My second day on Magic Online was a few days after the first, on the day after Thanksgiving. Although that day (known as Black Friday, for the non-U.S. readers) is the busiest shopping day of the year in the U.S., there’s a simple tradition at my Dad’s house on Black Friday: no one leaves the house. So, while my Dad was napping after a lunch of leftover turkey, and my sister and her husband were fighting a nasty case of the flu, I logged on to Magic Online for the second time.
“Yesterday’s” pace of five drafts in one day, with only two prize packs to show for it, suggested that I would go bankrupt long before I would go infinite. So I decided to purchase twelve packs each of Time Spiral and Ninth Edition (the two draft formats whose queues I saw fill up most often) and make them last as long as I could.
The Time Spiral queues were filling up quick, so I joined a 4322 and prepared for battle. I’m not wild on drafting 4322 – you have to win the draft outright to get a positive return on your investment, and even then it’s only one pack – but I did not trust my skills with the interface enough to move up. Also, since I’ve started drafting 84 I’ve found that sometimes you have to wait an inordinately long time for those drafts to start, but 4322s are almost always about to go. I sat down, exchanged greetings with fellow StarCityGames.com writer Jim Ferriaolo (drafting on my immediate right), and then we were off.
I had an easy first pick of Firemaw Kavu – there are very, very few cards in the set I would take over him, and most of them I would take only because they have value as rares – and then I had an interesting second pick of Penumbra Spider versus Grapeshot. There’s something to be said for staying on target and taking the Red card, and waiting until later to choose a second color. However, I know that Jim knows what he’s doing, and that Penumbra Spider seems to suggest that Green will be open from him. Plus, Penumbra Spider is one of the most important cards to have in a Green draft deck; there’s no better way to buy time to get your Durkwood Baloth unsuspended.
So, I took the Spider. Feel free to discuss that pick in the forums, but keep this in mind: an argument of “don’t pick the Spider because Green sucks” is not going to fly with me. I’m of the opinion that just about every color and color combination in this format is playable, given the right cards. About the only color combination I haven’t drafted is Black/White, and that’s only because the one time I tried to draft it, I ended up with enough good Black cards that I cut White from the deck entirely.
Back to the current draft: For a time I thought I would have a big Blue element, as I had Fathom Seer and Deep-Sea Kraken early on. Then, however, the Blue dried up and the Green started flowing just as it did in the drafts from “yesterday.” I opened Spectral Force in pack 2 and picked up the Scryb Ranger combo a few picks later. Then, a second Firemaw Kavu came from Jim, second pick in pack 3. That led me to this deck:
Creatures (18)
- 1 Ashcoat Bear
- 2 Durkwood Baloth
- 2 Firemaw Kavu
- 2 Gemhide Sliver
- 1 Havenwood Wurm
- 1 Nantuko Shaman
- 1 Penumbra Spider
- 1 Phantom Wurm
- 1 Scarwood Treefolk
- 1 Scryb Ranger
- 1 Spectral Force
- 1 Spinneret Sliver
- 2 Thallid Germinator
- 1 Thallid Shell-Dweller
Lands (17)
Spells (5)
The games have been lost in the mists of time (in other words, I was too dumb to figure out how replays worked and too lazy to take notes), but none of my matches was very close, including the match with Jim in the finals. I never actually had the Force and the Ranger on the table in any position where it was relevant; each was good enough on its own to swing games anyway. It turned out that Jim was U/R; he had passed me a Kavu because he himself had one! He took Grapeshot over the second Kavu to help out his curve, he said, a decision I disagree with.
This draft is a pretty good example of how a Green deck works for Time Spiral draft. You don’t have White’s flanking, Blue’s fliers or card drawing, or Black’s removal, so you have to make up for that by accelerating into a guy bigger than the opponent can deal with. The problem is that most of those hard-to-deal-with creatures are at rare or uncommon. At common, Havenwood Wurm is a slow trick that’s easy to see coming, Savage Thallid’s small behind can be a big drawback if there are not already Saprolings in play. Only Durkwood Baloth is unquestionably good, which is why many pros dislike drafting Green.
However, that’s the nice thing about drafting online: you can find yourself against all type of players. After drafting down at the local store long enough, I could probably predict when Green would be open and when it would not be. Only rarely online will you find yourself in a draft with that many people whose tendencies you know. The end result is that if you want to test out all sorts of different drafting strategies, the cards will generally be there.
Another thing that I began to realize at this time was just how bad my technical game was, and how many small details I was missing. For example, if this deck plays a second Forest on turn 2, if it’s holding a Mountain, that’s a clear blunder. Can you see why?
Seriously, look at the decklist and think about it. I’ll wait.
Yep, it’s Orcish Cannonade. There are no equivalent cards that have GG in their cost, so this deck should never, ever avoid having RR available on turn 3 if possible, because the Red burn spell could come off the top (and did in one game). Now, I might keep some hands in which RR is not possible on turn 3, and ripping Cannonade in those situations would be bad, but presumably I kept the hand because it has some other play I could make on turn 3. The point is that if I could have RR available on turn 3, playing Forests on turns 1 and 2 can never be right, even if I don’t have Cannonade in hand.
Also, you should not fool yourself into saying, “Well, if he doesn’t play a guy worth Cannonading on turns 1-3, it doesn’t really matter.” That’s beside the point. Correct play is correct precisely because it doesn’t matter if you needed it to be there, or even if you win or lose the game. It’s correct because it gives you the most value when you need the most value. That’s the discipline.
After finishing the draft, I looked into the Marketplace to see if I could get some value out of the rare cards that I had drafted over the past couple of days. I had a foil Avatar of Woe, among other goodies, that I had seen trade for good value in real life. Of course, anyone who has tried to use the Marketplace shouldn’t be surprised that topic deserves a day all to itself. I’ll be back tomorrow with that.
Remember, whether you’re a non-user who is looking into getting MTGO, or a current user who wants to know what I think about the system, send me your questions and I’ll get to them on Friday! Thanks for reading.
mmyoungster at aim dot com
mm_young dot livejournal dot com