A few days before Pro Tour Dragon’s Maze, everyone on Team SCG had already decided that we were all going to play Bant Control. We had a pretty good idea of what the deck would look like, but we were undecided on the last few cards. We called a team meeting, and most of us gathered around the living room to discuss where we thought the deck was.
I’d been curious about trying to get the ground together to record a discussion about drafting, but I had no idea if my phone would work well enough to record such a conversation. To find out, I recorded this conversation. I was pessimistic enough that I didn’t bother to tell people that I was doing it (and in doing so I’ve been told that I may have broken some laws), but we’re going to overlook that.
During the conversation, I thought about how valuable it could be for people to hear how this kind of discussion goes, and I was glad that I was recording it and hoped it would turn out.
After the conversation, I left to listen to some of the recording to see how it turned out. I decided it sounded pretty good and came back to the group to get everyone’s permission to use the recording. They were good with it, and here is that conversation. Unfortunately, there are no introductions, so if you don’t already know the voices, you won’t know who’s who, but the speakers are (in order of when I can make out a full sentence from them):
Patrick Chapin
Zvi Mowshowitz
Sam Black
Owen Turtenwald
Matt Costa
Tom Martell
Reid Duke
Brad Nelson
Jon Finkel
William Jensen
Andrew Cuneo
David Heineman (Just a whisper—he wasn’t really involved in Constructed testing.)
Jelger Wiegersma
In the future, we might be able to plan to do more recordings with more balanced sound, but I think this was a pretty good trial run. Hear for yourself: