I thought it would be a good idea to ratify my title statement, since most of my regular readers will doubtless have formed their own strongly-held unofficial belief that I’m in need of help long ago. Keenly aware that at any given Premier event my best chance of duelling victory is to challenge the cleaning lady, I come to you today nonetheless humbled and appalled by how little I know about Magic, specifically, the Drafting format about to be visited upon us at Pro Tour: Honolulu, (now just two and a bit weeks away) viz. Shards-Conflux-Reborn.
Some of you might suppose that, were you in my position, knowing that a marquee event was looming large on the schedule, you might somehow avail yourself of further information on the subject, secure in the knowledge that with a combination of hard work, thought, and listening very carefully to smart people, you would come out the other end being able to make at least a passing attempt at cognizance during Rounds 7-12. After all, much as I love the show, that’s the only thing I want to be Lost in Hawaii next month.
Here’s the problem. I have done precisely that. I have availed myself of further information. I have done much hard work. And much hard thinking. I have indeed listened carefully to smart people.
And I’m still clueless. Let me show you what I mean…
As usually happens prior to a Pro Tour, I ring around my extensive cell phone network of Brits who have historically been sufficiently less bad at the game than everyone else on these shores, so much so that they have appeared on the global scene multiple times. Then I add a few Pro Tour debutantes to the mix, and throw in a couple of halfwits (these not necessarily being interchangeable) because somebody has to represent the guy who miraculously got to 6-0 with his infinite Unbender Tine engine. (Honesty time. If I hadn’t written this sentence telling you that this deck does not exist, how many of you were just about to click on the card to see what it does? Thought so.) Then the whole caboodle gets invited round to a ludicrously small house in the middle of nowhere and invited to play Magic repeatedly for a weekend.
I form this Gathering gathering for five decent reasons. First, it’s fun. You remember fun? It’s where you’d rather be playing this than doing something else. In the unexpurgated version of this article, too downright vile for human eyes, there now follows a joke about origami that I will only tell Tom LaPille face to face when we meet before Grand Prix: Seattle. For the rest of you, imagine something hideous, and then remember it’s actually worse than that.
My second reason is utterly altruistic. I love people to succeed at things, and if things happens to be Magic, all the better. I was thrilled when one of the local players qualified for Honolulu, and if doing half a dozen Drafts against a bunch of people who have done it all before a few times can help, brilliant.
Reason number three is all about staying married. Cards tend to accumulate here at Hagon Towers, and every so often it becomes clear to me that said cards will be leaving the building shortly. Either they will be miraculously turned into hard currency via a Draft Weekend, or they will be miraculously turned into ash via a Wife Weekend. And some of you were thinking a Wife Weekend sounded quite intriguing. (Having shown this last paragraph to Helen, she has pointed out that I am making her out to be an ogre in a public domain. Her words, not mine. In response, I am pretending to remove the offending paragraph, which should placate nicely.)
Reason four is horribly mushy, so feel free to avert your eyes. Thing is, I like to give something back to the community. For a time, being part of the Judge scene fulfilled that role, but shortage of time and indeed opportunity has forced that to take a back seat, at least for now. I rarely play competitively, since I’m committed to going to most of the events I’d want to Qualify for, and, even if I were capable of doing so (as has bizarrely happened on a few occasions in the past), to beat people out of a tournament I can’t play in anyway seems perverse, and indeed rude.
But let’s not muck around. The biggie is Reason Five, which is to avail myself… hard work… thought… yadda yadda yadda.
Everything went according to plan. Multiple PT attendees, er, attended, boosters were cracked many times, and good times were had by all. I have the six undefeated decklists for your perusal, and I’m not too proud to say that I need your help, because I can’t tell what’s going on. I have plenty of anecdotes to share with you, and a few thoughts of course, but when it comes to an actual pattern to what I witnessed, it’s only a comprehensive absence of a pattern that I can report.
