FNM Draft 2018-07-20

First time drafting the Core Set 2019.  I did some practice drafts on a new draft simulator I found, Draftsim.  It has a pretty good presentation and better AI than the other simulators I've tried.  Anyway, there were I think 28 people in the draft for 4 tables of 7.

Here's my train wreck of a draft, from bottom left to top right:

For about 8 picks, I felt pretty good about this.  Open the Graves is a great build-around rare, and I felt like the Psychic Symbionts were a good top end for a grindy black deck.  Poison Tip Archer is strong on its own merits while also liking lots of creatures to die.  Reassembling Skeleton makes some nice combos with these cards, especially if I can get it to die over and over.  Toward the end of the pack, it became very clear that no one at the table was drafting red, but the good red cards I was seeing didn't really fit with what my other cards were doing.  I was not seeing anything good in blue.

Second pack I was very unexcited to first pick Doomed Dissenter.  There was also a Skymarch Bloodletter in the pack, and that was probably the better card but less synergistic with my other picks.  The rare was Mistcaller.  Second pick Murder was great, but then I tried to make blue work and failed.  Sarkhan's Unsealing was another clear sign that no one was in red, and I took it on raw power level despite having mostly small creatures that don't trigger it.  The rest of a pack was a mish mosh of horrible cards that I didn't want to play.

Pack 3 had a couple removal spells, and I decided Rabid Bite was the best.  The rare was Fraying Omnipotence.  I didn't think it was good and passed it twice, even though it has some odd synergy with my graveyard stuff.  Spit Flame at third pick was a great removal spell, and I was actually very happy to see Timber Gorge because now my red and green were both looking like good splashes.  I expected to see more dual lands in general, but other people wanted them as much as I did.  The last card I was really excited to get was Macabre Waltz to go with my graveyard cards.

So the result was that I had about 11 mono-black cards I wanted to play, a handful of cards each in blue, red, and green, plus some powerful gold cards.  This deck was going to be a mess.  My first version of the deck had 4 colors and was not quite what I wanted.  I played it a couple games but sideboarded back and forth with Jund (black-red-green) depending whether I felt like I needed the blue gold fliers.  Here is what I feel like was the "good" version of the deck:

So it played like Jund Control, but I really relied on Manalith, Timber Gorge, or getting lucky on lands.  Plummet and Abnormal Endurance both played as good efficient removal, and opponents did not expect either in main deck.  Abnormal Endurance is great with Skyscanner or Doomed Dissenter, trading with a bigger creature and generating extra value.  I think Plummet is a card I would play multiple copies in main deck in this format, since every color except green has targets at common and there are plenty of devastating bomb rare and mythic fliers as well.

Hired Blade looks like it's supposed to ambush creatures in combat, but I ended up using it more like how blue decks use flash, to hold up removal and then have a pseudo-haste creature at end of opponent's turn.

Here is the graveyard package that generates tons of zombies if it gets online:

The main thing the graveyard package was missing was a way to sacrifice creatures.  Sometimes Doomed Dissenter just doesn't find a way to die, and Reassembling Skeleton can form a value loop with Open the Graves if you have a way to sacrifice it at will.  I would have loved a Ravenous Harpy or two in this deck.

Here is the Sarkhan's Unsealing package:

Colossal Dreadmaw is this deck's best finisher, but the rest of the creatures here are so-so in the deck (Havoc Devils is good if you can cast it and Volley Veteran can kill things with 1 toughness).  The Hellion is really not a good card, but I was willing to play it for the upside of blowing up everything or using it to cast a big Rabid Bite.

Here's my sideboard.  I pulled out a ton of basic lands and spare sleeves in case I wanted to switch colors entirely.

I tried Explosive Apparatus, but it was way less efficient than my other removal and opponents could play around it on board.  Naturalize was good and I sided it in several times.  The blue cards are powerful but they just made my mana too bad.

Round 1 vs. mono-black.
This was a returning player who hadn't drafted in 3 years, and he was playing a lot of bad cards to make mono-black work.  He won the first game when I had blue in my deck, and then I took two straight with the Jund version.  He had a minor lifegain theme, and Diamond Mare was a big nuisance.  In game 3, I got way behind and fell to three life, and I came back through attrition and recursion, but I did play a little sloppy at the end just because I didn't think he had any outs to what I was doing.  Win, 2-1.

Round 2 vs. blue-red fliers.
This deck was really frustrating to play against because he had a ton of fliers and I didn't.  He also had Enigma Drakes and good cheap spells to support them.  He destroyed my Sarkhan's Unsealing in game 1, and I sided out that package and brought back the blue stuff for game 2 so that I would have some fliers.  I put up a good fight but just didn't have as efficient or synergistic a deck as he did.  Loss, 0-2.

