This week I’ve decided to show you one of the Monday Modern Masters drafts on Magic Online. I don’t think it needs any further introduction, so let’s do this.

Draft

Round 1

From my opponent’s perspective, that looked like a triumph of the shuffler, but to me it felt like proper execution of a sideboard plan was important there, which is why I love Modern Masters (and any other format where most of the cards are playable, a strength I’ve already seen in Theros).

Round 2

I felt like it was going to be tough to beat Elspeth and Meadowboon there and was definitely worried about my opponent’s draw, but my fliers were able to pull through in the first game. Given how excellent Take Possession has been for me at this point, you might be thinking that I should have just played built my deck that way in the first place, but both of my matches have been against green board-control decks that happened to have rares that were extremely difficult-to-beat permanents. Not all matches in this format play out that way, and the card is a lot worse against some kinds of decks, so it felt better to just maximize my ability to execute my primary plan in the first game.

Round 3

While one might interpret that as a well-deserved loss for my low land count, it was certainly anticlimactic. I know that going to fourteen lands is basically unheard of in Limited, but in my defense it is the equivalent of playing 21 lands in a 60-card deck and I felt like a 60-card deck with mana like mine wouldn’t play that many. The counterargument is that the colored mana in a 60-card deck would probably be quite a bit better, and that was certainly a factor in some of my mulligans where I might have been able to keep some of the hands if the one land had been a U/W dual land.

In hindsight, I would probably cut Court Homunculus for a fifteenth land, particularly since I couldn’t really play enough early white mana to support the white one-drop.

Thanks for watching,

Sam

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