are no more alternatives left.
I think people are often too quick in taking the Teller in a situation like this, even though the person to your left is most likely taking the Teller if you take the Laughter, and hot-potato-syndrome may well push the battle for black even further down the table. Then again, this will make the pickings in the Betrayers pack very slim indeed, and with Black being rather weak in Saviors that is something you can’t really afford these days. Hence this situation is one to be wary of and you should always keep the option of jumping ship/switching color open.
Specific Cards in Kamigawa block
Glacial Ray
Shortly after Betrayers came out I built a U/R Ire of Kaminari/splice standard deck and for a while, whenever I opened Glacial Ray I tried to draft basically that deck. Second pick Consuming Vortex is just about acceptable, but third pick Peer Through Depths really limits your options. A single Ray is hardly reliable and this archetype hence relies heavily on getting Ire of Kaminari, which does tend to go late, although only if there are actually any in the draft. I once managed to draft the following deck:
Creatures (9)
1 Floating-Dream Zubera (S)
1 Blademane Baku (S)
1 Soratami Rainshaper
1 Brutal Deceiver (S)
1 Cunning Bandit [S]
1 Soratami Mirror-Guard
1 Teller of Tales (S)
1 Heartless Hidetsugu
1 Earthshaker (S)
Other Spells (13)
2 Reach Through Mists (A)
1 Lava Spike (A)
4 Glacial Ray (A)
1 Consuming Vortex (A)
1 Yamabushi’s Flame
2 Toils of Night and Day (A)
1 Ire of Kaminari (A)
1 Torrent of Stone (A)
Lands (18)
10 Mountain
8 Island
Spirits: 5+1
Arcane: 12
I kid you not, I had four Glacial Rays, and would have had a fifth one if it hadn’t been hatedrafted. Sure, this sort of thing doesn’t happen very often, and probably wouldn’t happen at all on a better/more experienced table, but I’m just making a point here. Even this deck, which is more or less the best such deck you could possibly hope to have, failed to win the draft table. A loss in round one to a G/B deck filled to the gills with 3/3s of all description. Not to mention Cranial Extraction. Even Distress seems to kill this deck, especially if backed up by enough removal to kill all my dudes. Which, granted, is not that much removal. This sort of deck is like Dampen with worse defensive cards and a slower kill, and even Dampen wasn’t all that good in CCB. The time for creatureless decks has come and gone and, as exciting as it was, we all need to let go. Splice as a primary strategy just isn’t viable anymore in draft.
Nagao, Bound by Honor
This card is incredible if you have loads of samurai, and still very good if you don’t. The thing to keep in mind is that this guy makes other samurai better, but doesn’t require them to be gooood. There are two dangers here: drafting and playing crappy samurai such as Silverstorm Sam, Kitsune Dawnblade or (shudder!) Takeno’s Cavalry, and forcing a second color containing samurai for precisely that reason. It’s not a good reason because the Black and Red samurai aren’t all that exciting. They made samurai decks very tempting, but this isn’t Onslaught block. Tribal drafting isn’t required to get a good deck, and the tribal spells aren’t good enough to warrant playing suboptimal creatures just because you take kindly to their type round here.
Seshiro, the Anointed and his son Sosuke
Snakes is a much more interesting case, as most snakes are quite playable, but usually aren’t the kind of creatures you want too many of in your deck. Most of them are low-power utility creatures that are rather anaemic when it’s time to deliver the beatdown. Sosuke and Seshiro though are at their best with an army of snakes at their disposal. Most snakes however only have basic military training and aren’t really all that good at waging war. If general Seshiro is killed mid-combat they run around like headless chickens and return from the war in body bags.
Unlike Sachi, Seshiro and Sosuke turn snakes into soldiers, which is something most of them are not. This makes playing them an inherently high risk-high reward strategy. This has become exacerbated by the fact that all the common snakes in Saviors suck, and green has become more and more the color of soulshift and spiritcraft, leaving snakes by the wayside. The best reason in the block to draft lots of snakes is probably Sosuke’s Summons. Although by the time that comes around you probably passed all those snakes in Champions in favor of various Kami to bolster your spirit theme in anticipation of many Elder Pines. Anticipating Matsu-Tribe Birdstalkers just isn’t that exciting.
