Here's where I was in chaos draft when the pool filled for Masters:
This draft looks like a train wreck, but I think I could have turned it into something. It has lots of color fixing. I was a little unfocused because I knew I was likely to drop, possibly without playing a round. When you drop from a draft in progress, you just keep everything that you have at that time, including unopened and unfinished packs. I forgot to keep the rest of the pack that I was passing, so the rest of the table got about 8 - 9 extra cards. I opened the third pack because someone from the table was interested. Thaumatic Compass is cool, but there was nothing super exciting.
So here's the record scratch sound, and then we start the "real" draft:
If you aren't familiar with Masters 25, it's a "nostalgia" reprint set. Each card has a watermark of the symbol from the set where it first appeared, and M25 includes at least one card from every "normal" set ever released, including Commander and Conspiracy sets, and running through the most recent set, Rivals of Ixalan.
The other twist with M25 is that rather than creating a balanced draft environment with broad groups of cards that fit in predefined decks, they designed the set to be full of strong 2-card combos and cards that answer those combos, plus they tried to let each color be played aggressively, midrangey, or controlly (as opposed to normal draft environments where for example blue might be only playable as a control color and red as an aggro color). This makes drafting kind of chaotic, and I really didn't know what would be successful. I went in with a few preconceived ideas about what I might want to try.
In Pack 1, my rare was Brion Stoutarm, a strong white-red legend. I didn't feel like locking into WR right off the bat, so I opted for Freed from the Real, which is a flexible spell that can be used as removal or a combo enabler. Pick 2 Brine Elemental is also a combo enabler -- if I had found Vesuvan Shapeshifter, it sets up a combo where you can keep the opponent from untapping ever. The rest of the pack was all over the place, and Ash Barrens and Cultivate opened me up to playing more than 2 colors.
Pack 2 rare was Hanna, Ship's Navigator, a card that I think is only printed in M25 to help alleviate the severely limited supply of foil copies for Commander players. Fallen Angel is strong though and worked with Phyrexian Ghoul in some sacrifice combos, but the rest of the pack shifted away from black as blue and green seemed open (Murder of Crows was a strong signal). When I saw the foil Accumulated Knowledge come back around, I knew I was almost guaranteed to get all three (and maybe more in Pack 3), so I snagged them.
In Pack 3, I was feeling very blue-green, so I almost passed Prossh before remembering I had pretty good mana fixing and an Elvish Piper to cheat creatures into play. I took Ihsan's Shade with the same mentality (at least as a sideboard card against white). The Broodhatch Nantukos were nice pickups to help me survive against aggressive opponents.
Deckbuilding was hard, and I used almost my full 15 minutes making cuts. In addition to the usual trouble with having too many playable cards, the lack of set themes to give direction also made it tough. Was I combo? Control? Ramp? In the end, I tried to fit a little of everything, so that I wouldn't be just dead if I couldn't assemble a combo.
Here's my deck:
The mana base looks sketchy, but Ash Barrens and Cultivate really do a lot of work. Chartooth Cougar searches for a Mountain if needed, hence 2 Swamps but only 1 Mountain. Also, a trick I learned from playing Tarkir block Sealed: playing a lot of morph creatures helps make up for bad mana.
I had some tough choices narrowing down morphs. These three pairs are all 2-drop morphs with very different effects when flipped (the Nantuko doesn't have a flip effect, but you can put it into combat attacking or blocking and flip it to reveal that you'll make a lot of insects):
I decided Nantuko was best because it is better as a 2-drop (played face up) than the others.
The two main combos (other than the obvious Elvish Piper + any creature) are Lorescale Coatl pumping and Horseshoe Crab or a "Freed" creature making a ton of tokens or damage. I conservatively held back on Curiosity and Quicksilver Dagger because I was afraid too many auras would be setting me up for blowouts, but in hindsight maybe I should have gone all-in on the combo.
Here are the sideboard cards I ended up using:
I think there are a number of ways I could have built the deck better, but it was pretty functional in the form I played.
Round 1 vs. R.
He was white-red drafting to my left, so he had the Brion Stoutarm I had passed. Game 1 he didn't get his white mana and I won pretty easily. Game 2 he had a lot of goblin tokens, Savannah Lions, etc, and I was drawing too many lands to keep up. In game 3 we finally both had things clicking, and it was a slugfest. Before the round went to time, we got clarification on overtime rules for single elimination: 5 turns as normal, and afterward the first person to gain life or deal damage would win. This normally favors the person who gets to play turn 6, but he had Brion out able to gain life and deal damage at instant speed. I positioned myself to get turn 6 by waiting to pass to him for turn 1 right after we went to time. I survived one nasty attack with the sideboarded Lull. Then after he tapped Brion on my turn 4, I flipped my Brine Elemental (which he hadn't seen to that point) to make sure he couldn't untap again during his turn 5 or my turn 6. When turn 6 came around, I was able to attack freely with Ghost Ship for the win in a game I might otherwise have lost. Win, 2-1.
Round 2 vs. S.
S had a black-red deck full of Ruthless Rippers and other tiny threats. It mostly seemed annoying but innocuous, until late in the first game, he played a 7-damage burn spell on me, then played Izzet Chemister and picked up the spell from the graveyard to use again the next turn. Second game went similarly, but I couldn't mount any attacks for a long while. He assembled a nasty repeatable combo using Chemister, Hell's Caretaker, and several spells that bring dead creatures back into play, so I knew I was running out of time to win. I Pipered in Prossh on his attack to ambush his attackers, but learned that Prossh's "cast" ability is a nonbo when you cheat him into play. Then I flipped Brine Elemental to keep him tapped and had two attack phases to kill him. He had just enough blockers to stay alive at 1 after two attacks, and I lost. Loss, 2-0.
The card that surprised me the most in quality was Ghost Ship. It was almost always a relevant blocker or a relevant attacker, even though I never needed to regenerate it. This set has a lot of little creatures that get outclassed by Ghost Ship or Lorescale Coatl pretty quickly, and Murder of Crows was practically a bomb. Evasion is also hard to come by, and the ground gets gummed up, so big-butt fliers are particularly good. Ash Barrens was also quite good as an Evolving Wilds variant. Accumulated Knowledge felt bad, in part because I never drew more than 1 in a game.
It was a fun and challenging draft. I'd love to do it again, but I doubt anyone locally will be interested after this first week, because people generally don't like this set for value and it's hard to convince 7 other people to do a $30 draft resulting in $15 of cards when they could do a $10 draft resulting in $5 instead.
Speaking of value:
This was not a good value draft for me. I drafted 2 rare/mythic, which is below average, and 17 uncommons, which is way above average. My 3 foils is right on average, since this is a set with 1 foil in every pack, but they were all bad commons. I passed a few cards worth $3 - $5 or so, with Rest in Peace and foil Dark Ritual being about the top end. Prossh is one of a subset of cards in M25 where there is almost no demand for the regular version ($1) but the foil version (~$50) is a hot commodity because this is the first ever foil printing. Elvish Piper at about $2.50 is the best card I pulled, and I'm happy because I like this art better than the one already in my Commander deck (8th Edition). Total draft value was probably less than $10, even including the Chaos draft.
All in all, I enjoyed playing M25, and I wish that it was better priced for people to want to draft it again.
Thanks for reading!
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