There were 29 people, and I was at the lone table of 8.
Here's what I drafted:
One note if you aren't familiar with Guilds of Ravnica -- unlike normal sets where you have the option of 10 relatively balanced color pairs, GRN only supports 5 specific color pairs, so it is usually best to get into one of them and stick with it. There are a lot of multicolor cards and common dual lands but only from those pairs, and that makes it hard to do something outside of a 2- or 3-color deck that uses the supported guilds.
First pick was obvious -- Doom Whisperer is a ridiculous bomb and also in the $20 range, so I didn't have to think about it at all. Second pick was harder because there wasn't any card that stuck out as individually powerful. I took Thoughtbound Phantasm as much because it combos with Doom Whisperer as anything else. Third pick I went with a card I felt was generically strong even though it was completely counter to my first two picks. Then I finally found some removal, and some guildgates and cards that fit the Dimir (blue-black) Surveil strategy. The only thing I was completely sure of after Pack 1 was that I would be playing Doom Whisperer. The green cards at the bottom of the pack were good enough to consider drafting Golgari (black-green).
Pack 2 rare was Citywide Bust, which is a nice card but not what I was looking for. There were a couple good Dimir cards in the pack, and Artful Takedown was the best. Repeat on second pick, then I was fed a string of pretty good Dimir cards. One thing I was lacking was many creatures for the early game, and Child of Night (2/1 Lifelink) was a deliberate hedge to make sure I could survive long enough to cast my expensive spells against aggressive decks.
Pack 3 rare was Expansion // Explosion, another very good card that was hard to imagine fitting into my deck. I would have gone in on it if there hadn't been other good cards, and Deadly Visit was perfectly good as a strong removal spell that also helped with my surveil payoffs. Dead Weight gave me more help for the early game. Sacred Foundry was purely a greed pick for one of my constructed decks. Gatekeeper Gargoyle seemed like another reasonable big creature since I had drafted a lot of gates. The rest of the picks were just best card available, and I was very happy to get a pair of Douser of Lights just as more creatures of good size.
After giving it a second look, this draft was a bit of a mess and I was sorely lacking early game interaction. There were kind of two ways to go in building, either base Dimir with all of the surveil synergies, or some kind of 5-color monster with all of my removal spells and guildgates, which would play up the Gargoyle but have terrible mana.
I went with the safer option:
Apologies for the bad glare. The two hardest to identify are Dazzling Lights and Sinister Sabotage. As you can see along the top, I only played 11 creatures, and 5 of them cost 5 mana or more.
I went with green as my third color over red, mostly because I had one more Golgari Guildgate and because the fight removal spells Prey Upon and Undercity Uprising were cheaper to cast than my red removal spells, which both competed with my many other 5-drops. In hindsight, my red cards may have been just generally better, and Circuitous Route was a particularly sketchy thing to do since it really only helped if I could cast it on Turn 4 or if I was holding the Gargoyle.
I don't think I was wrong to play every card with surveil even though Thoughtbound Phantasm was the only real payoff, because surveiling is good on its own. Enhanced Surveillance was neat but I really only felt like I could include it because it's an early turn play in a deck without very many early turn plays.
Here's my functional sideboard:
I never tried the red cards. Crushing Canopy was far and away my best sideboard card, and I'd consider that for main deck in the future because every deck seems to have fliers or enchantment-based removal spells. The counterspells were good too, and I always had something I could board out depending on the matchup (bad cheap creatures in slower matches and bad expensive creatures against fast opponents).
Round 1 vs. Izzet (blue-red) Spells.
This guy is good, and he managed to get a good chunk of high-quality Izzet spells, although he didn't have the ridiculous bomb Niv-Mizzet or the Ral planeswalker. In the first game we were matched fairly well until he put together an attack with Erratic Cyclops and a big Explosion. Second game was a little worse, although I did have a nice moment where I was able to use Dispersal to kill a creature while he had instant speed card draw on the board by waiting until he activated in my end step and Dispersing while the draw was on the stack. Loss, 0-2.
Round 2 vs. 4-Color Surveil (sans-white).
Another tough opponent. He had way better surveil payoffs than I did, and Nightveil Sprite to power them. I lost a hard-fought game 1, won a fairly easy game 2 where he drew too many lands, and then lost game 3 when he put all the surveil stuff together before I could start casting my spells. I made a couple of mistakes that last game. First, I had a surveil 2 where I put both Circuitous Route and the Gargoyle on top of my library, then the next turn I cast Route for 2 gates...and shuffled the Gargoyle back into my deck. The second one was a bit more uncertain. I had Crushing Canopy and Deadly Visit in hand, and he had put a his-choice discard spell on the stack, so I had to use Crushing Canopy immediately or probably lose it. The potential targets were Disinformation Campaign, Capture Sphere on Douser of Light (my only creature), and Dimir Spybug with 1 counter on it. I chose the Campaign since it was probably worse for me in the long run, but he ended up playing out more creatures and growing the bug to win a couple turns later. The biggest problem with destroying Campaign was that it wasn't likely to make me discard anymore because I had an empty hand and a lot of mana. I'm not sure what was the correct target, but it wasn't Campaign. Loss, 1-2.
I considered dropping but decided to play a third round just to see if I could do something better (and probably against an 0-2 opponent).
Round 3 vs. Naya (white-red-green) ???
He got "Naya Tron" (a land of each color) on turn 3 in both games, but he never seemed to have much interesting to play, just some common creatures. I'm sure I didn't see whatever got him into those colors. Doom Whisperer and endless removal ended these games fast. I was dropping afterward anyway so I gave him the official win. Win, 2-0.
All in all, I drafted some good cards but not a deck that was likely to win a lot of games. The final record was 1-2 in matches and 3-4 in games.
I drafted 2 rares and 8 uncommons. The 6 guildgates I drafted from the basic land slot (since there are no basic lands in GRN packs) were partially responsible for this. But I did get 2 rares that paid for the draft -- Doom Whisperer is going at around $22 and Sacred Foundry is currently around $8 but also has as much guaranteed long term ability to hold value as any card currently in existence.
So not a very successful draft, but a good introduction to the new draft format. I don't think GRN has as much staying power as some of the other recent sets because only having 5 main deck archetypes is so limiting and likely to feel repetitive, but I'll definitely try it again.
Thanks for reading!