Round 3 vs. white-blue fliers.
I rebuilt my deck as shown above before this match, scrapping the blue cards and the Explosive Apparatus.  This guy had good cards but made some minor mistakes (as did I).  He had several very good rares, including the Sigiled Sword of Valeron, and he also had a good mill package on the side.  I put up a good long fight in both games but could not stabilize against his aggression.  In the second game I destroyed the Sword but he found a Trusty Packbeast to get it back.  Loss, 0-2.

Round 4 vs. Naya (white-red-green) stuff.
I was about ready to just leave, but my round 3 match was the last one to end so I didn't have time to think about dropping, and my round 4 opponent was going to play out the tournament, so I decided to stay for the match.  This ended up being my deck's most dominant performance, as I busted through Palladia Mors and Vivien Reid in game 1 and recurred my Dreadmaw after trading it with all his blockers in game 2.  I gave him the official win for the tournament so that he could have a (very slim) chance at a prize.  Win, 2-0.

So the overall record was not bad, 2-2 in matches and 4-5 in games (with 2 of the losses on my worse 4-color build).  I only managed to trigger Sarkhan's Unsealing once, but I did get opponents to counter or destroy it, so it did something.  Open the Graves was better, always providing value when it went in play.  What really impressed me was the green cards, the black recursion, and the removal.  Removal is bad in Core 19, and I lucked into some of the most efficient removal spells in the set.

Here's what I got for value:

I drafted 4 rares and 11 uncommons, which is slightly above average for both (vs. 3 and 9).  Alpine Moon is a little over a dollar and Sarkhan's Unsealing is a little under a dollar.  Aegis of the Heavens is a super pretty foil.  Total draft value ~ $3 maybe.

I also sold off my (very played) dual lands and a couple other Reserved List cards:

I'm kind of sad to do it, but I feel like the Reserved List in general is in a bubble at the moment.  More than that, it's in a place where these cards are liquid enough that I can sell them easily, safely, and securely at buylist prices.  If I wait, they might go up, but the more expensive they get, they also become a bigger liability (counterfeit, robbery).  I'm not playing with them and have no intention to do so in the future, so I sold.

Some reasons that I think the card prices might come down or stop rising (long or short term):

• Legacy and Vintage lose players due to lack of card supply and support.
• Old collectors release their collections into the "wild," selling and creating an influx of supply.
• Players refuse to pay antique collector prices to play Magic.
• Wizards reverses Reserved List and reprints dual lands.
• Wizards allows use of proxies or substitute cards in official events.
• The EDH Rules Committee bans certain high power Reserved List cards based on price/difficulty to obtain.

In any case, the vast majority of lower end expensive cards ($100 - $1000) are either not extremely low supply or high demand, which to me says that this is a bubble for those cards.  Most of them will never be true collector items because they aren't truly scarce, so their value is either artificial or supported by game interest.

Anyway, enough of that for now.  Thanks for reading!

Core Set 2019 Prerelease 2018-07-07

It's Core Set time!  I've never played a Core Set prerelease, but it was really not much different from a normal prerelease.  There are more "easy" cards at common, but the uncommon and rare cards have plenty of complexity and triggers to remember.

One of the things I like about this set is the dual lands in the land slot.  Most sets don't have any common dual lands, but this one has no rare duals and only a little uncommon fixing, so the common dual lands are important (especially with a cycle of 3-colored mythic dragons in the set).  There are normal basics also -- I got 3 basics, 2 duals, and a Nicol Bolas checklist card in my 6 packs.  Unfortunately, I got the wrong duals for the deck I built -- but I bet these lands will be premium picks in draft.

Anyway, I had the Nicol Bolas transform planeswalker in my pool, so the first thing I checked was whether I could build a deck for him.  I've had poor performances in Sealed before when I prioritized being 2-color over playing off-color bomb rares, and I did not want to fall into that trap again.  I had a few artifact-synergy blue cards and a couple sacrifice synergy red cards, plus some red-blue spells cards, but I stuck to my guns and tried to play more just good individual cards than go too deep into a draft archetype.  Here's what I ended up building:

I was not excited to have so many 2-toughness creatures at 3 and 4 mana, but I felt like their abilities earned their spots.  Act of Treason is a card I normally would not have looked at, but Dark-Dweller Oracle and Brawl-Bash Ogre were easy ways to turn it into a removal spell.  I also had two Thud in my sideboard, but that's where I drew the line on playing iffy cards for synergy.  Gearsmith Guardian is a nuts common by the way -- with enough blue creatures it's just a 5/5 for 5, which even beats green 5-drops in this set.  Anticipate was mostly there to make sure I had something to do on turn 2, since I only played two creatures in that slot.

