I have a question. Last pack in a MMD draft I’m playing Black and Green. I open my Darksteel pack to find an Essence Drain, Echoing Courage, and Pristine Angel. Should I take the Pristine Angel in the goal to”hate draft” or take something else?
After careful analysis into what makes the top decks tick, I crafted a decklist that seemed to be strong against the format, generating decent-to-good matchups with all of the other top decks. Balancing the deck was by far the most difficult issue of the bunch, seeing as how having game against both Goblins and Affinity is difficult enough, but throw in Slide and other White-based control decks, and you really have an awful lot to prepare for when deckbuilding.
I suppose that the title requires a bit of explanation. A week before the usual unlimited-proxy tournament, I was heavily testing combo GAT (Gro-A-Tog), complete with Fastbond and Future Sight. Somewhere during this time, JP started talking about a U/G deck full of Type Two jank and posting ridiculous win records against Slaver. It was just stupid enough to test, and in the interest of writing a great article for you, the reader, I took what was essentially Odyssey Block Madness to a fully powered Type One event.
Is there a new deck out there that takes the best card from all the available sets and meshes them together?
All this talk of metagames, environmental details, and even the rogue deck articles I’ve done the past couple of weeks demanded that I lay out my actual Regionals experiences to see how my expectations of environments lined up with what I actually hit. I think the answers are surprising.
I recently drafted a spectacular Green deck and smashed my opponent’s skulls in relatively short order. After the tournament was over, I got to asking myself, “How the golly did that happen?” This fleeting taste of success with Green gave me the impression that I had done something right. Unfortunately, this was, as I would later learn, wrong.
Basically, this deck takes the best deck from Onslaught Block and improves it significantly with powerful cards from Mirrodin Block. In contrast, both Goblin Bidding and Ravager Affinity are basically decks constructed from one block. In addition, if you read about the Bidding decks, you’ll see over and over again that even the people who play them admit that the Bidding itself is rarely that good in important matchups. I know it is cool to bring back lots of Goblins, but leave the ever so clever combos to decks which need to rely on such tricks to win. Red decks don’t need that nonsense to win.
Flores’ article from two weeks ago on strategy superiority and rogue deck design really caught me with respect to Type 1. In Type 1, there are so many powerful cards available that failing to build your deck in a way to try to grant yourself strategy superiority against a large number of opponents seems unacceptable.
Ravager Affinity is not an unstoppable Juggernaut. It is not the end of Type II. It does not define the format. Defining a format takes more than Ravager Affinity has got. To prove that, I’ll give you some decklists that wreck Ravager, but first, some metagame musings.
In your April 6th column regarding Platinum Angel you said,”Add to this the fact that Darksteel slowed the format down quite a bit.” I was under the impression that Darksteel sped up Mirrodin Block Drafts.
Last Saturday, I had the pleasure of running one of the first English Nationals Qualifiers in the country. The turnout was lower than expected, so only forty-nine players sat down in round one, giving the lucky top six players a chance to go to the English this year. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit I have to share with you from this qualifier is that not a single Ravager deck qualified in Bath. It was hated right out of the game.
I’d explain what’s in this deck, but you probably wouldn’t believe me anyway. Let me just ask instead whether you like taking lots of Time Walks in Type 2? Do you also like to do large amounts of damage directly to your opponent’s dome? Perhaps you just wanted to find a deck where you could finally abuse Serum Powder? Check inside if you find yourself at all intrigued, but please God, don’t play this deck at Regionals!
I recognized Stewart as one of the improving Scottish Magic players. In fact, I may have played him before, but in general I’ve a terrible memory for names and faces. I’m sure if I’d been at the end of some horrendous mauling at his hand, his face would be permanently scarred onto my retinas. He had the baggy pants and baseball cap of the perennially cool, accompanied by the superior sneer that only comes in the rainbow haze of youth.
I was wondering about what you had to say on color placements in upcoming team drafts. You stated that Black should go on the left and Green on the right. This seems to be the opposite of what I would expect, considering protecting seating and all.