Thankfully, all is not lost. Please, and I mean this even more than usual, tell me what you think about the decks. What is the shape of this shiny new format? What are the winning strategies? What cards rock, and what cards suck? In short, heeellllpppppp!
Alright, I can put it off no longer. Here come the decks in all their ‘!?!?!?’ glory.
Draft One — Andy Clayton (English Team, Worlds 2006) 3-0
7 Forest
6 Mountain
4 Swamp
Topan Ascetic
3 Rhox Brute
Colossal Might
Viashino Slaughtermaster
Court Archers
Nacatl Outlander
Deadshot Minotaur
Canyon Minotaur
Nacatl Savage
Wild Leotau
2 Kathari Bomber
Lightning Reaver
Naya Battlemage
Jund Charm
Dark Temper
Grixis Grimblade
Dragon Fodder
Monstrous Carabid
Matca Rioters
Ember Weaver
Fixing? Nope, just a Sealed R Us manabase. Removal? An obviously good Jund Charm and a Dark Temper. If we’re being picky. Clearly there’s plenty of other stuff that’s going to interact with monsters to put them firmly in the bin, but the reach out and touch brigade is thin on the ground, unless you include Deadshot Minotaur, which I don’t. My experience of that card this weekend was that it sits in hand, effectively mulliganing you while you wait vainly for a right time to cast it that never arrives. Until precisely 0.6 seconds after you’ve cycled it in the equally vain hope of finding something better. Yes, I can see that Esper Cormorants are going to die to it, leaving you a half-decent body, but against any actual chunk of flyer, it’s useless, what with its ‘only on your go’ clause.
On the plus side, the deck has plenty to ensure that it doesn’t get overwhelmed in the early game. At 3/3 Matca Rioters is good times, and Ember Weaver shuts down a ton of early aggro, in particular because it’s mono-colored and therefore falls foul of proportionally less of the outlander cycle. At 3/3 First Strike for three with Reach, this is vastly superior to a thoroughly decent Trained Armodon, and it’s only one Green mana. By the time we hit four mana, this deck is in real gear, with trips Rhox Brute plus Wild Leotau virtually guaranteeing a powerful turn four every game. Reassuringly bomb-free (although the Lightning Reaver can be very, very good), this is just a solid collection of decent fat monsters with a decent early game and a few nuts and bolts to keep opponents off auto-pilot. Is Jund fat the way forward?
Draft Two — Tom Harle (Nats runner-up, many PTs) 3-0
Naya Hushblade
Excommunicate
Lapse Of Certainty
Aven Squire
Wildfield Borderpost
Pale Recluse
2 Qasali Pridemage
Oblivion Ring
Angelic Benediction
Leonin Armorguard
Akrasan Squire
Filigree Fracture
Behemoth Sledge
Marisi’s Twinclaws
Grizzled Leotau
Valeron Outlander
Drumhunter
Resounding Silence
Naya Battlemage
Might Of Alara
Sigil Of The Nayan Gods
Gleam Of Resistance
Rhox Charger
Wild Nacatl
Bant Panorama
1 Mountain
6 Forest
7 Plains
Well, at least this one I understand. Tom’s been playing, and winning with, Green-White rush decks for ages, and this is a good one. It’s easy to spot potential awesome starts from this deck, but I’ll content myself with ones I actually saw happen. Turn 1, Akrasan Squire. Turn 2, Qasali Pridemage, attack for 3. Turn 3, Behemoth Sledge, attack for 4, Turn 4, equip etc etc. Or how about Turn 1 Wild Nacatl into Turn 2 Pridemage into Turn 3 Aven Squire attack for 5 into Marisi’s Twinclaws.
What’s particularly nice about the deck is the way it can keep coming back for more if it needs to. Although it’s there as fixing, Gleam Of Resistance can squeeze out the last few points of damage, and at 3/3 for 4 the Leonin Armorguard is a nice addition to the table once it’s potentially massive across-the-board effect has done its work. Then there’s the twin pillars of tempo with Excommunicate and Lapse Of Certainty, both of which efficiently steal a turn, and about as much removal as Green-White has a right to expect.