My prerelease promo was a knight lord, and I had a lot of just good high-stat creatures in white and green, so I built a second deck that I could bring in if I lost game 1 and just try to smash through against decks trying to do anything too cute:

I never played this deck, but I feel like it could do some good things on the play against opponents without good removal.  The auras give it a chance to make creatures that hit for 5 or 6 on turn 3 or 4, but it's very 1-dimensional and has no real sources of card advantage or evasion.

So how did Grixis Bolas do?

Round 1 vs. Jund (black-red-green).
I honestly forget what this guy had in his deck.  I know he had the dragon queen, because I gave him a token for it, but he never played it.  Oh, and he did have Goreclaw.  First game I had Bolas out, and I had difficult decisions about when to flip him because he would become vulnerable as a planeswalker despite the great abilities.  When I did get enough of a chump block buffer to flip him, he took over the game quickly.  Second game my opponent ramped out a turn 4 Colossal Dreadmaw, and I had to spend 3 cards to kill it, but he flooded a bit and I put together the pieces I needed.  Win, 2-0.

Round 2 vs. White-Green.
This guy is one of the regulars.  He had a funny pool, with powerful white and green rares, but not a lot of support, so he was playing main deck Naturalize, and that ended up biting me a couple times.  In the first game, I kept a hand with no islands and never drew one.  It wasn't completely one-sided, but it didn't end well.  Game 2 he got me down to 2 life with a Djinn of Wishes and a few small creatures.  He came at me aggressively and I had just the right trades to get him down to only a Bristling Boar against my Djinn.  Twice Djinn produced the correct blockers, once to chump and then to defeat the Boar, and then he wasn't able to come up with an answer to the Djinn in time.  Game 3 I was off to a good tempo start, bouncing his Hungering Hydra with the Exclusion Mage and then Dwindling it the next turn.  But he again had Naturalize, and suddenly he had Resplendent Angel and a big hydra that I couldn't do anything about.  Loss, 1-2.

Round 3 vs. Grixis.
This was the Nicol Bolas mirror match against a guy who I play against all the time.  He opened Nicol Bolas as his promo at my table, so we both knew what we were facing.  And it led to one of the most spectacularly unlikely events in Sealed.  We both had Bolas in play, and I drew Act of Treason, stole his Bolas, and it died to the Legend Rule.  So sweet.  Later in the game, he stole my Bolas with Switcheroo, and he even flipped it, but I had enough action to eventually win.  I actually made a bad misplay with Gearsmith Guardian, which would have been big enough to kill him if I had played a blue creature before combat, and he stuck it out a few more turns before I was able to close it.  Second game I had a couple minor misplays also, but I got good value out of my cards and finished the game with my life at 3.  Win, 2-0.

Round 4 vs. Green-Black with a blue splash.
We were both 2-1 so we figured out our prize split before the game and played for the odd 1 pack of Dominaria.  His deck had some big bruisers like Demon of Catastrophes, but I won both games on the power of Sleep.  That card is pretty amazing in Sealed when you get crowded boards.  Dark-Dweller Oracle was good too, allowing me to all-out attack and get value from the creatures that were going to die.  Win, 2-0.

So aside from Round 2, I did really well this time, despite a couple misplays.  3-1 in matches and 7-2 in games.  The mana was a little clunky, but it was worth it to play Bolas.  I rarely like playing blue in Sealed because it often feels underpowered.  I do feel like I have gotten better at playing Limited in the last couple years though, and I can make more of the conservative decisions that win games, like not playing Bolas on turn 4 when I have other 4-drops that I can make the opponent spend removal on.  I wish I could have gotten some just-for-fun matches in with the second deck.

If you're interested, my other two mistakes (that I know of) in round 3 were:

• I was holding Sure Strike as a way to kill his Departed Deckhand, and I forgot that it is a cast trigger that kills the Deckhand and I didn't have to worry about counterspells.  I also might have gotten better value using my spell in combat against a bigger creature.
• I had enough mana to attack for lethal by using my own Departed Deckhand to make something else unblockable, but I didn't notice for one turn.

As for value, here is what I came away with:

The Bolas card is currently selling for more than my entry fee on its own at about $34.  I don't expect it to stick there long term, but it is the kind of card that, even if it flops in competitive Magic, will probably stay over $5 in perpetuity just because it is so attractive for Commander.  The rest of the rares (aside from Djinn, which is a bulk reprint) are in the 50 cent - $1.50 range, and in my opinion likely to all become bulk long term.  Valiant Knight is probably not good enough to be expensive for competitive play, but the prerelease promo might be attractive to Commander players with knight decks.  And 4 sealed packs is $12.  So pretty good.

Thanks for reading!