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Draft Digest: Obsessions Of A Modern Master

Ryan Saxe is getting dangerously obsessed! Cruel Ultimatum in the maindeck! Night Terrors in the sideboard! Modern Masters 2017 draft picks for you to consider!

I am officially obsessed with the Modern Masters 2017 Draft format. In the past couple of days, I have put eight power on the battlefield on turn 2 (thanks to Burning-Tree Emissary), cast Cruel Ultimatum six times, and drafted a deck with multiple Gifts Ungiven, Unburial Rites, and Griselbrand! Let’s see if we can draft one of these absurd decks today.

Pack 1, Pick 1

The Pack:

The Pick:

Ranger of Eos is definitely a powerful rare, but not one I like starting my draft with. I think of the card as middle-of-the-pack. It can be very good, but the one-mana creatures aren’t great, so my deck doesn’t always have them. This pack is somewhat weak, but I would take both of the other options in the poll over it.

Falkenrath Noble is one of the best commons. This format is all about chip-shot damage. In the four-color control mirror, you often play Mist Raven as a 2/2 flier just to get in some damage. Against the aggressive decks, it makes trading impossible. The only other deck is the Aristocrats-style deck, which is where Falkenrath Noble absolutely shines, both with and against the deck. Overall, this is a card I haven’t been unhappy first-picking!

But then we have Wing Splicer, which takes the cake here. The power level is high, fliers are great, and there are plenty of ways to abuse the card. With the existence of Momentary Blink and Ghostly Flicker, your opponent often needs to kill the Wing Splicer over the Golem Token. That’s a great spot to be in. It’s another reason why cards like Recover and Unburial Rites gain additional stock.

Pack 1, Pick 6

The Picks So Far:

I’m pretty excited to play with this deck while only five picks in! You’ll see I’ve taken the cards Cruel Ultimatum and Soul Ransom, cards that I advised against initially due to either the difficulty to cast or the way the aggro decks shaped up, respectively. I was wrong, and I’ll admit that. Neither card has been hard to cast and abuse, given the speed of the format (most aggro decks can’t really beat a lot of the commons in the format).

The Pack:

The Pick:

Well, almost every card in this pack is a card I could see us playing in this deck. But most of these cards also take filler roles, and I like to minimize the amount of filler cards in this format. Any middling creature that doesn’t do much else in a control deck is out, then. Vampire Aristocrat is close to this, but the inclusion of Soul Ransom does make the card better.

Ghostly Flicker is also a very medium card. It does some cute things with Soul Ransom, but other than that, it tends to be easy to pick up and not great. So there really isn’t anything exciting in this whole pack, either.

Honestly, I’m going to take Azorius Guildgate. My favorite archetype, by far, is Esper. I know I have Cruel Ultimatum, but the only card in this pack that can’t really be replaced is this Guildgate. I can always find other cards to take the role of the nonland spells here. Yeah if I somehow end up in a Grixis Aristocrats-style deck, I’ll wish I’d taken the Vampire Aristocrat or the Mudbutton Torchrunner, but I think the probability of that happening is much smaller than the probability I end up splashing (or playing) white.