Here's my draft, from bottom left to top right.
This draft was about the longest I've ever gone without figuring out my colors and still ended up with a good deck. As insane as it looks, I'm proud that I eventually figured it out. Also, if you've been paying attention to my drafts in Guilds of Ravnica and RNA, it's pretty clear that I'm gravitating toward black an awful lot.
Anyway, pack 1 had a lot of good cards, but I ended up taking the $10 Kaya, who I was very unlikely to play. In Limited she is mostly just a lifegain spell, and not a very good one unless you can get the opponent to attack her. I didn't let this pick affect the rest of my draft. A weak second pack had Scorchmark, and a better third pack paired it with Skewer. I kept taking what I considered to be the best card in each pack, including a 5th pick guildgate for some reason. The green creatures at the bottom of this pack were actually very good, and at the end of this pack I was thinking I might be Gruul (red-green). I also had the beginnings of an aggressive Rakdos (black-red) deck.
The second pack gave me a much better Limited mythic in Mesmerizing Benthid, with the downside that I was very much not in blue. I took it anyway, just in case I could make it work out. Rix Maadi Reveler in the second pack wasn't a card I was super excited about, but the potential to draw 3 cards with it made it better upside than anything else. Then I waffled back and forth between Rakdos and Gruul for a bit, and capped it off with some surprisingly good blue and white-blue cards at the bottom of the pack. At this point I was very worried about the color situation, and I took two Gateway Plazas in case I ended up in more colors than I wanted to be.
I took a quick peek at my drafted cards before diving into pack 3, and it seemed like Rakdos was my most sure bet, so I picked Blade Juggler over a pretty excellent Gruul rare, Gruul Spellbreaker. In hindsight, I'm not at all sure that Blade Juggler was the better pick for this particular deck, but she is one of the best commons and she played well for me. I was super happy to get a third Plague Wight second pick, but that was nothing compared to the joy of finding a Priest of Forgotten Gods and several other great Rakdos cards in the middle of this pack. A second Savage Smash was too good to pass up, and I finished with some good scraps that were playable or close.
So here is the deck I built, and I didn't change the main deck all night.
With 5 Spectacle cards and a low aggressive curve, I did my best to maximize my odds of doing damage to the opponent with every card in the deck -- almost every creature has an evasion ability or a way to do direct damage.
Black-red doesn't usually have to splash green for creature removal, but that's exactly what I did. Reid Duke wrote a great little article about Savage Smash this week, and I found that it was exactly what I wanted in this deck. It is very easy to use it to kill a creature and then also get 2 extra points of damage, and Collision // Colossus is a more potent and flexible version of this effect. Since I was already planning on playing green, I used Rampaging Rendhorn as my curve-topper. You'll notice I left out some of the biggest creatures I drafted -- they are great, but I was planning to get ahead early and stay ahead, and I didn't have room for 7-drops.
The worst part of the deck is the mana fixing. I didn't manage to draft a single Gruul or Rakdos Guildgate, so I was stuck playing both Gateway Plazas. They're really taxing in the early game, where I want to be playing Plague Wights and Blade Jugglers. Hands with a Gateway Plaza put me in the awkward position of deciding whether to skip a turn early to get it in play or hold it back until I was done casting my creatures.
My sideboard was mostly expensive creatures and some lands, and one artifact removal spell.
My normal sideboard plan against decks with bigger creatures was to take out Swamp - Dagger Caster - Spear Spewer - Vizkopa Vampire and replace them with the bottom row of this picture: Forest - Consign to the Pit - Axebane Beast x2. Axebane Beast is very good at Savage Smashing larger things, and it's way better than Dagger Caster when the opponent doesn't have any X/1s.
This deck worked out better than I expected.
Round 1 vs. Orzhov (WB)
This was practically a warm-up round. I think it might have been his first RNA draft, and he had some cards in his deck that I would almost never play, like Thirsting Shade. I do think his draws were a little bad, but his deck was underpowered as well. Win, 2-0.
Round 2 vs. Simic (UG) with white sideboard
This guy is a good player who usually beats me. He almost always plays big-creature green decks, and this was no exception. I won a tricky game 1 in which he had to give me his Eyes Everywhere for a Plague Wight just to stay alive. That card plays strangely -- I wanted to swap it back for his Guardian Project, but it was actually better for me to just keep it for scrying and not give him the opportunity to steal another creature from me. I think generally if you're winning you want to keep Eyes Everywhere for yourself unless your opponent doesn't have access to blue mana. Second game he did some massive sideboarding to add white so he could make better early game defensive plays. I killed off his important creatures, like Senate Guildmage, and was able to roll through for another win. Win, 2-0.
Round 3 vs. Simic
Another Simic deck! He had a lot of tricky stuff like Applied Biomancy and Stony Strength to slow me down. In the first game, he got the upper hand early and I was forced to play the control position. Fortunately I had enough removal to make it work. I took a hit to 2 life before eliminating his last creature, and then Priest of Forgotten Gods took over the game. Priest is amazing with Dead Revels since you can cast Dead Revels with the 2 mana Priest adds to get back the two creatures you sacrificed (or better ones). I sat at 1 life after casting a Blade Juggler, and he couldn't do anything as I chipped away with little creatures. Second game he was a little pinched on lands, and I was able to play the aggressive role and burn him out while he still had expensive cards in his hand. Win, 2-0.
Round 4 vs. Simic
Notice a pattern? He was 2-1, but he had a very good deck using Growth Spiral to get bigger stuff into play faster than me. Zegana, Sharktocrab, and Mesmerizing Benthid are all effective blockades against Plague Wights, and I had almost no way to answer Zegana if she came down on turn 3 and adapted into an 8/8 on turn 5. These games weren't even close. He also had good disruption to bounce my potential blockers. Loss, 0-2.
Round 5 draw. I was locked for top 8, so I got to intentional draw.
Top 8 vs. Simic
Unfortunately, I ended up paired with the same player who had beaten me in Round 4. I fought hard in game 1 but couldn't keep up. I mulliganed to 5 in the second game and never had a chance because his draw was good. Loss, 0-2.
He got a promo Light Up The Stage and a share of the store credit prize, and I got a promo Conclave Tribunal.
I can't complain though, because it was another good run against a wide field. 6-4 in games and 3-2 in matches. Rix Maadi Reveler was way better than I expected -- I drew 3 off it without discarding anything several times, and with two copies of Dead Revels I was sometimes able to cast it early for its normal cost then later get it back and cast it for the spectacle cost. Savage Smash felt great most games, but when I had a 2/1 or 2/2 and the opponent had a must-kill 4/4 like Zegana, it was less exciting. Spear Spewer was just bad the couple of times I drew it, and I probably shouldn't have played it.
Here are the rares I ended up with:
I drafted 5 mythics and rares, which is more than the 3 expected, but only 2 of them went into my deck. I drafted 8 uncommons, which is slightly below the 9 expected. The only card worth more than $1 (including Conclave Tribunal promo) was Kaya, so I roughly broke even on value.
I think the local store is going to switch to chaos drafts as we get into spoiler season for War of the Spark, which releases mid-April. So maybe my next draft will be chaos!
Thanks for reading!
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