At the Prerelease, I drafted a bad deck. A very bad deck. In fact, I would say that it was the worst Draft deck in the history of mankind. And so I set out to have the universe punish me, as it should, for drafting such a botched atrocity.Prerelease drafts are a funny thing, and I’m not sure whether it’s possible to take them seriously. Are there lessons to be learned from a draft?
I dunno.
I’m stupid, because I treat Prerelease drafts as though they were actual drafts down at my local store. Yeah, they’re all three packs of the same set — which, in an expansion set like Planar Chaos, means that it’s a format I’ll almost never need to master — and it’s arguable whether you get more bang for your buck by winning packs or by just rare-drafting like a fiend and not caring around whatever deck you wind up with at the end. Yet still I try.
Planar Chaos makes it harder still, because the thing that zings the strings of almost every prerelease player is the word that’s been sending tribal players into spasms of ecstasy since 1997:
Slivers.
Everyone wants the Slivers deck. I could hear them giggling at the table, and I was too ignorant to realize what it meant — I thought they were all hoping to crack an Akroma. Silly fool. When they exchanged happy glances and windmill-slammed a pick to the table, they were doing it because they wanted to build the perfect Sliver deck.
Damn the mana! Slivers are cool!
But the problem with Slivers is that, well, they’re almost impossible to signal with…. Especially when you’re playing with people who, by their own admission, don’t draft that often. Do you really need to settle into a color? Hell, Slivers are a color! Follow your tribe and the lands will just flow!
So what you had was a table of players where two of them were just plucking whatever gold-logoed cards came their way, and three more were taking whatever Slivers looked best to them, and what did I wind up with?
Well…
Let’s be honest and admit that I am not the best drafter in the best of circumstances. I learned to draft in Invasion, which meant that I trained to learn in one of the weirdest color combinations in the history of Magic — only slightly less so than Ravnica — and as such, I’ve never been spectacular at reading signals. I’m not terrible at it, and I can usually settle into at least one color that someone is waving at me frantically, sending downstream, but certainly I wouldn’t say I have any talent for it.
And if you want proof? God, my Prerelease experience was it.
A better player might have recognized the Sliver traffic and plucked out a three-color deck that, while clunky, could have worked. But me? I flailed about like a fly caught in a spider’s web, starting with a first-pick Blue card and settling into White (because, ironically, it had a Sinew Slivers, and I thought I might go all Slivery — the shame!) before getting knocked out into Green and ending up at the first pack without a sign of where the hell I was.
That’s not a good sign.
The Red flowed briefly, oh so briefly, in pack 2, netting me back-to-back Rough / Tumbles and a Pyrohemia, and then I never saw any significant Red again. But dammit, I was in Green. And the Red made me stick. So lacking any better options, see-sawing in the breeze, I cracked open a Magus of the Arena and wound up with this monstrosity.
When I looked over my pile of cards, I had no idea what to assemble. It was awful — I was spread across four colors, with significant picks in all of them, and no mana-fixing. Apparently G/R was the best option I had with the cards I’d chosen, but that was not enough.
I decided to screw it. The quick beatdown would have to do. Sixteen lands, come blazing out of the gate, and lose to get this over with. So what if I could never pay the echo on my Stingscourgers? So what if Groundbreaker would be nigh-impossible to cast? So what if I would never get to six lands to play my Woodreaders, and that Dust Corona was serving as, God help me, a combat trick?
Witness… The worst draft deck in the world!
2 Citanul Woodreaders
2 Dead / Gone
1 Dust Corona
2 Fury Charm
1 Groundbreaker
1 Harmonize
2 Healing Leaves
2 Kavu Predator
1 Keldon Marauders
1 Magus of the Arena
1 Mire Boa
1 Needlepeak Spider
1 Pyrohemia
1 Rough / Tumble
1 Simian Spirit Guide
3 Stingscourger
1 Psychotrope Thallid
Round 1:
You’d think that with a deck whose main hope of winning was to use Healing Leaves to pump my own Kavu Predator, I’d be worried… But I wasn’t. This deck was a shackle around my ankles, an embarrassment that I really didn’t want to deal wit.
It was so awful that I arrived at the table with a grim sense of satisfaction; I had botched the draft in such a thorough way that being slammed into oblivion would be a mercy. It would be the gears of the universe locking comfortably into place, proving that indeed lack of skill and losing at Magic were inextricably intertwined.
Imagine my surprise when my opponent sat down to tell me that he had drafted the worst deck in the world.
“It’s awful,” he said, shuffling his cards, a flush of mortification on his cheeks. “I can’t believe I did that badly.”
His confidence in his suckiness irritated me. Did he not realize that I, The Ferrett, had the ungainliest, clumsiest deck in the whole world?
“No,” I corrected him. “My deck is far worse.”
He narrowed his eyes.
“I had no idea what I was doing,” he said slowly, slapping down each word onto the table like he was dealing a fresh card off a deck. “I might as well have picked a random card out of each pack, and it would have gone better.”
“I wish I’d done that well!” I said, rising to the challenge. “These cards, given the perfect draw against a deck composed purely of lands and Chimney Imps, would still lose 0-2!”