I was interested in the choice of Grizzled Leotau, since 1 power seems an odd choice for what is a highly aggressive deck, but Tom pointed out that not only are there not enough 2-drops to have reached saturation point, working with Exalted meant it could easily attack for 3, and a 3/7 causes a bunch of problems.
All in all, this is clearly a good deck, and yet both opponents who took a game did so in ways that I find quite worrying if I was trying to ‘solve’ the format prior to Honolulu. In the first case, a lucky Singe-Mind Ogre hitting a Pale Recluse meant that curving out with Putrid Leech — such a beating — Dragonsoul Knight, the Ogre and then Lightning Reaver was enough. This is worrying because there seems to be plenty of ways to thwart Aggro early, and in this case Tom’s deck lost the race. In the second instance, we saw the ‘death from a cloudless sky’ scenario, where a 2/4 killed him from 18. No prizes for correctly observing that this was Marisi’s Twinclaws. First, four mana produced Knight Of New Alara, giving the Twinclaws a 3 Power boost to 5/7, and then Colossal Might took it to the realms of the absurd by making it 9/9 Double Strike. Still, Green-White decks can look to have Path To Exile every so often, and that would have been a delicious answer.
Draft 3 (Tom Harle again) 3-0
Deny Reality
2 Mask Of Riddles
Kaleidostone
Esperzoa
Voices From The Void
Zombie Outlander
Fleshbag Marauder
Resounding Wave
Brackwater Elemental
Pestilent Kathari
Infest
2 Jhessian Zombies
Elder Mastery
Viscera Dragger
Grixis Grimblade
Architects Of Will
Vithian Stinger
Tidehollow Strix
Hissing Iguana
Dark Temper
Demonic Dread
Rupture Spire
3 Mountain
6 Island
7 Swamp
The lengths I go to in order to bring you this information. On the original decklist, one of these cards looked like, approximately, bearing in mind that there are some symbols bearing no relationship to the alphabet that no computer can produce, ‘Joltichra Dr8aj’. I’m almost tempted to offer a prize for which card this is, because even with the correct list, it’s next to impossible.
Anyhow, to the deck itself, and Tom crafted another unbeatable deck. The evolution of Elder Mastery is interesting. Having found that creature enchantments, as they were then called, had to be absurdly powerful before the inherent card disadvantage of being 2-for-1’d was nullified sufficiently for people to play with them, various fixes were tried, including the mighty Rancor idea, which turned out to be a little bit naughty, before WotC settled on the truly fabulous Equipment. Now all sorts of effects that wouldn’t have seen the light of play got their chance, because making one guy unblockable was risky, but making your next four monsters unblockable as the torch got passed from corpse to soon-to-be-corpse improved things massively. So now we have a generation of players who expect all their pump and hump stuff to be reusable, and that means that something old school like Elder Mastery really needs to deliver on smashing action. And it does. In the sense that you would likely Draft it higher, Terminate is clearly a ‘better’ card, but it’s really easy to lose games when you’ve successfully cast Terminate, and that isn’t the case with Elder Mastery. Short of an instant speed kick in the teeth like Naturalize, or a here’s-one-I-made-earlier Dispeller’s Capsule (in which case you’ve already won, at least morally), the Mastery delivers in spades.
There’s more discard action courtesy of Voices From The Void, which realistically empties a hand with or without the splash Mountain. Talking of which, there are few more ‘minorly irritating’ cards around than Pestilent Kathari. A 1/1 flyer for 3 really shouldn’t be robust enough to thwart entire armies, but it regularly seems to do so, yelling ‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough’ because it turns out most things aren’t.