Devouring Greed
Back in the good ole’ days of CCC and even in CCB, you could combine Black with pretty much any other color and get a pretty good Greed deck. G/B and W/B both offered the possibility of awesome soulshift chains, R/B offered some nice aggressive spirits and U/B had some nice flyers to punch through some damage to make Greed lethal. Now that Saviors has given nothing to Black spirit-based deck (apart from the long awaited soulshift 1 creature, the almighty Deathknell Kami), the only color combo that can really still make Greed shine is G/B. So picking Greed early is either a wasted pick or it decides both of your colors. Well, G/B soulshift is a fine archetype, especially with Greed, but if one of those colors isn’t open things aren’t going to end up pretty. Devouring Rage on the other hand may have even got better, as Saviors contains less instant-speed removal. Rage doesn’t need that many spirits to be backbreaking.
Genjus
Genjus are real skill-testers. No, I’m not saying they suck; remember this article is about good cards and why they suck. Hang on, oh, whatever, never mind. Coming back to Genjus, they are probably the least splashable one-mana spells ever. They are so mana-hungry and often very risky when you’re light on mana or mana of that specific color. Even though they are immune to most sorcery-speed removal and keep coming back, they die to the most random things, like Moonbow Illusionist.
Wait, what’s this section about cards that show up half-way through the draft doing here? I seem to have gotten distracted by my need to rant about Genjus. Hmmm, curious. Anyway, time to wipe the foam from my mouth and move on to other things.
Cool Combos and Why They SUCK
Mannichi, the Fevered Dream + Oboro Envoy
I had this in a sealed deck the other day, along with very playable Red and very playable Blue. I found the fact that I managed to play U/R in itself astounding, but the deck was also laced with synergy, it was full of neat little combos and had lots of spiritcraft triggers. So y’all know what I’m talking about, here’s the deck:
Creatures (17)
1 Soratami Cloudskater
1 Blademane Baku (S)
1 Ember-Fist Zubera (S)
1 Hearth Kami (S)
1 Minamo Scrollkeeper
1 Mistblade Shinobi
1 Mannichi, the Fevered Dream (S)
1 River Kaijin (S)
1 Moonbow Illusionist
1 Ronin Houndmaster
1 Akki Coalflinger
1 Oboro Envoy
1 Kami of Fire’s Roar (S)
1 Yuki-Onna (S)
1 Teller of Tales (S)
1 Sire of the Storm (S)
1 Earthshaker (S)
Other Spells (6)
1 Reach Through Mists (A)
1 First Volley (A)
1 Phantom Wings
1 Unearthly Blizzard (A)
1 Mystic Restraints
1 Spiralling Embers (A)
Lands (17)
9 Mountain
8 Island
Spirits: 10
Arcane: 4
This deck looks like it should have worked so much better than it did. I drew my combo of Mannichi and Oboro Envoy several times – but never got to activate it once because every time I drew the second piece the first was already dead. One time I had Earthshaker and River Kaijin out and played Mannichi to kill most of their guys and felt really good about my eleven points of power on the table. At which point my opponent played Blind with Anger on my Earthshaker, played a spirit to kill Mannichi and attacked me with so many creatures that I was forced to block my own Earthshaker, leaving me with nothing but said maker and shaker facing some flyers.
So, why did this deck lose horribly? Because it’s like a combo deck in a sea of Force of Wills and Duresses. It’s just too easy to disrupt, and while the individual pieces by themselves aren’t exactly bad cards, they aren’t exactly dragons either. The deck is only powerful in combo mode and the likelihood of the combination happening is low. Plague Wind requires you to draw it and lots of mana. Mannichi + Envoy requires you to draw both of them, lots of mana and still have enough cards in hand to shrink your opponent’s guys significantly to have the same effect. Of course the two cards have other uses, Oboro Envoy in particular is a bomb in its own right, but just because your deck has a “Plague Wind combo” in it doesn’t mean it’s particularly powerful.
I had the same combo in a draft shortly after and I got really depressed that I never once managed to pull it off. This is the real danger of kewl kombos. You get so fixated on them that you fail to play properly with the cards you actually draw/that actually survive their removal.
Genju of the Spires + Akki Coalflinger/Blinding Powder
Unlike the other Genju, Of the Spires requires a little help to be at its best. The creature has no evasion and is easy to kill, making it only really good if they have no blockers, it’s late in the game or you can supply a little help. Putting Tenza, Godo’s Maul on it can be very effective, although Blinding Powder is probably the best equipment to use here. 6/1s that can’t be killed in combat are rather good. Ditto those with First Strike when attacking. They still die to any and all removal your opponent can come up wit, though. This can often leave you manascrewed.
I don’t know why I’m bashing on Genjus so much today. Must’ve been that time I attacked with my only Mountain into no blockers, just to have it Horobi’s Whispered, leaving me color- and manascrewed and without any chance of getting a good game instead of being slaughtered. The moral of the story is probably simply to be careful with your lands, no matter how many cool tricks you’ve got.
Conclusion
Most of the problems talked about in this article can either be avoided easily or not at all. The main things you should take away from it are warning bells that go off when you open suspect cards. Sometimes you can just cruise through a draft and end up with an awesome deck, and sometimes you have to be careful and make sure you don’t fall into a trap. When you open a dragon it’s most likely the former and when you open one of the cards discussed above, it’s most likely the latter.
Until next time!
Martin
martin underscore dingler at hotmail dot com
darkheartofthorny on starcitygames.com forums
Bonus Section: Thoughts on the Changes to the Pro Tour Schedule
The Good
Getting a plane ticket means people will have to earn their PT invites all the way and can’t “buy” them as soon as they reach the final of the PTQ. It also makes it more likely that people will attend the PTs, especially the Japanese one. PT: Honolulu should be amazing and Team Standard should be an exciting new format. Worlds at the Louvre sounds incredible.
The Bad
The mere fact that Worlds at the Louvre is possible means that it probably won’t be all that. The Mona Lisa will hardly have front-row seats. Fewer PTs probably means fewer PTQs and far more “down time” with no big tournaments throughout the year. I hope they haven’t given up on Team Limited and will rotate the team format each year. The lack of money or any other “splitable” prize at PTQs means people who don’t want to qualify are less likely to attend, leading to decreased turnout at PTQs. Perhaps this is why Wizards decided to decrease the number of PTs, because running the same number of PTQs with lower turnout is not going to be viable.
The Ugly
Okay, now I’ll come to what really bothers me about the changes. It unbalances and standardizes the formats. I’ve heard people claim that there was an imbalance towards Limited because there were three Limited PTs and only two Constructed ones. This however fails to take into account Regionals/Nationals/Worlds. These are biased towards Constructed in such a way that it evens out the additional Limited PT. Now that that PT has been shelved there is a real bias towards Constructed. Heck, in the US they even cancelled the Limited meatgrinders just to ram the point home (well, maybe they had some other reason, but I can’t believe it is a good one). I think they need to change the formats a bit at Worlds (for instance, make the Top 8 draft instead of Standard), or else things will go down the drain. I say this as both a lover of Limited and a scientifically/ mathematically minded person with a penchant for the beauty of elegance and symmetry.
The PTs next year also exhibit a shocking lack of variety. There’ll be two Standard PTs (one of them team), two Booster draft PTs, Nationals (Standard/Booster draft) and Worlds (Standard/Booster draft and, unbelievably, Extended and Team Rochester!). So, apart from day three and four at Worlds, there will be all of two formats on the Tour next year. First they abolished Rochester draft, and then they sidelined Extended, Block Constructed and Team Rochester. I don’t think it’s quite time to declare the death of Magic, but this looks to me like inbreeding. They’re limiting the previously varied gene pool and biologically speaking this is the road to extinction. On the other hand, perhaps this is some brilliant scheme to whip up support for the brand-spanking new format they’re going to present us with for 2007. In any case, I realize they’ll only have the formats like this for that year, but just one year of tedium is a very bad thingTM.
Well, that’s my 2 pence. In other news, 9th Edition looks amazing – they finally got rid of their silly guidelines that made 7th and 8th Edition such bores. Well done!