“We’ll see!” he said, thundering to his feet. “My deck is the worst!”
“Mine!”
And so the Great Magic Suck-Off began.
And indeed, his deck looked to be a mighty challenge. It was Black and Blue, if I recall correctly, but its most salient feature was that in lieu of bounce or actual removal he had three Reality Acids. He did have a Jodah’s Avenger, which was a very powerful card, but he had nothing else to back it except for a single Shaper Parasite, a pair of Dreamscape Artists, and a Merfolk Thaumaturgist.
Could I possibly triumph against this deck?
Perhaps, gentle reader, you may think that given the unbounded confidence that both of us had in the absolute inability of our decks, that we played poorly. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, because we thought our decks were so utterly stenchworthy, we played at the absolutely top of our game.
After all. How could we be certain that our decks had collapsed if we gave up the ghost? No, we struggled mightily to use these inferior tools to prove how inferior they were, using every meager advantage our decks provided to try desperately to show how appallingly horrific they were.
It was an epic battle. He’d lay down some awful card, and I’d trump it with an even worse one. He’d Reality Acid my Kavu Predator just as I got it up to an amazing 7/7 trampling thing. My Mire Boa got bounced and Acided, my lands eaten away.
And in the end, I won the battle but lost the war.
Despite the amazing incompetence of my forty cards, Magus of the Arena turned out to be Some Good assuming that I could stall long enough. Which I did, because Reality Acid was just too slow.
I stared down at my cards. It had been a long match for decks this collapsible, perhaps half an hour, but I had won 2-1. But the victory felt like ashes in my mouth; wasn’t I here to prove how bad my deck was? Shouldn’t the universe be handing me losses to show me that this is not the way to draft?
I got up, my head reeling. I had won.
How could this be? My knees buckled. I staggered to my next round, thoroughly beaten by my triumph.
I was that bad. I really was.
I’d have to prove it in the next round.
Round 2:
I sat down to discover that my opponent had a cane. And appeared to have problems shuffling the cards; his hands trembled a bit as he shuffled his stack.
“I have brain damage,” he informed me jovially.
As it turned out, this was factually true. His name was TJ, and apparently he had been deep in the woods at the park service when he’d fallen off a bunk bed and hit his head quite hard. He had lain there unconscious for two days, suffering a subarachnoid hemhorrage, and when he awoke he was on the verge of death.
As a result, he couldn’t hold things properly in his good hand. He demonstrated, showing me how a pen fell to the table. He walked with a slight limp and leaned heavily on the cane, and though his voice was quite good I was hoping that his brain was more mush than it appeared to be.
To lose to a brain-damaged opponent? Ah, that would be proof of how bad my deck was!
TJ was cheerful, and turned out to be one of the most enjoyable opponents I played against all day. We traded banter, and laughed about how the hell had we gotten to the second round (for TJ was also not particularly confident in his deck’s abilities), and it was a lot of fun.
(Well, until he began to respect his elders. But that’s a story on, you know, another site.)
TJ was also playing Green, and he started with an Essence Warden. Which would have been fine, if my second-turn play hadn’t been a second-turn Kavu Predator. A Healing Leaves or two later, my 7/7 trampling doggie made short work of him.
I despaired. Would the universe not punish me for my sins? How could I have won with this pile of crap?
I was tempted to just concede to him right then. I didn’t deserve any victory. But that would be a tainted loss; the whole point was that I had to lose fairly with this rotting stack of timbers, to have it collapse on my head properly.
Anyone could concede. I had to lose.
The next game was tense. I was mana-screwed. Mana screwed? Anyone could lose that way! Sure, I was mana-screwed partially because of my light land count and high mana curve, but that was a mistake shared by literally thousands of bad decks.
I tried magnificently to rally. I almost made it. But TJ swarmed me under, and I was done.
We were onto the third game. This was for all the marbles. If I made it to the finals with a deck this bad, I don’t know what it would say for my faith in Magic.
Fortunately….
…TJ crushed me.
It wasn’t even a particularly close game. I don’t recall what exactly he pummeled me with, but despite a few stalling maneuvers of clearing the board with Rough / Tumble, he destroyed me.
Call me a masochist, perhaps. Call me Bruce. But I had done so poorly in the draft that to win would have made a mockery of the game of Magic.
But TJ. Ah, TJ. I could hold my head up high, and this deck down low, and cry, “I could not beat a brain-damaged Magic player with this deck!”
“Surely you’re exaggerating, Ferrett,” my friends would say. “That’s just silly-talk.”
“No,” I’d say confidently. “He had brain damage. And he beat me like a drum. And,” I’d continue, smiling proudly, “He was right.”
Signing off,
The Ferrett
The Here Edits This Site Here Guy
TheFerrett@StarCityGames.com
P.S. — I should add two things.
“Is it okay if I mention you were brain-damaged?” I asked TJ. He said sure. He had no shame about it, which I think is the proper way to wear a handicap; be proud, my friend, because if you can’t cover it up you might as well make it clear to the world that this is on your own terms.
TJ, I am happy to inform you, also won the draft.
P.P.S. — Next week, I’ll decide on a column name. It will be awesome.