Then there’s Demonic Dread, or Joltichra Dr8aj as it shall henceforth be known. Just like an ever-expanding universe, the distance between my initial reaction to the Hideaway lands (not entirely complimentary) and the reality (oh, okay then, just a staple of Worlds 2007, a defining card in Kyoto, and only likely not to make a splash in Honolulu because it isn’t in Block) continues to grow on a daily basis. Therefore you’ll forgive my circumspection if I decline to provide you with The Knowledge on Cascade. The tentative consensus is that everyone’s having fun imagining chains that you could have, and a few people have stories of chains that they did have, but that most people reckon it’s a fine mechanic that’s interesting, dynamic, and can occasionally do foolish things. On the Constructed side, Mike Flores and others have explored what is a fairly short list of things to do, while in Limited Tom goes with a list of free stuff that includes removal of Dark Temper, decent flyer Tidehollow Strix, bonus weenie Grixis Grimblade or (sigh) Kaleidostone, which is still another free card. Oh, and (tries to insert excitement into fingers whilst typing) ‘target creature can’t block this turn.’ Of all the unanswered question, Cascade is the one that most people seem to want answering. Personally, I think this stems from a belief people have that there are free Limited wins to be had if only you can build your deck right, and a format to destroy if only you could see how. Not sure the last time R&D let something like that slip through the net, but I’d be surprised if they’re having sleepless nights right now.
Enough of this Tom business. Doesn’t anyone else get a look-in?
Draft 4 — Neil Rigby (2x English team at Worlds) 3-0
Jhessian Zombie
Valley Rannet
Giant Ambush Beetle
Vithian Stinger
Undead Leotau
Ignite Disorder
Kaleidostone
Blood Cultist
Goblin Deathraiders
Suicidal Charge
Fiery Fall
Grixis Sojourners
Ridge Rannet
Sewn-Eye Drake
Resounding Thunder
Elder Mastery
Kathari Bomber
Pestilence Kathari
Firewild Borderpost
Scavenger Drake
Slave Of Bolas
Jund Sojourners
Dark Temper
Lavalanche
Rupture Spire
1 Island
1 Forest
6 Swamp
7 Mountain
Depending on how you quantify it, there’s removal here in double figures. Vithian Stinger and Blood Cultist make a devastating combination. Ignite Disorder obviously got better with the addition of Reborn. Dark Temper, Fiery Fall, the oldie-but-goodie Resounding Thunder, Pestilence Kathari making another 3-0 appearance. And then there’s Lavalanche. This awesome rare also makes more than a cameo appearance in the last Draft deck of the weekend, and it’s easy to see why. Great though it is, in Limited Wrath Of God takes quite a lot of careful situational engineering to reach the point where it does utterly broken things, although that’s not to say that a 2-for-1 or maybe a 4-for-2 isn’t often backbreaking. With Lavalanche you can just run your guys out there, secure in the knowledge that they’ll be living and the other guys won’t.
To be honest, but for one fabulous sequence of play, I’d be talking about yet another Tom deck, since Neil beat him in the final. The game had gone deep, and plenty littered both graveyards. With both Blood Cultist and Vithian Stinger active, it appeared that Tom was struggling to find any kind of foothold. Then we reached Neil’s end step, the cue for Tom to unleash a cycled Resounding Wave and Unsummon, utterly destroying Neil’s dominant board position, and leaving him with just Goblin Deathraiders in play.
Things got worse for Neil as a devastating hasty attack the following turn sent him from 14 to 6, and then Tom’s Domain deck did the full five as Spore Burst created an army of 1/1s. Thing is, Tom had an end step too, and that was the cue for another eight mana cycler, this time Resounding Thunder for 6. Now Tom was at 8, but it was hard to see the Goblin Deathraiders getting through the 1/1s. Untap, upkeep, draw, Lavalanche for 5, attack for 3, GG. Lavalanche — utterly, utterly foolish.
