- Monday Draft Report - May 29, 2017

What is up, my Internetters!

It’s time for another draft article, and to be honest, I’m surprised that this is the draft I’m using. Initially, I wasn’t going to post this draft. It’s from last week, and I knew that that was going to be Tams’ week, so I decided to go ahead and try something just for fun. The thing is, often times the just for fun decks are also the most educational. In my pack 1 pick 1, I had an option. Do I take the Cast Out, which is clearly the correct pick, but one which I’ve made time and time again, or do I take a chance and go for the uncommon I’ve never actually seen in a pack, which I’ve been told is good, but to me, seems simply too slow. Ladies and gentlemen, we took the Angler Drake.

Let’s go through the rest of the picks.

After my first pick, I really didn't know where I wanted to go, so second picking an Emberhorn Minotaur, followed by an Electrify, wasn't so much an "I want to play blue red" as "That seems like a good card". The next few packs were a little weak, so I really just took on colour cards, hoping that a direction would present itself. By the end of the first pack, I'd successfully cut blue, so much so that in pack two, the person on my left decided that it was open. -_-

So even though the drafter to my left went into blue, he still let enough come through that I didn't actually notice. That and the red that I managed to pick up really seemed like I was in the right place.

Picking up the Soul-Scar Mage made me hope I could find some more red removal, but that typically goes pretty early, so I knew that if I didn't see it in the first few packs, I'd be pretty much out of luck. The third pick Enigma drake was the only one I'd seen in the whole draft, and I really wished I'd had another.

Even with so many "playables", I had to think pretty hard about what I actually wanted in my deck. I had a lot of options, but not that many action spells. In the end, I decided not to run the second Pull from Tomorrow, in favour of more creatures to put my cartouches on. Running three Cartouche of Knowledges was really the only reason I was running the Soul-Scar Mage.

So, Round one had me up against the red white aggro deck, and even though everyone says there's no blocking in Amonkhet, that was really my only option. I eventually lost in three games, but that was more due to drawing more cartouches than creatures. I admit, with only 12 creatures, that was a danger, but card draw is supposed to help with that.

In round 2 and 3, the deck worked much more effectively. Cartouche of Knowledge on a Nef-Crop Entangler provides a fairly quick clock on its own, and then again on a Thresher Lizard makes a powerful team. My opponents didn't have much in the way of fliers, so I managed to get in hard. Edifice of Authority is good for taking care of the crack back, and two Naga Oracles also helped block, if my opponents had multiple threats.

My mistakes, I think, were that I should have been running my second Pull from Tomorrow, and my Commit to Memory over the third Cartouche, and Hieroglyphic Illumination. It would have made the deck stronger overall, even though I used both of those spells to good effect, I think swapping them out would have been even better value.

End result: 2-1, putting me once again in third place, not too shabby.

Thanks for reading,

-Step.