Draft 5 — James Escritt (First time Pro Tour in Honolulu) 3-0
Firewild Borderpost
Branching Bolt
Wild Leotau
Bloodbraid Elf
Ignite Disorder
Sigil Blessing
Valley Rannet
Qasali Pridemage
Soul’s Fire
Cylian Elf
Court Archers
Pale Recluse
Messenger Falcons
Path To Exile
Incurable Ogre
Rhox Charger
Welkin Guide
Kranioceros
Fiery Fall
Godtoucher Of Jund
Resounding Thunder
Resounding Roar
Sigiled Behemoth
Goblin Razerunners
7 Forest
6 Mountain
4 Plains
Another decent set of removal highlights this winning deck, and a rare that ends games in single-handed fashion, the Goblin Razerunners. While James was quietly accumulating three wins, Neil was involved in the moment of the weekend, where we saw how wonderfully wicked a choice uncommon could be. It’s early in the game, and he’s facing down a pair of 2/2s, one of which has hit him on turn 3 and 4, the other which has just arrived. At 16 life, Neil steadied the ship (which wasn’t exactly sinking anyway) by completing the Domain he’d been piecing together and running out Fusion Elemental. The next time he untapped, he had an empty board and was at 4 life. The culprit? Slave Of Bolas. I ran the text through the universal translator, and it actually says, ‘Be really unfriendly. Add insult to injury. Rub salt in wound. Kick you repeatedly.’ Still, at least Hybrid made it easier to cast, so more people can join in the uncommon fun…
Draft 6 — Andy Sempers (long-time local player, going to Honolulu as part of a local ‘Support James’ trip of a lifetime.) 3-0
Singe-Mind Ogre
Lavalanche
Terminate
Jund Hackblade
Bull Cerodon
Celestial Purge
Rhox Brute
Corpse Connoisseur
2 Jund Sojourners
Dreadcape Zombie
2 Maniacal Rage
Spore Burst
2 Ember Weaver
Canyon Minotaur
Bloodpyre Elemental
Viscera Dragger
Cavern Thoctar
2 Nacatl Savage
Veinfire Borderpost
Wildfire Borderpost
Jund Panorama
Savage Lands
4 Swamp
5 Mountain
5 Forest
So here we are, picking through the remains of the weekend, still trying to come to terms. Normally, there’s a shape to things that you can see. Sometimes it’s as early as during the first pack of the Draft, and certainly you can usually follow many of the possible paths and see where players are heading. While I accept that this is truer of a table of Pros rather than my playgroup, I don’t want to undersell them, and every time I’ve done this exercise before, the weekend has looked almost exactly like a typical Draft at the Pro Tour in terms of successful archetypes.
And that, as you know, didn’t happen this time. Cascade seemed broadly weak, except when it was strong. Aggro was great, and got utterly stopped by easy to cast, easy to source Ember Weavers. Removal didn’t seem especially plentiful, yet it was hard to make threats stick around. Any number of irritating cards sat around being exactly that — the Outlander cycle in particular seemed to turn things off almost at random. Oh look, I’ve drawn my Pro Black rather than my Pro Red, sucks to be you. Above all, and most worryingly, there was significantly more manascrew issues than I’ve seen before (at this table at least.) While some five-color decks did just fine, plenty of attempts at Aggro foundered on the rocks of two-drops that didn’t like each other, and splashes that never materialized.
To say that I’m eager to discover what Messrs Ruel and Bucher make of the full Block Draft in their excellent series is an understatement. Even the most complex Draft Formats (I’m thinking of Ravnica Block in recent times) had a clearly identifiable set of goals and objectives through the Draft that you could navigate towards, and it was possible to look at a finished deck and have a good guess at how it might fare, all other things being equal. We knew, in other words, what a good deck looked like, and how to get there. Even though we might not be able to do that in practice (and I frequently can’t), the fundamental knowledge was there for the eye to see. Right now, for me at least, that’s not true. I have two and a half weeks to work out what’s going on.
As I believe I may have said earlier…
Heeeelllllppppppppp!
And as ever, thanks for reading.
R.